Tag: mental-health

Ian Caldwell, Dustin Thomason, The Rule of Four (Dell Publishing Company 2005)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18431.The_Rule_of_Four?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=4mGd67XEr3&rank=1

Princeton thriller complete with secret codes, Florentine friars, hidden crypts, sealing wax, ancient diaries and assorted Renaissance occult lore.

Princeton 1999. Two students are on the verge of solving the mysteries of a (historically existing) 15th-century Venetian text Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Tom Sullivan and Paul Harris are launched into an adventure that ends with a murder. The story is set in a world of spectacular practical jokes and interclub rivalry that is Princeton culture – eating club ‘bickering’, arch singing, the Good Friday sermon and banquet, togas, limericks, steam tunnels, the annual stealing of the Bell Clapper from Nassau Hall, and even the now defunct Nude Olympics.

The Hypnerotomachia tells of the dreams of Poliphilo, and the text, studied before him by Tom’s father—dead from an accident that let Tom with scars—is known for its hypnotic effect on its readers.
Nov 1497. Two messengers bring a letter sealed 4 times in dark wax to San Lorenzo church near the Vatican. After dire warnings not to read the letter, they open it anyway. The wax contains belladonna. When he discovered their treachery, a Mason at the church slew them. Tom’s father discovered this fact from a letter from Francesco Colonna and publishes a book containing his ‘Belladonna Document’. He claims that the author of the Hypnerotomachia was not the monk Colonna but rather a Roman aristocrat. The monk Colonna was a confessed rapist, where the aristocrat was a model of virtue.

With one month left before graduation Tom is in his dorm room with Paul, Charlie and Gil. Charlie suggests a game of laser tag in the steam tunnels. Chased by proctors and campus police, they pop up in the middle of the Nude Olympics.

Someone is murdered, but the incident is dropped while other storylines are progressed, which seems unrealistic to me. In real life, the students would have demanded at the scene to know who it was. In a final riddle, Colonna includes geographical information leading to his secret crypt, encoded in a ‘rule of four’.
I wonder if the ‘cornuta code’ Tom and Paul discover, revealing the secret message from Colonna, is really there in the actual book.
In places the story jumps unconvincingly back and forth in time. Sometimes it reads like fine literature, unlike the Da Vinci Code to which it is compared. For example, Tom’s love story with Katie is told beautifully. It has a bit of a ‘fizzle out’ ending. After the grand finale, a few more chapters say what happened to everybody, who got jobs where. Also, maybe I missed it, but was the mystery actually solved?

Olive Ann Burns, Cold Sassy Tree (Mariner Books 2007)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40389231-cold-sassy-tree?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=ksVGD3FBKk&rank=1

6-stars. Charming family drama set in the old South

5 Jul 1906, the day after the first Fourth of July celebration in Cold Sassy, Georgia. Will is 14. Grampa comes by for his morning snort of whiskey and announces his intention to marry Miss Love Simpson, young enough to be his daughter and – a Yankee!

Miss Love works as a milliner at grandpa’s store, and the ladies in the family consider the new liaison a scandal, especially as Granny had just died 3 weeks ago. On her death bed, he’d heard Grampa praying, ‘Lord, you know my sin.’

There are those who said that the expensive coffin was a sure sign the stingy old man had something he felt guilty for. Will knows differently. Granny had once said she wouldn’t mind being buried on a bed of roses, and Grampa creates one for her grave, weaving roses one by one into a burlap cloth.

Will’s memories of Granny all have a down-home Southern feel. Granny saved the kids some sausage and ham because their father had decided Southern Presbyterians were God’s chosen people and should eat accordingly. Grampa had sold off her ancestral land but refused to use any of the proceeds to make her house ‘modrun’. A good part of the school year is devoted to teaching kids how happy the slaves were ‘before the war’ (which my own grandmother pronounced ‘befo-wa the wawa’).

Up on the railroad tracks, the trestle calls to Will like ‘one of them si-renes’ of Greek mythology. A mill girl Lightfoot saves his life from a passing train, and big black Loomis saves his dog. The well-wishers all want to talk about grandpa eloping with the milliner.
Aunt Loma decides she wants the piano, and the family goes to war. Miss Love treats Will with respect, and he empathises with her in the battle that ensues.

When Pa and Grampa get the town’s first two automobiles, there’s a parade from the train station all the way to the store.

Miss Love gives Grampa a new lease on life, and with the help of Will, works her way into the fabric of the family.

As the town name is modernised ‘over grandpa’s dead body’, to Progressive City, the old sassy (sarsaparilla) tree is cut down for a road widening.
This charming, wonderful and heart-warming tale is told in a believably 14-year-old voice, written in the Southern idiom of my childhood.

