9 Dragons by Michale Connelly

Reading Level: Adult Fiction

Submitted by Gerti

This is the second novel I’ve now read by Michael Connelly, and his writing once again impresses me. In this iteration, I met for the first time homicide detective Harry “Hieronymous” Bosch, who apparently is the hero of many of Connelly’s LAPD crime novels. In this story, Bosch is trying to solve the murder of a liquor store owner, a man who showed him a kindness many years before during the riots in LA in which Bosch’s partner was killed. The victim’s name here is John Li, and he and his wife ran Fortune Liquors in a tough south LA neighborhood. His son Robert runs another, more successful store in suburban Sherman Oaks.

At first, the police think the killing is merely a liquor store robbery gone wrong, but Bosch thinks there is more to it - that perhaps Li was killed when he couldn’t make his weekly payment to the Triads. But Bosch’s attempts to investigate are stymied as he experiences difficulties working with the men in the Asian Gang Unit who think he is prejudiced against them, even though Bosch knows China pretty well as he has family living in Hong Kong. But he rapidly gets an in-depth course in Chinese culture when his teenaged daughter Maddie is kidnapped, and Bosch must fly half way across the world to free her.

He gets some help from his ex and her new boyfriend Sun Yee, who used to be a Triad member after growing up in a poor area of Kowloon, which is where the title “9 Dragons” comes from. Bosch goes through many trials and tribulations with Sun Yee by his side as he comes to the terrible realization that the kidnappers plan to sell his daughter for her organs, and the clock on her rescue is winding down. Much like Liam Niessen in the movie “Taken”, Bosch leaves many bad guy bodies in his wake while trying to solve the mystery of where his daughter is being kept.

Eventually, Madeline is saved and bundled onto a plane back to the States, while Bosch puzzles out the details of the case and how her kidnapping is tied to the Li murder. Initially, he thought she was kidnapped after he put a Triad member in jail, but Bosch finally gets it right, after typical Connelly twists, turns and misdirection. Detective Bosch gets his man when he realizes that filial piety is not all it’s cracked up to be - his daughter and some of her friends (now dead) planned the fake kidnapping (until it went wrong), and the children of the store owner are behind his death.

I strongly recommend “9 Dragons” to anyone who likes a good crime story. This book is different than another story about Harry Bosch (“The Concrete Blonde”) that I’ve just read, because it has that fascinating international crime element which I don’t think many Americans know about. But bottomline, it’s a great read because Connelly has a brilliant way with words, and I’ll include one example here from page 1 – “She watched the clock like the owner of a candy store watches the fat kids.” Yes, Virginia, Michael Connelly really knows how to write.

Blood Work by Michael Connelly

Reading Level: Adult Fiction

Submitted by Gertie

This is the first novel I have ever read by Michael Connelly, and I have to say that I am impressed. I usually don’t read crime or detective stories, but this one caught my eye in the library bookroom, and I’m glad it did. Apparently, Connelly is a former LA crime reporter who not only has a good, clear style of writing, but is also quite a storyteller. One of the only critiques I have of “Blood Work” is that I had already seen one aspect of the plot in a Robin Cook book before, as his novel “Blindsight” deals with mobsters killing their way down a list of people on an organ donation list to make sure their boss survives. But Connelly doesn’t stop there – he adds a twist to that plotline that makes this story his own again.

Here the protagonist is former FBI detective Terrell “Terry” McCaleb, who recently got a heart transplant from a woman killed in a convenience store robbery. Her sister, Graciela Rivers, comes to him to help solve the crime, since the LA detectives working it seem to have hit a dead (no pun intended) end. He helps her out of a sense of obligation – her sister died so he might live. He has no idea until the end of the book how very right this assessment of the crime is. He does fall for her, and of course they end up sleeping together, which I expected, but found mildly irritating. (Can’t men and women just work together on a project without having sex?) However, Connelly doesn’t make it a big deal, and the sexual details are minor and relatively inoffensive to those with sensitive tastes.

