The Homecoming

The Homecoming

Dan Walsh

This is a reluctant hero kind of tale. Captain now Major Shawn Collins' Flying Fortress was shot down over Germany and manages to crash land it among beach dunes in occupied Holland saving his entire crew and getting them back to England the same day. At the same time his wife is killed on the home front in an automobile collision leaving his son in the reluctant care of the 7-yr-old boy's grandfather. There's a child care worker involved here. The grieving airman is sent home to a hero's welcome he's not sure he deserves and the less than willing recipient of a lot of attention. If you've watched Flags of Our Fathers you have an inkling of what he's up against. Or think John Basilone in The Pacific.

Shawn would just like to be left alone to grieve and bond with his motherless son but that is not to be his lot.

There's a great deal of name-dropping involved here. Shawn is from a suburb of Philadelphia. He takes Miss Thompson for Coffee at Wanamakers Department Store and later after meeting his PR Department guide, a newly minted Lt. who has never fired a gun he is casually taken for Dinner at the Waldorf, then a swank hotel next to Fennway Park where I expect he'll be throwing out the first pitch. Just a bit overwhelming for a small town boy.

Meanwhile back home Miss Thompson is learning how to be a Nanny or governess. There's a special place for Harry the train porter. The London Blitz gets mention including the dreaded Buzz Bombs. At some point an appointment with the White House for a Medal of Honour and for Katherine and Shawn an HEA that will make Patrick a happy boy. He may even get to pop THE QUESTION.

You'll have to read the book to see how it all came out.

Virus-free.www.avast.com

Red River by Borden Chase

Red River - Howard Hawks [1948 ]

Black and white. John Wayne 41, Montgomery Clift at 28. Tom Dunson and Matt Garth lead a Cattle Drove 1000 miles Texas to Missouri. Garth was the survivor of a raid that killed the other members of his wagon train and adopted by Dunson. As the drive begins he is a lithe young man.

From the Borden Chase book:

Blazing Guns On The Chisholm Trail

And even before the drive begins the contest between Matt Garth and the turncoat Cherry Valance is established. Who's the quickest draw must be established and the results are usually deadly.

I've yet to read the book but Hollywood likes happy endings and the movie has one. Johnny Boggs subsequent novel tells a different story.

If nine thousand cattle were driven down main street the after cleanup and the stink must have been massive. The little wood burning steam train shown in the movie would have taken years to transport that many cattle. Feeding that many cattle would have denuded the surrounding countryside but this was the movies.

The Book

Regret not reading it first. As expected Hollywood mashed the plot completely. A cattle drive with Texas Longhorns there was. River crossings, stampedes and death. And what remained of the crew made Abilene and found a railway. And a legend was born.

Virus-free.www.avast.com

The Marshal of Sentinel

The Marshal of Sentinel

Louis L'Amour

A short story I'm listening to in Dramatized Audio Format, an hour long. It all builds in tension as the marshal suspects a bank robbery is about to happen.

The marshal seems too soft spoken for the position he holds.

Virus-free.www.avast.com

Man Riding West

Man Riding West

Louis L'Amour, Mark Bramhall (Narrator)

Audiobook version. Two books by this name from this author. Being reluctant to fight doesn't make a man yaller, especially if he's a fast draw and doesn't want to get the rep that goes with the distinction. However riding with rustlers can get you branded as such and hung. What can we say.

Virus-free.www.avast.com

Cheyenne Challenge

The First Mountain Man #5

Cheyenne Challenge

William W. Johnstone, J. Rodney Turner (Narrator)

As wagon train after wagon train wends its way across the landscape Easterners set on leaving behind packed cities, poverty, taxes, and military service stream into the West invading native lands and threatening their livelihoods. While supplying employment to the mountain men who inhabit the wilds and know it best the influx of civilization threatens their way of life as well. And where there are hapless immigrants there are gangs more than willing to raid their wagons and murder the riders.

These books are violent and follow similar patterns. Piles of bodies litter the scene almost like a video game.

Virus-free.www.avast.com

Angels Flight

Harry Bosch #6

Angels Flight

Michael Connelly, Peter Giles (Narrator)

Harry and his team are called out to handle the murder of a prominent black civil rights lawyer hated by 100's of LA Cops. Dozens of other detectives were taken off the scene after Bosch arrived. He was assigned four IAD cops to assist including one he particularly hates. That at least half the force were prime suspects makes this particularly thankless.

Angels Flight is an LA funicular not unlike the one between the walled city of Quebec City and Lower Town. They consist of a railway of pedestrian cars. The one in LA two opposite moving cars which balance one another.

Two white cops going to inform a grieving black widow and her young adult son was not the smartest move especially since Bosch's two partners are both black.

