34. Dracula

Dracula - Bram Stoker

Outstanding!

Although, after loving the buildup...and the chase...and the total suspense of the final showdown... what a bummer that it ended so fast and so easily.

I loved this story, except that poor Lucy got screwed. Other than that it was great. I can't believe I spent 49.5 years having not read this book. Silly me.

33. The Glow

The Glow - Brooks Stanwood

A suspense novel written in the mid seventies. Supposedly along the lines of Rosemary's Baby. I hate to say it, but this is definitely not Rosemary's Baby, nor is it even close.

There is this group of mid-fifties folks who are health nuts and spend a lot of time jogging and working out. They welcome a young couple into a very exclusive upper east side apartment (Manhattan, of course). The couple joins them in the ultra-healthy lifestyle. Weird stuff happens. People disappear.

Come to find out...and I will spoil this one because I doubt anyone will go find it or read it if they did...the old folks stumbled upon a secret tribe of cannibals in the Amazon and discovered a secret to staying youthful forever. The problem is that it requires the blood of super healthy young people mixed with the roots of very special trees.

So, to stay alive the oldies (which are actually around 90 years old) must occasionally drink the blood-root juice mixture in order to stay young. They devised this entire lifestyle and plan to maintain the illusion and the trap into which they lure young couples over and over again.

It was alright. No big thrill and definitely not worth searching for.

30. The Turn of the Screw

The Turn of the Screw - Henry James


Henry James was definitely a guy who liked words. He uses a lot of them. A thought that could be conveyed with ten words takes James thirty. That being said, it is my only "complaint" with this book.

It was suspenseful and interesting....and old.

23. The Girl Next Door

The Girl Next Door - Jack Ketchum

Extremely disturbing. Haunting. Intense. Very unpleasant subject matter written in a way that grabs you by the throat and forces you to slam the gas-pedal to the floor knowing the bridge is out ahead and the pain is coming. I absolutely could not put this book down.

I will now have to watch this movie. The author approved. That is different.

This is a story loosely based on a real event from 1965 but placed in the more familiar surroundings of the authors childhood neighborhood. The real world events involved Sylvia Likens and Gertrude Baniszewski.

This book is full of mental illness, child abuse, and eventually murder. Knowing that these things happened make it even worse.

The involvement of the other children in the house and from the neighborhood in the abuse of this teenage girl remind me of Lord of the Flies. Far more violent and disturbing, but similar.

This book really left me feeling uncomfortable, angry and frustrated. It is rare for me to get real emotion from a read, but this one did it.

21. Dark Places

Dark Places - Gillian Flynn

Back in 2009 I read Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn. I liked it. I said I would read more of her writing. I am glad I finally did. Ms. Flynn's writing has made her one of my favorite female authors.

He stories are not happy. They have a very dark side to them. They are full of dysfunctional families and females with violent streaks. Her website says one reason she writes these novels is because:

"I think women like to read about murderous mothers and lost little girls because it’s our only mainstream outlet to even begin discussing female violence on a personal level. Female violence is a specific brand of ferocity. It’s invasive. A girlfight is all teeth and hair, spit and nails — a much more fearsome thing to watch than two dudes clobbering each other. And the mental violence is positively gory. Women entwine. Some of the most disturbing, sick relationships I’ve witnessed are between long-time friends, and especially mothers and daughters. Innuendo, backspin, false encouragement, punishing withdrawal, sexual jealousy, garden-variety jealousy — watching women go to work on each other is a horrific bit of pageantry that can stretch on for years."

This book is full of all that. The book bounces back and forth between present day investigation and past events that took place 24 years ago (1985). A family was devastated by the murder of a mother and two sisters by their teenage brother. A surviving sister testified against him. She was seven at the time. All these years later she is finding out that maybe what she said was not true and her brother was wrongfully convicted. Unraveling the events of that time and the repercussion it had on the lives of many people is an outstanding tale.

Sharp Objects was good. Dark Places was even better. I will read anything Flynn writes.

"I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ."

16. Kiss Me, Judas

Kiss Me, Judas - Will Christopher Baer

"The judgement of Phineas Poe, ex-cop, is not at its best. Just released from a psychiatric hospital, he is lured into bed by a beautiful and menacing woman who calls herself Jude. He wakes up in a hotel-room bathtub packed with ice, holding a damp note that reads, "If you want to live, call 911." Jude has stolen one of his kidneys. "Don't worry," she whispers in his dreams, "you really only need one." This brilliantly minimalist novel follows Poe--a grungy, seductive, and deeply vulnerable antihero--as he pursues the mysterious Jude and is plunged into an edgy, drug-blurred underworld where he almost feels like he's come home. Falling helplessly in love with a cruel but tender killer, he fights to avoid becoming her accomplice as well as her victim. As Kiss Me, Judas propels its cast of comic and sinister characters toward a shocking climax. This rare new voice glitters with corrosive wit and razor-sharp images that invade the mind with the arrogance and sexual intimacy of film. Will Christopher Baer doesn't describe arousal and vertigo--he evokes them."

