DWD's Reviews

Published in 2010 by Global Publishing Group. 298 pages. Tetterbaum's Truth was introduced to me as being similar to Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series. For those not familiar with this ever-growing series, Stephanie is the classic "fish out of water" - she is a gorgeous, unemployed single woman who takes a job as a bounty hunter for a bail bondsman. If she brings them in, she gets paid. But, she's never used a gun. She has no skills to do this job but, in the end, she does so in her own hilarious way. On the surface, this book does indeed have some similarities with the Stephanie Plum series. Angel Martin is a single woman who owns a bar in Chicago called Tetterbaum's Pub. She's invested her life savings in it and it's working. Her love life is a mess since her fiance dumped her and disappeared but she does have a good time with the mysterious Grayson. It's not serious but it is seriously physical. Her only living family is her Great A

Audio edition published in March of 2016. Originally published in January of 2014. Read by Wayne Farrell. Duration: 11 hours, 19 minutes Unabridged I have reviewed a lot of indie and small publishing house audiobooks lately and have been mildly disappointed with almost all of them. I don't want to be cruel, but there's a reason why some of these books are languishing in the publishing wasteland. But, sometimes you find a true gem out among the 2 and 3 star books. A gem just sitting there waiting to be noticed. This book is such a gem and it is worthy of your notice. It is an international thriller with a giant soul and a great deal of introspection. If you are looking for a "shoot 'em up" this is not your book, even though there is plenty of shooting. It is the story of two brothers, and like all families, this family is complicated. The McBride family consists of Conor, a talented musician who plays violin at the international level and Thomas, the br

Originally published in 2015 Elvis Cole is on the case. It's an odd one. He has been hired by a Meryl Lawrence to find her friend and person she works with. But, Meryl has all sorts of weird ground rules about when she will meet Elvis and how he may contact her. She also calls at weird hours and times and demands that he work faster. Robert Crais. Photo by Mark Coggins While follows a lead to a home just before the police raid it and discover a murdered arms dealer. Elvis gives chase to the suspect but is detained by police K9 officer Scott James. Elvis knows that this case is definitely part of something much larger and brings in his partner Joe Pike who brings in a friend who is a free-lance anti-terrorist agent. Scott James also starts his own investigation, despite being warned off of the case. Can this offbeat detective and this by-the-books cop find out what was going on before it is too late? I was looking forward to this book because it brought together most of

Originally published in October of 2014. Audiobook published in February of 2016 Read by Tom Lennon Duration: 18 hours, 24 minutes Unabridged I have read or listened to a few books about the experiences of fighter and bomber pilots in World War II and those books drew me to this one. The book's main character is Steve Carmichael. Steve grew up on a ranch near Orlando, Florida and was a baseball player at the University of Florida.  The Detroit Tigers are interested in him but, a s a kid he learned how to fly a rattletrap biplane that his father purchased for a song and refurbished  and Steve decides to join the Army Air Corps as a pilot. He becomes a B-17 Flying Fortress pilot and is shipped off to England in 1943. The story follows his original crew that all trained together as they try to work their way through their required 30 missions. The descriptions of everything to do with the airplanes and the combat missions in this book are absolutely excellent. I felt like I wa

Set in Eastern Indiana in 1842, this short novel does a great job of talking about slavery for a grades 4-6 audience. The Caldwell family has recently moved to Indiana from North Carolina. They are Quakers. Nowadays, Quakers are famous for their anti-slavery stand and participation in the Underground Railroad in the 1800s. But, in reality, the Quakers are split in two groups. All are anti-slavery but some believe that you should not break the law by helping runaway slaves. Others believe that helping people in need trumps the law. The Caldwell family embodies this split. Sarah, age 13, is anti-abolitionist and is quite sure her father is as well. However, her new young stepmother is certainly an abolitionist. She is close with Levi and Catharine Coffin, two of the most famous members of the Underground Railroad network who live in Newport, Indiana (now called Fountain City) and Sarah witnesses her helping a runaway slave. Sarah is sure that her father is anti-abolitionist and thr

