I enjoy making music with the SUNO AI platform. I don’t monetize my music, or even upload it to any other site like YouTube or Spotify. I know that a lot of SUNO users do. So I’m not one of those who seeks more followers or more likes for their songs. I don’t follow many other people since I haven’t found many whose music I like; I know some people, even some who follow me, probably do that in order to get people to follow them. I don’t. Still, I have accumulated over 100 followers without trying. I’m glad people enjoy my music. I don’t put any restrictions on them. People can remix them, i.e. make their own songs from the ones I’ve published. Getting more followers and likes, I’ve found, is largely dependent on SUNO’s whims or algorithms. So I’ve learned a few things about that.

Getting likes and followers is largely dependent on how often and how widely your songs are displayed to others when they are logged on. SUNO distributes in several different ways. When you log on, your home page is shown, and on that page are three columns: For You, Following, and Because You Create [country, Jazz or whatever]. For You displays songs you supposedly like, i.e. to your taste. One problem with this is that it often displays your own music here for some reason. That makes no sense to me. Following shows the latest songs from people you follow. Key insight here: the emphasis is on recent. SUNO definitely gives more exposure to recently made songs, no doubt to keep creators engaged or even hooked. So if you want more exposure, keep making songs. The last column is self-explanatory, but is largely useless because SUNO classifies things in inaccurate ways and also because in my case I make a lot of different genres: folk, blues, classical, rock, ragtime, swing, barbershop, jazz, country, bluegrass, etc.

Another obvious way to get followers and likes is to create music people enjoy. Tastes vary, but you can get some idea of what stuff others like (if that’s important to you) by paying attention to the number of thumbs up “likes” on your songs. I’ve found that an average successful song will garner about 5% as many likes as it has plays. If your song gets 100 plays (that’s more than most) and you get five likes, that’s success. I’ve seen this with others, not just with my songs. I suspect the reason more people don’t click that like button is the same reason I don’t, even when I enjoy a song. When you click that icon, the song is automatically loaded into your Liked playlist, which I use as my default SUNO playlist. I have over 200 songs there and add more regularly. I use it like others stream Spotify, etc. So I only click it when I know I’ll want to be listening to it again and again. If I like it mildly, but not enough to put in my playlist, I can go to the comments options and give it a thumbs up there, or make a favorable comment or icon. That shows approval without committing me to it. One warning: that 5% figure is not meaningful until you get up to at least a couple dozen. I rarely publish a song that I don’t like enough to put in my Liked playlist, so the first Like is mine. So after ten plays, if there’s one like, that really isn’t 10%, it’s 0% of everyone but me. But I’ve seen profiles of creators who have over 1000 songs, 1000 followers, and their most liked songs have only 2 likes in 1000 plays. So don’t just spew out scads of sloppy songs to get numbers. Content is more important.

I’ve found that a surprising number of SUNO users are devout Christians and they span genres. For many, it is their way to celebrate or demonstrate their devotion. My gospel recordings tend to do better than blues, folk, etc. Even though gospel/spirituals, etc. are less than 10% of my songs, my top two songs are actual gospel and #3 is Southern gospel style country. They adhere pretty closely to the 5% rule, but they get many more plays. The number of plays/likes for the five most liked songs are: 871/44, 767/33, 558/28, 71/9, 91/7. Another thing that matters is the graphic you create. Good videos get played in the “Hooks” section of the Search page and often attract followers or likes. But videos cost a lot of points and limit what you have for creating songs, so I use that sparingly and just don’t care that much about attracting people. I’ve found I get better quality still images from other AI sites like Gemini or Copilot than I do with SUNO, and those don’t cost any points so I usually upload one I’ve created there. I haven’t found that it makes much difference whether a song is a vocal or an instrumental. Four of my top 10 songs are instrumentals.

Engaging with others also often results in someone following me. I try to comment on others’ songs, as I mentioned before, instead of clicking Like. I’ve found people usually respond favorably with a grateful reply, even when they don’t follow me or Like any of my songs, and that’s nice, IMO. I’d rather have a nice comment on a song of mine than another follower or Like. Obviously, there’s a lot more that could be said about this, but this post is long enough already. If you want to hear/explore my music, here’s the link: https://suno.com/@ratkin.