That is what made me want to read this book. It lived up to everything I thought it would be and more. It is dark and disturbing. It is unpredictable. I was constantly trying to figure out what was going to happen next and getting it wrong 90% of the time.

If you want to go for a wild ride in a book that kept me engrossed and turning pages, this is one to do just that.

The characters throughout this book were outstanding. I could really hate them, or feel for them, or be disgusted by them...and sometimes it was multiple feelings at one time. Rarely would I feel bad for a dude that is a big a douche as Phineas Poe, but I did.

Here is the books description from the author's website: "Have you ever loved someone who's mortally wounded you? Phineas Poe, disgraced cop and morphine addict has just been released from a psych ward. He meets a beautiful woman and killer-for-hire named Jude in a hotel bar. Red dress. black hair, body like a knife. He takes her back to his room and wakes the next morning in a bathtub full of blood, missing a kidney. Dragging himself from a hospital bed, Phineas discovers he wants to get close to Jude like a hunger--and he wants to kill her. Finding her is a downward spiral. Falling for her is the start of a twisted love story that takes him from the snowy streets of Denver to the high plains of Texas where the boundaries between victim and torturer — killer and accomplice — become nightmarishly distorted."

If you are looking for any happy-happy/joy-joy, look elsewhere. It will not be found in these pages, but it is a great read.

80. The Book Of Fate

The Book Of Fate - Brad Meltzer

This was a pretty decent suspense thriller. Nothing magical.
The character of Wes Holloway was a big time sissy pants.

The title of the book is stupid. There is no "book of fate". It is some crap the crazy killer dude uses as reasoning for all kinds of things that happen to people.

The use of the Masonic symbols would lead one to believe that there was much more to that being tied into the plot than there really is. Once again, it is all tied in through the mental gymnastics of the lunatic character.

Still, it is an exciting book and would make a pretty decent movie. They may have to do some editing of the part where Lisbeth is getting whooped on by the bad secret service dude. That was not very nice.

The CIA guy seemed kind of clueless and had a lack of intuition at times. I would not think he would be in the position he supposedly held if he was nowhere near as bright as even Wes' lawyer friend.

Overall, I enjoyed it.

63. Sleepyhead

Sleepyhead - Mark Billingham

This is a police-procedural type book. It is the first novel by this author and was a hit. A big enough hit to spawn an entire series of books starring Detective Inspector Tom Thorne.

It was a creepy book. Weird in that it had a person killing people, but his intent was not for them to die. His goal was to put them into a semi-comatose state where they were alive and aware, but unable to move or communicate with the world outside their own minds.

That raised an interesting legal question for me early on. If and when they catch the "killer" would he be tried for first degree pre-meditated murder when the intent was NOT to kill? Would it actually be second degree? Maybe even manslaughter with reckless endangerment if they got a super lawyer?

Another interesting part to this book was the character of Allison. She was a 24 year old woman who was the "killers" first success. She is actually in this semi-comatose state all through the book. That could make for a seriously boring character, but it was the opposite. I found her to be the most interesting person in the book. Every second or third chapter was Allison alone. It was Allison within her head. Her thoughts. Her frustrations. Her desires and triumphs and failures. Rational and irrational. It was fascinating. Allison's character very much reminded me of "Johnny Got His Gun". That one freaked me out.

40. Scavenger Kill

Scavenger Kill - Ralph Hayes

An interesting book published in 1975 and the first in a series called "The Hunter". It is about a guy who leads safaris in Africa for spolied rich folks. He gets mad one day about a poacher taking tusks from rhinos and decides to go kill the guy. He finds out that the same guy owns a pharmaceutical company marketing a drug that is causing serious birth defects...and it just happens to affect the lives of his best friend and his wife.

Now he has two reasons to kill the guy. He is now hunting a man rather than big game. He justifies all this in some twisted way because his killing is far less "bad" than the other guys actions. Silly way to make a hero if you ask me.

Despite the moral dilema, which really wasn't a big deal since it is just a stupid book, it was pretty decent. Still, I don't feel a need to suggest anyone go looking for it. It was just OK.

