Hold Strong

 

Hold Strong is the latest novel by Robert Dugoni that I’ve reviewed. I’m impressed with the wide variety of genres that he has tackled. This one is historical fiction, a WWII novel that mostly takes place in the Pacific theater. I’ve probably read several hundred WWII novels although most have been stories that took place in the European arena. This is a sentimental story of heroism and love that must have truly taken place thousands of times during the course of the war. A young couple from rural Minnesota has just graduated from high school and it was their plan to return to Eagle Grove and continue their family tradition of being farmers. Then WWII happened and it changed both of their lives in immeasurable ways.

 

Dugoni tracked the most interesting lives of Sam Carlson and Sarah Haber. Although this book is fiction, Dugoni wrote with accuracy about the lives that they lived. This story touches the lives of so many people I knew from that same generation, including my parents. While I knew so many of the true events to which Dugoni placed his characterts, I had never heard of the “hell boats” that the Japanese used to transport POWs or the decision by the US Government to sink those boats although they knew so many POWs were being kept there. The thinking at the time that if they selectively saved the “hell boats” that the Japanese would figure out that the US had broken their communication codes, which would cause the Japanese to change the codes and thus prolong the war.

 

To complete your own knowledge about life and at home during the Pacific battles of WWII, I highly recommend this novel.

Secrets Typed in Blood

 Secrets Typed in Blood by Stephen Spotswood is the third book of his five-book series, The Pentecost and Parker Mystery Series. This story takes place in 1947 in New York City where the world’s greatest detective, Lillian Pentecost, lives and maintains her office. Will Parker is her young protégé and the two of them have formed a formidable detective team. They continue to be hired by people who either don’t want to go to the police with their problems, or the police had simply been unable to solve their problems, usually murders. A successful crime writer, Holly Quick discovered that someone was acting out her murder mysteries in real life. She felt violated to have to her ideas stolen.

 The cases are complex, but never too complicated for the remarkable Ms. Pentecost. Pentecost has muscular dystrophy which is slowly getting worse, and she is very dependent on Will for all of the leg work required of such an occupation. There are multiple copycat murders, and then one occurs when it is fresh off Ms. Quick’s typewriter, before it had even been published.

 

Spotswood has filled out his story with interesting characters surrounding both Ms. Quick and the detectives. The plot is well designed and I certainly did not see the end coming before I got there. The writing of Spotswood is starting to grow on me. Now, I’ve acquired the first book in the series, Fortune Favors The Dead. While these books do work as stand-alone novels, I think it makes more sense to read them in the order in which they’ve been published.

The Last Adam

 The Last Adam by Ron Echols is a modern era story about the second coming of Christ. The title of the book is a biblical reference to Jesus. It is written from a Christian perspective regarding the battle between good and evil. Nonearthly forces are called in on both sides of the battle as those same sides anticipate the birth of a new baby human who will be the force that turns the Earth into an example of success of the forces of good when the longstanding battle by the evil forces had slowly been winning that struggle during recent centuries. Mary and Joseph find one another to bring a male child into the world and it is their goal to keep the infant safe until he can begin to teach mankind the good values of Christianity. 

I am probably not the right person to write this review given that I’m not a Christian, and I certainly don’t trust the values of Christianity given the history of corruption and cruelty that has followed organized Christian churches, be they Catholic or Protestant. However, I was asked to review the book and report my thoughts about it. In a short comment, it is perhaps the worst book I’ve ever read. It might sell well in Christian bookstores, but I have trouble imagining that it would do well in any other retail setting. This story was a repetition of a 2,000-year-old-myth and was certainly not my cup of tea.

Murder Under Her Skin

 I read about the Pentecost and Parker Mystery Series by Stephen Spotswood in the New York Book Review, and the 5^th book Dead in the Frame was ranked as the best crime novel of 2025. The author raved about the whole series, so rather than jump into the fifth book, I found the second and third books on Libby and began to listen during my early morning dog walks. I’ve finished the second book, Murder Under Her Skin, and now I’ve started the third, Secrets Typed in Blood, and I’ve just gotten the first one, Fortune Favors the Dead. Meanwhile, the best crime novel of the year is sitting in my Audible account just waiting for me. I’ll review these in the order that I’m reading them. 

