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  • Nightshade (2025) – Michael Connelly

    Nightshade (2025) – Michael Connelly

    The last Connelly book I read, The Proving Ground, was also copyright 2025, so I guess he’s still cranking ’em out in volume.

    The hero of that book was good ole Mickey Haller, the Lincoln Lawyer
    (who now keeps the Lincoln in the garage and drives an EV :).

    This book introduces a new protagonist. He’s abrasive and kind of a hard-ass (think Bosch), but resourceful and interesting.

    His name is Stillwell.

    That’s all we get for a name! I looked for a first name, and could not find it. So I guess that’s going to be a thing here, like Shane, the lone seeker of justice!
    Or Reacher … “just Reacher”.

    I’m sure Connelly has some point in doing the one name thing, but I’m not into it. I think it’s a useless affectation. I’m sure the dude does actually have a first name. His girlfriend probably uses it when she asks him to pass the ketchup, so why do we pretend it doesn’t exist?

    Anyway, Mr One-name is a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s detective (Bosch was a Los Angeles City detective). He has been banished to Catalina Island for being the loser in some kind of intramural pissing contest back on the mainland. This gets explained in some detail around p 164.

    We learn that many people on the island are there because they messed up on the mainland somehow. They are hiding from someone or something. Pretty much all the government employees are there because they pissed somebody off on the mainland.

    Getting sent to Catalina seems to be the LA County version of getting sent to Siberia.

    It’s supposed to be a big demotion, but waking up on Catalina Island every day looks pretty sweet to me!

    You’re quickly introduced to what a quirky place it is.

    • Everyone drives golf carts!
    • There’s a herd of buffalo (American Bison) on the island, brought there on the 1920’s for a movie that never left!

    The Story begins

    It’s a foggy evening, and our hero Stilwell has driven out to the Harbor to pick up the presiding judge who is cruising over to the island on his sailboat!

    They do this every week. He meets the judge and drives him (in a golf cart) to the “justice complex”.
    This time he gets him to sign a search warrant along the way.

    p 14 The next morning Stillwell executes that search warrant at a garage to search for evidence of a bison killing! He finds the evidence he was looking for in the form of traces of animal blood on a skill saw. He gets hassled by the owner, a charming fellow everyone calls Baby Head. You can tell already that Stillwell is Bosch-like in his knack for pissing off the rich and powerful without even trying!

    The Body

    Then the real action starts, a hull scraper (person who scrapes the hulls of rich folks boat while they are docked at the harbor) spotted a dead body in the water while he was 30 feet down scraping hulls.

    p 20 We learn later that Stillwell was on the County dive team before his sparkling personality got him moved somewhere else, so he does have diving skills. He dives with the scraper dude to check it out personally. He can’t see much, but he thinks he sees a streak of purple in the corpse’s hair.

    Mainland sends out a homicide team that unfortunately includes the bozo that Stillwell got in trouble with to get exiled to Catalina.

    32 For a little dark comedy, the homicide bozo, Ahearn, falls in the bay! He wore his city shoes, slick-soled leather soles and wasn’t careful on the wet gangway, and took a dive. This of course makes him hate Stillwell even worse 🙂

    43 Stillwell introduces us the harbormaster, a woman named Tash. They just do work stuff this time, but the next time we see her we learn that she and Stillwell are an item! It started casusally when he was assigned to Catalina, but they’re gettin pretty serious!

    46 The once a week local newspaper comes out on Saturday, to be fresh for the weekend crowds. There were three stories on the front page:

    1. Harbor Homicide: Bound body recovered.
    2. Tourist interests want to build a giant ferris sheel you could see from the mainland.
    3. Mystery of the mutilated buffalo. It was decapitated and someone kept the head! Connelley throws in a bit about the island’s long history of UFO sightings.

    All three turn up again in this story later, so pay attention! 🙂

    Tuesday at the Black Marlin Club

    50 The big weeknd is over. There were 26 arrests! Most were inconsequential, but there was one: a fellow who broke a bottle over a deputy’s head in a bar. Stillwell notes some unusual behavior in the bar video.

    54 Of the 16 crime reports over the weekend, only one was interesting: a felony theft at the Black Marlin Club (BMC). Even the name is ominous! :))

    The BMC is a more than century-old private club. Invitation-only membership of rich mainland families with big yachts. Get used to that abbreviation, we’ll be using it a lot!

    We’ve learned a few things so far:

    • Stillwell is an abrasive fellow that gets under people’s skin as part of doing his job … sometimes by design, sometimes because he’s just an annoying guy.
    • Previous undersherffs have put in their time on the island, and scurried back to the mainland as soon as their time was done.
    • Stillwell feels like “he’s come home” out here.
      • He’s met a great woman (Tash), and loves the place and the job.
      • He thinks he might stay here forever.
    • He’s gonna start nosing around at the BMC.
      It seems predictable that he’s going to piss off some rich people.

    The theft was of a small black jade sculpture of a black marlin. Stillwell learns that an employee Leigh-Ann Moss was fired from the BMC around the time it disappeared.

    We are all pretty sure she’s the body in the bay.

    • 67 Stillwell visits the BMC.
    • Leigh-Ann was fired for “overly flirtations behavior”. Meaning it was clear that her whole reason to work there was to get her hooks into a rich guy.
      • Apparently she was very attractive.
    • 90 Tash lets him look at the harbor videos from when the body appeared.
      • 92 There are suspicious things going on on the Emerald Sea.
      • It’s a ketch (a two-masted sailboat) owned by a corporate lawyer named Colbrick.
    • 97 There’s some slightly sketchy stuff going in there but he can’t pursue it.
    • 101 He is going to go to the mainland to nose around a bit.
      • Everyone knows this is a terrible idea since he’s been ordered to stay away from the case.
      • He’ll be in Big Trouble of he gets caught … but he of course does it anyway!
    • 104 He goes to the apartment of a nice guy, slovenly actor who Leigh-Ann crashed with then she needed a place on the mainland.
      • It was the address she gave on her BMC application even though she didn’t really live there.

    Diving Backstory

    112 Way back, before he was a homicide detective, Stillwell was assigned to the Sheriff’s dive team. As long as he’s on the mainland, he meets his old dive team boss Saunders at a bar and pumps him for info on the case he’s not supposed to be working on.

    He learns the body was in a sail bag, a nice canvas bag for storing a jib-sized sail. That seems like a clue!

    Mixing with the rich guys

    • 119 Still on the mainland, Stilwell chats up Colbrick, the owner of the Emerald Sea.
      • Great example of how our guy is quietly annoying. He purposefully doesn’t ring the Colbrick’s doorbell til 9:15 in the evening, because he likes to catch folks when they least expect it.
    • 125 Anyway, he intimidates Colbrick into giving him permission to search the boat. Colbrick insists on going with him.
    • 126 Stillwell gets to see the inside of the California Yacht Clob (CYC) in Marina Del Rey, where Colbrick keeps the boat.
      • We discover that the bag for his jib is new!
    • 133 Back on the island, interviews Colbrick’s “crew”, which is one guy, Duncan.
      • Seems to me like he could’ve just driven out and talked to the guy, but instead he has him arrested and brought in handcuffed for jum[ping probation on a marijuana bust ten years ago.
      • Serious asshole behavior if you ask me.
    • 147 He makes a simple process complicated, but eventually they settle down, and Stilwell decides Duncan is not a suspect, he is a witness, but still …
      • 152 … because of the arrest thing the poor dude still has to spend a night in their lockup.

    Homicide Backstory

    • 156 Just when he gets Duncan sorted, Ahearn pops up wanting his badge!
      • Ahearn has visited the slovenly former boyfriend, who was surprised, because he had already been visited by the police, i.e. Stillwell.
      • Just reading, I saw this coming a mile off, but somehow Stillwell didn’t!
    • Captain Corum is the head of Sheriff’s Homicide. They all have a conference call.
      • It’s against Stillwell’s nature to be open with people, but he has to give a little here if he wants keep his job, much less stay on this case.
      • So he gives the Captain (and us) his theory:
        • 160 “I think Moss was killed inside the BMC with the jade statue.
        • The body was put on the bag and taken out to sea the next day and dumped. Currents brought it back.“
      • It works! Stillwell is now officially on the case.
    • He’s ordered to come to the mainland because Corum wants the team to have a face to face meeting.
      • He’s picked up at the ferry by Sampedro, the other homicide detective, who so far is just a normal guy, not a corrupt moron like Ahearn.
    • The bad blood with Ahearn was before Sampedro’s time, so in the car to police headquarters, Stillwell tells (his side of) the story of why he was kicked off Homicide and banished to Catalina:
      • 164 It’s a depressing story of departmental ass-covering and corruption:
        • a cop named Dobbins got kicked off the force for corruption
        • Because the department let him retire with a clean record he was able to get a clean PI license.
        • He kills a guy in a divorce case he was hired for.
        • Ahearn was the lead investigator on that shooting.
          • Stillwell was on the team.
        • Dead guy’s wife said it was a setup.
        • Stillwell wanted to investigate, but Ahearn took the word of a former cop (and closed it out.
          • He later finds out Ahearn and Dobbins were academy buddies.
        • Stillwell won’t let it go.
        • He discovers the gun was stolen 10 years in a case involving Dobbins.
          • Clear implication is that Dobbins grabbed it for future use.
      • Stillwell thinks the wife made a deal with Dobbins to kill the guy and split the money.
      • Stillwell went straight to IAB with all this rather than take it to Corum.
        IAB covered up the whole thing except:
        • AH got an “unfounded complaint” in his permanent records and
        • Stillwell got sent to “the Island of Misfit Toys“. (love that! 🙂
    • 168 Now we’re back in the present.
      They have their meeting and it’s pretty civil.
      They rehash everything.
      • The only new info is that Stillwell plans to get a search warrant for the BMC, which is sure to piss everybody off over there!
    • 173 Now Stillwell is back on the island doing his regular job.
    • Connelly treats us to in more local color:
      • Still has to go handle an eviction the Zane Grey Hotel!
      • That’s a real place turns out. The author built a home out there that was later made into a hotel.
    • More pages on the life of a Catalina sheriff …
    • 186 Finally something case-related.
      • A girl named Leslie let Leigh-Ann bunk with her sometime, until Leigh-Ann stopped paying rent.
      • Leslie still has all her stuff in a bag!
    • 195 She says Leigh-Ann claimed to have a boyfriend who was gonna pay the back rent.
    • 196 The only thing interesting in Leigh-Ann’s stuff was a $1,200 pair of barely worn Prada heels.
    • 205 There was a card in the shoebox from “Dan”.

    More Island lore:
    The only 4 star hotel on the island is the Mt Ada.

    The entire island used to be owned by “chewing gum magnate William Wrigley Jr.”. The hotel was originally built in 1921 as his summer home!

    • 208 Leigh-Ann met a guy named Daniel Easterbrook on weekends at the Mt Ada Hotel.
    • 212 Back at the substation, Henry Gaston was there, VERY scared! He is the fellow that worked in the tour cart repair place where Stillwell got the blood-stained skill saw.
      • I thought the buffalo thing was going to be just a little side show, but it keeps turning up in the story!
    • 214 Gaaston tell a long story about his boss (and likely buffallo killer) Baby Head (Oscar Terranova) and the mayor colluding on some kind of deal over the Big Wheel.
    • 216 Stillwell lets him spend the night in the lockup because he’s so scared.
    • 218 Early in the book we met the judge who comes to the island every week, now we meet Monika Juarez the District Attorney.
    • 221 We finally hear Stillwell’s theory on the buffalo:
      • A buffalo with it’s head missing will make the mainland news, and pique interest in the extra-terrestrials that are a sure-fire draw for folks to come to Catalina.
        • Pretty weak, but I think that’s it!
    • 223 Stillwell is going to take Juarez back to the station to talk to Gaston, and that’s when the action really starts!

    Action Movie interlude

    • At the station:
      • The deputy is hancuffed and concussed, with a blood-stained head.
      • Spivak, the jerk who clocked the deputy in the bar is gone.
      • Gaston, who they just put there 2 hours ago “for his own protection” is very dead.
      • Finally, the “tech loset” was sprung open, and the hard drive where he reorded the interview with Gaston is gone!
    • 227 Stillwell gets it pretty quickly. It was all planned!
      • Spivak hit the deputy, to get put in jail, so he could kill Gaston if necessary.
    • 230 The homicide crew comes over from the mainland. Captain Corm turns out to be way more interested in keeping his own ass covered than he is in solvong anything.
    • 238 Then things get REALLY tense, Spivak is still on the island and has kidnapped Tash, to make Stillwell destroy the skill saw he still had locked up n the evidence locker. (How did Spivak know that??)
    • 240 Stillwell does some trickery with phone GPS to determine more or less where they’ve got Tash.
    • He used his diver skills to go there by Zodiac rather than on land.
    • 244 He finds them, kills Spivak and frees Tash woo hoo!
    • 249 We spend a few pages with two OIS investigators (whatever that is), going over Stillwell’s actions.
    • 261 Back on the mainland again, he goes to the fancy home of Daniel Easterbrook. His wife has kicked him out, and he’s currently living in a crappy apartment in South Pasadena.
    • He was with her the weekend she was murdered. They excanged bodily fluids the night before (which means the coroners will eventually know about him).

    In case you haven’t figured it out, the name of the book, Nightshade, is the name of a purple wildflower that grows on Catalina … like the purple streak in her hair. It is a deadly poison! 🙂

    • 270 He visits Juarez at the Long Beach Superior Court building.
    • 274 It was NOT a happy visit. Terranova has “661” tattooed on his forearm, signaling that his from Bakersfield (661 area code).
    • He’s found that Juarez is also from Bakersfield and in fact requested t be assigned to Catalina.
    • She and Terranova and Spivak were all homies from the 661!
    • She has been the leak all along.
      • That’s how Terranova knew the skill-saw was still on the island.
    • 281 Stillwell is narrowing in onthe notion that the BMC manager, Charles Crane killed Leigh-Ann.

    To wrap it all up, tbe fool Ahearn does the foolish thing and charges Easterbrook with the murder, but when they go to arrest himhe’s hung himself. [Apparently he really did, there was never any reveal that it was staged by shadowy forces…].

    Stillwell and Juarez get Terranova to flip to the point of playing recording that nails the mayor for the murder in the substation. So Stillwell has the great pleassure of perp-walking the mayor out of a meeting and on to a helicopter to the mainland.

    Sadly, looks like Terranova is going to skate on everything, even the bison slaughter. We’ll get him in the sequel!

    Charles Crane killed Leigh-Ann, we think the jade sculpture broke when he used it to kill her. She had her hooks in him as a way to keep her job until she hooked an actual rich guy. When she nailed Easterbrook she tried to dump Crane, and he didn’t take it well.

    Looks like he and Tash are gonna be ok, they’re camping on the other side of the island at the end of the book.

    Epilogue

    (all these books have one, why can’t I?)

