BOOK REVIEW: After The Fire (Maeve Kerrigan, #6) by Jane Casey

After The Fire by Jane Casey is the sixth book in the British police procedural series featuring Detective Constable Maeve Kerrigan. Kerrigan and her immediate supervisor Detective Inspector Josh Derwent are part of the Major Crimes Squad of the London Metropolitan Police. In After The Fire the major crime is a suspicious fire on the top two floors of a public housing, high-rise apartment complex (called an “estate”) which leads to the discovery of three corpses, two charred to a crisp and one battered from a fall from a great height.

As with most good mysteries, the question of whodunnit is just one of many questions posed to the reader. Some of the more compelling aspects of the story being told in After The Fire come from the continuation of the ongoing developments in Maeve Kerrigan’s life, whose significance is heightened by the fact this is the sixth book in the series. Due to events in the previous book (The Kill), Maeve’s love life is a bit rocky and she’s dealing with ongoing potential threats to her personal safety. Her relationship with DI Josh Derwent, her immediate superior officer and unorthodox investigation partner undergoes some surprising (but welcome) maturation in this edition of the series. Her boss is still problematic, and the tensions of being an attractive woman in a predominantly male profession is still an important part of the day-to-day activity of this police procedural series.

The structure of After The Fire is different from previous entries in the series, since it involves a deadly arson where there are numerous victims (in addition to the dead ones several other residents had their homes destroyed) some of whom become suspects as we learn more about the unsavory nature of their sources of income and why they were living in a run-down housing estate even though it’s clear they had other financial options. In most police procedurals the limited number of suspects is key and here the problem is the converse.

Overall, After The Fire is a satisfying genre book; I believe all of the central mysteries in the plot are resolved. One does find out who caused the fire and why, as well as what and whom were responsible for all the dead bodies discovered at the scene. We even get a surprising resolution of Maeve’s ongoing personal safety concern. The primary unsolved story thread involve her personal and professional lives, but by their very nature that’s not something that one would expect to remain static in a long-running series anyway. I look forward to reading more about Maeve and her attempt to obtain satisfaction in one or more of these areas in future books.

Title: After The Fire (Maeve Kerrigan, #6).
Author: Jane Casey.
Format: Hardcover.
Length: 317 pages.
Publisher: Minotaur Books.
Date Published: May 3, 2016.
Date Read: August 14, 2021.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★★  (5.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A- (3.67/4.0).

PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: B+.
WRITING: A.

BOOK REVIEW: Why Fish Don't Exist by Lulu Miller

Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life by Lulu Miller is an unusual book for me to read and review. It is one of the few nonfiction books I have read this year and it is one of the very rare books I have ever read as an audiobook. Typically, I only access audiobooks when on vacation with my husband (since he has the Audible subscription) and this is how I read Why Fish Don't Exist. We had both heard the author discussing her book on multiple NPR shows (e.g., Radiolab, This American Life) and so when we embarked on a road trip to visit three national parks this summer (Bryce, Zion and Death Valley) Why Fish Don't Exist was on top of the list to be downloaded for the drive. It turns out to be a delightful way to experience the book; it’s read by the author herself, and being a radio person her delivery is engaging and the prose is memorable. Plus, in audio format the book only takes less than 6 hours to complete (shorter than it takes to drive from Los Angeles to Utah).

Why Fish Don't Exist is a fascinating and compelling story about the first president of Stanford University, David Starr Jordan, who was also one of the most prominent and prolific icthyologists (fish scientists) of his day, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He was also an unrepentant and fervent eugenicist and used his fame and status to promote this vile and dehumanizing ideology in the United States and around the world. Miller includes information in the book that intimates that Jordan may have been responsible for the still-unsolved mysterious death of Mrs. Leland Stanford. One of the clear beneficiaries of the untimeliness of her suspicious demise (by poison, while on vacation on Hawaii) was Jordan himself.

Why Fish Don't Exist is an exemplar of the maxim “truth is stranger than fiction.” Miller’s book is part biography of a great man of science, part autobiographical personal memoir and part philosophical musing on the nature of science. Miller injects pathos into the book by recounting how her scientist-father’s atheistic views, that human (and all other) life is ultimately immaterial to the fate of the Universe, that God doesn’t exist and that nothing happens after people die, had a measurably deleterious impact on a young Lulu Miller’s mental health. The search for a way to understand or refute her father’s nihilist view of life fuels her book’s examination of Jordan’s life and its focus on his obsessive project to identify and classify as many new varieties of fish as he could. Both Jordan and Miller are trying to produce order out of the chaos of the natural world.

Miller is incredibly lucky in her choice of subject. Jordan’s life contains an astonishing number of extraordinary events, often catastrophic, which he suffers but shrugs off. This includes deaths of multiple family members at tender ages (two of his children, his older brother and his first wife), the complete destruction of his collection of rare and unique fish specimens obtained through painstaking worldwide travel by train and ship by natural disasters (twice!) and living through the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1905. The highs and lows of Jordan’s life are cinematic in scope and scale.

