King of Ashes by S.A. Crosby

I read this entire book on a 7-hour airline flight. Squeezed into a bulkhead seat in tourist class, it was a way to pass the time. 

I'm not a picky reader. After all, I am the guy who read all the way through Dividend of Death by Brett Halliday (reviewed elsewhere 0n this web site). But I found the first two-thirds of King of Ashes slow, meandering and overall disappointing compared to this author's previous work. 

Under different circumstances I might have tossed it aside. But I soldiered on, hour after hour. In the last third, things really start moving, so it was worthwhile in the end.

English Soap Operas

I’m a bit tired of the same-sex love stories in these shows. I have no beef with gay people, but  these shows are overdoing it. 

Coronation Street features a gay male couple, a lesbian couple who are engaged to be married (one of whom is pestered by a long-lost fiance, also lesbian) a gay man who has no mate and a man who was once married to a transgender (the first trans character to appear in any British soap opera). 

EastEnders has a gay male couple and a lesbian couple. 

Emmerdale has a gay male couple, pestered by a sad gay man who wants to break up their marriage. One long-standing character is a transgendered man (played by a real-life transgender) who is married to a woman. 

I’m no Puritan, but it’s a bit much, innit? All of these characters appear in virtually every episode of each show. I know this because I watch all of them, which is a bit of a problem in itself. 

Trump says he’s firing Fed Governor Lisa Cook

There's disturbing news in today's Associated Press feed: 

Trump say's he's firing Fed Governor Lisa Cook, opening new front in fight for central bank control

By Christopher Rugaber and Will Weissert, August 26, 2025

We can safely assume that Trump wants to replace Federal Reserve Governor Cook with someone more sympathetic to his own ideas. That would set a terrible precedent. Packing the Fed with a President’s supporters is to be avoided, or so we were taught in our graduate school monetary policy class. On a personal level, the charge against Cook is almost nothing compared to the stunts I suspect Trump pulls with his real estate business. 

It’s outrageous. I don't dare put this in my social media posts. I'd lose friends. But still: sic temper tyrannis!

Coming Soon: The Weaver's Answer

by Roger Chapman and Charlie Whitney 

Weaver of life, let me look and see 

The pattern of my life gone by shown on your tapestry. 

 Just for one second, one glance upon your loom 

The flower of my childhood could appear within this room 

Does it of my youth show tears of yesterday 

Broken hearts within a heart as love first came my way. 

Did the lifeline patterns change as I became a man 

An added aura untold blends as I asked for her hand 

Did your golden needle sow its thread virginal white 

As lovers we embraced as one upon our wedding night. 

Did you capture all the joys, the birth of our first son 

The happiness of family made a brother for the one 

The growing of the brothers, the manliness that grew 

Is it there in detail, is it there to view 

 Do the sparks of life grow bright as one by one they wed 

To live as fathers, husbands, apart from lives they've led.

Are my lover's threads cut off when aged she laid to rest 

My sorrow blacking out a space upon our woven crest 

A gathering for the last time as her coffin slowly lain 

Ash to ashes, dust to dust, one day we will regain 

Does it show the visits when grandchildren on my knee 

But only hearing laughter when age took my sight from me. 

 Lastly through these last few years of loneliness maybe 

Does by sight a shooting star fade from your tapestry 

But wait, there in the distance your loom I think I see 

Could it be that after all my prayers you've answered me 

After days of wondering I see the reason why 

You've kept it to this minute for I'm about to die. 

 Weaver of life, at last now I can see 

The pattern of my life gone by upon your tapestry. 

"Dividend on Death" by Brett Halliday (1939)

Published in 1939, “Dividend On Death” introduces private investigator Mike Shayne, who later appeared in some 70-plus novels written under the pen name Brett Halliday (birth name: Davis Dresser). That intrigued me. Halliday/Dresser must have been a virtual writing machine. Imagine supporting your family by churning out such material, book after book, year after year. And apparently readers liked the character, because people kept buying them. 

