Finished: Since We Fell (Lehane) Well, this was quite a page-turner! I've never read a Dennis Lehane book, but I might have to read another. I'm just too tired to do an actual recap, so I will be lazy and put below what other sites have said about the book. Besides, there were so many twists and turns and tangents, that it would take me forever to write! I kind of wouldn't mind seeing a sequel with the two main characters, Rachel and Brian, but doubt that's in the works. ok, so here's Amazon's write up:

Since We Fell follows Rachel Childs, a former journalist who, after an on-air mental breakdown, now lives as a virtual shut-in. In all other respects, however, she enjoys an ideal life with an ideal husband. Until a chance encounter on a rainy afternoon causes that ideal life to fray. As does Rachel’s marriage. As does Rachel herself. Sucked into a conspiracy thick with deception, violence, and possibly madness, Rachel must find the strength within herself to conquer unimaginable fears and mind-altering truths. By turns heart- breaking, suspenseful, romantic, and sophisticated, Since We Fell is a novel of profound psychological insight and tension. It is Dennis Lehane at his very best.

Oooo this New York Times recap goes into good detail. It IS kind of weird how the first part of the book is about Rachel's despair and search for her father, and then the second part of the book kicks into high gear with all the shenanigans. I do agree with the last sentence...after all she goes through with her search for her father, dealing with her childhood with her impossible mother, facing her agoraphobia, a failed first marriage, an earth-shattering experience reporting in post-earthquake Haiti, and the "interesting" relationship with her second husband, and love of her life, Rachel DOES finally learn to depend on herself!

New York Times: “Since We Fell” is the first Dennis Lehane novel written from a woman’s point of view. She’s a tough character, but it’s a miracle that she can get out of bed in the morning. Rachel Childs was raised by Elizabeth Childs, Ph.D., a single mother, a self-help celebrity author who damaged her daughter in every way she could think of — and a woman with a fertile imagination. Elizabeth made a sadistic, narcissistic game out of not letting Rachel know the identity of her father.

Rachel grew up thinking of life as “a series of detachments,” which is a way of describing Lehane’s atypical “Since We Fell,” too. The novel begins with a string of joltingly different episodes from an author whose usual style is much more propulsively linear. The sequences are all parts of Rachel’s life, but that doesn’t initially glue them together; she is struggling to figure out who she is, and so are we. Only over time does the larger trajectory of “Since We Fell” become clear. 

It all makes much more sense in retrospect than it does as the book’s first chapters unfold. Here are some of its early developments: Rachel devotes herself to solving the mystery of her father. It’s complicated, and it leads the book into such unlikely areas as Luminism, the 19th-century style of American landscape painting. Lehane (“Mystic River,” “Gone, Baby, Gone”) has said that he can’t connect with white male working-class crime stories any more. Even so, this is a long way from home.The father question is answered, and not in ways likely to improve Rachel’s mental state. She’s the daughter of a man whose smile “wasn’t an invitation, it was a moat,” who brings to mind “the profligate poet, the drug-addled painter-genius, the musician who’d die in a car crash the day after he signed the big record contract.” So she fits right in with other tormented Lehane characters, who have two strikes against them before they even set foot on the field.

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Strong and smart as she is, Rachel needs a man in her life. She marries a producer named Sebastian, who works at the Boston TV station where she is a rising star. He’s irritable when Rachel endangers her career, since he cares mostly about her status. She goes to cover the Haitian earthquake and can’t be chirpy enough to satisfy her bosses. “Our viewers need hope,” they tell her. “Haitians need water,” she replies. One on-air meltdown later, Rachel has been fired and is a public pariah.

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Already subject to panic attacks, which are exacerbated by the horrors she saw in Haiti, Rachel stays in her apartment for 18 months. Sebastian drops out of her life. And it leads to Rachel becoming reacquainted with Mr. Right, Brian Delacroix, who she’d known casually and now looks at with new interest. He is tall, dark and handsome, and he is the first lover who really wanted to help her. Rachel falls gratefully into his arms, and they are married.

Their marriage ushers in a string of wall-to-wall spoiler alerts. Suffice it to say that this second part of “Since We Fell” is sharply different from the first. Instead, it’s packed with signs that Lehane sold this story to the movies, which he did, in 2015, and that he loves the Hitchcock classics that prey on mistrust. Suddenly, he begins delivering nonstop suspense only loosely rooted in Rachel’s story and its foundations.

