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420. Midnight Sun

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:  Jo Nesbø

Genre:   Fiction, Mystery, Crime, Thriller

273 pages, published February 16, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Midnight Sun tells the story of Jon, a hitman for Oslo’s biggest crime lord The Fisherman, who is on the run after he betrays his boss.  Jon flees to a small, isolated town in the mountains of Norway that is so far north the sun never sets.  While seeking sanctuary from a local religious sect, Jon falls in love with Lea, a bereaved mother and her young son, Knut.

However, the Fisherman’s men are closing in.

Quotes 

“I shut my eyes and concentrated on the sun, and on feeling it warm my skin. On pleasure. Hedon. The Greek god. Or idol, as he should probably be called seeing as I was on hallowed ground. It’s pretty arrogant, calling all other gods, apart from the one you’ve come up with, idols. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Every dictator’s command to his subjects, of course. The funny thing was that Christians couldn’t see it themselves. They didn’t see the mechanism, the regenerative, self-fulfilling, self-aggrandising aspect which meant that a superstition like this could survive for two thousand years, and in which the key–salvation–was restricted to those who were fortunate enough to have been born in a space of time which was a merest blink of the eye in human history, and who also happened to live on the only little bit of the planet that ever got to hear the commandment and were able to formulate an opinion about the concise sales pitch (“Paradise?”).”

 

“You couldn’t see anything, you were just getting on with your life, and then one day you could just physically feel that you’d got caught in the gravitational field, and then you were lost, you got sucked into a black hole of hopelessness and infinite despair. And in there everything was the mirror image of the way it was outside. You’d keep asking yourself if there was any reason to have any hope, if there was any good reason not to despair. It was a hole in which you just had to let time run its course, put on a record by another depressed soul, the angry man of jazz, Charles Mingus, and hope you emerged on the other side, like some fucking Alice popping out of her rabbit hole. But according to Finkelstein and the others, that might be exactly what it was like, that there was a sort of mirror-image wonderland on the other side of the black hole. I don’t know, but it strikes me that it’s as good and reliable a religion as any other.”

 

“I felt I was about to say something, that the words were on their way, I just wasn’t quite sure which ones they were going to be. And when they arrived it was as if they had arranged themselves, that I wasn’t in charge of them, yet they were still born of the clearest logic.”

 

“He rubbed his chin. “Then you have to believe that living as a Christian is in itself good. That renunciation, not succumbing to sin, has a value for human beings even in this earthly life. On a similar theme, I’ve read that sportsmen find the pain and effort of training meaningful in itself, even if they never win anything. If heaven didn’t actually exist, then at least we have a good, secure life as Christians, where we work, live happily, accept the possibilities God and nature give us, and look after each other. Do you know what my father—also a preacher—used to say about Læstadianism? That if you only counted the people the movement had saved from alcoholism and broken homes, that alone would justify what we do, even if we were preaching a lie.” He paused for a minute. “But it’s not always like that. Sometimes it costs more than it should to live according to Scripture. The way it did for Lea…The way I, in my delusion, forced Lea to live.” There was a faint tremor in his voice. “It took me many years to realise it, but no one should be forced by their father to live in a marriage like that, with a man they hate, a man who had taken them by force.” He raised his head and looked at the crucifix above us. “Yes, I remain convinced that it was right according to Scripture, but sometimes salvation can have too high a price.”

 

“He designed churches. Because he was good at it, he said, not because he believed in the existence of any gods. It was a way of making a living. But he said he wished he believed in the God they paid him to build churches for. That might have made the job feel more meaningful.”

 

My Take

I had previously read The Snowman by Jo Nesbø and really enjoyed it.  So I thought I would give Midnight Sun a read.  Okay, but not nearly as good.  I recommend skipping it.

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407. Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Lisa Goldberg

Author:   Ronan Farrow

Genre:   Nonfiction, Crime, Politics

448 pages, published October 15, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Catch and Kill is the story behind Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Ronan Farrow’s groundbreaking story in which he helped to expose the powerful interests, including his own employer NBC News, who conspired to protect serial predator Harvey Weinstein and how that scandal ignited the “Me Too” feminist movement.

