THE 6:20 MAN by David Baldacci

 Finished Su 1/25/26

This was a trade paperback that Janny loaned me. Usually I think Baldacci is today's James Patterson and these books are not well written and just for the 'ride'. However, this one was interesting as it concerns Travis Devine, an Army Ranger who goes to work on Wall Street. He's doing it to appease his father. When his father learned that he was an 'Ranger' he asked what national park he would work at...."My son is Smokey The Bear". Travis leaves the military and starts to earn big bucks in investment banking. 

From Debbish.com:

"Every day without fail, Travis Devine puts on a cheap suit, grabs his faux-leather briefcase, and boards the 6:20 commuter train to Manhattan, where he works as an entry-level analyst at the city’s most prestigious investment firm. In the mornings, he gazes out the train window at the lavish homes of the uberwealthy, dreaming about joining their ranks. In the evenings, he listens to the fiscal news on his phone, already preparing for the next grueling day in the cutthroat realm of finance.

Then one morning Devine’s tedious routine is shattered by an anonymous email: She is dead.

Sara Ewes, Devine’s coworker and former girlfriend, has been found hanging in a storage room of his office building—presumably a suicide, prompting the NYPD to come calling on him. If that wasn’t enough, Devine receives another ominous visit, a confrontation that threatens to dredge up grim secrets from his past in the Army unless he participates in a clandestine investigation into his firm.

This treacherous role will take Travis from the impossibly glittering lives he once saw only through a train window, to the darkest corners of the country’s economic halls of power…where something rotten lurks. And apart from this high-stakes conspiracy, there’s a killer out there with their own agenda, and Devine is the bullseye."

Odd Premise: The bad guy who runs the brokerage house uses a woman in a bikini to signal trades secretly. She's in a green suit if they are to continue to trade and she's in a red bikini if they are to shut down. 

STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND. by Robert Heilein

 Ebook borrowed from Lincoln Library and finished We 1/21/26

I've read this half a dozen times over the years. I was surprised to learn that it was first published in 1961. 

He dedicates the book to 3 people and one of them is Philip Jose Farmer

THE BRASS VERDICT by Michael Connelly

 Finished Su 1/1126

This was a paperback that I at the Rochester library book sale on Su 4/23/23. This was the last time that I will be attending a library book sale. There just isn't anything of any depth because it's all 'light reading' and I want something more. 

However, I liked this novel because it's the first time that Micky Haller works with Bosch. I was going to give it to Janny, but I noticed that she had just lent me this book in hardback. 

 The review of 'THE BRASS VERDICT' at The Guardian:

"Mickey Haller, who runs his legal practice from a car, is ready to get back to work after a year off recovering from a gunshot wound and an addiction to painkillers. But he gets more work than he wants when he inherits the caseload of a colleague, Jerry Vincent, who has been found dead. The cases include the forthcoming murder trial of film producer Walter Elliot, who seems strangely serene about his impending legal date. Mickey has to discover what Elliot is so smug about, and all the while the police are trying to find out who killed Vincent. Could there be a connection? The author is one of the top American crime writers, and whether you pick up one of his celebrated cop novels or a legal thriller such as this, you can be assured of an intriguing plot, decent characterisation, excellent writing and an exciting ending."

BLUE CALHOUN by Reynolds Price

Finished Mo 1/5/26

This is one of my ancient paperbacks that I had never read. However, this was one of the finest novels that I've read in a long time. 

In broad strokes the story is about a 35 year old musical instrument salesman who falls madly in love with a sixteen year old girl. The disruption caused by this action has ramifications that affect his family forever.

The book is Blue (the guys name) explaining his life to his granddaughter. 

He has a 13 year old daughter who he worships and his wife his 'long suffering, yet forgiving'. Mom and daughter are both Catholics and the family lives in Raleigh, North Carolina. This is also Reynolds Price's home. Luna is the sixteen year old girl who is far older than her years. Her mother is a childhood friend of Blue's. 

The reveal is that his daughter's husband (the storyline moves ahead thiry) might be having some kind of sexual interaction with Blue's granddaughter, Lyn. Dane, her father commits suicide when Blue witnesses what he thinks is a sexual encounter with the young girl. 

The story is told in a very southern, almost 'decorous' style. 

From the book's page at KIRKUS:

"Written in the almost buttery style that Price has favored since Kate Vaiden (1986), this melodrama concerns an ex-alcoholic music salesman, Blue Calhoun, living in Raleigh, North Carolina, in the 1950's. Having sorely tried his wife and daughter and old mother by his drinking (he's sober now), Blue at last seems level. But then into the downtown music store where he works comes an old acquaintance from high school and her 16-year-old daughter, Luna. Blue is tempted and again falls; Luna (an incest victim) is a taste of freedom and possible redemption. He tries giving her up once, and is taken back by his family, but the leukemia death of an old bachelor friend re-involves Blue with Luna (in a not terribly credible plot-thickening). This second lapse is more serious, and, in sorrow, his long-suffering wife, daughter, and mother send him away. Blue will get still another chance (the story is boned with second and third chances), but his flaw has affected three—and ultimately four—generations of Calhoun women permanently. Only their patience and grace-in-pain reconstitute him. Price, in his recent books, has been assembling a kind of humane moral iconography: variously posed portraits of the utterly human sinner, no better and no worse than people can be; and strong versions of the Blessed Woman. Here, though, in the soapy re- curlings of the style (``I understood I'd failed completely, now today if never before in my long mess. I knew I was locked in the trough of it too, out here lost on a girl's hot tether, awaiting her will''), the icon seems merely air-filled. The characters speak to each other in conspicuously sad/wise parables; themes are paired too smoothly; and a certain gooey smugness—in the classical self- condemnatory/self-congratulatory mode—lurks everywhere."