17. The Stepford Wives

The Stepford Wives - Ira Levin

This book is exactly what I expected from it. The darned thing has been sitting on my shelf for longer than I can remember. Actually, longer than I have had a shelf. So, I finally read it.

I got precisely the story I thought it would be. I loved it.

I especially love that there is no happy ending or last minute reprieve. It is what it is...and we really never know exactly what it is anyway.

43. Dead Even

Dead Even - Brad Meltzer

A crime novel. Lots of lawyers. Lots of criminals. This one didn't seem to be much different than most other crime novels I have read.

Bad guys do bad things. Lawyers and cops try to stop them. Bad guys win for a while. Good guys win in the end. Where is the suspense in that?

Despite the predictability, it was not all that bad. This was a story of a husband and wife who are both in the legal profession. She is a brand new rookie assistant district attorney. He is a defense lawyer seeking to make partner in a New York city law firm.

The bad guys do something bad and then manipulate the case so that the husband and wife will have to face each other in court.

I read these books and find them interesting because I just can't believe that folks find these characters anywhere near what they would be in reality. The good guys can't walk around doing anything they want to whomever they want and still make the case stick. The bad guys can't be as bad as they are supposed to be and still be unknown to the police in any way. Sometimes it is just a little too far-fetched and stretched to make it believeable at all, but it sure is fun.

32. Sweeny Todd and the String of Pearls

Sweeny Todd and the String of Pearls - Yuri Rasovsky

This was an aduio book of a play performed by The Hollywood Theater of the Ear. It says it is "an audio melodrama in three despicable acts".

It is the story of the same barber that has been portrayed in many different versions of this story. This one is a little different than what I remember. Sweeny is a bit more insidious than I recalled. He robs and kills hundreds of customers in his barber shop and then carries them into underground tunnels which connect to his accomplices business. Mrs. lovett owns a bakery a few blocks away. The two businesses are connected through these caverns.

Mrs. lovett's bakery makes the best meat pies in the entire city. Customers are always raving about the flavor and coming back for more.

They have no idea that the secret to her recipe is that she grinds up the cadavers supplied by Sweeny Todd and uses them as stuffing for her pies.

This was an interesting story that I enjoyed listening to. Partly because the actors portraying the parts were excellent. The writer, Yuri Rasovsky, used the original "penny dreadful" version of this story when writing the play, which makes it closer to the original than many of the more famous of contemporary versions.

14. Kill Me

Kill Me - Stephen White

Spoiler Alert!... spoiling it because I don't think you will be reading it yourself anyway.

This was my second try with audio and it was better. This one was more story-like than Walden and therefore was better for the long drive to and from work. This one was ten discs and took me five days or so to listen to. I think the only thing I did not like with this one was the reader doing some voices that just didn't fit the characters. A minor detail and has nothing to do with the book itself.

The book...
A cocky rich guy and his buddies like to do dangerous things like sky-diving, deep water diving, skiing untamed mountains, etc. One of the friends gets hurt and is in a vegetative state. The rich guy gets the news on a satellite phone while deep in the woods skiing with his friends. Then he has an accident while coming down the mountain and tells his friends to promise to kill him if he ever ends up a vegetable like the other dude. They all say yeah yeah yeah and go on with life...except for one of them.

Jimmy Lee is that friend and takes the protagonist (who never is named through the entire book) aside and tells him about a group that will kill him if he ever reaches a point where he can not live up to his own standards of life.

The man meets with this clandestine group and sets up a contract where they will kill him if his medical condition ever reaches certain client defined parameters that he has set as trigger points for his own execution. Not really suicide, but more like keeping control of a situation that may get beyond his control. He looks at it as some sort of "insurance policy".

He goes on with his life never really thinking he will need to use the service. He and his wife and kids continue as normal. A 15 year old son shows up at the door one day. He is from a one night stand the man had when he was 23. Adam, the son, becomes someone this man loves and wants to have in his life.

Then one day he goes to the doctor due to headaches and finds out he has an aneurism. It is inoperable. It could blow today, tomorrow, or never. As the symptoms progress he worries more about his health and his relationship with his son becomes more important.

One day a few years later he gets a phone call from the "Death Angels" (his name for them) saying he has reached an activation point and the contract is irrevocable. They are obligated to kill him!

The man does not wish to die yet. He is looking for his son, who has run away. He needs to explain some things so the boy will not think he was abandoned or something like that.

The events that happen are interesting, but it is predictable. One can only escape imminent danger so many times before it gets ridiculous.

