Book review: Return to Sender by Craig Johnson

Posted on April 5, 2025 by Bev Vincent

Craig Johnson has a home-and-away strategy to writing his novels featuring Absaroka County Sheriff Walt Longmire, which means that alternating books take place in the county seat and some place farther afield. Return to Sender is an away novel, although it’s still set in Wyoming. The Red Desert is located in the south-central part of the state, home to the largest living dune system in the United States. It is also the location of the country’s longest mail route, over three hundred miles, served by the “loneliest mail carrier in the nation.”

That mail carrier, Blair McGowan, who has a reputation as a political activist, has been missing for almost four months. Walt’s late wife’s cousin, a postal inspector, asks him to go undercover as a contract carrier covering her route to see if he can figure out why. Accompanied by his faithful companion, Dog, Walt leaves the local policing duties in the hands of his under-sheriff and fiancé, Vic Moretti. One of the book’s most entertaining developments has Walt, for the first time ever, acquiring a cell phone, although its the most rudimentary flip phone he can find. (He still doesn’t own a credit card.)

His attempts at subterfuge don’t last long: he doesn’t resemble a postal worker and his stature makes him instantly recognizable. That doesn’t deter him from his appointed rounds. After buying the distinctive 1968 Travelall previously owned by McGowan (sold by her sketchy boyfriend a month after she vanished), he sets out into the desert to deliver mail and look for clues. He isn’t optimistic about finding McGowan—the search area is immense and she’s been missing too long. 

He soon learns about a nomadic cult called The Order of the Red Gate, whose members have been living in the desert waiting to be taken away by aliens. McGowan had a special relationship with them, leaving their mail under painted rocks and picking up the outgoing post. Zeno Carruthers, their leader, is a charismatic former actor with a reputation as a grifter. McGowan herself has some cinematic experience, having once appeared on an episode of Mysteries from Beyond where she talks about being abducted by aliens. Two other members of the cult, though, have a less-than-stellar reputation: Bible-quoting Freebee Leland, who provides security and strongly resembles Charles Manson, and his partner Lowell Omman, who has no body hair and never utters a word.

There are several twists to the tale of the missing McGowan, who may have joined the cult voluntarily or may be held in their thrall. Any time Longmire ends up somewhere with a harsh environment, it’s pretty much guaranteed that he’s going to be stranded in conditions that would kill a lesser person. In previous adventures, he’s been caught in blizzards and abandoned in a Mexican desert. This time he isn’t alone, but that doesn’t make his circumstances any less dire.

The book is chock full of trivia about the postal service, state history, serial killers and the red desert, which Longmire recounts to anyone who will listen. When no one else is around, he talks to Dog. Otherwise, Longmire operates mostly on his own. There is one section that features the other regulars from the series, when he attends a banquet where his daughter expects to be announced as the next State Attorney General. However, Longmire’s past clouds this political appointment, and it is made clear to him that one of the conditions for it to happen is for him to retire and fade into the background. 

Two subplots in Return to Sender are sure to reappear in subsequent installments of the series. First is the question of Longmire’s retirement. He’s been considering it for a while now, but he resists when someone else tries to make the decision for him. He wonders who would fill his extremely large shoes. The other is the matter of the disappearance of his childhood friend, Ruth One Heart, now an ATF agent, who was involved in the violent shootout at the end of The Longmire Defense. Longmire and Vic have a scene with the Soviet agent who was hired to kill him, and it’s pretty sure that we’ll see Maxim Sidarov again.

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Book Review: Free — My Search for Meaning by Amanda Knox

Posted on March 15, 2025 by Bev Vincent

Amanda Knox has written at length about her experiences as a wrongfully convicted murderer in her previous memoir, a book she freely admits was written to help defray the crushing debt accrued by her family while mounting her defense against multiple prosecutions in Italy. However, gaining her freedom didn’t mean her ordeal was over. Her notoriety meant it was next to impossible to re-enter her previous life. For years, her name and face appeared in tabloids, newspapers, social media and news reports. Documentaries were made about her arrest and subsequent trials. Movies purported to tell her story and crime series episodes created fictionalized accounts of the case.