    I commend the author for resisting the urge to set up a high-speed golf cart chase somewhere in the book. If there’s a sequel I’ll bet there is one!

    After making to the end of a 1423 page book, this little ole 336 page book seemed like an appitizer. 🙂

  • Hallmarked Man (2025) Galbraith

    Hallmarked Man (2025) Galbraith

    It comes back to me now that Galbraith writes BIG books!

    This is a LARGE TYPE book, which makes it be even more huge!

    The upside is that even though there are a LOT of pages (1,422 to be precise!) the large type makes each page go very quickly. I wasn’t even trying very hard at dinner and I knocked off 90 pages!

    • I didn’t like the first part of the book very much.
      • I thought about giving it up and moving on to another less massive book that I could carry in one hand 🙂
    • 8/8 – But somewhere around page 100 (less than 1/14th of the way through :)) it got interesting and engaging to me, so now I think I’m here for the long haul.
    • Galbraith/Rowling really IS a good storyteller.
      • She creates interesting characters with charming accents.
      • She’s highly attuned to English class distinctions, particularly among the inbred mostly useless upper classes.
      • She delights little snapshot conversations where one of the principles talks to one of these walk-on characters for 8 or 10 pages.
        • We may never see that character again but those few pages are often very entertaining.
    • 8/17 – p 672 – I have read a lot of pages, but by my math I am STILL not half way through the book!
    • 8/19 – p 728 – Finally half way through!!
      • Both our heroes are making each other miserable right now, but we have 700 pages to fix that!
    • 8/20 – p 817 – Now that I’ve made it past the half-way mark, the pages are just flying by! 🙂
    • 8/24 – p 1024 – Woo!, I’ve made it to the thousands!
      • Our heroes seem to making progress on their relationship!
      • Now I worry that it’s happening too soon in the book!
        There’s 400 pages left for things get better then mess up again! 🙂
    • 8/27 – Skulking my way through the 1100’s.
      Still don’t know who is the dead person from page 3, but we’ve got new boatloads of personal drama for both Robin and Strike! 🙂
    • 8/31 – I made it!! 1422 pages!
      • I finished the murder mystery part over lunch today. A lot of action, I was pretty jacked-up by the time I finished!
    • Epilogues are usually 3-4 pages, right?
      As befits a 1400 page book, the this epilogue was 42 pages.
      A lot of loose ends DID get tidied up:
      • The personal issue that their client Decima hired them for in the first place did not work out the way she wanted it to, but it actually worked out better! {As they try to convince her in the Epilogue.)
      • The long running romantic tension between our hero detectives also got semi-resolved [FINALLY!] in the last 4 pages!
        • That should make us all tune in to the next installment.
      • I 100% enjoyed the book!
        I found it deeply satisifying, and don’t tell anybody, but I cried my brains out while reading it last part of the Epilogue this afternoon! 🙂

    I (re?)-learned that Robert Galbraith is actually a pseudonym for J.K. Rowling of Harry Potter fame!!!
    The whole book makes more sense (to me) knowing this!
    As I say a few times below, all those 800 pages of romance MUST have been written by a lady not a fellow. 🙂

    A little background

    The main characters in all these books are:

    Cormoran Strike

    I picture him as a big, shambling hulk of a man.

    • He runs a detective agency.
    • He fought in Afghanistan, and lost the bottom half of his right leg there. He has a lot of discomfort and recurring pain from it.
    • He doesn’t sound attractive to me, but the ladies in these books go crazy for him!
    • His parents are famous.
      Daddy was a famous rock star.
    • Mom was the famous hot wife of a rock star.
      • He seems to have existed at the edges of the “rich and famous” set his whole life.
      • England is a small island, and all the beautiful people in that set know each other and see each other at the same parties, and know the deep dirt on each other.
        It seems exhausting.
    • Day to day, he’s just a regular guy (almost aggressively so), but his being a part of the beautiful people set by birth is pretty off-putting for me.

    There’s kind of a star-f**ker vibe to these Strike books where half the people they interview are either famous or related to someone famous, and famous fictional people are always buzzing in and out of the story. It’s not my favorite thing about the stories.

    Now that I know that the author is really JK Rowling, this all a little less off-putting.

    Robin Ellacott

    His partner at the detective agency.
    She’s very pretty and smart and courageous and resourceful of course.

    • Evidently in the last book she went undercover at some kind of religious sex cult, which was very intense and stressful for her. [Remind me not to read that book!]. She’s still recovering and is a little fragile.
    • Robin was married then divorced a few books back.
    • She was raped in college.
      We’re hearing this about a lot in this book because it “messed up :her fallopian tubes” so she can’t have kids in the normal way.
      • Not wanting to discuss this with her boyfriend is one more element in the relationship strees that is an on-going theme of this book.
    • She starts this book with a serious boyfriend, a “Paul Newman lookalike” London detective. He doesn’t like her having the job she has, and he doesn’t like Strike.
      • The fact that her work is the most important thing in her life, and he wants her to give it up and have his kids is the unresolved issue of about 600 of these pages!

    More background

    At the start of this book they both have been dating other very attractive people and both secretly wishing they were dating each other.

    They are each afraid to make a move on the other because it would be unprofessional and therefore if it went wrong it would blow up the partnership which they both value extremely.

    • They’ve both had a LOT drama in previous relationships.
      • Especially Strike who seems to have been some kind of serial fornicator with the good-looking ladies of the chic set!
      • His long time girlfriend Charlotte committed suicide in a messy way!

    Robin is in a pretty serious relationship with a regular cop (Murphy). They are serious enough that they spend weekends together looking at houses. She goes along, but it secretly terrifies her! 🙂

    Strike is not dating anybody, although he is incessantly being hit upon because he is evidently such an irresistible hunk..

    They’ve hired a new contractor (Kim), former policeman who keeps trying to create siturations where Strike looks at her boobs and stupid stuff like that. Surprise, it’s hate at first sight for her and Robin and she doesn’t last.

    Have NOT seen the TV series!

    The internet tells me that there IS a seven-part Cormoran Strike series released in 2017, but it doesn’t seem to be available on my services.

    I’m actually pretty happy about that right now, because it allows me to enjoy the books the way we used to in the old days!
    You just read the damn book and use your imagination to picture what the characters look like!

    For instance I have a pretty clear mental image about what Strike looks like, but almost none for Robin.
    Calm+businesslike AND very attractive+sexy is just a hard one for me to process. Once I see the TV show I won’t have to wonder anymore, I’ll know! Which is kind of a loss for me!

    Finally, the book!

    The book opens with Cormoran visiting a potential client.
    She is a strange woman obsessed with secrecy.
    She doesn’t dress it or act like it, but she’s pretty wealthy.
    She is part of a famous family and has famous friends.

    This is where I almost gave up on the book, because I am SO NOT into that star-fucker stuff!

    Then the Freemasons entered the frame and I’m hooked! 🙂

    Galbraith starts each chapter of the book with a quote. After a couple of chapters, these started being Freemason quotes, about the quality of a man who would be a Freemason and such.

    It all sort of fits, because what the reclusive lady has hired Strike for is to prove that a dead body from a silver heist is NOT who the police say it is.

    Freemasons are really into silver turns out!

    • A company called Ramsay Silver hired a guy called William Wright.
    • Two weeks later he was found mutilated and very dead in their vault, which had been emptied of the valuable cache of Freemason silver that had been delivered there on Friday.
    • There were Freemason symbols in his mutilations, and the silver that was stolen was an extremely valuable (and heavy!) Freemason altar.

    The client is sure that the dead guy is not who the police think it is, rather it’s her boyfriend who disappeared around the same time.

    She’s got no support from his rich mom, who says he’s alive and well in Europe, but there’s no evidence of that, and she’s got the money to hire Strike to prove otherwise, so she does!

    The investigation

    Robin talks to the lady from Ramsay Silver who was there.

    They each get occasional phone threats and warnings, and Robin had a really worrisome event where some creeper came up behind her and whispered in her ear. Yuck!

    They’re pissing somebody off.

    I’m about a third of the way through this very thick book, and I don’t know what to say about it. It’s quite interesting page by page, and our heroes are finding stuff out, but there are no big reveals to report yet.

    At least half of all these pages are about the interior lives of Robin and Cormoran.

    In this part of the book it’s Robin and her handsome boyfriend. The are shopping for houses together. He’s very enthusiastic about getting the house and getting married … her not so much.

    We can see that she’s just not ready to marry to the guy. If she could just tell him then they could do other things on the weekend instead of look at houses they’ll never buy. But that’s not how folks do it in real life…

    Strike is acting even more of a mess about this.
    He spends endless time trying to set up a situation where they will together along on a quiet place for an extended time where he can declare his love and lay it all out in a top-down, orderly way as we guys like to do! 🙂

    Surprise! The right moment never happens and in fact their personal relationship steadily deteriorates over the next 500 pages.

    Now that I know a woman is writing this, I don’t see how it could be any other way! 🙂

    They spend so mych time thinking about their feelings for each others!

    This is SUCH a big book! I am somewhere around page 440, and NOT QUITE 1/3of the way through!

    Always a lot of stress at Christmas!

    late 400’s – It’s Christmas. They’re both off to visit their families. Both are really stressed by work and the fact that they are secretly hot for each other.
    But of course, families have their own set of stresses.

    Strike has a particularly unsatifactory visit to the family.

    I have trouble being sympathetic with Strike. The notion of every woman who meets you thinking about going to bed with you is utterly foreign to the life I’ve led.

    The related fact that there is a long list of women he met semi-casually and went to bed with “a couple of times” is also foreign to me. Maybe I’m just jealous, but I just “can’t relate” as the cliche goes. 🙂

    Robin get into a HUGE row with her mom. Everyone is pretty intense.

    p500 – They all – her and her brothers and their women – head to their local to get roaring drunk. That always helps family problems!

    She runs into her ex-husband Matthew, who is NOT married to the woman that broke up their marriage. This makes her get even more drunk.

    Her boyfriend Murphy has tagged along with her to visit her family. That h is doing that instead of visiting his family a pretty big sign of how “serious” the relationship officially is!

    p 507 Back to Strike …
    He’s going to a Christmas Party at his sister Lucy’s house. He shows up as late as possible. She’s really nice, and loves Strike.
    Her husband Greg however is a really asshole and never passes a chance to slag on Strike.

    p 519 Back to Robin …
    Apparently a family tradition is that they all go to the Bay Horse Pub after Christmas dinner.

    Finally it’s closing time at the Bay Horse.
    That lovely timeof night where everyone is bickering and crabbing at each other.

    Murphy is crabby, because he misunderstood a text to Robin from Strike.
    He’s VERY touchy about anything Strike-related.

    Her older brother Stephen seems a cool guy.

    She opens Strike’s Christmas present, which is a very touching silver charm bracelet.

    She’s going to spend the next 300 pages mostly pissed off at him, but on this night , when he is far away she is deeply moved!

    The New Year

    p 531 Everyone is home from Christmas and back to work!

    Robin is thinking a LOT about the bracelet Strike got her!

    • Suddenly there are porn stars in the story.
      • Porn has crept into the edges of the investigation
      • A fellow named Dick de Lion hasn’t been seen lately, and may be the body in the vault that started it all!
    • There is a another dead girl
      • A young woman named Sofia Medina
      • her roommate was a German girl named Gretchen.
      • p 564 Robin meets Gretchen
        • There’s over 10 pages of back and forth.
        • Thegood part is a rich, married guy that dated Sofia.
          He gave her expensive presents.
        • Sofia being murdered was traumatic, but what has Gretchen really upset is that they got drunk together and took sex pictures with her.
        • His name is …
    • Calvin Osgood – Sofia’s rich guy that dated the dead girl and has sex pictures of Gretchen.

    interlude

    I am page 600-something, and I am StILL not half way throiugh.

    I’m not really complaining.

    • I’m totally into the murder mystery.
    • I’m sort of invested in Robin’s travails with the hunky police detective, mostly because I’m rooting for her to break up.
    • I’m sort of invested in Strike’s long-running romantic soap opera.
      • It’s becoming more of a soap opera with hevery page!

    Given how many things have happened in the first 620 pages, it boggles the mind to think what will happen in the remaining 800!

    I amused myself in bed last night makiing a litle wager with myself about whether at the end of this book, Robin and Strike will get. it together and be ahip.n official committed relations.

    I think not.
    Long-range plot arc planner extraordinaire JK Rowling won’t let that happen.
    It’s just too easy, better to set it up as a teaser for the next book.

    More drama and a little moralizing from me

    p 587 The new hire Kim comes up with crime scene photos of the disgustingly mutilated copse that started this all.

    • We STILL do not know his identity!

    Strike gets a call saying that Bijou Watkins is telling everyone that he got her preggo back when they spent a couple nights together.

    I’m one those simple folk who tend to identify with the hero! There have been many times in the 800 pages (so far) of this book where I’m not identifying with Strike at all. Right now, when he is dealing with the collateral damage of randomly fucking a drunk and not too bright but exremely hot woman is one of those times.

    Just because you can get away with it doesn’t mean you should.

    Back to the story — so much happening …

    • p 605 Together they met up with their client Decima.
      It would be easier for Robin’s relationship with the cop of they dropped the case, but Strike wants to keep at it.
    • p 623 Bijou calls. Paternity tests were discussed.
    • 642 Their contractor Barclay had a Saturday night job to tail Plug, who’s not really part of the story …
      • What DOES affect the story is that Barclay gets food poisoning.
        • Strike has to change his plans and do the gig.
      • This simple event reverberates over the next 3-400 pages
        • He’s on the job so he’s got his phone off.
        • Robin can’t get in touch, and in their current state of mistrust she is 100% sure he’s disappeared on Saturday night to shag Bijou again.
      • They are both at acting too juvenile to have a normal adult conversation that would clear that up in a minute.
        • Just like real life, huh!? 🙂
      • She’s pissed at him for being the “thinking with his dick” kind of guy he often is … but ironically this time he wasn’t!
      • She cancels the Lake District junket with a mean email to him.
      • Strike can’t figure out why she’s so mean because …
        • He thinks she doesn’t know about the Bijou Watkins mess.
        • He doesn know that she thinks he was shagging Watkins on Saturday.
      • It’s a proper mess as they would say. 🙂

    661 Strike is vilely hung over and throwing up on the train that was supposed to take he and Robin to the love nest that he reserved in happier days before it all went to crap spectacularly.

    He runs into a friendly journalist who drops a little Masonic gossip about Lord Oliver Branfoot, who may turn out to be a big deal!

    672 Robin interviews a random teenage girl named Tia that turned out to be really charming!

    I’m beginning to see why Rowling needs so many pages.
    I would love to see her storyboard where she maps out the coincidences that made for such a disastrous weekend.

    P 700’s Robin is shadowing a creepy photoshoot guy.

