Digger Doherty is a smalltime Boston crook who went to Vegas for a few days and blew a lot of money that he didn’t have. Now he has to figure something out.

It seems like all of George V. Higgins’ books—[1], [2]—involve lowlifes who like to talk. A lot. He had a wonderful ear for dialogue. Sur­pris­ing­ly, none of his books seem to have been adapted for the stage and only The Friends of Eddie Coyle was filmed.

At the end of The Thirteen-Gun Salute, Aubrey, Maturin, and the crew of the Diane were marooned on an East Indian island. They are rescued eventually by a passing junk and taken to Batavia, where the governor gives them a new ship, the Nutmeg of Con­so­la­tion. They resume their original mission and travel to the penal colony in New South Wales. Sydney is a hellhole, ruled by capricious sadists.

This is another fine entry in the long-running Aubrey–­Ma­turin saga. Seafaring, a long chase, a couple of …continue.

Two boys grow up together in Kabul in the 1970s. Amir is the son of Baba, a wealthy merchant; Hassan is the son of Ali, Baba’s servant. Amir betrays Hassan, and his guilt pushes Hassan and Ali away. When the Russians come, Amir and Baba flee to America. Twenty years later, Amir returns to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to atone.

The Kite Runner is well written and touching. Betrayal and redemption, fathers and sons, love and hatred, cowardice and sac­ri­fice—all against a backdrop of Afghanistan’s horrible modern history.

In the end, I found …continue.

Kate Brannigan normally in­ves­ti­gates white-collar crimes, but re­luc­tant­ly agrees to find popstar Jett’s lost muse, Moira. When Moira is murdered at Jett’s mansion six weeks after Kate finds her, Jett engages her again to discover which of his entourage did it.

Kate is engaging and cheeky and it’s fun to ride along with her.

For two tumultuous years of the Depression, 1933 and 1934, the first war on crime caught the American imag­i­na­tion. John Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelly, Bonnie and Clyde, Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, and the Barkers robbed banks and killed people, mostly across the Midwest. The war on crime also caused the FBI to rise from obscurity.

The movie of the book con­cen­trat­ed on Dillinger and Melvin Purvis of the FBI. The book itself tells a broader, more nuanced story, skipping between its subjects in chrono­log­i­cal order.

Hoover’s FBI comes off badly. Staffed mostly by …continue.

Sequel to The Sunrise Lands. The travellers continue to head eastwards across post-apoc­a­lyp­tic America. They encounter many obstacles and not a few enemies on their quest.

En­ter­tain­ing enough that I read it in one day. Scourge did not fall prey to Middle Book Syndrome.

A faceless corpse has been found in a remote valley in the Yorkshire Dales. Is it connected to another murder there, five years earlier? Chief Inspector Alan Banks in­ves­ti­gates in the village of Swaineshead, which leads him to Toronto to dig into the dead man’s background.

Competent, thoughtful police procedural told from the viewpoints of Banks and Katie Greenock, the doormat wife of one of the villagers.

Farthing is set in a world where the British agreed to a peace with Hitler in 1941, eight years ago. This book starts out like a classic British murder mystery: a prominent right-wing politician is murdered at the Farthing country estate and Scotland Yard are called in. The story is told from two viewpoints, that of the secretly homosexual Inspector Carmichael and that of the daughter of the house, Lucy Kahn, who married a Jew. The dead man has a yellow star pinned to his chest, making David Kahn a likely suspect.

The …continue.

Kylar Stern ap­pren­tices himself to Durzo Blint, the city of Cenaria’s most ac­com­plished assassin. A truly successful assassin can have no friends or emotional at­tach­ments, something that Kylar struggles with.

This coming-of-age story set against a backdrop of intrigue and sorcery is en­ter­tain­ing but somewhat clumsy.

It’s shocking how few times I’ve crossed the Cascades into Eastern Washington in the seventeen years that I’ve lived in Seattle. We go up or down the I-5 corridor, usually heading for Portland or Vancouver, or we cross Puget Sound to the Olympic Peninsula. But we never go more than about 30 miles inland.

We needed a break and we wanted to celebrate our 12th an­niver­sary. For once, we decided to head over to Washington’s wine country. The Tri-Cities Wine Festival was being held in Kennewick today, so that was our des­ti­na­tion.

We drove across Snoqualmie Pass yesterday, through sleeting rain and snow, arriving in Kennewick after dark. This morning, we wandered around …continue.