THE MIDNIGHT LINE: A JACK REACHER NOVEL (audiobook) by Lee Child

Published by Random House Audio in 2017.
Read by Dick Hill.
Duration: 13 hours, 6 minutes.
Unabridged.

Jack Reacher is on the road again in The Midnight Line. Fans of the series know that Reacher just can't stay in one place too long so he is on a bus out of Chicago. The bus stops in a Wisconsin town for a "comfort stop" and Reacher decides to stretch his legs. He is window shopping in a pawn shop window and sees a woman's ring. It is a Class of 2005 West Point ring and he wonders how it ended up there. He is also a graduate of West Point (from 20+ years before that) and he knows that no one just gives up their ring.

Reacher lets the bus go on without him, buys the ring and starts backtracking how it ended up in the pawn shop. Right away, he develops a lot of resistance in the form of lies and eventually a serious attempt to drive him away. Of course, all of this makes Reacher even more determined to figure it out. Besides, what else does have to do...?

This is much more of a detective story than most Reacher books. Along the way, Reacher picks up an entourage of sorts. It is not unusual for him to pick up people along the way, but the vehicles get a bit crowded from time-to-time in this one. Some of the topics come straight from the headlines, others are a little more philosophical. I am rating it 5 stars, but really it's more of a 4.5 stars. It drags a bit about 80% into the book, right when everything starts to come together. But, everything before that is interesting and the ending is as well.

Dick Hill read this audiobook - he has read most of this series and he is great. There's a reason why he has won so many audiobook awards.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: THE MIDNIGHT LINE: A JACK REACHER NOVEL by Lee Child.

CAMINO ISLAND: A NOVEL (audiobook) by John Grisham

Published by Random House Audio in 2017.
Read by January LaVoy.
Duration: 8 hours, 45 minutes.
Unabridged.

Princeton University in New Jersey owns the original manuscripts of all five of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels. Camino Island starts out strong with an elaborate heist of these manuscripts and eventually ends up with an elaborate scheme to find the presumed purchaser of these priceless, purloined compositions in Camino Island, Florida.

This audiobook was a great example of great characters but a really loose story that really doesn't hang together too well. It's almost as if John Grisham had no real concept where the book was going so he started moving one way and then changed his mind and just left his plot hanging while he went a new way - again and again and again.

The result is a lot of interesting characters with a plot that goes all over the place and finally ends up with a pretty boring ending followed up by a nice little turn of the plot at the end. To be honest, I think Grisham wanted to write about a little island he vacationed on and have an excuse to write about sea turtles, authors, book tours, booksellers and the publishing industry.

It's a pleasant enough book, but hardly anything exceptional - especially not for someone who has written books that have struck me hard to the core in the past (A Time to Kill, A Painted House, Gray Mountain).

The audiobook was read by January LaVoy who does a great job with some accents but has a disappearing/re-appearing Southern accent with the main character, an author who grew up in Memphis and Florida and lives in North Carolina when the story starts.

I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5 and it can be found on Amazon.com here: Camino Island: A Novel by John Grisham.

PRIVILEGED to KILL (Bill Gastner Mystery #5) (audiobook) by Steven F. Havill

Published by Books in Motion in 2008.
Read by Rusty Nelson.
Duration: 8 hours, 57 minutes.
Unabridged.

Undersheriff Bill Gastner returns in Privileged to Kill, another mystery set in a sleepy New Mexico county on the Mexican border set in the mid-1990's. However, in this story, Posadas County is anything but sleepy.

To be fair, the story starts out sleepy enough with Bill Gastner feeling his age and talking with a a 51 year-old stranded bicyclist with a busted tire that he picks up on the side of the road just for the heck of it and totes him, his bike and all of his equipment into town. Bill and the bicyclist become friendly and the bicyclist heads off to make camp somewhere and then move on the next morning after he gets his tire fixed.

But, things pick up quickly when Gastner gets a phone call in the middle of the night. A freshman girl has been found dead under the bleachers at the high school football field and the bicycle rider was camped nearby and he has been arrested. But, that's not the end of it...

