The hidden and the hiding

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By Ande Jacobson

Tess Gerritsen’s fifth Rizzoli & Isles book, Vanish, was first released in 2005. Like the previous books in the series, this one follows seemingly separate storylines that intersect in disturbing ways, this time tackling human trafficking and abuses by the powerful.

Gerritsen jumps into the first arc of the main story without a prologue. The story opens in the past in Mexico narrated by Mila. Mila is a young Russian immigrant who thought she was going to a land of opportunity, but instead she finds herself in a nightmare. She’s trapped with several other young women in the desert in Mexico traveling north to the U.S. What she doesn’t know until she gets there is that she and her companions will be forced into a type of slavery that is far too common. Continue reading →

2024 – A Leap Year to remember

A Good Reed Review Commentary & Pubs ,

By Ande Jacobson

29 February only occurs in years divisible by 4, and for centennial years, only those divisible by 400. This little oddity has been written about in verse in that famous poem that has become a favorite mnemonic for remembering how many days each month contains:

Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November;
All the rest have thirty-one,
Excepting February alone,
And that has twenty-eight days clear
And twenty-nine in each leap year.

Growing up, leap years were exciting in a good way. We had the Olympics, both winter and summer in leap years. Because of a decision made by the Olympic committee in 1986, starting in 1994, the summer and winter games alternated in even years. That means that now only the summer games are held in leap years. In the summer of 2024, that extravaganza will take place in Paris, France.

U.S. presidential elections are held in leap years (barring the non-leap year centennials of course). While presidential elections always have the potential to be a little dicey, until relatively recently, the differences meant some potential policy shifts, but it didn’t really seem as if democracy itself was on the line. This leap year just like the last one, democracy’s fate is as yet undetermined. Continue reading →

Double take

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By Ande Jacobson

Tess Gerritsen’s fourth Rizzoli & Isles book, Body Double, came out in 2004. Like each previous book, we learn more of the main characters’ back story, this time that of Maura Isles. Readers already knew some of the basics from previous books including the fact that she was adopted, her history before moving to Boston, the fact that she was married, but they didn’t know much about how and why she’d been adopted or anything at all about her birth mother. This book changes all of that in a vivid and sometimes terrifying way. The story’s prologue starts out sweet, in the past, but it quickly turns into a nightmare that seems disconnected from the present until the pieces start coming together. In the present, there’s a murder of course, but this time there’s also a fair amount of misdirection from the start. Continue reading →

‘A Firehose of Falsehood’ is a must read!

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By Ande Jacobson

A brilliant new book entitled A Firehose of Falsehood: The Story of Disinformation written by Teri Kanefield and illustrated by Pat Dorian is finally available to all (as of 13 February 2024). You can buy your copy at your favorite brick and mortar bookseller, order it online, or borrow it from your local library. In August 2023, I had the opportunity to review a pre-publication copy of this stunning work, and it packed a punch. I more recently received a pre-publication hardcover copy of the book which I was eager to see. Although it was the same material as the digital version I previously reviewed, it was even more gripping in hardcover. This is a must-read book for everyone. A Firehose of Falsehood is a graphic novel, and as such, the illustrations are an integral and powerful part of the story. Kanefield wrote the informative and entertaining prose, and Dorian’s breathtaking four-color illustrations make this book also a work of art. Continue reading →

The dangers behind the walls

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By Ande Jacobson

Keeping on her yearly schedule, Tess Gerritsen’s third book in the Rizzoli & Isles series, The Sinner, first appeared in August 2003. Gerritsen goes in a new direction this time digging deeper in the personal lives of Detective Jane Rizzoli and Dr. Maura Isles. Maura’s ex-husband, Victor Banks, is also a doctor though not a medical examiner. Victor features prominently in this story, and their complicated history intrudes on Maura’s work this time. Of course there are murders to solve, the first one of a nun killed in Graystones Abbey, the home of a sequestered order. Two nuns were attacked, one died at the scene, the other was taken to the hospital, but the story doesn’t end there. There are some other seemingly disconnected murders across a surprisingly wide region. The story has tentacles that reach across states and across the world in surprising ways. Gerritsen is masterful in her storytelling, interweaving the professional and personal lives of her characters, and as always the details matter. Continue reading →

