Gordon Korman. Restart. Scholastic P, 2017.

As mentioned before on this blog, Gordon Korman is one of our favorite Young Adult (YA) novelists. Restart did not disappoint.

Restart is not as funny as many of Korman’s stories because the main story line is pretty serious. Big-time eighth-grade jock Chase Ambrose gets a restart in his life. A Christmas Carol is an all-time favorite because of the great change that takes place in the heart of Ebenezer Scrooge at the end of the story. Well, Chase Ambrose’s big change comes at the beginning of the story.

Chase accidentally falls from the second-story roof of his house, landing head first. He is not too badly injured except for a concussion, but he has amnesia. He can talk and still has his football muscle memory, but he does not remember a thing from the first thirteen years of his life. Except one thing—he has a vague memory of a little blonde girl in a fancy blue dress.

Chase discovers that prior to his accident not only was he a star athlete, but he was also an incorrigible bully. Eventually, he and his two buddies, Aaron and Bear, went too far. They were arrested for putting some firecrackers in a piano during a school concert.

They were singling out Joel Weber, a nerdy younger boy they liked to pick on. After that incident, Joel’s parents sent him away to a music-oriented boarding school for his own safety. Joel’s three tormentors were arrested for creating a public nuisance and sentenced to community service at the town’s Portland Street Assisted Living Residence—or as Aaron and Bear call it, the Greybeard Motel.

Each chapter is told from the point of view of the various young people in the story. Most of the chapters are by Chase and by Shoshanna Weber, Joel’s older sister who is in Chase’s class at school.

Because of the concussion he received from his fall, Chase is unable to play football for his eighth grade season, even though his team won the state championship the year before. The last time his school had won the championship was when Chase’s father starred for the team.

Mr. Ambrose comes across as an unreconstructed jock-bully himself. He cannot understand why the kids Chase pick on cannot take it. Since the entire story is written from the point of view of middle schoolers, readers have to read between the lines a little bit. Chase lives with his mother, his older brother is away at college, and his father remarried a few years ago and he and his new (trophy?) wife have a four-year-old daughter. Chase observes that even this half-sister Helen is afraid of him.

Indeed, as he walks through the halls of his junior high, he notices that many kids try to avoid him or turn away from him. Since he cannot play football, he decides to join the video club. His friends Aaron and Bear tease him about this, telling him that he has become a vidiot and joined dork nation.

His joining the club becomes awkward because the president of the club is Shoshanna, who understandably hates Chase’s guts. But Chase does not understand because he remembers nothing.

This all sounds very serious, and it is, but this book is by Gordon Korman, so there is bound to be some silliness, and there is. Most of the humor comes from the crazy stunts that video club member Brendan Espinoza comes up with in order to get attention on YouTube. I do not want to write too many spoilers, but let us just say that they will have you laughing. One involves a tricycle and a car wash, another involves pancake syrup and a pile of leaves.

In Chase’s case, his restart comes not from a ghostly visitation, but by gradual discoveries (we cannot call them memories because he did not even remember his mother) about his past. While the story is not religious, it would remind many readers of the new chance that God gives people through the work of Jesus. In some ways, we all recognize that we need a restart, a do-over.

It is never easy. Chase has to accept responsibility for his past actions even though he is ashamed of them now. In fact, it gets complicated enough that he has to go to court for another crime he committed before his accident. The fact that he has changed means little to the judge because of his prior record. (For readers of Pilgrim’s Progress, a little like the story of the shopkeeper’s debtor.)

Serious stuff, but with enough laughs to keep it light. Thank you, Gordon Korman, once again.

Donald E. McInnis. She’s so Cold. J & E Publications, 2019.

She’s So Cold is one of the most harrowing stories I have read. It is non-fiction, but I had to put it down about a dozen times—not because I lost interest. I just had to take a break because of its intensity.

Yes, it begins with a terrible murder of twelve-year-old Stephanie Crowe in 1998 in Escondido, California. It was not the murder itself that was the horror story. Do not misunderstand, the death by stabbing of a twelve-year-old girl in her home while her parents, brother, and sister were sleeping is terrible. That is not the focus of She’s So Cold.

The story is not about Stephanie, the victim. It focuses on the ordeal that her fourteen-year-old brother Michael and two of his friends went through.

I have read true stories like this before, but they were set in totalitarian countries. Yes, there were times I had to pause while reading The Gulag Archipelago and Heavenly Man, but the victims in those books were victims of cruel governments in lawless lands. This was set in the United States of America in 1998: Land of the Free, Liberty and Justice for All, the Bill of Rights, Innocent until proven guilty…and these victims were boys. They could have been in one of the high school classes I teach.

