It’s the eve of 1953, and Aloysius Archer is in Los Angeles to ring in the New Year with an old friend, aspiring actress Liberty Callahan, when their evening is interrupted by an acquaintance of Callahan’s: Eleanor Lamb, a screenwriter in dire straits.
After a series of increasingly chilling events—mysterious phone calls, the same blue car loitering outside her house, and a bloody knife left in her sink—Eleanor fears that her life is in danger, and she wants to hire Archer to look into the matter. …
The Husband (2006) by Dean Koontz is one intense book.
Mitch Rafferty, owner of a small landscaping business, receives a phone call from someone claiming to have kidnapped his wife Holly. The caller demands that Mitch pay two million dollars or Holly will be killed, and if he informs the police, Holly will be tortured and left to die. …
On arriving home, Mitch finds his house staged to look like he had killed his wife. He finds blood smeared over his clothes in the closet and splattered on the kitchen walls. …
As instructed, Mitch visits his brother Anson …. During this time, Anson receives a call from the kidnappers …. Anson, who had helped his siblings throughout their childhood cope with their parents, offers to give Mitch the two million dollar ransom amount. …
Like most teen boys my age, I read every Heinlein book I could get my hands on.
Tunnel in the Sky (1955) … a group of students sent on a survival test to an uninhabited planet, who soon realise they are stranded there. The themes of the work include the difficulties of growing up and the nature of man as a social animal.
His juvenile books are rollicking adventures. No profanity.
But on another level, Heinlein was a provocative philosopher on matters of personal freedom, particularly sexual freedom, libertarianism, religion, politics, and government.
Heinlein wrote strong female characters decades before it was cool. 😀
My main takeaway from Tunnel is the truism that rule of law must come first.
Everything else, later.
If you don’t have enforceable laws, wannabe dictators will insist criminals are tourists.
Here’s Georgia GOP Andrew Clyde barricading the doors of the Senate. He later called those attacking him tourists.
Any objective person would want those breaking into their home or business arrested. To deny this fact is to deny rule of law.
As in Lord of the Flies, which had been published a year earlier, isolation reveals the true natures of the students as individuals. The Heinlein book is more optimistic, however.
The colony of young people in Tunnel do establish rule of law. Democracy.
In any case, it’s still worth reading Heinlein books today. They are thought provoking.
Stephen King and Stewart O’Nan had previously collaborated in 2004 on a non-fiction book Faithful, chronicling the 2004 Boston Red Sox season. In Faithful, during a discussion about watching baseball on television, King posits an idea for a story entitled “Spectators”, which later evolved into A Face in the Crowd:
… What if a guy watches a lot of baseball games on TV, maybe because he’s a shut-in or an invalid (or maybe because he’s doing a book on the subject, poor schmuck), and one night he sees his best friend from childhood, who was killed in a car crash, sitting in one of the seats behind the backstop? Yow! …
A dysfunctional family drama compared with Yellowstone and Succession.
Mike is a sports writer. Claims he was only involved to keep facts straight on Pro Football.
But James claims Mike is the best co-author he’s worked with.
Jenny Wolf’s murdered father leaves her in charge of a billion-dollar empire—and a family more ruthless than Succession’s Roys and Yellowstone’s Duttons.
The Wolfs, the most powerful family in California, have a new head: thirty-six-year-old former high school teacher Jenny Wolf.
That means Jenny now runs the prestigious San Francisco Tribune.
She also controls the legendary pro football team, the Wolves.
And she has a murdered father to avenge—if she can survive the killers all around her.
Rick McCharles 