Shopping from my bookshelf

One of the deals I've made with myself in the last few weeks is that instead of going to the book store and dropping a significant amount of spending money on new books, I would instead make an attempt to finish all the "filler" books I'd bought "for later".

[Filler books are the books purchased when buying one or two items from B&N and needing to add a few more to make sure one qualifies for free shipping.--Ed]


So, now that later has come, I have been reading a period piece set during the Olympic Games during the Nazi Regime written by Jeffrey Deaver entitled Garden of Beasts: A Novel of Berlin 1936. So far, it seems to be one of those "what-if" type books about an American hit-man [yes, the idea of killers for hire goes way back: look up the definition of assassin in a good dictionary--Ed] impressed into taking a mission to kill one of Hitler's military leaders. An interesting read given the current climate of conflicts in which the US is involved.

I'm only a few chapters in, and already one of the odd things about the book is the way that it portrays Nazi Germany as being a very violent place where people are killed just on the merest suspicion of not being loyal to the party. For some reason, that does not ring very true to me, but I need to do some research and see if Deaver is taking liberties ore accurately capturing the moment. I know that the Brownshirts had a reputation for violent thuggery, but I didn't realize that it went as far as shooting people who tried to avoid checkpoints and random checks of identification papers.

But that book being too large to comfortably carry on the train, I am also reading another book by Michael Connelly. The Closers. This one is another Hieronymous Bosch book, in which Bosch returns to the force to re-unite with his old partner Kis Rider. This time to right what are called "Open-Unsolved" cases. Those are murder cases for which no arrest was ever made, revived by new evidence of one kind or another. In this case, it's a DNA hit identifying a suspect who has at least fired the gun used to kill a high-school girl abducted from her home and left dated in the hills behind her house. I have just started in on it, so there's no clear picture yet of where this is going. The DNA hit is too simple-seeming, and Harry Bosch's gut is telling him there's more to it than this. And Michael Connelly tends to trust Bosch's gut, so we'll see where this takes us.

Elizabeth once asked me why I read crime novels like this one. I have a bunch of reasons, but mainly I think it's because ultimately, the better police procedurals are resolved with justice being done. More on this another time.