    • Her boyfriend calls and bitches her out because there’s a leak in his case that was Kim’s fault!
    • Her niece has a premature delivery and the baby isn’t right, so her whole extended family is freaking out.
    • The guy she’s tracking is a real shit.
      • He tells her lies about Strike and his girlfriend that committed suicide.
      • He’s part of the evidently endless extended circle of everyone who knows everyone in the British “beautiful people” class.
      • They have a degrading pet nickname for Robin which he tells her.
      • Her stalker comes up afterwards.
        He doesn’t hurt her, but does scare the sh-t out of her.

    Cormoran is having a equally awful time but in very different ways.

    • He may be a baby daddy
      • Bijou has a charming habit is saving discarded condoms so she can use them to confuse paternity tests.
    • He slipped in the wet grass following his interview and face-planted.
      • He got super muddy and hurt his leg. It was painful and embarrassing and made him even crabbier.
    • He thinks Robin hates him, and at that very moment he’s kinda right!

    They meet at a a pub to exchange notes, and it goes badly.

    They’re both in terrible moods, and both did NOT to their usual thorough job on their work because they are so distracted by EVERYTHING … and neither one of them would share what was really bothering them.

    I’m beginning to see why Rowling feels like she needs 1400 pages to tell this story!

    She loves doing goofy British accents and describing odd little corners of the island.

    Our heros are working together …

    Both are still really about their internal dramas, and so not inclined to communicate with each other in a way that will improve understanding!
    It’s so much like real life that I find it quite excruciating toread about.

    There’s this character called Tyler.
    I’m nearly to page 800 and I don’t remember how they introduced him to the story, but he is a good candidate to be the person who was dead and mutilated in the first chapter oh so many pages ago!.

    The story of how Tyler got his life ruined in his home town was classic Rowling.
    A GOOD thing! 🙂

    742 The pair of them (Robin and Strike) are in Ironbridge, picturesque town on the Severn River where Tyler grew up.
    The old lady (Tyler’s mom) they want to interview is way up on a very steep street.

    [Nice descriptive detail:
    Houses on both sides face the river, so the houses on the left have their backs to you.]

    • They are both in terrible moods, but Strike has the additional drag that he hurt his leg at the last interview, and he’s too stubborn and pissed at Robin to tell her he’s in pain or to ask for help.
    • She’s too pissed off to help anyway! 🙂
    • 744 The old lady is not home.
      • They’re peering in the windows.
      • The guy across the street (sporting a Steely Dan t shirt 🙂 comes over.
      • He is extremely belligerent in his north England dialect about
        “What do you outsiders want?!”
    • After they get him quieted down, he turns out to be really nice!
    • He invites them over to his place to wait for the old lady to return.
    • Strike lets Robin do the interview since even he knows he’s a cranky, uncomfortable asshole right now.
    • His name is Ian Griffiths.
      Save that in your memory bank for later! I .didn’t even include his name first time around, but came back an added it to mark the first time he’s introduced into the story!
    • Since they are just killing time, Robin ask this guy why Tyler has such a bad reputation in his old neighborhood.
      This part is classic Rowling commentary on the politics of class in Britian, and kind of a Roshomon moment:
      This is one nice neighbor’s take. Local girls they interview later have takes that are pretty much opposite!
      • Tyler was a nice teenager working as a mechanic at the auto shop.
        He wasn’t too bright, and if you were nice to him he thought that ment you were into him.
      • He had a cute local girlfriend he thought he was gonna marry.
        She did NOT think that!
      • Then, rich, fancy city people moved into the big house at the top of the hill.
        True.
      • Everybody adored new people because they were rich and fancy and the locals were not.
        True.
      • 752 Big concert in another town, they all want to go,
        • Rich kid’s “couldn’t get a lend of Daddy’s Range Rover“., so he asks of Tyler would drive. Tyler got sick but let the rich kid use HIS car an drive it to the show.
          The rich kid is dating his former girlfriend of course.
        • The rich kid crashed the car and he and the girl were killed.
        • Simple local tragedy so far, but then the rich family starts putting it out that Tyler tampered with the car, because their perfect boy wouldn’t have just fucked up like that on his own.
    • So there it all is, rich people being jerks to the simple folks

    Legal aside:

    p 790 – Turns out pepper spray is illegal in England! I know this because Robin is “weeping” this morning because she rubbed it while she was making a home-made batch (chilies, cayenne, garlic and vinegar) in case the creepy guy attacks again. It would be illegal even to be found carrying it.

    [Checkov’s gun alert! If it’s introduced in the story, it’s going to matter later! :)]

    Back to the story:

    Robin and Barclay are out today surveilling a woman named Fiona, who’s in the sex trade and has a big, mean boyfriend. The reason Barclay is here is to look out for him returning while he does the interview.

    792 Robin learns about the bad prawn incident!
    She is processing the info that Strilke was working Saturday night, not shtupping Bijou Watkins again!

    796 Fiona tells Robin that Dick (real name Danny) de Lion is from some place with no cars. There’s a rich guy in the background that has paid all of them for sex (boys AND girls!).

    He also paid for Danny’s new teeth! Danny threatened him somehow and now fears for his life and has disappeared.

    816 They are still surveilling this awful guy Plug. His son was bitten by a dog. Now they think Plug’s into dog fighting.

    • There’s a lot of pages on Strike having to get a paternity test for Bijou.
    • There are even more pages of Robin an her cop boyfriend shopping for a house.
      • The on-going fact that she and Strike are working on a case that had been officially closed by the police is a sore subject between them.

    824 Robin gets a whatsapp from the daughter of Steely Dan guy.
    He loved Tyler, but he daughter says he’s a creep! See my italic comments above 🙂

    833 An Army buddy gets Strike a tour of the Freemason Hall.

    844 Finally, a good set up fpr our heroes to make up!!

    Robin is surveilling someone they call Mrs Two-Times. (They’ve nicknamed her husband Two-Times, since he’s always two-timing his wife! 🙂

    Robin is surveilling the wife tonight at a nice restaurant.
    Midge is supposed to join her, since two women chatting is a LOT less noticeable than one woman alone. Bur Midge has to bail for some reason. Strike seizes the opportunity and shows up for quality time with Robin!

    845 So there they are, having a nice quiet dinner at a nice restaurant, with nothing better to do thatn maybe figure out their issues a little bit!

    I guess I’m pretty invested in these characters and this book, because this fictional even made my whole evening a lot nicer!!

    They do a lot of catching up. But book ought to come with a storyboard, si you can keep track ofall the minor characters that come and go, then come back again 200 pages later …

    856 As of this page in the book, Robin and Murphy are still house shopping, and in fact have an offer in on one they like. So even though it’s a nice dinner, Strike’s big picture hopes are dashed yet again! sigh…

    860 Strike does the paternity test.

    864 Robin is trying to track down Cosima, one of the beautiful people. She has a pretty intense phone interview with Zeta a girl from Tyler’s home town.
    It’s all about crappy men can be to women where they think they can.

    867 Robin unleashes this great zinger:

    Robin was sick of bullying, callous, deviant men … (but she had to show her boyfriend a cheerful face when he got to the pub…)

    Hard to imagine a dude writing that sentence.

    • 870 Robin has a lengthy chapter of drama with Murphy about houses and babies.
    • Strike is trying to run town Todd the security guard at the Silver shop.
    • 893 Strike gets the phone call he’s been hoping for telling him that he’s NOT a dad!!
    • 905 They have tailed Pug into the countryside around Ipswich, to a big time dog fight!
      • 909 Strike actually goes into the arena to get video.
      • Towards the end he gets spotted.
      • A big scary dog is sicc’ed on him!
      • It’s going to get really mess, but Robin saves him with her homemade pepper spray [Checkhov’s gun comes through!]

    New Chapter

    • 917 They’ve determined that the place where Danny) de Lion grew up with no cars is the island of Sark.
      • It’s British but closer to France.
      • They’ve booked a flight together(!) in a few days.
    • Robin and Murphy have a few more pages wrangling about houses and babies.
    • 924 She has a little cat fight with Kim, who really has it in for her.

    Sark

    • 929 Finally flying to Sark!
      • Actually, they fly to Guernsey, then take a ferry to Sark. Ten pages of catching up on the plane.
    • 938 Arrive Guernsey, take taxi to town of St Peter Port, for the ferry to Sark.
    • 941 45 minutes later the are on Sark, where they will have to walk wherever they want to go. A tractor takes them and the other visitors to their rentals.
    • 942 The walk to de Leon’s house, and meet Danny’s short but thick and mean brother Richard, who is brandish a piece of firewood as he approaches.
    • 950 They putter about the island for a fwe pages..
    • 956 They find Danny gardening up the hill, and he clocks Strike in the face with hiw shovel!

    Then they have the now-familiar scrum where they convince him they aren’t the law or the bad guys. Robin tackles him!

    [IMO, this is another sign that the author is a woman:
    the female protagonist gets todo a lot of the “heavy lifting”    .]

    Oliver Branfoot

    960 It’s FINALLY becoming clear that this rich guy names Oliver Branfoot is the force behind a lot of the bad things in this book.

    • He’s the sugar daddy that took sex pics of Sofia Medina and her friend, and who probaby who had Sofia killed.
    • He paid for Danny’s teeth.
    • He thought that the body in the vault was Danny. I think he still does!
    • That’s what put Danny in danger.
    • 971 He has agreed to talk to Robin.

    She is cooking dinner for Strike

    They have coffee. She gets dinner to cook at their lodge.

    Like all the men in this book, I’m starting to love her too.
    Fixing food will do it for me every time! 🙂

    • 979 She’s cooking, keeps gettin texts from Murphy.
    • 984 She can’t stop crying, and has to tell Strike that she lost a baby.
    • 990-998 Working over the list of suspects by the fireplace.
    • Sounds pretty sweet!

    page 1000!! Back in London.

    • 1001 Kim is supposed to watching Mrs Two-times, but she’s gonna be late, so Strike show’s up.
    • 1007 Kim finally shows up, she’s been beat up by her old boyfriend’s new girlfriend. It’s a complicated world out there!
    • 1012 She starts making a pass at him, and he shut’s it down pretty brutally.
      • “We’re not going to fuck … ever!”
      • She quites the next day.
    • 1013 Robin’s staying at Murphy’s place. She gets Wynn Jones for a phone interview, and surprise he is exactly the juvenile slime bag we thought.
    • 1026 They banter until he says she’s got to show him her tits to get more informatin. That’s the end of that conversation.
    • 1029 Murphy comes back from the gym and she finds a Vodka bottle in his gymbag.
    • 1035 He comes back happy and carefree from picking up for him and Robin to find his whole life turned upside down by the vodka bottle discovery.
    • 1038 Robin has backed her bag and moves out.

    Brian Judge -> Barnaby’s

    • 1030 Strike tails the disgusting Plug, to a place outside a junkyard
      called Brian Judge Scrap.
    • It’s the middle of the night, and while he’s waiting for Plug, a familiar looking man pulled up in a rusted van. He drives in inside and leaves it. He walks back out and gets in a car and drives away.
    • 1039 We’ve progressed from late night to very early morning.
      • Strike has it in his head to run down the “last known address ” of Todd’s mother.
    • He does find it.
      • It’s a disgusting place.
      • Nobody answers his knock.
      • He’s negotiating woth some street kids to not mess with his BMW, then decides to use his skelton keys to peek into her house “to make sure she’s all right”.
    • 1043. Well, whatd’ya know, … the bodies of Jim Todd and his mother are lying in the living room in an advanced state of decay! Yuck
    • Good citizen that he is, Strike waits for the police..
    • The next few pages are his interview with Scotland Yard.
      • They are a perfect little gem of Rowling dialog!
    • 1053 There are two cops:
      • A white man around 50, cheap clothes and overwhelming body odor.
        • He’s investigating Sofia Medina.
      • a mid-30’s woman with red hair. A large mole on her cheek, gaps in her teeth, but good complexion and attractive green eyes.
        • Turns out she is the informant Murphy has had for the whole book (Iverson).
          • He may have shagged her back in the day.
        • She’s investigating the “silver vault murder”
    • 1058 They do a lot of sparring. They even mention Murphy.
    • 1065 Everyone is eventually tires of the game.
    • 1066 The police don’t charging him or keeping overnight.
      • In return Strike tells them that the mysterious Barnaby’s is the junkyard he visited tonight!
    • 1070 Robin/Murphy drama
    • 1073 She meets Strike at a cafe. They are both kind of a mess:
      • He’s still awake from being with the police.
      • She can’t sleep for all the relationship drama.
    • 1074 Strike reports on his busy night.
    • 1077 She tells him Murphy’s having a hard time.
    • He tells her Kim quit. They’re both kinda relieved about it.

    Robin has quality time with Dino Longcaster

    • Robin STILL wants to talk to Cosima Longcaster about why Decima’s missing boyfreind Rupert was at the fancy party beforehe tisappeared.
    • 1091 She waylays her outside her dad’s fancy club, Dino’s.
    • 1093 That fails, but Cosima must of complained to her daddy, because he comes out and invites Robin inside!
    • It’s a strange interview.
      • 1095 He calls Rupert “the jellyfish”.
      • 1096 He orders Robin a Dubonnet and gin, “the Queen’s favorite” 🙂
      • He gives Robin fashion advice she didn’t ask for or want (but follows later)
      • He does bring Cosima in for the info Robin wanted.
      • 1098 He shows her an old family picture. She really does get a lot of good background on Decima’s wierd inbred family (not literally, I think 🙂

    Strike’s at the office

    • 1106 They both endup at th office late that night.
    • 1123 Weirdly, Mrs Two-Times comes to the office to hire Strike to investigate her hubby.
    • This is why I love this really long book!
      • She knows Strike’s firm been watching her for her husband, so she hires the firm to watch him for her also.
        • At the same time Can you do that?
      • They shake on it, and off she goes! 🙂
    • 1127 Strike learns Murphy’s off the wagon.
      • The new hire Wardle was on the police force at the start of this book, so !he knows all the current inside gossip, including that Murphy fell off the wagon!

    Bad day for Robin

    • Emergency call from her (still…) boyfriend to come over and meet his parents for the day.
      • 1138 Mom is nice enough, Dad is not very likeable.
      • The dudes watch football, Robin checks work phone, and mom knits.
      • 1143 She’s gettin stuff done on the phone. She’s pictures Chloe Griffith in Instagram.
    • 1147 Murphy yells at her for being on the phone while he was engrossed in a football game.
      • He’s showing a lot of dry drunk symptoms. :<
    • 1149 She searchs his room for vodka, but finds a wedding ring! EEEK!!

    Strike is off to the “West Country in his BMW”

    • 1152 Strike STILL can’t make himself come clean to Robin.
    • In his mind he’s SURE she has accepted Murphy’s proposal, and just ins’t telling him.
      • Could NOT be farther from the truth as we know!
      • He’s such a moron in this Robin stuff.
    • 1160 He’s found the place called the Golden Fleece, where Tyler might be working. It wasn’t Tyler, but he does get waylaid my an MI5 agent.
      • He’s an arrogant fuck, and he pisses Strike off (big mistake!)

