richardrbecker's reviews
497 reviews

Although not as gritty as his usual work, All the Sinners Bleed is an engaging small-town sheriff story set in Charon County, Virginia. The story focuses on Titus Brown, a former FBI agent turned sheriff in town still sorting out racial tolerance. 

Mostly, the town doesn't address underlying racial tensions until a school teacher is killed by a former student. The shooter is subsequently shot by Titus’s deputies. Some dissenters use it as an opportunity to explore whether Titus is fit for the job. 

It becomes even more complicated when the investigation uncovers a series of child murders linking the victim, the shooter, and another serial killer together. Emboldened by the discovery of his victims under an old Willow tree, the serial killer raises the stakes by targeting anyone and everyone who might know his identity or come too close to putting the pieces together. 

With the highly publicized killings capturing regional attention, the town faces another crisis. Some groups are looking to exploit the murders by fanning the flames of racial hatred during a fall festival that the town relies on to generate tourism revenue. 

Multiple agendas and Sheriff Titus Crown's own personal issues make All The Sinners Bleed a deeply captivating story, even if it lacks some of the punch Cosby is known. Still, I highly recommend it.

Stephen King serves up another story that features killer old folks or elderly vampires — this time as cannibals instead of soul suckers, for better or worse. It's almost a shame the "campus cannibals" cross the path of Holly Gibney, making it my least favorite of her six appearances. I say it's almost a shame because I'm still a fan of this character but not a fan of the story so much. 

Tightening the book could have helped, cutting out a few forced political infusions. I'm not talking about Holly's propensity to worry over COVID or COVID in general. Holly's take on COVID as an obsessive-compulsive of sorts makes sense, even if she doesn't always see her hypocrisy as a smoker. 

What makes less sense (as a Native American) is the gratuitous random riff on a statue of a Native American outside of a store or hammering concern for Black people driving more than five miles over the speed limit. There are other instances when the author beats the drum loud enough to realize that it's King talking more than his characters, which disrupts the story. Maybe it would have been passable in passing, but King likes to pound these points like a bass drum from the whitest state in the country. 

Otherwise, I didn't mind the COVID emphasis, given Holly's track record for being a hypochondriac. While Holly and King's views are the same (and don't entirely match mine), the author does present other characters with different points of view. More interesting to me are those points that didn't fit, including what almost comes across as King's anger toward his own mortality. Indeed, he doesn't care for the nutty and racist criminal couple (which makes sense). But he doesn't understand many other seniors in his story either — those trying to stay fit into older age or those that give up.

The only one who gets a pass is a near-centurion poet, content to rise out her remaining days by dispensing wisdom from a wheelchair. She is a great character, almost reminiscent of Mother Abigail, from a time when King was kinder to his peers. 

Another shortcoming for the story, in my opinion, is the sheer stupidity of the antagonists. They call themselves out for committing crimes too close to home but carry them out too close to home repeatedly. This makes for a surprisingly thin case for Holly Gibney to solve, despite the danger she must face. But as King said, this novel was the product of seeing Holly's mother die of COVID, and everything else was an add-on. 

All in all, even if this isn't a story I'd likely pick up for a second read (whereas all the others I would), I did enjoy reuniting with Holly for a spell. Gibney, next to Bill Hodges, has become one of my favorite characters King ever brought to life. And I do know so very many of them.

When Light Bringer (named after the renamed starship Morning Star) engages its plot, there is no slowing down in the next installment of Pierce Brown's terrifyingly addictive saga that places the four cycles of civilization at its center — rebellion, ascension, decadence, and decline. But unlike the cultures we study in history, Brown's story occurs among the stars.

The Golds, the genetically enhanced and augmented society that dominates a future caste system civilization, are still at war with each other, and with the story's tragic protagonist, Darrow, a "red" turned "gold" with the help of advanced augmentations. Mostly, though, the society at the top of the heap is still up to its old tricks of treacheries and betrayals — sometimes for Darrow's benefit and sometimes not. Brown skillfully uses their deceits and conceits in his favor. Readers know what is coming, but the sweeping reversals of fortune always manage to ultimately surprise everyone anyway. 

