Scarecrow by Michael Connelly

I'd long looked forward to reading Michael Connelly because I know a few people who are very enthusiastic fans.

I'd enjoyed The Reversal but I think I would have enjoyed it more if I'd read the other books in the series first because I was not as familiar with the characters.

I was delighted, therefore, to discover the Scarecrow is a almost a stand-alone novel .. a sequel to The Poet, I believe.

I enjoyed Jack McEvoy's relationship with FBI agent Rachel Walling, the information I picked up about the world of computer security (something about which I knew very little), and the little elegy for the dying newspaper business (Jack is a crime reporter at the L.A. Times).

Jack is a prize-winning reporter for the L.A. Times. The newspaper is slowly laying off all of its reporters, and Jack gets a pink slip. He is asked to train his replacement, a "cub" reporter who will take over his crime beat but whose salary will be considerably less.

The same day he learns that he's to leave in two weeks, Jack gets a phone call from the distraught mother of a murder suspect. He'd written about the son in routine news story, but the mother insists that her son is innocent. Jack decides he'll investigate the mother's claims and try to write one last story about crime in Los Angeles. Only thing is, he soon discovers that the kid almost certainly is innocent. And his cub reporter colleague starts to put details together and begins to suspect the murder was actually carried out by a serial killer. Things start to get interesting.

A little nostalgia - it's Christmas

It's out of print now  but a book I loved as a child was The Children in the Jungle. (It's out of date in its cultural attitudes but it features an anarchical sense of creativity that's fun.)

Generally, what I've been reading lately

For myself, I just want to make a record of what I've been reading lately.

I'm currently reading The Scarecrow, by Michael Connelly.

Before that, I read Elegy for April, by Benjamin Black. Before that, I read The Reversal, also by Michael Connelly. Somewhere in there, I read Connie Briscoe's Sisters and Husbands.

Before that, I read Thomas Cahill's How the Irish Saved Civilization. Before that, I read Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney, which I found interesting but can't quite recommend. It was a little dour-spirited.

Before that, I read Night and Stars by Maeve Binchy. Before that, I read Persuasion by Jane Austen, for my book group. Since then, I've been reading Jane Austen for Dummies which I have greatly enjoyed and highly recommend.

Before that, I think, I read Switch: How to Change Things when Change is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath. That was also for my book group. I loved it. I also read a book on building buzz (word-of-mouth) for libraries by Peggy Barber and Linda Wallace.

Elegy for April by Benjamin Black

(I do not know the photographer of this image, but it came from structurae .net, an international database and gallery of structures on 8/18/19). 

Elegy for April by Benjamin Black (the pen name of Irish mystery writer John Banville) is the third in the Quirke series.

Quirke is a pathologist living and working in Dublin in the 1950's. His grown daughter, Phoebe, lives in town and works in a hat shop. She socializes with a group of four very disparate friends: Jimmy Minor, a reporter for a Dublin paper; Isabel Galloway, an actress at the Gate Theatre; Patrick Ojukwu, a Nigerian surgery student; and April Latimer, a well-connected junior doctor at a Dublin hospital.

After Phoebe doesn't hear from April for a week, she shares her concern with her friend, Jimmy. Jimmy laughs off her concerns -- after all, their friend April is known to be a little wild and certainly impulsive. She may have left town for an short holiday. As time passes with no word of April, Phoebe slowly realizes how much she misses April and how little she knows her.

She turns to Quirke for help. Quirke, awkwardly recovering from a stint in rehab, uses his contacts in the police and medical establishments to begin to investigate April's disappearance.

After I finished this novel, I went onto Amazon to see what other readers thought of it. One reader complained about the plotting but acknowledged that if you're reading Benjamin Black, you're not reading for the plot. (As for the plot of this novel, I imagine many readers might find the conclusion less than satisfactory -- not all the ends are tied up -- but I think it's an ending entirely consistent with the novel and a drizzly Dublin winter). For as another reader pointed out, Black is a poetical prose stylist.

His poetry is hidden. It's in the colorful and sometimes abrupt adjectives he uses. Gosh, I'm so impressed.

Sometimes when I have wondered, "What is it that I love about cities? Why do I love the Near North Side or Southwark?" I try to answer myself by saying, "I love abrupt juxtapositions." Certainly, city life gives us plenty of those. And so does Black's prose.

Here's a little bit from the novel:

"The light from the lamp on Huband Bridge was a soft, gray globe streaming outwards in all directions. It glimmered on the stone arch and made a ghost of the young willow tree leaning on the canal bank there .. Dimly for a moment he seemed to catch the babbling voices of all of his dead."

The Reversal by Michael Connelly

The Reversal is the latest in the Harry Bosch series. It's the story of the retrial of a man convicted of killing a little girl 20 years ago before DNA testing technology was available.

The defendant successfully sues for a new trial when he has the evidence in the case DNA tested and the DNA proves not to be his.

Mickey Haller appears here as well, this time working for the prosecutor's office, improbably, as a special prosecutor.

Perhaps because of his skill as a defense attorney, his work as a prosecutor is masterly, even though he's not familiar with the role.

Harry works as the investigator on the case, at Mickey's request. Maggie, Mickey's ex-wife, serves as his second chair.

This story gives you a chance to see Harry (and Mickey) as a father. Harry's daughter has returned from Hong Kong to live with him after the death of her mother. Her adjustment is awkward and slow and worries Harry. By the end of the novel, some of those domestic pieces are beginning to fall into place.

If you read this novel, "ripped from the headlines" as it is, I think you will be surprised. I certainly was!

Sisters and Husbands, by Connie Briscoe

I've been meaning to get to this novel for a long time. I'd call it a light read: it moves right along.

It's about 3 sisters and a friend. Beverly is about to get married, but everyone around her is afraid she'll have cold feet at the last minute because she's called off two weddings before.

Her sister, Charmaine, has recently remarried for the third time. Her marriage is strained by her husband's relationship with his daughter.

Evelyn, the oldest, the stable one, the responsible one, and the professional one (she's a therapist), seems to be the only sister with no problems. What her sisters, who resent her for being so seemingly perfect, don't know is that Evelyn has a secret: she's having trouble in her marriage and she's not only crushed, she's bewildered.

Beverly's closest friend is going through some things, too. Her boyfriend struck her. Beverly thinks that there's no way that relationship should be repaired. As far as Beverly is concerned, violence of any kind crosses the line and she can't understand why her friend can't see that.

All of these issues weigh on Beverly and increase her anxiety about whether getting married is really the right thing to do. Her fiance is kind and sexy, a professional, and seemingly everything a girl could want but Beverly sees her sisters' problems and feels deeply uneasy.

One thing surprised me. As Evelyn's marital problems escalate, she remains determined to stay calm and not make any rash decisions. She feels that as a marriage counselor, she of all people should know that marriages have their ups and downs and she is committed to do whatever's needed to save her marriage. But then she does something that seems to me to be completely out of character, and I needed that explained. But perhaps that's part of the fun of this book: that Evelyn steps out the patterns of her current life when her husband leaves her -- that his abrupt departure opens her up to viewing herself and her life in a new way.

A brisk read with an eventful story and interesting characters.