The Russia House

I wonder what it was like to read The Russia House as the Soviet Union was collapsing.  Back then, I was mostly reading what my parents called "books without words" (chemistry and chemical engineering textbooks), and lighter weight mysteries to take my mind off polymerization and kinetics. 30 years later, we know how things turned out, and once again Russia is an enemy, albeit not officially declared.

That time lapse colors my view of The Russia House.  I know how pointless Barley Blair's missions, but perhaps that's the entire point.  Blair is the head of a small, family-owned publishing house, one that specializes in safe, unchallenging genre fiction. On a prior trip to the Moscow Book Fair, he spent a long, vodka-soaked afternoon with a few writers and a physicist.  Several years later, that physicist gives his former lover three notebooks he wants published in the west, and she gives them to Blair's representative at the latest book fair.  It seems simple, but of course it's not.  Blair is only tangentially involved in his company's business at this point, more interested in leading a slightly dissipated life in Spain, and no one knows whether the notebooks are legitimate.  MI6 takes a chance on Blair and the notebooks and sends him to Moscow where he falls in love with his contact.  As is the case with many of LeCarre's books, the complex plot ultimately leads to a disquieting futility, but his use of language is superb.

The Guardian of All Things: The Epic Story of Human Memory

Sometimes a book ends up being even better than expected. That's how I felt about The Guardian of All Things.  I was expecting an analysis of how human memory works, but that was Micael S. Malone's starting point.  From simple memories, he moved into memory tricks, then writing, and eventually into the electronic resources which have allowed us to store simple facts we formerly needed to memorize, freeing our memories for more complex and interesting information. Like an episode of Connections without the puns (Malone mentions the show as one of his inspirations, and that he mapped out his book during a lunch with James Burke) The Guardian of All Things seamlessly linked apparently disparate events as it traveled through history.

The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell

I read Mark Krulansky's Salt about 15 years ago, so I had high expectations for The Big Oyster.  That's probably why I was disappointed.  More a history of New York City (to which as a Philadelphian I am naturally resistant) than of oysters, I found it interesting but not as engrossing as Krulansky's earlier work.   Starting with the importance of oysters to Native Americans and running through the Gilded Age into today, the book didn't tell me anything I didn't know about history and not enough of what I wanted to know about oysters.  Well written and researched, it just didn't grab me.

Ordeal by Innocence

Agatha Christie considered Ordeal by Innocence one of her best books, and I agree.  Two years after  Jocko Argyle died of pneumonia while serving a life sentence for killing his mother, Arthur Calgary appears to confirm Argyle's alibi.  It's a tribute to Christie's puzzle-making skills that this isn't as contrived as it sounds - Carlyle is an archaeologist who suffered a concussion in an accident shortly after dropping Jocko (who'd been hitchhiking) off at his destination, and left on a two year expedition of Antartica immediately after being released from the hospital.  He only learned of the high-profile murder case while wrapping items for storage in old newspapers after his return.  Determined to right the wrong, he contacts the Argyle family and finds out (as is usual in Christie's novels, particularly the murder in retrospect ones) that everyone either has a motive or no alibi for Mrs. Argyle's murder. The solution is one of Christie's most clever, simultaneously well supported and surprising. The only problem is that I now want to see the absolutely horrible 1985 version starring Donald Sutherland.  It's deservedly obscure and while I could probably buy a DVD of it somewhere, I don't want to waste the money. Wasting two hours to determine how good of a book could have produced one of the worst A-list movies of the 1980s would be enough.

Lady Vernon and her Daughter

I haven't read any of Jane Austen's juvenilia or her unfinished novels. Jane Rubino's and Caitlen Rubino-Bradway's completion of Lady Susan probably shouldn't count.  They created a standard novel around Austen's epistolary fragment but even though they brought the story back to Lady Susan's courtship, don't manage to fully flesh out the story and characters.  Susan doesn't live up to her reputation as a schemer, her daughter Frederica is Fanny Price without the abuse or the backbone, and the villains (Austen's specialty) are not only unmemorable but indistinguishable. Even a cameo from the Eliots and Mrs. Smith didn't decrease my disappointment.

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

No one could have done well as the US Ambassador to Germany in 1933, and no one wanted the job, except for William E. Dodd.  An academic who thought the posting would give him time to work on his history of the American South, he was completely unprepared for Hitler's Germany.  Dodd brought his family along, including his daughter Martha who became romantically involved with both Gestapo and Russian Communist officers.  Martha's personal story (Larson used her diaries as a primary source) dilutes the horror a bit, but I came away from In the Garden of Beasts admiring Larson's skill as a writer but too disturbed to have enjoyed the book.

A Grave Concern

Matthew Bartholomew and his associates in 14th Century Cambridge are old friends by now, not just to each other but also to me.  IT's the advantage of a long-running series - we know and appreciate the characters' foibles and Susannah Gregory can use them to plausibly send her detectives along the wrong path.

A Grave Concern opens with change.  Michael house has a new, repellant fellow n the young and arrogant Kolvyle, Sheriff Tulyet has Sir John Moyles as a prisoner with privileges (he's a favorite of the King), and Brother Michael is about to leave for a bishopric.  That would be enough without a new barber surgeon committing malpractice on Matt's patients while accusing him of encroaching on his profession, battling monument makers, and an increase in smuggling.  Not to Gregory who adds the murder of Chancellor Tynknell. Soon Moylens is dead too - murdered i the same way and three of the five candidates to replace Tynknell are no longer in the running. One is dead, one (along with an apprentice) is missing, and the third has withdrawn.  Michael, Matt, and Tulyet are experienced investigators, but they're hampered by Matt's medieval ethics, the increasing feebleness of Tulyet's sergeant, and Michael's needs o solve the case and install a proper puppet - I mean Chancellor - before he leaves Cambridge.  A Grave concern ties together several complicated plot lines and allows our detectives to serve justice after several false conclusions.  The personal stories, however, have a bit of a twist, and I'm looking forward to Matthew Bartholomew's 23rd Chronicle.

The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature

The World in Six Songs was one of the most frustrating books I've read in a while.  Daniel J. Levitn's theory (that all music falls into six types of song - friendship, joy, comfort, knowledge, religion, or love) was fascinating, and as a musician and scientist he has the knowledge to back that up.  However, every time I became engrossed in his explanation, he'd awkwardly name-drop or tell a story that just seemed too pat (or included an obvious fact-checking error - "We Built This City" was recorded in 1985 so it couldn't be on a 1970 playlist).  Interesting material, and a lot of potential, but not well executed.

They Came to Baghdad

In her autobiography, Agatha Christie said how easy it was for her to write.  All she needed was a table for her typewriter and she could produce a novel or two and some short stories every year.  She also talked about going on archaeological expeditions with her husband, Max Mallowan.  Because everyone on the expedition needed to contribute, she became one of the staff photographers, taking pictures of labeled pottery shards every morning and then, when the heat made most work impossible, retiring to her room and her typewriter after lunch.

This is how I imagine she wrote They Came to Baghdad.  It's a caper novel, along the lines of her Tommy and Tuppence series.  The book starts with the run-up to a major international conference where the east/west balance of power may be at stake.  That's just the framework for a young, barely competent typist's adventures.  Victoria Jones has been fired (again) and on her way to her employment agency, she meets a young man, Edward, about to leave for Baghdad as part of an NGO (or something like that - the details are fuzzy, both both to him and to Victoria).  On a whim, she decides to follow him and, shockingly, she manages to get a position as a companion to a traveller who's broken her arm.  Once in Baghdad, Victoria starts working for Edward's NGO - at least until she's kidnapped and drugged, waking up to find her hair has been bleached and she's far from town.  She ends up being mistaken for an anthropologist sent out to work on an archaeological dig, where she not only finds she has a talent for reconstructing ancient pottery from shards but also manages to solve her kidnapping and foil an international plot.  There's more (a dead body in the night, an attempted murder on a bus, a dashing spy, and a mysterious woman named Anna Scheele), which Christie ties everything together neatly and with proper support.  It's probably not one of her classics, but a highly amusing mystery novel that's definitely worth reading.

The Malaria Project: The US Government's Secret Mission to Find a Miracle Cure

We haven't beaten malaria.  The parasite is too well evolved, too wily.  Surviving an infection only gives a few months of immunity (although initial infections are more likely to affect the brain), and anti-malarial drugs have severe side effects.  The best prevention is to reduce the transmissibility through economic development  But there's a feedback loop in effect - malaria weakens people, sapping their ability to improve their economic status, leaving them in the sort of living conditions that both aid in the transmission of malaria and create a reservoir for the disease.

The Malaria Project starts with an outline of the disease.  There are four human strains, but two are most important, cyclical vivid and the more virulent falciparum.  This old world disease had a new world treatment, quinine, from the bark of the South American chinch tree.  It only saved the patient, though, it did not kill the parasite and left the victim subject to recurrent attacks and left them able to transmit the disease to a neighbor.