After four years in prison, Knox returned to America to a different type of incarceration. It was virtually impossible for her to do the kinds of things people do in everyday life. She would be recognized in a grocery store or a bookstore. How does a young woman go on a first date without the awkward discussion about her past, assuming the other person doesn’t already know her story and is attempting to exploit it? If she went to a night club, paparazzi snapped photos to sell to tabloids in which her behavior was seen as disrespectful to the memory of the murder victim (something she refers to as the “single victim fallacy”)? And who would hire her who wouldn’t also be attempting to exploit her name and reputation? How could she be simply Amanda Knox again without all the baggage attached to her name?

Knox frankly and eloquently discusses these ordeals and more in Free: My Search for Meaning. She puts her life under unblinking scrutiny, chronicling her struggles as a “free” woman, owning up to some of the mistakes she made after her liberation and her misadventures. She was an unwilling celebrity, someone who never asked to be notorious, but people believed they knew her, made assumptions about her, tried to befriend her or uttered threats against her.

One of the first people who extended a welcoming hand was a newspaper editor who offered her a minimum wage job writing reviews for the West Seattle Herald under a pseudonym. She could remain anonymous by screening movies in dark theaters, and on those occasions where she interviewed people in public, she presented herself as Emile Monte. (The story of how she created her pen name is reminiscent of Stephen King/Richard Bachman. She chose Emile because it was a character from one of her grandmother’s favorite childhood novels and Monte because of a can of Del Monte peas in her pantry. Many of those articles can still be found online.) 

The book revisits some of her experience in prison, including the depths of her despair and the people who handed her a lifeline, including a prison priest with whom she could have philosophical discussions despite her disbelief in his religion. Section headings are drawn from Dante—over the course of the decade after she was found innocent she progressed from Inferno through Purgatory to Paradise and beyond. Now she is happily married with a couple of children and working for projects associated with wrongly accused/incarcerated people She has steadfastly reclaimed her personal identity and re-emerged into public life as an advocate.

The most fascinating section of his book is her account of how she reconnected with the man who doggedly prosecuted her, Giuliano Mignini. She decided that, although the man had never relented in his public claim that—regardless of the decisions handed down by higher courts—he believed her prosecution was justified. Still, she wondered what kind of man he might be in private, so she reached out to him, first by mail. Their exchanges, some of which Knox quotes in the book, are intriguing. No matter how hard she tried, she could never get Mignini to acknowledge her innocence or the damage he caused her, but they did form an interesting bond. They talked about her children and his grandchildren. They even met in person in 2019, a private encounter that Knox had never previously disclosed. Although she could never get precisely what she wanted or needed from him, the relationship they formed was important to her and, it seems, to the aging prosecutor. It’s a powerful testament to Knox’s drive to get past her past and create a new path forward for herself. 

Anything that separates people can be bridged through empathy, she writes. Although her circumstances are unique, everyone has lived through their own worst moment. When people approach her to say, “I can’t imagine what you’ve been through,” her response is a single word: Try.

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Book review: Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer

Posted on December 22, 2024 by Bev Vincent

Ten years ago, Jeff VanderMeer released a trilogy known collectively as the Southern Reach or Area X novels. A mysterious, mostly impermeable boundary isolated a stretch of the Gulf Coast, killing almost everyone within its confines. The region was called Area X and the Southern Reach was a government agency created to keep the nature of the region hidden from the world at large and to determine its nature. Those books detailed various exploratory missions into this topsy-turvy region without getting to the bottom of what has happening there. 

Now, VanderMeer returns with a longer book that is both prequel and something of a sequel. It has three distinctly different sections, so it is in some ways a trilogy. Most of the book is told from the point of view of a former spy who goes by Old Jim, although it’s not clear even to him what his real name is. Twenty years before the barrier appeared, he was asked to try to get a handle on an existential threat in the region, although his bosses at Control are stingy with information. He practically has to beg for things he believes will help him understand the situation. His handlers suspect foreign interference, but how foreign? Soviets? Aliens? Something from another dimension?

