THE LIGHT BETWEEN THE PINES, even Kirkus likes it!

THE LIGHT BETWEEN THE PINES
WARREN READ
Ig Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In the stillness of a pine grove, a wrecked car tells a story no one wants to hear.

Red Miller has lived long enough to know when someone is lying, especially his daughter, Gina. On an afternoon in early fall of 1979, Red gives Gina’s boyfriend money he knows he won’t see again, then watches his daughter slip further away, wondering where it all went wrong. Five years later, a call from an Idaho deputy changes everything: Gina has vanished after a fatal car crash, and Red has a grandson he’s never met. Haunted by his failures and the memory of a wife lost too soon, Red travels to a small Idaho town in search of answers. But what he finds is more than a mystery; it’s a reckoning-of love misspent, of the fragile ties that bind us, and of the strange, stubborn hope that still lingers in the quiet spaces between regret and redemption.

The Light Between the Pines is a powerful, slow-burning portrait of family and fallout, told with the sparse beauty and emotional precision of Kent Haruf’s Plainsong and Richard Ford’s Wildlife.

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My Review: A grandparent who goes into battle for a dead child's child is a story that resonates with old-man me. By far my favorite iteration of it is Let Him Go by Larry Watson. This one's a close second.

Red Miller has the relatively common parenting experience of looking at a child's mate choice and thinking, "did I do *that* crappy a job?" Another not-uncommon event is the child whose own child is hidden from the parent for complicated emotional reasons, or uncomplicated practical ones; there are a million ways a family can fall apart, and Red's living through one or two...if the Idaho deputy on the other end of the phone telling him about his daughter's involvement in a fatal accident and subsequent disappearance, he's feeling like there's a few of her steps down the road of irresponsibility that he is due to catch up on.

Seeing everything unravel is likely a very common experience among the older people, no matter how hard one works there's often enough something that comes along to muck it all up. His wife's early death, his subsequent descent into private grief, his daughter's youthful rebellion, all leading to this moment...well, the details are likely different but you probably know these emotional blows from having endured them.

Now, of course, he has to head east into territory he doesn't know, isn't excited to get to know, and meet people he could do without ever having known existed to see what the hell he has to do to get this mess cleaned up, see if he can actually find a future with his family after losing the heart of it, losing his heart, and making every last mistake he could for the past five years right again.

The quiet, compact...just over 250pp...story is never mired down in the gloopy goofy introspection that can get so tiring when what you want to read is a story not a mea-maxima-culpa. Instead we see the life that Red Miller wants is not the one he has because he's doing a lot of work in the present to create a different one. It's so refreshing; it shows Author Read really took on board the lessons of writing his first book, The Lyncher in Me, about his appalling family secret. It's best to set the scene, say the least possible number of words, and let we-the-reader think it over and decide what we're going to do with it all.

Well applied, that lesson; it's made a terrific story into a pleasure to read.

EVER SINCE WE SMALL, second braided-stories novel in Standard English/T&T Kriol mixed from Mohammed

EVER SINCE WE SMALL
CELESTE MOHAMMED
Ig Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: An intricately woven tapestry of stories where survival, resilience and self-discovery are passed down through several generations of an Indo-Trinidadian family, Ever Since We Small is a sweeping epic that takes us from the days of the British Raj in India to multicultural modern Trinidad.

Written in a blend of Standard English and several flavors of Trinidad kriol, Ever Since We Small follows the bloodline of a young woman, Jayanti, following her decision to become a girmitiya, an indentured laborer in the Caribbean. The generational after-effects of this decision are seen in the lives of Jayanti's grandson, Lall, who seeks to escape the rural village where he was born, but instead becomes seduced and corrupted by urban life, and sis son, Shiva, who is forced to take a child-bride, Salma, but never recovers from the guilt. Heartache then follows for their three children, who must each find a way to accept and yet move past their parents' failed example.

Along the journey of these ten interconnected stories, the alchemy necessary to turn the family's inheritance of pain into a "generation of gold" requires intervention by the living and dead, the "real" and the mythical, the mundane and the magical, the secular and the sacred.

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My Review: In January 2024 I reviewed Pleasantview, the first braided-stories collection from the author. Like this work, it used Standard English interspersed with Trinidad and Tobago's kriols, as that's how the colonizers' language is used in that social setting. Each tongue has its place, each comes into play at certain conversational inflection points.

