I, Death by Mark Leslie

This review is based on a pre-published copy of the book. Nonetheless, I was very impressed with the creative way in which it was written. Most of it is written as a blog complete with comments from people out there on the internet, which provides in an interesting way, dialogue. Peter O'Mallick, the blogger, started the blog at the suggestion of his school guidance counselor. Peter believes that he can cause the death and suffering of those around him in some way, starting with his mother who died giving birth to him and his father who died when he was seven by getting run over by a car when he followed Peter who disobeyed and ran across the street to play with his friends. He also believes he killed his childhood friend in a hunting accident when the kid ran ahead and tripped and shot himself.

At the beginning of his blog his girlfriend, Sarah, won't speak to him. Her father had recently caught her performing a sexual act on him and when he confronted Peter he didn't yell at him, he just expressed his disappointment, which angered Peter. Right after that, he ended up with a brain tumor. Peter believes that Sarah must blame him for her father's tumor and that that is the reason she is not speaking to him. He loves her so much he is almost stalking her at school. The internet commenters tell him to give her some room and that she just got some bad news about her father and needs to process it. So he is trying to give her the room she needs. He is also having these horrific nightmares that follow him throughout the book.

At this same time he is falling in love with Shakespeare. Especially Hamlet and goes to the English teacher to ask for suggestions on what to read when he sees her with Sarah and becomes jealous of the teacher who has been spending so much time with her. That night the teacher and Sarah are in a car accident and the teacher ends up in a coma, while Sarah is lucky to walk away with just some cuts and bruises.

They get a new teacher, Robbie who introduces Peter into the world of books. Be prepared to add many authors to your reading lists here such as Sean Costello, Richard Layman, and Robert J. Sawyer. He feels a real rapport with this teacher and he even starts to stop thinking of Sarah some and start thinking of a girl named Monica instead.  The day after he asks her out and she blows him off something has happened to her and Peter blames himself once again whether it's his fault or not. And yes, more bad things will happen. And there's a mystery man who is in search of Peter for his own nefarious purposes.

By this time he is interacting more with the people who comment on his blog. Sometimes this will be an antagonistic relationship as he feels as though some of these people do not understand him or are giving him bad advice. This book shows how intimate we can become with complete strangers online and how angry and emotional that relationship can become when we feel we are not being heard or understood.  Yet, it's hard to convey an emotional conversation online (though in this case, Leslie conveys these conversations and actual ones recalled rather well). It is easier to get your meaning across if you are face-to-face with the person. But even then, while you might be understood, you still could be wrong. Leslie masters this unique way of writing in blog form with comments.

There will be times when you will want to give Peter a hug and tell him it will be alright and at times you will want to shake him and tell him to snap out of it. He's a teenager, so that's a common feeling when dealing with teenagers. This book quickly had me hooked and I did not figure it out so I was surprised by the ending. I cannot recommend it enough.

Quotes:

But he never hated the old man for his actions. On the contrary, the slaps and punches and spankings were virtually the only physical contact Brecht had with anyone, and he’d grown to look forward to them as a sign that the old man loved him.

-Mark Leslie (I, Death p 179)

Link To Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/I-Death-Mark-Leslie/dp/1927609038/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1480524900&sr=1-1&keywords=I%2C+death+mark+leslie

Tomlinson Hill: The Remarkable Story of Two Families Who Share the Thomlinson Name--One White, One Black by Chris Tomlinson

I have put off writing this review for about two weeks now.  Its difficult to write a review about a book that covers 150 years of Falls County, Texas history in a few paragraphs.  This book, only 379 pages, contains so many nuggets of information you want to write about them all.  To set this book, I feel I must explain my feelings about Texas.  Texas is a unique state that is slightly crazy, and I'm not saying that just because I have relatives who live all over the state who are, but because Texas has flown under six flags, one of which was its own as a country.  Also, a county over is Waco where David Koresh had his compound and the sniper killer who used students at a college in Texas as shooting targets in the 1960s.  I rest my case.