Quotes 

“In the end, the courage of women can’t be stamped out. And stories – the big ones, the true ones – can be caught but never killed.”

 

“You know, the press is as much part of our democracy as Congress or the executive branch or the judicial branch. It has to keep things in check. And when the powerful control the press, or make the press useless, if the people can’t trust the press, the people lose. And the powerful can do what they want.”

 

“I think that it doesn’t matter if you’re a well-known actress, it doesn’t matter if you’re twenty or if you’re forty, it doesn’t matter if you report or if you don’t, because we are not believed. We are more than not believed—we are berated and criticized and blamed.”

 

“Look at what’s happening! No one on these calls wants to own any of this, because it’s so obviously bad! It’s like a reverse Murder on the Orient Express. Everyone wants it dead, nobody wants to stab it!”

 

“I called Maddow, who listened, and said no one tells her how to run her show. And so it came to pass that, all through the two years after the Weinstein story, I appeared on her show, and never again on any other NBC or MSNBC program.”

 

“Weinstein laughed. “You couldn’t save someone you love, and now you think you can save everyone.” He really said this. You’d think he was pointing a detonator at Aquaman.”

 

“Ultimately, the reason Harvey Weinstein followed the route he did is because he was allowed to, and that’s our fault. As a culture that’s our fault.”

 

“Bourdain said Weinstein’s predation was sickening, that “everyone” had known about it for too long. “I am not a religious man,” he wrote. “But I pray you have the strength to run this story.”

 

“All the women before feel I am their fault,” she said. “And if there were women after me, I feel that is my fault.”

 

“The writer and actor Lena Dunham disclosed how, during the 2016 campaign, she’d told Clinton’s staff that the campaign’s reliance on Weinstein as a fund-raiser and event organizer was a liability. “I just want to let you know that Harvey’s a rapist and this is going to come out at some point,” she recalled telling a communications staffer, one of several she said she warned.”

 

“She had graduated from the best Ivy League institutions, in the sequence required to achieve maximum prestige.”

 

My Take

I had loosely followed the Harvey Weinstein story while it was all over the news and therefore had an interest in reading Catch and Kill.  Ronan Farrow narrates a compelling story of just how hard and how many obstacles had to be overcome before dam burst and Harvey Weinstein got his due.  It was especially troubling to see how corrupt NBC News was in covering up for Weinstein and Today show host Matt Lauer.  Hopefully, the world we be spared from future Harvey Weinsteins.

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404. An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Sue Deans

Author:  Alex Kotlowitz

Genre:   Nonfiction, Crime, Sociology

304 pages, published March 5, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Alex Kotlowitz, the bestselling author of There Are No Children Here, embeds himself in Chicago’s most turbulent neighborhoods during one summer to give a report from the inside.  The violence is staggering.  Over the past twenty years in Chicago, 14,033 people have been killed and another roughly 60,000 wounded by gunfire.  An American Summer paints a bleak portrait of despair and violence in America.

Quotes 

“. . .you can’t talk about death without celebrating life. How amid the devastation, many still manage to stay erect in a world that’s slumping around them. How despite the bloodshed, some manage, heroically, not only to push on but also to push back. How in death there is love.”

 

“There are so many . . . who carry the violence, who keep moving forward enshrouded in its aftermath. Yet there doesn’t seem to be any sense of urgency, especially among the rest of us.”

 

“In a nation that likes to see itself as forgiving, we are mulishly unforgiving of those who have committed a felony…”

 

“Do you directly target the violence because it so discourages any kind of economic development? Or do you bring in jobs and rehab homes, knowing that with a sense of opportunity the violence will diminish?”

 

“The only thing you can do is love, because it is the only thing that leaves light inside you, instead of the total, obliterating darkness.”

 

“I’m going to share something I learned since I been here and that is us as people when we have difficulty on our journey of life we tend to focus on what we need at the moment that we forget what we already have…”

 

“People have a capacity to keep going even when their world has been shattered. We all long for connection, for affirmation that our lives matter.”

