QB VII stands for "Queen's Bench seven" which is a particular court house in London. This novel by Leon Uris, published in 1970, consists of an introduction, and three parts. Near the end of World War II, Dr Adam Kelno was rescued by the Russians from a Nazi prison camp. Shortly afterwards, Communist Poland wants him extradited for war crimes. Kelno is held in prison for over two years while the processing and hearing takes place. The request is denied and Kelno is set free. Part one chronicles Kelno's life from the time he leaves the war, through the extradition hearing and until the second trial. Part two chronicles the same period of time for an Abraham Cady, a writer, who was a flying ace during the war, but is injured. He becomes a journalist and later a novelist. Eventually (late sixties) writes a non-fiction on the Holocaust and includes a bit about Kelno being a prisoner-doctor who assisted the Nazi's with medical experiments on captured Jews. Part three is the civil trial where Dr. Kelno sues Cady for libel. He wants a trial, damages, a public apology and changes to the book to retract the statement.

There was a Made For TV movie starring Ben Gazzara and Anthony Hopkins done in 1975 which I saw while I was in the service. I remember being absolutely fascinated by the story and so much so, that I actually considered reading the book (This was well before my reading days). But I never got around to it. At year end (2001), I noticed the film came out on video. So I picked it up and decided to read the book.

My recollection of the film was extremely faulty. I only remember the court scenes and I thought it was extraordinarily suspenseful. In the book, at odds was whether or not this Doctor Kelno was in fact a war criminal.  We have seen how he has done some extraordinary work since the war in the out-back of Borneo for years and becomes Knighted for his research. When he returns to London, he continues his work with the lower class in a public health hospital. He has deliberately been playing it low key. After spending two years in prison dealing with the extradition, he's concerned the communist will continue to come after him.

Cady, on the other hand, is a talented writer, but seems to gravitate toward "Hollywood" and block busters. As the story progresses, he begins to wonder if he even has it within him to write something of "value". He finally does, and it's Holocaust smash hit, not only with the public, but the critics as well. So, did he make a mistake in his research? Only the trial will tell, Kelno is not about to discuss out of court settlements.

The film is roughly the same, Kelno's work was done in Kuwait, not Borneo and some scenes were set in Israel rather than other parts of Europe as the book at them set.

To a young man in my mid-twenties, the film had me on the edge of my seat. But on this side of life, almost thirty years later, I seem to see everything coming even though I don't remember the film all that well. In all honesty, I didn't remember how it ended, so I didn't have to deal with a spoiler. I remembered that what intrigued me was the ping pong back and forth of "he did it" and "he didn't do it". Maybe, also, being of the tender age of 26 or 27, that I didn't really know of the extent of the atrocities of the Holocaust and this film had the additional impact of bringing my attention to that as well. Since then, not a year has gone by that something in the public forum doesn't bring it up. I don't mean to be insensitive, but man's inhumanity to man is nothing new, and as horrible as this event was, it isn't the only atrocity. There were also 6 million non-Jews massacred in those camps as well. That's not to mention the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Conquistadores, or the American Manifest Destiny's impact on native Americans and, of course, let us not forget slavery (which, I believe, is issue not a country on earth can claim innocence). Consequently, this story line or theme, if you will, just doesn't have the same impact on me as it did the first time around.

There were some differences between the film and the book. Cady, the writer, was more of a jerk in the film than the book painted him to be. The Kelno character was more sympathetic in the film, at least, initially.

Nevertheless, I have to say, the book will stay with me like few do. Whether you're a pup just starting out in life or have been around the block a few times, it will probably stay with you also, though, I'm sure, for different reasons.

