The reason for these "quarterly" reports is that I just can’t keep up with the speed most of you read. It is not unlikely that I’ll only get one book done in a month and now that my "day" job has me doing less traveling, I don’t go through Books on Tape as often.

This and the previous book I did on audio tape last March, but forgot to include them in the Slow Reader report for the first quarter. Dean Koontz's One Door Away from Heaven is another example of his frequently uplifting stories, laced with ETs. A young girl is convinced her step father is out to kill her because she has a deformity. Her mother, a child of the sixties who never grew out of it, believes her daughter will be restored by extraterrestrials.

City of Bones is Michael Connelly's latest. A dog finds a bone in the woods. The dogs owner, a retired physician, recognizes it as, not only, human, but that of a child. The bone has been in the ground for somewhere around 20 years. This leads Harry Bosch into a 20 year old child abuse/murder case. The side issues in this story are that Harry has lost Kismin from his team who has been moved up to RHD, a new woman, a young and eager patrol cop, comes into his life (she and her partner go the original call on the “dog bone”) and Irvin Irving seems to have an increasingly confrontational eye on Harry. The “signature” twist ending is back, sort of. The big surprise, though, is not the solution to the case, though that was nicely done, has to do with Harry, himself … It kinda makes you wonder what Connelly has up his sleeve for Harry.

Special Agent Pendergast is back (Relic and Reliquary) along with Bill Smithback (Relic, Reliquary, and Thunderhead) and Nora Kelly (Thunderhead). Nora and Smithback are in New York and seeing each other. Special Agent Pendergast asks Nora to look into construction site that has unearthed 36 bodies, murdered, dismembered, and hidden a little over 100 years ago. The site used to be what was called a "cabinet of curiosities" a precursor to "museums". These bodies, are the earliest and biggest number in what appears to be a string gruesome murders that continued for some years and then stopped. Now, identical murders are occurring prompting police to believe there is a copycat serial killer on the loose, but Pendergast thinks it just might be the same guy.

These authors have produced a string of medical/techno/speculative thrillers for a number of years and this is their seventh novel together. I've enjoyed every one of them. This one, however, didn't quite have the same "pizzazz" the others did. And I'm not sure what it was. Maybe I couldn't believe that Nora would get mixed up with a sleaze like Smithback. Maybe the suspense was too drawn out (there were times when I felt like shouting, "ALRIGHT, ALREADY! Let the shoe drop!" There were a number of perspectives going on at the same time and they circled around to each of them, leaving us in a series quasi-cliffhangers for the duration. I don't remember them doing that before. Maybe it was Pendergast, who always was quite an intriguing character, seemed almost supernatural this time in his powers of observation and intuition. I'm not sure.

There was some really good stuff in there, though. The historical basis for museum, and how comparatively recent that was. We got to know a bit more about Pendergast and his family and what drives him.

This is the first novel from Gregg Andrew Hurwitz, The Tower. It is a hard hitting, hard boiled, kick-butt and take names thriller. The country’s most dangerous criminals are imprisoned in “The Tower”, a cylindrical “tube” built in the ocean just off shore of San Francisco’s west coast. The majority of the tower is underwater. Depending on the tides, only two or three levels are above the surface. Allander Atlasia, a psychopathic killer manages to escape the “escape-proof” tower and Jack Marlow, ex-FBI and now consultant to law-enforcement agencies, is tasked to track him down. This is a complex story of a madman's twisted re-enactment of his own depraved past and that of his tracker who has his own demons.
 

I so enjoyed his first book, that I did something I seldom do. I picked up his next immediately. I don't usually do that, but I just couldn't help myself. It took me an unusually long time to get through it. However, I'm sure that has more to do with me than the book (my sister had a stroke this summer and we have spent a great deal of time with her therapy and care, so I just haven't had the time read. It took me nearly 3 months to finish). Nevertheless, Minutes to Burn was every bit as good as his first book. Set in the near future (late in 2007), this is the story of an ecological disaster in and around the Galapagos Islands due to ozone depletion and chronic earthquakes. A ragtag team of Navy SEALs are sent in to “baby-sit” a small team of scientists there to set up seismic equipment to monitor the quakes. Unknown to almost everyone is that there is new predator species emerging. With political unrest throughout the region, resources to support this mission are scant. That is why the team is composed of the “over-the-hill” and the “damaged.” Another relentless and riveting tale from Hurwitz.