The Dying Light (2026) - Ann Cleeves

 

The Dying Light is the fourth novel in the Two Rivers series featuring Detective Inspector Matthew Venn which began in 2019 with The Long Call. Series author Ann Cleeves is a veteran series writer who is best known for her eleven-book Vera Stanhope series and her nine-book Shetland series, but she is also the author of two earlier series. 

Readers of Ann Cleeves fiction know, first and foremost, to expect an atmospheric British setting, most usually some remote rural or coastal spot where the investigation is at least somewhat dependent on what the landscape is willing to surrender to police. Faithful readers know, too, that investigations will be further complicated by relatively small, tight-knit communities filled with long-held grudges, secret affairs, lots of gossip, and an unshakable sense that everyone has something to hide. 

The Dying Light offers plenty of all of that.

The story begins when Lottie, a seventeen-year-old girl, is found dead in the swimming pool of politician Paul Armstrong’s North Devon holiday home. Further complicating what is already expected to be a delicate investigation, Armstrong’s daughter Hannah - Lottie’s best friend - is nowhere to be found. Only the night before, the girls had managed to irritate the locals at a small music festival to such a degree that Venn and his team (DS Jen Rafferty and DC Ross May) have no shortage of suspects and motives to sift through. 

A big part of the appeal of series fiction is in watching the repeating characters change and grow over time, and Cleeves, a master of this, takes the time here to further evolve each of her main characters. Series readers will not be surprised to learn that Venn, as a result of his strict, cult-like religious upbringing, is still struggling with self-doubt and anxiety - even to the degree that Jen is at times the more effective investigator of the pair.Venn, however, is becoming more and more self-aware with each book, and his efforts to become more self-confident allow him to give Jonathan, his husband, the emotional support Jonathan needs in his struggle to resolve issues from his own past. Jen, not a native of North Devon, is feeling less and less the team outsider now, and she and young Ross are finally starting to put their rivalry aside long enough to trust each other.

The Dying Light is a fine addition to the formidable Ann Cleeves collection of well written murder mysteries. If you’re already into her Vera or Shetland books, this series is for you.

What I’m Reading This Week (6/20/26)

 The four books I finished up in the last couple of weeks were kind of hit and miss:

• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy - this one proved to be more difficult, and way less impressive, than I anticipated, as you can tell by the review I’ve already posted,
• Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne - a re-read that I think was even more fun than the first time I read this classic,
• Animal Farm by George Orwell - an almost perfect reminder of the dangers of socialism and communism that should be required reading in every high school and university in the free world, and
• The City of Mist by Carlos Ruiz Zafón - the author’s last work, a collection of eleven short stories, that I have to admit disappointed me a little.

A couple of the usual suspects are still with me, including The Camp of Saints, an eerily prophetic book about the impact of sudden mass migration on the West. And of course, I’m still reading the Twain biography, which seems to be turning into a year-long project now. The other two holdovers are John D. MacDonald’s A Purple Place for Dying and Ann Cleeves’s The Dying Light, two very different murder mysteries. I’m nearly finished with both, but as usual, I still haven’t figured out who the bad guy is in either of them.

And these are the four new ones I’ve started reading:

From Here to Eternity, the 1951 debut novel by James Jones that won the National Book Award and became a huge bestseller. It follows a U.S. Army infantry company stationed in Hawaii just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. I’ve neither read the novel, nor watched the big movie version of it, so I’m very curious about this one. I do know that it caused a bit of a sensation because it threw around “f-bombs” on a scale highly unusual for the time.

The Cyclist is the second book in Tim Sullivan’s D.S. Cross series. Cross is a brilliant detective on the autism spectrum whose style is as off-putting to his co-workers as it is to those he meets during his investigations. The titles of each of the books in the series reference the victims, as far as I can tell. I’ve only just started reading The Cyclist, but I find George Cross to be as fascinating a lead character as I did in the first book in the series.

I read George Meegan’s The Longest Walk for the first time in the late eighties, and that experience was one of the main drivers in my lifelong fascination with books about long walks or long road trips. Meegan began his long walk on the southernmost tip of South America on January 26, 1977 and almost seven years later, on September 18, 1983 he finished it on the northernmost beaches of Alaska. I’m just over 60 pages into this re-reading of The Longest Walk, and I’m already in awe of what Englishman Meegan and his Japanese wife endured.

Eifelheim is the one that has surprised me the most so far of this whole batch of books. It’s a clever mash up of historical fiction and first contact science fiction that seems to have been really well researched. In this instance, first contact is made in the year 1348 and the local German priest is the first human to make contact with the insect-like aliens who have crash-landed in the forest surrounding his village. Lots of scientific theory, medieval history, and theology in this one.

We’re going to be a little busier than usual around here next week, so I’m not sure how much time I’ll have for reading, but some of these are going to be hard to resist for long. I hope you all are doing well and enjoying life. Read on. 

Blood Meridian (1985) - Cormac McCarthy - Overrated?

 

Cormac McCarthy is said to be one of the best authors ever produced in America, and Blood Meridian is said to be his finest novel. The man’s prose has been compared to that of  both Faulkner and  Hemingway, as different as those two styles are. The influence of both men on McCarthy is readily evident in Blood Meridian, as is the prose style utilized in the Old Testament and in Melville’s Moby Dick. It’s all there, and that’s what made Blood Meridian such a difficult read for me.

The back cover of this 25th Anniversary Edition  describes the novel this way:

“Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian is an epic novel that traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennessean who stumbles into a nightmarish world in which the market for Indian scalps is thriving."

And that does pretty much sum up this rather plotless novel. 