 

“You grow up in a community with abandoned homes, a jobless rate of over 25 percent, underfunded schools, and you stand outside your home, look at the city’s gleaming downtown skyline, at its prosperity, and you know your place in the world.”

 

“The shooting doesn’t end. Nor does the grinding poverty. Or the deeply rooted segregation. Or the easy availability of guns. Or the shuttered schools and boarded-up homes. Or the tensions between police and residents. And yet each shooting is unlike the last, every exposed and bruised life exposed and bruised in its own way.”

 

My Take

Man, this was a depressing book.  While Alex Kotlowitz does a good job of vividly describing the heartbreaking violence and hopelessness in the gang infested parts of Chicago, he offers no solutions.  We discussed this book at my Rotary book club and also were disheartened.  There are no easy answers.

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400. Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Valerie Flores

Author:   Patrick Radden Keefe

Genre:    Nonfiction, Crime, History, Foreign

pages, published

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In December 1972, Jean McConville, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of ten, was dragged from her Belfast home by masked intruders.  Her children never saw her again.  In her early 20’s, I.R.A. terrorist Dolours Price planted bombs in London, targeting informers for execution.   Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein which was the I.R.A.’s political arm, negotiated the peace that led to the Good Friday accords by denying his I.R.A. past.   The stories of McConville, Price and Adams are just part of the horrific events in the brutal conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland known as The Troubles.  In Say Nothing, Patrick Keefe relates these and other stories from this black period in Irish history.

Quotes 

“if you could just get people to talk, he believed, the most bitter antagonists could discover common ground.”

 

“The body is a fantastic machine,’ Hughes told Mackers in one of his Boston College interviews, recounting the grueling sequence of a hunger strike. ‘It’ll eat off all the fat tissue first, then it starts eating away at the muscle, to keep your brain alive.’ Long after Hughes and Price called an end to their strikes and attempted to reintegrate into society, the nursed old grudges and endlessly replayed their worst wartime abominations. In a sense, they never stopped devouring themselves.”

 

“There is a concept in psychology called ‘moral injury,’ notion, distinct from the idea of trauma, that relates to the ways in which ex-soldiers make sense of the socially transgressive things they have done during wartime. Price felt a sharp sense of moral injury: she believed that she had been robbed of any ethical justification for her own conduct.”

 

“Outrage is conditioned not by the nature of the atrocity but by the affiliation of the victim and the perpetrator. Should the state be accorded more leniency because, legally speaking, it has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force? Or, conversely, should we hold soldiers and cops to a higher standard than paramilitaries?”

 

“the violence intensified, grandiose funerals became routine, with rousing graveside orations and caskets draped in tricolor flags. People took to joking that there was no social life in Belfast anymore, apart from wakes.”

 

“Dating back to the Iliad, ancient Egypt and beyond, burial rites have formed a critical function in most human societies. Whether we cremate a loved one or inter her bones, humans possess a deep-set instinct to mark death in some deliberate, ceremonial fashion. Perhaps the cruelest feature of forced disappearance as an instrument of war is that it denies the bereaved any such closure, relegating them to a permanent limbo of uncertainty.”

 

“But even if your parents were ardent supporters of the IRA, there were reasons not to tell them that you had joined. If the police or the army broke down the door to interrogate them, the less they knew, the better.”

 

“We beat them with stones at first, and they had guns. Our people had to go and get guns. Wouldn’t they have been right stupid people to stand there? Our people got shotguns at first and then got better weapons. And then the British, who were supposed to protect us, came in and raided our homes. What way could you fight? So you went down and you blew them up.”

 

My Take

Say Nothing is a compelling book which takes an in depth look inside The Troubles in Northern Ireland.  Prior to reading it, I only vaguely knew about this period in Irish History.  I came away with a much better understanding of the who, what, where and why of that conflict and the importance of forgiveness before there can be peace.