19th Century chemistry tried to synthesize quinine from coal tar and failed.  One failure, by William Henry Perkin, created the first artificial dye and kicked off the organic chemistry industry.  Germany led the way, and after WWI, her patents were confiscated by US companies.  WWI also broke down the late 19th Century gains against the parasite.  More troops were infected with malaria than died, and Mediterranean regions which had controlled transmission once found the disease to be endemic.

Malaria had never ceased to be endemic in the American South, and that's where Dr; Lowell Coggshall first joined the fight.  A formerly indifferent student who saw college as an escape from subsistence farming in Iowa, he worked for the Rockefeller Institute, measuring parasite loads in children and adults and pouring toxic Paris Green on stagnant ponds to kill mosquito larvae.  Along with experienced malariologists Samuel Darling and Paul Russell, he made headway but malaria wasn't truly controlled until the TVA brought electricity, running water, and jobs to the area.

While Coggshell was fighting malaria win the US, a German doctor, Julius Wagner-Jauregg, found that the high fever caused by malaria could cure tertiary syphilis (in about 30% of early cases).  Many patients died, but since tertiary syphilis is terminal, scientists father day did not see an ethical problem.  Jauregg eventually won a Nobel Prize and researchers - both German (where the Nazi regime preferred human over non-human experiments) and American - used mental patients and prisoners as both research subjects and reservoirs for the malaria parasite.

When WWII broke out, malaria control because a war weapon.  Again, more soldiers developed malaria than were injured and the available drugs (made from incomplete German patents) were so toxic that soldiers refused to take them.  Coggshell, now a Naval officer, devised control methods (screens, repellant, long pants and sleeves, clearing and poisoning stagnant water) executed by enlisted men chosen for their scientific backgrounds.  Once control methods were established (if not always followed), Cogwheel turned to testing treatments on soldiers sent home to recover.

US researchers, notably Alf Alving, continued to experiment on prisoners as well, They were better treated than other prisoners, and gave consent, but such consent can't be considered informed or voluntary.  Perhaps that's why the first Nazi doctor to stand trial, Claus Schilling, was executed while later doctors were condemned to life imprisonment during the Nuremberg Trials.  Alving's work, along with Coggshell's, did lead to effective treatments, but at what cost?  Although they passed muster in the day, we cannot argue that they were ethical.  But can we refuse the life-saving advances he made?

In the end, it may not matter.  Malaria is smarter than we are, and no matter how toxic, the drugs eventually become useless against resistant strains.  Multi-drug therapy helps stave that off, but only temporarily  Our best bet is to stop transmission, which can only come with economic development, which is hindered by endemic malaria.

The Color of Fear

Sharon McCone hasn't retired yet, and neither has Marcia Muller (there's a new McCone novel, just out in hardback). I'm glad - after losing Sue Grafton last year, there are only two remaining godmothers of the female PI novel.  Most of the mysteries I read are written by women, and I have Muller, Grafton, and Paretsky to thank for that.

The Color of Fear opens a few days before Christmas.  A mob attacks Sharon's birth father, Shoshone artist Elwood Farmer while he's taking a late night stroll.  We know from the start that it's a racially motivated attack, the identity of the gang leader, and the fact that there's also a personal connection to M&R investigations, the firm Sharon owns with her husband Hy Ripinsky.  I appreciate mysteries which play with the genre's conventions, and Muller has written a successful howdunnit. She's also given Sharon a chance to catch up with family.  Her birth mother, attorney Saskia Blackhawk, and her half-sister Robin have featured in the last dozen or so novels, and her nephew/employee Mick and his father (Sharon's ex-brother-in-law) play substantial roles.  This time, Sharon's youngest sister Patsy, unseen and barely mentioned since the All Souls days, makes a brief appearance, along with their mother who seems to be slipping into a fantasy world (or who has been living there for years).  It's an interesting juxtaposition, holiday cheer with family and friends against a distressingly topical racial attack, but it works well, thanks to Muller's skill.

A Terrible Beauty

Warning, spoilers for And Only to Deceive

The Moonstone, widely acknowledged as the fist mystery novel, used multiple points of view. The convention fell out of fashion in the 20th Century, but when done well adds background without resorting to excessive exposition.  Tasha Alexander uses the convention well, and also avoids making the returned dead spots trope convincing.

A Terrible Beauty begins with Phillip, Viscount Ashton's funeral.  Dressed in deep Victorian mourning, Lady Emily can hide her ambivalence for the husband she barely knew.  A decade later, happily married to Phillip's best friend Colin Hargraves, Emily receives a postcard sent to the Viscountess Ashton.  Is it a joke?  Or is Phillip still alive/  Emily hears his name on a trip tot he zoo with her sons, and then thinks she sees him in Athens en route to Santorini, where she, Colin, and her American classicist friend Margaret Michales plan to distract her friend Jeremy, Duke of Cambridge from his grief over his disastrous engagement.  Any doubts Emily has about the ghosts of her past disappear when she arrives at her villa, because Phillip arrived ahead of her - with a dead man.

Phillip, it turns out, did not die when poisoned by an associate while on safari in Africa, or so he claims.  He'd actually fallen into a deep coma and had been saved by a tribesman who substituted an actual corpse for the funeral, then nursed him back to health.  Two years later, he found his way to Munich and tried tor claim his identity.  Banks don't give monty do dead men, so he would have been stuck if he hadn't been befriended by a sympathetic German archaeologist.  Eventually, the amateur becomes a professional, and under the name Phillip Chapman discovered a bronze which may have belonged to Achilles.

His story convinces Emily and Colin, at least at first. He looks like Phillip, and with few photographs and the passage of a decade, he can explain away any doubts.  He's also being chased by a man out steal the Achilles bronze, even if it means killing Phillip.  this leaves two mysteries for Emily and Colin to solve, and with the help of Phillip's retrospective memories, I solved both about the same time as they did (although I didn't see the final twist until I read it).  A Terrible Beauty is one of the best entries in a generally good but occasionally uneven series

The Best Man to Die

I'd been waiting for one of Ruth Rendell's Inspector Wexford mysteries to grab me, and The Best Man to Die succeeded.  A bit less obviously psychological (popular understanding of motivations has evolved since the year I was born), it also introduces Wexford's drama-student daughter Sheila.

Sheila, and the dustmop of a dog she's watching for a friend, add a bit of levity to a pair of apparently unconnected mysteries.  Charlie Hatton was supposed to be best man at his friend Jack Pertwee's wedding.  Instead, someone killed him after he left the stag night at the local pub.  Wexford came across his body (and Maurice Cullum, one of the revelers and suspects) while walking Sheila's temporary dog.  While he spends his Saturday interviewing the wedding party, Inspector Burden goes to the hospital to interview the lone survivor of a car crash.  Mrs. Fanshaw, however, insists that her daughter wasn't in the car when her husband ran off the road.  If so, who was the young woman found burnt almost beyond recognition in the wreckage? As Wexford investigates the Hatton murder, he begins to suspect that the dead man's blackmail scheme connects to the fatal crash, but how?  There's an easy to miss, but obvious once it's mentioned twist which neatly (but not too neatly) solves the case, and a bit of comic tension (it's hard to explain without spoiling) which adds to the final pages.  Now I understand why the Wexford novels have remained so popular.

Katherine of Aragon: The True Queen

Reading Prairie Fires, I realized that historical fiction was my first genre.  Laura Ingalls Wilder's books were the first I remember re-reading multiple times, and like many little girls in the 70s, I played "pioneer" (rather surprising for a fastidious, super-indoorsey city girl). The Witch of Blackbird Pond and Johnny Tremaine also fell apart due to multiple re-readings, but as an adult, I stayed away from the genre until I was re-introduced through the hybrid sub genre of historical mysteries.

It helps that Alison, Weir, one of my favorite biographers, decided to start writing novels.  Katherine of Aragon: The True Queen, her 6th novel, starts series animating the six disparate women who married Henry VIII.

Weir begins Katherine's story when she's Catalina, Infanta of Spain, betrothed to Arthur, Prince of Wales, and about to land at Plymouth.  There she will become Kathrine, and eventually Queen.  Her Prince, however will never be King, and Katherine's first meeting with Arthur disappoints her.  Not only is he rather shy, but he's clearly ill, pale and weak and frequently coughing from a "lingering rheum."  He's too weak to consummate their marriage (although like a teenager, even one whose kingdom doesn't depend on it, he brags of his conquest).  The young newlyweds are affectionate, though, and Katherine mourns not just her lost position but her husband when he dies from tuberculosis a few months later.

Arthur's death plunges Katherine into several years of uncertainty as a political pawn.  After some talk of marrying her to the new heir, 11-year-old Henry, Duke of York, she falls into limbo. After Queen Elizabeth dies in childbirth, Henry VII considers marrying her, then abandons that in favor of this alliance or that, always looking for the most lucrative option - and not supporting the Dowager Princess and contractually required.  Parsimonious Henry Tudor didn't just want the best alliance; he wanted the best dowry.  Katherine spent her widowhood acting as a go-between for her father and father-in-law, trying to enforce he contract which held back her plate and jewels.

