And Here You Thought Rupert Murdoch Was a Nice Guy at Heart: Hack Attack (Nick Davies)

Hack Attack: The Inside Story of how the Truth Caught up with Rupert Murdoch - Nick Davies

About half a decade ago a reporter for one of the leading British Newspapers, The Guardian, thought he detected a discrepancy in the coverage of a minor crime. A London PI and a journalist for a London tabloid had been convicted for hacking the voicemails of the Royal family. Most Brits nodded sagely and then went on about the business of devouring football results and slobbering over page 3 girls (not unlike we Yanks after all, are they?) Not Nick Davies, though: Davies, the aforementioned Guardian reporter, smelled a rat. Thus began the five-year odyssey in which a handful of journalists and legal eagles took on the empire of one of the world’s most powerful men and fought it to a standstill.

For a few days.

Rupert Murdoch [source: David
Shankbone/wikimedia commons]

Davies lays out the history, often in excruciating detail, in his 2014 memoir Hack Attack: The Inside Story of how the Truth Caught up with Rupert Murdoch. Davies and his editor, Alan Rusbridger, began the laborious process of uncovering the seamy underbelly of Murdoch’s print empire in Britain with a single story in 2009. By the end, they had stripped the covers off not just the invasion of the privacy of just about anyone with any celebrity but also bribery of law enforcement. All this criminality was based on a single desire: for Murdoch’s journalism empire to become so powerful that they could dictate policy to the British government. They damned near succeeded.

Through 400-plus pages, Davies logs the small details of the crimes at News of the World, Murdoch’s flagship tabloid, and the involvement of officials of the company from James Murdoch to Rebekah Brooks. Over a period of three years, Davies and The Guardian worried at every piece of evidence, each inconsistency, every slip of the tongue by a participant. Names are named, including officials of the London Metropolitan Police and at Scotland Yard; likewise a series of residents of 10 Downing Street.

Reacher Reaches Nineteen, a Personal Milestone but Still Mediocre

Personal: A Jack Reacher Novel - Lee Childs

Considering the fact that I read dozens of novels every year, lots of them of the “no socially-redeeming qualities” variety, you might think that I had already devoured all eighteen of the Jack Reacher novels penned by Lee Childs. You’d be wrong: before Personal, the nineteenth in the series, my only exposure to Childs’ protagonist had been the Tom Cruise movie from 2012 which I’ve (accidentally) seen twice. Be that as it may, people have always sad that the novels in the series aren’t so interrelated that you have to read them in order, so I bit on Personal. I gotta say, the immense popularity of the series is a little puzzling to me…

Jack Reacher is, as usual, riding a bus somewhere when he spots the advertisement asking him to phone an old buddy. He makes the call, and within hours is whisked to a supersecret CIA billet on the opposite coast headed by an old acquaintance. There he learns that someone has hired a freelance sniper to put a bullet in the brain of one (or more) of the G-8 attendees, and the meeting in London is mere days away. Reacher’s needed because, at least in theory, he knows the mind of one of the four probably sniper candidates, having put him in jail fifteen years ago. John Kott is now free, and in the wind.

Reacher and his CIA minder, a tasty morsel named Casey Nice, head to Paris and then London in search of Kott. People die, Reacher does whatever it is that Reacher always does, and the evil plot underneath it all is exposed.

Par for the course for Reacher, I’m told.

The Son: Jo Nesbø Skillfully Transforms Revenge to Redemption

The Son - Jo Nesbø

Sixteen-year-old Sonny Loftus came home to find his father slumped over his desk, a pistol by his hand and a pool of blood by his head. A note suggested that he had been a mole in the Oslo police department who’d been tipping off organized crime for years.

Sonny did not take it well… twelve years later, the heroin-addicted young man is in Norway’s most escape-proof prison, convicted of serial murders dating back more than a decade. He’s also become a sort of father confessor, even a healer, to his fellow inmates; one of whom bares his conscience to Sonny one day: the boy’s father wasn’t really the mole, and was forced by a crime boss to kill himself in order to protect his wife and son. Within weeks, Sonny has kicked heroin cold turkey and arranged his own escape.

Once outside the prison walls, Sonny sets about getting even – with everyone involved. Not only does the bloody path he carves though the Oslo underworld get the crime boss’s attention, the local would like very much to discuss his activities, especially a homicide cop by the name of Simon Kefas. Kefas isn’t just another wily old workhorse cop, he happens to have been the longtime partner of Loftus senior. To say he has mixed emotions about The Son of his old friend is an understatement. To say that Simon has some baggage of his own is also an understatement…

Brennan Gets Hot and Cold Cases This Time, but Bones Never Lie

Bones Never Lie - Kathy Reichs

The case started like cases often do for Temperance Brennan: a phone call asking her to consult on an old case, a file of autopsy results and an earnest cop from a distant jurisdiction. But in this case, the victim was known: so why call in one of the country’s leading forensic anthropologists? It was the DNA: trace evidence with a DNA match to a long-ago case Brennan had worked in Montreal, a case she’d worked with Ryan. Ryan, the man who had cracked the Anique Pomerlau case, the homicide lieutenant gone missing lo, these many months.

Emily Deschanel, TV's Temperance Brennan from"Bones"
[Gabe Skidmore, wikimedia commons]

They didn’t want Brennan, they wanted Ryan – and they figured she could find him and he could find Pomerlau. Brennan didn’t think she could, but a new case in her own back yard made matters more urgent: the MO fit Pomerlau’s style, and Brennan’s research suggested that it was not the first time the woman had plied her evil trade in Charlotte… and so she jumped on a plane to fetch her sometime partner, sometime lover.

The trail led them back to Montreal where they reopened the files on the Pomerlau case; and then to Vermont whence the earnest detective with the damning DNA match had come a-visiting. Brennan did what Brennan does: she puzzled through the mystery and, in the process, got herself in deep doo-doo. 

What: you expected different?

The Golden Hour Yields Insight into Strange Cultures, Both in Africa and Inside the Beltway

The Golden Hour - Todd Moss

Emergency medical personnel know from experience that if a patient receives treatment within an hour after a heart attack or stroke, his chances of survival increase exponentially. Judd Ryker knows this because he worked his way through undergrad as an EMT, but in a moment of idle curiosity the polysci prof wondered whether the same principle translates to other “incidents” as well, especially his own field. Once a corps of grad students had sifted through a mountain of data, Ryker’s study of the history of coups d’etat convinced him that The Golden Hour translates to affairs of state as well. The statistics suggest that there’s a critical period within which governmental overthrow can be reversed; a period of about 100 hours. Once his findings are published, Judd finds himself plucked out of academia and dropped into a position at the United States Department of State.

Ryker quickly discovers that even the bloodiest coup in a third-world nation is tame compared to the back-stabbing and interdepartmental infighting going on among the many government agencies. A year after his move, while on a beach vacation, Ryker gets a call: there has been an overnight change of government in the West African nation of Mali. The hundred-hour clock has started… Ryker knows the terrain and the principals in Mali, because he spent many months there as a grad student. He even met his wife out in the wild fringes of the Sahara. Mali is also the country where he found himself in the hospital eight months back, caught with the Ambassador by an IED as he toured the countries of the Dark Continent. Once a few task-force meetings convince him that the best test of his concept is for to be more hands-on, Ryker makes his way to the scene.