Dead Money by Jakob Kerr
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Mackenzie is a woman lawyer at a venture capital firm. Jameson Danner is an FBI agent in the San Francisco office. When the CEO of a high-tech company that Mackenzie’s firm invests in is murdered, these two end up investigating as a team. Or are they really on the same side? The case appears to be a standard whodunit at first, but spirals into the arcane backstabbing, dog-eat-dog world of Silicon Valley and VC firms. Four stars may be a bit of a stretch, but I enjoyed it enough, subject to my usual reservations below.

As an FBI agent in the San Francisco office for decades and an attorney who worked at high-tech firms (like Mackenzie and the author) and an author of crime novels like Kerr, I am both amused and at times dismayed at how much writers of TV, movies, and books get wrong about the FBI. Of course much of it is intentional since the truth is too mundane. At least Kerr more or less solved the problem of lack of FBI jurisdiction, although with a preposterous angle. A few peccadilloes I feel compelled to point out: an FBI agent would never take a civilian to some of the dangerous situations in the book; agents don’t rack or fiddle with their guns before making the entrance to a dangerous situation. The gun is always loaded, a round chambered and ready to file. They don’t call each other by their titles, like Agent Jones. You don’t call your coworkers Manager Smith and Secretary Andrews, do you? One thing he did get right based upon my time as a manager in a couple of high-tech Silicon Valley firms is that the executives are out solely out for themselves and will gladly shaft fellow employees, investors, clients, the public, and stockholders if it’s to their advantage to do so. I’m so glad I went back to public service after the corporate jobs so I could feel good about my work.

View all my reviews

In my last post I showed three of the top boys names for babies in 2025. Today I’ll discuss the top three baby girls’ names for 2025 in order from first to third: Olivia, Amelia, and Charlotte. See the graphic.

Much like the boys’ names, these show two names that only became popular in recent decades and one (Charlotte) that may be considered old-fashioned but with a recent resurgence. Remember, these are not to scale, so the true top of Amelia’s scale should be slightly below Olivia’s if they were on the same scale. The relevant points are that although Olivia is still number one, it is declining, while the other two are gaining or at least at the top of their popularity. Why?

Gemini attributes Olivia’s popularity to a combination of media figures or characters including Olivia Newton-John (too early IMHO), Olivia Kendall (The Cosby Show) and on two daytime soap operas. Maybe, but I’m not convinced, and in any event, those don’t explain the decline. It attributes Amelia to America following the British trend where it was number one in 2011, but especially when the Dr. Who character Amelia “Amy” Pond was introduced in 2010. I don’t trust AI in general, but I can’t disprove these. I do note that there are many other popular Amelias like Amelia Bedelia of children’s lit and Amelia Bones in the Harry Potter series.

Sticking with Gemini for now, it says Charlotte’s gradual rise is not due to a recent pop culture cause, but is rather consistent with a 100-year cycle, reportedly a common phenomenon. It says names become stale “grandma” names after awhile and decline until 100 years later, more or less, then become trendy “vintage” names. It also attributes it in part to the general trend of this century using girl’s names that can double as tomboy names, like Charlie in this case. Copilot (another AI) attributes these changes more to saturation (Olivia now being oversaturated, and the other two not yet saturated). I buy that as I know my own kids didn’t want to name their kids anything that seemed to common. I’m just having fun speculating. This may all be BS.

It’s been a few years since I’ve examined popular baby names. I’m always fascinated by what names people choose for their babies and why. So I’ve updated my list to include the 2025 baby names from the Social Security website. Let’s take a look at three of the most popular boy’s names for 2025. I’ll do girl’s names in my next post. Liam, Noah, and Theodore ranked 1st, 2nd and 4th in 2025 for boys. Consider this graphic

Liam and Noah barely appeared prior to 1990, which is why I cut those years off. Theodore, on the other hand, was a very popular names at one time, died down, then has had a recent resurgence. Why? It’s fun to speculate, so I will.

Liam Neeson was a B-list actor until he landed the role of Oskar Schindler in the blockbuster movie Schindler’s List. He was nominated for Best Actor at the Oscars that year. That’s about when the name Liam took off. He’s had some big roles since, including in the Star Wars spinoff movies and the Taken series. That’s my guess for Liam. Gemini AI speculates that the same effect occurred with Noah when Noah Wyle became the star of the television series ER in 1994. I never watched it, but that makes sense to me. I haven’t been able to find a cultural trigger for the resurgence of Theodore, but I suspect it is part of a larger trend favoring old family or “vintage” names. Theodore gained in rank from 2017 to 2020 more than any other boys’ name. My own grandson was named Maxwell (Max), another old-fashioned name that had a resurgence around that time and in fact had a similar long-term pattern to Theodore.

