S. F. Baumgartner. Living Secrets. F.B. Publishing, 2023.

The author of Living Secrets seems to like people whose background becomes a surprise even to themselves. The two main characters of the novel both have learned that their parents are not who they thought they were. Dylan Roche of Florida discovers that he is the heir to a fortune that apparently was largely funded from the rackets. Lily Tso of Hong Kong learns that her birth parents, whom she had never met, were an international spy known as Phoenix and a man who is now a U. S. Senator.

Twenty-two year old Lily has a documents job in a Hong Kong hotel that is partly owned by Dylan’s family. Through Dylan she meets some people who want her to take some classified information from China to the United States. They tell her that she may finally meet her birth mother, someone she and the uncle who raised her thought was dead. To paraphrase Homer, that was the beginning of all her troubles.

Lily arrives with Dylan to Florida where they meet with some FBI agents including a father-son team. They make arrangements to meet both of Lily’s parents, but things do not go according to plan. There are so many people tailing other people it is almost hard to keep track of them. And it is certainly difficult to tell who the good guys are—if there are any. After all, Dylan has an aunt who is still with the criminal organization, and Lily’s mother has been operating as a spy for years. Whom is Phoenix spying for?

A criminal known as the Ghost seems to pulling the strings behind everything. We learn that Phoenix and Ghost know each other, too. There are also some Chinese spies and tong members. It gets complicated and interesting. The chapters are short, the action does not let up, and readers will be compelled to keep reading.

Oh, yeah, there is some kind of germ warfare going on as well. A deadly microbe originated in China, but some Chinese doctors have risked their own lives and reputations to try to get word of an antidote before it creates havoc in places that China considers rivals if not enemies. Hong Kong was where East and West met for a century. Are East and West still compatible there? Anywhere?

Richard Henry Dana. Two Years Before the Mast. 1869; Third Edition, Edited by Chris Thomerson, eNotated Classics, 2011.

A sailor’s liberty is but for a day; yet while it lasts it is perfect. (1964)

Yet a sailor’s life is at best but a mixture of little good with much evil, and a little pleasure with much pain. The beautiful is linked with the revolting, the sublime with the commonplace, and the solemn with the ludicrous. (741)

This seafaring memoir is a classic. After reading it, I can see why. It had an impact during its time, and its story endures.

Two Years Before the Mast originally came out in 1840. It describes the two-year adventure of the author sailing from Boston around South America to California and back on two different sailing ships from 1834 to 1836. At the time, this book was unique. There had been virtually no books about sailing on the oceans written by ordinary seamen. The perspective was very different. To use a term from land-based military, the seamen were the “grunts.” In those days they had virtually no rights. They worked hard, were fed poorly, and could be beaten (sometimes brutally) for many reasons, or for none at all.

Some “reforms” were hardly changes for the better. Dana tells us that, unlike the officers, the sailors were limited to what they could drink—even water was rationed. On one ship the sailors would observe the captain drinking coffee, cocoa, or grog, but the sailors were not allowed even water while they were working. As the temperance movement grew, some merchants began “virtue signaling” by dropping rum or other adult beverages from the supplies on board the ship. Dana saw this cynically: It was simply a way to economize and did nothing for morale or morals.

Dana’s background was different from most sailors, too. He came from a prominent Boston family. He had spent two years at Harvard as an undergraduate and decided to take some time off to explore the world. He was observant and literate. He writes of reading numerous books in his spare time while on the voyage. But most of the time he and his shipmates were working hard.

To illustrate the division of labor and status on board the ships, when his ship finally was full of cargo and returning to Boston, they took on a passenger. The passenger was the famous ornithologist, Thomas Nuttall. Nuttall was a professor at Harvard, and he and Dana casually knew each other, but while on the ship, they were separated and Dana and the other seamen were not permitted to speak to the passengers. Occasionally, the two men were able to have short conversations, but Dana tells us that they rarely saw each other on the long voyage home.

One secondary reason they did not see each other was the nature of the voyage, especially by Cape Horn. The weather there is notoriously rough, and they were traveling there in the austral winter. There were ice fields, icebergs, and almost constant gales. The sailors got very little rest during that part of the voyage. It really is quite exciting to read about the sailing around Tierra del Fuego.

The two ships Dana worked on both came to California for the same reason: to gather leather hides to bring back to Boston to sell. The descriptions of California in the 1830s is fascinating. Back then it was part of Mexico, so it was Spanish and Catholic. Dana picked up Spanish fairly well, having studied French and Latin. The ships sailed back and forth in Upper California between San Diego and San Francisco.

Dana describes the harbor at San Francisco as having the most commercial potential, but at the time there was just a Mexican fort, the Presidio, and one frame house. Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and San Diego were not much more than villages. Ranches provided the hides of cattle that the men bought or traded for. In spite of the sparse population, there were some families with noble backgrounds, though Dana observes what Weber would call the Protestant work ethic. The most successful businessmen, he writes, were Yankees who came to California and settled there.