It's during this period that the always devout Princess met her new confessor, Frey Diego.  A magnetic personality and hard line moralist (at least in appearance), he encourages her to confess deep sins and mortify her flesh (Weir hints at the possibility that Katherine's devout fasting was a form of anorexia nervosa, as theorized by Giles Trement).  Diego, who comes across ad manipulative but without a known agenda, enters her household after the Spanish Ambassador, Dr. de Peubla, forces out Katherine's protective but cunning duenna, Dona Elvira in yet another battle over the dowry.

Katherine's uncertain youth ends with Henry VII's death (also from tuberculosis) in 1509.  Already 24, she finds a love match in the 18-year-old Henry VIII who ends their betrothal with a quick wedding so that they may be crowned together.  Weir shows us the young, passionate, athletic king; one whom we can find attractive and yet, in his mercurial moods and extravagance, we can also see hints of the despot to come.  At first, though, he's a loving and doting husband, more suited to be a courtier than King. He celebrates Katherine's pregnancies as a father as well as a King, and mourns with her when the first two end with a stillbirth and a young Prince who only lives a few weeks.  Five more pregnancies over the next decade leave only Mary living, and although Henry is discreet, Katherine hears rumor of Bessie Blount and wonders why her still youthful husband flies a chivalrous banner at certain tournaments.  Eventually, Katherine learns that Henry feels their marriage is cursed because (even though their marriage was never consummated), she is Arthur's widow

Weir wisely keeps the political and theological arguments as the background of the third section of Katherine of Aragon. Instead, she shows a stubborn but righteous woman who still loves her husband (who may still love her).  As Katherine's status and household shrink, we see the personal toll it takes, tearing her from the devoted friends who have made up her inner circle and planting the seeds of dogmatic intolerance in Princess Mary.  Weir also subtly hints at how closely intertwined five of Henry's six wives, were, with a cameo by Jane Seymour and references to Maud Parr's daughter Kate.  Although of lasting political import, Henry's break with Rome and marriage to Anne Boleyn was a personal tragedy to Katherine and her ladies. Weir really brings that across, and even gains  bit of sympathy for Henry who, at least when he begins his quest for an annulment,s seems driven in part by grief. He's wrong, of course, but it's this sort of nuance that makes me look forward to Anne Boleyn: A King's Obsession.  I'm sure many characters will reappear there, but in a different light.

The Iris Fan

Warning - spoiler for The Shogun's Daughter

There's something bittersweet about reading the last book in a series.  Laura Joh Rowland published The Iris Fan four years ago, but because I fell behind, I've known for three books that she was winding up the Sano Ichiro mysteries.  Four years after The Shogun's Daughter, Sano has been demoted, Masihiro has no hope of a decent marriage or advancement through the Samauri ranks, and the family is living in cramped and straightened circumstances with Midori and her children (Hirata, still mired in his supernatural subplot, is missing).  He's hunting for evidence that Ienobu ordered Yoshisato's death while Yanigasawa is looking for evidence that his son is still alive.  The enemies and their quests collide when someone stabs Shogun Tokugawa (bedridden with measles), with an iris-decorated fan.

Sano's investigation leads to the women's quarters of the palace.  In prior cases, his wife Reiko helped him with these interviews but four years after her stillbirth, his devotion to the Samauri code and her lingering postpartum depression have driven them apart.  The case piques her interest, though, and reluctantly at first, she begins to investigate.  With help from a surprising person and both personal and professional roadblocks thrown up by Yanigasawa, Sano solves the case and achieves the happy (or at least bittersweet) ending that a reader expects from the final installment in a long-running series.  One warning, though.  The Sano books have always been a bit dark, and there's one scene in The Shogun's Daughter, where a beautiful but intellectually disabled young woman mentions her "special friends" that's particularly disturbing.

Let It Bleed

Let It Bleed starts with a car chase out of a Hollywood action movie, a chase that ends with John Rebus's boss in the hospital and the men they were chasing diving off an icy bridge onto the deck of a police boat (as the coroner says, at least it saved the department the case of a water search).  Don't worry, after that Ian Rankin returns to his familiar ground, political and police corruption against the backdrop of Edinburgh's dreary weather.  A few days after the chase, crash, and suicide, Rebus is called out to investigate the suicide of a recently released, terminally ill prisoner who chose a local councillor's open hours as his place of death.  Rebus thinks they're connected, and finding himself on an involuntary vacation tells him he's right.  The plot was a bit convoluted, involving tech start-ups (the book was written nearly 20 years ago, and there's a prescient scene where Rebus's drinking buddy claims that eventually we'll all have pocket sized computers) and sham contracts for retraining unemployed workers.  Rankin sufficiently supported his conclusion, but I liked the book more for Rebus than for the plot.

A Most Wanted Man

John le Carre's heroes aren't heroic.  They're world-weary men and women for whom spying isn't exactly a game, but they realize they might not be on the side of right.  A Most Wanted Man makes everyone a pawn.  The young man who may be a terrorist sleeper or an aspiring medical student.  The family who take him in and may be an apolitical mother and son who wish to become naturalized German citizens or a religious fanatic and a budding terrorist.  The banker whose father laundered money smuggled out of the collapsing USSR for the young man's putative father.  The idealistic woman who works for a refugee agency and may be falling for her charge.  Le Carre portrays them all vividly, but they don't matter.  What matters is the trap they make for the most wanted man.  Whether by design or not, Le Carre's plot was secondary to the atmospheric vignettes he strung together, creating an interesting novel in which the espionage is more of a background than the primary reason for the book.

Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

There are so many threads running through Caroline Fraser's excellent Prairie Fires that I don't know  how to start my review.  I grew up on the Little House books, eventually realizing that as hard as life was for the Ingalls family, the novels were novels rather than history.  Beyond that, they were sanitized for their juvenile audience, something I slowly came to realize as I read other, less complete biographies.  None of them, even Wilder's memoir Pioneer Girl, told how unremittingly grim Laura's life actually was.  Prior books implied this, but Prairie Fires spells out how Charles Ingalls was an abject failure.  He moved the family along the frontier not because "the land was too settled" but because he was a terrible businessman who left every outpost out of desperation and a little worse off financially than when he'd arrived.  Even when he "won his bet" with the government, earning title to his claim near DeSmet, he soon sold his quarter section and moved into town, eventually dying of overwork and heart disease at 64.

Laura's adult life wasn't much easier.  She started working to support the family at age 9, as a dishwasher, companion, seamstress, and eventually a schoolteacher.  Once married, she experienced two difficult pregnancies, the death of her infant son, a near-fatal bout of diphtheria, her husband's disabling stroke, and a fire which destroyed her house.  The Wilders never proved up on their land; after brief sojourns with Almanzo's relatives in Minnesota and Florida, both took paid jobs (Laura as a seamstress, Almanzo as a day laborer and drayman) to buy property in the Ozarks.  Even there, they took odd jobs and took in borders until Almanzo's father bought their house for them.

There was also Rose.  Bright and strong willed, prone to depression (and possibly bipolar disorder - Rose called herself "manic depressive" in her diary), outgoing where her mother was reticent, extravagant where her mother was extremely frugal, they were alike and different in the most combustible pairings.  It was Rose who encouraged her mother to write her memoir; but it was also Rose who urged her parents to invest in stocks which vaporized in the Depression making the Little House books both possible and necessary.  And it was Rose whose rather bitter form of libertarianism overlaid the myth of self-sufficiency over a life of outside help and escaped debts.

The Homestead Act, when you get down to it, was a land swindle executed by the government.  The upper plains were originally described as desert land, and the mostly wheat monoculture practiced by the small landholders depleted the soil and adversely affected weather patterns.  No one could expect more than subsistence farming on the prairie, and yet the government led thousands to believe the they could make their fortune on just 160 acres.  Fraser expands on this, pointing out that we've lived with the myth of the small farmer for much of the country's existence, but that it's not true.  Small scale farming has never been able to feed our population and provide export income, and yet we repeat the myth, perhaps hoping that we can make it true.

This myth bloomed into both women's right-wing political views.  Laura's were a bit softer but despite knowing that her sister Grace and her husband were struggling before the Depression, she never forgave them for accepting New Deal relief.  You can almost understand how Laura came to her views, though, since years of hard work and struggle left her extremely frugal.  Still, she overlooked the help she and Almanzo received from his parents or the low interest federal loans they took out.  Rose's libertarianism (and she's considered one of the movement's founders), seems a bit more...personal?  She could be generous on an individual level, informally (and mercurially) adopting young men and supporting them for years and providing friends with extravagant gifts.  She also considered taxes to be theft and when her writing career (which included "fake news" biographies and novels taken heavily from her mother's life) floundered claimed that she'd stopped writing because taxes took too much of her income.