Old Jim works undercover as the owner of the only bar in a mostly abandoned town in the vicinity of a team of field biologists who tempt fate by meddling with the local ecosystem. Subsequently, these scientists make some fascinating and disturbing discoveries that indicate that the region that will become Area X was already shifting into a strange realm. They’re haunted by strange music and discover swarms of carnivorous rabbits equipped with cameras. Perhaps the place has always been altering, under the influence of some chaotic force, and the appearance of the border was only its announcement to the world.

In the second section, Old Jim is assigned an assistant “named” Cass who, at times, pretends to be his estranged daughter, even though no one is fooled by the ruse. Given Area X’s subsequently discovered proclivity for creating doppelgangers, the government’s actions here are ironic. The biologist’s experiments have caused—or, perhaps, accelerated—changes in the local ecosystem, and pseudo-Cass is there to help Old Jim, whether he likes it or not. This section leads to an explosive finale that puts an end to Old Jim’s investigation.

The book’s focus abruptly shifts in the final section to a foul-mouthed and drug-addled man named Lowry (previously seen in Acceptance) who is part of the first expedition into Area X four months after the border materialized, an expedition that readers of Annihilation will recall as a full-blown disaster, with only one person returning to the other side in possession of some deeply disturbing video footage. Lowry’s prime directive is to find the hypothetical “off switch” that will disable the barricade. Upon his return, Lowry was seen to be a terribly unlikable character. Here, we learn that he was equally loathsome before embarking on the expedition. His stream-of-consciousness pervasive use of the word “fuck” in all of its various forms can be off-putting, making the final part of the novel difficult to process.

Of course there are no answers, but Absolution provides a new way of looking at Area X. It’s not a necessary part of the Southern Reach series, but it is a welcome addition to the mythos for people who appreciated the mystifying and disturbing nature of the previous three books.

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Book review: Midnight and Blue by Ian Rankin

Posted on December 22, 2024 by Bev Vincent

Former Inspector John Rebus finds himself in the same place where he put so many other people he investigated: Her (or is it His?) Majesty’s Prison Edinburgh. He’s been found guilty of attempted murder in the death of his longtime nemesis, Big Ger Cafferty. Although he’s been sentenced to life (which may not be long given his advanced age and health issues), his lawyers promise they’ll be able to successfully appeal his conviction, but they have been strangely and frustratingly incommunicative lately.

Rebus isn’t safe from crime behind bars, though; no one is. Another prisoner on his block is murdered after lights out, stabbed to death while his cellmate slept the sleep of the heavily drugged in an apparently locked cell. The murder weapon is nowhere to be found. Suspicion immediately falls on the prison guards. Who else would have been able to avoid the cameras and enter the cell and smuggle out the knife? When Rebus’s former colleagues arrive to investigate, he does his best to insinuate himself into the case, and DS Christine Esson is happy to have someone on the inside to help explain the lay of the land.

Out in the real world, Rebus’s former protégée, DI Siobhan Clarke, is working the case of a missing 14-year-old girl who has gotten herself wrapped up in the world of online pornography and exploitation. The third player in the novel is Malcolm Fox, who was once the lead in another Rankin novel but has more recently been relegated to the supporting cast. In his more recent appearances, Fox has become shiftier and less likable. The latest black mark on his career is that he recruited Siobhan to join his team in Professional Standards and she left quickly after discovering what it was like to work with him.

There’s a connection between Fox, now in Organized Crime, and the murdered prisoner that Fox would be happy to keep quiet. Fox had Jackie Simpson break in somewhere so he could use the subsequent investigation as an excuse to search a place that would otherwise have been off limits. His constant failure to reveal crucial details about both investigations will come back to bite him.