The scales for the charts are slightly different to accommodate all the highs and lows, so you can’t compare one chart to another. They are consistent for each year throughout each separate chart.

Kobuk the Destroyer: And Other Tales from the Wild, Unseen World of Test Engineering by Alex Davies
My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

Kobuk is a large bear in a zoo who is used to test “bear-proof” containers for outdoor product makers. If Kobuk can get into it, it’s not bear-proof. The book is the non-fiction description of product testing and all the types and their ins and outs. It’s clearly written and very informative. I’d hoped for a few more juicy bits – disastrous failures due to lack of, or the wrong type of, testing, for example. The title and cover suggest it’s more lighthearted than it really is. There was little of that, although a reasonable amount for a serious book. I found it interesting if a bit dry, so I skimmed a bit in the second half. There was some repetition. I rate it three and half stars.

View all my reviews

Rock Paper Scissors by Alice Feeney
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book was rated highly by a good friend so I really wanted to like it a lot. I did become engrossed in the story. The suspense was there and I really liked the posh British accents of the readers. It also had several twists I did not foresee which counts. It’s worth a solid three stars, but I can’t go higher because I just didn’t like any of the characters. There is plenty of foreshadowing that someone is likely to die, but you don’t know who or why. I came to wish they’d all get bumped off since I didn’t like any of them. The plot twists were too unbelievable and relied on the unlikely circumstance that one central character has prosopagnosia (face blindness) and can’t recognize anybody, even his own wife. If you like twisty mysteries, give it a shot, but if you need someone to root for, this is not your cup of tea.

View all my reviews

Cold Zero by Brad Thor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In this spy/action thriller CIA operative Kasey exfiltrates a scientist from China along with his invention, but the Chinese bring down the plane in the arctic where it lands on sheet ice. The Chinese send an icebreaker to retrieve the scientist and his invention while a stray Russian sub senses an opportunity and heads there. The Americans send a sub and a seaplane that way to rescue the survivors. That’s the early set up and it’s played for all it’s worth with unexpected turns and plenty of action. All in all it’s a worthy high-tech thriller with plenty of military jargon and weapon knowledge on display. No, not all the good guys come out alive.

Even so, there were a couple of significant gaps in the author’s knowledge that disappointed me. He made the all-too-common mistake of thriller writers, especially TV types, of confusing and conflating geosynchronous satellites, like weather satellites, with spy ones. At one point one military expert called for a satellite to “hover” over the crash site. Satellites can’t hover; they orbit! Spy satellites are in low orbit ~150-300 miles up and orbit the Earth every 90 minutes or so. They’re only in line of sight of a spot on the ground for maybe 5-10 minutes, then on the next few passes will not go over that same spot. The only satellites that can stay over one spot on the Earth are orbiting at around 22,000 miles (7 to 10 times higher than the spy ones) and right over the equator. They are much too high to get useful resolution of small surface features like ships or people, and in any event can never be in a polar orbit. Yet writers use this mistaken idea all the time. The TV show 24 was notorious for it. A drone can hover, but the crash site in this book was too far away for continuous drone coverage and weather would have prevented it anyway. Take a physics course before attempting to write a sciency novel, folks. I can forgive it, though; it was a fun enough read.

View all my reviews

I’m still enjoying creating music using the SUNO platform. I continue to specialize in updating old American songs prior to 1930 or so. As a break from my book reviews, I thought I’d share a couple of my recent ones, both duets as it happens.

Oh! Baby What a Night was published in 1929 with lyrics by A. Seymour Brown and music by Albert Von Tilzer

Rock It in Rhythm was a Tampa Red song from 1937.

Best Offer Wins by Marisa Kashino
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Margo is a hard-driving young professional woman who wants the perfect job, perfect baby, perfect husband, and most of all, perfect house. She is deliciously devious and unconstrained by such trifles as morals, friendships, and such. She falls in love with the perfect house that is just barely, maybe, in her and her husband Ian’s price range but knows other bidders will be offering more and all in cash. She can’t let such obstacles stop her. I foresaw one part of her scheme back in Chapter 8, but it unfolded on a grander scale than I imagined.

