Book Reviews by vicki rock

Bulwark is a walled city built to protect the people who survived a series of great cataclysms. Parallax, the artificial intelligence system that runs the city, rewards people. Over generations, an elite class, the Sainted, has evolved from the descendants of those who founded the stronghold.

Saint Enita Malovis feels that the end of her life is coming and that her decades of work as a bio-prosthetist must be protected. The lone practitioner of her art, Enita is determined to preserve her legacy and decides to create a physical being, called Nix, filled with her knowledge and experience. Nix refers to itself as “we” and “they.” Enita’s best friend is Saint Helen Vinter, who preserves books. The library is referred to as The Stacks.

Enita knows she received a kidney donation as a child. There are people designated as Body Martyrs, who donate organs to others. Any societal debt owed can be reduced or erased by donating organs. Recipient and Martyr are never allowed to meet. In the midst of her project, Saint Lucius Ohno is murdered and Parallax erases the event from its data.

Then Neren Tragoudi is injured in a building collapse. She is a Body Martyr. Her friends, Joni and Tomas, who are siblings, take her to Enita for help. Soon, Enita and Nix are drawn into the growing war that could change everything between Bulwark’s underclass and the programs that maintain order.

This novel is unusual. There are themes of utopia, revolution, artificial intelligence, body autonomy and friendship. There isn’t much action until the last quarter of the book. Much of it is speculation on the use of artificial intelligence.

Erika Swyler is also the author of “Light From Other Stars,” and “The Book of Speculation.”

I rate it four out of five stars.

Rusty Sabich is a retired judge. His fiancée, Bea Housley, has an adopted Black son, Aaron, 22, who is living with them in the rural Midwest because he is on probation for drug possession. One day Aaron disappears.

Aaron was recently laid off from his job with a party planning company. If he doesn’t return soon, he will be sent back to jail. Aaron eventually turns up with a story about a camping trip with his troubled girlfriend, Mae Potter, that ended in a fight and a long hitchhike home. Mae is the granddaughter of Mansy Potter, Rusty’s best friend. Her father, Harrison Potter, is a prosecuting attorney.

After two weeks, Mae still hasn’t returned home. After her car is found wrecked in the largest wilderness area in the state, her body is located. Mae had a lot of drugs in her possession. Then police arrive to arrest Aaron for murder.

Casper Sobonjian, Aaron’s defense attorney for the arraignment, tells Rusty and Bea that he’s never defended anyone for murder, so they need to find another lawyer. Rusty has kept his law license because he still works part time as an arbitrator and mediator. Bea begs Rusty to represent Aaron.

After he struggles to find another attorney, Rusty realizes that most people will presume Aaron is guilty and agrees to defend him. Hiram Jackdorp is the prosecuting attorney in this case.

The characters are outstanding. The plotting, especially the courtroom scenes, is amazing and the ending will come as a total surprise. “Presumed Guilty” is as good as Scott Turow’s first novel, “Presumed Innocent,” published in 1987. This is the third in the series, but it can be read as a stand alone.

I rate it five out of five stars.

It is soon after places started reopening after the pandemic. May Hanover, a law professor, lives with her partner, Josh Nelson. They are planning their wedding.

May and her best friends, Lauren and Kelsey, are going to the beach for a weekend. They have been friends since they were twelve. They haven’t been together in almost four years.

They call themselves The Canceled Crew. They think they’ve been cancelled: Lauren because of an affair, May because of a video of a confrontation on a subway platform and Kelsey Ellis because of her estranged husband’s murder. When they were camp counselors one year, Marnie Mann, another counselor, drowned.

This is heavily of the characters recounting past events. I didn’t like any of the four main characters and everything is blown out of proportion. The twists were minimal and the red herrings were obvious.

I rate it three out of five stars.

Dr. Layla Byrnes knows Nora, her unstable mother, will call her just before Christmas, although Layla has already told her that the plane tickets have been purchased. Her mother lives in a remote part of Tasmania.

Layla is an anesthesiologist who lives in Queensland. She has been suspended because she gave a patient a wrong medication. Her marriage is coming apart. She and her husband Gabe have two young children. Layla is also having an affair. Gabe wants her to work, but he still wants her to do everything at home.

Her mother tells her that there’s something she wants to tell her about Layla’s late father. Layla drops everything and goes to her childhood home.

It is slow-moving. I didn’t care for the characters. The plot tried to cover too many themes and became disjointed. Warning, there are sexual and abuse scenes.

I rate it three out of five stars.

Peyton Collard was a good man once, but his life changed after a horrific car accident. Now he is an alcoholic and drug user.

After getting arrested again while on parole, he is facing a 10-year prison term. But he is bonded out before trial. He doesn’t know who posted his bond. When he gets home, he finds that someone left $1,000 in his mailbox. He then finds a message, offering him $100,000 if he kills Walter Glaze, a drug dealer who is suspected of multiple murders.

