Talented Mr. Ripley

 

I started watching "Ripley" on Netflix (which is really good, by the way), and decided I needed to read the book before I finished watching the show. 

Thomas Ripley is a low-key con artist living in New York and posing as a collection agency in order to deceive people into sending him money. He runs into Herbert Greenleaf at a bar. Herbert is the father of an acquaintance of Ripley's, Dickie Greenleaf. Dickie has gone off to Europe and shows no signs of returning home. Herbert hires Ripley to go find him and convince him to come home. 

You cringe for Ripley a lot in this book, because he's super awkward and doesn't do anything right, yet he somehow manages to make it work and come out on top. He wasn't particularly clever, just lucky and quick on his feet. The suspense lies in whether or not he's going to get caught in his lies and deceptions. I won't spoil it, but there are sequels, so you can make of that what you will about the ending. 

Middle of the Night

 

Riley Sager's latest was great. Ethan's best friend, Billy, disappeared in the middle of the night out of the tent in Ethan's backyard where the 10 year olds were camping. He was never found. The police didn't have a lot of suspects, and the case went cold.

Thirty years later, Ethan is still plagued by nightmares about that night. He's recently moved back into his childhood home after his parents have relocated to Florida. Ironically, all of the original homeowners (other than Billy's parents) are still in the neighborhood. 

Told in alternating chapters between 1994 and 2024, there are plenty of Sager's red herrings and unexpected twists and turns. It had a satisfying conclusion. 

Lowdown Road

 

This was so much fun! 

It's 1974 and cousins Chuck and Dean are on the run from Texas with stolen marijuana, headed for Idaho where Evel Kneviel is planning to jump his motorcycle over a canyon. Hot on their tails are the drug dealer whose weed they stole, a crazy lawman from Texas who's angry they killed his mistress, and a pissed off biker that Chuck puked on after downing a gigantic steak.

If you're looking for a happy ending, this one's not for you. But if you like nonstop violence and situations where everything that could go wrong does, then you'll enjoy it. 

The House that Horror Built; The Canceling of the American Mind

 

This was a fun one. Harry is a single mom living in the Chicago area with her teenage son, Gabe. After the pandemic shut down the restaurant where she worked, she felt lucky to land a job cleaning house for Javier Castillo. Castillo is a horror movie director and has a house full of memorabilia and props, including a rather creepy costume from one of his movies that seems to move on its own. Harry is about to be evicted from her apartment (the landlord sold it to a developer) and is panicking about finding a new place she can afford. 

Harry is a really good mom. She doesn't want to worry Gabe and she sacrifices everything to make his life better. Which is why she reluctantly accepts Castillo's offer for her and Gabe to move into his big house temporarily. 

Castillo has a dark backstory: his son was wanted for questioning in a young lady's murder, and he disappeared, along with Castillo's wife. Castillo fled L.A. and moved to Chicago. Harry is convinced the house is haunted. The pacing on this book was super slow until almost the very end, but other than that I enjoyed it. 

It seems like no one is immune from Cancel Culture. A seemingly minor mistake made decades earlier as a teen can come back and destroy your life. It's a scary thought. I wish there were better solutions then just "raise your kids not to run to adults to fix everything" and "wait it out". I have no solutions, but I'm holding out hope someone does. 

Demon of Unrest

Sadly, I didn't love this one as much as the last few by Larson. It was still good, just a little disappointing. It felt like he was really reaching at times. 

Larson looks back at Fort Sumter and how the Civil War officially began. He describes events leading up to Lincoln's election, how the North and South started splitting apart long before 1860. President Buchanan, who preceded Lincoln, had a few opportunities to do something and instead decided to ignore the turmoil and let the new guy deal with it. Which he did, of course, and quite well. The most striking figure in the story is Major Anderson, who held the fort against all odds. It was, without a doubt, one of the saddest stories I've read, knowing the outcome and how many lives were lost. It was a shame that the South couldn't be persuaded to peaceably free the ones they'd enslaved. 
 

Mecca

 

I heard author Susan Straight speak at an event and was intrigued by the excerpt of this book that she read out loud. It sounded very interesting, so I checked it out. It was pretty good. 

Motorcycle CHP officer Johnny Frias rescued a woman who was being assaulted back in 1999. He ended up killing the abuser, but the woman took off before he could say anything to her. He buried the body and discovered the woman left behind her purse. He tried a few times to deliver it to her, only to be thwarted. 

Twenty-one years later, it's 2020 and the pandemic hits. Johnny is still with the CHP, helping his dad out in the canyons of Southern California, where he and all his friends grew up. There were a lot of threads woven together in this story, including the woman who Johnny rescued. I really like Straight's writing style, she's very descriptive without being repetitive. She is coming out with a sequel to this book, so something to look forward to!

Princess of Las Vegas

 

I enjoyed Bohjalian's latest, the "Princess of Las Vegas". Crissy is an impersonator at an off-strip hotel called the Buckingham Palace, and as you might have guessed, she recreates Princess Diana. Her younger sister, Betsy, is a social worker in Vermont who just adopted a thirteen year old foster kid named Marisa. Betsy's new boyfriend, Frankie, is into cryptocurrency and convinces Betsy to move to Las Vegas with him. 

Betsy and Crissy aren't exactly close, despite the fact that they look alike (this fact was overemphasized, so I knew it would come into play later on in the book, and it did). Frankie is in deep with some dangerous people and he needs Betsy's help to stay out of it.  Unfortunately that means framing Crissy. It was interesting, didn't delve too much into the nitty-gritty of crypto (which I have no desire to know more about), and had a satisfying ending.