Lake Mead is surrendering its dead. As its waters recede in the throes of a relentless drought, bodies once underwater are emerging on its shores. They appear, they’re discovered, they give up the ghosts they’ve been hiding for decades. Family secrets long buried—the affairs and adulteries, the lies and the scandals, even the murders—are one day revealed. No sins can remain covered forever. They all rise to the surface. All the bodies do.
Welcome to a thriller inspired by real-life events in the summer of 2022, when the skeletal remains of several bodies were discovered on the drought-ravaged shores of Lake Mead. Investigative journalist Kate Temperance is determined to prove they were victims of crime boss Giancarlo Gemelli—or die trying. Standing in her way is Sofia Gemelli, Giancarlo’s daughter, a woman as ruthless as she is beautiful. She will do anything, even kill, to prevent Temperance from uncovering her family’s dark secrets. The story will take you from the frenzy of the Las Vegas Strip to the tranquility of Oregon’s Willamette Valley, where the secret to making world-class Pinot Noir is killing the competition.
This summer, join Kate in her unrelenting pursuit of the truth!
True confession—I should have heeded that overused warning: “Don’t start this book before you go to bed. It will keep you up all night.” Last week I was awake at three o’clock one morning, immersed in Blake’s page-turner. Yikes!
What a brilliant premise! A young woman is found asleep in a remote cabin in the woods with a bloody knife in her hands. In the cabin next door are her two best friends, murdered in their beds. When the police arrive, the woman doesn’t wake up, a victim of the mental health malady “Resignation Syndrome,” the post-traumatic result of having witnessed (or participated in) something so horrifying that her mind has withdrawn from the world and retreated into itself. She is kept alive in an institution for four years until Amnesty International demands that the hospital release her on grounds of “inhumane treatment” or awaken her to stand trial for murder. Psychologist Benedict Prince must find a way to unlock her terrifying secrets and wake her up.
This novel has special resonance with me, since I had worked as a psychotherapist before my retirement. I follow Blake down the rabbit holes of the mind. I’m ensnared in the web he so artfully weaves. At times I find it hard to breathe. And now that I’m finished with the story, I am haunted by it. Read it at your own peril!
I think I’ve used this idea before, but it’s certainly true of this book. Lessons in Chemistry should come with a black box warning: THE AUTHOR ASSUMES NO LIABILITY FOR READERS WHO LOST SLEEP, SKIPPED WORK, FORGOT TO EAT, OR NEGLECTED CHILDCARE DUTIES BECAUSE THEY FELT COMPELLED TO CONTINUE READING NONSTOP. This novel is at once laugh-out-loud funny, disturbingly poignant, and spot-on in its acerbic observations of human nature and society.
Set in the late 50s and early 60s, it tells the tale of brilliant chemist, Elizabeth Zott, whose intellect and talent a male-dominated world refuses to acknowledge. After defending herself from sexual assault by the head of a university’s Science Department, she is summarily expelled from school without a degree. She lands a job at the Hastings Research Institute, where her original work “must be the product of the man she’s in love with,” and is ultimately stolen and published by another man. Along the way, she becomes pregnant “out-of-wedlock,” (in the eyes of her employer, a crime located somewhere between murder and kidnapping), and is fired immediately. Eventually, she winds up as the host of a cooking show on afternoon TV, Supper at Six, where, in addition to lecturing her female audience on the chemical composition of the foods and additives they so mindlessly ingest, she provides them with recipes for skewering the status quo.
Lessons in Chemistry is full of unforgettable characters, not the least of which are Six-Thirty, a German Shepherd who flunked out of the police academy’s bomb-sniffing squad, and “Mad” Zott, Elizabeth’s precocious child, the brainy bane of her Kindergarten teacher.
Author Garmus has written a novel as hilarious as it is heartbreaking, as entertaining as it is thought-provoking. If you haven’t read it already (per usual, I’m late out of the gate), start today! Then share it with someone you love.
I was very late in coming to this book, which already has more than 220,000 ratings on Amazon! As I’m sure you’re well aware, it’s an extraordinary novel, a work of art. Author Doerr paints and sculpts with words, creating unforgettable scenes with metaphors and similes that are often startling in the way they leap off the page. I sometimes felt I was in the presence of a word-magician, wondering, “How did he do that? How did he find those words for that event?”
