Our hero in Platform Decay by Martha Wells, as with all the Murderbot Diary books, used to be a murderbot. He found a way to override his governor switch because he found killing distasteful and lacking as a nuanced approach to solving problems arising between corporations or corporations and humans in space. With each entry into the diary, murderbot becomes more organic and less of a bot. Eventually he was adopted by Dr. Mensa and the Preservation colony. He is on a mission to bring two endangered citizens with close personal ties to Dr. Mensa home.
Our murderbot is now a SecUnit, a security unit, with skills that make him the perfect one to mount a rescue mission to a decaying platform surrounding a dead planet. When he arrives at the designated platform, he learns that there are a few more people who need to be rescued, but he doesn’t totally trust the woman who is seeking his help.
Once again, his old enemy, the powerful BE corporation is involved and the story becomes an action-packed race through well-kept parts of the platform that rings the planet and old, abandoned parts of the platform. Will SecUnit get everyone out safely this time? It’s a tense situation. It helps that SecUnit can turn off surveillance cameras or wipe them after the fact. It helps that he has pockets full of drones to use as scouts.
When SecUnit is stressed, he watches old movie episodes. He especially loves Sanctuary Moon, but he has expanded his internal library. I use the Murderbot Diaries in the same way that SecUnit uses Sanctuary Moon. The books are a brief adrenalin rush that refreshes because they are fictional. Long live our increasingly human Murderbot.
The Road to Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett started in an old folks’ home with a killer cat named Pancakes, and I almost quit reading. But, although this was a story of heartbreak and grief, it was also a story about how taking risks might mitigate grief or at least give a person the tools to handle life’s next blows.
The story ended up being a kind of a romp. PJ and Ivy lost their oldest daughter, Kate, on prom night. PJ deals with the loss by drinking, a lot. Ivy divorces him and moves in with a mutual friend, Fred. Ivy, in other words, moves on. Fred and Ivy, seeing how PJ is flailing and failing, take care of him as a family member. When Fred and Ivy announce that they are going to Alaska and that they will be unreachable by phone or text for a while, it appears that PJ might not make it. Then he sees an online post about a death in Tucson, Arizona of the husband of a woman he knew in school. She lives in the Tender Hearts community. He falls in love. It’s fate. He decides to travel to Tender Hearts. Should he take his old beaten-up ride?
However, fate has another path in mind for PJ. Luna and Ollie are headed for foster care because of parental stupidity (murder and suicide). Pancakes had a hand in this, maybe. Their father was PJ’s estranged brother. These children are not happy to accept PJ, Luna especially, but their only other option is foster care. Luna believes that her real father is a movie star who used to go to her mother’s high school.
What was a rather iffy situation becomes tolerable for everyone when PJ decides that they will all go on a road trip to find Luna’s movie star and ask him to complete a paternity test. Meanwhile they can also stop by Tucson to meet PJ’s intended at the Tender Hearts Senior Community. PJ’s grown daughter, Sophie, recently fired from her job, reluctantly decides to go with them. Hartnett’s novel tells the story of their journey. They take Pancakes along and leave a small trail of deaths behind them. We learn that Pancakes doesn’t kill indiscriminately.
Once we lose someone we love, the grief never leaves us, but Hartnett’s story gives hope that there is life after loss, even if fate has to beat us over the head and send us off on a wacky road trip to figure it out. There’s a lot more to this journey, but, of course, I won’t tell you.
Vigil by George Saunders is full of death and ghosts, at least these eternal figures, many continuing to inhabit the site of their death and only able to see others who have died, seem to be ghosts. Some ghosts can travel, can “refresh” themselves. If they agree to perform a task assigned by God and become “elevated” they have many powers, but they must give up who they were in life.
Jill ‘Doll” Blaine is elevated, and she has been assigned the task of comforting people just before they die. She has comforted almost 340 people, but K. J. Boone looks to be the most difficult assignment she has had. Plus, she is suddenly wondering whether she wants to be elevated or not because she misses being Jill. Other ghosts who are not elevated remember their lives. She was very young when she got blown up by accident (when she turned the key in her husband’s car).