In the end the man finds his son. Adam now is in need of an immediate liver transplant. Lizzie, his Death Angel, helper kills him. Adam gets a liver from his now dead father. Lizzie is also killed because she has been hiding breast cancer from the Death Angels and then decides not to hide it any more.

It is a decent story, but no big thrill. There were some points when I wanted to keep going and see what happened, but for the most part it was easy to take a break from the story and not think about it until I continued.

4. Slatewiper

Slatewiper - Lewis Perdue

Biological warfare with a twist. This time it is not governments controlling the bio-weapons, it is a corporation in Japan with a serious nationalist streak. This company is a global super-company. It is well respected (and feared) throughout the world. Nobody seems to catch on that they don't like anyone who is not Japanese. They hate everyone else.

So, the biological weapon they design can be "programmed" to attack specific genetic makeups. Yes, this is a weapon that is harmless to anyone except the race they decide to kill. There is a bit of dialogue between characters about the superiority of the Japanese race and how Koreans are just dogs, etc etc.

There is a lot of time spent writing about Japanese World War II atrocities and comparing Ishii to Mengele as far as medical experimentation. I had heard that the Japanese were pretty vicious once they landed on the mainland, but I had not heard the stories mentioned in this book, not had I heard of Dr. Ishii or Unit 731. I have ordered some books about the subject and will see how much is fact.

It felt like the author spent a lot of time researching and writing about Japanese history and culture and threw in a heavy dose of biotechnology.

As far as the book, I think it fell short of a rather good potential. Too many times things just fell into place. Either the people involved just happen to have millions laying around when needed, or perhaps they were just the right people in some powerful position to get exactly the thing needed to save the world. It got ridiculous after a while.

I think the biggest letdown was the lack of a climax. The story droned on and on and on. I kept waiting for the big finale...and then noticed I was reading the epilogue. Damn!

No need to go find this book unless you have read others of the genre and have nowhere left to go. It was OK, but no big thrill. I can't quite say it was a waste of time. It was just OK.

3. More Twisted

More Twisted: Collected Stories, Vol II - Jeffrey Deaver

Last year I read A Maiden's Grave by this author and thought it was good enough to read some more by Mr. Deaver. This book was not the one I should have chosen. It lacked the intensity of the former. It lacked the suspense and the edge of the seat heart pounding I felt with A Maiden's Grave.

This was a collection of stories. All were written to have a "twist". All were centered around crimes, large and small.

The twists were pretty predictable. This is not to say that I did not enjoy the stories. I did like a few of them. Even Deaver himself says that these stories are best read in small doses because the "twist" gets old after it is done repeatedly. Maybe I should have broken it up over more than a few days.

78. The Girls He Adored

The Girls He Adored - Jonathan Nasaw

This is a thriller. A very bad guy, a very capable psychiatrist, a very outside the box FBI agent. Mix it all together with some serous child abuse, sexual abuse, and a secluded area in which to hide in the mountains of Oregon. You get a very predictable, though still enjoyable jaunt through the exploits of a serial rapist/murderer with multiple personalities. There is the obligatory eventual victory of the good guys after they take their lumps from the bad guy.

At least this bad guy was believable in this book. I have read a few where the bad guy just never seemed to be real.

The book is nothing special. None of the characters are especially notable, though they were well portrayed. The story line was predictable. The little clues left around as to what would happen (there are always clues) were a bit too obvious for me.

If you are a strawberry blond, watch out for this dude.

74. Logan's Run

Logan's Run - William F. Nolan

This is one of those books I read because I remember thinking the movie was great when I was young. By today's standards the movie sucks.

The book on the other hand does not suck at all. I think it was fun and exciting. OK, maybe there were events that were a little too convenient. Maybe the story line could get a bit choppy. Things like Logan gets knocked out...when he wakes everything is OK and it is time to move to the next scene. I can overlook those things because I really liked the story. I really liked that this novel was VERY different than the movie.

I wish the movie had some of the elements of this book. The prison called "Hell". The Crazy Horse Mountain. The Thinker. The Sky Gypsys. The Baby Home. The Civil War reenactment. The whole idea the Sanctuary is not just some place with an old guy hanging out. I liked the whole twist with Francis (the other Sandman). I loved the way Logan and Jessica become a pair much better in this book than the random hookup in the movie. I liked the whole story with the cub scouts much better. Box was much more than some robot living in an ice cave. The maze.

This book has so much more to offer than the movie ever did. It makes me regret that I did not read it 20 or 30 years ago.

I have purposely avoided specifics regarding the plot line. I think that you should give it a shot, especially if you liked the movie at all.

Is it great writing? No, not really. I do recommend it because it surprised me with the joy it gave me while reading it.