I found it interesting that the author made Margo Japanese-American, like the author herself, and even has a similar first name (“Mar…”). Margo is sensitive about it, eschewing being “the ethnic friend” and also for being mistaken for Chinese. I can’t help wondering if the author is projecting her inner demon onto Margo, giving her free rein to do all those things real people can’t do in civilized society. I’m partial to Japanese language and culture having spent my college year abroad in Japan, but if the author is anything like Margo, I’ll pass on making her acquaintance. I will gladly recommend her book, however. It didn’t disappoint all the way through. It left me with chills and a grin.

View all my reviews

Poppy Montgomery Gets Even by Gordon Jack
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This cozy mystery stars an octogenarian (Poppy) who takes it upon herself to get even with someone who is scamming the old ladies in her retirement home. The tone is light and often humorous. Poppy and her own daughter have a tenuous relationship. There’s a lot of day-to-day wisdom in the book, and many characters get a life lesson as it goes on. The mystery is a bit farfetched, so hard crime aficionados might not be that charmed with it, but I enjoyed the book. I listened to the audiobook and the reader was excellent, no doubt increasing my enjoyment. It also helped that the story takes place in my home area. In fact the author is a librarian in a local school district in his day job, although he’s written two successful young adult novels. The book is too lightweight to get five stars but not bad for a fun read.

View all my reviews

Lifeguard: A Love Story by Janet Fash
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book was very disappointing. From the title, cover picture, and brief library description, I had thought this would be about saving lives, love for the ocean, and things of that nature. There was some of that. But about 80% of the book is about the corruption in New York City Lifeguard program and one man in particular. The union boss for the lifeguards, a man named Stein, ran the whole program like a fiefdom, rewarding his friends and cronies with jobs and promotions and taking vengeance on anyone who crossed him. The author, a thorn in his side but somewhat safe from his wrath since she was the city’s first female chief lifeguard, essentially wrote an exposé. I really wasn’t interested in that and I think there was some misrepresentation as to content by the publisher. It was upsetting to see corruption spelled out. In addition, the writing wasn’t very good. It wasn’t terrible, but the author was fast and loose with grammar at times (“Me and Bob went …”) and she confesses to needing a ghostwriter (or cowriter), Clio Chang, for her “writing abilities.” This is disturbing since the author was a teacher during the off season. I hope she didn’t teach English. But worst of all was her casual attitude toward drinking and drug use. She writes about how much fun it was as a teenage lifeguard to get drunk every night and come in to work hungover. She even seemed to look the other way toward cocaine use by other lifeguards like it was just boys being boys. In my view anyone who gets drunk regularly is not qualified to hold any job that involves the responsibility for the lives of others. This behavior seemed to persist even into her adult years. I finally had to start skipping liberally in the last third of the book.

View all my reviews

We recently sold my wife’s 20-year-old car (2006 Acura TSX) as it was unreliable and we’re shopping for a new EV. I asked four AI sites for recommendations: Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot. I gave them all the same criteria: not too huge (small garage, wife’s preference, no need), low tech – more buttons and knobs, fewer screen icons/menus, plug-in EV. After some back and forth and sharing the recommendations of each site with the other sites I winnowed it down to three choices they were all more or less happy with: Ioniq 5, Kona electric, and Polestar 2.

So today we visited the local Hyundai dealer, which sells both the Ioniq and the Kona. It turns out the Kona EV is not available in the U.S., at least not new, due to tariffs. The Ioniq 5 was there and it wasn’t a wasted trip, but still, I had specifically asked the saleslady yesterday if they had the Kona EV and they said yes. They lie to get you in the door. She wasn’t even there today even though she told me to ask for her. Maybe AI learned to lie from humans.

So I asked Google (AI mode) for the nearest Polestar dealer and it gave me the info for Volvo Palo Alto. I had seen a Polestar dealership there in the past. I called there to confirm they had the Polestar 2 in stock. The answer is no. They only service Polestar; they aren’t a dealer and in fact, there are no longer any U.S. Polestar dealers because of the tariffs. They all closed. Polestar has left the US market permanently after 2026. They did have a low-mileage used Polestar 2 and the sales guy sent me a video. It actually looks darn good for what my wife wants and needs, but I’d be nervous, as she is, about a used car that doesn’t have a dealership nearby. How long will the Volvo guys have any knowledge or interest in maintaining it?

