DWD's Reviews

First published in November of 2012. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the first Harry Bosch book, Michael Connelly has Harry re-visit a case from twenty years ago in The Black Box . The book starts with a flashback to the Rodney King Riots in 1992. There were so many questionable deaths during the riots (more than 50) that LAPD put out rolling homicide teams that documented scenes as well as possible until they were called out to yet another death. Harry Bosch and this then-partner Jerry Edgar were one of those teams.  Most of the victims they dealt with were people local to the neighborhoods where they were found so Anneke Jespersen, a foreign press photographer from Denmark stuck out and Harry Bosch always remembered her and felt guilty because he knew that he did not do a good job of starting the investigation into her murder due to the chaos of the riot - the investigation was barely started when they were called to another scene and by the time a true formal investigat...

Published in 2011 by Little, Brown and Company I am a big fan of the Harry Bosch series, having read 15 of the 16 books in the series and given all but one top marks. The Drop continues that excellent trend. This is a gritty mystery story (really, it is two mysteries) with a number of twists and turns and a morally ambiguous ending. Michael Connelly. Photo by Mark Coggins Bosch is part of the D.R.O.P program - the Deferred Retirement Option Plan. This allows police officers to work up to five years past their mandatory retirement age, with the department making the decision as to how long he will work. When the story starts Harry has 3 years left in the DROP program and he is working cold murder cases with a young partner named David Chu.  Harry sees the end of his career coming and he wants to get as many cases solved as he can. When a DNA hit on a rape/murder from the late 1980s points to a convicted child molester who would have been nine years old when the victim ...

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 boy...

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 financia...

A Tour De Force Published in 2013 by Simon and Schuster Read by Will Patton  Duration: 18 hours, 35 minutes I am an occasional reader of Stephen King. When I was younger I used to be an enthusiastic fan of all things Stephen King, but I took a break (about 15 years) and have slowly come back to the Stephen King fold, picking through some of what I missed, listening to his short stories as audiobooks and sometimes reading a book as it comes out. In this case, I am very glad that I did not hem and haw over this one. It is a tour de force of how to write horror, human frailty, human resilience and the power of friendship and love. Throw in the amazing performance by reader (and veteran actor - he is the coach in high school football movie Remember the Titans ) Will Patton and this audiobook is an experience that must not be missed. Stephen King Doctor Sleep is the sequel to the classic novel The Shining. I read it many, many years ago and decided NOT to re-read it before I ...

Originally published in 2006. Way back when when I got my Kindle 2 in 2009 this was one of the first books that I got - it was part of a free promotion and somehow I never read it. I guess I was afraid that it would be too cheesy. Boy, was I wrong. Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) The premise of this book is a mashup of How to Train Your Dragon with Master and Commander. It is the middle of the Napoleonic Wars and Napoleon is planning to invade England. All that stands between England and Napoleon's massive army is their far superior navy and a small contingent of dragons. Yes, dragons. It turns out that in this alternate world dragons occur naturally in the wild and have been trained to fight in war, much like horses and dogs occur naturally in the wild and have been trained to fight in war. Dragons, however, are smart and are able to talk with people. In fact, dragons bond with a human and they become a team. Dragons come in different sizes and jobs, much like an a...

Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in 2013. Read by Brian Hutchinson. Duration: 10 hours, 8 minutes. Unabridged. Author Scott McEwen co-wrote American Sniper , the auto-biography of famed SEAL Chris Kyle and from those contacts and the stories he heard he was inspired to write this fictional story of American special forces in Iran and Afghanistan. The insignia of the Navy SEALs This is really three separate operations deftly told as three separate stories with overlapping characters and a little overlap when they get back to base. The first operation is the insertion of a lone operative into Iran to kill a weapons designer. McEwen uses this fairly straightforward story to introduce the weapons and other equipment that will be used throughout the book. The second and third operations deal with a captured American female helicopter pilot in Afghanistan. She is part of a unit that inserts and extracts special forces all of the time so the men feel a real connection to ...

