Thoreau, A Life Sublime by Maximilien Le Roy \

A brief take on the life of Henry David Thoreau, a philosopher, an anti-slave activist, and as a result an anti-government activist.  He was a graduate of Harvard.  Known for Walden, or Life in the Woods, and Civil Disobedience, he spoke for John Brown’s release and then at his funeral and then memorialized the man in The Last Days of John Brown.  He spent his time living as natural a life as he could find.  He spent time with Native Americans to learn how they lived with nature instead of working against it.  He worked as a conductor on the underground railroad.  He refused to pay his taxes because he did not want to fund a government that approved of slavery and passed the fugitive slave act.  He spoke against this when a runaway slave was found and captured in Massachusetts.  He was a friend of John Brown and spoke with him for many years against the idea of a slave uprising.  But once Brown was captured, he came to his defense.  He was frugal to a fault, refusing to travel to get better treatment for his tuberculosis.  It finally killed him at the age of 44 in 1862.  His life, though brief has had lasting effect upon American and the world. 

 Squeeze Me by Carl Hiaasen

Angie Armstrong is an ex-con (she fed a poacher’s hand to an alligator – feels bad that they euthanized the alligator) who discreetly captures animals who are terrorizing people (at least in their minds).  She’s called to remove a python in a tree at a ritzy club in Palm Beach, where a rich, old woman has gone missing.   She was a leading member of the Potussies (don’t ask).  The python is lethargic because it ate a big meal, obvious because it’s bloated.  Angie decapitates it and puts it on ice in her truck.  She will deliver it to the State to be dissected.  When she gets home, her apartment’s been ransacked.  Then she checks on her storage, where the snake had been placed in a freezer, and it is missing.  The thieves are less than intelligent and having kidnapped the frozen snake, stop at a stripper club long enough for it to defrost and stink-up their stolen car.  They cut-open the snake, steal the jewelry and toss the woman’s corpse into a building’s freshly poured cement footing, then drive, drunk over a set of railroad tracks too fast, bouncing the trunk open and depositing the snake in the middle of the road.  Just before the secret service escort the First Lady home.  That night a boat with illegals lands on the island and on the way to find a job, one young man, Diego, crosses the same tracks and notices an unusual pink pearl and pockets it.  Then we meet POTUS, nicknamed by the secret service as Mastodon (he asked to see on in the National Zoo and was told it was on loan to another zoo), his overpriced club, Casa Bellecosa, becomes a central stage for the story. The First Lady starts an affair with a secret service agent, Kieth (really Youseff, but since POTUS doesn’t like people from ‘muslim’ countries has to use an alias ‘American’ sounding name.  Of course, POTUS is having his own affair with a stripper, who is writing a tell-all book about him.  Word that Diego has a piece of the rich woman’s jewelry, he is arrested for her murder.  POTUS uses this to stir up his base with a chant of No More Diegos. It’s up to Angie to solve the mysteries and get Diego freed.  She is visiteYhed by a retired state policeman, who gives her the coordinates in the swamp to a man she needs to meet.  Skink, the ex-governor whom Hiaasen has used in other books turns out to be letting Pythons loose all over palm beach, but swears he didn’t have anything to do with the first one, who ate the missing woman.

Walk the Wire by David Baldacci 

In which the main characters of the Memory Man series, Amos Decker and Alex Jamison, team up with the main characters from another series, Will Robie and Jessica Reel.  Decker and his partner get sent to London, North Dakota to look into the death of a woman, without any background information about her or why they are being asked to solve the crime.  She was found by a man hunting a wolf.  The town is embroiled in a fracking boom.  Then the man who found the corpse comes-up missing.  Decker discovers a clue relegated to a minor section of the autopsy report.  Then another woman goes missing and when Decker returns to the house of the missing man, he finds the woman dead in a shed.  When he confronts the part-time coroner, the man commits suicide.  Then one of the two richest men in town buys the other out and is found dead in his car, an apparent suicide.  Then the other rich man is found in his office, an apparent suicide.  Decker doesn’t like coincidences.  He is followed into an alley and is tackled, by Robie, which saves his life.  They team up to run down what looks like the real motive for the murders, busting up an attempt to poison everyone in a hundred-mile radius.  Only they didn’t kill the people Decker is investigating.

