Gallows Pole by JD Rhoades

Iron Horse is an off the books with no oversight squad taking the fight to the terrorist’s own ground and rules. They chart targets and take out the scum and the scum’s crew mostly by hanging and leaving a tiny iron horse statue. “The Horsemen” have the terrorists running scared.

An incident in Riyadh gets out of hand and the squad’s leader, Colonel Mark Bishop, declares himself a war criminal and sentences himself to a self imposed prison sentence built in rural Virginia.

In the US, a Honduran family, an Arab family, and an Iranian family are all found hanged in an apparent murder-suicide orchestrated by each father, neatly ordered by size . . . and a tiny iron horse is found at each site. 

One of the original Iron Horse squad, Heineman, has gone off the reservation. The FBI has assigned Melissa Saxon’s team to stop the killings, but the word gets to Bishop through his former squad convincing Bishop to end his exile and get back in the game.

Behind the scenes is the shadowy Mr. Campbell who was originally tasked to set up Iron Horse. Now he wants to bring Heineman and Bishop’s team back into the fold. Campbell manipulates the director of the FBI, Saxon’s team, and Bishop into a confrontation at his Shenandoah farm that where . . .  well you can probably guess the outcome.

Rhoades lives just down the road from Raleigh and made an initial splash with the redneck noir series starring the bail bond enforcer Jack Keller, but then went dark. A check on his blog showed that he had all but given up on the print business and had gone entirely electronic, now with 3 e-books available for Kindle and probably for the Nook, too. While one might say his stories are somewhat formulaic, they are no less engrossing. The acknowledged  cheapskate that I am has already purchased the other two, so be on the lookout. 

East Coast Don

Trickster’s Point by William Kent Krueger

Cork O’Connor and Jubal Little are out hunting in the frontier that is the Iron Range in the spout corner of Minnesota. Unfortunately, Jubal has an arrow in his chest with all the markings of the equipment used by O’Connor. Jubal doesn’t want to die alone so Cork sits with him for 3 hours while Jubal unloads his failings on Cork.

Now Jubal was an exceptional individual. A charismatic type from the day he and his mom moved to Aurora, MN from Denver. Jubal tries to hide his heritage as half Blackfeet (actual last name is LittleWolf) even though he is growing up on the fringes of a reservation. Jubal becomes the star quarterback who gets a scholarship, is then drafted by the NFL and, after bouncing around a few teams, lands for a successful 10yr stint with the Vikings after which, he is tabbed as a future political star by a powerful family with generational ties to the DC power elite. He serves the good people of Minnesota in the US House and has come back to make a run at the Minnesota governor’s race and things are looking very good. Win this race, then it’s the US Senate and who knows where that might lead.

But it’s the weekend before the election and Jubal rests at the base of a rock monolith (Trickster’s Point), spilling his soul and blood out to his lifelong friend.

No local really believes that Cork fired the fatal arrow at Jubal, but he is all the law has and the press is going ballistic that the first serious Native American politician has been murdered in the hours before his ascension to the governor's mansion.

But Cork is no ordinary friend. A local who is also a veteran of the Chicago PD, former county sheriff, and now a respected PI – and part Ojibwe, Cork conducts his own parallel investigation even while being told to butt out. With each passing question, the author takes O’Connor back to dozens of connections with locals who might want Jubal dead.

Since the 2008 passing of Tony Hillerman, I’ve been on the lookout for authors that weave Native American culture into their mysteries (maybe it's the 6.25% of me that is Cherokee). The Kate Shugat books by Dana Stebennow about native Alaskans are one such series and this series about the Ojibwe in Minnesota looks promising. But, so far, no one has stepped up to the level of the late great Hillerman’s depth of understanding and incorporation of Navajo culture, beliefs, and mysticism as integral components of his books. If you’ve never read Hillerman, well then shame on you.