Like so many mystery authors who have been drawn into screenwriting, Lehane writes best when he’s thinking solely about a book. “World Gone By,” the elegiac 2015 novel that preceded this one, had a tragic grandeur that is never approached by this less credible, more action-oriented thriller. But “World Gone By” had none of the tricks, shocks, visual effects, mad coincidences and disguises that propel “Since We Fell.” And Lehane is no slouch at those, either. He remains one of the great, diabolical thriller kings who seems intimately acquainted with darkness and can make it seep from the page or screen. A line of dialogue like “Oh, ho, ho, my man, let’s not push me tonight,” delivered with brittle levity, carries more menace than any outright threat could.

Rachel works extremely well as the focus of the book. Lehane has always written wrenching female characters into his stories, and he has no trouble giving center stage to one. The question is never whether she will escape her past. We know she’s got the moxie to do it, but where is she headed? Her options narrow as the book becomes more crime-centric and throws her into life-or-death situations rather than contemplative ones. But she’s as much of a pragmatist as anyone Lehane ever dreamed up. She comes a long way through the twists and turns of “Since We Fell,” which takes its title from a love song about desperate dependency. By the end of it, she’s learned how to depend on herself.

Finished: The Silent Corner (Koontz) Not as big of a page-turner as other Dean Koontz books I've read, but still good, and it comes with a sequel. It's the story of Jane Hawk, a grieving FBI agent whose husband has uncharacteristically committed suicide. Jane refuses to believe that Nick would have killed himself, but when she starts exploring they "whys", her life is threatened by very powerful people, as well as the life of her precious five year old son, Travis. Jane quickly sells her house, quits the FBI, stashes her son, not with known family, but with obscure friends, and goes about investigating further what caused not only her own husband to take his life, but several other people as well. Jane Hawk is tough, smart, wary and ruthless when it comes to finding her answers, and makes some unlikely allies along the way who are instrumental in helping her. She uncovers a corrupt group comprised of rich men, many high level, some even in her own department, who are using a super secret prostitute compound where the beautiful women have actually had something inserted into their brains to make them forget about their past, and be completely docile and compliant. Even the security guards have been treated as well, and don't ever "see" the members as they come and go. They are programmed only to respond to what names they hear called out by the computer announcing members. It goes even deeper as Jane discovers the creator of the implant is a scientist who also designed an algorithm on a computer to identify people who are a possible danger to their program, and to mark them for elimination by receiving the implants programmed to commit suicide. It's a bit of a convoluted plot, and just not quite as compelling as other Koontz books I've read. I was not tempted to sit there and read until I was finished while on vacation, or even when I got home. The book ends with Jane and her main ally breaking into the compound of the scientist and forcing him to give them all of his data AND his serums he has already created. Meanwhile, Jane's old FBI boss and mentor, who she was very close to in the past, is implanted and instructed to find Jane and kill her!! Sadly, Jane is forced to kill him first, recognizing he's been injected and knowing there is no cure for his deteriorating condition. So, at the end of the book, Jane has defeated the scientist, but has just scraped the surface of going after all the rich and powerful men in the group. She manages a quick visit to her son while he's sleeping, so he doesn't get his hopes up that she's home for good, and the book ends. I believe Jane Hawk's story continues in the sequel The Whispering Room.

