THE TWO MINUTE RULE (audiobook) by Robert Crais

Originally Published in 2006.
Audiobook edition published in 2008 by Brilliance Audio.
Read by Christopher Graybill
Duration: 9 hours, 23 minutes.
Unabridged.

Named Best Crime Novel of the Year by the London Evening Standard.

Named one of the Top Ten Crime Novels of the Year by The New York Sun and the Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel.

Audiobook version named a finalist for the Audie Award.

Veteran writer Robert Crais is mostly famous for his Elvis Cole/Joe Pike novels. The Two Minute Rule is on of his few stand alone novels. It features a former bank robber named Max Holman. 

Synopsis

Holman has a son that he barely knows because of Holman's life of crime and his subsequent prison term. All he really knows about his son is that he has become a policeman in LAPD - and Holman couldn't be more proud.

That pride turns into sorrow on the day of Holman's release from prison. As he is packing up, he gets a message that tells him his son has died as a result of a shooting along with several other officers.

Holman comes to believe that the police are intentionally botching the investigation and starts his own while trying to restart his life outside of prison...

My Review

There was nothing wrong with this book. It is a good mystery and the steps that were taken to solve it made total sense. But, the story has to be more than the mystery. To me, the whole thing felt forced.

Despite the accolades (see above), I am puzzled as to why this book just did not gel for me. There were great aspects to this story - a strong lead character, a great buddy from the old days, a new partner. All of the parts were there, but just didn't gel together even though there was great potential in this book to become something special and even start a series.

The audiobook was read by Christopher Graybill. He was excellent with any of the dialogue parts - lots of different accents and all delivered well. But, the rest of the text was just read like a bored tour guide who has delivered the same boring speech too many times.

I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: The Two Minute Rule by Robert Crais.

BRIONNE (audiobook) by Louis L'Amour

Originally published in 1968.
Audiobook published in 2016 by Random House Audio.
Read by Erik Singer.
Duration: 4 hours, 3 minutes.
Unabridged.

Synopsis

Major James Brionne is a Virginian and a confidante of President Ulysses S. Grant. He helped pacify the region immediately after the war, including hanging a criminal named Allard.

The rest of the Allard family gang, bushwackers from the brutal Missouri theater of the Civil War, comes to Virginia to kill Brionne. They don't find Brionne, but they do find his wife and son at Brionne's plantation house. She takes out one of the Allard gang and then kills herself rather than be brutalized by them.

The Allard gang never finds Brionne's son, who had hidden himself in a little cave nearby.

Brionne decides he needs a massive change of scenery. He takes his son out West on a train, to a region he had explored as part of a military mission years earlier. He wants to find a place to start over with his son - Utah.

But, Briolle gets the feeling that something is not right about other passengers on the train...

My review

Parts of this book are truly exciting, such the attack on the Briolle mansion and the prairie fire. However, the idea that a family gang would travel halfway across the country for revenge and then travel most of the way back across the country in an attempt to get even seemed more than a little farfetched to me.

This story was not a bad story, but it just felt underdeveloped. If I had been L'Amour's editor way back in 1968, I would have told him to add another 2 hours worth of story to this 4 hour audiobook and flesh out more of the characters and their story arcs.

I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Brionne by Louis L'Amour. 

THE HINDENBURG DISASTER: A HISTORY from BEGINNING to END (kindle) by Hourly History

Published in July of 2025 by Hourly History.

Hourly History specializes in little histories that take about an hour to read. For me, an hour of reading about the Hindenburg is about right. 

The Hindenburg Disaster is a short history that details the beginnings of zeppelins/blimps through the tragedy of the complete destruction of the German zeppelin Hindenburg in just 32 seconds in New Jersey in 1937. 

Germany was a focal point for building blimps/zeppelins during World War I and before World War II. The blimps went from being potential military airships to being experimental ways to travel. One has to remember that airplanes were even more experimental way to travel.