One of Rebus’s fellow prisoners, Darryl Christie, sees himself as Cafferty’s replacement. As a token of thanks to Rebus for getting the former kingpin out of the way, whether deliberately or not, Christie vouches for Rebus’s safety in HMP Edinburgh, an important consideration now that Rebus is out of isolation and in general population, where a few other prisoners wouldn’t mind doing him harm. Rebus also has an uneasy alliance with the prison guards and warden. In the past, they were both on the same side of the law, so they’re willing to provide Rebus with information, except when it seems like he might be investigating them.

The murder case and the missing girl seem to be unrelated, but Edinburgh is a small city and there’s a lot of overlap between its criminal population. Soon the tangled web Rankin has been weaving becomes clear. This is the twenty-fifth Rebus adventure but hopefully not the last, as Rebus’s future is still very much in question at the end of Midnight and Blue. There may be some life left in the old man yet.

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2024 in Review Part II: TV and Movies

Posted on December 22, 2024 by Bev Vincent

I watched 55 movies, including documentaries, this year (full list here), and will probably rack up a few more in the coming week. Most of these were watched with my wife, although I watched some alone because they weren’t something that interested her. I only saw three of them in the theater; the rest were on streaming. Most were films I watched for the first time, although there were several older movies that I saw for a second time.

In the documentary category, again, in the order in which we saw them rather than in any order of preference:

  • M*A*S*H: The Comedy That Changed Television (Hulu)
  • The Greatest Night in Pop (Netflix)
  • Elton John & Bernie Taupin: The Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song (PBS)
  • Jim Henson: The Idea Man (Disney+)
  • Brats (Hulu)
  • The Beach Boys (Disney+)
  • Will & Harper (Netflix)
  • Music by John Williams (Disney+)
  • Beatles ’64 (Disney+)
  • Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary (Max)
  • Never Too Late (Disney+)

For movies, here’s my top dozen, although there were a couple of others that might have made the list. I think I enjoyed Longlegs more than many of my friends and Barbie quite a bit less.

  • The Holdovers (Peacock)
  • Oppenheimer (OnDemand)
  • Godzilla Minus One (Netflix)
  • Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (in theater)
  • Hit Man (Netflix)
  • Under Paris (Netflix)
  • Fall Guy (On Demand)
  • Longlegs (in theater)
  • A Quiet Place: Day One (in theater)
  • Wolfs (Apple TV+)
  • My Old Ass (Amazon)
  • The Six Triple Eight (Netflix)

Television shows/streaming series is a lot harder to quantify. (See my full 2024 list here.) I watch a lot of them—some classic TV series like Blue Bloods, which just ended its 14-year run, for example. Now that it’s on Peacock, I went back and rewatched the first three seasons of Homicide: Life on the Streets and will probably pick up more of that one in 2025. My wife and I also completed our rewatch of M*A*S*H, burning through seasons eight through eleven and wishing we could see them all over again. I’m still a sucker for Survivor, watching two seasons this year. This just-completed season 47 was one of the best in recent years, especially the final run of episodes. I also rewatched all six seasons of Longmire and the first three seasons of Dexter. I haven’t dipped into the new Dexter series but probably will before long. In preparation for the new season of Severance, I tore through the first season last week.

There are a few series my wife likes to watch with me. This includes All Creatures Great and Small, Star Trek: Discovery, Elsbeth, Matlock, Doctor Who, The Midnight Club, The Sticky.

It’s really hard to pare the list down to fifteen series that I really enjoyed, but here’s my best crack at it:

  • Fargo S5 (Hulu)
  • Slow Horses S1-4 (Apple TV+)
  • Lessons in Chemistry (Apple TV+)
  • True Detective: Night Country (Max)
  • Shogun (Hulu)
  • The Gentlemen (Netflix)
  • The Responder S1, S2 (Britbox)
  • Bad Monkey (Apple TV+)
  • Nobody Wants This (Netflix)
  • Shrinking S2 (Apple TV+)
  • The Devil’s Hour S1, S2 (Amazon)
  • A Man on the Inside (Netflix)
  • Cross (Amazon)
  • The Diplomat S2 (Netflix)
  • Black Doves (Netflix)