Aided by Graciela and Buddy, his hippyish houseboat neighbor, Terry goes through the old case file of the crime, visiting locations, and re-interviewing witnesses. He finds a connection with another murder, this one at an ATM, and follows up on that one as well. When a third murder is connected to the same weapon, Terry sees the big picture at last, but the killer has a few surprises up his sleeve for him, too, including planting evidence on his houseboat that makes the FBI think Terry committed the crimes to get a new heart, and an escape to Mexico where a final showdown takes place.

Half Sherlock Holmes, half Columbo, Terry works his way through the evidence with logic and gut instinct, thrilling readers like me with his inside knowledge of cops and how crime solving actually works. Since I’m unfamiliar with the genre, the language and politics were fascinating to me, and the writing was good enough that I’ve already requested other Connelly novels to read during the Christmas vacation. I strongly recommend “Blood Work” if you like a crime story where the good guys win out, but which also contains lots of plot twists and odd moments of humor.

The Children's Blizzard by David Laskin

Reading Level: Adult Non-Fiction

Submitted by Gerti

Because of the huge winter storm that came through Northwest Indiana this week, I figured it was the perfect time to read about the blizzard of January 12^th, 1888. It took place in Dakota and Nebraska, and killed between a few hundred and a thousand people, especially school children, who were often on their way home when the blinding snow and below-zero temps descended on the Plains.

David Laskin’s “The Children’s Blizzard” details that horrible episode in US history, and instead of laying blame on the national weather service (which didn’t exist at the time), he shows why the “Signal Corps” which predicted the weather back then failed to predict much of anything. Laskin shows how the person most often blamed for failing to warn people, Lieutenant Woodruff, was just an honest man caught in the infighting taking place between college professors and governmental opportunists, none of whom could really predict the weather at all. From information given, it shows that Woodruff had actually made inroads into understanding how a polar vortex could come from Canada to kill school kids in the Plains. He also understood what lower barometric pressures indicated, and how cold and warm fronts interacted, even though fronts would not even be named for another 30 years. So Laskin details the early history of meteorology, and the nature of global weather itself, although at times those paragraphs were really hard to get through.

More entertaining for me were the stories of the school kids and their families, which often included why those families left Europe to come to the settle on free farmland in the Plains. These stories were easy to read, and engaging emotionally, as I read hoping against hope that certain children would live through the storm. Laskin definitely sees the big picture, as he linked the whole tragedy to the greed of various wealthy and often unscrupulous businessmen (namely those running railroads) who wanted to make money from passengers and therefore advertised this second Eden in Europe, despite the fact that running a successful farm on the American Plains was never a sure thing. We know that 100+ years later, but in the 1880s, many people thought success was simply a matter of hard work and stick-to-it-iveness, which sadly, it was not.

It is obvious through the passage of time to see how the tragedy occurred, and how the death of so many children was the perfect storm of meteorology in its infancy, and an immigrant populous with little experience of the Plain’s vicious weather. But like any tragedy, so much turns on the decision of the moment - parents who refused to let children go to school that day, children who ran outside when they should have stayed inside the safe and warm school buildings - but the true message is that so much is random, and no one could predict that morning which decisions would mean life or death. I did, however, learn a lot about hypothermia from this book, and reading it scared me enough about freezing cold and snow to keep me off the roads during yesterday’s blizzard!

Wait for You by J. Lynn

After a traumatic experience at fourteen, Avery Montgomery decides to move across the country for college in order to forget everything.  She just wants to get through college without causing any attention.  Plans for this get thrown after Avery runs right into Cameron Hamilton on her first day of college.  Neighbors and classmates the two form a friendship.  Cam is attracted to her and asks her out every chance he gets, but Avery is reluctant to begin a relationship.  The two form a friendship and as Avery's heart begins to soften for Cam, her past starts to resurface she is afraid she'll lose everything again.

