It’s Not Her by Mary Kubica
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is hard to rate. I enjoyed it even though I thought it was a piece of schlock tripe. It could be a 1 star or 5 star. Two related families are at a summer camp. Two people get killed and their teen daughter is missing. The author tells the story from two time frames – post-murder is told by Courtney, the sister of one of the murder victims, and pre-murder by Reese, the daughter of the victims and Courtney’s niece. Reese is a hormone-deranged teenager: surly, spiteful, rude, that is, until she sees the hot pool boy Daniel and Daniel takes an interest in her. Then it’s the best vacation ever. Courtney is a suspicious, paranoid airhead. She suspects everybody including her own husband, her nephew Wyatt, and of course Daniel. Then there’s the camp owner lady Mrs. Dahl who seems oddly detached from this horrible double murder. To top off the character list, there’s Mae and Cass, 10-year-old cousins, the youngest of the two families, and Detective Evans who seems competent and empathetic. The book kept me guessing and relatively entertained for several days, more so than the nonfiction book I left on the shelf.

So why do I complain that it’s schlock tripe? The author employs transparent cheap tricks to create a false sense of suspense and mystery. A woman hears a scream. The chapter ends and the scene switches. We have to wait for find out what the scream is for and it turns out to be something harmless and meaningless in the plot. Blood is found unexpectedly. The chapter ends so we have to wait for the explanation. Reese sneaks out at night to see Daniel and before she gets to the meeting spot she sees a form in the forest following her. The chapter ends and we have to wait. Courtney and Reese “feel” something is wrong, something ominous is looming but it’s nothing. You get the idea. I’ve never had to roll my eyes so much in my life. It’s impossible to figure out who the murderer is until the end because the motivation and unlikely mechanism that set the murder in motion isn’t revealed until then. The writing isn’t elegant or insightful; it’s a pure beach read aimed at the semi-literate. I feel guilty for reading to the end. Maybe that says more about me than the book.

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A Murder in Hollywood by Michael Crichton writing as John Lange
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I’m a big Crichton fan and it was no surprise to me that I loved this book. The primary appeal was actually not the mystery, although that was good, but all the inside detail about the movie business and the shooting on location in particular. The title is an odd choice since all the action takes place near Tucson, Arizona where a western is being filmed. The writer is found dead. He was a nasty fellow and quite a few people have motive to kill him, but was it murder or an accident? The local authorities have tentatively ruled it an accident.

The studio head brings in Perkins, the top insurance investigator to serve as private eye. He finds a lot of things to be suspicious. The detective work is superb (Sherlock Holmes-like). The biggest flaw in the book for me is that it is too short and too fast a read.The author originally wrote this under the name of John Lange, a name he used before using his real name and publishing The Andromeda Strain. This confused me at first because this book supposedly was never published in those early days, only in 2026. But Wikipedia tells me this was written in 1973, four years after The Andromeda Strain and two years after that was filmed, so I presume he got his scoop from being involved in that filming. I don’t know why he was still writing under the name Lange by that point.

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The Oligarch’s Daughter by Joseph Finder
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Our hero Paul falls in love with Tatiana, the daughter of a Russian oligarch living in the U.S. Hmm, maybe that where the title came from. The writing jumps back and forth in time starting from the early days when Paul falls for her and then to present day where he is hiding in a small town under a different name building boats. He has a girlfriend there and it’s not Tatiana. He’s obviously on the run from someone, but who, and why? The story continues to ping pong back and forth in time. There are several suspense/action scenes as Paul is pursued and has to use his wits and some luck to survive. It’s reasonably entertaining until it gets near the end and the plot begins to have some big “twists.” At least the author and publisher may consider them twists. They’re called twists because they’re unexpected, but they’re actually unexpected because they’re preposterous eye-rolling fantasy. I lost interest after the big bloodbath scene (not a spoiler). As a retired FBI agent I’m picky, maybe too picky, about portrayals of the FBI in derogatory ways, but mainly totally impossible ways. The author seems to get all his information on the FBI from second-rate TV shows. If nothing else, it spreads misinformation about the FBI. I finished it because it’s a selection for my book club.

