The First Assassin by John J. Miller

Lincoln's has been elected President and, according to secessionists, snuck into Washington like a coward. General Winfield Scott, hero of the war with Mexico is the big shot of DC and has assigned Colonel Rook to head Lincoln's security. And Rook sees conspiracies around every corner.

Langston Bennett is Old South. Home on Charleston's Battery and a plantation with plenty of slaves. He hates everything Lincoln stands for and works out a plan to hire a Cuban mercenary to kill Lincoln. Lucius, his childhood friend and personal slave, overhears the plot.

At the Bennett plantation, Lucius talks his granddaughter into sneaking off and to work her way to DC and warn someone in the White House. Oh, when Bennett was getting his photo taken, Lucius quietly has the photographer's assistant, a young black boy, to sneak a photo of the assassin as he leaves Bennett's battery home. It is this photo that  will get Portia, the granddaughter, into the White House.

The assassin, who goes by Mazorca, arrives in DC, seeks out the help of a society lady who is loyal to the cause. Plans how he'll kill Lincoln and begins preparations, including knocking off a bunch of folks along the way.

Rook senses doom and ramps up surveillance efforts, despite General Scott's insistence that Rook cease. Rook has to tighten the noose without alerting Scott or Mazorca and be prepared, just in case, to take the bullet.

I won't say this was great or that it was just so-so. It was cleverly plotted and paced with lots of content about simple life on the plantation, in DC, of travel in the pre-war south. The book picked up when Rook was in the center of the reader's attention. This story about the beginnings of the Secret Service (which didn't become official until Lincoln signed the paper's on the day he was assassinated) was pretty entertaining. As historical fiction goes, this was decent, not spectacular, but decent.

East Coast Don

Soccer Vs. The State by Gabriel Kuhn

Still on my soccer binge. Now I thought that 'How Soccer Explains the World' was just great. Each chapter was about how soccer in woven into a country's fabric of life. Great reading.

Not sure what I thought when I saw this on the rack at Barnes and Noble. Kuhn is a self-professed European leftist. What I found in the first chapter was a rant on how, throughout history, that soccer has  interfered with the masses being involved in leftist politics. Damn workers were more interested in playing a game rather than doing something important for the proletariat. 

Seriously? I never got into the 2nd chapter. Sure glad I got it from the library rather than spend the money.

East Coast Don

A Numbers Game (Chris Anderson) & Moving the Goal Posts (Rob Jovanovic)

I am something like 4 books behind, so I'll try and catch up here by doing 2 books in one post.

My ventures into non-fiction are mostly about soccer. A bunch of years ago, Anson Dorrance (UNC women's soccer coach) suggested I read Moneyball, which I did and liked a lot. A step into sports analytics followed with Soccernomics, a sort or Freakonomics for soccer. Then I stumbled across a terrific blog called SoccerQuantified.com prior to the 2010 World Cup. I wrote the author, Chris Anderson, and we've emailed back and forth a few times where he told me a book was in preparation. 

Then I was in Barnes and Noble and, per usual, wandered to the soccer rack where I saw Moving the Goalposts, another take on a numerical description of the game. Anderson's book was released in the US the end of July and Jovanovic's book came out in 2012. Ordered both from Amazon on July 30.

Analytics has been around many professions for a long time. Finance, retail, health care all have a long history with analytics, but the advent of BIG DATA, where enormous datasets are analyzed has only recently made an impact in sport, including soccer. Most all teams in the top league of a country have an analytics group. What they do with the data they get is anyone’s guess; big big big money decisions hang in the balance so teams hold their cards very close to the vest.

Now that NBC has gone wall to wall with the EPL, the match watching public will start seeing more data presented on the screen to help with your viewing enjoyment – possession, distance covered, etc. What will inevitably happen is that some long held assumptions and biases will likely be challenged, for fan and fantasy manager alike.

These 2 recent books deserve your attention, if you want to learn more about the game. Player, parent, spectator, doesn’t matter. There is plenty here to peruse.

