The Crown; The Last Stand; The Flight Attendant

I am totally obsessed with the Netflix show "The Crown" (fair warning: there are probably going to be a lot of books about the royal family in the upcoming weeks). This was a companion guide which helped separate fact from fiction on the show, along with pictures of the actors and the real life people they portray. It was a fun, quick read and I'm hoping they do it for every season of the show. This one just covered the first season.

Max Allan Collins polished up a few of Mickey's manuscripts to publish for the 100th anniversary of his birthday. This book contained two novellas, an early one and his "last" one. The first was the early Spillane, called "A Bullet For Satisfaction". A cop named Rod gets a little too close to discovering the truth about the Syndicate and their hold on his small town, and is fired for his trouble. He continues investigating, though, determined to bring the corruption to an end. "The Last Stand" was really different, but I enjoyed it. Set after 2001, a pilot named Joe crashes in the desert on an Indian reservation and is rescued by Pete. Pete takes him home and introduces him to his gorgeous sister, Running Fox. Joe and Running Fox fall for each other, but there's the little matter of a mineral deposit the government (and the bad guys) are keen to get their hands on and Joe knows where to find. Both were great, fun reads. I'm going to be sad when Collins runs out of Spillane's manuscripts to publish.

And finally, "The Flight Attendant" by Chris Bohjalian. Cassie is a flight attendant (shocking, I know! who would have guessed with that title?!) who makes terrible decisions. Like, horrible, awful, stupid, forehead slapping "why the $#@! did you do that?!" sort of decisions. She's an alcoholic who won't admit she has a drinking problem. She goes out binge drinking and sleeps with random guys as a matter of course. She wakes up one morning in Dubai after a night of hard drinking and finds her bed mate, Alex, murdered next to her. She panics, dives out of bed and rushes back to her own hotel, eager to get out of Dubai and back home before the body is found (okay, so that was a smart decision. It was her last one). She's *pretty* sure she didn't kill him in her blacked out state, but who knows? She hires an attorney who gives her excellent advise that she promptly ignores.
You know who Cassie reminded me of? My dad. My dad makes the dumbest decisions on the planet and yet always manages to come up smelling like roses. If I were Cassie, the ending wouldn't have been nearly as happy as it was. It kind of irritated me, because it always irritates me when stupid people make stupid mistakes and still end up okay in the end, I mean, if you make a bad decision and learn from it and DON'T DO IT AGAIN that's one thing, but if you persist in being dumb and everything still turns out okay for you, it's kind of frustrating. Oh well. It sounds like I didn't enjoy the book, but I really did, it was, as usual for Bohjalian, well written and entertaining. I'm just jealous I'm not as lucky :)

Rumble Tumble

Brett finds out her daughter, Tillie, who is a prostitute, is in a really bad situation, trapped on a remote ranch in Mexico, servicing a rough bunch of biker gang members. Hap offers to help extract Tillie, and of course Leonard has to go along for the ride. Things get messy, but they do manage to get out mostly intact and with Tillie, although they do leave behind a bunch of people who don't fare as well.

We Were the Lucky Ones; Raspberry Danish Murder

I resisted reading "We Were the Lucky Ones", because books about the Holocaust always make me cry. I finally broke down and checked it out, and I'm glad I did because it was so good. Yes, I cried a lot too, but it was worth it. Based on her own family's true story, the Kurc family lives in Poland at the start of World War II. Middle son Addy (Hunter's grandfather) is in France, working, when he gets the bad news that Poland has been invaded and taken over by Hitler's army. He worries about his parents, who own a successful fabric shop, and his siblings, but has no way to reach them. The book follows individual members the family for nearly a decade, as they manage to stay alive and out of the Gestapo's clutches. Addy ends up in Brazil, and after the war ends the family is reunited. Hunter learned about their history after her grandfather's death, and was surprised, since he'd never talked about it. She was determined that their amazing story of survival be told.

