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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Bering Strait by F.X. Holden
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In a near future, Russia attacks and sinks its own massive container vessel in the Bering Strait and accuses the U.S. of doing it. Why? No one is sure, but it serves as an excuse for Russia to launch a military campaign to take over St. Lawrence Island and gain total control of the strait. But wait! America has a secret drone base in a cave on Little Diomede Island. It is “manned” by Rodriguez and O’Hare, two kick ass women. Bunny O’Hare is a crack drone pilot from Australia operating jointly with U.S. troops. That much seems like a fun plot but it doesn’t really live up to its potential.

The book suffers from, or benefits from, depending on your point of view, of a bad case of Clancy-itis. From that point on it is a discussion of weapons and battles, mostly air battles with drones and fighter planes, but also submarine and land warfare to an extent. At the same time, the American ambassador to Russia, another woman, is facing down the Russian foreign minister. Like Tom Clancy, the author simplifies world politics, makes the scenario increasingly implausible as the plot progresses, and dwells on the capabilities and weaknesses of scores of military weapons and systems ad nauseam. Throw in a ridiculous AI system that falls in love with the ambassador, speaks with a British accent, and who can hack anything and predict what Russia will do for good measure and you’ve got the gist of it. The ultimate goal of Russia is eventually revealed. If you’re into all that bang bang stuff like Clancy, you’ll enjoy it, but for the rest of us it becomes a page flipper and eye roller after awhile. Except I couldn’t flip pages since I listened to it as an audiobook and the reader is what else … drum roll, please … another woman of course. She did a good job but sounded about 20 years old. I put it on 1.5X speed just to get through it faster. I don’t know anything about FX Holden, the author, but I’ll bet F is more likely a Francine than a Frank. (I looked it up – he’s actually male.) I’m all for women being allowed in combat. I’m no Pete Hegseth, but I find it ludicrous to think all the major important military and political figures in the next world war will be women. In short, this is a chick lit Clancy novel, even if a man wrote it.

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Fuji Fire: Sifting Ashes of a Forgotten U.S. Marine Corps Tragedy by Chas Henry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This documentary-style account of a tragedy I had never heard of was riveting at times and educational at others. In 1979, 10 years after I spent several days in an inn on Mount Fuji, a typhoon hit the same area and led to the rupture of a huge gas bladder used to fuel vehicles at a U.S. Marine Corps training camp there. The fuel mixed with the pouring rain and flowed downhill into the barracks where a spark or flame caused the fumes to erupt. The fires spread throughout the camp severely burning dozens, several fatally. The book is most compelling when describing the storm conditions and outbreak of the fire, and equally as it followed the rescue and treatment of the victims. It started a bit slow in order to give necessary background and personalize some of the key figures, but even that was interesting to me as I’d never been in the military. It was heartwarming to read sections where community members, other military branches, doctors, and others made personal sacrifices to treat, comfort, or help the burn victims. I lost interest a bit at the end as it chronicled the finger-pointing, lawsuits, possible cover-ups, and so forth. Personally, I found little if any fault with the Marine Corps. Typhoon Tip was the biggest, fiercest on record at the time, and I don’t believe anyone could have anticipated the accident. There were preventative measures in place, but they failed due to the extreme conditions. I give this one 4 and a half stars.

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Although I don’t do much geocaching these days, it’s still a big part of my life, so I wrote this song parody of “When I Was a Lad” from H.M.S. Pinafore. This has proven to be quite popular among my geocaching friends. Enjoy.

