“I’d lied to Rachel. I knew what I feared. Knew why I feared it. I closed my eyes and they were there — two lightbulbs hanging in the darkness of the Chicago Subway. Inside their glass skin, a question mark.  Something the old historian himself might struggle to decipher.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky (AUG 7, 2011)

Michael Harvey’s sequel to The Third Rail is We All Fall Down, in which PI Michael Kelly wears out a great deal of shoe leather trying to save the citizens of Chicago. An unidentified perpetrator may have released a biological weapon in the city’s subway system. When people begin to sicken and die, a highly trained team of brilliant scientists is called in to identify the substance (is it a strain of anthrax?) and try to find a way to contain it. Kelly is a student of Thucydides, who wrote eloquently about the Plague of Athens in his classic work, “History of the Peloponnesian War.” Kelly wonders whether, twenty-four hundred years later, a modern, man-made plague will decimate Chicago.

Harvey has been praised for his punchy prose style, clipped dialogue (“I don’t know.” “I have to go out.” “I’ll talk to you later.” You get the picture.), and his gritty take on a city that is legendary for its corrupt politicians, ruthless mobsters, gangbangers, and cops on the take. Although Kelly narrates, Harvey occasionally switches to the third person. For example, the author depicts an obnoxious racist named Donnie Quin, who comes from a long line of police officers but does not wear his uniform with pride. Instead, he is an extortionist who forces both legitimate and illegitimate businessmen (better known as drug dealers) to turn over part of their proceeds on a regular basis. He feels no guilt, since everyone knows that Chicago’s City Hall was “a fat, greedy, happy goose, taking in soft money at one end and cranking patronage deals out the other.”

How does Kelly fit in to all this? A sleazy guy from Homeland Security threatens to throw Kelly in jail on trumped-up charges unless the PI agrees to assist Ellen Brazile, “one of the foremost experts in the world on the genetic engineering of bioweapons.” Kelly powwows with Brazile and her team, the Mayor of Chicago, John J. Wilson, and the representative from Homeland Security. They try to come up with a game plan that will minimize loss of life without causing panic.

The prospect of “a molecular arms race,” in which “black biologists” create new strains of bacteria to use against their enemies is genuinely frightening. This novel has some neat bells and whistles–modern tools that can both create and neutralize “the most lethal pathogens known to man” and “smart clothing” made of nanofibers that can stop a bullet and release antiobiotics into the victim’s system. There are the usual violent confrontations, convoluted twists and turns, and a slam-bang ending in which a few loose ends are purposely left dangling. Although certain elements in We All Fall Down are far-fetched and confusing, Harvey manages to hold our interest thanks to his hard-hitting plot, sardonic dialogue, and his tough and savvy hero, Michael Kelly.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 13 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf (July 12, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Michael Harvey
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Fifth Floor The Third Rail

Bibliography:

• The Chicago Way (August 2007)
• The Fifth Floor (August 2008)
• Third Rail (April 2010)
• We All Fall Down (July 2011)

“Do you remember?” Mitch said staring out the darkened window, “how we used to talk about the rich guys, the CEOs and politicians? How we used to hate them for acting in their own interests instead of for the good of everyone else

“We went into this thinking we were going to stick it to guys like that. Like Johnny. People who broke the rules for their own good. And now here we are. Thinking the same way.”

Book Review:

Review by Devon Shepherd  AUG 6, 2011)

The titular novices of Marcus Sakey’s recent novel, The Amateurs, are four friends, three men and one woman, who band together against the frigidity of Chicago’s winters and the loneliness of urban life to form the Thursday Night Drinking Club. But amateur drinkers these four are not – experts in the art of throwing back martinis, the first thing any of these four do in a time of crisis is reach for a bottle of vodka. If only the same could be said for their foray into the criminal underworld.

