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Al McReady

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Judgment Prey by John Sandford (Lucas Davenport #33)

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Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers team up to crack an unsolvable case in this thrilling new novel by #1 New York Times bestselling author John Sandford.

Alex Sand was spending the evening at home playing basketball with his two young sons when all three were shot in cold blood. A wealthy federal judge, there’s no short list of people who could have a vendetta against Sands, but the gruesome murders, especially that of his children, turn their St. Paul community on its head. Sand was on the verge of a major donation to a local housing charity, Heart/Twin Cities, and with the money in limbo, eyes suddenly turn to his grieving widow, Margaret Cooper, to see what she might do with the money. Margaret, distraught over the death of her family, struggles to move forward, and can’t imagine how or why anyone would target her husband.

With public pressure mounting and both the local police force and FBI hitting dead end after dead end, Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers are called in to do what others could not: find answers. With each potential lead flawed, Davenport and Flowers are determined to chase every theory until they figure out who killed the Sands. But when they find themselves being stonewalled by the most unlikely of forces, the two wonder if perhaps each misdirection could lead them closer to the truth.

 

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The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every kind of animal, including humans, is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of our immense world.

In An Immense World, Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us. We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth’s magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and even humans who wield sonar like bats. We discover that a crocodile’s scaly face is as sensitive as a lover’s fingertips, that the eyes of a giant squid evolved to see sparkling whales, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision. We learn what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and what dogs smell on the street. We listen to stories of pivotal discoveries in the field, while looking ahead at the many mysteries that remain unsolved.

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  • 2 weeks later...

The Secret by Lee Child, Andrew Child (Jack Reacher #28)

Overview: Chicago. 1992. A hospital patient wakes to find two strangers by his bed.

They show him a list of names and ask a simple but impossible question. Minutes later he falls to his death from his twelfth-floor window - a fall which generates some unexpected attention.

That attention comes from the Secretary of Defense, who calls for an inter-agency task force to investigate. Jack Reacher, recently demoted from Major, is assigned as the Army's representative. If he gets a result, great. If not, he's a convenient fall guy.

Reacher may be an exceptional military investigator, but office politics aren't what gets him up in the morning. As he races to identify a cold-blooded killer and uncover a secret that stretches back 23 years, he must navigate around his new partners.

Will Reacher bring the bad guys to justice the official way...or his way?

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11 hours ago, Lemondropkid said:

Written in 2020, didn't know it existed till picking it up in a second hand bookstore. As funny as anything he's written. Only seems to get poor reviews from Trump fans.

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Just recently reread that myself. Very funny. 

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The Secret Life of John le Carre by Adam Sisman

Overview: The extraordinary secret life of a great novelist, which his biographer could not publish while le Carré was alive. Secrecy came naturally to John le Carré, and there were some secrets that he fought fiercely to keep.

Adam Sisman's definitive biography, published in 2015, provided a revealing portrait of this fascinating man; yet some aspects of his subject remained hidden.

Nowhere was this more so than in his private life.

Apparently content in his marriage, the novelist conducted a string of love affairs over five decades.

To these relationships he brought much of the tradecraft that he had learned as a spy—cover stories, cut-outs and dead letter boxes.

These clandestine operations brought an element of danger to his life, but they also meant deceiving those closest to him.

Small wonder that betrayal became a running theme in his work. In trying to manage his biography, the novelist engaged in a succession of skirmishes with his biographer.

While he could control what Sisman wrote about him in his lifetime, he accepted that the truth would eventually become known.

Following his death in 2020, what had been withheld can now be revealed. The Secret Life of John le Carré reveals a hitherto-hidden perspective on the life and work of the spy-turned-author and a fascinating meditation on the complex relationship between biographer and subject.

“Now that he is dead,” Sisman writes, “we can know him better.”

 

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Resurrection Walk by Michael Connelly (The Lincoln Lawyer #7)

Overview: Defense attorney Mickey Haller - The Lincoln Lawyer - rides the wave of freeing a wrongfully convicted man from prison.

Inundated with pleas from incarcerated people claiming innocence, Haller enlists the help of ex-LAPD detective Harry Bosch to find the next case which could result in a resurrection walk.

When Bosch finds a needle in the haystack - a woman imprisoned for murdering her husband, a sheriff's deputy - they discover evidence that doesn't add up, and a department pushed for quick closure in the killing of one of its own.

But is this rushed justice - or something more sinister?

As they face a David versus Goliath court battle, the secrets which could lead to an innocent woman walking free could also mark the end of the Haller-Bosch dream team. . .

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Also Season 2 of the newer Bosch TV Series spinoff (Bosch Legacy) now has 6 episodes released - they were effected by the Hollywood actors strike.

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For non-fiction, this is a great trilogy  that I started many years ago but never finished; I found the third volume, "Merchant Princes" in a free book kiosk a while ago and enjoyed it so much that I am now re-reading the first volume. It's a history of the Hudson's Bay Company, which is well-known to any Canadian of my age and probably many Brits as well since it was run from Britain until relatively recently and was the oldest chartered commercial business around:

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I'm about to order the second volume:

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And this is the one I just finished:

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If you love history done in an informative and entertaining, and often very humorous manner, this series is highly recommended - the author was one of Canada's foremost journalists and business/history authors and just passed away a few months ago at the age of 94.

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I feel for you @lazarus  Our son is 13 and is going through puberty with the mood swings that the hormones coursing through his body cause.

That, together with moving to senior school with all the challenges that brings, isn’t easy for him to deal with, but he’s dealing with it by immersing himself in gym work, football, taekwondo, piano and guitar playing and generally keeping himself busy with having friends stay for sleep overs etc have helped. 


Luckily it hasn’t affected his school work and we have just received his half term report which has marked him as excellent, with the exception of drama, which was only good. 🤗

Our main problem is getting him to go to sleep at night at 10.30pm on school nights, as he try’s to push the boundaries and stay up later  🤣

 

 

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2 hours ago, andycoll said:

Well it took awhile but I finally finished Centennial, Now I have returned home and have 8 books waiting for me from the library. I have started with this one.

 

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Brilliant, hadn't realised that was out! May treat myself to a paper copy for Xmas.

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