Hotel Angeline: A Novel in 36 voices

 I’ve never read a book quite like Hotel Angeline before, and I bet you haven’t either. The subtitle is “A Novel in 36 voices.” Robert Dugoni, one of my favorite authors, lives in Seattle which he described as a particular rich community for both writers and readers. In the foreword by Nancy Pearl, it is asserted, “No two people read the same book, even when it appears to be identical, with the same author, same cover, same publication date, and same pagination." She quoted Paul Auster, “The one thing I try to do in all my books is to leave enough room in the prose for the reader to inhabit it. Because I finally believe it’s the reader who writes the book and not the writer.” Dugoni and Jennie Shortridge were planning to attend a month-long arts festival in Seattle, and they looked for a way to make it more fun for the writers by writing a book together, six authors per day, six days in all. So, 36 authors agreed to participate. There was very limited instruction and structure for the authors, but the intent was for each author to build on what had been written before. Included in the effort was a nonprofit group founded by Dugani called Seattle7Writers.

You might imagine that there were unexpected changes and twists in this story, but the authors had a beginning, a middle and a satisfactory ending. The content was more for young adult reading that being an adult thriller. At any rate, if you’re intrigued by this effort to write a book in such a format, then have at it. It is kind of fun, but if it was not for the structure of the writing, I probably would have panned the content.

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Beyond Reasonable Doubt

 Robert Dugani is as good a courtroom drama writer as Grisham, and he demonstrates that talent in Beyond Reasonable Doubt, published in 2024. This story might remind you of the Elizabeth Holmes conviction for fraud which occurred in 2022. She had been found guilty of massively overstating what her new medical technology could do, and she misled her investors to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. However, I found Dugani’s story as being even more compelling than the real life drama of Ms. Holmes. The fictional CEO Jenna Bernstein also claimed that her new medical technology would be a great boon to medical science and to humanity. She claimed “the Link” would allow the development of cures for a wide range of human diseases. The technology might have eventually achieved the status of which Jenna dreamed, but it needed years more testing and research before it could be used safely, and she could not wait for that to happen.

Jenna was the CEO of Link, but her function was to be the primary fund raiser, and she was adept at getting very wealthy people to believe her pitch in the amount of hundreds of millions. Although not in love with Sirus Kohl, but she did love his money. They began a romantic relationship which they tried to keep a secret. Normally, a principal investor and a CEO would refrain from having such a relationship because it would not go well with other investors and the Board of Directors because of the increased chance of fiduciary irregularities.

Five years earlier, Jenna was involved with a similar scheme. When Eric Wei, her chief science officer was about to inform the investors that their technology was not as advanced as Jenna was claiming, he was murdered. Jenna was the number one suspect, but her trial for the murder was handled by the masterful Patsy Dugan, “The Irish Brawler.” He convinced her jury that they could not convict her because there was reasonable doubt. The Prosecutors were flabbergasted that Patsy had been able to get such a verdict, and the prosecutors never believed in her innocence.

Thus, Jenna was never convicted and she went free. In the next five years, Patsy’s alcoholism advanced to the point he could no longer do courtroom work, so when Sirus was found shot in the back of the head as he was about to release the information about her fraudulent sales pitch. Jenna asked for Patsy to defend her again, but given his still active alcoholism, she ended up with Keera Dugan, Patsy’s daughter, a young attorney. Keera had worked with the prosecution previously, but she left that work to cover for her deteriorating father and his criminal defense firm. Jenna and Keera had a long history since they had gone to the same schools while growing up. Keera knew Jenna was a liar, a woman who could not be trusted. She decided to take Keera’s case for a number of reasons as explained by Dugani.

It was the courtroom issues that were the meat of this book about a most complex matter. The arguments between Jenna and Keera were exceptionally well written. Meanwhile, Patsy entered an alcoholic rehabilitation program. The trouble that Patsy’s disease had on his family, on his relationship with his daughter, and the impact of that on his courtroom abilities were beautifully written.

I’ve given you enough information, and I’ll conclude that by writing that the story was excellent, and the book gets my strongest recommendation.

