Book Review: Free Fire by CJ Box

I think by now you will have realised that I am a huge fan of 'Joe Pickett' and indeed the Pickett family and of course Nate Romanowski as written about by Mr Box and I really haven't a bad thing to say about any of his books as I work my way through them, this is number 7 in the reading order of 12  and still I have nothing bad to say, even although for the first time in all seven books I found two errors, one of which was a stupid hyphen in dan-gerous WTF!

Setting aside that, and I have marked it down in my editing for Kindle (Harsh but what can one do), what about the story.Well, you may recall that by the end of, 'In Plain Site'  Joe has been sacked from his job as Game Warden and in Free Fire we find him working as Ranch Foreman on his Father-in-laws ranch while Marybeth's accounting business is expanding.

Out of the blue the new Governor turns up in Saddlestring and offers Joe his job back but with strings attached.

A multiple murder has taken place in Yellowstone Park and it looks as if, for the first time ever, anywhere in the world, 'It is the perfect murder'. They know who did it, he even handed himself in immediately after killing 4 people, but they had to let him go!

Yellowstone Park might be in the state, in fact it is in three US states, and therefore comes under Federal law because of its status as a National Park.  The Governor thinks the Federal authorities are not doing enough and tells Joe that he wants him to visit the park and find out what the hell's going on, even although he will have no jurisdiction.

After discussing it with Marybeth Joe takes the job, knew he would, and is reinstated as a Game Warden with no loss of service.  Director Pope who we don't miss from the story still manages to stick the knife in, by making sure Joe doe's not get his original badge number back which would show him as a senior Warden, instead sending him Badge no 54, reserved for rookies!

Joe sets off for Yellowstone in a brand new truck, you just know what's gonna happen to that, just as Joe can't hit a barn door if he was standing in front of it with his gun, you just know what's gonna happen to that truck (oh, it's deliciously funny) followed by Nate Romanowski as back up.

Soon he is in the thick of it, more murders are committed, and just to mix things up we learn of events from Joe's past, about his brother, how he died and where he is buried.  His parents break up and why Joe has hated his father and always avoids discussing him and ghosts from that past become real in Yellowstone all lead to complications in the investigation.

A thrilling climax to the book ends with the FBI and an old adversary from that organisation double crossing Joe and Nate but this after Joe in his usual stumbling way, solves the crime.

This really was /is as good as the previous six books and Mr Box just keeps getting better and better.  The Perfect Murder scenario was a master stroke in finding it and building a story around it and it worked well, I wonder if that little loophole has now been closed in reality (hope so, wont be in a hurry to visit that corner of Yellowstone Park until I know it has been!)?

Book 1 - Open Season                  √

Book 2 – Savage Run                   √
Book 3 – Winterkill                      √
Book 4 – Trophy Hunt                  √
Book 5 – Out of Range                 √
Book 6 – In Plain Sight                √
Book 7 – Free Fire                       √

Book 8 – Blood Trail

Book 9 – Below Zero

Book 10 – Nowhere to Run

Book 11 – Cold Wind

Book 12 – Force of Nature

Editing for Kindle /iPad: 4 out of 5
Reading Enjoyment: 5 out of 5 
Page length on kindle /iPad: 380
Plot: 5 out of 5
Overall Rating: 5 out of 5

You can purchase Free Fire At Amazon UK here or at Amazon US here 

CJ Box can be found here

Book Review: The Affair by Lee Child

You either like the Lee Child character of Jack Reacher or you don't, there really is no middle ground.  And can I just say at the outset, just to get it out of the way, Tom Cruise buying and starring in the movie franchise doesn't matter a jot.  A book is a book is a book, that sometimes gets made into a movie and generally the movie is well below the standard of the book, so people get over it and concentrate on the books and stop bloody whingeing!

Jack Reacher has been wandering around small town America for a couple of years now doing his best to wear out the tarmac of the roads leading into the middle of nowhere, arriving nowhere and finding the locals being bullied. Reacher doesn't like bullies and generally takes on the baddies in defence of the defenceless and cowered locals and he does it so magnificently and with so little effort, that we keep following him around from nowhere to nowhere, stopping occasionally to buy a new shirt and pair of pants; well when your walking and covering the miles that he does the last thing you need as an encumbrance, is a suitcase full of clothes.

The Affair takes us back to 1997 when Reacher was still a Major in the Army as an  MP and takes us back to the final case he worked on, before taking up his peripatetic wanderings through small town America.

1997 and Reacher is called to his boss, Leon Garbers, office. A woman has been Raped, killed and mutilated, her throat slit near an Army base in Carter Crossing, Mississippi.  Reacher is despatched undercover to get close to the local police while another MP investigates the Army side of things at Fort Kelham.  Sent off with half a story and finding that the local Sheriff is an ex Marine MP, Reacher discovers that there has been more than one murder and in fact there have been possible other murders elsewhere that can be linked to the local ones.  The nature of Army bases is that they can have followers who move around Army bases  setting up wherever they are, so they have no idea whether it is a civilian killer or an Army killer, but the underlying message is, 'that the good name of the Army, must be protected!'

As usual Reacher gets to the truth and all questions raised in the story are conclusively answered in the closing pages, including just why Reacher decided it was time to hang up his uniform.

Disillusioned with the Army at the same time that it was downsizing, a less than stellar report from an Army Colonel on his attitude and tactics which would have seen him marking time career wise.  The blackening of innocent peoples reputations by politicians, and the Army, these were all the things that were vaguely referred to in previous story lines, and going back to 1997 gave us the story behind the myth that is Jack Reacher.