Based in Miami, this tale name-checks familiar places such as Jackson Memorial Hospital, Flagler Street, Biscayne Boulevard and the Roney Plaza Hotel. It also contains steamy passages such as: “A woman was descending the stairway, and she reached the bottom just as Shayne passed. She wore the white uniform of a nurse and carried a napkin-covered tray. She was a full-bodied blond of about thirty, with predatory eyes. Shayne glanced at her as he passed and caught a fleeting, almost animal look on her face. Her lips were pouted as though in assent, thought he had not spoken to her.” 

Later on, this woman appears unannounced at Shayne’s apartment and insists that he make love to her. I leave it to the reader to imagine how that turned out. 

At no time does this hard-boiled private investigator brandish a gun or beat up anyone. In fact, he himself is beaten up, his pain and suffering described in detail. But he solves the case, an elaborate swindle involving a Raphael painting. This is where the tale strains credibility. In a many-paged discourse at the very end of the book, Shayne explains to a room full of people who the real swindlers are and the diabolical plot they put into action. But how did he figure that out? There is little or no previous plot exposition to support it. But with this one exception, the book is well-written and I tore through it like a house on fire. I’ll read more of this author’s work.

Further Reading: Brett Halliday by Hal Charles. EBSCO. 2023. 

David Souter, Julius Caesar and Donald Trump

Retired Supreme Court Justice David Souter died recently. This quote from his AP obituary caught my eye: 

"What I worry about is that when problems are not addressed, people will not know who is responsible. And when the problems get bad enough...some one person will come forward and  say 'Give me total power and I will solve this problem.' That is how the Roman republic fell,  Souther said in a 2012 interview."

Associated Press obituary for David Souter, May 9, 2025 

After some digging, I found this:

"Having defeated all his enemies, Caesar was granted a 10-year dictatorship for purposes of restoring the republic. His solution was to reconstitute himself as a Roman form of Hellenistic divine king or ruler."

Purdue University Lecture 26: Fall of Roman Republic133-27 BC"

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

This was a terrific read. I'll definitely seek out more of this author's work. This one is a complex mystery set in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. Beautifully written with believable characters who are fully developed, it also has much to say about relationships and conflict: between rich and  poor, boys and girls, husband and wife, parents and children. 

Both narrative and dialogue are nicely handled. The timeline is a bit unorthodox, beginning with the disappearance of a child in 1975. Then it shifts to earlier events in the 1950s and 1960s before coming back to the 1970s to resolve the disappearance and other problems the characters wrestle with. For those who want to know how the author managed to keep all those balls in the air and wrap it up with a satisfying conclusion, listen to this podcast on the New York Times' website.

Further reading:

New York Times, July 22, 2024

Kirkus Reviews, July 2, 2024

Washington Post, June 24, 2024

The New Yorker, July 15, 2024

Lethal White by Robert Galbraith

This is the fourth book in the Cormoran Strike crime fiction series. It has an absorbing plot, believable characters, and well-written dialogue. For purely personal reasons I liked the setting - southern England  – and the author’s descriptions of London neighborhoods, a topic near and dear to my heart. The action moves along nicely, and the relationship between the principal characters - Strike and his employee Robin Ellacott - is  tense, deep and skillfully drawn. 

My one complaint is that I had difficulty keeping track of the secondary characters and how they're related to the plot, and to each other. There are so many of them. I often wanted to back up and refresh my memory. That would have been easy to do when reading on Kindle - just use the search for the character's name, and up pops a list of every time he/she is mentioned. But you can't do that with a hard copy edition, which is what I had in hand. I found myself wishing that Rowling would give us a list of characters right at the beginning, like Shakespeare did. I tried to scribble my own dramatis personae on my bookmark, together with the page number where they first appear. The list for the first 100 pages was 17 characters long. After that, I just gave up and went with the flow. It was well worth the effort.

N.B.  I read the second and third books in the series (The Silkworm and Career of Evil) 10 years ago. As to when I read the first, that is lost in the mists of time. I read most of the Harry Potter books as well. Rowling, aka Robert Galbraith, is a remarkable talent.

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