The author was the defense lawyer (when the authorities finally allowed it) for one of the three boys arrested and tormented for days before they were even read their rights. Like most boys, they had been taught to respect the police. Even though they sometimes went over twenty-four hours without sleep in the interrogation room, they tried to please the men asking the same questions over and over again.

To sum it up, the boys were browbeaten by the four detectives and one “specialist” on the case. They were repeatedly lied to. Michael was asked numerous times why there was blood in his room if he were sleeping and did not hear anything. There was no blood in his room.

To get one of the boys to confess, when he asked for his parents, he was told that his folks knew what he did and they did not want to talk to him. Each was told that the other two boys had confessed to things they had not confessed to. At times they were not allowed to go to the bathroom.

The police would not allow their parents to be with them. There was no mention of any rights or having an attorney present. Eventually, after three days to a week, the three boys were arrested. By this time they had been intimidated and scared out of their wits. Michael was even told that the reason he did not remember killing his sister was because he was demon-possessed.

My heart went out to those boys. I could not imagine even most adults standing up to the interrogation techniques used. But before I went into teaching I was in law enforcement. In fact, my first teaching job was at the Coast Guard Marine Environmental Protection School teaching other Coasties about environmental law.

We understood that a case was always “innocent until proven guilty.” Since most of our work was involved with oil and chemical spills, we understood the importance of all kinds of evidence including eyewitness testimony and physical evidence. I do not believe we ever lied about a case to anyone. Occasionally to protect a source of information, we might have said something like, “Even if I know who reported it, I couldn’t tell you.” Sometimes we knew, sometimes the tips were anonymous.

And we were always dealing with adults.

Once when I was working on an oil spill, I got a phone call at the Coast Guard station from a newspaper reporter. I was the English major, so I usually got the media calls. The reporter was convinced that a certain oil company had deliberately discharged the oil. He kept asking me variations of the same question to try to get me to incriminate someone when we were still investigating.

His news article the next day misquoted me. He lied. Some reporters do. That was his problem more than mine. They people he accused were not happy, but they knew both us Coasties and the newspaper and trusted us more.

But what if people whom you trust persist in saying terrible things about you? You eventually believe those things. That is what happened to the three boys. As the Bible says, “Death and life are in the power of the tongue.” (Proverbs 18:21)

Perhaps even more infuriating in the story is that a man with a police record who was a mental hospital outpatient was roaming the neighborhood that night. He looked into the window of at least one neighboring house and said he was looking for a girl named Tracy. A police car patrolling the area saw someone enter the Crowes’ house through a sliding door (which was ajar the next morning) close to midnight when all the Crowes were asleep. Just a couple of weeks later the man would be arrested for molesting two middle school girls and became a registered sex offender.

He was briefly questioned the next day, but the police noticed no blood on his clothes. He had spent the night in an all-night laundromat. Hmm. The police did take a few of his newly washed clothes as evidence. A few months later, after the preliminary trial had begun, the defense asked that the clothes be sent to a state lab for analysis. Traces of blood were found on some of the clothes. Its DNA matched Stephanie’s. But he was not arrested, and Escondido continued with the trial against Michael and his two friends.

There is a lot more. This is a gripping tale of law enforcement gone lawless.

I recommend also the brief afterword which discusses how the so-called Miranda rights go above the heads of most children. The author makes some recommendations for times when children are arrested or giving testimony in which they may be implicated. Most children in the face of authority tend to be honest, but they are easy to take advantage of and can be manipulated easier than adults. Such actions may appear to be a quick way of solving a mystery, but manipulation does not bring us closer to the truth—and investigations and court hearings should be about the truth.

Note to our readers: We have been using the standard Seventh Edition MLA format for our bibliographical information at the heading of each review. A little over two years ago, MLA issued a new handbook with some significant changes. Beginning with this review, we are now using the format of the MLA Handbook, Eighth Edition. Of course, since we normally just review one book at a time or books by the same author, we do not alter the order of the family name and given name of the author.

Joseph Conrad. An Outcast of the Islands. 1896; Amazon Digital Services, 2012. E-book.

This was Joseph Conrad’s second novel, and it is worth reading, especially for those who appreciate his two most famous novels Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim.

The novel is set in a location not far from Lord Jim, in the Celebes of the Dutch Indies (today’s Sulawesi of Indonesia). The merchant Captain Lingard has made a decent living by trading all over the East. He has what almost amounts to a personal supplier up a virtually unknown river on the island of Celebes. Here Almayer runs the trading post and Peter Willems works for both men.