Rounding thirty, they are poster children for urban ennui: Alex is a former law-student whose sideline as a bartender turned full-time ten years ago when his now-ex wife gave birth to their daughter, Cassie; Ian, a trader with a coke problem, flew too high, too fast with a phenomenal trade in undervalued Hudson-Pollam Biolabs stock, only to face increasing loss and derision as he stalks the financial markets, looking for another off-the-radar meteor to ride back to his seat among the stars; Mitch is a bookish hotel doorman who carries a torch for Jenn, the only female member of their drinking crew, but lacks the spine to do anything about it; Jenn is a travel agent who dreams of travelling herself but can’t seem to commit to making it happen, much like she can’t seem to commit to any of the men she dates, content to coast along on what is left of her good looks. If the group reads like a clichéd list of youngish urbanites, well that is largely because it is. But in lieu of nuanced characters, Mr. Sakey presents us with a moral dilemma.

Imagine you could steal a substantial sum of money, not enough to make you rich, but enough to alleviate some of your immediate problems and broaden your future horizons, would you do it? What if I promised you wouldn’t get caught? Or what if that money belonged to people you knew were overdue for some karmic comeuppance, people like professional criminals?

That is the question the Thursday Night Drinking Crew faces when Alex’s no-good boss, Johnny Love, bullies him into posing as muscle for an after-hours deal. The money for the deal is locked away in a safe, but Alex knows the combination. Resentful of Johnny Love for coercing his participation, Alex tells the crew about the deal. With their last game of “What would you do if . . .. you had half-a-million dollars?” (called “Ready-go” here) still fresh in their minds, the others are primed and ready to fantasize about travelling the world or day trading themselves to a fortune, but the stakes for Alex are much higher.

Cassie’s step-father has received a promotion that requires moving the family to Phoenix. Alex’s ex-wife informs him that, while she has no intention of keeping his daughter from him, due to a series of late or missed child support payments, he doesn’t have a legal say in the matter. Figuring (bizarrely) that making up the late payments will give him the legal right to stop the move, Alex pushes his friends, first Jenn, who he’s casually sleeping with, then Ian, who has developed a gambling problem (and the concomitant debts) to help him steal the money. Following Alex’s lead, the group uses Mitch’s crush on Jenn to coax him out of his reluctance.

Because why should they be shut out when everyone else has their hands in the cookie jar? Bear Stearns is in the midst of collapsing as the sub-prime mortgage crisis guts the economy, leaving many on Wall Street millions, if not billions, of dollars richer. Regular people like them are being stolen from everyday. Why shouldn’t they step up and start taking want they want too?

Ian brings up a problem that has become a classic in both game theory and moral philosophy, The Prisoner’s Dilemma. Although it can take many forms, the dilemma is usually presented in the form of two people getting arrested for a crime. The police know they are guilty, but don’t have enough evidence to press charges. The criminals are separated and told that if they rat out their partner they will go free, but their partner will get 10 years. If both criminals stay silent, they will each get charged with a lesser crime that carries a penalty of, say, 6 months in jail. If both confess, they will split the time, each serving 5 years. What is the rational thing to do here? If maintaining your freedom is a priority, then obviously you’re best off confessing before your friend does. But if the game is repeated, that is, if after the first prisoner confesses, the second prisoner is still given the opportunity to confess, the best thing to do over time is to stay silent, because 6 months (the time served if both stay silent) is better than 5 years (the time served if both confess).
Since the Thursday Night Drinking Club do not belong to the criminal underworld, and do not need to maintain trust and relationships of fellow criminals, there is no iteration of the game for them, and so, according to Ian, they have nothing to lose, and much to gain, by betraying Johnny Love.

But, in moral philosophy, the Prisoner’s Dilemma is often used to illustrate how rational self-interest can produce socially undesirable outcomes. Or to put it another way, the problem describes the tension between self-interest and the interests of the group, because a group where everyone acts in self-interest can sometimes produce individuals that are all worse off than they would have been if they had acted in the interest of the group.

As the four friends plan their heist, they fail to anticipate some obvious contingencies, and the robbery goes the only way it could – horribly wrong. Left with a pile of money and a new set of problems, the group promises to lay low for a while, each swearing not to spend their share of the money until the heat has died down and they’re sure they’re beyond suspicion.