One interesting observation concerns the Mexican view of race. The Mexicans considered people with Spanish blood to be citizens and superior to the Native Americans. However, even someone who had just one Spanish great-grandparent was considered Spanish. That was and is notably different from the way Americans viewed people with any African ancestors.

While the book originally came out in 1840 and was a bestseller by the standards of the day, Dana published a revised edition in 1869. In 1859, twenty-years after he first visited California, he revisited it. Now it was a state of the United States, and it was a very different world. San Francisco was now a city of about a hundred thousand, and the other ports were all much more populated. Some of the Mexican families he knew still lived there, and he visited some of the folks he had met a quarter century before. California was on its way to becoming the state we know today. It was already another country in more ways than one. And there was very little leather trade any more. The railroads had opened up the cattle country of the Plains.

One caution: Years ago I read a diary of someone who read Two Years Before the Mast, and he had this observation:

Finished Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana – to my mind a very dull book, entirely too full of foreboom, royal spinnakers, and top gallant yardarm try sails.

The reaction might be a little surprising considering the author of the diary had lived in San Francisco. However, his critique cannot be entirely ignored. The book is full of nautical terms. Now, I was in the Coast Guard and was familiar with many of them, but not the specialized jargon of sailing ships. I did have to look up a number of terms.

I had a break, however. I started reading the book in a printed edition, but I was going on a trip, so to pack light I downloaded the Kindle version mentioned in the header. I recommend that version. It has a very thorough set of hyperlinked footnotes that define those terms that the above diarist complained about.

I think that note also tells us that Dana had in mind an audience of seafarers. Gradually, the plight of ordinary seamen and boatswains came to the greater attention of the public and the merchants who hired them. Gradually, reforms were made. My mother’s stepfather was a merchant mariner from the 1920s to the 1950s, and he would testify that the union took good care of him.

N.B.: References are Kindle locations, not pages.

F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Pat Hobby Stories. Scribner’s, 1962.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s reputation grows out of his stories of the 1920’s “Jazz Age,” especially the upper classes, or as some like to say, the rich and the rotten. That is true of all his completed novels and most of his better known short stories like “The Rich Boy” or “Winter Dreams.” They all seem to have a Gatsby, Daisy, or Tom type character somewhere in the tale. The Pat Hobby short stories are quite different. Except for the fact that they still have allusions and deliberate name choices, they hardly seem to be products of the same person who wrote The Beautiful and Damned.

Part of that, no doubt, reflects the changes in Fitzgerald’s own life. His first three novels—This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, and The Great Gatsby—all reflect something of his background at the time: a preppie, an Ivy Leaguer, and an army officer observing the upper classes. In the mid 1920s he spent a lot of time in Europe, hanging out with other American ex-pats like Hemingway. That would be reflected in Tender is the Night, whose ex-pat main character travels around the continent. While Fitzgerald did spend a year in Hollywood in the twenties, he returned there to write screenplays in 1937. His last writings, then, tell of a Hollywood screenwriter of questionable skill and character.

The introduction to the published collection of stories is quite helpful. It is written by Arnold Gingrich, who was Fitzgerald’s editor at Esquire magazine during the last two years of Fitzgerald’s life. FSF died in December 1940, so five of the stories were published posthumously in the magazine’s January through May issues.

It is simple enough to sum up Pat Hobby—an over-the-hill Hollywood screenwriter who is hard up for money and addicted to the bottle and the horse races. He apparently had a few successful screenplays during the silent era, but has never really made the grade since the advent of talkies. He manages to barely hang on by getting a few jobs that last a few weeks and also by cadging money off people he knows.

At one point, he comes up with a great line in a script with a doctor trying to save a life: “Boil Some Water—Lots of It,” which is, by the way, the title of the story. Back in the twenties that would have been a title card for five or ten minutes of action, but now it is just one line. It might be a good line, but the story needs a lot more dialogue. The writer’s work clearly was simpler back in the day.

Nearly every tale reminds us that Hobby is forty-nine years old. He has worked with some well-known actors. A few, like Ronald Colman, remember him, though most do not. He names Colman and Claudette Colbert in his speech and memories more than anyone else. Colman actually appears in one of the stories. Colbert does not. (For what it is worth, back in the 1920s in their wilder days, FSF and Zelda played a prank on Colman, but Colman apparently took it in good humor.)

The stories are quite short, no more than ten pages or so. While nothing like what Fitzgerald is known for, they do entertain us, especially those who enjoy ironic humor. It seems like Pat Hobby is always trying to get something for nothing. Yes, that is why he gambles, but also why at best he is a Hollywood hanger-on.

