The Burning Room by Michael Connelly
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

My legion of followers (tongue in cheek) knows that I’m a big Harry Bosch fan. This book did not disappoint. The Bosch series is pure police procedural and Connelly really knows his stuff. He uses timely events and the most modern police techniques and tools well. Here Harry is teamed up with a young female detective named Soto, but there is no romance going on between them. I guess it’s no longer plausible that a guy his age (almost 65) can get the hot young chick. He mentors her and we are encouraged that she turns out to be one of the rising stars who really care.

Harry is on the cold case squad. A comatose shooting victim who has been at death’s door for almost 20 years finally passes through. The coroner rules the death a homicide due to the bullet, so they have a murder with the evidence sitting in 18-year-old files. All the original investigators are retired. Bosch and Soto are assigned the case. It turns out the shooting is connected to two crimes: a bank robbery and an arson. To make things more complicated, the arson was of Soto’s childhood residence in the barrio.

Harry leads the way in a very credible, professional step-by-step fashion to solve the crimes, while (of course) stepping on the toes of the politicos in and out of the department. I listened to the audiobook edition, which was read by Titus Welliver, who does a superb job playing Bosch in the Amazon Prime series (title: Bosch)

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Chain of Events by Fredrik T. Olsson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A retired cryptographer (male) and linguist (female) are kidnapped by a mysterious organization and taken to a remote castle where they are tasked with saving humanity. This sci-fi/medical thriller aspires to be something akin to The Andromeda Strain or The Da Vinci Code, perhaps both. Unfortunately, it falls short on both counts. As a cryptographer I found the whole code thing to be ludicrously portrayed and perhaps that spoiled the whole thing for me. I’d heard it said that you shouldn’t read novels about your own line of work because it will always be unrealistic and disappointing. Maybe. But I’ve also heard that a writer should write about what he knows, and this author obviously knows nothing about code-breaking or DNA, so I’m placing the blame on him, not me.

More than that, though, the author had an extremely irritating habit of bringing the reader up to the brink of some revelation and then leaving the scene and moving on to something else. I’m sure he thought that would heighten suspense. It didn’t, at least not for me. Then, when he finally got around to the big reveal, it turned out to be nothing. In short, it was poorly written formulaic stuff. The author is Swedish and despite his obvious mastery of English, the prose sounds a tad stilted to a native English speaker.

I wouldn’t call the book bad. It provided reading fodder for a few days (although I did have some trouble forcing myself to read it at length). It was just disappointing. The premise had potential.

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Cliff Knowles fans:

My latest book, Behead Me, has made the short list of 100 self-published books worth reading at Readfreely. The next round of voting will reduce that to the top 50. Please click the link below and vote for Behead Me in the thriller category. If you don’t want to give the site your email, just use a fake one. Thank you, everyone.

I was planning to post a grammar lesson today, but the events in Orlando make that seem both irrelevant and disrespectful. My condolences to all those affected and my sincere appreciation to the first responders and ER personnel who have tirelessly and bravely tried to lessen the collective trauma. I have confidence the FBI will do a complete investigation but I know there is no stopping these kinds of attacks while AR-15s and similar weapons are in the hands of civilians.

I posted a review of The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins a few months back. I really liked it and gave it five stars. It was a long-time number one bestseller both in the U.S. and the U.K. So I suggested it for my book club, a group of retired men, mostly engineers, and yesterday we met to discuss it. I was the discussion leader.

I was surprised both at the strength in the division over the book, and the fact that most of the discussion group members didn’t like it and said they would have stopped reading it had it not been selected for the club. Two members either didn’t read it at all or stopped less than halfway through. One member absolutely loved it and was passionate and effusive about how much he enjoyed it. The next member said he hated it, at least at first. Those who didn’t like it at first, but who finished it, said that they eventually got into the story and ended up liking it okay, but there was little enthusiasm.  The most common complaint they had was that they were bored. Nothing was happening during the first half in their view.

Needless to say, I didn’t feel the same way. The suspense grabbed me from the beginning. It’s a psychological thriller, not an action thriller. There’s an ominous building of tension over what happened, largely because that whatever it was is not described early on. The reader can tell that something bad has taken place or is about to do so, but the main character, Rachel, is a classic “unreliable narrator” whose alcoholism and psychological issues make the reader doubt what she tells us. It is not a classic good guy(s) trying to find the bad guy(s) kind of mystery. As we get to know the characters better, we find none of them to be very admirable. The police play a minor role in the story even though the crime turns out to be a murder.

One of the members who didn’t like the book said he thought the difference was a male-female thing and wondered aloud what percent of the buyers were women. Of course, those in the group who liked it, the only ones who weren’t engineers, disagreed that only women would like the book, but I’m not sure he was on the wrong track. The author, Paula Hawkins, wrote several romance novels (under a different name) before this book. This book is in no way a romance novel. Still, she writes from a woman’s perspective. The book is told through the eyes of three characters, all women. On the other hand, maybe it is engineers who don’t like psychological thrillers. Perhaps they are more rooted in the concrete, the mechanical, the provable, and want facts and action, not thoughts and feelings of the characters.

While my opinion of the book hasn’t changed, I thought it might be useful to my many readers (he says tongue in cheek) to explain an opposing point of view or at least provide a useful warning to male engineers out there. I didn’t realize it until yesterday, but it seems to be a love it or hate it kind of book. It is also going to be made into a movie, due out this fall.

I’m really independent and not very political, but I think this Reuters news bit is worth contemplating and hasn’t made it to any news outlets I regularly follow:

North Korea endorses Trump for president

North Korea has backed presumptive U.S. Republican nominee Donald Trump, with a propaganda website praising him as “a prescient presidential candidate” who can liberate Americans living under daily fear of nuclear attack by the North.

A column carried on Tuesday by DPRK Today, one of the reclusive and dynastic state’s mouthpieces, described Trump as a “wise politician” and the right choice for U.S. voters in the Nov. 8 U.S. presidential election.

Read the rest on Reuters…

Tell Me Where It Hurts: A Day of Humor, Healing and Hope in My Life as an Animal Surgeon by Nick Trout
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If you’re a pet lover or would-be vet or just someone who enjoys a wry and witty account of someone else’s workday, you’ll enjoy this book. I can’t quite push it to five stars, but I’m glad I hung in through a few of the rocky spots. Trout writes well and is obviously a very experienced and talented veterinary surgeon. Other reviewers invariably compare him to James Herriot and his All Creatures Great and Small, usually to ill effect. I believe that’s unfair to Trout, who writes about his modern day urban pet practice, which is in no way comparable to the rural farm practice of the 1930s in northern England. I tend to think that the negative comments reflect a nostalgia for a simpler time rather than a critique of the writing itself.

Trout does spout a bit too much of his personal philosophy at times and I tend to think he is too full of himself. I sense some false modesty in his writing, too, but there are many great stories, both humorous and heart-warming to make the book well worth reading. Trout is English but practices in Boston. I’m a bit curious how the decision to stay in the United States to practice came about and he doesn’t really explain it. I listened to it on CDs. The British actor did a very good job conveying the smarmy wit and still was able to switch to a convincing serious tone when the content required it. He even did American women’s accents and voices creditably, if not perfectly.

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