    Robin visits Mr Whitehead, gets assaulted again

    • 1166 This is the dad of the boy that got killed in the car accident.
    • This turns out to be another Rashomon moment, because his version of events is quite different from the other two quite different versions we’ve heard.
      • 1169 He thinks the car WAS messed with, but it was Chloe Griffin who did it, NOT Tyler!
        • Didn’t see that coming!
      • 1172 He says Chloe made a creditable threat to kill Tyler and Ann-Marie … over something that sounds insignificant.
    • 1178 She thinking about all this instead of paying attentiion to her surroundings getting into her car, and her stalker gets her!!!!
    • He’s strangling her, but she does get her hands on her pepper spray and “neutralizes” him!
    • 1181 Strike has a phone call with Danny de Lion, to smear Branfoot before Branfoot has a chance to eff him up. Great advice, and he takes it this time!

    Strike is gonna get smeared by the gutter press, so much as he hates the idea, he has to visit his dad to get a good lawyer!
    (Spoiler alert: Dad seems like a nice guy, and Strike should lighten up on him.)

    • 1182 His press buddy tips him off, and it sounds bad!
    • 1185 He swallows his pride and visits his rock star father to get the help of his lawyer!
    • Jonny Rokeby was a big time rock star with his band the Dead Somethings. He treated Strike badly as child but wants to “know his son” in his old age.
    • I really like the guy from these few pages!
      • He’s on his best behavior of course, but he seems sincere and I think Strike should give him a chance!
    • 1186 Jonny does introduce him up to Denholm his fearsome lawyer.
      • Jonny want’s to pay for it, Strike categorically refuses.
      • 1189 They bicker about money for a while. Strike wants NONE of his money …
    • 1192 Jonny: “I behaved like a cunt, I’m fuckin admittin it, all right?“
    • 1193 He learns more that I need to know about how he was conceived!
    • 1196 Robin calls, she at the police tation about the attack.
    • 1198 Strike’s sister Pru thinks he’s in love with Robin and they should be together. (duh! …we readers say after 1200 pages. of this…)
    • At the front door Strike agrees to “have a beer” with Dad! Yay!
    • New Chapter
    • Robin’s at home still feeling beat up.
    • 1206 A lot of self-doubt about being the weak link, etc.
    • 1208 Strike is thinking about Robin.
      • He’s sure that’s she’s engaged but not telling him!.. (she’s not…)
      • His plan is to approach his next convo with her
        “with a tact for which he was not generally renowned.” 🙂
    • 1214 “You’re the best I’ve ever worke with, Ever!”
      Strike does manage to work that in!
    • 1215 “You didn’t want to lose me. I don’t want to lose you.”
    • Strikie tells her about visiting his dad and the lawyer stuff.

    Sir Oliver Branfooot

    • 1226 First surprise is that former employee Kim is at his side. It’s gonna be spicy!
    • 1227 A very entertaining chapter!
    • Very satisfying in that Strike comes out on top in the little pssing match that this whole expensive meal was.
    • 1230 Branfoot goes out of his way to be mean to Robin.
      • We can guess that Kim had a hand on that part.
    • 1233 Kim has blabbed everything abut their working for Decima.
    • 1236 She thinks she’s provided killer dirt on Strike and Robin
    • 1237 Finally Strike turns the tables.
    • Branfoot is the rich guy who turns people with sex, usually older dudes with too-young girls. He secretly films them.
    • 1239 Strike correctly figures he got Kim on this scam.
      • She knew the plan to seduce a fellow.
      • She didn’t know he would keep the film to used against her!
    • 1240 Strike drops the news that de Leon is alive and talking to the press!
    • 1241 Branfoot stalks out. Then Kim stalks out!
    • 1243 Robin really enjoyed it!

    Strike drives to Heberley

    Heberley is where Charlotte grew up, and still the home of her awful mother, Tara.

    • 1253 He gets in by impersonating a delivery guy.
    • 1254 He snoops while the maid is fetching Tara and sees the missing nef we’ve heard so much about in her dining room.
    • A nef is “extravagant table ornamental container made of precious metals in the shape of a ship” [wiki page]
    • That’s basically what he drove there to do, to confirm the presence of the nef.
      • They say horrible things to each other for few more pages, then he leaves.
    • Recall that all the way back at the start of the book, 1250 pages ago(!) Strike was hired by Decima Mullins? to prove that the motilated body in the silver shop safe was her boyfriend Rupert Fleetwood.
      • This nef was stolen around the time of the morder.
    • By finding the nef, Strike thinks he has proved the opposite, namely that Rupert Fleetwood is NOT the mutilated body, but is alive and well and hiding at a Clairmont Hotel somewhere in Europe!
    • 1264 He has a faairly short convo with Decima, reporting all this.
      • He says their contract with her has been satisfyied by proving that Rupert is alive, so he terminates it.
      • He basically wasn’t comfortable taking any more of her money.
      • Boom! After all these pages, it’s over.
    • 1265 He reports all this to Robin.
    • 1268 Robin is having trouble letting it all go.
    • 1271 She gets visited by her brother Martin who seems to me another of those handsome but weak and useless men that populate this book.
      (i.e. everyone but Strike 🙂
      • His wife kicked him out because he’s an asshole.
    • 1289 Robin gets a long late-night email from Chloe Griffiths
    • 1291 Strike is still looking for Rena. (I’ve forgotten who Rena is!)
    • 1299 There is a terrorist attack on Westmonister Bridge … in case everyone isn’t stressed enough…
    • 1306 Strike finally runs down a mentally ill Rena huddled under a bridge in Camden.
    • 1318 Robin gets in phone touch.
      • Strike has banashed her to working at home because the police released her attacker! 🙁
    • Midge finally intervierws Hussein Modammed, the fellow living in the same dump apartment bldg as Willian Wright.
      • Recall that this is hte name the dead guy was using when he was killed.
      • Willian Wright had “weights” in hos room with gold lettering on them.
        • Not sure why this is important, but everyone is pretty excited about it.

    I can’t quite remember how we got here, but Strike and Robin are convinced that Ian Griffiths is the chief thug that has done most or all of the murdering in this book.
    He and his crew of misfits have also done most of the sexual assaulting.

    • 1333 Robin and Midge are meeting for a job.
      • They are going to check the walls of the basement of Ramsay Silver.
      • In a pricelss bit of dialog, Robin asks her how she’s doing?
        • “Not bad, I did a bit of rebound shagging last night!“
    • 1335 Strike is also meeting up for a job.
      • He’s invited Wardle and Barclay:
        • both are big, rough ex-cops who will be handy if things get rough, which Strike thinks is a good possibility.
    • 1339 Robin and Midge have broken through the wall in the back of the storage cabinet in the basement.
      • Surprise!!
      • The silver never left the building! It was there all along!
    • 1343 Strike and his buddies are back in Ironbridge, the little town where so much of this book happened.
    • The crew of rapist/thugs are all at Ian Griffiths house next to Tyler Powell’s old family house.
      • We were there like 1000 pages ago, and Griffiths did a great imitation of being a nice, normal guy!
    • 1344 Strike thinks all the thugs are at the pub, so he breaks and enters (again)
    • Wynn Jones was sleeping upstairs. Strike clonks him and frees Sapphire, a 13 year old girl they had chained to the radiator.
    • Ian Griffiths comes home from the pub. It was a big, dramatic scene, but by page 1356 they have them all subduesd.
    • Strike interrogates them for a few pages before calling the police.
    • 1368 This guy Griffiths is pretty much the mastermind.
      • A ton of confusing little plot points are clear up as being purposeful misdirection.
      • They made Sapphire impersonate Chloe Griffiths, who is actually dead.
      • With fake emails and texts, they’ve made us believe Tyler is alive and well and working at a pub somewhere.
        • When in fact has he’s the mutilated guy in the vault!
        • I.e. he’s been dead since the start of the book!
    • 1377 The last thing we learn before the police arrive is that the girl Chloe Griffiths that they thought was in Europe is really named Jolanda and was Ian’s abused daughter. She is buried under the floor of this house. (yuck)

    Epilogue

    Well, that was exhausting!

    • 1381 Strike attends the funeral of his army mate that killed himself.
    • 1383 The tell-all on Sir Oliver Branfoot was published,
      • Griffiths did the murders, but Branfoot ordered them.
    • 1386 They found Tyler’s hands in Petts Woods where Strike thought they would be.
      • Now they can PROVE he is the body!
    • 1389 Robin is on a work trip to Sardinia, … purpose unknown.
    • 1399 She arrives at the Hotel Serenita.
      • She goes to the dining room to eat after her long trip to get here.
      • She doesn’t have to ask around, because the elusive Rupert Fleetwood bings her the menu!!
      • 1401 She sets him straight on it all.
        • Decima’s child, his child, is healthy and normal.
      • Decima was his half-sister.
        • That’s why he bugged out, he couldn’t keep committing incest.
      • Dino Longcaster banged his mother back in the day, and here we are.
      • 1406 Robin convinces him to call Decima and come clean.
    • 1407 Back in London Decima visits Robin and Strike at the office.
      • She leaves, then Robin heads out the door to meet her Murphy in his birthday, where he will almost cetainly propose to her and give her that ring!
    • For some reason, after allll these page and allll this drama, here on page 1413 Strike decided it’s now or never!
    • So he chase her down the stairs to tell her!
    • 1414 He stutter and blithers and beats around the bush for a awhile.
    • 1415 Finally he just blurts it out: ‘I’m in love with you.’
    • 1416 First disbelief….
    • 1417 Then anger … now she mad, as well she should be!
    • 1418 Strike: ‘I don’t want an affair. I want to be with you. Marry me.‘
      • Strike surprised himself when that popped out! 🙂
    • 1419 She really does leave this time.
    • 1421 Back on the office, the phone rings … and rings and rings.
    • Strike numbly stares into space then goes upstairs to get fish food.
    • And that’s how the book ends!!!!

  • Smiley’s People (1979) – Le Carre – second half

    Episode 4, Chapters 17 – 19

    Reading the book in parallel with the tv show is really fun for this part!

    I watched Smiley meet Herr Kretzschmar on TV first, then read about it the next day … and hugely enjoyed both!

    Chapter 17 – Now Smiley is in Lubeck Germany, on the bleak northern Germany road Herr K directed him to take to find Otto Leipzig..

    The road was as empty as the landscape.

    Just as I watched it on TV last night:

    • He finds the shabby house nestled in an industrial area.
      • He disturbs the obviously fornicating young couple …
    • … but he does get them to direct him to a boat in an even sketchier area.
    • At the boat harbor he is faces with the problem of getting on the boat.
      • So just as TV, he persuades an old man in a dinghy to row him out there.
    • Poor ole Otto had been tortured to death.
      • It was really gross on video, but only mildly gross in print.
    • He does find a packet suspended on fishing line off the side of the boat.
      • Marked with yellow chalk, which we by now recognize as the General’s tradecraft.
    • The scummy local derelicts trash his rental car like in the video and the book.
    • He gets the heck out of there in his trashed rental car to avoid meeting the police.

    The printed page is better here, because we get a nice internal dialog about how soon the German police are gonna come looking for him. He buys a funny hat and some extra clothes, just so ticket takers and direction givers will remember him a little differently.

    You can tell he’s too old for this shit. Those kids were creepy.

    It’s the weekend, and he determines that Herr Kretzschmar is at his house in the suburbs of Hamburg. He takes the train to there.

    They are having the German idea if an American suburban pool party.
    I loved it!

    Herr K doesn’t recognize Smiley because of the funny hat, so lets his wife welcome him!

    His wife is a leggy babe in Vegas pool clothes, the perfec embodiment of a bourgeois German idea of Vegas style. 🙂

    [In the video the funny that stuff happens at Herr K’s is different, but the drama when he hears that Max is dead is the same intense thing!]

    Smiley and the missus have pleasant conversation for a minute until Herr K comes and who Smiley is, and that he is distressed!
    They go inside and he gets the bad news about Otto.

    It’s a stark contrast, the carefree summer party outside and Herr Kretzschmar being genuinely grief-stricken over Otto inside.
    He really liked Otto, and he really wants to fuck up whoever did it!

    I came out of this episode with a deep admiration for Herr Kretzschmar!
    He’s a guy you would want to have on your side!

    Chapter 18 – Back to Paris, and Madame Ostrakova still in her lonely flat trying to survive.

    Recouperating on her divan.
    Facing the door with her ancient pistol clutched in both hands.

    She can see them out the window in the courtyard below. On TV, they are a cartoon version of Russian KGB agants, black coats, black hats and a menacing way of something as harmless as asking directions to her flat.

    264 Too many people are collected in the hallway to watch them as they knock on her door, so they leave for the moment. You know they will be back.

    FINALLY, Smiley arrives at that same barricaded door. The same concierge accompanies him upstairs.

    She tries to bullshitting Madame O, that Smiley is a doctor to get her to open the door.

    Smiley tells her the simple truth, that he has the letter she sent to the General. He slips it under the door …. she lets him in!

    Slap-stick interlude

    It’s funny to see one of these over-dignified brit dudes suddenly break a sweat and start hurrying! It’s a wonderful scene on the TV show and a great few pages in the book starting on p268.

    Our old friend Peter Guilliam (from the last book) is now Head of Station at British Embassy in Paris. He gets a call from his wife, who is French, pretty, and pregnant. She’s very agitated and says he has to come immediately!

    He busts into his own house, grabs the intruder in a headlock!

    It’s George Smiley … with Madama Ostrakova in the bedroom being ministered to by Marie-Claire Guilliam.

    This part is VERY video-friendly. It’s just another action scene on the page, but it’s Keystone Kops sequence on the screen.

    Episode 5, Chapters 19-

    Chapter 19 – George and Saul get together.

    Saul Enderby is a classic, central casting upper class British twit!

    He’s very easy to mock and bitch about, but over the next few pages he turns out to be a lot smarter than he acts. He’s actually good at his job. He DID replace Smiley as the Head Man after all… And the pro-Smiley crowd still has it out for him to this day. Bt he actually comes off as pretty good at the job in this book.

    pp 276-288 The next few pages are him rereading Smiley’s report, which is about the events of this book. It’s VERY enligthening, a look into Karla’s mind among other things.

    288-293 After Enderby helpfully recaps this complicated story, they get down to what Smiley wants, which is approval of a mission regarding Karla and the mystery woman who Karla wants a legend for.

    I secretly kinda like Enderby, even though he sets himself to to be very hate-able. After bitching at Smiley for a few more pages he gives him everything he needs.

    p 293 Their last snippet of conversation is about Smiley’s lighter!

    If you’ve read the whole cycle, recall that Smiley actually interviewed Karla in India many years ago. “Tried to get him to defect”. Tricky bastard that he is, Karla came out of that meeting with Smiley’s lighter. “An ordinany Ronson, they’re built to last”!

    Chapter 20

    We’re sort of at the beginning of the end game now.

    Smiley is in a weeks long holding pattern. We get impressions from Toby and others of how inward he is.