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398. The Secret Place

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Tana French

Genre:    Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Crime, Suspense, Foreign

480 pages, published August 28, 2014

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

A year after the discovery of a teenaged boy’s murder at a girlsʼ boarding school, Detective Stephen Moran is brought in with Detective Antoinette Conway to reopen the case.   Moran had been waiting for his chance to join Dublin’s Murder Squad when sixteen-year-old Holly Mackey arrives in his office with a photo of the boy with the caption: “I KNOW WHO KILLED HIM.”  Under the watchful eye of Holly’s father, fellow detective Frank Mackey. Moran and Conway investigate the murder which leads them to Holly’s close-knit group of friends, a rival clique, and to the snarl of relationships that bound all of them to the murdered boy.

Quotes 

“You forget what it was like. You’d swear on your life you never will, but year by year it falls away. How your temperature ran off the mercury, your heart galloped flat-out and never needed to rest, everything was pitched on the edge of shattering glass. How wanting something was like dying of thirst.  How your skin was too fine to keep out any of the million things flooding by; every color boiled bright enough to scald you, any second of any day could send you soaring or rip you to bloody shreds.”

 

“I love beautiful; always have. I never saw why I should hate what I wish I had. Love it harder. Work your way closer. Clasp your hands around it tighter. Till you find a way to make it yours.”

 

“She hears all the voices from when she was little, soothing, strengthening: Don’t be scared, not of monsters, not of witches, not of big dogs. And now, snapping loud from every direction: Be scared, you have to be scared, ordering like this is your one absolute duty. Be scared you’re fat, be scared your boobs are too big and be scared they’re too small. Be scared to walk on your own, specially anywhere quiet enough that you can hear yourself think. Be scared of wearing the wrong stuff, saying the wrong thing, having a stupid laugh, being uncool. Be scared of guys not fancying you; be scared of guys, they’re animals, rabid, can’t stop themselves. Be scared of girls, they’re all vicious, they’ll cut you down before you can cut them. Be scared of strangers. Be scared you won’t do well enough in your exams, be scared of getting in trouble. Be scared terrified petrified that everything you are is every kind of wrong. Good girl.”

 

“Trust your instincts, Dad always says. If something feels dodgy to you, if someone feels dodgy, you go with dodgy. Don’t give the benefit of the doubt because you want to be a nice person, don’t wait and see in case you look stupid. Safe comes first. Second could be too late.”

 

“She wants to leap up and do a handstand, or get someone to race her fast and far to wreck them both: anything that will turn her body back into something that’s about what it can do, not all about how it looks.”

 

“They always act like they’re having an amazing time, they’re louder and high-pitched, shoving each other and screaming with laughter at nothing. But Becca knows what they’re like when they’re happy, and that’s not it. Their faces on the way home afterwards look older and strained, smeared with the scraps of leftover expressions that were pressed on too hard and won’t lift away.”

 

My Take

The Secret Place is the sixth book was the fifth book that I have read by Tana French (and the fifth in her Dublin Murder Squad series).  While I loved her other books (The Witch Elm, In the Woods, The Likeness and Faithful Place, and Broken Harbor) I liked, but did not love, The Secret Place.  I found the characters and the central mystery a bit less interesting than previous French reads.  It is still a good book, just not quite up the standard French sets in many of her other books.

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396. Broken Harbor

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Tana French

Genre:    Mystery, Thriller, Crime, Foreign

450 pages, published April 30, 2013

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

In one of the half-abandoned luxury developments that populate Ireland, Patrick Spain and his two young children have been murdered.  Mick “Scorcherˮ Kennedy of the Dublin Murder Squad investigates the case and finds that all is not as it seems.

Quotes 

“Over time, the ghosts of things that happened start to turn distant; once they’ve cut you a couple of million times, their edges blunt on your scar tissue, they wear thin. The ones that slice like razors forever are the ghosts of things that never got the chance to happen.”

 

“Only teenagers think boring is bad. Adults, grown men and women who’ve been around the block a few times, know that boring is a gift straight from God. Life has more than enough excitement up its sleeve, ready to hit you with as soon as you’re not looking, without you adding to the drama.”

 

“People you knew when you were teenagers, the ones who saw your stupidest haircut and the most embarrassing things you’ve done in your life, and they still cared about you after all that: they’re not replaceable, you know?”

