Where Sebastian Faces Some Real Darkness

Where the Dead Lie by C.S. Harris
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I love this whole series, and this might be my favorite out of the 12 I've read. Top 2 or 3 for sure--though that's a tough call.

But it's also very hard to read.

I would never say that this very well-written series is exactly "cozy." Even though I usually enjoy reading these books before going to sleep (which is, to me, one indication) there are many other series that fit that label better. But it's also usually not too brutal (bearing in mind that there are deaths in every one). So it's not Murder She Wrote--far from it--but it's not Criminal Minds, either. However, this particular book could have been a Criminal Minds episode, complete with serial killer and genuine suspense. It's tough in spots. The murderer abducts children, tortures them, and then kills them. It's fiction, but it's real, you know? Such things happen. And it's horrible to face it and think about it.

Anyway, even though I had to quit watching Criminal Minds at some point because I couldn't take the misery portrayed in the stories, this is still very readable, and I'm trying to work out why I felt that way. Good people are working to save the kids, and despite the darkness there's a ribbon of hope spooling out through the whole story. I feel like the author balanced the difficulty of the subject matter with the grit, direct action, commitment, anger, and bravery we need as a reader to follow along. It's well done, and though it has a complex conclusion, I found the ending satisfying, and I'm eager to look at the next one.

Just as an aside: there's some discussion of the writings of the Marquis de Sade here, and at first I thought it was going to be simple and moralistic (which woulda been totally okay in this context, though not terribly edifying), but it ended up being surprisingly nuanced. I learned some stuff. So that was cool.

I think there are at least 3 stories waiting on the edges of this one: 1) Dr. Gibson needs to get off drugs; 2) One unexpected death was surely not due to natural causes, and I think I know who did it; and 3) Sebastian's niece is gonna need help with her horrible husband.

This is also my wish list for stuff to be solved in the next book. However, the author has her own way of timing things, and since everything so far has been very well done, I'll just wait to see how she manages it.

Recommended.

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Hopeful, helpful, enlightening

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoy reading Malcolm Gladwell's books, and I enjoyed this one. Truth is, though, it was losing my interest; much of this read like an interesting but overlong Buzzfeed article. (Not that there's much wrong with that.) However, the last two chapters were worth the price of reading the rest. If you're feeling TL;DR, just read the last two chapters.

The thesis of the book is that we often know things in an instant without knowing how we know. Secondarily, we do a bad job of interrogating these intuitions, and trying to explain or explicate them leads us farther from the truth, not nearer.

Pretty good. Useful.

But there's also a great deal in here that's more expected, like how our flashes of insight are often wrong and lead to problems. The key, it seems, is learning when we can trust ourselves to make snap judgments--a narrow range of things--and knowing all the other times when it will lead us into error.

That's what's great about chapters six and seven. It talks specifically about countering our intuitions, or unconscious reactions, when they're likely to be wrong.

Chapter six is about the kind of thinking error that leads cops to view POC with undue suspicion, subject suspects to unnecessary violence, and employ deadly force when it wasn't called for. What I found most interesting in this discussion of research and examples was the way human stereotyping can be accounted for using proper police technique, reducing or eliminating these kinds of errors. In other words, we don't have to just throw our hands up and say that policing is difficult and dangerous and shit happens; we can demand proper training and proper technique to help prevent tragedies.

And chapter seven is about the difficulty symphony orchestras have had removing gender bias in decisions like hiring and pay. I didn't realize how misogynistic orchestras were; I though women had been integral to them for decades. Nope. Turns out, until they started evaluating musicians from behind a curtain, it was nearly impossible for women to break through, especially if they played trombone or French horn or other "masculine" instruments. Once they started using blind auditions, things changed. Women who had been dismissed as average by directors and others who should have known better proved to be exceptional when gender bias was accounted for. (It took additional fighting and unionization, though, to keep up the momentum.)

Interesting, enlightening, helpful, hopeful, stimulating--that's how I saw the end of the book. Parts of it didn't impress me, but all of it was instructive, much of it was entertaining, and some of it was must-read good.

Worth taking a look.

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