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The Children Return

 The Children Return is the 7^th book in the Bruno series by Martin Walker. Once again, I chose the audiobook format with Robert Ian McKenzie as the most capable narrator. This book deals with the rapid infusion of Muslims into France which reached about 10% of the whole population. There were perceived problems from widely different angles depending on ones prejudices. An undercover Muslin agent was found murdered, and a young man, Sami, who had grown up in St. Denis. He was probably autistic, but he had always been mechanically gifted. As he grew up, he disappeared from the school system and some years later, was found in Afghanistan. He was thought to have been radicalized and put to the task of bombmaking against the allied forces that had come to Afghanistan. Sami came to the surface when he was trying to escape the Afghan war and return to St. Denis. It was Bruno who helped him get to France. As a young man, Sami was suspected of having been put to work by the Taliban as a highly skilled bombmaker. The allied forces called him “the engineer.” Bruno had to figure out who Sami really was so that he could protect the people of his home town.

I thought this book was a fair and unbiased look into the issues of a largely different but large  minority moving into a country. How much does each side of the immigration question have to adapt. It’s a very good book and I highly recommend it.

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Sunrise

 Sunrise by Tea Obreht was recommended in the 9/13/26 NY Times Book Review. It was described as a clash of the old west and a young woman, Nina Terzic who literally dropped into the story when a small plane she was riding in crashed into a lake in a remote Wyoming forest. I got as far as Day 5, Part 1of this adventure before I chose not to read any more. Nina had apparently been pushed from the plane and there may not have been any other survivors. Mostly this part of the book was a monologue by Nina as she often denies the reality of her circumstances, but then has some moments of lucidity. We hear Nina’s thoughts about her life, her boyfriend Ben, her fears, etc. When she stumbled onto an old ghost town, she found a novel that was being written or had been completed by the author about 100 years earlier. The body of the apparent author lied near the manuscript where she had been trapped in a cellar. Other subplots are initiated, but I got bored with the script, did not find Nina’s musings about herself and her life to be very interesting.

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The Resistance Man

 The Resistance Man is the sixth book in the Bruno series by Martin Walker. I think the review I read in Audible probably best describes the intrigue that the author provided. I’m cheating by using a quote from another source, but if you’ve been following my reviews of this series, you’ll surely forgive me for taking this shortcut. I may have done this once before in the 1934 reviews that we’ve posted. I continue to be well entertained by this series. 

“It's summer in St. Denis for chief of police Bruno Courrèges, and that means a new season of cases. This time there are three weighing on his mind. First, there’s the evidence that a veteran of the French Resistance is connected to a notorious train robbery; then, the burglary of a former British spymaster's estate; and, finally, the murder of an antiques dealer whose lover is conveniently on the lam.

“As Bruno investigates, it becomes clear that they are connected--however, figuring out how will take every skill he possesses. Add in juggling the complex affections of two powerful women, maneuvering village politics, and managing his irrepressible puppy, Balzac, and Bruno has his hands full once again.”

I listened to the audiobook format which was once again narrated by the very capable Robert Ian MacKenzie. Another important reason for my enjoyment of this series which takes place in rural France is that the author skillfully ties the location of the small village and its inhabitants to past wars. Geography is an important topic in all of these books. Thus, while St. Denis is a rural village, it has not been free from traumas in the world which have left scars on its population.

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The Mogul

 

This is the 11^th R.G. Belsky book that has been reviewed in this blog, and it’s my fifth one. We have reviewed about 500 different authors, and there are only a few of them that we’ve read more than Belsky. I can say without doubt that he’s one of our favorites. The book is entitled The Mogul and the characters who wrote stories for the The Sentinel, a daily newspaper in New York City. The story takes place mostly during the 1980’s which was really the highlight era of print journalism. The Sentinel hired hundreds of reporters, and this paper had a daily subscription of one million readers. The primary protagonists were the owner of the newspaper, Billy Blaine, and the paper’s city editor, Nick Marston. Nick was already a reporter for the paper when Billy bought it. Although Billy was an unpredictable and demanding owner, he and Nick got along well until the end. It was clear that they both were willing to cut corners and manipulate the stories they were printing, all of the sake of selling papers.