James Tomlinson left Alabama in the late 1850s during the land rush after the Mexican-American war.  His sister had moved there with her husband and was making money hand over fist.  He built his house on Tomlinson Hill in Falls County, with the county seat of Marlin.  He would have eight children, one of which died during the Civil War, of which Texas saw little action.  Robert Edward Lee Tomlinson was but a small child during this time and he would become the author's great great grandfather.  R.E.L, as he was known, would go to Texas A and M, as his brothers did, but he would also seek further education in order to become a teacher.  He and his brothers, however still grew cotton and cattle.  Their main source of income was the cattle.
After the war, the Tomlinson's would keep blacks on as share croppers.  They would let them work the land, charge what they needed at only specific stores, where the owners were in collusion with the plantation owners, to charge as much as possible for goods and clothes.  By the time the crop came in, the share-cropper would not have a cent to his name, after he paid off the plantation owner.  Some, however, worked for small wages in the fields as laborers.  Peter Tomlinson and Josephine, born slaves, would work as share-croppers on the Tomlinson land.  Chris Tomlinson was told as a  child that the slaves on the plantation loved their masters so much that they had taken their name.  LaDamian, a decedent of Peter's , a young man today, grew up believing that Tomlinson's Hill was named after his family.

In Texas, times were turbulent for many years after the war.  Texas would not re-enter the Union until 1870, the last state to do so because they did not want to give the slaves their freedom or the right to vote.  During the 1890s there would be the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan that would cause all kinds of problems.  Though he has no proof, Chris believes that his relatives were involved in some of the terrorization of the blacks in Falls County at this time, as nearly everyone was.  When they put dynamite under the house of a share cropper, killing nearly everyone in it, including women and small children, the county became enraged and searched, in vain for the killers, and the Klan slowly died down.  But the blacks of Falls County knew not to rock the boat.  The first school to be set up in western Falls County would be one for the blacks, as white children were taught at home.  The Tomlinson family would set it up on their land.  High ranking blacks, such as George Washington Carver believed in not asking for Civil Rights, but instead, try to get an education so they could go further than the fields for a living.

R.E.L's son, Tommy, would move to Dallas to look for work, as he wasn't interested in farming.  He would marry and have a son named Bob, whose only interest was bowling and who had no ambition.  He was Chris's father and he would raise him to be without prejudice.  Chris recounts growing up in a Texas that was fighting desegregation and would end up going to many schools, some mostly black.  The whites would flee to the suburbs to avoid sending their children to school with blacks.  So, in the end, you still ended up with a lot of schools that were mostly black or mostly white.

On the black side of the Tomlinson's Peter would have a grandson, Vincent Jr., who would make a small success out of his life.  His son, O.T., first married Jewel and had four children by her.  Then when Jewel wanted to leave Tomlinson Hill for Waco, he would divorce her and marry Loreane and have three children by her, one of which is LaDamian, who would go on to become one of the most famous wide receivers in NFL history, while he played for the Chargers (you might have seen him in the Campbell's Chunky Soup commercials with his mom).  He didn't have much of a relationship with his dad, as when his dad fell off a ladder twelve feet and landed on his back, damaging it, he would become hooked on pain pills and later other stuff as well.  Loreane left him and moved the family to Waco.  LaDamian worked hard and made a success of his life.  His brother, LaVar, not so much.  He was blessed with a modicum of talent, but not enough to be a success at it and the black school he attended had left him woefully unprepared for college.

The author, stumbled into journalism, while in Africa.  He covered all the horrors of Africa in the 1990s and then the Middle East after 9-11.  When one too many of the people he worked with died, he quit and went home and began to become curious about his family history and thus this book was born.  There is so much to learn about a small microcosm of American history here and it is truly incredibly fascinating.  From the 1850s to the 1980s a Tomlinson, white or black, has always lived on Tomlinson Hill.  This book shows how their lives interact with each other and the land that came to mean so much to them.

Link to Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Tomlinson-Hill-Remarkable-Story-Families/dp/1250005477/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1480347396&sr=8-1&keywords=tomlinson+hill

Prayers For the Dead by Faye Kellerman

In this tenth Lieutenant Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus Decker mystery, a famous surgeon and transplant doctor is found shot several times in the head and stabbed multiple times in the chest and left in his car behind a restaurant.  There are many sides to this man:  there's the benevolent doctor, the motorcycle riding weekend warrior, the devout Fundamentalist Christian, and the mostly absentee father to his family of six children.

