TREASURE STATE: A CASSIE DEWELL NOVEL (audiobook) by C.J. Box

 

Published in 2022 by Macmillan Audio.
Read by Christina Delaine.
Duration: 9 hours, 20 minutes.
Unabridged.

Montana private investigator Cassie Dewell's latest adventures are actually two overlapping cases. One involves a hidden treasure of gold coins. Clues to the treasure were written by an unknown poet who wrote them in a poem on a dry erase board (the "daily specials" board) in a small town restaurant. Dewell is ostensibly hired by the author to see if the treasure can be found by tracing the author's literary footprint. I was immediately struck by the thought that a treasure hunt inspired by a poem story line had already been explored in the TV show Longmire. I would imagine that a great proportion of C.J. Box readers are also Longmire viewers.

The second case involves a swindler who finds lonely wealthy widows, romances them and bilks them out of some of their money with fake investments. Another private investigator from Florida had come to Montana with a lead but disappeared. Dewell picks up the case and finds more than she bargains for...

****

This was a hit and miss book for me.

Cassie Dewell has always been C.J. Box's second series when compared to his work with Joe Pickett. There are fewer Dewell novels and they tend to have more extreme plot twists like deaths of main characters, career changes, moving to different states and more. This book at least offers some stability of keeping Dewell in the same career in the same state at the end of the book. I think the future health of the series is helped by the addition of a familiar character from the C.J. Box multiverse.

The story has some weird plot holes that don't stand up if the reader thinks about them very long afterwards. If the person who has hidden the treasure truly wants to stay hidden, why even tempt a trained investigator with a staff to help her who already has a proven track record of taking down a serial killer and a corrupt police department? He even provides a clue that leads straight to the author of the treasure poem. 

Personally, I think this was an excuse for Box to introduce a bunch of author characters that Dewell interviews throughout the book. They are a diverse bunch and most are not very flattering portrayals of authors. It makes me wonder if he was getting in some digs at some authors he knows. 

The bad guy's reasons for defrauding widows is so contrived that I cannot imagine it happening. Weirdly, it's not just about the money.

C.J. Box is clearly exploring some things. I follow him on a social media platform and he puts out some conflicting thoughts on modern life out there. This book does that as well, with commentary on mask mandates expressed by characters - Dewell's wonderful son is against wearing masks and a mentally ill author is obsessed with wearing them. Box also tosses in comments about pointless nature of a college degree but then has a character that makes a point of observing that he had made it out small town Montana and benefited from the expanded view of the world his education had given him.

Downtown Bozeman, Montana

This book had a definite rural/small town vs. urban vibe. True big city dwellers (NYC, Chicago, etc.) might be surprised that Montana has any urban scene in any sense in the whole state, but I am from small town Indiana and I can guarantee any reader that the rural vs. urban vibe is a thing all over the country.

In this case, the urban dwellers are predators on small town America, but small town America is depicted in a horrible light in this book.

There is also a strange argument between the values of "pull your own self up by your bootstraps" vs. strong unions and even praise for a socialist town government in Montana nearly 100 years ago to counter the power of rich urban elites.

The reader was Christina Delaine. She is not my favorite reader - her tone is simply too disinterested for me. However, she is excellent at reading the spoken parts characters with issues, such as a character with a speech impediment and the crazed ramblings of a woman suffering from a decades-long case of PTSD after a gang rape while she was in high school. It's a glossed over plot point - almost like she was supposed to do something more in the story, but it was dropped. Too bad.

I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5. This book can be found on Amazon.com here: TREASURE STATE: A CASSIE DEWELL NOVEL by C.J. Box.

KING RICHARD III: A LIFE from BEGINNING to END (BIOGRAPHIES of BRITISH ROYALTY) by Hourly History

 

Published in 2019 by Hourly History.

Hourly History is a series of histories and biographies that a reader can read in about an hour. Sometimes, that works out quite well. Sometimes, the topic is just too big to cover in an hour.

I am an avid reader of history, but I have areas of weakness that I am perfectly willing to shore up a bit, but I don't want to invest a ton of time. I want to know a bit more, not become an expert. The British Royal Family is just one of those areas for me. I know more than most people, but I can see the glaringly empty areas of my own ignorance.

