Found this book in a free pile I think? It is added to the list of “books I picked up that I read on planes that also themselves have plane crashes in them” Basically this book is about a terrorist who is effective at using computers to advance his terrorism. It was also written before a lot of us were really using the graphical web so much and so a lot of it winds up being about virtual reality. That said, as a book with a lot of VR in it, this was not bad. The bad guy is a little more sadistic than I usually enjoy reading about [some nasty torture scenes] but otherwise for a book about computers, I did not find it totally implausible or insuting of my intelligence.

I read this stupid book again by accident. Didn’t like it as much the second time.

Found this book acidentally when I was searching for something to read on the long flight home from Anchorage. Liked the cover, took the book home. And I liked it! It’s the first in a series of ... I’m not even sure what the type of book is. They’re vaguely Victorian mysteries, only with a tenacious and interesting female lead character and her vaguely mysterious part-Gypsy (guy who winds up being) partner. As themey mysteries were, I liked this one a lot and would pick up the next in the series if I found it.

The Niceville public library had a section where they were giving away paperback books. These were not books in the booksale, these were free. I took two and when I found they were both about the same again, about MY age, I realized that they were probably weeding books that didn’t circulate that were more than 40 years old. This book was great. It tells stories from the bush pilot years, when Alaska was still much more of a frontier and before there were commercial airline flights to much of the country.

The stories the author, himself a bush pilot, tells are even more poignant when you realize that the world he describes [including knowing people who were in Alaska when Will Rogers' plane crashed there] is even more distant now than when the book was written. I enjoyed a lot of his stories of early explorations, Alaska wildlife and natural scenes, and narratives about how some of the small native villages became bigger towns and cities. This is not a great book to read while you’re on an airplane however since many of the early bush pilots' lives we cut short by plane crashes.

This book was terrific. Tana French manages to put together a book that is part mystery and part... nostalgia bit without any of the parts really screwing up the other parts. The modern day part of the story is about a detective who has to investigate a child who was murdered in a local woods. The kicker is that this cop was himself the victim of a crime in the same area. He has a female partner who he has a super close relaitonship with and they have a sort of nice thing going. And then, as you’d expect, things fall apart. I loved the writing and I loved the story and unlike other books I’ve read this month, this one did not have a sadistic streak in it which meant that dealing with difficult topics [childrens' death, possible child abuse and child sexual abuse] was okay reading.

[review pending]