This is the first novel from Jeanne M. Dams and introduces Dorothy Martin, a American widow who has retired to Sherebury, a fictional town outside London, England. The setting is Christmas Eve and while attending a Midnight Mass, she discovers The Body in the Transept. It's a cozy and not a bad first effort (she received an Agatha for it). Dorothy does spend about the first half of the book trying to decide whether or not to pursue her own investigation of the murder. But, by this time, she's already met the killer, but doesn't know it. There were some elements that were a bit loose. I mean that some of the motivations didn't seem realistic and some explanations seemed out of character. But I loved the setting (I'm a sucker for anything set in England) and smiled knowingly at her problem with driving on the left and "roundabouts", those traffic circles England employs, probably because the roads intersected long before the discovery electricity and traffic lights (I had a training job in England in '89 and was there for a week. Between the hotel and the office where I held the class there was this massive roundabout, I dubbed "The Double Helix" -- I swear I saw Roman Soldiers stuck on that thing!) Anyway, the mystery was decent, but I think the real calling card of this book is the interaction with the people, the setting and Dorothy's ridiculous but amusing obsession with fancy hats. In spite of these apparent mainstays, there are occasionally surprisingly astute investigative observations. I don't mean than in a condescending way. It's not that I didn't think Dorothy (or Jeanne) was capable of it, but rather, I just excepted the effort to go elsewhere in the story. So that was nice and served to add a bit a depth to the story.

The seventh in a series of Gregor Demarkian holiday mysteries, A Stillness in Bethlehem by Jane Haddam is set in Bethlehem, Vermont. The an annual Nativity play, sponsored by the town brings lots of tourists' dollars, but Trish Verek, a True Crime writer, is filing a suit to have it stopped on the grounds of separation of church and state. Just as she is about to do so, she is shot and killed. Shortly after, an eighty year old woman is shot and killed. Both, though suspicious, are initially thought to be hunting accidents (rifle shots from far away, different rifles for each victim, both killed on the edge of a wilderness). However, Gregor Demarkian, retired FBI and an amateur sleuth, is in town for the play is not so sure. Of course, if he were wrong, this really wouldn't be a mystery, would it? The nature of mysteries are really pretty simple. Somebody gets dead and somebody else figures out who; game over. The act and the solution, of course, have to be separated by about 200 pages or more, so what separates one mystery from another is what is done in between to keep you interested. There are a variety of ways to do that. There is, of course, the peeling of the onion; the unraveling of the mystery itself. The suspense of who's next. There are sub plots. Picturesque characterizations. Waxing philosophical. Jane employs all these and quite enjoyably.

 It is not a hard-boiled murder mystery, but I wouldn't exactly call it a "cozy" either. To extend the egg metaphor a bit, I might call it "over medium". There isn't harsh language. The murders aren't gory and clinical details are only as necessary but antiseptically distant. What sex there was was only alluded to; this guy likes it rough and beats his wife and she seems to accept that, that guy is living with this woman, these two women are living together. So why isn't it a cozy? I don't know. To me, a cozy borders on a fairytale or fantasy, but Jane's work has a fresh air realism about it that brings it a step up from that. I liked it.

The Serial Killer's Diet Book by Kevin Postupack is a riot. An "extremely fat" man is killing people by stuffing gourmet sandwiches down their throats. This book has almost everything I enjoy about reading. First, it's funny. There are some laugh out loud, funny scenes and others which bubble under until you can't help to pop off another yuck.

"How was the water?" he asked (in Italian).

 "Here, see for yourself." She brought her wet body onto his and they rolled on the beach as they kissed, and when he looked at her again she was coated with sand.

”You look like … a veal cutlet."

 There are even funny situations. Our antagonist fancies himself as a writer and has spent a great deal of time working on the first sentence of bestseller in the works. He is unhappy with it:

Til the soul-departed seas wash your empty shores, and earth becomes a hollowed ball.

Postupack spent 4 pages with the antagonist reworking the above sentence. After all, it wasn't even a sentence. He labors over it, almost one word at a time, with literary justification at each step, whittling it down to about four "Hemingwayesque" words. Then just as meticulously he fleshed it out bit by bit until it was exactly as it started. But now he was happy.