Although leaving readers with what feels like a bigger cliffhanger than previous outings, Light Bringer spares no expense in presenting a theatrical empire eerily similar to the Roman Empire had it become space born. This time, most of the book is spent among Jupiter's outer rim and moons, with Darrow searching for an army to replace the one he lost. He has little time as core Golds lay siege to the red planet his family calls home. 

Light Bringer does a great job shining a light on new heroes and villains. Good thing. We needed replacements at the pace Pierce Brown likes to bury them. Along with these new stars (and a few remaining favorites), readers will notice how mature Darrow has become as a leader. No longer a teen known for his bravado, the aging, bearded hero has grown wiser and war-weary. Where he once sought the council of giants, he is now one in his own right. Breathtakingly brilliant. 

I love Christopher Moore, but I didn't love Shakespeare for Squirrels. It's probably the only book of his I didn't like (and I like plenty that other people did not). 

Maybe he played it too close to Shakespeare (nah), or maybe it was something yes (oh, sure), but the plot overlay on A Midsummer Night's Dream is just too thin, making Squirrels rely heavily on raunchy humor alone. That's kind of, well, boring for Moore.  

Still, I do enjoy Moore's writing. He can be clever at times (cliche at other times), which is what kept me reading long after I lost interest. There's also a little Monty Pythonish feel to the story, which elevates the nuttier and nonsense at times. But otherwise, just as the book's name might imply, Squirrels is just a bit too chaotic for its own good. Definitely don't pick it as your first foray into Moore's mind. There are plenty of outstanding books like Lamb, Sacre Bleu, A Dirty Job, Noir, and his Pine Cove series. 

As a character study, Demon Copperhead brilliantly follows the early life of Damon Copperhead, a self-deprecating teen with a drug-addicted mother and abusive father figure (his own father died in a tragic accident), growing up in Virginia's Appalachian mountains. As a result, he frequently finds himself barring the brunt of the system — thrust into foster care homes that are more akin to work camps while his mother tries to get clean (until she ultimately doesn't). 

It's easy to like Damon because he desperately tries to be a good kid. He might have even weathered it perfectly if not for being introduced to opioids when painkillers became a cure-all. Taking place before the HHS declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency, Demon Copperhead captures how pushing painkillers devasted areas that were once too proud for government dependency. 

There is an irony in reading Demon Copperhead in that Kingsolver does a better job covering the plight of blue-collar, rural Americans than the nonfiction book, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope because Kingsolver doesn't have an agenda. She merely wants to tell the story of a boy growing up in the darker recesses of our country and does so, vividly, over the top of "David Copperfield," by Charles Dickens, as a template. And she can do it because she retains the boy's spirit to illuminate his life and the life of others intact, creating a character we can admire instead of save. 

If you enjoy character-driven coming-of-life stories that span years, Demon Copperhead is a fine pick, with the only trouble being how much clarity Kingsolver gives him too soon in his early years. While the book runs a little long, it's a well-crafted, enjoyable read that sheds light on a part of America that is sometimes neglected. 

Remove the first 30 percent of Down to a Sunless Sea by David Graham, and you have an excellent disaster novel with six hundred passengers and crew aboard a jumbo jetliner flying high above the end of the world. They are traveling from New York to Heathrow when the nuclear war breaks out, eliminating both their departure city and destination. 

As the crew scrambles to find an alternative landing site, the nuclear exchange quickly erases each one from consideration. There is no safe place on the planet, except one small runway on an island in the Azores. The people there were hit too, but by a neutron bomb — a weapon deemed too terrible to mass produce at the time it was written. When the public looked elsewhere, world powers made them anyway. 

Although criticized for modeling itself after On the Beach, Down to a Sunless Sea manages to salvage itself as an aviation-suspense story. Where the story works is that the crew doesn't witness the nuclear exchange as much as they hear about it from ground control and other aircraft. Later, they see some of the aftermath — dark and heavy radioactive clouds blotting out the sun. 

