In 2008 an 18-year-old woman reported that she had been raped at knifepoint in her apartment in Lynwood, WA. The police did not believe her because there were inconsistencies in her story. The victim finally admitted that she had lied, the investigating officer charged her with charged with a gross misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in jail. What happened was that the police did not believe her and pressured her to recant her story, not understanding that many victims of violent crimes have difficulty describing what happened to them. The inconsistencies weren’t because she was lying, the inconsistencies were caused by the trauma she suffered.

Ken Armstong, The Marshall Project and Christian Miller, ProPublica working in tandem have written about how police treat rape victims. While the Lynnwood police department did not believe their rape victim, the police in Golden, Colorado did, and they followed the correct procedures for handling rape crimes. First off, they believed their victims; they reached out to other area police departments looking for similar type occurrences. When confirmations of other similar rapes came, the police departments worked together to identify the rapist, Marc Leary.

This book examines how we as a society view rape. How are views were shaped, why we see some of the reactions to people claim of sexual assault. The #MeToo movement will hopefully have a positive impact on our handling of sexual assault.

Like the 33,000 people on Goodreads who could resist reading this book? I can imagine that the Trump White House would allow Mr. Wolff access if, for no other reason than hubris, I can also imagine the outrage the Trump White House felt when the book published.

Trump is not the transformative figure that is going to move this country forward; I am saddened every day to read a newspaper, listen to a podcast, or read an article only to learn of the outlandish behavior of the 45th POTUS. The book, which might be considered gossip and remember not all gossip is false, has chronicled the disarray that has surrounded the White House since January 20, 2017.

It took me a while to work my way through Gods of Howl Mountain; I just couldn’t get into this book. As beautifully written as the book was, there were times when I thought the words got in the way detracting from the story.

The story takes place in the 1950’s, Rory, the main character, returns home from the Korean Ware with a wooden leg and few job opportunities. Rory ends up running liquor for the local bootlegger. In the 1930’s the government created the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) and flooded acres of land depriving thousands of people their homesteads. This is the backdrop for the book.

I just felt that the characters were too stereotypical. There is a rich history of Appalachia that I didn’t get a feel for in this book.

I was a little hesitant to request this arc from Netgalley cause I thought the premise of the book was strange. I like Chris Bohjalian's books so I figured what's the harm, I am so glad that I had the opportunity to read this book.

Cassie Bowden is not a particularly likable character, her life centers around drinking too much and getting laid. While she is able to hold on to her job, at just past 40, her life is slipping away from her. On a flight from New York to Dubai, she meets a younger businessman, whom she ends up spending the night with. The following morning Cassie wakes up in bed with a dead man. Cassie's life is forever changed.

Upon her return to New York, Cassie lies to the FBI about her interlude with the young businessman. Cassie has come to a point in her life where she needs to decide which way to go, she finally admits that she was with the businessman the night he was murdered. As Cassie attempts to tone down her life she meets an actor whom she is drawn too. She also realizes that someone is following her and that her life may be in danger.

I enjoyed this book, the suspense that builds throughout the book is great, you just want to keep on reading. Chris Bohjalian is a master storyteller.

White Houses Is the story of the romance between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok. Both women in their own way had very sad lives. Eleanor because she lived in the shadow of FDR and Hickok because of her brutal early life.

While the romance was scandalous it was by no means extraordinary. Bloom characterizations of Eleanor and Lorena are lovely, they were devoted to each other.

Amy Bloom is a wonderful writer, she has written a thought-provoking book about two lost souls that find a bit of happiness with another.

For a début novel The Chalk Man was very good. The book was a mixture of Kate Atkinson and Mo Hayder, two very skilful storytellers to my mind. I like books that move from past to present, the author did a good job of moving gracefully between the periods.

You get the sense that not everything is as it seems. Not really sure whats what, Eddie, who is recounting the story tends to neglect telling you all, leaving a bit for later. So do not get comfortable while reading cause you never know what is right around the corner.

Who would have thought that a newly minted Army Ranger would drive the get away car in a bank robbery. Why would a newly minted Army Ranger do such a stupid thing? Ben Blum, cousin to the newly minted Army Ranger spends a goodly amount of time trying to answer that question.

To be an Army Ranger was all Alex ever wanted. Two weeks before his scheduled leave for Iraq, and days after he finishes the grueling Ranger training he climbs into his car and drives three other people to a Bank of America in Seattle. They rob the bank of about fifty-two thousand dollars. Why would Alex have done this having just achieved everything he wanted in life.

