Author talk
Bone Valley. Gilbert King. Flatiron Books, 2025. 384 pages.
Paroled in 2024, Leo Schofield spent 36 years in Florida prisons for murdering his wife, despite the fact that multiple witnesses supported his alibi, the killer's fingerprints were found in the victim's abandoned car, absolutely no blood was found at the alleged murder scene, the body was found at a location that the killer was known to frequent, AND the real killer confessed multiple times. Technically, Leo is still a convicted murderer today, paroled but not yet legally exonerated. How does this happen? At least two state prosecutors and some detectives intentionally destroyed evidence, suborned perjury from witnesses, ignored and threatened other witnesses, withheld evidence, and actively lied to jurors and parole board members, shielding a confessed serial killer while doubling and tripling down to convict an innocent teenager and to keep him in prison for the rest of his life. And Leo's conviction is still, and will always be, the only conviction ever to result from the case. Pulitzer prize winning author Gilbert King and his research assistant and producer Kelsey Decker created a hugely popular podcast, called "Bone Valley," to discuss the case, and ABC's "20/20" covered the story, but I had never heard of it until I went to a book talk a couple of weeks ago to see King and Schofield in person. I went because I really, really liked King's previous books Devil in the Grove and Beneath A Ruthless Sun, also about horrible miscarriages of justice in Florida. This book is incredible, unforgettable, affecting, dumbfounding, and infuriating like few other other books that I've read, and no fiction writer could ever conceive a story this powerful. Read this book and listen to the podcast.
Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson. Jeff Guinn. Simon & Schuster, 2013. 512 pages. Thanks to Simon & Schuster for the review copy.
I have no idea why Simon & Schuster offered review copies of a twelve-year old book, but I did recently enjoy Jeff Guinn's latest book Waco, and this biography does live up to my expectations. It is considered the authoritative bio of Charles Manson, and Guinn managed to interview important people who had never spoken to previous authors, like Manson's sister and his cousin, and some former Family members who had rarely done interviews in the past. It's a thorough, and thoroughly fascinating, account of the man, from his horrific childhood through the murders and subsequent trials, and it also places him in the context of his time, reflecting the turbulence and confusion that constantly swirled in the late 1960s. As the expression goes, "The man and the hour have met." Manson is an incredible character, and the time was unique. Both are great subjects to be mined. Deftly blending them together makes for a really good read.
Documentary on career and trial
Devil's Garden. Ace Atkins. Putnam Adult, 2009. 368 pages.
Ace Atkins is one of the authors presenting at the Savannah Book Festival in February 2026, so we decided to listen to one of his earlier works in preparation. Devil's Garden is based on one of Hollywood's earliest and biggest real-life scandals, the trial of Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle. In 1921, Arbuckle was arguably Hollywood's biggest star, one of the first stars to earn a million dollars. His only rival for the spotlight was Charles Chaplin. He was America's greatest slapstick comedian until a young woman named Virginia Rappe died as a result of a drunken party that took place in rooms rented by Arbuckle in one of San Francisco's fanciest hotels. Arbuckle was charged with her sexual assault and death. The resulting scandal and trials, plural, shocked American sensibilities, destroyed his career, and forever cemented Hollywood's reputation as "the Devil's Garden," despite the fact that he was eventually acquitted. Atkins fictionalizes the story, with a particular focus on Sam Hammett, a Pinkerton Agency detective hired by Arbuckle's defense team to investigate the case. You might know Sam better by his middle name Dashiell, the name under which he wrote some of the most acclaimed detective noir novels and created the characters Sam Spade and Nick and Nora Charles. Atkins is a huge fan of the genre and of Hammett, and this book is both his homage and a good story. I enjoyed it, but I have two complaints, especially with the audiobook version. One, the Hammett/Noir style flirts dangerously with parody. The vocabulary and language reminded me at times of comedy sketches lampooning 30s gangsters, even Rocky and Mugsy, the gangsters who were outsmarted by Bugs Bunny in a couple of cartoons. Two, I'm not sure it was the fault of the narrator, the producer, or the editor, but there were many instances in which the narration seems to jump, jarringly, from one scene to another without a pause or transition. Otherwise, a good book.