Of course, the whole ghost thing is just a conceit for some high-level philosophical thinking. K. J. Boone rose from humble beginnings to become a wealthy and powerful man. He and his wife Vivian, daughter Julie, traveled extensively when he became the owner of a large gas and oil company. It took skills to locate the best places to find oil and gas, to arrange to have it brought to the surface, and to refine and deliver it. Of course, he knew that people came to believe that pollution from burning fossil fuels was harming life on the planet. But he believed that oil and gas offered the best energy sources and that not using these fuels would cost him and his rivals profits. So what if he faked some science to convince the peons that burning fossil fuels had nothing to do with climate change and that men were too puny to affect nature on such a grand scale.
Now he lay dying and here was this young lady, this nobody, in her pink blouse, beige skirt and black shoes trying to get him to admit that he has been selfish, greedy, and mean, and that he had hurt the earth and everyone on it with his lies. Then there was that pesky Frenchman, the one who invented the engine that jump-started the Industrial Revolution, who kept popping in and out of his bedroom, who also wanted him to confess and admit that he was wrong to have inverted the scientific method. The ‘Mel’s came and went, toadies and rivals, long dead, who kept spawning new ‘Mel’s in unconventional ways.
There was a wedding going on next door in this upscale neighborhood and when the stench of the dying man’s sins became too great Jill would observe the party or even mingle unseen with the guests. This is how she became homesick for simple things she had enjoyed like lipstick. This is how she started to wonder if she had made the right choice to be elevated. This is when she begins to see that perhaps how people turn out is inevitable because of their birth and the events in their life. The world was certainly declining from its former beauty and the weather offered little certainly that houses would stand or there would be enough to eat. But what good did it do to try to get Mr. Boone to change his mind as he lay dying?
Plenty to think about in Vigil by George Saunders. (I did not realize that we reside in the same city, just a side observation.) Did I like the book as well as Lincoln in the Bardo? That story was so poignant, and so clever with all the ‘ibids’ and ‘opcit’s. We feel no grief for the dying K. J. Boone. We may feel some for Jill ‘Doll’ Blaine, but that’s not the point of the story. Perhaps placing blame for climate change is not important unless we can change the minds of powerful people who are living and can still do something about saving the tiny planet where we all live.
NB
My cousin William (Bill) Goodenough, now deceased, wrote a book that offered fake evidence intended to disprove climate change, so I was well prepared for Boone’s backwards science. (The Three Concepts of Climate Change: Is AGW Politics or Science?) If you begin with your conclusions (although you call these statements your hypotheses) and then set out to collect evidence that backs up your conclusions and ignores evidence that negates your conclusions, that is cheating. That isn’t science at all. It’s propaganda.
Kudos to Virginia Giuffre for writing about this very tough subject; a subject you are encouraged to keep hidden. A woman who is sexually abused, beginning at a very young age (or any age) often believes that she is responsible for what men did to her, that she somehow caused these things to happen. She bears twin burdens of both grief and shame. Often abused girls and women are threatened with repercussions if they reveal these “secrets.” Born Virginia Roberts, Giuffre writes about sexual abuse by her father and a friend of her father; abuse ignored by her mother. She becomes Nobody’s Girl, which is the title of her memoir and exposé of the sexual trafficking of Jeffrey Epstein and his partner-in-crime, Ghislaine Maxwell.
Roberts was working in the spa at Mar-a-Lago when she was recruited by Epstein and Maxwell. What began as a massage session quickly turned into what is commonly known as “a happy ending.” Happy perhaps, but not for all participants. People ask Giuffre why she kept coming back to the pink house in Palm Beach at 358 El Brillo Way. As she describes it, she came back because she was experiencing some kind of Stockholm syndrome, where the consequences of leaving loomed in her mind as more fearful than the consequences of staying. Epstein and Maxwell were criminals, involved in, apparently, more than one criminal activity so they used threats to keep their victims from revealing their secrets. If you were a good girl, you were praised and treated well. If noncompliant, you were chastised and ostracized.