Willems has married a native woman and runs into some trouble. He is cast out by her tribal people. He is the outcast. Almayer has little to do with him now. Things get progressively more complicated as Willems falls in love with another native woman from a different tribe. Since he is an outcast, everyone considers him separated if not divorced, but when his wife comes looking for him, it gets complicated.

As is typical of both Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness, much of the dynamic of the novel is between the Europeans and their uncivilized subjects. While Celebes is part of the Dutch Indies, it is not too far from Borneo, part of which is British and part of which is Dutch. In the background there are some conflicting claims and conflicting flags. Both Batavia, the Dutch capital of its Indies, and London, the British capital, are far away. The only law is the practical law of the sea and whatever tribal or international law people are willing to recognize.

Just as the natives call Jim Lord or Tuan in Lord Jim, so Captain Lingard is called Tuan Laut or Lord of the Sea, or even Rajah Laut, King of the Sea. Everyone respects him. He has wealth and power. Almayer and Willems both depend on him as do most of the natives. In this case there are also tribal rivalries and even religious rivalries since some tribes are Christian and some are Muslim. Both groups still have elements of their folk religion, too. Much of the real law is simple vengeance and vendetta, the law of the settled score.

An Outcast of the Islands is probably a little more predictable than the later novels of Conrad mentioned above, but we can see his craft developing. In this tale the white men think that they understand the natives, and the more articulate Malay men and women think they understand the Europeans. We begin to see that neither really understands the other well.

There are some notable quotables in this book. First is one that anyone who has worked at sea knows well:

In life—as in seamanship—there were only two ways of doing a thing, the right way and the wrong way. (150)

Of course, in the Coast Guard we would add a third: “The Coast Guard way.” The Navy men say something similar.

There is also an image virtually identical to one in Heart of Darkness:

In the darkness her figure was like the shadow of a woman with clasped hands put out beseechingly. (247)

In this story, though, we get a sense of what the woman is thinking. In Heart of Darkness, the African woman with outstretched hands is silent, at least in any language the narrator understands. Both women are trying to connect with their men but at the same time keep their own identity. Is it even possible? If love is a part of it, is it even desirable?

There is one lovely description of life at sea. As one who loves the sea and appreciates it, I have read few descriptions that equal it (one from an O’Neill play, but I forget which one, and one from the Old English “The Seafarer”):

The sea, perhaps because of its saltness, roughens the outside but keeps sweet the kernel of its servants’ soul. The old sea; the sea of many years ago, whose servants were devoted slaves and went from youth to age or to a sudden grave without needing to open the book of life, because they could look at eternity reflected on the element that gave the life and dealt the death. Like a beautiful and unscrupulous woman, the sea of the past was glorious in its smiles, irresistible in its anger, capricious, enticing, illogical, irresponsible; a thing to love, a thing to fear. It cast a spell, it gave joy, it lulled gently into boundless faith; then with quick and causeless anger it killed. But its cruelty was redeemed by the charm of its inscrutable mystery, by the immensity of its promise, by the supreme witchery of its possible favour. Strong men with childlike hearts were faithful to it, were content to live by its grace—to die by its will. (16, 17)

Ah, but our outcast Willems, like the later Congo outcast Kurtz, though a lesser man, tries to do what Kurtz would more cleverly attempt. To Willems:

The wise, the strong, the respected, have no scruples. Where there are scruples, there can be no power. On that text he preached often to the young men. It was his doctrine, and he, himself, was a shining example of the truth. (14)

Captain Lingard himself warns Willems:

“A man sees so much falsehood that he begins to lie to himself.”

And as Kurtz looks into an abyss of his own making, so Willems also senses an abyss—i.e., eternal things that can be full of horror. He observes:

He was in the grip of horrible fear; of a fear whose cold hand robs its victim of all will and of all power; of all wish to escape, to resist, or to move; which destroys hope and despair alike, and holds the empty and useless carcass as if in a vise under the coming stroke. It was not the fear of death—he had faced danger before—it was not even the fear of that particular form of death. It was not the fear of the end, for he knew that the end would not come then…It was the unreasoning fear of this glimpse into the unknown things, into those motives, impulses, desires he had ignored, but that had lived in the breasts of despised men, close by his side, and were revealed to him for a second, to be hidden again behind the black mists of doubt and deception. It was not death that frightened him: it was the horror of bewildered life where he could understand nothing and nobody round him; where he could guide, control, comprehend nothing and no one—not even himself. (115)

As “Mistah” Kurtz would say: “The horror! The horror!”

Ken Britz. Fall to Earth. New York: Ken Britz, 2017. E-book.