The charm of this series is Bill Gastner's slow pace (he is the oldest character in the book) and the fact that he uses experience and his extensive knowledge of Posadas County to figure things out. But, he also uses his mouth. For a self-professed hermit, he is talks to everyone and listens. This can make the book slow-paced, but that makes sense for a cop looking at retirement. For me, this book series is the literary version of comfort food. I know the characters, the stories move to a slow-but-steady pace and the mysteries are pretty good.

The author, Steven F. Havill

Rusty Nelson read the book and he really does a very solid job with the accents. I think he gets Bill Gastner very well. As normal, there is a bit of Spanish in the book and that is Nelson's weakness. I am not sure why no one call help him with his Spanish, but if you don't know any Spanish it won't bug you either way.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5 and it can be found on Amazon.com here: PRIVILEGED to KILL (Bill Gastner Mystery #5) by Steven F. Havill.

DETROIT: AN AMERICAN AUTOPSY (audiobook) by Charlie LeDuff

Published by HighBridge in 2013.

Read by Eric Martin.

Duration: 7 hours, 21 minutes.
Unabridged.

Detroit: An American Autopsy is one of the best audiobooks I have listened to in a very long time.

It made me laugh, made me think, made me glad I don't live in Detroit, made me worried that I live in another Rust Belt city that has lost a lot of its industrial base, and, over and over again, it shocked me.

Charlie LeDuff grew up in the Detroit area and moved away to do a lot of different things, including being a reporter for the New York Times (where he won a Pulitzer Prize). He came back home to Detroit to work for a newspaper and to be close to family. When you go away from someplace and come home you see things a little more clearly and he was more than a little surprised Detroit was not only every bit as bad off as most of the country believes - it was actually a lot worse.

I recently read the book Janesville: An American Story by Amy Goldstein.  In a lot of ways, it is similar to Detroit: An American Autopsy in that they both detail the stories of a community wrecked by the collapse of the American automobile industry during the Great Recession. Janesville, Wisconsin is a small city that lost its lifeblood - a General Motors truck factory. Janesville lost one factory - Detroit has been losing factory after factory after factory for 50+ years. When Charlie LeDuff was growing up in Detroit, it was dying - but nobody knew it. When he returned it was painfully obvious that Detroit was gone.

The author, Charlie LeDuff

But that's too simple. Detroit is not dead. It has firefighters fighting to save the town from chuckleheads that set fire to abandoned homes just to watch the show when the fire department shows up. It has police that keep plugging away, even though Detroit is regularly known as the "murder capitol" and its leadership seems focused on looking good rather than being good. It has people just trying to make a living even though almost all of the good factory jobs are long gone.

It has its lost people, its thieves and hustlers. It has people that use religion as a tool to fleece the people. Its schools are literally falling down around its children. It has people that just don't care. But it also has Keiara Bell, a middle schooler who scolded a member of Detroit's City Council for being rude during a council meeting (if only Keiara Bell had known the half of it). Bell, it turns out, graduated from a Detroit public school, went on to Wayne State University (in Detroit) and graduated and wants to go into city management. She is featured in this TV story by Charlie LeDuff.

This is a tough book. There is no happy ending. It's a messy discussion of race, class, crime, politics, money and LeDuff's personal life and it is compelling. I blasted through this audiobook, looking for chances to listen a little more. Eric Martin read the audiobook and he was perfect for it. He never hit a wrong note as he read the book. I hope he won some sort of award, but in keeping with the theme - why would he? After all, it is about Detroit.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5 and it can be found on Amazon.com here: DETROIT: AN AMERICAN AUTOPSY (audiobook) by Charlie LeDuff.

NIGHT SCHOOL (Jack Reacher #21) (audiobook) by Lee Child

Published by Random House Audio in 2016.
Read by Dick Hill.
Duration: 13 hours, 7 minutes
Unabridged.