Once the Kid throws in with the Glanton gang, he rides from massacre to massacre gathering scalps to be sold for the bounty offered by the Mexican governors of Chihuahua and Sonora. At first only hostile Indians are attacked, but when no more hostiles are to be found, the gang wipes out a peaceful village populated by the peaceful Tigua Indian tribe. Even that doesn’t satisfy the bloodlust and greed of the gang, so they turn to wiping out small Mexican villages and mining camps - and passing off the scalps of their victims as having been taken from hostile Indians. Any encounter with the Glanton gang is guaranteed to be a violent one, and no one south of the border is safe from them.

There are a few notable characters in the gang, including its leader John Glanton and the Kid, but the most memorable of them all is a huge, hairless philosopher simply called the Judge. The Judge starts out as Glanton’s right-hand man but soon develops such a powerful influence and hold on Glanton, that it is really the Judge who dictates the gang’s downward spiral. Without his presence, it is likely enough that the gang would never have devolved into the nightmarish death machine that it became. The Judge is all-powerful, and McCarthy by making all characters so secondary to him, emphasizes his dominance. 

It was for stylistic reasons - not for the abundance of extreme violence and cruelty on display - that I found Blood Meridian to be such a difficult book to finish. Cleverly, McCarthy surrounds the sudden flashes of violence and bloodletting with much longer sections of mind-numbing travel and terrain descriptions. This gives the reader a feeling very similar to what the gang experiences between its murderous raids. Much of that prose reads like a cross between Faulkner and the authors of the Old Testament, and as beautiful as it probably is, it is still quite a chore to read a dozen or so straight pages of it before something else finally “happens.”

This one sentence is typical of that kind of writing:

“They crossed before the sun and vanished one by one and reappeared again and they were black in the sun and they rode out of that vanished sea like burnt phantoms with the legs of the animals kicking up the spume that was not real and they were lost in the sun and lost in the lake and they shimmered and and slurred together and separated again and they augmented by planes in lurid avatars and began to coalesce and there began to appear above them in the dawn-broached sky a hellish likeness of their ranks riding huge and inverted and the horses’ legs incredibly elongate trampling down the high thin cirrus and the howling antiwariors pendant form their mounts immense and chimeric and the high wild cries carrying that flat and barren pan like the cries of souls broke through some misweave in the weft of things into the world below.” 

So do I personally think Blood Meridian is one of the best American novels of all time? No, not by a long shot. For such a violent book, it feels very repetitive. Even the violence, which is at first is so shocking, loses its punch after a while, and the story really is just one of a gang riding around committing one atrocity after another. None of the characters, including the Judge and the Kid, are developed well enough to make them seem particularly real, and there is no big payoff at the end of the novel to make me feel that it was all worth the effort of working my way through McCarthy’s almost impenetrable prose.

(From what I understand, Blood Meridian rates high on the list of “novels started but not finished,” so I do get a tiny sense of satisfaction for having finished it on my first attempt - unlike the half-dozen or so tries it took me to get through Moby Dick. So there’s that.)

A Rip Through Time (2022) - Kelley Armstrong

 

Back when I was eleven years old, the 1960 movie version of The Time Machine was my first real exposure to time travel stories. I knew I wanted more, but time travel movies don’t come along every day, so I reluctantly turned to the movie’s source material, the 1895 novel of the same name by H.G. Wells. That’s how a whole new fiction subgenre was introduced to me, and I’ve been a sucker for time travel novels ever since. Over the years, I’ve read some great ones, some mediocre ones, and some pretty bad ones.

Kelley Armstrong’s A Rip Through Time is one of the good ones.

For me, time travel novels come in two general types: thoughtful stories that explore the ethics and dangers of being able to change the future by changing the past vs. the, usually simpler but thrilling, adventures time travelers experience by going backward or forward in time.  Even though Armstrong's time traveler, Mallory Atkinson, is aware that her meddling in the past might change the future to some degree, A Rip Through Time falls more squarely in the second  category.

Mallory, a homicide detective with the Vancouver police department, is in Scotland to visit her dying grandmother for the last time when she crosses paths with a serial killer who tries to strangle her. The last thing she remembers, before waking up in a strangely antiquated room, is fighting for her life. Now she has to figure out why she’s trapped inside the body of a teenage housemaid in 1869 Edinburgh -  and why everyone seems to dislike her so much. And all the while, Mallory is desperately looking for a way back to her own world and time.

A Rip Through Time is a solid murder mystery in which Mallory and the local police work together to identify and stop whoever is strangling young women (Mallory believes that finding the killer is the key to her being able to return to her own time), but the real fun comes from watching her try to adapt to the period in which she’s trapped. Mallory’s police detective experience gives her crime scene insights and skills that 1869 policemen can only dream about, but she has to keep reminding herself that to them she is only a teenage housemaid - and a supposedly reformed thief, at that. On a lighter note, Mallory struggles not to use contemporary words and phrases that have completely different meanings in 1869 Scotland than they have in twenty-first century Canada - even though some in the household appreciate them enough to begin using the new words and phrases themselves.

A Rip Through Time has two sequels, The Poisoner’s Ring and The Music of Time that I hope to explore later. I’ve already read the first chapter of The Poisoner’s Ring and see that it takes up exactly where A Rip Through Time ends, so I decided to take a break from that world before reading on into the series. If you like more lighthearted (despite the numerous murders in this one) time travel fiction, I think you will enjoy A Rip Through Time.

Bookish (2025) - Lucy Mangan

 

Lucy Mangan’s Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives is Mangan's follow-up to 2018’s Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading, which covers the author’s childhood reading influences and experiences. Bookish picks up with Mangan’s teenage reading years and concludes in what the author calls her middle-age ones (she is 52). 

“If we stop reading, if we stop putting ourselves in other people’s shoes, if we stop considering their situations, relationships, reactions, choices and morals, if we stop exercising ourselves imaginatively, if we stop asking ourselves, ‘What if…?’ and ‘What would I …?’, then we cut ourselves off from inward avenues of growth, exploration, adventure."