Originally published in 2003 Coke vs. Pepsi. Kleenex vs. Puffs. McDonald's vs. Burger King. Stephen King vs. Dean Koontz.  There is a "name brand" that defines almost every field. Let's face it, in the literary world, Stephen King is the master of the horror field. Dean Koontz is clearly the second place guy, but he is second place. I have followed that pattern in my own reading. I have easily read two dozen Stephen King books and perhaps ten Dean Koontz books. Nothing wrong with Dean Koontz, just like there's nothing wrong with Pepsi, Puffs or Burger King. I was aware of the Odd Thomas series - they're in all of the book stores and the name certainly gets your attention. But, I never was tempted to pick the first one up and get started until last week. Odd Thomas is a twenty year old resident of Pico Mundo, a suburban town in the Southern California desert. Odd (yes, that's his real name) certainly lives up to his name. He is a gentle soul th

Audio version released in January of 2016 by LLC Cherry Publishing. Originally published by Oceanview Publishing in August of 2015. Read by Rebecca Roberts Duration: 9 hours, 21 minutes Unabridged Hannah Parks is a survivor. She grew up in an incredibly verbally abusive home and watched her mother be physically abused by her father on a regular basis. But, one day, she fought back and now her father is in jail and she is married to a tech genius whose start-up has become a major corporation. But, Hannah and her husband have been growing apart. When she hears him dreaming about raping a woman and discovers a secret porn file on his computer she confronts him only to have him fly into a violent rage. She leaves him only to have him try to kidnap her. But, a man named Black intervenes. A man she doesn't even know kidnaps her away from the kidnappers and now Hannah's life really starts to disintegrate... If you love a book with a lot of plot twists, well this is your

Published in July of 2015 Cassie Dewell was the lead character in 2013's The Highway , a gritty novel with a truly creepy bad guy. Dewell is a young widow who lives with her wacky mother and her son. Dewell makes the move from Wyoming to North Dakota in this book.  This is a good move by all accounts - there is a substantial raise, a promotion in rank  and it lets Dewell get out of a bad work situation detailed in The Highway . A fracking operation in North Dakota. Photo by Joshua Doubek. Grimstad, North Dakota is in the center of the new oil boom. Thanks to "fracking",  it exploded from a little farm town to one of the fastest growing economic centers in the world. It has become the kind of town where anyone can get a job but no one can get a place to sleep and you have to wait for half an hour just to order at the local McDonald's. The local sheriff has a problem. He knows that gangs are moving in to sell drugs and run prostitutes and he's pretty sure

Slow Going At First. Published in 2010. For a book that is all about how quickly the world's stock markets can be played by a few bad actors who don't particularly care about making money so much as they care about wreaking havoc, this book took a very long time to get started. Part of that is my fault. I failed to realize that I was in the middle of a series until after I had read this book. I had read the second installment in this series 7 years ago but I literally remembered nothing about the main character, Ty Hauck. In this installment, Hauck is in the suburbs of New York City. He is working for a corporation as a security consultant, meaning he investigates people the company may work with and gets involved with internet breaches and the like. Hauck's company is investigating an big-time investor with a hidden past. But, Hauck has a personal connection to the murders of a Wall Street broker and his family and soon finds a connection to a third murder that

Published in 2009. The year is 1665 and the English colony of Jamaica is surrounded by a constellation of Spanish colonies. The Caribbean is in a near-perpetual state of war as English privateers attack Spanish treasure galleons hauling literally tons of New World silver and gold to Spain. Charles Hunter is the captain of an English privateer ship named Cassandra (or, he is simply a pirate when Spain and England are not at war). He has learned that Spain has a fortress on a remote island called Matanceros to protect ships that attempt, but fail to make the trip to Spain. They cannot return to their port of origin alone. In fact, the less time they are alone and exposed to privateers, the better. So, Spain has built an impregnable fortress to protect such ships.  Michael Crichton (1942-2008) At least it is supposed to be impregnable. Hunter is very sure that he has figured out a way that the perfect team can infiltrate the fort and then take the ship that it is supposed to pr