The Mangrove Coast. Randy Wayne White. Putnam, 1998. 290 pages. Book 6 of 28 in Doc Ford series.
Marine biologist and former-secret-agent-of-some-undisclosed-sort Doc Ford is just living his life in his Sanibel Island, Florida stilt house when he gets a visit from a stranger claiming to be the daughter of an old comrade killed in Cambodia on a secret mission shortly after the Vietnam War. In letters home, the friend had told his wife that Doc was the man to call on if she ever needed help when her husband was not around. Now, the daughter needs Doc's help. Her mother is missing and possibly endangered by a really shady and worrisome individual. She's broken all contact with the daughter and may be out of the country. Worried and intent on helping his dead buddy's family, Doc finds himself enmeshed in a dark mystery that takes him to Cartagena, Colombia and then to Panama. Another good Doc Ford mystery, and here's the history link: the book was published in 1998, and today it makes for a quaint look back at the early days of home computing and the internet. Emails and chat rooms comprise an integral part of the story, but it was new territory in 1998. Characters refer to emails as "letters' and "correspondence." At one point during their first meeting, the daughter is surprised to learn that Doc doesn't own a computer. Ford declares that he has no need for one, saying "I have a phone, a public library down the street, and the post office. Why do I need a computer?"
Radio interview with author
Forgotten Souls: The Search for the Lost Tuskegee Airmen. Cheryl W. Thompson. Dafina/Kensington Books, to be published January 27, 2026. 240 pages. Thanks to Kensington Books for the free advance readers copy for review.
It's taken far too long for the Tuskegee Airmen to get their just due for their service as the nation's first black military pilots and for their legendary record of achievements in World War II, but, at least in the past few decades, the veterans and their stories have been recognized. Unfortunately, not all survived long enough to see it. In fact, 27 of the over 1,000 Airmen were lost during the war, and their service and sacrifice was forgotten to all but their family. Cheryl W. Thompson, an investigative journalist and the daughter of a Tuskegee Airman herself, set out to uncover and tell the stories of those missing men. The result is a really great history of the unit and the men who comprised it, and now, after 80 years, those 27 missing men are getting at least some of the respect they deserve.
Author talk
Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival. Stephen Greenblatt. W.W. Norton & Company, 2025. 352 pages.
This book appears on multiple "Best of 2025" lists. I've read and liked Greenblatt's book, The Swerve, although it wasn't a page-turner by any stretch of the imagination. I'm really interested in the Renaissance/Elizabethan period, and I have read a lot about it. I love a good historical mystery. Yet, after a getting a third of the way through, I'm giving up on Dark Renaissance, fully embracing the late-in-life rule of thumb that life's too short to read books that you don't enjoy. Problem number one: Seemingly every sentence contains words and phrases like "probably," "maybe," "likely," "might have," "could have," "potentially," "perhaps," et cetera. If those words were removed, the book would be half as long. Yes, Greenblatt does provide context about Elizabethan England, but the specifics about Marlowe are scant, to put it generously. Problem number two: The book is just simply boring, at least so far. It did not hold my attention.
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Author podcast interview
Incendiary: The Psychiatrist, the Mad Bomber, and the Invention of Criminal Profiling. Michael Cannell. Minotaur Books, 2017. 304 pages.
