The World Played Chess

 The World Played Chess by Robert Dugoni is a coming of age novel that is about the very era in which I came of age. Although I was lucky enough to get a high draft number which kept me in school and away from military action in Vietnam, the Vietnam War has always been a part of my life, and as the years went by, it became a more tangible reality for me. After finishing medical school, I began training as a psychiatrist in the immediate post Vietnam War era. In med school, I spent many hours seeing patients in two different VA hospitals. My residency was based in a VA hospital as well as a predominant academic institution. When I left one residency program to move to another, it was once again at a VA hospital. Upon graduation, I ran the psychiatric emergency clinic at the same VA where I supervised every admission, many of which were once again, Vietnam related. After a couple years, I stayed with the academic setting in a volunteer status and continued to supervise psychiatric residents who were seeing lots of combat soldiers. I remember seeing one soldier from the Spanish American War, many World War II soldiers, a former POW in Korea, and many others from the various military conflicts in which the U.S. got involved.

 

I know too many war stories, and it was certainly traumatic for me as I sat for hours listening to men tell about the atrocities they had witnessed and participated in. I became an expert in PTSD. I remember walking out of a war movie because of the horror and anxiety I felt, and I’ve still never seen Band of Brothers. My sensitivity to such things has eased somewhat over the decades, but I’m still careful about any war-related material that I read. It was with some trepidation that I continued reading this book once I realized that a large part of it was about men who had to come to terms with combat experiences. All of the material presented by Dugoni was consistent with the war stories that I had heard directly from combat soldiers. It was the recognizance Marines that always had the scariest stories.

 

So, The World Played Chess was about young men who were shipped off to Vietnam, the more than 50,000 who did not make it home, and those who did make it home with horrible experiences of war to think about in civilian life. The book was also about other young men who were learning about adult responsibilities and their own rebellious feelings. It was the character William Goodman who wrote a diary about his war and life experiences, and after many years of not seeing his surviving Vietnam buddies, he sent the journal to Vincent Bianco, who was Dugoni’s protagonist. By the time “Vincenzo” read the journal, he had become a lawyer, had a long-term marriage, and had children of his own who were dealing with their own coming of age events. Now, Vincent was dealing with a new set of trials which involved being a good parent as his children prepared to leave home to face very different challenges than he had faced.

 

I thought it was a well-designed plot and an entirely excellent account of the unique struggles Vietnam era soldiers had to face and then continue to manage over their ensuing years. The characters that Dugoni developed were all very believable. I give this book a very strong favoraable recommendation.

Long Time Gone

 My binging of Charlie Donlea’s novels might be over, at least regarding those in audio format I think I've now been through them all. If you’ve been following my book reviews, you know that I’ve found his plots and characters to be excellent. If read one after the other in the course of less than two months. In this one, Long Time Gone, there was excellent development of his protagonist, Sloan Hastings, a physician who is completing her fellowship in forensic pathology. When she submits her own DNA to a popular genetic tracing service, her own family of origin came back as a total surprise. Sloan knew she had been adopted, but she learned she had been the victim of an unsolved kidnapping 30 years earlier, a national news sensation.

I thought this was an excellent story and I was about to recommend it to my daughter. After an exciting plot, the final story hung on one ridiculous detail that was beyond the realm of believability. While readers in this genre must be willing to suspend reality to a degree, there are limits to that. For the first time, Donlea went beyond the border of believability, and it sure spoiled a good book. So, I was entertained until the very end. I am disappointed. Maybe you’ll have a different reaction.

King of Ashes

 My fellow reviewer, ECD, wrote a wonderful review about this novel on 8/5/25. Please read his review, and I'll only add a few words. It was ECD who introduced me to Cosby's work, and I had already read this one. Then, I saw it was available on Libby in audio format, and chose to listen to it. This is southern noir at its best. I find myself gasping as I take in the plot and learn about his characters. Cosby use of language is captivating. He gets a 5/5 from me.

The Suicide House

 I’ve continued my binge reading and listening to murder mysteries by Charlie Donlea. There may be only two books left that are available in audio format. My last read was The Suicide House, a story that takes place at a successful high school college prep boarding program. The campus is large and beautiful, and the teachers also lived on campus in a building that provided them with privacy from the students. However, when a train track was built to support a local mining operation, the teachers’ house became undesirable due to the constant noise. But when that structure was abandoned, it became the favorite place for students to use when they wanted to get away from the very strict rules that were a part of their academic program. Party on!

 

But then there was a series of deaths in the old teachers’ house and on the nearby railroad tracks. In the second book in the Rory Moore/Lane Phillips, Donlea further developed those characters. It was Rory who had a unique expertise in recreating murder scenes from cold case unsolved crimes. Lane was the one person in the world who understood this obsessional and autistic woman. His support allowed her to do her thing. She simply saw clues that others had missed.

 

This is a good plot and I appreciated learning more about the protagonists. Perhaps this book is not great literature, but it is captivating none-the-less. If this is your genre, you should get to know Charlie Donlea.