Michael Crichton, The Lost World (Alfred A. Knopf 1995)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8650.The_Lost_World?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=ZTz8SLnWSd&rank=1

6 stars. Technothriller with dinosaurs. What’s not to like?

First of all, the notion that anyone in this fictional world hasn’t heard of Jurassic Park and its demise is ludicrous – nondisclosure agreements or not.

That aside, the now dino-phobic Dr. Malcolm is recruited by rich investor Richard Levine to go dinosaur hunting in Costa Rica.

Levine is called to Rojas near Panama to examine a carcass – of some large lizard. He says to Marty Gutierrez, field biologist, ‘It’s not a damned lizard.’ He cuts a sample from the femur before the Public Health men destroy it. There are rumours of other ‘aberrant forms’. The animals are said to crave the lysine in genetically modified soybeans.

Ed James meets Dodgson and Basildon at 2 AM. They want to know about ‘Site B’. ‘Find Levine,’ says Dodgson.

Levine lands with Diego the pilot on Isla Sorna. Elizabeth Gelman, head of research at the San Francisco Zoo, has examined Levine’s sample. It looks like a lizard, but with the smooth muscle fibers of a warm blood, nucleated red blood cells of a bird, and a radio tag. ‘Somebody’s raising these things,’ she says.

Engineer Jack Thorne has built all the equipment to be ‘lightweight and strong’. Hyena expert Sarah Harding flies from Tanzania. Mechanic Eddie Carr discovers the dino-factory, disused for years, has power.

This isn’t just dinosaurs and screaming humans. There are the dastardly capitalists trying to steal intellectual property. There is Levine trying to study the animals and Malcolm trying to test his theories about evolution and extinction. But it’s once the humans start to interfere with the natural processes that the dino-shit starts really hitting the fan.

Once the action starts, there’s no let up. Sarah and Kelly are battling raptors, while Levine and Malcolm deal with angry tyrannosaur parents.

A dense jungle is the perfect setting for suspense. You hear breathing, but all you can see is a chain-link fence. Suddenly, you realise the raptors have chameleoned into the patterns of the fence and the shadows cast by the windows.

The tension increases as some of the humans (Dodgson) are trying to kill other humans (Sarah). The rescue helicopter comes and goes.

As the scientists examine each element, we learn more about the science. For example, Sarah explains predator/prey ratios to Eddie while pondering the surprising large numbers of velociraptors.

6 stars. The perfect technothriller.

Lincoln Child, Death Match (Anchor 2006)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39027.Death_Match?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=8OLbjb50nY&rank=1

6 stars. A technothriller with a twisty solution to the crime

Maureen Bowman hears the Thorpe baby crying. Both Lewis’s and Lindsay’s cars are in the drive. Finally, she goes over. Following the child’s line of sight, she sees the trauma.

Christopher Lash steps out of a cab on Madison Avenue. Eden Incorporated offers its clients an AI-selected ‘perfect soulmate’ selected by ‘Liza’, a supercomputer built by Dr. Richard Silver. Eden is hiring Lash, a psychologist specialising in human relationships, to investigate the Thorpe double suicide. Lewis and Lindsay had been one of their ‘supercouples’, couples whose particulars had matched 100%.

Posing as an investigator for the couple’s insurance policies, he interviews Lindsay’s father. ‘The happiest couple I’ve ever seen,’ he says.

Then, another supercouple commits double suicide. The wife survives long enough to say, ‘Make it stop. The sound in my head.’ These comprise what the FBI calls ‘equivocal deaths’, deaths that are related but with the nature of the relation unknown.

Lash can only suggest the possibility of homicide, probably a rejected Eden candidate. James Groesch is flagged. Lash has been getting phone hang-ups, and his credit card is declined. Only once in his career has he seen a serial killer like this.

Eden head of research Tara has been matched with a colleague – Gary Handerling, who, when investigated, proves to have utilised Eaton information to target vulnerable women.

Reluctantly, Eden brings him ‘inside the wall’, allowing him access to client files. He tries the interview process as an applicant and is rejected. Lash, for some reason not removed from the Eden applicants database, is matched with a soulmate – Diana Mirrin, and they have a date. But the next supercouple on the list, the Connellys, are under threat.

The brilliant twisty solution to the crime relies both on Lash’s expertise as a psychologist and Eden’s computer wizardry. Despite computer processing and AI having dramatically moved on in 29 years since its 1994 publication, the techno-bits don’t seem antiquated and still surprise.