Blood Work

Living on a boat in San Pedro, CA, Terry McCaleb is a former FBI agent who received a heart transplant.  It has been two months and he is recovering quite nicely.  He has plans of restoring his father's boat and moving to Catalina Island.  However, Graciela Rivers shows up on his boat and asks him to solve his sister's murder.  Having gained public notice in his FBI days, he is used to such requests and initially declines.  Then Graciela reveals that her sister provided his transplanted heart.  Against the direction of his doctor, McCaleb takes the case, infuriating the LAPD detectives who haven't solved it.  The story refers to events in previous novels, notably The Poet.  In fact, McCaleb is credited with being on that case though I don't recall him from the novel.  He even mentions Agent Rachel Walling.  LA Times reporter Keisha Russell, who appeared in at least a couple of the Bosch books, appears here too.

 

The mystery continually expands and soon becomes far more complex than one would expect from the start.  Like previous Connelly novels, there are no coincidences.  Everything is important and it is only thanks to the detail-oriented nature of his protagonists (Bosch, McEvoy, McCaleb) that the loose ends are tied and impossible cases solved.

 

Great book and highly recommended.

 

The Pawn

Who is Greta Thunberg?  Obviously, I know who she is but why is she Time's Person of the Year?  There are countless people who have made climate change their life's work but somehow this teenager from Sweden is the face of the movement.  How did that happen?  When some accomplished person starts lecturing me, at least I can see that they are accomplished.  When Warren Buffet calls for higher taxes, I may disagree but I understand why he has the platform to say this.  His success as an investor earned him a platform to opine about how his taxes are too low.  So what did Greta do to get her platform?  She ditched school.  Lots of teens ditch school and that is a pretty low bar as far as accomplishments.  Why would some Swedish teen rise to such heights on a topic where she has no special knowledge?  Why not Al Gore or any one of the frequently stated 97% of scientist who say climate change is real?

 

As someone who believes taxes are too high and government spends too much, who would be a better spokesperson for that cause: Arthur Laffer or a random teen from Nebraska?  For some reason, the climate change folks have chosen the random teen over the a PhD in the subject.  Why is that?  Greta is not trying to convince anyone with her knowledge of the issue but rather with the emotions she can evoke.  The evidence has failed to achieve the goal so now the guilt trip.  You have stolen my childhood.

 

Greta is a pawn, a useful figure to pull heartstrings.  She is not the first.  Back in 1992, there was Severn Cullis-Suzuki.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJICmLMb06Y

 

Severn has since gone to Yale where she earned a BS in ecology and evolutionary biology.  Gee, she sounds like a better advocate.  Well, except that her 1992 doomsaying didn't come to pass.  Back then, the big concern was the ozone layer of the atmosphere and global warming was only just getting traction as a topic.  We don't hear much about the ozone these days.  Huh.

 

Greta and Severn were plucked from relative anonymity because they were useful pawns for the environmentalists.  Kids are often used as pawns.  Kids parrot what their parents tell them.

Fury (2014)

The tank crew of the Fury are the sole remaining tank out of a platoon.  Upon returning back to the nearest base, they are assigned a new machine gunner/backup driver; the last one was killed during the previous action.  Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman) is a clerk who can type 60 words a minute but has no tank experience.  Sgt. Collier (Brad Pitt) is not happy to have such a raw recruit but has no other option.  Here is a story of Norman being thrown into the deep end of the pool to either sink or swim.

It is April of 1945 and the US Army is overrunning Germany but the casualties are very high.  Joining another 4 tanks, the Fury heads back into the action.  Along the way, they tackle gun emplacements, clear a town, face a Tiger tank, and defend a crossroads.  The action is intense and sometimes graphic.

 

The role of each tanker is detailed quite well.  Gordo (Michael Pena) is the driver, Swan (Shia LeBeouf) is the gunner, Travis (Jon Bernthal) is the loader, and Collier is the commander.  The workings of the Sherman and the teamwork involved in operating it is the best part of the movie.  Where Patton had tanks swarming around, this is a detailed look at one tank and its crew.  Very enjoyable.

 

The ending was disappointing.  The German column would have marched around the tank rather than throwing away a third of its force to repeatedly attack it.  Maybe the tank should have been named the Alamo instead.

 

Angels Flight

It is 2 in the morning and Harry Bosch is waiting for a call from his wife.  She went out last night and he hasn't seen her.  When the phone rings, he is surprised to find that it is Deputy Chief Irvin Irving.  Howard Elias, a high profile lawyer who made a career of suing the LAPD, has been murdered.  Elias was about to go to trial on a case involving cops torturing a black suspect so everyone suspects a cop killed him.  The city is on edge and there are fears of a repeat of the 1992 riots.  Because police themselves are high on the suspect list, Internal Affairs Division is called in to assist.  Detective Chastain, a long-standing nemesis to Bosch, is suddenly his subordinate in this explosive case.  They have hardly gotten started when the FBI are brought in to allay fears that the LAPD would whitewash the case.

 

Not as good as previous books.  The plot is too intricate and comes across less real than others in the series.  The inclusion of Eleanor leaving Bosch is unsatisfactory and felt tacked on to provide additional stress.  Bosch's love life is a constant disaster.  To date, he has been involved with Eleanor (felon), Jazz (felon), Sylvia (the wife of a cop who he killed), and Theresa (coroner).  He sure can pick 'em.  Much like The Black Echo, everything matters.  There are no loose ends and just about everyone proves to be corrupt.  It is a very dark picture he paints.  One does not expect cops to have a sunny disposition.

 

Were it not for Jeffery Epstien, the pedophile ring among the wealthy elite that is exposed in the book would have been farfetched.  Nope, turns out Connelly was onto something despite writing this book in 1999.

 

Overall, a good book and worth your time.

 

Militant Normals

In this book, Kurt Schlichter explains how it is that an outsider like Donald Trump was able to harness the frustration of normal Americans into an electoral victory over the elites of both parties.  Mostly, normal Americans - apolitical folks of middling to low education - have been content to live their lives with only occasional concern for what is happening in Washington DC.  This worked well enough for most of the 20th century.  After all, the elites had won WWII and put a man on the moon.  The economy was mostly great from the post-war period until the 2008 crash.  However, there was a growing rift between the elites and the normals.  The elites, who have always looked down on the normals, became a lot more open in their disdain.  Hillary's 'deplorables' comment is the most noteworthy but there are many others.  Then there is the two-tier justice system.  Crimes by the elites are not treated the same as crimes by the normals.  Much of this was tolerable when the elites actually did a competent job of governing but the repeated unwinnable wars, unchecked illegal immigration that neither party took seriously, and nearly 2 decades of a stagnating economy riled them.  First, they responded with the TEA Party movement and were trashed and defamed by both parties.  Donald Trump, a man who spent most of his life among the elites, tapped into the unrest among the normals and rode it to the Republican nomination and the presidency.

 

The best part of the book was his ripping into Conservative Inc., the voices of conservatism who have spent decades writing about policies and ideas that are never enacted, even when Republicans have been in office.  Amazingly, most of Conservative Inc. became the Never Trump movement, despite the fact that Trump has enacted many of the policies that these very writers and pundits have promoted for decades.  Looking only at the judges who have been appointed, conservatives should be ecstatic for the Trump Presidency but they are not.  Schlichter posits that they are elites first and conservatives second.

 

The book is an easy read and highly-relatable.  Though a retired colonel, trial lawyer, and syndicated columnist, he writes more like a guy ranting at the dinner table than a professor lecturing the unlearned.  There is no mincing of words.  Great stuff.