DWD's Reviews

Published in 2008 by Brilliance Audio. Read by James Daniels. Duration: 7 hours, 52 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis Usually, books in the Elvis Cole/Joe Pike series focus on Elvis. Elvis is a private detective with a smart mouth. He catches a case, does some digging and his partner, tough guy Joe Pike, comes in when things get hairy. It's an old formula. You see it in Perry Mason, the Spenser series, and even Magnum, PI because it works.  The Watchman is different. It starts with Joe Pike. He is on the run with a girl and a hit squad is after them. Joe Pike is asked to babysit a witness because a Mexican drug lord wants her dead. Multiple hit teams have come after her. What makes it more complicated is that she is very rich and she has makes the newspapers regularly for being a party girl. If you were alive pre-social media, think Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie.  Joe is using every trick he has and barely escaping. He reaches out to Elvis Cole for some detective and logistical...

Published in 2024 by Little, Brown, and Company. Read by the author, Malcolm Gladwell. Duration: 8 hours, 25 minutes. Unabridged. Malcolm Gladwell delivers another immensely entertaining and informative rambling discussion of, well, so many things in Revenge of the Tipping Point . Ostensibly, this is a look at the opioid epidemic, but Malcolm Gladwell's style always reminds the reader that the world is inter-related and complicated and so very interesting. I plowed through this 8 hour audiobook in just a couple of days. I listened whenever I could and, honestly, I forgot that this was supposed to be a book about the opioid crisis during the 2nd hour and I did not remember he directly came back to the topic during hte 7th hour. In the meantime we had discussed medicare fraud in Florida, Cheetahs in zoos, the dangers of monocultures, Los Angeles as the country's epicenter of bank robberies, COVID superspreaders, vehicle emmissions, and more. It was all so interesting and he does ...

Published in 2024 by Tantor Media. Read by Stephen R. Thorne. Duration: 7 hours, 1 minute. Unabridged. Alan Dean Foster is a prolific sci-fi author. He has written over 50 sc-fi novels, but he is probably most famous for his numerous novelizations of sci-fi movies and TV shows, such as the original Star Wars movie (ghost written for George Lucas), Alien , Star Trek: The Animated Series , Krull , and The Last Starfighter . The Director Should've Shot You is the story of Foster's experiences as the man who Hollywood turns to to write novelizations of sci-fi movies. He talks about how that system (usually) works, the odd experiences, his interactions with directors, producers, and faceless stuidio executives, and his various thoughts of the strengths and weaknesses of the various projects.  My experiences with Foster as a young reader start with his two Star Wars books that he wrote when George Lucas  and his team were finishing the original movie. As I noted, he ghost wrote th...

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 ...

Published in 2025 by Little, Brown and Company. Read by Peter Giles. Duration: 10 hours, 50 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis The Lincoln Lawyer returns for another case in The Proving Ground . Mickey Haller has moved away from defense work to civil litigation. In this case, an AI program designed to be a friend substitute to young adults and teens told a teenage boy to get rid of his girlfriend in a way that could easily be interpreted as killing her. So, he took his father's unsecured pistol and shot her in the high school parking lot. Haller is suing the company for marketing a faulty product towards teens. He is pretty sure he has the goods - bad programming and an unethical marketing team that is more concerned about demonstrating the potential of the AI so the company can be absorbed by a bigger company with deep pockets. They wanted the payoff rather than making it safe. But, as Haller and his team start to dig, they find they are out of their depth. Tech writer Jack McEvoy come...

Published by Little, Brown, and Company in 2025 Read by Will Damron. Duration: 9 hours, 3 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis Michael Connelly takes a break from his Lincoln Lawyer series, his Harry Bosch series, and his Detective Ballard series to explore something new - Catalina Island. Los Angeles County has jurisdiction over Catalina, a 75 square mile island a little more than 20 miles from mainland Los Angeles. Almost everyone takes the express ferry to Catalina, a boat ride that takes a little more than an hour.  The separation means that Catalina is a very different place than Los Angeles. Cars are rare - almost everyone drives golf carts or walks. Less than 5,000 permanent residents live on the 75 square mile island and the pace of life is quite a bit slower. It is widely believed that the Los Angeles Sheriff Department sends its screw up cops to Catalina for a little more seasoning or to find a safer place to make enough mistakes for the department to boot them out. Nightshade ...