If you are a fan of this series and have not listened to this version of the story you need to pick it up today - it is that good Published by HighBridge Audio. Originally broadcast in 1981. Multicast performance. Duration: approximately 6 hours. When Star Wars was at the height of its popularity in 1981, George Lucas gave a National Public Radio (NPR) affiliate permission to create a radio drama of the original movie, now known as Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope . Sci-fi author Brian Daley was tapped to adapt the movies since he had experience with the series having written a trilogy of Han Solo novels in 1979 and 1980. I have no idea what Daley's qualifications were for writing radio drama were besides those books, but he clearly was an inspired choice. He had a feel for the story and, more importantly, the characters as he more than doubles the original length of the movie. Listeners get more about Luke's life on Tatooine and a lot more about his friend Bi...

Book originally published in 1996. Audiobook published in 2004. Read by William Roberts. Unabridged. Lots of the reviews here give this one 3 or 4 stars. Perhaps it was the format, perhaps it was the end of the school year rush for me and the welcome respite this book provided. Perhaps I just liked it better. Nevertheless, it was a good story, despite the fact that problems with Elvis and Joe's case are telegraphed from miles away. In Sunset Express a celebrity restaurateur's wife is killed and her body is dumped in a ravine near their very swanky neighborhood. The police detectives stop by the home of this restaurateur to inform him of his wife's demise and they find a bloody hammer in the bushes by the front door of their mansion. But, there is a problem: the detective (Angela Rossi) that found the weapon has been accused of planting evidence in the past and the defense lawyers seize on that fact. Elvis Cole is hired to look into the accusations against Rossi and se...

SUSPECT May Be the Best Book That Crais Has Written Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons in 2013 Robert Crais is best known for his long-running Elvis Cole series, but he has consistently produced high-quality "stand-alone" novels as well (however, I just learned that the characters from this book will be part of the next Elvis Cole book). Suspect continues that tradition in a big way. Scott James is a fairly young member of LAPD who is on the mend from a frightful shooting that resulted in injuries so severe that he was offered a chance to retire. While his physical injuries are real, they are not as profound as his psychological trauma. He was an up-and-coming officer, now he second guesses himself and, more importantly, cannot shake the feeling that he failed his partner who was killed in the incident. He is working the case on his own even as he trains to be a K-9 officer while he is recovering. Robert Crais Maggie is a retired German Shepherd who was trained...

Published in 2011 by Minotaur Books A person who left a comment on one of my Amazon reviews told me about C.J. Box and gave me the title to his first book featuring Joe Pickett. I found it at the library and I was hooked. If you like Michael Connelly or Robert Crais you will love C.J. Box. If you like Tony Hillerman, you will enjoy Box's descriptions of the local landscape and the people of Wyoming and Montana. Back of Beyond is the beginning of a new series, not a part of the outstanding Joe Pickett series. It features Cody Hoyt, a broken-down alcoholic of a cop who drank himself out of a job as a big city cop in Colorado and is now in Montana, in danger of losing his last chance job as a cop.  The story starts out with as strong of an opening as I have ever read: "The night before Cody Hoyt shot the county coroner, he was driving without purpose in this county Ford Expedition as he often did these days. He was agitated and restless, chain-smoking cigarettes until his th...

First published in 1999. Retired Catholic priest Joseph F. Girzone is most famous for his 1983 book  Joshua (which also became a movie) which features Jesus coming to a modern-day American small town and the influence he has just be being himself - no great announcements, just Jesus being Jesus. A Portrait of Jesus builds on that same idea but it looks at what the New Testament records about the life of Jesus and how he related to everyone around him. Girzone writes movingly about how Jesus preached compassion above all and he demonstrates it again and again in this book. His description of Jesus and his emphasis on relationships over law and the descriptions of how that worked then and how it can work now were profound when I first read them 10 years ago. I re-read the book after doing a deep cleaning of the book shelves. I was considering selling it to a used book store but I decided that the book was so powerful that I would keep it on the shelf and re-read it again in 10 y...