One book is The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know About Soccer Is Wrong by Chris Anderson and Davie Salley. The other is Moving the Goalposts by Rob Jovanovic. Both look at old and new concepts about the game and offer numbers to support or refute various topics. While they are both conceptually similar, they really are entirely different in their approach and presentation.

Anderson and Salley are both business profs, Anderson at Cornell, and Salley at Dartmouth. I couldn’t find an ‘about the author’ page for Jovanovic. You should quickly realize that The Numbers Game is probably a more in depth look into the game.

Jovanovic’s book is a series of short lessons on assumed truths about soccer and most of his applications are from the EPL or the Euros. His number crunching (in comparison to Anderson/Salley) is more of the back of the envelope type. Much of the data used come from box scores and season summaries. For example, the myth of the corner. The overall success rate of a corner in the EPL is about 1.5%. In 2008/9, there were 4232 corners and only 61 goals. A traditional corner is practically giving the ball to the opposition.

How about the assumption that a 2-0 lead is the hardest to hold? Were you aware that in the Euros, the team with a 2-0 lead wins 94% of the time and loses only 0.3%? 2-0 sounds pretty safe to me. 

Or who was the greatest player? Jovanovic says Pele. Why? Because when Pele played for Brazil, they had a 94.2% winning percentage. When he didn’t play, Brazil’s had a 56.3% winning percentage; Quite a dropoff. What about Maradona? When Maradona played, Argentina won 62.2%, but won 69.4% when he wasn’t in the lineup. OK, maybe ‘greatest’ isn’t the best term, maybe ‘important’ is better. But that didn't stop me from getting Maradona"s autograph.

Anderson/Salley offer a far more in depth look at a few major concepts of the game and in doing so, use bigger datasets like those from Prozone, Opta, databases available just to the media, and even the EPL’s accountancy firm. BIG DATA by comparison. To begin, they discuss in some detail the role of luck in the game and offer quantitative explanations for why the outcome of a game is almost 50% pure luck. Tied to this is the fact that the infrequency of goals makes luck an even bigger role than in games like basketball or American football.

They also tackle (no pun intended) the concept of possession vs. direct play pointing out while there is little correlation between time of possession and outcome, teams that are able to possess the ball not only score more but they also prevent the other team from scoring. And they provide some insights into teams that buck this trend like Stoke, Watford, and others. Like how Stoke can have less than 30% of the possession, take 2 shots, and beat Chelsea 2-0 last year.

Here’s a question bound to raise the ire of some. Which is better? To score or to prevent the other team from scoring? Think about that. You can score a goal and still lose, but if you shut the other team out, the worst you can do is tie. And from this, they go into a discussion about personnel, managers, management, and decisions about transfer and fees being so high for strikers and so low for defenders. Their position is that defenders are ridiculously undervalued. As a former defender, I knew that!

So while both books are about ‘analytics’, they each have a bit of a different slant on the topic. Jovanovic takes a more ‘People Magazine’ approach to analytics. Short, easily read and digested topics. The perfect presentation for those who want to have some facts in their arsenal for inevitable debates and bar bets. Anderson and Salley provide a deeper journey into broader concepts of the game (while sparing the reader from the gory mathematical details).  

It all depends on what one wants out of their ‘analytics’ so I won’t recommend one over the other (even though I liked Anderson's book; hey I'm a bit of a statistics geek so their methods interested me. That and it has a rich reference list). Each will set you back $12 to $16 depending on where you find it. At that price, get both.

East Coast Don

Breaking news:

Elmore Leonard died this morning at age 87. One of MRB's favorite writers and creator of some really memorable characters and books including Deputy Raylen Givens of TV's Justified and dozens more. RIP Mr. Leonard. Shouldn't be long before the 'genius' tag becomes synonymous with his body of work. Check out his website to see just how many books and movies sprung from his fertile imagination. 