Prairie Fires bursts the myth built up around the Little House books, but it also fleshes out the story. Novelists need to leave out anything not necessary to the story, and even with Caroline Ingalls's emphasis on education there's not much room in the books for reading.  Fraser shows that Charles Ingalls wasn't just a storyteller, but as avid of a reader as was possible on the frontier, and that Laura devoured lurid crime tales as an adolescent.  It fleshes out DeSmet as a small but bustling town, one that could have grown into a twin of Gopher Prairie.  And in the epilogue, it shows how the towns which so vehemently oppose government help rely upon it, even as they flounder.

I'm afraid that my review has done less justice to Prairie Fires than the emetically sweet and hilariously melodramatic TV series did to the Little House books.  It's an amazing blend of joint biography and historical analysis that should not be missed.

The Secret of Chimneys

Shortly after my dad died, I went on a Christie kick, re-reading several of my favorites.  Around the same time, my mom decided that she wanted to read the books in publication order, and I realized that I had lost several books over the years.  Some may have been loaned out and never returned, but I think most of my lost books were soaked when I had them stacked under a wall AC unit which had a towel under it to block warm air.  A thunderstorm soaked the towel and I came home to several irreparably soggy paperbacks.  Naturally, I went to my favorite used book sources to start filling in the gaps.

One of those new/old books is The Secret of Chimneys.  I know I read it in high school, and I'm pretty sure I read it about the same time I read The Seven Dials Mystery.  I didn't remember anything else, other than it was enjoyable.  More than 30 years later, it's a lightweight wannabe spy novel with engaging characters and plenty of banter.  Anthony Cade, an impoverished and somewhat rakish aristocrat, is shepherding a tour group through archaeological sites when an old friend asks him to deliver the memoirs of a deposed and deceased Hertzoslovakian diplomat to a London publisher.  Murders, theft, a beautiful widow, and an Earl's plucky daughter ensue, with the solution coming through maybe a little more coincidence than the average reader should expect.  It's a natural successor to The Secret Adversary, with plenty of action and slightly more believable characters.  It's her fifth novel, and Christie hadn't quite hit her stride yet, enjoyable but not overly memorable.

Bone Box

When Faye Kellerman wrote Murder 101, I said that it was probably a good thing that she didn't make Peter Decker's daughter Cindy the new lead of the series because the West Coast native would probably put Philadelphia neighborhoods in the wrong places and that it would make  me angry.  I was right.  No, Ms. Kellerman, a cop and a medical student would NOT live near Rittenhouse Square, and even in University City (which I think you described) they probably wouldn't have a 3 bedroom apartment.  Cindy wouldn't drive to the Roundhouse from Rittenhouse Square or West Philly - traffic and parking prices are both insane and we have SEPTA.  Oh, and you can't leave suburban Cleveland around 11 am and get to Philadelphia before 5.  Getting from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia in under six hours is only possible if you don't stop to pee and don't encounter a construction zone (and there's always a construction zone).

Ms. Kellerman, these are not obscure facts.  A simple check on Zillow for "Rittenhouse Square" and on Google for "drive time between Cleveland and Philadelphia" would have fixed your draft.

I wish geographic errors were my only problems with Bone Box.  I've enjoyed Faye Kellerman's Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus series, but it's a weak, disorganized entry.  It starts well, with Rina literally stumbling across a partially buried skeleton while on a nature hike.  The bones belong to a former student at one of the Five Colleges Consortium, a young man who'd dropped out of one of the colleges to work in finance and had started to transition to being a woman.  Decker and McAdams link this death to another one, and possibly to a pair of related and intermarried couples on the faculties of four of the colleges.  If this sounds improbable, it is.  Kellerman used a similar theme in The Theory of Death, and making it more complex only made it less believable.  Her ventures into the LGBTQ community also felt a bit off, although as an outsider, I can't say anything more specific that the LGBTQ people portrayed didn't feel like real people.  That happens sometimes with minor characters, but the mystery's main victim should be a bit more fleshed out.  I enjoyed parts of Bone Box (the interplay between Decker and McAdams, plus a guest visit by Decker's former partner Marge Dunn), but I'm beginning to question Kellerman's decision to both move Decker to the East Coast and to keep him as an active police detective.  As much as I like her books,  maybe she should have ended the series with Decker's retirement.

Caroline: Little House, Revisited

I loved the Little House books as a kid (the TV show was another matter - it strayed too far from the script and was cloyingly maudlin so it became my first hate-watch show).  I've re-read them a few times as an adult and while I now cringe at parts, I still enjoy them.  Caroline: Little House, Revisited, as the title says, tells Little House on the Prairie from Caroline Ingalls's point of view.  Laura backtracked when writing her novels (the family moved from Wisconsin to Kansas in 1870, and then back to Kansas a little over a year later), in part because she didn't plan Little House in the Big Woods as part of a series and in part because her publisher didn't trust a three-year-old protagonist.

Ma was always stoic in the Little House books; not exactly cheerful but considering gloom as improper as boisterousness.  She was the anchor, the practical woman who anchored her wanderlust-stricken husband.  She came from a stoic era, but she'd also spent much of her child in deep poverty after the death of her father.  That colors the internal monologue that makes up most of Caroline.  Where Charles always sees the possibilities of life, Caroline anticipates problems. And yet she follows him, joins in his dream, separating from family and a comfortable life to spend weeks tracking across the endless prairie with nothing to distract her (I can't even handle a half-hour car ride without a book; Caroline went months without reading materials) and to give birth nearly alone (Carrie was born in Kansas, and Mrs. Scott who lived 3 miles away acted as midwife).  There's less action in Caroline than in the Little House books, but more fear because an adult can anticipate death (by drowning, due to malaria, or under the logs meant to build shelter).  It's quieter and more reflective, and while good, perhaps not quite as memorable.

Mourn Not Your Dead

Warning - mild spoiler for Leave the Grave Green

I'm beginning to wonder why Duncan Kincaid gets so many high profile cases.  I've read five of Deborah Crombie's mysteries and Duncan has investigated the deaths of two high ranking police officers and the son-in-law of a famous opera couple (conductor and soprano).  I guess he has a reputation for being discreet.  A week after their impulsive night together, Duncan and his DS Gemma James find themselves investigating the bludgeoning of Commander Alister Gilbert.  The suspects fall into two categories, professional and personal.  Gilbert may have been involved in some high level corruption, he wasn't popular in his village, and there's something "off" about how his wife and stepdaughter act during their initial interviews.

Normally, Gemma and Duncan would coordinate their investigation, but their encounter has gotten in the way.  For Duncan, it was the natural release of the barely recognized sexual tension between the two, but for Gemma - younger, lower-ranked, and a woman - it was a risky, potentially stupid act.  She has feelings for Duncan, or thinks she does, but she's a young divorced single parent from a working class background whose ex-husband is less than diligent with support payments.  Because of the shifting point of view (and because the pair married several books later), we know that Duncan isn't being predatory, but Gemma doesn't know that, or exactly what she feels towards Duncan.  This could hurt the career she needs on multiple levels, and this conflict begins to spill into their working relationship.  It doesn't prevent them from solving the crime, and Crombie doles out the clues so that I came to the right conclusion about the same time as Gemma and Duncan.

An Unholy Alliance

Four years ago, I re-read A Plague on Both Your Houses, the first book in Susannah Gregory's Matthew Bartholomew series, as part of an online book group.  The characters (and 14th Century Cambridge) had changed so much in the 15 or so years that had passed for Matt and his friends that I decided to re-read the entire series.  So why did it take four years?  Well, I don't have a To Be Read list, I have a To Be Read library.

Gregory starts An Unholy Alliance with a man trying to steal important university documents.  Unfortunately for him, the lock was a special one with a poisoned prong and the Chancellor finds the man's body.  He gives Matt and Brother Michael (not yet a Proctor, but already plotting his ascension to the highest office in the University) the task of finding out who this man is, how he died, and why he was robbing the University.  Somehow this mystery may (or may not) tie to the cults that have grown up in the wake of the Plague and a series of women (mostly prostitutes) murdered and left with marked feet.  As with my first re-read, I enjoyed the mystery (which Gregory ties together well), but was more interested in the characters.  Brother Michael is now a friend and ally to Matt, but we don't yet have his entire backstory as a courtier or know the depths of both his ambition and his skills.   Matt's book bearer Cynric is still a bit of a cypher, although we see the first hints of his ladies' man persona, and William is an antagonist rather than the Friend Nobody Likes he becomes by the middle of the series.  We meet Sheriff Tulyet for the first time, and I'd forgotten that he (like Michael) was somewhat antagonistic at the start, and Matt's first crop of students, including the rich but hopelessly dim Deynman.  Most importantly, we meet Matilda, leader of the sisterhood, protector of her fellow prostitutes, and Matt's eventual love.  I'd forgotten how casually she'd been introduced, and I wonder if Gregory intended for her to be a minor, or even one-off character.