Some of Hobby’s experiences are likely based on things that Fitzgerald himself may have witnessed while a screenwriter in Hollywood. (For what it is worth, FSF only received screen credit for two films, neither of which made much of an impression on either the box office or the critics.) Gingrich’s introduction makes us believe that Fitzgerald himself was hard up during the time he was writing these stories as he always asked that his payment be wired to his bank account rather than having a check mailed.

Some situations themselves are funny. People on the lot get excited when Orson Welles comes to town. All Hobby can think is what’s the big deal? Another story has a surprise when Hobby learns that one of his ex-wives married a rich potentate from India. The son of his ex and himself has been raised in luxury. Since the boy has been adopted by her new husband, the family wants to give a small allowance to Hobby. Finally! He can survive without working or having to pretend to work. Of course, there is one condition to the terms of the contract…

The backdrop to all this is the war in Europe, which began in September 1939. A few of the stories have actors and actresses who are refugees. But most of the characters are the “little people” at the studio: the writers, the secretaries, the callboys, the security guards, and the bookie. Lou the bookie manages to hang on at the studio as well. Maybe Pat Hobby has yet to learn from gambling that the house always comes out ahead.

Aurelius Augustinius [St. Augustine]. The Confessions of St. Augustine. 395?; Translated by William Benham, Collier, 1909. The Harvard Classics.

The Confessions of St. Augustine is different from any book I have ever read. Unlike the Confessions of Rousseau or Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Augustine presents this book as an actual confession to God. It is not written in the second person like Bright Lights, Big City, but the second person is very common. The second person is God. The book is addressed to Him as the ultimate Father Confessor.

While the vast majority of the work focuses on sin, especially Augustine’s own sin, it does not deliver great details. He confesses that he had a long relationship with a “concubine,” and that as a boy he stole some things, but mostly it examines his sin nature and his motivation for sin. At the same time the book discusses the various belief systems he examined—he embraced the Manichaeans for a few years—and rejoices over the truth and salvation that he found through Jesus.

Although the Roman Catholic Church considers Augustine one of its doctors, he comes from a very different philosophical direction than Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas developed his theology by examining Aristotle and Aristotelian logic. Augustine considered Aristotle “vain” because he did not acknowledge the supernatural or see the moral law as God-given.

The attraction of the Manichaean system for Augustine was similar to that of certain views we hear today. The followers of Mani taught that the cosmos exemplified a struggle of good versus evil, with the evil being the material world and the good being he spiritual world. This is not unlike the Orientalist or New Age view of the material world being illusory and the spiritual realm being real; or again not unlike the Daoist concept of yin and yang, good and evil being two sides of the same coin. It even suggests the Mormon idea that Jesus and the devil are brothers. Like other adherents of such belief systems, Augustine found it satisfactory for a while because it explained good and evil.

He rejected Christianity in spite of his mother’s prayers and pleas for two reasons. One was the basic reason for many: He enjoyed sinning, especially concupiscence. (Although the root of concupiscence is Cupid, he points out that, as in I John 2:16, all “worldly” desires are sin: Cupid’s lust of the flesh, but also greed, and lust for power.) The other reason was that if there were a good creator God, then why does evil exist? That, of course, is a common philosophical objection to Christianity or Judaism today. It became known as Friday’s Question because Friday asks Robinson Crusoe virtually the same thing.

Eventually, he was persuaded or realized that Platonism, not Aristotelianism, had an answer. There was an ideal. Because we understand the moral law, even though we do not always keep it, we can see that there is an ideal Creator, one who is good. Augustine notes the similarity between the Platonic ideal and the opening verses of the Gospel of John:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. (John 1:1-4)

Once he overcame the philosophical objection, it would be only a matter of time when he would embrace the Gospel of Jesus. Jesus, as John goes on, “became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14) to save us from our sins and deliver us from that sin nature. Not only is God good, but He shares His goodness to all who follow Him and acknowledge His Son. To Augustine that included the gift of continency, the self-control needed to deal with those worldly temptations (189, cf. I Corinthians 7:6-7, Galatians 5:22-24).

As I read this, I was struck by two things from my own reading of other works. I realize that is no coincidence that Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk. Wittenberg was an Augustinian university. Most of the other universities in sixteenth century Europe were Thomist. Wittenberg was different.

We are told that many days Luther would spend three hours in confession. His confessor and other monks and priests at Wittenberg thought he was excessive, but he was searching for righteousness. But anyone who has read The Confessions of St. Augustine can see where that came from. This two hundred page book is one confession or analysis of personal sin followed by another and another and another. Luther was seeking righteousness just as Augustine was.

Augustine would hear a voice tell him “take and read,” and he picked up a Bible and turned to Romans 13:13-14, which spoke directly to him:

Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.