But group interests aren’t enough to keep Alex from breaking their pact and paying his overdue child support. Ian, fearing for their personal safety (when Ian exchanged information about their plan for guns, Katz, the gangster running an illegal casino, threatened the lives of his friends if he didn’t settle immediately following the robbery) pays off his gambling debts. However, word travels fast in the underworld, and Victor, the other end of Johnny Love’s deal, gets wind of this ridiculously inept band of robbers. Not planning on ever having to deal with these criminals again, the group didn’t account for iteration – and as things go from bad to heart-breakingly horrible, they quickly realize that what they made the wrong choice: they should have played it straight instead of betraying a group of known criminals.

Despite all this philosophy – Plato, Nietzsche, and Sartre all get paraphrased for good measure – this is a darkly effervescent book. In this fast-paced and entertaining novel, Mr. Sakey spins the crime genre on its head to ask what happens when regular folk take it into their heads to become criminals.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 25 readers
PUBLISHER:	NAL Trade; Reprint edition (June 7, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Devon Shepherd
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Marcus Sakey
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes

Bibliography:

• The Blade Itself (2007)
• At the City’s Edge (2008)
• Good People (2008)
• The Amateurs (2009)
• Scar Tissue: Stories (2010)
• The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes (June 2011)

“I could hear the sincerity in my voice. I could imitate sincerity so well that even I believed it.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky  (JUN 4, 2011)

Clare O’Donohue knows what she is talking about in Missing Persons, a satirical and amusing novel about a Chicago-based freelance television producer who specializes in true crime stories. Since O’Donohue has been a producer, she understands “the frustration, annoyance, and craziness” that go with the territory.

Kate is an adorable character who is bright, hard-working, blunt, sassy, and very skilled at what she does. However, she would be the first to admit that she is driven and will do almost anything to get a good sound bite. It’s her mission to manipulate the people she interviews. If she wants someone to cry, she knows how to make it happen. It is no wonder that Kate has become so jaded. Her commitment to her work may be one of the factors that broke up her fifteen-year marriage. She is separated from her soon to be ex-husband, Frank, an aspiring artist. While Kate earned a living, Frank dreamed, puttered, and made promises that he never kept. Now he has found a new significant other and is moving on with his life.

A shocking tragedy changes everything and Kate becomes involved in her own personal drama. In addition, she has a new assignment for a show called Missing Persons. With the help of her cameraman and audio guy, Kate is conducting interviews with everyone who knew Theresa Moretti, a twenty-two year old woman who vanished over a year ago. Did Theresa walk away from her life voluntarily or did someone abduct her? Kate, an amateur sleuth, conducts her own informal inquiries into the Moretti case.

This is a clever and engrossing mystery that, happily, avoids most of the clichés that make readers wince. There is no gloppy romance for Kate; the trajectory of the investigation goes off in unexpected and original directions; and the ending is surprisingly tame and free of melodrama. Even more unusual is the fact that Kate befriends Frank’s mistress, Vera Bingham, who seems to be a rather nice person.

There is witty and sometimes profane banter between Kate and her crew–her cameraman, Andres, and her sound man, Victor. We also get an interesting behind-the-scenes look at the making of a low-budget cable television program. Kate’s profession is challenging and highly competitive. She sometimes loathes herself for using devious tactics to get the footage that she needs. In a particularly telling scene, Kate says about a woman she is interviewing, “She was so vulnerable, in so much pain. It would look great on camera.” How cynical can you get? This is a lighthearted story with some serious themes: First, television executives often cater to the lowest common denominator, exploiting an audience that craves sensationalism. (“People love other people’s misery.”) In addition, Kate, in a rare moment of introspection, begins to understand the part that she played in the dissolution of her marriage. She realizes belatedly that, had she been a bit more unselfish, compassionate, and giving, she and her husband might have managed to stay together.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 17 readers
PUBLISHER:	Plume; 1 edition (May 31, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Clare O’Donohue
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:Burning Garbo by Robert Eversz Look Again by Lisa Scottoline

Bibliography:

Someday Quilts Mysteries:

• The Lover’s Knot (2008)
• A Drunkard’s Path (2009)
• The Double Cross (2910)
• The Devil’s Puzzle (September 2011)

Kate Conway Mysteries:

• Missing Persons (May 2011)

“It’s good early in life to experience success. It puts you on the right track for later on, when it counts. You don’t learn a god damned thing from defeat. That’s the wrong track and defeat stays with you and becomes the expected thing. It’s a chain around your neck.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (MAR 02, 2011)

Ward Just is a writer’s writer, as straightforward and gritty and no-nonsense as Chicago—the city from which he hails. His solid 17th novel carries a seemingly enigmatic title – Rodin’s Debutante – a curiosity, considering the book has nothing to do with Rodin or debutantes.