    300 He shakes his watchers and takes to train to visit Ann, his estranged wife! Recall that she is REALLY estranged because her affair with Bill Hayden …. which made that whole thing so much worse.

    307 Finally things are moving.
    Smiley takes a plane and train to Berne Switzerland.

    Chapter 21

    The chapter is very fun if you delight in the play-by-play on British spy-craft of the era (which I do!)

    309 Toby is briefing George about Grigoriev’s cover at the Russian Consulate in Berne. If you’ve lost track of who the hell Grigoriev is, he’s the other fellow in the sex photo with Otto Leipzig. The photo that seems to have gotten Otto and the General killed.

    It’s really fun how le Carre teases it all out, but Grigoriev a mid-level Russian foreign service hack, who Karla has chosen to implement his plan.

    George and Saul have a very funny back and forth about how Karla can’t use his regular VERY good spies for this because it’s off the books. So he chooses Grigoriev, who is pretty good at tracking the kind of off-the-books spending they’re asking him to do, but he’s a terrible spy. 🙂

    [I think the other reason is that he is basically kind man who treats the girl as well as you could hope for.]

    He’s the Russian they plan to “burn” in their lingo.

    So here we are, George and Toby and Grigoriev, who’s suddenly got enough money to buy his own Mercedes.

    310 “They like the guy George. You know how watcher are.
    It’s love or hate all the time. They like him.”

    And indeed, he is a very sympathetic likeable fellow in the BBC series!

    “What do you make of Grigoriev, Toby? What is he?“
    “A trained hood he isn’t, George. No tradecraft, actually a complete catastrophe. But he’s not straight either. He’s a half-breed, George.“

    Chapter 22

    Now we switch frames to the institution where they are keeping Tatiana (called Alexandra at the institution).

    She makes a weak pass at the doctor, just to relieve the bordom. Mostly we just get a few pages of her confused internal dialog. She is indeed a little cray-cray.

    And who can blame her?!

    This scene kind of bland on the screen, but what’s going on in her head is very intense on the written page.

    Chapter 23

    Back to Toby and George in a coffee shop, watching the bank where Grigoriev goes every Friday to get his cash.

    Here is why I love reading these books:

    322 George saw the yellow mail van parked boldly in the no-parking bay, and he knew it was Toby’s post. Toby had a life-long faith in mail vans; he stole them wherever he went …

    327 The second half of the chapter is Grigoriev doing the second half of his Friday routine, which is to to ride his bike to the institution (so no one sees his diplomatic plates) and visit Tatiana/Alexandra.

    He really is a nice guy. And the girl really is kind of a mess.

    Episode 6, Chapters 24 –

    Chapter 24 – We’re gettin there!

    337 Ten pages were devoted to finding the right time and right way to approach Grigoriev. I’m happy to say that the movie followed the written script very closely here and was delightful.

    Grigoriev sneaks off from his routine to watch a chess game in the park. This is the opportunity Toby and his crew have been waiting for to get him away from his Soviet watchers so they can abduct him.

    They do it very smoothly in broad daylight in a public park, and bring him to Smiley.

    Smiley plays his part as a disapproving Soviet commisar perfectly, and soon Grigoriev was singing like a bird!

    354 Another scene that was charming in the book AND the show, Smiley makes him call his wife and be authoritative with her. He loved it! And all the watchers loved it and cheered him. It was very sweet.

    Chapter 25 Still with Grigoriev.

    357 Grigoriev still telling his is story. He is taken to meet Karla.

    Chapter 26

    The final meeting took took the last twelve minutes of the final show. It was very suspenseful. Toby was so wired up he could barely form sentences!

    He and George and Peter G watch the little man in a workers overcoat walk across the checkpoint bridge between East and West Germany and turn himself over to the watchers.

    Lotta stuff going on in the eye contact between him and Smiley.

    He dropped Smiley’s lighter (which no one but Smiley noticed?!).

    I’m pretty sure Smiley just walked away and left it there.

    This was very hard on me, because I would have HAD TO pick it up if it were me….. 🙂

  • Smiley’s People (1979) – Le Carre – first half

    Smiley’s People (1979) – Le Carre – first half

    Fifteen pages in I can tell that I am going to have a LOT of thoughts about this book.

    Many of these are regarding parallels between the Trump Adminstration’s manner of speaking and the Soviet Union in the Cold War.

    Watching the TV Series at the same time:

    I noticed a few weeks ago that the BBC TV series for Smiley’s People is here on YouTube right now! So my new plan is to re-watch the BBC series at the same time I’m re-reading the book!.

    Characters vs Cast:

    • The book Wiki lists the Characters
      • e.g.: Otto Leipzig – “The Magician”, Estonian small-time crook who works with Vladimir
      • or: Oleg Kirov alias Oleg Kursky – an agent deputed to find a suitable legend for Karla’s daughter
    • The tv Wiki, lists the Cast, which is the same book characters along with people who are playing them:

    For the first, “Small time crook” sounds so trivial compared to how Otto fits in Madame Ostrakova’s imagination (“the Magician!”).

    For the second, Oleg Kirov is a minor character in the drama, but the bit about ‘Karla’s daughter‘ in the book description is something we puzzle about for most of the story, so it is a bit of a spoiler for this point.

    The 2000 (new) Introduction:

    As another side note, Le Carre (real name David Cornwell) wrote a new introduction to this edition of Smiley’s People in 2000. It is a perfect little gem of quality prose itself!

    The neatest part is how much he loves Alec Guiness as Smiley (“an actor playing one of his characters to perfection“).

    Then comes the downside:
    Guiness played Smiley so well that the public kind of took him over.
    He wasn’t Le Carre’s character any more.

    • This happens to me all the time at the other end of the media food chain:
      • Toby Esterhase for instance will forever be Bernard Hepton in my imagination.
      • Ian McKellen IS Gandalf … Nobody I know would challange that! 🙂

    Le Carre also says that he intended for there to be 10 or 15 Smiley books, “covering all corners of the globe, constituting a kind of Comedie Humanaine of the cold war“.

    (He’s way too fancy for me, I don’t even know what that is, but it sure sounds cool!)

    Episode 1, Chapters 1 – 5

    We open with a memorable and sympathetic character, Madame Ostrakova!

    As discussed above, the visual medium rules for us casual readers:
    She is forever burned on my heart and mind as being the actress who plays her, Eileen Atkins!

    Anyway … she is waiting for the bus to take her home from work when she is approach by a creepy, obvoiusly Soviet-type dude. He tells her the Soviet Union would like to reunite her with the illegitate daughter she had with “the Jew Glickman“, who she took up with after her husband “the traitor Ostrakova” was banished from the Soviet Union.

    She knows this is utter bullshit, but she can’t let go of the chance that she might see her daughter. She doesn’t know what to do.

    There’s an almost legendary person known to the emigre’ community as The General. She tracks down his address in London and sends him a letter.

    He writes her back and say to wait for a visitor who has the other half of a torn postcard.

    The General was known to be an incorrigible ladies’ man. The secretary where he had a desk in London clearly had had a thing with him. She was so good-looking that I looked her up. She was Ingrid Pitt, a semi-famous actress in the 60’s and 70’s. Her biggest hits were vampire movies. Simply from the fact that her dowdy blouse looked like it had pillow stuffed in it I now have a little bit of a thing for her..

    The other postcard half is slipped under her door the next night. Ostrakova talks the night away with the courier who she calls the Magician!

    Some kind of trade-off happens on a ferry in Hamburg. Something is being delivered to the General via a not real bright Estonian long distance trucker named Villem.

    Chapter 3 – Smiley gets summoned by the police to Hampstead Heath to view a body that turns out rto be the General (I hate this part, the General was cool!).

    The Superindent of Police is there. Clearly he was told by unseen powers to bring Smiley in and give him the run of the place.

    Smiley asks to see his face. It was gross enough to make the policeman retch! (see a few paragraphs below)

    Chapter 4 – Smiley goes straight to an un-named “safe house” to meet one of the really hatable civil service types that Le Carre despises, Lacon Strickland and a likeable young fellow names Mostyn

    Smiley’s stirring defense of the General is really fascinating:

    • .Born Estonian
    • Changed his name from Voldemar to Vladimir to join the Russian Army.
    • “Fought like a lion with the Russians against the Germans.

    Chapter 5 – Mostyn tells the story of the General’s last day.

    We eventually find that he was shot with a soft-nosed bullet in the face, which I guess looks really disgusting, hence the retching above..

    The video is much better on the General’s last evening and the minutes before he was shot …. which makes sense since those are more cinematic events.

    I do appreciate that BBC did NOT show the actual murder. American TV would have made a bloody spectacle of it. One second the General is hobbling through the woods to get away from whatever was out there, then the next second the police chief is leading Smiley to his covered body. That’s the way to do it!

    The book gives a lot more details on the dialog at the safe house.
    Whatever happened to the General is unknown to them.

    Episode 2, Chapters 6 – 10

    Chapter 6 – Madame Ostrakova is living her normal live in Paris. The bad guys waylay her on the way home from work and run her over with a car.

    It was striking how closely the TV scene followed the book descruption.

    • One man had been pretty much exactly 30 feet behind her for a ling time.
    • Now there is another man on the other side of the street keeping pace with her.
    • Now guy 1 comes up to be next to her, and guy 2 cross the street to be on her other side.
      • There was a detail that guy 2 was walking in the gutter so he be next to her, and they faithfully did that on the TV!
    • Now there is a car matching their pace.
    • They grab her.
      • The car speeds up.
      • She belts one of them with the heavy iron she was carrying for just this purpose.
      • They throw her in front of the car.
    • We leave her badly injured and go back to England …

    Chapter 7 – Back in London, Smiley searches The General’s shabby flat on the top floor of his building.

    Not much to show for it. He does recover a taxi receipt whose amount indicates a long trip taken two day ago (unusual on the General budget).

    On the way out he asked the postman for any mail for that apartment (“save you a walk up the stairs“). There is a brown envelope postmarked Paris.

    Chapter 8 – Smiley goes back to Paddington to re-trace the General’s last steps.

    This was another very cinematic scene (i.e. perfect for the screen).
    Smiley poring over the pathway looking for anything the General might have stashed when he knew he was in danger.

    And it pays off! He spies a crumpled packet of Galoise cigarettes high up in a tree.

    “High up” to Smiley, who is short 🙂
    It was within easy reach for the General. After some struggles, Smiley’s gets it.

    Next Smiley wants to run down that taxi receipt. Clever fellow, he calls the taxi company and asks for that driver specifically for an important fare immediately.

    When the driver shows up, Smiley lays 10 pounds on him to tell him where he took the General.

    Chapter 9 – Smiley gets his car and drives himself out to the place … in the Charlton area of Southeast London which seems like a depressing, grimy place.

    The address was an Orthodox church on a street with the memorable name Battle of the Nile Street. You bet they kept a cool name like that in the TV show!

    In the book we get learn how Smiley feels about cars:

    If it had not been Saturday he’s have taken public transport … he lived on terms of mutual hatred with the combustion engine.

    He’s there to meet another Estonian. We’ll call him by his birth name Villem. He is of course the fellow that did the hand-off on the ferry in Hamburg way back in the first episode.

    He’s a big-hearted young kid who just wants to please everybody. Now that he’s home, he wants to please his older wife, who calls him William and just wants him to be a good Englishman and stay the heck away from Smiley and the General and all that dangerous foreign intrigue.

    The other thing that recommended him to the General is that he drives a long-distance shipping truck that makes regular trip to the Continent!

    Over the next 20 pages Smiley teases it out of him that he was in Hamburg two weeks ago.

    So Villen sort of ties the first third of the book together.

    • Madam Ostrakova gets accosted by a KGB guy who gives her negative of someone he says is the daughter
    • She later gets a visit from someone she calls the Magician.
    • He tells her to write the General.
      • She does and Smiley snags the letter!
    • Separately, something described as “the second of two events that brought Smiley out of retirement” happened.
      • It was an odd tableau where a young fellow left a bag oranges on a specific seat on a ferry in Hamburg, left the area, then came back 2 minutes later and pick the bag back up.
    • More we bounce to England, where the General turns up dead on Hampstead Heath, pretty leary a KGB hit.
    • Smiley investigates and eventually ends up at Villem’s.
      • He was of course the young man witht he bag of oranges.

    Chapter 10 – Smiley’s next stop is the Free Baltic Library.

    In case you are ignorant about the Baltic States also, the Baltic States are:
    Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia.

    The Baltic States were absorbed by the Soviet Union during WW2 and regained their independence in 1991. Here in 2000’s they are just three cute little countries in a row next to Russia on the Baltic Sea, but back in the middle of the 1900’s, having the Soviet Union NOT gobble them up was a big part of the whole Cold War drama!

    Here we meet Mikhel and Elvira, an odd couple if ever there was one!

    She pretty clearly had a thing going with that old dog the General. She’s devastated by his murder. As an aside, Elvira makes a dowdy old librarian’s outfit, a lacy blouse buttoned to the neck, sexier than I would have thought possible.

    She is actress Ingrid Pitt. I just looked her up. I think I looked her up last time I watched this a decade ago! I am enchanted by her.

    Smiley has a lot of dark thoughts that maybe Mikhel is the one that sold the General out over Elvira and got him killed. So he grills him pretty hard! It wasn’t much fun for Mikhel, but he does give Smiley a lot of background information:

    • The General didn’t have a passport
    • Since he couldn’t travel he used good ole Villem to do his messenger work. This of course could cost Villem his sweet upwardly mobile job, and which is why Villem’s wife hates them all for asking.
    • The General wanted maps of major cities of the Baltic area, which includes Hamburg.

    Episode 3, Chapters 6-

    Chapter 11 – Madame Ostrakova is home from the hospital and holed up in her apartment with her husband’s ancient gun in her lap. She is a wonderful character! She intends to survive this.

    Chapter 12 – Smiley goes back to the Savoy, where he had stashed Vladimir’s treasured cigarette packet.

    He takes it home. There is a very entertaining few pages where he develops the photographic negative himself while thinking about the professional film shops (“10 minutes away”) under contract with the Circus who could have deveoped this film much more quickly and with better quality, but Smiley is old-school. You get none of that detail in the video version of course!

    Then for some reason, his wife Ann, who we have heard about for so many books, calls him out of the blue, … because she’s feeling lonely and wants company.

    This brings up a lot of complex feelings for our hero.

    In case you’re not up to speed here, this is Book 3 of a trilogy of books about Smiley and the strange world he lives in. The first book, Tinkor, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was about Smiley being betrayed my his mentor and boss Bill Hayden … who was his best friend and mentor (and of course…) and also Ann’s lover.
    It was a really good book, and a pretty good movie!

    [For the record, the second book, The Honorable Schoolboy was also a good book, but not did not become a BBC series. Wiki said it’s Hong Kong location was too expensive.]

    The Ann thing made him have a lot of negative thoughts about what he’s up to here.