That’s how Collard becomes a hit man for an anonymous patron. He justifies it by saying his is securing the future for his daughter, Skye, 13. But as he goes on a spree that leaves a trail of bodies across California, Peyton wonders about the identity of his anonymous patron.

Soon, his questions become an obsession, and he tries to discover the truth about the murders he’s committed. Meanwhile, he becomes a suspect in Glaze’s murder and some other men are after him for money.

While I really enjoyed Adam Hamdy’s last novel, “The Other Side of Night,” about a man regretting losing contact with his son, as I read “Deadbeat” I kept thinking what a terrible person Collard is. Although the characters aren’t likable, the plot is engrossing. The ending is good and ties up the loose ends.

I rate it out four of five stars.

Delphine is a retired marine biologist who helped police break up a child trafficking ring. She and her late husband, John, lived in Sitka, Alaska. They both started out in criminal investigations.

She is now in Seattle, being treated for cancer. Her surgeon said she has a slow-moving cancer that is terminal. Delphine worries she’s become a burden to her son, Bertie, and his family. One night, while contemplating how to go on, Delphine witnesses a violent argument between a man and his girlfriend. When Delphine discovers the woman has gone missing along with her young child, Delphine embarks on a quest to find them.

What begins as a chance encounter balloons into a rescue across the Pacific Northwest. Soon, she winds up in the middle of a battle between a child-trafficking ring and an Aryan biker gang. Delphine is determined to see her mission through, knowing full well it may be her last.

Straley interweaves action, insights on whales’ social behavior, and flashbacks to Delphine’s life before she got sick. The plot relies heavily on coincidence and the whole thing isn’t believable.

I rate it three out of five stars.

East Harlem, 1982. Anthony Carter, 42, has been unemployed for two years. He is separated from his wife and daughter. He was kicked out of Columbia University for dealing drugs, but eventually got a degree in education from a minor college.

He is home in a five-story tenement when the building collapses into a hill of rubble. As the city’s rescue services and news media respond, the surrounding neighborhood descends into chaos. At day’s end, six bodies are recovered, but many of the other tenants are missing. Anthony is one of the missing.

Others there include Felix Pearl, 24, a photographer and videographer who rushes to the scene. Royal Davis is the owner of a failing Harlem funeral home. He is there to possibly get more business. Mary Roe is a veteran city detective who becomes obsessed with finding Christopher Diaz, one of the building’s missing.
While this is an interesting plot, I had a real problem with Richard Price’s writing style. The opening paragraph is a run-on sentence of over 100 words. Price also writes scenes that move quickly like they were written for television. I really didn’t get caught up in this novel as I hoped I would.

I rate it three out of five stars.

The phone rings four times in eight minutes. Armand Gamache, head of homicide at the Sûreté, ignores it as he sits with his wife in their back garden in Three Pines, a tiny village in Québec. But why is he ignoring it when only friends and family have that number.

Reine-Marie watches with increasing unease as her husband refuses to pick up, though he clearly knows who is on the other end. When he finally answers, his rage shatters the calm of their quiet Sunday morning.

Then an alarm goes off in their apartment in Montreal. Gamache calls his son-in-law, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, his second in command. He and his wife, Annie, and their children live near the Montreal apartment. Beauvoir goes over to the apartment and says it was a false alarm.

That's only the first in a sequence of strange events. The next is Gamache’s missing raincoat, followed by a note for Gamache reading "this might interest you,” a puzzling scrap of paper with a mysterious list―and then a murder.

All this propels Gamache and his team toward a terrible realization. Something much more sinister than any one murder or any one case is fast approaching. Gamache, Beauvoir, and Inspector Isabelle Lacoste can only trust each other, as old friends begin to act like enemies, and long-time enemies appear to be friends.

Determined to track down the threat before it becomes a reality, their pursuit takes them across Québec and across borders. Their hunt grows increasingly desperate as the enormity of the potential attack they’re trying to prevent becomes clear. If they fail, the devastating consequences would reach into the largest of cities and the smallest of villages.

This is very intense from almost the beginning. Readers will race through it to find out what happens, but will still want to slow down to savor the excellent writing. The plotting is complex and the characters as vivid as ever. “The Grey Wolf” is the 19th in the one of the best series being written.

I rate it five out of five stars.

James Becker works at Fairburn House in Scotland. He gets a call one morning from Will Goodwin, director of the Tate Modern museum in London. Fairburn loaned three art pieces to the Tate. A forensic anthropologist realized that one of the pieces contains a human bone.