That will be a problem for some readers; I batten on it. It feels less like I'm reading a novel than listening in on life as the characters are living it. That makes the read feel more immediate, more as though it is happening not being reported after it's over. Quite a feat for a book!

I'll modify the Bryce Method of reporting on each story because the stories are more like ten chapters than ten self-contained, completely satisfying narratives. Again, this is to me a feature not a bug; but for others it might feel like a deal-breaker...or
I'll modify the Bryce Method of reporting on each story because the stories are more like ten chapters than ten self-contained, completely satisfying narratives. Again, this is to me a feature not a bug; but for others it might feel like a deal-breaker...or -maker for some.

THEN 1899-2000
The Legend of Jayanti treats the matter of the ancestral matriarch with the plainspoken matter-of-factness it does not deserve...this is drama enough to sustain a three-act opera! In the story, a young widow declines to satisfy her husband's family honor by committing sati, which you can look up yourselves. She instead leaves the Raj for indenture in the colony of Trinidad and Tobago. On the trip she meets and marries a man who fathers the line of descendants we're following here. 5*

Outsiders follows Shiva, their great-grandson, as he incurs a supernatural curse. He accidentally drowns a "buck" and is doomed from then on.

Godfrey's Revenge sees Shiva reap the terrible price of his carelessness. He and his child bride, Salma, are destitute; he's maimed; and he's racked with guilt over his role in the victimization of Salma. Doesn't have the wherewithal to refuse, but guilt is its own punishment.

Sundar Larki brutally finishes Shiva's curse for his crime against the buck. Here he commits more horrifying acts, truly repugnant ones that are explained but not excused by his being under a curse. The three Shiva stories as a unit merit 5*

NOW 2000-2017
The Visitation treats Shiva and Salma's daughter Abby's anxiety about her dark skin as she prepares to meet her white American boyfriend in the flesh for the first time. It's a gut-punch. Are women only to be judged by their attractiveness to men? Are darker-skinned people inherently less attractive because the Western mass media landscape promotes whiteness as The Standard? Are white men, of necessity, exoticizing darker-skinned women, and is this inherently victimization? None of these are explicitly asked, but they are very much there in the narrative. Answers...well...the questions matter far more. 5*

The title story, Terre Brulée,Goat-Mouth, Star Girl, and The Gospel According to Boisey, all have their own delights. None merited less than four stars, which is why the collection as a whole gets almost all five stars. I encourage all y'all to get on this bandwagon now, preorder one...they'll send a Kindle sample to you if you want to try the waters...but please get this marvelous exploration of the way humans relate to Others, and how deeply that shapes every conversation we have, knowingly or unknowingly.

Celeste Mohammed helps us think through the settler-colonial mindset by showing us in these lives the many ways it simply replicates itself, a malign meme of judgment that relentlessly pushes some down so others can stand on their backs.

Strongly, strongly recommended.

A COMPLETE FICTION, even the title has sneaky, hidden levels!

A COMPLETE FICTION
R.L. MAIZES
Ig Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: With little evidence, would-be author P.J. Larkin serves a "nibble" on the trendy new social-media app Crave, accusing editor George Dunn of stealing the novel she submitted to him for publication. The nibble shoots to the top of the site's Popular Menu Items and before you can say "unpaid literary labor," George is embroiled in a scandal, his job and book deal in jeopardy. P.J.’s novel is snapped up amid the publicity, but has she revealed secrets belonging to her sister, Mia, in the book? Some diners on Crave think so and now it’s P.J.’s turn to feel the public’s scorn.

Told in the humorous vein of Where'd You Go, Bernadette?, A COMPLETE FICTION examines the very serious questions of who has a right to tell a story, and has cancel culture gone too far in our social media-drenched world.

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My Review: Bitterly funny takedown/send-up of the corrosive world-view promoted by the algorithms of "engagement" that tech scum have foisted on social media users.

A writer manquée takes umbrage at a writer-editor (dangerous combination) publishing a novel that she feels is closely based on her own rejected novel. She stirs up a firestorm of outrage by accusing the male editor of plagiarism. The entire little world of this (invented; also brilliant, someone get on developing this!) app erupts! The consequences are multivarious, and serious, for all concerned.