The Cellar

The Cellar is dark, even for Minette Walters, and unlike most of her books, there's no happy ending. We see the events unfold through the eyes of Muna, a girl taken from an orphanage and hidden from view by an African immigrant family in England.  When their younger son goes missing, they realize they can't hid Muna any longer and pretend she's their mentally disabled daughter and not their slave. Muna is actually much brighter, and much more calculating, than anyone in her family, and even better than her "mother" at developing cover stories for the neighbors.  More of a thriller than a mystery, The Cellar left me with mixed feelings.  It's even creepier than it's dark, and while I admired Walters' writing, I was a bit to unsettled to actually enjoy reading the book.

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

I'm not an expert.  I'm a former bench-level chemist who became a lawyer, has spent years in pharmaceutical document review, and is now working on a master's in regulatory affairs.  I still figured out that Theranos was a complete con before I finished the first article I read on the company. It's just not possible to do a complete blood panel instantaneously with the few drops of blood you get from a finger prick.  There's not enough blood to test accurately.  Back when I was in the lab (we did pesticide testing for FIRFA re-registration), we knew that as we isolated the minor metabolites, there was always a chance that our samples would be too small and too dilute for us to get an accurate read on how much material we had.

What I didn't know was how *much* of a con it was, and just how reprehensible CEO Elizabeth Holmes and her second in command/secret romantic partner Sunny Balwani were.  Holmes is a brilliant psychopath whose goal from childhood was to be a billionaire.  She convinced a Stanford engineering professor of her brilliance before dropping out and leveraged his cachet with venture capitalists into one of the hottest start-ups in Silicon Valley.  I can almost understand how these intelligent but scientifically naive executives fell for Holmes's pitch.  Sure, it's impossible, but Holmes was selling the dream.  In our pockets we carry more computer power than put man on the moon (and use it too look at cat videos), and if I so wish I can watch a movie during my commute - that was a fantasy as late as 2000.  So, maybe this magic machine could...no, I still can't see how anyone with even a high school knowledge of science could fall for it.

But they did, and they did in part because Elizabeth Holmes was such a fantastic salesman.  She put on a show, imitating Steve Jobs's black turtlenecks, using her Hitchcock blonde looks, and when asked for actual demos, simply cheating.  Her first victims were also mercenaries, so while I found her actions repellant, I looked at them clinically.  Venture capitalists are just in it for the money, the CEO of Wallgreens was trying to one-up CVS, and James Mattis pulled rank on the FDA savvy Lieutenant Colonel who saw that the machine didn't, couldn't work.  Sunny Balwani (a man who'd lucked into a dot-com payoff despite not realizing that potassium is K, not P, in the periodic table) made the Theranos workplace incredibly toxic, but people either moved on or coped.  The constant turnover didn't hurt Theranos's public impression, and George Schultz, Sam Nun, and Henry Kissinger joint the Board of Directors.

Then Theranos, and Holmes, started harassing members of the Fuisz family.  They're not sympathetic people, but the Fuiszes and Holmes parents had once been close and Richard Fuisz helped get her started.  It just didn't seem fair to slap them with a frivolous patent infringement suit.  This suit, however, started the company's downfall.  The Fuisz attorneys found a potential whistleblower in Ian Gibbons.  A tragic event prevented his testimony, but it eventually led to another whistleblower tipping John Carreyrou of the Wall Street Journal.  I'd been moderately interested in Bad Blood to this point, but Carreyrou's investigation (complete with stalking and threats aimed at him and the whistleblowers, including Shultz's grandson Tyler) completely engrossed me.  Theranos feel apart, probably a decade later than it should have, and Elizabeth Holmes's fortune disappeared.  In a final attempt to save her company, she cried sexism - but as someone half a generation older who was literally held back in math in junior high because I was a girl, it doesn't sit well with me to see her do that.  She used her classic beauty and the desire for Silicon Valley to improve optics with a female billionaire to con others.

The Last Detective

I decided to take a chance on Peter Lovesey's Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond series, and while I enjoyed The Last Detective, I'm not sure I'm gong to search out the rest of the series.  It won an Anthony Award, but I didn't find the detective particularly compelling.  When the book opens, Diamond had recently been promoted and transferred from Scotland Yard to Bath CID, but his involvement in the questionable confession of a man later proved innocent leaves his position in jeopardy.  He also sees himself as the last of his kind, the kind of detective who solves mysteries through dogged investigation, not computer analysis (the book was written in 1993).

While I didn't find the main character interesting, I did enjoy the mystery.  Late one Friday evening, a policeman's neighbor finds a body floating in a lake.  She calls her neighbor, and after a day or so of CID investigation, an English professor identifies the body as his wife, a former soap star.  She was glamorous but erratic, and he was becoming close to the mother of a teenage boy he'd saved from drowning.  Lovesely takes his time, realistically pacing the investigation and trial, scattering clues relating to a local businessman and some letters believed to have been written by Jane Austen.  In the end, it's a throwaway comment that identifies the true culprit.

Mary Boleyn: the Mistress of Kings

I suspect that no one would have cared about Mary Boleyn if she weren't The Other Boleyn Girl.  Alison Weir's biography shows that Mary was clearly the "other" sister - less intelligent, less ambitious, less interesting.  That doesn't make Weir's book any less interesting, though.  She uses this biography of a somewhat-famous-by-reflection as a way to explore lower profile aspects of court life and to show the mechanics of her job.

Mary's life was marginally recorded at best.  Weir spends much of the early chapters reconstructing Mary's life, proving that she was indeed the older sister, and outlining the life of an inconsequential member of a prominent family. Mary spent time at the French court as one of Queen Mary's attendants and was briefly the mistress of Francois I.  Today, we wonder how consensual the affair between a king regnant and the lady in waiting to the queen emerita could be.  In the 16th Century, it damaged Mary's reputation and could have had repercussions for the entire Boleyn family, which was already considered a bit dodgy.  She spent several years in obscurity before marrying her cousin Henry Carey, a courtier, and joining him at Henry VIII's court.  There, she again became the mistress to a king, securing her place if not in history, in historical fiction.

I know this sounds very dry and dull, but I found it fascinating.  I also saw sections of Weir's book as a rebuttal to Derek Wilson's biography of Henry VIII.  Wilson's theory is that Henry VIII was a bad king because he was a lousy lover, and he was a lousy lover because he only had one acknowledged illegitimate child.  Weir argues that Henry was discreet, rather than sexually inept.  She also argues that he did have two illegitimate daughters, and that he didn't claim them for logical reasons.  Acknowledging the first, by the daughter of the court goldsmith, would bring him no political advantage, and the second, by Mary Boleyn Carey, make his marriage to Anne Boleyn illegal on the same grounds he was using to annul his marriage to Katherine of Aragon.  Leaving aside how male and female researchers may have different views on the connection between a king's sexual aggression and his competence, Weir's argument makes sense.

Hardcore Twenty-Four

Since there are only so many mystery-related T words, Janet Evanovich switched to rhyming for the title of the 24th Stephanie Plum novel.  Hardcore Twenty-Four is entertaining, but far from the best in the series.  This time, Stephanie's cases mesh with Joe Morelli's - both of them are encountering headless bodies.  Steph is also the temporary guardian of a hot dog (and roadkill) loving snake and trying to stop Grandma Mazur from hooking up with a swinger in Florida.  Oh, and Diesel is back in town and back in Steph's apartment.  Evanovich hits most of her usual notes (Lula's outfits, a funeral, lunch with Grandma Mazur and Mrs. Plum, a particularly funny car death), but the main plot doesn't hang together well and the outcome doesn't fit the series's tone.  It's worth reading if you come across it, but probably not worth searching out.

The Rottweiler

I love most of Ruth Rendell's novels written as Barbara Vine, but didn't start reading the works she published under her own name until a few years ago.   I'm not sure why The Rottweiler wasn't published under the Vine pseudonym, because it feels more like The House of the Stairs or King Solomon's Carpet than the non-series books written as Ruth Rendell.  While entertaining and well-written, The Rottweiler is a bit to self-consciously eccentric, tying together several disparate (and one quite depressing) threads.

The Rottweiler is the name given by the press to a serial killer.  He strangles young women, takes a memento, and hides their bodies.  We quickly learn his identity, but not quite as quickly as his landlady, Inez.  A 50ish widow, she runs an antique shop and rents three of the four apartments above it.  Her assistant Zeinab has a loose relationship with punctuality and two rich fiancees, and her tenants (a woman with a fake Russian accent and an affable boyfriend who pretends not to live there, a mentally disabled young man named Will, and a computer consultant) wander in and out of the plot, along with Will's aunt Becky, his boss and his boss's sister, a theft ring, Zeniab's family, Becky's romantic target, and an enthusiastic but less-than-competent police detective.  It sprawls and doesn't quite mesh (Will's and Becky's story is much sadder than the other's, and Zeniab's includes one unexpected and hilarious scene), and relies a bit too much on coincidence.  I'm not sure if I've decided to never read it again (and donate my copy), or re-read it in a few years to see if my opinion was influenced by the personal upheaval I was dealing with while reading this book.

