Endurance: Shakleton's Incredible Voyage

 This is the third time I’ve read Endurance, Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage, by Alfred Lansing although this time was via audio format. Simon Prebble was the perfect voice for this remarkable story. I chose to read it again in anticipation of actually going to the Antarctica in another month. We will fly to Buenos Aires, and then take a second flight to Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world, located on Tierra del Fuego. From there, we’ll take a 10-day cruise to the peninsula which juts north from the Antarctica mainland. We’ll be crossing the dangerous Drake Passage which Lansing writes about in vivid language. That passage around the cape is famous as being the most dangerous sailing area in the world due to the monstrous waves. 

It was about 16 years ago that my wife and I sailed through this same area. Two days before Cape Horne, while we were sailing through the more protected Straits of Magellan, there were 60-foot waves in the Drake Passage which would have kept us from going out to the cape, but when it was our turn, the seas were nearly dead flat. It was a beautiful day and we sailed around the small island of Cape Horne where there’s a light house before heading off for the Falklands. At the time, it was not our intent to go to Antarctica. While standing on deck and getting a good luck at the remarkable beauty of Cape Horne, a fellow passenger told me it was the fifth time she had taken this tour, but because of brutal weather, it was the first time she had actually seen the Cape Horne island. Because I had the prior experience of being at sea and sailing through a typhoon with it’s own monstrous waves, which I found to be exciting as hell, I’m hoping this trip does not have another flat day. I’m hoping for some motion, just maybe not 60-foot waves.

 

The Endurance, the name of Shakleton’s ship as well as the title of the book, is nearly indescribable with regard to adventure and danger. After reading many adventure books, I find myself eager to be a part of such treks, but not this one. I thought Lansing was shouting at his top voice, “Don’t do this.” At the same time, Lansing’s admiration of Shakleton was unmistakable. As one might expect of anyone who would undertake such a journey in what was a failed attempt to be the first to reach the South Pole, Shakleton was obsessed, a maniac, but also a man who drew the affection and loyalty of his total crew of 28 men. This was Shakleton’s third trip to Antarctica. The story starts with all the difficulty of putting together such an expedition in 1914, but when it arrived, the Endurance got stuck in an ice floe. Despite heroic attempts to dislodge the boat, the crew had to abandon it, and that’s when their greatest perils began. His descriptions of going through the Drake Passage on a 22-boat was amazing. Time and again, Shakleton faced life and death decisions, and more than two years after setting out on his journey, they made their way to safety. He did not lose a single man, compared to his rival Amundsen who lost three men on his contemporary expedition.

 

This is a great true adventure book, certainly one of the best ever written. Did you know that the ship Endurance was recently discovered where it sunk in the Antarctic waters? I’ve seen underwater pictures of the ship, and I hope to learn more about that.

 

The Protector

My daughter was attending a charity event and she happened to be sitting at the same table with the author of this book and her husband. She described a pleasant evening and good conversation. She learned that the author, Mary Beth Wilkas Janke, had served in the Secret Service and had completed an autobiography. I was intrigued, so I bought the book. Clearly this woman has led an interesting life, and it was unfortunate that the Secret Service, after only a short stint, chose to terminate her employment because of an alleged lie she told on her original application. She presents her state of mind about that matter and the act of termination does seem a bit suspect. I'm sure the agency is a misogynistic one, but she does not harp about that fact. Rather, she continues her career doing private security work, while continuing her education. This was not a good book, rather flat, basic, and sometimes boring. I did read the whole thing cover to cover, but I cannot recommend it.

 

Birds of Prey Don't Sing by Jay Cary

Now this is an interesting premise.

Michael Harrier (with any number of aliases) is a gun for hire. Quite good at it. The book opens 

up with him in sniper mode in Africa. A squad of big game hunters have teamed up with 

poachers to do some hunting off the books, off the reservation. Endangered? Who cares.

 Harrier lines the poachers and the hunters up in his sights and picks them off one-by-one, 

leaving one survivor (on purpose). For a healthy paycheck. From whom? He doesn’t care. Did 

his research, took the job, killed the targets, left the survivor who will eventually get blamed for 

 the carnage.

Part 1:

You see, Harrier’s corner of the hired assassin market is that he only takes jobs where he is 

supplied with two names: the TV (target victim)  and the SV (surviving victim). The TV is 

obvious. The SV is who gets framed for the murder. 

Harrier’s next job (for which he’ll get $3 million) seems like an impossible task. Kill a known (but 

never ‘convicted’) pedophile priest (the TV) and blame God (the SV) for the priest’s untimely 

death. He’s been hired by a father whose adult son was repeatedly abused by the priest when 

his son was serving as the parrish alter boy years earlier,  but the assaults were never proven 

by the police or the Catholic church despite intense investigations. 