Epstein was worth millions, earned for dubious services to some very famous people, most from the world of politics. He had a compound in New Mexico, an expensive property in Manhattan (done up in black and red), and the island visited by men for unrevealed reasons, in most cases. Virginia would travel with the pair to parties in these places and eventually she would meet some of the famous men and be ordered to have sex with them. She had a firm belief that if she tried to leave, she would not be allowed to, considering the intimate knowledge she had of famous men (and a few women) who liked sex with young women (women who were often girls). Jeffrey would often tell his visitors that marriage with very young women was an accepted custom in many places around the world.
Eventually Virginia reminded Jeffrey and Ghislaine that they promised to help her get genuine credentials as a masseuse. They sent her to a school in Thailand to study. Virginia might have already planned to never return to America, but she met and fell in love with Robbie Giuffre. They married in a temple, and he took her to his home in Australia. For a while Virginia experienced some calm moments until her new address was discovered by Jeffrey and Ghislaine. By this time the pair were being tried in US courts for sex trafficking and other victims were being asked to testify. Guiffre felt that she had to tell what she knew. She doesn’t name all the famous men who abused her except for the former prince, Andrew and a famous scientist. She recognized faces but did not know their names until the names were later attached to the pictures.
Some people believe Virginia’s (Jenna’s) story. Some place blame on her for her involvement in the situation. Women who have been abused do not. They understand the skills of those who dominate and the fear they engender in their victims. When Giuffre finishes her book, she is still alive. Afterward she supposedly committed suicide. We know that Jenna attempted suicide because she writes about it, but she later vows in print that she will never do that again. She says that if there is a suicide, then we would know that she had been murdered. She is survived by her mother, her father, her husband, and their three children. She is also survived by Ghislaine Maxwell.
Jeffrey Epstein’s reach has shocked us all. He knew so many of the powerful people of our time. He intimated that he had videos of the famous men and the young girls he trafficked (usually from overseas) and that he could destroy their lives if he pleased. That could certainly explain how he came to be worth millions. Although extortion may explain some of his wealth, the favors he did in secret for people in power also were well paid. Was it the zeitgeist of the times to be invited to his parties and partake of forbidden pleasures. The truth is unraveling, but we may never know everything. It was very brave of Virgina Roberts Giuffre to write this book, and it did take a toll on her health, her mental state, and her family.
The novel Theo of Golden by Allen Levi kept popping up on my reading radar. It’s not the kind of book I am normally drawn to, but I knew it would be a positive experience. I often enjoy things that are more labyrinthine and that offer some social commentary, but it seemed like a break was just what I needed. This is a lovely story. I know “lovely” is often the kiss of death in a book review, but I mean lovely in the sense that it validates human virtues, rather than human sins. The images the author creates as he describes the town of Golden and the people Theo meets are also lovely, in the sense that seeing this world through Theo’s eyes allows us to see how beautiful it can be.
Theo is old and he is in Golden for a reason, but he’s not ready to say what his reason is. He was born in Portugal, and he is a river man. He lives near rivers, at least within walking distance wherever he goes, and is in the habit of visiting the nearest river at sunrise and sunset whenever possible. He was born near the Douro in Portugal, knows the Seine intimately, as well as the Hudson River in Manhattan.
The people in Golden know very little about Theo as he spends his days along the Promenade which runs down the middle of Broadway. He spends time at The Chalice, a coffee shop owned by Shep and Addie Carlile. Shep and Addie share the work of a local artist, Asher Glissen, around the walls of the coffee shop. The paintings are portraits of the residents of Golden.
Theo decides to stay in Golden for one year. He is allowed to rent the apartment that Mr. Ponder has upstairs in his house. Ponder, a Broker and Consultant, has never rented this apartment to anyone so the locals are surprised when he takes in Theo. Mrs. Gidley, Ponder’s secretary, is quite suspicious of Theo at first, but he wins her over. In fact, Theo wins over almost everyone he meets. He becomes good friends with Tony who owns the bookstore. He befriends a homeless woman. A young cello player comes to value Theo. Making friends is his talent, although we eventually learn that he has many.