But wait – as in much of Ward Just’s work, there is complexity and hidden meaning behind the seeming simplicity. Sculpturally, Rodin – the progenitor of modern sculpture — possessed a distinctive ability to model a complex, turbulent, deeply pocketed surface in clay. Similarly, Lee Goodell, the key protagonist of Rodin’s Debutante, takes his own unformed life and sculpts it, in an education that stretches from the boarding school at the Ogden Hall School of Boys to the mean south side city streets of Chicago.

The story begins in the early 20th century with the bellicose Tommy Ogden, a rough-edged Chicago tycoon who thwarts his wife Maria’s desire to travel to Paris to commission her own Rodin bust; instead, he chooses to endow a Midwestern boy’s prep school. A Rodin bust of an anonymous debutante does eventually grace Ogden Hall’s Library, but it is not the bust of Maria Ogden, despite commonly accepted wisdom. It is “just appearances” and a metaphor for what life is all about.

Flash forward many decades. The story shifts to Lee Goodell. He and his family live in New Jesper, a quiet traditional town off the shores of Lake Michigan, where Lee’s innocence is shattered after a particularly violent sex crime of a classmate. Lee – a self-described observer of life – ends up at enrolling at Ogden Hall, where he excels; he, too, wants to sculpt. In a twist of fate, he meets the now reclusive millionaire and gushes to him, “I believe Rodin’s bust of your late wife is a wonderful work of art. It’s a great thing to have in the library. It’s an inspiration. It’s been an inspiration to me.” A bemused Tommy Ogden casually shatters that illusion…the first of many illusions that will be shattered for Lee.

And that is the book’s core theme: the divergence of false appearance and reality. Whether it’s the falsity of a respectable community where the truth never sees the light of day, the false appearance of harmony in Hyde Park, which is rife with class and racial distinctions, or the falsity of the legend behind Rodin’s debutante marble statue, life is never what it seems, only what you make it. The fact that Lee becomes a sculptor, too, is also no accident. He finds comfort in a slab of unformed marble, where possibilities are infinite, and where he has the control of shaping the outcome. In this career, the ideal of art and the reality of life are finally able to blend.

Lee Goodell is a good man…perhaps, a bit too good, which translates into not enough of the pockmarks and imperfections that lead to a fully-rounded and satisfying key character. Still, this is a solid piece of work, with sparse and powerful prose, rich observations, and a meticulously crafted plot. The sense of place, the crude glamour of rough-and-ready mid-century Chicago is spot-on. Rodin’s Debutante is a very worthy addition to Ward Just’s fine craftsman-like body of work.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 25 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (March 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia on Ward Just
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More Chicago fiction:Dream City by Brendan Short

Bibliography:

• A Soldier of the Revolution (1970)
• The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert: Stories (1973)
• Stringer (1974)
• Nicholson at Large (1975)
• Honor, Power, Riches, Fame and the Love of Women: Stories (1979)
• A Family Trust (1978)
• In the City of Fear (1982)
• The American Blues (1984)
• The American Ambassador (1987)
• Jack Gance (1989)
• Twenty-one Selected Stories (1990)
• The Translator (1991)
• Ambition & Love (1994)
• Echo House (1997)
• A Dangerous Friend (1999)
• Lowell Limpett and Two Stories (2001)
• The Weather in Berlin (2002)
• An Unfinished Season (2004)
• Forgetfulness (2006)
• Exiles in the Garden (2009)
• Rodin’s Debutante (2011)
• American Romantic (April 2014)

