Stepping in the Write Direction

Although I love literary fiction and nonfiction books, police procedurals, true crimes, and detective/investigation thrillers are my literary crack. There is nothing quite like the physical feeling of liftoff as a book soars airborne toward its climax, and you just can’t put it down. If such a book also has a more original story, is written well, and the last few paragraphs give an unexpected punch, it’s the cherries on top! If it takes place in Chicago, even better! The Fourth Monkey by J. D. Barker, book one in the book The Fourth Monkey Killer (4MK) thriller series, is just such a book. Before I’d even finished reading it, I’d already ordered books 2 and 3 in the series.  The elusive perpetrator of a number of recent deadly  kidnappings is interrupted making a crime related delivery, when a Chicago Transit Authority bus accidentally hits the killer mid stride. Although one detective later expressed a hope the bus reversed and backed over the killer again, one strike was mor...

I read The Rachel Incident by Carolyn O’Donoghue following two intense books, Lady Tan’s Circle of Women and Wellness. My sense of O’Donoghue’s book is of it feeling like the sorbet course sometimes served between the entree and main course to cleanse the palate. It was piquant, refreshing, lively, humorous, poignant, energetic, and very entertaining. The story starts out with a 20 year old, tall, zoftig Irish woman Rachel who needed “ to be in love and to be taken seriously.” She yearns to be independent from her family noting,  “It’s not that we weren’t capable of warmth, as a family. But we were regularly seduced by the concept of being wronged.” Rachel is on the verge of attending the university in Cork, just as the economy has taken a serious downturn affecting her parent’s dental office, making it impossible for them to cover her fees, and requiring her to work in order to support herself at school. She lands a job in a book store, and meets her new best friend (not romantic)...

In his book Wellness, the Chicago of author Nathan Hill’s imagination is a far more richly layered one than meets the eye, full of possibilities, both good and otherwise. The book is like a coming of age (middle age) for main characters Jack and Elizabeth long after they arrive in Chicago for college. Their pilgrimage through life together forces them to examine the authenticity of their lives and trust their own instincts, rather than continuing to make life altering decisions based on prevailing external forces and social media dictates.    This powerful book feels epic in scope. It begins on the sweeping prairie of Jack’s childhood, a backdrop of an endless sea of rippling tall grass, teeming with life, as vibrant to those who really look, as if it had a heartbeat of its own. Jack is taken by the images he sees around him every day of twisted and bent prairie trees, “growing up crooked, nudged that way by the prairie’s relentless bullying air.” It is a stark landscape, one ...

Welcome to the Fox News Follies, A Farce, or as Michael Wolff chose to title his book,  The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty.  A farce is defined as “A light dramatic work in which highly improbable plot situations, exaggerated characters, and often slapstick elements are used for humorous effect.” Follies is defined as “ Lack of good sense, understanding, or foresight. An act or instance of foolishness. A costly undertaking having an absurd or ruinous outcome.” (American Heritage Dictionary).  All of these elements come into play in the course of this true life yarn of clashing egos in media corporations and the family that owned one, with billions at stake, played out across boardrooms, studios, and upscale dining locations. It’s soap opera in the way only big business can produce it, and truth is always stranger than fiction.  I read the Kindle with Audible narration which was set to a speed of 1.4x. Holter Graham is the narrator who did a masterf...

In her memoir, Enough, Cassidy Hutchinson describes her birthplace in Pennington, NJ, and early life leading up to her comet like ascension into Washington DC’s halls of power at an early age. She interned in her 20th year for Sen. Ted Cruz in 2016, interned at 21 years for Majority Whip Rep. Steve Scalise in 2017, at 22 years she interned at the White House Office of Legislative Affairs in 2018, in 2019 was  the first in her family to graduate college (Christopher Newport University),  at 23 years she was employed full time at the White House Office of Legislative Affairs, and by age 24, Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’ principal assistant (March 2020), her desk a few seconds walk to the Oval Office. By the time she was 25, US Marshalls were knocking at her apartment door to deliver a subpoena from the Jan 6 Committee to meet with them and answer questions.  The most stunning part of the book, for me, were the revelations about her biological father, and his tre...