I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes

I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes was a 5-star read for me. This is the kind of book that we at Men Reading Books wait for – an international crime/terrorist fiction story with great writing, great characters, and a binding and believable plot line. Hayes wrote numerous screenplays, but this is his first novel, and it’s a remarkable effort. How do a domestic murder and a jihadist plot to bring unbelievable terror to the entire population of the U.S. tie together? The reader does not learn the identity of the protagonist until well into the book, as the author successfully teases that information along. He repeatedly made the most clever use of foreshadowing that I’ve ever seen. This is a book that is in the same rank as the works by Daniel Silva and Frederick Forsythe. I couldn’t give it a higher compliment. The good news is that it’s a great book. The bad news is that you’ll have to wait until late May for it’s release by Atria Books.

Tumbledown by Robert Boswell

Tumbledown by Robert Boswell is a diversion from the usual genre found in MRB.  Boswell writes about people… people caught in life’s situations trying to survive but all on the verge of failing.

James Candler is a counselor at Onyx Springs, a treatment center for nonviolent ‘clients’ needing a little help coping with life.  From outside appearances Candler is destined for success.  At age 33, he has a fiancée, a sizable home, and a red Porsche and is in line to be director of the upscale Southern California treatment center.  Yet his life is a mess.  He is falling in love with a former patient, is underwater on his mortgage, and has put his free spirited, lifelong friend, Billy in charge of a therapeutic program that Candler himself has created at Onyx Springs.  Further, he feels he does not deserve the pending promotion.  But then he feels he does not deserve happiness as he is continually haunted by the long ago suicide of his older Asperger inflicted brother.

Like Candler everyone around him seems to struggle to cope with the everyday… on the cusp of tumbling down.  His patients include the kind and stunningly beautiful, Karly whose IQ is too low for her to live alone, the young schizophrenic, Mick who cheats on his meds so he can feel something and dream of returning to his former self, the rebellious sarcastic, Maura who falls in love with Mick, and Vex the talented mechanic with anger issues. Candler’s friend Billy drifts through life, well-meaning but lacking in ambition and good judgment.  James’ sister, Violent, has lost her much older husband and secretly wants to celebrate the loss rather than grieve it.  His girlfriend, Lise was a former patient and secretly stalked Candler before he began to fall for her. Then there is Barnstone, the ex-hippie, ex-rocker who became an Onyx Springs counselor when her band brokeup after a gig at a local bar 20 years earlier.  Unable to follow rules, she can’t seem to maintain a professional distance from her patients.  This eclectic crowd of characters all seemly headed for self-destruction somehow achieve varying degrees of success and combine in a tale of humanity, humor, and compassion.

I enjoyed the diversion that Boswell offers. Not only are his characters off beat, so is his literary style.  Towards the end he writes two endings to the same plot line all comingled into the same chapter.  I’ve never seen that done before but it allows you to choose your own ending… happy or tragic… interesting twist.  More importantly, I enjoyed the depth, complexity, and compassion of his characters… put me in mind of a modern day John Steinbeck.  We don’t get enough of that from today’s popular authors.

Doctor Sleep by Stephen King

Ever wondered what happened to Danny Torrance, the kid that the Overlook Hotel wanted in The Shining (The book, not the movie)?

Like father, like son; Danny grows up a drunk. Started drinking around age 14. Bounced from one menial job to the next, he was a mean drunk. Did his share of coke, too. Went home with this one coke-head, woke up with a world class hangover. Drags himself out of bed, steals her money, and just as he's about gone, a toddler in a droopy diaper appears, sees the remnants of their partying lined up on a table and mumbles, "Canny". Danny just leaves and tries to bury, unsuccessfully, that particular image. 

He heads north on a bus, knowing he'll be dead soon if his attempts to use alcohol and drugs to shake the nightmares of The Overlook and his father fail. Something about a small New Hampshire town beckons him where he is sort of taken in by a city employee working TeenyTown, the local summer tourist attraction. But a condition of employment is 90 in 90; 90 AA meetings in 90 days. 

Slowly, Danny gets sober, rents an apartment and starts working at the local hospice where, with time, his shining abilities become a bit more controllable. People dying are in need of someone to help them cross over and Danny's telepathic/empathic skills do just that, getting him the moniker of Doctor Sleep.

In the next town, however, Abra is born, and Abra's skills make Danny look like a sideshow barker. She reached out to Danny within hours of being born and by middle school, can leave messages on a blackboard where Danny lives. Think of her as Carrie on steroids. She and Danny can shine back and forth with each other even when separated by hundreds of miles.

Traveling around the country is a band of oldsters in motorhomes, going nowhere in particular. That's not quite accurate. This crowd, The True Knot, are a bunch of immortals, some date back over a millennia or more. The survive by sucking steam - that's the essence that leaves the body of someone with the shine when they die.