Meanwhile, the private lives of both men were highly dysfunctional, especially Billy’s. We learn early on that Nick’s son was killed at the age of 18 in a traffic accident. That happened on a night that Nick was supposed to go with Sean to a Yankees game, but as he often did, Nick opted out of the game because of a story that he was working on. The death of Sean was the beginning of the end for Nick’s marriage. Meanwhile, Billy’s son, Wilson, was overly protected by his parents and given the privileges of being from a very wealthy family. Wilson had scrapes with the legal system, but good lawyers always got him out of any real punishment.

Among all the reporters was Carrie Anne Cody, a 23-year-old beauty who had just graduated from the school of journalism at Northwestern. On paper, she looked like a straight A student, although it was eventually discovered that she lied about that. Although she was being paid relatively low wages as a beginning reporter, she somehow afforded to pay rent in the most ritzy area of Manhattan. She lied about having her income subsidized by her wealthy father and she really wanted nothing to do with her parents. Both Nick and Wilson found her presence to be entrancing.

The principal characters in this book were believable and three-dimensional. The reader learns that Carrie Anne Cody knew that Billy was running illegal schemes to support his extravagant life style, and she knew that Nick was going along with Billy’s illegal schemes. It became her goal to bring them both to public shame and bankruptcy. Carrie Anne was writing a novel that would expose Billy’s schemes. Meanwhile, she sought information about the business dealings of The Sentinel, and she was willing to do anything to get the information she wanted. As the book progressed, we learned the remarkable origins of Billy’s past relationships and how that tied into Carrie Anne’s history.

The plot is very well-developed, and the reader is not given enough information until the end of the book to know who it was that killed her. The ending to this story is most cleverly revealed. The pace of the story was fantastic. I read it in only two sittings on consecutive days. Given my reading of Belsky’s prior books, I expected to be totally entertained, and this work did not disappoint.

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The Devil's Cave

 The Devil’s Cave is the fifth book in the Bruno series by Martin Walker. If you’ve been following my reviews of the first four books in this 21-novel series, you’ll know I’m hooked, and yes, I’ve already downloaded the sixth book, all of which I’ve enjoyed in audiobook format by the excellent narrator Robert Ian MacKenzie. This book opens with a dead woman floating down a river towards St. Denis. The formerly beautiful woman was lying face up for the world to see her nakedness. Her identity was the first mystery in the story. Then there were the satanic symbols that marked her body.

Complicating the story was a domestic physical abuse case, the promise of a high end real estate development that just might keep this small town afloat (unlike so many countryside towns which had been abandoned), and the return of the Red Countess who had a long and very controversial history dating back to before WWII.

Once again, the author Martin Walker has provided an excellent plot with the further development of the usual cast of characters, Bruno, Isabelle, Pamela, J.J., the Baron, and the news photographer. Importantly, a new basset hound Balzac is introduced along with Hector, Bruno’s horse. I am fully entertained by these stories.

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Black Diamond

 Black Diamond is the third novel in the Bruno, Chief of Police series by Martin Walker. See the reviews of the first two books which I've written recently. Once again, the narrator is the wonderful voice of Robert Ian MacKenzie. I’ve obviously gotten hooked by the team work of Walker and MacKenzie, so I’ve already gotten the next two books. I suppose you could read the books out of order or to consider them stand alone books, but I think reading them in the order of publication is very entertaining as the reader has a chance to learn about Bruno and his cohorts in the order the author intended.

As we learn more about the delightful life in rural France, we learn a lot about their cuisine and their wines, all of which seem to be more important to Bruno than many of the murder mystery characters that I’ve read in the past. In this book Bruno, a single man, continues his romantic entanglements, and it is clear that he loves life in St. Denis as much as anything else. One of his favorite culinary treats are truffles, and Walker spends some time explaining how they are best prepared. As the Chinese have discovered truffles, the value of them has increased several fold. It’s the truffle market that provides the scene for one of Bruno’s friends. Bruno is determined to solve that crime. The continued development of Bruno’s character and the cast that surrounds him is most enjoyable. The unfolding of the plot is done perfectly. Just planned to get hooked on this series the way I have. The next two books which I'll start shortly are The Crowded Grave and The Devil’s Cave. 

