LINCOLN by Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal just passed away, and I realized that I had never read one of his books.  I had a copy of Lincoln and decided that now was the time to tackle it.  Historical fiction has the advantage (or disadvantage, in some cases) of a known outcome.  We know who's going to win the Civil War, but getting there seems almost impossible, given the Union's paucity of capable generals, the infighting among political leaders competing for Lincoln's job, the leakage of military plans to the Confederacy, and the bogus intelligence about the size of the Southern forces from obviously unreliable sources.  The book is overly long, but then there's a lot going on, including the plot by local Confederate sympathizers to kidnap or assassinate Lincoln.  The White House residents are aware that they may have to evacuate at any moment, given their proximity to the seceded state of Virginia.  Lincoln's wife's extravagance and migraines add to Lincoln's woes that include attempts to depose him for incompetence.  Eventually his foes in Congress and in his own Cabinet realize that Lincoln is the consummate politician who is wily enough to outsmart them and powerful enough to push them out of his way.  Some of his plans never come to fruition, due to his untimely death.  His ideas of reimbursing the slaveowners and relocating the slaves to Central America were not popular with his colleagues, but I couldn't help but wonder if the Reconstruction era could have been even more chaotic if he had lived.  One thing that I found disconcerting was that the author switched subjects or perspectives rather abruptly, and I had quite a bit of difficulty keeping the long list of characters straight.  No matter.  This book reads like a novel and reminds us that issues such as the size of the national debt and the separation of church and state are not new.  Imagine our current problems compounded by war on our own soil.  This book gives a glimpse of what was truly a turbulent time.

BELONG TO ME by Marisa de los Santos

Bad things happen to good people, and in this book all the characters are likeable.  Cancer can happen to anyone, and it's devastating.  However, Elizabeth's disease helps bring together two women—Cornelia, the petite newcomer, and Piper, Elizabeth's judgmental best friend.  There's also a surprising blast from the past that is sort of a mixed bag.  Any way you slice it, though, the cast of characters is delightful.  Cornelia is married to handsome oncologist Teo, and Cornelia's new friend Lake has a smart and congenial teenage son Dev, who has a new love interest in Clare, who visits Cornelia and Teo from time to time.  Cornelia and Teo would like to have a child of their own, now that they're permanently situated in suburbia.  Besides the cancer and a few spats due to misunderstandings, the worst thing that happens is that Dev's teacher in his previous school stifled his academic aspirations with a nasty putdown.  Lake, though, responds in the best way possible by moving Dev to a new locale, near Philadelphia, where our story takes place.  Dev suspects that the move has something to do with his father, whom he has never met.  Clare stirs the pot by encouraging Dev to try to identify and locate his father.  The result is that the kids get more than they bargained for.  Too bland a read?  Not at all.  The writing is lovely, and the lives of these nice people have enough bumps in the road to make us want to find out how they cope.

THE DESCENDANTS by Kaui Hart Hemmings

I haven't seen the movie, but I can see why this book was made into one.  Matt King is a mostly inattentive father whose wife is now in the hospital from a boat racing accident.  We learn a lot about Joanie from Matt's and his daughters' reminiscences, and I expect readers either love her or hate her.  I fall into the latter category.  She's a department store model, obsessed with her looks, who competes with her daughters, drinks late into the night in bars, and engages in high risk activities.  One of them is an affair, reported by the older daughter, Alex, to her clueless father, who now starts to wonder what he should have done differently to keep his wife from straying.  His 10-year-old daughter, Scottie, is sending hurtful texts to a classmate, and Alex, found drunk and out past curfew at her boarding school are clearly out of control as well.  It's hard to ascertain whether Joanie is a good mom and the girls are just acting up due to her absence and uncertain prognosis, or if this behavior is the norm.  We suspect the latter, given that Alex's substance abuse is the reason she's in boarding school in the first place.  Matt definitely has his hands full and doesn't know where to start.  Plus, he's hurt and angry about his wife's affair.  In walks Sid, a friend of Alex's, who obviously has issues of his own, but he serves as sort of an impartial moderator—a role for which he is probably ill-equipped, given that he has been banished from his mother's house.  He's a trip, though, and unknowingly spreads comic relief all over the pages.  A series of darkly hilarious events unfold, as Matt grapples with how to approach his wife's lover with the news that Joanie is being taken off life support.  The scene in which he finally does have that uncomfortable conversation, making the man squirm, is just splendid and seems to be the pivotal moment in which Matt takes control and shows us what he's made of.