Spare Parts: Four Undocumented Teenagers, One Ugly Robot, and the Battle for the American Dream by Joshua Davis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This documentary-style narrative tells the story of four teens in Phoenix Arizona starting in 2004 and follows them for years. The teens are all Mexican-Americans, some undocumented, others with legal status. Led by a go-getter named Oscar Lopez they formed a robotics team at their high school, one of the most impoverished in the area. This team went on to compete against other robotic teams in national competitions going up against the likes of MIT among others. The grit, smarts, and persistence of the boys is well-told and inspiring, but the book is more than about robotics. It sets forth the hardships they faced and in particular the racism and discrimination that hindered their efforts. The story is both inspiring but also a tad schmaltzy. The movie based on the same story was even more so, and whitewashed a lot of the negatives, especially some of the family relationship issues and post-graduation troubles the boys faced. I enjoyed the book, but I couldn’t finish the movie knowing what I did from the book.

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The Feather Detective: Mystery, Mayhem, and the Magnificent Life of Roxie Laybourne by Chris Sweeney
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Roxie Laybourne was a diminutive woman, but a firebrand who made a lasting impression at the Smithsonian Institution as well as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the FAA, the U.S. Air Force and many airlines. She was an expert at identifying birds using forensic methods she invented herself in days before DNA sequencing was possible. As a young woman she was called on to identify some bird remains during a deadly airline crash caused by that bird and that catapulted her into a career in bird identification. The book is basically a biography, not a criminal whodunnit. Roxie did testify in some criminal cases and even some civil trials, although her testimony may not have been crucial, but her main focus over the years was aviation safety. Bird strikes do bring down planes and kill people. Her work identifying bird species led to establishing standards for strength of windshields and engines, but also helped airports, air bases and airlines with knowing migration patterns at specific times so that they can mitigate the risks. She no doubt saved many lives during her career and mentored many others. Much of the book deals with the struggles of a woman without a PhD fighting her way up the ladder in a world of men with doctorates. I can’t say the book was riveting, but I found Roxie to be an interesting character and there was enough detective work and bird facts to pass muster. I’ll stretch a 3.5 to a 4 for this rating.

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Bird City: Adventures in New York’s Urban Wilds by Ryan Goldberg
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The author provides a detailed description of many of the prime spots in New York City to go birding. He also mentions many species, giving descriptions and habits. But much of the book is about birders, naturalists, researchers, city/state/federal agencies, and the politics and disputes between them. If you’re a birder you’ll probably love this book, and maybe if you’re a New Yorker, too. But I found that latter part boring and it took up too much of the book. The title is misleading. It should be birder city. I was put off at first by the lack of photos or other illustrations of the birds, but I realized that everybody today has a phone or computer and can look up beautiful photos of any of the species mentioned. Photos are really expensive to print in a book, so I’ll give him a pass on that one. I did spend a lot of time on my phone looking and pictures and maps. I lived in New York years ago, but I never lived or worked in Brooklyn, where most of the action is in this book. All in all it was okay, but not a book I can recommend to anyone other than a birder.

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My Friends by Fredrik Backman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Louisa, a homeless 18-year-old artist is “discovered” by a famous artist known as C. Jat. We later find the four letters of his name are actually the first letters of the names of his four friends. The artist realizes Louisa is “one of us” and shortly thereafter dies and leaves Louisa the most valuable of his paintings. She is rich except has no money or place to keep the painting. Ted, the T in Jat, gives her the painting according to the artist’s wishes, but then tries to distance himself from her. Instead she latches onto him to get his help selling the painting. They take a train ride which turns into various misadventures. Eventually Louisa gets from Ted and others the fascinating story/-ies of the artist and his friends and the painting. It is a story of deep love between friends. Of course it’s quite implausible, but that shouldn’t stop the enjoyment. I’d rate it 4 and a half stars but Goodreads doesn’t allow half stars, so I’m rounding up.