Kreuger is a new author to the MRB boys. This 2012 book represents the 13^th(!) book in the Cork O’Connor series so I have some catching up to do. And while he won’t get mentioned in the same breath as the original master that was Hillerman, and won't garner the lofty status in my personal power rotation (yet), Kreuger will do nicely.

East Coast Don

Mystery

A Southern California resident, traveling in Vienna, reading a book about murder in Los Angeles. Go figure. I was out of more geographically appropriate books, so if anyone has any recommendations for thrillers based in this area, let me know, quickly please. I head back to So Cal in a couple more days.

Jonathan Kellerman always provides a dependable story, and his protagonist, Alex Delaware, is as real a psychologist as any that I see presented in literature. In this story, Alex and Robin are meeting at one of their favorite haunts, The Fauborg Hotel. It’s the last night for the hotel before it literally meets the wrecking ball. Kellerman captures the impermanence of LA, although perhaps too harshly: “I live in a company town where the product is illusion. In the alternative universe ruled by sociopaths who make movies, communication means snappy dialogue, the scalpel trumps genetics, and permanence is mortal sin because it slows down the shoot.” Alex and Robin notice a beautiful young woman who is alone, and there’s a muscleman, a goon type, waiting outside. Then, her body is discovered in Pacific Palisades, murdered only a short while after they last saw her in the hotel bar. The hunt for the killer takes us through old time Hollywood B movies and porn, multigenerational family dysfunction, and a good subplot about life, death, and redemption.

After a couple books that did not make my A list, it was good to get back to one of the guys in my power rotation.

In Sunlight and In Shadow

This is beautifully, artfully written, but it is not my style of book. It’s more of a romance novel, although to call it only that would be unfair. There are other important themes in this post-WWII novel of a soldier who falls in love with a beautiful woman who just happens to be from one of the wealthiest families in America and who is about to be married to a man who is from her socioeconomic strata. Catherine Thomas Hale is not in love with her fiancé. Her fiancé is 25 years her senior and he raped her when she was only 13 years old. After their chance encounter on the Staten Island Ferry, Catherine falls in love with Harry Copeland. Harry is dealing with his own failing leather goods business that he inherited from his recently deceased father, and his partner is a black man, so racism is a theme, as is the mob and their protection racket in New York. Helprin is an accomplished writer and scholar (not to be confused with Mark Halperin, author of Game Change), whose work has not previously been reviewed in this bog. The language of In Sunlight and In Shadow was at times poetic, always beautiful, but also a bit too flowery for my tastes. My wife loved this book, but it was not my style and I chose to abandon it about 1/5 of the way through.

The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power

By Robert A Caro

     This is the fourth book in a five (six??) volume of Robert Caro's monumental boigraphy of Lyndon Johnson.  I cannot believe I read the first volume thirty years ago. Volume four covers the 1960 election through the first few months after the Kennedy assassination. Through the first three volumes, Caro has told the story of Johnson's youth, early years in Texas, the growth in the House, to the point that arguably as Senate majority leader, was as powerful, if not more than the president.

    In this volume Caro tells the story of Johnson's absolute lust for the Office of the President.  Johnson, in 1958 started his run to the 1960 election and absolutely botched his approach.  When he finally realized how bad he has underestimated the machine run by Joe Kennedy for his son,  he takes the apparent missstep of agreeing to accept the second spot on the Democratic ticket.  He believed that Kennedy could not win without Texas and that he was the only Vice President candidate that could deliver Texas.  He also believed Kennedy's promise that Johnson would be a valued advisor and voice in the administration.  After the election, Johnson awoke to the fact that the Kennedy people (esepecially Robert Kennedy) not only disliked him to a point of ridicule.  They insulted him in private and public to the point that the entire media was laughing at him.

     After Dallas and Lyndon Johnson's ascention to the Presidentcy, he tried to keep most of Kennedy's people around him, but of course most left   It is a great story about politics and the inability of working together for the common good, even within the same party. 
   