Second, this book has some of the most picturesque and, almost, lyrical writing I've come across in a long time. Consider:

The traffic wasn't so bad at this hour. Cabs wove in and out like leopards on the hunt, and he watched one pounce on its prey -- a man at the curb flailing his arms, instantly gobbled up by this sleek yellow predator. And then it glided back to the jungle depths to digest its meal.

Third, it is salted with philosophical musings. An Wednesday afternoon discussion group is livened up by stranger who wanders into their meeting, spicing up the discussions with thoughts of life and death, God and the devil, can there be one without the other?

These are some, if not all, my favorite attributes of a book, and this one has all of them. But, for me, the sum of it's parts is actually less than the whole. The various vignettes seem unrelated and, though witty and even interesting, are distracting. They do, eventually, get tied up and I realized they weren't that disjoint after all, but by that time, the damage was done. Another thing that bothered me was the escalated vocabulary. During the group discussion on Postmodern art, someone calls it a scam an then a counter speculation: "'A simulacrum,' said Barton Snide. (Barton Snide believed that everything was a simulacrum.)" Simulacrum? Barton does seem to go on that way, and maybe that was one of Postupack's humor things, but I had to look that word up along with "verisimilitude" and bunch of -mancy forms. Maybe I should know these words, but I felt like I was being ridiculed for my ignorance.

But, to be fair, these were just slightly off-putting and, overall, I enjoyed the book. To put this in perspective, I love Douglas Adams' stuff, but a little goes a long way and it's been two years since I've done any of his. I will definitely read more Postupack.

This is J.R.R. Tolkein's follow-up, of sorts, to the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The Hobbit, chronicles a year in the life of Bilgo Baggins' adventure with Dwarfs on a quest. The setting is long ago when myth and magic were real. It is a children's story, to be sure, but it's not childish. I was struck by "craftsmanship" of the setting. I picked this up on audio, mistakenly thinking it was a prequal to ...Rings I don't know where that came from, because I know better. Maybe it was that the audio for ...Rings was closer to $100 and this was less than $40 and though I wanted to get both, I could only get one at that time. Anyway, I'm now looking at a large audio tape bill for the next batch.

Day of Reckoning from Jack Higgins has Blake Johnson working for the President, downstairs at the White House. He gets a call that his ex-wife, an investigative reporter, has been found in the river in New York, an apparent drug over dose victim. Though divorced, they were still very close and Blake knows she was not into drugs. He soon learns that she was investigating Jack Fox, a Mafioso. This is an action story of covert ops and revenge played out in the British Isles. Nice and quick kick-butt, take-names thriller. I liked it.

The Associate  by Phillip Margolin, is a young lawyer in a big firm where his contemporaries are all Ivy League graduates. He's a sharp kid from a not so prestigious schooling, but is trying to make up for by working harder. This is what gets him to take an evaluation of "discovery" material for a suite against a pharmaceutical company, which his firm is defending and is being charged with producing a drug that causes birth defects. The material is voluminously overwhelming. At the end of a long day, he is saddled with preparing an evaluation of the material by 8:00 AM the next morning.

During the deposition by the plaintiff's council of an executive of the company, which the associate is in attendance, he presents everyone with a letter from one of the scientists to an attorney that states how his tests show a link to a high birth defect rate in monkeys. This spawns a array of problems, not the least of which are how the plaintiff got privileged documents and why the associate didn't find it. He is fired. But later that same day, his boss calls him to make an arrangement to meet him, it seems that the discovery problem wasn't his fault. He arrives at the meeting and finds the man dead. So now he is also accused of murder.

Philip Margolin is one of those discoveries I was introduced to while waiting for the next Michael Connelly release. After reading Gone, But Not Forgotten (his third) and Heartstone his first, I finally met him up in the Bay Area ("M" is for Mystery). I had just finished his latest, The Undertakers Widow. He said that he always tried to have a surprise ending. Welp, that's what I want and that's what we get this time too. I liked it. It did seem to wonder off into the woods every now and then. Though these diversions were, eventually, tied together, I got a confused a few times. These were long trips and I almost thought I was in the wrong book.