 Lucy Mangan is a dedicated reader whose relationship with books goes far deeper than all but the most dedicated of readers can imagine, so Bookish is as much a love letter to books, authors, bookstores, libraries, and publishers as it is a memoir. I get the impression that when Mangan is not reading, she’s thinking about reading as she anxiously makes her way through the day’s assigned tasks. 

It is not surprising that Mangan depended heavily upon her reading to prepare and guide her through the stages of adulthood: falling in love and finding a life partner, beginning a career, motherhood, and the ultimate grief that accompanies so much of anyone's lifetime. In addition, the book explores topics such as “formative novels,” genre fiction, “reading the canon,” dystopias, “studying the classics,” guilty pleasures, romance novels, crime fiction, and creating "a library of one’s own.” 

My own favorite chapter of Bookish is its tenth, entitled: “A Library of Ones Own: Curating a Book Collection.” It is great fun to experience Mangan’s joy and “all is right with the world” feeling as she turns a small outbuilding behind the family’s second home into a personal library and hideaway all her own. The amount of physical labor involved in sorting and shelving 10,000 books, much less all the labor that preceded the shelving, was staggering, but I can easily imagine the grin on Mangan’s face as she worked and envisioned what the finished space would become. 

But even the most avowed of book collectors, sooner or later, has to face the fact that enough is enough, and that there will never be enough space to keep every book that comes into their lives. So with a goal of culling at least five percent of the books she moved to her new library, Mangan approaches the purge this way:

“So the great culling of my mid-forties began. It was a long job and it couldn’t be subcontracted out, because the decisions could only be taken by one individual- me, hi! - one individual book at a time…I held each book in my hand and wordlessly communicated with it…If we still had something to say to each other, if we still had a connection, the book stayed. If there was silence, I thanked it for its service, wondered who the killer had turned out to be after all and pitched it into the charity box."

 If the above paragraph is a little bit like an arrow to your heart, Bookish is for you. You will get Lucy Mangan and consider her a kindred spirit, a friend you haven’t met yet. 

Future Boy (2025) - Michael J. Fox & Nelle Fortenberry

 Michael J. Fox was only 23 years old in 1985 when he pulled off one of the craziest Hollywood stunts of all time. For about three months, beginning on January 15, 1985, Fox worked simultaneously on two major projects: completing the third season of Family Ties during the day while shooting his scenes in the first Back to the Future movie at night. He managed this by working five days a week from roughly 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Family Ties before being hustled over to the movie set for several more hours of work. It didn’t hurt that Michael was only 23 years old and fearless.  

In Future Boy, Michael tells us how he managed to pull it off.

Michael J. Fox (the “J” was added to his name because another Michael Fox was already registered with the Screen Actors Guild) caught the acting bug in Canada during junior high school, and by age 15 he had landed a major role in a Canadian sitcom called Leo and Me. By age 18, he had dropped out of school for good and moved south to the U.S. with about $3,000 in his pocket. Michael was not exactly an overnight success although he did manage to pick up guest shots on a few television shows like Lou Grant and Palmerstown U.S.A. 

But still, a few years later Fox was near penniless, had sold his furniture to buy food, and even sometimes used dumpster diving as a way to find free food. He finally caught his big break with Family Ties, but memories of those early days were still fresh enough that Fox was determined to take advantage of every opportunity that presented itself. So, feeling young and invincible, he jumped with both feet into the work schedule that would ultimately turn him into a superstar. 

And he did it.

Future Boy is particular fun for fans of  Back to the Future or Family Ties, but even those who only know Fox because of his more recent pubic struggles with Parkinson’s will respond to the actor’s likable and heartfelt approach to the memoir. Reading Future Boy is akin to sitting across the table from Fox while he tells you stories about those three months - and that he uses an often-humorous, self-deprecating approach to his casual storytelling makes it all the better. In addition to Fox’s stories, the memoir includes some fresh interviews with cast and crew members, including an account of Fox’s remarkable relationship with Eric Stoltz, the actor he replaced in the role of Marty McFly after Stoltz had already completed five or six weeks work in the role. 

Michael J. Fox is an easy guy to pull for, and this glimpse into his behind the scenes life makes for fun reading. Now, though, I wish he would give us a similar look at how he has managed to deal with Parkinson’s for the last thirty-five years. 

Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox (11-19-22)

What I’m Reading This Week (6-8-26)

 During the past two weeks (since I’ve done one of these “what I’m reading” posts), I’ve finished up four very different books:

• The Things We Never Say - Elizabeth Strout’s latest literary novel,
• Future Boy - Michael J. Fox’s memoir about working simultaneously on the third season of Family Ties and the first Back to the Future movie,
• Bookish - Lucy Mangan’s account of her evolution as a reader from childhood to middle age, and
• A Rip Through Time- Kelly Armstrong’s time travel novel about a young female Canadian detective who gets trapped inside the body of an 1850s Scottish woman who almost became the victim of a serial killer. 

I enjoyed each of the four to one degree or another, but I’m still looking for what will be only my third five-star book of 2026. Either I’m grading harder than ever this year or I’ve been unlucky in my choices. Either way, the search goes on.

I’m at various stages of completion in Chernow’s Mark Twain, McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail. The only possible five-star book I see there is Mark Twain, but the jury is still out on that one. I have, in the meantime, started a few others:

John D. MacDonald is an author I loved reading in my late teens and early twenties, but I don’t think I’ve read him since. And it’s been so long ago now, that even if I accidentally re-read something of his, there’s almost no chance that I’ll even notice it. A Purple Place for Dying has already been an eye-opener in the sense that Travis McGee, MacDonald’s fictional P.I., is so blatantly sexist a character. I hadn’t realized just how different the ‘60s were from today in that way. 

The Dying Light, the fourth book in Ann Cleeves’s Detective Matthew Venn series, will be published at the end of September. I’ve read the first three books in the series - and I’m a longtime fan of Ann Cleeves - so I have high hopes for this one. It certainly gets off to a rousing start as the first chapter opens with the discovery of the drowned body of a 17-year old girl at the summer home of her missing friend.