Wait for You is a wonderfully written New Adult book by J. Lynn (who also writes books under Jennifer Armentrout).  New Adult books are a fairly new genre that center on adults in the late teens and early twenties. The male love interests in the books tend to be bad boys with big hearts.  Cam was a reformed playboy who liked to bake cookies.  Every Sunday he would come over to Avery's apartment and make her breakfast. Where is this man in real life?

Although the reader could figure out what made Avery's high school experience so bad, it was still shocking to read about what happened afterwards.  She had to learn how trust people again and did have some time believing that Cam actually liked her.

If you are looking for a steamy romance then this is the book for you.  There is a sequel available on e-book for the library called Trust in Me that is Cam's side of the story. 

There's More to Life Than This by Theresa Caputo

Reading Level: Adult Non-Fiction

Submitted by Gerti

Brassy Hicksville-native Theresa Caputo has become famous as the Long Island Medium, and not only has a TV show with that name, but also tours the country giving psychic readings, and was recently in Merrillville doing the same.

I’ll say first that I am a fan of the show, and did want to buy tickets for her performance at the Radisson Star Plaza, but was ultimately unable to do so. I picked up the book as I have always been a believer in “the other side”, but my father’s death last year and the passing of a number of other beloved relatives and friends in 2013 had me searching for a little more confirmation about that.

This book heartily supplies that confirmation for me. Caputo starts the book discussing her early life and how hard it was to make peace and understand the gift of channeling the voices of the departed. It was very believable to me that as a young person, such images and messages would be hard to integrate into her life, even for her family and friends. Finally she meets someone who can help her accept and fine-tune her gift, and then she becomes the Theresa Caputo so many people recognize and love. The book is written in that unmistakable voice of hers and includes moments of her irreverent and unexpected humor as well.

But this book is more than a mere biography, and more than a listing of the successful readings she has had with people. Caputo works to examine larger issues for her readers – why she sees a Christian God when she channels, what happens to children who die, and whether many of us are given signs from beyond that we simply fail to see because they are not what we are expecting.

Even more heartening for people who have lost loved ones, Caputo maintains that those who die (not matter how) are always happy as they wait for the chance to return to earth in another form. This sounds more like Hinduism than it does Catholic doctrine, but Caputo is undeterred. She says family groups tend to go through life cycles together again and again, so in theory my father who passed will be reborn as my grandchild in 20 years or so. The people we loved apparently wait in “heaven” until they find a family they want to reconnect with, and come back to earth to learn a virtue they failed to grasp in their last life.

That is strangely comforting, as is her contention that our pets are also in “heaven”, and that sometimes our pets channel messages from those we love as well, since they are more psychically attuned. Yes, I’ll grant that for those who don’t believe it all sounds a bit mad. But for those of us who want to believe “there is more to life than this” (her title), Caputo’s book hits just the right note, and although I won’t buy a copy (sorry, Theresa!) I recommend those who need comfort after losing a loved one to find it in this book, whether it’s bunk or not.

David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell

Reading Level: Adult Non-Fiction

Submitted by Gerti

I have read several books by Malcolm Gladwell already, including “Tipping Point,” “Blink”, “Outliers,” and “What the Dog Saw.” In short, he’s been one of my favorite authors for years now. Several of those books (including “Outliers” and “Blink”) were downright brilliant, so it was with great expectations that I picked up his newest, “David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants.” Sadly, it does not live up to the brilliance of some of those earlier works.

As the title might indicate, “David and Goliath” is the story of how improbably one-sided battles can be won by the underdog, how disadvantages can turn out to be advantages. And like many of his books, it includes research and interviews with people who are living examples of the point he is trying to make.

His first story involves why David beat Goliath. This is a famous story from the Bible, in which a shepherd boy goes against a giant war hero who makes even other soldiers tremble, and wins the day with his slingshot and several well-chosen rocks. Gladwell shows how despite appearances, it was Goliath who was at a disadvantage in this battle, due to his acromegaly and poor eyesight. But the point really is that David won by changing the rules. Goliath was only good at hand-to-hand combat, but David using the slingshot to fight him changed the rules enough to insure his success.