I recently read Hourly History's biography of Henry VII (the king that defeated Richard III in battle and took his throne). Usually, I find the British Royal family to be a tedious topic, but I found the Henry VII biography to be quite interesting. I was hoping to have a similar experience with the biography of Richard III.

King Richard III (1452-1485)

Richard III took the throne towards the end of the slow motion civil war known as The War of the Roses. Richard started out as a loyal and devoted follower of his brother (Edward IV) who pretty much let him rule Northern England as a sort of mini-kingdom. Richard dealt with Scotland and border incursions and consolidated English royal control over some of the major noble families of the region.

When Edward IV died, Richard was supposed to step in and serve as Lord Protector for Edward V. Edward V was only twelve years old and Richard was to rule in his stead until Edward V came of age. 

This is where Richard III's story becomes complicated and very much like an episode of Game of Thrones...

This is an exciting story (Shakespeare wrote a play about it because it was so rich in drama) but this short biography just fails to convey that drama. 

I rate this biography 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: KING RICHARD III: A LIFE from BEGINNING to END (BIOGRAPHIES of BRITISH ROYALTY) by Hourly History.

GANGSTERS vs. NAZIS: HOW JEWISH MOBSTERS BATTLED NAZIS in WARTIME AMERICA (audiobook) by Michael Benson

 

Highly Recommended

Published in 2022 by Tantor Audio.
Read by Gabriel Vaughan.
Duration: 8 hours, 53 minutes.
Unabridged.

Flag of the German American Bund

In the United States in the 1930's there was a small, loud, enthusiastic, and growing group of Americans that were great fans of Hitler and the Nazi party. They were largely ethnic Germans and formed organizations that sported Nazi symbols and mimicked the big rallies that Hitler had in Germany. They also mimicked the overt antisemitic speech exhibited by the Nazis. The most successful of these was the German American Bund (German American Federation).

There were a lot of small groups but there were two larger organizations with a different take than the Bund. The Silver Legion of America (Silver Shirts) had a spiritualist take on hate. Father Coughlin was a literal Catholic priest who brought a "Catholic" view on antisemitic hate and anti-interventionism from Detroit. He had a massive radio audience that was so enthusiastic that his church superiors were afraid to muzzle him.

Officially, Nazi Germany did not support these groups, but there were plenty of unofficial connections.

The national government could officially do nothing to stop them quickly (although the age-old tactic of looking for things like tax violations did work to slow some of them down over time.)

There was also very little that local governments could do to stop these meetings. Some localities, like New York City, outlawed wearing some of their Nazi-style outfits (dubious legality). Others just buckled down and over-scrutinized all of their rental applications for meeting halls, applications for parades, and so on. If there was a misspelling, or any similar type of mistake it was denied. 

But, that kind of thing only lasts so long. Eventually these American Nazis learned to double check their paperwork and take advantage of America's wide open freedom of speech rules to advocate for actions that would kill those very same freedoms.

A judge from New York City named Nathan Perlman decided that if the American antisemites were going to have paramilitary organizations, American Jews needed one to literally punch back. Turns out he knew a whole bunch of tough Jewish guys that paraded through his court room on a regular basis - Jewish mafia gangsters. People like Mickey Cohen, Meyer Lansky, Davie "the Jew" Berman*, and Bugsy Siegel were talked to in an unofficial way. 

The deal was simple - no killing, lots of roughing up (but not too rough), try to disappear afterwards, no overt help from the judge, avoid the press. In return, there would be lots of backroom maneuvers to get them out of jail if needed. The judge appealed to their sense of ethnic loyalty and it worked. These men were not good Jews in any kind of moral way. Most had long since stopped going to temple. However, most had had enough of a connection to the larger Jewish community to have had a Bar Mitzvah and they all understood that if people were going after harmless rabbis and little old ladies that go to temple, they would certainly go after Jewish mobsters.

Mugshots of Meyer Lansky (1902-1983)

Meyer Lansky said this about their involvement: "The stage was decorated with a swastika and a picture of Adolf Hitler. The speakers started ranting. There were only fifteen of us, but we went into action. We threw some of them out the windows. Most of the Nazis panicked and ran out. We chased them and beat them up. We wanted to show them that Jews would not always sit back and accept insults"

This Nazi-Gangster fight did not go on for too long - a couple of years at longest. The German American Bund began to fizzle out during 1939 when everyone was starting to get a real sense of what Nazi Germany was all about. Pearl Harbor pretty much brought an end to the pro-fascist meetings thanks to Italy and Germany declaring war on the United States to express their solidarity with Imperial Japan. 

