Promise Falls Trilogy

Broken Promise by Linwood Barclay
Published by Recorded Books on July 28th 2015
Series: Promise Falls #1
Format: audiobook
See it @ Goodreads

Synopsis

From the New York Times--bestselling author comes the first novel in an explosive trilogy about the disturbing secrets of a quiet small town.
After his wife's death and the collapse of his newspaper, David Harwood has no choice but to uproot his nine-year-old son and move back into his childhood home in Promise Falls, New York. David believes his life is in free fall, and he can't find a way to stop his descent.
Then he comes across a family secret of epic proportions. A year after a devastating miscarriage, David's cousin Marla has continued to struggle. But when David's mother asks him to check on her, he's horrified to discover that she's been secretly raising a child who is not her own--a baby she claims was a gift from an "angel" left on her porch.
When the baby's real mother is found murdered, David can't help wanting to piece together what happened--even if it means proving his own cousin's guilt. But as he uncovers each piece of evidence, David realizes that Marla's mysterious child is just the tip of the iceberg.
Other strange things are happening. Animals are found ritually slaughtered. An ominous abandoned Ferris wheel seems to stand as a warning that something dark has infected Promise Falls. And someone has decided that the entire town must pay for the sins of its past . . . in blood.

I have seen good reviews for Linwood Barclay’s books so I decided to give them a try. I chose the Promise Falls Trilogy for starters. The third book Twenty-Three is not available to me yet. No matter…
The first book Broken Promise started a little slow for me, but it did pick up. The story-line is very good and well plotted. The characters were interesting and I enjoyed that we were getting the story from different perspectives. At the end of Barclay’s wrapped up the story very nicely leaving a few dangling story lines for the next book in the trilogy.

Far From True was even better, the plot tighten up and Barclay made better use of his characters in this book. The twists and turns were better. At the end of the book Barclay has done it again wrapped up some of the dangling story lines but one and that is hopefully what the last book, Twenty-Three will do when it is released November 1 of this year.

I am looking forward to it…

The Life We Bury

The Life We Bury by Allen Eskens
Published by Tantor Audio on June 9th 2015
Format: audiobook
See it @ Goodreads

Synopsis

College student Joe Talbert has the modest goal of completing a writing assignment for an English class. His task is to interview a stranger and write a brief biography of the person. With deadlines looming, Joe heads to a nearby nursing home to find a willing subject. There he meets Carl Iverson, and soon nothing in Joe's life is ever the same. Carl is a dying Vietnam veteran-and a convicted murderer. With only a few months to live, he has been medically paroled to a nursing home after spending thirty years in prison for the crimes of rape and murder. As Joe writes about Carl's life, especially Carl's valor in Vietnam, he cannot reconcile the heroism of the soldier with the despicable acts of the convict. Aided by his skeptical neighbor, Lila, Joe throws himself into uncovering the truth. Thread by thread, he begins to unravel the tapestry of Carl's conviction. But as he and Lila dig deeper into the circumstances of the crime, the stakes grow higher. Will Joe discover the truth before it's too late to escape the fallout?

The Life We Bury is a nice change of pace “who done it”. Joe Talbert, brother to an autistic teenager, son to an alcoholic mother, and college student has an assignment for one of his classes to write a biography of a person. On a whim Joe stops at a nursing home where he is improbably (isn’t that why it’s called fiction) introduced to a convicted murderer.
Carl Iverson, has been released from prison because he is dying of cancer. Thirty years ago, he was convicted of murdering a teenage girl. Carl agrees to tell Joe his story, as Joe hears more and more he begins to suspect that there is more to the story than Carl is telling him. Joe with the help of his attractive college student (but I don’t want to get involved) neighbor start piecing together a different version of Carl’s story.

A good debut novel.

The Death of Innocents: A True Story of Murder, Medicine, and High-Stake Science

The Death of Innocents: A True Story of Murder, Medicine, and High-Stake Science by Richard Firstman, Jamie Talan
Published by Bantam on July 13th 2011
Pages: 640
See it @ Goodreads

Synopsis

Unraveling a twenty-five-year tale of multiple murder and medical deception, The Death of Innocents is a work of first-rate journalism told with the compelling narrative drive of a mystery novel. More than just a true-crime story, it is the stunning expose of spurious science that sent medical researchers in the wrong direction--and nearly allowed a murderer to go unpunished.
On July 28, 1971, a two-and-a-half-month-old baby named Noah Hoyt died in his trailer home in a rural hamlet of upstate New York. He was the fifth child of Waneta and Tim Hoyt to die suddenly in the space of seven years. People certainly talked, but Waneta spoke vaguely of "crib death," and over time the talk faded.
Nearly two decades later a district attorney in Syracuse, New York, was alerted to a landmark paper in the literature on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome--SIDS--that had been published in a prestigious medical journal back in 1972. Written by a prominent researcher at a Syracuse medical center, the article described a family in which five children had died suddenly without explanation. The D.A. was convinced that something about this account was very wrong. An intensive quest by a team of investigators came to a climax in the spring of 1995, in a dramatic multiple-murder trial that made headlines nationwide.
But this book is not only a vivid account of infanticide revealed; it is also a riveting medical detective story. That journal article had legitimized the deaths of the last two babies by theorizing a cause for the mystery of SIDS, suggesting it could be predicted and prevented, and fostering the presumption that SIDS runs in families. More than two decades of multimillion-dollar studies have failed to confirm any of these widely accepted premises. How all this happened--could have happened--is a compelling story of high-stakes medical research in action. And the enigma of familial SIDS has given rise to a special and terrible irony. There is today a maxim in forensic pathology: One unexplained infant death in a family is SIDS. Two is very suspicious. Three is homicide.
From the Trade Paperback edition.