Originally printed in 1966 As you can tell by the title, Jim Beckwourth: Negro Mountain Man  has a hopelessly out-of-date title. When it was written in 1966, the term "negro" was still considered to be acceptable, of course. Jim Beckwourth Jim Beckwourth (1798-1866) was born in Virginia and moved out to the frontier, roughly in the St. Louis area, before he moved out on his own. He apprenticed as a blacksmith but didn't really pursue that career. Instead, he set off as part of larger expeditions and quickly earned a reputation for being tough, fair and honest. And, perhaps most important, he was considered to be dependable in an environment where almost nothing was dependable. Beckwourth's skin color did not seem to hurt him any as he trapped beaver, scouted for military expeditions and explored the American West. He even served in the Second Seminole War in Florida. It seems that real talent was valued a lot more than a man's race. But, the bulk of t

Read by Charles Hinckley Duration: 4 hours, 15 minutes Unabridged A lot of people don't know that the end of the classic Cowboy era was the beginning of a dinosaur rush. Paleontologists went out West and found all sorts of skeletons and shipped them back East to be installed in museums. Reputations were made based on who could find the biggest and most exotic fossils. Edward Cope with a fossil Two scientists,    Edward Cope and O.C. Marsh tried their best to outdo one another as their teams explore the American West. Sometimes they just compete, sometimes they actually try to hurt the other guy's operations.  The book is told from the point of view of an old Western guide/stagecoach robber who joined with one of the scientists and helped him navigate the landscape and local politics and is now telling the story to a reporter. This story was adapted from a movie script. It listens like a "movie of the week"-type fun western. Nothing too serious, but yo

Published by Hachette Audio in 2009 Read by the author, Malcolm Gladwell Duration: 12 hours, 49 minutes Unabridged This fascinating audiobook is actually a collection of articles that Malcolm Gladwell has written over the years. Each story is about 30-45 minutes long and cover a great variety of subjects. Topics include ketchup, mammograms, FBI profilers, pit bulls, menstrual cycles, Ron Popeil (founder of Ronco), the dog whisperer, plagiarism, the Challenger Explosion/risk, home hair coloring products and the opportunities that those products offered for female executives, first impressions/job interviews, homelessness and how to solve it (really!), The Pill, Enron and the importance of having a great teacher in every classroom. I am a teacher and I was of course interested in his discussion about teachers. What was best was his emphasis on the day-to-day interaction between students and teachers and how one can observe quality education in action. What was worst was the insi

Published in 2008. Originally published in 1996. This edition collects the original four volumes of this limited series into one complete volume. If you liked the feel of the recent Batman v Superman movie, you will likely enjoy this graphic novel. If not, you are probably better off skipping this introspective spectacle. We start with a world out of control. A new generation of Meta-humans abound. They have the skills of the old Justice League but none of their standards. The good ones still fight with the bad ones but they do it with little regard to the regular people who live all around them. Cars explode, buildings crumble and people get hurt. In a single fight Kansas was obliterated in a massive explosion caused by the death of a nuclear-powered Meta-human. Where is old Justice League? It has disbanded since Superman retreated from the world and is living on a pretend hologram Kansas farm inside of his Fortress of Solitude. He is sick of watching his regular friends age

Published by the National Park Service in 1996 The format of this small book  (88 pages) is much like a small old-style National Geographic with three wide-ranging informative  essays by Larry Gara, Brenda E. Stevenson and C. Peter Ripley.  The pictures are excellent in that they are reproduced wonderfully and well-shot. A notice from 1851. Most importantly, these three essays are an excellent introduction to the topics of slavery, the slave trade (not just to the United States but also to the Caribbean and Brazil) and the contradictions of some of the Founding Fathers fighting for their personal freedom while owning other people. But, the heart of the book is the fight against slavery - both political and practical. After all, it is one thing to say you are against slavery and it quite another to help a runaway slave that comes to your door and help her move on to another safe place. The book documents the different strains of Abolitionism (Do you help fund the fight in Kan