Reacher is a killer, but a killer with scruples and a sense of what is morally right and what is not.  He knows that not everyone on the planet is capable of looking after themselves either physically or by engaging the law, and so he is prepared to look out for their interests.  Killing will never be right, but when it is done out of a clear sense of justice that the normal course of the law would not get to, whether it be for a cover up, or lazy and useless police work , he can easily become, judge, jury and executioner , even when it is the Army, Federal or Local  Government, or just pure criminality; he will take them all on....... and I will be there again, when Reacher arrives at the next small 'nowhere' town.

Editing for Kindle /iPad: 5 out of 5
Reading Enjoyment: 5 out of 5
Page length on kindle /iPad: 405
Plot: 5 out of 5
Overall Rating: 5 out of 5

Lee Child / Jack Reacher can be found here


Footnote:  I love my Kindle but I do wish they would take a leaf out of the Kindle App for iPad and show the book tile and Authors name on each page and more importantly, show the page number as it does when reading through the Kindle iPad app, just saying.

Book Review: Convergent Space by John Paul Cleary

The Galaxy was living in peace and harmony benevolently controlled, protected, and guided by The Guild.

200 years ago The Aveche threatened the peace and tranquillity of the planets within The Guild.  Earth as the founders and most technologically advanced Planet develop a Shield that will encompass all of the Galaxy's and systems within The Guild, and after millions of relay stations are set up it is time to put the Shield in place.

The Earth fleet sets out with the final part but before it can be put in place  a Great (shock) Wave spreads through known space destroying millions of planets and trillions of lives.

Earth is blamed for the catastrophe and ostracised and a new ruling class is born in the The Renaissance.

Earth spends the next 200 years sending out Archeosoldiers to track what actually happened in the belief that their technology and the Shield could not have caused the disaster, no one believed them.......

Convergent Space then, turns out to be a futuristic inter galaxy archaeological detective story, with one person Archeosoldiers sent out in their ships with nothing more than a micro companion, which is connected to them wirelessly from birth, and dies when its human companion dies.

As large parts of the remaining galaxy are still in turmoil and planetary wars and civil wars are ongoing, the attrition rate of the Archeosoldiers is high.  Rone, a female Archeosoldier was badly injured during her quest and had managed to get assigned to a Renaissance station and was living with the leader of that part of space until a badly wounded soldier turns up in her front room.

She likes the life she is living and feels that Earth needs to forget its past and move on as no one really cares any more, but the Quest has become a religion on the home planet and all resources are geared to that and that alone.  The injured soldier dies but not before giving Rone information that could lead her to the truth of what happened two centuries ago.

She reluctantly takes up her old life and sets off in pursuit of the quest only to stumble upon a new threat to what's left of the Galaxy.  Humans, Phlegars, Hernesses are just some of the seemingly humanoid like species living in this mixed up star system.

The truth is finally revealed and the climax to the story is horrific, can history be repeated?

Over all I found it a little bit slow in places but, that was made up for in the overall story which has a bit of a twist to it that many people may find intriguing.

Putting it into today's setting (and whether the author intended to or not, I have no idea) The Renaissance, are probably the bankers who now control the system, francising out chunks of space to individuals and corporations but their actual power is proved to be a myth.  The Phlegars are the itinerants of the system, who have a dark secret that even they don't know about and the Hernesses are the Occupy Movement who will stop, only just short of genocide (except against one race) to rebalance the system for the betterment of everyone.  And humans, well we have just turned out to be blamed for all the ills that makes the system what it is and are ignored and hated by everyone in power... much like we peasants are today by both Governments and Businesses!

There were a couple of errors* in the book not story line but grammatical and spelling, but not as many as some I have recently read and if the author sorts these out

Editing for Kindle: 4 out of 5*
Reading Enjoyment: 4 out of 5
Page length on kindle: 348

Plot: 5 out of 5
Overall Rating: 5 out of 5

John Paul Cleary can be found here 


Convergent Space can be purchased at Amazon UK here and Amazon US here 

The Mistrust Within - Will it Lead to an (new) Implosion of the Labour Party?

Noticed these tweets earlier on Sunday from a staunch Labour lefty

Éoin Clarke ‏ @DrEoinClarke
Tony Blair's meetings, secret meetings with Blairite MPs have been going on for 13 months now. Not sure why it keeps getting rehashed as news
Éoin Clarke ‏ @DrEoinClarke
I could bore you with a list of who those MPs are (meeting Blair) but truth is you probably haven't heard of most of them. #StarStruck

and they appear to confirm what I suspected all along, and that is; you cannot trust a politician!

We all know that the labour left always hated Blair and what he stood for but that the Labour party, prior to Blair was to far to the left and too much in the pockets of the unions to ever get elected.  Blair and his cronies recognised this and somehow managed to oust power and position away from the left to win the 1997 election.

Since Blair and his warmongering ways are gone and he has rode off into the Sunset to become, I believe, the richest ex Labour Prime minister in history, leaving the country in the stewardship of Brown, who seemed to be despised in equal measure by all sides.  Now we have Milliband and a resurgence of the left and Dr Eoin Clarke being one of their more vocal spokespeople tweeting a daily tirade against the incumbent Coalition Government.

I have no problem with his comments, per say, governments and politics is fair game but his comments, about his own parties MP's who are seemingly meeting with Blair on a regular basis, show that there is a clear divide within the Labour party between the left and the centre right?

Is this a credible party then that anyone should be voting for?  A party that looks as if it will once again tear itself apart in dogfighting and mudslinging.  A party where MP are against MP, where mistrust and lying are the norm.  

Are these people, if they cannot be honest with each other, going to be honest with the British public, I hardly think so, do you?     

You can see other comments, from me,  on Politics et al here