HOLD TIGHT by Harlan Coben

 Finished Fr 4/29/22

I borrowed this e-book from the library because I saw the Netflix series 'HOLD TIGHT'. Netflix set the series in Gdansk, Poland and the book was set in New Jersey. I had trouble understanding the movie but the book was also packed with too many characters and storylines. It seemed to lack focus.

It addresses the problem of parents keeping tabs on their children. Is it OK to read your children's social media accounts and follow their emails and texts? A very interesting concept but a ham-fisted presentation.

A young high school student overdoses and this event reveals a ring of drug traffickers.  

From BookBrowse.com:

"Tia and Mike Baye never imagined they'd become spying, overprotective parents. But their sixteen-year-old son Adam has been unusually distant and aloof lately, and after the recent suicide of his classmate, Spencer Hill, they can't help but worry. They install a spy program on Adam's computer and within days they are jolted by a strange message to their son from an unknown correspondent: "Just stay quiet and all safe." Meanwhile, browsing through an online memorial for her son, Betsy Hill is struck by one photo in particular - it appears to have been taken on the night of Spencer's death . . . and he wasn't alone. She thinks it's Adam Baye standing just outside the camera's range, and when Adam goes missing, it soon becomes clear that something deep and sinister has infected their community. Uncovering the secrets and lies at the heart of Spencer's death may be the only thing that can help Betsy move on - and perhaps save Adam's life."

A valid criticism of the book at Amazon:

"I am sorry for the three star rating because Coben is such a wonderful storyteller and I'm wondering if it's an inability on my part to comprehend someone who writes a story by introducing a new family or person in the first five chapters and expects me to remember what happened in chapter one and then figure out where the main plot is going. Eventually he pulls it all together and if I could have kept all the nuances straight in my mind I would have enjoyed the story more. For Coben lovers it will make no difference as I say, it could just be me."

Sometimes Harlan Coben hits the mark but this one is a miss.

THE WEIGHT OF THIS WORLD by David Joy

 Finished Sa 4/16/22

I ordered this novel from Amazon after watching 'TOMATO RED' by Daniel Woodrell. I wanted to order another book by Woodrell, but the prices were too high. I noticed that David Joy was a similar author, so I gave him a shot.

Thad and Aiden are as close as brothers. They live deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains about halfway between Ashville, North Carolina and Knoxville, Tennessee in a place called Little Canada. 

Thad is deeply traumatized after a tour of Afghanistan. Aiden has stayed in the mountains and now lives in a relationship with Thad's mother, April.

No one has steady employment and most of the people get by by making and selling meth.

A local dealer blows his head off accidently. He thought the gun was unloaded and Aiden and Thad take his stash and money. Mayhem rains down.

This was not as compelling as it could have been, but I will definitely keep this author in mind in the future.

From Publishers Weekly:

"Appalachia provides the evocative setting for this tale of a brutal world filled with violence and drugs from Edgar finalist Joy (Where All Light Tends to Go). After a tour in Afghanistan as a soldier, Thad Broom returns to North Carolina more damaged than when he left, unable to forgive or forget what he did there. With nowhere else to go, Thad settles in his dilapidated trailer down the mountain from his mother, April Trantham, who, he knows, has never loved him and is pursued by her own demons. Thad reestablishes an aimless life with his best friend, Aiden McCall, who at age 12 saw his father shoot his mother dead. The two friends suddenly have a windfall of drugs and cash after witnessing the accidental death of their drug dealer. But neither Todd nor Aiden is capable of climbing out of his self-imposed rural prison. Lyrical prose, realistic dialogue, and a story that illuminates the humanity of each character make this a standout."

An interesting review of the book: 

https://carolesrandomlife.com/2021/08/09/review-the-weight-of-this-world/

REVOLUTIONARY ROAD by Richard Yates

 Finished We 4/13/22 

After the yearly meeting with Dax. I streamed the movie on Pluto TV a couple of days after I finished the novel. Great book and a terrific adaptation; with Leonardo DiCaprio, Michael Shannon, Kathy Bates, and Kate Winslet.

It deals with a couple who seem to be disillusioned by the choices offered to adults just after WWII. Not everyone wants to head to the suburbs and start families. The Wheelers are looking for a little more.

Frank and April got involved in a local community theater production, but the play is a bust. This 'failure' begins to reveal cracks in their marriage and April decides that they should move to France and join the bohemians. 

Frank decides to quit the job he hates. His father worked for the same company.

Then April becomes pregnant and their plans of Europe (and their marriage) crumbles.