I first read this Jules Verne classic when I was 13 or 14 years old, so I imagine that this reading will impress me a lot differently than that first reading did. Back then, it was all about the adventure. This time around, in this George Makepeace Towle translation, I’m most enjoying the humor and the characters themselves as Fogg and Passepartout scurry around the world with Detective Fix in constant pursuit. I have vague memories of seeing a movie version of Around the World in 80 Days during my childhood, too, something else I want to look into further. 

I fell in love with Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s four-book The Cemetery of Forgotten Books series a few years ago, but I’ve never read any of his short stories. The City of Mist is a collection of ten of those stories, and they all sound very similar in theme and tone to the novels, so I’m anxious to get to them. I’m kind of afraid that I’ll be re-reading all four novels if these stories turn out to be as good as I suspect they are.

We read Animal Farm in junior high school, as I recall, and I remember being fascinated by it, especially once I figured out what Orwell was actually doing here. The teacher didn’t do a lot of prep work, allowing us instead to read the book on our own for most of the first week. It was fun to see the “light bulbs” turning on one by one around the classroom as the week came to a close. Then, the real fun began.

I’m especially looking forward to finishing Blood Meridian this week. I can’t remember when I’ve worked as hard understanding a novel as I have on this one - probably when I finally managed to read all of Moby Dick a few years ago. It’s really been a chore, and I’m wondering why I’m not reacting to Blood Meridian the way all the critics keep telling me I should be reacting. 

Have a great week, everyone.

The Things We Never Say (2026) - Elizabeth Strout

 

The Things We Never Say is Elizabeth Strout’s first standalone novel since The Burgess Boys was published in 2013. Going back to 1998, the year in which her first novel was published, this is Stout's eleventh novel overall, and just her fourth standalone.

“For Artie it was as though he had lived these many years looking at things from one angle, and now it was as though someone had turned him partly in a different direction and everything - everything - looked different."

Artie Dam is the kind of high school history teacher who is remembered by former students for decades. Artie has everything going for him. On the surface at least, Artie has settled down into the kind of steady life that others can only aspire to. He’s been married to the same woman for decades, loves his teaching job and his students, has a grown son who seems to be doing well, and is often found solo-sailing his own boat out on the bay near his home. 

But Artie Dam, surrounded by friends and family though he might be, is a deeply lonely man who feels that he really doesn’t know even the people closest to him, and truth be known, Artie even feels a little bit suicidal at times. Then even that uncomfortable world gets turned upside down on Artie after he learns a deeply buried family secret that further convinces him that no one ever really knows anyone else. The final straw for Artie comes with the 2024 election. He dreads the election as it approaches, and when it’s over he’s left with the feeling that everything familiar to him is slipping away.

In the end, Artie figures out that being alive is a “private thing” for all of us, that our real pains, truths, and thoughts are things that no one else will ever fully be able to understand or even have access to. This is a novel about loneliness, communication, and connection, and Strout leaves the reader with a lot to think about despite how short, at only 220 pages, The Things We Never Say is. 

This is another beautifully written Elizabeth Strout novel, but it is not destined to be one of my favorites of hers mainly, I suppose, because the way that Artie and, with one exception, everyone around him reacts to the 2024 election does not feel realistic to me. I found it hard to believe how deeply obsessed and self-destructive the people in Artie’s life allowed themselves to become immediately upon announcement of the official results. For me, it feels a little heavy handed even as a literary device. That said, The Things We Never Say is an Elizabeth Strout novel, and Elizabeth Strout proved a long time ago that she is incapable of writing a bad novel.  

Abandoned Books - Jan thru May 2026

 I generally keep track of the books I’ve tossed aside, usually somewhere between 10 and 20 of them per year, just in case I might want to give them a second chance. During the first five months of 2026, I’ve abandoned seven books for one reason or another.

In the order of which I’ve abandoned them, these are the seven:

This is the first book I bought after acquiring my new Kobo Reader, and I really had high hopes for it since it was a National Book Award semi-finalist at one point. But I found Chain Gang All-Stars extremely difficult to read because its author decided to go all “pronoun crazy” on me. This is a “woke” book by any definition, but my only problem with it was tying to figure out if “they” and “them” were supposed to be singular or plural. The plot was interesting, but not interesting enough to keep me working so hard to figure out what easily could have been made obvious by simply using pronouns the way they were meant to be used. I got tired of re-reading whole paragraphs just to be sure that the author was only talking about one person instead of multiple ones.

I was looking for an Australian novel when I started reading A Hundred Small Lessons, and was drawn to this story about an elderly woman forced to leave her family for health reasons. Unfortunately/fortunately, the home she’s placed in is within walking distance of her old house, and she keeps coming back even though a young family has moved in. It’s probably me on this one, but it just became too much of a “Hallmark movie” to keep me turning pages…too predictable.

This one seemed like a natural fit for me, so I have now given its second, and final chance. Turns out that I don’t get much of a sense of the author’s “passion” from this collection of bookish essays he’s written over the years. Frankly, I found them to be very dryly written, and a little bit dull if read as a steady diet. I’m sure that many people have loved this one, and can tell me that I’m wrong about it. I’ll grant them that. Just not for me.  

I abandoned Every Day I Read for exactly the opposite reason that I quit on A Passion for Books. The South Korean author of this one took such an overwhelming cutesy approach here that I quickly realized I am not even remotely close to being part of her intended audience. I imagine this one got a big push on BookTock, exactly where its intended audience hangs out for a good time. For me, it was just too simplistic and obvious to get me past the book’s first few pages.

The Black Wolf is, by far, my biggest disappointment of the year. (Maybe it started with what I consider to be a pretty horrible cover.) I made it all the way through Penny’s 50-page recap of her previous book (barely), and then waded right in to her preachy anti-business, anti-American diatribe on global warming and Canadian sellouts willing to ruin Canada in order to enrich themselves. This one is a real downer of a story.