Their leader, Rose the Hat, can sense kids who can shine. The kid is tracked down, kidnapped, tortured (the more scared, the better the steam), killed, and their steam is captured in canisters for later use. After killing a kid in Nebraska, Rose starts to zero in on Abra, but not before returning to a campground they own up in the Colorado mountains. A camp that just happens to occupy the land of a former luxury mountain hotel by the name of The Overlook.

From here, we follow the Knot's attempts to find and grab Abra, Danny's attempts to block those attempts, finally leading up to the final confrontation between Danny and Rose on the still possessed grounds of the former Overlook hotel.

I've mentioned in passing here at MRB that I read a few early King books back in the late 70's, including The Shining (which scared the ever loving crap out of me). I tried The Stand, but couldn't get through that 1000 page monster and never went back to either the books or his supernatural movies (OK, I did see Shawshank and Stand By Me, both terrific, but never read either).

But this one intrigued me and decided to give it a go. And, for the most part, I liked it just fine. Yeah, it was a little heavy on the AA angle and came to find out from the 'about the author' segment that King wrote The Shining essentially in an alcoholic haze. Never quite got all that caught up in the Knot part of the plot triangle, but thoroughly enjoyed the Danny-Abra relationship with Danny working out the demons of his past while helping Abra and her family come to grips with just who Abra is and can be.

Monday or Tuesday night, I woke up around 3am for no reason so I started reading. Two hours later, I had finished the book - the final chase into the Rockies, setup, and eventual confrontation with Rose and the True Knot. Upon finishing, I went back to sleep for a couple hours.

In the morning, it struck me. There was no way I could've done the same thing reading The Shining - I would've been up for a couple days if I'd read that ending in the middle of the night. For that reason alone, I think I can say that, as good as the Danny-Abra story was, the overall book was just so-so for me. It just didn't have the soul or the shear terror of its predecessor. Maybe as a standalone, it might be better. But if, like me, you read The Shining, I'm going to bet you'll be thinking Doctor Sleep doesn't follow the same trail as that explored in The Shining.

East Coast Don

15 Seconds by Andrew Gross

Dr. Henry Steadman is a well-respected plastic surgeon from Palm Beach, Florida visiting Jacksonville for a quick round of golf with a former college roommate and to address a Doctors Without Borders conference.  On his way from the airport to his hotel in a rental car he is stopped by the Jacksonville police.  Probable cause for the stop seems weak to Henry and the police officer Martinez appears to have mistaken him for someone else.  Finally as Officer Martinez agrees to release Henry with only a warning, a blue car with South Carolina plates pulls up beside the police cruiser and shoots and kills Martinez.  Henry panics and tries to follow the perpetrator’s car, fully aware he himself could be accused of the murder.  He calls 911 from his cell phone and reports a partial license plate number from the blue car but is repeatedly instructed to return to the scene.  When he does, the police open fire on him so he flees the scene again.  This time he heads to the home of his golfer buddy only to find him dead.  Now Dr. Steadman is the sole suspect in two murders.

With nowhere to turn and suspicious of the local police, Henry calls the police headquarters in an attempt to clear up this huge misunderstanding.  His call is inadvertently routed to Carrie Homles in the community outreach department.  Carrie is a recent widow with a son recovering from an accident.  While she wants to believe Henry’s story, she follows department protocol advising him to surrender.  When her boss discounts her attempts to clear Henry, she does some investigation of her own and confirms her intuition that Henry is innocent.  Unable to convince her boss, she takes a leave of absence and heads to South Carolina to further investigate on her own.

Henry then is contacted by the perpetrator who has set out to ruin him.  The villain calls Henry from his daughter’s cell phone to inform the good doctor that his daughter has been kidnapped.  Henry is warned that any word of this crime to the police will result in her death.  Now to save his daughter and his reputation, Henry must try to solve the mystery of who this guy is and why the vendetta against him while avoiding law enforcement.

15 seconds is what MRB commonly refers to as an airplane book.  It’s a page turner and a quick read that holds your attention through each twist and turn of a fast paced thrilling plot.  With such rapid fire action, however, the author's character development is weak… insufficient to create much of a connection to the characters. But the story does hold your interest and is an entertaining tale.  Next time I want to read an airplane book… and sometimes I do… I might consider another Andrew Gross novel.