That leaves out quite a few really good shows. Such is the peril of making a list. I’d probably choose a few things differently if I made the selection tomorrow. Tracker is surprisingly good although a little formulaic. Season 1 of The Tourist was pretty terrific; Season 2 a little less so but still good. I’m a long-time Criminal Minds fan and glad to see that the characters can—and do—say “fuck” a lot. I get a lot of use out of my Britbox subscription and always on the look out for a good British crime series. The Jetty with Jenna Coleman was good. Apple TV+ continues to put out the best series, in my opinion.

Anyhow, that’s the wrap on 2024! See y’all next year. It’s bound to be…interesting. As in “Chinese curse” interesting.

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2024 in Review Part I: Reading and Writing

Posted on December 21, 2024 by Bev Vincent

Season’s greetings and happy holidays and all that! This is part one of my annual year-end review. As the title above suggests, this one is about writing/publishing and things I’ve read, which seem to go hand in hand.

This year has been a pretty good one for writing projects. My latest book Stephen King: His Life, Work, and Influences (Young Readers’ Edition) came out in September. As that title suggests, this one is geared toward teen readers who are beginning their journey into reading adult fiction. “A thrilling visual companion curated for young adults voraciously reading their way through Stephen King’s colossal corpus of creepy books” that Booklist called “catnip for King enthusiasts.”

I also had a chapbook called Lost (or Found) in Translation from Lividian Publications come out the same month. In this one, I tracked down all the foreign editions of King’s books and collated the titles used for the translations, reverse-engineering them into English as best I could. François Vaillancourt contributed the chapbook’s cover, along with ten full-color interiors depicting what these King books would look like if he had been hired to illustrate the translated editions.

I’ll have an essay called “High School Confidential” in Carrie’s Legacy: Revisiting Stephen King’s Girl with a Frightening Power, also from Lividian Publications, in the spring.

Related to writing, I was interviewed a few times this year:

The second one was interesting in that it related to a 1984 People magazine interview with Peter Straub and Stephen King about The Talisman. The fourth one was with a radio station in Australia which was done live during an overnight radio program, another first for me! And the first one was different in that it focused primarily on my short fiction, which was a nice change of pace.

Regarding short fiction, the following stories appeared in 2024:

I have a few more stories queued up for 2025. The most significant among them as far as I’m concerned is a little tale called “Lockdown,” which will appear in The End of the World As We Know It: Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand, which will be published by Gallery in the US and Hodder and Stoughton in the UK next August, together with a German edition from Buchheim Verlag in December.

Other exciting news forthcoming for 2025, but I can’t say anything more about that yet.

I had a moderately good year reading, 37 books finished or will be finished very soon. (Full list here, if you’re interested.) If you’ve been following me on these year-end posts for a while, you’ll know that I’m crap at making best-of/top-10 lists, but I can probably narrow the list down to a dozen in the order in which I read them (with a few links to the ones I reviewed).

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Book Review: Tooth and Claw by Craig Johnson

Posted on December 21, 2024 by Bev Vincent

The weather has not always been kind to Sheriff Walt Longmire. His home turf of Absaroka County, Wyoming has brutal winters, and he’s been stranded in the desert for days on end as well. Walt has also faced some human monsters in the past, but nothing compares to the beast in Tooth and Claw, a short Longmire novel.

The novel is framed as a flashback story Henry tells former sheriff Lucian Connally while he and Walt join Lucian for a game of chess and an illicit New Years Eve cookout at the Durant Home for Assisted Living. A chess maneuver known as “the Polar Bear System” inspires Henry to relate an adventure that happened in December 1970, shortly after they returned from Vietnam.