Using social media is something most of us do, in 2025 in the US anyway. We're increasingly dependent on it. Without it, stuck in a place I can't physically leave with any ease or comfort, I'd go insane from boredom. Yet I see frequent idiocy plagues run rife on many platforms, as well as the darker side of the world of these apps that spy on us via "cookies" and increasingly via "AI" moderation. It's a world run by algorithms. These do not, in and of themselves, present a problem; it's the scum that decide how the algorithms should be written that present an existential threat to civil discourse.

In the publishing industry, plagiarism accusations are taken very seriously. It's shocking to me that more of the opposition to "AI"'s rise isn't centered very publicly, very loudly, and outside industry circles around the reality that it's trained on plagiarized material. Nonetheless, the use of this colossal, often career-blemishing accusation as the basis of this tale is heartening. It is not a "yes he did it" or a "she made this accusation in bad faith" story. It really delves into the complicated reality of emotional reality not meshing with consensus reality. It offers a chance to examine how deeply the roots of creativity entwine with personal identity. How very toxic anything can become when it attacks, as you see it, the roots of your identity. How deeply unwise, how destructive, how of necessity unfair, it is for outsiders to take sides and form mobs about things they can't know in detail sufficient to warrant such partisanship.

In this way, Author Maizes skewers our cultural moment's absence of perspective. She offers us alternating perspectives. She makes each writer take a turn in her narrative hot seat because "nobody's perfect" isn't a nostrum for defusing conflict by accident. In the end, however, I was enlightened by this technique more than I was drawn to invest in the characters by it. I had no sympathy for PJ and fairly little for George at any given moment, yet their imbroglio compelled my attention throughout the read.

So while I can't offer a full fifth star, I can say I was eager to come back to the read every time I had to put it down, and had the fun I badly needed while reading this pretty scathing story. No one, especially not the reader, comes out of this fight unscarred.

Very much a recommended read.

THE HIDDEN ISLAND, essay collections by exiled Cuban journalist

THE HIDDEN ISLAND
ABRAHAM JIMÉNEZ ENOA (introduction by Jon Lee Anderson; tr. Lily Meyer)
Ig Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$19.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The work of one of the most powerful new voices in independent Cuban journalism, The Hidden Island is a searing portrait of life in contemporary Cuba, where the struggles of ordinary citizens collide with the brutal repression of the government.

In this powerful collection of essays, we encounter a memorable and diverse cast of regular Cubans who are trying to survive with few resources and little hope—including a female boxer in a country that has long outlawed women's boxing, a boy who collects money for the country's underground lottery, a male gigolo, and the residents of a neighborhood that is so poor that the government doesn't officially recognize its existence. We also meet the homeless, and vendors who eke out a meager living by selling fruit and vegetables, scraping by in a former socialist paradise.

Jiménez Enoa juxtaposes these ordinary lives against the repressive tactics of the government, or "regime." He describes his “walks” around Villa Marista, the headquarters of the secret police, and the spies, confidantes, informers and regime sympathizers who crush anyone who questions the official narrative, which forces many independent journalists into exile. In a final self-portrait in the book about his own exile, Jiménez Enoa writes that, “to escape from Cuba is to fall into the world, to realize that Cuba is an island that has been hijacked by a political system which ensures that the country remains locked inside the twentieth century.”

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My Review: Essays by journalists, especially ones that don't get a gentle massaging to flow into each other, can make for somewhat choppy, repetitive reading. Founder of online Cuban resistance magazine, El Estornudo, Author Jiménez Enoa highlights "...fresh perspectives on challenges for independent journalists and reporting on issues rarely covered by {Cuban} state media, including racism in Cuba. In 2020, state security officers strip-searched and handcuffed Jiménez Enoa, interrogated him for five hours, and threatened him and his family over his writings about life in Cuba in his {now-defunct} Washington Post column. The persistent harassment and censorship forced Jiménez to flee to Spain in 2021, where he is currently living in exile."

All that potted biographical information (from Ig Publishing's website) should tell you that this is a book by a man who's living by his principles, is in fact doing the very thing authoritarians hate the most: Talking about them factually, therefore in unflattering terms. As expected, the terms change little; the essays, taken in large doses, thus become repetitive. Space them out, intersperse them with jolly Wodehouse stories or something in that vein.