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With a Mind to Kill

 I’ve read another novel by Anthony Horowitz, an audiobook format narrated by the great Rory Kinnear. This story is a very clever James Bond novel, and I think it was probably Ian Fleming that first got me hooked on books about murder and espionage. When I was 11 or 12 years old, I devoured all of Fleming’s novels. I’ve seen all the movies more than once, starting with the second one, From Russia with Love, which debuted in 1963. I’ve not read a Fleming book since then, and what fun it has been to read Horowitz’s take on this master spy and assassin.

The novel is entitled With a Mind to Kill. Horowitz reviews the prior James Bond adventures and neatly fits his novel into that sequence. After being badly injured during his last assignment in Japan, Bond had mostly recovered. His director, “M” thought Bond was ready for a new assignment, and M thought that it was only Bond who could take on the next specific challenge. After faking M’s death at Bond’s hands, the hero was allowed to be captured by the Russians. There was a subset of powerful Russians who believed that Nitkita Khurshchev, the head of the country from the mid 1950’s to 1964, was too weak to lead the country in the direction that they wanted. They wanted the country to return to the terror of Stalin. It was the brainwashing of an expert in that technique that believed he could turn Bond into the assassin who could do that. The international balance of power was at stake.

Of course, there was a stunning woman, a psychiatrist who had been trained in that discipline from a distorted Russian perspective, who was sent to determine if the brainwashing of Bond had been complete. Predictably and delightfully, she fell in love with him.

There are many more details, but if you’re a Bond junkie like me, this review should draw you to the writing of Horowitz and narration of Kinnear. Just as the Fleming books were rather short, this is not a long book. It is, however, most satisfying.

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Poontown

 

Warning, this book is not a murder mystery. It’s just a very good story.

Poontown is the second novel I’ve read by L. M. Weeks. Four years ago, I raved about his first novel Bottled Lightning. I wrote, “In short, this story is a fast ride of international intrigue, one that will keep you spellbound.” 

Poontown is not what I expected based on the title, but then I’m not a fly fisherman. Poon is the nickname for tarpon, a game fish that is typically found in warm coastal waters, so they are often found in Florida. Fishing for tarpon is about the fight to land them. They can weigh over 200 pounds and are known to repeatedly leap and fight against capture. Tarpon are not good to eat, so typically this is a catch-and-release effort. It’s a sport that becomes addicting to the fisherman who hunt them.

While there are famous real tarpon fishing contests, this story is about the fictional Sabalo Cup. It’s an invitational tournament that takes place in Southern Florida, and only for the best five teams of tarpon fishermen or fisherwomen, although women are not usually invited to compete. The contest consists of teams of two people, an angler and a guide, and the tournament lasts five days. There are strict rules that must be adhered to, and the bigger and better the fish, the more points that are scored. There is a $3,000 entry fee.

The fisher-people in this story all know each other since they’ve been competing against one another in a variety of tournaments, but the Sabalo (the Spanish work for tarpon) Cup is the most important one, the World Series of tarpon fishing. A woman has a key role in this tournament, Olivia, and her guide is Nathan. I won’t list the names of the other competitors here, but if you read this book, you’ll learn about them, along with other people that are associated with tarpon fishing. Weeks has written about a fascinating cast of characters. Weeks also weaves into the story a man who is trying to sell three rare and valuable orange pygmy alligators, and the reaction of the contestants when they learn about that.

I think it’s because I’m not a fisherman that I got a bit tired of the details of the contests and all the catches and losses. However, if you’re a fisherman, I think you’ll get caught up in the battles to land and release these magnificent creatures. The personalities of the contestants and their histories of competing are really fantastic.