Educated: A Memoir

When I think of separatists, I think of people living in a cabin far from civilization.  What surprised me most about Tara Westover's upbringing was that her cabin was only 15 or so miles from town - distant to a Philadelphian like me but not far for someone in the rural parts of the Mountain West.  She grew up in a separatist family.  Her mother theoretically homeschooled her and her six older siblings but in reality kept the family financially afloat as an herbalist and midwife.  The children all worked for their father, sorting scrap metal and doing occasional construction jobs.  In their father's eyes, school was part of the government and the government was the enemy.  After all, the government had killed the Weavers, and had done so because they homeschooled their children.  Modern medicine poisoned rather than healed, and the family treated even severe injuries with herbal remedies mixed in their kitchen.  And yet, the family had contact with general society.  Tara's paternal grandparents lived in an adjoining property and they saw each other almost daily.  Her maternal grandparents lived in a nearby town, and the family also attended weekly services at the Mormon church in town.  As the children (Tara is the youngest of seven) came of age, some of them took jobs in town, and Tara even participated in musical theater productions.   With nearby family and contacts in town, I wonder how or why no one noticed what was happening on Buck's Peak.

It all seems innocent, when Grandma-over-the-hill offers to take Tara with her on her yearly snowbird trip to Arizona.  If she comes to Grandma's house by 5 am, no one will notice that Tara is missing until nightfall.  By then, she'll be in Arizona and can enroll in school.  She's tempted, but after staying up all night decides not to go.  Maybe Tara was too young at that point to see how truly difunctional her family is, or maybe it wasn't quite so bad yet.  It's probably a bit of both.  At seven, Tara's life felt normal to her because she'd never experienced anything else, and it becomes clear that Gene Westover is not so much an ideologue as a man whose severe but undiagnosed mental illness became more disruptive and destructive as time passed.

By age 10, Tara is only theoretically homeschooled.  Her mother Faye's midwifery practice fell victim to concussion-induced migraines and with the three oldest sons gone (Tony started his own trucking business and got married, Shawn ran off after a fight with his father, and Tyler unexpectedly went to college), Gene needed Tara's labor sorting steel from copper, working alongside her brothers Luke and Richard (15-year-old Audrey had found a job in town).  Tara follows suit, working as a babysitter for two families and packing nuts at a local store.  That's when she started taking piano, dance, and voice lessons, leading to a disastrous recital and her foray into musical theater.

It's during her years in community theater that we first get to know Shawn.  We see from the start that he's emotionally manipulative and explosively violent, but to Tara he's a protective older brother. Later, the family attributes his mood swings and outbursts to a head injury incurred while working on a family construction project, but we (and Tara) eventually realize that he's always been violent, perhaps having inherited a variant of the mental illness that plagues their father.  Tara's relationship with Shawn is unsettling, leaving me to wonder if she left anything unsaid.

Music also leads to Tara's unexpected entrance into the outside world.  Her brother Tyler, now a college graduate and about to start a graduate program in mechanical engineering, encourages her to apply to BYU.  They accept homeschooled students, and they're a conservative, Mormon university.  She hesitates, but he convinces her that if she majors in music, she can become a choir director in a Mormon congregation.  With a high ACT score and an application filled out by Tyler, she's accepted and enrolls.

Tara doesn't initially adjust well to outside life.  Her roommates shock her by wearing revealing clothing and grocery shopping and doing homework on Sunday.  She, in turn, appalls them wth her questionable hygiene.  She'd never heard of the Holocaust or the Civil Rights movement, and had no idea that she was supposed to buy textbooks.  Somehow, though, she manages to make it through her freshman year and eventually gets counseling from her congregation's Bishop.  Asking a professor for help in class leads to mentorship, and eventually to a program at Cambridge.  Still, Buck's Peak calls her back and she spends summers scrapping and working at the local grocery store.  Her expanding knowledge, though, eventually shows her that Shawn is dangerously violent (and also victimized Audrey and Tyler).  Things change after her father suffers severe burns in an accident.  He survives, attributing it to Faye's herbal preparations.  Suddenly, they've got a successful business and Gene's survival leads him to become almost a cult leader.  Tara's journey to be Dr. Westover isn't just a matter of being educated, but a matter of developing the perspective to see how destructive her upbringing really was.  Estranged from part of her family, close to others (including Tyler and Richard who have Ph.D.s in mechanical engineering and chemistry, respectively), and reconnected with the aunts and uncles she barely new growing up, Educated ends with the newly minted Dr. Westover reading an e-mail for her aunt who's excited that she'll see Tara again in only 12 hours.

A Higher Loyalty

I have to compensate for two types of bias in my review of A Higher Loyalty.  The first is political, and the fallout of the 2016 Presidential election.  The second is more personal - how does the book compare to my 22-year-old memories of my Trial Advocacy professor?  I've never read, let alone tried to review, a book by someone I knew, albeit slightly.  Because of that, I'm going to break my review down into parts.


Comey's writing style is engaging and highly descriptive, showing an affinity for the language which meshes with my memories of his classes.  As a professor, he emphasized preparation (which indirectly led to my Jack McCoy moment) and using your questions to make the witness comfortable enough to use his vernacular.  He makes those priorities obvious in the chapters on his early career as a prosecutor.  I found them engrossing, particularly the mob trials (which he also used as classroom examples) and the prosecution of Martha Stewart, but readers who aren't lawyers and don't read legal thrillers might not agree.

He also uses a bit of self-deprecating humor to counter an earnestness that verges on self-righteousness.  That's important as he segues into his years as Assistant Attorney General and FBI Director.  Comments about being the "FBI giraffe" and the tight quarters in the Situation Room humanize a man who clearly believes in the American system and the rule of law.  Without that, these chapters might come across as a bit too self serving.  I assume that anyone who writes a memoir has a healthy ego, but Comey's writing style and flashes of humor prevent these chapters from coming across as self-aggrandizing.

Now, about the emails...  I've spent the last 19 months thinking that the FBI mishandled the "October Surprise."  Not just because of my political views, but because I've spent most of my career doing document review.  When I heard, less than 2 weeks before the election, that there were thousands of new emails to be reviewed, my first thought was "de-duping."  Document review programs have gotten much better at de-duping in the 15 years since I moved from hard copy to electronic review - good enough that de-duping (along with predictive coding) has affected my job security.  Comey writes he was told that there was no way to review all of the newly found emails before the election.  My belief (which I think is supported by the fact that the *FBI* did review them all in under a week) is that he received bad information.  Most of the emails were duplicates, and the rest were fully reviewed within a few days.  I've found that partners and associates who either haven't done document review in years or who've always had project attorneys to handle the grunt work don't have a good grasp of the mechanics of electronic review.  My experience has been with associates who don't understand the limitations of the review systems, but I can easily see how the top few levels of the FBI legal team, who probably hadn't done document review since they slogged through a warehouse full of bankers' boxes in the late 20th Century, wouldn't know how good review programs are at de-duping data sets and how an experienced reviewer can separate the relevant an non-relevant documents with a few good keyword searches.  Keeping that in mind, I can understand Comey's reasoning, but I still think he made the wrong decision.

This leads us to Donald Trump.  Press reviews focused on Comey's description of Trump's hair and spray tan, but that's not particularly important.  I was more struck by Comey's comparison of Donald Trump to the mobsters who filled the headlines in the 1980s (and my Friday night viewing while in law school) - so much so that I flashed back to Trial Advocacy and Comey's cadences as he switched between the his prosecution voice and that of his mobster witness.   Except that he's less disciplined, firing (executing) people with little thought about the repercussions.  That mix of ruthlessness and thought-free "decision" making combined with avarice and more than a dash of incompetence scares me.  I think it scares James Comey as well, and reading A Higher Loyalty I think he feels some responsibility.  I just don't know how much.

The Adventuress

Lady Emily's childhood friend Jeremy, Duke of Bambridge, has spent Tasha Alexander's novels making himself the most useless man in England and avoiding marriage.  At the start of The Adventuress, we learn that he's failing at one of his goals.  Jeremy, Emily and Colin, Cecile, and Meg are in Cannes to celebrate Jeremy's engagement to the daughter of an American millionaire.  Amity Wells is a bit unpolished compared to Jeremy and his friends (although not when compared to her social climbing mother - the mother and daughter reminded me of To Marry an English Lord), but her enthusiasm grew not only on me but on Emily.

Emily can't help but encounter dead bodies, and in this case, it's one of Jeremy's Oxford friends.  Even worse, the poisoned whiskey was intended for Jeremy - but who would want to kill the cheerfully useless young Duke?  I thought I figured it out early on, and then changed my mind, only to change it again about 5 pages before Emily discovered the murder's identity.  Normally, that's an ideal mystery - fooled twice, but solved.  However, the murder's motive was a bit off in my mind.  I followed the logic but it just felt wrong.  I'd still enjoyed the book, because I love Lady Emily, and I was thrilled to see Margaret again.

