GPL Blog

by Jane Easterly

Book Review | Blood On Their Hands by Mandy Matney

Published on by Emily DuGranrut

From the publisher: The highly anticipated inside look at the collapse of the Murdaugh dynasty by the celebrated investigative journalist and creator of the #1 hit Murdaugh Murders Podcast, Mandy Matney.

I am not a podcast listener and so have not heard any of the Murdaugh Murders Podcast (MMP), an extremely popular podcast that has often been ranked #1 ranked on Apple Podcasts. I requested an advance reader copy of Blood on Their Hands expecting it to be true crime nonfiction about Alex Murdaugh. It’s not. It’s a memoir by a journalist who wants us all to know how hard she has worked to be successful and how many people got in her way.

Mandy Matney is a good writer with a major chip on her shoulder. She wants to be a good journalist fighting the good journalist fight and shining a light on crime and corruption. She has faced sexism in the workplace – welcome to being a working woman, Mandy – and feels she has been betrayed by a number of colleagues she trusted. As I read this book, I couldn’t stop thinking about Sally Field and her “I can’t deny the fact that you like me. Right now, you like me!” speech when she won an Oscar.

I don’t question that Matney has put in the work to become a respected journalist, but to me, a reader unfamiliar with her and her work, she comes off as whiny and bitter in this book. Alex Murdaugh, his family, and the aura of invincibility around them needed to be investigated, and it seems like Matney and colleagues did good work. But, for example, Matney acknowledges that Will Folks gave her a job when she needed one, and the support and leads (and paycheck) she needed to investigate Murdaugh, but she also writes near the end of the book, “Looking back now, I can see that the relationship was a bad fit from the start. Will threw me a lifeline when I was desperate for a way out of The Packet,  but I think I gave him too much credit for ‘saving’ me. I excused the rumors about his unsavory reputation because of how much I wanted to believe he was a good guy. I ignored the times his judgment felt off because I was eager to grow with the company. But our early talks about my earning equity at FITS never panned out, and as MMP took off, I began to realize Will saw me more as a competitor than as a teammate. I see now that I never needed a man or an institution to lend my work credibility – I just needed more confidence in my abilities. I’ll always be grateful to FITS for being a stepping stone at a crucial time in my career, but I wish I could go back and tell my former self to get out as soon as things started to curdle.” (p. 251 of the ARC). Way to throw someone under the bus who by her own admission gave her a lot of information and contributed to her ability to write the podcast stories about the Murdaugh family. Matney didn’t do herself any favors with me as a reader with this section. She could have said it was time to move on and left it at that.

Please note that your reaction may vary. Readers who love Matney and her podcasts may love this book. If you are a fan of Murdaugh Murders Podcast, give it a shot. If you are not, this might not be the Murdaugh book for you. I read an advance reader copy of Blood on Their Hands. It is scheduled to be published on November 14, and the Galesburg Public Library will own it.

Book Review | This House of Grief by Helen Garner

Published on by Emily DuGranrut

From the publisher: On the evening of Father’s Day, 2005, separated husband Robert Farquharson was driving his three young sons back to their mom’s house when the car veered off the road and plunged into a dam. Farquharson survived the crash, but his boys drowned. Was this a tragic accident, or an act of revenge? The court case that followed became a national obsession.

A parent and their children go into a body of water in a vehicle; the parent survives but the children don’t. This unfortunately is a story we’ve heard before. Robert Farquharson claims he had a coughing fit and passed out. Once in the water, he was able to exit the car and swim to the surface, but his three sons were not. This book about his trial was published in 2014 in Australia; now a new edition has been published in the United States.

I can well imagine what a sensation this was in Australia. I remember the media fascination with Susan Smith in the 1990s after she left her sons to drown. I remember the Jaclyn Dowaliby case in the Chicago area in the 1980s. (That case didn’t involve drowning, but a child reported abducted from her home and found murdered a few days later, and a trial of the mother.)

This House of Grief feels like it was written much longer ago than 2014. It is a call back to classic works of true crime like In Cold Blood. It has a literary feel to it that most modern true crime that I’ve read does not. The author acts as a cool and objective narrator. She has no connection to the case other than reporting on it. She feels emotion – pity, grief – but not passion over whatever happened. Robert Farquharson himself remains a remote figure; I felt I got to know and understand his ex-wife’s parents better than I did Farquharson or his ex-wife.