Rule of the Bone is my other big regret for 2026. I’ve had a copy of this one around the house for years, and this was my second attempt at reading it. I was surprised, or maybe not really all that surprised, I suppose, to end up quitting on it this second time around just a few pages past where I quit on it the first time I tried to read it. Russell Banks manages the near impossible here: a particularly repulsive storyline that still manages to be boring as heck.

I really didn’t get very far into this one. I will probably catch some flak for saying this, but I’ve grown weary about every book, movie, or television show being required for political correctness reasons to have at least one, or maybe a handful of LGBQT characters at the forefront. I’ve nothing against anyone’s personal life, not my business, but I think the group is overrepresented now to the point of ridiculousness - and, in the long run, that’s to the detriment of the very population being highlighted. Call it LGBQT fatigue, if you will. 

That’s it, so far. Looks like I’ll probably come in around 15 abandoned books again this year, right on schedule. How many do you guys give up on each year on average? I used to force myself, when I was much younger and had way more reading years still ahead of me than behind me, to finish every book that I began, but those days are long gone.

The Little Liar (2023) - Mitch Albom

I’m really not all that much into audiobooks these days, but I do still enjoy them anytime I’m driving alone for more than just a few minutes at a time. The extra focus that audiobooks demand keeps me more aware and alert than I otherwise would be by just listening to music while I drive. So I put Mitch Albom’s The Little Liar to good use last month. I chose an Albom book mainly because he is one of those writers whose stories are sraightforward enough that they don’t require a focus level that might be dangerous at 75 miles per hour. That he does such a wonderful job narrating The Little Liar himself was a bonus I didn’t expect.

Mitch Albom books tend to be a little gimmicky, and this one is no exception. This is a story about an eleven-year-old boy in Salonika, Greece, who has never in his life told a lie. We know this to be true because the book’s narrator is none other than Truth itself, and Truth tells us that young Nico Krispis is simply incapable of telling a lie. We, as readers, believe it - and so does everyone in Nico’s Salonika community.

But Nico’s determination never to lie backfires on him when the Nazis invade Greece and a devious German officer exploits Nico’s reputation for unfailing honesty to trick the boy’s fellow Jews into calmly boarding the trains that are to take them to faraway concentration camps. Nico believes that the families are being relocated to new towns and jobs where they can safely ride out the war, and that’s what they believe when he tells them it’s true. He’s believes what he’s been told by the German he’s befriended, and that’s what he tells everyone at the train station. It’s only when Salonika has largely been cleared of its Jewish population that Nico figures out the truth. And when he does, he is so horrified that he never tells the truth again.

There are four main characters in The Little Liar: Nico; his older brother Sebastian; Fannie, the little girl both boys are in love with; and the German officer. The four characters go their separate ways after leaving Salonika for the camps, but they are far from done with each other. Albom tells their stories in rotating segments focused on each's post-war life until the moment forty years later that they finally meet again for their final confrontation.   

The Little Liar is a story about lies, devastating guilt, reluctant forgiveness, self-forgiveness, and hard-earned redemption. It reads like a deceptively simple parable requiring a fairly strong suspension of disbelief at times, but it still manages to pack a surprising punch. 

Godfall (2023) - Van Jensen

 

“No one knew where the thing came from. What it was. How it remained unseen for so long. Only that it was three miles long, head to toe. If it didn’t change course, in six days and twenty-two hours it would make landfall in the United States. Models were forecasting western Nebraska. At the speed it was going, it would strike the earth like a bullet. An extinction-level event…"

But that’s not really what happens.

Instead, as it approaches rural Nebraska, what turns out to be an alien corpse falls slower and slower before rather gently landing just outside Little Springs, Nebraska. No one dies. No one is even injured. But almost immediately, a swarm of military personnel, FBI agents, scientists, cultists, foreign spies, and conspiracy theorists hits Little Springs - and Sheriff David Blunt’s problems are just about to begin. In the end, the Sheriff will be lucky to survive the invasion of his little town, because almost immediately people start to die - and it looks like the string of murders is directly connected to the massive, supposedly dead, alien.

Godfall is not as much of a science fiction novel as its title and basic plot might lead readers to believe it to be. It is much more a solidly crafted police procedural in which the Sheriff, with a mixed bag of help and opposition from the FBI and the military, tries to catch a serial killer who is relentlessly picking off his victims one by one. That so many of the killer’s victims are townspeople personally closest to Sheriff Blunt makes it all the more urgent that the killer be stopped quickly. The job would be a lot easier, though, if Blunt could tell the difference between those he can trust and those who are lying to him.

This is a well done mashup of the science fiction and murder mystery genres that will probably please fans of the mystery genre a bit more than it will please science fiction fans. In truth, the scifi here is really rather limited in comparison to the space given to catching the town’s serial killer. It helps that the novel’s characters are distinctive enough to keep them all straight, with Sheriff Blunt and his journalist cousin being particularly well developed ones.

If you are a fan of both science fiction and of mysteries, Godfall is definitely one you should take a look at, but even non-scifi fans will enjoy this one.

A Brief Visit to College Station Pays Off

College Station, home to Texas A&M University, is only about 75 miles from my front door, so I enjoy driving up there every few months to see what might turn up in the city’s bookstores. Even though I ended up doing more selling (I hope) than buying this time around, I did come home with five additions to my home library. I’ve decided to begin selling off my collection of Civil War books, nonfiction and fiction alike, and a little indie bookstore in Bryan (College Station’s neighbor) has shown some interest in those. So there’s that.