Published by DC Comics in 2023. Written by Collin Keely and Jackson Lanzing. Art by Xermánico and Romulo Fajardo, Jr. Synopsis Clayface has moved away from Gotham City and has gone to Hollywood to be a movie star. The original Clayface character from 1940 comic where he premiered was a B movie actor named Basil Karlo. Basil Karlo is working as a waiter in Batman - One Bad Day: Clayface while trying to make it big in Hollywood. He's diligent about everything, but he does not have a light comic touch that is called for in romantic comedies. His roommate does, however. When they both read for the same part it becomes a problem when the roommate gets the part and Basil Karlo doesn't. Being Clayface means you can make yourself look like anyone - at least for a little while. Clayface kills the roommate and then assumes his shape so he can get his big Hollywood break. And then one murder leads to another. And another. And another. And another and so on. Meanwhile, Bruce Wayne is in t...

Originally published in book form in 1993. Published as an audiobook in 2008 by Brilliance Audio. Read by Mel Foster. Duration: 8 hours, 13 minutes. Unabridged. I found the Elvis Cole novels years ago, but somehow I have been reading them as a I found them rather than trying to trying to read them in chronological order. So, here I am going back more than thirty years to book 4 out of a 20+ book series, depending on how you count some of Crais' other books. Synopsis Like all classic detective novels, in Free Fall we find our intrepid main character in his office when a beautiful young lady enters looking for help with a desperate problem.  This young woman is concerned about her fiance. He is a relatively young member of LAPD and part of a rapid reaction team because he is a promising young officer. When crime pops up in a neighborhood - such as new gang activity or more drug sales or a series of home invasions, this team is sent out to supplement regular officers in the neighborho...

Book originally published in 1992. Audiobook published by Brilliance Audio in 2008. Read by Mel Foster. Duration: 8 hours, 33 minutes. Unabridged. Anthony Award Nominee for Best Novel (1993) Shamus Award Nominee for Best PI Hardcover (1993) Synopsis Elvis Cole is hired by a very successful young Hollywood director in Lullaby Town to find his divorced wife and his son that he hasn't seen since he was an infant. It has been ten years since the divorce. His ex-wife hasn't been kidnapped or gone missing - she just moved away and the director has lost track of her. Now, he'd like to meet his son.  The director has to be the single most annoying client that Elvis Cole has ever had. He is pushy, obnoxious, and completely self-absorbed. Elvis notes early on that almost every sentence the man utters starts with "I" as in "I think this" and "I did that." It's pretty obvious why the ex-wife left him and just kept on going with no forwarding address...

Published in 2025 by Lake Union Publishing. Synopsis Elizabeth May has lived a life based on lies ever since she went off to college. As a small child she was caught up in one of those Satanic child abuse day care cases  that swept the nation in the 1980s. If you are not aware of this, the cases were almost always built upon an accusation by an angry child followed by leading questions from a series of adults that convinced younger children that they should go along with the accusations. After a while, the smaller children just believed the made up version. Elizabeth May has ran away from her past - no one in her hometown showed any understanding of how she was also a victim, including her own family. May hides by being a travel nurse - she can move every year or even every few months. She avoids long-term romantic entanglements, she uses every possible variation of her name - Liz, Betty, Beth, etc.  Elizabeth May has lived in Santa Cruz for about a year. She's got a great job...

