The reason for these "quarterly" reports is that I just can’t keep up with the speed most of you read. It is not unlikely that I’ll only get one book done in a month and now that my "day" job has me doing less traveling, I don’t go through Books on Tape as often.

Off and Running
Philip Reed

Harvest is Tess Gerritsen's first hardcover release. Dr Abby DiMatteo is a second year resident at Boston's Bayside Hospital when she is asked to join the elite cardiac transplant team. Something seems amiss when a 17-year-old, next on the recipient list, is by-passed for a wealthy private patient. Abby and the chief resident hatch a bold plan to re-direct the heart back to the dying 17-year-old. Thus begins a series of events, presumably from the rich husband of the patient who had felt that DiMatteo had stolen the heart.

This was Tess's "astounding debut.…" However, she had a number of Harlequin Romance paperbacks prior to this. Nevertheless, it is still a stunning piece or work, debut or not. As the onion is peeled to reveal a deeper and more complicated cause, the suspense doesn't let up.

The Serial by Cyra McFadden is a wacky, zany, bizarre and satirical look at, as it is subtitled, "a year in the life of Marin County" residents. Marin County is located just across the Golden Gate Bridge, north of San Francisco and is considered home of well-to-do and artist-types. As I was growing up in the Bay Area, the local DJ when giving the temperature readings in various areas, would always list Marin County last with, "…and in Marin, where they pay for their weather, it is a nice 70 degrees…" With that said, this story spoofs them even further. The main characters are Kate and Harvey Holroyd who are having difficulty "relating" and their friends "who know where its coming from" can "get behind their separateness" and all that 60's hippy stuff of those who graduated to the seventies. Very funny. There are 52 episodes representing, roughly, a week each.

A film based on this book, Serial, starring Martin Mull and Tuesday Weld as Harvey and Kate, is one of my all-time favorite comedies. The film told a different story from the book and though it used many passages from the book, it made up some new ones. But it kept the flavor and satirical edge of the book.

Samsara, by John Hamilton Lewis is a thriller about Nick Ridley who, at the end of WWII, builds up a small airline from War Surplus planes. He is on the verge of being named as the British Commonwealth's official airline of the Far East when his world begins to unravel. There are quite a number of "mini-plots", most, but not all of which deal with Nick.  There is the fact that Nick, an American, had joined the RAF prior to Pearl Harbor to get into the war just as he meets Courtney, the love of his life. He is captured by the Japanese and spends a good deal of the war in a prison camp. There, near the end of the war, he beats the prison commander in a Japanese duel, which left the commander short of a leg and Nick all but dead from a stomach wound. After the war, Courtney seems to have dropped out of sight, so Nick stays in the Far East (Hong Kong) to build his fortune.

By 1950, Nick has build up the airline and, because of his pre-war associations, he is about to be named as the Crown Colony's official carrier. However, right on his tail is Thomas Gradek, the scoundrel in charge of Gradek International who'll stop at nothing to seize more power in the Orient and he wants Ridley's airline out of the way for that. Things are looking up for Nick as the appointment nears and he is reunited with Courtney after all these years. But Gradek closes in. Drugs are found on one of Nick's cargo flights from Bangkok and a local Triad war has links and implications pointing to Nick's own staff.

Reading a book by John Hamilton Lewis is much more than a read. The imagery, characters, and dialogue are so finely crafted that you become part of the story. It makes it difficult to step back and just hit the highlights; I have a tendency to just tell the whole thing, but that would spoil a good read for you. I have to say just a couple things, though. It was nice to see the tie- in from John's first book, Opal Eye Devil. Eric Gradek in that story founded Gradek International and Thomas in this story is Eric's grandson. Also, I was deeply moved by John's depiction of the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb blasts. I suspect, like me, most American's aren't really proud of that, but somewhere in the back of our mind we justify it with Pearl Harbor and that it saved a great many lives (on both sides) that would have been lost if we got into it over Tokyo had the war continued. But John, not so gently, reminds us that maybe we can't really file this away so easily.
 

Resurrection Men is my first Ian Rankin novel. It's a John Rebus novel. After a brutal death of an art dealer, Rebus blows up at his supervisor and gets sent to a form of Scottish Police "reform school". There he is bunched up with other cops equally troubled by authority. This is where they have one last chance to redeem themselves and save their careers. Rebus is asked, while he's there, to try to get information on a notorious gangster the crime squad has been after for a long time. Contacts for him are right there at the school. The trail leads right back to the very murder of the art dealer that got him sent up in the first place. I did it on tape. As I look back on it it, I enjoyed it a great deal and will want to do more of him. But I had some problems at the start, which I now believe were my problems. The reader has a British accent (or Scottish, or Irish, one of those things). I love that, but it is difficult for me to hear. It tends to sound like music to and I forget they are actually saying something. I had to start it over a number of times before I could get on track.

