Living Witness

 

By Jane Haddam

A Gregor Demarkian Mystery

The folks of Snow Hill, a small Pennsylvania town in the foot hills of the Appalachian Mountains, are unhappy. After the recent school board election, the new members of the board are pushing a religious agenda centered around putting God back into the schools. It was a bit deceptive on the part of the new board members, who ran on a platform not of religious fundamentalism but on one of getting the new wing of the high school completed, which had been neglected for several years.  

The town is divided between the religious people and the progressive people, both sure the other side is stupid and wrong. Progressive people because they don't want religion taught to children in public schools. And religious people who believe progressives are trying to keep religion out of everything and sending the country straight to hell. 

The religious proponents want a sticker inserted in the science books that instructs readers to explore the idea of Intelligent Design by checking out a book that is available in the school library. The progressives are against the sticker being placed in science texts because Intelligent Design is not based on science or on facts. So the progressives get together and launch a lawsuit to stop the school board from putting nonscientific ideas in science text books. Things come to a head when one of the progressive plaintiffs of the lawsuit and a member of the school board, the leading and most venerable citizen of the town, ninety-one year-old Annie-Vic Hadley, is assaulted in her own home and beaten unconscious. 

Now Annie-Vic is in the hospital, unresponsive, and the town is in an uproar with progressives accusing the religious of being terrorists and murderers. And the religious accusing the progressives of trying to destroy the country with their godless agenda. Snow Hill police chief Gary Albright, who is known to be on the side of the religious crowd and thus a suspect in the assault, decides he needs outside help to investigate this crime. He calls in Gregor Demarkian, and ex-FBI agent who does freelance detective work to lead the investigation into the assault on Annie-Vic. But before Demarkian has barely got his investigation off the ground, two more progressives are attacked and beaten to death, both in Annie-Vic's vacant home, in the same place where she was assaulted. 

I enjoyed this story. The writing is quite engaging and it kept me interested even though it is much longer than I usually like reading, almost 400 pages long. I had never come across a Gregor Demarkian story before but it is a series of about 30 novels, first published in 1990 with Not a Creature Was Stirring. Living Witness was published in 2009. The author passed away in 2019. 

Publishers Weekly also has a review of this novel. As does Kirkus.

Texas Destiny

 

By Lorraine Heath

The first book in the Texas Trilogy series.

Amelia Carson used to live on a plantation with her parents and her two older sisters. But by the time the US Civil War was over, all that was gone. Left alone and desperate, she listed herself in a mail-order bride publication, and after a short correspondence, is on her way to Texas to meet and marry one Dallas Leigh.

Unfortunately, Dallas will not be a the train station to receive his fiancée. Because he recently broke his leg after falling off an untamed horse. Instead his younger brother, Houston, will be picking up Amelia. It has been arranged that they will recognize each other by Amelia wearing a hat that Dallas sent her and he would be wearing a cloth she embroidered and sent to Dallas. Instead it will be Houston with Amelia's cloth.

Houston and Dallas both accompanied their father when he went to fight for the perpetuation of slavery in America. Houston was just a young teen at the time and he was seriously wounded and their father was killed in action. Houston lost an eye and his hearing on one side of his face and is badly scarred. He tends to dip his head and he wears an eye patch and keeps his hat lowered to conceal his scars. His is not the face Amelia is expecting to see when she arrives in Texas. 

She is a bit puzzled when the man carrying her cloth does not match the description of the man she is expecting to marry. But the sight of Houston's damaged face does not shock or horrify her. The Civil War left many men with terrible wounds and damaged bodies, so it is nothing new for her to see. She takes Houston's explanation calmly and together they set out for Dallas' ranch, a trip of about three weeks. 

Of course, we know that Amelia and Houston are going to fall in love on this long and arduous trek together, alone in the wild Texas countryside. But Amelia has promised to marry Dallas. And Houston is just a mess from his experiences in the war. Will Houston man-up enough to deal with his psychological damage and claim the woman he wants? Will Amelia stand by her promise to wed Dallas and sacrifice herself on the altar of duty? 

This old-fashioned romance was really touching in many ways, a step above most modern romance novels. The two main characters have trauma that they must deal with, Amelia having the rape and murder of her two older sisters during the war and Houston losing his father in battle and himself being wounded. Really, the story is about two damaged, good-hearted people finding healing and love in each other's company. 