Nonfiction:

• To What End: Report from Vietnam (1968)
• Military Men (1970)

“On that last day Mor took us up to the roof, she had calculated the difference between what we couldn’t have and her ability to watch us want. The difference between her pain and ours, she decided, measured nine stories high.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (FEB 11, 2011)

It amazes me that The Girl Who Fell From the Sky is Heidi W. Durrow’s debut novel. It is poetic, poignant, beautiful and elegiac with the panache of a seasoned writer. Once I started it, I could not stop thinking about it. It haunted my days until I finished it. Durrow has a talent that is rare and brilliant, like the northern lights.

The novel is about Rachel, the lone survivor of a fall from an apartment building. How did she fall? What made her family go off the roof-top? Told in different voices, the story unfolds slowly and the reader is let in on family destinies, secrets, shame, and the legacy of alcohol.

The story starts off in Chicago. It is told from the viewpoints of Rachel, a bi-racial girl who is in fifth grade when the story opens and is in high school at its end. There is Nella, Rachel’s mother, who is Danish, and whose surviving diary tells her story. Roger, Rachel’s father, is a black man in the military who meets Nella in Europe and who leaves Rachel with his mother after the fall. Laronne is Nella’s supervisor at work who comes across Nella’s diaries after her death. And then there is Brick, a young man of the Chicago tenements whose stolen copy of Peterson’s Field Guide to Birds of North America is his most prized possession.

As this haunting novel begins, Brick, a budding ornithologist, is watching for birds to fall in the alleyway of his building. He is hoping for an egret but usually what he sees are falling trash bags and detritus from the upper floors. This time, he sees what he thinks is a huge bird falling and he runs downstairs to see what kind of bird it is.

“He was certain the silhouette of the great egret had passed his courtyard window…When he finally reached the courtyard, he saw that his bird was not a bird at all. His bird was a boy and a girl and a mother and a child. The mother, the girl, the child. They looked like they were sleeping, eyes closed, listless. The baby was still in her mother’s arms, a gray porridge pouring from the underside of her head. The girl was heaped on top of the boy’s body, a bloody helpless pillow.”

This sight becomes imprinted on Brick and effects the course of his entire life.

Rachel is the only survivor of the fall and, after her hospitalization, is sent to live with her grandmother in Portland, Oregon.   With her blue eyes and “good” hair, she becomes very much aware of race. There are the white girls and there are the black girls. She fits in nowhere though she tries to make a new self after the fall. Her mother, “Mor,” had done her best to shield Rachel and her siblings from race, to see themselves as unique beings, not as a color. This was much easier to do in Europe than in the United States. As Rachel navigates the racial terrain of her new world, she is stymied over and over by the subtleties and outright cruelties of race.

Rachel watches her grandmother drink her “contributions” and sees how the amount of her drinking increases daily. Rachel is very aware of the impact of alcohol on her family’s lives. Nella was in recovery when she died and her diary begins each day with the number of days she has been sober. Roger, Nella’s father, is an alcoholic, and it becomes clear that Rachel’s grandmother has a huge problem with her “contributions.” Though Roger does not visit Rachel once she is out of the hospital, his story is told through Brick who met him in the hospital. There, Roger shared family secrets with Brick and made him promise to one day tell these to Rachel.

The story unfolds in layers, slowly and magnificently. The reader has questions answered page by page until the story of the fall, the family secrets and history, are all given to us in haunting and precious bits. This is more than a story of a bi-racial girl and her ability to adapt to a new world and the horror of her legacy. It is a story of resiliency and hope and awareness and insight. Rachel is one of the strongest and clear characters that I have come across in literature. This is a book to be treasured and re-read. It is that good.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 228 readers
PUBLISHER:	Algonquin Books; 1 edition (January 11, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Heidi W. Durrow
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another “fall off the roof” novel: Stella Descending by Linn Ullman Another “mixed race” book: Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama

Bibliography:

• The Girl Who Fell From the Sky (January 2011)

“I wanted what I had wanted from the time the nightmare began: the life I had before. I did not have the strength, if the truth be told, to start again. Or to see my son, a fragile creature, become the final victim of the entire tragedy.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky (MAY 4, 2010)

Back in 1987, Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent created a sensation. It had all of the elements that fans of legal thrillers adore: murder, adultery, courtroom pyrotechnics, and a final twist that knocked everyone’s socks off.  In Innocent, the highly anticipated sequel, it is 2007.  Rusty Sabich is now sixty years old and has risen to become Chief Judge of the Third District Appellate Court in Kindle County. He is hoping to run for the State Supreme Court in the near future. Unfortunately, his personal life has been far less successful than his career.