69. Chasing the Dead

Chasing the Dead - Joe Schreiber

This book is OK, but a bit to Stephen Kingish for me at this point in life. This type of horror book where some creepy guy who was killed 100's of years ago coming back and doing things in the modern world just seems too childish any more.

It was not bad, but didn't really get me wanting to read the rest of the story. It was suspenseful, but not edge of the seat suspenseful. It was puzzling trying to figure out what was happening, why, and who the "bad guy" really was, but it never really mattered to me as the reader.

34. The Camel Club

The Camel Club - David Baldacci

This book took me back to my favorite genre, the political/military/spy thriller. I have heard of this author through recommendations by a few friends, but I never picked up one of his books. I finally did.

I enjoyed this book right from the start. It has some very interesting characters. I felt like I got to know them a little better than I do with most other books. I understood them, their actions, and why they said some things they said. I do not think there was onetime where I thought "why did that person do that?"

The plot of this book was very detailed, and also very ambitious. I am actually a bit surprised that the whole story fit into 600 pages and still had the detail it contained. Maybe the end was rushed, but it was really just the aftermath of the adventures of "The Camel Club" anyway. Aftermath being the one second left on the countdown to launching the nuclear missiles and the dismissals and resignations of presidential cabinet members. None of that was what this story was about, but the ends needed to be sewn up.

One thing that did bug me a little was the actions of the Secretary of Defense. This was not a major player in the story, but it seemed to me that this part was not based in reality. The words and actions of this person in cabinet meetings made it seem like the military was hoping for a total nuclear holocaust in the middle east. That is hog-wash. Nobody that felt that way would ever be put into a position where they had influence over the decision. I thought that was pretty much Hollywood cheese, but the rest kicked buttocks!

I will read more by David Baldacci. I have another of his books, "Divine Justice", on the shelf. I will get to it before the end of 2009.

In case you care, The Camel Club, is a group of four guys that the Secret Service considers conspiracy theory types. One lives part time in a tent in Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House. They know these guys and consider them harmless. The Secret Service guys visit the park and play chess with them. LOL When you are talking about folks living on the fringes of society like that, well, you can get some very interesting individuals...and this book has plenty of those.

25. The Cobra Event

The Cobra Event - Richard Preston

This book was written in 1997 and is about a biological terrorist attack on New York City. Supposedly, Bill Clinton, then President of the United States of America, read this book and then had the federal government to a feasibility study on the events that were fictionalized within the pages. In my opinion, it is possible that something like this could take place.
I enjoyed reading the story and identified with a few of the characters. Some of them were a little over the top. One guy was a UN weapons inspector in Iraq and did some things that would probably have gotten him killed in the real world. Most of it was pretty believable.
One part of the book really got me freaked out. Every once in a while I will have a dream in which I am stuck somewhere and waiting to die. Nobody can find me to help me get out. I am going to be there until I either starve or suffocate. These dreams really freak me out, make me sweat, get my heart racing, and then I can't sleep any more. Whatever.
One part of the book has a character chasing the terrorist through unfinished subway tunnels under the streets of New York. He ends up in a small tunnel (18x24 inches) to escape a bio-grenade and the concrete behind him collapses. He is trapped. He has lost radio communications because he is under ground. Nobody knows where he is. He starts to panic. The descriptions used by the author of what this man was feeling and thinking were so familiar that I was getting short of breath. Then the character creeps forward and ends up hanging upside down in a vertical shaft, unable to move, in the dark, with nobody knowing he is there. The terror that scene put in me was unmatched by anything I have ever read. Just thinking about it is freaking me out. I think I will stop writing about that now. Ugh.
The writing was extremely technical concerning the whole biological stuff. Production of viruses, DNA manipulation, descriptions of bio-labs, equipment used for detection and production of biological agents, etc etc. If you like technological stuff you will like this book.
My father-in-law works for General Dynamics Advanced Technical Products division. He is a systems engineer and has been working on the chemical-biological detection machines used by the military. These were deployed all over the country after 9-11. He saw this book and was very interested in a thing called the Felix. It is a fictional machine that does pretty much exactly what his machine does. I will lend him this book and see what he thinks.
SPOILER PARAGRAPH: In case you care, the terrorist gets killed in a horrible way, some people die in horrible ways also, but the HUGE catastrophe is narrowly avoided. There are casualties, but not what it could have been. That was predictable. After the story ends there is a kind of epilogue where the genetically engineered virus has made it's way into the rat population...therefore leaving the future up in the air. Yeah yeah yeah.
I enjoyed this one and would recommend it to people who like the techno-thriller type of books. I love them.