Still Foolin' 'Em by Billy Crystal

I'm normally not one to read celebrity autobiographies because they tend to be a bit narcissistic or part of some therapy. While reading this, I tried to remember the last one of these I had read and I think it was from Tim Allen (whose 'Men Are Pigs' Showtime special still ranks as perhaps the funniest standup routine I'd ever seen - worth tracking down, guys).

My wife gave this to me as a present because she knows I like Billy Crystal. Always thought his takes on the Cosell-Ali sparing was among the best impersonations out there and he definitely was in the top three of all-time Oscar hosts (w/ Bob Hope and Johnny Carson). This was an easy and entertaining romp through Crystal's history.

Yes, successful entertainers lead more interesting lives than most of us, rubbing elbows with and becoming 'close friends' with the likes of Ali, Cosell, Mickey Mantle, Joe Torre, Sophia Loren, Loren Michaels, Johnny Carson, Jack Palance, Robin Williams, yadda, yadda, yadda and for many readers, such goings on might be laborious, I mean, how many people (entertainers or otherwise) could manage to sign a 1-day contract with the Yankees and get to face down a MLB pitcher at 60? But Crystal weaves enough one-liners and quips to make it all bearable. Especially when he talks about some of his more famous outings like When Harry Met Sally, City Slickers, his secret crush on Sophia Loren, and, of course, The Oscars.

Robin Williams says it best in his cover blurb: "A Hollywood autobiography with one wife, no rehab, a loving family, and loyal friends."  Read this book as Crystal's musings on turning 65 and most all men of a certain age will find plenty to identify with when it comes to marriage, children, grandchildren, retirement, and (yes, even) death. Actually seems like he'd make a pretty good neighbor, tax bracket notwithstanding.

Not our usual fare, but not an unworthy undertaking either.

ECD

Killer by Jonathan Kellerman

Killer is just more of the same we’ve grown to expect from Jonathan Kellerman.  Just another of his psychological thrillers featuring Dr. Alex Delaware and Lt Milo Sturgis and their intellectual sleuthing that now spans four decades… never stale and always entertaining.

Dr. Delaware has developed a reputation within the LA law enforcement community for psychological assessments that are competent, straight forward, and accurate and therefore, rarely contested. The courts call on him frequently for the more challenging child related cases which he gladly accepts as his schedule allows.  In his latest case, Connie Sykes the dominating, over baring, successful business owner sues her free spirited, rocker, poverty stricken younger sister, Cherie Sykes for custody of her baby Rambla, born out of wedlock.  Dr. Delaware does his assessment and pronounces Cherie a fit mother with insufficient reason to alter baby Rambla’s guardianship.  Connie reacts angrily to the judge’s decision and blames Dr. Delaware for the outcome.  Alex then learns from a grateful former patient, turned gangster that a hit contract has been issued for Alex’s life… Connie’s anger turned to action.

Enter LAPD Lt. Milo Sturgis, longtime pal and coworker.  Milo attempts the direct face to face approach with Connie but finds her stabbed and strangled to death in the foyer of her home.  Meanwhile, sister Cherie has vacated her apartment, baby Rambla in tow and is nowhere to be found.  Rocker friend and suspected father of baby Rambla then shows up dead… shot in the head.  Unconvinced Cherie is capable of such violence, Alex expands the investigation and studies the behavior of everyone involved in the custody battle.  Talking to the judge, her support team, the lawyers, and Cherie’s know associates, Alex observes very subtle behaviors that lead him to places police procedure would overlook.

So Kellerman proves once again why he is in my power rotation.  Not a lot of character development because as followers of the series we know what we need to know about Alex and Milo… solid, professional, nonjudgmental, compassionate… just a touch of egotism from where they sit on moral high ground.  So in each annual episode we need ‘Just the facts, Mam’ and we get them in fast paced, efficient writing… continually wondering what the next page holds… knowing it will all end too quickly… now we wait another year.

Thanks to Net Galley and the publisher for an advance copy of this one.

