Month: June 2020 (Page 1 of 2)

The Cold Dish – Craig Johnson
This is the time of year when I abandon my To Read list and seek out Best Summer Reads type lists online. One such list suggested this book, which was a nice spin on the detective procedural.

Walt Longmire is a sheriff in a small town in Wyoming. He is in his 50s, widowed, and spends too many nights pounding too many beers. He went to USC to play football, lost his deferment and got drafted into the Marines, who provided him with an all-expenses trip to Vietnam in the height of the war there. He is also very well read, and drops lots of lovely literary references into his conversations.

Just as he is about to start his first romance since his wife’s death, a couple of dead bodies show up in town. Both dead men were involved in a case several years earlier where a group of white teenage boys sexually assaulted a mentally challenged Native American girl from the neighboring reservation. Although the boys were convicted, there was outrage in the Indian community about the lightness of their sentences.

Longmire thus begins an uncomfortable search to find this assassin. Uncomfortable because he believes that justice was not served in the original case. Uncomfortable because his best friend may be a prime subject. Uncomfortable because of how it brings that old trial back to the attention of the community, which he hopes will elect his preferred successor when he retires before the next election.

There are some nice zigs and zags before the killer is identified. A solid read, although I don’t think I’ll read any more books in the series.

Last Days of Summer – Steve Kluger
This, on the other hand, was an utterly magical and delightful read. It was funny and deeply affecting.

It begins in 1940, with 12-year-old Joey Margolis having a very difficult time. His father has recently left Joey and his mother alone in Brooklyn for Manhattan and his new, younger wife. The neighborhood bullies use Margolis’ Jewish faith as an excuse to kick his ass on the regular. Looking for help, Margolis begins writing letters to the New York Giants rookie phenom third baseman Charlie Banks, claiming he has cancer and other illnesses in an effort to get Banks to both hit a home run for him and announce on the radio that Margolis is his friend. After a couple form-letter replies, Margolis tracks down Banks’ home address and writes him there, which elicits a somewhat put out response from Banks.

This kicks off a back-and-forth between the two that carries the book. The bulk of the story is told through letters between the two, through transcripts of Margolis’ meetings with a psychologist, his letters to the Roosevelt White House, and correspondence between his teachers and mother.

The correspondence between Margolis and Banks blossoms from contentious into a great friendship. Banks learns of the pain in Margolis’ life and speaks up for him to the bullies, stands in for Margolis’ father at his bar mitzvah, and eventually takes Margolis on a road trip as the Giants’ bat boy during the 1941 season. Through his mentoring of Margolis, Banks softens some of his harder views, comes to terms with the death of his brother, and learns how to appreciate his relationship with an actress/singer.

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor Banks enlists and the story takes a pretty predictable turn, which still hits hard despite knowing what is coming.

The relationship Margolis and Banks forge is extraordinary. They give each other shit and support in equal measures and help each other grow into more mature humans. Kluger perfectly captures that feeling of being a pre-teen, baseball obsessed American boy, while also getting just the right cultural touchtones to correctly place the story in that pre-war period.

I enjoyed the hell out of this book.

The Border – Don Winslow
For an author, finishing a trilogy has to be difficult. Especially when you didn’t set out to write a three-book series to begin with.

This is the final entry in Winslow’s excellent Power of the Dog series, in which he unfurls the epic story of the rise and fall of a Mexican drug empire and the forces that were aligned against it.

I think authors have two choices when writing a series: you can either tie each book closely together, make it necessary to read the previous entries to understand the latest one; or you can fill later editions with plenty of hooks back to the history laid down by earlier books, while still making them readable on their own.

Winslow takes the second tack. It would surely help to have read one or both of the first two Power of the Dog books, but you can also jump right into The Border and figure things out.[1] He jumps back in time often enough, without being distracting, to either catch up or brush up the reader.

As with every Winslow book I’ve read, I really enjoyed this. The Border brings the series up to the current moment in time. After four decades of chasing the Mexican cartel leaders, Art Keller has become the head of the DEA late in the Obama administration. He entered the job with a secret: a few years earlier he had killed Adan Barrera, the head of the most powerful cartel in Mexico, in the jungles of Guatemala. That murder set off a period of chaos on Mexico as the Sinaloa cartel began to disintegrate and a host of leaders attempted to claim more territory for their organizations.

Much of the book is about the machinations of those Mexican factions. Older bosses attempt to take Barrera’s place, while a younger generation is trying to push their way into power. They enter new alliances while always seeking to push themselves ahead of their partners. Winslow has a real gift for introducing a dizzying number of characters but always coming back to them and adding depth to their stories so that none of their stories are throw-aways.

In Washington, Keller is attempting to adjust the focus of the DEA, and American drug policy as a whole. That is not always a popular idea. Especially with an election ahead.

Ah, 2016. Winslow makes that year’s election, and its aftermath, a key component of the book. While Obama appears briefly as himself, a man named John Dennison stands in for our current president. Keller takes the elements of the Russian scandal and flips it to be about Mexican drug money. A lengthy, harrowing undercover operation eventually discovers direct ties between the son-in-law and the biggest Mexican cartel, which sets off a special counsel investigation and eventual constitutional crisis. If much of the series was about the ill effects of the War on Drugs on our country, this book becomes very much about our hyper-partisan political age in general, and our most corrupt president ever in particular.

I have to admit, I struggled with the political angle. I think Winslow could have brought in American politics without shifting into an examination of our Kleptocrat in Chief. That subject is so emotional that I think it distracted a little from the bigger story. I would rather Winslow have split that off into a separate novel.

While the big moments are full of drama and excitement, where the book really excels is in telling the stories of minor characters. We get peeks into the life of Jacqui, a Long Island junkie, and how her life spirals deeper into the abyss as her addiction takes a greater hold.

The minor character that most hit with me was Nico, a 10-year-old living in the slums of Guatemala who, after being forced to join a gang, flees for America. We follow him as he literally rides on top of a train through Guatemala and Mexico, losing friends and avoiding perils along the way, and then slips into the US only to be immediately captured and eventually sent to a juvenile correctional facility. The chapter of his life in juvie is one of the most fun and yet heartbreaking in the entire book. Eventually he lands with an aunt and uncle who are living illegally in New York, and just as he begins to carve out a normal, American life, he gets sucked into the world of gangs and slinging dope.

Winslow is not a brief writer. There are no quick asides. This book checks in at over 700 pages, and they’re not Stephen King 700 pages that read twice as fast. This book requires an investment from the reader, but it pays off.