The Conviction

I’ve reviewed at least eight novels by Robert Dugoni, most of which I’ve commented about very favorably. The Conviction does not stand up to the author's prior efforts. This is meant to be a thriller about the never-loses lawyer, David Sloane. Written in 2012, the story surrounds Sloane and a friend choosing to take their boys on a wilderness hike. The story surrounds the boys running afoul of the law in a small California town which has been purchased in its entirety by a very wealthy man who wants to run a tight ship with regard to even the pettiest of crimes, or really, just bad manners. The boys are arrested for sneaking out at night and breaking into a small store at night, and before Sloane and his friend can even wake up the next morning, the boys have been tried and sent off to a juvenile boot camp respectively for 6 months and 12 months. Then Sloane and his friend are arrested for being rude to the judge who had sentenced the boys.

I thought the story was ridiculous. Those of us who love thrillers and murder mysteries must suspend judgement to some extent regarding the circumstances that we’re reading about, but the stories can’t go too far away from reality to keep us interested. This one crosses that line the wrong way. I got to the one-quarter mark of the book and decided I had better things to do with my time.

I’m not recommending this one. Good authors can’t write a winner every time, and this is just one of those books that does not qualify.

Her Cold Justice

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.

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.

The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell

 I’ve reviewed six of Dugoni’s novels, all of which were in the thriller/murder mystery genre. Six books means that I like his writing. This story was referred to me by my daughter who is the communications director of a substantial nonprofit called Orbis. Orbis is known as the flying eye hospital which provides ophthalmologic care to people in economically poor countries around the world. In the course of the story, Sam went to work for Orbis as a means of escaping the traumas he had experienced at home.

Sam Hell, actually Sam Hill, had been born with a genetic flaw that led to his diagnosis of ocular albinism. He had no pigment in his irises which made his eyes look red. His condition was rare and he seemed to be immediately rejected by the medical community as well as the people at his Catholic church where his mother had been a devout and dedicated woman. When he got to school age, Sam found that the parochial school’s head mistress, Sister Beatrice, wanted to ban him from her school. Sam’s mother won the battle with Sister Beatrice, and despite his admission to the school, she continued to try to set him up for failure. His peers at school immediately rejected Sam who they dubbed as “the devil boy,” therefore “Sam Hell.” It was a nickname that stuck with Sam the rest of his life.

 

It was a school bully, David Bateman, who began to repeatedly abuse him, and it was only after the intensity of the abuse was discovered that Bateman was expelled. However, Bateman was to come back into the picture when these two antagonists were adult men. Through elementary and middle school Sam protected himself from further rejection by being a loner. It was not until the beginning of high school that he struck up good friendships with other students who were also being ostracized, Ernie, the only black in the school, and Mickie, a young woman from a highly dysfunctional and poor family. The three of them stuck together in what was a lifelong friendship.

 

Sam was academically successful as an ophthalmologist, but he had always been hindered in his ability to find other good relationships. It was his work as an ophthalmologist that led to his next encounter with Bateman when his wife brought their six-year-old daughter to his  office due to her visual problems. Sam quickly realized that her visual probems were due to repeated head trauma that had no doubt been caused by her father’s beatings. Bateman’s wife was so terrified of her husband, it took her a while to admit the abuse. Bateman worked as a cop and had developed into a full-blown psychopath.

 

I’ve revealed the main plot lines and I refuse to be a spoiler by revealing too much. Dugoni has provided fascinating characters who felt quite real. I learned to love Sam, his parents, Ernie, and Mickie. I also learned to hate Sister Beatrice and Bateman. It takes a great author to evoke such intense feelings in me.

 

My only problem with the story came at the end. As Dugoni nicely resolved the various plots and subplots, as Sam’s parents aged and got quite ill, he reexamined his lifelong atheism  which he had achieved largely by rebelling against his mother’s devotion to the church. He could not tolerate her repeated comments about all things being due to “God’s Will.” However, as he continued to encounter his own parents’ growing frailties, he began to reexamine his own beliefs. As he mourned the loss of his mother, he found himself praying and using his mother’s rosary. Perhaps most other readers won’t have as strong a negative reaction to Dugoni’s descriptions in this regard, but I also found that it did not negatively impact my feelings about his entire book. This is a story that’s worth reading, all the way to the end. It gets my strongest, 5/5 recommendation.