This reviewer had some curiosity about Fall to Earth because it seemed to have some connections to the King Arthur legend. Most of the characters have names taken from the Arthurian stories.

Even though it is science fiction from the near future, the main character is a champion fencer—i.e., swords(wo)man. Indiana Beckham, about the only name that does not allude to Camelot, becomes the focus of a scientific experiment set up by a military agency (DARPA?) overseen by a guy named Arthur.

The fictional science is that people have figured out how to have sword-like energy transmitters (think Star Wars light sabers) guided and powered by a person’s own brain and nervous system. The lead scientist is a Dr. Di Lago. Her name is simply Italian for Du Lac, Lancelot’s surname.

Beckham’s muscle memory from fencing makes the device become a deadly weapon in her hands. Like most of the main characters in this novel, Beckham is female. She is something of an outlier, though, because all the other participants in this weapon development are military. She is the only civilian warrior, but chose for obvious reasons.

The device works, in part, because of newer, concrete discoveries made connecting gravity and electromagnetic forces. According to Fall to Earth, the Theory of Everything will help make new weapons as well as new kinds of armor and propulsion. Some people whom everyone thinks are dead really are not, thanks to the new armor. There is also a new kind of “gravitic” propulsion that people are learning to harness to simplify space travel.

Arthur’s big rival in weapons development is the officer of a competing agency named Cornwall Marks. So we have the King Arthur vs. King Mark of Cornwall rivalry in this tale. But a lot of the names are merely coincidental, like Dr. Di Lago’s.

Isolde is Mark’s daughter, not wife, though a guy by the name of Tristram does have a crush on her. Mark’s research is located in Tintagel, Pennsylvania, instead of Tintagel Castle in Cornwall, Great Britain. There is no Merlin character in this story, but Arthur’s mother Igraine has developed an algorithm, using ideas developed by Richard Feynman or Tom Stoppard, that can predict certain events with impressive probabilities based on physical cause-effect occurrences. Beckham’s waveblade (as the weapon is called) is named Caliburn. A guy named Percy has one named Grall. Percival in most version of the legends finds the Holy Grail.

There is a secret society of women scientists named the Mare de Scientia which Dr. Di Lago belongs to. It is led by three highly respected older women (the Ladies of the Lake?), one named Modesty. There are two brothers Aggy and Gavin (Agravaine and Gawain?) One project is called Avallach which sounds like Avalon or Avillion. Other allusions abound.

Because there are so many characters and at least three different technological projects, Fall to Earth is a bit hard to follow at first. It is a corporate or interagency rivalry that becomes deadly. It has an ironic epilogue.

While many of the names and even the fighting style are reminiscent of the Arthur tales, Fall to Earth is its own story, not a retelling. Instead of magic, it is science fiction. But most readers understand there is an overlap between science fiction and fantasy. While this is clearly on the sci-fi sector of the Venn diagram, its characters and setting are a shout out to the fantasy circle, even if there is no real overlap in this story.

Robert McCaw. Off the Grid. Sarasota FL: Oceanview, 2019. Print.

I confess this book got my attention because it is set on one of my favorite places in the world—the “Big Island” of Hawaii. Not that I get to travel that much, but I have been there twice and would not mind visiting again if the situation arose. And because even the Big Island is not all that big, I was familiar with most of the locations and ways people make a living there. The author has owned property on the island for thirty years.

Our main character is Chief Detective Koa Kāne of the Hilo Police. Det. Kāne responds to two homicides on the same day. While the scenes are miles apart, it turns out the victims are a husband and wife who do live literally off the grid in the middle of the island’s rain forest. Both murders were intended to eliminate any trace of the victims: a propellant-initiated auto explosion and a body left in the path of an active volcano’s lava flow.

There is a lot weirdness about this case. The two large tracts of land the couple lived on are owned by offshore corporations, one in Lichtenstein and one in the Cayman Islands. The wife was a small-time artist who had some success selling paintings. Few people on the island had ever seen her husband. They may have been raising orchids, but if they sold any, there were no tax records.

The case gets more involved. The police chief threatens Koa with termination if he continues investigate why the owner of a large ranch would sell those pieces of land to offshore entities at ridiculously low prices. The chief, the mayor, and the ranch owner are all actively supporting a local state senator’s run for governor.

Then a CIA agent comes to inquire about the case. (Koa vouches his identity with the Coast Guard admiral who has worked with both men.) Then the FBI declares the murder of the husband a Federal case. Then two agents representing the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) swoop in with all kinds of threats trying to tell Koa that he will be arrested if he continues his investigation.