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Upgrade by Blake Crouch
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’ve read two previous Blake Crouch books, so I should have known better than to read this one. He has intriguing ideas for a sci-fi fan and I get hooked on that, but the execution is poor. Here the main character is the son of an infamously brilliant but misguided genetic expert who tried to save the world from ecological disaster by engineering some genes affecting crop species, but that went haywire and she ended up killing millions of people due to unanticipated side effects. To carry on her work, she injects her two children without their consent or knowledge, giving them both genetic “upgrades” turning them into a modern-day Superman/woman pair. They become enemies and you have a pretty classic superhero vs. supervillain story. The writing is second-rate with various minor sloppinesses like saying his pulse shot to 114 bmp (bitmap?), but the worst aspect is how it is overladen with technobabble. The author obviously spent many hours on Wikipedia, Google, or his favorite AI chabot to get lists of gene names and acronyms, weapon brands and specifications, obscure species scientific names and capabilities, and other mumbo-jumbo to impress those who lap that stuff up. The plot is preposterous and the battle of the titans at the end is laughable. Still, I read it all the way through and it kept me occupied, if not entertained, so I can’t give it a 1.

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Polar Star by Martin Cruz Smith
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The disgraced investigator Arkady Renko (Gorky Park) has fled Moscow and found work on the Polar Star, a Soviet factory ship in the Gorbachev era. The US and USSR work jointly with American ships trawling the Bering Sea and the Soviet ship processing the catch. Then a woman’s body is hauled up in one of the nets along with tons of fish. It turns out to be one of the kitchen workers on the Star, a vamp who has been sleeping with several men. Why was she in the water and how did she die? It’s murder we find out, but then we have the questions of who, how, and why.

The author has penned another uplifting novel of the Soviet state. I say uplifting not because that is the tone of the story but because it is the exact opposite. The author has again captured the miasma of Soviet despair, cynicism, corruption, depression, greed and desperation that makes the American reader like me feel so lucky to have lived here and not there through that era. While the tone is mesmerizing at times, the plot becomes too hard to follow. There are too many characters, both Russian and American. The action scenes are well done, but too numerous and implausible. I was satisfied enough as I became immersed in the story, but in the end I can only give it a mediocre rating.

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Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This scholarly work is both a historical review (up to the present) and an opinion piece comparing and contrasting the PRC and US, primarily from an engineering, business, and economic perspective. Wang is a Canadian of Chinese origin and has lived and worked in Canada, China, and the United States, so he writes from personal experience. As a lawyer I largely agree with the author’s characterization of the U.S. as burdened by process, which is a small issue in the autocratic Chinese regime. His observations, while on point, at times overlook important societal factors. The takings clause of the U.S. Constitution (Fifth Amendment), for example: “…nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” I skipped a little toward the end and may have missed something, but I don’t believe this was ever mentioned in the book. It is fundamental to his premise. America, and especially Americans, take personal rights seriously. I worked for a public agency in San Jose in the field of eminent domain takings of private property for transit purposes. The laws protecting owners and lessees are not only seriously unbalanced to the detriment of the government, but the process is even more onerous, i.e., expensive, than Wang describes. It’s amazing that any new infrastructure gets built anywhere in the U.S., especially in the Bay Area or other astronomically expensive areas.

He ridicules the transit failures of the Bay Area. While he’s not wrong, he fails to note the striking differences in the Bay Area from other big cities in the US or even China: a huge metro area with no central business district, only three major population centers distanced about 50 miles from each other with an enormous body of deep water in between. The high water table and active earthquake faults make subways nearly impossible in the South Bay, the heart of Silicon Valley. The high-speed rail project of the Central Valley is burdened by the same geographic and constitutional obstacles. In a way, the U.S. and especially California is a victim of its own success. It is so desirable to live here, for many reasons, that the land is very expensive which in turn, combined with the takings clause, make such projects nearly unobtainable. Wang himself admits that despite the impressive infrastructure achievements China has made, many Chinese, including he and his parents, have chosen the land of personal rights and crumbling bridges right here in North America to live. Some things are just not reconcilable. We all have to prioritize.