Miller is also incredibly effective at using intimate details of her own life to increase the emotional connection between her book and the reader. She describes her own suicide attempt as a teenager to emphasize the importance of her teleological search for life’s meaning. Later in the book she provides details of how her admission of a casual same-sex indiscretion led to the collapse of her first significant romantic (heterosexual) relationship and a subsequent professional downward spiral that delayed the completion of the book. It was during this period that she discovered the dark facets of Jordan’s supposedly shiny jewel of a life: the full-throated support for involuntary sterilization fueled by his eugenicist and supremacist instincts, the suspicious behavior to interfere with the official investigation into Mrs. Stanford’s death and the unseemly romantic entanglement with an Indiana University student when he was the youngest University President in America.

Overall, Why Fish Don't Exist is an informative and engaging book about the complications and contradictions of life itself. Like all good art, it allows the reader to interact with it in different ways, and different readers will be drawn to different aspects, with most people being affected in long-lasting ways. Highly recommended!

Title: Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life.
Author: Lulu Miller.
Format: Audiobook.
Length: 4 hours 55 minutes or 225 pages.
Publisher: Simon and Schuster.
Date Published: April 14, 2020.
Date Read: July 29, 2021.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★★  (5.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A (4.00/4.0).

PLOT: A.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A+.
WRITING: A.

BOOK REVIEW: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir has quite a lot going for it. The book jacket has blurbs from giants in science fiction and fantasy like Brandon Sanderson, George R.R. Martin and Blake Crouch. Barack Obama included the book in his list of summer 2021 reads. Weir is most well-known for his blockbuster debut novel The Martian which became a blockbuster film directed by Oscar-winner Ridley Scott and starring Matt Damon. His “thing” is realistically depicting hands-on science and engineering ingenuity to survive realistic, life-threatening situations. The premise behind Project Hail Mary is eye-catching (if surprisingly far-fetched for an author whose previous work has leaned so heavily on verisimilitude as a selling point). A newly discovered bacteria called astrophage somehow is causing the luminosity of the Sun to diminish at a slow but exponentially increasing rate which will lead to the extinction of all life on Earth within a few decades. Project Hail Mary is humanity’s attempt to investigate and fix the problem, but when the book begins all the reader knows is that something has gone horribly wrong and the main character has woken up alone in a spaceship (named Hail Mary) after spending years of interstellar travel at relativistic speeds in an induced coma leaving him with no memory of where he is or why. Unsurprisingly, Ryan Gosling is attached to a possible film adapation of Project Hail Mary by the producers and screenwriter of The Martian. (No word yet whether director Ridley Scott is interested in helming his second Weir adaptation.)

The structure of the story in Project Hail Mary is brilliant; it is told in two linear time-frames near simultaneously. The reader slowly learns that the main character’s name is Ryland Grace and that he was a junior high school science teacher. Because of Grace’s amnesia, the reader gets little drips of Grace’s life prior to the Hail Mary while he’s adjusting to the situation he wakes up to. Slowly he remembers that he’s there to try to save the world by discovering why Tau Ceti is the only local star near ours which has not experienced a reduction in luminosity in recent decades. Project Hail Mary was intended to be a one-way scientific mission with three scientific experts to investigate the phenomenon and discover a solution for the astrophage infestation harming the Sun and send it in four quadruple redundant “information life boats” back to Earth. So the two timelines of the story follow Grace trying to complete his mission in the future and remembering the past when he was involved in the preparation and design of the Hail Mary, along with the amazingly dictatorial leader of Project Hail Mary Eva Stratt (who would be perfectly cast by Emily Blunt or Tilda Swinton in the inevitable film adaptation). Ryland Grace is supposed to be white, American, under 40 and average looking. I had someone like Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Tobey Maguire or Topher Grace is who came to mind as I was reading. Ryan Gosling would probably be great.

There’s an incredible and incredibly surprising development about one-third of the way into Project Hail Mary that I don’t want to spoil in this review. Suffice it to say that it moves the plot in a whole different direction and switches the book from scientific thriller to something else in addition. Without revealing anything more I can say that this development is an amazingly positive aspect of the story. It provides another example for Weir to show he is able to deploy his scientific chops to describe a scientifically complicated scenario and raises the emotional stakes of the story.

The reader learns some shocking things about Ryland as the earlier time frame unspools in his memory that causes us to question our identification with him as the main character. However, another plot twist very near the end of the book provides Grace with a dilemma that allows him to redeem himself to the reader and results in a very surprising ending (which I suspect will not survive the Hollywood film adaptation). Overall, I think that Project Hail Mary is at least as enjoyable and exciting as The Martian, and is almost certainly a better (written)  book. I look forward to reading more from Weir, and I strongly agree with President Obama’s recommendation to include Project Hail Mary on your summer reading list.

