Nineteen Minutes; The Onion Field; Every Day by the Sun; Bloody Valentines

I read Jodi Picoult's "Nineteen Minutes", which was great. Her books are so hard to read, though, physically exhausting. There were plenty of twists and turns I didn't see coming a mile away, which is typical of me. It reminded me of Lionel Shriver's "We Need to Talk About Kevin", and I loved that one. Peter and Josie were friends when they were little, but as they enter high school Josie has made her way into the popular crowd while Peter is picked on and bullied on a daily basis. Josie does nothing to stop her new friends from hurting her old one. Peter shows up to school one day with a backpack full of guns and starts shooting, and their small town is rocked to the core. I really loved the way she painted Peter's parents, because of course our inclination is to blame the parents of these kids, but Peter's parents are wonderful and caring and seem to do everything nearly right, whereas Josie's mom really screws things up but Josie still turns out okay. Or sort of okay, at any rate.
I've been meaning to read Joseph Wambaugh's classic true crime "The Onion Field" forever and finally did. I didn't like it as much as I thought I would. His style was like Capote's in "In Cold Blood", where he blended fiction and nonfiction into a hybrid type of style. I prefer my true crime straight forward and factual, I don't need to know what the author "thought" the criminal was thinking when he committed his crimes. At any rate, it was a very sad story of how two police officers were kidnapped and one was murdered by a couple of petty thieving scumbags back in 1963. I'd like to see the movie now.
In "Every Day by the Sun" Dean Faulkner Wells reminisced about her uncle, William, who helped raise her after her father, Dean, was killed in an unfortunate plane crash four months before she was born. It was a lovely, moving story of William Faulkner as "Pappy", a man, a breadwinner, the family patriarch, as opposed to just William Faulkner the writer. I'm totally in the mood for some Faulkner now! I missed rereading "The Sound and the Fury" this Easter, so I may have to do that soon.
And Melissa de la Cruz's Blue Bloods series takes an intermission in "Bloody Valentines", which is a short collection of short stories featuring the characters from her series. To be honest, her books are just too complicated for me, I can't keep track of what's going on and all the mythology behind the vampires, but this one wasn't too bad, since it was short bits.