Likewise, Gladwell shows how having dyslexia or losing a parent as a child can make a person either a brilliant success or a pathetic failure. Using examples like Richard Branson, Charles Schwab, and several presidents (including Barack Obama), Gladwell demonstrates how these perceived disadvantages made these men work harder and find tricks and shortcuts that allowed them to succeed. It’s a subject he’s touched on before – how 10,000 hours of hard work and not natural talent can make one an expert at something. And since these men spent so much time overcoming obstacles, they became more capable than those who had never had to face obstacles before.

This would be good book for teachers and school administrators as it talks about the value of small class sizes (of lack thereof), but all of Gladwell’s books have clues about how teachers and schools can make students, even the most disadvantaged among them, succeed. Still this work left me strangely unaffected, despite Gladwell’s easy-to-read style and interesting subject matter. The lessons learned from it are also unarguably valid – work harder to succeed, change the rules if you can’t win the game as it’s typically played, and find out what advantage your disadvantages give you. And while it’s fun learning the true story behind a classic Bible battle, and the struggles of iconic leaders like Lawrence of Arabia and Martin Luther King Jr., I would recommend reading “Outliers”, “Blink” and “Tipping Point” before picking up this latest Gladwell book.

Divergent by Veronica Roth

Reading Level: Young Adult

Submitted by Gerti

I’m so proud of Northwestern University graduate Veronica Roth for this brilliant debut YA novel. Although teens consider it this year’s “Hunger Games”, that comparison does not mean it is bad. “The Hunger Games” is the story of a young woman’s struggle to survive in a dystopian world, and so is “Divergent,” but in Veronica Roth’s novel, the setting is Chicago, which makes this an even more interesting read for someone familiar with the city and its sights like Navy Pier and Millennium Park. Also in Roth’s favor is the fact that her heroine, Beatrice Prior, has a normal name. Sorry, Suzanne Collins. I think Katniss is a mouthful.

In THG, the brave new world is divided into 12-ish districts, and just about any teen can tell you which tribute comes from which district, and what that district makes or grows. In Roth’s world, there are five factions instead, and they are divided into specific virtues that the survivors of a war decided were important to keep around. Protagonist Beatrice (or Tris, as she becomes later) is from Abnegation, a grey-wearing, Amishesque group who believe that being selfless is the path to true peace. The other groups are Candor (for the painfully honest), Dauntless (for the insanely brave), Amity (for the friendly), and Erudite (for those who like research and reading). But there is movement between the groups.

Just as in THG, teenaged Tris is at this turning point in her life where she must choose what to be. In the Hunger Games, the districts have to send tributes to the eponymous “games”. In Roth’s world, each 16 year old has to undergo a series of mental tests which determine (to a large extent) to which faction they truly belong. Tris has had a hard time being selfless like her parent’s in Abnegation, and her test shows it. But she is something even rarer called Divergent (hence the title), which means that she has elements of various factions. Her test giver changes the results so this fact isn’t automatically known to her superiors, and warns Tris that she should tell no one about the results (not even her family), as being Divergent can be deadly.

Despite some qualms about leaving her family, Tris chooses Dauntless, and her new name comes with her introduction there as a Transfer. Like THG again, there is some training, there are some tests, but like Katniss Everdeen, Tris is able to learn and move from the bottom to the top of the ranks of new Dauntless candidates by playing to her own peculiar strengths. Like any young adult novel, Tris makes friends, faces down enemies, and has several opportunities for romance within her new faction. Of course there are symbols for each faction (think marketing opportunities!) and Tris gets a few tattoos which reflect her heritage and choices. The final scenes of the book involve her foiling an Erudite revolution against Abnegation involving a Dauntless army… and if that sounds too confusing, you must read the book! It is a thrilling trip into a dystopian post-war Chicagoland filled with teenaged angst and adventure. Can’t wait to read the next one!