Henry had traveled to the North Slope of Alaska, inside the Arctic Circle, to try to bring Walt to his senses. Walt is working as a security officer on an oil rig, drinking too much and avoiding making important decisions about his future, including what to do about his rocky relationship with a young woman named Martha. Henry joins Walt on an outing to escort a US Geological Survey worker who is taking ice core samples looking for ice worms. They are accompanied by several other men and a sniper who mounts a hastily erected metal tower at each stop to protect the workers from polar bears, a task made all the more difficult by the abbreviated daylight hours and an oncoming storm.

There is a political battle over the region, which is protected against drilling, while the oil company wants to exploit the vast resources under the ice. The teams get split up and a massive polar bear starts stalking the workers. The malformed creature is reputed to be a nanurluk, a legendary bear god. It’s invincible, insatiable and kills for pleasure rather than sustenance.

The storm prevents them from leaving, but they fortuitously encounter another legend: a ghost ship that was abandoned four decades earlier. It’s the only place for them to weather the frigid temperatures and extreme conditions, but they’re not the only ones who seek refuge there on the longest night of the year.

The sense of cold and dread is pervasive in this novella. Although survival is the dominant theme of the tale, it’s not without a crime aspect. The pacing is relentless and the adversary is one that Walt and Henry can’t negotiate with. They’re in its territory—it knows all the secret routes and their weapons are mostly ineffective against a creature that stands up to twelve feet tall.

Of course, since the tale is told in flashback, readers know that at least Henry and Walt will survive, but it still makes for a harrowing and literally chilling adventure.

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This is going to take a while

Posted on November 17, 2024 by Bev Vincent

I joined Twitter 15 years ago, about three years after the “microblogging” platform came into existence. In that time, I have tweeted (or retweeted) 326,000 times, liked nearly 300,000 posts, blocked 6700 accounts and muted 600 other. I acquired over 10,000 followers, making it my most successful social media platform by far. Yesterday, I downloaded all of my data from the site (31 MB, including message conversations) and today I started the process of deleting everything. DeleteTweets has been running for well over an hour and it’s only removed 3000* tweets, so, this is going to take a while.

My new primary social is BlueSky, where I’m @bevvincent.bsky.social. I joined that site when it was still invitation-only, but in the past week or so the site has exploded, adding a million new users a day, and my followers list is getting up there. Still only a tenth of my Twitter following, but it’s a work in progress. I’m also on Threads as bev.vincent, but I haven’t figured out how to make that site work yet. If anyone has a newbie orientation video or site, that would be greatly appreciated.

Today it’s raining, and I’m feeling quite smug about it. Why? Because I wanted to do some yard work this weekend in preparation for fall (mulch the leaves on the lawn, for example), and I actually did it yesterday, whereas today it would have been impossible. So, yay me for getting off my ass and getting it done.

Last Friday, I submitted a short story that I’ve been working on for a few weeks, off an on. My ability to focus on writing took a serious hit during late October/early November, and I made several false starts on this story. I knew what it was about, generally, but I didn’t know how to dig it up. I hand-wrote at least three different multi-page sections that I abandoned before finding my way in. Ultimately, I was able to use several pieces of the early efforts, so all was not lost, and I was quite pleased by how it turned out. However, it was a crime story without an identifiable crime. Something nefarious definitely happened, and two characters knew exactly what that was, but the detective didn’t, nor would readers, which the editor didn’t think would work in the anthology. The editor gave me the chance to take another stab at it, but I declined.

Twenty years ago, I would probably have done it, so eager was I to get stories out there. However, in this case, having finally captured the story the way I felt it had to be told, it seemed that I would be untrue to the story to change it in that way. The editor understood when I decided to withdraw, and encouraged me to submit to future anthologies, so all was not lost. And I still have story. Now I just have to figure out what to do with it.

More and more people are learning about the forthcoming anthology (August 2025) called The End of the World as We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand, which involves a few dozen writers contributing stories set in the universe of The Stand. My story is called “Lockdown,” part of the section that takes place during the events of the novel. Some stories are set after the book ends (some long after!). It can’t wait to read everyone else’s contributions.

