Worst Case by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge

Mike Bennett is a NYC detective, a widower, who has been left with the 10 kids that he and his wife adopted. He seems like he runs a happy and healthy household, which happens to be Catholic. There is a Catholic subplot to this based on some Biblical writings about Ash Wednesday. But, there is a new murderer on the scene, an old radical leftist from the 70s who sold out, and is now unhappy about the fact that he has become wealthy and influential, hardly living up to the ideals of his youth. He begins by murdering a couple kids from the wealthiest families in NYC who attend the same affluent private high school that he attended. With the first kidnapping-murder, the FBI gets called in to help, and the beautiful FBI agent, Emily Parker, provides Mike with a love interest. Of course, there is some jealousy over Mike with the nanny, and that provide some comic tension through the story. The name of the bad guy is not revealed until far into the story, so I’m not going to tell you who it is. The climactic scene takes place at the NYSE trading floor where the bad guy has enough explosives to blow the place up, along with a couple more rich kids. This was a good story and a fast read. Not great literature, but very entertaining – a good airplane book and one that nephew Boedeker might consider taking with him on the place to Scotland for the British Open. I will occasionally continue to read James Patterson

West Coast Don

The Bodies Left Behind by Jeffrey Deaver

I am surprised there are no Deaver books reviewed in the blog, especially given his genre and his prolific writing. I remember reading The Bone Collector but that must have been several years ago and more than a year before we started this blog project. This is a murder mystery that starts with the killing of a couple, the woman, Emma Feldman, a high powered attorney, and her husband, Steven, a social worker. The murder takes place in rural and remote Wisconsin, and that brings us to the primary character, Deputy Kristen Brynn McKenzie. There is a gradual character development of Brynn throughout the book that is closely tied to the unfolding of the mystery. Her boss, Sheriff Tom Dahl and other members of the Kennesha County, Wisconsin Sheriff’s Department take on peripheral roles. Another woman is intimately involved who Brynn discovers in the woods near the cabin where the murders occurred, and then they are both hunted by the killers. A significant portion of the book is the chase/hunt action in the forest, all in the course of one night, and it involves mostly just four characters, the two men who are in pursuit, and the two women. I’m surprised that this section held my interest so closely, but it did, and that is a tribute to Deaver’s unfolding plot, descriptive writing, and character development. This story has a great tie to the mob via a labor boss, Stanley Mankewitz. At any rate, Deaver does a great job with twists in the plot that I did not see coming, just as I thought we were concluding with some of the characters in the book. This is more than an airplane book, and I’ve already bought my next Deaver to read. Given the number of books that he’s written, I’m excited about this “discovery.”

West Coast Don

Night Work and North of Nowhere by Steve Hamilton

Two more by Hamilton who has become one of my favorites. Night Work is not about Alex McKnight, but about a probation officer, Joe Trumbull. All the women in Joe's life are coming to a bad end, starting with the woman he was about to marry who was killed while he was at his bachelor party. The dialogue and character development are typical of Hamilton -- a good and entertaining read. North of Nowhere is about Alex McKnight who is pulled out of his reclusive life style by friend Jackie, owner of the Glasgow Inn in Paradise in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Jackie insists that McKnight go with him to a poker game, and there is a take-over robbery of the house in which the game is happening. The novel is about McKnight's effort to figure out who and why, while dealing with crazy accusations that he had a part in it. I will keep Hamilton in my vacation rotation.
West Coast Don

Night of Thunder by Stephen Hunter

Bob Lee Swagger’s oldest daughter dreams of working for the Washington Post. For now, she works for a regional paper in Bristol, that odd town that straddles the border of Virginia and Tennessee. And it is home to a favored stop on the NASCAR circuit.

Nikki has sniffed out some big goings on in the Tennessee mountains. On her way down the back roads, a beefed up Charger tries to run her off the road to certain death rolling down the steep overlooks. But Nikki has some skills from her motorcycle days at home in Idaho and manages not to get away, but at least far enough down the mountain to avoid the crushing rolls, ending up in a coma in a local hospital, but her notes, laptop, and phone are damaged beyond repair.