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The Dark Vineyard

 I recently reviewed the first book in the Martin Walker 21-book series, Bruno, Chief of Police. I was so excited about the quality of that murder mystery novel, that I quickly acquired through the app Libby the second book The Dark Vineyard, published in 2009, a year after the first one. I see that author Walker has written a book a year since then, so assuming the quality of his stories continues there’s lots to look forward to.

Chief of Police Bruno Courreges is the only police officer in the small rural village of Saint-Denis located in the Perigord region in southwestern France. He has learned to love the quiet and intimate life in the village. Bruno only spoke a limited amount of English, which was all he needed in the countryside. The intense romantic relationship that Bruno had begun with police investigator Isabelle Perrault was interrupted as the result of her transfer back to her home base in Paris. That interruption seemed to be a great disappointment to both of them. But Bruno did not like the idea of living in Paris, and Isabelle was ambitious and thought working in Paris would provide her with the best chance at promotion.

As author Walker described delightful day-to-day life in Saint-Denis, there were frequent references to the local cuisine and many references to wine that might be consumed at any time of day. This second book started over a special vineyard where GMO crops were being tested, but many of the locals were not happy about it. While this venture was supposed to be kept secret, there really were not many secrets in this small village. When the crops were torched by an arsonist, it became a worldwide story. It turned out a large international producer of wines was considering making a major land purchase in Saint-Denis which surely would have changed the quality of life there. Some of the locals including the mayor saw the opportunity make a lot of money, but others were against the changes that this huge industry would bring

We learned about a cast of characters that included locals who worked in various businesses and people from the large wine company. It was when this quiet town experienced two deaths of longstanding beloved villagers that the tale got most interesting. Meanwhile, Bruno struggled with missing the wonderful relationship he had been building with Isabelle, as well as his attraction to one of the women who had made Saint-Denis her home of choice.

This book masterfully revealed a great plot and the developed a fascinating cast. Once again, the narrator of this audiobook was Robert Ian MacKenzie, and he was fantastic. I might just have to keep following Mr. MacKenzie for whatever books he narrates. Now, I will get my hands on Bruno book #3, Black Diamond.

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A Deadly Episode

 Anthony Horowitz wrote The Word is Murder in 2017. As explained in my review of that book, it was the first in a six book series. This prolific author of novels and screenplays, wrote the six book, A Deadly Episode just this year (2026), and I saw a very favorable comment about that one in the New York Times Book Review, so I started with the first and worked my way through them in order. Because of its popularity, I had to wait almost two months before the audiobook became available on Libby. I’ve enjoyed this series so much, I jumped right into it as soon as I could.

Please see my reviews of the first five books. The protagonists were Daniel Hawthorne, the world’s greatest detective, and a fictionalized version of Mr. Horowitz himself. He had in mind that he wanted to write himself into a series like Sherlock Holmes and Watson. He has done that but these two characters were actually antagonistic to one another. They never achieved a comfortable friendship, and right to the end, Hawthorne allowed Horowitz to write about his his crime-solving work, but he resisted letting Horowitz really know anything about his private life. The research into Hawthorne became the fictional author’s detective work.

Horowitz brought this series to an end that was quite satisfying, but it was not the rapprochement I expected. Rather, it seemed that after six books about Hawthorne’s brilliant detective efforts, both characters decided they had quite enough of dealing with one another. It was clear there never could be a true friendship, a mutual appreciation of the skills that they each brought to this situation. In the sixth book, a murder took place on the movie set where one of the earlier books in the series was being filmed. At first, it was thought that it was Hawthorne who had been killed, but then the author revealed that the death had been that of the actor who was playing Hawthorne in the movie. Hawthorne had come to the movie set as a technical advisor and Horowitz was there to comment on the screenplay which he had not been asked to write. This last novel actually helped tie the whole series together, and I would encourage readers to go through them in order. Once again, the narrator Rory Kinnear was fantastic throughout the entire series.