Really wild stuff!

Let us just say that when I was in the service I knew a couple of guys who worked for the DIA and became friends with one of them. While their job perhaps makes them a little more suspicious than the average person, this reader could tell that the DIA guys in Off the Grid who came to Hilo were not exactly acting kosher. What were they doing, then?

There is a lot more. A local birder happens to have a recording of the men who apparently caused the car wreck that killed Mrs. Campbell. The birder was trying to record a bird song at the time with a parabolic microphone. It turns out the men were speaking Indonesian and records show they were hired by the same ranch that sold the parcels of land indirectly to the Campbells. The men speak of not doing anything that would get “the captain” mad at them. There is somebody big behind this.

Mrs. Campbell was a native of China who ended up in Belgrade before coming to the United States. Mr. Campbell had enough aliases that it was impossible for the Hilo police to tell what his real name was.

All this tangle gets the reader’s attention. Off the Grid is a page turner that is lots of fun to read. The artifice that captures the mastermind behind the plot is worthy of Sherlock Holmes himself. To say any more might spoil the fun.

Other Koa Kāne mysteries we have reviewed:
Death of a Messenger
Fire and Vengeance
Treachery Times Two
Retribution

Julie Cosgrove. Fallen Leaf. Dallas: Write Integrity P, 2019. E-book. A Relatively Seeking Mystery.

The Fallen Leaf in the title of this mystery is a leaf in the family tree. This is apparently second in the Relatively Seeking series of genealogical mysteries. By genealogical mysteries, I do not mean discovering the name of your great-great-great uncle’s second wife. I mean an actual mystery like Sherlock’s or Miss Marple’s that began because of some genealogical research.

In this case, Jessica Warren, a Texas divorcee who was adopted as a baby, decides to do one of those online DNA tests. She is surprised to find out from the DNA test that she is about fifty percent American Indian. She has blonde hair so she never imagined that, but she admits she does tan easily.

Her adopted mother shares a letter that she received from Jessica’s birth mother when she was adopted that tells her the name of her birth mother and gives some clues about her birth father. Jessica never had an actual birth certificate, simply an adoption certificate with her birth date on it. The adoption records are closed.

She learns that her birth father is an inmate in a prison near Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she was born. Her two girlfriends, Bailey and Shannon, accompany her to Tulsa to meet, if possible, her birth parents. Bailey’s boyfriend is a police detective who has a friend in Tulsa who is a district attorney. That D.A. helps grease the wheel so Jessica is able to meet her birth father during visitation time at the prison. There is a very good discussion on what to expect should anyone ever have occasion to visit a prison.

She also visits her birth mother. It is an emotional reunion, but her mother and her husband tell her in no uncertain terms that they do not want to see her again.

Her Cherokee birth father was sentenced when he was just eighteen and has spent about thirty years in prison. He had eloped with her birth mother but started running drugs for a gang on the side to earn a little more money. He was found guilty of carrying drugs with intent to sell and of homicide. A guard at what is now an Indian casino site was stabbed to death during the drug transfer. After he was sentenced to forty-five years, his wife divorced him. A few years later married the man who had been her husband’s best friend.

Jessica is convinced her birth father is innocent. But, as they say, everyone in prison “didn’t do it.” The D.A. friend looks into the trial record and sees some discrepancies. The question is whether someone framed her Cherokee father, and if he remains silent because his life would be in danger if he tells what really happened and who was really involved.

This is a suspense story with an different twist because of the genealogy factor. Like most good mysteries nothing is really as it seems. Jessica soon gets in over her head. Because the D.A. has obvious political connections, it is not clear whether she can really trust him—especially after driver of the car he sent to pick her up after a meeting attempts to kidnap her.

This is a fast-moving tale with a number of twists and surprises—and some divine ingenuity. Since I have been reviewing new books regularly now, I have read many books that are a part of a series. While most of them are OK, I cannot say I feel impelled to read the other books in the series, except, of course, for the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency books. This one may be a little different. The characters of the three friends are drawn well enough that the reader cares. I confess to some curiosity to see what other adventures they may have. If the romance angle does not get too sappy, I might be inclined to pick up another in this series.

Disclosure of Material: We received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher through the BookCrash book review program, which requires an honest, though not necessarily positive, review.

Tim Severin. The Brendan Voyage. London: Endeavour Media, 2013. E-book.

First, to get it out directly, Tim Severin, the author of The Brendan Voyage, must have lived one of the most adventurous lives on earth. I might actually envy him. In addition to sailing across the Atlantic Ocean in a leather curragh or coracle, his book titles suggest that he has attempted other historical voyages in historically authentic vessels. Not only am I too old to try to imitate him, but I would have to learn how to sail.

