All The Wrong Places by Joy Fielding
“So, tell me about yourself, he says. He smiles what he hopes is a sweet smile -- neither too big nor too small, one that hints at a wry, maybe even offbeat sense of humour that he thinks would appeal to her. He wants to charm her. He wants her to like him.”
The would-be charmer doing the speaking is a guy who calls himself Mister Right Now in his online profile. The woman to whom he is speaking is trying out this online dating thing for the first time, thinking it might be fun. Will this first date lead to something that will last a long time, or is it going to be a date with death?
Back in the olden days of the mid-80s, when I began interviewing authors while working at radio station CFUN in Vancouver, one of the first writers I had the pleasure of chatting up was Joy Fielding. The book we discussed at that time was Life Penalty, which came out in 1984. All the Wrong Places came out in 2019, from Double Day Canada.
At first, Fielding wanted to crack the acting business, so she moved to Los Angeles where she got to kiss Elvis Presley and act in an episode of Gunsmoke. After a while she returned to Toronto, and soon started writing full time. According to the website, she has written and published 29 books. If you'd like to learn more about Joy Fielding, please search your electronic devices for our Talking Books and Stuff's podcast and seek out either episode 136 or episode 7. When she is not writing, Joy Fielding likes to golf and watch movies. A fine combination.
The Judge's List by John Grisham
“The call came through the office landline, through a system that was at least twenty years old and had fought off all technological advances. It was taken by a tattooed receptionist named Felicity, a new girl who would be gone before she fully understood the phones. They were all leaving, it seemed, especially the clerical help. Turnover was ridiculous. Morale was low. The Board on Judicial Conduct had just seen its budget chopped for the fourth straight year by a legislature that hardly knew it existed.”
This is the beginning of yet another page-turning legal thriller by John Grisham, and is a story that involves a murder case that remains unsolved after twenty years, but the suspect may have gone on killing for years and years.
If you've read more than five or six books in the past year, most likely one of them was by Grisham. Once a lawyer himself, Grisham long ago turned from churning out legal briefs to penning chart-topping blockbusters.
His first novel was A Time to Kill, a modest success, but then he blew up the publishing world with The Firm, which has sold more than seven million copies. Remember the movie of the same name? Tom Cruise was in it. As was the late Gene Hackman.
In The Judge's List, we have a guy who is tracking down judges he feels have done him wrong. He keeps killing, and he keeps getting away with it.
According to my exhaustive research, Grisham is one of only three anglophone authors who have sold two million book copies on the first printing. The other two are Tom Clancy and J.K. Rowling.
The Judge's List came out in 2021 from Doubleday. If you are so inclined you can track down the scribe at .
Blood on the Coal by Ken Cuthbertson
“Death cares nothing for etiquette. All too often, like the unwelcome visitor that it is, death arrives unannounced and unexpectedly. It did that on the evening of October 28th, 1958. One hundred and seventy-four miners were at work deep within the Dominion Steel and Coal Corporation ( DOSCO ) colliery at Springhill, Nova Scotia, when the earth suddenly moved. Scores of men died instantly.”
Blood on the Coal by Ken Cuthbertson is the true story of the great Springhill mine disaster, with a foreword by Anne Murray. Why her? She grew up there, and her father was one of the town's doctors. When you read this book, you'll read about life as a coal miner, but you'll also learn of the families of the miners, and the town in which they live, and what they did before becoming men of the deep, and also how they managed life after the big bump.
Seventy-five miners died, but 99 were rescued,with the last group of survivors being brought to the surface on the first of November. The disaster became the first major international event to appear in live television reports, courtesy of the CBC.
Blood On The Coal was published in 2023 by Harper Collins, and the author himself can be reached at . Tell him Dennis sent you.
For even more information, ask your electronic assistant to locate episodes 84 and 230 of the Talking Books and Stuff's podcast.