The new book I’m most tickled about is the 1943 wartime edition of Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Case of the Buried Clock, shown above. Despite its age, there is no spotting or discoloration on any of the book’s 250 pages. Considering that this Grosset & Dunlap edition is just a cheaper edition of the William Morrow "Victory Edition"of the book, that’s a pleasant surprise. The inside flap of the book jacket says this in red letters:

This book, while produced under wartime conditions, in full compliance with government regulations for the conservation of paper and other essential materials, is COMPLETE AND UNABRIDGED.

The book’s copyright page adds this:

* VICTORY EDITION*

 The typographical size and format of this book are in accordance with the paper conservation orders of the War Production Board.

I saw almost a dozen other Perry Mason books from the same era today, but the pages in all of them were so discolored that I passed on buying any but this one. From the drastic difference in its condition compared to the others on the same shelf, I don’t think it was acquired by the store from the same seller. 

I also found three Carlos Ruiz Zafón paperbacks published in the UK. Two of them The Prisoner of Heaven and The Angel’s Game are part of Zafón’s well known “The Cemetery of Forgotten Books” series, a series you should definitely try if you haven’t already done so. Because I’ve not read any of Zafón’s shorter work, I’m particularly looking forward to the third, The City of Mist, a slim collection of eleven of the author's short stories. The covers of the three are very similar, so I’ll just share this one to give you an idea of what they look like:

And finally, there’s this collection of critical essays by Harold Bloom on the key works of novelists ranging from Cervantes to Amy Tan. If I’ve counted correctly, there are 77 essays, sorted by birth year, with Cervantes being the oldest and Tan the youngest. I’m really curious to see what Bloom had to say about Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian because I’m still very underwhelmed by it at the 60% mark. I can tell that the collection's previous owner, a female with beautiful handwriting, started reading the collection with great intentions - but she seems to have lost interest pretty quickly. I hope I use the book more than she did.

I really enjoyed the day, so much in fact, that I plan to make a similar trip up to Huntsville sometime in June or July. Sam Houston University is the school in that town, and Sam Houston is very much a part of that city’s history. I haven’t visited for a couple of years, so it will be fun to visit Sam’s gravesite and the spectacular museum dedicated to his memory again. And maybe they have a bookstore worth visiting now…who knows?

What I’m Reading This Week (5/26/26)

 While I did finish two books last week, Godfall by Van Jensen and The Little Liar by Mitch Albom, it seems like I’ve been doing way more " book grazing” than I usually do. When I grow temporarily weary of a book, instead of just picking up another book I have already invested a lot of reading time into, I find myself reading the first chapters of  random books or maybe a short story or two from some anthology I have on hand. So this week calls for a little regrouping on my part.

I’m almost 500 pages into the Twain bio, but the steam has kind of gone out of that one for now, so it’s slow going. And to one degree or another, I’m also struggling with Blood Meridian and The Camp of the Saints. On the other hand, Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say is going well, especially as I get deeper into the family dynamics of that one, and it’s the one I hate to put down right now. 

My book grazing, though, has given me some options for what I will be turning to next:

Future Boy is a relatively brief memoir from Canadian actor Michael J. Fox. This is not anything approaching an autobiographical length memoir; rather, it primarily covers the months at the beginning of Fox’s Hollywood career during which he was simultaneously working on the first Back to the Future movie at night and finishing up the third season of his very popular television series, Family Ties, during the day. Back to the Future is one of my favorite movies, and Fox has such a natural, likable screen personality that my curiosity about how he managed to pull this off at such a young age made Future Boy impossible to resist for very long. 

I am a total sucker when it comes to books about books, especially the kind written by people who turn them into mini-memoirs along the way. That seems to be what Lucy Mangan has done with Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives. To this point, I’ve only read the Introduction to the book, but I’m finding it almost conversational in style, and I have high hopes for it. I particularly like this quote from the intro, “…if you read without self-consciousness or snobbery, you are liberated: free to enjoy whatever comes your way and makes you happy…” That is exactly the reading philosophy I’ve employed most of my life, and I recommend it to all new readers - or light readers - I run across.

I’ve been on a time travel novel kick lately, so A Rip in Time easily caught my eye. It’s not the most “serious” take on the subject, but I’m definitely having fun with it so far. The basic premise is that a young detective from the US goes to Scotland to be with her dying grandmother, but while there she is targeted by a serial killer and nearly strangled to death. She survives, but wakes up in 1850s Scotland inside the body of another young woman from that time period who was strangled by the same man in the same place. It’s been fun watching her figure out how to adapt to her new circumstances while trying to come up with a way to travel back to the present. Of course, she’s going to try to catch the killer. That’s just who she is despite the new body she’s wearing. 

I have quite a few short story anthologies like The Best Mystery Stories of the Year (2022) around, but I tend to forget that I have them. In an attempt to force myself finally to pay some attention to books like this one, I’ve placed it prominently on top of my desk. I plan to dip into it when the short story mood strikes me - and I hope to find some “new” mystery writers to explore further that way. There are 21 stories in the collection, so that seems likely. 

That’s the plan for this holiday-shortened week. I hope that you all had a great Memorial Day celebration, and I look forward to seeing what you have to say this week. 

The Dentist (UK 2020) (US 2025) - Tim Sullivan

 Where it comes to the things I like most about crime fiction, Tim Sullivan’s The Dentist ticks most of the boxes for me. Most importantly, Sullivan writes the kind of methodical, steady paced police procedural that has become harder and harder to find in recent years because today's publishers seem to prefer publishing crime thrillers in which every other chapter ends with a shocking twist or ciffhanger designed to keep the reader turning pages as fast as possible. While those can be fun for a while, a steady diet of them can  get me to the burnout stage pretty quickly. I much prefer procedurals like The Dentist that give me time enough to think right along with the investigative team working the crime.

But it gets even better.

The Dentist is book one in what is currently an eight-book series featuring DS George Cross - and it’s the Cross character that transforms an already solid murder mystery into something truly exceptional. Cross, you see, has Asperger’s Syndrome, a subset of Autism Spectrum Disorder, a disorder with some symptoms and traits that cause him severe social interaction problems and others that make him into the almost perfect detective. 

