Void Moon by Michael Connelly

It had been too long since I read a Michael Connelly book, one of the kings of our genre who is also at the top of all of our power rotations at MRB. I was encouraged to read Void Moon by old buddy MG. This one was written in 2000.

Cassie Black was just out of prison after having been caught in a big time robbery of a high roller at a Las Vegas casino, the Cleopatra. On the night she was arrested, her lover Max was killed, apparently having jumped from a 20-story window while she waited below. Cassie always thought he was murdered, all the way through her five years of confinement in the High Desert Correctional Institute for Women, but there was no evidence to support her idea.

After prison, Cassie was trying to make a go of straight life as a car sales person at Porsche of Hollywood, but she needed more money and she missed the excitement of the crooked side of life. The book opened with her obvious and unexplained interest in a family who had a home up for sale in Laurel Canyon. How did that connect to the rest of the story? She had been out of prison for a couple years when Cassie finally contacted one of her old criminal cohorts, Leo Renfro, who proposed a job back at the very casino where she was arrested and Max died. She was reluctant to ever set foot in the Cleopatra again, but Leo was sure this robbery would provide her with the seed money she wanted to disappear. She might not ever get another opportunity like this one.

Vincent Grimaldi was still the owner of the Cleopatra, and he had kept his security guy, the brutal Jack Karch, under his thumb since Max’s death. The casino was up for sale and mob money from both Chicago and Miami was in play. When Cassie hit the high roller, she got more than she bargained for. Rather than finding the expected 100k, she got a brief case with $2.5 million, money that was intended to be a payoff by one of the mobs for the casino deal. It was too much. She had stolen money from the wrong guys.

The chase was on and bodies started dropping everywhere. This was an action packed book which proves Connelly remains at the top of my power rotation and that MG knows what he’s talking about (at least this time).

Allegiance by Tom Abrahams

Allegiance is the second novel by Tom Abrahams, the best feature being his protagonist Jackson Quick who works for the governor of Texas who happens to be in the midst of a losing battle for reelection. The story opened with an intense sniper shot, and the action continued nearly nonstop throughout. This was not a book to put down despite the fact that I had some problems with it. The authors device was to delay important background information about Quick until near the end of the book, and that finally pulled together how this man had the skills to master violent events which seemed to be well above his pay grade. Quick might have been a more believable character if I had known more about him earlier. Ultimately, this is a dirty politics story in which the two men running for governor will stop at nothing to win since by doing so, they will further enrich themselves and those who are loyal to them. It’s all about the money and power. There were great twists in the plot and subplots which included the oil business in Texas, nanotechnology, and a secessionist movement to make Texas as an independent republic. There was something missing in the dialogue, but like I wrote above, despite my not totally buying into the characters and the storyline, I also needed to know what was going to happen to Quick.  

Fever Dream by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Fever Dream is the 10^th installment of Preston and Child’s series featuring the handsome, cultured, and eccentric protagonist, Special Agent Pendergast of the FBI.  This book reveals a personal side to Aloysius Xingu L. Pendergast (yup, that’s his given name) so is an excellent opportunity for the authors to develop their signature character.

Pendergast is examining his gun collection at his family mansion in Louisiana when he discovers his former wife’s rifle had last fired a blank.  Helen had last fired that rifle twelve years earlier on safari in Africa as a lion attacked and mauled her to death.  Pendergast surmises someone else had replaced Helen’s live ammunition with blanks thus setting up her demise.  He is compelled to investigate Helen’s murder and solicits help from longtime friend and collaborator, NYPD Lieutenant Vincent D’Agosta.  Together they retrace Helen’s activities prior to her death.

Apparently, Helen had become secretly obsessed with the famed naturalist and painter John James Audubon.  She had spent hours searching for a missing painting, Audubon’s final work before his death, entitled Black Frame.  She had come to believe Audubon had experienced some creative transformation before doing this painting and she was on track to discover the cause of this transformation.  As Pendergast and D’Agosta reconstruct Helen’s findings, they discover secret and deadly medical research perpetrated by a pharmaceutical research company located deep in the Mississippi bayou.  Unraveling the connection of this illicit activity in the bayou with Helen’s gruesome death in Africa twelve years earlier, places Pendergast and D’Agosta squarely in the murderer’s sights.


