All Good People Here by Ashley Flowers - the host of the #1 true crime podcast "Crime Junkie." This is her debut novel.
A journalist, Margot, returns to her small hometown in Indiana because her uncle who raised her is suffering from progressive dementia. When she was six years old, her best friend across the street was abducted and murdered. The case went unsolved. Soon after Margot arrives, another little girl goes missing in the area. Margot sees connections and is determined to investigate.
I have read much better mysteries. In this one, there are plot holes all over the place. Plus, there are too many similarities to the JonBenet Ramsey case. Was the author pushing her theory of what she thinks happened with that case?
The worst part was the ending, or rather, non-ending! Margot is confronting someone and then...it just ends. I actually scrolled the audio back 5 minutes to see if I accidentally fell asleep and missed something, but no.
Non-fiction: History
Black Hawk: The Battle for the Heart of America by Kerry A. Trask
My brother, Greg, sent me this book. We were born and lived in Rock Island, Illinois the site of Saukenuk. However, I did not know much about Black Hawk nor the Sauk and Fox people. I can remember learning in school that Abraham Lincoln served in a militia during the Black Hawk War. It is sad that I didn’t know any more about Black Hawk especially since I grew up nearby.
Trask does a good job using primary sources to set the stage from both viewpoints – Sauk and white. He documents the voraciousness of the government and the businessmen who cheated the Sauk and Fox out of their lands. He discusses the Indian culture in which limited, ritual inter-tribal warfare, was considered to be an essential element of manhood, and how this reputation led to panic among the whites and the subsequent overreaction to the Sauk incursion into Illinois. He explains how a similar macho culture among the white frontiersmen led many of them to feel they had to prove their own manhood by going out and killing a few Indians. He points out not only Black Hawk's qualities as a leader but also the flaws that eventually contributed to the destruction of his people in a tragic precursor to the massacres at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee.
It was hard reading about how avoidable the war was and the disastrous effect it had on the Sauk and Fox tribes. Ultimately, the Sauk people in Black Hawk’s group were starving as they fled on foot from the advancing troops. Black Hawk tells the people to flee west across the Mississippi River while he and other chiefs flee into the Wisconsin woods, in an attempt to recruit other Indian warriors. There he is eventually captured. The account of the US troops slaughter of the unarmed Sauk women and children as they attempted to flee across the Mississippi River is gut-wrenching. They were murdered and their bodies grotesquely mutilated simply because they were born Sauk.
Non-fiction: History
Dark Invasion 1915: Germany's Secret War & the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America by Howard Blum
How had I never learned of the German terrorist cells? I vaguely remember something about the Black Tom explosion and an assassination attempt on JP Morgan, but I did not know how extensive the German saboteurs and spies efforts were before and during WW I. Dark Invasion focuses on the efforts of Germany to seed disruption and terrorism in the United States.
In the days before Homeland Security, it was up to a New York Police inspector to track down saboteurs and spy rings. A German diplomat set up a ring of saboteurs and spies aimed at spreading anti-British propaganda, disrupting war supplies, and even assassinating banker JP Morgan. The Germans were determined to keep the United States out of the war and stop their material support of the British. They utilized bizarre attempts including creating a fake labor union so that they could load timed explosives with cargo bound for Great Britain and using anthrax to infect military horses bound for France (it is unknown how many humans were also infected by this biowarfare!). It is a startling look at the danger of neutrality and the blindness with which President Wilson clung to in order to maintain it.
Non-fiction: History
The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story by Kermit Roosevelt III
I loved this book! I heard the author speak on C-Span’s Book TV and knew I had to read his book. Kermit Roosevelt III is a professor of constitutional law at the University of Pennsylvania. He has published in the Virginia, Michigan and Columbia law reviews, among others, and his articles have been cited twice by the Supreme Court and numerous times by state and lower federal courts. He is a 2nd. great-grandson of United States President Theodore Roosevelt and a distant cousin of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
“We all know the common story we tell about America: that our fundamental values as a country were stated in the Declaration of Independence, fought for in the Revolution, and made law in the Constitution. But, with the country increasingly divided, this story isn’t working for us anymore—what’s more, it’s not even true. As Kermit Roosevelt argues in this eye-opening reinterpretation of the American story, our fundamental values, particularly equality, are not part of the vision of the Founders. Instead, they were stated in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and were the hope of Reconstruction, when it was possible to envision the emergence of the nation committed to liberty and equality.”
