Small Mercies – Dennis Lehane
According to my master reading list, it’s been eight years since I had read a Lehane novel. Which doesn’t seem possible, until I realized he’s only released one new novel in that span.
This story takes place in the summer of 1974, just before the city explodes when forced busing to desegregate Boston’s public schools takes effect. Mary Pat Fennessy’s teenage daughter disappears after a night out with friends, and no one wants to tell her what may have happened. Her daughter’s disappearance coincides with the death of the son of a Black co-worker. Fennessy has to go up against the biggest powers in Southie to determine what happened to both kids.
Lehane’s story is a pretty stark representation of racism in Boston (or any other city) where poor whites and Blacks were often pitted against each other for jobs and resources. To his credit he includes several characters who are pretty racist, but realize the hypocrisy in their racism.
Red Widow – Alma Katsu
It’s kind of crazy how many spy novels I read that are written by former CIA employees. This one is the latest addition to that list. It’s pretty spicy.
Katsu’s story is about an agent, placed on leave for having an affair with a British intelligence officer, who is brought in to help identify a possible Russian mole inside the CIA.
The spy’s identity is revealed pretty early before Katsu takes the reader on twist after twist after twist about the spy’s motivation, who knew about their deceit, who covered for whom, who is turning on whom, and so on.
Those twists are the story’s strengths. While they may be a bit over-the-top, they combine to result in a pretty engaging tale.
The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal – Laine Nooney
In this book I was expecting something more focused on the general coolness of the Apple II and other computers of that era.
Instead, after going through a quick history of the computer industry up to the 1977 Trinity of the Apple II, the TRS–80, and the Commodore PET 2001, Nooney explores how the market for software specifically built for the Apple II changed the entire computer industry. People were struggling to understand how these cool, but very expensive, new objects could be used to improve their lives. It was the development of software made for specific purposes that began to make the personal computer integral to people’s homes.
Nooney’s account is more academic than I expected. It reads a little dry. At times it veers too far into critique of consumer capitalism. It’s not my favorite book written about that era, but I added some new knowledge along the way.
City of Dreams – Don Winslow
Book two of Winslow’s Danny Ryan trilogy. He sticks with the style of the first: short, choppy sentences and limited descriptions. I have to say I enjoy reading that style, as I can knock out a book in about two nights.
However the story is not as good as in his longer, more expressive books about the Mexican drug cartels. There’s plenty of material to mine in the conflict between the Italian and Irish mafias of Providence, RI. But perhaps the brevity of his writing here takes away from its impact. It reads as rushed and unfinished, as more of an exercise to get away from his traditional style than an effort to crank out a well formulated story.
Reptile Memoirs – Silje Ulstein
Whoooo, this book! It begins a little slow, bouncing back-and-forth across a 15 year period among a small group of characters in Norway, one of which is a tiger python. Eventually it becomes clear that two of those characters are actually the same person, appearing under two different names in two parts of her life. Shortly after that reveal things go crazy. And keep getting crazier. There was a moment, roughly two-thirds of the way through the book, when I let out a gasp followed by an appreciative laugh. There are several shocking, “Holy Shit!” moments throughout the back half of the story.
This book is dark and disturbing. There will be some people who probably can’t or shouldn’t read it (Semi-spoiler alert: if you can’t read about violence against children you should skip). But if you can deal with the extreme darkness, it is a hell of a story, one of the more unique and memorable ones I’ve come across recently.