May Audiobooks

I got back into reading pretty heavily in May and finished 9 books. I liked all of the except for the first one, The Light Pirate. Spoiler alert, that trend will continue for June as I'm close to finishing another book that I really don't like. I read 3 "real" books this month and enjoyed all of them. Probably my favorite were the Mark Dawson books. These are #2 and #3 in the Atticus Priest series.

​What good books have you read this month?
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The Light Pirate
By Lily Brooks-Dalton, Read By Rosemary Benson

The best thing about this book is the narrator. Everything else about it is awful. It ranks right up there with Where the Crawdad Sings on my top 10 most hated books ever. I knew after the first 2 hours that I wasn't going to like the book and I should have shelved it at that point but I decided to ride it out just to see how it ended.

This is a poorly conceived story centered around climate change effects on Florida specifically. It starts in current time where Florida is already flooding and having multiple severe hurricanes every year. Of course, that's not really happening but I can go with the fiction. Within 10 years Miami and all of South Florida has been evacuated but at that point the climate change effects seem to stop because there's no more change for the next 40 years. What's up with that?

The story is centered around Wanda. She was born during hurricane Wanda, the most devastating hurricane to hit Florida. Over the next decade most people leave the state except for Wanda, her father and a few other oddballs who decided to stay and eek out a living much like pre-civilization. They all could (and would) have left in normal circumstances. There's no power, water or communication services and all of the buildings are flooded. But they stay anyway because Wanda has never known any other place. There also don't seem to be any issues with alligators or snakes or other critters that dwell in permanent swamps. That's convenient. The whole premise, is stupid. I could go on and on.

Supposedly the books is told in 4 parts: power, water, light and time but I didn't get that at all and didn't realize that was the premise until I re-read the summary. Much of the last half is hard to follow because there were jumps back and forth in time and between character perspectives.

​Now, If you read the reviews, this one (like Crawdad) gets rave reviews across the board so you might want to ignore my lone dissenting voice and give it a try.

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The Words We Whisper
By Mary Ellen Taylor, Read By a cast

Set in Nazi-occupied Italy during WWII and modern day Richmond, VA. Zara Mitchell is a hospice nurse and has just finished a case and adopted a third dog left behind by it's owner. She received a call from her sister in Richmond telling her that their Grandmother Nonna is dying and has asked specifically for Zara to come home. Nonna is obsessed with finding a box that's hidden somewhere in the overstuffed attic and that becomes Zara's job.

With the box comes stories from Nonna's past during the War in Italy. She had been a seamstress for a couture dressmaker and witnessed the transition to Nazi occupation and the eventual arrival of the Americans.

It was a good story with excellent character development. 

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Resurrection Walk
By Michael Connelly, Read By a cast

This is #7 in the Lincoln Lawyer series and it's a huge improvement over the #6 book. In the last book, Mickey Haller got a wrongfully convicted man out of prison. The walk out of prison is called the "resurrection walk". 

He has now hired is half-brother, retired detective Harry Bosch, to help him assess potential other cases of wrongfully imprisoned people. Harry identifies one potential case of a woman convicted of killing her sherriff husband. It's a high risk case in federal court.

​Like all of Connelly's books, it's fast paced and it's fun to have Mickey and Harry together in this one.

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The Amber Room: The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure
By Catherine Scott Clark and Adrian Levy

​I picked up this book in hardback at a library sale. Honestly, I had never heard of the Amber Room. It was a very opulent room that was started in 1701 and was eventually installed in the Catherine Palace in Russia. It disappeared during WWII and has never been seen since. 

Clark and Levy spent years digging through research but mostly being stonewalled by various agencies and people in Russia and Germany. It all sounds eerily like our government today. 

It was an interesting book but a little tedious. I expect that it would appeal to about 1% of people. But I liked it.

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A Place to Bury Strangers
By Mark Dawson, Read By Simon Vance

This is #2 in the Atticus Priest series. I've only read this one series of Dawson's but I expect that all of his series are very dependent on reading the books in order and that's the case with this one. It picks up with some unfinished business from the first book, The House In The Woods. This series is set in Salisbury in the UK.

A human bone is found is the middle of a field. DCI Mackenzie Jones is called to investigate and she's struggling to figure out where the bone came from. She calls in Atticus Priest to help. They trace the bone to an abandoned church graveyard in a nearby town. That leads to the discovery of a deeper mystery.

It's such a good series that I immediately downloaded the 3rd book in the series.

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The Other Wes Moore by Wes Moore

In the summer I like to sit outside in the sun a bit and like to have a book to read. I usually pick them up at thrift stores and from Thrift Books. This was a Thrift Books find. It was published in 2011 but the story and message are still relevant today.

There were two Wes Moores born within a year of each other in close neighborhoods in Baltimore. Both were fatherless and led difficult lives. One grew up to be a decorated veteran and Rhodes scholar. The other is in jail with a life sentence. 

Why is that? The author sent a letter to the other Wes Moore one day and he wrote back. That led to many letter and meetings and this book tells the stories of both men. I found it fascinating and thought provoking.
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The Red Room
By Mark Dawson, Read By Simon Vance

This is the 3rd, and I think last, in the Atticus Priest series. The crimes in all 3 books are related and this one wraps up the series.

A man falls from a cathedral spire. Authorities are sure it's suicide but his family says no. Then a video is delivered to a local newspaper and it seems the family is right. The victim may have been blackmailed. That's quickly followed by two more victims and two more videos. The videos are all set in a red room and the victims in the videos are all children. Someone seems to be on a revenge tour.

I enjoyed this series and will probably checkout some of his other series. I was particularly grateful that, although much of the story takes place during pandemic times, he left out all references to anything pandemic related. I think that will give these books a much longer shelf life.

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The Falcon Thief
By Joshua Hammer

This is the book that I took for my beach read. It became my ER read when Chris was injured. It's a very interesting story and reminds me a lot of The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson. Both books are about people stealing things that you would never imagine. In this case it's rare and protected falcon eggs.

Jeffrey Lendrum was traveling from Birmingham in May 2003. A janitor, and former security guard, felt that he was acting suspiciously in an airline club restroom. He alerted the authorities and they discovered Lundrum with 14 live peregrine falcon eggs. 

This book is the story of Lundrum's life but also the background of falcon racing and breeding along with profiles of people involved in the crimes and investigations.

It's a really interesting book if you like these kinds of books.

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Starter Villian
By John Scalzi, Read By Wil Wheaton

We picked this book for our drive time to and from our vacation and it was perfect in length and entertainment value. If you like Carl Hiaasen, I think you will like this book. Wil Wheaton was an excellent choice for narrator!

Charlie is a divorced substitute teach who is just barely getting by. His dream is to buy a local pub but the bank doesn't seem interested in extending him the loan.

Then his uncle Jake dies. He hasn't seen Jake since his mother's death when he was a young boy. Jake has left him his business....a supervillain business. Jake had a lot of enemies and Charlie has inherited those too. With the help of unionized dolphins and intelligent spy cats, he has to fight his new enemies.

We really enjoyed it and I will read more by Scalzi. It was a perfect road trip book.

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