Hissing Cousins: The Untold Story of Eleanor Roosevelt and Alice Roosevelt Longworth

More than a century later, Eleanor is a heroine and Alice has mostly been forgotten. No one could have envisioned that in the early 20th Century, when Alice Roosevelt Longworth was the sparkling, sharp-tongued star of Washington society and her cousin Eleanor Roosevelt was the slightly cowed wife of an ambitious politician who was himself considered a bit of a dilettante.  Their shockingly different personalities came from a surprisingly similar background.  Not only were they cousins born a few months apart, but they also lost parents young and were partially (and most affectionately and effectively) raised by their Aunt Bambie, Theodore and Elliot Roosevelt's older sister.

Hissing Cousins only spends a few chapters on the cousins' upbringing, but it explains how the two girls grew into very different women.  The Alice we know is a whirlwind brimming with confidence and her father's famous swagger, but here we see her as a baby abandoned by her grieving father (TR lost his mother and wife on Valentine's Day, 1884, the day after Alice was born).  After a few years with Aunt Bambie, Alice returned to her father and step-mother. Edith Roosevelt was a rather stern and forbidding character who insisted that Alice live with the family because it was proper.  My impression is that she meant well, but Alice never felt welcome and in modern parlance "acted out."  That led to occasional trips back to Aunt Bambie, who was also Eleanor's occasional guardian.

Eleanor's story is even sadder.  Her alcoholic father half-abandoned, was half-removed from his family and eventually died from his addiction.  Shortly afterwards, her mother also died, but instead of being permanently left with Aunt Bambie, Eleanor and her brothers were left in the care of her maternal grandmother.  Mary Hall's household was backwards and repressive, far from the ideal situation for a bright, sensitive girl, and visits to Aunt Bambie (plus a year in finishing school at Babmie's insistence) still left her shy and insecure.

As adults, they continued to live parallel lives.  Both married unfaithful men (although they dealt with that in different ways), were indifferent and ineffective mothers but loving grandmothers, and became standard bearers for their respective parties.  That is where their stories separate and why we now revere one and barely know the other.  Alice was a grand campaigner, and the doyenne of Republican Washington, but her high profile position was essentially inconsequential.  Eleanor, as befits her more earnest personality, got into the weeds of policy discussions.  Political differences exacerbated the personality differences, and they spent much of their adult lives estranged.  But even someone like Alice can mellow with age and tragedy, and by the time of Eleanor's death, they were at least cordial.  I thoroughly enjoyed this dual biography of two strong women who were joined by blood and separated by the blood sport of politics.  It made me want to read more about them, and about the sprawling Roosevelt family.

Present at the Future: From Evolution to Nanotechnology, Candid and Controversial Conversations on Science and Nature

Present at the Future is an imperfect commute book.  Ira Flatow, whose work I've enjoyed since I was a kid watching Newton's Apple, seems to have aimed a bit too low and a bit too trendy with this mid-2000s book.  The chapters, discussing topics ranging from the Dover, PA lawsuit on the teaching of intelligent design (disclosure - I know Steve Harvey, the attorney who argued science's side) to alternative energy sources to outer space, just aren't deep enough to be fully engaging.  On top of that, I read it with a decade of perspective, and therefore a bit of knowledge about how some of these issues turned out.

Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court

I'm familiar with the Tudors and Stuarts, and with George III and the 19th and 20th Century English monarchs.  The first two Geroges have been placeholders in my mind.  They came to the throne by political accident, German Protestant cousins of the childless Queen Anne, plucked from obscurity to lead a major power.  Lucy Worsley describes court life under George I and II, when the monarchy was transitioning to an almost purely ceremonial position and when appearance mattered.  Chronicling the public (and nearly nonexistent private) lives of ladies-in-waiting, artists, writers, and a pet "wild boy" as well as those of the Kings and Queen Caroline, Courtiers provides an introduction to an era.

Leave the Grave Green

One reason why my mom loves Deborah Crombie's mysteries (and pushed me to read them) is how she blends police department politics into her novels.  That's at play in Leave the Grave Green, where the Assistant Commissioner calls in Duncan Kincaid to take on the case of Connor Swann's drowning.   Connor's in-laws are a famous conductor and opera singer, both knighted in their own rights, and twenty years earlier their son had drowned in the same flooded stream.  As Duncan explores the family matters (and becomes attracted to the victim's widow), Gemma explores the world of opera.  Along the way they find several viable suspects and motives (the widow is always a suspect, and the victim's gambling connected him to a particularly unsavory local character).  Crombie created an unexpected conclusion, though, which surprised me and in which the separate worlds in which Connor Swann lived collide.

To Marry an English Lord

Although I read it at home, To Marry an English Lord is the perfect commute book.  Interesting enough to distract me from work but arranged in short, discreet sections so that I'd never reach my stop at *the good point*, it's the perfect book to pick up when you only have a few minutes.

The authors start by tracing the patterns of American wealth.  Old Money, as we all know, is quiet, and until the mid-19th Century, American society was less sparkling than its European counterpart.  As brasher, flashier families acquired wealth, the old (and not so old) families closed ranks.  Meanwhile, in England, old families had old homes which needed an infusion of cash and the outgoing daughters of robber barons outshone their sheltered English counterparts.  Add in the Prince of Wales's predilection for vibrant female company and you have the recipe for two generations of American girls marrying titled men.  To Marry an English Lord doesn't stop at the wedding, though.   It shows the dreariness of married life in a cold, run-down manor house and the need to produce an heir (it also touches on the acceptance of extramarital affairs once that heir had been produced).  What most struck me was how recent some of these marriages were.  English Lords started marrying American heiresses in the mid-19th Century, but the last marriages were shortly before WWI.  Some of the women profiled lived well into the 1960s and even the 1970s, relics in the modern world.

Cities of the Empire: The British Colonies and the Creation of the Urban World

Tristam Hunt's trip through the British Empire starts in 17th Century Boston and ends in 1980s Liverpool.  As he travels from the early stages of the empire to the riots and racial tension of an English city in a loosely affiliated commonwealth, the British desire to impose their ossifying social structure on every city they took over.  While the British do deserve credit for the roads, buildings, and cultural institutions they left in Cape Town, Hong Kong, and New Delhi, they also brought segregation and suppressed local cultures.  The British Empire made the modern world, but at what cost?

Heretics: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

I'm not sure how I feel about Heretics.  Some segments were engrossing, but others (including the first three, on militant creationists, ghost hunters, and a meditation retreat), were a plodding mixture of dry facts and Will Storr's oversharing.  Storr's writing-as-therapy faded as his delved into more interesting topics, and I found the chapter on implanted memories of (presumably) false abuse particularly fascinating.  He finished the book, though, road tripping with Holocaust deniers, which I can only describe as disturbing.  Perhaps a better writer could have explained how these people developed their horrifying obsession, but such a task is far beyond Storr's skills.  Still, there were enough interesting topics and adequately written chapters for me to not quite regret reading it.

Marriage with My Kingdom

The third book in Alison Plowmen's Elizabeth Quartet serves as the non-fiction counterpart to Alison Weir's The Marriage Game.  Both explore Elizabeth's relationship with Robert Dudley, although bound by verifiable facts Plowden emphasizes their common background as child prisoners over their alleged love story, and both emphasize the political issues involved in a Queen Regnant's potential marriage.  For Elizabeth, marriage was necessary but also a no-win situation.  If she chose one potential suitor she'd create enmity with another kingdom, and she'd also have to cede some of her ruling power.  Perhaps it was a phrase she used to distract her subjects from her single status, but there was truth to her statement that she was married to her kingdom.  Like a modern politician, she was married to her job, putting political policy (lack of enemies being better than a single strong alliance) ahead of her personal matters.

The Case of the Love Commandos

The Love Commandos are real, a group that whisks away couples who wish to marry for love and avoid arranged marriages.  As an American, even one who's hopeless when it comes to the dating scene, I can't imagine entering an arranged marriage.  For millions of people, though, it's not only normal but leads to a successful partnership and happy life.  That's Vish Puri's point of view.  He and Rumpi had an arranged marriage which quickly turned to a love match.  Decades later, they're grandparents and still in love.

Puri's operative Facecream, though, doesn't agree.  She's been quietly working with the Love Commandos, and as the book opens she's "kidnapping" Tulsi, daughter of a rich and ruthless upper-caste family so that she can marry her Dalit boyfriend, Ram.  Ram, however, disappears from the safe house and Facecream calls her reluctant boss for help.  Puri doesn't believe in love matches, but he also doesn't believe in vacation, even if the vacation is a family pilgrimage.  So he visits Ram's home town and comes across both political corruption and unethical pharmaceutical testing.  Like The Case of The Deadly Butter Chicken, Tarquin Hall seamlessly integrates serious social matters into a fairly light mystery.  He also gives Mummy-Ji a chance to remind us that she's a skilled detective as well, when her recovery of Vish's stolen wallet leads to her solving the robbery of a shrine.

