Good Books...

_Look Again_ by Lisa Scottoline. Truly frightening premise: What would you do if you had a child adopted before his second birthday and a couple of years later a picture (age progressed) looking just like him showed up on a post card for a child missing since his first birthday?

_Dead Beat_ and _Proven Guilty_ by Jim Butcher. A weekend with Harry Dresden, Murphy and the gang. I had missed these two and a couple of later books in the series make a lot more sense now. These books consistently make me laugh.

_Ford County: Stories_ by John Grisham. He did his own reading on this and probably shouldn't have. He's not bad at it--he'd be great in a bookstore reading--but a full unabridged book seems a bit flat with him.

That said, I liked the book a lot. Some nice "slice of life" stories that often end abruptly, emphasizing that there will be stuff happening the next day, but it's just not included in this story.

The first story was sort of an updated version of "The Reivers... See More", the second could have been an included subplot of something like _A Time for Dying_. I loved the breaking of the casino tale. Something about the matter-of-fact telling helped overcome the underlying absurdity of the quick change of the protagonist from milque-toast to card-counter and let the "I want to get my woman back" theme dominate.

Actually, several of the stories seemed to be such that typical Grisham novels could be written using the story. In particular, the story of the nursing home attendant both documenting abuses and defrauding the estates of patients at the same time had a _Runaway Jury_ feel to it.

The final story about the young gay son of one of Clanton's aristocratic white families returning in the late 1980s dying of AIDS who can only find a place to stay with an elderly black woman was meant to be a tear-jerker, and really was. It, too, seemed to have the same feel as a novel, in this case, _The Last Juror_.

This format was a good fit for Grisham. His novels' plots are generally nothing to write home about-they're ok, but there are thriller writers that can plot circles around him. Where he shines, in my mind, is in the _sweetness_ of his characters-never fully bad, never fully good, but always trying to live life in a sometimes awkward situation. And if he has stories like this in his background of Ford County, I can see why the novels he sets there seem so full.

_Nine Dragons_ by Michael Connelly. Always nice to spend time with Harry Bosch, especially with a cameo appearance of Mickey Haller. Harry investigates the murder of a Chinese store owner and has unexpected revenge taken on him. Watch as Harry investigator turns into Harry rampaging father and turns his brain off too much.

_The Prestige_ by Christopher Priest. Quite different from the movie, not as dark in some ways, yet at the same time more in a horror genre. Leaves lots of unanswered questions. Still, I liked the presentation from different points of view that kept embellishing the story, making it morph from previous tellings into something more mysterious and complex.

_The Child Thief_ by Brom. Astonishing. Brutal beyond belief. Mystical and deeply touching. Angry and funny and gory and inspired and frightening and renewing. Peter Pan and Avalon and Irish, Welsh, Finnish legend, pimps and pushers and trolls and Puritans and New York kids in Faery. Death and death and death and rebirth.

_A Study in Scarlet_ by Arthur Conan Doyle. I've re-read many of the Sherlock Holmes short stories over years, but it's been decades since I read this--long enough to confuse it with _The Sign of the Four_ and actually be a bit surprised from time to time with what I'd forgotten! Not a good book for Mormons,... though, which is something I didn't consider in my teens.

_America Libre_ by Raúl Ramos y Sánchez. Story of the launching of a new civil war in the US pitting Hispanic (declared "Class H" citizens) against an increasingly repressive US government sliding from social to political oppression. Most disturbing, I guess, is the ease with which this incremental slide can... be imagined in this time when jingoism seems to rule the airwaves.

Oh, about the book...was actually reminiscent, surprisingly, of the early techno-thrillers. Not that it is one, but it has the step by step inevitability of assembling the resources and coalescence of events that Tom Clancy might have done in _Red Storm Rising_.

Unfortunately, the depth of characterization was about the same, too. Only Manolo ... See Morehas any real inner conflict and even that just seemed to me to be there to reinforce his "good man in a bad situation" role.

I'd run into the acquisition of the Southwest by Anglos just showing up and taking it in things as diverse as histories and Louis L'Amour's Sackett novels. I'd never taken the logical step, though, of considering that perhaps what gets called "illegal immigration" might, in reality, in many cases be "repatriation."