Sometimes you just can’t make this stuff up, truth is always stranger than fiction. There are two stories in The Death of Innocents:
The first is about Dr. Alfred Steinschneider who based his clinical research on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) on the actions of a serial murderer. In 1970 and 1971 Waneta Hoyt lost two children, Steinschneider used these deaths to base his SIDS Research on sleep apnea as a cause of those deaths, he also indicated that it could be inherited trait. In October of 1971 Steinschneider published a paper in the Pediatrics Journal.
For the next two decades, the scientific and medical industries built a multi-million business of diagnosing SIDS as sleep apnea. Clinics were established that received generous funding from both the government and private sources, private enterprise stepped up to manufacture the home infant monitors, everyone got rich and famous but the babies kept dying.
The second story is about a prosecutor that had dealt with another suspicious SIDS death that found and doggedly followed Waneta Hoyt until he was able to bring her to justice.
The husband and wife writing team, do an excellent job of weaving the two stories together. There is no judgment in their writing, it is presented in a factual but readable way. It is an outstanding piece of investigating journalism.

Additional Links:
Wikipedia
Murderpedia

About Jamie Talan

Science writer Jamie Talan (with co-author Richard Firstman) won the 1998 Edgar Award for best nonfiction for The Death of Innocents, a gripping account of forensic science that was also a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Talan, who covered neuroscience for Newsday for more than twenty years, is science writer-in-residence at The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in New York.

About Richard Firstman

Richard Firstman is a former staff writer and editor at Newsday, where he was the recipient of numerous awards for feature and investigative reporting. Among his eight published books are A Criminal Injustice, a chronicle of the trial and conviction of Martin Tankleff, and The Death of Innocents, written with his wife, Jamie Talan, which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was the winner of an Edgar Award. He teaches at Stony Brook University School of Journalism and lives in Northport, New York, with his wife and their three children.

American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst

American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst by Jeffrey Toobin
Published by Doubleday on August 2nd 2016
Pages: 368
See it @ Goodreads

Synopsis

From "New Yorker" staff writer and bestselling author Jeffrey Toobin, the definitive account of the kidnapping and trial that defined an insane era in American history.
On February 4, 1974, Patty Hearst, a sophomore in college and heiress to the Hearst family fortune, was kidnapped by a ragtag group of self-styled revolutionaries calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army. The already sensational story took the first of many incredible twists on April 3, when the group released a tape of Patty saying she had joined the SLA and had adopted the nom de guerre Tania.
The weird turns of the tale are truly astonishing the Hearst family trying to secure Patty s release by feeding all the people of Oakland and San Francisco for free; the bank security cameras capturing Tania wielding a machine gun during a robbery; a cast of characters including everyone from Bill Walton to the Black Panthers to Ronald Reagan to F. Lee Bailey; the largest police shoot-out in American history; the first breaking news event to be broadcast live on television stations across the country; Patty s year on the lam, running from authorities; and her circus-like trial, filled with theatrical courtroom confrontations and a dramatic last-minute reversal, after which the term Stockholm syndrome entered the lexicon.
The saga of Patty Hearst highlighted a decade in which America seemed to be suffering a collective nervous breakdown. Based on more than a hundred interviews and thousands of previously secret documents, "American Heiress" thrillingly recounts the craziness of the times (there were an average of 1,500 terrorist bombings a year in the early 1970s). Toobin portrays the lunacy of the half-baked radicals of the SLA and the toxic mix of sex, politics, and violence that swept up Patty Hearst and re-creates her melodramatic trial. "American Heiress "examines the life of a young woman who suffered an unimaginable trauma and then made the stunning decision to join her captors crusade.
Or did she?"

I was twenty-four years old and living in the Bay Area when Patty Hearst was kidnapped. It was without a doubt one of the strangest things to happen during the counter-culture movement of the late sixties – early seventies.

Toobin retells the story of Hearst’s kidnapping and her conversion to an SLA member. He has unusual insight into Hearst’s motives and actions. I believe that his telling of the story and his insights are 100 percent accurate.

Toobin believes she willingly became a member of the SLA and I agree with that.

“The shoot-out at Fifty-Fourth Street cemented Patricia’s transformation into a committed revolutionary. She was kidnapped on February 4. On March 31, she convinced the comrades of her worthiness to join the SLA; on April 3, she sent the communique in which she vowed to “stay and fight” under her new name of Tania; on April 15, she participated in the robbery of the Hibernia Bank; on April 24, she sent the communique that mocked the idea that she had been brainwashed; on May 16, she fired her machine gun (and another gun) at Mel’s to free Bill Harris from the clutches of his pursuers; on May 17, she watched her comrades, including Willy Wolfe, die excruciating deaths.”

“If you look at her actions … over the following year, you see the actions of a revolutionary, not a victim,” Toobin says. “There was some glamour to what she was doing, the swagger of wearing berets, of carrying machine guns — the romance of revolution was an undeniable part of the appeal of the SLA.”

What intrigues me is what would happen today if Patty Hearst did what she did forty years ago? Would we be so forgiving? Would she be considered a domestic terrorist?

‘American Heiress’ Author: ‘You Cannot Overstate the Terror that Patty Hearst Faced’