The Theory of Death

There's not a lot of violent crime in picturesque small towns - unless you're a mystery writer (or live near the Cabot Cove Serial Killer).  If you're a mystery writer who moves her police lieutenant protagonist to a college town in upstate New York, you should expect a crime wave, or at least annual murders.   In The Theory of Death, the first corpse belongs to Eli Wolf, a Mennonite math genius found naked and shot to death in a clearing in the woods.  Conveniently, Detective Peter Decker's former/future partner Tyler McAdams has escaped Harvard Law to study in the Decker's quiet home. To him, investigating a murder is a break from studying for the degree required by his grandfather's will.  While determining whether Eli's death was murder or suicide, the two stumble upon academic jealousy and fraud, the sexism that plagues academia as well as the rest of the world, an affair, and another dead body.  I thought Kellerman's last book, Murder 101 was a better novel than mystery.  The Theory of Death reverses that, a satisfying mystery that got the non-mystery parts wrong.  For me, it was how Kellerman portrayed science students.  Granted, I'm nearly 30 years removed from Carnegie Mellon, but I'm tired of seeing STEM majors portrayed as socially awkward and blind to anything but their research.  Sure, I knew people like that - but I also knew many students far more well rounded than my law school classmates and the lawyers with whom I've worked.

The Violinist's Thumb

Paganini, regarded as the world's greatest violinist, had freakishly flexible fingers.  Due to a genetic quirk, he could stretch and bend his thumbs and fingers into remarkable positions with ease whereas the rest of us who play (or attempt to play) the violin have to stretch and twist and pull our fingers, often to the point of discomfit and rarely with such easy dexterity.  What blessed his music career cursed the rest of his life.  Paganini's flexibility was probably due to Ehlors-Danos syndrome, a hereditary disease affecting the amount of collagen people can produce.  His tendons broke down and his lungs and colon stopped functioning properly, leaving him in pain and leading to his early death.

Sam Kean uses Paganini's story to title his follow-up to The Disappearing Spoon, but it's an aside in the story of genetics.  Kean traces the science from the first knowledge that parents pass on traits, through Mendel's pea plants (and the administrative and political headaches that interfered with his work), past horrifying experiments in cross-breeding primates, and to the success of the Human Genome Project.  Along the way, he outlines the conflict between genetics and Darwin and spends a few chapters with fruit fly scientists.  I particularly enjoyed that part, because the scientist, instead of giving their genes dry alphanumeric names, decided to be descriptive, giving us Tudor (leaving males childless), Lost in Space, and Cheap Date (for those of us with low alcohol tolerance).  Like his prior book, The Violinist's Thumb is accessible without being condescending and slips in the right amount of humor.

Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases

I've read two of Paul Offit's other books and mostly enjoyed his mix of righteous indignation and scientific explanation.  Vaccinated could have used a better editor.  Part history of vaccine production, part "as told to" memoir of Dr. Maurice Hilleman who developed or co-developed nine vaccines, and with a few chapters of public health warning tacked on, Offit's book never fully comes together.  I think the problem is that he's telling two stories linearly, one the life of an important but paradoxically ordinary man, the other of the diseases Hilleman's work prevents.  It's a bit jarring to move from the small, generally ordinary, glimpses into the life of a man who appeared to be fairly ordinary if driven to the history of a now-vanquished communicable disease and its horrifying consequences, to the discovery and development of a vaccine, and back to Hilleman's personal life.  Definitely worth reading, Vaccinated requires the reader to mentally shift gears each chapter and would have been a better book either without the Hilleman biography or with that thread in its own section.

A Guilty Thing Surprised

Several books in, I'm still not sure how I feel about Ruth Rendell's Wexford mysteries.  They're compelling and well-crafted, but the psychology she used so well in her stand alone novels (both written under her own name and as Barbara Vine) feels archaic.

Elizabeth and Quentin Nightingale are the Lady and Lord of the Manor, owners of Mayfleet Manor and the social pinnacle of the community.  When Elizabeth's body is found in the woods, Quentin is a natural suspect.  He's not the only one - a recently patrolled murderer is in town, and Elizabeth and Quentin both had an odd relationship with her brother and sister-in-law.  While I followed the reasoning and psychology and enjoyed the "detection," I still feels like it falls into the uncanny valley.  I'm going to keep reading the Wexford novels because I enjoy them, but I hope that they begin to feel more natural as Wexford enters the 80s.

The Wyndham Case

A few years ago, I read Jill Paton Walsh's last Imogen Quy mystery, The Bad Quatro.  I enjoyed it, but Walsh's books appear to be out of print so it took a while to get to her first.  The Wyndham Case has a double meaning, both the mystery to be solved and a literal case of 17th and 18th Century books which St. Agatha's college must guard in exchange for a fairly generous stipend.  Once a century, a Wyndham representative makes a surprise inspection - if anything is missing, the college loses the money and Imogen's friend Roger, the librarian in charge of the Case, loses his job.

Needless to say, finding a dead body in front of the open case would violate the Wyndham will.  The body had been Philip Skellow, a scholarship student who had problems with his upper-crust roommate and a mysterious influx of funds.  It looks like someone surprised him while he was stealing from the Wyndham Case, but that doesn't feel right to police officer Mike Parsons.  He asks Imogen for some low-key help and she obliges, uncovering bullying, corruption, romance with a townie, and a calendar problem.  Walsh sets a brisk pace through the 223 pages she allots to her case, and produces a well crafted mystery that can be read in one sitting.

Superman: The High-Flying History of America's Most Enduring Hero

I'm the odd geek who isn't interested in superheroes or comic books.  They just never grabbed me.  I do have a soft spot for Superman and Superman II.  Some of that affection is nostalgia - they were the first crush-movies for my friends, one of whom kept me on the phone for 45 minutes in 5th grade as she wrote (and tore up) a very gushy fan letter.  She was not one of the friends I invited over two years later to watch the movie on VHS (later that day, my mom found kiss-marks on the TV).  Despite my relative indifference, I realize how important Superman is to the American psyche.  Created by two Depression-era teens, he's a prime example of what my History and Fiction professor said - our literature shows both who we are and who we want to be.  A war hero (fighting racially stereotyped villains) in the 40s, the square-jawed hero of low-budget 50s TV, a Saturday morning member of the Legion of Justice in the 70s, and a modern teen in the 2000s, Superman has been both constant and altered to our ever-changing times.  Larry Tye's Superman: The High-Flying History of America's Most Enduring Hero traces our hero's history.

Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two outcast kids in a hardscrabble Cleveland high school, dreamed up Superman in the early 1930s.  Siegel was the writer, and the hustler - he wanted to make it, somehow.  Superman was his idea, but he needed someone to draw his creation so he turned to (or used) his classmate.  They hired a local model (actually another teenager who a decade later married Siegel), and poured their fantasies onto the page.  They should have been set for life.

They weren't.  Siegel and Shuster's character ended up in the hands of Jack Leibowitz, a pornographer who bought the Action Comics (later DC) from the more artist-accomadating but less business minded Harry Donenfeld and spent the rest of their lives alternating between mostly menial jobs and begging Leibowitz for payouts.  Superman thrived at DC, selling millions of comics and an almost unfathomable amount of tie-in merchandise.  He appeared on TV, radio, movies, and even in a Broadway musical.  Everyone knows Superman, and he's the hero you want or need him to be - even a stand in for Jesus.  He's showed us who we are as well as who he is.

A few words on the Superman Curse.  It's easy to believe - Christopher Reeve spent his last years paralyzed after a riding accident, George Reeves died in a suspicious suicide, and Siegel and Shuster lived most of their lives in or near poverty.  Tye addresses the curse, and demonstrates how it's not really true.  Reeve's accident was a freak event, but the other tragedies can be explained.  Additionally, there are the stories of Kirk Allyn (typecast, but not much of an actor, he spent decades happily cashing in on his fame, Noel Neil and Jack Larson (long lives and a life-long friendship), and Bob Holliday, the star of the Superman musical who left show business for a successful career in contracting in Pennsylvania where his former fame is a source of civic pride.

Lionheart

Sharon Kay Penman originally intended to write a trilogy, but she couldn't let go of Richard I.  He was a supporting character in Devil's Brood, completely overshadowed by reckless Henry, scheming Geoffrey, and callow, spoiled John.  Richard was the dashing hero, more valuable but much less interesting.  Penman found something compelling in his character, though, and while Lionheart sprawls across three years and dozens of battles, it doesn't quite live up to her usual standards.  The problem, I think, is Richard.  He's not as compelling as his parents or brothers (or the Welsh heroes of her first trilogy), and the martial focus doesn't leave room for Penman's strength, finding humanity in politically astute schemers.  Richard comes across as more complex than in her prior books, but other than a few scenes with his Saracen opponents, he's working alone.  Lionheart is worth reading, but it didn't transport me the way her best books have.