Highway - C J Box

I have become addicted to the C J Box mysteries, but this was not his usual story.  It was not his renegade Conservation Officer, but rather his renegade cop, but then it was also one of his most unusual stories, one that touched on a ghoulish concept of a serial rapist and killer who drove the highways in his semi and preyed on vulnerable women.

It was he and his "partners" who ran a house of horror where these women of the road were tortured and killed.  But the trucker - the Lounge Lizard - met his match when the two women who were abducted were the girl friends of Cody Hoyt's son.  Cody, the unorthodox cop knew how to go where other lawmen were afraid to tread.  Getting the bad guy for Hoyt had no limitations.

But at the beginning his slightly overweight partner, Cassie, a hire by the department to satisfy the diversity requirement, nabbed him - busted him - got him thrown off the force.  So Hoyt was no longer a renegade cop when he set out for the margins of Yellowstone National Park.

However, despite Hoyt's history of success, it is Cassie who is the heroine.  She is the one who busts the bad guys - all except one.  This is not a book where the good guys always come out on top.  However, she nails one of the bad, rescues the women, and everything would be great if the Lounge Lizard would only be caught.

Thanks to CJ Box we finally find that a woman can be exceptional without also being classified as a super model.  The last thriller I read had every woman hot beyond description and it makes you wonder where the people I see every day are.  In this one Cassie is complex, slightly overweight and not exceptional in any way which makes her a wonderful hero.

It is a book that demands that you turn the page, but not one you want to read just before bedtime.

Andrew's Brain - E. L. Doctorow

I have tried to think of a word - a single word that is suggested by reading this book.  Fascinating is too remote, to inexact.  Surprising has no real connotation.  Unsettling is good because it reflects the fact that the narration is of a type I am not used to reading and it takes time to be brought in to Andrew's brain,  Not the book title, but the neurological narrator.  Insightful? Yes, but while the brain takes us on a path that is convoluted, like the brain itself, and it provides social and political commentary, it is also muddled and at times confusing. It is not always pleasant, it is often unpredictable, the antagonists are neither likable or horrible.  The events are both world shaking and mundane.  Maybe the word I want is provoking.

Doctorow has found a new voice - the brain - but of course the brain, while it controls speech, controls or manipulates thought cannot express itself without the resource of the person and in this case the presence of the psychiatrist who is us because it is the interjection in a stream of consciousness.

Life and death, perspectives on others and insights to the self, presidents and 9/11 athletics and intellectualism are all here in the players and in the perspective of who we are.  Andrew is not just the owner of the brain, he is in fact a brain scientist and the psychiatrist is trained to probe and challenge the brain.

We see the brain in this as outside the individual.  The brain can generate thought, expand beyond the immediate reality.  It can conjecture, it can analysis and it can create decision or indecision.  It is conscious and unconscious and which is us?  It is a computer and it is an emotional sponge.  It misfires and it makes insightful conclusions.  It is a mind and a soul if we let it be.  It is the function that truly stops life, more than the heart and lungs and tissues.  So this ride through a life is incomplete because it is streaming images and ideas and events in a way that only a brain could perceive them or at least the way that the author sees a brain sorting out the world.

And therefore it is not always sequential and images flash by that we want to hold on and examine, but they move past quickly because the destination is somewhere else.  The psychiatrist occasionally inserts a statement that the reader might want to make - why did it take so long to say that?  But of course that is because the brain of the psychiatrist is like the reader - outside the brain that is spilling a sequence that can only come from one source - the self in the center of the tale.  Or perhaps it is a collective mind with patches of previous existence - all existence.

The reader will find a mind in despair, we are not privileged to know where the story will take us, how it will end, even if it will end and as a reviewer I cannot tell you the ending - I can only share the journey.

When the Mississippi Ran Backwards by Jay Feldman

 1811 and 1812 saw the New Madrid earthquakes shake the center of the continent unlike any other earthquake in our human history.  It was a movement that affected the flow of the Mississippi, changed its course, created a new lake - Reelfoot - and may have altered our history.

It happened during the cusp of the war of 1812 and the efforts of Tecumseh to unite the Indian nations.  It happened during the maiden cruise of the New Orleans down the Ohio and the Mississippi Rivers - the first steamboat to do it and the beginning of an new age. It happened where a formerly important Spanish settlement - New Madrid - had been established, a location now part of the new territory of the Louisiana purchase.

It happened where to countries - US and Spain formerly bordered one another with Kentucky, across the river, filled with miscreants and outcasts (including relatives of Meriwhether Lewis) and the earthquake seemed like a symbol of more than the stresses of a continent and the movements of great faults, it was also a pivotal moment in Indian, Spanish, Louisiana, commerce, and British relationships.

The author uses the earthquake to tell much broader historical tales and allows the actual shaking of the earth to be an anchor point in his narrative.  That might be a little shaky too, but he still finds ways to connect the areas of the two major rivers together and the story telling is vivid and enjoyable.

In the Shadows of the Sabertooth by Doug Peacock

An interesting journey of discovery by Doug Peacock - a close friend of Edward Abbey who was the model for Hayduke - he is a writer and philosopher in his own right.  He is a former green beret, a man of immense experience in the wild and the author of In the Presence of Grizzlies - his most prominent book.  And all of these background items help focus his current book.

In this book he tries to follow the footprints of both the Cave Bear and the early inhabitants of North America.  It is easy to see that he relishes the idea of a land so wild with such overwhelming predators that early humans could not survive - they would have been dinner.  Yet he wishes he could have tried.

Then he explores the clovis and pre-clovis cultures, the demise of the megafauna that dominated the continent and the various excavations, arguments, and findings that can be found in literature and tempers this with his own visit to the sites and excavations.

It is a mind map of his thought process and his physical presence in the story.  He wanders in to his own speculation which is no different that the exercise of others in the anthropology field.  But there is one big difference.  He is a grizzly man and the movement of the grizzly becomes a trail blazer for the movement of humans.

It is interesting, sometimes convoluted, and always thought provoking.  I am sorry he can not go back and live it.

Ghost Horse - Joe Layden

This is a surprise book - one that completely exceeded my expectations. The book is a true story about a race track lifer who has suffered defeat and alcohol hazed living. A man who suffered greatly at home in his youth and ran away to find safety and salvation. Booze and high living could have killed him.

But instead he meets a woman who loves horses and works at the track. Much younger, much nicer, and driven to rescue horses and Tim Snyder they become married.

But the nice woman has a physical flaw, an illness that does not forgive or go away and Tim has to face another loss. He handles it poorly and turns from Lisa's parents who had taken him in and wanders the track circuit again until he ends up with a horse - Lisa's Booby Trap - named after a strip club with his ex-wife's name in the front.

The horse becomes a surrogate for Lisa, it also becomes a winner after overcoming its own handicaps and both Tim and the horse form a bond that transcends 
the track.

Is the horse a reincarnation of Lisa? You can make your own decision on that, but you will not lose the love that develops between the horse and handler and the coincidence of personality between horse and lost wife.

The writer handles this really well. No maudlin sentimentality. He does not make Tim out to be a nice guy. He is who he is and that is enough for the story.