I don’t know how many times I gotta say this, people. If you find a bag of money then you should just leave it there. If you take it, bad things will I don’t know how many times I gotta say this, people. If you find a bag of money then you should just leave it there. If you take it, bad things will happen.
But since we are a race of slow learners I guess it doesn’t hurt to go over it again.
Rick Hoffman was once an investigative reporter with a promising career, but he left that behind to take a high profile job with a swanky magazine specializing in fluff pieces. Unfortunately, when the magazine downsizes Rick is left unemployed, in debt, and with zero career prospects. He’s so broke that he’s staying in his father’s house which has been falling apart after years of neglect since a stroke put his dad in a nursing home two decades ago.
When Rick discovers over $3 million in cash hidden in one of the walls, he can’t help but give into temptation. He stashes the cash and goes on an ill-advised spending spree at first, but then he’s suddenly kidnapped by some people who threaten him if doesn’t hand it over to them. Rick scrambles for answers by digging into his father’s past as a shady lawyer who acted as a bagman/fixer for a huge construction project just before the stroke left him completely unable to communicate. The more Rick digs, the more dark secrets come out, and the danger gets worse all the time.
I’m a sucker for both stories about finding illicit cash and sleazy fixers so this should have been right in my wheelhouse, but I ultimately found it disappointing. That’s mainly because I didn’t care for the main character at all.
Yeah, I know that this is supposed to be an arc of Rick starting out as kind of jerk who once had potential to be something better and discovering his better nature again. This kind of story demands that the lead character either be so flawed or desperate that they are the kind of person who would take money that will surely bring trouble.
Yet Rick was just too stupid for my taste. He starts off pretty well in his early moves of stashing the money, but when the danger starts he behaves like a moron. Sure, he does some moves like moving around to different hotels and renting different cars, but this is a guy who gets kidnapped and nearly murdered not once, but twice. But he never does anything like get a weapon, hire bodyguards, leave town, or any other thing that having $3 million in cash would allow you to do.
Instead he just bumbles along while surviving mainly by luck. I also didn’t much care for the way he investigates all this. He’s supposed to be a former hot shit reporter who knows how to dig up dirt, and there is some stuff about him pulling records and finding clues. Yet his interactions with the people he tries to question are these incredibly lame efforts of him trying to trick them into believing he’s working on other stories, and yet when his flimsy lies collapse he just starts demanding answers which they have no real reason to give and usually don’t.
Overall, it was OK as a crime story, but never came close to really getting me interested after the money was found....more
For over a year now a lot of us have been working from home, and now I feel like a real rube because what I should have done was get a Lincoln and havFor over a year now a lot of us have been working from home, and now I feel like a real rube because what I should have done was get a Lincoln and have somebody drive me around all day while I did my job.
Mick Haller is a defense attorney who uses his car as an office as he shuttles between courts and jails seeing various clients. While not not completely crooked, Mick is certainly bent, and he has no problem using every trick he knows to keep his clients out of prison. When a wealthy young man is accused of brutally assualting a woman during an attempted rape, he hires Haller and insists that he’s innocent despite the evidence. At first, Mick sees this new client as nothing more than a big pay day, but as new things come to light Mick finds himself personally involved in ways he could never have dreamed of.
I’ve got a weird thing going with Michael Connelly. He’s an incredibly popular crime writer, and I’m a guy who loves crime fiction. His ideas and characters seem like they should be right in my wheelhouse, and this is another example of that. Yet, despite having several of my reading buddies cite Connelly as a favorite of theirs I remain mostly immune to his charms. Which is weird because I like plenty of other books that are similar in tone and concepts to what Connelly does. I guess it’s just like J.K. Simmons said in Whiplash, it’s not quite my tempo.
So while I enjoyed this one and found the character of Mick Haller intriguing, I just kind of wish that there was something MORE to the book, even if I couldn’t tell you exactly what it is I found lacking. I guess one point was that I was more into the angles that Haller played in the early part of the book than I was once the main plot got rolling. In fairness, the whole last act does hinge on Haller pulling off an unorthodox courtroom stunt so it’s not like Connelly just forgot that Haller was a lawyer. It’s more like he got more interested in the crime plot than the character, and so I wished Mick was a little bit less of a standard male lead in a thriller and more sleazy lawyer in the last act.
Still, I got no major complaints, and it’s got some aspects I really liked....more
I’ve never seen the old TV show with Raymond Burr, but general pop culture awareness has told me thatI’ve been very confused about Perry Mason lately.
I’ve never seen the old TV show with Raymond Burr, but general pop culture awareness has told me that Mason was a defense lawyer whose clients were always innocent, and that he’d get them acquitted by figuring out the true guilty party who Mason would then get to confess on the stand. So I was a little shocked when I watched the new HBO series in which Mason as played by Matthew Rhys wasn’t even a lawyer at the start, but rather a small-time drunken private investigator who gets embroiled in the case of a murdered infant and has to navigate a web of crime and corruption to try and find some shred of justice.