Second, what attracted me to this book in the first place was simply that this was an effort like Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki and Ra voyages to prove that it was possible for someone to sail from one distant location to another. I had read somewhere, possibly in Marshall and Manuel’s The Light and the Glory, that Columbus had read about Bendan’s legendary voyage to a new land across the Atlantic Ocean and based his voyages partly on that.

So in 1976, the author got together a crew of five after spending the better part of two years researching how the Gaelic leather boats were made. He followed as best he could the descriptions from medieval sources of how it was done and found experts in a number of different fields: lumber, leather, and flax being primary.

The project was impressive. One of the most remarkable things was that building a leather boat using the medieval technology actually made the craft more seaworthy than using more modern techniques of carpentry and leather dressing.

There are over a hundred manuscripts extant of the voyage of Brendan, and the author noted that the basic story is really pretty specific and changes little though there are variations in the manuscripts. Was this based on fact? It helped that Mrs. Severin was a medieval scholar. He managed to get enough financial backing to give this a try.

The story is fascinating. He admits that he was lucky in some ways to find the experts that he did. In one case he was looking for someone who could duplicate the medieval way of treating leather thongs for sewing oxhides together. One expert told him that no one could do it any more except maybe a Mr. John O’Connell who was no longer in the business. He found him. He also found the last man in Ireland who made curraghs for a living, though rarely had he made one as big as the one Severin had made, which he christened Brendan.

I was in the Coast Guard and the rescue and patrol boats we used were generally around forty feet long and about twelve feet wide. Of course, they were diesel powered, not sail. These were typical for relatively sheltered areas, though they were pretty seaworthy in a pinch. They normally had a crew of three, which was enough for most of our work.

The Brendan was thirty-six feet long and eight feet wide with a crew of five. There was not a whole lot of living space. They followed the route to North America that St. Brendan apparently took. It was kind of island-hopping: Ireland to the Hebrides to the Faeroes, to Iceland, to Greenland, to Newfoundland.

The Brendan did not stop at Greenland since it was mostly uninhabited. That was not the case in the sixth century when Brendan the Navigator sailed. The climate was warmer then, so there were at the very least some Irish monks there. Later Eric the Red would settle there. Once the “Little Ice Age” of about 1300 to 1850 began, things would change.

Indeed, it seems clear that while Brendan did encounter some icebergs on his trip, he did not have the trials that Severin and his men had trying to navigate through ice fields.

There is so much more. Not only do we read about this challenging voyage and the various places the voyagers sailed to, but we see the sea birds, fish, and marine mammals close up. Some of the tales of sea monsters from the Brendan stories were very similar to some of their experiences with whales. Although they did have some very dangerous moments in rough weather and ice, one of the most intense moments involves an encounter with a Killer Whale.

Rounding up an experienced and varied crew was not unlike the first half hour or so of The Magnificent Seven. Each had talent and experience which the vessel needed. Without each one, the voyage might not have succeeded. There is expertise in the construction and in the execution. It would have been so in the sixth century, and it is still the same to sail anything in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Like The Odyssey, the story begins in the middle of the action, and then gradually we learn how the Brendan got into the gale described and how the crew got out again and actually made it to Newfoundland. If they did it, it seems pretty clear Brendan and others could have done it as well back in the day. And, clearly, Columbus may have learned something from Brendan, too, especially on his return route to Europe.

Severin has another book out called The Ulysses Voyage. We can imagine what that attempts to do. I am curious to see if he identifies the various stops in The Odyssey with those of Mauricio Obregón in his Ulysses Airborne. I use that in my classes when I teach Homer. I think some day we shall see.

Alexander McCall Smith. The Department of Sensitive Crimes. New York: Pantheon, 2019. Print.

Alexander McCall Smith, the author of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency books among others and one of our favorite light writers, has apparently started a new series. Detective Ulf Varg leads a special unit of the Malmö, Sweden, police department called The Department of Sensitive Crimes. They investigate reported incidents that may or may not be caused by a criminal act, but with a potential for being more than a mere crank call.

A man at a trade show is stabbed in the back of the knee. It does not seem like an accident, but, let’s face it, that is an unusual place to be stabbed with a knife, especially when the victim is standing up at the time.

A young woman feels left out because her girlfriends all have boyfriends. In fact, her closest friend has two and manages to keep them both. So she makes up an imaginary boyfriend and actually gets a guy she meets in a coffee shop to pose for a selfie with her.