Make no mistake that Cuba is an authoritarian state; it always was. Its slide into poverty came when the Soviet Union crashed out and Russia, as the successor state, opted not to resume propping up the Cuban economy. Things do not go well for former client states that suddenly lose the support of their masters. There was no plan for a way to transition into a new economic model, so misery resulted, as always when one system collapses and no new ideas are allowed to arise.

Author Jiménez Enoa dared to point this out publicly. The regime did not like having its failures openly discussed and used bullying and intimidation to silence him. That website I've linked to above is his riposte. Not silenced, but rather energized, motivated to say his piece on the biggest stage he could find.

I wonder how many more times this game of repression and rebellion will need to be played out before the real message gets through to the powerful: What you're doing is wrong, and we all know it and see it. You are not going to fool anyone by acting the bully.

All the essays Jiménez Enoa has written about the Cubans he's met...especially the sex-worker guy, who reminds me of John Kilo...show how resilient people are, how many ways they find to keep their lives moving and thriving.

Good people are so often cursed by bad governments, aren't they.

DOMESTIC DARKNESS An Insider's Account of the January 6th Insurrection, and the Future of Right-Wing Extremism, URGENT READING!

DOMESTIC DARKNESS: An Insider's Account of the January 6th Insurrection, and the Future of Right-Wing Extremism
JULIE FARNAM
Ig Publishing
$27.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: After being named Assistant Director of Intelligence for the Capitol Police just days before the 2020 election, Julie Farnam warned its leadership of the upcoming insurrection, sharing that “Congress itself is the target on the 6th.” Tragically, her warnings were ignored.

Domestic Darkness takes us inside the explosive events of January 6, 2021, revealing how the Capitol Police disregarded intelligence about the right-wing extremists who would seize the capitol on that fateful day. In addition to offering a harrowing view of what it was like on the ground, watching the violence unfold and knowing it could have been prevented, Domestic Darkness also examines the specific groups and ideologies, such as the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, QAnon, and white supremacists, who were central to the events of January 6th and who, emboldened by Trump and other right-wing leaders, continue to be a threat to our democracy.

The book will also explore what happened within the Capitol Police in the wake of the insurrection, and how to address future dangers from domestic terrorism. With the 2024 presidential election just around the corner, we need to look at the lessons January 6th taught us to ensure something like that never happens again.

Julie Farnam served as the Assistant and then Acting Director of Intelligence for the United States Capitol Police during one of the most tumultuous periods in this country’s history. During her time there, she oversaw the identification and vetting of nearly 20,000 threats against members of Congress, most of which were made by U.S. citizens who adhered to extremist ideologies.

Prior to joining the Capitol Police, Farnam served with the Department of Homeland Security for over fifteen years.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Oh gawd, I hear y’all thinking, he’s off again, ranting about the MAGATs and their scum of a leader.

Yep. Sit down and eat your literary spinach. This is Important.

I will avoid the book report part of the read because 1. I hate doing it, b. I want to, iii. the details that Author Farnam presents made me sick to my stomach to read. That US citizens could be radicalized in this vile, scumbaggy way is a shock to my sensibilities, though in no way a surprise. I did, after all, grow up in Texas.

What I *will* discuss is the scariest, most infuriating bit of the story (to this reader, anyway)...the misogyny and unaccountability of the US Capitol Police. They dismissed a fifteen-year intelligence professional's substantiated warnings because she is a woman...they didn't have to give information to any other agencies because the Legislative Branch for whom they work is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act...they had the usual Police Department attitude towards those outside of mild contempt and utter disrespect. This is someone who came from the inside, and they treated her like she was a tourist who happened to find an unoccupied desk.

Why I want you to read it is simple: Author Farnam names names. There were those inside the US Capitol that bad, horrifying January day in 2021 who very carefully did nothing. She knows who, and makes a decent case for why. This is, by itself, worth the cost of the book. The manner in which the author makes her case for what to do with that information is a model of clarity and convincing authority. Her commonsensical call for this very important law enforcement agency to work collegially with other parts of the huge security apparatus the US is hagridden by seems modest enough, given the events of January 6, 2021. Her additional, very well founded calls for the US law enforcement establishment to expand its definitions of, and penalties for, terrorism of domestic origin are music to my cop unfriendly ears. This is a major problem and it will not go away if we just ignore it.