And now I'm all caught up with Hannah. Ross has disappeared, and Hannah fears the worst after his assistant, P.K., is murdered. The police find that P.K. was drugged from a box of candy that was left on Ross's desk. So the question is: was the candy meant for Ross or P.K.?
A couple of things in this book annoyed me to no end. Like the amount of food these people eat. I mean, my God. How do they not all weigh 300 pounds? Seriously. Between the never ending cookies, they're always popping off to grab dinner somewhere (and have appetizers, bread, and a dessert or two) before heading home to Hannah's condo where they have to try a new cookie recipe. I mean, I felt sick to my stomach during some of her descriptions of what they ate in a single day. Ugh.
And the sly bit of business about P.K.'s real name. They joked about it, but didn't actually tell us what it was. Not cool. I mean, I figured it out (Porter Kirby) but c'mon.
It ended on a cliffhanger, when we discover Ross was not the man we all thought. HA! (proudly re-raises my Team Norman flag).

Clue; The True Death of Billy the Kid; Banana Cream Pie Murder

I love, love, love the 1985 film "Clue", based on the classic board game, it's such a great movie. This graphic novel had a lot of the same elements (and inside jokes--the detective says she's going to go home and sleep with her wife, much like Mr. Green did at the end of the film. Such a great line). A group of people with no apparent connection gather at the mansion of a mysterious man named Mr. Boddy and one by one, they start dying. Two detectives show up, and because of the raging storm outside no one can get in or out. The case is solved and the ending was funny.

A super quick (I think it took me 10 minutes to read it) graphic novel about the life and death of Billy the Kid. I have a book by Geary about the Borden murders, and since I'm a Billy the Kid aficionado I figured I'd give this one a whirl. For someone who doesn't know anything about the Kid, it would be a nice way to introduce them to the subject, since it covers all the high points without getting into too much detail.

And finally, back to Hannah! She and Ross are back from their honeymoon and settling into married life. It seems to be a lot like single life: Ross is gone a few nights on out of town trips, and when he is home he goes to bed early while Hannah and Michelle are out investigating the latest Lake Eden murder: Mayor Bascomb's sister, Tori. Michelle's school lets her come direct the play that Tori was supposed to be working on, so she camps out at Hannah and Ross's condo, which...I mean, they're *newlyweds*. You maybe want to give them a little privacy? I mean, jeez. At any rate, it hardly matters since Ross is seriously never home. Hannah doesn't have a lot of suspects for Tori's murder, and the ones she does have she's able to quickly eliminate. I actually got the ending of this one about 2/3 of the way through (Fluke dropped a pretty big hint that even I was able to pick up on). The book ends with Ross mysteriously disappearing--my guess is that Fluke didn't quite know what to do with Hannah now that she's not torn between Norman and Mike. Yeah, I'm not sure either, hon. Good luck.

Bad Chili; Darling Buds of May; Walking Dead Vol. 29: Lines We Cross

Hap comes back to Texas after working for several months on an offshore oil rig and promptly gets bitten by a rabid squirrel. Good job, Hap. Are you literally trying to get yourself killed? At any rate, his overpriced medical insurance sucks, so he has to check into the hospital and stay in order to get his rabies shots. It's not all bad, though, he meets a lovely nurse named Brett and the sparks fly. Charlie comes to visit him with some distressing news: Leonard went after a biker who his ex-boyfriend Raul took up with, Horse Dick. Horse Dick is dead and Leonard is missing, the cops are hunting him on the assumption he killed Horse Dick. Hap leaves to go find Leonard, and the two of them somehow end up embroiled in a horrible mess of people who film gay people getting beat up and sell it underground. Apparently it's big business, which is just sickening. A whole lot of bad stuff going on in this one, but the ending was really good.

