Stepping in the Write Direction

The first 25% of Stacy Willingham’s book All the Dangerous Things starts out gradually, like a wave beginning to slow it’s onshore advance, or that moment you’re sitting alone in your home, aware it should be silent, but hearing a barely audible cacophony of high pitched sounds, like a tinny concert of cicadas pitched at a frequency almost beyond comprehension. As you read there are twinges of things that seem faintly foreboding, but not as jarring as the sudden sound of a doorbell you’re not expecting to ring.   At this point Isabella Drake’s toddler son Mason has been missing one full year, taken from his crib at night, without any trace of evidence. Isabella’s life has become solitary, her obsessive quest to find her son is her reason for living.  There are two strands to the story that alternate throughout the book, her present circumstances and scenes from her past replaying themselves in an almost stream of consciousness like search for the truth. Her knowledge bad thing...

January 6, a few days before Spare was released, I posted about it on Facebook, and got a reaction from a friend living in Britain: “Spare me - I think he’d have done better investing in a proper therapist than ‘writing’ a hate filled memoir. Won’t be on my reading list, excerpts were bad and unbelievable enough.”     I responded to my friend’s comment: “I am curious as to what he has to say, particularly about his childhood and earlier years. I read a lot of memoirs (13 in 2022) by people in all walks of life and political persuasions. I did think the title “Spare” was interesting and telling. History is full of children who grow up with celebrity parents or those with great power and wealth, who are so often collateral damage to family ambitions, pathologies, and the media circus feeding off them. My friend’s emphasis on “writing” reflects the speculation Spare had to have been written by someone else; as Harry points out in his book, the “Harry is thick” narrative has dogge...

Unmasked by criminalist Paul Holes reminds me of another excellent book, Blood Beneath My Feet, by death investigator Joseph Scott Morgan. Both involve case review and police procedures, but are also in large part a memoir about the meticulous, grueling forensic work done to catch and convict killers, and the human toll this profession extracts by those who get caught up in that, by virtue of  their proximity to details. In Holes’ book, his strengths are on site crime scene management, thorough analysis of voluminous cold case files, and development of a perpetrator profile specifically based on information provided in both crime scene analysis and painstaking  review of investigative files.  In the cold case involving a rapist and murderer, an issue Holes encountered was withholding of information by law enforcement. Once a task force was set up, the flow of information between investigative districts was not always freely forthcoming. Michelle McNamara was an online sle...

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver is a big book. It’s about being born, struggling to survive, finding yourself, losing yourself, redemption, family and kin you’re born with and those you choose, being tied to a place on the planet with a fierceness fiction rarely sees, hitting rock bottom, crawling out of a hole of your own making, people who love each other in every shade of loving, and life resurrecting itself like a cold dark mountain ridge as sunrise hits on a spring morning when redbuds and mountain laurel are in bloom. It’s the Appalachian Spring of literature, breaking hearts and lifting them with hauntingly beautiful melodies.   The characters are so vivid they rise off the page,  ready to escape the one dimensional world, testing themselves against the worst and best the world has in store. From wards of the state placed in foster home slave labor farms to those taken in by families for the cash they bring, the system begins testing from early age. Whether it’s ...

The Night Lady by Debra Castaneda is set in  the summer of 1950. A newly hired reporter documents a number of mysterious murders coinciding with two major events in Los Angeles’ Chavez Ravine community, a movie is being filmed nearby, and powerful interests are forcing all homeowners out for a new stadium and a public housing project.  Soon eviction notices are hand delivered to homes, which raises  tensions and emotions:  “Robert only half heard him because he spotted a man from city hall walking up the dirt path. Standing at least six-foot-five, with a gaunt face and grim expression, it was like the grim reaper had exchanged his black robe for a custom-order gray suit, the black leather briefcase he carried instead of a scythe probably full of eviction letters.”   Most of the residents are Hispanic, some lived their whole lives here in homes their parents built; this huge disruption is particularly hard on older people who don’t relish starting over late in li...

I’ve been reading One Damn Thing After Another by William P. Barr (or as I refer to it: “one damn page after another”) since June 9th; July 10th I was halfway through it, finishing it August 21. The audiobook is 22 hours long, and I contemplated why such long biographies weren’t published in smaller volumes, such as two eleven hour audiobooks. I believe the reason is the sales of subsequent volumes might be significantly lower than the first one, so from that standpoint, better to cram it all into one product to market.  Barr’s high school goal was to specialize in China during his post secondary academic study and become head of the CIA. When his first child Mary was born with a heart issue requiring surgery, the quality of health insurance caused him to seek employment in a law firm.    My favorite parts of this book were those about his childhood, the discussion of death sentencing, his in depth discussion of the 2020 George Floyd incident and its nationwide aftermath,...

As I begin this review, I’m only 39% into this Amazon First Reads book, and almost didn’t get it because some reviewers complained there were some awkward phrases in the early part of the book, and it was poorly written. I checked author Victor Methos’ author page and listened to a sample of one of his audiobooks to see if the thousands of positive ratings his previous books received were the products of people who don’t know good writing when they see or hear it. I was impressed by the sample, decided to roll the dice, and make The Secret Witness my June First Reads selection.  Despite having read one reviewer’s listing of several of the “awkward phrases,” as I listened to voice over on the book, I never recognized them. From the beginning this book grabbed my interest and it hasn’t let go yet. If this is bad writing, bring it on! I have been disappointed by far more First Reads selections than I have been pleasantly surprised by them. Choosing a First Reads book takes me such an ...