He repented, the Holy Spirit changed him, and the rest is his history.

Luther also was converted by a verse in Romans. Now, in his case, he was a monk and took his vows seriously. If his confessors are to be believed, he did not have much sin to turn away from, but he still needed God’s assurance of salvation. He was also reading the Book of Romans, notably chapter 1 verses 16 and 17:

For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.” (Romans 1:16-17, cf. Habakkuk 2:4)

The righteous live by faith! It is not our own doing, but faith in the salvation that Jesus provided by dying on the cross! Luther would write that when he accepted this, he was born again. It was about five years after this experience that Luther’s questions about church teachings gained the attention of others, and the Reformation followed.

Luther noted in one of his writings the irony that the universities in his day taught Greek, not to read the New Testament in its original language, but to read Aristotle—and Aristotle was a pagan who only believed in the material world. In other words, he rejected the roots of Thomism for a reason similar to why Augustine saw Aristotle among the vain philosophers. (See, for example, To The Christian Nobility of the German Nation §25)

(As an aside, even today, scholarly Catholics are encouraged to read Aristotle to help them understand Aquinas. I was assured this was the case by an acquaintance who was a member of the Catholic lay order Opus Dei.)

Augustine also quotes and alludes to Scripture after Scripture. I give credit to the translation I read. Its language may be a bit dated, but it italicized nearly every Bible allusion and quotation. We begin to see how much Augustine relied on the Bible, even when describing his life before his conversion. We see a similar use of Scripture in much of Luther’s work as well.

Not only did The Confessions of St. Augustine remind me of Luther, it reminded me of one of the most famous fictional characters of all time—Prince Hamlet. Hamlet, after all, attended Wittenberg. He was trained in Augustinian theology. I suspect Shakespeare may have been familiar with The Confessions. We can be pretty well assured he knew Latin. He attended grammar school where Latin was taught from an early age. We know he knew Ovid. If they taught The Metamorphoses, they likely taught The Confessions as well.

So Hamlet expresses his depression in a manner similar to the way Augustine described his when he was going through a period of similar stress. Hamlet says, “Denmark’s a prison.” So Augustine writes, “My native country was a torment to me” (51). And as Hamlet finds little pleasure in distractions and entertainments so Augustine writes about his melancholy:

O madness, which knowest not how to love men, like men! O foolish man that I then was, enduring impatiently the lot of man! I fretted then, sighed, wept, was distracted; had neither rest nor counsel. For I bore about a shattered and bleeding soul, impatient of being borne by me, yet where to repose it, I found not. Not in calm groves, not in games and music, nor in fragrant spots, nor in curious banquetings, nor in the pleasures of the bed and the couch; nor (finally) in books or poesy found a repose. All things looked ghastly, yea the very light…(53)

He could be describing Hamlet’s madness as well as his own.

Yet like Augustine, Hamlet was spiritually aware. He understood that the devil or another spirit could be exploiting his grief and “abuses me to damn me.” We are indeed in a spiritual battle, sweet prince. Yes, “there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.” God sees. He is the Omnipotent Word. He knows what is going on better than we do.

Augustine shares something of his battle and what he learned from it. Over the centuries he has spoken and still speaks to those who understand what is at stake. Some readers may want a more contemporary translation than the one quoted here, but don’t pass it up if you are concerned about the condition of your heart or soul—or if you want a little more insight into Hamlet.

J. R. R. Tolkien. The Hobbit. 1937; Del Rey, 2020.

“There are no safe paths in this part of the world.” (138)

Yes, I recently re-read The Hobbit. I believe it is about the fourth or fifth time I have read it. The first was around 1965. The most recent was nearly 10 years ago when I reviewed a copy of The Annotated Hobbit. I also suspect that many of our readers have read this fantasy classic, too. This is, then, not going to be a typical review one might expect from the English Plus Language Blog. This mostly contains a few reactions from re-reading it after a long time.

First of all, The Hobbit is worth re-reading. One thing struck me right away in the first chapter: Tolkien was a really good writer. He has an engaging style. There are echoes of a fairy tale style—appropriate when considering that there are actual fairies in the story. The style is clear and direct, but like fairy tales with some asides and speculations that make it fun.

I also am currently wading through Tolkien’s Silmarillion. That is a very different book because it was not really written to be published. It consists of notes organized by Tolkien’s son Christopher. There is little narrative continuity or style in the book. Therefore, reading The Hobbit reminds this reader that when Tolkien is conscious of his audience, and not merely making notes, he knows how to tell a story.

I had forgotten, too, what a wild story it is. Right from the beginning Bilbo Baggins, the Hobbit protagonist, is more or less invaded or imposed upon by the wizard Gandalf and twelve dwarves.(I have to spell it dwarves, not dwarfs, since that it Tolkien’s way). They raucously eat and drink and joke as they get their quest underway. The story has an epic quality. One cannot help thinking of the beginning of The Odyssey with Penelope’s suitors dining and drinking raucously, though for very different reasons.

