Fever Beach
by Carl Hiaasen
— mystery/thriller —
Description:
“The afternoon of September first, dishwater-gray and rainy, a man named Dale Figgo picked up a hitchhiker on Gus Grissom Boulevard in Tangelo Falls, Florida. The hitchhiker, who reminded Figgo of Danny DeVito, asked for a lift to the interstate. Figgo said he’d take him there after finishing an errand.”
My review:
Carl Hiaasen, in his 70s now, still has what it takes. This is classic Hiaasen, a Florida Man comic novel, IMO as good as earlier works like Native Tongue and Strip Tease. The women characters are memorable, smart, decisive, wise to the world; the male protagonist, an environmentalist just odd enough to be equally memorable, is a worthy hero. The cast of villains … a large one … is made up of Hiaasen’s typical grotesques, along with a Jewish hitman who balks at assignments from antisemitic clients. I almost expected the former governor to make an appearance, but then realized that with Fever Beach’s contemporary setting (post-Jan 6/Trump’s second term), Skink would be too old, even possibly dead. Twilly Spree has potential, that is if he doesn’t go off to his Bahamian island, and yes, I noticed the similarity of his name to Eustice Tilley’s, and the frequent references to The New Yorker.
A thoroughly entertaining read for Carl Hiaasen fans, this one.
Free Ride
by Noraly Schoenmaker
— memoir/travel —
Description:
By the YouTube sensation with nearly three million followers, the inspiring account of a young woman who, in a moment of personal crisis, embarked on an epic, transcontinental motorcycle ride — and along the way found a new sense of purpose.
My review:
I didn’t want this to end and paced myself by reading only one or two chapters per day. If you’re one of the more than two million who follow Noraly’s videos on YouTube, you’ll want to read her book, where she opens up about her personal history and shares thoughts and details never seen on her videos. If anything, after reading Free Ride, you will be an even bigger Itchy Boots fan.
Her autobiographical first effort, Free Ride, briefly covers her pre-Itchy Boots life, then concentrates on her first ride, an epic journey that began on a rented motorcycle in India, continued eastward on her own newly-purchased bike to Myanmar and Thailand, then back west eventually all the way home to the Netherlands … basically, season one of her YouTube adventures. If you’re like me, you’ll find yourself watching those season one videos between reading chapters.
I bought the Kindle version, which includes the color photos included in the hardcover book, only they’re in black & white. And I’m happy with that, but if you want the full experience you should probably pop for the hardcover.
If Noraly decides to write more about her adventures, I’ll be there. Just as she reveals a cinematographer’s eye in her videos, here she reveals herself as a talented writer.
The City and Its Uncertain Walls
by Haruki Murakami
— fiction/fantasy —
Description:
… a search for a lost love takes a man on a journey between the real world and an other world — a mysterious, perhaps imaginary, walled town where unicorns roam, where a Gatekeeper determines who can enter and who must remain behind, and where shadows become untethered from their selves. Listening to his own dreams and premonitions, the man leaves his life in Tokyo behind and ventures to a small mountain town, where he becomes the head librarian, only to learn the mysterious circumstances surrounding the gentleman who had the job before him. As the seasons pass and the man grows more uncertain about the porous boundaries between these two worlds, he meets a strange young boy who helps him to see what he’s been missing all along.
My review:
From my review of Murakami’s 1994 novel, The Windup Bird Chronicle:
The image of the wind-up bird — a never-seen bird who is only heard by certain people at certain times, whose creak makes them think they’re hearing the slow winding of the spring that runs the world — will stay with me forever. I was talking about the popular novel Geisha with a friend and mentioned that I hadn’t ever read a real Japanese novel (one written in Japanese by a Japanese author for a Japanese audience), and she said “I have one right here, translated into English.” And she gave me a copy of this entrancing book, which, from the moment I read the first lines on the first page, I could not put down. Murakami uses something akin to magical realism to tell his story […] Very rarely, a novelist will touch a need deep within you and send you out into the real world in search of what your heart wants. Patrick O’Brian did that for me with his Aubrey/Maturin series of novels: I want a friendship like the one shared by Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. Murakami does it too with the friendship that develops between May Kasahara and Toru Okada in this novel. This is brilliant work. I want to read more.
I don’t see other reviewers mentioning The Windup Bird Chronicle in connection with The City and Its Uncertain Walls, but I kept thinking of it as I read this newer work. Vast differences, of course, but as with the earlier novel, it’s a world I want to enter; in this case one where the walls between realities shift, waver, sometimes disappear. All very dreamlike, and who’s to say who’s the shadow and who’s “real”?
The Lion Women of Tehran
by Marjan Kamali
— fiction/historical —
Description:
In 1950s Tehran, seven-year-old Ellie lives in grand comfort until the untimely death of her father, forcing Ellie and her mother to move to a tiny home downtown. Lonely and bearing the brunt of her mother’s endless grievances, Ellie dreams for a friend to alleviate her isolation.
Luckily, on the first day of school, she meets Homa, a kind girl with a brave and irrepressible spirit. Together, the two girls play games, learn to cook in the stone kitchen of Homa’s warm home, wander through the colorful stalls of the Grand Bazaar, and share their ambitions of becoming “lion women.”
My review:
This was my book club’s selection for May 2025.
A Goodreads reviewer describes it as a “book club book.” Light, engaging, just enough important social and political hooks to hang a discussion on. I can’t believe I enjoyed it as much as I did, or that I gave it a four-star rating, but as an exemplar of a book club book, it’s right up there.