Preston and Child tell a good story.  They build a strong plot and masterfully peel the onion until all is revealed.  While their prose is eloquent, their vocabulary is a bit of a challenge for me. Perhaps that is in keeping with their highly educated, well cultured lead character, A.X.L. Pendergast… but I find myself looking up two or three words in every chapter.  That’s kind of annoying when the words they chose don’t really blend well into the story… but thanks for the vocab lesson.  My greatest problem with the book, however, is that I just don’t relate to the lead character, Pendergast.  We are constantly reminded how handsome, cultured, and intelligent he is when to me he comes off as pompous, reclusive, and self-centered… not your typical hero.  I think I’ve read the last of Preston and Child.

The Counterfeit Agent by Alex Berenson

Apparently, a few decades ago, a whole bunch of nations were trying to get the bomb, or at least weapons grade uranium, but most abandoned their efforts and shut it all down. One enterprising engineer managed to hang onto a few kilos of the stuff just in case there might be someone interested in making a covert purchase.

A CIA case officer in Peru got involved with a local, but when he came back from a trip early he found his lovely in the sack with another case officer and sought assignment far away, like Hong Kong where, with the help of a decent inheritance, went bonkers for black jack, eventually mustering out of the CIA and falling off the grid.

Not to mention that European businessmen with Iranian contracts are winding up dead.

In walks "Reza" to the US embassy in Istanbul. Says he is an officer in the Revolutionary Guard and fed up with the path his government is taking. Tells the local case officer that Iran is planning of bombing 2 Israeli embassies . . . and it happens. Months pass and the CIA's got nothing on Reza. Then Reza says that Iran is planning on taking out a CIA Chief of Station somewhere in Asia. Shortly afterwards, the Manila COS is gunned down.

By now, not only is Langley interested in Reza, but so is Ellis Shafer, a former DCI, and the most recent DCI Vinny Duto (now Senator Duto). While the suits that make all the decisions are starting to believe that maybe Reza is the real thing, Ellis and Duto, never great friends, are  in agreement that Iran's involvement in the recent attacks make no sense. But Washington is feeling pulled toward war, especially when Reza says a test run is underway right now to insert fissionable material in the US, not for Iran to bomb the US, but to build a bomb inside the US to use as a deterrent against a possible US strike on Iran.

Whoever is behind it all is very good. Excellent tradecraft, smart planning, and very well funded. Shafer convinces his best muscle, John Wells, to start tracking down clues that take him from DC to Guatemala to Panama to Peru to Texas to Phuket to Istanbul. And you know that whenever Wells gets a scent, bodies start to pile up.

As usual, full disclosure: Berenson in firmly entrenched way up high in my power rotation and has been since The Faithful Spy, his first novel. He has developed Wells into one of the more compelling characters amongst modern thriller heroes and the plots are fresh and entirely believable. There are plenty of those 'seriously?' moments and hold-your-breath sequences that have become signatures of Berenson. If you miss Mitch Rapp after the untimely passing of Vince Flynn, then run, don't walk, and start in with John Wells from the beginning. You will not be disappointed. Books like this populate the alter where the MRB guys worship.

East Coast Don

Run by Blake Crouch

“Run” by Blake Crouch never caught my interest. I thought the quality of the writing and character development were poor, and by the time I abandoned the book at 13% on my Kindle progress meter, the plot had yet to even vaguely develop.

Bury Your Dead by Louise Penny

In “Bury Your Dead,” Penny takes on three simultaneous story lines, skillfully intertwining them in a way I’ve not seen done before. The first has to do with Chief Inspector Gamache’s struggle to recover from a hostage scene that has gone incredibly wrong, but it’s a scene that the readers of this series was unfamiliar, a scene that led to the death of an agent and the near fatal shooting of Gamache and his closest associate, Inspector Jean-Guy Beauvoir. The second story line has to do with the murder that was solved in the last book, “The Brutal Telling,” in which the resident of Three Pines, Olivier, was convicted of the crime of murder. While all evidence convincingly pointed to Oliver, Gamache was never satisfied that justice had been served, so as Gamache recovered from his wounds in Quebec, Beauvoir was sent back to Three Pines to take a new look at the old case.

The third story line occurred as Gamache was recuperating from his physical and emotional wounds in Quebec City in the warmth of his retired mentor, the former Chief Inspector of Surete du Quebec, Emile Comeau. Gamache’s hobby was to do research on the history of Quebec and he had a particular interest in finding the body of Samuel de Champlain, the founder of the city. In the course of his research, a new murder is committed that has a direct impact on Gamache’s quest. In the course of leading the reader through this story, the history of Quebec is fully reviewed and the author discussed the ongoing tensions between the English and French communities in the city.

