The Burning Room, by Michael Connelly

Connelly keeps writing Bosch novels, and I keep reading them. This one is pushing pretty close to the "could this be the last Bosch?" question, but it doesn't have to be.

Bosch teams with a young female partner to crack a cold case where a mariachi musician dies from a ten-year-old gunshot wound, and in the process, takes on a second investigation into an arson that occurred many years before.

Completely satisfying.

Truth Like the Sun, by Jim Lynch

This book is set in both 1962 and 2001. Roger Morgan is an important promoter of the Seattle World's Fair, the expo of 1962, the "Century 21" extravaganza that left its footprint on Seattle, a mark that may still be seen in many places, but none so obvious as the Space Needle, which has come to be the icon of Seattle.

Washington Post Review

New York Times Review

This is also about a young PI reporter, Helen Gulanos, in 2001, who takes on the story of Morgan and the corrupt network of illegal gambling businesses, real-estate traders, and law enforcement with whom he seems to have been involved during his ruthless promotion of the Expo, as well as the subsequent boom in Seattle as the I5 freeway was completed, changing the layout of the city and value of properties.

Many colorful fictional characters are in this story in both eras. Exactly who they represent would be an interesting study, but I doubt that anyone has the desire to fight the lawsuits--not to mention other consequences--that would result from an attempt to publish such a study.

The reviews are lukewarm, but I found this book impossible to put down, and read it in about a day.

Bleeding Hearts, by Ian Rankin

This is not an Inspector Rebus novel. It is, instead, a novel told partly in first person by a hired assassin, and partly in third person about the private detective who pursues him from England to America.

After a few Rebuses, I was disappointed to find myself noticing some cardboard-cutout characters, and not-so-great writing.

I did read the whole thing. It was well-plotted, even including a religious cult, and a fictional account of a real-time financial error made in the time of Manuel Noriega and the Iran-Contra scandal.

New York Times review.

Tatiana, by Martin Cruz Smith

A novel in the Arkady Renko series. This is set in post-Soviet Russia. Renko begins an unauthorized investigation into the death of Tatiana Petrovna, an investigative reporter not loved by those in power, who died falling from a window. Her death is generally considered a suicide, but Renko has doubts.

At the beginning of the book, we witness the murder of a translator who has been working for a group of wealthy businessmen. The translator keeps a coded notebook, which was in the possession of Tatiana Petrovna before her death.

Set against a backdrop of cynical corruption, Renko's investigation requires a persistence that borders on insanity. Indeed, one of the characters describes him as "Sisyphean."

A New York Times review says "In “Tatiana,” his eighth crime novel dominated by the lawless landmass once known as the Soviet Union, Martin Cruz Smith sets his Slavic sleuth, Arkady Renko, on the case."

In the Pond, by Ha Jin

Shao Bin is a frustrated artist, master calligrapher and cartoonist, who works in a factory in China. He feels mistreated, even abused, by the men who run the factory, and his attempts to get better housing for his family, and improve his life, are constantly frustrated.

This is an unusual novel, a picture of what life in China might be like, or at least what it was like in recent times. It can certainly be seen as a protest against the bureaucratic system there, but there is more going on than just that.

A very fast and enjoyable read.

This is a New York Times review.

Peripheral, by William Gibson

This was a little hard to get into, but I'm glad I got there. Gibson tends to write sparingly, not bothering to explain what things are, or what (made up sci-fi) words mean (e.g. assemblers, cosplay, well, read the review I've linked below, that guy did a better job than I will of explaining this problem) and while frugality is generally a good policy when spraying words upon the page, sometimes I could use just a little bit of guidance, like, what the fuck was that?

All in all, this is a terrific book. Once I got past the abovementioned initiation phase, it was a page-turner, and I was sorry when I got to the end.

There is time travel, of a sort, and some thoughts about the paradoxes that come from that. When Gibson's future characters meddle with the events of the past (the future people are in London, the past people in America, maybe East Kentucky?), it creates a "stub" of time-continuum. That is, a new branch grows away from the future inhabited by the meddlers. A nod to the alternative universe concept.

A review in The Guardian

Legacy of Ashes, The History of the CIA, by Tim Weiner

An audio book. While I was "reading" this book, the so-called Senate Torture Report became a major news item. That was unintentional; I read the book on the recommendation of a friend.

Legacy of Ashes is, among other things, a good review of American History since World War II. It is also a sobering look at just how dishonest, desperate, and corrupt the political leaders of this country have been in that period of time, and how willing they were to quickly abandon principle to accomplish their ends -- even though, so very often, the projects of the CIA failed miserably.

An alternative title for this book might have been Why They Hate Us.

As an American citizen, all I can say to the people of the rest of the world is, most of us have no control over these things. Our system has gotten away from us. It isn't exactly our fault, but then, I suppose, it is...

A review on the CIA's website.

A NY Times review.

An article about the CIA in The Guardian. A snippet: "Even the agency’s most successful mission – slowly bleeding out the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s by arming the mujahideen – paved the way for the worst terrorist attack on the US in its history."

The Emperor of Ocean Park, by Stephen L. Carter

http://www.randomhouse.com/book/24851/the-emperor-of-ocean-park-by-stephen-l-carter

This is an audio book.

I just read (actually, listened to) a very entertaining and, I think, well-done novel entitled The Emperor of Ocean Park,  by Stephen L. Carter. This is basically a mystery, with political, legal, and racial issues mixed up in it. The mystery is pretty good, with the requisite unexpected twist(s) of plot. There are sufficient red herrings. The characters are all very good, to my mind.

One thing about Ocean Park that makes it extra-interesting is that the main character is an upper-middle-class African-American,  a law professor whose father had been a Federal Court of Appeals Judge. The father dies early in the story, and there is suspicion about his death. I won't try to tell the whole thing, I doubt that I could, but it's a really absorbing read. And through all of it, one gets the impression of having a really unique point-of-view, that is, if one does not happen to be an African-American.

More than once I felt that the author beat certain political drums unnecessarily. His issues happen to be abortion (he's against it) and charter schools (he's for them). Since I disagree with his positions, these drumbeats rankled particularly, and I don't think I failed to notice any. My opinion here could be suspect because of my politics, but I think Carter could have left all of that out without harming the story at all. 

If economy is to be celebrated in writing, removing anything that is not necessary to the work is an obvious goal. I wonder, however, if Carter would not disagree with me. He may have felt that including these issues was important to setting the scene or tone, to providing insight into what is (at least to me) a little-known stratum of American Society: the Middle Class, even professional,  African American. 

I keep a blog of (some of) what I read. I don't always write much about a given book, but I try to include enough to at least jog my memory if I'm trying to remember what it was about. This email is going to do double-duty, as I'm going to use it as my blog entry for this book. 

Now that's economy.

EL

The Mission Song, by John leCarré

Audio book.

Excellent, of course, which is no surprise. "Salvo," Bruno Salvador is a British subject born in The Congo. He is a brilliant interpreter with a command of many African languages and dialects, as well as several European. In the usual leCarré fashion, he winds up recruited by British Intelligence, and does several jobs for "Mr. Anderson," interpreting sound interceptions and interviews from recordings.

The story gets into gear when Salvo is sent on an unusual mission, where he is to use an assumed name and identity, for people with whom he's not acquainted. This happens coincidentally with his discovery -- through an interpreting job -- of the love of his life, although he is a married man.

While this novel does not depart from leCarré's dark view of modern history and international affairs and the cold-hearted, cynical people who orchestrate them, its denouement is uncharacteristically uplifting, in a way still consistent with the writer's world, drawn from his own history and experiences.