Title: Project Hail Mary.
Author: Andy Weir.
Format: Hardcover.
Length: 476 pages.
Publisher: Ballantine Books.
Date Published: May 4, 2021.
Date Read: July 21, 2021.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★★  (5.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A/A- (3.83/4.0).

PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A.
WRITING: A.

BOOK REVIEW: Blind to the Bones (Cooper & Fry, #4) by Stephen Booth

Blind to the Bones is the fourth book in the police-procedural, murder-mystery series featuring Detective Sergeant Deborah Fry and Detective Constable Ben Cooper written by Stephen Booth set in the Peak District in the north of England. In the first three books, there have been three very different but compelling mysteries in that Cooper and Fry are the main protagonists and the plot revolves around each of them solving crimes.  Blind to the Bones is somewhat similar to the other books in the series but this time instead of solving crimes together, each one of them has their own assignment, which eventually they both reluctantly recognize are linked. One of the curious and compelling features at the heart of the series is the fractious relationship between these two very different police officers. They are colleagues but they are certainly not friends; they are very different people with different personalities, life experiences and views on life. But they are both members of a small police force so they often need to work together to successfully do their jobs “to serve and protect“ the public.

There are three main mysteries in Blind to the Bones: 1) Who killed the local man whose body was found in an abandoned train tunnel (at the beginning of the book)? 2) What happened to the woman who has been missing for just over two years and whose cellphone has just shown up? 3) What crimes is that family with multiple delinquent children hiding? Of course, with all good mysteries there are several other smaller questions/puzzles to be answered as well.

Blind to the Bones is an unusual entry in the series because much of it takes place in the small town of Withens, not the typical setting of Edendale, which is where Cooper is from and where most of the action in the first three books (Black Dog, Dancing with the Virgins, Blood on the Tongue ) took place. Cooper ends up being seconded to the Rural Crime Task Force to work on the dead body in the train tunnel while Fry gets assigned to deal with the delusional parents of the missing college student (who even after two years of not seeing their daughter refer to her in the present tense and have kept her things all over the house intact). Fry gets stuck working with the corpulent and indolent Detective Constable Gavin Murfin while Cooper has his own adventures in Withens and beyond.

Overall, Blind to the Bones was not as compelling a read to me as the first three books in the Cooper and Fry series. I’m not exactly sure why. I think it might have been because by having each of the protagonists work separately on their own mystery it reduced the amount of interaction they had with each other, and one of the key features of the series has been the emotional frisson between Cooper and Fry. It's also significantly longer than the median mystery novel, well over 600 pages. Another quibble that I had with this entry was that it was resolved just a little too neatly for my taste, in such a way that it seemed unlikely the reader could have found the answers on their own, which seems a bit unfair. Regardless, I do think I will continue reading the series because I am curious to see how things develop between Cooper and Fry in future books, especially now that progress has been made an important project that Fry was working on in multiple books (thanks to the actions of Cooper).

Title: Blind to the Bones (Ben Cooper & Deborah Fry series, #4)
Author: Stephen Booth.
Format: Kindle.
Length: 643 pages.
Publisher: Witness Impulse.
Date Published: January 7, 2014 (first published January 1 2003).
Date Read: July 8, 2021.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★☆  (4.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: B/B+ (3.25/4.0).

PLOT: B+.
IMAGERY: B.
IMPACT: B+.
WRITING: B+.

BOOK REVIEW: The Silent Wife (Will Trent, #10) by Karin Slaughter

The Silent Wife by Karin Slaughter is the tenth book in the Will Trent/Sara Linton series. These are best-selling crime thrillers set in the Atlanta metro area. Will Trent is a GBI (Georgia Bureau of Investigation) agent and Sara Linton is a medical doctor who often works as a coroner/medical examiner consultant for the GBI. This is the sixteenth of Slaughter’s books that Sara has appeared in but for some reason neither of the Slaughter-written series have her name on them. Prior to the Will Trent series, Sara was one of the three main characters in the Grant County series which is set in a rural Georgia county that Sara is from and where her parents still live. That series revolved around a love/hate triangle of Sara, Lena Adams and Jeffrey Tolliver. Tolliver and Adams were police officers and Sara was the pediatrician in town who sometimes moonlighted as the Grant County medical examiner.

Slaughter is a master at suspense and her books are packed with gory, violent crimes (almost always against women) and include complicated situations that lead to moral dilemmas and heightened emotional tensions. She also does an excellent job of incorporating just enough romantic intrigue that even a gay skeptic like me is very interested and invested in the Will-Sara bond despite a profound disinterest in romance books generally.

In addition to Sara and Will, who by the 10th book in the series are in a serious (but often complicated) romantic relationship, the books feature Faith Mitchell, Will’s GBI partner (and one of Sara’s closest friends) and Amanda Wagner, GBI Deputy Director who is Faith and Will’s boss. Another important character in the series is Angie Polaski, Will’s manipulative ex-wife. Both Angie and Will were sexually, physically and emotionally abused as children and thus grew up in state-run group homes and foster care. It’s the resonant back stories of many of the supporting (and primary) characters that increases the salience of the books as the series gets longer and readers become more accustomed to the style and format.