The word comes quickly to Bob Lee’s Idaho ranch. His concern stretches to whether she was targeted for some past transgression of his and heads to Bristol to help care for Nikki and poke around. Detective Thelma Fielding thinks it was just some wild kid imitating his favorite NASCAR driver and the accident was just that, a random accident. Bob Lee has other ideas.

He enlists the old Marine network to look at photos of the skid marks and comes to find out that a pretty decent driver on the tour is a Marine (remember, there is not such thing as an ex-Marine). Mac McCready and his crew chief look at the photos and conclude the driver really knew what he was doing and Nikki was targeted and not a random accident.

Turns out, the eastern Tennessee mountains are a hotbed of meth labs. So Bob Lee thinks that was what she was checking into. He also starts to notice an occasional tail following him around the area. And the family name of Grumley pops up. Reverend Grumley is the patriarch of a clan of inbreds who run a “Baptist Bible Camp” (wink, wink). Maybe this paragon of humanity is running meth out of the mountains.

Some nifty work by a local geek on a damaged hard drive reveals a piece of a phone number and some even niftier detective work matches the phone number to a nearby gun shop. Bob Lee is also confused by a cryptic code Mk. 2:11. A lot of Bible study fails to come up with what this means. When Bob Lee (with some help from new friends) figures out that Mk 2:11 really is the brand of a Norwegian armor piercing 50 caliber round, the Reverend puts out a hit order on Bob Lee. Problem is, we all know Bob Lee isn’t an ordinary father worrying about his daughter. He has . . . how should we say . . . skills. Two of the inbreds follow him to a country store where Bob Lee takes them out and leaves a scared kid to take the credit. Two others track him to his daughter’s apartment and he takes them out, too (after being alerted by a scared, but brave 12yo Cambodian girl destined to be raped by one of the Grumley boys. I said they were inbred).

The FBI (Bob Lee’s good friend Nick Memphis) is now on the case and they put 2 and 2 together to figure out that the bad guys are not about meth. The ammunition is for a hit on the armored car that will be carrying the cash from the concessions at the Bristol NASCAR race, to the tune of around $8mil.

The race ends and in the post-race traffic jam, the Grumley’s blow open the armored car, juice up the diesel engine and bush-whack to the nearest mountain where a helocopter will meet up to take the Grumley’s and the cash on a tree-top flight out of the state. The shoot out at the race occupies the FBI and Special Agent Memphis is injured. But Bob Lee has his daughter’s motorcycle and goes overland to follow the Grumley’s up the mountain. The ensuing shootout is child’s play as Bob the Nailer takes out the Grumley’s one by one. The cash-filed helicopter has just lifted off and Bob Lee grabs the 50 caliber gun, nails the ‘copter that almost gracefully falls into the emptying stands of the racecourse, spilling all that cash.

Done, got the bad guys and prevented the theft. He turns around only to come face to face with the brains behind the operation (you didn’t think a bunch of in breds could dream this up did you?). He stands facing Detective Thelma Fielding, multi-year winner of the Area 5 USPSA fast draw pistol competition. Bob Lee has seen her draw and knows she is fast. They face off on the top of the mountain ridge, both knowing what is coming . . . Midnight at the OK Corral, Tennessee style. Bob the Nailer drops Fielding where she stands. The last words she hears are, “Area 7 USPSA champ five years running. Nobody ever called me slow.”

Epilogue: the guy who ran Nikki off the road gets away. The NASCAR Marine McCready tells Bob Lee he is sure he knows who the guy is . . . his brother, a genius driver and mechanic who was thrown out of NASCAR because he had killed another driver in a race . . . their father. The nut wants revenge on Bob Lee and follows him down a mountain road and just as he is about to do the deed, Bob Lee slams on the brakes and drops back, revealing that he is following Mac McCready, who eyes his brother and pushes him off the cliff. Now it’s done. And of course, Nikki comes out of her coma.

As I said once before, Bob Lee in my new hero. Hunter is bookmarked on my computer and firmly planted in my power rotation. This one runs right along at back straightaway pace. OK, the plot to rob NASCAR might seem a little far-fetched, but who cares. I'm hooked. A couple day read at best, it goes that fast. It's on Kindle, too. From a few references in the book, I may be looking up some earlier Hunter titles about Bob Lee’s dad, Earl, from his days as an Arkansas lawman..