I decided to go to the source to try and figure out what the real skinny is on this Perry Mason guy, and I checked out the book that started it all way back in 1933. What’s the verdict? It seems like Mason was a lot closer to the HBO version.
Mason gets hired by a woman who needs his help to keep her name out of a tabloid newspaper after she and a politically connected male friend who wasn’t her husband have gotten caught up in a situation that could turn into a scandal. Even though the lady is lying about who she is, Perry takes the case, but when he starts digging and finds out who really owns the paper things get messy in a hurry.
What’s really interesting to me is Mason’s role at the start of this. Although he is an attorney he also comes across as a fixer/bag man/detective. His opening move is to try and bribe and bully the editor of the paper into silence, but then he shifts tactics immediately to using the opportunity to track down the owner of the paper. Along the way he does things like bribe hotel phone operators and a cop, he pretty much extorts extra cash out of the male companion who was with the woman to keep his name out of it, he hides from the police at one point, he coaches a person at a crime scene on what part of their story to lie about, and he pretends to be somebody else so that he can accept a legally executed subpoena to that person in order to get information. I’m not an attorney, but I think those kinds of things are generally frowned upon.
The amusing part is that Mason comes across as a real sonofabitch. He’s all bluster and bullying while doing everything he can to dominate every conversation, and most of his conversations with his assistant Della Street and his investigator Paul Drake consists of him barking orders. It doesn’t make him the most likable protagonist, but he is probably what you’d want from your lawyer when your ass was in a crack because his one core belief is that he owes his client his full efforts no matter what they’ve done.
There’s some distinctly dated elements to it with Mason’s attitude towards the women in the story being horrid by today’s standards, and there’s an outright racial slur at one point by one of the characters that nobody seems bothered by.
Despite that and Mason not exactly being a guy who I’d like to hang out with, it’s a pretty solid mystery that has the hard boiled atmosphere of a Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett novel. ...more
If I wasn’t hoping that death is just an endless, dreamless slumber before then I sure am now.
Richard ‘Dodge’ Forthrast made billions with the video gIf I wasn’t hoping that death is just an endless, dreamless slumber before then I sure am now.
Richard ‘Dodge’ Forthrast made billions with the video game company he founded, but money doesn’t help him when a routine medical procedure goes sideways and leaves him braindead. However, Dodge once signed up with a cryonics company to have himself frozen after death, and that old legal agreement becomes the impetus for his friends and family to pour resources into tech that eventually can digitally map Dodge’s mind as part of an uneasy alliance with an ailing billionaire, El Shepherd, who is desperately trying to find a way to cheat death.
Years pass, and eventually Dodge’s consciousness is brought back in a digital realm, but he has no real memories of who he was. Operating mainly on instinct, Dodge starts shaping the world he now inhabits into something approximating his old reality, and eventually the living begin adding more dead mapped minds to that space. Slowly, a community that Dodge oversees begins to grow, but Shepherd doesn’t like the world that Dodge and his people have made so he finds a way to make sure that he’ll be in charge once he dies and gets his brain plugged in.
That’s a lot of plot for one book, but since this is a Neal Stephenson novel there’s all that and more. In addition to the story of Dodge in his digital world there’s the stuff with his friends and family dealing with all the technological and legal issues that arise from starting and maintaining a virtual afterlife. There’s also a long subplot that details how the internet and social media eventually becomes so awash in bullshit that everyone needs a personal editor to weed out the nonsense they don’t want to see, and the trend of people only believing what they choose creates whole reality challenged zones of the United States based on ‘alternative facts’. All of this stuff takes up a good chunk of the first half of the book, and I was enjoying that part quite a bit.
However, in the second half the focus shifts much more to dead Dodge in his computer world, and that’s where it got incredibly tedious. Stephenson does a lot here that draws on various religious creation myths with Dodge essentially becoming a Zeus like figure before the thing shifts into a more Christian style story with Dodge being cast in the Lucifer part by Shepherd. That’s an interesting idea, but the execution of it goes on for so long that I lost patience with the whole thing because it starts reading like someone tossed a Bible and a copy of Lord of the Rings into a blender.
Another part of the problem is that Stephenson also baked in some video game influence here, and as a guy who helped create a huge MMORPG type game it makes sense that Dodge’s approach to building and living in a digital world would feel somewhat like that. However, while it can be fun to play a video game like Civilization yourself, it’s boring to just watch someone else do it, and that’s what reading this book felt like for a good part of it.
Oddly, Stephenson also never really deals with the big questions that the story brings up. Like, are Dodge and the others in the cyber world falling into the rhythms of Greek mythology and Christianity out of some subconscious instinct that recalls those stories, or is it possible that our reality is also just some kind of artificially created existence that and the creation of these kinds of places just plays out in patterns?