Cold Pursuit  by T. Jefferson Parker. San Diego Police detective, Tom McMicheal is on rotation when he draws a bludgeoned murder 84-year-old Pete Braga. There some history between the Braga and McMicheal's families. It isn't difficult for Tom to put the family feud behind him since it was more of his father's era, but what is difficult is dealing with his infatuation of Sally Rainwater, Braga's nurse, and by most accounts, a prime suspect. A good story. There is also a question of Braga's will and why some of his kids were disinherited. Also, as the investigation proceeds, it looks into Braga's business, the Catholic diocese, a multimillion-dollar Indian Casino, and, of course, the McMichaels family. Parker does seem to hang his lead characters out to dry. This story is no exception. Interesting.

Elvis Cole and Joe Pike are back after a two book hiatus in The Last Detective by Robert Crais. This time Ben, the son of Elvis' girl friend, Lucy, is kidnapped. The relationship between Elvis and Lucy is already strained because of the violence his job brings into their lives, but this event stretches it to the breaking point. Nevertheless, paramount on Elvis' mind is finding Ben. Complicating things is the LAPD's plodding pace as they are more interested in preserving evidence rather than finding Ben; the FBI who have their own agenda; Ben's father who has come from Louisiana, apparently, to ride Cole's back and oversee the investigation; and the kidnappers, who claim this isn't about money, but about revenge for actions Elvis took in Vietnam as a Ranger. There are some pretty vivid passages. A really kick-butt kind of story. I was somewhat disappointed that the wise-cracking Elvis Cole was almost nowhere to be found. When he did show up, his joking was kind of flat. That may have been by design since this story is very personal to Elvis, and it might seem in congruous for Elvis to be cracking wise when the center of attention is so personal. Nevertheless, I sure do hope we get our smart-alecly Elvis back soon. One other thing, Elvis Cole, in a small vignette, meets and unnamed man who seems to be Harry Bosch, the main character of Michael Connelly's series. It turns out that both Cole and Bosch live on the same street. Fans have wondered out loud why they never run into each other, and they apparently do here.

There's the Michael Connelly I know and love. Harry Bosch is back in Lost Light but this time as a private citizen. Harry takes on a cold case from 4 years earlier that was taken from him by RHD (Robbery-Homicide Division) and where it remained unsolved. The investigation is tough because he no longer carries a badge, but still carries the drive to "Speak for the Dead". It is also tough because he is getting advice and out and out threats to back off. They are coming, not only from the LAPD, but also the FBI and other organizations. The case involves a murder  of a young woman working for a film studio in Hollywood. Two days after the murder, while Harry was on the set doing interviews, gunmen stormed the set and stole 2 million dollars in cash that was being used as a prop in the film. This has all the stuff I've missed in recent books; a nice twist at the end (which I didn't see coming), touches of the past, where we see Harry hook up with Eleanor Wish, from The Black Echo and Trunk Music (his ex-wife). We see Roy Lindell, FBI guy, also from a previous novel. There is also something new; it's written in first person from Harry's point of view. A cute moment was that Connelly throws a quid-pro-quo back to Robert Crais after his allusion to Bosch in The Last Detective. Harry drives past a guy in the yellow Corvette he recognizes as a long time PI in the neighborhood. The meeting is not the same event in the two books. Too bad, that might have been fun, but, I’m sure, are real pain in the butt to coordinate.
 

George P. Pelecanos' Soul Circus features Derek Strange, a private detective, whose firm, Strange Investigations, is used, as the book flap says, "…in a world where crime is the rule and justice the exception…." It is set in Washington DC. A drug czar is jailed on murder charges and Strange gets involved in order to get to the bottom of the tangled web of loyalties behind the killing. But there's too much risk for anyone to speak up. Almost. A young woman whose pride is stronger than her fear, opens up and Strange does whatever it takes to keep her and her young son alive as he cracks the street's code of silence.
 

This is the first Pelecanos novel I've done. I've been looking forward to Pelecanos for quite a while and finally got a chance to do one, but I have mixed feelings about it. It is a hard boiled, tough as nails street crime novel and Pelecanos makes it feel so real, I wondered if Pelecanos isn't a part time undercover agent. But it was difficult to sympathize with most of the characters because they were so dirty. This admitted drug czar may or may not have done the murder for which he's charged, but I was pretty much uncaring whether we was cleared or not. But what was interesting was that Strange immerses himself in this muck without becoming soil or loosing sight of why he does this. Also, Derek doesn't care much about the guilt or innocence of his clients, just the truth, because guilty or not, everyone deserves the best defense. Too often, procedurals, I keep reading have lines like, "What do you need an attorney for, if you have nothing to hide?" And this from author's one would should know better (Like author's with law degrees). Well, even for me, a red, white and blue, flag waving, Republican (right of center), that is, in my opinion, horse pucky. Everyone has something to hide. It is refreshing to read something were it isn't merely about righting the wrong of a wrongly accused.

Wow, too! Kelly Lange's Dead File* is her second mystery novel and has Maxi Poole, TV Reporter, looking into the mysterious death of Gillian Rose of Rose International, a firm producing dietary supplements. Sub stories include the mechanics of a book deal one of Maxi's co-workers has made and another about a news anchor under negotiations. The mystery itself might be predictable to a seasoned reader that is paying attention. I was surprised, though, but I wasn't paying attention; I was having too much fun "paling" around with Maxi.