I made one of my rare trips into Houston last month to meet up with Richard Chizmar and his wife at Under the Volcano before his signing at Murder by the Book, where he was paired with Johnny Compton. The Chizmars and a couple they knew from the area and I also went out to dinner afterward, which was nice. The couple live in the same community I do, and she teaches at the same school my daughter attended back in the 90s—small world. It was nice to see Rich—we have an ongoing dialog by text, but we only get together in person on rare occasions.

I picked up a few books while at the bookstore, including Compton’s Devil’s Kill Devils, which I haven’t started yet, but seems like good fun. I also got Midnight and Blue by Ian Rankin and Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson, both of which I’m currently reading, the latter to my wife. We just finished The Great Hippopotamus Hotel by Alexander McCall Smith (the latest in the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series). I also read a galley of The Folly by Gemma Amor and read most of The Waiting by Michael Connelly, while waiting, ironically, for the event I participated in at the River Oaks Theater last month with Daniel Kraus, where we chatted before watching Creepshow. The latter two books are reviewed at the respective hyperlinks.

After watching the documentary Music by John Williams on Disney+, I remembered that I’d never seen E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. Ever. When it came out, I was an undergrad at Dalhousie and it only played at a theater that was somewhat difficult to get to if you didn’t have a car, even though Halifax had a very good bus system. For some reason, I never got around to watching it subsequently, although I knew the story and have seen countless snippets. I may even have read the novelization. Anyway, we rectified that oversight finally, watching the film on Amazon. It holds up quite well, but seeing those young, young actors…wow! We also watched My Old Ass on Amazon, starring Aubrey Plaza. Terrible name for a movie, but it’s really quite charming. It’s about an 18-year-old girl on the verge of leaving home (a cranberry farm) to go to university in Toronto. High on mushrooms, she encounters her 39-year-old self (Plaza) and they begin a weird kind of dialog over the course of the next several days or weeks. We liked it a lot.

Last night, we watched the final episode of Season 2 of The Diplomat, and all I could say was “holy fuck” after the final twist. I knew something big was coming, but I had no idea what to expect, and I would never ever have guessed that. Highly recommended. I also watched Teacup (Peacock), which is based on the Robert McCammon novel Stinger. It’s a pretty good sci-fi horror series, with some decent shocks and scares, but I was hoping for a better ending rather than a setup for a second season. It’s hard to say that I enjoyed Disclaimer (Apple TV+) because it’s a difficult, unsettling story. Also, it’s told out of sequence, so it takes a while to piece together what’s happening when, and a lot of the story is based on a book written by a character who wasn’t present when the focal incident happened, and wasn’t able to talk to anyone who was there, so the viewer has to separate fact from fiction. It’s Cate Blanchet and Sacha Baron Cohen (who plays her hangdog husband) with Kevin Kline, who is the “villain” of the piece. It’s definitely worth watching, but not if you’re feeling at all depressed—which a lot of us are these days, I fear. A good antidote to it is Season 2 of Shrinking, which is delightful and uplifting even when dealing with some harsh truths. Seeing Harrison Ford do full-on comedy is worth the admission ticket by itself.

*update — in the time it’s taken me to write this, DeleteTweets has deleted another 800 posts. This is definitely going to take a while.

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Book review: The Folly by Gemma Amor

Posted on October 26, 2024 by Bev Vincent

The inciting incident is reminiscent of the Michael Peterson case popularized on the Netflix series The Staircase. A woman falls to her death in the family home when the only other person present was her husband. Was she pushed or was it an accident? A jury convicted Owen of murder. His lone supporter is his daughter, Morgan, who has campaigned relentlessly for his release. Finally, the day comes when she picks him up from prison after he served six years of a fifteen year sentence, exonerated of the crime after an appeal and a second trial.

Morgan, now forty-three, knows that popular opinion remains against her father, and she’s broke, so she sells the family home and finds a position for Owen as caretaker of a multistory tower standing at the edge of a cliff overlooking the Atlantic in Cornwall. The house where her mother died has too much history for them to stay there any longer but their new home has its own baggage: The Folly (a characteristically British term for a building that has little or no practical purpose) has a reputation for people—including a famous writer—either falling or jumping to their deaths.