The Silent Wife is an unusual read because it is told in two time frames, one of which is set in the Grant County series and the other is in the Will Trent series. It is the first time Slaughter has done this and for anyone who has read both series it is devastatingly effective. The ostensible reason for the parallel storytelling is that there’s a guy attacking, drugging, immobilizing, and sexually assaulting women in both time lines and it appears that must mean the person who was identified as the perpetrator (by Lena and Jeffrey) in the earlier time frame can’t be doing the later crimes (since that guy is still in prison). But really, it is clear that Slaughter still loves writing the Grant County characters and this was an opportunity to do so, especially in a way that makes life and love more complicated for Sara and Will. So, does this mean that the Grant County folks got the wrong guy back then and some rapist/murderer has been free to stalk and damage women this entire time? (Sadly, the answer is yes.)

As I’ve said before, almost all the time I read mysteries I never figure out who the perpetrator is. However, this time I had an early suspicion that turned out to be correct. But it didn’t lessen my enjoyment of The Silent Wife in any way. All it did is let me see how Slaughter leaves clues for the reader and it seemed to me that knowing whodunnit early in the book makes one even more invested in the crime fighters solving the case.

Overall, The Silent Wife was another strong entry in the Will Trent series. (There’s a reason Slaughter is a best-selling author: all of the books of hers that I have read have been of extremely high quality.) Happily, the author promises that she will be writing more books featuring Will and Sara, and I will look forward to reading them!

Title: The Silent Wife (Will Trent, #10).
Author: Karin Slaughter.
Format: Kindle.
Length: 498 pages.
Publisher: William Morrow.
Date Published: September 10, 2021.
Date Read: July 17, 2021.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★½☆  (4.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A- (3.67/4.0).

PLOT: A.
IMAGERY: B+.
IMPACT: A-.
WRITING: A.

BOOK REVIEW: Catalyst Gate (The Protectorate, #3) by Megan O'Keefe

Catalyst Gate by Megan O’Keefe is the third book in The Protectorate trilogy, following Velocity Weapon and Chaos Vector. The entire trilogy is an amazing, action-packed, space opera story featuring a diverse set of multifaceted characters that populate a complicated, engaging story that provokes thoughts about the nature of intelligent life, the possible future trajectories of human civilization and the emotional stakes of personal attachments.

The central characters in the Protectorate series are Biran Greeve and Sanda Greeve, brother and sister, who are both citizens of Prime, a galaxy-spanning human civilization. Sanda is in the military and is also the captain of one of the most amazing spaceships known to mankind, inhabited by an artificial intelligence named The Light of Berossus (more commonly known as Bero). Biran is a Keeper of Prime, which means that he contains a chip in his head which contains access to Prime’s greatest secret: the technology to the Gates which facilitate interstellar travel between various Prime star systems.

By the time we get to the third book in the series, Catalyst Gate, the plot has developed to a point where Sanda and Biran are in two very different places, both literally and figuratively. Biran has been named Speaker of Prime and is a member of the High Protectorate, a body akin to an Executive Committee of Keepers who run the government of Prime. In that capacity Biran is dealing with the aftermath of the discovery that Prime’s Casimir gates were not invented by the revered founder of Prime Inventive, Alexandra Halston, a few centuries before, but were basically reverse engineered from alien technology. Because of a flaw Halston made when she initially engineered the Casimir gates on their initial startup use the gates have been releasing deadly radiation into the star systems they facilitate human travel to, basically sterilizing them of all multi-cellular organisms, which explains why in hundreds of years humans have never encountered any other intelligent alien life. What’s a little weird (and frankly a little unbelievable) is that humans have not been finding any Earth-like planets either in the star systems that they have colonized to date. All of Prime’s citizens live below huge pressurized domes, generally on large asteroids or rocky, geologically stable planets which for some reason work best with the Gates. The entire subject of how the gates work and any science or technology associated with space travel in any way is highly classified and only Keepers are allowed to have any access to it. O’Keefe does an excellent job of depicting this and other cultural aspects of Prime society in convincing fashion. Her worldbuilding is on par with the very best in SFF.

Sanda, who is a Commander in the Prime military and due to the events in Velocity Weapon and Chaos Vector has control of the most advanced ship in the known Universe. She and her crew, which consists of a motley but capable group of folks that are trying to locate Rainier Lavaux, the person responsible for a heinous and deadly biowarfare attack on Prime citizens who has openly stated her genocidal intentions towards humanity. Sanda’s crew includes Tomas Cepko, the double (or triple?) agent who loves her; Arden Wyke, the non-binary computer super-hacker; and Nox, an ex-soldier cum mercenary who used to date one of Sanda’s dads; Min Liao, a scientist/medical doctor who inadvertently helped Lavaux accomplish her attack; and two other people who help maintain the ship. If this seems like a large cast, it is. But O’Keefe skillfully deploys them and I never felt confused or overwhelmed.