Daughters

For the blog’s 600^th book review, it would have been nice to come up with a great book. Not only is this one off-genre for Men Reading Books, it was not a great read for me. I considered quitting the book several times, but I slogged ahead. I’m drawn to epic historical dramas, multigenerational stories about specific ethnic groups or geographical areas. This one seemed to fit the bill even if the title is a bit distant from the kind of books we normally read. Daughters by Consuelo Saah Baehr is about three generations of Palestinian women starting in the late 1800’s, pre-WWI, up to the late 1950s. The story is mostly about the tension from one generation to the next as the world around them changes. It was not an anti-Jew propaganda novel. Baehr does a good job portraying the battle between staying true to tradition and adapting to a constantly modernizing world. The author’s main characters were impressive women, but I found the character development to have been overly tedious. Perhaps it is an accurate reflection of the culture and the times, but the love relationships evolved very, very slowly. This was not an uplifting book as tragedy begat tragedy. The writing itself was excellent. The historical information was helpful, but if you decide to read this, be prepared to take your time wading through details.

The Beautiful Mystery by Louise Penny

Louise Penny’s The Beautiful Mystery is somewhere in the middle of her Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series.  This one is not set in the remote community of Three Pines but in a Roman Catholic monastery located deep in the Quebec wilderness.  The Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups order consists of fewer than two dozen monks hand-picked for their singing ability.  The purpose of the order is to practice their faith through ancient Gregorian chants which they sing a cappella at three services a day.  The chants are so inspiring that they are thought to mysteriously unite the listener with God thus the beautiful mystery.  Although under a vow of silence, the order has recently recorded their chants and has marketed a CD.  Proceeds from their venture have gone to maintain the physical structure where they live, a four hundred year old, cross shaped, stone monastery.  But now conflict ensues for the sect.  Do they continue their isolation from society and remain true to their vows or further share their divine gift with the world?  The quandary divides the brotherhood and results in the murder of Friar Mathieu, their choir master.

The abbot, Dom Philippe calls Sûreté du Québec. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his lead investigator Jean-Guy Beauvoir are dispatched to the secluded abbey. The two inspectors use forensic evidence and their interview skills to unravel the mystery to find motive and opportunity for one monk to sin against his god in such a profound way.

Louise Penny is a gifted author.  The pleasure derived from her work is not in the story but in the telling of the story… it’s in the journey, not in arriving at the destination.  Her strength is in character development.  She creates individuals and puts them in situations that reveal their character traits thereby making them human.  However, in The Beautiful Mystery, the plot is a bit too contrived.  A secluded monastery in the Quebec wilderness exclusively controls ancient chants unknown even to the Vatican suddenly decides to out itself with a CD so it can install a geothermal heat pump? …. Really?  I recommend you Louise Penny fans skip this one but don’t give up on the author.

Five Minutes of Blackness by Doug Smith

To say that Jesse Collins, former FBI agent and current San Diego detective, is a wounded man would be an understatement. He's a drunk, plain and simply. Was offered 'early retirement' by the FBI, got lucky with  sort of a pity hire by a friend in the SDPD, his wife left for Boulder - told him to all her when he'd been sober for 90 days - 'Just one' means nothing. Hungover is his normal state. He pukes, pisses, and craps blood, routinely cracks his head on the toilet, eats like crap, doesn't sleep as much as he passes out. His partner Fig is a bit of an enabler and crime tech Erica keeps trying to get him back into AA. 

Rich guy in a pricey car is found in a La Jolla garage, slumped over the steering wheel in a pose that Jesse knows all too well. Except for one thing. This guy's balls have been blown off. Clues? Plenty. They can ID the gun and bullets, have fingerprints, blond curly hair fragments, DNA, footprints. But nothing in any local of national databases.The killer has just vanished.

Jesse is the lead because, in spite of his alcoholism, he's still a dang good detective. A friend of his Chief is the head dog in Charlotte. A local restaurant owner is found in a parking garage. Same MO. Based on the similarities, Jesse is thinking a wronged woman correcting old wrongs done to her.

And he still drinks . . . a lot . . . and frequently . . . but now he has to go to Cape Cod. Another guy, same MO. Another chance to either blow it and get drunk or start showing everyone he can handle it.

He screws up again . . . and ends up in jail in the modern day version of the drunk tank . . . rock bottom. But Fig has found a link between the 3 victims. All were students for a time at a small college in NH. So it's back on a plane headed east. The noose is tightening, if only by a little. The killer is tracked to NJ. So now Jesse, Fig, and Erica head for the NJ coast. Jesse finds a hot source, follows it up and comes face to face with this 'woman scorned.'

Smith takes the reader back and forth between the existence of a world-class drunk and a decent detective trying, very poorly, to get sober. 'They' say to write about what you know and the author blurb says he is grateful to be free of drugs and alcohol. Not pretty.

I'd put this into my partner West Coast Don's category of 'airplane books'. A quick read that breaks little new ground. And it wouldn't even take a coast to coast flight. Maybe LAX to ORD. Not too long, not too demanding. As presented, expect a sequel. Maybe I'll check it out, maybe I won't. Jesse wasn't that enthralling for me to breathlessly wait for the next installment. Who knows.

ECD