On page 6, Garner writes, “When I said I wanted to write about the trial, people looked at me in silence, with an expression I could not read.” She is very thoughtful and philosophical as she observes and comments on the trial and all the people involved. The subtitle of the book is “The Story of a Murder Trial,” and the author writes her book as a story (a story with an ending that will not satisfy all her readers).

If you like classic works of true crime, I recommend This House of Grief. If you like graphic descriptions, every criminal detail, and proper closure in your true crime, this may not be the book for you.

I read an advance reader copy of This House of Grief. It was published on October 10, and Galesburg Public Library’s copy will be added to the collection soon. 

Book Review | Walk Through Fire by Yasmine S. Ali

Published on by Emily DuGranrut

From the publisher: The first book to examine the rarely-acknowledged Waverly Train Disaster of 1978 – the catastrophic accident that changed America forever and led to the formation of FEMA.

Since Galesburg is a railroad town and I can hear the trains go by my house – most of us in Galesburg can – I was interested in Walk Through Fire. I was in high school when the Waverly Train Disaster happened, and even though my parents are both from Tennessee, I don’t remember hearing anything about it.

Ali was a child in Waverly when the disaster happened. Her parents are physicians who emigrated from the Middle East to Waverly and played critical roles in the one bright spot during the disaster – the triage work that took place in the small local hospital after the explosion. Ali is justifiably proud of them and interested in the disaster, and her personal interest is reflected in the book.

Ali covers a lot of ground. Some of the information did not add much to the story for me as a reader. For example, there is a long part about Union Forces in Tennessee during the Civil War and the laying of tracks by Black laborers, and the information about what caused the disaster was very detailed. But Ali really cares about the town and its people, she knows many of the survivors, and her empathy for the people of Waverly really shines through. I can tell she did a lot of research and conducted a lot of interviews. She describes the terrible burns that people suffered with compassion and her own medical knowledge as a doctor.

I actually feel better about the unknown cargo on trains coming through Galesburg each night after reading this book. A lot of mistakes were made that led to the Waverly explosion, by the railroad and by local law enforcement because they had no idea how dangerous the situation is. A full investigation led to a number of changes to regulations and standards and to the creation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

I listened to the author read much of the book. She’s not a professional reader, and some of her phrasing was a little odd. However, her own passion for the subject kept me going.

If you live near trains or are interested in how disasters shaped our lives for the better by prompting safety changes, you might want to read Walk Through Fire.

The Galesburg Public Library owns Walk Through Fire in print and as a Playaway audiobook.

Book Review | The Christmas Guest by Peter Swanson

Published on by Emily DuGranrut

From the publisher: A spectacularly spine-chilling novella in which an American art student in London is invited to join a classmate for the holidays at Starvewood Hall, her family’s Cotswold manor house. But behind the holly and pine boughs, secrets are about to unravel, revealing this seemingly charming English village’s grim history.

The Christmas Guest is a small bite of a read, a little snack that can be read in one sitting. It’s immersive and fun and a bit disturbing. We hear from two voices: Emma Chapman, the English student who lives at Starvewood Hall, and Ashley Smith, the American classmate Emma has invited home for the holidays. Ashley speaks to us through the words she pours into her diary.

The author pulled me in right from the Dedication: “For two aunts – Pearl Taylor Moynihan, who disliked Christmas, and Sue Ellis Swasey, who doesn’t particularly like it either.” The dedication is followed by an Epigraph that calls out to A Christmas Carol.

The novella opens with our narrator, living in New York and alone on Christmas Day except for her cat, sorting through her crowded bedroom closet. She comes across an old diary, written by a friend thirty years ago. Although hesitant to “go back in time to that annus horribilis, that murderous year,” she cannot stop herself and begins to read.