Are there thorny free speech issues in this scenario? Well, it looks bad when a judge is recruiting a crew of guys to beat people up for expressing their political thoughts. But, when you consider the record of Nazis before and during the war it's pretty hard not to enjoy hearing about the mobsters beating the crap out of a bunch of loud-mouthed racist bullies.

I recommend the audiobook version because of the reading of Gabriel Vaughan. The book is written is written in a lively and engaging manner and uses words or phrases from movies or newsreels from the time period, using slang like "heaters" (guns) and "whacked" (mafia ordered murder). Vaughan doubles down on this theme by reading with a mild accent reminiscent of newsreel narrators of the time.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: GANGSTERS vs. NAZIS: HOW JEWISH MOBSTERS BATTLED NAZIS in WARTIME AMERICA (audiobook) by Michael Benson

*Note on Davie "the Jew" Berman. Mobster nicknames are almost always colorful. Berman has to have the least imaginative nickname of all the mobsters of this era. That's most likely due to the fact that he was operating out of Minneapolis and Iowa City - places not known for large Jewish populations.

KING HENRY VII: A LIFE from BEGINNING to END (BIOGRAPHIES of BRITISH ROYALTY) by Hourly History

Published by Hourly History in 2019.

Hourly History is a series of histories and biographies that a reader can read in about an hour. Sometimes, that works out quite well. Sometimes, the topic is just too big to cover in an hour.

I am an avid reader of history, but I have areas of weakness that I am perfectly willing to shore up a bit, but I don't want to invest a ton of time. I want to know a bit more, not become an expert. The British Royal Family is just one of those areas for me. I know more than most people, but I can see the glaringly empty areas of my own ignorance.

King Henry VII of England (1457-1509)

Henry VII was the king that ended the a civil war between competing royal families - The War of the Roses. It was not a sure thing, though. It was a long shot for him to even survive, let alone make it to the throne. Normally, these complicated royal stories bore me, but this one had a lot of dramatic elements - murder of children, escapes, battles, betrayal, the death of a king on the battlefield, and more.

The length of this e-book was perfect. I rate this e-book 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: KING HENRY VII: A LIFE from BEGINNING to END (BIOGRAPHIES of BRITISH ROYALTY) by Hourly History.

REBEL with a CLAUSE: TALES and TIPS from a ROVING GRAMMARIAN (audiobook) by Ellen Jovin

Published by HarperAudio in 2022.
Read by the author, Ellen Jovin.
Duration: 7 hours, 38 minutes.
Unabridged.

Ellen Jovin had a fun idea. She sat up a table near a New York City subway entrance with a sign that said "Grammar Table" and within 30 seconds someone came to ask a question. She doesn't just take questions, though. She also takes complaints, comments, and observations as well. 

This worked out so well that she and her husband decided to take it on the road and visit all 50 states and make a documentary (he is the cameraman, she is the talent.) However, they only made it to 47 states due to the intervention of Covid-19.

Jovin has a great way of speaking with people about grammar and she has the training to back it up. Most people are defensive and/or nervous about their grammar skills. Jovin sets them at ease and gives them explanations that are easy to understand. I literally have no problem with that aspect. 

That being said, this audiobook was kind of a chore to finish. Jovin's reads her own book and does a good job, but the text was grammatically correct but not necessarily inviting for long-term listening. 

Each of these chapters would be a great weekly 3-5 minute segment on an NPR radio show but were not necessarily fun to listen to back to back to back they got to be be quite repetitive.  

The author at her table

A typical chapter would include the description of the people asking, the location of the table for this question (South Bend, Indiana or wherever) and a literal transcript of their conversation. This could take a while and rarely revealed anything particularly interesting and if properly edited could have knocked at least an hour off of the book. At first, this aspect to the book was charming - it felt sort of welcoming and homey. But, by the time we had worked our way up to the twentieth question, it was getting a bit old. If this were broken up into weekly segments on NPR I am sure I would have loved it.