Rusty’s wife of thirty-six years is a brilliant woman, but she is afflicted with a crippling case of bipolar disorder. She is prone to uncontrollable rages and devastating depression; medication cannot completely alleviate her symptoms. Rusty and Barbara have stayed together partly to protect their sensitive only child, Nat, twenty-eight, who is about to graduate from law school. When Rusty is tempted by a beautiful thirty-four year old woman who has set her sights on him, he must decide whether he should risk everything to embark on an affair that is bound to end badly.

Twenty-one years earlier, Tommy Molto had been a prosecutor during Sabich’s sensational trial, and the two have a history of mutual respect and antipathy. Each acknowledges the other’s courtroom skills, but neither one can forget how Rusty evaded conviction. Now Tommy, who is acting Prosecuting Attorney, tries Rusty for a new murder—that of Rusty’s wife, Barbara. Molto’s fiery deputy, Jim Brand, is fiercely loyal to his boss and something of a pit bill. He uses all of his powers of persuasion to convince Tommy that this time, they can nail Sabich and make him pay for at least one of his crimes. What follows is a clash of the titans, since Tommy is not the only powerhouse attorney eager to win this case. Rusty is fortunate to have on his side a top-notch defense lawyer, Sandy Stern who, as he did before, hopes to wield his magic wand and exonerate his high-profile client.

Turow keeps us off balance by going back and forth in time, changing points of view, and withholding key bits of information so that he can spring a few surprises in the final chapters. Innocent is an intense story of how people nurse deep-seated resentments that fester for years and do inestimable damage; of family members who are afraid to tell one another the truth; of infidelity and betrayal; and ultimately, of love and redemption. Turow’s courtroom scenes are mesmerizing, and he makes the complex proceedings accessible and fascinating, even for those who know little about criminal procedure.

One quibble is that Rusty’s behavior does not always ring true. He is supposedly an intelligent and self-disciplined individual who has learned something from his past misdeeds, but his actions in this novel are a bit too naïve, foolish, and self-destructive to be believed. In addition, there is a bit of contrivance in the way the author sews up the threads of his narrative so that everyone gets his or her just desserts.

Still, Turow knows how to grab our attention and hold it, and he maintains a high level of suspense throughout this fast-paced and intricate tale. The sharply written and sometimes earthy dialogue as well as Turow’s entertaining and often dryly humorous prose keep things moving along quickly. Innocent, as its predecessor did more than two decades ago, demonstrates how difficult it is to mete out perfect justice in an imperfect world where so many people lie to themselves and others.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 265 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grand Central Publishing; 1 edition (May 4, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Scott Turow
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Ordinary Heroes Reversible Errors Personal Injuries

Bibliography:

• Presumed Innocent (1987)
• The Burden of Proof (1990)
• Pleading Guilty (1993)
• The Laws of Our Fathers (1996)
• Personal Injuries (1999)
• Reversible Errors (2002)
• Ordinary Heroes (2005)
• Limitations (2006)
• Innocent (2010)
• Identical (October 2013)

Non-fiction:

• One L: The Turbolent True Story of a First Year at Harvard Law School (1977)
• Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer’s Reflections on Dealing with the Death Penalty (2003)

As Editor:

• The Best American Mystery Stories (2006) (with Otto Penzler)

Movies from books:

• Presumed Innocent (1990)

“The pieces of this case, maybe two or three cases, held together by the thinnest of wires: circumstance and an educated guess. The rest floated and turned in the darkness, offering themselves up as a piece of the puzzle, with no real clue as to how or why.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowsky (APR 22, 2010)

The Windy City is the setting for Michael Harvey’s fast-paced thriller, The Third Rail. Private investigator Michael Kelly is part of a task force that includes a detective named Vince Rodriguez and a no-nonsense FBI agent, Katherine Lawson. Their goal is to find a sadistic sniper who shot several passengers riding Chicago’s public transit system. Someone in the know contacts Kelly, and the conversation leads the ex-cop to believe that the key to this puzzling case may lie in the distant past.

