Orphan X

Gregg Hurwitz is a prolific author who has not previously been reviewed in this blog, and I was hounded by one of his most devoted fans, Matt Gage, to do so. Matt suggested I start with Orphan X, a book release in 2016, the first in a five-book series about Evan Smoak, who at the age of 11, was snatched from and orphanage and taught to become an assassin. This was black contract stuff, government-funded activities. Evan was ready for his first assignment by the time he turned 19. However, by the time this story unfolds, Evan had about 15 years in this service. Jack Johns was his handler, the only one who provided him with training and assignments, the only one who knew his history. Other orphans were similarly trained, but they were not supposed to interact with one another. In the process of his murderous acts, Evan became a wealthy man. He lived in a 7,000 square foot Wilshire Boulevard penthouse. But, he was on the run. He had finally grown tired of his assignments and no longer trusted that he was only being directed to take out bad guys. With a new identity, he was hiding in plain sight. He decided to keep life interesting by using his talents against people who he could identify as bad people, and he had a system designed to do just that.

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But, what happens when other orphans are hired to take him down? Therein lies Hurwitz’s plot. On the one hand Evan was a rather two-dimensional stereotypic character, the solo male hero who can walk into just about any situation and deal with it, whether that means punching, stabbing, or shooting. He was a sort of modern day, West Coast version of Batman or even Clive Cussler’s Dirk Pitt. Remember the television shows The Equalizer and The Fixer, then you get the idea. On the other hand, this was one awesome plot which kept me from putting the book down. So, I’m not as smitten with Hurwitz as my buddy, but I could find my way back to another Hurwitz book in the future.

The American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road

The American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road by Nick Bilton is exactly what the title suggests. This is nonfiction story about the hunt and eventual capture of Ross Ulbrict, a.k.a. Dread Pirate Roberts, who is from Austin, graduated from University of Texas Dallas with a degree in physics, and headed to Penn State as a physics doctoral candidate. Ross was not really a political activist, but he was a radical libertarian who was against government regulation/intervention is all things. That’s what led him to start selling magic mushroom seeds on the Dark Web. Ross thought people should have what they wanted and the laws preventing that were unreasonable. On his own, he figured out how to program and create his own website, The Silk Road, how to use the Dark Web browser Tor, and how to be paid in bitcoins. That allowed him total anonymity.

Given his libertarian beliefs, he thought it was reasonable, as long as he got a cut of the action, for others to use his website to sell whatever they wanted to sell, other drugs, guns, kidneys. Really. His website went live in 2011, and it took four years to bring him down and sentence him to life in prison. He went from making a few dollars a month to millions per month. It was a story about The Silk Road in Gawker that really brought Ulbrict fame, but that also brought the attention of a team of Feds who did not share his libertarian viewpoint. Jared Der-Yeghiayan from the Department of Homeland Security in Chicago, Carol Force from the DEA in Baltimore, Chris Tarbell from the FBI in New York City, and Gary Alford from the IRS in New York were the key players in bringing Ulbrict down. Of course, given the millions of dollars that were flowing into his website, there were other crooks who were able to steal money from Ulbrict – and when they cheated him, he hired killers to take them out.

Bilton wrote, “The site was making more money than he knew what to do with. He had tens of millions of dollars on thumb drives scatter around his apartment. The problems, though abounding, had simply become daily work obstacles for Ross. When he wrote in his diary that he had loaned a dealer half a million dollars, or had Variety Jones [his chief associate] deploy one of his soldiers to deal with another problems, or paid hackers or informants $100,000 apiece, it was just a day in the office for Ross. Murders, extortion, reprisals, and attacks had all just become the job. Sure it was stressful at times, but in Ross’s alternative universe he was king.”

This just goes to show that even the brightest man in the battle, along with his team of helpers, probably can’t win against a team of determined agents with unlimited time and resources. Of course, the team was also lucky and Ulbrict did make some critical mistakes that led to his government foes finally identifying him.

This was a captivating read, and it gets my strong recommendation.

Real Tigers

Mick Herron’s Real Tigers is an example of why I love the crime/espionage genre. This is the fourth book in the Slough House series, and I’ve already raved about the first three books. This new one won the Golden Dagger aware of the Crime Writers’ Association of the United Kingdom in 2016, so it’s obvious that a lot of people are on board with me about that.

This story continues the saga of protagonist Jackson Lamb, one of the most vile and disgusting characters I’ve ever known to be written into the role of hero. He’s a disgusting human being, hardly the guy you would imagine riding to the rescue of others, but it’s what he does. In this fourth book, one of Lamb’s Slough House subordinates, Catherine Standish, is kidnapped. Catherine is an alcoholic who has been sober for a while, but she seems to fragile that when she disappeared, her colleagues initially assumed that she was off on a bender. But then River Cartwright, another Slough House character was caught trying to smuggle ultra top secret documents out of a secure location – he had been compromised in an extortion plot to get Catherine’s release. For Slough House, an operation that rarely saw anything more exciting that a paper cut, this was a remarkable series of events. The documents in question had to do with background information about the new political appointment, Peter Judd, to the position of Home Secretary, the ultimate boss of MI5 (Regent’s Park) and Slough House. Judd had been Regent’s Park harshest and loudest critic because it served his political ambitions. Interestingly, Judd’s own application to “The Service” had been turned down three decades earlier because he was a narcissistic sociopath.

But the intrigue also had to do with the head of MI5, Dame Ingrid Tearney and one of her second desks, Diana Taverner (“Lady Di”). It was no secret that Taverner coveted Tearney’s job, but given they were close to the same age and were approaching retirement age, Lady Di’s time was running out. Yes, Herron brings all these plots together with more great characters, while further developing the background about Lamb and his cast of underlings (Roderick Ho, Marcus Longridge, Louisa Guy, Standish, and Cartwright). This is an excellent book, but don’t start the Slough House series with this one – read the Slow Horses first. Herron is a master story teller and his use of language is particularly enjoyable. I’ve already downloaded, the next book in the series, Spook Street, which was just released.

