DWD's Reviews

  Published September of 2022 by Pandamoon Publishing. Synopsis: Dee Rommel has decided to leave the Portland, Maine police force due to physical disability. She lost part of her leg and has to wear a prosthetic. She gets around very well but she just doesn't have it in her to go back on the police force. Instead, she is working with a private detective and (very slowly) working on her own private investigator license.  The mother of a wealthy local family with a generations-long history of being town benefactors and being more than a little quirky has confessed to murdering her gardener in her own backyard. The police think it is an open and shut case. However, her youngest child, a twelve year old who is a genius by anyone's standards thinks otherwise. He has hired the detective agency Rommel works for and Rommel is assigned the case. While the police seem to think it is a cut and dried case of murder, Rommel keeps finding evidence that things may not be as simple as they se...

  Published in 2018 by Simon and Schuster Audio. Read by the author, Stephen King Duration: 3 hours, 46 minutes. Unabridged. Stephen King has a long history of publishing collections of short stories. I am usually not a fan of short stories, but I have no problem with a Stephen King short story. I think King is so good at making characters that the reader can identify with in such a short amount of time. This collection is pretty short - just two short stories. Both feature older men. The author In one, we have a man living in Maine with a supernatural problem and also a misunderstanding with his neighbors. This one really feels like two stories, but it was pretty touching. In the second story, a desperately lonely widower living in the Florida Keys is brought a gift by his older sister to get him up and moving again - a puppy. These are both good stories - very enjoyable and always with a twist. They were read by Stephen King. It was neither a good thing nor a bad thing - his acce...

  Published in 1988 by Recorded Books. Paper book originally published in 1985. Read by Betty Harris. Duration: 11 hours, 20 minutes. Unabridged. Note: A newer audiobook version read by Clair Danes was published in 2012. I am very late to The Handmaid's Tale - more than 35 years after the original publication date.  The plot is fairly well known so I am not going to go into extreme details. The story is set in a dystopian future America after a violent coup took out the Congress and the Executive Branch. Pollution and constant warfare have lowered the birth rate to an alarmingly low rate and the upper classes have instituted a religion-based system of surrogate motherhood. The upper classes were inspired by the Biblical story of Jacob and Rachel  from the book of Genesis and how Rachel resolved the fact that she was unable to have children by having her handmaid sleep with Jacob and Rachel would keep any children as her own. The red robes and the white headpiece are the o...

  Published by Pandamoon Publishing in August of 2021. Waterfront in Portland, Maine Synopsis: Dee Rommel is at a crossroads of her life. She is on leave from the police department of Portland, Maine because she lost half of one of her legs on duty. After months of diligent physical therapy (and less then diligent psychiatric therapy) she is being pushed to decide if she is coming back to work or not. She has been helping her godfather Gordy, her deceased father's best friend. He is a private detective and she feels very comfortable with the paperwork and the billing. When Gordy takes some time off to donate a kidney in Florida, a situation arises. One of Gordy's lifelong friends urgently needs help now and Dee is asked to step in and do some investigating while Gordy is down and out from the surgery. The friend is a famous billionaire named Claren - Maine's version of Bill Gates. A local boy who made it big in the tech business. Claren's twenty-something daughter is al...

Originally published in 1982 as a novella in the collection Different Seasons . Read by Frank Muller. Duration: 3 hours, 57 minutes. Unabridged. I originally read this novella when it was published as a part of the collection called Different Seasons  more than 35 years ago. This is the third time I have read this story, but the first time in the last 20 years.  I have never seen the beloved movie. Stephen King Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption tells the story of two prisoners in Shawshank Prison in Maine, starting in the late 1940's. One is the main supplier of things smuggled into the prison (but not hard core drugs) and the other is a banker that has been falsely convicted of murdering his wife and her lover. They are not exactly friends, but they are friendly and they certainly respect one another. The banker has an odd habit of collecting rocks he finds in the prison yard and carving them into little sculptures - but could it be a sign of something more? I have neve...

Originally published in 2003. Note: Lee Child wrote his books out of chronological order. In chronological order, this would be book #10. This book starts out with a very different sort of introduction. I don't want to spoil it so I will skip ahead a bit. Reacher is out to get a man who he thought he killed years before. He has some sort of business arrangement with a family with underworld connections in Maine that lives in a castle-like mansion on the coast. Reacher works his way inside the organization and waits for his opportunity. Also, he is on the lookout for a missing DEA agent who is thought to have been kidnapped by the organization and is being held somewhere. Reacher is not sure who he can trust as he tries to figure out what is really going on... This story is more complicated than most Reacher stories. The action is ridiculous, as always - but that's one of the reasons you read a Jack Reacher book. I rate this book 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.co...

