Flagstaff

Harlan Coben is a craftsman.

Revisado: 02-11-22

Four stars in all respects because it's better than average (3 stars) for this genre, pretty much believable, and what you would expect from Coben. A suspenseful page-turner.

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Action-packed

Revisado: 01-14-21

This was my first Mark Greaney book. I liked it a lot. Continuous action. If the plot had holes in it, I didn't get a chance to notice them. It made the hours and miles both fly by.

The narrator did a great job on all the voices and accents.

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Very well written, from multiple perspectives

Revisado: 08-15-20

Very well written, from multiple perspectives. The authors write about the Olympics, the media and reporters, the investigators, about Richard Jewell and his family and friends, and finally about the real bomber, in a segmented fashion. Chapters about one group, then another, give a great sense of how they all mesh together. For me, Jewell became the real person, much more complicated and human than newspaper accounts and TV interviews ever did. He was very human and apparently likable to those who could ignore his quirks and bad driving. But those people were few and far between.

If this were on paper it would have been a page-turner. It maintains a high level of interest all the way to the end.

It also carries an important message: Just because a lot of intuitive conclusions seem to point to a guilty party, they mean nothing without real evidence, and opinion is not evidence. In the end, the only "evidence" they had against Richard Jewell was the conjectures of an FBI profiler, who apparently knew some of Jewell's life story as he was preparing the profile. The problem with that was that Jewell was an innocent hero. There was never a single bit of physical evidence against him, and there was some exonerating evidence in his favor. But because one FBI agent's "gut" decided Jewell was the man, he did all he could to dig up proof that didn't exist. Innocent until proven guilty is the cornerstone of our criminal justice system, for good reason.

Side note: There were many familiar names in the cast of FBI agents. They have been in the news a lot in the last four years. And author Kent Alexander was one of the DOJ lawyers who worked on the case.

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You don't have to be a scientist to enjoy it.

Revisado: 12-07-19

If you are merely interested in astronomy and/or physics and/or mathematics (and you must be or you wouldn't be reading this), this is an absolutely fascinating book. It's extremely well-written, so that it's understandable without including all the esoteric details. The context, which IS provided, gives you the background you need to enjoy the narrative and understand the importance of each part of the story.

There are lots of tidbits about the quirky lives of important scientists whose names you may not recognize, and things you probably have never heard of before. One of the stories takes a scientist out of his laboratory and onto the battlefield. And did you know that entropy requires that light DOES escape from a black hole? That's what Stephen Hawking said. I may have that wrong, but I don't think so.

On the other hand, if you are actually a physicist or astronomer yourself, or a student intending to work in those fields, you will enjoy this book even more.

I'll listen again someday.

I liked the narrator, but sometimes his delivery sounded a bit like a Country Time Lemonade commercial. It wasn't distracting, though.

Highly recommended.

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An odd compilation of titles.

Revisado: 09-01-19

This is definitely a bargain if you're a Harry Bosch fan, but for some reason the publisher assembled it with the books out of order, and this can be a bit irritating because the sequence matters slightly. All three are very good stories, typical Michael Connelly, so this is just a heads-up on what to expect.

The order on the recording is Echo Park (book 12 in the series), The Narrows (book 10), and The Overlook (book 13). If you want to listen in the correct order (maybe slipping The Closers (book 11) in before you listen to Echo Park), The Narrows starts at 4:14:28 of Part 2. The Overlook starts at 0:03:45 of Part 5.

Also, The Narrows is a sequel to another Connelly book, The Poet (book 1 in his Jack McEvoy/Terry McCaleb series). The Narrows is one long spoiler for that book, which is too bad, because The Poet looked like it would have been another great read.

Finally, my only complaint about the narrator, Len Cariou, was his habit of dropping his voice to indicate a female speaker. It's hard to hear and makes the character sound very weak and indecisive.

Overall, this is a great use of one credit.

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Connelly was still developing the Bosch character.

Revisado: 08-16-19

Even though this is the eleventh in the series, I think Bosch was still developing as a character. I have read several books by Connelly, and this was about average which I think is very good. It did seem to have too many places where I was ahead of Bosch; that is, the clues were a little too obvious, to the point where Bosch should have caught on to their meaning earlier. This seems to be a device that Connelly uses on purpose, but it's a little clunky in this one. And there were places where he would have, in real life, asked some more questions. Like all Connelly books I've read, the plot is not just good, but interesting.