Another aspect I didn’t care for was using the characters like Dodge and some of his family and friends who were also in Stephenson’s thriller REAMDE. I really enjoyed that book as one of Stephenson’s more straight ahead stories, and I especially liked Dodge in it. So to just essentially kill him off in the early going here is a bummer that puts a retroactive pall over that book.
Maybe the thing that bugs me most about this is that it’s essentially two rich guys battling to control what happens to people after they die. As the book lays out it would take an enormous amount of resources to develop something like this so it’s just cold hard reality that the first people to be able to live on past death would be wealthy.
However, it seem incredibly unfair that the privilege they enjoyed in life would then carry over to the point where they literally get to shape reality to their view of how things should be. Even good guy Dodge never questions why he gets to choose how things are going to work once everyone who dies starts getting uploaded. We just know that Shepherd was a jerk in life and in death so we’re supposed to root for Dodge, not ask why he gets all the power.
We already live in a world where obscenely rich assholes get to make all the rules. I was really hoping that death would be the end of that so I didn’t much enjoy a long story about how these fucks could maintain control after we all croak. Can you imagine what happens if the Koch brothers were essentially gods who could shape reality to what they want it to be?
If that’s the way it was going to be then I’d take a hard pass on the afterlife and just settle for the comfort of a long dirt nap. Reading about that idea isn’t a lot of fun either even if Stephenson tries mightily to convince us that it’d be cool just so long as the right rich guy is in charge....more
Is money the root of all evil or does it make the world go round?
The answer to that is yes.
Annabel is American living in Geneva with husband Matthew wIs money the root of all evil or does it make the world go round?
The answer to that is yes.
Annabel is American living in Geneva with husband Matthew whose job with a secretive Swiss bank keeps him away from her too much, but the trade off is the wealthy lifestyle they’re living. Marina is journalist engaged to Grant who comes from a very rich family, and his father is about to become a candidate for the presidency of the United States. It might seem like both these ladies won the trophy husband lottery, but Annabel is bored and lonely while Marina feels like she’s have to have to give up the job she loves to really be part of Grant’s family. Yeah, I know. Rich people problems.
However, things take a turn for both women. Annabel’s husband is killed in a small plane crash with home of his wealthy clients, and she starts questioning exactly what he was doing at the bank. While on a vacation trip to Paris, Marina does a favor for her old friend and editor by picking up a USB drive with encrypted data, but this errand leads to her ending up with information on money laundering done for international criminal types. Both Annabel and Marina quickly find out that these are not the kind of people who like you asking questions about their business.
This is a solid thriller whose biggest strength is in the idea that there’s a vast ocean of blood money being hidden and utilized by some of the world’s most powerful people. If you’ve been paying attention to current events that’s a story with the ring of authenticity to it. I mean, a rich asshole with presidential aspirations and shady international business connections isn’t much of a stretch these days, and it gives the whole book an honest hook to it.
It’s well written by airport thriller standards, and the presentation of the lives that Annabel and Marina are leading is very well done. There’s some interesting thematic stuff in that Annabel truly loves her husband is now filled with regrets about the independent lifestyle she gave up even if she is living in the lap of luxury. It fits nicely with Marina’s story since she’s on the verge of essentially making that same choice.
Unfortunately, the weaker side comes with the thriller stuff. There’s a few scenes with characters being followed and some lightweight chase scenes, but this isn’t an action story. It’s more about paranoia and dread which is fitting for a book about the money and power lurking behind world events, but I could have used more of a sense of danger to it.
And frankly it seems like a book that real world has outpaced in terms of how much trouble we’re all in. The characters here have faith that a free press and government oversight can ultimately stop and punish people who break the law like this. It doesn’t take into account that the evil rich doing this stuff are now the ones in power, and that institutions we counted on to protect us have been corrupted or neutered.
So it’s a decent read with an interesting idea and above average characterization, but it comes across as too naive a story to really accomplish what it might have just a few years ago....more
A woman and her male friend were brutally murdered just outside her home. There was practically a trail of blood leading to her ex-husband’s house. ThA woman and her male friend were brutally murdered just outside her home. There was practically a trail of blood leading to her ex-husband’s house. The ex had a history of domestic violence against her and no alibi. A mountain of physical and circumstantial evidence including DNA, hairs, footprints, and a bloody glove found on his property all point at him as the killer.
You didn’t need Sherlock Holmes to solve this one, but I doubt that even an amazing lawyer like Perry Mason or Atticus Fitch could have gotten a conviction considering everything that happened next.
