Book a Week with Jen -

Book 57 of 52: Resurrection Walk by Michael Connelly

November 29, 2023 | Fiction

It’s November, which means it’s time for a new Michael Connelly book!

If you’re new here, I embarked on a project a few years ago to read all of Connelly’s works, most of them focused on his main character, Harry Bosch, a now retired LAPD detective. Resurrection Walk is about him and his half brother, Mickey Haller, the so-called Lincoln Lawyer (and even though it’s billed as a Lincoln Lawyer novel, it’s a pretty even split).

They’ve teamed up for two reasons: first, Bosch needed health insurance and to enroll in a clinical trial to treat his cancer, which Haller could provide. And second, the book opens with Haller having a conviction overturned. His client does what he calls a “Resurrection Walk” out of jail (hence the title of the book). Bosch’s job is to sort through all the requests Haller subsequently got from inmates after, to see if there was any promise in those pleas for help, in sort of a two-man Innocence Project.

Bosch finds one: a woman who was sent to jail for killing her husband, who was in the LAPD. But the facts don’t add up. I won’t say more because the plot spoilers happen early, but it’s […]

November 26, 2023 | Fiction

Another book from another country, though not in the language of that country: I bought The Queen of Dirt Island by Donal Ryan at the San Francisco Book Company, an English language bookstore in Paris.

The Queen of Dirt Island focuses on one family of women, starting with the birth of Saoirse. Her mother got pregnant out of wedlock, for which she is spurned by her family, even though she married the father — who was killed the day of Saoirse’s birth. His mother moves in, and the story of these women go from there, as told in short bites which each “chapter” between a page and a half to two pages long.

My takeaway was much like that of The Guest by Emma Cline: I didn’t get why I was reading about this family. I didn’t find myself caring about them (either liking them or not, because a novel can certainly be about not liking the characters). Their story wasn’t telling or related a bigger one than “being a woman is hard,” but one told by a man. I also didn’t like how he wrote one of the few women in this story who did not have children, […]

November 20, 2023 | Fiction

I left on this trip with only one book — gasp I know! But that’s because I knew I would want to pick up something along my travels to read. That ended up being Richard Osman’s The Bullet That Missed, the third in the Thursday Murder Club Mysteries series. And while my last book had nothing to do with England, this book is about as English as it gets.

It’s about a group of senior citizens in a retirement home — the Thursday Murder Club — and the latest murder they’re trying to solve: that of a young female journalist whose car was pushed off a cliff just as she was about to break a big story. It involves getting into the weeds of local British television, including the pecking order of news readers and presenters (of which Osman is one in real life), and also wound back to the murder from the previous book.

Osman fixed a problem he had with that last one, The Man Who Died Twice. You really needed to remember what happened in the first book (called The Thursday Murder Club) to understand the second, which was annoying. The Bullet That Missed doesn’t have […]

November 17, 2023 | Fiction

The latest in our series of Savage Run by C.J. Box. Did it occur to me that it was a bit odd that I brought a book about a Wyoming game warden to read in England? Yes. However, I also read Regency romance novels in my home in New Jersey so is it all that different?

Anyway – this is the second in Box’s Joe Pickett series about, yes, a Wyoming game warden. Like Open Season (which I did read while out west this summer), which I read earlier this year, it’s about the tension between environmentalists and people who use the land for profit, sport or both. It opens with an exploding cow. Yes, an exploding cow.

As the book progresses, we follow the two men responsible for the exploding cow, and murders of high profile people working in the environmental movement. Pickett gets involved because he investigates the cow incident, eventually puts together that these murders are connected.

It’s a quick read, and one that kept me engaged, which is why I brought it with me, to read on the flight, and then on the London Underground while zipping around London. It was the perfect book for it.

Also a […]

November 14, 2023 | Fiction, Romance

After my dog died, a friend was kind enough to send me a box of romance novels (and I know you read this, so shout out in the comments if you’d like!). I was looking for one more book to read before I left for London, so picked Wreck the Halls by Tessa Bailey out of the box. It looked like a Hallmark Christmas movie, so why not.

WELL! I was wrong about the tone of this book. If I had just flipped to the back jacket, I would have known that Bailey is known a high spice level in her book. This maybe one of the most explicit romance novels I’ve ever read? Of course that’s my fault since I judged the book by its cover, but I kept flipping between the book and the cover and thinking “huh!”

Our main characters are Beat and Melody. Their mothers had been in a band together until something split them up and they became sworn enemies. Beat, for reasons we find out later, is being blackmailed, and the one way for him to get enough money to pay this guy off is to do a reality show that challenges him to get […]