Tall Man in Ray-Bans by Joseph Flynn

A couple kids playing in a dry lake bed outside of Austin, TX unearth a skeleton. Some early clues point toward the corpse being a long time fugitive Randy Bear Heart. Randy disappeared years ago after robbing a few banks, killing a couple bank guards, and a reservation cops. This means that multiple agencies are called in.

Austin PD has first dibs, but the FBI as well as the Bureau of Indian Affairs also get called in; turf wars are on the horizon. BIA Special Agent John Tall Wolf has, how to say this, a unique way of conducting an investigation and is entirely unimpressed with the courtesies normally showed the FBI. When he was recruited, he had his own requirements, primarily independence and not being sent to a reservation. His boss wanted to know if he also wanted a license to take scalps, to wit, "That'd be a good start."

Tall Wolf has to dig back into Bear Heart's history and find out how and why he managed to disappear.  He traces Bear Heart from a North Dakota reservation to Canada, to Texas, California, and Banff uncovering a bizarre set of circumstances surrounding girlfriends, wives, a son, songwriter, and a comely Mountie (even BIA detectives are allowed a little fun).

My brother-in-law suggested this book and by good luck and timing, it was on sale for the Kindle. Having just finished that beast of a book, the 700-page I am Pilgrim, Tall Man was a veritable short story by comparison. I have missed the mysteries of the late, great Tony Hillerman and his Navaho cops Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, looking for someone to fill that void. One of the primary draws of the Hillerman books was the way he would weave Navaho culture and mysticism into the stories. Flynn makes no bone about Tall Wolf being Apache, but here Tall Wolf seems to live comfortably a bit more inside the White world of government agencies, and for that I'm disappointed. But that doesn't mean I'll quit here. This is the first of two (so far) Tall Wolf books and I will definitely be finding the next.  Highly entertaining.

East Coast Don

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

A third of the way through, I gave up on The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, despite its 4/5 rating on Amazon. The book was recommended to me with enthusiasm by a dear friend, a woman who does not delve often into our usual crime genre, and my wife had already downloaded it for one of her book groups. It’s a story about loss. A boy’s narcissistic father left him and his mother without warning, and then the mother and son are the victims of a new terrorist attack in New York. The son survives, but his mother does not. The book was about pain, agony, and survival, and I was simply not drawn to continue with the characters in that process. In the course of my work as a psychiatrist/psychoanalyst, I experience life with real people as they struggle with loss and pain, and search for the best survival, adaptation, and growth that is possible. I tend to read for escape, and while being well written, this novel certainly does not invite escape.

The Gods of Guilt by Michael Connelly

Mickey Haller, aka the Lincoln Lawyer has earned his reputation as a sleazy, scumbag lawyer.  He represents the guilty… preferably the guilty that has the cash to pay him for his legal services.  He represents drug dealers, prostitutes, and murderers and has done it so often he knows all the legal loopholes and courtroom tricks to placate his culpable, sometimes unworthy clients. His office is the back seat of a Lincoln Town Car and his associate, office manager (also his second ex-wife) and private investigator work from home.  They hold staff meetings in abandon office buildings of foreclosure clients.  A recent case gone wrong has cost Haller his chance to be LA County Prosecutor, his relationship with his first wife and daughter, and his self-respect.  His deceased father, also a courtroom lawyer, frequently referred to jurors as the ‘Gods of guilt.’  Mickey has expanded the concept to mean all the wrath that has befallen him as a result of his poor judgment in life up until now.  His life, personal and professional, is in a shambles and he is burdened with guilt because he knows only he is responsible.  Yet he doesn’t know how to fix it.

Then one day, Mickey is asked by Andre La Cosse, a cyber pimp who manages websites for call girls, to represent him on a murder charge.  The victim, Gloria Dayton is a former client of Mickey’s and had actually recommended Mickey to Andre sometime before her death.  Years earlier Mickey had attempted to rescue the now deceased client from her world of prostitution and is distressed to learn that Gloria had returned to a life of crime… yet another God of guilt.  Haller rationalizes away all thoughts of conflict of interest when he learns Andre can pay in gold bullion.