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Bruno, Chief of Police: A Novel of the French Countryside

 Bruno, Chief of Police is a current day story that quickly ties into a WWII event. Bruno is the protagonist who is the Chief of Police in a small rural village in France. In fact, he’s the only police officer in the village. This is the first in a 21-book series authored by Martin Walker. I chose to get the audiobook format, and the narrator is Robert Ian MacKenzie. Considering all the audiobooks that I’ve consumed, it’s not a small compliment to write that he’s a good as any narrator that I’ve heard, and that includes Tom Hanks in the book The Dutch House by Ann Patchett. It’s an 8-hour, 52-minute listen. This first novel was first published in 2008.

Bruno Courreges is fully enjoying the quiet life he’s living in St. Denis. Previously, he was seriously injured by a sniper during the Balkan War. He had a past love who was killed in the same battle in which he was injured. He arrived in St. Denis as a single young man. He came to know of two men who had been resistance fighters during WWII, but rather than having become great friends, they never acknowledged one another. Then one of them, an Algerian who had fought on behalf of the French resistance in WWII was brutally murdered, and a swastika was carved into the victim’s chest.

As a result of the murder and the investigation that followed, it became apparent that the village was harboring some longstanding secrets and racial prejudices. The murdered man was an Arab, and in France at the current time, there is a growing ultraright movement against all immigrants. Meanwhile, Bruno found himself becoming very attracted to a woman investigator who had been sent from Paris to St. Denis to help with the investigation.

The author provided a cast of the most interesting characters, and Bruno’s ability to interact with a wide variety people turned out to be one of the reasons that I came to like him so much. I’m quite excited to find yet another author with an extensive body of work that I can look forward to. enjoying It’s my plan to find the second book in the series, The Dark Vineyard, and if the second book is as good as the first, then I have a lot of joy coming my way.

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Whisper Down the Lane

 Whisper Down the Lane by Clay McLeod Chapman is the ultimate horror novel, a genre that I generally avoid. However, this story was inspired by the real and most ugly McMartin Preschool drama of the 1980’s. Two issues led to me fighting my way through a story that is so difficult to read as the result of very real human trauma involved. One of those issues is that I knew a family that sent their youngest of three sons to the true McMartin Preschool (which had first opened in 1956 and closed in 1984 after allegations of horrific child abuse) in Manhattan Beach, California, so that young boy was never part of the trauma that was to follow. The second issue was the belief at the time that recovered childhood memories of sexual trauma were always true. I am a part of the mental health personnel that struggled with the reality of such claims of abuse and the fallout that occurred in families as the result of the wide publicity that came as the result of such claims.

At the end of the story which occurred after extensive investigation and legal action, all charges were dropped against most of the accused employees of the preschool, and no one was convicted of any wrongdoing. The mental health practitioners that pried stories from the preschool children were known to have used manipulative methods to pull out false information they thought were true.

I thought the author captured the essence of some of the trauma. He touched on Satanic rituals, the issue of multiple personalities, and without labeling it as such, he described dissociative identity disorders. I continue to feel embarrassed by those professionals who fell victim to the mass hysteria that underlied the McMartin Prescrhool trials.

I really can’t recommend this book to anyone because of it’s content. It’s just too terrible.

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Magpie Murders

 

I raved about the Hawthorne & Horowitz Series by Anthony Horowitz. He is a prolific writer in multiple genres. Magpie Murders is apparently his best-selling thriller, and I got it in the audiobook format. Once again, he writes about a successful fictional author of crime novels, Alan Conway. His editor, Susan Ryeland has been working with Conway for many years and has already edited many of his novels. However, she becomes suspicious that Conway’s new book actually contains a true-life hidden story of greed and murder. Conway wrote about a detective he named Atticus Pund who is reputed to be the best in the world at what he does. Given the story-within-a-story format, there are many characters to learn about, so the reader has multiple options to choose who the real suspect is. Horowitz is clever and fun. I plan to scan his long list of novels and choose another one in the near future. You won’t be disappointed.

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Blunt Instrument

 Blunt Instrument by Amy Bloom made the list by Oprah for Daily Best Book for the Summer. I didn’t think it was that good. I stumbled across this novel in the NY Times Book Review. Ms. Bloom has not previously been reviewed in this blog.

