Bag Man: The Wild Crimes, Audacious Cover-Up, & Spectacular Downfall of a Brazen Crook in the White House

 I remember Watergate, but I don't remember Spiro Agnew. Unlike Nixon's crimes, Agnew's were, well, blatant and ordinary. He was a somewhat obscure local official who spent most of his time shaking down developers for bribes. After somehow ending up as the Governor of Maryland, he was picked to be Nixon's 1968 running mate. Like the most recent ex-president, he was crude, combative, and feuded with the press - and a segment of the public loved him for it. Based on the 2018 podcast, Bag Man provide just enough background to explain how, in 1973, we had both a President and Vice-President under investigation for serious crimes. How did we survive the crisis? Three Assistant US Attorneys, Barney Skolnik, Tim Bake, and Ron Liebman, and US Attorney George Beall (the brother of Maryland's then junior Senator) stood up to pressure from Nixon and quietly put together a case that forced Agnew to plead guilty and resign. He didn't go quietly (the last few chapters chronicle months spent slowly winding down his VP office and transitioning to brokering unsavory deals with foreign governments), but he went. He died in 1996, essentially a footnote to history. The attorneys who prosecuted him also escaped fame, each spending several more years working for the Justice Department before moving into private practice (George Beall died in 2017). While Agnew can stay obscure, Beall, Skolnik, Blake, and Liebman deserve to be better known. Their job wasn't glamorous (and parts of the Bag Man are a bit dry because there's only so much you can do to make a financial investigation interesting - trust me, I know), but it's not an exaggeration to say that they may have saved our democracy.

My Name Is Victoria

 Princess Alexandrina Victoria spent her first 18 years trapped in the System. Her mother, the Duchess of Kent devised the plan along with Sir John Conroy. Keep the heir from the public, ostensibly for her safety; strictly control her few contacts; read her diary; and never allow her to be alone. Among the few strictly vetted people she was allowed to know was Victoria Conroy, and the future queen's diary does not snow any affection towards "Miss V." But...what if that was a ruse, that the two Victorias were actually close friends? Lucy Worsley creates an alternate history, in which the volatile royal Victoria sees her friend as an ally rather than a spy, and the advisor's daughter walks a fine line between protecting the princess and giving her father just enough information to keep her position. As with her other YA novel, Maid in the King's Court, Worsley introduces romance, this time with the Saxe-Colburg brothers. We know how that really  ended, but Worsley has a plot twist to keep it interesting (and possibly...no, that would be a spoiler).

A Conspiracy of Violence

 I love Susanna Gregory's Matthew Bartholomew mysteries, and had been eying her Thomas Chaloner series for several years before buying the first one. Reading it, I remembered what someone said in an online discussion: it's better to start a series two or three books in because the author and characters have found their footing. Maybe that's why I found A Conspiracy of Violence hard to follow, or maybe it's because I'm less well versed in the Restoration (and less interested in the Stuarts than other English dynasties). 

Thomas Chaloner is a spy in search of a sponsor. Recently returned from Holland with a lover who works as a lady's companion to his puritan neighbor's daughter, he's desperate for work. When someone murders a messenger during an interview with a potential employer, Chaloner sets out to solve the murder and to untangle the conspiracy behind it. The plot was a bit too complicated for its own good, but I enjoyed Gregory's depiction of 1660s London and found Chaloner's company enjoyable. I doubt he'll replace Matthew (that series seems to be winding down), but his first exploit is promising.

American Sherlock: Murder, Forensics, and the Birth of American CSI

 I loved Quincy as a teen and for years I said that instead of law school, I should have gotten the certifications to run a crime lab. (That is also the wrong answer, by the way - when I realized I didn't like my lab job I should have entered the regulatory affairs program I'm graduating from next month. Better late than never, right?) When I looked through the Free Library of Philadelphia's ebooks, American Sherlock was an automatic pick.

E.O. Heinrich invented forensic science, and his work led to the world where we emphasize expert testimony. More than we should - some techniques such as bite analysis are completely useless and in 2004 a man was executed for the arson murder of his children un unreliable evidence and posthumously cleared of the crime. Even the reliable disciplines of DNA and toxicology are subject to contamination if samples are improperly collected or stored. Still, it's better than eyewitness testimony which is as unreliable as it is compelling

Incorrect eyewitness identification factored into one of Heinrich's cases, the kidnapingand murder of a priest. The priest's housekeeper identified a short, dark, "foreign" man but the kller was a tall Texan Heinrich used psychology and the now-partially discredited science of handwriting analysis to identify an eager witness as the killer. By examining a pair of overalls, he identified the three men who killed a train crew in a botched robbery. His knowledge of chemistry told him that a murder victim wasn't a pioneering chemist but the victim of a con man with a sham lab.

Heinrich also played a role in two high profile hung juries. We may never know how Virginia Rappe developed peritonitis, but her chronic bladder condition is the likely cause. Confusing and conflicting testimony and moral crusades against the then new motion picture industry led to three trials against Roscoe Arbuckle. Heinrich produced physical evidence, including handprints and analyses of smears on a doorjamb, but Arbuckle was eventually acquitted (although never cleared in the public's eyes). The case shows how evidence we trust can be misleading - while clear, well collected fingerprints are identifying, reading a smudged partial print is an art of interpretation and extrapolation.

Walsh begins and ends the book with the death of Allene Lamson and her husband David's trials. Did he beat her to death in the bathtub, did she fall and hit her head, or, improbably, did a stranger slip in while David was doing yard work? Heinrich testified for the defense and sowed enough doubt for an overturned conviction and two hung juries. The science behind his blood splatter work is now questioned, but gave the jury enough doubt to free David Lamson from death row and let him live to become a best selling author.