This book does not lack for suspects.  Dr. Azor Sparks's three oldest children, triplets, with a set of twins, Luke, a reformed drug addict who cannot get his life together and asks his dad for a loan on the night of his death, Bram, a Catholic priest, which really ticked off his dad, who is also the "golden child" whom everyone looks to for support, and Paul, a stockbroker who is in massive amounts of debt and needs lots of money now.  Then there's Dana, whose Jewish husband will not convert and whose businesses are doing poorly and they have also asked her dad for money.  The last two children are Michael, a twenty-five-year-old med student, trying to get his dad's attention, and the baby, Maggie who is eighteen.  Their mother is a former pill addict, which is no wonder, seeing as how she had to raise six children all by herself and could not ask for help from her church.

There is also the doctors at the hospital.  Dr. Sparks had discovered a new drug for use with transplant patients for when they have had their surgery and must take immunosuppressors to help the body accept the new organ.  He worked with Dr. Reginald Decameron who had an argument with the doctor when he was last seen and was the go-between with the drug company and the FDA, Dr. Myron Berger, a man he had gone to school with and who was now working for him in this study and would now be taking over his patients, and Dr. Elizabeth Fulton.

To complicate matters, Rina knows Bram from when she was married to her first husband.  The two were best friends as he tried to teach Bram the Torah and other Jewish texts and then became an indispensable helpmate to Rina during the last year of her husband's life as he battled cancer.  She could not have made it through without him.  When Decker finds this out, he withdraws himself to a more supervisory position when evidence at another murder scene incriminates Bram, who refuses to speak at all, not even to ask for an attorney.

This book has so many twists and turns in it, but you never get lost.  Just when you think it is one person, another person seems to be a better candidate.  After all, his wife inherits his estate and retirement, while his children receive a million dollars each in inheritance money and the doctors could be sitting on a big pile of money if they play their cards right with the drug company.  I was not prepared for the ending.  It came as a complete and wicked surprise to me.  This is a great novel and one really worth reading.

Link to Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Prayers-Dead-Decker-Lazarus-Novels/dp/0062087878/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1479908745&sr=1-1&keywords=prayers+for+the+dead+by+faye+kellerman

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

In full disclosure, I saw the movie first, and I must say that I liked the movie more, just because it was so much more vivid and colorful and spectacular.  The movie remains very faithful to the book, which is why I can also honestly say I loved the book.

This book is written in letters by Charlie to a person unknown to him that he heard about at school and with whom he feels the need to write to.  The year before Charlie became a freshman, his best friend committed suicide.  That almost sent Charlie back to the psych doctors where he went on his seventh birthday, December 24, when he found out his favorite aunt had died in a car accident going out to buy a birthday gift for him.

Charlie starts out the school year alone but soon makes friends with seniors and step-brother and sister, Patrick and Sam.  They introduce him to a new world and bring him out of his shell and get him to "participate" in life more as his English teacher keeps telling him to do.  During the school year, this teacher would give  him extra books to read and have him write essays that had nothing to do with his grades but would improve his writing and expand his horizons.

Sometimes Charlie has uncontrollable rages, where he can absolutely destroy someone.  When he is picked on by a bully during his first days, he beats him up.  Because of this rage, that rarely comes out, he doesn't play sports, like his college freshman football playing brother, Brad.  His Senior sister dates a guy who once hit her, even though she's not supposed to do so.

Charlie, Sam and Patrick often meet at the Big Boy and talk about everything going on in their minds and in their lives.  They also do the Rocky Horror Picture Show.  Sam is dating an older guy named Craig who doesn't appreciate her and Patrick is secretly seeing the quarterback of the football team, until things go horribly wrong and Charlie must save Patrick, for once.

Sam knows that Charlie loves her, but at the very beginning she tells him that it would never work and to give up on the idea.  So, when Mary Elizabeth, one of their friends, asks him out to the Sadie Hawkins Dance, he goes.  He doesn't really like her that way and all she does is talk.  Soon, unable to tell her no, he finds himself dating her, and ultimately resenting her, until one night when he royally screws everything in his world up and almost loses all of his friends.

