As Time Goes By by Mary Higgins Clark

Reviewed by Gerti

It’s a sad thing for this fan to admit, but Mary Higgins Clark is old. She has been writing thrillers for a very long time! And although “As Time Goes By” is a thrilling story written in her usual vein, it has some inaccuracies and idiosyncracies that I can only attribute to Clark not being “with it” in the modern sense. She probably isn’t on Facebook or Instagram, and it’s that sort of thing that sinks a book for the modern reader who is more acquainted with those technological advances than is Clark. For example, I had a hard time listening to her discussing TV journalist Delaney Wright’s job because I had worked in the broadcasting and many aspects of TV reporting and anchoring were portrayed clumsily here, as though Clark had little experience of it.

Another false note for me was the character named Singh Patel. Those are two last names from the Indian subcontinent, and it seemed odd that a character would have two last names, the English equivalent of naming your child “Smith Jones”. Perhaps it happens, but it is odd enough to make me think that Clark doesn’t know any people of Indian or Pakistani descent, and therefore just picked these names because they sounded foreign to her. Since she didn’t catch the awkward name herself, an editor should have caught and changed it.

But now that I’ve revealed my pet peeves, on to the highly implausible plot – A beautiful widow named Betsy Grant is accused of having murdered her wealthy older husband, a famed local surgeon laid low by early-onset Alzheimer’s. Delaney Wright is supposed to cover the trial, but is suddenly promoted to evening anchor. However, since she’s so great at reporting, they don’t want to take her off the court beat. And yet the news stories that Wright delivers about the trial are anything but fair! Wright would get fired for biased reporting if she really filed the news stories as Clark writes them here!

As a side plot, Delaney is obsessed with finding her birth mother. She was adopted illegally, so it’s hard to research, but those loveable lottery winners, Alvirah and Willy Meehan, are around to do the work for her. And as luck would have it, the accused murderess is her birth mother! Delaney was conceived at senior prom (could it be any other way?) and the boy didn’t even know Betsy was pregnant! Delaney stops reporting on the trial again, as now she would really be biased! And in another clumsy plot twist, Betsy just reconnected with her old prom date – and Delaney’s birth father – before her husband died, and they are again in love. But that info sounds awful when revealed during the murder trial!

There are other possible suspects in the doctor’s death – the other doctor’s in his practice, his shiftless son who is deeply in debt, that sort of thing. But the real problem with ATGB is that there are so many different “important issues” fighting for center stage here, the drama gets lost. Too many implausible coincidences and not enough fact checking turns NYC into Fantasy Island in this Clark novel.

 Extreme Prey by John Sandford

Reviewed by Gerti

Meet the latest author with whom I am obsessed! John Sandford is a gifted storyteller and his protagonist Lucas Davenport is every bit as thrilling as the renegade cop Harry Bosch created by Michael Connelly. And Sandford is proving to be an even more prolific writer, as he’s already cranked out 26 “Prey” novels, which is how you recognize this series when you see them on the library shelf.

“Extreme Prey” is the perfect story for this election year, as there is a strong female candidate running for president, and just like with Hillary Clinton, there are those fanatics out there who dislike her strongly. Members of one family dislike her enough to want to kill her, and when the radical group they are part of refuses to back any so-called “direct action”, Marlys Purdy and her son Cole prepare to do it on their own. And they’ve got the skills – Cole is a former military man who not only can shoot any number of weapons accurately, but he is also able to construct an IED. Candidate Michaela (Mike) Bowden is alerted to the threat, but she’s counting on Davenport to neutralize it before she walks unguarded around the Iowa State Fair.

Although Davenport is originally from Minnesota, he makes himself at home in the politically active state of Iowa, and gets help from all sorts of police agencies as he tracks down the attempted assassins. He’s got a number of other crimes to solve, too, as the leader of one radical organization, the Progressive People’s Party of Iowa (and his girlfriend) die when the Purdy’s see them as threats. Another PPPI org member knows too much about a dairy bombing decades earlier, and he also gets iced. His death is the work of another group member (who has her own reasons for the murder). Davenport interviews a ton of people, and it’s only Sandford’s clever writing and the fact that Davenport is such a brilliant but likeable scoundrel that keeps it all flowing.

Finally the day of the fair arrives, and although Davenport knows his chief suspects by sight, they allude him and set up camp before he gets there. Then it’s a race against time before the bloodbath begins. I won’t ruin the ending for you, but I will say it is worth reading, as every Sandford book I’ve touched seems to be so far. The ending is even a little ironic, as good and bad people die, yet no one second guesses the candidate on her decision to attend the Fair even though it cost innocent bystanders their lives. The reader is left with a moral question about where the fault for their death lies. Of course the assassins did their damage, but if Bowden hadn’t been stubborn and insisted on going to the event for PR reasons, blameless people would not have been injured or died.

Sandford is clever and his plots are intricate. His characters seem real, whether he’s writing about the police detectives, the politicians, or the people who lives on hard-scrabble farms. Don’t miss “Extreme Prey”! It’s a page-turner! 