That’s the setup. Killing the priest is a chinch. Framing God is an altogether more difficult 

assignment. Harrier investigates the priest and studies how death is portrayed in the Bible. 

After considerable research into Old and New Testament descriptions, he comes up with a 

plan. A plan that leaves virtually no possible clues that God, not a man, killed the priest.

Once he puts his plan into play, Harrier has to confront the priest first. The interaction between 

Harrier and the priest as the scene is set up is a wonderful exchange of not necessarily good 

and evil, they both are evil, but of how the plan was developed from both a practical and 

religious perspective. 

Part 2:

The next stage of any plan like this is to get away with it. Once the first part of the assignment 

is completed (the first half of the book), the priest is dead and the media is swarming like flies 

on manure, the police assign Jordan Becker, their most experienced detective, who also is just 

digging out from under an internal affairs investigation, to unravel this complex case. 

Taking down the killer and making sense of the God angle could just be Becker’s own chance 

at redemption in his own life and work.  There are sparse clues to speak of and what he finds 

upends each succeeding step. Every inch forward sends Becker back well past where he 

began. More than once, Becker begins to believe that he has met his match in this priest killer. 

As so often happens, when an investigation continues to fail, the only way to capture the killer 

is to get down in the sewer of darkness where such targets exist. 

Some premise, right? The author takes us on a roller coaster ride where good and evil exist in 

tandem. Is there a ‘winner’ here? Lessons to be learned? Characters that may be part of an 

ongoing series? 

Probably not, 

Despite the lack of a clear good guy/bad guy. There’s no black and white, only gray. Lots of 

gray.  But there is one clear winner: the reader who picks up this book.

The Hitchhikers by Chevy Stevens

 

Been a while since i’ve posted. Still reading, just find the time to pen a review has been difficult. 

I reviewed a prior book by Chevy Stevens a few years ago (Still Missing) and just raved about 

it. Not gonna happen today.

The Hitchhikers revolves primarily around Alice and Tom. A later 30-something couple doing a 

road trip east across Canada eventually reaching Montreal for the 1976 Olympics. They are 

hoping this adventure will repair some glaring holes in their relationship that blew up with the

 loss of a child during childbirth. They’ve purchased a pickup/camper to camp their way across 

Canada. 

On a gravel road leading to a campsite, they pass a young couple walking in. As the 

campground was some distance, they offered the couple a lift. The girl introduces themselves 

as Ocean and Blue (latter day hippies it seems). The two aren’t all that conversational but they 

open up enough for Tom and Alice to offer a meal and to let them roll out their bags at their 

campsite.

Doesn’t take long for the author to reveal tidbits about Ocean and Blue’s backstory. Basically 

broke and living off the generosity of others. And that Ocean is pregnant. Next day, Tom offers 

to drive them to the next town. At one of the stops, Alice glances at a newspaper and is 

stunned to see that their passengers are wanted for the brutal stabbing murders of 

Ocean’mother and stepfather. She tears out the article and stuffs it in her pocket to show Tom 

when they’d be alone.

Once she shows Tom what she’s found, Blue discovers that their secret is out. The two men 

struggle and Blue manages to subdue Tom, secure both in the camper and all four head out. 

Where? Who knows. Tom and Alice know that wherever they are being taken will end up as a 

1-way trip.

And about now, I lost interest. The story made me flashback to a TV movie of the early 70s 

called Badlands. A lost soul presented as a James Dean-wannabe who picks up a shy teenage 

farm girl and they go on a killing rampage in the Dakota Badlands. The film introduced most 

viewers to future A-listers Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. If that kind of story interests you, 

watch Badlands. I found the unfolding of the Ocean/Blue story to be tedious. Didn’t develop any 

real connection or interest in either couple. While some might consider the ending to be an 

unexpected twist (and it was), it just seemed to take an inordinate amount of time to get to it. 

Don’t get me wrong, based to Still Missing (and reviews of some of her other books), the author 

is talented and has won her share of awards. This one didn’t do it for me.

Murder Crossed Her Mind

 Murder Crossed Her Mind is the fourth of five novels in the Pentecost and Parker Murder Mystery Series by Stephen Spotswood. This book was published in 2023, but the story is set in New York City in 1947. I got to this series as the result of the New York Times annual book review which suggested that the fifth book was the best crime novel written in 2025. At Men Reading Books, we’ve reviewed more than 1,000 authors and now 1,848 books, which were mostly about crime, mystery, espionage, and murder. We’ve identified very talented writers who rarely get mentioned by the Times as being worthy of such awards, so I was compelled to see if I could agree with a critic who made such an audacious claim about Spotswood's fifth book. So, for background, I've read and reviewed the first four books in the series before getting to what the critic claimed was the best one.  