Penny slips some great lines into her novels, and she did so again. While reviewing the history of the province of Quebec and discussing the people who were most fascinated by it, Penny wrote, "And while forgetting the past might condemn people to repeat it, remembering it too vividly condemned them to never leave."

This is a beautiful book, well written, creative, but if you new to Penny’s books, this is not the place to start. Her other books might be freestanding, but this one is not. At minimum, one should read “The Brutal Telling” before this one, but it would be better yet to start with book #1 of the Armand Gamache series, “Still Life.” If you’ve already read Penny and have finished “The Brutal Telling,” this one should be the very next book in your reading queue. With those caveats, Penny gets 5 stars for this effort.

White Fire by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

White Fire by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child is the authors’ latest in a series featuring Special Agent Pendergast, eccentric FBI agent and Corrie Swanson, an impulsive criminology student being mentored by Pendergast.

Corrie needs a thesis project to complete her criminology degree and learns of a grave yard being relocated in Roaring Fork, Colorado.  The town was founded as a silver mining boom town in the mid-19^th century but is now a popular ski resort and getaway for the extremely wealthy.  The graves are being moved to make room for a massive country club in an exclusive residential development containing several multi-million dollar mansions.  The human remains from the graves date back to the 1870’s and include skeletons of several miners who were attacked by a grizzly bear.  Corrie hopes to examine the bones and gain forensic knowledge about animal attacks of humans.

But trouble greets her soon after she arrives in Roaring Fork.  Police Chief Morris denies her access to the skeletal remains so she breaks into the warehouse where the bodies are being stored.  She does her examination of one skeleton and discovers the body was cannibalized not attacked by a grizzly bear as legend suggests.  Chief Morris catches her in her quest and arrests her for breaking and entering and disturbing a grave.  The prosecutor under the influence of Mrs. Kermode, the town matriarch offers Corrie a plea bargain of ten years in prison.  Broke financially and in spirit, Corrie writes to her mentor Agent Pedergast explaining her situation and her illegally obtained findings.

Pendergast swoops in like a superhero to save the day for Corrie.  He challenges the town’s legal right to relocate the graves and gets charges dropped against Corrie.  He then joins the investigation of the cannibalized remains and begins to contact descendants of the victims to gain permission to further investigate.  From his days as an Oxford scholar he recalls reading about a meeting between two famous authors in London in the 1889.  At that meeting, Oscar Wilde told Arthur Conan Doyle about a tale he heard while traveling in America promoting his books.  The tale described a summer of terror in Roaring Fork, Colorado when a grizzly bear attacked and killed several miners.  The tale however, suggested the attacks were by humans and the prey were cannibalized.  It becomes Pendergast’s theory that the mercury used in primitive silver ore refining, caused delusions and insanity in the mine workers and turned them into murderers and cannibals.

But before Pendergast and Corrie can prove their theory, more tragedy strikes the elitist community of Roaring Fork.  One of the spectacular multi-million dollar mansions is set on fire with the family trapped inside.  Then a day later another mansion is intentionally incinerated.  Chief Morris is overwhelmed and asks Agent Pendergast for assistance.  Then a sniper takes a shot at Corrie as she drives down a mountain road and soon after her dog is decapitated.  Apparently her mission to dig into the past is unearthing some present day threats for someone.  But discovering ‘who’ and ‘why’ has become a dangerous game.

White Fire is my first Preston and Child read.  The writing is very well crafted and full of intrigue and mystery.  The plot is a bit contrived but the connection to Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle is fascinating.  It is in the character development where I have trouble.  Corrie is too short tempered and self-serving to be likable.  The Pendergast character is too ridiculous to be taken seriously.  He is supposedly a handsome, well dressed, articulate, refined, Oxford educated master detective who happens to be an FBI agent stationed in North Dakota… hmmm.  Plus he has enough freedom from his bureaucratic employer to run off to London for a week to research a case, first class accommodations all the way.  At one point he uses an ancient Tibetan mind technique called Chongg Ran to meditate and visualize events that took place more than a century ago… really?  Not your stereotypic FBI agent to say the least.  For this reason the label ‘airplane book’ seems appropriate... it will hold your interest but not bowl you over.