Any sort of air travel was going to be prohibitively expensive - only the richest of the rich could afford it. Blimps/zeppelins offered a stately, luxurious ride - planes were seen as a noisy and cramped and inferior alternative.

This short history chronicles the struggles of the blimp/zeppelin industry during the 1920's. When the Nazis took control of Germany, they saw zeppelins as a way to demonstrate German technical excellence and as a way to flout restrictions on German airships. One can see now that the idea of taking a blimp into a World War II fighter plan dogfight would be suicidal, but that was not always clear in the early 1930's.

Eventually, the German government decided that zeppelins were a great propaganda machine inside and outside of Germany. They are attention-getting, massive, and the Nazis slapped a big Nazi swastika on the side of them to generate publicity.

This history does a good job of describing the technical reasons for the Hindenburg disaster - including the surprisingly small number of deaths for such a massive fireball. But, it does a rather poor job of telling the story of blimps/zeppelins after the Hindenburg. This disaster practically destroyed the idea of luxury travel in zeppelins and the book gives the impression that that disaster sort of wiped out the entire concept.

But, any American sports fan knows that this is simply not true - the Goodyear Blimp shows up at every major sporting event and provides "aerial coverage." It used to be accompanied by the Fuji Film Blimp, although I haven't seen that one in a while.

The fact that this history spent so much time detailing the history of zeppelins prior to the disaster and tells almost nothing about them after the disaster is a major oversight.

Fun fact that I discovered while writing this review: A successor company to the company that operated the Hindenburg operates the Goodyear Blimp in Europe. Mentioning this fact would have been a great way to end this short history. 

This history can be found on Amazon.com here: The Hindenburg Disaster: A History from Beginning to End by Hourly History.

GRANT and LEE: VICTORIOUS AMERICAN and VANQUISHED VIRGINIAN by Edward H. Bonekemper III

Originally published in 2007.

Edward Bonekemper was a Civil War historian who came to the game kind of late in life - after he retired as an attorney for the federal government. 

However, he brings his skills as an attorney to this book. Imagine a regulatory attorney bringing all of his research to bear in order to win a case by simply  overwhelming the other side with binder after binder of evidence. In this case, the evidence is almost 200 pages of appendices, endnotes, and a bibliography. 

Bonekemper makes an argument in this book that Grant was undoubtedly the superior general when compared to Lee. In fact, he makes the arguments that Grant was the best general in the Civil War by far and Lee squandered his soldiers and his resources by going on the offense almost all of the time.

Being the best general does not mean Grant made no mistakes. It does not mean Grant was perfect. Bonekemper acknowledges mistakes by Grant in every campaign and gives Lee his due from time to time. 

Grant and Lee is really a dual history of these two generals, comparing their pre-war careers and then various stages of the war itself. For example, there is a chapter called May-July 1863 where the Vicksburg campaign is compared to the Chancellorsville/Gettysburg campaigns. 

A constant refrain is that Lee's biggest weakness is that he did not conserve his resources by falling back on the defensive. His argument is that Lee did not grasp the strategic fact that the North had to literally conquer the South while the South just had to stay alive until popular support collapsed in the North and the Europeans recognized the Confederate government. 

Instead of building a series of fortifications and compelling the Union forces to destroy themselves in useless attacks, Lee kept lashing out at Union forces and invaded the North twice only to lose both times and discourage European intervention after both failures.

Lee rarely lost more soldiers than the Union forces he fought, but he did not have a constant supply of new soldiers coming to the front - and the North did. Not only did the North replace soldiers at an amazing rate, they also managed to create all new armies when needed.

I found that I basically agreed with Bonekemper. Grant was the better general. Lee was too focused on Virginia and too eager to go on the offense. He did not save his resources and did not share the ones he had with other theaters of the war.

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: GRANT and LEE: VICTORIOUS AMERICAN and VANQUISHED VIRGINIAN by Edward H. Bonekemper III.