Theo takes on a project which involves the paintings that decorate the walls of the coffee shop. It’s the heart of the story so I will let you discover this part of Levi’s tale for yourself. The soul of the story is also connected to the paintings. Taking on a book that I wouldn’t usually read was rewarding. It reminded me of all the unselfish things that people do in this world. It reminded me that everyone has a story. Good stuff.
Sybil Van Antwerp rarely leaves her home these days. She runs errands, goes for walks, goes to garden club meetings and tends her flower garden. She clerked for many years for a well-known judge. People always ask her why she was content to be a clerk to a great man, when she could have been great in her own right. She always reminds them that when she grew up women did not have all the options available to them now.
Sybil writes. She corresponds. She writes letters on the stationery she has used for decades. Sybil writes letters to friends, to favorite authors, to her best friend, Rosalie, to her brother Bruce, her son Felix (and her dead son Gilbert), to her daughter Fiona, and even to her ex-husband Daan. Rosalie and Sybil always end their letters to each other by telling what book they are reading. She has written to Joan Didion and Ann Patchett and has no compunctions about sending off missives to famous people. Guilt is an undercurrent in her letters, but, of course, guilt is an undercurrent in all our lives if we are older than twenty-five.
Sybil knows that she will soon be blind, which may be a reason she stays so close to home. She knows her property is desirable as it has a water view and is close to DC. She writes all her letters while she can still while sitting at a window that faces the water. She hasn’t told even some of her family members about the condition that will most certainly end in blindness.
The universe is a mysterious place. Just when you’re enjoying your daily routine, your rut, your hamster wheel, the universe sets things in motion that will bring change to your life. Sybil doesn’t shift gears easily but, in the end, there is information and there are people that get her out of her rut and allow her to embrace the very things that will make her life fuller.
The Correspondent by Virginia Evans is a novel that consists completely of letters sent and received by Sybil. This cannot have been an easy novel to write and, unless it is based on real correspondence, required planning, consistency, a list of characters, and a coordinated timeline. Perhaps Virginia Evans will inspire you to become a correspondent, perhaps not. It doesn’t matter because the novel is well done and doesn’t make any demands on you to become a writer of letters.
John Grisham has been a very prolific writer. I haven’t read all his books, but I remember reading The Firm, The Pelican Brief, and The Client, each in one gulp. You know the experience; you are so engrossed in reading that you forget to eat, and you stay up way too late. So, I check back in with John Grisham now and then and then wander off in other directions until I find myself picking up a new book he has written. He writes from the world of courts and lawyers for a legal adventure that reminds me of all the corruption humans are heir to, and all the ways good laws, good judges and good lawyers can set things right. The Widow, Grisham’s newest book tells just such a story.
Simon Latch is a small-town lawyer. He handles “bankruptcies, drunk driving charges, delinquent child support payments, foreclosures, nickel-and-dime car wrecks, suspicious slip-and-falls, dubious disability claims” and occasionally, estate work – updated last will and testaments. He is bored with it all and is finding excitement in sport’s gambling at Chub’s Pub, getting himself in a bit of debt, but still under control. He and his wife have three children but there is no love left between them. His blah life perks up when Eleanor Barnett (Nettie), an 85-year-old widow walks into his law office.
Nettie wants Simon to write a new will. She doesn’t trust Wally Thackerman who wrote the last one. Wally did plan to steal a good chunk of Nettie’s net worth, even though no one could pin down whether she was rich at all. She mentioned Coca Cola stock and Walmart stock worth about 16 million.
Greed is one of mankind’s seven deadly sins and it can afflict any of us. Wally was greedy and unethical. Simon silently vowed to keep his greed in check and keep his work on the right side of the law. He did keep the will secret from his secretary; he did meet his client for lunches so they could try ethnic foods. He was responsible for her love of a certain ginger cookie which led to Simon’s arrest for murder. Was he guilty?
Enjoy the book to find out about Nettie’s bad driving and what happens to Simon. See if you like Raymond Lassiter as well as I did and add to your schema on poisons (thallium, in particular). Warning: you might stay up all night.