    After he calmed down he got down to the business of studying the General’s photos that he just developed. They are of two European-type fellows having sex for money with two young, healhy-looking girls. One fellow is big and kinda flabby,. The other is a little guy, ferret-y.

    For some reason Smiley starts daydreaming about the time they had Karla prisoner in Germany. Smiley’s job back then was to chat with prisoners whose time was up and were scheduled to be handed back to the Russians, so see if they might want to work for out side when they went back.

    Episode 3 Chapters 6-

    Chapter 13 – Smiley visits Toby Esterhase.

    p 170 “you trying to pin me down George”
    “I suppose I am. Yes.”

    172 Toby’s work name is Hector … Smiley wants to know why the General said “is Hector no good?”
    172 “Fear is information without the cure”.
    176 Smiley says something that pisses Toby off (possibly on purpose)
    “eyes, cheeks coloured,, the sleeping Hungarian in him was wide awake“
    177 We hear about Otto Leipzig – “the Magician“. He will turn out to be the little guy in the picture.

    Another fellow called Kretchmer comes up, few pages later. He is NOT the big guy in the sex picture, rather he is the guy who was taking the picture! Kretchmer runs a sex club in Hamburg called the Blue Diamond. Smiley will go there.

    Chapter 14

    But first! Smiley drives out to visit Connie Sachs, retired spy, and a brilliant, weird person.

    200 He’s mining her brain for recollections of little Otto Leipzig and fat Oleg Kirov (the other guy in the sex picture).

    Chapter 15 – Smiley and Connie get to the bottom of it!

    208 These little phrases. like “a waiter’s anger“. Smiley’s thought that more than once when he was thinking about the little guy (Leipzig)’s feelings about the big guy (Kirov). So evocatibe in a strange way.

    215 origin story for Karla’s mistress (Tatiana’s mother)

    “He found her as a child, wandering a burnt-out village in the war.
    Adopted her, fell in love with her    .” …
    “Educated her, played Daddy, played lover, played God.”
    Then he bumped her off.

    Why?

    “She went soft on the revolution. Wanted the state to wither away. He told her to shut up, she wouldn’t. He had her shoved in the slammer. It made her worse“.

    216 “There was a child“

    217 A don at Leningrad University was ordered to take on a special child Tatiana. She was raising hell but couldn’t be touched because her daddy was a big deal. She tried to seduce him (the Don), told him “Daddy had Mummy killed for showing insufficient faith on the historical process” (Love that!).

    He ran into a bullet.

    That’s it for Connie. But sh’s basically given us a road map for the rest of the book!

    Chapter 16 – Smiley hops a plane for Hamburg.

    He meets Herr Kretchmer at his club and brings him the sad news that the General has been killed. They both agree that Otto is in danger also. After some sparring he tells Smiley how to find Otto on the houseboat where he is living.

  • Evidence (2009) Kellerman

    I almost passed this one by, because I’ve kinda been over Kellerman. His last book struck me as predictable and formulaic at the time. This one however is super fun so far!

    Chapter 1 of this book makes us familiar with a loser-ish young fellow whose crappy underpaying job is to watch an abandoned construction site, a really ugly mega-house whose construction was abandoned years ago. It’s the “eyesore at the top of the hill” in an extremely upscale neighborhood.

    The Checkov’s gun principle says this guy will matter to the plot down the road. He’s not a very promising fellow, so I’ll be interested to see how that happens.

    At the the end of the chapter he discovers two bodies on the top floor!

    We have a crime!

    The watchman finds dead bodies in that ugly building. Now we have a crime!

    In chapter two the men that are the backbone of these books get together. They are:

    • Milo Sturgis – physically imposing but unkempt LA police detective who we long time readers know is gay as gay can be, but so far that has not been introduced in this story.
    • Alex Delaware – child psychiatrist who works out of his home office. It’s been so long now I do’t even remember the origin story of why Milo always calls him to join him to visit crime scenes and even to talk to witnesses.

    In this case the murder site is like three miles from where Alex lives. That is to say that it’s in the very upscale part of LA. But it has a whole different feel and style to Alex’ modestly scaled neighborhood.

    There’s some fun dialog with an attractive coroners assistant. The dead guy was carrying his wallet, so they have a good ID on him (Desmond Backer), but no clue on the woman.

    Then they lightly interrogate the watchman kid, who kinda freaks out a little … because (I think) he’s just too mentally slow to quite get what’s going on.

    The really entertaining stuff happens next chapter when they attempt to run down where the dead guy worked.

    It’s a run-down building with fancy pretensions at the downscale end of Main Street in Venice. Milo has hilarious dialog with a gorgeous shaved-headed German woman who answers the door.

    She says priceless little tidbits like this:

    p 24 “Modern humanity – post-industrial humanity is a criminal biomechanical disruption of the natural order.“

    It’s not that often that you run onto someone who talks like that! 🙂

    We meet his co-workers. They are all women, and in the coffee room we find that he apparently had sex with all of them. The young ones aren’t surprised about each other, but they all are kinda surprised that the older woman who is the co-owner of the company (Marjie) went for his line of BS. “Only once” she says.
    (you can guess how much everyone believes that!)

    There’s an interlude where Alex talks to his girlfriend for a page or two.
    I am reminded again that Kellerman is great at forensics and characters and even great character dialog in the investigation, he’s really wooden with romance and day-to-day talking. Maybe that’s just life the way is! 🙂

    Now that I’ve started this rant, dialog between Milo and Alex is can pretty be lame also. Alex’s little jokes to Milo are usually pretty bad. I guess when you have the same crime-fighting duo for 17 books it’s hard to keep coming up with snappy new greetings. 🙂

    The kid from the first chapter does turn up again!

    p 93 He’s in a tussle with this well-appointed but shabby around the edges fellow at the site – Charles Rutger.

    Apparently Rutger’s family did own the house way back in the day when it was just a normal McMansion, but they sold it to the mysterious entity DSD for reasons unknown.

    Milo has a very entertaining conversation with Rutger’s family lawyer, the upshot of which is that Rutger may a little crazy

    Around p 125, things start happening!

    • we get a lead that DSD might not be be Arab after all.
      • It IS oil money from a Muslim country, but it’s a made-up island nation called Sranil off the coast of Indonesia that happens to be sitting on top of huge oil reserves.
    • Backer’s sister is finally back from family vacation and returns Milo’s calls.
      • She says the dead girl went to high school with him.
    • p 122 Coroner reports says no sexual assualt, no autopsy necessary.
      • Milo is not pleased.
        This violates all his intuitions about what happened, but that’s what the coroner says!…
    • p 124 Alex comes up with Sranil independently from late night web surfing.

    More about Sranil

    p 128 We never meet the two main Sranil dudes, but they are:

    • the Sultan – very conservative devout Muslim.
      • We know he’ a convervative Muslim because he thinks you only need one Rolls-Royce to get around (and maybe one for backup).
      • But maintaining 5 or 6 or 15 Rolls’ as his son is ostentations and blasphemous.
    • Prince Tariq – the polar opposite. He was the ultimate LA playboy who got into plenty of trouble and was eventually called home.

    More about Des Backer’s back story

    • p 131 Milo finally gets ahold of his sister and breaks the news about Des Backer murder.
    • She says the dead girl was Doris Fredd. A high school friend.
      • She was a bit of a bad girl as the story unfolds.
      • She was sent to a local rehab place called Hope Lodge .
        .. which the locals called “Ho Lodge” :))
    • p 138 Next day Des’ sister has driven down from the Seattle area in Milo’s office.
    • p 142 We starting getting to get a strong whiff of good ole Pacific Northwest radical leftist “save the trees” politics!
    • Des loved the song “Burning Down the House” :)) (me too!)
      • Politically motivated house fires are a theme in this book.
    • THEN sis finally comes clean that Des shipped her a couple of heavy valises containing $50K in the form of 1,000 $50 bills!
    • p 143 She stashed them in the storage unit where they put their parents’ stuff.
      • “Please don’t tell her husband”
    • p143 Milo calls the Port Angeles police to get the cash

    Sparring with the Feds

    p 147 Milo has been harrassing the FBI for whatever information they have on the dead people, and his usually reliable sources have been completely silent.
    We think because of Sranil money!

    Today he gets an in person visit from a real live Special Agent named Gail Lindstrom.

    She’s here about Doreen, doesn’t know anything about Des. Doreen was in deep with home-grown eco-terrists in Seattle from all the way back to high school.

    There are pages of repartee of varying quality. Gail is super-stingy with information, ad she has pissed off Milo enough that he’s giving her nothing for free. She has to she work for it. There’s a couple of pages of them trading insults about Federal screwups vs LAPD screwups. I could’a done without that. Didn’t help my appreciation of the story any.

    p 161 Eventually we get aroud to the Sranilis. They trade bits of info that inform each other, but we the readers already know it. 🙂

    p 165 Milo gets a drop-in from a bitchy coroner who tells him she made an error by not doing the rape kit. What happened is too gross for me to talk about, so I won’t.

    .p 168 They uncover some very interesting stuff about Sranili culture being maybe 2/3 modern Muslim, but 1/3 holding on to some dicey-sounding animist beliefs from it’s tribal days. It’s also pretty gross, so I’m skipping that too.

    p 179 There’s been talk for half the book about vegan Jell-o, which is a kind of homemade napalm popular with the militant tree-huggers. It gets invoked a lot for the rest of the book.

    p 186 The event we all saw coming, finally came!

    Somebody torched the house on Borodi Lane!
    (The scene of the crime that started the book if you haven’t been keeping up!)

    188 The slightly batty old fellow whose family used to own the place was incinerated. He was having a little champagne and pate in a private party with himself on the third floor when the place went due to planted charges. (I.e. at least manslaughter if they catch ’em!)

    We think he was collateral damage, the arsonist(s) did’t know he was there.

    192 The nice neighbor they talked to a few chapters ago came by to report that there was a Swedish Bikini Team blond woman jogging past three times just that day!
    (His words! You can tell what decade he grew up in 🙂

    The get a visit from Marjie pointing the finger back at Helga, who we haven’t heard from for a while.

    p 206 More research on Helga shows that she’s Swiss, not Swedish (Swedish is cooler I guess). Her parents are very rich bankers, and most interesting she has a cute and buxom (and apparently very nice) party-girl sister named Dahlia.

    Milo’s has had his two really talented young detectives (Sean and Moe) the job for the last 100 pages. Moe (the Doc Martens-wear former punker) comes up with a young Indonesian women who was good friends with Dahlia.

    p 209 She shows up to talk to Milo “tiny, gorgeous, terrified”. She talks for about 16 pages of fun things they did together, many including Teddy the Sranili playboy!

    p 222 She and Milo drive to Brentwood so she can show him where Dahlia lived. No one’s seen Dahlia for quite a while, but sister Helga is living there now.

    p 242 Putting Helga on the 11 oclock news produced a tip about a garage space she rented. Backer and Doreen (the dead girl, was Doris in high school, but goes by Doreen now) were there a lot.

    p 254 They stake out the place and nab Helga and bring her in for an interview.

    p 256 The interrogation is super dramatic. They cover a lot of ground.
    p 268 Milo gets under her skin about Dahlia, but can’t faze her about killing Backer.

    p 270 Milo finally springs it on her about the old guy who was partying on the when she torched the house. That gets to her!

    p 277 She gets the last .. word by swallowing a cyanide pill she had hidden in her wig, and is dead in seconds.

    We find what happened to Dahlia

    All these high level players, the Swiss banker parents and the Sranili landlords and playboys) have got Milo in touch with the Chief of Police … a mixed blessing!

    Somehow they are tipped that the Sranilis have an airplane hangar! I think is was the police chief, but in any event, it was definitely the chief that told him to not bother asking the Srinalis for permission. The would have stalled him, so justs do it!

    p 284 Milo and the boys search the airplane hanger.

    p 286 Inside there is a lot of fancy stuff. Including four really, really fancy cars and a white Prius(!)

    Milo goes straight to the Prius of course, where surprise, there are two dead bodies! They’ve been there about 2 years. (yuck!)

    DNA shows the woman is Dahlia. (Too bad, I liked her, and kinda hoped she wasn’t really dead. ):. We think the fellow is the Prince, but no one has actually said that yet.

    So the two year old mystery of the disappearing Prince and Helga’s party girl sister is now buttoned up, along with Helga as arsonist.

    Which is nice, but …

    We have less than 50 pages of book left, and no clue who did the original murders that opened the book!

    We’re not the only ones to notice this:
    Milo is given two weeks more to solve the case, then he will be re-assigned to gang stuff and the case file will go into the unsolved bin.

    Spoiler Alert (again 🙂

    It all happens pretty quick after this:

    p 290 Waay back in the middle of the book, Milo got a tip from a pay phone (how rare is that nowadays?) about seeing Doreen in the neighborhood and being afraid of someone named Monte.
    “WhoTF is Monte?” has been a recurring question for pages and pages.

    Just as the two weeks are running out and Milo is settling into his new Southwest Division gig, a patrol officer spots an old fellow using the pay phone.

    p 292 The old fellow in question is a really cool 91 year-old short black dude who grew up in Baton Rouge (so he has a lovely southern accent 🙂 .
    He saw Doreen living at the house of a creepy dude (Monte) as he took his daily walk around the neighborhood.

    He’s scared of the dude because he gave him a creepy staredown when he saw him on the street seeing her. Then two weeks later Milo put her picture on the evening news and the fellow called in.

    In the heavy irony department, if Monte had killed the old dude they never would have caught him.

    p 299 Milo and Alex scope out the house.

    The dude living there looks very much like the average-sized dude in a grey hoodie who has turned up everywhere for the last 100 pages.

    p 301 But the woman he lives with (who replaced Doreen as girlfriend) is the big shocker of the book:

    It’s the Coroner’s Assistant from all the way back in the first chapter!!!

    Didn’t see that one coming!

    We finish up with a fun 10 pages of cat-and-mouse with Milo nailing down the coroner lady in her testimony.

    Then a less fun 4 pages of tailing Monte home from the law office where he works, to find a safe place to arrest him. They do the best they can, but he’s a bad-ass and draws on them anyway.

    The coroner said he had 28 bullets from 5 different guns in him.

    A pretty fun, engaging book all in all!

  • Cutthroat Dogs (2021) Estleman

    Looking forward to a good old fashioned detective story!

    The frontispiece list about 30 previous Amos Walker books, another 40 other crime books (mostly in Detroit), and another 30 or so Page Murdock westerns and other westerns.

    So he is a prolific son of a gun! This book is copyright 2021. That’s a lot of stories. Roughly 100 books full of colorful characters … and a heck of a lot of zippy one liners!!

    It is a total change in literary style from the razor-sharp elegance and precision of the Lincoln Lawyer to this shambling slob of of a small time Detroit private eye and his (and everybody else’s) endless wise cracks..

    That private eve is Amos Walker.

    Even though the book was published in 2021 and it’s setting is modern, the tone and style is frozen in the 50’s or 60’s somewhere.