In Murder Under Her Skin, the reader meets the world-famous detective Lillian Pentecost and her protégé, Willojean Parker, as they learn of a murder that has occurred in a travelling circus. This just happens to be the traveling circus to which Willojean, Will, escaped from her very dysfunctional family as a young teen. The victim was Ruby Donner, the tattooed circus woman, a fascinating character who had been so loved by nearly the entire circus family, including Will. The main suspect had been Will’s circus mentor, a knife throwing expert. After being a part of the tight circus family for several years, as the circus was dying, Will had left for a better opportunity as an assistant to Ms. Pentecost. But, the circus people had always been loving and supportive of Will, effectively her surrogate parents. She expected to be as much a the part of that circus family as when she had lived with them, but Will soon learned that there were lots of secrets that were being kept from her. During her five years with Pentecost, Will had proven herself to be a hard worker and a very gifted detective herself.

 

The story took place on the East Coast during the 1940s. All of the characters in the circus were fascinating, and there was clearly competition among them for being the most desirable performer. I thought it was a fun read or I would not have acquired more of the books in the series. Still, I’m intrigued by the notion of getting to the “best crime novel” of the year. At Men Reading Books, we’ve reviewed more than 1800 books, most of them crime/mystery/thriller novels, more than 100 of those this year alone, and we’ve written about our favorite authors including Daniel Silva, Louise Penny, C.J. Box, Michael Connelly, Brad Thor, Charlie Stella, Greg Iles, James Lee Burke, John Grisham, Lee Child, Jonathan Kellerman, Robert Crais, and about 1,000 more. Are these stories by Spotswood better than those authors, or even as good as them? I’ll need to see more of his work before I rate him as the equal of than those others. However, I am titillated to have a new body of work to learn about, and at least my initial impression is favorable. I have been duly entertained.

Nash Falls

Nash Falls is a new novel from David Baldacci who is introducing a new protagonist, Walter Nash. Nash came from a Vietnam War verteran father and a most loving and supportive father. His parents’ marriage was a good one and both of them were obviously still in love with each other through Nash’s early years. Nash was proud of his father’s accomplishments in Vietnam, a decorated war hero. His dad had also been a star athlete in high school and college, and Nash thought he wanted him to follow in those footsteps. However, Nash chose tennis because he loved the sport and didn’t have to get beat up by others in the process of playing. Nash always thought that was the reason that they had a major falling out and then both father and son began leading noncommunicative lives. Nash perceived that his father hated him, and that did not change when his mother was diagnosed with late-stage cancer and died at too early an age. Although Nash himself got married and had two children with Judith, he always maintained an emotional distance from everyone.

 

Meanwhile, Nash used his college degree to become an expert in investments, and he advanced to a senior executive VP at a company called Symbaritic Investments. The company was wildly successful because of the financial success of Barton Temple who had founded the company, and then turned the CEO duties to his son Rhett. Rhett was Nash’s boss, and Rhett was clearly a severe narcissist and could not accept that the company’s significant continued prosperity was really due to Nash and not himself.

 

Although Nash and his father lived only eight miles apart, there was never a rapproachment for Nash and his father, Ty, and Nash only learned of his father’s death from an elderly neighbor who let him know that his father’s funeral was about to happen. It was at the funeral that Ty’s best friend, a fellow Vietnam veteran, stood up and openly verbally ripped Nash a new anal orifice. But then Ty’s will seemed to cloud the picture about his real feelings for his son.

 

At the same time, Nash was approached by the FBI about illegal dealings by his company, something that he had not known. This was when this story got most interesting. There were giant forces at workon both sides of the corruption, and Nash’s life was certainly in danger. When Barton Temple was murdered and all vectors pointed at Nash as being responsible, when this emotionally limited man’s marriage was coming apart, and then his beloved daughter was kidnapped by the very evil side in the corruption struggle, Nash turned for help to the very man who had badly embarrassed him at his dad’s funeral. He disappeared for more than a year while getting ready to return to deal with both the FBI and the evil forces leading the corruption. 

