Mike's Books

Dead Silence (The Foundlings Trilogy #2) by   Wendy Corsi Staub   4 Stars Dead Silence is an absolutely terrific follow-up to Little Girl Lost .   It’s rare for a sequel to be better than the original, but Wendy Corsi Staub has pulled it off. Dead Silence picks up the stories of Amelia Crenshaw Barnes and Stockton Barnes 29 years after we left them in Little Girl Lost , and introduces a new villain known only as The Angler who just may be the most vile, detestable, psychopathic killer ever to darken the pages of any thriller.   It will have you turning pages late into the night, and then checking all of the doors and windows to make sure they’re locked!

Inferno (Robert Langdon #4) by   Dan Brown 4 Stars Inferno is the fourth book from Dan Brown featuring Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon.   This time Langdon awakens in an Italian hospital with no memory of how he got there or why someone is trying to kill him.   He and his lovely young doctor Sienna Brooks then embark on a desperate chase to unravel a series of codes centered on Dante Alighieri's masterpiece The Inferno .   As usual in a Dan Brown book there’s plenty of action, some very thought-provoking plot points (this time dealing with overpopulation and genetic engineering), and plenty of art history.   In this case, I thought there was a little too much art history though.   At times the detailed descriptions of Italian and Turkish architecture and artwork seemed to get in the way of the story and I found myself wishing Brown would just get on with it.   Still, it’s another great read in one of my favorite series.

After All: A Gathering Storm of Romance, Revenge, and Espionage in Postwar South America by   Robert Arthur Neff 5 Stars After All is the sequel to Neff’s extraordinary work of historical fiction Uber Alles .   In my humble opinion, it’s not quite as good, but then Uber Alles was a tough act to follow.   Nevertheless, I’ve still accorded this book the rare (for me) distinction of a 5-star rating for one simple reason: it led me to think about an important subject in a way I probably never would have otherwise, and that is, to me, one definition of a great book. Neff’s books introduce us to a German general who could easily be considered a Nazi war criminal and, more importantly, to a few others who benefit greatly from his crimes.   But in the end, it’s very difficult to think of General Otto von Seigler and his family as criminals.   They are much more real people caught in the chaos of war, and separating crimes from mere attempts at surviv...

The Robots of Dawn (Robot #3) by   Isaac Asimov 4 Stars Lije Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw, the crime solving duo that are the stars of The Robots of Dawn , are without a doubt my favorite literary detectives.   Baley is an Earthman (after all, this is a future where humans now inhabit some 50 other worlds and the distinction of being from Earth is an important, and not altogether desirable, one) and Olivaw is his robotic partner.   Although robots are common on the outer worlds (among the “Spacers”) they are still mistrusted on Earth, and Baley’s partnership with the all too human Daneel Olivaw is, therefore, a most unusual one.   It is also at once both comical and touching, representing a deep (and very human) friendship. The Robots of Dawn is the penultimate work in Asimov’s Robot series, which begins his epic story of the future that concludes with his Foundation series.   It’s a future that’s certainly not utopian.   The people o...

The Thieves (Riyria #4.9) by   Michael J. Sullivan 3 Stars This short story (which has become chapter 1 of Sullivan’s book Theft of Swords ) introduces the characters Royce and Hadrian.   It is a very short tale, so there’s not a lot here, but it’s obvious that these two are characters you want to learn more about.   Bring on the full book!

Pile of Bones (The Legends of the First Empire 0.5) by   Michael J. Sullivan 3 Stars Pile of Bones is a delightful short story featuring Suri and Minna, two characters from Sullivan's "The Legends of the First Empire" series. This is my first exposure to the world of Elan, and it's made me excited to explore more.

America's Trailblazing Middle Linebacker: The Story of NFL Hall of Famer Willie Lanier by   Joe Zagorski 2 Stars I was very disappointed by this book.   I expected and hoped for a biography of one of the greatest football players from my youth, Willie Lanier.   What I found was essentially just a recap of each Kansas City Chiefs game from the early years of Lanier’s career sprinkled with quotes from Lanier pulled from interviews he gave to NFL Films.   There is almost nothing about Lanier’s youth and painfully little about his time in college or his life after his retirement from the NFL.   I don’t feel like I know any more about the man than I did before reading the book.

Little Girl Lost (The Foundlings Trilogy #1) by   Wendy Corsi Staub 4 Stars As Amelia Crenshaw’s mother lays dying in 1987, Amelia learns that she was not her birth mother.   The man she has always called her father found her as a baby abandoned in the church where he worked as a janitor, and the people she has always thought her parents kept her and raised her as their own, thinking she was the answer to their prayers.   At about the same time back in 1968, a serial killer was in the midst of a killing spree that would leave four families dead and four young women pregnant with his children.   Now in 1987 Amelia’s search for the truth about her past is about to entangle her with another killing spree linked to that time nearly twenty years before. Little Girl Lost is a terrific, suspense-filled read.   It starts a little slowly and it’s tough to connect the many disparate parts to the story, but it’s well worth sticking it out.   T...