Finished: Small Great Things (Picoult) A very good book that tackles the social inequity of an African American labor and delivery nurse, with over twenty years of experience, who is accused of letting a Caucasian newborn die because she has been instructed by her supervisor not to touch the baby, per the request of the white supremacist parents. Whew, that's a mouthful, and the book is an eyeful. Ruth Jefferson, a single mother to a very intelligent teenage boy, has worked hard to provide for her son since the death of his father who served our county. Ruth is determined that her son, Edison, will have all the educational advantages of his white peers. Ruth has been a practicing labor and delivery nurse at New Haven's Mercy West hospital for over twenty years..the small hospital's only African American labor and delivery nurse. She has held her tongue as a much younger and less experienced nurse was given the job as supervisor; she has turned the other cheek when people have raised their eyebrows to see that she lives in an upper class, white neighborhood; and she's kept her cool when followed through stores by salespeople who want to "keep an eye on her". When Ruth begins her shift one morning, taking over for the nurse who was with a couple when their baby was born, her life changes in ways she never expected. As Ruth goes in to assess the newborn baby boy, his parents, Turk and Brittany, cringe and are very reluctant to let her touch him. Ruth writes it off as new parent nervousness, but soon finds out differently. Within an hour, a request has been made by the parents that Ruth be reassigned and never allowed to touch their infant again! Ruth is incredulous when she reads the post it note that her supervisor pins in the chart "Infant Not To Be Touched By Any African American Nurses". Of course, since she's the only one of those, Ruth is terribly offended. She let's her disdain for the unfair treatment be known, and then she goes home for the day. Upon working a double shift the next day, Ruth is in the nursery caring for another infant when Turk and Brittany's baby, Davis, is brought in after his circumcision. Sleeping soundly due to his sedation, the new nurse asks if Ruth will look after him because she is suddenly called to the operating room for an emergency C-section. The new nurse says she'll be back in twenty minutes if Ruth will just keep an eye out on little Davis. Of course, Ruth looks over at Davis when she is alone with him and notices that he's not breathing and turning blue. She has a momentary moment of hesitation as she wonders if she SHOULD touch him to help him, and then she does just that. She jiggles his feet, a common tactic to get newborns to start breathing again, and she rubs his chest. Just then she hears her supervisor coming in from the same emergency C-section and she swaddles Davis just in time for it to appear to the supervisor that Ruth has done nothing at all to help the baby. Code blue is called and all kinds of doctors and nurses rush in. Ruth begins infant CPR on orders from the pediatrician, and after several horrific minutes of trying to resuscitate the baby, he is pronounced dead. Unknowingly to all the medical personnel, the parents have been standing in the doorway and witness the horror. Too many details in the book to recap it all, but the bottom line is that the parents accuse the n-word of having it out for them and purposely killing their son. :-( Ruth is arrested and goes to trial. Her lawyer, Kennedy McQuarrie, is one who is appointed since Ruth can't afford an attorney. Kennedy is a young, white, smart-as-a-whip attorney, who is also a young mother, who has never been allowed to take a murder case for the public defender's office yet. After meeting Ruth, she begs to be given the case, and her boss agrees. Kennedy considers herself completely unprejudiced, but after spending a day with Ruth once she's out on bail, Ruth manages to make the point that even though she's worked hard to put herself and her son in a better environment, she is still treated like a lesser being. Kennedy and Ruth develop quite the friendship, though with its ups and downs, as the pre-trial and then the trial gets going. Ruth also struggles with Edison as he suddenly begins skipping school and putting his potential college career in jeopardy. We also read the view point of Turk, as we learn the history of how he became a white supremacist, how he met the "leader" of his group's daughter, Brittany, and married her with her father's blessing. Brittany is one little bad-ass white supremacist herself, and has no problem with the idea of just running over a black person if need be. They are truly awful people. We follow them all as the trial proceeds and we wonder whether Kennedy will really be able to get Ruth acquitted, especially after Ruth insists on taking the stand and explaining to the jury how it feels to be a black woman in a white person's world...something Kennedy is vehemently against her doing. Anyway, in the end, the jury is hung, but the judge, who Kennedy has had two losses with, who really doesn't like Kennedy, rather than declaring a mistrial and putting everyone through the whole ordeal again, he acquits Ruth. He states that he was able to sees clearly that she was not at fault. Basically the big defense argument was that the baby had a metabolic condition that was life-threatening, but that, because he was born near the weekend, was not relayed to the doctors by the lab after his little routine heel stick, until it was too late. If they'd been notified sooner, they would never have had him fast before the circumcision due to his condition, and would have had an intravenous sugar solution flowing through his little body. In other words, there wasn't much that could have been done to save little Davis. The judge apparently has the right to make the decision whether or not to interpret the testimony himself and acquit or call for a re-trial. He thankfully acquits!  The kicker at the end of the book is this....when Kennedy is putting away her notes on the case, she takes a last look at Davis' lab results and realizes there's something else written on the back that none of them even looked at. They all stopped when they got to his metabolic condition and went with that. It turns out that Davis was a sickle cell carrier, which is very rare in Caucasian babies, but very prevalent in African American babies. Kennedy does a little digging and finds out that Brittany's father, who has raised her by himself, always saying that her mother cheated on him and left, had in reality had Brittany with a black woman!!! When confronted with the facts, the father, this supreme being of the white supremacy movement, doesn't deny it and Brittany and Turk both go into a tailspin. Brittany is half black!! Brittany, unable to handle the thought of one drop of black blood in her body, kills herself. Turk, realizing how much he loves Brittany no matter what, begins to question everything he's been taught his whole life. He realizes that if his baby were alive he would be part black, and that would be ok with him as long as his baby was alive. Turk completely turns his life around, remarries a couple of years later, and has a little girl. He spends his time going on the lecture circuit to talk against white supremacy and racism...the very ideals he was brought up with that began the entire ordeal with Ruth. Edison goes on the graduate from Yale, and Ruth furthers her degree, becomes a nurse practitioner and opens her own clinic with money that she most likely won from the hospital when Kennedy filed a wrongful termination suit against them. A very good book that really does make you step back and see that still in this day and age, we have so very far to go in terms of us all becoming truly color blind.