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Mating by Norman Rush
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

The description of this book in Goodreads says it is a “splendidly expansive novel of high intellect….” The New York Times Book Review quoted on the cover says it is “Exhilarating … vigorous and luminous … evokes(s) so eloquently….” Baloney! This book is so overwritten and pretentious I thought it was a satire when I started reading it. The author never uses a two- or three-syllable word if he can find a four- or five-syllable one. Never an English one if there is a French one twice as long. Consider this passage where the female narrator is describing an older man, “He was still well-built but showing a little gynecomastia, which didn’t really go with his rectilinear, almost columnar midsection… (he) was just over the line into paterfamilias.”

I once had an English professor who liked that kind of writing. I was getting C’s on my essays until she read aloud another student’s she considered an A paper. Once I choked down my vomit reaction I copied that style for my remaining papers and got an A for the class, but I could hardly live with myself. I couldn’t stomach any more of this book and stopped about page 40. If you enjoy this sort of thing, I pity you.

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I’m continuing to enjoy my membership in SUNO.AI, the artificial intelligence music company. I’ve created over 70 songs so far. I’ll embed a couple of my recent ones just for something different from all the book reviews.

Fever Beach by Carl Hiaasen
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book is vintage Carl Hiaasen, which is to say, it is excessively crude, insulting, and generally offensive while also being witty and amusing political commentary. Here a bunch of right-wing white supremacist losers, mostly rejects from the Proud Boys and Oathkeepers, form a group called the Strokers for Liberty. Thin as it is, the plot revolves around the Strokers being funded by some rich white supremacists through their local bribed congressman to influence the upcoming election and, more importantly to the funders, create a fake charity along the lines of Habits for Humanity that is actually a plot to get a patch of land cleared and approved for development. Needless to say if you are familiar with Hiaasen, the book is a sort of stream of consciousness tale of crazy bungled idiocies. The Strokers get their tails whipped by a bunch of drag queens. Their leader, Dale Figgo, was at the January 6 insurrection but mistakenly smeared feces on the statue of a confederate general thinking it was a U.S. President. Figgo and his crew are mostly derailed by a rather unambitious trust fund baby named Twilly and his girlfriend Viva, who also happens to be Figgo’s tenant, both of whom are appalled at the politics and stupidity of the Strokers. Hiaasen can be funny at times, but I am so put off by his crudity and lack of any credible plot that I can’t give this a high rating. I only read it because it’s a choice of my book club.

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I love my local library and feel privileged to have such access to books, music, and movies there, but sometimes I have to roll my eyes. The parking lot at this branch is small and one lane, with slant-in slots on one side for the first half and on both sides in the second half. Of course since it’s one lane, there’s just one entrance and one exit at opposite ends similar to a drive-through. As I pulled into the parking lot today I noticed all the first half slots were filled, so I continued on, but then saw a car slowly coming at me the wrong direction. I slowly pulled forward hoping the driver would realize the error as I got closer. Then I realized she was trying to back into a slot. That makes no sense in this lot since that would only cause her to be facing the wrong way when leaving. All the slots are slanted the same way, unlike some lots where they go both directions and the lanes are wide enough for two-way traffic. She’d have to make a sharp 120° left turn to exit the right way, so it’s triple the work parking and again leaving. I watched as she pulled in, which took twice as long as it should, and then passed her to park in one of the last slots. As I got out I realized she had parked so crookedly she’d taken up three slots!

After that great start I went in to get my book, which was on hold. I checked it out, no problem. I’d noticed that my wife also had a book, as I always check for her and vice versa; so I checked hers out with the copy of her card I carry. At the end of the usual process, instead of a message saying the book has been checked out, a big red warning screen popped up saying the item “could not be added to your account” and to see the librarian. So I went to the desk and stood there watching as both librarians ignored me and kept talking to each other about something. Finally one of them came up to the counter and offered to help. I explained what happened and she took my wife’s card and scanned it. She said the problem was that my wife had left her library card in the reader and needed to come to the desk herself to retrieve it. My wife had in fact left her card there accidentally a few days ago, but she had already gone back and retrieved it. This flummoxed the librarian because the computer told her no that hadn’t happened. She almost argued with me but rummaged around in the drawer where the found items are kept and couldn’t find it; so then she decided the computer must be wrong, and proceeded to clear that blockage. She told me it was handled and I could leave. I asked her if the book had completed checkout and she said yes. So I left.