Elderly Professor Bullfinch was bludgeoned to death with a bust of Daniel Hawthorne. It was possible that his death was linked to the struggles in his department at Cromwell University. Bullfinch was not a very popular guy. The university president hired a private detective in an attempt to solve the murder before the police did, therefore being able to keep the matter quiet. 

Although Ms. Bloom is a prolific author, this is her first crime novel. I think I’ll wait for her to develop better crime chops before I read this author again.

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Storm Warning

 Storm Warning is the first novel new series which introduces Sonny Marshall as the protagonist. I had already read the second novel, Storm Damage. The story line is pretty good when his beautiful girlfriend ended their relationship because she could not tolerate Sonny’s fixation with helping people who desperately need help. Please read my rave review of the second novel. Sonny is not a cop, not a PI, not a detective. Rather, he’s a successful musician who places the saxophone in a blues and jazz band known as the Storm Lake Blues Band. It was when he was unable to protect his sister from a brutal assault that he began study marshal arts, skills that he would often make use of in his “white knight complex” efforts.

There was one aspect to the story line in the second novel which I did not like. The plot had to do with the kidnapping of exceptionally bright and beautiful children. When one five year old girl was taken and Sonny began learning as much as he could about it, he ran into a police detective in Sacramento, Detective Katrina Hastings, who had been pursuing the kidnapping of a girl for the last seven years. They teamed up and then fell in love. That was a good part of the book. They discovered a ranch in New Mexico where the kidnapped children were taken and being trained. The powers behind the abduction scene wanted to create a master race. It was there intent to make these highly intelligent children run the world because they believed without them, the world would come to a catastrophic end. It’s an old story line of which I’m quite tired.

However, Terry R. Bacon has created a great cast of characters who are quite different than most of the murder mysteries that I read. I really want more of this – hint – so when am I going to see book three?

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Ransom

 

Ransom by Daniel Silva is his 26^th novel about Gabriel Allon, an Israeli spy and assassin who rose to being the director of an undercover department, but he has finally, allegedly, retired from such clandestine work. Allon spends his winters in his flat on the Grand Canal in Venice with his Venecian wife, Chiara, and his two children. In retirement, during the summer months, he retires to a remote cabin in Cornwall, England. He works as a restorer of old art masterpieces, the same skill he often used during his years as a spy to disguise his true identity.

This story starts out with four women, now in their 30s, who have been friends since their college days. One of them, Alice Winnter, married to Edward Knight, a man worth billions, and she typically pays for all expenses for their annual week-long reunions in only the most extravagant places. The current gathering is on the island of Ibiza. Alice is a dazzling socialite who has millions of followers on social medial. However, before the week is over, Alice gets in a major argument with one of her girlfriends, Phoebe. Alice then disappears, and her husband is desperate to find her. The story become one of kidnapping and an outrageous ransom demand, leading to Knight’s plea to Allon to find Alice.

The plot involves the discovery that Knight is only so wealthy because of his financial support by a Russian oligarch. However, there’s an important twist regarding the kidnapping, and Alice reveals she must divorce night because of his connection to the Russians who are currently at war with the Ukraine. When the ransom demand went unpaid, at first, it is assumed that Alice has been killed. The unwinding of the mystery of Alice’s disappearance is the meat of the story, including the undoing of her husband’s source of wealth.

I’ve often thought of myself as Silva’s best fan. He produces one new book a year which I usually read in a day or two, and then impatiently wait for another year before I get to enjoy the continuing saga of his protagonist. The life and adventures of Gabriel Allon have captivated me. However, this book was not up to Silva’s usual engaging stories. It’s not a simple task to follow any  hero through 26 books as he ages out of the very work that made him so interesting. The wonderful and rich descriptions of his travels was present, just as in all of his previous novels. However, as Allon gets into the tedious details of money laundering on behalf of Putin (never named in the body of the book), we’re taken through lengthy and boring details. The plot stalled until the very end of the novel. So, this particular novel was not one that I can recommend.