O’Keefe’s writing has numerous strengths: she describes action well, and she also uses it to forward the plot effectively. Additionally, she does an exceptional job of incorporating diverse characteristics and identities into her characters which makes them interesting and relatable without being precious. The Protectorate trilogy is an excellent example of how she’s able to do all this while maintaining within the genre conventions of military space opera, which is quite an impressive feat. Although this series is complete and I am sad to not spend any more time with Sanda and Biran Greeve I am very curious and interested to read what O’Keefe will write in the future.

Title: Catalyst Gate (The Protectorate, #3).
Author: Megan O'Keefe.
Format: Kindle.
Length: 544 pages.
Publisher: Mullholland Books.
Date Published: June 22, 2021.
Date Read: July 1, 2021.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★★  (5.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A (4.0/4.0).

PLOT: A.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A+.
WRITING: A.

BOOK REVIEW: Poems that Solve Puzzles by Chris Bleakley

Poems that Solve Puzzles: The History and Science of Algorithms by Chris Bleakley is a book that is built around a stunning insight: that an algorithm, “a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, especially by a computer,” (Oxford Dictionary of English, 2010) when written down as a step-by-step list of instructions can also be viewed as a poem. This interesting device is used multiple times as the author converts problem-solving into poetry for various scenarios. Bleakley says his book is intended for people who don’t “know what algorithms are, how they work, or where they come from” but this is a book that can (and should) also be enjoyed by people who regularly use algorithms. Additionally, if you believe that anyone who teaches and learns mathematics (or any subject, really) should be exposed to the historical context of the subject they are teaching and learning, then it is clear that anyone who teaches, learns. or uses algorithms will benefit from knowing more about the history of algorithms as presented in Poems that Solve Puzzles.

 

Somewhat unsurprisingly, there’s a fair amount of overlap between the history of algorithms and the history of mathematics. For example, the source of the word we know now in English as “algorithm” comes from the name Al-Khwārizmī which was later latinized as “algoritmi.”  People familiar with the history of mathematics may recognize ''Al-Khwārizmī'' since he is known as the author of the booal-Kitāb al-Mukhtaṣar fī Ḥisāb al-Jabr wal-uqābalah (The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing), one of the most famous ancient mathematics texts written in Arabic from which the term “algebra” comes from.

 

Similar to the self-evident truth that the history of mathematics is too large and wide-ranging a subject to be encompassed comprehensively in one book, the history of algorithms is also a very extensive topic. In Poems that Solve Puzzles, Bleakley addresses this problem by selecting for inclusion in the book just some of the most famous algorithms that the general public are most likely to have heard of or involve topics or buzzwords present in the zeitgeist of 2020. This is a reasonable choice to make in order to reduce the scope of a book on the history and science of algorithms to be more easily digestible, and a good one since it makes the book quite effective and affecting because the algorithms included in are thus more likely to be interesting to the casual reader.

 

This is not to say that everything in the book will be familiar to most readers. Even someone like myself who has taught multiple courses in the history of mathematics and conducts research in numerical analysis learned many fascinating nuggets of information about certain algorithms. In particular, I now have a much better understanding of the up-and-down (or up-and-down-and-up-and-down-and-up!) nature of the academic reputation of artificial intelligence after reading Chapter 11 (“Mimicking the Brain”), the longest chapter in this compact but engrossing volume.

 

Of course, considering the increasing prominence of networks and networking play in modern society, Poems that Solve Puzzles devotes considerable time to discussing the Internet, search engines and social media by recounting the history of how each of these phenomena developed along with describing the underlying algorithms involved at a level non-experts can understand.  Although there are no equations in the book which may have made the text more salient to more informed readers I view the efficacy of the book despite their absence an impressive feat of clear exposition by the author.

 

Overall, Poems that Solve Puzzles: The History and Science of Algorithms is an informative and entertaining book. It is appropriate for a wide swath of readers, from people who are interested in learning about what “blockchain” is without having to do any math to students and instructors in the mathematical sciences who need more examples of how these academic topics make important contributions to the technologically complex world we live in.

(This review was also published at MAA Reviews.)

Title: Poems that Solve Puzzles: The History and Science of Algorithms.
Author: Chris Bleakley.
Format: Hardcover.
Length: 320 pages.
Publisher: Oxford University Press.
Date Published: October 31, 2020.
Date Read: June 13, 2021.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★½☆  (4.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A- (3.67/4.0).