David Szalay’s main character Istvan, in his Booker Prize (2025) winning book, Flesh, is an exploration of “contemporary masculinity” according to Esquire. Esquire also describes the writer’s style as spare. Okay. If you read the book, you might be tempted to count the number of times the response “okay” appears in the dialogue. It could be argued that English is not Istvan’s first language, he is Hungarian, one of the most difficult languages to learn, we are told.
Istvan’s vapidity does not seem to be related to being Hungarian, however. He is not the only character to respond with just the one word “okay”. Perhaps his lack of verbal content reflects the emptiness of his mind, or his soul. And perhaps other characters copy his laconic way of speaking.
He must be handsome because women seem to like him, especially women with older husbands. His first sexual experience happens with a middle-aged neighbor woman when he is fifteen. It ends badly (an understatement). He does not seem to carry around a burden of guilt. After subsequently serving in the Hungarian army, Istvan goes to England. He works as a bouncer until he has the good fortune to meet a mentor (male) who hires him to serve as a driver for wealthy families. As his bank account gets healthier, he leaves his mentor’s company, and he becomes a permanent driver for Helen, Karl and Thomas. His life gets more complex, but his feelings are as opaque as ever and the dialogue is still monosyllabic.
The author allows us to know some of the inner workings of Helen’s mind and some of the details of her married life, but no insight into Istvan’s mind. Helen’s son Thomas assigns nefarious motives to Istvan, but Istvan seems to be unworried about whether his actions might be considered immoral and criminal. It all just happens. (Okay.) Istvan accepts Thomas’ hostility, perhaps remembering his own sullen behavior from his younger days. He makes a few feeble attempts to connect with Thomas, but he lacks any real motivation.
It’s not easy to write a book so lacking in emotional depth and to make it a great read. One day, Istvan may become one of those classic characters who we refer to as if he’s a real person. He is so passive that when he could be accused of murder, or theft he shakes it off, he doesn’t own that any repercussions of his actions might rebound on him. The way he handles grief also exposes a coolness bordering on coldness. I get what Szalay has done. At least I think I get it. After all I am just a girl.
Gabriela Rose is the newest Janet Evanovich main character. She pursues stolen art, jewelry, and other insured items as a recovery agent. Gabriela began her career in The Recovery Agent and is now entertaining us in the second novel, King’s Ransom. Perhaps you’re familiar with Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum books which are laugh-out-loud, share-with-friends-and -family fun, and as tasty as any amuse bouche in the world of fiction. Gabriela is just as fearless as Stephanie, although she inhabits a more sophisticated world. But, like Stephanie, Gabriela does not forget her old friends.
In the first chapter we find her working for an insurance company to recover jewelry. Since husband and wife are involved in a contentious divorce she decides to look close to home, the home the husband now occupies. She waits until the husband holds a public event at the house. While everyone is distracted, she rappels into a well on the husband’s property.
“She kicked around and felt something solid under her foot. Her heart skipped a beat. She put her hand into the muck and pulled out a plastic ziplock gallon freezer bag filled with jewelry.”…
“What’s going on? Luis called down. Everything okay?”
…
“In less than a minute she was out of the well with the bag tucked into her tights.”
“What were you in a previous life?” Luis asked. “Marine commando? Where’d you learn to climb like that?”
She peels off her muddy clothes and is left in her La Perla underwear. The peacock did it.
This is exactly the dashing way that Gabriela goes about solving high stakes crimes for the rewards insurance companies pay. There are references to The Thomas Crowne Affair (two of my favorite movies). Gabriela finds she has some unusual, and less-than-welcome, participants in her newest endeavor, the one that involves a “king’s ransom”.
When she arrives home from the jewelry case (home is an apartment in Soho, NYC) she finds her ex-husband, Rafer Jones singing in her shower and his cousin Harley Patch passed out on her sofa. There are proper embellishments offered which I will let you read for yourself. This is where the real fun begins. These three have been friends since school days and Rafer has been Gabriela’s ex for long enough that they can relate by sarcasm (and the familiarity of old friends) rather than anger. Rafer and Harley have not been trained to investigate thefts for insurance companies, but this case is personal. Their lack of training gets them, Gabriela included, in one pickle after another.