I thought the interest I had in the OJ Simpson murder case had been buried in a shallow grave back in the ‘90s along with some grunge CD’s, my flannel shirts, and any lingering belief that the legal system actually worked as advertised. That's why I was surprised to find myself getting so wrapped up in the excellent TV mini-series from FX based on this book that I wanted to read it. While the show was a gripping dramatization that highlighted social issues that we’re still grappling with today this is more of a straightforward look at the case, but it’s still fascinating to get a step-by-step account of what exactly happened.
Jeffrey Toobin was a lawyer turned reporter who covered the trial starting with a story leaked to him by Simpson attorney Robert Shapiro that was the first seed of what would become a defense based on the idea that OJ was framed by racist cops. Toobin doesn’t even pretend to entertain the notion that Simpson might have been innocent and instead focuses on the legal strategies and mistakes that happened along with a bit of biographical info about the major players and their personalities. He also highlights what a media circus the entire fiasco became and how that became a factor for everyone in the court room.
The book delves deeply into exactly how Simpson’s legal team, led by the brilliant Johnny Cochran, exploited the racial tensions of Los Angeles just a few years after the Rodney King beating and riots. Cochran had been hoping for a hung jury at best and basing much of his strategy on pointing a finger at the detective who found some of the key evidence, Mark Fuhrman*. After tapes of Fuhrman using racial slurs and bragging about abusing minorities as a cop surfaced that proved he’d lied under oath a delighted Cochran realized that he’d gotten the chance for a full acquittal and pressed hard for it.
OJ’s defense was helped along by the prosecution which had an almost unerring instinct for shooting themselves in the foot at critical moments. For example, one strong piece of evidence was that the type of gloves used by the killer were a specialty item of which only 200 pairs had ever been sold. Investigation showed records that Nicole had purchased a pair of these in OJ’s size while they were still married, and the prosecution had a strong witness in a sales rep for the company to explain this.
Yet rather than simply pointing out how unlikely it would be that Nicole Simpson was murdered by someone else who had bought these rare gloves Christopher Darden let himself get distracted and baited by the defense into having OJ try them on. This led to the famous incident of OJ struggling to put on the gloves and Cochran’s later assertion that, “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”** What should have been a solid piece of evidence against OJ instead became a moment that was a complete disaster.
Still, Toobin documents the prosecution probably had no chance to convict no matter what they had done once the jury was chosen. From the focus group research done before the trial to the mindset of the of jury during the proceeding to their very brief deliberations the book makes a compelling case that they jury had their minds made up almost from the start, and that OJ’s fame as well as the LAPD’s history of racism both played a large part in that.
I don’t think that’s actually unique to the OJ jury. I’ve been reading a lot in recent years that has convinced me that people are hardwired to believe what we want, and this applies to politics, religion, conspiracy theories, and even the scams of con men. Human beings are just crappy about accepting facts that contradict what we think we already know, and we will come up with any absurd reason we can to justify this. That’s a big part of the reason why a judicial system based on believing in the common sense and objectivity of average everyday people is fundamentally flawed. And democracy doesn’t work either. (OK, I’m kidding about democracy. Sort of. Maybe. Maybe not. Ask me again in November 2016.)
There were a couple of small issues I had with the book. I listened to the audio version of this which hasn’t been updated in quite some time so the wrap-up at the end was pretty dated. It doesn’t include the deaths of some key players like Cochran or that OJ lost a civil suit to the Brown and Goldman families during which more evidence of his guilt was presented. OJ only paid a fraction of the millions they were awarded and is currently in prison for another crime he committed years later. I’ve also seen that Marcia Clark has disputed some details of Toobin’s account recently, but I’m not sure how much of that is because he consistently places much of the blame for prosecution failures on her for being arrogant overall and sometimes hostile to witnesses when it wasn’t called for.
At the end of it all Toobin effectively spells out that African-Americans in LA during the mid-’90s had ample reasons to mistrust the police force. The LAPD having a racist like Mike Fuhrman be a cop at all was the kind of thing which created the environment that allowed a wife-beating narcissist whose favorite hobby was playing golf with his rich white friends at his country club to successfully exploit a very real racial problem to get away with double murder.
* Fuhrman had tried to get a stress disability pension in the early '80s and essentially admitted misconduct while claiming it was the stress of the job that caused his behavior. The LAPD thought he was faking to get an early pension and put him back on the street. So either Fuhrman was a guy admitting that he was unstable and unfit to be a police officer, or he was a liar trying to get off the job. Neither one of these would seem like the kind of cop you’d want to keep on the payroll, and yet they did.
**Toobin provides a detailed explanation as to why the form fitting gloves which were coated in dried blood wouldn’t easily slide on over the latex gloves Simpson was wearing, and OJ did one of his finest acting jobs ever by pretending to struggle with them. Marcia Clark also pointed out in a recent interview that while claiming innocence OJ didn’t seem bothered at all by trying on gloves coated in his ex-wife’s blood and mugging for the cameras and the jury while doing it....more
Loading...