The Hobbit has an epic scope, too, because there is a long, historical grievance. As Telemachus in The Odyssey is being dispossessed by the suitors, so the dwarves have been dispossessed of their ancestral home by the dragon Smaug. Like other dragons in Nordic mythology, e.g., in Beowulf, the dragon guards a vast treasure, much of it here created and accumulated by the dwarves over centuries. The quest takes the fourteen adventurers through a variety of perils and alliances “there and back again.” It is truly an Odyssey or Argosy.

From reading The Hobbit, it appears Tolkien already had a few ideas for The Lord of the Rings. We know from his notes that he began thinking about such things as early as 1914, so the mythos of Middle Earth was already fairly well developed by the time The Hobbit came out in 1937. (Perhaps I should say the legendarium of Middle Earth since that is what Tolkien devotees call it.) For example, The Hobbit drops hints about Gollum’s background that an alert reading might pick up.

Yes, our narrator says about Gollum, “I don’t know where he came from, nor who or what he was” (71). But two pages later, we are told that Gollum has some vague childhood memories about sharing riddles.

Riddles were all he could think of. Asking them, and sometimes guessing them, had been the only game he had ever played with other funny creatures sitting in their holes in the long, long ago, before he had lost all his friends and was driven away, alone, and crept down, down, into the dark under the mountain. (73)

Funny creatures sitting in their holes? This reminiscence indeed echoes the novel’s very first sentence, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit” (1). Hmm.

Many people note that the creatures called goblins in The Hobbit are called orcs most of the time in The Lord of the Rings. However, there are hints that they are the same thing. The Dwarf King Thorin’s sword was called “Orcrist, Goblin-cleaver” (64). The tale also reminds us how Bilbo’s sword would earn its name of Sting.

One observation about the nature of the goblins suggests something about the nature of evil people everywhere.

They did not hate dwarves especially, no more than they hated everybody and everything, and particularly the orderly and the prosperous…(62)

They envy the orderly and prosperous… The Bible describes such motivation of envy:

“On that day, thoughts will come into your mind, and you will devise an evil scheme and say, ‘I will go up against the land of unwalled villages. I will fall upon the quiet people who dwell securely, all of them dwelling without walls, and having no bars or gates,’ to seize spoil and carry off plunder, to turn your hand against the waste places that are now inhabited, and the people who were gathered from the nations, who have acquired livestock and goods, who dwell at the center of the earth.” (Ezekiel 38:10-12)

Other adventures include hostile elves in Mirkwood, giant spiders, the distinctive Bear-Man Beorn, suspicious humans, greedy humans, and, of course, the dragon. It really is quite an adventure and fun to re-read. And, of course, Bilbo discovers the Ring. We know it is enchanted because it makes Bilbo invisible when he wears it, but we have no idea of its significance until The Fellowship of the Ring. Isn’t that the way some things are?

“…they all felt that the adventure was far more dangerous than they had thought, while all the time, even if they passed all the perils of the road, the dragon was waiting at the end” (133).

And, without meaning to make a spoiler, the end of the dragon is not the end of the conflict or the adventure. I had forgotten that there is more. After all Bilbo calls his adventure story There and Back Again. There is, then, a “back again” to tell as well.

N.B. I read this because I just happened to be on Amazon a few weeks ago when they had a one-day-only special on a four-volume boxed set of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I could not pass up such a deal. Will I read the trilogy? Certainly, though probably not right away.

Josiah Vencel. The Pension Plan. Mav Press, 2020.

Usually subtitles are helpful but do not provide much to a book’s effect. The Pension Plan could be different. It is subtitled A Murder Mystery. In other words, this is not a book about retirement planning! This novel distinguishes itself in a number of ways.

Nowadays we speak of legal thrillers, a genre that really did not exist until attorneys Scott Turow and John Grisham started telling intricate and intriguing stories about legal cases. Yes, before that there was Perry Mason, but those were basically whodunits whose main character happened to be a lawyer. Similarly, people usually did not talk about medical thrillers until Michael Crichton appeared on the publishing scene.

So is The Pension Plan a forensic accounting thriller? Well, sort of. The author’s day job has been working with pension plans. In the course of the book we learn a lot about the funding of and politics behind public pension plans. Some of the details may actually get readers to think about their own pension plans or retirement account if they have one.

One example. A worker for a pension investment firm explains to young journalist Owen Daniels, the main character, that people often do not think of the significance of gains and losses in investments. Let’s say, for example, you have $100 dollars invested in an account and it drops 10%. that means it is now worth $90. But what percentage do you need to regain the loss? Actually, you need a little over 11%. If you said 10%, that would only be nine dollars (10% of $90). You would need a higher percentage to get back to where you were. Examine numbers and statistics carefully.