One of the most frustrating bits of the read was the realization that Author Farnam handed her critics a big cudgel to bludgeon her with: She had an intimate relationship with a man inside the department who, it later transpired, was feeding insider knowledge to the insurrectionists. This is in the end, however, one of the most important pluses of the read. She is upfront about it, she makes no bones about his fate of being Federally indicted for his role being just and proper, and thus assures us...possibly convinces those on the MAGAt side, too...that she speaks with real, sincere awareness of the many facets of the problems she delineates and offers solutions for.

There is no louder voice than the one from inside the house. This book amplifies that voice for us all to hear...and I very much hope heed as well.

PLEASANTVIEW, multiple prize-winning Trinidadian story-novel

PLEASANTVIEW: A Novel in Stories
CELESTE MOHAMMED
Ig Publishing
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

THE 2022 OCM BOCAS PRIZE FICTION WINNER!

2022 FIRECRACKER AWARD for FICTION WINNER!

The Publisher Says: Coconut trees. Carnival. Rum and coke. To many outsiders, these idyllic images represent the supposed easy life in Caribbean nations such as Trinidad and Tobago. However, the reality is far different for those who live there—a society where poverty and patriarchy savagely rule, and where love and revenge often go hand in hand.

Written in a combination of English and Trinidad Creole, Pleasantview reveals the dark side of the Caribbean dream. In this novel-in-stories about a fictional town in Trinidad, we meet a political candidate who sets out to slaughter endangered turtles for fun, while his rival candidate beats his “outside-woman,” so badly she ends up losing their baby. On the night of a political rally, the abused woman exacts a very public revenge, the trajectory of which echoes through Pleasantview, ending with one boy introducing another boy to a gun and to an ideology which will help him aim the weapon.

Merging the beauty and brutality of Trinidadian culture evoked by writers such as Ingrid Persaud and Claire Adam with the linguistic experimentation of Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings, Pleasantview is a landmark work from an important new voice in international literary fiction.

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My Review: PLEASANTVIEW is a mixed-idiom collection of Trinidadian fictions that's come in for a heaping helping of praise and prizes...albeit from very literary sources...was my next foray (after If I Survive You) into Caribbean-inflected English-language storytelling. What a dramatic difference between the two projects.

Where Escoffery's Booker-nominated Jamaican-American work was firmly set in the US, this delightful braid of nine stories is emphatically not about, for, or inclusive of US sensibilities. For this reader, that is a feature not a bug. While Author Mohammed does maintain Standard English spellings throughout the book, her inflections and emphases are decidedly NOT Standard English. Her characters would likely struggle to speak Standard English. Those of us without our life-experience being inclusive of other forms of English will likely have to make an effort to get into the flow of this idiom. It is always a good idea for everyone to read in and about areas that are not centering our own unique experiences. This task is made easier, and harder, when reading English that is not the same as the English most of my readers speak. The effort one puts in to see this magnificent, flexible tool of a language used in unfamiliar ways is a big benefit to those who make it. We're seeing our words and our understanding of them used and applied to think thoughts we could never come up with. Isn't that the entire point of reading fiction? Stretch your horizons a bit more with every read.

I am sure you're expecting that I will use the Bryce Method of offering a story-by-story opinion of each piece. Well, you lose this time. The nine stories are:

Prologue: The Dragon's Mouth (Bocas del Dragón)
Endangered Species
White Envelope
The Ides of March
Home
Loosed
Six Months
Santimanitay
Epilogue: Kings of the Earth

I've chosen not to review them individually this time because that is just not the point of this exercise; no one story here is exciseable from its context to present on its own as a really satisfying story. Contrast this with the above-referenced If I Survive You, whose stories are satisfying as stories, if slightly less so as a braid; but they weren't written to be one, so that's not shade. The difference is in expectations. Interconnected stories share a lot of themes, or characters, or settings; braided stories share all of those things and operate towards one storytelling goal, as novels do, though without a novel's unity of voice and/or purpose.

PLEASANTVIEW succeeds as a braid of stories, a polyvocal novel, in a way that a more ordinary novelistic structure would strain to match. It succeeds on its own terms, and offers us as readers access to a very different way of being in the world. The best kind of fiction, then, is what this is.