Eventually, Captain Jonah Scott noodles out a solution with the help of onboard advisors and a few allies over the radio. Antarctica may be their only hope, assuming they can get there. The problem, of course, is that the math doesn't work out. The ratio of passengers to supplies is less than ideal, and the doomsday clock for the survivors is ticking. 

The book is excellent overall, especially because Graham took the time to exhaustively research the business of flying planes. Had he researched the rest, he might have skipped the first third of the book that paints a near-future when America faces an energy-crisis-fueled economic collapse, making it an easy target for Russia after Israel launches an unexplained strike against its neighbors. All that is a little thin, but the balance still manages to carry it over the finish line. 

I wanted to like it. When I picked up Tightrope, I hoped to read something that addressed the challenges faced in rural America, challenges not unlike those I faced growing up in the inner city suburbs years ago, while exalting its strength and resilience. Indeed, I would have labeled an "escape artist," as they dubbed those who could climb (actually crawl) out of their at-risk circumstances. 

To some degree, the authors do point out that we all too often exalt the rich, and we punish the poor. Unfortunately, as is often the case, the authors are talking from a position already exalted and, therefore, use antidotal cases to drive their narrative — not toward understanding this segment of the American people — but toward particular public policies and political parties. 

The net result is to correctly identify the problem — educational indifference, drug dependence, teenage pregnancy, domestic violence, among other things — and then suggest the solution, being various national safety nets to intervene, believing that people cannot do it on their own. Sure, they can't once they have hit a proverbial bottom. But true prevention doesn't begin with typecasting a specific population segment as predisposed to find themselves in those positions. 

They might discover something different if they took the time to truly understand these communities instead of standing ready with a pre-drawn prescription. It's the pre-drawn diagnosis that is often the problem. At-risk people are led to believe they are destined for specific outcomes, and, therefore, never given the tools and techniques they need to overcome it. Instead, they accept some readily-made prescription and, unfortunately, the indoctrination that they can't live without it. I know. I was one of them. 

But in neglecting all this to push for police, Kristof and WuDunn do what is expected. They use their stories to chastise one party and its policies over another. Case in point, they downvote Nixon for vetoing national childcare, casting him as a typical conservative, without understanding the real reasons behind his veto nor recognizing that Nixon was hardly a hardline conservative regarding eliminating poverty. Nixon radically expanded the Food Stamp program with a longer-term goal of moving toward an all-cash Family Assistance Plan, which could have helped lift people out of poverty AND helped them learn how to become self-reliant. You would think this would be worth the mention. But it wasn't because it didn't fit the premise. 

This example is one of many. Like so many books on either side, they give their heroes a pass while holding their opponents to a different standard. They praise policies other countries adopt without recognizing the obvious — they are other countries. What works there doesn't work the same way here, much like some of our solutions won't work there. 

Of course, all this isn't to say the book has no merits. There are some tragic and remarkable stories told. I appreciated those. The authors dedicate a couple of pages to what individuals can do that doesn't require sweeping national policies. They were included in the back, titled Appendix. 

Surprisingly enduring story about love and friendship. The Five-Star Weekend is a story about Hollis Shaw, a popular food blogger who comes across as a modernized Sandra Lee reboot, after she loses her husband. Plagued by the loss (and some guilt), Hollis attempts to set her life right again by beginning together four women from different phases in her life — her best friend from high school, best friend from college, best friend in her thirties, and a newcomer who connected with Hollis after the death of her husband. 

Given that some of the women don't get along and the newcomer, a pilot named Gigi, carries a secret that adds ample tension to the story (doubly so because the reader is well aware of it). To make matters worse, Hollis invites her estranged daughter along to film the weekend for her popular blog. 

All of the women coming together have problems of their own, which inevitably gives them opportunities to find common ground. Some readers might find this oddly redundant if they have read Hilderbrand's other books. I've only read one, so didn't really see it as a problem. My take on the story was that it was relatively fresh for what it is — a quick summer read about friendships during a crisis. And mostly, Hilderbrand manages to write about those with a certain sense of authenticity — at least enough to satisfy my eclectic taste as a reader.