73. The Others by Jeremy Robinson

read on my Audible
read by R. C. Bray
Unabridged audio (10:15)
2018 Breakneck Media
314 pgs.
Adult SciFi
Finished  August 6, 2018
Goodreads rating:  3.92 - 801 ratings
My rating:  3
Setting:  Contemporary AZ & NM

First line/s:  " 'You know I don't like coming here, Harry.' Sheriff Godin dusted off his hat, despite its being clean.  'Especially for something like this.  Even more so at this time of night.'"

My comments:  About 40% of this book, maybe more, was horrible gunfighting, hi tech gun fighting.  Yuck.  But the other half was full of building relationships and thought-provoking interpretation of aliens and nano bits that burrow into people's heads (making them capable of all sorts of high technology).  Set in Arizona and New Mexico, driving through the desert in all sorts of crazy vehicles, we accompany a ragtag group of people that are trying to discover the secrets of "the others" who have inhabited the earth secretly for a couple of millennium. I liked that part a lot.  And, believe it or not, this book was full of one man's love for family and kids.

Goodreads synopsis:  UFOs and alien abductions remain one of the most hotly debated and mysterious subjects of the twenty-first century. In the decades since 1960, with reports of strange encounters on the rise, thirteen million people have gone missing worldwide and never been found. The Others takes a fast-paced, unique, and moving look at the phenomenon that has fueled Jeremy Robinson's imagination since several sightings, strange happenings, and visits with renowned UFO investigator, and family friend, Raymond Fowler.

TO SAVE A MISSING GIRL...
          Dan Delgado is a private investigator. When it comes to finding cheating spouses, corporate thieves, or runaway teenagers, he's unenthusiastic, and unmatched. As a former San Francisco detective, he misses more meaningful work, but he hasn't had the heart for it since his wife's death five years prior. That is, until a phone call from a distraught mother. An illegal immigrant who can't go to the police puts him on the hunt for a missing little girl.
          By the time he reaches the mother's small home, she's missing, too. The circumstances are strange, but when a team of heavily armed mercenaries arrive, Delgado is convinced there is more going on than a simple kidnapping.
          Joined by his elderly assistant, a gun-toting pastor, and a UFO enthusiast Uber driver, Delgado follows the clues west, to Colorado City, a town cleaved in two by the 37th parallel, also known as the UFO Highway. In a town infamous for fundamentalist Mormon cult activity, they uncover evidence of a massive child-trafficking ring, whose ringleaders might not be human.
          Delgado and crew are plunged into a dangerous world of corporate competition, UFO lore, and government cover-ups. While they hunt for answers, they're pursued across the Southwest by high-tech mercs, brainwashed cults, and beings whose true identity has been concealed since 1947.

...HE MUST RISK THE WORLD

MOVIE - The Magnificent Seven

PG-13 (2:12)

Wide release 9/23/16

Viewed 11/6/16 at Century Park Place
IMBd:  7/10

RT Critic: 63   Audience:  75
Critic's Consensus:  The Magnificent Seven never really lives up to the superlative in its title -- or the classics from which it draws inspiration -- but remains a moderately diverting action thriller on its own merits.

Cag:  4, Liked it more than I should have...

Directed by Antoine Fuqua

Sony Pictures

Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Vincent D'Onofrio, Peter Sarsgaard, Matt Bomer

My comments:  The old west.  Lots of gunfights, as expected, but entertaining story.

RT/ IMDb Summary:  With the town of Rose Creek under the deadly control of industrialist Bartholomew Bogue, the desperate townspeople employ protection from seven outlaws, bounty hunters, gamblers and hired guns - Sam Chisolm, Josh Farraday, Goodnight Robicheaux, Jack Horne, Billy Rocks, Vasquez, and Red Harvest. As they prepare the town for the violent showdown that they know is coming, these seven mercenaries find themselves fighting for more than money.

32. Gun Games - Faye Kellerman

Decker/Lazarus # 20
10 unabridged cds (on the road back and forth to school)
2012, William Morrow & Co.
Harper Audio read by Mitchell Greenberg - very well
375 pgs.
Adult Murder Mystery
Finished 5/3/2015
Goodreads rating: 3.82
My rating: 3.5
TPPL
Setting: Contemporary LA

My comments:  Actually, 3.5.  Reason?  About 50% of the story is about Decker's 15-year-old foster son, piano prodigy Gabe Whitman, who meets a shy 14-year old LA/Persian Jewish girl, falling, apparently and mutually, head-over-heels for each other.  He's a horny, 15-year old boy, but she's been raised as an Orthodox Jew in a very strict home, and the sex talk...then scenes...are more graphic and in-your-face than what I remember of previous books in this series.  I'm not a prude (at all!), but she was so young and innocent that in some ways her capitulation was believable, but in other ways not.  Of course, their story intersects with the case that Decker is working on (what a coincidence!) and everything turns out okay.... it was all okay - likable and interesting - but a little unbelievable.