In the Folly, they will be mostly away from prying, suspicious eyes. Morgan doesn’t mind the isolated location—the entire country has been in lockdown for the past couple of years due to the pandemic, following distancing regulations that are even more drastic than those in America. Many businesses have shuttered and the familiar pub culture has vanished. The man who hires her father to tend to the Folly—the job consists mostly of general upkeep and chasing off death tourists (as the trespassers are called)—arranges for regular food deliveries, so the duo doesn’t need to leave the premises.

It doesn’t help, though, that the Folly’s central feature is a spiral staircase, a constant reminder of the way Morgan’s mother died. Morgan has steadfastly believed in her father’s innocence; however, now that they are forced to live together in close confines, cracks form in their relationship. Complicating matters is the appearance of a mysterious stranger who seems to be channeling her mother’s spirit, provoking her to ask her father difficult questions. Owen is so uncomfortable in this post-pandemic world that he floats the idea of committing another crime so he will be incarcerated again.

This is a brooding, atmospheric and claustrophobic novella, essentially a two-hander with an interloper who threatens to throw their precarious relationship off balance. Morgan’s struggle with the past and the new present is the book’s focus, which Amor handles deftly. As so many other Gothic stories have demonstrated, isolation is not without peril. Long-held secrets have a way of bubbling to the surface when people are trapped in moody, dark places.

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Book review: The Waiting by Michael Connelly

Posted on October 26, 2024 by Bev Vincent

For most detectives, losing their gun, badge and ID would be humiliating, but for Renée Ballard, it could be a career-ending incident. She’s had enough run-ins with powerful people in the LAPD for it to be grounds for dismissal. So, instead of reporting the loss, she sets about attempting to retrieve the items by herself. She soon discovers that the theft, which occurs while she was surfing, is tied to a rash of thefts occurring to other surfers, who leave valuables in their vehicles while catching waves.

Ballard is working for the Open-Unsolved Unit, formerly led by retired detective Harry Bosch, who is undergoing cancer treatments. Her staff consists of volunteers, including retired cops and other specialists who concentrate on cold cases where it is possible that the culprit is still alive. Often, DNA evidence points to new suspects either directly, through a database match, or to a family of potential culprits through genealogy databases.

The hot case in The Waiting—the book’s title is inspired by a Tom Petty song and relates to the fact that investigators often have to wait for forensics results to proceed—involves a series of rapes that ended with a murder. A genetic match leads to a potential suspect with political implications, which means the squad has to proceed cautiously. At the same time, Maddie Bosch, the squad’s newest volunteer, thinks she’s cracked a legendary Los Angeles cold case. Solving this one would be a boost to everyone’s career, but there are political factions involved here, too, and Ballard isn’t the kind of person who treads lightly through these complications.

Tracking down her stolen items leads Ballard from one criminal to another and another. She discovers someone is planning a terrorist plot, which means the FBI gets involved, but because of her precarious situation, she also brings in Harry Bosch to cover her back when dealing with these dangerous individuals. Adding to her emotional load is the fact that her mother is missing, a possible victim of the recent fires in Lahaina. Their relationship has been complicated and is one of the main topics of discussion with her therapist.  

As much as it may pain long-time readers to find Bosch in a diminished role, Connelly is doing a fine job of passing the torch. Maddie seems to be following her father’s trajectory in her rookie career, and Ballard is every bit the lone-wolf detective who’s willing to work around the bureaucracy to get the job done, often at the risk of her career. Unlike Bosch, though, she’s willing to dig deep into her psyche to figure out what issues are driving her.

And as far as plotting and storytelling go, The Waiting is rocket-fueled from the first page without letup, and the multiple, unrelated storylines are threaded together into a sophisticated and satisfying tapestry. Bosch may fading into the background, but Connelly is still at the top of his game.

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