“Again to Carthage“, by John L. Parker Jr.,published in 2007,  is the sequel to Once a Runner published in 2007. Quinton Cassidy the collegiate mile runner in Once a Runner is now 10 years older. He has gone to law school and is doing quite well. He hangs out with his buddies and has a cute girlfriend and all that but he isn’t happy. He feels his youth slipping away from him and he wants to prove that he still “has it.”

He mulls it over and decides that he wants to make the Olympic Marathon Team so he excuses himself from his law practice and heads to a family cabin up in the hills and commences a brutal training regimen running over 120 miles a week (about two and half months worth of running for me.)

The book is pretty good but the end of it is the best when Cassidy runs the Olympic trials to see if he made the team. Parker is a former competitive runner himself and his best writing is describing the races and how brutally hard they are for the top competitors. (Like I’ll ever know.)

Parker waited 29 years between the two books. The writing style of the second book is much more mature without sacrificing any of the passion. The first book is a runners cult classic, I’ve seen it on the counters of some of the running stores in town. (My brother, who started running long before it became cool and still runs about 40 miles a week gave it me, he gave me the second book also.)

The book is well written and very interesting if you want to know about the life of a competitive runner.

I give it three stars out of five.

I just finished The Fifth Witness by Michael Connelly. It is another book in the Lincoln Lawyer series starring Mickey Haller a criminal defense attorney who, because of downturn in the economy, has switched to defending homeowners against fraudulent foreclosures in southern California.

Mr. Haller doesn’t have an office, he conducts his business in the back of a Lincoln. Mickey has a brand new associate right out of law school, an investigator, who is also a biker, and Maggie, an ex-wife with benefits, and I don’t mean a 401K.

One of his foreclosure clients is accused of the murder of a banker who held her mortgage. So Mickey has to put his foreclosure business on hold and get back in the courtroom. He goes up against a good friend of his ex-wife who happens to be an assistant DA.

This is one of the best books of the courtroom drama genre I have ever read. The trial goes this way and that way between exhilaration and despair as Mickey and the prosecutor hook it up and try and outwit and outmaneuver each  other in the courtroom ruled by “a judge with a grudge.”  The stakes on trial go up every day. There are no slow boring parts. It was literally a page turner. In fact I liked it so much that even though I had a library copy I bought it on my Kindle. There is nothing finer than reading a book on a Kindle (I imagine the other e-readers are similar.) You can just fly through a book.

I give this book a five out of five. I don’t give too many fives, so go to your library and get a copy.