So what kind of man ws Heinrich? He was driven by OCD and the childhood poverty that led to his father's death by suicide (teenage Heinrich found his father's hanging corpse). This led him to drop out of school and work in a pharmacy where he discovered chemistry. Eventually earning a degree fro Berkley, he transitioned from water treatment to forensics, and from public service to a private lb. always anxious and unsatisfied but always convinced he was right. His OCD may have worked to his advantage in the lab but ld to professional fuels and fraught relationships with the sons he loved (the elder of whom became one of the WWII Monument Men). Walsh does a better job of describing his professional life than integrating his personal life into the narrative (while interesting, the transitions into the personal vignettes are awkward). With that minor exception, I highly recommend American Sherlock.

The Breakers

 I'd put off reading The Breakers because I was afraid that it was the final Sharon McCone novel, leaving only VI Warshawski left of the three godmothers of the female PI. As I read, it felt like a series finale, with Sharon's rumination on her age and career and worries about her failing mother. Sharon wraps these thoughts around the search for her former neighbor, Chelle Curley. We first met Chelle as a hustling teenager, primed to be a millionaire by 30. Now in her early 20s (thanks to some handwaving and retcon), she's a property developer specializing in flipping distressed buildings. The Breakers is a derelict former hotel and night club, and the room where Chelle had been essentially camping during the renovation was decorated with pictures of serial killers. Is there a connection between the macabre decor and Chelle's disappearance? And what secrets are Chelle's parents keeping from Sharon while begging her for help? The Breakers isn't prime McCone, but it was well crafted and entertaining. And it's not the last McCone - after finishing it, I went to Muller's website and found out that there's a new installment due later this year.

The Great Indoors

I'm an incredibly indoorsy person. When lockdown started a year ago this weekend, I thought "This might not be too bad, once I stop panicking over the fact that there's a deadly disease out there. I like being home." A week or two in, I realized that I need more outdoor time than I thought - my evening walks (during the dinner hour so as to minimize contact with others) when it wasn't too wet and raw were not enough. I was shocked to learn that I didn't just need the exercise to burn off my stress, I needed to be outside. Things got better when I started taking regular walks and making sure some of them went through the local parks. The weather's been lousy the last six weeks so I've stopped, and I can't wait until the cold and mud recede enough for me to restart.

The Great Indoors explains how our built environment affects our lives, and how we can improve them. After a few chapters on the generalities of our need for light and nature, Emily Anthes gets into specifics including a tour of a grade school built with natural light, curving surfaces, and setting set to both absorb and encourage fidgeting. That experiment was thwarted by a growing population and shrinking budget which ended up filling in some of the open space but the chapter on adaptive living spaces was more inserting. Focusing on an apartment building for people with autism, I think that several of the adaptations (soundproofing, light levels that can be fine-tuned) could, like some of the physical accessibility advances of the last 30 years, come into general use. Beyond that, The Great Indoors made me think more about my personal environment and how it affects me more than I realize.

A Very British Murder

I've spent my Corona lockdown two ways - playing trivia games and watching history documentaries on YouTube, several of them presented by Lucy Worley. One I haven't watched (yet) is A Very British Murder, which I thought was going to focus on our affection for fictional murders. While she does cover the Golden Age British writers and the pulp novelist who cast a more jaded eye on my favorite genre, most of the book discusses our interest in true crime. Since novel writing isn't very cinematic, I should have expected this, and while I enjoyed the book, I suspect that the series is better.

Shell Game

 And then there was one? 30 years ago, I started reading the three "godmothers" of the female PI novel, Sue Grafton, Marcia Muller, and Sara Paretsky. Grafton died leaving Kinsey Milhone's alphabet unfinished, and Muller appears to have retired along with Sharon McCone. I haven't yet read the final installments in those series, possibly because I don't want them to end.

Sara Paretsky published another VI Warshawski novel in 2020, and I'm beginning to wonder how much longer I'll be reading new installments, and whether it's time for Paretsky and VI to retire. Previous novels did a good job of mixing VI's cases with Paretsky's social conscience, but Shell Game fell flat. Lotte Herschel's grandson is a Canadian grad student in Chicago and involved with the daughter of Middle Eastern poet and dissident. One night he goes missing and at Lotte's request, VI searches for him. This leads to a plot mixing the refugee crisis, art theft, and VI's ex-husband. While exciting, it never quite fit together and there were a few "superhero" moments that just didn't feel right. I enjoyed it, but it's more like the somewhat forgettable early 2000s VI Warshawski novels than her post-2008 renaissance.

Squeeze Me

When I saw Carl Hiaasen on a speaking tour for Razor Girl, he joked that he hoped Florida didn't cause any problems in the 2016 election. Instead, they became the site of the Winter White House. And at a thinly veiled version of Mar a Lago, Kiki Pew Fitzsimmons, a member of the wealthy and elderly presidential fan club called the Potussies, gets eaten by a snake during the White Ibis Ball for IBS. The club manager calls in wildlife rangler Edie Armstrong to handle the problem and then hires two incompetent (of course) criminals to remove the body (and snake) from Edie's storage locker. Of course they stop at a strip bar along the way, which leads to the decomposed snake disrupting the FLOTUS's motorcade. As usual, Hiaasen ties several ridiculous side stories together into a well supported plot, but my favorite part of the book was the references to all of the minor charity balls being held "after the pandemic." Partially because "Stars for SARS" sounds funny, but partially because it gives hope that there will be an "after" when life returns to normal. Or as normal as it gets in Hiaasen's Florida.