Harley has been working for a bank which is starting to look a bit shady. Now he’s being blamed for crimes he did not commit. And for some reason people are getting shot (double tap style). Several valuable items have been stolen including the Rosetta Stone, but the most valuable one of all is a gold coffin of a newly unearthed Egyptian king, King Tut’s brother.
Would Gabriela be better off without these two? Indubitably. But what fun would that be. And then there is Ahmed El Ghaly, who Gabriela doesn’t quite trust.
Evanovich’s books are perfect to snuggle down with on a quiet weekend or a snow day. She always knows how to combine the genres of thriller and comedy in delicious ways. A bit of sexual attraction adds to the fun without being overly graphic. I believe I have read almost every one of her books, although I may have missed one or two because I got distracted by politics. Sometimes reading should be fun.
From a Google Image Search – Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, 2025
Sonia Shah is in her junior year at a college in Vermont and she is lonely. She cries on the phone to her parents in India. Thus begins the story by Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. It’s an excellent story of two upper middle-class families in India experiencing the injections of modernity into their traditional lives. There is the traditional reliance on arranged marriages, for example, while all the younger people seem to believe that it is better to marry for love.
Sunny Bhatia’s father died young so Babita, his mother, is left to fend for herself. Her father (the Colonel) happens to play chess with Sonia’s Papa, Manav, and he suggests an arranged marriage between his daughter, Sonia, and Sunny. A letter is sent to Sunny in NYC and to Sonia in Vermont. The timing is bad, as these are two of those modern children who want to marry for love.
Sonia, in her loneliness, becomes involved with an older man, an artist, with a personality that wavers between charming and mentally abusive. Ilan de Toojen Foss, is a strange man given to magical imagery and manipulation. He’s a painter and very ambitious. The relationship of these two has a Haruki Murakami vibe.
Sunny is living with an American woman from the Midwest, Ulla. They travel together to meet her parents in Kansas, which Ulla thinks will be a disaster. It isn’t a great success, but it isn’t terrible. When they return to NYC, Sunny goes home to visit his family in Delhi. He’s working as a reporter-at-large for the Associated Press and he plans to write and publish articles as he travels. When he arrives back in New York, he finds that Ulla has left him, moved out with all her possessions.
Sonia, who wants to write a book, is still with Ilan when his wife arrives and eventually evicts Sonia. Sonia’s mother keeps a cache of jewelry at an Indian bank, intended for her daughter’s dowry, but she gives Sonia an amulet in a silver case carved with Tibetan clouds and dragons holding a little demon figure. The demon is a talisman called Badal Baba, or Cloud Baba. When Sonia leaves Ilan he keeps her amulet.
Is this why Sonia and her family have a run of bad luck? Is this why a fierce ghost dog keeps chasing Sonia and disappearing. Is this why she almost drowns in Goa.
Sonia and Sunny do not realize that their parents have arranged their marriage, although they give them a choice in the matter. These two meet entirely by chance in India on a train. Sunny likes her right away because of the title of the book Sonia is reading. They have a few conversations in India, and when Sunny’s friend Satya gets married, Sunny convinces him to go to Goa where he also plans to meet Sonia. Goa is on the ocean and the two of them encounter the terrifying ghost dog who, fortunately, disappears into thin air.
Sunny returns to NYC, and Sonia stays in India with her family. Sonia’s mother and father live separate lives. Her mother lives in the cloud cottage in the mountains, full of magical visions and fantastical imaginings. There are eyes everywhere in this story.
Sometimes the story turns very informative, revealing aspects of Indian life, relationships with servants, the tensions between Hindus and Muslims. Parents are aging and need care, so Sonia becomes the caregiver for her father. Sunny’s mom faces a crisis that forces her to sell her home. Her families’ ties to corruption are revealed. She ends up in Goa.
It’s a long time before Sunny and Sonia meet again after a disastrous trip to Venice. Read the book. It’s wonderful, but I can’t tell you all the reasons why. I listened to the book on Audible because I had built up credits. The voice of Sneha Mathan, the woman who read the story made the story even better. Then I bought the book so I could get all the names straight.
So Many Books, Choose Wisely 