Rejection - a Lou Drake Mystery by Thomas K. Matthews

This is a classic crime novel, one that was written for our genre at Men Reading Books. Matthews has created a compelling character in Lou Drake, an NYPD detective who was once the golden boy of the detective squad. However, 10 years earlier, Drake was involved in a very high profile murder case that looked like a slam dunk against a wealthy mover-shaker type guy, until the last second before court when the case fell apart as witnesses started changing their testimony and an unlikely lowlife criminal confessed. Accused of wrong doing in the case, Drake was demoted to patrol where he was supposed to live out his career on the police force until his retirement and pension. Currently, Drake was bitter and broken. With only six months to go before retirement, in the midst of drowning in self-pity, Drake screwed up in his basic role at a new crime scene. Captain Andrade decided that the only way to keep Drake from being fired and losing his pension was to put him in the booking cage where he was not apparently a risk to anyone. That transfer did not quite work out like Andrade expected.

Meanwhile, there were two important subplots that were developed by Matthews. First, as another factor in his depression/failure, Drake had tried to write a crime-cop novel that had been rejected by every publisher, and he became a part of a writers’ group who had similar frustrations. It’s one thing to finish a book and it’s another to get it in print. Second, a serial murderer was at work, and the killer was targeting literary agents in one NYNY neighborhood. Matthews successfully brought the several plotlines to a fitting and exciting conclusion that I did not see coming until the end of the book.

This reviewer can only guess that Matthews must have been frustrated with his own efforts to find a literary agent and to get published, so there is a strong undercurrent of humor as one agent after another is gruesomely murdered. Rejection is a good book which gets my recommendation, and I hope to see another Lou Drake book. It was a book that I stayed up too late to finish, and if Matthews can produce more works like this, he has a good chance of landing in our “power rotation” of authors.

Summer Death by Mons Kallentoft

I wrote a raving review of the first novel by Mons Kallentoft to be translated into English, Midwinter Blood, and now I’ve had a similar experience with this next work. As before, his protagonist is the police superintendent, Malin Fors, a divorced woman in her 40s with a 16-year-old daughter, Tove. During most of the book, Tove and her father are off on a trip to Bali while Malin works to find a serial killer who preys on the most vulnerable young women who are about Tove’s age.

Do you remember the 1981 movie, Body Heat, with Kathleen Turner and William Hurt? That story memorably captured the essence of living in the brutal heat of a Florida summer, and Kallentoft does an equally effective job of portraying living through the hottest summer in Sweden's history. Fors and the other characters suffer from the inferno with every movement they make and their world is on fire, literally, as a forest fire rages uncontrolled near their town of Linkoping.

Once again, I’m going to avoid writing too much about the plot. Interestingly, the author more than hints at where the plot is going, but this reader was held in its grips as the story actually unfolded exactly where I thought it must. Malin agonizes about her role as a single mother and her distant relationship with her ex-husband. Chillingly, Kallentoft captures the essence of evil, violence and psychopathic thought processes. The crimes about which he writes are personal and disturbing. He introduces subjects such as the role of immigrants in a changing society and the impact of prejudices in the police force. Once again, he often writes in the first person, even as he switches from one character to another. He also created a fascinating dialogue from the perspective of the deceased victims whose spirits hang in the ethers, watching with horror as they are joined by more victims, trying to find a way to communicate with Malin to bring their killer to justice.

It’s good news that Kallentoft has two more books that are scheduled for release in 2014 and 2015. Following the seasonal theme in Midwinter Blood and Summer Death will be Autumn Sonata and Spring Remains. Considering that I got up at 3:30 in the morning in order to finish Summer Death, for me, his next two books will be must reads.

The Bear Guardian by Rick Emmerson

This is a very clever novel by a first time novelist. It’s more of a new age conspiracy theory novel than a crime novel, although great crimes are committed in the course of the story. The author, Rick Emmerson, starts off with an interaction in the Congo among wild bonobos, also known as pigmy chimpanzees, the closest relatives of humans. The story quickly shifts focus to a research group in San Diego that is studying the use of experimental drugs to deal with overly aggressive behaviors, something a drug company supposedly wants to market to rich people to help them deal with their troublesome children. Blanton Research International Corporation is the owner of the operation, and their motive for Project Trooper is quickly under suspicion.