That is the question Ben Blum tries to answer. In a rather long convoluted story Ben recounts his search to understand why his cousin would have done this. What makes this book interesting is Ben a mathematician by training, is also having a crisis of his own. Knowing that mathematics alone will not answer his own questions, he delves into his cousins misfortune to find out what made him do something so totally out of character, hoping to better understand himself.

It is an inmate study how a person ends up doing a totally crazy thing. I think each reader will need to decide for themselves why this happened.

I love stories set in the South. The mountains always have dark, and deep forbidding secrets. Heaven’s Crook Finger is a story of a charismatic man who run a christian ministry in the Georgia mountains. It is about a family that is torn apart by misguided beliefs, setting father against son and brother against brother.

Returning home after 33 years away. Earl Marcus is confronted with the death of his father and the impending death of the black woman who cared for him after he left his family at age 14. Earl at age fifty is a private investigator, and an alcoholic. Never reconciling the abusive early years of his live, Earl now must confront them. Without really wanting to Earl keeps getting drawn in further and further into the misdeeds that his father and his followers committed.

The book is well plotted. Earl is not one of my favorite characters but there is potential for this become a good series, if the characters get developed a little better.

While, I enjoyed this 5th installment of the Lisbeth Salander saga, The Girl who Takes an Eye for an Eye, this book doesn’t have the depth of original series. There is just something missing, I felt that the plot was just a little weak and didn’t have the same intricate balance that the first two books had.

The story was just not big enough to handle the mythical character, Lisbeth Salander. In the earlier books written by Larrson, the plot revolved around the characters, they were the forefront of the story. In this book the story was in the forefront not the characters. Lisbeth was some how diminished, along with Mikhael Blomkvist became mere shadows of their former selves.

Janesville was devastated by the closing of the General Motors plant in December 2008. Amy Goldstein’s book takes us through the five years following the plant closure. Janesville survived the loss of the plant and all of the supporting industries but it never finally recovered.

It was refreshing to get an honest appraisal of what happen in Janesville. Millions of dollars flowed into Janesville for job retraining which proved to be a dismal failure. None of the jobs that Janeville residents retrained for ever returned them to where they were financially before the plant closing. Many of the folks were ill-equipped for retraining as they had no computer skills. As the residents struggled, the city and county attempted to respond by developing identifying possible job skills for retraining it citizens. Various forces worked against some of the folks that were retrained. Even after re-training wages were never equal to what they were paid working for General Motors. Going back you school after being in the work-force for 15 to 20 years is hard. Training a new trade is hard, but learning a new trade in a community where the economic base has been destroyed is near impossible.

Today Janesville, has an underemployment rate of just over 4 but the area has not recovered to where it was prior to the plant closing. There are still residents that are commuting to other GM plants rather than take a cut in wages. I don’t see the current administration doing anything substantial to return Janesville to prior economic status. Although Janesville is the home of Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, Goldstein makes it clear that Ryan did not involve himself in the in the community as one thought that he should. Janesville is just another example of how we are losing our manufacturing base in this country, while our corporate and civic leaders are doing nothing to find new avenues of meaningful and well-paying employment for its middle class.

I would highly recommend this book, it is honest and forthright.

The Fact of a Body is billed as a murder and a memoir, at first glance I thought it was about someone who had personally experienced at murder within the family. But the book took a deceive turn. Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich was a freshly minted lawyer when her law firm her assigned her to a death penalty case of a convicted pedophile and child murderer, Ricky Langley. Marzano-Lesnevich whom until the time was a stanch anti-death penalty supporter, immediately after watching a video tape of the convicted murderer wants him to die.

The book then takes on a strange but interesting twist, Marzano-Lesnevich begins to intertwine her childhood with that of the murderer. As she researches the case she is forced to reconcile her own childhood, giving up practicing law to write. As a child she was molested by her Grandfather, once her parents were made aware of this, they stopped having her grandparents stay in the house. Alexandria and her sister were told not to speak of this, her parents never directly addressed the issue. The book moves between her own troubled childhood and that of Ricky Langley, how society refused to acknowledge the problem the both faced one as the abused and the other as an abuser.

The book is well written and engaging. The subject matter is very timely as we now have a political candidate running for office in the United States Senate that has been accused of molesting a fourteen year old girl. He is calling her a liar and is continuing to gain support in the Alabama election which is unconscionable.

In 1987 I was living in Huntington, Long Island, that Christmas there was a strange news story of a young newly married couple who had a fight, the wife had gone missing.  For at least a week there was nightly news stories about how the young husband was assisting the police in the search and was responsible for providing information that led to the discovery of his wife's body.  He was later convicted of murdering her.  I often wondered if something had tripped in his mind that allowed him to repress what had happened. What happens when the mind gets so so over loaded it can no long know the truth.