Published in 2012 by G.P. Putnam's Sons I've been reading a lot of "assigned" reading lately. By assigned reading I mean books I agreed to review for publishers/authors or books that I read just to shrink my dreaded 4-milk-crates-full "to be read" pile. They were mostly good books, (some were great, even) but when I was at the local purveyor of books I saw this Elvis Cole novel. I had to to read it just for me simply because it was my idea in the first place. Also, I am a big fan of the series. In Taken Elvis Cole is hired to find a missing college student. A widowed mother has received a call for a few hundred dollar ransom but she believes her daughter has ran off with "that boy" and is trying to scam her for money to go off and get married in Las Vegas. Sadly, Cole proves her wrong. The girl and "that boy" have been kidnapped by bajadores - bad guys that kidnap illegal aliens coming into the United States in order to squeeze...

Published in August 2013 by Thomas and Mercer This is my 1,000th review on my blog. I have several good books that are already read and just waiting to be reviewed, but only one could be my 1,000th review. This is the best of that small bunch of books and it is really quite good. This is the fourth book in a series of books about married San Francisco homicide detectives Jane Candiotti and Kenny Marks. I had not read any books in the series until this one and the reader does not have to read them in order to join in. Candiotti and Marks are called in to a nasty murder scene in a fast food restaurant. Six strangers are massacred in the basement storage area right after the lunch rush. They have nothing in common except for the way they died. To make everything much, much worse, one of the victims is Marks' nephew. The San Francisco Police Department starts to sort through the clues and work through the pasts of all of the victims looking for a motive and their search leads ...

Published by HighBridge Audio in 2009. Performed by the guests and cast of  Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! Duration: 2 hours and 29 minutes. If you have not discovered NPR's weekly radio show  Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!   ,  then I pity you. This clever show is truly one of the funniest shows on radio or television or just about anywhere and this collection is promoted as a distillation of 12 of the best visits from a very funny crop of celebrity visits. They truly are all funny. Even the people who I had never heard of like Philippe Petit and Michael Pollan were funny and interesting. Other, more well known personalities (at least to me), like Carrie Fisher ( Star Wars ), Jane Curtin ( Saturday Night Live, 3rd Rock from the Sun ) , Neal Patrick Harris ( Doogie Howser, How I Met Your Mother ), and Leonard Nimoy ( Star Trek ) were as funny or funnier than I expected. This audiobook focuses on a part of the show - the "Not my job" segment. In this segment a cele...

Originally Published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact in September of 2010. Winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novelette. Nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novelette. I found this unique science fiction short story by Eric James Stone with my kindle, one of those happy accidents you sometimes get when you surf around on Amazon. That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made is about a funds manager for CitiAmerica who is stationed at the sun. Actually, just inside of the sun (but not too far in, that would be dangerous!). Stars are used to create interstellar portals - those portals require so much energy that only stars can provide them. So, our fund manager, Harry Stein, is located at the sun because he gets the news from other systems about eight-and-a-half minutes before funds managers on Earth (news can only travel as fast as the speed of light). Harry is a Mormon and is the "branch president" of the Sol Central Mormon congregation. He has six human members and fo...

A Very Moving True Story Published in April of 2013 by Zondervan The hardest book reviews to write are for the books that truly touch you. A Dream So Big had me spellbound from the first and I cannot even attempt to write a proper review. If you have ever had the scary meeting with a "genetic couselor" at the OBGYN office than you can feel for the Peifer family. In my family's case, the meeting was unnecessary - our daughter was born with no complications. For the Peifer family, this was not the case. Their son was born with severe disabilities and only lived a few days. Peifer describes the devastation to his family and how he and his family come to join the faculty at a boarding school for the children of missionary families. He describes how a one year gig has become a mission to feed and educate as many Kenyan children as possible. Peifer's good humor is visible throughout the book and he is a natural self-deprecating storyteller. He balances his t...