Winner of the Anthony Award for Best Paperback Original. Winner of the McAvity Award for Best First Novel. Originally published in 1987. Published in 2008 by Brilliance Audio. Read by Patrick Lawlor. Duration: 8 hours, 9 minutes. Unabridged. I have been reading Robert Crais' Elvis Cole novels for 15 years and I just assumed that I had already read all of the early ones years ago. But, when I checked my blog I found that I had not read 7 of them - that is more than a third of the series!  The Monkey's Raincoat is the first in this 20 book series.  Synopsis Two women come to meet Elvis Cole in his office. Cole is a decorated Vietnam veteran turned private detective. The women want Cole to find the Mort, the husband of one of the women and their son. Mort picked the boy up from school, but they never came home. Elvis starts to dig around and quickly discovers that Mort's talent agency is in trouble. The more he uncovers, the more it becomes obvious that Mort has been hiding m...

Published by DC Comics in 2018. Part of the Hannah-Barbera Beyond series. 2019 GLAAD Media Award winner for Outstanding Comic Book Synopsis: DC Comics and Hanna-Barbera set out to reimagine some of their late 1950s to 1970s Saturday morning television cartoons, including The Jetsons, The Flintstones, Scooby Doo, Wacky Races, and Space Ghost. Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles is the last installment of the series. The graphic novel is set in the Red Scare/McCarthyism era. Congressional subcommittees are looking for Communists in all fields, but they are particularly concerned about Communist entertainers who may be negatively influencing Americans. Snagglepuss is a very successful New York City playwright. He lives in a world where humans and anthropomorphic animals interact as equals. He moved to New York from Mississippi years ago, but he still speaks in a Southern accent and often uses pithy folksy aphorisms. He is married to an actress, but that is a sham marriage. In rea...

Published by Dreamscape Media in 2023. Read by Cady Zuckerman. Duration: 9 hours, 26 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: Forgotten Trail is the third book featuring Felicity Harland of the Investigative Services Branch. If you are not familiar with the ISB, join the club - I had no idea that it was the "FBI" of the National Parks Service. If the local park can't deal with it, they call in the ISB. That always include murders. Harland is partners with a park ranger nicknamed Hux. He is a big, strong guy. Harland is a short (but very tough and determined) lady. There is always of undercurrent of romantic attraction between the two, but there is caution about acting on this attraction for fear of messing up their friendship and very strong working relationship. Her dog rounds out the trio. In this series, ISB is called out to a different park for each book. It lets the reader get a feel for a new park in every book. In this book, a brutal murder has taken place in a room at a br...

Published in 2024 by Hourly History. Betty White was a staple of the American entertainment scene for literal decades. She was on multiple highly-rated TV shows, was a regular on several classic game shows, guested on dozens of TV shows, and even made one of the most popular Super Bowl commercials of all time.  This short e-book gives the outline of her nearly 70 year career. It's pretty much a "just the facts" sort of book due to the limitations of this book series. Eech history and biography published by Hourly History is designed to be read in about an hour and the sheer length of Betty White's career means that the depth of this biography is fairly limited.  Even if it is limited, I still found this biography to be enjoyable. I rate this e-book 4 stars our of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Betty White: A Life from Beginning to End .

Published by Brilliance Audio in 2025. Read by Luke Daniels. Duration: 8 hours, 25 minutes. Unabridged. My synopsis: Elvis Cole is back on the case in The Big Empty . This time around he is working for a social media personality that specializes in making muffins and making people who watch the videos feel included, like they are talking to the girl next door.  This social media star wants to hire Cole to figure out why her dad went missing about 10 years before. She hired an quality Private Investigations firm earlier, but the results were inconclusive. Her handlers are not enthused about reopening old wounds, but she overrules them. Cole heads out to the small town (by L.A. standards) where her father disappeared and finds lots of stuff - including people who are determined to keep the secrets of the past buried in the past... My review: This was a complicated mystery with an ending that leaves a lot of moral questions about what is best for just a few people vs. what is best for...