The author pokes fun at himself and his “gothic” novella, with Ashley, the diary’s author, revealing that things are both exciting and creepy and almost willing herself into a gothic romance or thriller. (“Chance of gothic thriller murder mystery: Growing by the minute.”) There are a few twists, but in a weird way, this is a comfort read for the cozy mystery reader. It doesn’t take much imagination to figure out where the story is going, but the atmosphere makes it worth the read.

The cover is amazing – cute and cozy but also sinister. I read an advance reader copy of The Christmas Guest from Netgalley.

It is scheduled to be released on October 17 and will be available at the Galesburg Public Library. (Although it comes out in October, I recommend waiting until Christmastime to read it. 😊)

Book Review | The Road to Roswell by Connie Willis

Published on by Emily DuGranrut

From the publisher: A delightful novel about alien invasions, conspiracies, and the incredibly silly things people are willing to believe—some of which may actually be true. Part alien-abduction adventure, part road trip saga, part romantic comedy, The Road to Roswell is packed full of Men in Black, Elvis impersonators, tourist traps, rattlesnakes, chemtrails, and Close Encounters of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth kind.

The Road to Roswell is a screwball science fiction romantic comedy. A woman travels to Roswell to be her best friend’s Maid of Honor and is kidnapped by a tumbleweed alien while she is wearing a neon green, glow-in-the-dark bridesmaid outfit. The tumbleweed takes her on the run, then kidnaps a con man, a true believer of alien conspiracies, a professional gambler, and the driver of a large mobile home.

There’s nothing particularly original here, but the story is a lot of fun (if a little long). The author works in a lot of pop culture references that add to the story, and I enjoyed the southwestern setting. This book would probably be especially fun to listen to on a long road trip.

This is science fiction that doesn’t take itself – or humanity – very seriously. There is a lot of sly, subtle humor, and even the unlikable characters are likable. The many references to western movie tropes were especially fun, and there are a lot of nods to “kidnapped by an alien” tropes as well. There are some plot twists – not very well hidden plot twists – and commentary on the gullibility of humans who Want to Believe in whatever conspiracy theory they’ve latched on to. I found the ending a bit flat.

The Road to Roswell reminded me of the author’s book Crosstalk but also Men in Black, Little Miss Sunshine, the funny episodes of the X-Files, and Project Hail Mary.

The Galesburg Public Library owns The Road to Roswell and other books by author Connie Willis in multiple formats.

Book Review | The Death of Us by Lori Rader-Day

Published on by Emily DuGranrut

From the publisher: The discovery of a submerged car in a murky pond reveals betrayals and family secrets that will tear a small town apart.

The Death of Us has a great premise. A man cheats on his young wife, and the woman he slept with has a baby. One night, his wife answers the door, and the other woman hands the wife the baby and promptly disappears. Although fifteen years pass for the characters, the mystery of her disappearance is solved quickly in the book. A submerged car is found in an old flooded quarry on the family property. Inside is a baby carrier and some bones.

The husband and wife are now separated, as his ability to stay faithful hasn’t improved. They’ve been raising the child that was left behind together. Liss, the wife, loves her stepson fiercely. Because of the unknown status of his birth mother, Liss has never formally adopted Callan, but she IS his mother. Her husband Link is a man-child, spoiled by his mother, but Liss has broken things off with a man who loves her to try to salvage her damaged marriage.

The Death of Us is a great, fast read. The character development is good – I liked and sympathized with Liss and felt sorry for the teenager who is not quite sure how to handle his emotions when his missing mother is discovered. The marshal investigating the discovery is Liss’s recent lover; the man he replaced is the husband Link’s father. It’s a small town where everyone knows everyone’s business.

I guessed one of the big bads early on, but that did not affect my enjoyment of the book. The author still had to spin out her plot, and I liked watching it unravel. There’s a bit of Hollywood blockbuster nonsense at the end, but the author paints some great pictures. Surprisingly, this is my first book by Rader-Day, but it won’t be my last.

I read an advance reader copy of The Death of Us. It is scheduled to be published on October 3, and the Galesburg Public Library will own the book in print, as an ebook, and in audio. The library owns Rader-Day’s previous six books, if you want to try one now. 