I saw a movie on TCM a few weeks ago called "The Mating Game", starring Debbie Reynolds and Tony Randall, and it was so adorable and charming. I went online and found out it was loosely based on a series of books by H. E. Bates, and luckily my library owned it. There were three novellas in this book. The first one is the one the movie was based on: a tax collector named Charlton comes to the Larkin farm in the English countryside to figure out why Sid Larkin has never paid taxes. The Larkins live a life most of us can only dream of: yes, they work hard on the farm, but they also believe in eating, drinking, dancing, partying, and basically having a good old time. Soon Charlton is smitten with oldest daughter Mariette, and they end up married. The second novella finds the Larkins traveling to France for a holiday. And the third has Pop selling the big manor house he acquired for a song to a couple from the city who think they can make a go of the country life. They were fun, delightful stories and much needed to lighten the mood after Hap and Leonard.

The survivors are rebuilding after the Whisperer attack, and Rick finds out Eugene has been communicating via radio to a woman in Ohio. He decides to send a group to go meet with this woman and her group and see if they can forge some mutual bonds of interest. Michonne offers to go, and even though Rick doesn't want her to, she does anyway. He's still pretty torn up about Andrea dying, and lets Negan go, much to Maggie's horror. Carl returns to the hillside camp to help them rebuild and Lydia is jealous of his relationship with Sophia. Uh oh. I see trouble brewing there. Michonne and her group find a girl named Princess living on her own on their way to Ohio and let her tag along, she seems like a character. Wondering how long she'll survive.

The Listener; Dear Fahrenheit 451

I was pleasantly surprised at how good "The Listener" by Robert McCammon was. I've never read anything by him before, and I was expecting a decent horror story, but it was much more than that. It takes place in the 1930s, during the Depression. A con artist, known as Pearly, and a woman he hooked up with, Ginger, decide to kidnap a couple of kids and squeeze their wealthy businessman father for a hefty ransom. What they didn't count on was the daughter, Nilla, being a "listener": Nilla can hear and talk telepathically to others who share the same gift (or curse, depending on how you feel about it). Nilla talks to Curtis, a young, hardworking black man. When Nilla and her brother Jack are kidnapped by Pearly, Ginger, and her nephew Donnie, Nilla sends Curtis a distress signal. He receives it and promises to help her, but he's in the unenviable position of trying to first of all, get an audience with a powerful white man, and secondly convince him he's not a lunatic. Like I said, it was really, really good and suspenseful, the characters were very well written. Great read, I might have to check out more of his work

In the Library world, whenever a librarian gets a book published (spoiler alert: most of us are frustrated writers who never get published) the rest of us all squee and go "You have to read this book! A LIBRARIAN wrote it!".
This is what happened with Annie Spence's book, "Dear Fahrenheit 451". The first half was love (or break up letters) to books she's read and liked or disliked, the second half was more suggestions for reading. It was a super quick read, and while it wasn't bad...I hate to criticize a fellow librarian. But for me, her tone was just too casual and familiar. It grated on me, her little cutesy phrases and way of talking. And then with the "Virgin Suicides" by Jeffrey Eugendies. It's, apparently, her favorite book of all time. Great. I've read it, it's a good book, I enjoyed it. But she literally mentions it 1,000,000 times. I imagine it's how I would be, if I were writing a book about books *I* liked. It would be "Sound and the Fury" every other page and everyone would be rolling their eyes. I probably wouldn't have bothered with it, if it hadn't been written by a librarian, but that being said it wasn't terrible. Just not my cup of tea.

I'll Be Gone in the Dark

So many books exist about certain unsolved crimes: the Zodiac, the Black Dahlia, Jack the Ripper. Michelle McNamara was obsessed with another criminal who isn't nearly as well known, although he committed more than 50 rapes and murdered twelve people in California during the 1970s and 80s. McNamara unfortunately passed away almost two years ago, leaving her book unfinished, but what she had put together was quite good. It's a shame she died, I would have enjoyed reading more of her writing. The case is still unsolved, and the killer, if he is still alive, would be an old man by now. It would still be nice to know who did it. He has a very unusual DNA type, but it seems unlikely that any new suspect would be found to test at this late date. Detectives, both professional and armchair, are still hunting for him, so we'll see. As far as true crimes books go, though, this one is definitely a winner.