Sort of signing off for a few weeks. Don’t see how I can work, watch the World Cup, and keep up with my reading. Once the World Cup gets out of the group stage and there are no more multi-game days on ESPN, I can get back to it.

East Coast Don

The Narrows by Michael Connelly

This is a 2004 book, the sequel to The Poet which was written in 1996. It's another Harry Bosch story, who is one of my favorite characters. The Poet was a book that was not solved at the ending, so it needed a follow-up, and Connelly was great. Along with Bosch, we get reintroduced to Agent Rachel Walling, who is the Poet's (Robert Bachus) primary target. The action takes place from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, some of it on Zzyzx Road, the exit in California off the 10, between those two cities (one that I should see in about 2 weeks when I make that drive).

How about this story on the road from Connelly: "This is Zzyzx," Dei said, pronouncing it zie-zix. "As far as I can tell, it is the asshole of the universe. Some radio preacher named it and built it 60 years ago. He got control of the land by promising the government he would be prospecting. He paid winos from skid row in L.A. to do that while he went on the radio and called on the faithful to come here to bathe in the spring waters and guzzle the mineral waters he bottled. It took the Bureau of Land Management 25 years to get rid of him. The place was then turned over to the state university system for desert studies."

I always wondered about that.

I don't need to give you the plot, just my recommendation to read it. While this book would stand on its own, I think it should be read after The Poet. Good and believable action, good plot, great characters.

West Coast Don

Outcasts United: A Refugee Soccer Team, an American Town by Warren St. John

This is not a book from the man-adventure genre, and I'm the fourth one in my family to read it, which means that it is not really a soccer book, even thought it uses soccer as a focus. This is a nonfiction work. It has to do with Clarkston,Georgia, and the remarkable number of refugees from various cultures who are disposed of there, or who are at least making their first stop in the U.S. there. Unlike so many other areas of refugee resettling, this is not just one new culture that is trying to blend into American and have America accommodate it, this is about 50 cultures, and the one thing they have in common is soccer. The author follows a Jordanian woman, Luma Mufleh, who has abandoned her own well-to-do family in Jordan to live in the U.S., but they disowned her, leaving her to fend for herself. She saw soccer coaching as a way to make a contribution, and it pulled her into a lifetime commitment of involvement with the refugees. Her club is the Fugees. Clarkston had been a homogeneous white enclave until the refugees arrived, so the assimilation of them was resisted by the locals. St. John follows a number of characters over the course of a couple years. If this subject strikes your interest, it is a good true life character study that is worth the time.

West Coast Don (writing from Fassardi, Paraguay)

The Silent Sea by Clive Cussler and Jack Du Brul

This is formulaic Cussler, and a good airplane book, an entertaining fast read, but also not one you need to run out and purchase. The primary plot is feasible, and starts with a historical context. It was Gavin Menzies book entitled 1421 that set forth the hypothesis that the Chinese explored the world 70 years before Columbus set sail, and if you haven't read that one, I would recommend it. The trail involves information about an ancient Chinese junk which was lost in the "land of ice." Cussler simultaneously develops a story that takes place in modern day Argentina, recently under a new dictatorship which forms an alliance with China to extract oil from the Antarctic. To be the heroes and to carry out the action, we have the hero Juan Cabrillo and his best friend Max Hanley, as well as all of the other usual post Dirk Pitt heroes. Ultimately, I'm glad that I did not spend more than one day on this one.

West Coast Don

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson

This is the third book of Larsson's trilogy about Lisbeth Salander and Michael Blumkvist. I thought there might have been 30 to 50 pages in the middle of the book that were not riveting, and the last 100 pages are intense. The third book begin exactly where the second book leaves off, with Salander unconscious and in need of immediate medical attention. I don't need to give you more about the plot except to say that it works. Remember that Larsson died in 2004, shortly after turning in the three manuscripts for these books. I learned about a rumor that there could be a fourth book that has never been printed and remains in Larsson's computer, which remains in the hands of his girlfriend, who won't release it until the royalties battle with Larsson's estranged family is settled. Furthermore, the rumor says that she gets some of the credit for his writing, and if that is really the case, maybe we'll see more of this remarkable character. I'm only sad that the trilogy is over.

West Coast Don