#101 Fool's Paradise by Mike Lupica The late Robert B. Parker had several mystery characters going at the time of his death, including detectives Spenser and Sunny Randall, plus Jesse Stone, police chief of Paradise, Massachusetts. This story leads recovering alcoholic Jesse into a murder whose victim is a man Jesse met for the first time the night before at an AA meeting. It also involves one of the richest and most powerful men in the state, his second wife, the man's son, Sunny Randall, several members of his department who are attacked, and some shady characters from Spenser's world. Jesse solves the mystery but lacks the proof to convict his target. His off-and-on relationship with Sunny also takes some faltering steps. These books are interesting as mysteries, but to me they're more about the characters involved. It's a fairly quick but fun read.
#102 Bonnie and Clyde: The Lives Behind the Legend by Paul Schnieder The author tells this story in the present tense and mostly in the second person, as if he is narrating Clyde's life to Clyde as it happens. The other portions presented in other people's POV are all third person present tense narratives, as if Clyde is hearing about these things from a third party. It's highly detailed, with many quotes from letters from the principal participants and interviews with others involved as victims or witnesses. Since nearly all the sources are subjective, including the newspaper reports, there are naturally some disagreements about details: was Bonnie pregnant (per this volume, no proof either way) or not (per the Hamer book and the doctor who autopsied Bonnie, no)? Who did the shooting at all the gunfights? How much did Bonnie shoot (never, said W. D. Jones, often, said others)? It's a story about two people crushed by poverty and exacerbated by the early Depression who turned to crime to survive and killed easily when thwarted. They gathered a number of other desperadoes to them over the years of their depredations, too, and the gang was responsible for the murders of at least nine lawmen in addition to the ones they wounded. They stole cars whenever they could, they robbed banks and gas stations and retail stores and threatened hundreds. Because they had publicly vowed not to be taken alive, the officers with Hamer in Louisiana in May 1934 were determined to live through the encounter they knew would turn deadly. Bonnie and Clyde died as they lived: violently and suddenly. They were not heroes but villains.
#103 Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde by Jeff Guinn This version of the Bonnie and Clyde story is presented as straight history. It is far more detailed than the previous volume, and more accurate as far as I can judge by the extensive bibliography and detailed chapter notes. I've read a lot about the Barrow gang and their depredations through the Depression-era southwest, but I always learn something when I pick up another volume. For example, I learned that the Easter 1934 Grapevine, Texas murder of two motorcycle highway patrolmen was witnessed by a couple near the highway turnoff to the attack site who stated that the taller of two men shot the troopers while they were down, while a man who said he saw the action from much farther away insisted that Bonnie was the one who fired the final shots. She'd been crippled in a car wreck the year before and couldn't have walked to the troopers, let alone carried a BAR and shot them multiple times. But that's what most of the papers printed, and that's what much of America believed at the time. Fascinating tale. The author includes a section at the end to relate the fates of those on the periphery of the couple. A well-told and readable history.
#104 Ten Things I Hate About the Duke by Loretta Chase I'm not usually a reader of romance novels, especially historical ones, but this one was fun. The beautiful Cassandra (age 26 and variously called The Gorgon, Prophetess of Doom, or Medusa because of her unyielding opinions and forceful manner) and her lovely sister Hyacinth (a lovely flower of a 19-year-old girl) are both eligible women in 1830's London. Hyacinth is the very image of a proper young lady, ready to be wed to a suitable man and support him in all of his endeavors. Cassandra, though, is intelligent and principled and determined and abrasive and willful and skilled enough to win a fight against a man. Not good marriage material. She accidentally re-meets Lucius Ashfort, the man with whose image she fell in love at age 11. He has wasted his life in debauchery and drunkenness and deliberate pranks played on the upper class, so much so that he's persona non grata to the Royal Family. Their chance re-meeting is literally a carriage wreck, and she treats him with such disdain that he decides to reform and win her admiration, if not her love and her hand in marriage. No mystery, but there is some character development, and some social intrigue that made me smile. Surprise? It should be rated PG-13, if just barely.