Bodily Harm

Thanks to my son-in-law, Mateo, I’ve discovered the work of Robert Dugoni, and Bodily Harm is the sixth book I’ve read by Dugoni. Once again, the protagonist is David Sloane, the third book of the series. Sloane has a most interesting start in life as a charismatic child preacher in Mexico, but he escaped the slaughter by the cartel attack on his village and secreted to the U.S. Unfortunately, he ended up in the U.S. foster system and saw early life from a cascade of different and dysfunctional foster homes. Somehow, he was able to extract himself from those traumas and to educate himself right through law school. He became one persuasive and successful lawyer, but his life was bereft of companionship and love. Sloane managed his early adult years by paying attention to how he should act to get ahead, not how he really felt. 

Given his brilliance and attractive appearance, he finally started a relationship with Tina and she proved to be a critically important person for him. She taught him how to love. Tina had a son by a prior marriage which she had left because it was simply emotionally dead and flat. But, she produced a wonderful son, but life with her husband was troubled by his substance abuse. With Tina and Jake, David had a family and life was good. But Sloane got involved in a case that involved the world of toys. There was big money involved in the development and marketing of a new toy created by an independent toy maker, Kyle Horgan. Kendall Toys bought the toy from Horgan who then returned to his life of isolation. Kendall’s main competitor was Galaxy Toys and those two were out to control the production of this new miracle toy and for the survival of their own companies. Early marketing results suggested that it was bound to be the next hot item – the toy was a sort of super transformer which was made of plastic but contained a number of small but very powerful magnets. However, there was a design in its production. If the magnets were not contained in a high but expensive plastic, then those magnets could be fatal to youngsters who swallowed them.

 

When the prototypes were made with a cheaper grade of plastic, a couple kids did died.

But their cause of death was not understood to be due to the magnets. A wonderful doctor was successfully sued by Sloan, and he won a huge judgement against Dr. Douvalidis. When Sloan learned Douvalidis had done nothing wrong, it was too late because the doctor had committed suicide. It was then that Sloan turned his attention to Kendall, the toy’s manufacturer. This was literally a dirty business and an attempt was made on Sloan’s life, only to have his wife get caught in the middle of a gun fight that left her dead.

 

I won’t reveal any more of this excellent plot. Not only is the plot bold, interesting, and believable, the characters themselves are very well developed. This book deserves a 5-star rating. You won’t be disappointed.

Damage Control

 Damage Control by Robert Dugoni is the fifth novel that I’ve read and reviewed. While I really liked two of his novels and was only luke warm about the other two, I had this book in my Kindle and decided to give it a go, and I’m grateful that I did. 

The protagonist is Dana Hill, a talented lawyer who worked for a monster of a boss in Seattle. Dana had so many things going wrong in her life besides a bad boss. Her marriage was failing, her father who was also a very successful lawyer died while he was in the middle of an infidelity, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and then her twin brother was killed. It made no sense to anyone that someone would murder her brother James. He had become a lawyer mostly to please his father, but he hated the work. He chose to quickly get out of the rat trap that he made for himself, sold everything that he owned, and eventually decided to lead as simple and cheap life as he could while earning enough to live by being a law professor. In the last couple years, both Dana and her twin had grown more distant from one another. She was busy and he was rather aloof, but she began to investigate what his life had been. She thought her twin was happy but was aware that he had begun to lead his life very close to the breast. Dana discovered that James had been having an affair with a woman he had known in law school who was currently the wife of the governor of Washington State. According to the press, Robert Meyers and his wife Elizabeth were the darlings that rightly belonged in the White House. Become president had been the lifelong ambition of Robert and in fact, he announced his candidacy in the course of the story. He had married Elizabeth because she fit the image of just such a woman. He was actually an ambitious narcissist and sociopath, but few people were aware of those traits, and he played at the role of returning the country to Camelot with Robert and Elizabeth in the White House, sort of like Jack and Jackie.