Are we a country based on inclusiveness and equality? Or one based on unity? Do the words 'all men are created equal' mean ALL?
The Declaration was never intended as a statement of universal human rights, it was intended to unite the colonies in rebellion against King George. Accepting slavery was the price of forming the new nation, no slavery - no United States. The Declaration was a declaration of political independence, not a statement of political rights.
The Declaration said nothing to condemn slavery and then the Constitution endorsed slavery. Several different clauses in the original Constitution—the Three-Fifths Clause, Slave Trade, and Militia clauses of Article I, along with the Fugitive Slave Clause of Article IV protected the interests of slaveholders. Most of the framers of the Constitution reasoned that a union permitting states to allow slavery to exist was better than no union at all. Withholding explicit judgment of slavery in the text of the Constitution was seen as a necessary compromise.
This is why racism is not an aberration, it is a natural consequence of the American founding which has compounded over time. The Confederacy interpreted the principles of the Declaration as containing their right to break away from the Union to protect their ‘rights’ which included the right to own and enslave another human being.
Restless Waters of the Ichhamati by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Rimli Bhattacharya (Translator, from Bengali)
My brother, Greg, also sent me this book and it is a gem! Set in the 19th century, it is about the little known practice and aspects of indigo cultivation in Bengal. The British forced villagers to cultivate indigo, which ruined their arable land, pushing them into poverty.
Set along the river Ichhamati,“the indigo plantation ... and the multitude of people whose lives are bound visibly and invisibly with the plantation economy make for a localized yet expansive canvas…” The river is key as it evokes the flow of time in which generations have lived and those yet to be born will live along the Ichhamati’s banks as it wends its way towards the Bay of Bengal.
Most fascinating are the sharp snapshots of the societal strata comprising everyone from the owners of the plantations to Brahmans to the peasants, and the different dynamics among them. The author showcases this by using dialectical English to distinguish between the upper and lower classes.
While the societal strata may proscribe how they interacted, it didn’t keep them from reacting to each other humanely. One evening a family was walking home through the jungle. Suddenly a man with a stick began running towards them and then stopped. It was a childhood friend, Hala Pekey, who had become a thief. Hala Pekey greets the family and hugs the young son. This causes the father to contemplate, “Was not there the divine even within him? Was he bad? Who would judge them? Who had the right to judge them? There was a supremely mysterious force unseen by anyone, who works silently, guiding us all; letting each one come to fruition in his or her way, each one following the way as it came naturally to to him or her… No one, whether he be a Hala Pekey … would be uncared for. Each life was precious and needed.”
I learned a lot about the social mores for women of the time when a man, Bhabani, agrees to marry three women from the same household to ‘save them’ from spinsterhood. His oldest wife, Tilu, is mortified at being seen with Bhabani during the day because “they’ll say, such and such’s wife was walking along quite brazenly with her husband in public.” Another woman, Gaya-mem, is treated like an outcast because she dares to voice her opinions and consorts with the plantation owner. Bhabani notices how the women are treated and envisions a time when they will not be so constrained by meaningless restrictions.
Fiction: Crime Mystery
A Winter Grave by Peter May
A Winter Grave is set in the year 2051 in Scotland where the effects of climate change we've been warned about have become a reality. Many parts of the world are underwater and the world's population is on the move.
Near Loch Leven, a young meteorologist named Addie is checking a mountain top weather station and discovers the body of a man encased by ice. It is Charles Younger, an investigative journalist with the Scottish Herald who had been reported missing three months earlier. Glasgow Detective Inspector Cameron Brodie volunteers to travel there to investigate along with a forensic pathologist, Dr Sita Roy. Cameron has personal reasons for wanting to take on the case and his backstory is revealed in flashbacks that begin in 2021.
Younger’s body has been kept refrigerated in a hotel’s cake cabinet and what Brodie and pathologist uncover during the autopsy puts both their lives in danger. Brodie must face his past as well as a killer who is desperate to keep secret what George Younger’s investigations had threatened to expose.
The 2051 setting was slightly dystopian as was the political scene in Scotland. And, while the character’s motivations and emotions remained the same as people’s today, May included some interesting advances in technology, developments in transportation, and changes in the environment. As a “cop” mystery, there were also expected and unexpected complications in the plot.
I thought this was a well-crafted story. The narrative transitions back and forth in time were smooth. The plot is compelling and complex and the characters are complicated and authentic. This is a compelling mystery.
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