#105 Requiem for Battleship Yamato by Yoshido Mitsuri translated by Richard H. Minear Yoshido Mitsuri was a navel lieutenant assigned to Battleship Yamato on her maiden voyage in April 1945. Her mission was to attack the American fleet invading Okinawa and destroy as many of the enemy as possible before she was sunk. She never got there. Halfway to her destination, she was intercepted by a fleet of American bombers and sunk. Yoshido (last name first, Japanese form) expected to die, but was blown to the surface of the ocean by two massive underwater explosions from the sinking monster. Yamato and her sister Musashi were the heaviest battleships ever built. They mounted main guns of 18 inches in muzzle diameter, the largest ever put on a ship, and neither sister ever fired her main weapons at another ship in combat. Yamato was a dinosaur, a majestic waste of resources by a resource-poor nation, and her death was a gallant but futile and wasteful gesture of fighting spirit directed at the subjugation of other people. The result of the suicide mission was two-fold: many high-ranking officers and skilled seamen died needlessly, and these many men who could have helped rebuild Japan after the war were unavailable to the nation. The endeavor satisfied the bushido notions of honor, but it was a disaster for the Imperial Japanese Navy and for the Japanese people. It's a moving first-person narrative in the present tense with tension and resignation and deep regret on nearly every page.
#106 The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larsen This is a pretty detailed account of Winston Churchill's first year as Prime Minister 1940-1941 during the Battle of Britain. I learned that Churchill was a human being who rose above his personal limitations and poured his heart and soul into the defense of his country. I also learned about the people around him, how they reacted to him, that in their own ways they either helped or hindered them (sometimes both at once), and that his family was vitally important to him despite his disappointment with some of the things they did. I already knew he was a great man, but now I know a bit more about how great he was. Packed with information and very readable. Two thumbs up.
#107 Ex Machina by Christopher L. Bennett Star Trek TOS. This imaginative volume takes up right after Star Trek: The Motion Picture (also known as Star Trek 1) and follows the Enterprise as they respond to a distress call from a non-aligned world where survivors of a destroyed planet are trying to stabilize their society on a new planet. For those Trekkers out there, this is the follow-up to the episode "For The World is Hollow, And I Have Touched the Sky." There's a lot of action, but there is also character development among the new crew Will Decker assembled for the ship and among the Enterprise veterans called back to the ship to serve with Kirk. It was interesting to read about each character's doubts and fears and how those doubts and fears were dealt with. For example, Kirk is somewhat hesitant about being acclaimed a Galactic Hero, McCoy thinks he doesn't belong on a starship, Spock is trying to deal with his new-found emotions without going berserk, Uhura is working to integrate the human crew with the non-human (with mixed results), Scotty is trying to deal with his own guilt over the deaths of several crew members, and the civil unrest on Yonanda threatens to destroy not only their society but involve the civilization on a neighboring world. Good story where no one is perfect and everyone has a chance to be a hero to one degree or another. Two thumbs up.
#108 The Galactic Whirlpool by David Gerrold Star Trek TOS. On a mission to investigate a possible Klingon incursion at the Federation border, Enterprise finds a lost colony ship from Earth and must decide what to do about it - then they must decide the best way to carry out the decision. The colony ship is on a collision course with a pair of rotating black holes nicknamed "Polo's Bolos" and leaving the survivors alone in space is tantamount to a death sentence. Gerrold wrote the famous episode "The Trouble With Tribbles," along with several other Trek episodes in various incarnations. He's also a prolific SF author with many other credits to his name. This volume is filled with subtle humor and inside Trek jokes. It's also the first authorized story to reveal that James T. Kirk's middle name is Tiberius. Out of print, not available digitally, and hard to find except in a used book store. I was lucky to find the copy I bought.