The Widow

 The Widow is a John Grisham novel. I think we’ve read and reviewed most of Grisham’s novels and he has generally gotten high praise, if not outright ravings regarding his characters and plots. In this story, an elderly widow, Ms. Eleanor Barnett, walked into a lawyer’s small office with a request to rewrite her will. She had done this recently with another lawyer in the same small town, but she had grown to distrust that guy. In fact, when it seemed she was a woman of great wealth, the lawyer wrote a clause to grant himself a near half-million dollar cash gift at the time of the widow’s death. Simon Latch, the new attorney, had seen his practice slide toward bankruptcy, in part because of his failed marriage, but also because of his gambling debts. The widow’s husband had apparently led a frugal life and left her with about $20,000,000 in stocks for Coca-Cola and WalMart.

 

Desperate to find a way to avoid his own financial demise, Simon agreed to take the case at a rather high fee for the work he would do, and he then avoided thoroughly vetting his client when she did not produce the usual documents with regard to her assets. He was afraid that if he pressed her for the information, that she would just take her estate matters to another attorney. She began to take up more and more of Simon’s time, but he kept on with the expenses that Ms. Barnett was accruing with a promise of a huge payout from her estate. Then she became ill, was hospitalized, and then died quickly under suspicious circumstances. All guilty motives pointed toward Simon.

 

I would rate this as an interesting book, but it’s not one which held my interest to the extent that most of his others have done. I don’t think this novel is Grisham’s best work.

Don't Believe It

 My binge of Charlie Donlea’s books continues. Don’t Believe It is a story about whether Grace Sebold murdered her boyfriend, Julian, while on a Spring Break from their fourth year of medical school. They’ve traveled to St. Lucia with a group of close friends since high school for the purpose of being at the wedding for two of them. It’s Julian’s plan to propose marriage to Grace, and Julian chose the most romantic spot, high on a cliff overlooking a beautiful white sandy beach and the Caribbean. Julian’s body was subsequently discovered in the water and he had obviously fallen from the cliff. Grace was accused of having pushed him off, and there was significant physical evidence that tied her to the crime 

Although Grace constantly protested her innocence, claiming that she had not even gone to the planned rendezvous with Julian, her statements were not deemed to be credible. She was provided with local council who was thought to be inadequate to the task, and Grace was convicted of murder. She had been in jail for 10 years when filmmaker Sydney Ryan chose to focus on this case for a television series. She discovered some inconsistencies in the original investigation. The St. Lucia Department of Justice was uninterested in reopening the case for fear that it would hurt their vital tourism business, and the U.S. Department of Justice was uninterested in looking bad because it meant they had ignored a U.S. citizen who needed their help. In the face of danger to herself, Sydney was determined to carry through with her investigative efforts despite the resistance she faced..

 

The plot was exceptionally well written, and I did not see the last-minute shifts in the story until they actually occurred. This is another good and entertaining murder mystery novel from Donlea. I have become a fan, and my binge reading/listening to his stories will continue.

Some Choose Darkness

 Some Choose Darkness is the fifth Charlie Donlea novel I’ve read/listened to in a very short time span. His books are available on Libby and the wait for them has not been too long. He typically writes about psychologically damaged women, both the people hunting for clues about an old murder as well as those who have been the victims. The subtitle of the book is A Rory Moore/Lane Phillips Novel, Rory being the protagonist in this good story. She specializes in forensic reconstruction of cold cases, finding clues that others have missed.

 

In this story, her father was an attorney of a client he had taken on early in his career, a serial killer who was convicted and imprisoned for only one of the women he had been suspected of killing. Rory’s father, she discovered to her own horror, had continued his relationship with “The Thief” and had taken on responsibilities that were far beyond a typical attorney-client relationship, including managing his wealth and then paying himself for services rendered from that fund. Her father was terrified that although The Thief had never been paroled, he was coming to the end of his 30-year prison sentence and was about to be released. His anxiety increased until he had a heart attack and died.

 

Rory had graduated from law school and was listed as being on her father’s staff, she had never practiced law. Rather, she had quietly left that scene and limited her legal work to reconstructing crimes. However, as she studied the victims of old crimes, she became emotionally disturbed by the effort. At the start of this story, the emotionally fragile Rory had just returned from 6 months off work as the result of the trauma she felt by the nature of her work. She was not prepared to take on her father’s cases, and given the short timeline to the prisoner’s impending release, something her father had successfully stalled for some years, the judge would not allow Rory to refer the case to some other attorney.

 

The case that had led to this man’s incarceration had to do with the disappearance of Angela Mitchell, another presumed victim of this killer. It was Rory’s reconstruction of that crime that moved this story line along. Angela’s body had never been found, and Rory began to wonder if she might not still be alive.

 

I have been entertained by this series of books by Donlea, and I’m already nearing the end of another one of his books. You should expect that I’m giving this author a strong recommendation.