So I went back to all the AI sites and pointed out that two of the cars they recommend are no longer available in the U.S. They all “apologized” but I don’t blame them despite the fact that I had said we were shopping for a new EV. I hadn’t specified that we wanted something to buy right now in the U.S. They were giving feedback based only on the criteria I gave it and online reviews, dealers’ specs, etc. So now I have a new set of cars to research, but I’m going to resort to an old-fashioned technique and ask my friendship circle for recommendations. You have the criteria above, and in addition I’ll mention that my wife is (somewhat reluctantly) driving/sharing my 2021 Volvo XC40 EV (which I love) and we have a level 2 charging station in our garage. An EV is an absolute. My wife and I hate gas stations and oil changes, etc.

Let me have your recommendations!

We Were the Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a semi-biographical novel of a Jewish family in Poland during World War II. The hardships and cruelty they endured are incredible, yet real. It is a large family, and as the title implies, they are the survivors, the lucky ones. Most of their fellow Polish Jews did not. Some were living in eastern Poland when Hitler and Stalin divided the country. They ended up in Soviet labor camps, not much better than Hitler’s camps. Others ended up in the walled-in ghettos the Germans created. One brother, Addy (we later learn short for Adolf) is in Paris at the outbreak of war and is inducted into the French army. Others at various times end up in Italy or Persia or Brazil.

The book is well-written although I thought it was going to be a slog at first. It was a book club choice, so obligatory, but it didn’t take long for me to become engrossed in the story. I’d give it a higher rating if it weren’t for the depressing nature of the story itself. It is unpleasant to yet again read of the atrocities the Germans (and the Russians and Christian Poles, too) committed against the Jews, against anyone. I couldn’t take more than an hour or so of reading when I had to switch to something else.

View all my reviews

Good People by Patmeena Sabit
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The central figures in this novel are the Sharafs, an Afghan immigrant family. There is a death, but we don’t know at first who died or whether it was an accident or a murder. Although fiction, the author says it was inspired by a real case. The story is told in a piecemeal way modeled after a typical crime documentary where snippets of many interviews are interleaved to tell the story in chronological order, but from multiple different views and experiences. The Afghans surrounding the main characters look at all the facts from the standpoint of their traditional culture and the Islam religion, while neighbors, teachers, reporters, police, and other non-Afghans see things a different, traditional American way. Interestingly, the author does not tell what happened by any purported statement of the main characters, only surrounding characters, friends, witnesses, reporters, etc., except for an attorney representing the accused at the end. Thus there is a lot of rumor and speculation with people accusing and others defending. Some Afghans say the family was too American while others say the family hadn’t assimilated and were actually anti-American and too Afghan. It does a good job of portraying racism, culture clash, and generation clash.

Some people may be put off by the unusual format, with some “chapters” being only one sentence, and even the longer ones usually only three or four pages. It also suffers a little from hyperbole and repetition. The purported newspaper coverage is completely tabloidy, hearsay, and gossip, not credible reporting. We get four, five or more people making accusations or providing evidence or theories that suggest someone is guilty, followed by the same number of others explaining away that so-called evidence and coming to their defense. You only need one or two of each, not five. In short the book is somewhat overdone and overlong, but still a worthwhile read.

View all my reviews

Whistler by Ann Patchett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Like Patchett’s earlier book The Dutch House this book is beautifully written without a heavy reliance on plot. It is about relationships, about the choices we make in whom we love and mistakes we make and the consequences that has on our happiness. The characters are nearly all likeable though each is quite different from the others. There is a suspense generated that holds throughout the book. It surrounds how the narrator, Daphne, survived a life-threatening situation (a car wreck, but it’s more than that) in her childhood and why she thought it was her fault her parents divorced. Daphne and her family are basically book people (readers/editor/publicist) in Boston and New York at different times, and that explains how some came into contact with others, it doesn’t play a big role in the story. It’s more of a story about love – between spouses, sure, but also between parent and child, both “natural” and step. Patchett has great insight into human behavior.

View all my reviews

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 to 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.

View all my reviews

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.

View all my reviews

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.

View all my reviews

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.

View all my reviews

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.

View all my reviews