Originally published in 1982. Published in 2010 by Simon and Schuster. Read by Kevin Kenerly. Duration: 7 hours, 42 minutes. Unabridged. Stephen King's long and storied career is legendary. At this point, he has 61 novels, including 7 written under the pen name Richard Bachman. At first, he wrote books under the Bachman pen name because the publishing industry had a rule of thumb - no more than one book per year per author. Clearly, with a prolific author like Stephen King that rule would be problematic. This edition of The Running Man includes an essay by Stephen King that talks about Richard Bachman and his relationship with his pen name. The Bachman books have a darker tone than the Stephen King books by design. The Running Man has a particularly dark tone. Set in 2025 in an alternate history (even though it was written in 1982, it refers to things in 1978 that did not happen) in which America has become a corporate oligarchy. The economy is ruled by a company called Genera...

Published in 2015 by Simon and Schuster Audio Read by Tim Sample. Duration: 1 hour, 20 minutes. Unabridged. Stephen King uses the voice talents of Tim Sample, a humorist that specializes in talking about Maine. Fans of Stephen King know that the prolific author loves to set his stories in his home state of Maine. This one is set on the corner of a lake surrounded by vacation homes. Two families are part of a year-after-year fireworks contest. One is a family from Rhode Island. The other is an older mom and son who grew up in the area and bought their dream home on the lake. They don't know each other well, but their sense of pride get in the way as their desire to "one up" each other gets more and more ridiculous as the years go along. The folksy manner of the narrator makes this predictable story a lot of fun. It is the perfect matching of author and narrator. I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Drunken Fireworks by Stephen King.

Published in 2014 by Random House Audio. Read by Dick Hill. Duration: 1 hour, 27 minutes. Unabridged Lee Child was a prolific writer of Jack Reacher stories. I say was because he recently announced his intention to stop writing those stories. His brother will start writing them instead. Child wrote numerous books and short stories in no particular order, bouncing around the timeline of Jack Reacher's life. This one is set in Maine. I presume it fits in on the timeline with the other Reacher stories that take place in Maine and New England. Jack Reacher is hitchhiking to the end of I-95 at the U.S.-Canada border. Another of his books starts at the other end of I-95 down by Miami, Florida and Reacher makes a point that he wants to have traveled from one end of the road to the other. Once he gets there, he gets out and is soon picked up by three younger Canadians who are headed to a four day long hiking trip. Their trail starts at one town and ends up at another. Reacher decides...

Originally published in 1985 as part of the short story collection Skeleton Crew .  Published in 2017 by Simon and Schuster Audio. Read by Will Patton. Duration: 5 hours, 19 minutes. Unabridged. This is technically a re-read for me - I read The Mist when it was originally published 30+ years ago. It is such a vivid, tightly written story that it has always stuck with me. In my mind, this is one of Stephen King's better works, even if it is one of his shorter ones. The story focuses on David Drayton, his wife and his son. Drayton has made a pretty good living as a commercial artist and is able to afford a home on a lake in Maine. A particularly nasty summer storm has come through Maine in the middle of the night. Trees are down everywhere and, as a consequence, power lines and phone lines are down everywhere. It is important to note that this was written a long time before cell phones. The radio stations are also down - especially those that broadcast from the direction of a...

Published in 1993 by Harlan Davidson, Inc. This unique volume looks at the near-constant state of war that existed in one part or another of the English colonies, from the first attempt at colonization in 1585 until the end of the French and Indian War in 1763. The first quarter of Struggle for a Continent deals with the frequent wars that erupted between the English and the Native Americans that they encountered. Similar patterns emerge as disagreements and misunderstandings become full-fledged brutal and desperate wars of survival in colony after colony, with the exception (at first, at least) of Pennsylvania.  The rest of the book is devoted to the English struggle against other colonial powers, namely the Spanish and the French. Spain was already a declining power at this point so they posed a minor threat when compared to the ever-growing French Empire. A great part of the book is spent discussing the French threat emanating from Canada towards New England and what ...

Published by Tantor Audio in 2017. Read by David Colacci and Susan Ericksen Duration: 14 hours, 48 minutes Unabridged Matt and Karen Smith decided to visit every National Park in the U.S. National Park System. They decided to only visit the 58 sites that are actually named "National Park". This is important because there are over 400 sites in the park system that have titles like National Monument, National Lakeshore and National Recreational Area - so many that it is doubtful that any one person has been to them all. As if to prove this point, just after the Smiths published the first edition to this book, a new National Park was added to they system and they had to go visit it and update their own book just to keep their own record intact.  The book is written as a series of e-mails back to their sometimes traveling partners Bob and Sue. Bob and Sue never actually accompany them on one of these trips. They alternate back and forth narrating their adventures in the or...

Published in 2016 by Tantor Audio Read by David Colacci Duration: 7 hours, 17 minutes Unabridged Fallen features Daniel Briggs, a retired Marine sniper who is struggling with alcohol and his own personal demons, especially an internal drive to fight and kill that he calls "The Beast". Briggs is a drifter who stumbles into trouble as he wanders the country and often finds himself in the middle of trouble, much like Lee Childs' character Jack Reacher. If you are familiar with the Reacher series, Briggs is more morose and angry than Reacher, but I think that they would find a lot in common. Briggs is in Maine, drinking at a touristy bar when he encounters some drunks giving the waitress a hard time. He takes them on, wins and then discovers that the police are coming for him. Briggs takes off on foot and encounters a friendly local preacher who is delivering food to members of his church - sort of a rolling food pantry. The preacher takes in Briggs for the evening and...