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Storm Damage

 Storm Damage is the second book in the Sonny Marshall Thriller series written by Terry Bacon. This is an excellent and well-written story, and I’ve already downloaded the first novel in the series, Storm Warning. Sonny Marshall is a blues musician whose band has brought him considerable success. Most of his time is spent in the Bay Area of California, and he owns a music studio in San Francisco. His back story is important because it includes his family suffering a home invasion in which his older sister was brutally raped. He was only a boy at the time and came away with intense guilt, that he had failed to save her from the trauma. He promised himself he would not allow another innocent person to suffer. Sonny began an intense study of Marshall arts. A couple years later when his younger sister was being bullied by a group of boys, he followed her home from school and when they began their harassment of her, he took them on all by himself. Sonny brought the group down and they left his sister alone after that. Author Bacon called this a “white knight complex.”

There are many references in this second book, Storm Damage, to Sonny having repeated similar events in his adult life, but I’ll have to read the first book to learn about that. In this book, The Storm Lake Blues Band has just returned to the Bay Area from a tour. They were working on a new album which was due to be released the following month. Eric, the lead guitarist, had been hitting cocaine quite heavily. He went to a drug party only to try an unknown designer drug which led to his death. At the same time, there were several similar drug-related events around the Bay Area in which people were suddenly become homicidal – behavior which was totally foreign to their day-to-day personalities. The deaths were piling up and Sonny began to use his own contacts, including law enforcement, to track down the mysterious creator of this new substance.

Meanwhile, the author let us know more about Sonny’s personal life. His girlfriend, Katrina Hastings or Kat was a detective in Sacramento, and she had a daughter, Sara, of middle school age. Kat shared some of Sonny’s savior feelings, so she was able to tolerate his rescue behaviors. Even though Sonny and Kat seemed averse to talking about their future together, the book ends with the two of them moving together in Sonny’s apartment where the very talented Sara will be able to attend a special high school.

I found myself attracted to the author’s writing, and I’ll give you a one paragraph example:

When my former girlfriend, Marily Anne Crittenden, caught COVID in 2020, I spent a       week sleeping on the couch while she recovered in our bedroom. Nobody in the world knew what to do back then. Advice from the CDC changed every other week, and the president advised people to drink bleach and shine ultraviolet light up their ass. Mac wasn’t sick enough for a hospital, but my taking care of her was like a grease monkey arranging flowers

Bacon treats the reader to a rich cast of characters including Kat, Sara, his band members, members of law enforcement, and the drug-affected victims. One subplot had to do with replacing Eric with a new guitarist, and Bacon introduced the remarkable artist Le’Andre Kimani to fill Eric’s shoes. He wrote beautifully about the emotional process of producing new music. Now, I must impatiently wait for the third book in this promised series.

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Close to Death

 Close to Death is the fifth of six books in the Hawthorne & Horowitz series written by Anthony Horowitz. I’ve already reviewed the first four books, so I need not report here what has drawn me to this series which has gotten my rave comments. This book is different from the others since the two protagonists do not appear in the book until about the 30-40% mark. Rather, the author Horowitz, distinct from his semi-fictionalized writer in the novels, provides us with a lot of background about the small and elite housing area near London, Riverview Close. Close is an English term for a small and relatively insular area of homes, the word coming from the word “enclosure.”

I’ll be brief. Once again there is a murder. While there has been very little turnover of the houses in the close, one of the houses went up for sale. It was purchased by Giles Kenworthy who very quickly becomes an irritant to all of the other neighbors, and it is Giles who is murdered with a crossbow shot into his throat. Detective Hawthorne comes to the scene to solve the murder, and Horowitz is there to gather material for his next novel. The reader is provided with a great cast, any of whom had a motive to kill Kenworthy. There are artful misdirections, and there was the usual tension between the two main players.

The sixth book is entitled A Deadly Episode, and I’m in line to get it, estimated at another seven weeks although there are 47 copies in use. I’ll impatiently wait for it to become available.

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