Michael Cannell is another author appearing at the Savannah Book Festival in February 2026, so I chose to read this earlier work. It's about an episode of history that was totally new to me. I had no idea that New York City was gripped by terror from 1940 to 1956 because a Mad Bomber detonated dozens of pipe bombs in public areas around Manhattan. Bombs were planted in phone booths, restrooms, subway stations, and movie theaters. Radio City Music Hall was even targeted. Fortunately, no one died, but there were multiple injuries. The Bomber wrote letters taking credit and explaining that he was seeking revenge against Con Ed, the huge electric company that had mistreated him following a workplace injury. The police were stymied, and the public lived in fear. The head of the police bomb squad, a progressive cop who believed that science and crimefighting went hand in hand. This was a radical idea in the mid 20th century. Many of his superiors and colleagues thought the idea was ridiculous, that crimes were solved by legwork and instinct. Captain Howard Finney persisted, however, and sought out the advice of psychiatrist Dr. James Brussel. Brussel provided a detailed description of the Bomber's background, personality, and even personal appearance that narrowed the investigation. The real break came when a newspaper took Brussel's advice to make the investigation more public and engaged the Bomber in a public correspondence, causing him to unwittingly reveal more identifying information that led to his arrest. This was an excellent book that really held my interest throughout, and I learned about this specific case, as well as about the history of the bomb squad, other big criminal cases, the use of the insanity defense, and how Dr. Brussel became the father of criminal profiling.
Ten Thousand Islands Randy Wayne White. G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2000. 320 pages. Book 7 of 28 in Doc Ford series.
This Doc Ford mystery is really focused on Marco Island Florida and the Calusa people who occupied it before the Spanish invasion. Like the other indigenous peoples who occupied Florida before the Spanish, we know very little about them. Almost all of Florida's first peoples died of disease and murder in the earliest days of contact. The Calusa were thought to be a powerful confederacy that dominated southwest Florida that fished and traded and probably had connections to the Mayas. The region, and especially Marco Island, were once covered with mounds and remains of settlements. Then the developers came. That's the backdrop for this mystery that surrounds the death of a teenage girl fifteen years earlier. She seemed to have a special psychic connection to the Calusa that allowed her to find artifacts including a Marco Island cat figurine, one of the most intriguing artifacts ever found in the Americas, in my opinion. (The real one, about 6 inches high, was discovered in 1896.) Her psychic gift and her discoveries may have her death. Now, strange things are happening, her grave has been disturbed, and her mother turns to Ford for help. Like the other Doc Ford books, you'll probably figure things out before he does, but it's still a good story.
Art: An Interactive Guide: A Hands-On Tour of the World's Greatest Artists and Their Masterpieces: With Magic Pages, Flaps, Wheels, Timelines, and More! Mifflin Lowe. Bushel & Peck Books, 2025. 80 pages.
I've always been a huge fan of pop-up books and museums-in-books, the interactive books with pop-ups, manipulatives, and inserts, so I thought this book looked fun. It's aimed at grades 4 through 6, but it could have wider appeal. It contains brief biographies of a number of major artists and overviews of one or two of their most famous works. It's adequate, a decent introduction to art and artists. And the title must set a record for most colons, and punctuation in general, of any book title ever. However, it's kind of disappointing on two counts. First, it is overwhelmingly male and European in focus. Secondly, the inserts and geegaws are boring. They don't add much. The most common gimmick is an overlay with notes pointing out a few elements. The book doesn't come close to matching the subject.
The Bishop's Pawn. Steve Berry. Minotaur Books, 2018. 352 pages. Book 13 of 20 in Cotton Malone series.
I found the last Cotton Malone book that I read, The 14th Colony, to be disappointing, but this entry in the series is a return to form. It's a flashback to Cotton's first case as a top US Justice Department 18 years earlier, before the Magellan Billet was actually formed, and his first meeting with his future boss, Stephanie Nelle. The usual tropes are almost all there: Stephanie sends him on a mission without telling him critical information, there's a mysterious and very capable woman ally, there's a major conspiracy based on some intentionally hidden bit of history, the stakes are high, Cotton refuses to explain his unusual nickname, there are betrayals, multiple people die in very public shootouts (You have to wonder how all these shootouts, explosions, and chases are reported and explained - or not? - in the media or by authorities to the survivors.). There's one major variation: the big climactic shootout doesn't take place in church or religious site; it takes place in the middle of Disney World --- which is akin to a religious site for many, in a way. And it is a departure for Berry in that it's mostly written in first person, told by Cotton. The mystery here involves the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. , and it delves deeply into King's last years, his assassination, the conspiracy theories, James Earl Ray, and into J. Edgar Hoover's personal hatred of King and his totally illegal and unethical use of the FBI to attack King and the entire civil rights movement using the truly evil COINTELPRO. (Look it up and educate yourself. If you ever fell for Hoover's carefully created and crafted image of the FBI as a super-professional, elite, apolitical, organization beyond moral reproach, you'll find that the organization has actually had multiple and continuous periods and pockets of immorality and ineptitude within, throughout its history.) Berry creates a solid action adventure that's also thought-provoking, and he even manages to pull off a major twist in the end.