The protagonists in these novels are Lillian Pentecost who is reputed to have the best crime-solving mind in New York City, and her assistant, Will Parker. Both characters do have fascinating and unique personal histories, although through the first four stories, the reader learns much more about Will than Lillian. Lillian’s history is scheduled to be revealed in more detail in the fifth book, Death in the Frame. Over the course of the first four books, many murders are solved and more interesting characters are revealed. In Murder Crossed Her Mind, an elderly woman, Vera Bodine, who is renowned for her photographic memory, turns up missing. Later, her body is found buried in a large trunk in her own apartment, covered in bags of lavender sachet. Meanwhile, the tough Will Parker finds ways to get repeatedly beaten up as the result of her willingness to charge into dangerous situations without any self-regard. Meanwhile, the plots and subplots are involved with federal agents, Nazi spies, and the wealthy Jessup Quincannon who has discovered a secret from Lillian’s past that he has threatened to reveal.

 

I’ve been entertained enough to keep reading this series, and at last I’m ready to take on “the best crime novel of 2025.” I thought this fourth book was probably the weakest of the series, but the exploits of the two main characters have kept me interested. I also found, at times, that the wise-cracking Will is too much over the top.

Red Deuce

 After reading Thomas Roehlk’s second book, Fire Feud, I decided to read the first on in this series, Red Deuce. Red Deuce is the nickname given by a brother to his identical twin redheaded girls, the middle kids in a sibship of 10, Mandy and Reggie Doucette. The twins were 29 years old and still often chose to wear the same clothes just to get the reaction of people they were meeting for the first time. They had shared a bedroom for the whole lives except during their graduate school years and the beginning of their careers. Both were bright women, Mandy became and attorney and spent three years working for the Department of Justice, but then she returned to her roots in Chicago where she became the chief compliance officer for a very large corporation. Reggie had gone to med school and then became a forensic pathologist with the FBI. She had also returned to Chicago to live with her sister where the two of them shared the details of their lives and their love of running. They were beautiful and very eligible women.

 

This is a story of corporate corruption and espionage. Lurking behind some corporate troubles was an international conspiracy of spies. I thought the first few pages of the story were weak, but the characters were quickly developed, I found myself thoroughly enjoying Roehlk’s tale. This may not be great literature, but I was entertained by how the author developed his plot and subplots. There were five murders that had to be solved, and the twins were in danger for their lives, as well engaged in finding good men who became their marriage material. So, it’s also a love story.

The Secret of Secrets

 I just finished Dan Brown’s 688-page latest novel The Secret of Secrets, a title his protagonist Robert Langdon explains just as the book comes to an end. Although I was warned by a reader that I trust that this was not Dan Brown’s best work, I must strongly disagree. This was a page-turner and I got little else done until I finished, including staying up late and getting up early to keep reading. While he does seem to slip in some supernatural material to which I would normally object, I thought this all flowed well with his main theme. The main idea he pursues is that a new understanding of human consciousness is coming, based on longstanding human beliefs as well as very new scientific findings, all of which is being delivered by Katherine Solomon, Langdon’s colleague who has enticed him to meet her in Prague for a conference in which she is the headline speaker.

The findings suggested by Solomon have important implications for psychiatry, neurology, neuroscience, religion, spirituality, and politics. As you begin to read, it would be helpful to look up the term “noetic,” and perhaps contrast that with “intuition” since that is the point that Brown uses to dive into this  story. Noetic medicine is an important trend in modern medicine. Quickly we learn that Solomon is in danger by forces that feel endangered by the release of her ideas, a danger that Solomon had never anticipated and one that Langdon did not immediately understand. As a psychiatrist/psychoanalyst, this reviewer found the author’s dive into psychiatric terminology and diagnosis to be accurate for the most part. The discussion of brain chemistry is woven into the story, and that’s well done (this coming from someone who has been prescribing psychotropic medications for more than 50 years). He describes the universal fear of death as being critical to the consciousness of all humans.

 

This is a murder mystery and love story that is laid out with great characters and a perfectly designed plot. I’ll give Dan Brown an A+ on this work. Finally, Brown ties together the main plot and subplots with a most satisfying and optimistic view of what the new meaning of consciousness has for the future of human life. Could my first book in 2026 be the best of the year? Could be.