Among the more problematic traits are: 

• an extreme difficulty making or maintaining eye contact,
• taking all conversation literally because of an inability to recognize sarcasm, implied meanings, puns, or jokes,
• a difficulty reading facial expressions and knowing when and how to enter or leave conversations, 
• being exhausted by the extra effort required to survive any kind of social interaction, and
• anxiety generated by crowds, noise, or particular smells. 

On the other hand, Asperger’s allows Cross:

• a strong memory for details related to topics he takes an interest in,
• the expertise to recognize order, pattern recognition, structure, and routines - and the ability to sense when those have been disrupted, along with
• a talent for splitting goals into precise step-by-step lists that give him great pleasure to complete.

While I found DS Cross to be a very sympathetic character, and  admired his efforts to compensate for his social shortcomings, I also appreciated the typically dry British humor that was generated by Cross’s habit of taking everything around him so literally. Never was the humor mean spirited, and it only made me like the Cross character even more. This is a fun detective series that I intend to fully explore over the next months. 

What I’m Reading This Week (5/18/26)

 I turned a lot of pages last week but ended up only actually finishing one book, Tim Sullivan’s The Dentist. I really like the way that Sullivan develops his characters, especially Cross who suffers from Asperger Syndrome, and I’m looking forward to reading the second book in the DS Cross series soon. 

I’m over halfway through Godfall now, and I’m still trying to answer one of the questions I had coming in: is this a mystery or is it a scifi novel? At this point, the author seems to be focusing more on the serial killer who has come to town along with the alien, but I’m really looking forward to how he ultimately resolves the issue of a three-mile-tall alien dropping from the sky. 

I’m struggling a bit with Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, but that doesn’t surprise me much. I struggle with McCarthy in exactly the same way that I struggle with Faulkner. Those long descriptive sentences demand so much concentration that I can only read the book when I am most alert. So if I don’t read from Blood Meridian early in the day, it’s just as well that I pass on it for the whole day. Otherwise, I often end up reading the same long paragraph two or three times to make sure that I haven’t missed something important. The result is that I’m only about 130 pages into this one.

I’m doing my monthly 200-mile round trip drive for lunch with friends from my high school graduating class this week so, in addition to Godfall and Blood Meridian, I’ll be adding a new audio book to get me through those four hours of driving - plus these two:

I’m a big fan of Elizabeth Strout’s novels, and I’ve fully explored her Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge worlds now, especially getting a kick out of the way she intertwines the two worlds. I’m always ready for more about those ladies, but The Things We Never Say is a standalone focusing on a 57-year-old high school teacher called Artie Dam who is struggling with a kind of deep loneliness that would surprise his friends and students. The real irony is that Artie is married to a therapist. This one has been well received by Strout fans and critics alike.

The Camp of the Saints seems to be quite controversial these days. It is a French novel written in 1973 by Jean Raspail that predicted the open borders situation that the world is dealing with today. I’m only about thirty pages into the novel, but it begins on the morning that a fleet of ragtag boats is arriving on the beaches of France with almost a million impoverished Indians onboard. The novel was out of print for a long time, and a 2025 reprint was taken down by Amazon a couple of weeks ago over an “offensive content” issue before it was re-listed due to the feedback the take down received. I decided to see what the big deal was for myself. Is this a racist rant or is it a prophetic novel…or can it be both, I wonder. 

I’ve chosen The Little Liar by Mitch Albom for Wednesday’s road trip. I’m not much of a Mitch Albom fan, but this one seems to be different from the others of his I’ve read. It tells the story of an eleven-year-old Jewish boy duped by the Nazis into working with them to convince his neighbors that they have nothing to fear when boarding the trains to “new jobs and safety.” He only figures it all out after his own family is “herded into a boxcar” headed to Auschwitz. This sounds perfect for what has become a rather boring drive over the years…not too complicated, but not too mindlessly silly either. 

So that’s it for the next few days. I look forward to seeing what you all are up to.

Return to Sender (2025) - Craig Johnson

 

Return to Sender is the twenty-first book in Craig Johnson’s Walt Longmire series, and I’ve read every single one of them. I’ve also watched the entire Longmire television series, so you can definitely consider me a fan of Craig Johnson’s work, someone quite familiar with Walt and his surrounding cast of characters. But as much as I still look forward to the next Walt Longmire mystery, there’s one thing I learned about the stories a long time ago: they are strongest and the most fun when Walt doesn't go all solo on us. Walt is just a better sheriff, man, and fictional character when he has Henry Standing Bear, Vic Moretti, Lucian Connally, Ruby, and Cady Longmire around to shake up his personal life a bit. Johnson always produces a good, solid mystery thriller for his readers to enjoy, but what makes them special for longtime fans are Walt’s interactions with all the other series regulars.

Unfortunately, Walt’s gone and done it again in Return to Sender. This time he’s off on his own working undercover as a mailman in a remote county of Wyoming as he tries to find a mail lady who disappeared while driving her regular 307-mile route. Walt is not very good at undercover work, as he himself readily admits, so he’s outed fairly quickly by the locals even though for a little while he thinks he’s fooling them. His search soon leads him to a weird UFO cult in the middle of the Red Desert called The Order of the Red Gate that the mail lady seems to be connected with somehow. But, while looking for her, Walt learns disturbing details about the cult and its leaders that will make it near impossible for him to rescue everyone there who needs immediate rescuing. And he’s on his own because even the county cops are not able to offer him a whole lot of timely help way out in the middle of the desert. It’s pretty much up to Walt and Dog, his loyal canine, if this one is going to end well. 

Thankfully, there are a few pages near the middle of the book where Walt joins Vic, Henry, Cady, Ruby, and Lucien in Cheyenne for a black-tie reception. It’s only an overnighter, but it is a welcomed break in what is otherwise merely a solid mystery thriller that could easily be read as a standalone novel instead of as the most recent book in a popular two-decade-old series. Johnson seems to be going that direction more and more - and that’s kind of a shame.