The narrative follows the adventures of a blind teenage girl in Nazi-occupied France, whose museum-employed father has been entrusted to protect a large diamond, the Sea of Flames, from the invading German troops. He refuses to believe the legend of the stone’s curse: that it will provide its bearer with eternal life while all those associated with him will suffer terrible tragedy.
A parallel story is that of German adolescent Werner Pfennig, gifted with a genius for understanding and building radios, and conscripted into service to find those in the French resistance sending forbidden codes to the advancing American army.
The reader is challenged time and again by contradiction, as the author writes about the horrors of war in piercingly beautiful prose. Not only that, but the writer goes on to describe, in understated but heart-breaking terms, the posttraumatic stress coiled like a parasite in the minds of survivors for the rest of their lives.
Ultimately, the novel becomes a testament to human folly and the willful ignorance of world leaders and nations who believe that human problems can be solved on the battlefield.
Given the current state of affairs, I fear we may beat the tribal drums yet again and march our children off to fight another war with “the enemy”: other children whose mothers also nursed them and loved them and loosed them on the world.
Unfortunately, the old folk song still rings true: “Where have all the flowers gone?”
I just received a stellar book review of my last Driftwood Mystery from Red Headed Book Lover. Click the pic to read it, and then take a look at Aimee’s website.
No, it’s not their fault. Mr. Brain-Like-a-Sieve forgot to put that story into PDF format, so I’ll bet a lot of you couldn’t open it. I’d blame it on the eggnog, but I hadn’t had any! Anyway, here it is again in its corrected version. And Merry Chrismas!
I don’t pray as much as I should. One brief prayer I manage as soon as I awaken each morning is: “Thank you.” I know the older one gets, the more precarious good health becomes, and I want to be aware of how good I feel this morning. Right now. Amen.
More good health: It’s such a pleasure to write while listening to my wife painting in her studio. Her work in oil and cold wax requires a lot of scraping and layering and scraping again. The sounds are comforting, as are the clicks of my keyboard. They’re sounds of creation, birthing new works in paint and in print.
So with a heart full of gratitude, I want to thank my readers—my truly “extended family”—for your ongoing support and encouragement. May you all have a blessed holiday season and a healthy and happy New Year.
Project update: I have sent out 208 queries to literary agencies in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada. So far, I’ve received fifty rejections and two positive responses. An agent in London to whom I sent the first three chapters has requested the whole manuscript, and an agent in New York City to whom I sent the first ten pages has requested the next five chapters. Fingers crossed!
Finally, please accept this short story as a token of my appreciation. I know some of you have already read it. I wrote “Dangerous Christmas” fifteen years ago and included it in my 2017 collection of short stories entitled, Catch of the Day. I dusted it off this morning and was pleased to find that I still liked it. I hope you do, too.
I want to update friends and family to the status of my current project, the novel All the Bodies Do. Since the story begins in Las Vegas, my wife wisely suggested we take a trip there for research. It was a wonderful idea because it lent more authenticity to my descriptions of the city and the surrounding desert. The picture above is the so-called “bathtub ring” around Lake Mead, left as the lake receded to its lowest level ever because of the megadrought here in the West. It’s white because of the calcium carbonate in the waters of the Colorado River.
By spring of 2022, water levels had dropped 176 feet, exposing the skeletal remains of bodies on shorelines that had previously been underwater. The most famous is “Hemenway Harbor Doe,” a dead body found in a fifty-gallon drum near the Hemenway boat launch and marina. As if being found in a barrel wasn’t enough to get it labeled as a homicide, there was a bullet hole in its skull! Below is a picture of Boulder Basin, the area where it was found.
This photo was taken from the Lake Mead Overlook outside of Boulder City, a place where tour buses and visitors stop. It was fun to watch people pose for pictures in front of this background. Since no mention is made of “Hemenway Harbor Doe” on the information posted here, my guess is that most didn’t know they were posing in front of a crime scene!
Finally, I took the picture below from our hotel room. That’s the famous Sphere, which just opened last Friday with a concert by U2. The Ferris wheel is called the High Roller, and it had been the highest in the world until 2021, when it was surpassed by one in Dubai.
The protagonist of my book, the investigative journalist Kate Temperance, will discover the identities of the bodies in Lake Mead—or die trying. Her adversary, Sofia Gemelli, owns the (fictional) Florentine Hotel and Casino on Las Vegas Boulevard. Kate’s investigation will take her from the Vegas Strip and the Nevada desert to the lush vineyards of the Willamette Valley in Oregon. My hope is that the twists and turns of the story will keep readers guessing and keep them turning pages long past their bed time!