    We open in a physical bank, where Walker is in line to physically deposit a physical check from a client. See what I”m saying? … I’ll bet that’s not how you deposited checks in 2018!

    A guy ahead of him in line pulls a gun to rob the cashier(!) Walker shoots him in the leg(!!).
    He happened to be packing his sidearm, because he was coming back from a job.
    It could happen to any of us in 2019, right??

    So here we are, the branch bank getting robbed at gunpoint by a lone gunman.
    The gunman is shot by a citizen who happened to also be carrying a gun in the bank.

    I think Estleman is at the YOLO stage of his career (he’s earned it), … he’s just having fun with it!

    The plot

    Regardless of how cheesy it was set up, this has the effect of the getting Amos’s name in the paper (insert tired joke about “legacy media”).

    This notoriety causes new and old names from the Walker universe to bubble up. Here are the important ones in order of their appearance:

    • Barry Stackpole – Walker sidekick forever – free-lance journalist – older, still with a bum leg from excitement in Vietnam decades ago. p 9
    • Chrys Corbeil – The bank teller in the heist that started all this.
      • A self-contained young lady with a “triangle-shaped face” who thanks Amos then hires him to get her brother out of prison. p 12
    • Dan Corbeil – Her brother.
      • He’s been in the Michigan correctional system for way too long.
      • Possibly suicidal from the hopelessness of it all.
    • John Alderdyce – also in Walker book forever – retired Chief of Detectives – older but still very black and very cranky. p 34
      • In this book all he’s done is appear every few chapters to say bitchy things to Amos.
    • Chester Goss – Father of the dead girl. His introduction is pretty neutral, but he plays a big part … not in a good way.
      • His wife is Vail Goss.
    • Stan Kopernick – He was an unpleasant, brutal police seargent back then. Now he’s an unpleasant, brutal senior person in the department.
    • M C Mihalich – and the defendants lawyer, then and now!! We’re gonna call him MC! p 62

    Twenty years ago

    Chrys tells Amos the basics of the story at their first meeting:

    • the dead girl (April Goss) and Dan used to date.
    • Dan went to her apartment and found her dead in her bathtub, wrists slit, an apparent suicide. p 17
      • He calls it in.
      • At the trial, turns out she tested positive on a pregnancy test. p18
      • After conviction, turns out she was not pregnant!! p 19
    • Over time, the police decide it’s a fake suicide. They indict Dan.
    • Dan can’t afford a good lawyer, so he takes the next guy up at the Public Defenders Office.
    • Against the experienced lawyers and investigators of the state, that lawyer never stood a chance.
    • Dan has been in prison for 18 years.

    Investigating…

    Amos drives out to Ypsilanti, home of Eastern Michigan U, also home of the Huron Valley Correctional Facility. p 25

    The first interview doesn’t go well. Dan is really in the dumps. Maybe suicidal.

    Amos keep driving on out to very upscale-y Bloomfield Hills to see Chester Goss.

    Chester was a mere assistant programming director back in the day, but now he’s a rich and successful BFD with a syndicated “unsolved violent crimes” show that makes him a ton of money.

    It woud be REALLY bad for his business if the crime that got him started, his daughters murder and his noisy fingering of Dan Corbeil on his show as the murderer was all wrong!

    Chester Goss’ tv show is called Cutthroat Dogs. p 37

    Amos asks enough annoying question to get himself kicked out of the house.

    Next day he has a busy day at the office:

    • Stackpole drops in news that is was known that April Goss was NOT pregnant during the trial, but no one introduced it as evidence..
    • Vail Goss shows up, to try to call Amos off. She fails at that, but does establish that she is a good person even if she likes good whiskey and her husband is a jerk. p 49
    • Then comes his client Chrys Corbeil.

    Amos gets visited at home by Kopernick. He wants to work with Amos, and we all want to know why. p 55

    New day, Amos drives out to Eastpointe, formerly East Detroit to visit the former public defender MC (Mihalich) p 65

    Amos tries to sell him on taking this re-trail case. MC is NOT into it at first, but Amos sells the redemption angle, and eventually gets the lawyer on board.

    Amos has been around the block a few times, so instead of hiring MC, he has MC hire him! Now he’s doing the lawyer’s business, not his own, which gives him special powers as an investigator.

    More Detroit local color:

    For no reason other than so Estleman can lay on the Detroit history, Kopernick meets Amos in a deserted warehouse. It’s getting complicated. p 101

    After some verbal sparring, Amos agrees to continue helping. Kopernick has been a doulep-crissing bastard for Amos’ entire professional life, now he’s playing nice and even shaking hands! Amos doesn’t know what to make of it.

    After that, in the middle of the night, Amos stops by his office “because he missed today’s mail”. How quaint. Anyway, someone is rifling his desk. p 107

    In the excitement gets a glancing blow on the neck from a sap, and the intruder catches a poorly aimed shot somewhere that leaves a small trail of blood.

    On the way home FINALLY after that he gets pulled over by Chester Goss, and they go back and forth for a while. He also is trying to make a good show of not being a thug. p 116

    He has a quick call from his client. p 120

    Then a quick vist from Alderyce about the break-in. p 122

    p 128 Now Kopernick wants to meet again at the dead-end place they met last time. By the time Amos gets there, there is a dead body on the floor, the guy who’s been shawoding him, and the guy who sapped him and took a bullet.

    p 134 This sends Amos to visit Stackpole, to go through his endless video archives, so Amos can scan old episodes of Cutthroat Dogs for this guy.

    p 137 we find he was the star criminal from an episode in the third season! According to that show he should still be in prison right now!

    p 152 The client’s brother, the guy in prison is now in the prison hospital because he got billy-clubbed by a guard!

    What happened was that another of Goss’s pet criminal stooges pushed him into the guard, so the guard did what he was trained to do and clubbed him.

    Spoiler alert!

    Now the good guys have learned enough to go back over the 20 year old evidence to see if her dad was there, and they find a ton!.

    There is a lot intrigue and snappy dialog but at the end of the book, Amos has gone back to Goss’ house to brace him and get “the truth”. And we end up with this memorable line (p 183)

    It wasn’t murder made to look like suicide, it was suicide made to look like murder.

    Afterword

    For all the cheap shots I’ve been taking at Estleman’s style, this is a true whodunit, much more than many of the books who bill themselves as such.

    In most, you have a pretty good idea who did it, the drama and suspense comes from getting it all out into the open and pinning it in the bad guy. Here, on p 140 of a 196 page book, I truly don’t know whodunit.

    We are starting to get a pretty good idea, but I’m expection one more curveball from the author. 🙂

  • The Proving Ground (2025) – Michael Connelly

    Michael Connelly sure does know how to craft a novel.

    Bosch has finally aged out, so there probably won’t will be any more Bosch books.

    So it looks like Mickey Haller, the Lincoln Lawyer, will be Connelly’s main dude going forward.

    Mickey is still young-ish, but also aging (aren’t we all!).
    He’s moved up the legal ladder from criminal law to civil law.

    He doesnt even drive the Lincoln any more!
    He’s still got it in the garage for special occasions, but day to day he drives a very practical and easier-to-park Bolt! 🙂

    He’s still got his very large investigator, Cisco.
    Cisco’s attractive wife Lorna is still his office manager.

    This book

    Mickey is suing a giant AI company (Tidalwaiv) on behalf of a woman who’s daughter was killed by a classmate/former boyfriend. The lawsuit says an AI bot named Wren told him to do it.

    There are actually three parties to the suit at the start:

    • Brenda – the single mom of the dead girl
    • Trisha – the mom of the killer.
      • The two moms have sort of bonded in their grief.
    • Bruce Colton – the dad of the killer
      • This guy is just a straight-up jerk.
      • All through the book, he’s jerky every chance he gets.

    “Aaron Colton killed my clients daughter because of AI chat bot went rogue.” p 22

    p 34 Mickey and Cisco go to interview a disgruntled former employee, but he is dead! An apparent suicide.

    p 13 A tech guy named McEvoy has offered to work on this case for his own investigative goals.

    p 60 He’s already turned up a woman (Naomi Kitchens) who was hired to be an ethicist for the company but then she suddenly disappears from all emails and they hired a different ethicist! Naturally Mickey wants to know why!

    p 65 She teaches at Stanford. Mickey and McEvoy fly up to interview her at her History of Machine Learning class. She’s scared.

    Their flight home becomes a drive because there is a massive wildfire in the LA hills so all the flights are packed.

    I think the fire itself will be a distraction, but (p 83) it has the effect of burning Maggie McFierce (current LA District Attorney and Mickey’s former wife Maggie McPherson) out of her house so that she goes to live with Mickey. …
    Where they re-kindle the old flames! Yay!

    Quick talk with Wren (the bot)

    Mickey’s team have Arron Colton’s computer, the one from which he had his conversations with the AI bot.

    The catch is that in order to talk to the bot they must be on-line. They’re afraid to do that because the company with their sophisticated tools will see what they’re upto and will trace them instantly.

    p98 They work out a very complicated scheme to sign on to the laptop from inside the police station investigating the crime. Doesn’t go well. They get two questions in then are cut off.

    Mickey makes an enticing little crack about calling the bot as a witness at trial! (p 101)

    Challenger disaster

    p 104 Turns out Naomi Kitchens was born on Jan 28, 1986, the very day of the Challenger disaster. I’d forgotten how gruesome it was, all seven families of the astronauts gathered to watch, and it exploded before their eyes. Yuck.

    This has defined her life in a small way. Her birthday is a happy day for her, but the papers are full of “remembering Challenger” every darned year! 🙂

    Now she’s thinking about the whistleblower who kept quiet, and decided to give Mickey’s crew the hard drive they want.

    Another case pops up, which I’m not even gonna talk about until it affects the main plot. By the Chekhov’s gun principle, it will eventually, but until then… 🙂

    Tidalwaiv ups their offer to walk away to $50 million!! That gets everyone’s attention.

    Mickey would walk away with 10-12 mil he reckons! More money than he’s made in his whole life he notes to himself.

    The dad of the murderer (Bruce) is all over it. He wanted to take the earlier offer for much less money, so he’s pretty intense about wanting to take this. But the mom of the victim is a hard NO, no amount if payment is enough. The murderers mom backs her up.

    p 172 Bruce is such a major jerk, that Mickey says something uncharitable about no wonder the kid spent all his time with “an on-line fantasy”.

    The trial starts

    • p 196 Opening statement by Mickey.
    • p 202 First witness. Detective Clark, who I thought was a cool guy.
      • p207 Funny bit where Clark recognizes a quote from Romeo and Juliet because it was in a Blue Oyster Cult song from his high school days :))
    • p 219,20,22,23,24 – all have bits of dialog between the boy and Wren, the AI bot.
    • Naomi Kitchens is really impressive, her list of academic accomplishments makes me jealous!
      • 245 College USF, Masters UC Berkeley, doctorate Stanford
      • 246 worked as coder at Microsoft, Apple (I dunno about tht…)
    • 247 She explains what an “ethicist” is
      • Clair (the Software Project being sued) was already under development for three years old when they brought her in for “ethics” oversight!
    • 248 We learn what a Large Language Model is.
      • How machines acquire natural language.
      • Also biases and inaccuracies
    • 249 Naomi was VERY alarmed that Clair is designed to be a “thirteen-plus” project.
      • that means it’s rated as suitable for 13 year olds.
      • 250 But the large language model they trained it on was for grownups!
    • 255 Next day we find that the coders on the project are all male, and a few of them seem to be in the “hates women” incel-ish category.
      • Again, not evil per se, but not great for designers of a a female Bot for 13 year old boy.
      • 251 Naomi had clashed with a particular coder who put personal stuff in.
        Vacations to the sex alleys of Thailand was her example of not cool for 13 year olds.
        • Mickey of course wants to talk to this guy!
    • 258 Trouble!
      • Defense turns up that Naomi had a boyfriend at the company when she was at there!
    • 261 Bruce is still an asshole.
    • 271 Bruce and Trisha go fo the money! They drop out of the suit and settled for the big bucks.
    • 287 Many pages with spent Dr Debbie, a child psychiatrist from Florida who is expert on children addicted to AI.
      • 293 “Clear that Aaron was in love with Wren”
      • 294 “Wren told him to delete her from his life”
    • “303 Next witness Dr Spindler, a Caltech prof
      • I liked him because he gave a nice history lesson in the Eliza program at MIT in the 60s-70s, back in MY day! 🙂
      • 307 another history lesson on Isaac Asimov!
      • 310 Now we’re doing wording details from incel internet buzzwords. I’ll skip unless it matters.
    • A juror tests positive for COVID. They break for the weekend.
    • 320 The billionaire behind the company shows up with a briefcase of cold, hard cash to bribe Haller to get his client to settle.
    • There’s more drama with someone playing dirty tricks on Mickey, but it gets sorted, and on Monday he’s ready to call his final witness!
    • 351 Final witness is the misogynist coder (Whittaker). He’s the kind of guy who would make his on-line name “wiseacre23”, as a play on Whittaker.
    • He is hyper-reactive and unpleasant from the first question.
    • 359 As the day moves on, Mickey finally maneuvers his testimony to where can read some damning Reddit posts and get him going on incel stuff.
    • 363 Mickey calls him an incel, which stirs up the judge.
      • 365 He makes a strong case that Whittaker was involved in a dark site that targeted women.

    TidalWaiv folds. Mickey and his remaining client get $50 million!

    Conelley is a very good expositor. I loved all that stuff about language models and history and Eliza such … could you tell?

    Summary thoughts

    Mickey was going to put the bot (Wren) on the stand but didn’t get to because the other side gave up.

    There was NEVER a body! I was so sure someone would get murders along the way, but it didn’t happen?

    I think Connelly had a little fun with this by having the very first witness the went to interview be dead from natural causes. That was the last dead person!

  • Rusty Puppy (2017) Joe R Lansdale

    A Hap and Leonard Novel

    I’d forgotten that Lansdale books are very funny!

    The story

    Hap (the white guy) is manning the office by himself while Leonard (the gay black guy) is off in Houston checking out a fellow for a new boyfriend.

    A nice black lady with a cavernous purse comes in to hire them. We get jokes about how big the purse is.

    There was the usual racial dance where she’s was hoping to talk to the black guy, but when she gets to the office it’s the white guy.

    She’s uneasy about is, but Hap convinces her to go for it because she remembered him from an incident at the school last year where he did something cool!

    Hap is the team’s diplomat. Leonard is permanently cranky and ready to get into it with anyone.

    The names in this book are ridiculuos.

    • The very corrupt police detective is called Coldpoint.
    • His sidekick is Officer Sheerfault.
    • The godforsaken little town they operate in is called Camp Rapture.

    The corrupt cops do their dirty work at an abandoned saw mill (the Sawmill) where they throw the bodies in the disgusting mill pond. The book title Rusty Puppy alludes to what he decaying sawdust makes the bodies look like if they bob to the surface.

    Hap’s got a girlfriend now (Brett). Their daughter (Chance) lives with them!