So the murder intrigue revolves around some shady dealings with a pension plan for municipal workers in a small central California city. The murder which we witness takes place about two thirds of the way through the novel, but there are suspicions that there may be others. Owen begins to see a pattern where retired city employees seem to all be coincidentally dying right around the time they turn eighty. Clearly, a pension plan would save money if its pensioners did not live too long, but how could this happen? And why? Or is it just an unusual string of coincidences.

Owen is especially concerned because his grandmother, his one living relative, will be turning eighty in less than a year and she is a retired city employee. He was doing feature stories on city employees, some retired, some still active, when he began to notice the weird coincidences. With the help of Darcie, the obituary writer, he sees that this pattern goes back a number of years. When he enlists the help of an interested police officer, J.R., things get going.

He begins to get warnings. His editor, hardnosed but fair, tells him not to pursue the story. He says he cannot tell him why because it was even above the editor’s pay grade to know the reason the order came down. He gets an anonymous envelope with photos of his place and his grandmother’s to let him know that he is being followed. Danger, Danger. Danger.

The Pension Plan also has some interesting discussions. Owen is politically left-wing. His grandmother, though a former government worker, is not. At one point she tells him:

“Take money from person A and give it to person B. That’s where socialism fails. There must always be enough person A’s to provide for person B’s.” (6)

This reminds me of Margaret Thatcher saying that socialism works until it runs out of other people’s money. We certainly see this from the historical record.

California, we are reminded, has legalized assisted suicide. It seems that some of the eighty year old pensioners have died of exposure to the poison used to kill people who avail themselves of this law—except that there is no record that any of them asked for this. How could this be done?

There is another very revealing quotation. Owen recalls a lecture from one of his journalism professors:

“But a journalist uses words to advance an agenda. Long after the facts in your article are forgotten by readers, the assumptions and emotions you infuse into your writing will stick in their subconscious minds. Do this often enough, and you will grow a populace that thinks like you do.” (18)

This is very interesting. A journalism major in the seventies would remember something very different. Journalism used to emphasize objectivity. Just tell what happened, use the four W’s (who, what, where, when, and maybe why), and let the editorial page give opinions. If what Owen (who was born a little before 2000) recalls is typical of today’s journalism classes, no wonder people complain about fact-checking and fake news!

A key to the mystery in The Pension Plan becomes a key to understanding existence. Though a skeptic, Owen begins to recognize a truth: “Patterns have pattern-makers!” (55)

The Pension Plan is a very intelligent mystery. It does involve a clever plot in a devious cover-up. It also raises other questions, as we have already shown. Even after the mystery is solved, it may keep readers thinking. Patterns have pattern-makers. Think about it.

Heidi Glick. Hold for Release. White Rose Publishing, 2023.

Hold for Release begins with a bloody mess. Carlotta Hartman volunteers at a local animal shelter. She has arrived for the evening shift to discover the director of the animal shelter, Ed, murdered and six dogs with slit throats. She calls the police, but she is reluctant to call her husband, Jake.

Their marriage is on the rocks. She has been undergoing fertility treatments for a few years without any success. This frustrates her. Meanwhile Jake seems consumed with his job as a reporter for the local newspaper. Jake had a one night fling with an attractive young staffer Allison. He was inebriated and remembers little of what happened, but Allison is now threatening to accuse him of sexual harassment.

We really have two or three different plots going in the novel. All three are done realistically and effectively. It looks like Jake will be losing his job. It looks their marriage will be breaking up, especially as Carlotta meets a kind and understanding divorce lawyer. Jake, Carlotta, and the local police for different reasons are all interested in finding out who murdered Ed.

There appear to be a couple of related incidents going on in town as well. As Jake researches news files, he sees a pattern similar to that of serial killer in the area from twenty years ago. And what about some dog walkers complaining about a masked stalker?

In contrast to the Hartmans’ marriage, Carlotta has a sister who was divorced from her husband when he was imprisoned for selling drugs. Now her husband has claimed to have found God and been rehabilitated and wants to get back with her and their son. We see two relationships headed in different directions.

There are a number of potential suspects in the murder. Was it someone who did not like Ed? Everyone seems to have liked him. Was it an animal rights radical? Why then would the dogs be killed? Was it someone after Carlotta or someone else at the shelter?

Carlotta is a librarian, and one patron has been trying to flirt with her, even perhaps to the point of harassment. Did he arrange to have a library elevator stop between floors with just the two of them in it?

Is Jake in his investigations getting too close? Will he lose his job because of Allison’s accusations? Is Carlotta’s sister’s ex-husband for real?

