My picks:
Manhunt: The 12 Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer- soon, and I’m sure regrettably, to be a major motion picture.
Great book that reads with the pace and thrill of a novel. “You are there” with Booth as he hides in swamps and retreats further into delusions of grandeur as nothing goes as expected (only Lincoln’s assassination works, he’s not hailed as a hero, even friends like Mudd turn against him, etc.). Also casts more light than usually given on his compatriots. Since Harrison Ford stars in the film as leader of the troops who ultimately capture him I fear it may take on a chase film that it really wasn’t (he was captured less from detective work than from good luck, witting and unwitting informants and the fact 50,000 Union troops were still in the field in Virginia).
Worst (adapted in part from my amazon review):
Hannibal Rising, or “To Hell With IRAs, I Know a Better Way to Retire Rich” by Robert Harris. Pure dreck as he tries to complete (or technically begin) Hannibal’s trek from remorseless murderer to tragic antihero (who happens to kill and eat people sometimes just for his own amusement).
If you read Hannibal you know that his sister got et by starving soldiers in WW2 Lithuania and Hannibal didn’t take it too well. This book is basically “what happens next”, a sort of OLIVER TWIST meets KILL BILL in THE TEAHOUSE OF THE AUGUST MOON as orphaned Hannibal moves to Paris, falls in love with his uncle’s Japanese wife and seeks revenge on the men who ate his sister (cause you only gotta eat Hannibal’s sister once to get that boy p.o.d).
It could have been a cerebral revenge tragedy. As grisly and barbaric and sickening as the atrocity in Lithuania was, the most primitive and honest part of us would probably refuse to deny that in the position of the soldiers we’d at least have considered doing the same thing; this is a situation so dire that morality is an abstract concept- if we do nothing everybody, including the girl [already seriously ill], will die, but if we kill her we can live. We may never speak of it again and try to drive it from our memory, but… lizard brain moment, to judge them is like judging the people who tried to use others as flotation devices on the Titanic, it’s something you can’t say what you’d do until you’re in the situation (which I’ve only been once, and then finally the IHOP waitress brought the Turkey stacker just as I was about to plunge the knife). It could have been an interesting concept: who is the villain and who is the victim and who is the morally correct, Hannibal for avenging his sister or the men for breaking the ultimate taboo as a matter of survival and having to struggle with the guilt.
Luckily Harris delivers us from nuance by making the most hideous and almost cartoonishly funny villains in recent memory, men who make Mason Verger look like Christopher Reeve in terms of humanity. They’re soooooooooooo evil that they not only make fat livings from horrid acts but they sexually torture chained girls for fun and luckily they all end up in Paris along with Hannibal and they just happen to have left identifying information in the Lithuanian farmhouse where the crime occurred and it just happens to be there years later even after Soviet occupation and looting and other horrors
so Hannibal gets to stalk them and begin revenge. (Good thing for Hannibal that post WW2 Paris was brimming over with eleven fingered [which Harris seems to forget, at least he never mentions it] maroon eyed eastern Europeans or one of them might recognize Hannibal as he interacts with them.
I won’t say skip it because if you’re like me you like completion of series, no matter how bad, but it’s just truly awful. In honor of Harris’s prior work I’ll give it a charity D, but if this were a new author it’d be a straight to the bargain bin F, and of course it’s already been made into a movie.
SO, what are your pics? You needn’t be as verbose if you don’t like.