A reader may be wondering at this point why I didn't do just that very thing and listen to this book in bits of pieces over a long period of time. The answer is simple: I checked this book out of the library as a digital download and only had it for a limited amount of time to listen to it before it went back to the library and on to the next person on the waiting list. So, I listened to it over the course of 10 days or so and it was a bit too...a bit too much.

I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: REBEL with a CLAUSE: TALES and TIPS from a ROVING GRAMMARIAN (audiobook) by Ellen Jovin.

ALL the WAY to the TIGERS: A MEMOIR by Mary Morris

 

Published by Recorded Books in 2020.
Read by Susan Bennett.
Duration: 6 hours, 32 minutes.
Unabridged.

Sometimes I fall asleep listening to the news on my local NPR station. One morning I woke up to PBS's Rick Steves (the guy who does all of the European travel shows) interviewing Mary Morris about this book. Turns out he has a travel-themed NPR radio show and they discussed her travels around the world. They discussed where she went in India and why she went (to see a tiger in the wild) and I immediately looked it up on my audiobook up and requested it.

But, I was unpleasantly surprised to find out that this book was not the book I heard described in the interview. I heard a great discussion about a travelogue book to India. I am always interested in hearing about India because it is an ancient society, it is a democracy and it is an up-and-coming economic power.

Also, I am a sucker for travelogue books.

I have read a book by a man who hiked across America following an oil pipeline, a man who hiked the Appalachian Trail with his semi-drunk friend, two guys who hiked from Mexico to Colombia, a guy who biked from the UK to India, a guy who rode a motorcycle around Afghanistan, a guy who hiked across Afghanistan when the Taliban collapsed in the early 2000's, and two ladies that rode bikes from Turkey all the way to India and China. I am sure there are more.

This book has some travelogue features to it, but about 1/3 of the book is flashbacks to her childhood and her parents. They are both weird. One could easily argue that they were abusive.  About 1/3 is flashbacks to the time she broke her ankle while ice skating and all of the reconstructive surgery she had to endure. The remaining 1/3 (maybe less) talks about her trip to India to look for tigers in the wild.

The travelogue portion was the best part. The flashbacks parts, at their best, were tolerable. I almost quit listening at multiple points. But, in the end, I just had to know if she saw a tiger or not (they are elusive, solitary creatures).

I rate this audiobook 2 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: All the Way to the Tigers: A Memoir by Mary Morris.

CULPER SPY RING: A HISTORY from BEGINNING to END by Hourly History

 

Published by Hourly History in 2022.

The Hourly History series features e-book histories and biographies that can be read in about an hour. They are great if you want to learn more about a topic, but you don't want to read a regular-sized book or biography. Plus, they offer a set of free books every weekend so you can explore without spending a dime.

The Culper Spy Ring has become a trendy topic in Revolutionary War history (if you can have such a thing). The spy ring grew out of the need of Continental Army to keep tabs of the British forces based in New York City. The spies were untrained but clever amateurs who, over time developed fairly sophisticated techniques to deliver information, including newspaper ads, letters with invisible ink and secret codes. They used the fact that they were private citizens to their advantage by taking advantage of their normal business routes and family visits to pass along knowledge.

I was intrigued by the fact that after the war the spy ring kept their secret spy ring a secret until they died. Their roles were pieced together by historians in the 20th century. 

Hercules Mulligan, 1740-1825

I was surprised find Hercules Mulligan in the book. I was only aware of him because of my daughter's love for the Broadway musical Hamilton. Mulligan is on the edges of the action in the production (he has less than a minute of solo singing parts - here is a link to all of them put together. Be aware that Mulligan uses foul language in the musical.)

It turns out that Hercules Mulligan may be worthy of his own musical. He was a member of the Sons of Liberty and he ran a high end tailor shop that was so good that the British officers used despite his political leanings. He must have been a great conversationalist because he pumped those officers for information even after Benedict Arnold had him briefly imprisoned for being a suspected spy. He started the war as a slave owner but freed his slave Cato in 1778. He also co-founded the New York Manumission Society, a group dedicated to gradually abolishing slavery and protecting free African Americans who were wrongfully accused of being runaway slaves. 

I enjoyed this e-book quite a bit. I rate it 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: CULPER SPY RING: A HISTORY from BEGINNING to END by Hourly History.