HEAVEN, HELL AND PARADISE LOST, new in the Bookmarked series of lit-crit titles

HEAVEN, HELL AND PARADISE LOST
ED SIMON
Ig Publishing
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating:

The Publisher Says: A poet who crafted the greatest character in literary history with his engaging anti-hero of Satan, John Milton connected personal experience with the breadth of cosmic epic. His Paradise Lost is a touchstone of English literature.

In the latest entry in Ig's celebrated Bookmarked series, author Ed Simon considers Paradise Lost within the scope of his own alcoholism and recovery, the collapse of higher education, the imbecility of the canon wars, the piquant joys of labyrinthine sentences, and the exquisite attractions of Lucifer. Milton is easy to respect and easier to fear, but with the guidance of Simon, Milton becomes easiest of all to love.

Paradise Lost may have generated thousands of works of criticism over the centuries, but none of them are like this.

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My Review:

PUTIN'S TROLLS: On the Frontlines of Russia's Information War Against the World & FREEZING ORDER: : A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath

FREEZING ORDER: : A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath
BILL BROWDER
Simon & Schuster
$28.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Following his explosive New York Times bestseller Red Notice, Bill Browder returns with another gripping thriller chronicling how he became Vladimir Putin’s number one enemy by exposing Putin’s campaign to steal and launder hundreds of billions of dollars and kill anyone who stands in his way.

When Bill Browder’s young Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was beaten to death in a Moscow jail, Browder made it his life’s mission to go after his killers and make sure they faced justice. The first step of that mission was to uncover who was behind the $230 million tax refund scheme that Magnitsky was killed over. As Browder and his team tracked the money as it flowed out of Russia through the Baltics and Cyprus and on to Western Europe and the Americas, they were shocked to discover that Vladimir Putin himself was a beneficiary of the crime.

As law enforcement agencies began freezing the money, Putin retaliated. He and his cronies set up honey traps, hired process servers to chase Browder through cities, murdered more of his Russian allies, and enlisted some of the top lawyers and politicians in America to bring him down. Putin will stop at nothing to protect his money. As Freezing Order reveals, it was Browder’s campaign to expose Putin’s corruption that prompted Russia’s intervention in the 2016 US presidential election.

At once a financial caper, an international adventure, and a passionate plea for justice, Freezing Order is a stirring morality tale about how one man can take on one of the most ruthless villains in the world—and win.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY. USE THEIR SERVICES! WE NEED THEM AND THEY NEED US TO SURVIVE.

My Review: In the pantheon of moral crusaders, Bill Browder's the least likely figure I've found to date. He's on a personal and quixotic quest to shut down Putin's money-laundering pipeline to the Western banks who are hiding (it transpires as a result of investigations tied to Browder's own) about a trillion dollars...that is $1 000 000 000 000...for him and his kleptocratic cronies.

And you wonder why the Ukrainian war is still going on...what better way to distract the West and provide his own people with a Cause, Russianness or Russification call it what you will, to rally behind him to fight!

There are laws in numerous Western countries, called collectively "Magnitsky laws," that trace their passage to Browder's jihad against Putin for the crime of ordering the death (in a very nasty way) of Russian clean-government activist and Browder's Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky. These financial-crimes laws empower governments to freeze assets owned by people or entities not based in the country doing the freezing's legal jurisdiction.

You can see this would cause someone with a trillion...a trillion!...stolen dollars some little anxiety. It's led to many murders and attempted murders. It's been clearly documented (the book has astoundingly detailed source material citations). It's led to many acts of cybercrime and harassment (see review below) against those trying to stop the actual stealing and killing.

In the end, I am not so much glad that I read this book as I am grateful to it, and to Author Browder, for showing me that people who live in a principled way and advertise their intentions clearly can, and do, effect change for the better.

But honestly, I can not remember a time I've been this furious for this long at the existence and the power wielded by Putin supporters and apologists.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

PUTIN'S TROLLS: On the Frontlines of Russia's Information War Against the World
JESSIKKA ARO
Ig Publishing
$18.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In this courageous and unflinching book, award-winning journalist Jessikka Aro interweaves her own dramatic story as a target of Russian social media propaganda with accounts from many internationally known critics of the Kremlin, who share their own stories of being targeted by Russia’s multifaceted cyber warfare campaigns. As Jessikka began to investigate the impact of the Kremlin’s troll operations outside of Russia, she learned that private citizens in many other countries were being victimized by Kremlin-designed information campaigns. These actions were frequently conducted through an organized “troll factory” led by Russia’s security and intelligence apparatus, using unregulated social media platforms including YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Many of the disinformation campaigns were centered around the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine and subsequent occupation of the Crimean Peninsula.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

