Plum’s got her latest assignment, no problem. She just has to bring in Ranger, a suspect in the death of a wanna-be gangster, the son of an arms dealer.
What I Liked
As with most things Plum, there’s a lot going on … Grandma has moved in, she gets stuck babysitting a wild dog, and there’s a killer running around who likes Stephanie. Plus we get to see an old high school pal, Moon Man, who is frequently fun since the elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top floors.
What I Didn’t Like
The whole sub-story with gun-runners and missing money, and Ranger being “wanted”, gets a little ridiculous after a while.
Plum is on her fifth outing, looking for her missing uncle and one angry little man. Uncle Fred was complaining about paying for garbage pickup, and the truck skipped his house. So he went into complain and disappeared. Of course, he’s in the Plum family, so the weird part is he left behind photos of severed body parts in garbage bags. Aunt Mabel wants Stephanie to look for him, although she’s not entirely sure she wants the cheap bastard found and brought home. Plus, a midget missed his court date.
What I Liked
Stephanie’s family is definitely on the wild side, and the uncle is pretty out there for 70. Fun to see all the pieces at play. Plus Stephanie decides she needs to “diversify” her income sources, so asks Ranger to help mentor her in new areas (i.e., to work for him), so we get to see more of his line of work and meet his crew/employees (like Tank). And Lulu and Stephanie chasing the short guy are hilarious to read.
What I Didn’t Like
Morelli’s family is not as much fun as the Plums, and fairly one-dimensional. Plus Benito Ramirez is back, and is just annoying. My biggest objection though is a “cliff-hanger” ending on the romance side that deliberately plays with point-of-view to keep it vague who Stephanie is talking with at her door.
Devlin Tracy is a claims investigator working for an insurance company. The VP gives him a case to investigate — a friend of the President of the company is in a sanatorium, one of the other patients changed their beneficiary on their insurance policy just before they died, and the doctor at the sanatorium got the winfall. The President is afraid that his friend will be pressured to do the same, and the President wants Trace to make sure there’s nothing weird going on.
What I Liked
Warren Murphy was the creator of several other series, and while some of those were kind of pulp-style, this one is a full “standard” detective novel. Wise-cracking, determined, but not always the fastest to figure things out. Trace works hard, keeps poking until something shakes loose, and then grabs on and won’t let go until whatever scheme falls apart. All the elements of the series are here — drinking like a fish, sleeping with suspects, wearing a little frog pin that records conversations, and a bit of a blundering style that worms his way into lots of situations. There are sub-stories with drugs and potential lawsuits, but mostly it is just about Trace shaking things up.
What I Didn’t Like
He has a girlfriend, of sorts, and her portrayal in this one is more annoying than usual for the series. Plus she comes in near the end as a super-detective to help solve the case, but Trace was doing fine on his own. She helps him out, as she often does, but she was mostly superfluous for this outing.
Last June, I went to my wife’s graduation ceremony for her Master’s degree, and the guest recipient of an honorary degree for that session was Jeffrey Kottler. I confess that I’m not sure if I had ever heard of him before that, although I vaguely remember seeing reference to his books in some “best of self-help” lists. As a speaker, he was amazing. He told a couple of stories about himself growing up, and about a woman who underwent a profound change in front of him, and in all of the examples he gave, he basically had an underlying double-edged message…first, that change can happen anywhere and second, he has studied it for a good part of his life and has no idea what really causes change.
His speech and approach to change were intriguing enough that I came back home and googled him, looking up some of his books on Amazon. And then promptly ordered “Change – What really leads to lasting personal transformation”. I got the book around mid-June and I jumped in, but I’ve been slowly reading a chapter here and a chapter there. It has tons of great info about some common elements to various approaches to understanding change and how to make change happen, or more accurately, how change happened in specific instances for others.
Even the preface is solid. He repeats what he said in the speech, namely that after centuries of study, none of the “experts” really know what’s going on with people as they change. However, generally speaking, making changes is easy; sustaining the change afterwards, i.e. maintaining the momentum is where the hard part begins.
As he gets started in Chapter 1, I found myself nodding to myself in a lot of places. First, and foremost, I love the idea that change is not about a cure for a problem but rather the process of overlaying new patterns over top of older ones…like building a city on other foundations. Sure, the metaphor breaks down if you talk about weak foundations, but it is more about covering up the other foundations, putting down new roads or paths overtop, and eventually, the new paths are the dominant ones.
The first chapter is filled with definitional issues, and I found one of them quite profound:
When does an alteration in attitudes, beliefs, behaviour, thinking, or feeling “count” as change, and how long does it have to last in order to qualify? What if there are reported changes in a person’s thinking or attitudes but no observable shift in behaviour?
For me, the answer seems simple…in reverse order, a change in thinking is enough to qualify for a “change” of sorts, a pre-requisite if you will for any future change to come, and it “counts” if it is sustainable on it’s own i.e. it embeds itself in your thinking without blowing it off or reverting back to the previous way you thought or approached things.
In the same vein, I find the scope of the initial chapter a little too large. It notes for example that there are “levels of change”, including attitude shift, experimenting with alternatives, rational skill development, external support, meaning-making, and even cognitive restructuring. For me, it is much simpler…a mental change, an attempt to try other approaches, finding an approach (mental or process) that works for you, and reinforcement of that initial mental change to “cement” the change. This is much closer to the general approach he outlines (desire for change, a situation that forces change, awareness, testing, and avoiding relapses), but I am not sure I agree about the “situation” that forces change. He makes a large emphasis on this in later chapters, but it doesn’t answer all the foundational issues in my view, so I’ll discuss more of that later.
What does change mean to you? Does temporary change count? Or only permanent, sustainable change?
Set in the 1970s, a Russian poet has sought asylum in the U.S. Days before he qualifies for citizenship, he is kidnapped from Grand Central Station. Why was he taken? How can they help him? Where is he?
What I Liked
The story diverges on two tracks — a black-bag CIA operative comes in from the cold just enough to maintain full deniability while he looks for the missing poet. At the same time, an FBI manager keeps poking and prodding trying to find out why. Neither one knows the other exists, and the two stories remain fully compartmentalized.
What I Didn’t Like
The opening is extremely descriptive, almost one step removed from the action, and it takes a while until you fully engage in the two tracks.
