Recently in What I'm Reading Category

The Dark Tower (The Dark Tower, Book 7) by Stephen King

It's finally here, a good thirty years after it began -- the end of the Dark Tower saga. Roland, Eddie, Jake, Susannah, and Oy are near the end of their quest for the Tower. I first began reading the series in high school, about twelve or thriteen years ago, and waited patiently (and less so) for the fourth through seventh books. Now, the wait is at last over, and, for better or worse, so is the Dark Tower story. I find quite interesting one of the quotes at the very beginning of the book. King includes a few lines from "Hurt" penned by Trent Reznor (and performed, of course, by Nine Inch Nails):

What have I become?
My sweetest friend?
Everyone I know
Goes away in the end
You could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt

My own take upon reading this is that King is trying to tell his "Constant Readers" that they're quite likely to be pissed off by whatever ending he has in store. Not having finished the book, I have yet to see if that's true. It could also be looked at, by those well-versed in the story of the Tower, as being quite apropos to the story as it's developed thus far.

Retribution by Jilliane Hoffman

I am, apparently, one of the few remaining attorneys on the face of the planet who has not written a novel. This particular novel is the first by a former Florida Assistant State Attorney.

Retribution opens in 1988 with Chloe Larson, a recent graduate of St. John's Law School, reluctantly taking a break from her studies to go to a broadway show with her boyfriend, who is a high-powered gunner at a major New York law firm. Predictably, the guy ends up being a major tool who not only shows up two hours late for the show he begged her to see, but then fails to give her the engagement ring she was expecting. Feeling jilted, she goes home--alone--not knowing that a creepy stalker wearing a clown mask lays in wait in the bushes outside her apartment. He breaks into her apartment and brutally rapes, tortures, maims, and leaves Chloe for dead. She manages to recover physically, but, understandably not mentally.

Fast forward twelve years to Miami. Chloe has changed her appearance to look more plain, and changed her name to C.J. Townsend. We learn that it took her two years to pull her life back together, after which she moved to Florida, took the Bar exam, and became a prosecutor with the State Attorney's office in Miami. A rising star, C.J. eventually becomes the Assistant Chief of the office's Major Crimes Unit. One of her major cases is one involving a serial rapist/murderer known as the "Cupid" killer. A random traffic stop results in an arrest of a man suspected to be the Cupid killer, and, during the probably cause hearing, C.J. nearly has a breakdown when, after she hears the man speak and sees a distinctive scar on his arm, she realizes that the suspect is, in fact, the man who brutally attacked her twelve years earlier. She realizes that she may have a conflict of interest going forward with the case, but nobody in her office knows of her past, and she wants to keep it that way. Also, she is afraid that if her office gets conflicted out, the case will be reassigned to a much smaller, less experienced State Attorney office elsewhere in the state. She learns that the statute of limitations has run out on her crimes in New York, so she does not have a New York prosecution to fall back on. Her only hope for justice lies in successfully prosecuting her attacker in Florida.

Hoffman does an excellent job of realistically portraying the life of a prosecutor without dumbing down the legal terminology or burying the layperson in unnecessary jargon. Townsend is quite believable as the prosecutor with the the tough-as-nails veneer covering a fragile, vulnerable psyche. It will be interesting to see what comes of her somewhat unethical decision to conceal her conflict of interest. In real life, such a move might well result in the very thing she dreads the most -- a reversal of a conviction, with the case being retried by another prosecutor.

Yes, it's another legal thriller by yet another attorney-turned-novelist, but, for a first effort, it's a very entertaining read. Maybe I ought to get to work on my novel, too.

The Last Juror by John Grisham

This is the latest product of the John Grisham literary empire. You can go ahead and make all the jokes you want about the lawyer reading the legal thriller, but I've always enjoyed Grisham's work, even back in high school when I wasn't even thinking about a legal career.

In this novel, we find the somewhat improbable story, which begins in 1970, of J. William Traynor, a twenty-three-year-old slacker from a rich Memphis family who drops out of Syracuse's journalism program after his wealthy grandmother cuts him off after five years with no degree. Traynor joins the staff of the near-bankrupt weekly paper, the Ford County Times, in Ford County, Mississippi, and is promptly christened "Willie" by his boss, the paper's editor, who co-owns the paper with his elderly sister. When the struggling paper is forced into involuntary bankruptcy by its creditor's, "Willie" borrows $50,000 from his grandmother, and buys it. At the ripe old age of twenty-three, Willie manages to take over the failed newspaper and increase its readership and revenue considerably.

