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Rise Of The Political Cop. Nearly 15 yrs ago now, when Michael Brown still had almost exactly a year left in his life, Radley Balko released a seminal history of the rise of the militarized police force in the United States he titled Rise Of The Warrior Cop. In it, he traced the history of policing in the American tradition all the way from its origins as the 'Shire Reef' in feudal England to its then most modern incarnations. (He has also released an updated versi...

Pessimist Gen X Yale Professor Takes A Selective Road Trip Through America And American History. Understood through this lens, this book isn't as terrible as it could have been. It is still quite politically oriented in the expected directions from a Yale professor, and its treatment of history is quite surface level and routine, but it is also at least somewhat more balanced than many books from similarly situated authors - so it does have that going for it.

The bibliography clocks in at 15%, which isn't great, but does meet my bare minimum threshold...

Solid Cruise Mystery In Vein Of Doctor Odyssey. When Doctor Odyssey was cancelled around this time last year after barely one singular season, I was bummed. Yes, as an experienced cruiser with 25 cruises and approaching 200 days at sea, I can tell you without hesitation at all that that tale was *not* "realistic". IT WAS NEVER SUPPOSED TO BE! It is FICTION, and it tells an excellent tale in an exotic and exciting setting!

So very many of the 1* and 2* complaints about this book decry its "lack of realism", and I'm here to tell you: OF COURSE IT ISN'T FUCKING REAL, IT IS FUCKING FICTION! But enjoyed in the vein of Doctor Odyssey (which, I ...

Stunning Return Has Me Absolutely Enraptured. I've been talking about McAfee's 33AD and its resultant Bachiyr series for (nearly?) 15 yrs now. I found it back then because Amazon was insistent on recommending it to me in my early Kindle era, and eventually I picked it up... and was immediately hooked. Opening in the titular year with a vampire assassin killing another vampire who had become a believer in this charismatic rabbi from Nazareth and having a Roman centurion stumble into the aftermath, I was immediately hooked. To this day, I've never seen any other vampire tale done quite like this, and I've never seen any other historical fiction tale done quite like this either. It was a perfect combination of both, and I've been a fan of McAfee ever since.

But something happened over the nex...

Scifi Horror Action The Way It Is Supposed To Be. If you like your action tales with a tinge of horror, or perhaps your horror tales with a lot of action in them, this is going to be a book - and a series - that you need to check out. Following on from the fallout of Spores, Book 1 of this series (so read it first!), the survivors of that tale quickly find themselves involved in another similar event - this time half a world away, in the jungles of Si...

Don't You Forget About Me. Yes, the title is a Breakfast Club reference... because at its heart, this is essentially a Breakfast Club tale for adults - of a type, at least. A group of strangers forced together all day, all with secrets of how they found themselves there at that moment. An emotional tale of what happens over those several hours.

And, in a bit of irony, other than the "it has cussing!!!!" one star review, literally every complaint in every existing one star review on Goodreads as I write this review nearly 10 days a...

Solid Second Set. This book picks up shortly after where Silverleaf, Book 1 of this new series, ended - so absolutely read it first - and continues the story of the Haverly family, largely extending plot lines from the first book for some of the family members... and introducing a few new ones for others.

Fans of family dramas featuring elite families of some form - think a less soapy Dynasty or a more rural Blue Bloods or similar - are going to love this new series and this tale in particular, as there are so...

Dark, Disturbing Spinoff Starter With Meat. In a first in my experience with Spangler, this is a book where there is a lot of interesting theological discussion *just* below the surface of this tale - hidden enough so that you can enjoy the actual story as told without diving too deep, but also obvious enough that it is fairly easy to follow Spangler's thinking for anyone who chooses to do so. That is the "meat" here - there really is a lot to ponder, and at least through certain sections of the tale, Spangler really makes you wrestle with a big theological word you rarely see outside of church... if you choose to do so.

If you don't want to wrestle with your theological outlook, this is still, on a more surface level, a dark and disturbing thriller from a guy that is known for his dark and disturbing thrillers in his De...

Hollywood Hope. This one is very different from Lindstrom's debut, actually corrects some mistakes it made (somewhat), and even manages to land haymakers even Stephen King couldn't land quite so well... while directly calling out King. Yes, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption is called out a few times in this tale, and yes, the tale largely follows a similar path to a point... and yet Lindstrom really does take that framework and make it his own in a tale as old as Hollywood itself.

At its heart is a guy who went to Hollywood as a typical midwestern guy looking to make it as a star... who then encountered Hollywood as it actually is, up to an including a #MeToo level scene (that is brief yet present) before falling to its al...

More Memoir Than Science. In all honesty, one of the books I keep coming back to as an example of what this book *is* is Rachel Held Evans' Searching For Sunday, just a more explicitly anti-Christian one rather than someone who still considered themselves a believer in Christ but was searching for a version of the faith that made more sense to themselves.

Here, we get a so-called "Elder Millennial" or "Xennial" similar in age to both Evans (before she tragically suddenly died a few years ago now) and myself, though from a different area of the US than the Southern Appalachia Evans and I both called home - the New Mexico deserts were Eaves-Egenes' homeland. Like Evans and myself, Eaves-Egenes grew up in the American Church (she's never ultra specific on which exact version beyond it being "evangelical", but that can mean a wide-ish range of actual beliefs), but unlike myself (though similar to Evans in that Evans did become more open to the more mystical within Christianity), Eaves-Egenes ultimately becomes one of the so-called "Ex-vangelicals" who have seemingly left Christianity behind... and still...