     In the early volumes, Caro was more objective, but as he gets to this volume, his respect for Johmson's political ability and liberalism, becomes much more obvious. This has been a monumental piece of work taking over 30 years just to get to this point.  It is fascinating, insightful, and entertaining.  It will be interesting to see if Robert Caro can finish the story in one more volume. I predict it will take two.

    This book is not an easy read, but it does keep moving.  If you are interested in how modern politics got to where we are today, this is a nice place to start.

Vegas Bill

The Little Book

Timing. That’s a triple, quadruple, quintuple entendre, at least, but one you will only understand after reading this most wonderful story. At this moment, this book strikes me as being my favorite novel of the year. There are so many intersections for in this book for me: history (my college major), Greek literature (one of my college minors), anti-Semitism and the Holocaust (I married a Jew and then became one), Freud the father of psychoanalysis (I am a psychoanalyst), and the recurring loop of family events/connections/passions (my daughter suggested this book for me knowing that I was traveling to Vienna). In what other book do you run across an author who is equal parts adventure writer, travel writer, scholar, theoretical physicist (I say what with tongue in cheek), and historian. So cleverly, the author ties together Freud’s ideas about the Oedipus Complex with his characters and interactions with each other, exploring what was right and wrong about the great doctor’s ideas.

Edwards’ story makes use of time travel, and I’ve been fascinated with the fantasy of time travel since I was a boy. “Boys’ Life” the monthly magazine for Boy Scouts carried a great series about time travel during my latency years. There was the “WABAC” or Wayback Machine by Mr. Peabody and Sherman in “The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show,” cartoons that first aired from 1959 to 1964 in my early adolescence. And of course, there was H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, written in 1895, and made into the first of two movies in 1960 (much better than the 2002 version).

Edwards’ story mostly takes place in 1897 Vienna, but it jumps back and forth to 1988 in California and Boston, as well as to important events between, including WWII and the plans for the invasion of France by the Allies. The protagonist is Frank Standish Burden III, also known as Wheeler, but his father and grandfather, mother and grandmother are juxtaposed throughout the story at different ages as Edwards takes us back and forth through time. The time travel idea works beautifully.

This book was a lifetime effort by Selden Edwards, and I’m delighted to have had the chance to read it. Whatever book I choose next will be the victim of the “John Wooden effect.” After a legendary event or person, no matter how good the next coach, the next event, the next book, it will never measure up to the preceding one. I’m traveling in Croatia, a few days from flying to Vienna for the first time, and I’m more prepared to see the city and more knowledgeable about it’s history than I was before.

Creole Belle

At age 75, James Lee Burke has only gotten better. As a two-time winner of the Edgar Award and a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America, he has produced the 19^th novel in the Dave Robicheaux series which may be the best yet. There are times when his prose is poetic, and he frequently uses his characters and the conflicts he puts them in to sprinkle in bits of his own wisdom about life. On the one hand, I find myself going slowly, savoring the writing, not just rushing through to follow the story line to its conclusion. But on the other hand, after letting his particular people and their dilemmas come into rich form, I could not put the book down for the last 150 pages. Burke captures not only the great beauty in life and relationships, but he also writes about dark ugly crevices of human existence, and it is the tension that he creates between those two extremes which holds me spellbound.

As much as this series of books is about Dave, this story was also about Dave’s longtime partner and running mate, Clete Purcel. The story was about family and friendships and how far they can be pushed and tested. Dave is an alcoholic who has been sober for many years, but Clete is still abusing himself with multiple substances in significant quantities. But Clete is the man who Dave has trusted and will trust with his life, the man he trusts more than any other. The story begins with Dave in the hospital where he is recovering from the gunshot wounds from his last battles with the bad guys. Clete was also wounded, but not nearly as badly as Dave. It’s dangerous for an addict to be treated with morphine for pain, but Dave’s injuries left him little choice. Was it a morphine-induced hallucination when Tee Jolie Melton, the Creole Belle, appeared at Dave’s hospital bedside and told him about her encounters with some bad men in the oil business which happened to be the primary source of income for the State of Louisiana? How could it have been a hallucination when she left him an iPod to listen to in his hospital bed? It was not a hallucination when Tee Jolie’s little sister Blue was found in a block of ice. Still in recovery from his injuries and still using morphine, Dave was hardly in any condition to figure out the difference between reality and his imagination.