Time and Again (1970) - Jack Finney

 It’s strange to me how some books can stick in your mind so firmly that even after more than fifty years you still remember the very first time you became aware of their existence. Time and Again is one of those books for me. 

My wife and I were living in Houston in mid-1972 and had driven about 110 miles back to the two little towns we had been raised in so that we could visit our folks for the first time in several months. Port Arthur had recently opened up a new library near my in-laws that caught my eye, and I decided to drop by for a quick look. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to borrow any of the books, but still couldn’t resist browsing the shelves for a few minutes anyway. But I never even made it to the shelves that day because a brand new copy of Time and Again was sitting on top of a little display between the front door and the shelves I was headed toward. The book looked interesting so I settled into a nearby chair with it for a closer look, and would hardly move again for the next two hours before reluctantly putting the book back where I found it and leaving the library to pack for home. And I was so curious about how Finney’s story would end that I bought my own copy as soon as I could make it to a Houston bookstore the following week. 

That’s the exact copy of the book I just re-read for the first time since 1972.

Finney’s story is not one involving time machines, wormholes, or parallel universes, and in a way, that makes it all the more believable. His time-travelers are specially recruited men and women who can immerse themselves into period-correct settings until they are able to use self-hypnosis to travel back in time. Si Morley is one of the few recruits actually able to pull off the stunt, and after a brief foray to 1882 New York City, during which his visit  does not impact the present, he is allowed to return to January 1882 with strict instructions that his is to be only an observer, that he is not to interact with anyone he meets. Well, that’s easier said than done.

Si takes a room in a boardinghouse where he is smitten by Julia, niece of the woman who owns the home. He knows that nothing can come of his feelings for Julia, but when he learns that she is engaged to a man Si knows will destroy her life, he does his best to make sure that their marriage will never happen. 

“Observe, don’t interfere: It was a rule easy to formulate and of obvious necessity at the project…where the people of this time were only ghosts long vanished from reality nothing remaining of them but odd-looking sepia photographs lying in old albums or in nameless heaps shoved under antique-store counters in cardboard boxes. But where I was now, they were alive. Where I was now, Julia’s life wasn’t long since over and forgotten; it still lay ahead. And was as valuable as any other. That was the key: If in my own time I couldn’t stand by and allow the life of a girl I knew and liked to be destroyed if I could prevent it, I finally knew that I couldn’t do it here either."

Could Si, by dooming their potential children never to be born, be negatively impacting the future? It’s a chance he’s willing to take, but when the project bosses do a complete one-eighty and task him with doing something in the past that will have historical significance in the present, he begins to doubt himself. Now what does he do?

Time and Again would be great fun even if this were all there was to it, but there’s more. What makes the book so special, in my estimation, are all the sketches and historical photos used to illustrate the 1882 world that Si is traveling back to. (My particular favorite is a photo of the raised arm of the Statue of Liberty sitting on the grounds of Madison Square before the statue was fully assembled where it stands today.) The attention to detail makes it easy to imagine the very different New York City that Si is trying to figure out, and survive, all by himself. 

This was a successful re-read. I come away from it with a deeper appreciation for what Finney accomplished with Time and Again, if maybe a little less excitement than then I felt the first time around. And that’s on me. After all, I was in my twenties the first time I read the book, and I’m in my seventies now. A lot has changed, not me the least. 

What I’m Reading This Week (5/11/26)

 Reading four or five books at the same time often means finishing two or three of them within a day or two of each other, and that’s what happened to me last week. I finished Time and Again, Jack Finney’s classic time travel novel, Buckeye by Patrick Ryan, and Return to Sender, book number 21 in Craig Johnson’s Walt Longmire series all within a few days. And while I continue to read John Chernow’s Mark Twain bio, I’ve been neglecting it for at least a week now. Instead, I’ve started three new ones all pretty much at the same time:

The Dentist is the first book in Tim Sullivan’s DS Cross series. As of the moment, there are eight books in the series, but I’m just now beginning to explore the Cross character mainly because of the tremendous enthusiasm Cathy over at Kittling: Books has been showing for the series for the last few months. I’m primarily drawn to the series because its central character, George Cross, has Asperger’s Syndrome, a condition that his fellow cops can tolerate only because of the guy’s tremendous talent for solving murders. I’m really enjoying this first book.

Godfall is just too weird to ignore. This one is a sci-fi murder mystery, and I’m not sure yet which genre is going to be most emphasized. Picture a three-mile-tall alien (who seems to be dead) crashing into a remote part of Nebraska. The sheriff of Little Springs now has to contend with all the government agents, scientists, and cult weirdos who descend on his little town - along with a string of murders that seem to somehow be connected to the town’s newly arrive giant resident. I’ve only read the opener so far, but I find Van Jensen’s writing style very comfortable and I’m looking forward to getting deeper in…soon.

I’ve only read two or three Cormac McCarthy novels, but have been meaning to revisit his work again for a while now. I picked up this copy of Blood Meridian last year, so it seems like a good place to jump back in. McCarthy’s prose has always seemed a little intimidating to me for some reason, but I’ve found the first three chapters of Blood Meridian not to be that way. It’s about the “Kid,” a fourteen-year-old drifter from Tennessee who stumbles into the bloody, nightmarish world that was the Texas-Mexico border in 1850. McCarthy’s books can be very brutal, and this one is no exception. 

These three are going to get the bulk of my reading time for the next week or so unless I end up abandoning one of them, something I don’t see much chance of happening with this bunch. The fun part of beginning three books within something like a three-day window is waiting to see which one, if any, ends up dominating my reading time because it hits me harder than the others. That ends up happening more times than not. I hope you all have a great reading week ahead of you. Have fun!