 

“But this is what I know about people getting ready to walk of the edge of their own lives: they want someone to know how they got there. Maybe they want to know that when they dissolve into earth and water, that last fragment will be saved, held in some corner of someone’s mind; or maybe all they want is a chance to dump it pulsing and bloody into someone else’s hands, so it won’t weigh them down on the journey. They want to leave their stories behind. No one in all the world knows that better than I do.”

 

“I have always been caught by the pull of the unremarkable, by the easily missed, infinitely nourishing beauty of the mundane.”

 

“If you think you’re a success, you will be a success; if you think you deserve nothing but crap, you’ll get nothing but crap. Your inner reality shapes your outer one, every day of your life.”

 

“One of the reasons I love Murder is that victims are, as a general rule, dead… I don’t make a habit of sharing this, in case people take me fore a sicko or- worse-a wimp, but give me a dead child, any day, over a child sobbing his heart out while you make him tell you what the bad man did next. Dead victims don’t show up outside HQ to beg for answers, you never have to nudge them into reliving every hideous moment, and you never have to worry, and you never have to worry about what it’ll do to their lives if you fuck up. They stay put in the morgue, light-years beyond anything I can do right or wrong, and leave me free to focus on the people who sent them there.”

 

My Take

Broken Harbor was the fifth book that I have read by Tana French (and the fourth in her Dublin Murder Squad series) since starting my thousand book quest.  Like The Witch Elm, In the Woods, The Likeness and Faithful Place, Broken Harbor did not disappoint.  French is a gifted storyteller and her mysteries are much more about the human nature involved than whodunit.  A great read.

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392. Faithful Place

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Tana French

Genre:    Mystery, Thriller, Crime, Foreign

416 pages, published July 13, 2010

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

In 1985, 19 year old Frank Mackey was from a dysfunctional family living in a poor part of Dublin in small flat named Faithful Place.  He and his girl, Rosie Daly, were all set to run away to London together, get married, get good jobs, and break away from the despair of their lives in Ireland.  However, on the winter night when they were supposed to leave, Rosie didn’t show.  Frank assumed that she’d given him the brush-off and gone to London on her own.  Frank left Faithful Place and never went home again.  22 years later, Rosie’s suitcase shows up behind a fireplace in a derelict house on Faithful Place.  Frank, now a Detective on Dublin’s Murder Squad is going home again where he must figure out what happened to Rosie and deal with his family demons.

Quotes 

“My father told me once that the most important thing every man should know is what he would die for.”

 

“I’ve always loved strong women, which is lucky for me because once you’re over about twenty-five there is no other kind. Women blow my mind. The stuff that routinely gets done to them would make most men curl up and die, but women turn to steel and keep on coming. Any man who claims he’s not into strong women is fooling himself mindless; he’s into strong women who know how to pout prettily and put on baby voices, and who will end up keeping his balls in her makeup bags.”

 

“Her forehead was a maze of anxious little grooves, from a lifetime of wondering about whether everyone within range was OK.”

 

“I listen to the things people want out of love these days and they blow my mind. I go to the pub with the boys from the squad and listen while they explain, with minute precision, exactly what shape a woman should be, what bits she should shave how, what acts she should perform on which date and what she should always or never do or say or want; I eavesdrop on women in cafes while they reel off lists of which jobs a man is allowed, which cars, which labels, which flowers and restaurants and gemstones get the stamp of approval, and I want to shout, Are you people out of your tiny minds?”

 

“We had no one else to learn this from- none of our parents were shining examples of relationship success- so we learned this from each other: when someone you love needs you to, you can get a hold of your five-alarm temper, get a hold of the shapeless things that scare you senseless, act like an adult instead of the Cro-Magnon teenager you are, you can do a million things you never saw coming.”

 

“You can be a rich scumbag just as easily as a poor scumbag, or you can be a decent human being either way. Money’s got nothing to do with it. It’s nice to have, but it’s not what makes you who you are.”

 

“Privately, I consider religion to be a load of bollocks, but when you have a sobbing five year old wanting to know what happened to her hamster, you develop an instant belief in anything that dissolves some of the heartbreak off her face.”

