Brad Marley

There may not be a book premise more ridiculous than one involving super smart vines with the ability to perfectly mimic a chirping cell phone, for instance, in order to lure unsuspecting adventure hunters to their gory deaths. But try reading this book two weeks after a newborn arrives on little to no sleep, and then tell me how ridiculous it sounds.

Terrifyingly ridiculous, that's how.

Scott Smith's The Ruins tells the story of a group of young adults on vacation in Mexico who follow a German man they've recently become acquainted with into the jungle to help find his brother who was supposed to meet a woman on an architectural dig, but failed to return.

Armed with only limited food, some hard liquor, and their wits, they soon find themselves terribly unprepared to face the most terrifying literary situation I've ever read (and I've read Gerald's Game.) And, as any group of well-fed, privileged human beings would do when faced with scorching heat and maniacal foliage, this one deteriorates quickly, but not in a way you would readily imagine, or else you would be writing horror novels.

I won't go into great detail in case you want to scare yourself silly, but a large chunk of the survival situation involves one character's hands-on quest to find the sickness that has invaded his body.

If I have not yet completely scared you away from reading this book, here are a couple things that will enhance your experience:

1. Only read in the daytime.

2. Make sure you have had ample sleep (i.e. wait until your kids have gotten past the newborn stage.)

3. Remember it's just a book.

But I suppose if you're into reading horror novels, the horror is the best part, and this book certainly delivers. 

What do Guglielmo Marconi, the Italian inventor who discovered wireless telegraphy, and Hawley Harvey Crippen, the diminutive American doctor accused of killing his wife in cold blood, have in common?

They were key players, albeit indirectly, in the first made-for-tv car chase, which contained neither tv's nor cars, but instead, wireless communication and transatlantic ocean liners.

In the summer of 1895, Marconi, who was trying to perfect the idea of wireless communication, moved his experiments outside his lab/attic and discovered he could transmit messages long distances using electromagnetic waves. From that success, he was able to seek out assistance from the British post office to fund further experiments.

In the year 1910, Dr. Crippen poisoned his wife in their London home and claimed she moved to California to cover up her disappearance. To escape the authorities that were closing in on what really happened, Crippen and his lover, Ethel Le Neve, altered their appearances and tried to escape to America via Canada on the SS Montrose.

Thanks to Marconi's wireless device, which was now installed on most ocean liners of the day, the captain of the Montrose was able to send messages, while en route on the open sea, that he suspected Dr. Crippen was a passenger on his ship.  While he wined and dined the doctor into a false sense of security, people all over the world followed the chase through newspaper coverage fueled by regular updates sent via these magical wireless devices.

(Think of it as a slowly evolving OJ Simpson chase, only with a different verdict.)

When the Scotland Yard investigator chasing the doctor stepped on board to arrest him as the ship approached Canada, Crippen's fate was sealed. And with the arrest, and subsequent analysis of the crucial role Marconi's device played in the apprehension, the importance of instant communication was was forever set in stone.

Our world would never be the same.

In 1959, two ex-convicts traveled to Kansas for what they were led to believe was an easy score.

According to one of their former cell mates, a wealthy farmer from Kansas hid a large amount of cash on his property, and it was ripe for the picking.

The plan was simple: steal the cash, kill the family, and escape to Mexico. But only two parts of the plan came to fruition. They never found any money.

A brief about the unsolved murders in The New York Times captured enough of author Truman Capote's attention to cause him to convince fellow author Harper Lee to accompany him to Kansas so he could write about the crime before any arrests had been made. He spent six years on it — including interviews with the suspects – before it was published in four parts by The New Yorker.

Six years. That's equivalent to six decades in today's tweet-it-before-you-prove-it news cycle.

If Capote spent six years on a story today, the publisher would laugh him out of the building when he turned in his manuscript.

But Capote worked in a time when there wasn't as much urgency; you could let a story simmer before serving it to the public. You could make sure every word was accurate without somebody breathing down your neck to throw up something half-assed because they didn't want to be the last to file the report.

Obviously, those days are history, which makes this book somewhat of a recent relic.

I highly recommend it.

If The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo was a surprisingly delectable, medium-rare filet mignon that got better with each bite devoured, then the The Girl Who Played With Fire was the chef's attempt to replicate the original experience.

Unfortunately for chefs and authors alike, the anticipation of a repeat performance is rarely, if ever, surpassed by the second helping.

That is not to say, however, that The Girl Who Played With Fire was a terrible book.  Quite the contrary.  But when the book that introduced me to a character as complex and intriguing as Lisbeth Salander forced me to remain on the couch until I plowed through to the end, well, the sequel definitely had its work cut out for it.

The second installment of the late Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy takes place roughly two years after the events of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

When Millennium magazine is approached by a freelance writer to publish a book on Sweden's underground sex trade industry that will implicate some of the country's top officials for their participation in this horrific past time, the editorial staff thinks they have another piece of investigative work on their hands comparable to the success of their fictional Wennerstrom affair coverage. 

But, as is often the case in the world of fiction, something goes wrong, and newly renowned Millennium reporter, Michael Blomquist, feels it is his journalistic duty to skirt the police investigation to solve a crime that Salander, and other characters from the first book, figure prominently in.

I usually judge books on how easy they are to walk away from mid-read, and it was not difficult to put this one aside for a day before returning to the story.

Unlike the first installment, where the story revved up about forty pages in and never stopped escalating, the second seemed to stay stuck in neutral, with an occasional uptick in gear that hinted at a top speed that never materialized.

Luckily for those of us reading the series, the third and final book, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest, is scheduled to be released in October, and I hold out hope that the plodding pace of the middle entry was a necessity, because the first one was too good and showed too much promise to be an anomaly.

But who am I kidding?  Even if this book was the literary equivalent of an overcooked, dried out T-bone, I would still line up for thirds, come October.