Subplot: Mrs. Givens, their realtor, her husband and their son John. He is on leave from a mental institution and is the only one who seems to support their decision to split to the continent. 

April gives herself a self-induced abortion and dies. Frank moves away. 

A link to the book at Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Road

I should read more novels by Richard Yates.  

HALF ASLEEP IN FROG PAJAMAS by Tom Robbins

Finished We 4/6/22

This is one of my ancient trade paperbacks that I bought at the library book sale on Sa 6/9/18, but I had never read.

Very funny and the writing was clever and there was a phrase or passage on nearly every page of the book that was notable. 

Gwen Mati is an American/Philippine who is 'badly' together with a rich guy, but sexually attracted to Larry Diamond. They both work in the investment game, but Larry is a fringe character and the market has just tanked. 

The boyfriend owns a monkey and he has escaped and can only be seduced with banana popsicles. 

The action takes place over an Easter weekend in the Seattle area. 

 From a reviewer at Goodreads:

"It opens with the beginning of a disastrous three-day weekend for one Gwendolyn Mati, a lovingly unlikable stockbroker whose ambitions are sky high and whose perceptions seem hopelessly shallow. It is the night before Good Friday and there has been a disastrous plunge in the stock market that has the whole economy screaming disaster, and Gwen finds herself facing termination on Monday morning thanks to some shady ethics she exercised in her client’s portfolios that have been brought to light by the crash. Her once-promising boyfriend, Belford, is annoying her to no end after developing an unhealthy dose of Christian guilt that is compelling him to leave his promising real estate career for (gasp!) social work. Gwen desperately needs to find a way to keep her job before Monday morning, but she can’t seem to get a seemingly sleazy former stockbroker named Larry Diamond off her mind. And things only get worse the following day, when Belford’s born-again pet monkey escapes and Gwen’s best friend, a 300 pound psychic named Q-Jo, vanishes. All this happens in the first hundred pages of “Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas,” and the Robbins roller coaster has only just begun. There’s still a curious cancer treatment, a bunch of overly rich and rowdy teenagers, celestial interference, a sex offender, disappearing frogs, a transfixing Van Gogh sketch, aliens, and more to come.

“Half Asleep” is at its riotous best in its first half, when Robbins gives free reign to his limitless imagination, and the result is a philosophical-comedy mind-warp that could give Vonnegut’s masterful “Breakfast of Champions” a run for its money … until the second half of the novel devolves into a talky jumble of rambling philosophical dialogue that does more to annoy the reader than to enlighten him. I like what Robbins is saying underneath it all (that we need to chill out, think about how we define our lives, and focus on what really matters instead of allowing money and ambition steer us off course), but he weakens his argument by muddling it with random references to alien mushroom spores, enemas, et al. His specious asides confound more than anything else, and make you long for the carefree opening salvo that had said so much more without trying nearly as hard. The ending is also truly disappointing because it is all too sudden and leaves you with too many questions."

I skimmed the last fifty pages because I just wanted to get to the end. I have other books by the author and I would be willing to give them a try. I remember I even had the soundtrack to 'EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES' (John Cale) on cassette tape.  

THE BURGLAR WHO LIKED TO QUOTE KIPLING by Lawrence Block

 Refinished Th 3/31/22

This is one of my old paperbacks that I finished over a three day weekend; Su 4/7/02

From the book's page at Goodreads.com:

"Bernie Rhodenbarr has gone legit – almost – as the new owner of a used bookstore in New York's Greenwich Village. Of course, dusty old tomes don't always turn a profit, so to make ends meet, Bernie's forced, on occasion, to indulge in his previous occupation: burglary. Besides which, he likes it.

Now a collector is offering Bernie an opportunity to combine his twin passions by stealing a very rare and very bad book-length poem from a rich man's library.

The heist goes off without a hitch. The delivery of the ill-gotten volume, however, is a different story. Drugged by the client's female go-between, Bernie wakes up in her apartment to find the book gone, the lady dead, a smoking gun in his hand, and the cops at the door. And suddenly he's got to extricate himself from a rather sticky real-life murder mystery and find a killer – before he's booked for Murder One."

Premise:

'The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow' is a book length poem by Rudyard Kipling. According to the novel (I don't know if this is true) Kipling was an anti-Semite and this poem revealed his sentiments. Supposedly there was only one copy left as the entire printing was destroyed. One of the copies is autographed by Adolf Hitler and he possibly used this verse to firm up his thinking before he wrote Mein Kamp. H. Rider Haggard was the original owner of this remaining copy.

A man approaches Bernie Rhodenbarr is arrange a sale of this very valuable volume. However, the scam is that there are numerous 'last' copies. Since the deals are always secret, no one is aware that there are many 'one of a kinds'.  