Alice Feeney's Sometimes I Lie gives us a glimpse, into the dark side of how the mind works.  She also did an excellent job of messing with my mind in one of the best psychological thriller I have read.  If you enjoy this genre, this is the book to read.

The French Girl is one of those books that immerses you. A well written tale of six English students who spend a week in the French countryside only to have a French girl who was staying across the way go missing. Fast forward ten years and five of the six students are now settled into their lives in London when they are notified that the remains of the French girl have been found in an old well on the property where they were staying.

Thus begins the cat and mouse game between the old friends, who knows what, each person carefully searching to see what the others know. This is not a sit on the edge of your seat thriller but a nuanced study of how friends react to news that most likely one of the is a murderer. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and would highly recommend it.

When you read a book about murder especially a horrific murder you expect a resolution, an explanation, something to ease the pain. In Idaho Emily Ruskovich gives you none of that.

Ann knows when she married Wade that he has early on-set dementia and that his first wife murdered one of their children. The beauty of the story is not about the murder, but how Ann goes about bringing closure to an act that was so brutal. We don’t often get a glimpse of the aftermath of a tragedy, it goes against our sensibilities not to know what happened but the author is more concerned with how life continues after such a tragedy. The book spans a thirty year period, moving from present to past, back and forth from character to character each giving us just a bit of insight always moving forward never back.

Idaho is beautifully written book but, challenging as it does not move in the direction you expect, it will move you from comfort zone.

I have to say I love the cover for this book. It really draws you in, I could hardly wait to listen to this book. Expecting the second coming of Edna Ferber’s Giant I settled in for a good listen.

Take a fading railroad tycoon from Boston, an adopted son trying to hold together his fathers railroad,two small children and Mexican Revolutionary and you have the makings for EL Paso. I have to say it is a great story line, rich gringos with their multi million acre ranches with hundreds of thousands head of cattle and one desperado out to prove to the world just how notorious he is should make a great read. I just couldn’t take the book seriously, there wasn’t the depth needed to make this a serious work of historical fiction. Simply put the characters lacked depth, and that detracted from the story.

Many years ago, my brother and I saw a play called Hadrian the Seventh, which was based on a book by the same name. The gist of the story is that two members of the Roman Catholic church visiting a pathetic Englishman who failed at becoming a priest; they make him a priest and take him back to the Vatican where he is elected Pope. Instead of having control over this rather pathetic fellow, he goes on to have his way with the Roman Catholic church. So any time I read a book about the Vatican I always think of Hadrian the Seventh.

Robert Harris has taken another tact, which has been written about before but Harris does such an excellent job that you really won’t mind. Using current day politics of growing place the third world, race and ethics Harris takes us through the election of a Pope. As we all know the Roman Catholic church is going faster in the third world than it is in the “old world”, so as the Vatican prepares to elect it’s newest Pope there are a lot of unknowns. It appears that the former Pope did somethings that no one was aware of until after his death.

A good read, but not something I see happening.

The River at Night is about 4 women who decide to spend a weekend white water rafting in the backwoods of Maine. The woman lose their guide and spend the next three days trying to get back down the river to civilization. Along the way there are people who are trying to stop them.

The story is billed as psychological thriller but it is more just a suspense/mystery. It is well plotted and the characters are interesting enough. It is a very readable story and I enjoyed it. Anyone who loves a mystery would enjoy this book.

This is the second book in the Peter Ash series, it was a great read. Well plotted story, good character development, moves along at a good pace.

June’s mother, a brilliant programmer was a victim of a hit and run accident, now someone
Is trying to kidnap June in effort to get access to June’s mother’s program. Peter Ash a veteran with PTDS meets up with June, together they try to figure out who wanted June’s mother dead to get her last program.

Peter and June with a full cast of characters pursue and are pursued making for an action packed read. I received this book from Penguins First to Read, for an honest review.

The rental market is rigged, it is especially so for the poor. I don’t know how one of the most basic of necessities has become so abused. Are there any reputable landlords out there, I think not, especially in poor communities.

The book follows eight families and two landlords experience with renting and renters in Milwaukee, it is not a pretty story. We tend to forget the depth of poverty in this country. The vacancy rate for cheap housing is in the single digits, it’s a landlords market and they know and exploit it. Very sad, heart wrenching read, but also a necessary read.

Far From True was even better, the plot tighten up and Barclay made better use of his characters in this book. The twists and turns were better. At the end of the book Barclay has done it again wrapped up some of the dangling story lines but one and that is hopefully what the last book, Twenty-Three will do when it is released November 1 of this year.

I am looking forward to it…