THE REVISIONISTS by Thomas Mullen

How about a futuristic novel that takes place in the present?  Our narrator, Zed, has time-traveled from the future to present-day New York, where his mission is to make sure that the historical agitators ("hags") do not alter the course of history.  The hags have tried to prevent the Holocaust, the 9/11 tragedy, and now the Great Conflagration—presumably a nuclear event.  Zed's employers want to ensure that the peace and prosperity that follow the Great Conflagration remain intact.  Now Zed's gadget for identifying hags has gone on the fritz, and he meets a fellow employee with instructions that conflict with his own.  Zed belatedly starts to suspect that his employers are not the good guys.  Caught in this web of intrigue are Leo (a former CIA operative), Tasha (a corporate attorney who secretly leaks a corporate greed scandal), and Sari (an Indonesian woman in the employ of a Korean diplomat and his cruel wife).  The author weaves a pretty good plot here, but the characters are stilted, and the various tragedies each has endured somehow fail to arouse sympathy.  I found the final outcome puzzling, and I can't even blame the time-travel aspect for my confusion.  Leo's anonymous client is a shady company called Enhanced Awareness, who also employed Troy Jones, whose identity Zed is using in the present.  I never quite got what that company's evil mission was or what its relationship to Zed's employer was.  One reviewer assumed that Zed was from another planet.  What??  I didn't think that at all.  Apparently I'm not the only reader whose awareness could use a little enhancement.

THE FIFTH WITNESS by Michael Connelly

Mickey Haller is back, in this sequel to The Lincoln Lawyer.  He's now representing people who are in the process of losing their homes to foreclosure, although I'm not sure how they can afford an attorney if they can't pay their mortgage.  Oh, well.  One of his former clients has now been charged with brutally murdering a bank executive, causing Haller to dive back into criminal law.  In this instance, movie rights are expected to cover Haller's fee when the case incites a media circus.  The bulk of the novel follows Lisa Trammel's trial, with lots of bumps and surprises along the way, all of which Haller twists to his and his client's advantage.  With conclusive DNA evidence on the murder weapon and the defendant's shoes, and an eyewitness who places Lisa near the scene of the crime, Haller pursues another angle—the victim's personal financial difficulties and a shady foreclosure processing company—in order to prove that his client was framed.  Most puzzling of all is how a 5'3" woman could bludgeon a standing 6'2" man on the top of the head—an anomaly that the prosecution fails to address.  The plot lacks the nail-biting timing of The Lincoln Lawyer, and the outcome and aftermath of the trial are a little predictable.  Even so, I still really enjoyed the ride, and the book's finale is very satisfying, with things playing out perfectly for Lisa Trammel and for Haller's career.  After all, what's Haller's overriding personal objective?  To get his ex-wife and daughter back.  I hope there's more to come.

SILVER SPARROW by Tayari Jones

James Witherspoon has two wives in Atlanta, with a daughter by each.  Wife #1, Laverne, and daughter Chaurisse are oblivious to the existence of wife #2, Gwen, and daughter Dana.  Gwen and Dana, however, are fully aware of their secondary status, despite their beauty and intelligence, and frequently sneak clandestine peeks at their rivals.  Meanwhile, James, with the help of his ever-present business partner, Raleigh, is barely maintaining a precarious equilibrium, keeping both households happy and, by all means, separate.  This balancing act teeters toward destruction when Dana and clueless Chaurisse become acquainted, due to Dana's morbid curiosity, coupled with Chaurisse's envy of Dana's looks and attitude.  Both Gwen and Dana realize the dangers inherent to revealing themselves to Laverne and Chaurisse, since James has made it clear that having both families in the same place at the same time is strictly taboo.  For example, James cannot allow Dana to take a summer job at Six Flags, since Chaurisse is planning to work there.  Dana's frustration leaps off the page and drives her to test the boundaries of what she can get away with, where her relationship with Chaurisse is concerned.  In some ways, she is taunting both Chaurisse and James, dropping obvious hints on Chaurisse that should raise suspicion with James when the fallout reaches him.  When circumstances make it virtually impossible to keep their friendship a secret, Dana realizes that she has stepped over the line and does her best to keep the resulting upheaval at bay.  If James's elaborate ruse crumbles, someone will have to pay, and this knowledge, on the part of everyone except the unsuspecting Laverne and Chaurisse, infuses the plot with tension.  Plus, the mention of many Atlanta landmarks brought a nostalgic and knowing smile to my face.

THE HYPNOTIST by Lars Kepler

Here's another violent Swedish thriller, but I didn’t find it to be of the same caliber as the Stieg Larsson trilogy.  The first half was very promising, with two possibly related crimes.  One is a spree in which an entire family is murdered, except a teenage son, Josef, who survives the rampage, and an older daughter who had moved away.  Detective Joona Linna enlists the assistance of Dr. Eric Maria Bark in gleaning information from Josef by hypnosis, despite Bark's decade-old vow never to hypnotize a patient again.  Then someone kidnaps Bark's teenage son Benjamin, while Bark is in a drug-induced sleep.  So far so good.  Could Benjamin's abduction have been plotted by a gang whose members name themselves after Pokemon characters?  Or by Josef, who is angry at Bark for having hypnotized him?  Or by one of Bark's deranged ex-patients?  The plot temporarily derails during a rather long section in which Bark recounts the incidents that led up to his vow to stop hypnotizing.  He had been performing group therapy on several patients who relived traumatic events via hypnosis, in order to confront and thus thwart their inner demons.  This section drags on, and then we finally get back to the present-day crime-solving efforts, prompting Bark's wife Simone to remark, "Everything takes such a bloody long time."  My sentiments exactly.