BOOK REVIEW: Only The Innocent (DCI Tom Douglas, #1) by Rachel Abbott

Only The Innocent is my first book by Rachel Abbott and it’s a doozy of a psychological thriller. The main character is DCI Tom Douglas but the meat of the story is sourced in the sadomasochistic relationship between Laura Fletcher and Lord Hugo Fletcher. Lord Fletcher is murdered in the very first chapter and the rest of the book is about finding out whodunnit as well as why and how. The answers are riveting, repulsive and really surprising.

Only The Innocent is the first book in the "DCI Tom Douglas Thriller series" which would seem to indicate that it is a police procedural. And to some extent it is, with the main plot fueled by following DCI Tom Douglas as he tries to solve the case of who killed Lord Fletcher. But there's also no question that a significant fraction of the content of the book is centered around the internal thoughts of Laura Fletcher, in the form of letter she wrote to her best friend Imogen Dubois who was previously married to Laura's brother.

Lord Hugo Fletcher was a celebrity well-known for running a non-profit that combated sex trafficking of young women. Through Laura's letters we discover that the benevolent, patrician face Hugo shows to the world is very different from the face Laura saw when they were alone.

We slowly learn what a controlling person Hugo was (he took care of every single detail of their wedding, kept the location of their honeymoon a complete secret, claiming that he was doing this all for Laura's benefit). We also learn that he has some truly bizarre views about sexuality, although we don't get a full sense of the full extent of his depravity until near the end of the book.

For most of Only The Innocent, one reads the book with one's mouth agape in horror as the depths of Hugo's perfidy are slowly exposed through Laura's letters. In fact, this is where the book goes a bit off the rails because it's hard to believe that any sane person wouldn't figure out a way to flee the situation that Laura was in at the time. Instead she ends up being institutionalized (twice!) in the years before Hugo is eventually killed.

Another main theme of Only The Innocent is the inclusion of family drama. In addition to the marital strife between Hugo and Laura, we also find out more about Hugo's relationship with his previous wife (and mother of his young daughter, Alexa, who Laura dotes on). There are multiple years-long estrangements that are revealed as the story unspools: Imogen and Laura's brother Will, Imogen and Laura, and Hugo and his sister Beatrice.

Overall I enjoyed Only The Innocent and I was actually surprised by the identity of the perpetrator (although in hindsight it was really quite obvious who it had to be). We get good insight into how DCI Tom Douglas operates and I am definitely interested in spending more time with him and loo forward to reading the next book in the series The Back Road.

Title: Only The Innocent.
Author: Rachel Abbott.
Format: Kindle.
Length: 459 pages.
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer.
Date Published: February 5, 2013.
Date Read: June 22, 2021.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★½☆ (4.5/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A-/B+ (3.5/4.0).

PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: B+.
IMPACT: B+.
WRITING: A-.

BOOK REVIEW: Heaven's River (Bobiverse, #4) by Dennis E. Taylor

Heaven's River is the fourth book in the Bobiverse series by Dennis E. Taylor. Bob is a self-aware machine intelligence formed from the downloaded mental state of Bob Johansson, a self-describe nerd who had the foresight to have his brain downloaded onto silicon before his very untimely death (literally while walking across the street) at the beginning of the first book, We Are Legion (We Are Bob). As the story has progressed in subsequent books, Bob has figured out to make multiple copies of himself. The rub is that there are slight differences in each copy which causes the new copies to have their own personalities. Eventually there are so many copies of Bob floating around that they inhabit a cyberspace they call the Bobiverse. Each "Bob" has their own name and personality and are essentially individual "siblings" of the original.

However, just because the Bobs are virtual doesn't mean that they can't impact "meatspace." The original Bob was an expert programmer and tinkerer and the Bobs have figured out how to control many computer systems and technologies. Bobs can operate drones and avatars in order to have physical experiences and sensations via sensors that simulate what Bob can see, smell, touch, feel, and taste.

The original Bob became the artificial intelligence of a probe sent in to far outer space to explore a signal that could signify an extraterrestrial intelligence. Many of the Bobs have exploration and munificence towards other intelligences as some of their core values and in the hundreds of years since the Bobs have been exploring they have found a few intelligent aliens, typically further behind in technological development than they are. The Bobs have generally helped the aliens as much as they can. 

One of the central features of the Bobiverse books are the references to "nerd" culture. There are many, many homages to Star Trek, especially due to the Bobiverse ethos of peaceful exploration of space and "doing no harm" to sentient species they discover in their journeys. It's not just Star Trek that the Bobiverse pokes fun at, however. There are often references to role-playing games, Dungeons & Dragons, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones and more. It's a fun way of connecting with the reader.

The Bobiverse is close to the 24th generation of Bobs at the time of the events in Heaven's River so there are literally thousands of Bobs, and some of them are exhibiting unusual behavior. One of the central tensions of the book is how do you resolve irreconcilable differences, especially with someone who you assumed you were 90-percent-plus in agreement with due to shared DNA (or software). Some of the Bobs (called Star Fleet are promoting a version of the Prime Directive where they want all Bobs to stop interacting with alien species. It turns out they are willing to go farther than other Bobs would have expected to impose their will on other Bobs and this causes much consternation in the Bobiverse as a whole.