The Alice Network by Kate Quinn 

The predecessor novel to The Huntress about a group of British and French women who spied on the Kaiser’s German troops in conquered parts of France.  Alice, or Lil as she is called in most of the story is a former princess and governess who can get through any checkpoint and runs the largest network of spies in France and Belgium.  The story takes place in two timelines, one during World War I and the other after World War II.  I’ll separate them here, though they are masterfully woven in the novel as Eve’s story being told to Charlie.   In the first timeline, a young woman, Eve Gardiner, is recruited to serve her country.  She jumps at the chance and after a short training period is sent into Alsace-Lorraine to work in a little town near the front on the German side.  She poses as a waitress and says nothing as she overhears plans and dates and locations being discussed by German officers who frequent the restaurant.  There is a complication, the Frenchman, Rene, who owns the café, takes an interest in her and she is faced with leaving the service or sleeping with him.  She chooses the latter and pillow talk becomes even more worthwhile to the Allies.  But one bit of information is so important that Lil talks her protégé into going with her to Belgium to deliver the news.  But this time, Lil’s luck at crossings runs out and they are arrested.  Their story that Eve has nothing to do with Lil works and the Germans release Eve, who goes on to meet their contact and deliver the information.  But when Eve returns to her employment, the restauranteur points her own gun at her.  He knocks her out and ties her up and tries to interrogate her.  He tortures her, breaking every joint in her fingers.  When that doesn’t work, he drugs her with opium.  When she comes to, he has the information he was trying to get.  Eve is sent to prison and considers herself a betrayer of Lil.  Lil eventually dies in prison, but Eve survives.  When she returns to England, she refuses to accept medals bestowed upon her and takes to living in a flat in London, trying to drink herself to death. At which point we come to the other timeline.  Charlie is young, unmarried, a sophomore in college and pregnant.  Her brother fought in WWII and upon returning, tried to let his family know he preferred men.  But they would not accept it and between the horrors he saw in the war and their rejection, he could not take it and killed himself.  Charlie wishes she could have done something to help.  She also has not her from her beloved cousin, Rose, since the war and has decided to look for her.  The only clue she has is Eve Gardiner’s address and a name, Rene.  Charlie’s mother is taking her to Switzerland to rid her of the ‘little problem’.  Charlie escapes in London and goes to the address.  Eve, drunk, does not want to help, but since Charlie has no money left and cannot get back to her mother easily, Eve tells her to sleep on the couch, but be gone by morning or she’ll be shot.  When Charlie wakes-up, a man is in the kitchen preparing breakfast and tells Charlie not to worry.  Eve hired the man to do things around the house that her mangled hands prevent her from doing, and he prepares breakfast for her every day.  The name Rene resonates with Eve and the trio set off to France to find out what happened to Rose.  The answer is not what Charlie wanted to hear.  But the connection is that Rene reported Rose to the Nazis as a possible connection to the resistance.  Their response was to try to kill everyone in the village.  One woman survived and tells the story of how Rose died.  Eve then takes over and they hunt Rene down.= The book is extremely well written, the language precise and worth studying.

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy

A Jonathon Livingston Seagull for this generation.  A simple feel-good book that could not have had better timing than to come out at the beginning of the pandemic.  It encourages self-worth, and a feeling that no matter what we face, we can go on.

False Positive by Mike Walton 

A collection of short web comics in the horror genre.  There is a thread based on a man and his daughter who are immortal and humble, living from before civilization throughout the stories.  They deal mostly with magic and simply want to be left alone.