Old Bone

Title: Old Bones
Author: Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Published: August 20th 2019 by Grand Central Publishing
Format: eBook, Hardcover, 384 pages
Genre: Thriller
Source: My thanks to Netgalley and the Publisher for an opportunity to read an advanced copy of this book.
Series: Nora Kelly #1

Combining legend, fact, fiction, and science, the writing team of Preston Child takes the reader into the final days of the Donner Party and wraps enough mystery and intrigue to captivate the reader with a current-day archaeological dig, led by Nora Kelly a curator at the Santa Fe Institute of Archaeology, in the Lost Camp, all the while encompassing treasure hunting, grave robbing, and bio-warfare.

The book grabs you from the beginning, slows down a bit in the middle, and ends with such an explosive end the reader might not have understood, from the beginning, where this book would end up. Some of the descriptions are a bit graphic and stomach-turning, but this is about the infamous Donner Party and most people know what was supposed to have happened.

This is the first in the new Nora Kelly series which has Pendergast making a surprise visit, but not sure if he will be a recurring character. But one does wonder if Corrie and Nora will partner together on future cases.

The Warehouse

Title: The Warehouse
Author: Rob Hart
Published: August 13th 2019
Format: Hardcover, 368 pages
Genre: Dystopic / Technothriller
Source: My thanks to the Publisher for an opportunity to read an advanced copy of this book.

As Margaret Atwood once said, add enough truth to your fiction so people can’t accuse you of making it up and that is exactly what Rob Hart has done. As if Bezos, Walton, and a little Musk on the side, had a singular vision with the backing of government antiregulation. It isn’t shocking that the head of Cloud comes from Arkansas or that there are drones delivering products that have been, in a way, stolen from their rightful inventors. This is what business has turned into and billionaires are only supplying what the masses demand.

The Cloud has devised a new live-work environment since there are very few life-sustaining jobs outside of their facility and the earth is little more than a wasteland. Cloud, in its infinite wisdom, has given the public what it needs – jobs, housing, and food. What more could a desperate workforce want?

Zinnia is a corporate spy. Hired to infiltrate Cloud technology and find a way to bring it down. Paxton was the CEO of his own small business that was slowly pushed out of the market by Cloud. When that dream was over, he worked as a prison guard which gave him the right credentials to work for Cloud security and to learn their secrets. What Zinnia and Paxton didn’t expect was their two worlds colliding. Decisions will be made, minds altered, revolting revelations made, and in the end, there will be one final chance at freedom.

The plausibility is what is so terrifying. The learned helplessness. We see it coming, we know it is possible, yet we do nothing because we each want to save a few dollars, receive items nearly instantaneously, and all the while putting out of our minds what those sacrifices entail. Oh, and don’t get me started on the future of food.

Ron Howard and Brian Grazer now own the movie rights to this book. As you read, you can see it on the big screen, see the crowds arrive at the theaters and walk out chattering about how fantastical the idea is as they contemplate their new big box store purchase.

The Cactus

Title: The Cactus
Author: Sarah Haywood
Published: May 7th 2019 by Park Row
Format: Paperback, 384 pages
Genre: Women's Fiction

Cacti is not prickly to keep invaders away but to allow it to thrive in the harshest of environments.

I am not going to go as far as to say Susan Green is on the spectrum, but I do tend to wonder since she has very precise ways of looking at life. Ways which are orderly with no room for emotion or the feelings of others. She has well throughout life plans and when she discovers, at the ripe old of 45, she is pregnant, and with the recent passing of her mother, Susan is a befuddled mess.

Susan and Richard had a mutually satisfying relationship. He was a man that she had met a decade or so previously through a lonely heart ad. They laid out their relationship rules, complete with an understanding there would be no sharing of their personal lives and settled on a purely physical relationship with mutually agreed upon evenings out. All organized and precise the way adults should behave. She never anticipated a baby would enter the picture, and when it did, she quickly ended their relationship determined to keep her independence.

Her relationship with her widowed mother was of begrudgingly mutual respect if they did not see each other frequently. Susan’s brother Edward, on the other hand, was a thorny nuisance and when her mother’s will was read, and Susan did not receive what she believed to be her fair share, she did what any other rational legally trained person would do -- she gathered her documents and went to court.

Refusing to give up her autonomy, yet needing the proceeds from the sale of her mother’s home, she reluctantly begins asking for help from the few people who are willing to get close to this prickly person who raises cacti. Then again, she doesn’t technically ask, they are the only people left in her life willing to see past the brusque exterior.

As her due date nears, and the court case is coming to a head, Susan encounters a shock she never prepared for. A secret so devastating it causes an emotional upheaval that will breakdown her walls and allow her to bond with Rob and Kate, letting in a life she had denied, and in turn, allowing Susan Green to forget the rules.

The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World

Title: The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World
Author: Melinda Gates
Published: April 23rd 2019 by Flatiron Books
Format: Hardcover, 273 pages
Genre: Women's Study / Human Rights

I savored this book. I had no intention of rushing and found myself lingering over certain passages and stopping fellow book lovers asking if they had had a chance to read, and if not, let them know that they were in store for a remarkable journey when they did.

Somewhere in the first couple of chapters, you forget who millionaire philanthropist Melinda Gates is and instead join a woman on a journey of not quite enlightenment but a discovery of women in general. Women who once they know they have a voice will use it to lift their neighbors and daughters and allow them to see a world that was denied to the previous generations.

You will cry along with Melinda and relish in the differences that the Gates Foundation has made in the lives of women in impoverished countries. Women that thought that their only choice was no choice. A husband would be chosen, more children would die than see their fifth, not to mention their first, birthdays. Hunger, beatings, and brutal backbreaking work so their husband could live a freer existence because that is the way it has always been.

There are many quotable parts of this book, but what remains with me is a simple fact that “change does not happen until someone says no”. They are simple words, but words strung together have a deeper meaning. This is a nightstand book, a book that should be picked up and reread from time to time so we don’t forget.