This book is about friendships, family, what its like to be in high school during those horrid years, and how a young man is trying to open himself up to the world instead of staying inside and being an observer all the time.  This book will touch your heart and break it with the climax at the end.  It will remind you of all those times you didn't belong and the one time in your life when you did.  Will Charlie survive high school after all his friends have graduated?  Who knows?  But his journey through this year he thought would be really tough, opens him up to a new world.

Quotes:

Sometimes, my dad calls her beautiful, but she cannot hear him.

--Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower p 16)

-Do you always think this much, Charlie?

-Is that bad?

-Not necessarily.  It’s just that sometimes people use thought to not participate in life.

-- Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower p 24)

Not everybody has a sob story, Charlie, and even if they do, it’s no excuse.

-- Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower p28)

 

The only thing she asked me the whole time was whether or not I wanted to kiss her good night.  When I said I wasn’t ready, she said she understood and told me what a great time she had.  She said I was the most sensitive boy she’d ever met, which I didn’t understand because really all I did was not interrupt her.

-- Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower p 114)

I almost didn’t get an A in math, but then Mr. Carlo told me to stop asking ‘why?’ all the time and just follow the formulas.  So, I did.  Now, I get perfect scores on all my tests.  I just wish I knew what the formulas did.  I honestly have no idea.

-- Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower p 165)

We accept the love we think we deserve.

Link to Amazon:  https://www.amazon.com/Perks-Being-Wallflower-Stephen-Chbosky/dp/1451696191/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1479480552&sr=1-1&keywords=perks+of+being+a+wallflower

 

 

 

The Black Tower by P.D. James

It's been almost ten years since the last Adam Dalgliesh mystery was written and we find that he got married and lost his wife and baby during childbirth.  Now he's in the hospital with a diagnosis of leukemia and he has gotten all his affairs in order and settled himself to his death, when the doctor says sorry, but you only had a bad case of mono.  Now he doesn't really want to go back to being a detective and plans to retire.

While at the hospital he receives a letter from an old family friend, Father Baddeley who is asking for his help.   He is staying at a disability commune/hospital and so, when he is able to travel, Dalgliesh sets out to visit him at Troydon Manor, which is run by the very odd, slightly mean warden, Wilfred Anstey, who claims to have had D.S. and went to Lourdes and bathed there and came back healed.

Says those of Troyden "There were a hundred better places for convalescence than this claustrophobic, self-regarding community dedicated to love and self-fulfillment through suffering, where people sent each other poison pen letters, played at childish and malicious pranks or got tired of waiting for death and hurled themselves into annihilation."

When he arrives, he learns that one of the patients "accidently" rolled off a cliff on to the rocks below and that his friend Father Baddeley died of a heart attack.  Dalgliesh wants nothing to do with the place or its people, and frankly, you won't either.  Soon, people start dropping like flies, but the police still don't suspect murder and Dalgliesh don't feel like trying to solve the mystery.  However, the people that die are likable people and you want justice for them and for someone, anyone, to wake up and yell "murder!"

At the end, Dalgliesh has a sudden lightning bolt of insight that comes from god knows where since he hasn't been paying much attention to anything the entire book, so caught up in his grief he is, and figures out who the killer is and soon finds himself in a sticky situation hat has the book picking up speed and interest as you wonder how he gets out of this one, because ten years later James writes another Dalgliesh mystery,

Do you know he'll survive intact for that next book?

Link to Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Black-Tower-Adam-Dalgliesh-Mystery/dp/0743219619/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1479308993&sr=8-1&keywords=black+tower

The Girl With a Clock For a Heart by Peter Swanson

This bizarre book follows the life of George Foss during two times in his life, his first semester of college at Mather, and his current life forty years later.  At a college party at the beginning of the semester, George meets Audrey Beck and falls hard for her.  The rest of that semester they spend every available moment together.  Then George finds out, when he comes back from winter break, that Audrey committed suicide.  Unable to accept this, he takes a bus down to her home in Florida and discovers that the girl he was in love with was not Audrey, but a girl named Liana, who quite possibly did something really bad.  For the rest of the next twenty years, George would spend time looking into crowds for her, even hunting down a porn star that looked like her, only to be disappointed.

