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DANCE HALL of the DEAD (Joe Leaphorn #2) (audiobook) by Tony Hillerman

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Originally published in 1973. Audiobook version released in 2005 by Harper Audio. Read by George Guidall. Duration: Approximately 6 hours. Unabridged. Winner of the 1974 Edgar Award, Dance Hall of the Dead is an early entry in the Leaphorn series and is one of the best. Joe Leaphorn of the Navajo Tribal Police is called into a case that technically occurred on the Zuni reservation but there is a Navajo involved. Ernesto Cata, a middle school-aged Zuni boy and his friend George Bowlegs are missing. All that is left behind is an immense amount of blood that makes it clear that one or both of the boys died. Joe is brought in by the FBI who is coordinating a joint FBI/Zuni/Navajo task force to find the boys. Leaphorn has the feeling that the Zunis think the Navajo boy killed the Zuni boy and he has just been brought in to lead a manhunt as far as the Zunis are concerned. The FBI makes it clear that they think it is related to drug trafficking and they think the boys were ju

REDLINERS by David Drake

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Published in 1996 by Baen David Drake is well-known for his various series of military science fiction books. Redliners is a rare stand-alone book for this prolific author.  There is a struggle between humanity and an alien species called the Kalendru. The Kalendru are similarly built to people, more slender and covered with fur. But, unlike people they cannot conceive of the idea that humans and Kalendru can coexist as equals since their own society has no such concept. They have a definite pecking order within their own society and they want to put humans below the Kalendru in the galactic pecking order. Strike Force Company C41 is roughly analogous to an American Special Forces unit - they are elite soldiers, they are sent in when the situation is nigh-well impossible and in this case, Strike Force Company C41 is pretty much used up after an attempt to create a beach head during an aborted attack on a Kalendru planet. The soldiers are tired and suffering from combat fati

HAVANA QUEEN by James Bruno

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What will happen to Cuba when the Castro brothers are gone? Published in 2013. James Bruno was a diplomat and a member of military intelligence. He served in Cuba during his career, a fact that makes his current offering pop with a realistic feel (and has irritated official Cuba since their official newspapers have attacked him for this book. See links in blog post here:  link.  ) Havana Queen features a Cuba dealing with the impending deaths of the Castro brothers. Considering that they have been the leaders of Cuba for more than half a century it would not be unreasonable to expect the transition to a post-Castro Cuba to be a rocky one. The book works best when it features the unrest of the Cuban people due to their pent-up demands for food and even the simple the freedom to express themselves about the regime's ability to maintain the infrastructure of the country. The characters to arise from this part of the story - a young military officer, a blogger, a older war

SCARCITY: WHY HAVING TOO LITTLE MEANS SO MUCH (audiobook) by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir

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Published by Simon and Schuster in 2013 Read by Robert Petkoff Duration: 8 hours, 47 minutes. I teach in a public high school that is in the midst of transforming from a suburban/affluent to an urban/poverty school. I currently teach Spanish but I am also licensed to teach several social studies classes including economics. While this hardly makes me an economist, it does mean that I know enough about economics to make me dangerous to myself. I always think that it is interesting when economists take on non-traditional topics, like the Freakonomics guys do. In this case Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir look at the effect of scarcity on impulse control, poverty, time management, dieting and lonely people. Kids at my school have a horrible time with impulse control, poverty and time management so I was hooked when the authors started to look at how scarcity affects these behaviors. Through a series of studies (theirs and others) they demonstrate that people who are fina

47 RONIN (audiobook) by John Allyn

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Originally published in 1970. Audiobook version published in 2013 by HighBridge Audio. Read by David Shih Duration: 7 hours, 34 minutes. Based on historical facts, the story of the 47 Ronin is a very popular one in Japan that has been told and re-told hundreds of times in books, plays, films, manga and more. A friend of mine that teaches Japanese compared it to the tale of King Arthur in England in that some versions feature magic, some extra characters, some are longer and some are shorter but there are some things that are consistent in every version. Of course, not being Japanese, Westerners often miss some of the power of the story. John Allyn's knowledge of the language, his time in Japan during the Post-World War II occupation and his extensive experience with theater made him a fairly unique talent to present this story to Westerners. Allyn explains quite a bit as he tells the story , including items that would not have to be explained to native Japanese. It is

VIGILANTE (Jessica Daniel #2) by Kerry Wilkinson

Published in July of 2013 by Thomas and Mercer Kerry Wilkinson has done what almost all of Amazon's self-published authors have dreamed of - he has published a Kindle e-book, outsold the established names and got the attention of mainstream publishing houses and won himself a publishing contract.   While this series is not life-changing literature, I found it to be better than the latest offerings that I have read by much more established authors such as Patricia Cornwell and James Patterson. In the second book of this series Detective Sergeant Jessica Daniel is searching for a serial killer. But, there are people who don't seem to care too much if she actually catches this murderer since the only people he kills are criminals. While vigilantes are officially discouraged, more than one police officer notes that this murderer is making their jobs easier. The DNA results make everything all the more confusing because the results point to a man who would be a great suspec