Book Review | A Light in the Dark: Surviving More Than Ted Bundy by Kathy Kleiner Rubin and Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi

Published on by Emily DuGranrut

From the publisher: The first book by a confirmed survivor of Ted Bundy, and the only memoir to challenge the popular narrative of Bundy as a handsome killer who charmed his victims into trusting him.

I haven’t read that much true crime. I’ve read a lot about John Wayne Gacy because I was in high school in the Chicago area when his horrors were discovered, but I didn’t know much about Ted Bundy going into this memoir. I held the popular beliefs that he was charming and intelligent in addition to being a serial killer. Kathy Kleiner Rubin was one of the young women he attacked when she was sleeping in her sorority bedroom, and she has a lot to say about how Bundy is viewed in popular culture.

The author makes the case that what we believe about Bundy is wrong. He was not charming; most women he approached found him creepy. Most of his victims were not lured into his car by a sad tale that he spun but were attacked in their beds or from behind by Bundy. He was not intelligent or learned; he was a poor student who had no aptitude for the law or anything except killing.

I had no idea how many suspected victims Bundy had. I knew he was brutal but didn’t know his preferred technique was to bash his victims in the head first, before violating them. The author is only a few years older than me, and I found her passionate defense of Bundy’s victims very moving. The memoir very much gave me “there but for the grace of god go I” vibes.

Kathy Kleiner Rubin is very resilient and a true survivor. She has one son, Michael, and he didn’t find out until he was 37 years old that the attack she suffered in college was at the hands of the notorious Ted Bundy. When he found out, he called her in shock. Toward the end of her book, she writes, “Michael was a big part of my happiness in life. During that phone call, as he kept repeating ‘you were so normal’ he brought up the pool parties I hosted for his birthday and other things I did to make his life as ordinary as possible. To me, this was one of my great accomplishments in life. Bundy was on a sick and twisted journey and he dragged his victims down the path. After I survived the attack, I dug in my heels so that he could pull me no further.”

There is some information about the author and her husband surviving Katrina which felt like filler, but aside from that the narrative flowed. The author has a lot of encouraging words for others who are fighting battles. Her words and memories are very inspirational. Appendix A is a list of the women and girls who lost their lives to Bundy, which is very reverential and which I read with great care. As the author points out, none of them are to blame for being murdered by a monster. Appendix C has a helpful list of ways to replace his narrative with remembrances of his victims.

If you like memoirs of people who have overcome great obstacles, or if you’d like to know more about Ted Bundy’s victims, I recommend A Light in the Dark.

I read an advance reader copy of A Light in the Dark. It is scheduled to be published on October 3, and the Galesburg Public Library will own it.

Book Review | Murder at the Merton Library by Andrea Penrose

Published on by Emily DuGranrut

From the publisher: A perplexing murder in a renowned Oxford University library and a suspicious fire at a famous inventor’s London laboratory set Wrexford and Lady Charlotte on two separate investigations in this masterfully plotted, atmospheric Regency-set mystery.

Are you looking for a new historical mystery series? Check out Wrexford and Sloane by Andrea Penrose. Charlotte Sloane is a widowed lady of quality with a secret. She is a satirical cartoonist under a pen name. She uses her pen to cast light on injustices and misbehavior. Circumstances bring her together with two orphaned guttersnipes who she comes to love as her own, and with the intimidating Earl of Wrexford. This series has a nice mix of mystery, historical details, and found family. The relationships feature romantic love, parental love, family love, and deep friendships.

The book that introduces these characters and other series regulars is Murder on Black Swan Lane, and book seven in the series is due out in September. This is a great time to start reading, because if you like the first book, you can move right on to the next, but the number of books already published is not intimidating. Set in Regency London, the author likes to spotlight legitimate scientific innovation of the time period. Real scientists make occasional appearances in her stories.

Book seven, Murder at the Merton Library, starts with the murder of an Oxford librarian. It deals with fallout from the Napoleonic wars and intrigue around competition to create a marine propulsion system utilizing steam engines. (If that sounds boring, don’t worry – the author makes it interesting.) The Regency details seem perfect, and the author believably makes her female characters as important to the action as the male characters. I’ve found some of the other books in the series a bit draggy at times, but this one moved along briskly for me.

This series is a lot of fun for the serious historical mystery reader.