I would read anything by Lawrence Block, but I prefer the Matthew Scudder series. Bernie Rhodenbarr is just a good as Donald Westlake's character John Dortmunder.

GEORGIANA by Amanda Foreman

 Finished Mo 3/28/22

I ordered the hardback book from Amazon after watching 'THE DUCHESS' with Keira Knightley, Ralph Fiennes, Dominic Cooper, and Charlotte Rampling. Won 1 Oscar; 8 wins & 21 nominations.

I loved the film and felt it really captured the lives of the nobility during the British Regency Period.  

Georgiana was the 5th Duchess of Devonshire

Lady Elizabeth Foster (Bess) became a very close friend of Georgiana and possibly a lover to both the Duke and Duchess. This was clearly a ménage a trois by any standard. 

'The Ton' (le bon ton)- members of the upper class who were obsessed with fashion. Georgiana was a true icon of fashion for the age.

An ardent supporter of the Whig party

Georgiana was a profligate gambler and lost and gained several fortunes. She was constantly after the Duke to give her money, but she was always afraid to tell him exactly how much that she owed. 

Georgiana popularized various styles of dress including the huge wigs for women. Some creations were three feet high and sometimes topped with figurines. Also, tall feathers that extended far above the wig.

Georgiana belonged to the Spencer family, one of the richest and oldest in Britain. Lady Di is a distant relative. The Cavendish family was the Duke's relatives and they were one of the richest families in all of Britain. 

The House of Lords was filled with the richest men and The House of Commons was made up of the 'next richest' men in the country. 

Although Georgiana and her compatriots wanted 'Freedom' it wasn't exactly equality, just more representation in government and less by the aristocracy. 

I really liked the book and it was chockfull of tidbits and information about the people and the life of the '1 percenters' of the 18th century.  

Charlotte Williams was an illegitimate daughter of the duke and raised by Georgiana as her own. 

Over 1,000 personal letters written by the Duchess of Devonshire are still in existence and many excerpts are included in the book. 

A DANCE AT THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE by Lawrence Block

 Finished Mo 3/21/22

This is one of my ancient paperbacks that I bought at the library bike sale on Sa 1/12/02, but I don't think that I ever read it. No notation on the flyleaf.

This was a great novel and starred Matthew Scudder and I just saw a film with Liam Neeson in the lead role.

TWO CASES:

1) A very rich couple is attacked when they walk in on a neighbor's robbery. The wife is raped and murdered and the man is assaulted. The brother of the wife retains Scudder because he thinks that the man killed his wife and used the incident as a coverup. 

2) A man rents 'The Dirty Dozen' video tape and finds a snuff film hidden in the middle of the movie. A rich man and his wife are having sex with strangers and then killing them

The Tie-in:

The man with the murdered wife is involved with the couple that is snuffing strangers.

From the review at Kirkus:

"A wrenching and lurid Matt Scudder outing that pits the unlicensed p.i. against childkilling slime and climaxes in vigilante violence. Perhaps the plot externals are so fierce here because Scudder's internal demons have mellowed: He seems to have won his battle with the bottle, and his loneliness has been banished by love for call-girl Elaine and by friendship with Irish gangster Mick Ballou. The only enemy left is the evil of others—which is waged war upon in two related cases here. In the first, Scudder is hired by a dying man (AIDS) to determine whether, as both he and the cops suspect, the robbery/rape/murder of the man's sister was really a setup by her greedy husband, cable-TV magnate Richard Thurman, to cash in on her life insurance. In the second, Scudder is asked by an A.A. colleague to watch a rented video of The Dirty Dozen; hidden on the tape is a snuff film in which a costumed man and woman torture, then kill, a teenage boy. In one of several coincidences that gear the plot (and which Block doesn't try to hide), Scudder, trailing Thurman, recognizes the man from the film—Bruno Stettner, who, with seductive wife Olga, had mesmerized Thurman into joining their sadistic sex games and killing Mrs. Thurman for profit. This Scudder learns by winning Thurman's confidence during several chats (which, added to his long talks with Ballou, Elaine, and a cop-pal, give the narrative a lazy, even slack, feel); but although Thurman's confession solves that case—and leads to his murder by the Stettners—it takes Scudder and Ballou's vengeance by cleaver and gun, in a grand guignol finale, to close out the second. Written with great heart and care, but even less of a mystery and more of a melodrama than A Ticket to the Boneyard (1990), and smacking a bit too much of Andrew Vachss (the child-abuse vigilantism), as if Scudder/Block were treading water, albeit it dark and deep."