But wait! There’s more. When I walked out, the electronic sensor set off the alarm beep, so I went back in. The librarian was reflummoxed and checked again to see that the book had been checked out okay. Then she realized that it wasn’t my wife’s book that set off the alarm, but mine. She checked that and it showed as checked out to me. She said the machine is supposed clear the electronic thingy in the book when I check it out, but apparently hadn’t, due to the book’s thickness, so she took my book and rubbed it around a few times on her own electronic pad. She handed it back and told me not to worry about it and to just keep on going if it happens again. So I went to leave again, but there was a lady coming in and another going out at the same time. I tailed right behind the lady exiting just as the other lady tried to enter. The alarm bells and beeps went louder and longer this time. The lady I tailed yelped and went back to the librarian thinking she had set it off. I got out of there while the getting was good as the other lady stared at me, no doubt sure I had just stolen a book and was escaping. As I approached my car, I saw that the badly parked car was gone and all three slots were now filled with cars parked correctly. Sigh.

For those of you not following chemical news, there is a company in Garden Grove, California (near Los Angeles) called GKN Aerospace that has a dangerous chemical situation. A huge tank of methyl methacrylate, a “highly volatile” substance used in the production of plastics started overheating and was in danger of exploding. The fire department has been spraying it down. It has now sprung a leak, which is considered a good thing as the pressure has been reduced and the heat is starting to lessen. So of course I felt I had to check this out with my trusty reporter, What3Words.

The tank is nestled against two other tanks. The W3W coordinates for this cluster are:
umbrella.crispy.island
heavy.longer.mushroom
payback.shared.erupted
sulked.reveal.dent

So reading those tea leaves, what we have is a vessel with a dent that when it has erupted will turn the area into a crispy island under a mushroom cloud. How fun.

Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This story is told by two young women, Pamela and Ruth. Pamela is a sorority president in Florida when she witnesses a man enter the sorority house late at night. Shortly thereafter she discovers that several of the women have been attacked and one raped and murdered. Ruth is a young woman in Washington State. It is revealed that Ruth was murdered by the same man who entered the sorority and killed there. The book is a novel with fictional characters, but it models closely on the case of Ted Bundy, the real-life serial killer. I didn’t know that when I started reading and I think I would have enjoyed it more if I had, although the back cover advertises that fact. Though it’s well-written and the author manages to inject some suspense, it is too close to the real mundane world of law enforcement and criminal courts to be exciting. I know that world all too well.

The author also spends too much time depicting all the men as sexist and condescending, including even the judge in the case when the defendant goes to trial. I’m not disputing the accuracy of the depiction, but this is a novel, not a screed, and it needs more plot and less polemics. I listened to the audiobook, which is read by two different women. They both did a good job although one them can’t pronounce erudite or nomenclature.

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London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth by Patrick Radden Keefe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a true crime story with a twist. It begins by telling us the victim in this, a 19-year-old boy named Zac, was seen on video jumping to his death from a high balcony in the heart of London. The police quickly chalk it up as another teen suicide. But we soon learn there’s a lot more to it than that. He had injuries not consistent with the fall. We learn the apartment he jumped from was that of a known underworld gangster and enforcer named Indian Dave. Then we learn the boy was living a double life, pretending to be the orphaned son of a Russian oligarch. Another dodgy character named Akbar sent Zac to Dave and both appeared to be “mentoring” him. The police do bafflingly little to get to the bottom of this death. Akbar and Dave both lie shamelessly about what happened that night, as proven by records like security videos, text messages, and phone records. Zac’s parents have to hire a private investigator and an attorney to get any answers. In the end I think they got the full story, but nothing is 100% clear in this one. The story unfolds in a surprising and suspenseful way. Each new chapter brings in a new character, a contradictory fact, and so on. It had me on the edge of my seat throughout. It can be a sad and depressing story, but a worthwhile read.