Published in January of 2025 by Hourly History. Hourly History specializes in biographies and histories that take about an hour to read.  In this case, Hourly History has a history of a favorite in my household as I grew up - John Denver. The book gives a good accounting of his early life, his early struggles as a musician, and his impressive drive that just kept pushing him forward until he made it. Once he made it, there was no one bigger than John Denver - He had a series of number one songs, number one albums, multiple awards, and movies and TV show appearances. But, it all seemed to come at the expense of his personal life. This little biography covers the timeline of his life pretty well, but skimps on any sort of analysis on his uneasy position as a Country Music artist. For example, he won their official awards, but many mainstay country music artists considered him an interloper - a folk artist who was sort of assigned the title of "country artist." Still, this was a...

Published in 2024 by 3 Girls Jumping. Read by the author, Michael Jamin. Duration: 9 hours, 39 minutes. Unabridged. Michael Jamin is a professional Hollywood screenplay writer. He works in television, working on comedy shows like King of the Hill, Just Shoot Me, and Tacoma FD . In the afterword he talked about his desire to write something more than TV shows. He wasn't unhappy with writing screenplays, but he wanted to branch out.  The stories in A Paper Orchestra are from Jamin's life. Some are funny, some wistful, some very sad. As a group, they all have the feel of NPR's Moth Radio Hour  - but instead of having a variety of performers, it is all from the same man. Jamin read the audiobook. In the afterword, he and his wife talked about how they worked together so that he could perform these stories live on stage. She is an actress and she helped him with presentation style - and I think she was successful at it. I worked my way through this audiobook rather slowly. At ...

Published by HarperAudio in November of 2024. Read by Jim O'Heir, George Newbern, Eva Kaminsky, Janina Edwards, Roger Wayne, Jim Meskimen, and Adam Verner. Duration: 6 hours, 24 minutes. Unabridged. Jim O'Heir has been knocking around Hollywood for years as a journeyman actor. He has had roles in dozens and dozens of TV shows and movies - good stuff and bad stuff - but always regular stuff. He was well on his way to becoming one of those character actors that you see so often that you say, "Oh! There's that guy! He was on that one show." Then in 2009, he showed up on the new NBC show Parks and Recreation playing the bumbling and often befuddled lovable loser Jerry Gergrich. He kept playing this character for all 123 episodes of the show. This book is a dual biography of sorts. It is the story of Jim O'Heir and how he came to the show, but it's also the story of the show itself. Jim interviews producers, writers, directors, and other actors to give us the s...

Published in October of 2024 by Little, Brown, and Company. Read by Christine Lakin, Titus Welliver, and Madison Lintz. Duration: 10 hours, 50 minutes. Unabridged. LAPD Detective Harry Bosch first showed up in a novel in 1992. The Waiting is the 25th book in the series, but he has appeared in more than 30 books and short stories. Bosch is aging. He has aged right along with the series. He would be about 74 years old in this book and he is no longer the detective that goes out and finds the bad guys, but he does contribute from time to time. His protégé Renee Ballard is in charge of the cold case unit of LAPD.  Her unit is almost entirely made up of volunteers and they go through unsolved serious crimes and see if modern technology (like DNA comparison) can help to solve them. This book is mostly a Ballard novel, but Bosch does play a critical role in one of the three mysteries that are dealt with in this novel. I have a feeling that the "Bosch" in the Ballard and Bosch books...

Published in 2024 by Nine Innings Press. Cost of Malice is the third novel featuring attorney Jake Clearwater. Jake is an on-again off-again law professor who is often tempted to trade the classroom for the courtroom.   Clearwater is offered a chance to sit on an informal council of leaders in the prosecutor's office. Cases that may be tough to win are brought to this council and they brainstorm possible strategies and determine if they are even worth the effort. The book deals with three of these cases.  Case one is a murder case in which the two primary witnesses are jailhouse snitches. Case two is a horrific child abuse case in which one spouse literally beat a child to death at the direction of the other spouse. Clearwater wants to convict them both equally despite the fact that one of them literally never laid a finger on the victim. Case three is a school shooting case modeled heavily on the Oxford, Michigan case that ended in April of 2024. It feels right that Cl...