That’s enough of the plot. The plot development was excellent and the characters were believable and held my interest. I think this book shows Baldacci at his best. It comes to an end just as Nash is flying to Hong Kong to take on the very dangerous and notorious Victoria Sterers who has been stealing billions of dollars from Symbaritic. Now, ASAP, I want to get my hands on the sequel, Hope Rises.

The Blink of an Eye

 In The Blink Of An Eye by Yoav Blum is a story of time travel, which has always been a favorite of mine. Time travel just grabs my imagination. It was in the late 1950’s that I received a magazine, Boys Life, as the result of being a member of the Cub Scouts. They published a monthly serial of stories about time travel, and I could hardly wait for the next issue. It never mattered whether it was a book, a newspaper story, a short story, whatever, I always enjoyed thinking about the topic. It was several years ago that I read a fascinating time travel novel that had a psychoanalytic twist. I thought it was called “The Little Book,” but now I can’t find my review in the blog, and to make it worse, I can’t recall the author’s name.

 

This novel by Blum has a very complex plot. There are a close group of friends who have known each other since college, and they are all bright and talented. It was one of them, a brilliant physicist who built a time machine. The rules of the use of the machine were unique. One could only observe the past and not the future. In observing the past, the physicist insisted that one could not make any changes, like preventing Kennedy from being assassinated. He wrote that doing so would surely make time collapse on itself. He described that as a paradox which had to avoided. But, as the story continued, he began to actual travel in time, which was a most exciting thing for the world renown historian in the group. This was a murder mystery that by the book’s end, the murder of the builder of the time travel machine, and the mystery was not solved.

 

I did not enjoy this novel and do not recommend it to anyone that might happen upon it, but mabe you’ll find it more interesting that I did.

Life & Death & Giants

 At least for the length of this novel, I’ve abandoned our usual murder mystery, thriller, and espionage genres. Life & Death & Giants by Ron Rindo is just great literature. This is a story about an Amish community in Wisconsin and their interactions with people that live outside their community, typically referred to by them as the English. There is a very large Amish community in northern Indiana where I grew up, and I’ve visited the larger Amish community in Pennsylvania. My parents sometimes hired Amish women to help clean our house and we often visited an organic fruit and vegetable stand to buy food for the house. The quality of their sweet corn is something I can never forget. Our interactions with them were always curious, honest and wholesome. 

I learned more about the severe and unforgiving image of God that drives the organization of their lives, and the danger that “English” lives present to their way of thinking. Although generally withdrawn into their own community and avoidant of significant interactions with the English, some interactions are inevitable. The interactions among the Amish community itself is beautifully portrayed.

 

In this story a huge baby boy is born to an Amish woman who was excommunicated because her pregnancy did not arise from a marriage. That is a severe punishment that challenged her own ability to survive. Fortunately, she found an English woman who helped her. The boy, surely suffering from acromegaly (a pituitary gland tumor) although that was not specified by the author, was huge at birth, and he just kept getting bigger eventually becoming over 8 feet tall and weighing nearly 600 pounds (all muscle). He was a sensitive and well-loved man who grew up on the periphery of the Amish community and he became a sensation when he accepted a football scholarship to the University of Wisconsin where he became a once-in-a-lifetime star until he lost his leg as the result of a football injury. His exposure to the English world led him away from the Amish, and he actually became a sensation in the sports world when he agreed to become a one-legged professional wrestler. From my perspective, it was a most creative idea.

 

The quality of Rindo’s writing was wonderful. The plot unfolded in a carefully planned manner, and this reader became fascinated with the Amish and non-Amish characters. These were complicated people, bot the Amish and English. I needed to know how Rindo would bring the various subplots of love, struggle, angst, and death to a meaningful conclusion. He succeeded in all regards.

 

I’ll be returning to my usual genre in the immediate future, but this book is surely one of the best stories that I read this year.