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Vanish by Tess Gerritsen
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This tale is told in two timelines. Some Russian women are lured into what they thought would be good-paying jobs in America, but instead are smuggled in, abused, and forced into prostitution. The other story line involves a woman detective with Boston P.D. (Rizzoli). She’s pregnant and at a later point in the book, gives birth, her first child. Her husband is an FBI agent, but he’s a relatively minor character. Isles is the medical examiner, but she plays a relatively minor role in this one, too. She’s there mainly so the author can describe grisly autopsy scenes. The two story lines merge after a hostage situation arises. Of course there’s a conspiracy at the highest level of government and the prego detective has to solve it while on maternity leave. It’s all ridiculous and very disappointing. I listed to the audiobook and that was a big mistake, too. The reader does a good job when not doing Boston cop dialogue, but her Boston accent is awful – or I should say, it may be accurate (I don’t know as I’ve never lived in Boston), but the sound is so nasal and grating that it is very unpleasant to listen to. The story is also unnecessarily gory and full of gross stuff, both sexual and visceral.

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At Midnight Comes the Cry by Julia Spencer-Fleming
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In this 10th Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne novel the married odd couple becomes involved with a white nationalist group and the domestic situation of the abused spouse of one of them. Clare is an Episcopal priest and former army helicopter pilot. Russ is a recently involuntarily retired police chief. It seemed to be an inauspicious pairing to me, but the author managed to create a suspenseful tale when the body of a forest ranger is found in the remote wilderness of an upstate New York park. I’d give this one another half star if Goodreads allowed it. It suffers a little from its reliance on the reader knowing the main characters already. I didn’t and I learned barely enough to follow the family dynamics there. The final scene was too complicated. The shape and connections of the physical space are important and it just isn’t easy to envision from text descriptions. But I enjoyed having characters who weren’t potty-mouthed all the time and I especially liked the fact the author paid attention to law enforcement jurisdiction as a plot device. That’s so important in real life (I was an FBI agent), but is often glossed over or misrepresented in crime fiction. I never did figure out what the title had to do with the story.

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SUNO is an AI platform for making music. I’ve posted about it before. But it’s also a way to find new music. It’s not well-designed for that purpose, so it takes some work, but it’s been worth it for me so far. Once you’re a member, including a free member, you can search for songs using genre, creator, instruments, title, style, etc. The search results will be the creations of members, i.e. creations that the SUNO AI software made using text prompts, audio uploads, or a combination of the two, so it’s hit and miss. You have to listen to a lot of not-so-good stuff, but it’s quick and easy to just go on to the next one. I’ve found great songs there that way.

Another way is to create your own songs using those same techniques. With experimentation and luck you can produce something new that you really like. I’ve done that, too, in many genres: ragtime, blues, rock, gospel. I’ve created over 20 songs that I really like. You can download songs you created yourself. You can put all of the ones you like in playlists. In fact, every song you give the thumbs up to automatically goes into your Liked playlist. You can listen to your own liked songs later just by going to that playlist.

Here are a couple of SUNO rock songs I really like, one by a French creator and one I made:

Not Quite Dead Yet by Holly Jackson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Jet is a 27-year-old woman still living at home after a failed law school attempt. She’s attacked from behind on Halloween with a hammer, but somehow survives. Only she suffers a bone fracture at the base of her skull which will almost certainly result in a fatal aneurysm. She has a week to live and is determined to find her “killer” although, as the title says, she’s not quite dead yet. She and her best friend from childhood, Billy, set out to do so. Billy is devoted to some unnamed woman he has loved since forever. Of course Jet is the only person too dense to figure out who that is. It’s an original plot setup. The family dynamics are very complicated. Jet has an older brother who is a rather angry sort and dealing with a father who doesn’t value him as he should. Their sister Emily was the rock star of the family, but died as an 11-year-old when her hair got caught in the pool drain. Billy’s mother took off and abandoned her family some years earlier. Everyone is blaming everyone else for these things. All these play into the final plot resolution. I couldn’t get excited about it, but the book was interesting enough to keep me reading to the end. Perhaps it qualifies as a beach read.

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I’m continuing to enjoy using SUNO AI to remix songs. This is more than just playing around with it. I used to be able to play guitar and even upload a few videos of my playing to YouTube, but arthritis robbed me of that ability years ago. I’ve really missed the creative side of my music. SUNO has given that back to me in a new way. Enjoy the Bessie Smith classic reimagined.