The Jury Master by Robert Dugoni

The Jury Master by Robert Dugoni is the first in his David Sloane series, first published in 2006. Sloane is a gifted and successful criminal defense attorney in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has a spellbinding effect on juries, but this is not a courtroom drama. Sloane had grown up with the information that his parents were killed in an auto accident when he was a boy, and he was then raised in a series of foster homes. Although he succeeded despite those handicaps, his personal life was nearly empty beyond his relationship with one old woman and another, his secretary at the law firm. What did Sloane have to do with the death of Joe Branick, personal friend and confident of the President of the United States, Robert Peak? Branick died in a national park in West Virginia while Sloane was touring Yosemite Park in California, and Sloane had never heard Branick’s name.

This was a story of international intrigue, a conspiracy about oil and politics, great tragedies that had been swept under the rug 30 years earlier, and Sloane’s discovery of his real identity. Dugoni has written a true page-turner. The action was non-stop even if some of the connections between the subplots sometimes seemed sketchy. I thought some of his similes were a bit pedestrian: “[the bullet] had ripped through the man’s temple like a runaway freight train” or “Stress weighed on some men like wet clothes, leaving them weighed down and drained.” But, for the most part, the writing was solid, and Dugoni’s character development was good enough. I’m not ready to elevate this author to my power rotation, but I’m going to get the second David Sloane novel and see what develops in the 5-book series. Dugoni also has some free-standing novels.

In 12/24, I listened to this book in audio format, having completely forgotten I had already read it. My opinions are unchanged except that I should add that the similes were almost non-stop, often pretty funny and enjoyable. It's not great literature and I'd give it a B grade for mystery. Still, I enjoyed my time with the book and tolerated the reality-testing elements in the story.

Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World by Jan Karski

The Story of a Secret State: My Report to the World is a nonfiction work by Jan Karski. This is a remarkable WWII story about the Polish Underground, and it was actually first published before the end of the war, in 1944. Karski was a courier, both within Poland among various ranking members of the Underground, and outside the country, culminating in meetings with both Churchill and FDR. Mostly, this was a story about the remarkable organization and functioning of the Underground in defiance of Hitler. Every mission was done at the risk of torture and death. Surely, Karski’s real work as a courier was the template for subsequent novels about the clandestine activities during the Cold War by some of our favorite authors.

Karski wrote, “The German Occupation, contrary to the general belief, was not successful, at least not in it’s policing aspect. The experience of the Underground movements, not only in Poland but in all of the occupied countries, has shown that the machine of repression was powerless against a clandestine body that was well-organized and that benefited from the strong support of the people…. The average German police officer was most often a totally ignorant, uneducated sadist, as well as a criminal. In 1982, the Gestapo, the Underground estimated, had more than 60,000 agents in Poland alone, backed by a huge army. Yet they were never able to crush the elaborate organism of resistance we offered them and almost never broke through to its central agencies.”

In the course of his missions for the Underground, Karski who was a lifelong practicing Catholic, came in contact with ranking Polish Jews who told him that the Polish Jews were not just being contained in the ghettos or transferred to labor camps, but they were being murdered. Once he believed the wholesale slaughter was actually true, he knew he had to see it for himself if he was to provide believable accounts to the outside world. He was smuggled in and out of the Warsaw ghetto and then one death camp where he saw the unspeakable horrors as they were being committed. Then, he was the first to report to the outside world on the extermination of the Polish Jews by the Third Reich. While he gave a description of FDR’s heartfelt response to this startling information, it was clear that neither FDR or Churchill were willing to change their tactics or the course of the war in order to save the Jews who continued to be slaughtered until the war’s end.

The writing was dramatic and detailed the death of many of the Underground participants with whom Karski interacted. The lifespan of any person working for the organization was quite short, and Karski’s survival through the war was evidence of his skill and, often, good luck. After the war, Karski moved to the U.S. and got his Ph.D. at Georgetown where he became a professor for the next 40 years. He became a U.S. citizen in 1954, and he lived until the age of 86 and died in 2000.

According to Wikipedia, “During an interview with Hannah Rosen in 1995 Karski said about the failure to rescue most of the Jews from mass murder;

It was easy for the Nazis to kill Jews, because they did it. The Allies considered it impossible and too costly to rescue the Jews, because they didn't do it. The Jews were abandoned by all governments, church hierarchies and societies, but thousands of Jews survived because thousands of individuals in Poland, France, Belgium, Denmark, Holland helped to save Jews. Now, every government and church says, ‘We tried to help the Jews’, because they are ashamed, they want to keep their reputations. They didn't help, because six million Jews perished, but those in the government, in the churches they survived. No one did enough.”