In the Bosch timeline, his daughter is only two or three years old here, living with his ex-wife in Hong Kong. This is his first book after Bosch returns to the LAPD after a three-year retirement. Having read later books before this one, I was surprised by the characterization of Jerry Edgar in his small part in this one. He is not as likable as he becomes later.

I am spoiled by Titus Welliver as a narrator. He has become the face of Bosch on the Amazon TV series, and he is also Bosch's voice. Len Cariou is irritating in comparison. Better in this book than in "Echo Park."

There is almost no gratuitous sex in this one. So little and unnecessary that I almost missed it.

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A saga in four parts

Revisado: 06-20-19

"Witness" was highly recommended to me by a friend. It was a good recommendation. I don't know if it's considered to be an autobiography, but that's the way I perceived it, as a four-part autobiography or memoir.

The first part was Chambers' life as a child of poverty, yet he doesn't seem to have thought of himself as being poor. In those years before WWI, his family's position was probably not that unusual. I found this part of his story to be pretty sad, especially regarding his family relationships. He struck me as being not just lonely but isolated and friendless. Although he didn't portray himself as pitiful, his early life obviously had a great influence on his later years.

Parts two and three (in my mind) are his transformation into a young communist in his twenties, his recruitment from the public American Communist Party into the underground of the Soviet Communist Party in the US, and his decision and plans to make his eventual break from the Party, which finally came in his late thirties. (He was born in 1901, so this corresponds to the same decades of the 20th century.) He joined the ACP as an idealistic twenty-something true believer but eventually became disillusioned. The Party did pay the bills, however, something important to anybody during the depression. Very interesting is his description of the fear he had of punishment from Communist agents for his defection, once it took place, and the elaborate precautions he took to protect his and his family's lives. He makes it clear that neither the American and Soviet Communist Parties had any compunctions against "eliminating" non-compliant or former Party members, both in the United States and those who were taken to Russia. Of course, there is much more than that.

Part four covers his life after he decided to come out of hiding, his success at getting employment with Time magazine (he had previously written and edited for the Daily Worker and other Communist publications), and all the facets of the Alger Hiss case and the interrogations by the House Unamerican Activities Committee.

To me, the striking aspect of his story was how matter-of-factly he reported that Communists and fellow travelers had infiltrated much of the US government and higher education during the twenties and thirties. If you are inclined to think both those institutions are still heavily left-leaning, it isn't hard to conclude that the groundwork was laid during those years. And it transpired that there were plenty of them in high positions in 1950. And then there is the resemblance to today. The press and official Washington were all on the side of Hiss and against Chambers.

This is a massive work. The fact that Chambers is able to pull it off in such an understated way is a testament to his own equally massive talent.

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Fantastic. Not in a good way.

Revisado: 05-23-19

Sidney Rye is the dumbest dog walker turned multi-millionaire private detective that I have run into so far. The most likable character is the dog, whom the author manages to underuse and mis-use. Action-adventure stories are naturally over the top, but almost nobody in these three books behaves in any way believably.

There were a few high spots. The general plots weren't too bad. The way they were developed was the problem. I ended up listening at 1.5 to 1.75 speed just to finish, and I admit that puts the author at a disadvantage.

The narration was ok, once I got used to the monotone style and frequent up-speak? It was probably appropriate for the material.

I could say more in detail, but there's no need to beat a dead horse. Other people obviously liked these stories. Maybe you will, too.

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Good combination of story and narrator.

Revisado: 05-13-19

Great pacing for an action thriller, it moves along fast and remains interesting. The suspense builds, and the fantasy is coherent enough to be believable. Jude Cameron is a likable hero.

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It may be a classic, but it is dated.

Revisado: 05-13-19

The Russian accent of the narrator, while understandable in the context of the story and also understandable to the ear, was distracting nevertheless. Some of the details of life on Luna were just plain confusing, but I suppose necessary to show how "different" it was from Earth in 1966. Some of the politics in the story made it feel very dated. Other details seemed right up to date, probably because politics and humanity themselves don't change much over hundreds of years, let alone only fifty.

It was intended to be thought-provoking, so there is not a lot of action.

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