Vanessa Chapman was the artist. Sebastian Lennox is the heir to the Fairburn Foundation which was set up by his late father, Douglas. Grace Haswell, Vanessa Chapman’s executor, lives on Eris Island, an isolated Scottish island accessible to the mainland only twelve hours a day. Vanessa’s husband, Julian, disappeared after visiting her 20 years earlier. Julian had financial difficulties and was frequently unfaithful to Vanessa.

Becker decides to drive to Eris Island to talk to Grace. She is a retired physician. He knows it will be difficult to gain her trust because Douglas sued her multiple times in the past over Vanessa’s diaries. Chapters of Vanessa’s diaries are interspersed with present day chapters.

It is difficult to like the characters. The plot is tense and dark as secrets are woven together. The reveal and the ending are shocking. Suspense novel fans will love it.

I rate it four out of five stars.

It is spring 1963 and George Smiley has left the Circus, the British overseas intelligence agency. He is living a more peaceful life.

But Control has other plans. Mikhail Bortnik, a Russian agent, has defected, and the man he was sent to kill in London, Laszlo Banati, is nowhere to be found. Smiley reluctantly agrees to one last simple task: interview Susanna Gero, a Hungarian émigré and employee of the missing man, and sniff out a lead. It is to only take 48 hours at the most.

Soon, he is back in East Berlin, and on the trail of his most devious enemy’s hidden past. Tom Lake, another agent, is helping Smiley. Susanna comes along because she knows Laszlo.

This is set in the missing decade between two iconic instalments in the George Smiley saga, “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” and “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” written by John le Carré, the pen name of John Cornwell. Nick Harkaway is the pen name of Nick Cornwell, his son.

While it starts off slowly, it soon builds the suspense. It is character driven. You don’t have to be familiar with the John le Carré books to enjoy it, but his fans will agree that his son was the right person to continue the series.

I rate it four out of five stars.

Renée Ballard is a detective with the LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit. She is surfing before work and when she gets back to her vehicle, she finds that her badge, gun, and ID were stolen. She can’t report the theft without giving her enemies in the police department ammunition to end her career.

Ballard is the only detective in the Open-Unsolved Unit. The others are retired detectives who volunteer their time. The unit clears, on average, three cold cases a month. Then they get a DNA connection between a recently arrested man and a serial rapist and murderer who went quiet twenty years ago. But Nicholas Purcell, the arrested man, is only 24, so the genetic link must be familial: His father was the Pillowcase Rapist, responsible for a five-year reign of terror.

When Ballard tries to find her stolen property, her mission draws her into unexpected danger. With no choice but to go outside the department for help, she calls on Harry Bosch, who was her mentor.

At the same time, Ballard takes on a new volunteer to the cold case unit: Bosch’s daughter Maddie, now a patrol officer. The reason behind the thefts is bigger than Ballard first thinks. And Maddie has reasons of her own for joining the unit.

Connelly’s writing is precise. His narrative style allows the tension to build. The characters are good and their relationships are natural. This is book six of the Ballard and Bosch series.

I rate it five out of five stars.

It is the Year of the Wood Dragon, and puzzle expert Mike Brink has been invited to Tokyo, Japan to open the legendary Dragon Box, a 19th-century puzzle that has remained unsolved for over 150 years.

The box was constructed during one of Japan’s most tumultuous periods, when the samurai class was disbanded and the shogun lost power. In that moment of national crisis, Emperor Meiji placed an Imperial secret in the Dragon Box, locked it, and hid it in a temple far from the palace. Only two people knew how to open the box: Meiji and the box’s constructor, Ogawa. Both died without telling anyone the secret.

Since then, the Imperial family has held a contest to open the box every 12 years. The Dragon Box is difficult, filled with tricks, booby traps, poisons, and mind-bending twists. Every puzzle master who has attempted to open it has died in the process.

But Brink is not any puzzle master. With his abilities, he may be the only person alive who can crack it. He suffered a traumatic brain injury as a teenager that left him with savant syndrome. His injury made him a mathematical genius with the ability to solve complex puzzles. Sakura Nakamoto is his Japanese-American contact. She escorts him to Japan. Her aunt, Akemi, is secretary to the empress.

Yet, Brink’s determination is echoed by the faction, a radical group who have vowed to claim Meiji’s secret. The leader of the women is Sakura’s sister, Ume. When the group aligns with Brink’s archrival, Jameson Sedge, Brink is up against the most dangerous challenge of his life. Brink finds himself Sedge’s target although he witnessed Sedge die two years earlier.

This is a sequel to “The Puzzle Master,” but it can be read as a stand-alone. “The Puzzle Box” is reminiscent of “The Da Vinci Code” by Dan Brown. It is intense and non-stop as readers will race through it to find out how Brink gets through the various traps. The illustrations of puzzles are beautiful. You don’t have to be a puzzle enthusiast to enjoy “The Puzzle Box.”

I rate it five out of five stars.