Testimony by Scott Turow

Fifty year old Bill ten Boom decides he needs a fresh start in life.  He leaves his wife and family and forfeits his partnership in a prestigious law firm.  He has no plans other than to enjoy life in a different setting.  Then an old law school buddy recommends him to be a prosecutor for the International Criminal Court in The Hague where war crimes and other international crimes against humanity are prosecuted.  Boom reluctantly takes the job and is assigned to a ten year old case in Bosnia where 400 Gypsy refugees vanished at the end of the Bosnian war.

Boom finds one witness, Ferko Rincic, the sole survivor of the massacre.  Ferko testifies about his friends and family being herded in the night to a nearby cave and being buried alive inside as explosives are used to seal the cave entrance closed.  Ferko’s sketchy description leads to several possible suspects for the crime.  They include a disgraced U.S. major general, a former soldier reporting to the general now turned military contractor in Bosnia, a former brutal Serbian leader, and a possible conspiracy.  Boom hires bull dozers and back hoes to dig up the cave in search of physical remains of the massacre.  But physical evidence doesn’t match Ferko’s testimony and Boom is forced to investigate Ferko and his lawyer as well as the other possible suspects.

While this is an interesting tale, I didn’t find it thrilling or all that intriguing… in fact, a little slow at times.  I’ve read most of Scott Turow’s books because Presumed Innocent is one of the best legal thrillers I’ve ever read.  I even remember exactly where and when I read it, on vacation at Nags Head, NC in June 1990.  Nothing Turow has written since measures up… and yet I hope.

Thanks to NetGalley for the advance look at this one.

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

My son, Dale, and his wife, Mai, went to hear Neil deGrasse Tyson in San Francisco, and they knew I’d be jealous. They bought his latest book, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry, got his signature, and sent it to me. I am thrilled. I’ve already been buying his t-shirts and coffee mugs with pithy quotes like, “Science Doesn’t Care What You Believe.”

This is a short read, 208 half-size pages. He wrote that it was his goal to provide a “foundational fluency in all major ideas and discoveries that drive our modern understanding of the universe.” That’s a big task for a small book, and he certainly achieved that. I’ve been through multiple explanations of the big bang, and Tyson takes the reader there again, breaking it down in 1 trillionth of a second parts. He referred to the big bang as “the greatest story ever told.” Really, I still don’t fully understand it, but after reading the book, I understand more about the theory. At the same time, a main story line had to do with how much is not understood about the universe, especially facts about both dark matter and dark energy which comprise 95% of the mass in the universe. That’s right, what’s visible only comprises 5% of the universal mass. He wrote, “Other unrelenting skeptics might declare that ‘seeing is believing’ – an approach to life that works well in many endeavors, including mechanical engineering, fishing, and perhaps dating. It’s also good, apparently, for residents of Missouri. But it doesn’t make for good science. Science is not just about seeing, it’s about measuring, preferably with something that’s not your own eyes, which are inextricably conjoined with the baggage of your brain. That baggage is more often than not a satchel of preconceived ideas, post-conceived notions, and outright bias.” It’s no wonder that a man who can think like that has become so beloved.

After working his way through information about the big bang, the place of the earth in the universe, the ever expanding universe, dark matter, dark energy, invisible light, etc., it was in Tyson’s last chapter, he offered some of his philosophy: “Want to know what we’re made of? Again, the cosmic perspective offers a bigger answer than you might expect. The chemical elements of the universe are forged in the fires of high-mass stars that end their lives in titanic explosions, enriching their host galaxies with the chemical arsenal of life as we know it. The result? The four most common chemically active elements in the universe – hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen – are the four most common elements of life on Earth, with carbon serving as the foundation of biochemistry. We do not simply live in this universe. The universe lives within us.”

Tyson wrote that the cosmic perspective flows from fundamental knowledge, but it’s more than that. “It’s also about having the wisdom and insight to apply that knowledge to assessing our place in the universe.” He commented that the cosmic perspective is humble and spiritual, “even redemptive – but not religious.” He added, “The cosmic perspective not only embraces our genetic kinship with all life on Earth but also values our chemical kinship with any yet-to-be discovered life in the universe, as well as our atomic kinship with the universe itself.”

Thanks Dale and Mai. I loved it.

The Totally Unscientific Study of The Search for Human Happiness

I love Paul Poundstone. I love her humor on NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, and I’ve taken my family to see her do standup comedy. Hysterical material, and I will go again when I get the chance. So, when I heard she had a book out (didn’t know it was her second), I promptly bought it: The Totally Unscientific Study of The Search for Human Happiness. Paula pondered what might make her feel happy, whether that was getting fit, improving her computer skills, getting organized, dancing with abandon, etc. She wondered that if there was a secret to happiness, why would anyone keep it a secret. I thought I would be entertained by her silliness, but I was left disappointed. It just did not capture my interest and I abandoned the book about halfway through.

Not that there were no redeeming stories and one-liners. When she talked about improving her computer skills, she complained about having to keep track of so many passwords, so she bought a new kitten in order to have a new name she could recall. Regarding Twitter, she said, “Twitter has to be one of the stupidest, most narcissistic activities humans have ever come up with, and I was enjoying it very much.” When reorganizing her desk, she realizing she had misinterpreted the forever stamp, thinking anything with that stamp meant she had to keep the letter forever. With regard to rearing her three adopted kids, Paula said that her least favorite kid argument started with the three words, “But you said…” So, there was some good stuff, just not enough to keep me going beyond halfway.