Originally published in 1999. Unabridged audio edition published in 2012 by Random House Audio. Read by Rob McQuay. Duration: 9 hours, 47 minutes. Bill Bryson discovered that he lived near the Appalachian Trail, which is no surprise since it winds more than 2,200 miles from northern Georgia to Maine and literally runs within an hour drive for millions of people. After looking into a little, Bryson decided to walk the trail. Why not? He had no equipment, no real experience in wilderness hiking and was woefully out of shape. What could go wrong? He is joined by his friend, Stephen Katz (not his real name), who is even more out of shape than Bryson and off they go to northern Georgia. The book is more than just a story of their hike, though. It is also a running commentary on consumer culture, the irksome (and all-too-often) ineptitude of the National Park system, the camaraderie of almost every hiker he met, friendship, compulsion, the experience of walking in a society that has...

Published in 2006 by Penguin Audio Read by Edward Herrmann Duration: 5 hours, 57 minutes Abridged Everybody knows the story of the Mayflower and the Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving. Or, they think they do, anyway. Nathaniel Philbrick's re-telling of this oft-misunderstood story in Mayflower A Story of Courage, Community, and War is a very approachable for the average reader. He begins with an explanation of the religious differences between the Puritans and the Church of England and how the politics of the day exacerbated the situation.  Philbrick's re-telling of how the Pilgrims moved from England to Holland and eventually to the New World was very well done, as was the story of the first few seasons of Plymouth Plantation (Plymouth colony), starting in 1620. In fact, the book flowed very well throughout, even though it was abridged. Oftentimes, abridged books are clunky, but this one was not. The story finishes with King Philip's War (1675-1676). This wa...

Not Cornwell's Best Effort. Published in 2010 by HarperCollins Set in 1779 Massachusetts, Bernard Cornwell tells the story of the Penobscot Expedition - a small scale invasion by British forces of a bay in what is now Maine. The government of Massachusetts is determined to repel this invasion without help from the Continental Army. It calls up its militia and its fledgling navy. It does accept help from the American national Navy and its contingent of Marines. By far, the most famous American in this campaign is the commander of the Massachusetts' artillery unit, Lt. Colonel Paul Revere. Cornwell does a decent job of developing the British officers as characters.  A young officer named John Moore gets his first taste of battle here. In the Napoleonic Wars, Moore was one of the architects of Napoleon's eventual defeat. Cornwell's battle scenes are, as always, excellently described. He switches from naval battles to land battles with ease. I felt absolutely confid...

Published by Simon and Schuster Audio in 2006 Read by Ron McClarty Stephen King Duration: 1 hour, 30 minutes I am not sure who the person was at Simon and Schuster Audio that decided to record Stephen King's short stories as separately packaged stories, but I think it was a stroke of brilliance. I am leery of listening to a 30-40 hour audiobook for a taste of King's special brand and I am equally leery of a short story collection - I get tired of mentally shifting gears so often. In this short story, Richard Sifkitz is an overweight graphic artist (he specializes in book covers and advertisements) who was told by his doctor that he needs to lose a little weight and eat better because his cholesterol is too high. The doctor compares his cardiovascular system to a road maintenance crew and says that Sifkitz is working his crew to death and soon enough it will start to fail. Sifkitz resolves to work out and buys a stationary bike. He paints a simple painting of a...

Published in 2012 by Houghton Miffllin Harcourt Publishing Company I have had Scott Weidensaul's The First Frontier for longer than a year, buried in my legendary pile of books (actually, I am more organized than that, they are all in 4 milk crates) but when I heard an interview with Wiedensaul on the John Batchelor radio show I was reminded to dig it out. Weidensaul is to be commended for a very thorough job of researching the history of the relationship between the natives and the European colonists. The records are scant, the spelling is haphazard and so much of it is buried in myth and politics. He starts with the disposition of the American Indian population prior to the arrival of Europeans. The limited history of pre-Colombian contact is discussed (with the Vikings and various fishing fleets) and the discussion of the similarities of differences of the various American Indians arrayed along the Atlantic coastline is quite interesting. But, as Weidensaul's...

Audiobook 7 CDs 8.5 hours Read by John Bedford Lloyd The Poacher's Son is the first in a series of books about Mike Bowditch, a rookie Maine Game Warden. Bowditch is settling into his job, losing his long-time girlfriend, dealing with the locals that have bad interactions with the local wildlife and rude out-of-state tourists that flaunt Maine's laws. Bowditch's life is turned upside down when a local deputy is killed while escorting a timber company executive (who was also killed) away from an unsuccessful attempt to cool local passions about the timber company's long term plans for the area. It seems that the number one suspect is Bowditch's estranged father, a local poacher, hunting guide and bar brawler well-known for his bad attitude and violent nature. Bowditch is sure his father is innocent. He has no illusions about his father's nature, but he cannot figure out a motive for his father. He gets involved despite repeated warnings from his s...