Unwilling to be a helpless pawn in a psychotic individual’s twisted game, Kelly launches his own investigation with the help of Hubert Russell, a “twenty-something cyber hacker.” Kelly also consults a retired policeman named Jimmy Doherty in order to gather information and gain a fresh perspective. Michael scours his memory, as he tries to figure out what happened long ago that could have driven someone to commit such vicious crimes. He soon suspects that the shooter may have an accomplice who is nursing a long-standing grudge.

Not everything in this novel is gloom and doom. Kelly has a soft spot for his year-old spaniel, Maggie, and a high regard for a beautiful judge named Rachel Swenson. Although Rachel is uncomfortable with Michael’s penchant for getting into trouble, she cares enough about him to keep him in her life. However, as events heat up, Rachel may very well run out of patience with her boyfriend’s tendency to track down felons on his own.

Harvey has a spare and straightforward writing style, enhanced by brief, staccato sentences and crisp dialogue. Dramatic descriptive passages add to the tension-filled atmosphere. After the perpetrator picks his first victim, “He pulled the trigger, and the woman dropped straight down. Like a puppet with strings cut, she was all here and there, arms, legs, and a smear of lipstick across her lips and down her chin.” This is not a prettified Chicago. There are rats the size of cats, seamy alleys filled with dumpsters, and “the last remnants of the city’s Cabrini-Green housing complex project” provide a haven for gangs and other miscreants. In the high-rise, which is now little more than a shell, “metal mailboxes scored with bullet holes ran along one wall, and the linoleum floor was covered with broken glass and a handful of syringes.” Even Chicago’s blunt mayor, John J. Wilson, is a profane and arrogant boor who bullies people into doing his bidding.

This gritty police procedural keeps us engrossed until it wanders off track during the overly cluttered conclusion. Harvey throws everything but the kitchen sink into the mix (terrorism, abduction, corruption, violence, cover-ups, you name it), and not all of the myriad twists and turns work well. However, The Third Rail is, for the most part, a suspenseful and entertaining novel that is as unpredictable and rough-edged as the most rundown areas of Chicago’s South Side.

Editor’s note: A portion of this book’s proceeds will be donated to The Cambodian Children’s Fund.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 51 readers
PUBLISHER:	Knopf; 1 edition (April 20, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Michael Harvey
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: We All Fall Down The Fifth Floor

Bibliography:

• The Chicago Way (August 2007)
• The Fifth Floor (August 2008)
• Third Rail (April 2010)
• We All Fall Down (July 2011)

“He concedes that genetic enhancement does force major reconsiderations, starting with the boundaries between justice and fate, the natural and the inevitable. But so did the capture of fire and the invention of agriculture.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (OCT 18, 2009)

There are many reasons why Thassadit Amzwar should not be the way she is—always happy. For one thing, she has lost most of her family in the ongoing Algerian civil war. Her father is killed and her mother dies soon after from pancreatic cancer. She has left her home behind and is now a refugee studying in a mediocre college, Mesquakie, in Chicago.

It is here that she runs into Russell Stone—who is teaching the creative writing course she is enrolled in. Stone is a disillusioned writer who works at a day job editing content for a self-help magazine. Along with his students—who are various shades of young adults—Stone is really struck by Thassa’s boundless enthusiasm for life. She is labeled “Miss Generosity” –for the eternal sunshine she visits on those around her and for her generosity of spirit.

Stone begins to wonder about Thassa—how can one who has been through unspeakable horrors be so cheerful? Does Thassa have a psychological problem that she needs to be protected from? To get at the answers, he meets a school counselor, Candace Weld, who, incidentally, is a spitting image of his ex-girlfriend. Candace sympathizes, even applying a label to Thassa’s condition: hyperthymia, a rare condition that programs a person for unusual levels of elation.