 

It was Dana’s investigation that led to the discovery of the affair, and she figured out that it was the governor who had ordered James murder so the affair would not have a negative impact on his election. The story told by Dugoni mostly was about Dana managing her many life challenges while carrying on her investigation and then her hunt for clues to prove the governor’s guilt. The plot and characters were excellent and believable. This is a five-star story and it gets my strongest recommendation.

Her Last Breath

 Robert Dugoni is another one of the prolific who-done-it and mystery writers. Tracy Crosswhite is his protagonist in one 15-novel series. She’s a homicide detective in the Seattle Police Department who has a long problematic history with her police captain, Johnny Nolasco. When the case of a serial killer arises, he believes that it would be too much for Tracy to handle, so he assigned her to be lead on the investigation assuming that she would fail and then he could dismiss him from the department forever. As she pursued the investigation, and more and more exotic dancers were brutally and sadistically killed, there were roadblocks thrown in her way repeatedly. She had a loyal partner and a supportive attorney boyfriend. In this particular story, Dugoni provided a surprise ending that I did not see coming. It was a good story.

Wrongful Death by Robert Dugoni

Robert Dugoni has written a murder mystery based on the Feres Doctrine, which (as written in Wikipedia) effectively bars service members from collecting damages from the United States Government for personal injuries experienced in the performance of their duties. It also bars families of service members from filing wrongful death or loss of consortium actions when a service member is killed or injured. David Sloane is the protagonist, a can’t-lose attorney in San Francisco. But, he gave up his practice there to follow his love to her new job in Seattle, and he picked up with his continued string of courtroom victories there. Then, the widow of James Ford who was killed in Iraq, came to Sloane for some help. She wanted to know what had really happened to her husband on the night he was killed. How could anyone killed in Iraq have died without it being “incident to service?”

When Sloane began to dig into the matter, powerful forces both inside and outside the government put the squeeze on him. They even threatened the lives of his now wife and stepson.

If you like military drama, you’ll like this story as people within the government, military, and private contractors struggle with their knowledge of and motives about the events in Iraq. This was my second Dugoni book, also about his guy David Sloane, and we do learn more about Sloane’s very interesting background. This was a worthwhile read, but Dugoni does not appear to be a threat to the authors in my power rotation.

The Jury Master by Robert Dugoni

The Jury Master by Robert Dugoni is the first in his David Sloane series, first published in 2006. Sloane is a gifted and successful criminal defense attorney in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has a spellbinding effect on juries, but this is not a courtroom drama. Sloane had grown up with the information that his parents were killed in an auto accident when he was a boy, and he was then raised in a series of foster homes. Although he succeeded despite those handicaps, his personal life was nearly empty beyond his relationship with one old woman and another, his secretary at the law firm. What did Sloane have to do with the death of Joe Branick, personal friend and confident of the President of the United States, Robert Peak? Branick died in a national park in West Virginia while Sloane was touring Yosemite Park in California, and Sloane had never heard Branick’s name.

This was a story of international intrigue, a conspiracy about oil and politics, great tragedies that had been swept under the rug 30 years earlier, and Sloane’s discovery of his real identity. Dugoni has written a true page-turner. The action was non-stop even if some of the connections between the subplots sometimes seemed sketchy. I thought some of his similes were a bit pedestrian: “[the bullet] had ripped through the man’s temple like a runaway freight train” or “Stress weighed on some men like wet clothes, leaving them weighed down and drained.” But, for the most part, the writing was solid, and Dugoni’s character development was good enough. I’m not ready to elevate this author to my power rotation, but I’m going to get the second David Sloane novel and see what develops in the 5-book series. Dugoni also has some free-standing novels.

In 12/24, I listened to this book in audio format, having completely forgotten I had already read it. My opinions are unchanged except that I should add that the similes were almost non-stop, often pretty funny and enjoyable. It's not great literature and I'd give it a B grade for mystery. Still, I enjoyed my time with the book and tolerated the reality-testing elements in the story.