Fans of Jack Reacher know that the Lee Child does not write his books in a linear pattern - he bounces around on the Jack Reacher timeline quite a bit. Night School is set in the 1990's when Reacher was still in the military. Reacher has just come off of a secret mission in the Balkans.  He helped find and eliminate war criminals from the fighting that erupted in the wake of the collapse of Yugoslavia. It was the kind of mission that the government was glad to have done, but not glad to acknowledge.

Reacher receives a medal in a private ceremony and then is sent off to an inter-agency training seminar in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. But, it turns out that there are only two other people at this "training" - an FBI agent and a CIA agent that are also fresh off of missions that the government was glad to have done, but not glad to acknowledge.

The State Department has gathered them together as a team of go-getters to figure out what is behind a piece of intelligence that they have picked up thanks to an embedded operative - a terror network is offering $100 million for something to a seller in Germany. Reacher and company are being asked to figure out what is for sale and how they can get it before the bad guys do without losing the operative...

This is my fifteenth Jack Reacher book and it was one of the best. It's got some action, but mostly it is a detective story with really big consequences if it is not solved soon.

Dick Hill read this audiobook. He reads most of this series and that is a very, very good thing because Dick Hill has nailed the narration and character voices perfectly.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5 and it can be found on Amazon.com here: Night School by Lee Child.

STRUGGLE for a CONTINENT: THE WARS of EARLY AMERICA (The American History Series) by John Ferling

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 is now the states of Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia and Western Pennsylvania.

Time and again the colonies are brought into wars that started in Europe. The colonies became a sideshow to the war and many times their hard won gains were given away on the bargaining table in order to make a peace treaty work for Europeans.

Ironically enough, the last of these wars, the French and Indian War, was clearly started by a young colonial soldier named George Washington who stumbled into a group of French soldiers while leading troops in Western Pennsylvania and was forced to surrender them at Fort Necessity. This fight led to the removal of France from Canada and sowed some of the seeds that became the American Revolution.

This is a very informative, concise volume. Well done.

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5 and it can be found on Amazon.com here: STRUGGLE for a CONTINENT: THE WARS of EARLY AMERICA.

THE LAST CHECKOUT (audiobook) by Peter Besson

Published by Peter Besson, Inc. in 2018.
Read by Conner Goff
Duration: 7 hours, 7 minutes.
Unabridged.

In the near future the population of the world has reached the breaking point and climate change has made it all the harder to feed everyone. Throw in a near-continuous state of war and a collapsing economy and you might understand why some people would want to go and kill themselves before someone else gets around to doing it.

So many people were killing themselves that a niche industry formed - suicide hotels designed to deal specifically with the needs of those that want to kill themselves. They are called "Last Resorts" and have any number of conveniences for those that are determined to "check out" of this life, such as handguns, poisons, drugs for overdosing and convenient places to throw oneself off of the roof without harming passersby. The only real rule is that once you check in, you cannot check out alive. You can stay as long as you'd like, so long as you have the funds. Also, if you change your mind, you will be killed by a professional assassin. No one gets out alive.

Ansel Grayson has lived in a Last Resort for 12 years. He and a few other long term residents have watched hundreds of people check in and leave via the morgue in the basement of the hotel. For 12 years, Grayson has tried to work up the courage to finally kill himself and on the day he truly works up the nerve, he gets interrupted by a new female resident who is determined to kill herself as soon as possible. It's love at first sight for Grayson and suddenly he has found a reason to live...

The Last Checkout was an interesting audiobook. I can't say that it was fun to listen to, although it times it was very funny. It was a book full of misery, pain, addiction, greed and despair, but it was also hopeful. I am glad I listened to it, but I never want to listen to it again.

The book could easily be adapted to an Amazon Prime Video or Netflix 10 show mini-series format since it explores not only this brutal vision of the future, but it also explores the reasons why many of the long term residents of the hotel have checked themselves into a "Last Resort."

Conner Goff did an outstanding job as reader. He struck the right tone throughout, which had to be tough considering how many of the characters are trying to kill themselves.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5 and it can be found on Amazon.com here: The Last Checkout by Peter Besson.