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Revenge for the Sixties: Sam Alito and the Triumph of the Conservative Legal Movement by Peter S. Canellos
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sam Alito is Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court Samuel Alito. The author does a good job of describing Alito’s family and upbringing is reasonably short, efficient ways without this turning into a real biography. This book focuses heavily on how Alito came to wend his way onto the Supreme Court and how he has chosen to wield his power there to complete the rightward tilt of that body. Alito is no doubt a man of high intellect and steely determination. He was almost a cipher throughout his days as a law student, attorney and Circuit Court judge, although those close to him, or who studied him as The Federalist Society did, knew of his strong conservative views. Now the world knows him as an arch conservative who flips his judicial philosophy repeatedly to favor the Republican party. The quotations from his various judicial opinions bring this out in stark relief.

The title refers mostly to Alito’s time at Princeton for his undergraduate days. I had forgotten about that turbulent time. As I was on the west coast at the hotbed of dissent and anti-war picketing (Berkeley) at that time, I didn’t pay much attention to the fact that the same thing was happening at Princeton, the Berkeley of the East. Alito was very must offended by the disruption to his academic career the protests caused and the anti-government views of the protesters. He joined ROTC, one of the targets of the protests. According to the book, this whole experience colored his judicial and even life view. He’s punishing everyone now for the effrontery of the demonstrators et al. As an attorney and someone who turned down the Ivy League to stay at Berkeley, I may have a particular interest in this book that others might not share, but I found it very worthwhile.

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The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church by Sarah McCammon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The author read this audiobook herself and did a good job. It recounts her own history being raised by parents in the white evangelical Christian church. Her childhood sounds like an absolute nightmare, one of constant fear: fear of doing something, saying something, looking some way, even thinking about something that somehow will cause her to prevent her from going to heaven, or maybe sending someone else to hell or cause some other form of torment. She later, as an adult, left the evangelical church, hence the title of the book, but the teachings she had have clearly caused her lifelong pain and stress, not to mention loss of normal family relationships. Yet she hasn’t left Christianity. In this respect it resembles another book I read a few years ago: Educated a book written by a woman raised in a fundamentalist Mormon family.

This book, though, is more than that. The author is an NPR reporter and the book is to a large extant an investigative report. She has interviewed many other exvangelicals and religious scholars and reported on their experiences and opinions. The overall message of the book is an important one – that the evangelical doctrine is harmful and now even more dangerous due its linking itself to the far right white nationalist movement, especially to Donald Trump. This message seems to be universal from everyone who left the evangelical movement and from outsiders who have studied it or otherwise experienced it firsthand through family, etc.

While I applaud the the message and the generally excellent writing, I find the style of writing a bit preachy (note of irony there) and a bit too “woke” sounding, which can be offputting. She uses words or terms that one hears all the time on NPR but almost nowhere else and seems unaware that it sounds that way. One such example is saying LGBTQ every single time instead of gay or bi. Five syllables instead of one. It sounds ridiculous when spoken, and (gasp!) she leaves off the +! Heaven forbid (pun intended) that she should leave off some self-identified sexual minority even once. The book also becomes quite repetitive because the stories of her interviewees or sources are so similar. Still, it’s an important book for its content and I found it fascinating while at the same time horrifyingly sad.

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The Apollo Murders by Chris Hadfield
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I tend to be skeptical of novels written by celebrities but this one is a legitimate thriller. The author is a former astronaut and obviously knows his stuff scientifically and technically, which adds a lot of plausibility and just plain interesting detail. In an alternate history 1973 NASA is sending one last Apollo mission to the moon. But shortly before launch they learn that the USSR has put a spy satellite in orbit that will uncover many US secrets so the NASA team is tasked with taking care of that in its initial Earth orbit before shooting off to the moon. Meanwhile the USSR has its own secrets and objectives. Things do not go as planned for either country. There’s plenty of suspense and clever plot twists but I’d better stop here to avoid spoilers. As the title makes clear, some people don’t make it. For those like me who are old enough to remember those days it all seems quite plausible. Real persons, like Nixon, Kissinger, Andropov, Al Shepard, Deke Slayton, etc. appear in the book. It was a bit slow for the first 150 pages or so, but it quickly became a page turner after that.

