Finished The Fated Sky last night. It’s the sequel to The Calculating Star, an alt-history in which the space program takes off a couple decades early and is far more ambitious than the real one. Deals with a lot of social justice issues in the context of a rocketing-along plot. I liked this one better than the first, which I also thought was pretty good.
It has a pretty profound moral, though: don’t ever, ever, ever get food poisoning in zero G. Christ almighty.
I had a pretty quiet Memorial Day weekend, and so I was able to finish two novels.
The first was Cari Mora by Thomas Harris. I started it almost reluctantly because it has very mixed reviews, and also because Harris sometimes goes overboard with violence and repellent characters. But I actually wound up enjoying it quite a bit. Unlike his other novels, it’s a quick read with a relatively simple plot that resolves itself quite abruptly. Lots of violence, but it mostly involves bad guys getting what’s coming to them, which is less disturbing to me than innocent people being violated. If I had to summarize the book in a sentence, I’d say it’s as if Harris decided to take it easy for a change and write a Dean Koontz novel. And since he’s a much better writer than Koontz, the result was good enough to entertain me.
The second title was The River by Peter Heller. It’s one of those novels that straddle the line between literature and thriller. It’s been compared to Deliverance, and that’s pretty apt. Two college students take the summer off to float down a river in Canada. And because of the thriller aspect, they of course encounter shady people along the way and rescue an injured woman who needs to get to a hospital. Not only that, but a distant, gigantic forest fire appears to be heading directly into their path. Much drama ensues. I was not completely satisfied with the ending, but it’s an enjoyable read, especially since Heller obviously knows his way around the outdoors and shows it in an entertaining way.
Last night I finished Helene Tursten’s An Elderly Lady is Up to No Good, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I actually could have done with one or two more short stories. I remain highly amused by the title, and am now leaning toward naming my jazz album (when I finally record one) Up to No Good. 
I had a little trouble picking what to read next, but settled on Uncommon Type: Some Stories by Tom Hanks (yes, *that *Tom Hanks). Another short story collection, coincidentally. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started reading the sample on my Kindle, but it turns out that I like Hanks’s writing style enough that I bought the book when the sample ended. I’m about halfway through the first story.
Managed to finish The House Children, but I’m sorry to say it was a stinker. The writing had a very flat affect throughout. “This thing happened. I felt sad. Then this other thing happened. I was happy.” And to top it off, there was a list of discussion questions in the back of the book! I did feel as if I’d just finished a school assignment. Call this my book report.
Finished The Kremlin’s Candidate, by Jason Matthews. The final installment of his Red Sparrow trilogy. In this one, a Russian mole is poised to be named director of the CIA by a president who hates his intelligence services anyway – sound familiar? That’s not a spoiler, the mole is named on the very first page. The suspense comes from seeing whether the protagonists can learn who she is in time, before the mole is confirmed and can see that the head of Russian foreign counterintelligence is herself a US mole. Very good overall. A couple of offhand remarks appear to show Matthews is not a big climate-change believer, and that’s disappointing. But he is himself ex-CIA and knows the ins and outs of spycraft, and the story is a good one. Some of the action takes place in Hong Kong, which I’ve not visited this century. But I was there several times in the 1990s, both before and after the handover, and his description of the place brings back memories. One protagonist even stops in at Delaney’s, which I’m glad to read is still there, although it is an Irish pub and not an English pub like he mistakenly calls it. The five-star Peninsula Hotel figures large, and the wife and I have stopped in there at the bar for a drink. A fitting end to the trilogy, although something of a shocker ending.
Have started Freewheel: #HonoluluLaw, #FamousTriathlete, & a #Charity, by Katharine M. Nohr, the second of her own trilogy and sequel to Land Sharks. She is a local attorney and writer. You may remember she’s the one whose Land Sharks I got from her at a Christmas-party gift exchange last December. She is the friend of a friend, and when she heard I liked the first book, she loaned me a copy of the second through our mutual friend. The heroine of the series is a young lawyer/triathlete in Honolulu who solves sports-related crimes while dating a TV star of a show in the vein of Hawaii Five-0 or Magnum P.I.
Finished it, and I’d give it a B. Although I learned quite a bit about Jones (I hadn’t know how often he had to deal with disobedient officers and near-mutinous crews, or his on-shore reputation as a ladies’ man), I’m afraid Thomas is no McCullough, Chernow or Ellis in his storytelling skills.
I also just zipped through Jim Lehrer’s (yes, the PBS guy) novel Top Down, about a Dallas reporter trying to help one of JFK’s Secret Service detail, tormented five years later by his decision to remove the bubbletop roof of the President’s limo. Interesting premise, but meh writing.
I’m now about two-thirds through Robert A. Heinlein’s 1951 bodysnatcher novel The Puppet Masters, which isn’t as good as I remember but is still a good read.
My all-time favorite Holmes pastiches are by the late June Thomson - her short stories were as good as Conan Doyle’s best IMHO. Start out with The Secret Files of Sherlock Holmes.
June thread?