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. Nonearly forces are called in on both sides of the battle as those same sides anticipate the birth of a new 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. 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 right 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 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 of the part of that family as when she had been there, but soon learned that there were lots of secrets that were being kept from her. During her couple years with Pentecost, Will had proven herself to be a hard worker and a very gifted an up-and-coming 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 higher 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.

Tourist Season

 After reading and reviewing 1,835 books in this blog, most of which have been murder mysteries and thrillers, I’d say we’ve never seen a book quite like this one. Brynne Weaver has written about 11 novels, and I read about this book in the New York Times book reviews. She is a best-selling author, and her website recommends that her books be read either in the order of publication, or in the case of her three series, start with the first and read to the end. Tourist Season is the first of two books, the second called Harvest Season, and the series is entitled The Seasons of Carnage Trilogy. 

The novel begins with the tragedy of a driver crashing her car into another, apparently on purpose. Nolan Rhodes was a victim of the accident, and he spent months in a hospital in the course of his recovery. His little brother was killed, and two other friends in the backseat walked away with scratches. But Nolan’s life was turned inside out over the loss of his brother. He got a good look at the driver who fled from the scene and disappeared from law enforcement efforts to bring her to justice. It was the rage he felt about his brother and his own injuries that caused him to pursue the driver, Harper Starling. He spent for years trying to find her until Harper was located in a seaside town, Cape Carnage. Nolan’s anger led to him becoming a serial killer of other thoughtless criminals who had killed innocent people. Harper was already a serial killer who had found the place she wanted to grow old, and it was her intent to both protect the town and to protect her aging mentor, a famous but also elusive serial killer. Then, they were all being hunted by a true crime devotee who was operating a popular website and looking for another big story.

 

Most of the time I was reading this well-designed dark thriller, I felt the humor of Nolan falling madly in love with Harper who he wanted to murder, and Weaver wrote some of the most vivid sex scenes that I’ve ever reviewed. In an important sense, this was absurd. It felt like watching the TV series Dexter although the intensity was doubled, no cubed.

 

This is not great literature, but I was duly entertained, and I do plan to read the second novel in this series.

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.