Goodreads synopsis:  Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus are back in this gripping mystery involving a secret cabal of some of Los Angeles' most wealthy--and vicious--teens
          LAPD lieutenant detective Decker and his wife, Rina, have willingly welcomed fifteen-year-old Gabriel Whitman, the son of a troubled former friend, into their home. While the enigmatic teen seems to be adapting easily, Decker knows only too well the secrets adolescents keep--witnessed by the tragic suicide of another teen, Gregory Hesse, a student at Bell and Wakefield, one of the city's most exclusive prep schools.
          Gregory's mother, Wendy, refuses to believe her son shot himself and convinces Decker to look deeper. What he finds disturbs him. The gun used in the tragedy was stolen--evidence that propels him to launch a full investigation with his trusted team, Sergeant Marge Dunn and Detective Scott Oliver. But the case becomes darkly complicated by the suicide of another Bell and Wakefield student--a death that leads them to uncover an especially nasty group of rich and privileged students with a predilection for guns and violence. Decker thought he understood kids, yet the closer he and his team get to the truth, the clearer it becomes that he knows very little about them, including his own charge, Gabe. The son of a gangster and an absent parent, the boy has had a life filled with too much free time, too many unexplained absences, and too little adult supervision.
          Before it's over, the case and all its terrifying ramifications will take Decker and his detectives down a dark alley of twisted allegiances and unholy alliances, culminating at a heart-stopping point of no return.

4. One Came Home - Amy Timberlake

2013, Alfred A. Knopf

258 pgs.

Middle Grades Historical Fiction and Mystery

Finished 1/10/15

Goodreads rating: 3.85

My rating:   (2) It was okay 

1871 Wisconsin (Placid - where current day Wisconsin Dells stands)

1st sentence/s:  "So it comes to this, I remember thinking on Wednesday, June 7, 1871.  The date sticks in my mind  because it was the day of mys sister's first funeral and I knew it wasn't her last - which is why I left.  That's the long and short of it."

My comments:  This really was an okay story - and I'm not sure why I'm not more excited about it.  I like that it was a mystery and historical fiction.  Probably I'm so used to my adult mysteries that I wanted more in that department?  The setting was excellent, a dusty town in Wisconsin in 1871.  Time was tough to follow..people dying and marrying and the pigeons arriving all happened more closely together than the story made them seem.  And I liked that the 13-year-old protagonist really did seem 13.  Random thoughts, I know....

Goodreads book summary:  In the town of Placid, Wisconsin, in 1871, Georgie Burkhardt is known for two things: her uncanny aim with a rifle and her habit of speaking her mind plainly.

     But when Georgie blurts out something she shouldn't, her older sister Agatha flees, running off with a pack of "pigeoners" trailing the passenger pigeon migration. And when the sheriff returns to town with an unidentifiable body—wearing Agatha's blue-green ball gown—everyone assumes the worst. Except Georgie. Refusing to believe the facts that are laid down (and coffined) before her, Georgie sets out on a journey to find her sister. She will track every last clue and shred of evidence to bring Agatha home. Yet even with resolute determination and her trusty Springfield single-shot, Georgie is not prepared for what she faces on the western frontier.

9. Burned - Ellen Hopkins

Audio read by Laura Flanagan, who gets high marks
For: YA, definitely older YA
published 2006
5 unabridged cd's
5 hrs. 15 min.
544 pages - told in free verse form
Rating: Ooooh...hard to say......some is 2...some is 4....so 3, I guess

After I heard the first minute or so I almost didn't continue. I should have realized that this beginning part was definitely foreshadowing. Pattyn Von Stratton, just ending her junior year in high school, is the oldest of seven sisters with pregnant mom finally about to have another sibling. However, this time it will...finally...be a boy.

Thre's so much to say about Pattyn and her family. They're Mormons who live in Carson City, Nevada. The father is an abusive drunk. The mother, although the main target of the abuse, sits on the couch and watches reality tv all day while the daughters cook and clean and vacuum and change diapers. The girls are raised to obey the father, be righteous, attend Sunday testimonies, and never...ever...think for themselves. They wear homemade clothing and have few friends.

When a male classmate becomes interested in Pattyn, she is torn in two directions - what her bishop and father have taught her, and what her own feelings..and all the reading she's done....are telling her. Then her father catches her in an uncompromising position and sends her for the summer to stay with his estranged sister in the middle of Nevada. This is where I had my second wonderings about the book. Aunt Jeannette was a wonderful, caring, thoughtful, liberal feminist who had nothing good at all to say or do with the father. Why would he ever send Pattyn there? And then Pattyn has a wonderful, love (and sex)-filled summer learning to drive, to ride, and to trust herself and her feelings.

But disaster after disaster happens once she has to go back home. One bad thing right after the next. The ending , after all these disasters, is what any thoughtful reader should have realized right from the first few lines was going to happen.

You hear the last words of the story and say, to yourself: "Okay." "What?" "Well...." and "Yuh, I guess so." I KNOW that if I had any inkling about what was going to take place in this book, I wouldn't have read it. I don't know if I'm glad I had no inkling and DID read it, or would have rather not read it at all.

The Biggest Bear - Lyn Ward

Caldecott Medal 1953
Houghton Mifflin, 1952/1980
paper $6.95
84 pages
Rating: 3.5

The illustrations in this 1953 Caldecott Award winner are brown and white and lovely. The story is definitely 50 years old.

Johnny Orchard goes out to hunt a bear as is the custom in the area, apparently. However, he befriends a baby bear, takes him home, and makes a pet of him. The bear eats and grows, eats and grows, until he becomes somewhat of a menace looking for food. The father tells the boy that the bear must go back to live in the woods.

Of course he's too late. No matter where or how far he takes the now-grown bear, he always finds his way back. So only one thing can be done. The boy takes his rifle and heads out into the woods. But, instead of shooting him, they are captured in a huge trap. The zoo is looking for animals, and the zoo is where this huge bear will now live out the rest of his life.

Blech!

The pictures are very cool.

The story....well....is it still believable for some parts of the rural U. S? Because I don't think it was written as a tongue-in-cheek story. Did it match the times? Or is it just my-own-personal-anti-gun thing? Needless to say, many aspects of the story didn't do much for me. I've got to read more of these older award-winners...will this run true with others?