In Heaven's River one of the Bobs (named Denver--get it?) has gone missing and some of his fellow Bobs go looking for him. When they explore the volume of space he was last known to be in they discover a huge megastructure called a topopolis, which is basically an artificial world for an intelligent alien species called Quinlans. The topopolis is gigantic, a billion miles long along the central axis, producing several billion square miles of living surface. The aliens are sorta like large otters and the topopolis has six central tributaries of a central rover flowing in it, which is why they have named the structure Heaven's River. Bill and some other Bobfriends of his use remote control-operated virtual reality called a "manny" which allows the Bobs to interact with the Quinlans and experience everything in real time during their expedition.

Basically the story in Heaven's River is split between the developing rift among the Bobs and the search for Bender disguised as Quinlans on Heaven's River. We learn a lot about the engineering of the structure and Quinlan society. One big mystery is that the Quinlans clearly do not have advanced technology, but someone built (and maintains!) the topopolis, so who is that? The other source of narrative tension is whether Bill will find Bender before they are discovered by whomever (or whatever?) is running Heaven's River discovers that an alien intelligence has infiltrated this world it created for the Quinlans.

Although quite different from the first three Bobiverse books (and significantly longer, apparently it was originally written as two books that were combined into one) it is quite effective. Another interesting feature of the Bobiverse books has been the grappling with existential questions. Are artificial intelligences really "people"? Effectively, the Bobs are immortal, as long as they have power and raw materials to build with. (In the setting of the books 3-d printers have been invented which can replicate themselves and basically any other product one has designs for, so the limiting factor is literally heavy metals and minerals found on planets.) So, facing immortality, what should the Bobs do? What would you do if you woke up and found yourself "alive" (or at least sentient and self-aware as an artificial intelligence) a hundred years in the future, with the capacity to remain in that state forever? Overall, I would say that the Bobiverse books in general, and Heaven's River specifically combine humor, adventure and philosophy in ways that are quite compelling.

Title: Heaven's River.
Author: Dennis E. Taylor.
Format: Kindle.
Length: 632 pages.
Publisher: Ethan Ellenberg Literary Agency.
Date Published: September 24, 2020.
Date Read: June 6, 2021.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★★  (5.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A- (3.67/4.0).

 
PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: B+.
WRITING: A.

BOOK REVIEW: Network Effect (Murderbot Diaries, #5) by Martha Wells

Network Effect is the fifth entry and the first full-length novel in the wildly popular Murderbot series written by Martha Wells. It was nominated for multiple prestigious awards: Locus, Hugo, and Nebula. It recently won the 2020 Nebula Award for Best Novel in 2020. In fact, it was this win that convinced me to read it. I read the first four novellas and although I thought they were mostly fun, I didn’t really understand what the ecstatic enthusiasm was about. Murderbot is a cyborg called a SecUnit who has powerful weapons and excessively violent capabilities combined with an extremely introverted (and borderline antisocial) personality. She has organic components (brain, I think) but is physically much stronger than a human or even an augmented human.

All SecUnits have a governor unit that is used to control them; it can be set to self-destruct at any time and thus SecUnits are generally compelled to do whatever their owner tells them to do. However, early in the first book Murderbot figures out how to hack its governor and becomes autonomous for the first time. The next few stories are centered around Murderbot’s search for meaning in a world where they can do what they want now, but where everyone else still thinks they are a violent, dangerous tool that can be used for nefarious means. Of course, it turns out that in the setting of the Murderbot storied there’s a large number of unscrupulous folks in a universe where capitalism has run amok and corporations have even more power and influence than they do today, while their operating principles have grown even more immoral.

My biggest problem with Murderbot in the earlier stories was that eventually it became clear that Murderbot itself didn’t care whether it lived or died as it was getting itself into incredibly dangerous situations. This was portrayed as an aspect of its dysfunctional mental and emotional state, but to me as a reader I wondered why I should care about Murderbot’s fate if it didn’t care about it either?

However by the time we get to the fifth entry in the series, Murderbot has begun to demonstrate that there are certain people and entities it cares about very much and the feelings are mutual. This made me care more about what happens to it (and the people and entities it cares about) in Network Effect.

The plot in Network Effect like in the other books, is insanely complicated. However you can really just follow along for the ride and not worry about whether the story makes sense. The more important and memorable aspects of any Murderbot story is really the vibe and emotional cadence of the book, as we experience the plot through Murderbot’s jaundiced and misanthropic “eyes.”

To me, there’s still something gimmicky about the entire Murderbot oeuvre but I do agree that’s there’s something compellingly readable about the Murderbot stories. It definitely takes substantial skill by the author to take a somewhat flimsy premise and produce stories that have become so popular and effective.