I read an advance reader copy of Murder at Merton Library from Netgalley. It is scheduled to be published on September 26. The Galesburg Public Library will own it in multiple formats, and we already own the first six books in the series.

Book Review | Starter Villain by John Scalzi

Published on by Emily DuGranrut

From the publisher: Inheriting your uncle’s supervillain business is more complicated than you might think. Particularly when you discover who’s running the place.

Charlie, the narrator of Starter Villain, is something of an affable idiot. Divorced and living in the childhood home he doesn’t even own due to complications with his siblings after his father’s death, he was laid off from his job as a journalist and is now working as a substitute teacher. He wants to buy a beloved local pub, but he has no money and no collateral. The best thing he has going for him is his relationship with his cats.

Then Charlie’s estranged Uncle Jake dies, and his lawyer shows up asking Charlie to attend his uncle’s memorial. Charlie is hesitant, and finds the request a little weird, but he agrees. And so his life as a starter villain begins. Yes, his uncle owned a large chain of parking structures, but he had other, bigger, more nefarious interests as well (mwa ha ha).

I enjoyed the Chicago area setting, and our narrator is an affable naïf who is fun to spend time with. Scalzi is clearly a cat lover and that certainly resonated with me. In the super villain business, it’s not dogs who spy for villains on other villains. (Yes, the cats are intelligent spies who can type on a computer using a special keyboard. Including Charlie’s cats.) I learned a new word – quisling! (“A traitor who collaborates with an enemy force occupying their country” according to the OED.) The narrative is pro-union, and against cats murdering birds. Intelligent talking dolphins also come into play, and I couldn’t stop myself from singing “So Long and Thanks for All the Fish” every time they made an appearance.

Charlie does better handling the various super villains that he meets than one might expect, and as he doesn’t take things seriously it was hard for me as the reader to take things seriously either. I perhaps did not enjoy Starter Villain as much as I enjoyed The Kaiju Preservation Society; the whole thing came off as a little less original, and the “starter villain” idea began to wear a little thin. Still, Starter Villain was a fun read with some genuine laughs for me.

 I read an advance reader copy of Starter Villain from Netgalley. It is scheduled to be released on September 19 and will be available at the Galesburg Public Library.

Book Review | Disneyland on the Mountain: Walt, the Environmentalists, and the Ski Resort That Never Was by Greg Glasgow and Kathryn Mayer

Published on by Emily DuGranrut

From the publisher: A fascinating look at Walt Disney’s last, unfinished project and the controversy that surrounded it, including the budding environmental movement that made sure the resort never saw the light of day.

I’m a huge fan of Disneyland, Disney World, Disney movies, and their creator, Walt Disney. Walt Disney revolutionized animated films and theme parks. He truly was an American genius. (And I think he’d be appalled at some of the things being done in his name today.) When I saw a book was coming out about his attempts to build a Disney ski resort destination, I wanted to read it.

I’m afraid to say I did not find the entire book to be “fascinating,” no matter what the blurb says. Parts of the book I did indeed find fascinating, but I think this book could have been a great essay. The book appears to have been exhaustively researched. There are 18 pages of footnotes, a 2 page bibliography, and a 7 page index. There is no doubt that the authors did indeed find the subject fascinating.

The book opens just three months before Walt Disney’s death from lung cancer in December 1966. Right up until the end of his life, he was excited about goals he had for the Disney company. If he had managed to turn California’s Mineral King valley into a Disney resort, it would probably have been amazing. This book tells the story of the environmentalists who were determined to stop the resort from being built. (I got a definite sense that some of the people who already lived in the valley wanted to keep it pristine for themselves. It reminded me of a quote, attributed to Dennis Miller, that I heard my environmentalist brother-in-law repeat more than once: “A developer is someone who wants to build a house in the woods. An environmentalist is someone who already has a house in the woods.”)

I did find parts of the book interesting, and I learned things that I did not know. It’s only about 200 pages (not counting the footnotes and index). If you are attracted to all things Disney, you may want to read Disneyland on the Mountain.

I read an advance reader copy of Disneyland on the Mountain from Netgalley. It is scheduled to be published on September 13, and the Galesburg Public Library will own it.