The manuscript has had a thorough editing by my beta readers, and now that I’ve added my notes from our Las Vegas trip, I’ve begun to query agents to see if I can get it traditionally published. If I can’t connect with an agent within the next 8-10 months, I’ll go ahead and publish it independently. I’ll keep you apprised of this writer’s journey!
It can be difficult to approach a book as it was intended to be read and not drag with us all our “modern sensibilities.” We are probably doomed to experience everything through the lens of our current beliefs, like it or not. This results in criticizing what went before as if the author or the artist or the sculptor “should have known better.” Statues get torn down, books get banned, art gets condemned. “So it goes,” as Kurt Vonnegut famously said.
I just finished rereading The Stranger, by Albert Camus, a book I haven’t looked at in more than fifty years. True confession: I was struck by the cringe-worthy scenes of domestic violence and animal abuse in the first half of the book, scenes I had never recalled from my reading the book in my youth. What I did remember was the poetic intensity of the concluding chapters of the novella, when the protagonist Meursault is in prison awaiting execution for murder. At one point he says, “From the dark horizon of my future a sort of slow, persistent breeze had been blowing toward me, all my life long, from the years that were to come.”
Against his wishes, Meursault is visited in his cell by a priest, but finds “…none of his certainties was worth one strand of a woman’s hair.” He is so provoked by the chaplain, that Meursault grasps him about the neck and shouts his rage at him. When the priest finally leaves, Meursault says, “It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe.”
But it was the final sentence of the book that had so disrupted my quiet seminary education all those years ago. Interestingly, I’ve learned that newer translations have changed the wording to bring it more in line with the original French. The version I had read was the old one by Stuart Gilbert, who apparently took some poetic license in his rendering of cris de haine. That phrase is literally “cries of hate.” Unfortunately, we so overuse the word “hate” in English (“I hate that movie. I hate that hair style.”) that we’ve eviscerated the power it has in French, so I still like Gilbert’s translation: “For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.” That still gives me chills!
Currently, I’m slogging my way through The Myth of Sisyphus. It’s pretty dense, and my philosophic chops aren’t as honed as they used to be, so it can be hard going! The Plague made great reading during the pandemic. Its lucid humanity can be a bracing tonic for these divided times. I think I’ve repeated my favorite line from that novel many times before: “…a loveless world is a dead world, and always there comes an hour when one is weary of prisons, of one’s work, and of devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.”
If you’re new to Camus, you might want to try starting with The Plague or with a shorter work like The Fall. He was also a marvelous essayist, and I’ve always been fond of “Nuptials at Tipasa.” After JFK’s death, brother Bobby Kennedy immersed himself in Camus, so you’ll be in good company.
In Thorp’s follow-up to his masterful Uncle Joe’s Muse, the boys—and Allison—are back in town. But things have changed for the better. They play concerts in big arenas instead of little seedy dives, they have a recording contract and a full-time agent, they’re going on tour in Japan. If only Ian can figure out who of the all-female punk rock band Stygian Teal is the daughter he never knew he had. Perhaps he’ll find out if Uncle Joe’s Band signs up Stygian Teal to be their opening act in Japan.
As with Uncle Joe’s Muse, Uncle Joe’s Senpai tells two entangled tales, that of the band’s (mis)adventures and that of the mysterious nomadic poet Joji Ojisan, who treks across Japan leaving a trail of haiku poems in his wake. Along the way, Joji meets Satoshi Tajiri and inspires him to develop the Pokémon game franchise. He encounters Hayao Miyazaki and helps him create what becomes the classic animé “My Neighbor Totoro.” He provides encouragement for a young Masako Owada, the woman who will become empress of Japan. And he helps some American Marines catch lobsters for dinner.
A note of caution: don’t read this book in a place where you have to be quiet, like a library or the middle seat of an airplane. Your laughter may disturb those around you. Thorp’s novel is a comedic gem, seasoned with just the right amount of insight and wisdom so it lingers long after you’ve finished.
Reading Uncle Joe’s Senpai is like eating oysters with a fine Chardonnay—you savor every delicious morsel and you don’t want it to end.
William J. Cook 