As Haller and his legal team prepare to defend the presumed guilty La Cosse, they discover he may actually be innocent.  To prove that innocence Mickey must enlist help from a cartel thug and a disbarred lawyer both currently in prison.  Haller uses all his well-practiced courtroom antics to get his ‘other-guy-did-it’ theory accepted into the trial.  The theory threatens to expose a corrupt DEA agent and a shady investigator for the District Attorney.  As more is revealed about this law enforcement team’s wrong doing, Mickey’s life hangs in balance.  He hopes his gallant rescue of this innocent man will gain him the respect of his teenage daughter who currently thinks him a low life villain for his chosen profession.  He hopes too to gain back his own self-respect… but at what cost?  The gold bullion has long ago run out and he has placed his life and the lives of his employees in danger.

Connelly has mastered the legal thriller genre with the Mickey Haller character just as he mastered police procedurals with Harry Bosch.  He has a way of taking the damaged and down trodden in society and revealing their humanity… the reader can’t help but like them.  Connelly has a knack for making them real.  For example, he incorporates into his story that the movie Lincoln Lawyer was made about Mickey Haller, his fictional character.  As a result the trend of lawyering from the back seat of a Lincoln Town Car has caught on.  A side street at the LA County courthouse is filled with Town Cars parked there waiting for the owners to return from an appearance in court… fact or fiction?  Real or unreal?  He makes you wonder...  very clever way to create the illusion that Mickey Haller is a real person… nicely done.

The Blackhouse by Peter May

The Blackhouse by Peter May is an excellent crime story takes place on the Isle of Lewis, the most northerly island of the Outer Hebrides archipelago in Scotland. Detective Sergeant Finlay “Fin” Macleod of the Edinburgh Police Department grew up in the village of Crobost on the island, but he left at the age of 18 and had not been back in 18 years. When he was 18, like so many other boys his age, he just wanted off the island. His family was dead, so he had no one to return for, and he definitely had memories of his early life that he wanted to avoid. When he flunked out of college in Glasgow, he wound up on the police force in Edinburgh and being smarter than most cops, worked his way up to be a detective. Soon after investigating a gruesome and widely publicized murder in Edinburgh, Fin’s wife and 8-year-old son were run over by hit-and-run driver which killed the boy, and badly damaged their marriage since Fin blamed her the death of their son.

After a month of mourning for Fin, there was a second nearly identical murder in Crobost and the victim was one of Fin’s childhood tormentors, a brute of a man, Angel Macritchie. Because Fin spoke the Gaelic lingo of the islands and since he knew the locals and their customs, Fin’s boss gave him a choice to get back to work on the new murder or leave the force. Fin chose to go home and face his haunting memories, as well as take the opportunity to get some time away from his wife.

This story is an artful one which interwove the crime investigation and Fin’s complicated back story. The character development, especially of the protagonist, was masterful. The novel also gave more than a glimpse into the life in Scotland, especially the islands, where the people were viewed as being unsophisticated hicks by the city folks. Given that the weather is nearly always awful, nearly every paragraph in the book seemed to make reference to the weather. I thought that accurately reflected what life is like in Scotland where the weather is a constant issue and is always a part of every conversation.

This is the first book of The Lewis Trilogy, and I’ll definitely read the next one, The Lewis Man, at least I will if it finds its way to Kindle or if I can find it in an old book shop. This is the first novel in the blog for Peter May, and he was suggested to me by my lifelong friend Linda, but I was looking for his series called “The China Thrillers.” Linda lived in China for eight years and knew of his work when she was there. When I could not find those on Kindle, I checked out his only available novel, The Blackhouse and was not disappointed. Perhaps I was drawn to this because, in my travels, I got to know a cop from one of the northern Scottish islands, and he was a most interesting character. I’ll keep Peter May on my list of worthy authors. Thanks Linda.

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.