This is not a bodice-ripper. The main characters don't tumble into bed the first chance they get. And the sex scene at the end is not explicit. Which is what I prefer in a romance story. I don't want or need the intimate details of the characters' erogenous zones. I don't know if this hold true, though, for the other two books in the series.

The Heist

 

By Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg

Book One in the Fox and O'Hare series

Kate O'Hare is a gung-ho FBI agent with a military background and a burning desire to capture wanted conman Nicolas Fox. Fox has been a thorn in her side for a long time, always managing to elude her best efforts and taunting her with Toblerone candy bars and otherwise making her look like a fool.

By stepping up her game in a drastic and dangerous way, Kate finally nails Nick and he is locked up until his trial. The day of his trial, Nick escapes while using the courthouse men's room. Imagine Kate's astonishment at Nick once again being on the loose after all the months she spent trying to capture him. Imagine her even greater astonishment when she learns his escape was engineered by her boss at the FBI and by the deputy director of the FBI.

Did Nick Fox somehow corrupt two top FBI officials? No. It is all part of a plan to track down and capture some of the worst criminals in the world, using Nick's genius at pulling off brilliant heists and complex scams. And they want Kate to be part of the operation. Which means she will be working very closely with the man who has been getting under her skin for a very long time. And it doesn't help that Nick is witty, charming and very handsome.

This book was so much fun! I thoroughly enjoyed it. The heists are complicated and wild and Kate and Nick have a spicy and uncertain relationship. I'm sorry I am just now discovering this fun and exciting series which began with this novel in 2013.

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews.

The Skull Mantra

 

By Eliot Pattison

Shan Tao Yun is a Chinese political prisoner who is part of a forced labor gang building roads in Chinese-occupied Tibet. Before he ran afoul of a Chinese official, Shan was a top investigator known for his skill and intelligence. 

A Chinese official has been found murdered at a site not far from where Shan and his fellow prisoners have been working. The Chinese man in charge of this remote district, Colonel Tan, frees Shan from the labor camp to investigate the murder. What Tan doesn't know, but soon learns, is that Shan is not going to help him cover up the murder, but will dig for the truth to the best of his considerable ability. Complicating everything are Shan's fellow prisoners, a group of Buddhist monks who have gone on strike, refusing to continue working on the road due to their concerns about the murder which they believe involves the ghost of the murdered man and a demon who they claim is responsible. 

Shan's life among the imprisoned monks has lead him to embrace some of their Buddhist teachings. And investigating the murder leads him even deeper into understanding their teachings about balance. He becomes very interested in their view of the world and that helps him figure out exactly why and how the dead man met his end.

This was an OK read. There is a lot of Buddhist teachings which, as a non religious person, didn't appeal to me at all. Stories of demons killing people, of sorcerers, of monks flying through the air just seemed like a fantasy story to me. Oddly Shan seems to buy their tricks while still knowing it is fakery, even when he understands how the tricks were pulled off. 

Anyway, it is a really long book, takes forever to get anywhere and has a lot of Buddhist religious thought which I didn't enjoy reading.

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews. Major reviewers seem to really like the book, so even though I thought it too long, too slow and too religious, I still gave it a "good" rating. 

The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie

 

By Jennifer Ashley

Beth Ackerly is a young widow in 1881 and engaged to marry another man when she meets Lord Ian while attending a show at a theater. Lord Ian warns her not to marry the man she is engaged to. According to Ian, the man is debauched and unfit to be a good woman's spouse. Instead, he asks Beth to marry him, even though this is their first time meeting. Of course she refuses. But she follows his advice and breaks up with the other man. Still, Lord Ian has captured her imagination and she decides to travel to France to give herself some time to sort herself out.

While in France, she meets Ian's sister-in-law and her estranged husband, Mac, who is Ian's brother. She also encounters the police detective Lloyd Fellows, who has decided that Ian is a murderer who is responsible for the deaths of two woman in London he was known to associate with. Fellows tries to enlist her in his investigation into Ian and his other brother, Hart, the Duke of Kilmorgan, who Fellows believes is sheltering Ian from the police. But Beth repulses Fellows because she doesn't believe the picture he has painted of Ian and his family. 