Next comes the rape and murder of a young widow, with the prime suspect being Danny Padgitt, a twenty-four-year-old member of the Padgitt family, a mysterious and dangerous clan of bootleggers who has a stranglehold on the county and the sheriff in its pockets. Willie's new paper thrives on the sensational journalism that the crime inspires.

The Padgitt's iron-fisted power isn't enough to scare the jury out of convicting Danny, who, despite a life sentence, gets paroled after serving less than ten years. Then the jurors start turning up dead.

While this certainly isn't high-minded, intellectual literature, it does make for a good read so far, and I'm looking forward to finishing soon.

Wolves of the Calla by Stephen King

At long last, the fifth book of Stephen King's "Dark Tower" series. I got hooked on this series in high school, and was forced to wait until after I graduated from college to read the fourth book, and after graduating from law school to read this one. It was well worth the wait, for King has not only released what is, thus far, shaping up to be an excellent installment in this series, but also, he finally decided to take the time to simply finish the series. The sixth and seventh, and final, books will be released this spring and next fall, respectively.

The Dark Tower is definitely King's grandest work. As it turns out, many of his other books tie into this series as well, some in subtle ways, and some in not-so-subtle ways.

The latest installment finds our heroes, Roland, the last of the Gunslingers of Gilead, a sort of aristocratic/ruling class in his world, and several of his new gunslingers, expatriates from "our" world, taking a detour from their search for the Dark Tower to help the folks in a small farming community known as Calla Bryn Sturgis. Once every twenty or so years, mysterious, evil beings known as "the Wolves" descend upon the Calla, and take one child out of every set of twin children (twins seem to be the rule in the Calla, as opposed to an exception in our world) for several months at a time, sending them back "roont," which means that the children become mentally stunted, and grow to abnormally large sizes, finally dying a terrible, premature death several years later.

While I'm still working my way through this novel, I find that the storytelling is magnificent, and there is a lot more character development (even beyond that in the fourth book). If you're new to the Dark Tower series, check back soon, as I may post a primer as to which of King's works to read to get the whole story (novels like The Stand and 'Salem's Lot, which would seem to stand on their own, actually play a significant role in the Dark Tower series). If you've read the other books and haven't gotten around to this one, then definitely get to it. It has been worth the wait, and unlike with the other installments, the wait for the next two will be quite reasonable.

The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson

This is a pretty cool sci-fi novel set in the 2020s. An American expatriate 20-something slacker in Thailand goes with a fellow expat to check out this monolith that appeared out of nowhere. This Chronolith, as it comes to be called, is a huge structure that is built of material and with technology that seems to be unheard of. It is a monument to a great military victory---20 years in the future. A few years later, another one pops up in the middle of Bankok, wiping it out. Over the years, Scott Warden, a computer programmer, is recruited by a former physics professor to help get to the bottom of things.

I'm still in the middle of this one, but it's an excellent read. It's a different type of time travel story, and it takes a look at some astonishing new evidence that changes the way physicists think of cause and effect. I highly recommend it.

American Empire: The Victorious Opposition by Harry Turtledove

This is the latest in Harry Turtledove's saga that began with How Few Remain, which involved the premise that the Confederacy had, in fact, won the civil war. This, in turn, led to the Great War series, in which World War I was fought not in Europe, but here in North America, with the USA versus the CSA. The CSA in this version of history, took the part of Germany, starting a war with the USA, and eventually losing it. Harsh reparations and forced cession of land as spoils led to the same deep-seated resentment that created the Nazi party, which, in this particular novel, takes the form of the Freedom Party, whose leader, a bitter ex-sergeant named Jake Featherston, has justed been elected President of the Confederacy. In the CSA under the Freedom Party, it is blacks instead of Jews who are persecuted, and Featherston's hatred and oppression of them appears to mirror Hitler's hatred for the Jews.

From what I've read so far, this is as intriguing and well-researched as anything by Turtledove, who holds a PhD and a professorship in history is widely regarded as the master of the alternate history genre. I would recommend the entire series to anyone who has ever wondered "what if...?"