The conspiracy? The World Order of the Arcturus is a new and powerful cult-like (but not quite a cult) and religious-like (but not a religion) organization that is dedicated to preserving and respecting all living things and to making the earth a better and safer place to live. The threat that the order caused was that so many people were dropping out of their usual roles in society in order to live their lives according to its main tenets. As the result, they were less interested in earning money and spending it to support a lifestyle that was ultimately damaging to the planet and its inhabitants. Without the taxes earned from their income, western governments were on the verge of collapse, so a group within the NSA, by way of Blanton, created a way to target the founders of Arcturus and to undermine the validity of their beliefs.

The book quickly shifts to the Congo where most of the action takes place. As the researchers try to expand their work to bonobos in the wild, the leaders of Arcturus descend on the same remote jungle area as they look for their lost temple where life on earth is said to have begun. Devious behaviors abound, as well-meaning people try to understand what is happening. Emmerson created strong characters, and as the story unfolded, he disguised who were the good guys and who were not. He juxtaposed a tribe of bonobos with a tribe of natives who interacted and traded with one another in a working symbiotic relationship, and the natives thought of the apes as being superior to themselves. In contrast, the people from the most civilized and advanced societies were filled with ill intent and unable to get along with each other.

Emmerson used one of the founders of Arcturus to express the philosophy of the group: “The worth of my life does not depend on the truth of the existence of a larger consciousness; rather it depends on how well I play my small part in harmony with the things I can experience or know. If a belief in a larger consciousness guides me to be more content, more peaceful, or helps me harmonize with our exceptional planet, then it enhances the worth of my life. Others reach the same end through a belief in a god or the awe that comes with scientific discovery. In the end, science and spiritual quests have one thing in common: the pursuit of harmony.”

Arcturus is a reference to the brightest start in the constellation Bootes, also known to the Greeks as “The Guardian of the Bear” a detail that the author weaves into the story. I had a free day to read this book and thoroughly enjoyed my time. The book gets my recommendation.

CyberStorm by Matthew Mather

For all you doomsday preppers out there.

It’s Thanksgiving week. In one of the ubiquitous Manhattan apartment buildings, those who haven’t left New York for the weekend are getting set for a group feast. Mike Mitchell, wife Lauren and 2yo son Luke are, however, dining with her folks who want them to move back home to Boston. Mike ain’t happy.

In the days approaching Christmas, Mike and Lauren’s bond is coming apart. And the snow starts falling, and falling, and falling. Then the power goes out, then the water fails. Before long, all utilities in not only New York, but in the whole country are shot to hell. The entire internet-based grid has collapsed to a crawl. Who is behind it? Rumors fly. The Russians. The Chinese. Iranians. Some international criminal syndicate. Where is the military? Has the US been invaded?

Manhattan quickly turns into a cold, snowbound refugee camp. Makeshift hospitals, food distribution depots, roving gangs of looters. Diseases. Paranoia. Water needs are paramount. And it keeps snowing. Seven feet piles up. Waste and bodies litter the streets.

Mike’s neighbors are struggling just like the rest of the city. One of the neighbors is a wannabe prepper. Chuck has supplies in a storage locker and a cabin in the Shennandoah mountains. The all take in this young guy, Damon, who has lost his girlfriend in a huge train wreck in Connecticut. Smart kid. Knows how to manipulate cell networks. Some think he’s a hacker. He sets up a kind of network that goes viral allowing people who can get connected to communicate.

Six weeks they struggle with the cold, snows, death, disease, thirst. But do manage to get out and head to Virginia, which is a dream compared to NYC. Off in the distance, they can see a glow over DC. Mike agrees to walk there and find out what’s going on. When he arrives, all he sees are refugees walking. The entire mall between the Capitol and the Washington Monument is fenced off. He climbs to a neaby roof to see what's inside. He sees a massive military installation . . . a Chinese installation.

The author’s notes say that this was a self-published book at first, got picked up and has been optioned to Hollywood - an American success story I'd say. Mather’s exploration of survival after a digital collapse is a Cormac McCarthy-bleak look at what might be thought of as a Lord of the 21^st Century Flies. One cyber security type read the book and said it was an accurate depicting what people who play ‘what if’ games expect to happen in the event of a digital collapse.

Who needs a zombie apocalypse when a digital apocalypse is more believable and might actually happen?

East Coast Don