The Affair is another one of Lee Child‘s Jack Reacher novels. Jack Reacher is big mean Military Policeman who doesn’t take much crap from anybody. Jack Reacher books are my brain candy. This book is a prequel to the very first Reacher novel The Killing Floor. I hadn’t read it so I guess I have something to look forward to reading.

In this one Reacher is sent down to Mississippi by the Pentagon to go undercover to make sure that a murder investigation is being conducted properly. While there he hooks up with the local sheriff Elizabeth Deveraux.  Well poor Elizabeth falls head over heels for the handsome Jack Reacher. One feature of the town is that there is a freight train that roars through town exactly at midnight every night and is so big and fast it shakes everything in town. Well guess what, Jack’s hotel is right next to the train and Jack and Liz time their “peak expression for the affection they have for each other” to coincide with the arrival of the train at midnight.

I thought that was hilarious, but they are so good at it they start using the expression “catching the train.” I just rolled laughing. I can do that you see, it is my brain candy.

Plot, what plot, oh yeah, Jack figures out eventually that he has been played, crossed, and double crossed and well of course he has to take corrective action and he does in true Billy Jack style.

I give this book four stars out of five. Don’t you judge me!

I love short stories and look forward to the each year’s edition of the Best American Short Stories comes out. Each year there is a different editor and it is interesting to see what they pick. Also interesting is that each of the authors gets a short bio section and an opportunity to talk about the story. It’s amazing how long these authors have been perfecting their craft and how educated they are. I think the competition is intense for an author to get their works published. Also interesting is what the author’s say about the chosen stories. Some of the stories are worked over and over for years. Others are images they had in their heads and they have been gestating for a time as a story comes out of the image.

I love it, generally. This year I have to say the stories as a whole were a little disappointing. I look for things to happen in stories and in too many of these stories not a whole lot happened. Still I’m glad I read it and am looking forward to the next edition. I give this three stars out of five.

Poison Flower is one of Thomas Perry‘s “Jane Whitefield” Books. Ms. Whitefield hides people as her mission. She takes people who are targeted for abuse or death and sets them up with a new identity in a place where they are safe. In Poison Flower she helps James Shelby a man framed for his wife’s death escape from jail. She also helps Iris a lady she met in an abused women’s shelter.

She runs into complications though because the man who framed Shelby is a very powerful criminal who sends professional killers to kill Shelby. They find Jane and torture her but she doesn’t reveal where Shelby is. As you can guess she escapes her tormenters and turns the tables on them and heads out to find the employer.

I didn’t really care for the book at first. She suffers horrific torture but shrugs it off, it was about halfway in before it got interesting when the turning the tables phase begins.. Even then the whole book was predictable and not very suspenseful. I give it two stars out of five. Sorry!

The Sense of an Ending won the Mann Booker Prize for 2011. I’m old enough to where I don’t read books just because they are good for me, a book has to be a “good read” for me to be interested in it. The book is about memory and how memory can fool us as the years go by. That has always intrigued me because sometimes when I get together with family and talk about far ago events we each sometimes have completely different versions what exactly happened. Also, if you have ever been involved in a lawsuit you often have a two step process. First you recount to your attorney’s just what you think happened. This is often completely refuted when you go back through the documentation. Memories are a powerful thing, they are hard to change.

Anyway, I didn’t know the book was about memory until after I had read it and peeked at real book reviews by people who can read critically and know how to write reviews. Unfortunately you get me. While I was reading the book it was about an older baby boomer, Tony Webster, in his 60’s who is pestering an old girlfriend from his teenage years. She had dumped him way back when to date one of his best friends, Adrian. Adrian died in an accident while still a teenager. Over the years Tony got on with his life and forgot about both Adrian and his girlfriend until one day he got a letter and found out that the girlfriend’s mother had bequeathed Adrian’s personal diary to Tony. Problem is, the old flame still has it and isn’t giving it up. So Tony decides he wants the diary and proceeds to make a fool out of himself.

So to me the book is about how guys just a little older than me are still capable of making asses out of themselves and it is also a book about how guys “just don’t get it.” I didn’t get the basic riddle of the book until literally the last page. I bet most women could solve the riddle by about 20 pages into the book.

Don’t get me wrong, the book is a good read. Barnes has a way of writing that draws you into the story. That is what I’m looking for in a book. A book that makes time stand still as you are completely engrossed.

I give the book three stars out of five.

The Vault is one of Ruth Rendell‘s “Inspector Wexford” novels. Reginald Wexford has retired from being a policeman and is kind of bored although he finds plenty of stuff to do. None of it really has any meaning for him. He is a good detective but he is not very dashing, athletic, and is the opposite of the tough guys we love so much in America.

He gets a call from the police asking for his help on his case. They need the help really bad but not so bad as they are going to pay him or really give him any sort of official status or even cover his expenses. The case involves a hidden underground vault near a house where several bodies have been found. Several from over ten years ago and the latest just two years ago.

The case is a real headscratcher and Wexford proceeds to work on it by talking to the present occupants of the house, neighbors, and others. He does it almost apologetically explaining to everybody that they don’t really have to talk to him, but they do. He slowly starts piecing together what happens. The people he talk to are all characters, most of whom have secrets of their own, and are not necessarily that helpful, but they are helpful enough.

In the meantime he has family drama to attend to. His daughter is involved in a love affair with a man half her age who really can’t handle rejection and things really take a bad turn there. His daughter is hiding what really happened and he has to figure that story out while solving the police puzzle.

I give this book four stars out of five. I love the interplay between Wexford’s work on the case and his family life and all the different “difficult” characters he has to talk to, and the portayal of a mine trying to find some meaning in his life.

Go to library and get this book! The Kindle edition is $12.99 which is way too much in my opinion.

I just finished Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins, the second book in her Hunger Games Trilogy. The story of Katniss and Peeta continues. Wikipedia’s summary of the trilogy is here. The books are meant for young adults but I love them. The books move quickly through the story and there are plenty of twists and turns in the plot. I’ll be reading the final book soon.

I give it four stars out of five.

I just finished “Women in Love” by D.H. Lawrence. It was written in 1920 and is set in the early 1910’s, before the first World War, and concerns the lives of two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen who live in a small coal mining town in England. Gudren, who is an artist,  falls in love with Robert Crich, a businessman. Ursula falls in love with Robert Birkin, an intellectual. A good summary of the book is here. The book is about relationships, between men and women, and between men.

The book has a racy reputation but it is very tame by modern standards. It was banned in Britain for 11 years after its publication.

My impression of the book is that it is a torrent of words, a regular Niagara Falls. Lawrence sets up the various scenes completely including the emotional state of the parties involved and then puts the scene in motion. I thought he was great at picking out the nuances of a relationship, from deep attraction, to mild irritation and of describing how people in a group interact. He set up some scenes that seemed fairly innocuous and then suddenly something happens, a punch is thrown, a horse kicks up, somebody drowns. To do all this requires the deluge of words, words of all types. I read the book on my Kindle because it is free and that was handy because of the built in dictionary.

I enjoyed the book but it is not light reading. The information density in the prose is thick and if you don’t pay attention to it then the subsequents scenes don’t make much sense. Anyways, I’m glad that I read it and can now tick it off my life TBR list and I don’t think that I’ll be reading much more of his stuff. I am not smart enough.