Through Dave’s recovery, we learn that his adopted daughter Alafair graduated from Stanford Law School, but rather than follow a promising career with the Justice Department, she had returned to Louisiana to write novels. Clete has spawned a daughter with a woman who was a hopeless heroin and cocaine addict, a prostitute. Rather than the love and support that Alafair grew up with, Gretchen Horowitz was sexually abused from an early age, sold by her mother to bad men for her next fix. Could Gretchen be the woman known to the underworld as Caruso, an assassin who had several well-known hits in her resume? For the really evil side of the story, we get to the Dupree and Leboeuf families. The patriarch of the Dupree is Alexis, a nearly 90-year man who survived the Nazi death camp at Ravensbruck. But, why did he survive in a camp that was only for women? The granddaughter of Alexis is Varina Leboeuf Dupree, a brilliant and beautiful manipulator of men who has a history with both Dave and Clete.

Alafair and Gretchen become intrigued with each other, and that pulls them both into further danger which tests the extent of their fathers’ relationship with each other. That’s enough of the plot. There were lots of other characters and supporting subplots, all written to support the main storyline. This book gets my highest and strongest recommendation.

An example of the quality of Burke’s writing and his insight to one of the dark sides of life: “Every alcoholic knows what every other alcoholic is thinking. There is only one alcoholic personality. There are many manifestations of the disease, but the essential elements remain the same in every practicing drunk, CEO, hallelujah-mission wino, Catholic nun, ten-dollar street whore, academic scholar, world boxing champion, or three-hundred-pound blob, the mind-set never varies. It is for this reason that practicing alcoholics wish to avoid the company of drunks who have sobered up, and sometimes even get them fired from their jobs lest there be anyone in proximity who can hear their most secret thoughts.”

The Master Sniper by Stephen Hunter

WWII is winding down. Germany’s defeat is a foregone conclusion; just a matter of when. At a secret installation near the Black Forest, a couple dozen Jewish POWs are being fattened up before parading them in to a dark field at midnight where 24 are cut down by a single shooter in a matter on minutes – practice. 

The master Nazi sniper Repp is testing the latest weapon in Germany’s arsenal. The first generation of a night vision scope. Repp is a hero of the fatherland from his exploits on the eastern front where on one day he had something like 325 kills in 330 shots from his position in a tower overlooking a prime intersection. 

But 25 POWs were herded to that field. One escapes because he was invisible to the scope and manages to work his way to the allied lines where the escapee gets interrogated by the OSS in London. Over multiple sessions and some dogged investigative work, the OSS slowly learns about the secret installation, a last gasp Nazi assignment for Repp called Operation Nibelungen.

Considering the technological advance of a night vision scope and whom it is for, the question is the target. Eisenhower? Churchill? The Pope? Hitler? Someone else? OSS launches an attack on the installation with 3 goals in mind. Kill Repp. If that fails, get or destroy the night vision scope. Failing that, get to the camp's records to learn the target and time line.

Hunter jumps back and forth between the 3 OSS staffers and Repp and slowly tightens the noose around Repp. Hunter jumped to my power rotation with one book, iSniper. Guess I could look at this book as being the other bookend to Hunter’s collection of sniper stories. It wasn’t Bob Lee Swagger quality, but once the OSS puts the clues together and the chase is on in earnest, Hunter applies the screws to the reader, keeping me firmly planted in my seat to its conclusion 150 pages later. Not his Hunter’s best, but far, far from his worst. Hunter remains a charter member of my power rotation.

East Coast Don