 

My Take

Having previously read and thoroughly enjoyed The Witch Elm, In the Woods, and The Likeness by the brilliant Irish writer Tana French, I was highly anticipating Faithful Place (the third book in Dublin Murder Squad series).  It did not disappoint.  French brings you into the time, place and motivations of her characters so completely that I felt like I was right there with them.  Additionally, her insight into the human condition adds a depth and richness that keep her books in your psyche long after you are finished reading them.

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389. American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Monica Hesse

Genre:   Nonfiction, Crime, Mystery

255 pages, published July 11, 2017

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Intrigued by a five-month arson spree across the rural coast of Virginia in Accomack County, Washington Post reporter Monica Hesse decided to check out the scene.  She discovered a compelling story of rural life in the age of Trump and the strange twists and turns that human nature can sometimes take.

Quotes 

“This was not the story of Accomack. This was the story of America. In 1910, back in the peak of the Eastern Shore’s wealth, more than 70 percent of Americans lived in rural counties. It was the norm, it was the standard. Now, rural counties contained only 15 percent of the nation’s population.”

 

“By the numbers, Accomack could look like a desolate place to live. The Opportunity Index, a nonprofit measurement of sixteen different indicators of success in every county in America, gives it a forty-three out of one hundred. But numbers can be misleading. To residents, statistics could not account for the deep feeling of belonging that came from being able to find your surname in three hundred-year-old county records. They couldn’t account for how clean the air felt and how orange the sun was setting over the Chesapeake Bay. How do you calculate fish fries in the backyard, kiddie pools in the front yard, and unfettered views of a thousand stars in the night sky? So much of life is intangible, and places don’t feel like they’re disappearing to the people who are living there.”

 

“In November of 2012, the Eastern Shore of Virginia was old. It was long. It was isolated. It was emptying of people but full of abandoned houses. It was dark. It was a uniquely perfect place to light a string of fires.”

 

“Here was a county that had almost burned down. Here was that county moving on. All of these fires could have happened only in Accomack, a place with empty, abandoned buildings, prominently signaling a fall from prosperity. Where else was there so much emptiness, so many places for someone to sneak around undetected? Except that maybe it could have happened in Iowa, heart of the heartland, where rural citizenry has been decreasing for the past century. Maybe in southern Ohio, where emptying factories led to emptying towns. Maybe in eastern Oregon, where rural counties had aged themselves almost out of existence. Maybe it could have happened anywhere.”

 

“Big-name crimes have a way of becoming big name not only because of the crimes themselves but because of the story they tell about the country at the moment. The infamous bank robbers of the 1930s — Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, Frank “Jelly” Nash — were stealing money at a time when hardly anyone had any, when Dust Bowl poverty made such thefts seem, if not justified, then at least understandable. The 1920s jazz killers — women who murdered their husbands and blamed it on the music — did so in an era where the country was grappling with rapidly loosening morals and a newly liberated female populace, which had just gotten the vote.

And now here were arsons, happening in the type of rural environment that had been figuratively burning down for several decades, whether in the midwestern Rust Belt or the southern Bible Belt, or the hills of Appalachia.”

 

“It is the greatest tragedy and the greatest beauty of a relationship: that at some level, the person you are closest to will always be a total friggin’ mystery.”

 

“The trouble with being the type of person who would do anything for love was that you would do anything for love.”

 

“As economies change, as landscapes change, nostalgia is the only good America will never stop producing. We gorge on it ourselves and pass it down to generations.”

 

“But maybe rural America isn’t dying so much as it’s Shucker-ing: adjusting, adapting, becoming something new, getting a new outdoor sign and adding jalapeno hush puppies to the menu. I’d like to think that.”

 

My Take

American Fire is a page turner.  The primary reason for this is that Monica Hesse is a very talented writer.  She takes a subject and characters that could be a bit boring and brings them to life.  Even though you know who the arsonist is from the beginning of the book, you keep reading to find out why.  Her insight into the depressed coastal region of Virginia, like many of the rural areas in the U.S., makes for compelling reading and gives the reader a clearer picture of the disparities in our country and the impact that is having.