Warren Hoyt’s story continues …

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By Ande Jacobson

One year after the first book in the series was released, Tess Gerritsen’s second work in the Rizzoli & Isles series dropped in August 2002. The Apprentice picks up where The Surgeon left off with the same heart-stopping action and mind-bending puzzles that Gerritsen’s mystery/thrillers are known for. Gerritsen introduced Warren Hoyt, a skilled and pathological serial killer, in the first book. He’s in prison, but a new series of crimes that reek of his signature come to light. Detective Rizzoli and her team are immediately engaged, and so is Detective Vince Korsak in Newton, a Boston suburb and a different jurisdiction than Rizzoli’s territory. FBI Agent Gabriel Dean also appears for some unknown reason. Other parts of the federal government also kibitz later in the story causing additional confusion and misdirection. In this second book in the series, Medical Examiner Maura Isles is introduced, and she and Rizzoli begin their long-admired professional collaboration in crime fighting though their relationship doesn’t cross the boundary into level of personal friendship that they do in the television adaptation of the books. Dean and Korsak both have different prominence in the books than they did in the television series as well. Korsak is integral to the case in The Apprentice, although this is the only time he works professionally with Rizzoli and company despite his being a regular on TV. Continue reading →

2024 is going to be a long year

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By Ande Jacobson

Here we are almost a month into a new year, and it’s been eventful so far. 2024 is a consequential presidential election year with democracy on the line, something that’s fast becoming a mainstay of our political process. It wasn’t always this way. There was a time when the two major parties may have preferred different approaches to solving the nation’s problems, but they worked together to try to make things better for everyone. FDR’s New Deal and Eisenhower’s Middle Way were two sides of the same coin from a Democratic and a Republican president respectively. Both held that the government had a role in regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, and aiding in making the U.S. a more fair and equal society. Continue reading →

Doctors make the scariest villains

A Good Reed Review Book Review , , , ,

By Ande Jacobson

First released in hardback in August 2001, The Surgeon is the first book in Tess Gerritsen’s Rizzoli & Isles series even though Medical Examiner Maura Isles isn’t introduced until the second book. Making full use of her background as a practicing physician before retiring to write mysteries full time, in The Surgeon, Gerritsen creates a riveting mystery that draws the reader in and doesn’t let them go even when they get to the last page because they know there will be more. In another book. Even so, The Surgeon is at turns gripping and terrifying, and the resolution to this first book in the series is satisfying with a whiff of “happily ever after” for some of the characters. Continue reading →

Books matter

A Good Reed Review Commentary & Pubs , ,

By Ande Jacobson

Something unexpected happened recently.

Almost a year ago, I wrote an essay about a controversial post I made on Facebook with a simple thesis. Reading and listening are not the same thing. In the course of my background reading for that piece, I dug into some of the research surrounding the differences between reading and listening as it pertained to absorbing and processing written material. One interesting note came to light during that investigation, that being that there’s also a difference in comprehension and retention based on how you read printed material. There was some study evidence that reading an e-book isn’t quite as good for comprehension as reading a physical book. Given that wasn’t the focus of my previous essay, I noted it, mentioned it in passing in the essay, and set it aside. Continue reading →

2023 is finally ending

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By Ande Jacobson

So many things happened in 2023 that were unforgettable, many of them things that we wish weren’t happening. By the same token, there has also been some good to come out of 2023, though sometimes it seems harder to find the good given the preponderance of bad news filling the airwaves and the internet on a daily basis.

So what good has happened? Locally, the arts have been recovering and in some respects have just about reached their pre-pandemic levels. San Jose’s Saxophone Christmas had 190 saxophone players making lovely holiday music for those willing to venture out into the uncertain world despite the risks of infection swarming around us. Theater has also returned locally with many lively productions, and music is in the air all around even beyond the return of the saxophones to San Jose. Continue reading →