While the list of suspects grows, at a certain point, it becomes fairly clear to the reader who is behind Ed’s murder and some of the other strange goings-on. Dramatic irony takes over, as if to say as the audience of a horror movie might, “Don’t go into that abandoned farmhouse!” Will Jake, Carlotta, and the police see what is going on in time? Things get intense as the drama grows.

With the combination of suspense and family drama, Hold for Release reminded this reader of works by Danielle Steele. Readers who like her should get a kick out of Hold for Release.

Jake Burt. Greetings from Witness Protection. Scholastic, 2017.

We have been reviewing some pretty serious, even heavy, books lately: a few theological works about heady topics like the Book of Job and a couple on the American Civil War. I needed to lighten up a bit. Greetings from Witness Protection did the trick. It is funny but with a page-turning plot. If you like Gordon Korman—our favorite popular young adult (YA) writer—you will like this book.

Nicki Demere is turning thirteen. She is essentially an orphan. Her mother is dead, and her father has been in prison. She writes him, but he does not reply. She lived with her grandmother until she was nine when her grandmother died. Since then she has been in and out of foster homes, otherwise marking time at an orphanage in New York City.

When, once again, she is called to the supervisor’s office to meet a prospective fostering family, she steels herself for disappointment. None of the families have worked out. Why should this be any different?

Well, it is different. It turns out that the man and woman in the office are not a married couple looking to foster or adopt. They are Federal Marshals. They are looking for a child around her age that physically resembles a family they are placing in the Witness Protection Program. The idea is that even if a criminal or criminal organization is looking for the family, they would be less likely to suspect a family with a different number of children in it.

She is shown a picture of a woman. Nicki realizes the woman looks a lot like her. The lady could pass as her older sister. That is why the marshals have picked Nicki. If Nicki is interested, it means a completely new start with a completely new identity. She will no longer be Nicolette Demere from New York, but she will be someone else from somewhere else.

She and her whole new family will have to do things to not stand out. Nicki, for example, will be in seventh grade. Even though she loves to read and gets good grades in most of her classes, she must earn a B-minus in all her subjects. She is to participate in one sport, but not stand out in it. She must have one other extracurricular activity, but not one that has any kind of interscholastic competitions or special awards. She and her family are to blend in. And no photographs or social media postings.

After a week of training in Georgia, she meets her family. She does not know their real story or why they are in witness protection. She understands that one of them must have testified in a serious criminal trial. Their made-up backstory is that they have recently moved from Cincinnati to Durham, North Carolina. This is where a lot of the humor comes in. The principal of her new school, for example, attended Xavier, so when he starts talking about Ohio, she has to fake it on her feet.

She, her new parents, and new sixth-grade brother have all come from the North. Some of the slang terms and practices in the South are new to them. The neighbors have a “pig-picking” picnic for them a few days after they move in so that they can meet everyone in the neighborhood. At one point a neighbor says her brother is “showing his butt” online. As a Yankee, I could guess what pig picking was, but I had no idea what it meant to show one’s butt.

Nicki, now called Charlotte, makes friends with Britney. “Brit” did fine until sixth grade when she suddenly became a social outcast. Welcome to middle school! She is convinced no one can like her. At the same time she has become a whiz at an online role-playing game. In other words, she is a nerd. To Brit’s mother, online gaming is a community activity, a modern quilting bee.

To give an idea of how “ordinary” her family is supposed to look, at first the marshals tell them not to put up any Christmas decorations when Christmas season arrives. Except that they are the only family with no decorations—which makes them stand out. So the marshals look at satellite photos of the neighborhood from previous years. They figure out the average number of lights, decorations, and yard displays the houses have. They are to have so many strings of lights, so many decorations, one wreath on the door, not too religious, not too garish; in other words, a B-minus in Christmas decorations. Anything not to stand out.

Now Nicki/Charlotte has one particular skill. Her grandmother also had had a criminal career in her day. She had taught Nicki how to pick pockets. Her grandmother would praise her when she came back from a mall visit with money and jewelry she had purloined. When Nicki flew to Georgia, for example, she had never been in an airport. What a place for picking pockets! She saw all kinds of potential.

That skill provides humor as she outwits people in a number of situations. When she first meets the marshals, she starts rattling off facts about Eric, the male marshal—where he lived, that he has a son, and a few other details. How did she know those things? She had lifted his wallet and read his drivers’ license and marshal ID, and she saw a family picture.

Later when she and Brit encounter the class “mean girls” in the nearby shopping mall, she has fun with their purses and ultimately keeps them girls from teasing Brit. While in neither of those cases does she actually steal anything, she does have some difficulty with kleptomania. She steals things not because she needs them or sells them, but just because she can and she likes to. Her skill at theft was one thing she used to be complimented about.