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378. Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Suann MacIsaac

Author:   Gary Krist

Genre:   Nonfiction, History, Crime

432 pages, published October 28, 2014

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Hoopla

Summary

Empire of Sin tells the story of New Orleans in the early 20th century, immersing the reader in a time when commercialized vice, jazz culture, and endemic crime defined the Crescent City.  The book focuses on Tom Anderson who ran New Orleans’ notorious Storyville vice district and fought to keep his empire intact as it was attacked from within and without.  We also learn the stories of flashy prostitutes, moral reformers, jazzmen (including Louis Armstrong), Mafia enforcers, venal politicians, and an extremely violent axe murderer.

Quotes 

“It is no easy matter to go to heaven by way of New Orleans.”

 

“New Orleans, it was often observed, was the first American metropolis to build an opera house, but the last to build a sewage system.”

 

“New Orleans’ rebellious and free-spirited personality is nothing if not resilient. And so the disruptive energies of the place- its vibrancy and eccentricity, its defiance and nonconformity, and yes, its violence and depravity- are likely to live on.”

 

“So much, it would seem, for the music that would eventually be regarded as the first truly American art form.”

 

My Take

I liked, but did not love, Empire of Sin.  There just wasn’t enough of a compelling story or characters to really pull me in.   Which shouldn’t be too big of a problem when New Orleans is your source material.  I read this book in anticipation of my first trip to NOLA.  I loved the Crescent City and wished I would have had a better book to get me ready for the visit.

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377. The Woman in Cabin 10

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Ruth Ware

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Crime, Thriller

357 pages, published April 16, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The Woman in Cabin 10 is a thriller that takes place in the constrained confines of a high end luxury yacht that has set sail on the North Sea.  Lo Blacklock, a journalist who writes for a travel magazine, is on board to cover the maiden voyage.  At first, she enjoys the glamour and opulence.  However, when the weather starts to turn, Lo is awakened in the middle of the night and views a woman being thrown overboard.  When she rings the alarm bell, no one believes her since no passengers are missing.  Things become more desperate for Lo as she begins to doubt her own sanity and struggles to figure out what happened.

Quotes 

“My friend Erin says we all have demons inside us, voices that whisper we’re no good, that if we don’t make this promotion or ace that exam we’ll reveal to the world exactly what kind of worthless sacks of skin and sinew we really are Maybe that’s true. Maybe mine just have louder voices.”

 

“Maybe that was closer to the truth–we weren’t captor and captive, but two animals in different compartments of the same cage. Hers was just slightly larger.”

 

“I love ports. I love the smell of tar and sea air, and the scream of the gulls. Maybe it’s years of taking the ferry to France for summer holidays, but a harbor gives me a feeling of freedom in a way that an airport never does. Airports say work and security checks and delays. Ports say… I don’t know. Something completely different. Escape, maybe.”

 

“There’s a reason why we keep thoughts inside our heads for the most part—they’re not safe to be let out in public.”

 

“Of course the one type of sashimi you really must try is fugu,” Alexander said expansively, smoothing his napkin across his straining cummerbund. “It’s simply the most exquisite taste.” “Fugu?” I said, trying to insert myself into the conversation. “Isn’t that the horribly poisonous one?” “Absolutely, and that’s what makes the experience. I’ve never been a drug taker—I know my own weaknesses, and I am very aware of being one of life’s lotus-eaters, so I’ve never trusted myself to dabble in that sort of thing—but I can only assume that the high one experiences after eating fugu triggers a similar neuron response. The diner has diced with death, and won.”

 

“she had made her way up the corporate ladder by treading on the backs of more young women than you could count, and then, once she was through the glass ceiling, pulling the ladder up behind her. I remembered Rowan once saying, Tina is one of those women who thinks every bit of estrogen in the boardroom is a threat to her own existence.”

 

My Take

I gave The Woman in Cabin 10 four stars because it has the quintessential quality of a good thriller:  I couldn’t put it down.  In a similar fashion to Something in the Water (a page turner that I also really enjoyed) Ware does a great job of keeping the tension high, the red herrings plentiful and the twists coming at just the right moment.  Highly recommended vacation read.

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