It gets a little more complicated as her friends keep wanting to meet this guy. Finally, she says that he is a meteorologist and has to do some work at a weather station above the Arctic Circle. Meanwhile her two-timing friend finds a bloody cloth in the girl’s car trunk and whose relative has been stationed in the same weather station and has never heard of the guy. So she reports that she suspects foul play to the police.

The death of an imaginary friend? There is more than meets the eye. Call in The Department of Sensitive Crimes.

Then the police commissioner himself asks Ulf, Anna, and Blomquist—the three Sensitive Crime police—to check out a resort run by the commissioner’s cousin. It seems there have been some unusual happenings going on around the inn. Customers are leaving after just a night or two and complaining the place is haunted. Could this be foul play by a competitor or something else?

The lighthearted and good-natured characters like those in the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency stories are nearly duplicated here. Ulf Varg is a lot like Precious Ramotswe and the compulsive and boring Blomquist echoes Grace Makutsi. But here there are interesting and curious reflections on things Scandinavian. At one point we are told, for example, that Homer translates well into Swedish. He sounds like a Norse saga.

Ulf reflects on automobiles in a way reminiscent of J.L.B. Maketoni. Anna and Ulf seem to have a connection not unlike Mma Ramotswe and Bra Maketoni in the early Ladies’ Detective Agency novels, but Anna is married, and Swedes are stoics. If Grace Makutsi sometimes drones on about secretarial college, Blomquist has a single-minded obsession with fishing.

If this is the start of new series by Mr. Smith, it does have some promise. Some parts cause laughter, some parts are simply silly, and some are suspenseful fun. The detective agency formula he has developed still works here.

Tim Keller. The Prodigal God. New York: Penguin, 2008. Print.

It used to be that everyone knew the story about the Prodigal Son from the fifteenth chapter of the Book of Luke. Now not so much.

I recall tutoring a student for the SAT around 1990 and I mentioned something about the story. She had never heard of it. I was thinking that just twenty years before, even the Jewish kids from my school had at least known something about that story. It was part of our culture.

Tim Keller reintroduces this story to us. But let me say that even long-time Christians who can quote the story word for word from the Greek Bible will get something from this little book. It is great.

First of all, Tim Keller writes very well. We get a sense of the heart of God from the way he presents the story Jesus tells. Keller does call it a parable, and it may be, but neither Jesus nor Luke specifically call it a parable. Indeed, Jesus begins by saying simply, “There was a man who had two sons.” (Luke 15:11) It sounds like this could be a true story. I certainly am not going to be dogmatic about it, but it is a thought.

The Prodigal God tells the story from the father’s point of view. That in itself is humbling because we understand that the Father represents God Himself. Years ago I read Daring to Draw Near, a book I still recall well. That was a look at Job from God’s perspective. I had to read a lot of it on my knees. When we see things from God’s perspective, most of the time we just have to shut up. (See Job 42:3)

There is a lot to the story of the Prodigal Son, but Keller notes that neither son had a right relationship with his father.

The younger son, the prodigal, does not respect his father. By asking for his inheritance before his father has died, the son is basically saying, “I wish you were dead.” Why? Because Daddy’s rules keep him from having fun. So he goes off to “far country” and prodigally spends his money till he has nothing left. He “comes to his senses” and repents. (Keller reminds us that prodigal means “spendthrift”).

Now, he knows that he has been sinning, and the sinful lifestyle has led to emptiness. He not only is remorseful, though, he recalls that his father loves people enough that he would take him back even as a servant. He returns.

Keller points out a lot of things that are culturally significant which I will not go into here, but we read that the father runs out to meet his returning son. So God is reaching out to the repentant one.

Of course, there is also the older brother. He is a typical older brother in that he tries to please his father. But he also does not really respect him. Not only does he criticize his father for taking the younger brother back, but then he complains that he has worked hard and yet his father never even gave him a kid to roast let alone the fatted calf he barbecued for the returning prodigal.

If the younger son were a wastrel and obvious sinner to anyone, the older son’s problem is self-righteousness. He thinks he deserves his fathers’ inheritance because he has been a good boy, a dutiful son. He also sees his father in terms of what he can get from him. The main difference is that he is willing to wait and is unwilling to share.

Notice, though, that the father goes out to the older son, too. God is reaching out to all of us. The question is whether we answer Him.

According to Jewish Law, the eldest son gets twice the inheritance of any other heir. (See Deuteronomy 21:17) Since the younger son already received his share, when the father says, “All that is mine is yours,” (Luke 15:31) that is precisely true according to the Law. Not only does that mean that the older son could have had a kid or a calf at any time, but it also means that the older son had to accept the fact that his father was giving up a calf and a ring to the younger one that otherwise may have become his own since now everything would be going to him.

