the rix mix

Michael Connelly: The Brass Verdict (2008)
Detective Harry Bosch meets Mickey Haller, The Lincoln Lawyer, "a criminal defense attorney who operates out of the back seat of his Lincoln Town Car, traveling between the far-flung courthouses of Los Angeles to defend clients of every kind. Bikers, con artists, drunk drivers, drug dealers — they're all on Mickey Haller's client list." The Lincoln is chauffeured by a client working off Mickey's fee. Mickey's ex-wife handles his schedule at her home.


Mary Gordon: Reading Jesus - A Writer’s Encounter With the Gospels (2009)
My blog post on this book.

Steven Hart: The Last Three Miles: Politics, Murder, and the Construction of America's First Superhighway (2007)
My blog post on this book.

Elmore Leonard: Road Dogs (2009)
"Elmore Leonard returns with three of his favorite characters: Jack Foley from Out of Sight, Cundo Rey from LaBrava, and Dawn Navarro from Riding the Rap. "

Irene Marcuse: Under the Manhattan Bridge, an Anita Servi Mystery (2004).
My blog post on this book.

Val McDermid: The Grave Tattoo (2006)
200 year old body uncovered on a Lake District hillside may be Fletcher Christian, who may have returned to tell his story to William Wordsworth, who may have put it in a poem, which may be hidden away someplace in Cumbria. Brit Lit grad student & pub waitress Jane Gresham returns to her childhood home to search for the lost manuscript & make her rep. The story works. As usual, McDermid makes makes no concessions to the language of her American readers, part of her charm. Also read Laura Lippman's In a Strange City, P.I. Tess Monaghan's encounter with Baltimore's Poe fanatics.


Robert J. Randisi: Hey there, (You with the gun in your hand) (2008, 3rd Rat Pack mystery).
"It's 1961 and Las Vegas is still the place to be. Eddie Gianelli, pit boss at the Sands Casino, now considers the Rat Pack his friends. And this time, his friend Frank Sinatra wants him to help Sammy. Someone has an embarrassing photo of Sammy and wants $25 grand for it. All Eddie has to do is make the pay-off and collect the photo. Easy, right? But at the rendezvous, in place of a blackmailer, Eddie finds a dead body greeting him instead. Pretty soon Eddie and New York torpedo Jerry Epstein are up to their elbows in bodies. There's a double-cross going on. Could the presence of the Secret Service mean that JFK is somehow involved?" Delivers exactly as promised. Cameos by Marilyn Monroe & Buddy Hackett. Epstein is a great sidekick character.

Jonathan Van Meter: The Last Good Time: Skinny D'amato, The Notorious 500 Club, And The Rise And Fall Of Atlantic City. (2003)
Friendly & largely unvarnished biography of a guy who loved Atlantic City more than the casino owners do. Skinny walked with ease among the high & the low, rich & poor. "That's Life" could be his theme song. Skinny used the 1946 success of Dean & Jerry at the 500 to help a down-&-out Frank & make a lifelong friend (Sinatra was wildly popular in A.C. when Hollywood treated him like a bum). Skinny kept a nightclub going at 6 South Missouri Ave. for thirty years. He was as mobbed up as you'd expect from someone running a gambling establishment behind a club in A.C., but nobody owned him. His biggest business & public relations mistake was getting involved in Sinatra's Cal-Neva mess with Sam Giancana (see "Hey there"). There were horrifying, tragic events in his family; Van Meter interviewed Skinny's son in a prison. The 500 burned down in 1973. Resorts International opened in 1978. Paul "Skinny" D'amato lived long enough after gambling became legal to see some evidence it would no more preserve the working class & ethnic neighborhoods of his hometown than his own high roller hotel room card games had. The casinos destroyed them. Pity, the D'amato family couldn't do something with the 500 Club name, license it to a casino as a lasting tribute to Atlantic City's most memorable host. (Terrible dust jacket cover design.)

Sarah Vowell: The Wordy Shipmates (2008) Her shipmates: John Winthrop, Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams.
Sarah on the Rachel Maddow Show

Brenda Wineapple: White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (2008)
My blog post on this book.

Labels: Atlantic City, Rix reviews, what I'm reading