By the time of my forced departure, I had endured a two-and-a half-year campaign of death threats and libelous news articles. Online hate sites had brainwashed even some of my friends, turning them into enemies. These same sites portrayed me as a criminal, a liar, and mentally ill. Anonymous users suggested various methods of killing myself. One stranger proposed that I hang myself, while another recommended a 'Russian suicide': someone would push me under the metro, but in a manner staged as self-inflicted. A third individual wished that someone would put a “bullet in the whore’s head, Russian style.” Each time I opened my laptop, or glanced at my phone, I was forced to read snuff fantasies about me produced on an assembly-line scale. I was afraid that the psychological violence would at any minute spill out of the internet into the physical world...I had become the target of such vitriol for one reason only: I was a journalist investigating Russian social media information warfare.

It is chilling to read this book in close temporal connection to Bill Browder's unnervingly personal account of the strains and hazards he and his fellow anti-Putin activists underwent in their ongoing campaign against state-committed murders and actions designed to silence opposition to their kleptocratic agenda.

Jessikka Aro was awarded a 2019 International Women of Courage Award by the US State Department. This was rescinded by the administration then in power...could this be because the Russian asset "leading" it was not about to let his friend Little Vladdy Pu-Pu be discommoded by recognition of his thuggishness getting praise from our government? We may never know. Our grandchildren might.

It's enough to gag a maggot.

Anyway, I didn't start this read calm, cool, and collected, but outraged and indignant. None of those emotional realities calmed under the influence of Author Aro's story. It's as infuriating as you can possibly imagine. Then multiply by ten thousand...read Browder's book, too. These are two people, individuals, trying to hold a world "leader" accountable for civil and criminal violations of international law. They've been subjected to horrific amounts of stress and malicious targeted activity. They've never, ever stopped being at the forefront of the anti-Putin infowars, either.

All the respect in the world to both Author Aro and Author Browder. Standing up for years under the onslaught of the troll factory run by a state leader can not have been easy.

Book-A-Day meme #12: OUTERBOROUGH BLUES, a book that gives me a sense of place

OUTERBOROUGH BLUES
ANDREW COTTO
Ig Publishing (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$11.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Publisher Says: A beautiful young French girl walks into a bar, nervously lights a cigarette, and begs the bartender for help in finding her missing artist brother. In a moment of weakness, the bartender—a lone wolf named Caesar Stiles with a chip on his shoulder and a Sicilian family curse hanging over him—agrees. What follows is a stylish literary mystery set in Brooklyn on the dawn of gentrification.

While Caesar is initially trying to earn an honest living at the neighborhood watering hole, his world quickly unravels. In addition to being haunted by his past, including a brother who is intent on settling an old family score, Caesar is being hunted down by a mysterious nemesis known as The Orange Man. Adding to this combustible mix, Caesar is a white man living in a deep-rooted African American community with decidedly mixed feelings about his presence. In the course of his search for the French girl's missing brother, Caesar tumbles headlong into the shadowy depths of his newly adopted neighborhood, where he ultimately uncovers some of its most sinister secrets.

Taking place over the course of a single week, Outerborough Blues is a tightly paced and gritty urban noir saturated with the rough and tumble atmosphere of early 1990s Brooklyn.

My Review: The Doubleday UK meme, a book a day for July 2014, is the goad I'm using to get through my snit-based unwritten reviews. Today's prompt, number 12 in the series, is to discuss the book that gave you the best sense of place.

I moved to Manhattan in the 1980s, when it was still dirty, stinky, vice-ridden, and a boat-load of fun. Now it's clean and sanitary and there's a damn Disney store where there used to be hookers, drugs, and other useful things. Yuck.

Anyway, the same thing happened to Brooklyn about ten years later. This development is called "gentrification" and it's a double-edged sword. Nicer middle-class neighborhoods, no place for the poor to live...well, can't make an omelette....

Cotto's reluctant sleuth, Caesar, came to be in this country because of his great-grandmother:

My mother's mother came to this country in the usual way--she got on a boat with other immigrants and sailed from Sicily. She wasn't one of them, however: neither tired nor poor or part of any huddled mass. Instead, she traveled alone, with her money in one sock and a knife in the other, coming to the new world with an old world motive--to murder the man that had left her for America.