Shark River. Randy Wayne White. G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2001. 291 pages. Book 8 of 28 in the Doc Ford Series.
This eighth Doc Ford adventure opens with Doc enjoying a rare vacation at a luxury island resort. But, of course, it's Doc, so the vacation is cut short when he thwarts the attempted kidnapping of another guest, resulting in his entanglement with a Colombian cartel, and he himself becomes the target of the cartel's ruthless head. He also has to deal with a from-the-grave curveball thrown at him by his recently deceased estranged Uncle Tucker - a curveball that leads to yet another adventure for Doc and his buddy, Tomlinson. It's another excellent Doc Ford action story, and the reader learns some major details about the secret past lives of Doc and Tomlinson - details that could affect their relationship. White also takes the reader deeper into the lives and the relationships of the residents of Dinkins Bay Marina. And a fun, new, and hopefully recurring character is introduced, with the foreshadowed possibilities of a couple of other new future characters.
From CBS Sunday morning
Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor. Christine Kuehn. Celadon Books, 2025. 272 pages.
Every family has secrets, but few secrets are as massive and as consequential as those hidden by Christine Kuehn's father and Aunt Ruth. Kuehn knew that her father had been born in Germany, but he had grown up in Hawaii, where his family had migrated to in the late 1930s. However, he almost never talked about his parents or siblings except to say that his parents had both died in Germany. Christine thought it was very strange because he was a great storyteller normally. Then, one day in 1994, a letter from a screenwriter researching the Pearl Harbor attack found her and changed her life. She found that her grandparents had been Nazi spies working for the Japanese and tasked with learning sensitive military information in preparation for X-Day, the surprise attack on America's Pacific Fleet naval base. base. Not only was her grandfather Otto the only person ever convicted in connection with the Pearl Harbor attack, but her Aunt Ruth, Christine learned, had been a mistress of Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels when she was a teenager. Her grandmother and Ruth had actively gathered information from oblivious naval personnel and their wives and girlfriend. Eberhard's youngest brother Hans had been trained as a small boy to charm his way onto American battleships and to memorize details of weaponry and layout. Only her father appeared to be innocent. Kuehn struggled with this information for decades, researching and uncovering more and more information and then debating with herself and with her husband about what to do with the information, finally deciding to publish. It is an incredible story, and it is, once again, proof that truth is usually stranger than fiction.
Twelve Mile Limit Randy Wayne White. G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2002. 304 pages. Book 9 of 28 in the Doc Ford series.
The 9th Doc Ford mystery open with a scuba diving tragedy that takes the life of Janet Mueller, one of Doc Ford's Dinkins Bay neighbors and friends. White based the story on a real-life incident that occurred in 1994, down to the details of the search for the real victims and using real quotes from people involved in the real investigation, but he adapted the true story to accommodate the fictional Janet and her three companions. The Canadians who disappeared in the true story were never found, however, and White's hypothesis of what happened to them provides the rest of the plot for this dark story. The plot revolves around human trafficking and the international sex slave trade, and it requires Ford to mount a rescue mission to the jungles of Colombia. Published in 2002, it tackles the subject well before human trafficking became as big a part of our public awareness. Ford is dragged into a large and violent international conspiracy that threatens his life and those lives of people close to him. Another good Ford thriller.