Virus-free.www.avast.com

The Kill List

Mitch Kearns Combat Tracker #3

The Kill List

J.T. Sawyer

Mitch drops Dev off at the Durango Airport. The locations used in the novel really exist this being a mountainous region with deep canyons I've actually driven. The people involved with the capture, conviction, and incarceration of a crime lord's son are drugged and dropped into a canyon about to be flooded.

Included are

Mitch

Nicholas prosecuting attorney X

Dylan marshal X

Julie doctor X

Brian prison warden X

Lisa author who wrote about it X

Well it is called The Kill List

Virus-free.www.avast.com

Peak

If there weren't children named Dwezil, Moon Unit, River, Rainbow, Peak would seem far-fetched. I've had a subscription to Backpacker and some knowledge of rock climbing but Rock Rat is new to me.

Asked why a man would climb a mountain littered with the bodies of those who did not make it the answer given was, "Because it's there." Mountaineers are a strange confraternity. That a father would take his fourteen-year-old son to such a place.... You'll also rail at self-important officious functionaries everywhere.

Rarely does a book so capture my attention and I read it in one sitting but this is such a book. It's also eminently readable, action-packed, and well-edited.

Virus-free. www.avast.com

Born To Darkness

Born to Darkness is a genre bending book. Part horror, romance, sci-fi. A couple take tantric sex to the point that it blows electrical circuits for an entire block. People possess psychic powers that enable them to probe other's minds, project pain and mental distress, even move objects. Children are tortured.

As the story progresses we are treated with three romances.

At over 500 pages the storyline too often gets lost in too much detail. As with too many other books I've read since the age of computers began this book could have benefited greatly from the loss of about 200 pages.

Virus-free. www.avast.com

13 Reasons Why

The book takes the form of a 6-hour suicide note left on cassette tapes with commentary from one of the people who listen to them, or if you like a sod off from beyond the grave. Which begs the question as to why someone with that level of rationality and self-awareness went ahead with the act in the first place. This cry for help was pointless if the act succeeded. Did the individual intend to succeed or was her death an accident. Suspense builds as each side is completed and the listener still hasn't learned his part in the story.

For me school was a trial that had to be endured. For the most part I was an outside observer. My only activities were library and glee club where I excelled, and the occasional drama. I'm sure all the social interactions described here went on, one of my classmates showed up with a tooth broken in a fight, but I took no part in it. Hour-long bus rides on dusty, muddy, or ice-slicked roads added to the tedium coming and going. School dances were boring affairs I suffered. Graduation an exercise we marched through in advance of receiving our provincially marked grades. I stood first in my class, so I was an egghead.That teenagers have their own cars is still a revelation to me, that they get a new one for their 16th birthday....!

Reading the book has led to me to look up a classmate I haven't interacted with in 50 years. It has also made me think of all the people I have known who took their own lives whose acts I felt powerless to prevent.

---

This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. www.avast.com

Ten Thousand Saints

Lack of education, unemployment, malnutrition, broken homes, depression, drug & alcohol addiction, early death.... The destiny of slum dwellers everywhere. The characters in this novel fit the pattern and no effort is made to pretty it up for us.

The action moves from a New Hampshire back woods town to the streets of New York City and up and down the New England Coast.

The mid point has the gang on a road trip as a rock band. An addendum 18 years later has Jude, the central character and the book's ostensible narrator back in his old neighbourhood that is remarkably gentrified since his teen years.

Virus-free. www.avast.com

Malice in Maggody

If you didn't know already the novel was set in the south, Arkansas, names like Jim Bob and Larry Joe would give it away. Fishing for catfish and a display of dried beef jerky beside the garage cash register seal the deal. The style is so ah shucks down home it makes Andy Griffith's Mayberry look like an urban metropolis. Since I've driven through Dildo, NFLD, I'll not question the placename Maggody.

The chief of police here is a woman. The turns of phrase contain gems like: "beanpole with acne", "booming threats that would scare the horns off the devil" . The behaviour of town council gives hicks a bad name, policing is strictly keystone cops. Inbreeding and family relationships interconnect all aspects of town life. Having attended Mississauga City Council meeting little would surprise me though I doubt back room bar meetings are broadcast on local cable in Maggody.

The Storyline switches from venue to venue, from sub-plot to sub-plot without warning or even a break in the text to indicate a change. The whole is so cornball as to seem laughable but one fears all too true to small-town life where speeding tickets fund city coffers.

Virus-free. www.avast.com

Something Like Summer

Will the Geeky Gay Kid get the Sexy Hunk Jock

Ben is gay and a non-athletic geek with above average intelligence. He has crushed on an unattainable jock he has seen out jogging in his neighbourhood. He is out and beyond notice in his clique in high school but will this jock notice him even were he a closeted gay? The premise behind this book is rather far-fetched and demands major suspension of disbelief to work.