    The plot in a nutshell is that the Camp Rapture is an awful town, with a cadre of awful police that to evil things.

    A cute black girl (Charm) takes pictures where she shouldn’t, pretty sunset pictures at the Sawmill. She gets arrested by Sheerfault for no good reason other than she’s cute and vulnerable. He molests her in jail.

    Her brother (Jamar) starts nosing around and gets himself killed. That’s what Hap and Leonard are investigating.

    It’s a pretty fun book. Not so fun that I want to spend a lot of time writing a full play-by-play as I have done for other books.

    • Our heroes nose around the project where Jamar was last seen.
    • They piss off the local group of shiftless teenagers.
      • Our heroes are better at fighting than the teens.
      • The teens re-appear later as semi-good guys.
    • A guy named Timpson is involved.
      • Hap and Leonard talked to him once, but when they went back he’s been beat to death by the police!
    • Hap and Leonard have stirred up enough s–t that they are beaten by the police.
    • Leonard meets a cop called Marvin. By mysterious gay radar they detect that each is gay. They are seeing each other 20 pages later.
    • Marvin is an honest cop in a different department.

    A lot energy was expended, but at the end everybody ends up back at the Sawmill, for a series of Texas-style gladiator matches, which of course include Hap and Leonard, who turn out to still be pretty good fighters in their unique ways.

    Coldpoint is arrested (I think!). But Sheerfault gets it in a memorable way by eacaping in his vintage Cadillac but losing control after running over a couple of people and sinking in the pond with his foot still stuck in the car.

  • 52 Pickup (2013) Elmore Leonard

    52 Pickup (2013) Elmore Leonard

    I’ve thought about this particular Elmore Leonard work for years, and here it was, taunting me from the stacks at the Rohnert Park Library.

    I think it’s the movie that captured my imagination. After seeing the movie, Roy Schneider and Ann-Margaret are burned in my brain permanently as the faces of the protagonists But I am looking forward to rereading the book version anyway!

    Is it just me, or does Ann-Margaret exude sexuality for you too!?

    I glanced back at the other Leonard book in my list – The Switch – and there’s are lot of similarities in the plots of the two books.

    Both are about hard-working Detroit businessmen who for whatever reason start messing around with some 20-something cutie, and end up getting blackmailed by menacing bad guys.

    The Book

    Our businessman in this book is named Harry Mitchell (Roy Scheider). We meeet him in the first scene. He comes straight from work to the apartment he’s rented for his side-hustle, a blond named Cini. He’s on the phone with his foreman at work, because he always working.

    Cini has vanished, and instead there is a big, shadowy black man and a skinny shadowy white guy. They tell Harry they need $105,000 of his hard-earned money.

    Chapter 2, at his nice house in Bloomfield Hills, we meet Barbara Mitchell (Ann-Margaret) . She can tell something’s wrong (they always can 🙂 but doesn’t know what.

    Ch 3 finds Harry at his office at the factory, telling his lawyer (O’Boyle) all about The Problem. The lawyer didn’t think Harry was this kind of guy, but here we are.

    He tells O’Boyle how he met Cini. She worked at some kind of nude picture emporium that seems kind of quaint by today’s standards. Look at and take pictures of a nude girl, $15 for ½ hour. What a deal!

    Ch 4 Harry goes straight at the problem, which we learn is sort of his superpower!

    He goes to the nude picture place just to nose around. (It was a sporting goods store when he was a kid. 🙂 He doesn’t really learn much, but boy does he get the bad guys stirred up!

    p 46 Bobby (the black bad guy) and Doreen (Cini’s friend and Bobby’s very cute black sidekick) shake down a tour bus! I don’t remember that from the movie!

    The movie made a really strong impression on me back in the day. As we meet each of these characters in the book, I see a much younger version of this actor in my mind!

    Harry takes it to ’em, they escalate

    Alan goes to Harry’s house interacts with Barbara, and steals his gun and an old coat. He a creepy guy, and he starts having creepy thoughts about Barbara.

    p 98 Harry continues to tell them to fuck off.
    They actually kill Cini with Harry’s gun and use his coat as evidence.

    The interesting thing here is that we kind of expect Harry to cave and pay them and such, but that’s not who Harry is. Harry instead starts stirring stuff up even harder!

    p 122 Harry goes back to the peek-a-boo place where Doreen and Cini worked and leads Doreen into telling him everyone’s real names. Then he follows them:

    • Alan to his dirty movie place.
    • Leo to his office.
    • He talks to each and convince each that he’s agreed to pay the other two and that they’re all lying to each other.

    The bad guys (and Doreen) are all lying double-crossing criminals, so it’s not really that hard for Harry to convince each separately that they are getting screwed by the others.

    • It gets creepy. Alan kidnaps Barbara, pump her full of herion and has his way with her.
    • Bobby kills Leo.
    • Alan kills Bobby and Doreen, who totally deserved it, but it was pretty slick how he did it.
      • Alan was the brains, Bobby was the muscle, and Leo was just there.
    • Alan calls Harry to tell him he has his wife.
    • Parallel to this stuff there have been actual labor problems going on at Harry plant.
      • His car was blown up.
      • He decides to use this to his advantage.
    • He gets dynamite from a guy.
    • He rigs up the pay-off brief case with the dynamte
    • There’s a lot of drama about it, but eventually he gets Alan to take the briefcase and get blown up.

    And that’s the end of the book! The police with think it was more labor unrest, Mitch and Barbara go back to their lives. Mitch’s lawyer is pretty freaked out by he all, but he’s got privilege, so he’s not talking.

  • Fever Beach (2025) Carl Hiaasen

    It’s been a while since I’ve read a Hiaasen book. They are very funny, and I remember being hugely entertained, but the last one I finished was in 2023.

    My journal says I started Powder Burns and didn’t finish it … I don’t remember why…

    The book

    For the first couple of pages I thought this one might make the “‘didn’t finish” list, but it got better quickly!

    Scene 1:

    • A weirdo named Dale Figgo picks up a hitchhiker heading to the interstate, but has to “do something first”.
    • The thing he wants to do is leaflet a neighborhood with anti-Jewish hate leaflets. He drives and the hitchhiker offers to throws them.
    • On the way out of the gated community, an irate resident accosts them, and Dale runs him over with his truck.
    • The hitchhiker catches on that he is a crazy situation and wants out, so he hops out of the truck and runs away at the first opportunity.
      • Lucky for him, this is the last we hear of him, he’s out of the story.
    • Everyone else, including the run-over resident are around for the duration of our strange story.

    Scene 2:

    • We’re on a flight to Orlando.
      • A man named Twilly Spree has scored an aisle seat.
    • He starts shamelessly hitting on the woman across the aisle.
      • It goes nowhere.
    • Her name is Viva.
      • Leaving the plane she leaves the New Yorker she was reading with her address on it on her plane seat.

    That is NOT the kind of thing a street-wise attractive woman leave on her seat when she’d just escaped a creepy guy next to her on the plane.

    [I found this fellow very off-putting from this introduction, but he turns out to be one of the main Good Guys in the whole story. It all comes together a few pages later.]

    Scene 3

    Viva rents the guest room at the house of the sketchy MAGA loser Dale we met in the first scene, just to tie it all together.

    So now we’ve been introduced to the major players so we’re ready to go!

    Here’s a bit of Hiaasen humor:

    Viva thought Twilly looked like the author of a book she’d read:
    How to let Happiness Find You.
    She had quit in the chapter named
    How to Let Yourself Let Yourself Go“.

    [that’s why I’m here, for this kind of nonsense.]

    Ch 2 We learn all about Twilly, who is some kind of trust fund baby.

    We also learn:

    The Proud Boys are anti-wanking!

    I did not know this! But the internet says it’s true!

    p 20 Our anti-hero Figgo was expelled from the Proud Boys for trashing a monument to a Confederate war hero from Mississippi (whose statue is still in the Capitol for some reason) during the Capitol Riots on January 6!
    Figgo thought it was Ulysses Grant!

    The displaced resentment from this caused him to wank so hard he got carpal tunnel … or “carpy tunnel” as he says.
    A little over the top, but hey, it’s a Hiaasen book!

    23 Viva’s perfect South Florida job is the “wealth director” of the Mink Foundation which gives away money so folks will remember Claude and Electra Mink.!

    She and the Minks are having dinner with an upstate Florida Congressperson who wants a donation for a foundation he made up to teach underage kids construction. Yes, unbelievably sketchy!

    His name is Clure Boyette. His district is upper west part of Florida, but he’s never there. He spends all his time with expensive hookers on the coast.

    p 37 Dale has a sidekick, Jonas Onus, which is a lot funnier the second time I read it! 🙂

    He is a fire fighter retired early on a bogus insurance claim, and he has three kids from three different women born within days of each other. I’m sure there’s a great story behind that, but the author hasn’t shared it yet.

    p 52 The resident that got run over all the way back in Scene 1 is recovering from his injuries and he’s pretty pissed. Not just about his injuries but the anti-semitism and racism of Dale Figgo. His name is Noel, very Scandinavian, the whitest man you’ll ever meet.

    p 58 The Highway Patrol person investigation Noel’s hit and run is getting a part in our drana it seems. She is Danielle Dominguez. Watching Dale think he can outsmart her because she’s just a minority hire is painful to witness.

    Dale and Onus call a meeting of their group, Strokers for Liberty. :)))
    They meet at Fever Beach 🙂

    It’s getting complicated…

    • Viva works for the Mink Foundation
      • The Foundation is devoted to money-laundering.
    • Clure Boyette just donated 1-2 million to the Foundation to be laundered.
      • He (and Claude Mink) are both right-wing zealots and (surprise!) completely immoral.
      • Strokers for Liberty is to be their money laundering vehicle!
    • Clure invited Viva for drinks.
      • She accepts for her own reasons.
      • Clure is much more central to the plot than I anticipated
    • Dale’s truck gets repossessed
      • He’s getting sued by Noel the Scandinavian he ran over
    • Viva and Twilly finally get it on!
    • Onus gets greedy. He’s plotting ways to get a chunk of that 2 million.
    • Viva and Clure’s underage cutie – Galaxy – get together for drinks.
      • (It was ok, Galaxy knew the bartender. 🙂
    • Dale calls a meeting at Fever Beach
      • Onus loses it and cheap-shots him.
    • Noel’s black wive tracks down Dale’s power-boxing mother.
      • They make an entertaining cross-alliance to make our complicated story even more complicated!

    A lot of silly stuff happens, but the really funny one is that Dale decides to take his crew of misfits to Key West for a “secret” practice mission to get publicity for the group by busting up a gay bar (!!! In Key West !!!)

    Twilly, who has easily infiltrated the group, tells Dale repeatedly this is a TERRIBLE idea! Sure enough, the performers and servers at the transsexual bar they invaded (Trauma Queens) were into martial arts and utterly demolished the rednecks.

    Back home, things get even more complicated:

    • Galaxy blackmails Clure for a $300K Astin-Martin.
      • Somehow Twilly spends some of his bottomless pile of money to get it instead, just to keep everybody off balance.
    • Galaxy and Viva become friends and have drinks together.
    • Clure’s equally racist, anti-semitic and anti-gay dad is in the picture also.
      • Every time Clure needs money, which is quite often he has to hit dad up for it.
    • Onus is trying to take over the Strokers to get his hands on that 2 million!

    p 262 Viva to Twilly … very drool repartee for our heroes.

    Wnen you come back, I want to try something super kinky in bed.

    What’s that?

    Eye contact!

    Subplot

    This sub plot has been going on for most of the book, but just got interesting here at the end.

    The Minks’ biggest scam is a development (the Bunkers) out in a beautiful, pristine part of the Florida Keys that was almost a done deal in when one of the corrupt County Commisioner (Baltry) disappeared with all his bribe money.

    As long as he’s just “absent”, the deal cannot be finalized. So the Minks hired a hit man named Moe to kill him and email back proof that h is dead so they can install a new commisioner. Moe found him easily enough hiding in Montana, and sure gave the impression he was going to kill him at the end of a chapter.

    Now we find that he did NOT kill him. Apparently Moe the killer is jewish, and got wind of what virulent, raging anti-semites the Minks are, and decided eff-em, he’ll let the guy go..

    In another complication, Clure’s dad (Clay) has hired Moe to eliminate Galaxy.

    p 316 Oh it’s getting very cute.

    • 307 Baltry is loose and somehow talks to Twilly
    • He tells Twilly why Moe let him go.
      • but Hiaasen’s idea of suspense is to not tell us for a few pages.
    • 309 The make and model of Baltry’s car, which Moe took over to “go undercover” comes up and Twilly realizes Galaxy saw it hanging outside her house!!!

    Soon enough, Moe is knocking on her door and Galaxy totally handles him.

    The killer found himself horse-collared and facedown on a stale pile carpet, immobilized by a girl he outweighted by at least 80 pounds. She smelled like mountain wildflowers, which made the sitation even more surreal. Where the knife came from he didn’t know. He felt the tip of the plade pressed keenly into the side of his neck, the girl’s calm breath in his ear.
    Did the congressman send you?

    That’s some quality stuff, right??

    p 316 With the knife still in his neck they have a very entertaining dialog for four pages ending with Moe inviting her to dinner after he realized she knows the Minks (who hired him for the first hit if you’re losing track).

    What other crazy s–t is gonna happen in the last 40 pages?

    Denouement

    • Twilly and Viva are in her room at Dale’s having fun.
      • Onus shows up, intent on beating the eff out of Dale.
      • Dale isn’t home, so Onus has the very bad idea to force himself on Viva.
        • Honestly, I’m surprised this han’t happened sooner.
        • Last thing he remembers is getting clonked on the head.
        • He gets some pages of folllow-up, but that’s it for Onus in this story.
    • Sadly we don’t hear much about the lunch with Galaxy and her assassin, but it happened
    • Baltry, the first victim that wasn’t actually killed, makes a surprise appearance at the next Bunkers meeting to reject the project and turn states evidence against the Minks and the other corrupt commisioners.
    • The Wee Hammers house goes up in flames.

    The masterstroke that will get the Strokerz(*) national recignition and win the election for Clure is to take over a voting location in his district, a retirement community called Serene Transitions. Since I am typing this from my living room in a retirement community, this is kind of poingnat.

    (*) Onus’ big contribution after becoming co-leader of the group was to change Strokers to Strokerz.

    You won’t be surprised to learn that the whole operation is a clusterfuck. The police show up in force and assure that voters can vote safely. The Strokerz are scattered and arrested.

    Dale escaped the scene but manages to eliminate himself anyway by hanging himseof while climbing up a flagpole to deface a Pride flag.

    To wrap it all up, all the good people have good things happen to then and all the bad people have bad things happen.

    • Dale’s dead.
    • Onus is dead.
    • Claude Mink keels over at a board meeting.
    • Clure is not a congressman any more.

    On the other hand…

    Twilly and Viva are getting along great! She thinks she’s gonna take an office job in New York (ugh). Twilly is moving ahead on his island.