 

The Last Coyote by Michael Connelly’s

Reviewed by Gerti

For Michael Connelly’s protagonist, former LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch, the coyote is a metaphor for himself. He is one of the lone survivors in the terrible urban landscape of LA, trying to get by on his cunning and stealth. This is true when he tries to live surreptitiously in his cantilevered house, which has been condemned after the latest earthquake, but which he refuses to leave. He has been left behind by his previous girlfriend, who went to Europe, and now has been suspended from his job and forced to see a police shrink because he attacked his commanding officer. To watch this rebel and loner navigate this treacherous situation and come out on top at the end is what makes “The Last Coyote” (despite the wacky title) one of Connelly’s best novels to date.

Lucky for Hieronymous “Harry” Bosch, he knows how to work the system. He knows that you don’t have to be a cop to act like a cop, and until they take away his badge and gun (and even after they do, actually) he works to crack a case ignored for decades – the murder of his prostitute mother. For true Bosch fans, this book will be a delight, since there has been so little background information given out about their favorite LA cop. We have seen snippets in other books by Connelly, but not until “The Last Coyote” do we get to see the true story of Bosch’s mother, including finding out who killed her and changed (I wouldn’t quite say ruined) Harry’s life forever. Like the coyote, he faces trouble and survives.

Like all great mystery and crime stories, there is misdirection as Harry follows the clues that ultimately lead him to a criminal he did not suspect. There is for him also the bittersweet joy of discovering who his mother’s true friends (and enemies) were, and of course overcoming the natural obstacles put up by trying to solve a decades old cold case. But if anybody can do it, Bosch can. He even figures out why so little effort was put into solving the murder case initially, and he gets to meet the man his mother loved, and planned to marry.

If you’re a Bosch and Connelly fan like I am, you won’t be able to put this book down, and I couldn’t, even though the 512 page it takes to tell the story seem like a lot. Stylistically, it’s classic Connelly, with a clear-cut, no-nonsense style you just never want to stop reading. And in terms of the plot – it’s his usual non-stop, heart-pounding action as curmudgeon-y detective Bosch takes readers through his process, knocking corrupt cops and two-timing friends out of the way as he goes toward his goal. Connelly shows his maturity as a writer, and “The Last Coyote” delivers a treat to his legion of fans, with us seeing the softer side of hard-nosed Bosch, and learning what it is that made him the man we love. The book is just that – a way for fans to spend a long evening with Bosch over a bottle of wine and some smooth jazz, listening to him slowly tell the sad tale of his life, and crying with him over the heartbreak of lost chances and double-dealing friends. One of Connelly’s best, and well worth the read.  

 

The Two Mrs. Grenvilles by Dominick Dunne

This novel by Dominick Dunne is everything the backcover blurbs promise – compelling, steamy, engrossing, fast-paced, and diverting. Dunne has a reputation for being on the inside when it comes to information about the rich and famous, and this novel is no departure from that. His tale takes a sexually promiscuous showgirl and turns her into a society stunner after she marries the only son and heir to the New York Grenville fortune.

While not an original plot, Dunne’s treatment of Urse Mertens, a little nobody from Pittsburg, Kansas who turns into Ann Arden Grenville, arbiter of style and member of the jet-set and ultimately murderess, is fascinating. Dunne writes well, and only a few glitches (like saying that someone is a direct relation to Katherine Howard, Henry VIII’s 5^th wife, who got her head cut off before she could produce any children for him) shows him to be fallible with the facts. His other details about the right place to buy one’s flowers, linens and clothes in New York, I’m hoping, are more en pointe.

Mostly, Dunne has a good sense for what makes people tick. His portraits not only of gold digger Ann, but of her stuffy mother-in-law Alice, and her hapless husband, Junior “Billy” Grenville, are rich and layered. He is not content to make them caricatures of themselves, but allows them to grow as people who make decisions and choices for very understandable human reasons, even if those decisions are not the right ones to make. Dunne shows Ann’s cleverness, which of course must face off against that of her wealthy boyfriend’s snobbish family. He shows their snobbishness, and that of their friends, but in the end it is only Ann’s crime that brings her back to being a person of little consequence.

It is not a short book, being over 300 pages, but it is an interesting one from beginning to end, as Ann is pursued by a writer who wants to know the truth behind the night her husband died, and to get a little revenge of his own for being marginalized by her years earlier. I sense hints of Truman Capote’s story here, a story Dunne would also know well, but he could be talking about his own experience of getting to the heart of high–profile, high-class crime.

I strongly recommend this book for adults, because some of the sexual escapades would probably be a bit much for young teens. I think you need to be a bit cynical to enjoy the story, which is a story of luck and ambition, both of which eventually run out for the younger Mrs. G. This would make a great book to take along to a spa or resort, because it will take you some hours of leisure living to get through, but you won’t want to put it down until you do.