While nearly all the book is written from Nicki/Charlotte’s point of view, there are some pages, usually a single page, between chapters that document other things that are going on. We begin to see the reason her new family is in witness protection. One of them testified against a major New York crime family. When Nicki hears the name, she realizes how serious their situation is.

Of course, in our day and age it is almost impossible to stay hidden. Sooner or later their past will catch up with them. Yes, there is a lot of humor, but like of some Korman’s books, the main plot is deadly serious.

I had a friend who was an admissions officer at an Ivy League college. He said that as soon as the admissions letters were sent out in April, the head of the admissions department would take a week’s vacation. He told no one where he was going. A week later when he returned to the school, a lot of the people who were upset about the decisions had cooled down and had taken steps to move on.

One year, a leader of an organized criminal network was trying to get his son admitted to the school. Like the vast majority of applicants, the son was turned down. The father tried calling the admissions office only to be told that the admissions director was out of town, and no, they did not know where he was. Anyway, at an airport over 800 miles from the school where the director of admissions was changing planes, a representative of the criminal family accosted him to ask why his boss’s son had been turned down. Such enterprises can be well connected.

To say much more would amount to spoiling things. I will drop one hint, though. Readers may have heard of the term Chekhov’s Gun, or Chekhov’s Rifle. The great Russian author and playwright Anton Chekhov once wrote, “One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off.” There is a very clever use of Chekhov’s Gun in the story. I say no more. Greetings from Witness Protection is Jake Burt’s first book, If he can keep this up, we may have another Gordon Korman waiting in the wings. Enjoy!

Andrew Murray. Divine Healing. 1900; Edited by Katie Stewart, What Saith the Scripture, 2009.

Andrew Murray was a profound Christian thinker and expositor. Many of his sermons were turned into books. We have reviewed one of his other books recently. Divine Healing has some of the same themes as Abide in Christ. If we abide in Christ, we will experience His healing.

I confess being a little surprised at Murray’s approach. He generally is acknowledged as teaching from a Reformed perspective, but Divine Healing could have been written by someone in the so-called Faith movement such as Oral Roberts or Kenneth Hagin.

First of all, Murray emphasizes that the Bible teaches physical healing as a gift to believers from God Himself through Jesus by the Holy Spirit. He says that there is no indication in Scripture that the gift was only limited to certain time periods. He gives a few testimonies of people he knew who were healed from serious illnesses by divine intervention. It is easy summarize his argument.

The Bible promises in James 5:15 that “the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up.” What is needed? Faith. What is often lacking? Faith. Much of Divine Healing presents Scriptures and discussions to encourage and increase faith in the reader. In other words, it is like the faith teaching of the twentieth century.

What else is needed? A right relationship with God. Sin is a hindrance to the answering of any prayer. So the second half of that verse from James declares, “And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven.” Or as Isaiah 59:1-2 puts it:

Behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save,
or his ear dull, that it cannot hear;
but your iniquities have made a separation
between you and your God,
and your sins have hidden his face from you
so that he does not hear.

Sometimes we do need to confess sin. We may have to ask the Lord to help us with that as the Psalmist prays in Psalm 139:23-24:

Search me, O God, and know my heart!
Try me and know my thoughts!
And see if there be any grievous way in me,
and lead me in the way everlasting!

Murray explains, “God’s pardon brings with it a divine life which acts powerfully on him who receives it.” (854)

But Murray spends most of his time really persuading the readers to increase their faith. Divine Healing quotes numerous verses describing God’s promises to His people. It tells how the readers can understand and apply those promises.

Interestingly, it comes back to the main theme of the other book by Murray reviewed on these pages: abiding. One of the greatest promises in the Bible is this: “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you” (John 15:7). Jesus compares the process of abiding to branches connected to a vine.

I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. (John 15:5)

Think of this relationship, what it means.

The branch has nothing: It just depends on the vine for everything. (1619)

The sap does not flow for a time, and then stop, and then flow again, but from moment to moment the sap flows from the vine to branches. (1627)

If there was anything in the grapes not good, the owner never blamed the branch; the blame was always on the vine. (1640)

No one who learns to rest on the living Christ can become slothful, for the closer your contact with Christ the more of the Spirit of His zeal and love will be borne in upon you. (1642)

“He is my Vine, and I am His branch; I want nothing more—now I have the everlasting Vine…It is enough, my soul is satisfied.” (1727)

Ah, Let it be. And let Murray’s witness speak to you and persuade you and heal you.

This particular edition is a free download from the publisher. The editor has made a few annotations—as if the reader could not distinguish the context when the book was speaking of sin as a specific sin or the sin nature or between belief meaning “trust” and belief meaning “historical knowledge.” However, these are few and are easily accounted for. The editor also includes the full text of any verses cited in the text. That is very helpful and even more faith-building! After all, “So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17).

N.B.: Parenthetical references are Kindle locations, not page numbers.