I wish there were more chapters, early on, written from Homa’s point of view. She’s the character I wanted to know best.
Sorry, I really don’t have a lot more to say. Save that, upon finishing it I immediately passed it on to my wife and that I’m eager to hear what she has to say about it.
Burn
by Peter Heller
— fiction/dystopia —
Description:
After weeks hunting off the grid, two men reach a small town and are shocked by what they find: a bridge blown apart, buildings burned to the ground, and bombed-out cars abandoned on the road. Trying to make sense of the sudden destruction all around them, they set their sights on finding their way home, dragging a wagon across bumpy dirt roads, scavenging from boats left in lakes, and dodging armed men — secessionists or U.S. military, they cannot tell — as they seek a path to safety.
My review:
I had a hard time suspending disbelief with this one. The biggest issue for me was how Jess and Storey could be caught so flat-footed by a major civil war that apparently erupted all around them during the weeks they were hunting and camping in the Maine woods, a devastating war resulting in the total burning of towns and the killing or forced evacuation of entire populations, coming as a complete surprise when they emerge from the trees. Nor did I ever understand why the few people they did encounter afterward, never mind which side of the conflict they were on, were dead set on killing them, no questions asked.
The sexual history between Jess and Storey’s mother read like one of those teenage fantasy forum letters in an old issue of Penthouse. And there was way too much internal reminiscing on Jess’ part … I kept wondering how this story would’ve read had Cormac McCarthy written it. Or Lee Child.
Still, a pretty good tale, and Peter Heller kept me turning pages. I’ve read him before (The Dog Stars, a few years ago) and enjoyed it, which is why I picked Burn up when I saw it on the library shelf. So, 3.5 stars from me, not the 4.5 I gave his earlier novel.
The Ruins
by Steve Wick
— mystery/thriller —
Description:
In 1954, Lindenhurst’s new chief of police, Paul Beirne, struggling with the demons from his time as a POW in Japan during the war, gets the call that a woman’s mutilated body has been found in a field north of town, near where a new cemetery is being constructed to accommodate the growing suburbs. There hasn’t been a murder in the village in decades, and on top of this horrific crime, there is a suspicious accident on the railroad tracks.
My review:
Am I to believe the hapless chief of police, Paul Beirne, himself not only a WWII veteran but a survivor of a Japanese prison camp, does not know what the tattooed number on Doc’s arm means? That this passive drunk will morph into a combination of Jack Reacher and Sherlock Holmes, unraveling a complicated history of German espionage, the America First movement, a series of grisly murders, and the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, overcoming alcoholism and winning back his estranged wife and son along the way? I mean, you go Paul … but I can’t swallow it.
What kept me turning pages was the history of the German-American Bunds and the America First Party during the lead-up to WWII, the clandestine activities of German-American Nazi supporters and spies, and what may have been the real deets of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping and murder. Rachel Maddow has explored pre-WWII American Nazism in her Ultra podcast and a recent book titled Prequel: an American Fight Against Fascism. Steve Wick weaves into this actual history a plausible what-might-have-really-happened exploration of the Lindbergh baby killing and murder. Speculation about whether Lindbergh himself engineered the kidnapping aside, The Ruins is a work of nonfiction with a thin veneer of fiction in the person of that hapless Long Island sheriff, himself the son of one of the main German plotters.
Killing Time (The Time Police #5)
by Jodi Taylor
— science fiction/time travel —
Description:
A ghost train, lost in Time, hurtles through the night …
Two members of Team 236 are trapped on board. Not ideal under any circumstances but catastrophic when they’re at each other’s throats.
Hot on their heels, but never quite able to catch up, can Lt Grint and his team overcome all obstacles in their way and save their fellow officers before the train disappears for good?
My review:
Killing Time was a casual pickup at the library. I read the blurb, liked the premise, and checked it out.
It’s the 5th novel in a series about time police. I’ve started many a series in the middle or towards the end, and it’s never been a problem. Killing Time, though, is front-loaded with characters chewing over events from previous installments, and not in a way to encourage a new reader to forge ahead … I felt as if the author was forcibly urging me to put this novel aside, go find installments one through four, and read them first. Undaunted, I skipped pages until the actual story of this novel began, and that did the trick.
Another irritation: “fire-trucking,” Jodi Taylor’s substitute for “fucking.” Members of the time police pepper their speech with profanities, most of which are spelled out in plain English, save for the f-word. It’s fire-trucking this and fire-trucking that and after a while it dawned on me that the characters in this novel swear a lot. And then, oddly, halfway through the novel they stop, and no one says fire-trucking again.
And another: every time characters are about to act and move the story along, they hesitate. They have sudden bouts of introspection or doubt. Or something happens. It’s akin to padding: the story itself, the temporal hijacking of a historical train full of people and the time police department’s efforts to intercept the train at the known points in space and time where it subsequently appeared, is a good one, but it’s mercilessly padded, and just as I found myself skipping pages at the beginning in order to get to the action, I soon began skipping later pages to avoid narrative distractions.
I mean, I like the idea. Time police. Gotta be an interesting job, right? And who doesn’t like to contemplate the paradoxes of time travel and changing history? Strip away the padding and you’ve got yourself a great short story.
Looking over other reviewers’ comments, I see these novels are well-loved by fans, who apparently *have* read the first four books of the series and are committed to all the characters. What I see as padding getting in the way of the story is what they’re here for. Right, I get it.
Book descriptions copied/paraphrased from Goodreads.