Title: Network Effect.
Author: Martha Wells.
Format: Kindle.
Length: 352 pages.
Publisher: Tor Books.
Date Published: May 5, 2020.
Date Read: June 14, 2021.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★½☆  (4.5/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A- (3.67/4.0).

PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A-.
WRITING: A-.

BOOK REVIEW: A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine

A Desolation Called Peace is the sequel to the celebrated debut novelA Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. The first book was nominated for multiple prestigious awards: Locus, Hugo, Nebula ,Clarke and Goodreads. It won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2020.

Because of the acclaimed nature of the first book, the sequel was very much anticipated by many science fiction fans. Although I was less enamored of the first book than others, I also looked forward to reading the sequel and I was not disappointed.

The main character in the books is Mahit Dzmare, a diplomat for Lesl Station, which is a small space station located near a jump gate. The setting of the books is the Tleixcalaani Empire, which controls a vast number of planetary systems. Tleixcalaan is a galactic superpower with military, cultural, and financial hegemony. Mahit has been fascinated by all-things Tleixcalaan all her life, so her appointment as the Lesl Ambassador to Tleixcalaan is her dream job. In the first book, A Memory Called Empire, Mahit arrives on Tleixcalaan and immediately discovers that her predecessor had been murdered and finds herself in a complicated diplomatic and political maelstrom. She is helped in navigating the dangerous waters by a minor diplomatic functionary assigned to her named Three Seagrass and Three Seagrass’s friend Twelve Azalea. During the book Mahit interacts with people at the highest echelons of Tleixcalaan society, including the Emperor himself (Six Direction) and Nineteen Adze (one of a limited number of Imperial advisors who represent the Emperor and implement his wishes). Mahit uses her smarts and the efforts of her Tleixcalaan hosts to figure her way out of a complicated situation that maintains the sovereignty of Lesl Station and her own body integrity.

In the beginning of A Desolation Called Peace Mahit is back on Lesl Station and Three Seagrass is back on Tleixcalaan when news of incursions into imperial space by alien ships and a massacre of Tleixcalaan citizens on a remote industrial planet begins to roll in. Mahit is still recovering from brash decisions that she made while on Tleixcalaan and trying to re-acclimate herself to being “home” on Lesl when she is asked by Three Seagrass to go to a Tleixcalaan military vessel that is patrolling the sector of space where the aliens are active and may have received a signal from them that needs to be interpreted in order to make first contact. It’s basically an irresistible invitation to participate in a historic diplomatic first and of course Mahit says yes, although it is complicated to the unresolved status of her relationship with Three Seagrass.

The other main characters in A Desolation Called Peace are the commander of the Tleixcalaan fleet that has encountered the alien ships, Nine Hibiscus, and the 12-year-old “90%-clone” of the former Emperor, Eight Antidote.

In my opinion, one of the key failings of the first book was its focus on language (in particular poetry) and the depiction of the central political conflict as a process of sussing out the motives of the characters struggling for supremacy by parsing what they said (and left unsaid). That’s not to say that there wasn’t action in A Memory Called Empire, but the real meat of the story was often in the thoughts about the action. This “chatty” problem is mainly rectified in the sequel. I think there’s more action in A Desolation Called Peace and although there is still a fair amount of space devoted to characters thinking and talking about the action, the amount of time the book spends in character’s heads seems less prominent in the sequel.

The key themes in both books are culture, communication and compatibility. In A Desolation Called Peace the question is central to the plot because Nine Hibiscus (and Mahit and Three Seagrass) are trying to determine if it is possible to communicate with alien beings, and once they show that they can do so, how compatible they are.

Tleixcalaan culture is geared towards domination, never accommodation, but it is clear these aliens are at least as technologically sophisticated, so the question of compatibility becomes central to the plot. In the first book Mahit was the outsider treated like a barbarian by Tleixcalaan citizens while in the second book because the power differentials are undefined who will play which role in the interaction with the aliens is unclear.

In A Desolation Called Peace the reader spends a fair amount of time with Eight Antidote, who literally is the heir apparent to the Tleixcalaan Empire. Because of his age (and position) he becomes the vehicle the author uses to show the reader different aspects of Tleixcalaan culture and how contingent communication (and interpretation) are.

Mahit is still central to the resolution of the plot and is definitely still should be considered the main character in A Desolation Called Peace but I think it is a clear improvement over A Memory Called Empire that there are multiple other characters to carry the narrative thrust of the plot. I enjoyed this book more than the first. Right now it is not clear if the Tleixcalaan books are a duology or a trilogy, but I would definitely love to read a third book featuring Mahit having further adventures in Tleixcalaan space!

Title: A Desolation Called Peace (Tleixcalaan, #2).
Author: Arkady Martine.
Format: Electronic (CloudLibrary).
Length: 496 pages.
Publisher: Tor Books.
Date Published: March 2, 2021.
Date Read: May 20, 2021.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★★  (5.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A- (3.67/4.0).

PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: B+.
WRITING: A.