First published in 2004. I am a serious fan of C.J. Box, having been introduced to him by a person who left a suggestion on one on my reviews on Amazon.com. Since then I have read most of his books in the order that I have found them - which is no order at all. So, this is probably my 15th or 16th book by C.J. Box but it is only now that I am getting around to #4 in the Joe Pickett series. Photo by DWD. This is a weird one. If you like to watch "news of the weird" type of stuff than you are probably familiar of the urban legend about cattle mutilations. These stories suggest that aliens are picking up cattle, performing surgeries on them and then leaving their mutilated bodies scattered across the countryside. In Trophy Hunt , farm animals and wild animals are being mutilated. Their faces and genitals are being cut away with precise cuts so Game Warden Joe Pickett knows that they are not the result of animal attacks - at least not anything he's used to. Wh

Published by Tobin H Michael in February of 2016 Read by Tom Lennon Duration: 8 hours, 33 minutes Unabridged Valley of Deception is a thriller featuring Jake Matthews, an experienced U.S. Marshal who lives and works in Iowa. The book starts out with a lot of action as Jake Matthews and his team are out to execute an arrest warrant in a small town in Iowa, accompanied by an inexperienced local deputy who is serving as the local guide. The arrest goes poorly and most of the team gets shot.  Jake takes some much-needed time off with his wife to recover emotionally in his vacation home in Iowa. It is a farmhouse where Matthews can play at farming a bit and go hunting. But, this time for rest and relaxation is not going well - Matthews is experiencing panic attacks and having a hard time sleeping at night.  Photo by DWD One day, he decides to go on a walk along his property line when he smells the all-too-familiar smell (in his line of work) of a meth lab. He crosses onto

Published in 2014 Wynne's War is a war story and a western with a bit of A Few Good Men thrown in as well. It starts out in Iraq where Army Ranger Elijah Russell is filmed rescuing a horse during a firefight and becomes a YouTube sensation. Russell and his buddy are taken out of Iraq to a remote base in Afghanistan. Russell is tasked with training horses for a special forces unit to use against Taliban fighters. They want horses because they are quiet compared to any motorized vehicle, can go places where four-wheelers can't and never need to be re-fueled so long as there is available grass. Russell grew up breaking horses and a great deal of the first third of the book is about Russell thinking about his childhood and detailing his "horse whisperer" style of breaking horses.  The charismatic leader of this special forces unit, Captain Wynne, is a mystery and so is his real goal with these horses. Russell can't quite figure him out and when he and his buddy

Audiobook edition published in November of 2015. Published by Blair Howard. Read by Tom Lennon. Duration: 7 hours, 23 minutes. Unabridged. Harry Starke is a former cop turned private detective in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He has a successful agency with several associates with different skill sets. Harry is also connected to the Chattanooga political scene through his father, a federal judge. Most importantly, Harry is connected through his connections as a former police officer. He knows a lot of cops, knows the department's habits and has a romantic relationship with an important detective.  Most important, Harry is a smart, tough detective who can put two and two together, get four and figure out why that answer is important to the rest of the problem. Plus, he can shoot and fight well. The Walnut Street Bridge in Chattanooga. Harry is out for a late night drink and he notices a beautiful young lady. Later, while strolling across the Walnut Street Bridge he sees he

Published in August of 2014 by Danny bent, Ltd. It took me a long time to read this book. I read it over the course of several months on my Kindle and on my phone's Kindle app.  The book details the trip of a teacher from the UK who rides his bike from the UK to India in an effort to raise money for charity and to teach his kids something. I really struggled with the first part of the book because the author seemed so self-absorbed and I never really understood how he was going to raise money for a charity by riding and as a fellow teacher I seriously did not get how this trip was going to do anything for his students besides do show everyone that he could do this outrageous thing.  So, I struggled through the first half of the book because I kept on coming back to the premise behind his trip and wondering about it (how is he raising this money? Is it by the kilometer? Is it a lump sum and will be donated so long as he makes a solid effort? These are the types of question