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Such Quiet Girls by Noelle W. Ihli
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Two miscreants with a get rich quick plan kidnap a busload of children and hold them for ransom. The children and their bus driver are imprisoned in a buried container that had been fitted out with water, a makeshift toilet, and some mattresses. One resourceful 12-year-old girl, the tallest in the group, becomes a lead character as does her mother, who has access to school funds and who receives the ransom note. The story is full of suspense and clever ideas. It is inspired by, although not completely true to, an actual kidnapping that occurred in Chowchilla, California in 1976. I remember that kidnapping well, or at least the news coverage of it, as I was in the FBI at the time, stationed only two hours drive away, but I did not have any direct involvement because I was in language school, not on an investigative squad. I was involved in three other kidnappings in my career, only two of which resulted in the survival of the victims. Perhaps it was because of that experience and memory that I found this book more chilling than the writing alone might have been. For me it was a page-turner.

There are two or three other books with this title, so be sure you get the right one.

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If you’re not familiar with What3words, search that term or W3W in the little search box above. I enjoy commenting on the news from time to time by finding W3W combos that seem to apply to items in the news. Today I’ve done that with the arch President Trump is proposing to build in the Memorial Circle between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington Cemetery. It’s quite a large grassy circle (the proposed arch is over 250 feet wide) so there are hundreds of W3W combos there. I haven’t had time to examine them all, but here are a few that seem to apply:

ocean.voter.scam
giant.single.stick
tunnel.cult.logic
system.thing.cult

Approaching a different way and looking for the locations of appropriate terms, I found:

trumps.huge.arch – near Vladivostok, Russia
trumps.vanity.project – near Irkutsk, Russia
huge.imperial.arch – in Antarctica

All of these locations seem more appropriate to me. Funny how often the word cult shows up in MAGA-related sites. Have a nice day.

This Might Hurt by Stephanie Wrobel
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I can’t believe I finished this piece of garbage. The story is an intermixed tale of two pairs of sisters, in each case and older one and younger one. Some names are given, but for one pair, the names are not clear because one of them is narrating those chapters, referring to herself only as I, and the other sister is referred to by a nickname that we know is not her real one. Thus it is possible the two sets are the same women but at different stages of life. I suppose this was intended to add an element of suspense, but all it does is irritate and confuse the reader. The two sets do eventually connect, but it takes way too long to get there. There’s lots of meaningless filler before that. The rest of the book is pretty much just descriptions of sadistic behavior, either physical or psychological torture, something the author seems to relish. All the characters are either sadists or idiots and the plot is ridiculous and unbelievable. I think it’s the lowest rating on Goodreads of any book I’ve ever read and I’ve read a lot. I grabbed this off the new book shelf at my local library and it’s a lesson in why one should always read reviews and descriptions first.

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Nathaniel’s Nutmeg: How One Man’s Courage Changed the Course of History by Giles Milton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The book chronicles the history of the Banda Islands in what is now Indonesia. The author has done an admirable amount of research of the voyages of various ship captains of both the Dutch and English, two countries that were fighting over the East Indies spice trade in the 16th and 17th centuries. It’s shocking how much violence there was between the two countries and between the Dutch and the natives. Slaughter is an understatement and torture and slavery were rampant. Control of the islands, and Run in particular, shifted back and forth several times. The last Englishman to have control of it before its ultimate disposition by treaty was a man named Nathaniel Courthope, the eponym of the book. The bravery of the sailors and tradesmen of the day is incredible today since most of them ended up dying of scurvy, disease, or violence. Life (and death) was quite literally cheap. I found the accounts fascinating, although I must say they became rather repetitive in nature. I liked the liberal quoting of the captains and others using what seems archaic English now. There are many hints throughout the book that the island of Run was later to play a very big and unexpected part in history, but that part is not revealed until the very end. I don’t fully accept the idea that Run was as instrumental as the author makes it out to be, nor do I find Courthope to be the transformational figure he is made out to be.

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