Tim's parents are too typical of a wealthy couple who really didn't intend to have children but slipped. They give him everything including his good genes, his Camaro, but they do not give him themselves.

Ben's sister is a babblermouth. His parents are tolerant of his boyfriend sleeping over and even open about facilitating their relationship.

Out and proud geek teen and closeted jock. How do you expect this to go? But what happens when they meet up later in life?

This ends in a love triangle of the homoerotic kind. By the end I'd lost interest and was just glad it was over.

Virus-free. www.avast.com

Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

Above 25,000 ft the human body is dying which begs the question as to why anyone would want to risk climbing to such heights. Surprising is the fact that the climb begins in Equatorial heat amid a riot of blooming shrubs and wildflowers. There is an element of unreality about the entire enterprise. Amid an ancient people and Buddhist Monks adventure seekers flock to climb their holy mountain. More incongruous is the concept of an expedition that daunts professional climbers being offered as a tourist attraction. 

Eye-witness accounts have proven to be notoriously unreliable and the majority of the people on that mountain were suffering hallucinations from lack of oxygen. The author makes a considered effort to defend his version of the events. Whatever your assessment the book is well written and makes good reading. Risk takers fall victim to their gambles as did adventurers here, the author made it back to write his account. 

All the Galland Men by Don Stratton

Before the US became ostensibly the world’s police force it’s foreign policy was essentially isolationist. Then as now the military establishment was more than happy to profit from supplying the matériel of war but it took the events of December 7, 1941 to bring America into the war and another two years before a substantial force could be mobilized and trained. The USS Arizona remains sunk in Pearl Harbour a graveyard for the men who served aboard her whose bodies were never recovered and a memorial to their sacrifice. This memoir tells the story of one of the few men who survived and uses archival material, diaries and letters to fill in the details. It serves to make history personal. The man whose memories were here transcribed by a ghost writer was 94 at time of publication. Most veterans are reluctant to dredge up old wounds and traumas. We are indebted to this man for sharing his.

A Torch Against the Night

Book 2 of An Ember in the Ashes. A pair of lovers flee for their lives in a classic picaresque novel in which it is us against the world and the odds are stacked heavily against them. Reading Book One first is a definite prerequisite. That said this book is eminently readable and the action will carry the reader along.

Loyalties are divided and serving those you do not respect and with those you despise and know spy on you.... Invented profanity is still swearing, just not the words with which we have become all too familiar. The story is told in the third person alternate chapters from Laia, Helene, and Elias' point of view. Life here is violent, blood runs in the streets and rivers run red.

Although the central pair achieve a certain resolution the causes of their distress remain unsettled. Will there be a book 3 in which the coming wars are fought?

Virus-free. www.avast.com

A Place to Call Their Own

Two twenty-year-olds set off for the wilds of Kansas in hopes that they can live their lives as lovers in peace there. As the case of Matthew Shepherd proves too little in the lives of gay lovers has changed over the last century. Having survived the Civil War Frank and Gregory leave their less than accepting families behind braving bands of ruffians, marauding Indians, bad weather, prairie fire, and suspicious neighbours to carve out a life for themselves. The book is well-written and charts pioneer life and spirit. Although it is made clear this couple sleep together and exchange hugs and kisses the text does not describe their further love-making nor does it find it necessary to use profanity. Although novella in length it is a very satisfying read.

An Ember in the Ashes

A fantasy with a dark tone the setting is a training facility within a militaristic society where there is little empathy, slaves and trainees alike are cruelly punished, the penalty for desertion being flailed to death, lesser crimes lead to slaves being disfigured or losing hands. There are two central characters: Laia who enters the training camp as a slave to spy on its Commandant who is the unfeeling mother of the Elias, a reluctant trainee whose best friend Helene is the only other female in the camp. Elias encounters jealousy when he pays attention to the slave whose handler on the outside is red-haired Keenan described as shorter but muscular. Hence a potential for two love triangles.

By Gaslight

There are two sets of characters here and initially no clear sense of how their stories insect. One is centred around the famous William Pinkerton in search of a ghost in London; the other Adam Foole who operates on the other side of the law. Charlotte Rickett's name appears in both story-lines.

In over 700 pages in flashbacks the novel ranges over India, South Africa, America as well as Nineteenth Century England. No quotes are used to indicate dialogue. Although historical characters appear this is a work of fiction. Not certain what all the diversions add to the story but they certainly serve to draw out the storyline to epic proportions. There is enough material here for at least two books.

AT Wolf Ranvh

Mixes Cowboy, Murder Mystery Thriller, and Romance. As you'd expect the guy is tall, lean, broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted; the woman beautiful and bewitching. Well-edited for the most part with the usual coital interactions and foreplay. 

Call me a nit-picker but Uncle Phillip is described as shackled behind his back, he could not have banged his fists on the table two pages later. Not a bad read though I find the crude language unnecessary.