Parallel narratives track the career of a famous geneticist Thomas Kurton—a scientist who is well versed not just in science but also in the marketing of it. Helping him achieve his high-profile career is Tonia Schiff, a host of a nationally televised science program, a “thinking man’s babe.” Schiff often gives the scientist Thomas Kurton a forum to bring his research to the public.

Meanwhile back at the college, one day Thassa is raped by one of her fellow students—the news item that follows would have easily disappeared from the public radar screen if it were not for the fact that Stone mentions one word when he is interviewed for the story: hyperthymia.

This word catches Kurton’s attention. Up until now, Kurton’s research is almost there—trying to prove the genetic basis for happiness and other kinds of moods. To him, Thassa seems like a godsend and soon enough she becomes the subject of his research and Thasssa rapidly gets on to the national stage as the “happiness” person. She even appears on the Powers’ equivalent of Oprah after which she has surely and firmly jumped into the public fishbowl.

An endless media frenzy ensues and Powers details the rapidly spirally downturn Thassa’s life takes. “Blogs, mashups, reality programming, court TV, chat shows, chat rooms, chat cafes, capital campaigns, catalog copy, even warzone journalism all turn confessional,” Powers writes of the contemporary sound bite culture we live in. “Feelings are the new facts. Memoir is the new history. Tell-alls are the new news.” The huge hype Thassa’s story brings about is cataloged well by Powers although sometimes you begin to wish he would have stopped while he was two steps ahead. It is at this point that the story teeters on the verge of being a tad formulaic. Incidentally, I thought it ironic that I finished the book on the same day that the “balloon boy” made all the headline news. The parallels between that incident and the media’s obsession with Thassa seemed all too apparent.

Generosity is also a beautiful exploration of the craft of writing—in fact there is a separate train of thought throughout the novel where a narrator explains what elements of fiction are being executed at what stage. This kind of technique brings with it its own risks—one of them being that the novel might seem too gimmicky and worse, overly scripted—but fortunately that doesn’t end up being the case. In one brilliant paragraph, Powers likens the six thousand years of writing to a 600-page novel. “The last chapter is filled with deus ex machinas, and on the very final page, the very last paragraph, the characters throw off the limits of the Story So Far and complete their revolt,” he writes. Which, in the novel, they actually do—sort of.

Arguably Powers’ strongest talents lie in presenting cutting-edge scientific facts in the form of literary fiction. The brain and its workings seem to be his particular favorites. In the spectacular, award-winning The Echo Maker, Powers’ protagonist was a young man suffering from Capgras Syndrome (a form of delusion in which you believe a close relative is actually an imposter) in the wake of a near-fatal accident.

In Generosity too, Powers mines the riches of scientific advances in genetics. As Thassa’s fate careens out of control, Powers effectively shows us how quickly scientific facts—or any other for that matter—can be distorted to reflect one’s own beliefs.

A few days ago, on NPR, a reputed scientist said that the biggest problem facing science these days (especially in the United States) is the rise in the number of people who don’t believe in it. “We need effective communicators, people who can bring science to the public,” he said. People, I suppose, like Thomas Kurton, Tonia Schiff or even Richard Powers.

What’s especially commendable is that above all, Powers consistently delivers powerful, readable stories. The fact that he is also the only writer I’ve read who has successfully used the word “amygdala” in his writing—that, I’ll admit, is the sort of stuff that gets me all weak in the knees.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 37 readers
PUBLISHER:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux (September 29, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Richard Powers
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and audio excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of Orfeo The Echo Maker

Bibliography:

• Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985)
• Prisoner’s Dilemma
• The Gold Bug Variations (1991)
• Operation Wandering Soul (1993)
• Galatea 2.2 (1995)
• Gain (1998)
• Plowing the Dark (2000)
• The Time of Our Singing (2003)
• The Echo Maker (2006)
• Generosity: An Enhancement (2009)
• Orfeo (January 2014)