Such a fine, upstanding family! Things don't get a lot better in succeeding generations, and Caesar is running at top speed to get the blood-feuding nightmare of his family away behind him. So why does he agree to help the waifish French lassie, Colette, find her brother Jean-Baptist (sic)?

Because he wants some. Because the bar where he works is closing in on him. Because. He starts to search for the boy, an artist, and he gets himself tangled with some people who are where they are because it's where they want to be:

The lady in the liquor store sold me a fifth of whiskey and the landlord’s name without taking her eyes off the book she was reading.

It's clear that Cotto knows his folks well, and has their collective number. It's also clear that Caesar is walking streets deeply familiar to Cotto:

In the open sky above the hushed streets, the moon was a porcelain plate on a black table as I walked home. A breeze raised the collar of my jeans jacket as I sliced through the silvery silence, past unlit buildings and quivering trees and cars idle by the curb. The air felt like glass. I crossed empty corners under the mauve light of overhead lamps.

A more perfect, more poignant recreation of a fall night's walk in the seaport of New York I haven't read. Something that people who live here forget is that this is a seaside place, it was a port for centuries, it is spang doodle on the Atlantic Ocean, and that means the seaside is all around:

The full moon rose above the harbor as brightly lit tour boats skimmed along the black water, the brilliant cluster of lower Manhattan piled like stacks of coins from a treasure chest in the distance. Up the river, bridges arched across the wide water all the way up the east side, while the Brooklyn side was marked by soft, round lights, like a string of pearls.

I've stopped for that view any number of times in the past, and it never failed (or fails) to render me immobile with a blazing bolt of homecoming joy.

So, Caesar and his quest kick into high gear, several associates of his prove to be more than what they seem, and the more questions he asks about Jean-Baptist (sic) the more trouble he gets into. Beatings. Threats. Some sex. Memories blast our guy at every turn, all the crap he's wanted to escape from bubbles up as he searches the druggier parts of Brooklyn for Colette's foolish artist wannabe brother:

Gypsy cabs jostled and honked...Dollar vans lined the sidewalk and people piled in and out. As I walked down the slope, the buildings grew smaller and squalid. Trees vanished...and the heat picked up. Beyond the brick wall of the Navy Yard, the silver skyline of Manhattan glimmered in the distance like a mirage. The industrial remains of the flats were low and decrepit and mostly abandoned, though a few beeping forklifts unloaded trucks here and there. The storefronts were shuttered except for a bank busy with Orthodox Jews. The funk of a chicken processing plant contaminated the air.

I walked along the high brick wall that separated the Navy Yard from the street, frequently stepping over pulverized vials that sparkled like jewels on the sidewalk. There was no shade. I blinked away the dust.

Yep, been there. The Navy Yard, by the mid-1990s, was a cheap warehousing area, and the publisher whose office work I did had his books stored there. Not a super-nice place to walk at night. Fascinating history, and very different now, but this passage nails the sensation of blasting heat and stinking blight that permeated the place then.

More stuff about the search for Colette's brother turns up nasty secrets involving everyone Caesar knows, information that he uses to get a ghost from his own past laid to rest, and then *clap clap* the mystery's solved.

This made me mad. I don't like being taken on a ride and then dumped outside town, told I'm there, and left.

But you know what? Homecoming means more than how you traveled to get there. I liked the people I met on the trip. I liked the evocative landscape descriptons. I liked the sense of Caesar's working through so much about his past wasn't going to Make Shit Better, because landing him in more trouble later means more of this:

Past the projects, the land opened up and water came into view. The breeze carried rain and salt. Jetties and barrier walls supported the shore, which was stacked with crumbling brick warehouses. Out in the channel, the Statue of Liberty stood alone on her little island, her corroding flame held high in the air as the sun set over the industrial shoreline and skyways of New Jersey. Across the narrows, the bluffs of Staten Island wavered in the smoky light of dusk that turned the Verrazano into bronze. Faint light burnished water into busy with freighters and tug boats. A lone sail boat flitted in the distance. On the near shore, on a slip of water between a jetty and the land, a blood red barge bobbed on the tide.

And that, laddies and gentlewomen, is good.