During this time, George works as a manager of a literary magazine and has had an on-again-off-again relationship for the past fifteen years with Irene who works for the Boston Globe.  They're best friends who date other people and are always there for each other.  One night at their usual bar, George sees Liana and sends Irene home so he can find out for sure if it's her.  She says she needs him to do her a favor.  She's in trouble and needs his help.  George, of course, can't resist.

She stole money from a man she was sleeping with who was married but made some of his money illegally, and now some threatening guy, named Donnie Jenks, is after her to kill her if she doesn't turn in the money.  After George returns the money to the man, he runs into the real Donnie Jenks and now wonders who the guy is that he met, who nearly ruptured his kidney that he thought was Donnie Jenks.  He meets Liana later that night for dinner and she spends the night with him but leaves before he wakes up.

That morning, cops show up at his door.  The man he returned the money to is dead and the diamonds in his safe are now missing.  George feels as though he has been played the fool by Liana once again.  And confesses all he knows to the cops, of whom, one actually believes him.

This tale of love, lust, and betrayal is truly wicked.  You have no idea just who Liana really is and neither does George, until its too late.  The twist at the end might leave you a little frustrated--it did me.  This is one smartly written book that I definitely recommend.

Quote

Approaching forty, George felt as though his world had been slowly drained of all its colors.  He’d passed that age when he could reasonably expect to fall madly in love with someone and raise a family, or to take the world by storm, or to have anything surprising lift him out of his day-to-day existence.

--Peter Swanson (The Girl With a Clock For a Heart p 6-7)

Link to Amazon:  https://www.amazon.com/Girl-Clock-Heart-Novel/dp/0062267507/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1479144050&sr=1-1&keywords=the+girl+with+a+clock+for+a+heart

 

Justice by Faye Kellerman

Peter and his wife Rina, are Modern Orthodox Jews, meaning that they practice kosher and Sabbath.  In fact, Sabbath is the only day he gets off from work.  They have a one-year-old daughter Hannah, a fifteen-year-old and thirteen-year-old son from Rina's previous marriage (she was a widow when Peter met her in the first book, Ritual Bath, which I highly recommend), and Cindy, a college-aged student that is Peter's daughter from a previous marriage.  The police call him Rabbi, in a good way.  Unfortunately, his partner Marge is on vacation in Hawaii, and her character is sorely missed.

In this ninth Detective Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus mystery, a young woman is found in a cheap hotel tied up in a Christ-like pose and is strangled to death.  There is evidence that two men had sex with her (two condoms, yet semen in her vagina as well as different pubic hairs), but the Peter's Lieutenant refuses to look farther than the girl's kinda boyfriend Chris Whitter, the adopted son of a mob boss, who has drawings of the real girl he loves, Terry, in as much he is able to love someone, tied up in exactly the same way.  He is engaged, in an arranged marriage, to another mob family daughter and tries to stay away from Terry because of this.

On Prom night, a group of them go to the hotel and have a party, before going into separate rooms.  While he says he doesn't remember what happens, Chris admits to killing Cheryl in order to have the pictures taken out of evidence, so that Terry won't have to go through the ringer with the press and the publicity of the pictures.  But did he really do it?

Terry dogs Decker to reopen the case two months later because she believes he is innocent of this crime.  Maybe not other crimes, but this one.  When Decker begins to look into the case with fresh eyes and follow up on leads and talks to witnesses who were never talked to, one of which has died the same night as the girl, he finds himself doubting the boy's guilt.  Will true Justice be done?

Quotes

She died of breast cancer.  She had it for a long time, but was afraid to go to the doctors.  She was afraid of losing her breast, disfiguring the body he loved so much.  She just let it go until it was way too late.  Stupid.  He later told me the sexiest thing about her chest wasn’t her breasts but her heartbeat.

---Faye Kellerman (Justice p 48)

Link to Amazon:  https://www.amazon.com/Justice-Decker-Lazarus-Novel-Novels/dp/0061999369/ref=sr_1_14?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1479056654&sr=1-14&keywords=justice