Ian also arrives in France and Fellows become even more insistent in his campaign against the Mackenzies. To protect Beth from Fellows' persecution, Ian talks her into marrying him. His brother the Duke has the political power to stifle Fellows' snooping. Ian then takes Beth to Scotland to live at the Duke's estate. But Beth is determined to discover if Fellows' accusations are true. So she heads to London, against Ian's and the Duke's wishes to find out for herself if she is married to a madman and a murderer.

This was a pretty good story. Ian has some kind of mental condition, possibly Asperger's or some other form of autism. Since the novel is set in the 1880s, no one really understands Ian's condition, including Ian himself. He has been told he is insane, told he is unfit to wed, views himself as dangerous. He is certainly confused, that is certain. Seeing Beth come to understand how different but still loveable Ian is made for good reading. Some elements of the story are a bit silly, like Beth's ability to solve the mystery that has eluded her husband, his brother the Duke and the police. And the constant diversions into sex scenes. This is one of those stories, where the lady and gentleman can't see each other without tearing each other's clothing off and going at it. Putting all that aside, I enjoyed the story and the mystery even if I found Beth's role in solving it all a bit too much.

Breathers

 

By S.G. Browne

Turns out zombies have always been around, but hiding. But now they are coming out of the closet and trying to co-exist with the living, or, as they call them, breathers. They even have support groups, such as Undead Anonymous, to help them cope with being undead among the living. 

One such is newly-turned zombie, Andy, who died in a car crash and who now resides in his parents' basement. Andy, despite seeing a therapist and attending his support group, is not coping well with being undead. Things take a turn for the better, however, when Andy gets to know Ray, a zombie who lives in an abandoned grainary along with two of his friends. Ray shares his food with Andy and Andy's friend, Rita. Ray claims the canned meat is venison but after eating it, both Andy and Rita start to feel better in small ways. 

Andy and Rita and other members of their support group also get to know Ray and partake of his jars of canned venison. And they start to enjoy improvements in their physical wellbeing. Andy, who was not able to speak because of damage caused by the car crash, regains his voice. Other zombies' wounds start to heal. And Rita's heart begins to beat again, although very slowly. Of course, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that the meat Ray has been sharing with the other zombies is not actually venison. It is human meat, harvested from the living. And the more the zombies eat, the stronger and better and healthier they become. Now that they know the secret to the good "life" for zombies, they become just as voracious as depicted in all the zombie stories and movies. Their greed for human meat overpowers their common sense and they go on the rampage and give up trying to live in peace with the Breathers.

To back track a little, at the beginning of the story, zombie Andy wakes up and finds his parents' bodies stuffed into the family freezer and frig. He has no memory of killing his parents though. I mention this because it is a clue to how the story is going to end: in violence and death. In between, though, it is a charming and amusing story of a zombie guy who falls in love and who is trying to lead a normal life among people who view him as walking garbage. But the ending is not the happy-ever-after usually associated with love stories. It gruesome, bloody and very disappointing. The story sets the reader up for hearts and flowers and then pulls the rug out from underneath us. 

Here is a review by Kirkus Reviews.

Neuromancer

 

By William Gibson

Case used to be a hotshot "cowboy" hacker who got caught and he was punished by being changed to being physically unable to connect to cyberspace. He ends up in a city in Japan, where drugs and criminals rule the nights. 

He is approached by two people, Armitage and Molly who say they can reverse the punishment and in exchange they need him to hack into the Tessier-Ashpool computer system, which is located off of Earth on Freeside, a space station that is a luxury resort for the wealthy and the home and headquarters of the Tessier-Ashpool family. 

Armitage wants Case to use a virus to penetrate the Tessier-Ashpool computer system. Armitage is taking his orders from Wintermute, an artificial intelligence who is determined to break into Tessier-Ashpool's system. And Case doesn't care about anything but getting back into cyberspace and once again becoming a hacker cowboy.

This novel won lots of prizes but I found it very confusing. I didn't even totally understand what it was about until I read the Wikipedia page about it. Just too many characters, too much going on, too many trippy drug scenes, too much slang and jargon.  Like flipping and ice. I still don't understand what those terms are referring to.  This story just didn't compute for me.

Here is a review by John Mullan in The Guardian.