I am reminded that the enemies who conspired to kill Jesus were mostly self-righteous. They did not believe that they were sinners. They were skeptical that Jesus was the Messiah. Both Judas and Peter denied Jesus, but Judas was not restored because he remained angry at Jesus because Jesus was not doing things the way he thought they should have been done. He was like the older son. He was angry at God. Peter knew he had denied his friend and wept. Jesus was able to restore him.

There is a lot more, but this book is anointed. Although it is a small book, there were times I had to stop reading just to think and pray about what Keller and the Bible were saying. Our relationship with God comes first. We do not have to prove ourselves. Nor should we be prodigally sinning. “We are the righteousness of God in Christ.” (See II Corinthians 5:21 KJV)

We are joint heirs with our older brother, Jesus. (Romans 8:17 KJV) But let’s face it, half of infinity is still a pretty big number.

Jessica Fellowes. Bright Young Dead. New York: Minotaur, 2018. Print.

Bright Young Dead is exciting fiction. It starts off like a cozy mystery, but develops into something out of Dickens.

The author, niece of Downton Abbey impresario Julian Fellowes, is writing about the same time period as her uncle’s television show. The central characters are historical figures—the famous/notorious Mitford sisters. It is the Roaring Twenties. The older sisters have debuted, the younger ones still are being nannied. Even though the sisters are historical figures, the tale itself is fiction. I guess we can think of Downtown Abbey, set in a real aristocrats’ home, but mostly fiction.

The title Bright Young Dead comes from a term which was coined to describe the fashionable upper class revelers of the Twenties: Bright Young People. For Downton Abbey fans, think of someone like cousin Rose.

There is a party at the Mitford estate. The Bright Young People are there. They devise a treasure hunt game (Americans usually use the term scavenger hunt) and everyone seems to be having a good time. Second-oldest daughter Pamela has debuted but is still required to have a chaperone. Young Louisa Cannon, sometime nanny to the younger daughters, is her chaperone. Much of the tale is told from her point of view. She will get to accompany Pamela and Nancy to parties and to jaunts in London.

During the opening scenes of the story, one of the Bright Young Men named Adrian Curtis falls to his death from the steeple of the chapel on the Mitford family property. (The father’s title is Lord Redesdale; the estate is Asthall Manor). The mystery starts out like a cozy. There are about a dozen people attending the party, and along with a few servants and chaperones, everyone is there. It could be any number of stories by Agatha Christie.

But it is not that simple. While Louisa is bright and young, she is a maid and a nanny—not a bright young person by society’s definition. She comes from a poor part of London and has friends who belong the Forty Thieves, a gang of young women criminals headed by the notorious and distinguished-looking Alice Diamond. Louisa’s friend Dulcie is a member. Dulcie is a maid for one of the London families who were invited to the party, so she comes to the party to help as a servant.

Dulcie discovers the body of Mr. Curtis and, when searched, she is found to have items stolen from the Redesdale estate on her person. She is arrested for theft and soon for murder as well.

Louisa has known Dulcie for a long time. Yes, she admits Dulcie is a thief, but she is no murderer.

Meanwhile another London friend of Louisa’s, Guy Sullivan, is a sergeant in the London police who has been assigned to undercover work trying to spy on and infiltrate the Forty Thieves and their male counterpart the Elephant Gang.

The story then weaves a fascinating connection between these London gangs and the Bright Young People. While alcohol is not illegal in England as it was in the United States, drugs are. Gang members are happy to supply rich clients with them. Some gangsters get rich and hang out at the same clubs the Bright Young People do.

Some of the Bright Young Ladies get their clothing made by a talented widowed seamstress who gets good deals on her fabric from the Forty Thieves as fenced by the Elephants. And this dressmaker, in turn, is taking care of the three-year-old son of one of the Forty while she is in jail.

There is potential for action—even mayhem. The tale gets more and more involved. Louisa and Guy discover lurid details to the point where things become dangerous for everyone. While the surprising climax back at Asthall Manor could be from Christie, in between with London lowlife and gangs, threats, fights, drugs, and thieves, Bright Young Dead has a lot more in common with Oliver Twist than Downton Abbey.

P.S. Not too long ago I had read a review of a book that had come out about the Mitford sisters. The eldest, Nancy, became the writer. One of her sisters became a Fascist; another became a Communist. Nancy is credited with coining the terms U and non-U to describe language and behavior that distinguished the lower classes from the upper classes. Jessica Fellowes has fun with this family. The reader will, too.