Review of "The White Lady: A Historical Thriller" by Jaqueline Winspear

When Germany invades Belgium during World War I, an underground resistance network called La Dame Blanche (The White Lady) is formed to spy on and sabotage German troops. Eleven-year-old Elinor and her 14-year-old sister Cecily are recruited into La Dame Blanche because schoolgirls are thought to be above suspicion.

Elinor and Cecily record train movements, and - after a while - the girls are taught to sabotage train tracks to derail German shipments of soldiers and weapons.



One evening the girls are discovered by two German soldiers, and when the men try to rape Cecily, Elinor shoots them dead.



After World War I, Elinor - who can speak several languages - teaches at a girl's school in England. Then....when World War II breaks out, Elinor is recruited to do espionage service in Belgium once again. A tragic incident during a spy operation deeply affects Elinor, who continues to be haunted by the event.



Skip to 1947, and - in the aftermath of the war - Elinor is living a quiet life in an English village.



Elinor's interaction with her neighbors is usually limited to a nod hello, except for a young family: Jim Mackie, his wife Rose, and their small daughter Susie. Elinor takes a shine to little Susie, and gives the child small gifts and such.



With Elinor's history in spy networks she has a habit of learning about everyone in her vicinity. (Elinor REALLY could have used the internet. 🙂) Thus Elinor discovers that Jim Mackie belongs to London's notorious Mackie crime family, and that Jim moved away to 'go straight.' However, NO ONE is allowed to leave the Mackie criminal network, and Elinor sees Jim and his wife being threatened and assaulted by Jim's brothers.



Elinor springs into action, and disregarding the strict petrol-use laws, Elinor hightails it to London to consult with Detective Chief Inspector Stephen Warren of Scotland Yard, who happens to be a personal acquaintance.





Elinor wants DI Warren to crack down on the Mackies, who have a history of robbery, assault, extortion, etc. Warren isn't too receptive, though, saying he has bigger problems than the Mackies. Warren suggests that Elinor drop the matter, and go back to her quiet village life.

Faced with Warren's reluctance to arrest members of the Mackie clan, Elinor takes matters into her own hands. Elinor is determined to keep Jim, Rose, and Susie safe, no matter the consequences.



A large part of the story relates to Elinor's espionage work during the two World Wars, and these scenes are edge-of-the seat compelling. Elinor is exceptionally skilled with knives and guns, and one has to admire her pluck.

I enjoyed this historical thriller, which is a fine depiction of women's contributions during both World Wars.

Rating: 3.5 stars

Review of "Refractions: A Sci-Fi Space Opera" by M.V. Melcer

At some time in the not too distant future, the Earth is in crisis. Climate change has led to cataclysmic flooding, drought, hunger, and mass migrations, and a plague has killed two billion people.

In the chaos, China led the recovery and took the economic and technological lead.....



.....and the New American Union (Union) - which has become more Christian than ever - is struggling to catch up.



In this climate, the Union is trying to establish Christian colonies on distant planets. To do this, the Union has to 'lease' Chinese interstellar ships, which are controlled by Chinese engineers. The Chinese engineers have sole access to the ships' engines and inner workings, to make sure no one steals China's technological secrets.



The Union's first space settlers were sent to establish a colony called Bethesda, which is 35 years away in space-travel time. For the first ten years, things were going well on Bethesda, with messages going back and forth between Earth and the 5,000 people on the distant colony.



The apparent success of Bethesda led to additional colony ships being launched; a ship named Gabriel was headed to join Bethesda, and other ships were sent to different planets.



Before the additional ships arrived at their destinations, Bethesda went silent. The residents stopped sending messages to Earth and no one knows why. Thus the passengers on Gabriel and the other colony ships - which have now arrived at their destinations - are being kept asleep in cryo-chambers until the situation on Bethesda is resolved.



Now a rescue ship called The Samaritan has been launched to Bethesda, with Union AND international (Russian, Kenyan, Canadian) personnel. There are doctors, nurses, scientists, security experts, and so on. The Samaritan's purpose is to find out what happened on Bethesda, and to make sure the space colony is safe for more residents. As always, The Samaritan's engineers are Chinese, and they will have sole access to the 'secret' parts of the ship.

One of the passengers on The Samaritan is a Canadian space pilot named Nathalie Hart, who's second-in-command. Nathalie is running away from a scandal on Earth and mourning the death of her sister and baby niece from a serious illness.



While The Samaritan is en route to Bethesda a fire breaks out among the cryo-chambers, and several passengers, including Nathalie, are automatically awoken.



The fire is put out, but the Captain and several other passengers perish. This makes Nathalie the new Commander of The Samaritan. When Nathalie climbs back into her cryo-chamber to resume the trip to Bethesda, she sees the word 'Sabotage' (in Russian) written inside her pod.



As the story unfolds, there are flashbacks to Earth, showing what happened before The Samaritan departed. These scenes demonstrate the after-effects of the plague; the continuing medical problems on the planet; the segregation of Earth's populations into the super-rich (mostly Chinese) elite who live in sky high orbitals......





.....and the struggling masses down below; the unrest among the economically deprived; and more.



We also learn what induced Nathalie to take a job on a colony ship that wouldn't return to Earth for at least 70 years.



When The Samaritan finally arrives at Bethesda, everyone wakes up, and messages and news reports from Earth - which have taken years to reach the spaceship - report increasingly cold relations between China and the Union. This causes friction among personnel on The Samaritan, and divisive factions form. Meanwhile, Nathalie dispatches medical, scientific, and security teams to the planet surface, to figure out what happened to the original colonists.



Nathalie has a hard time as the new Commander because she lacks experience and confidence, and other crew members don't necessarily trust her to do the job. In addition, almost everyone aboard The Samaritan is keeping secrets, and there's an underlying agenda that Nathalie knew nothing about. This leads to plenty of action and adventure, and some interesting technological jibber-jabber.



I enjoy a good space opera, and I found the first two-thirds of the book compelling (if a bit derivative of other sci-fi stories). However, the last part of the novel stretched credulity too much for my taste. In any case, I appreciate the author's intentions, which is to tell the story of a person trying to do her best in a difficult situation, and to demonstrate the negative aspects of prejudice and discrimination.

The book has a helpful glossary at the end, for techno-terms and some Chinese dialogue.

This is the first book of a planned series, and I'd be curious to see what happens next.

Thanks to Netgalley, M.V. Melcer, and Storm Publishing for a copy of the book.

Rating: 3 stars

Review of "From Eternity To Here: The Quest For The Ultimate Theory of Time" by Sean Carroll

Sean Carroll is an American theoretical physicist and philosopher who specializes in quantum mechanics, cosmology, and the philosophy of science. Among other things, Carroll writes about cosmology, the arrow of time, and the Higgs boson.

Sean Carroll

This book addresses a variety of topics, but concentrates largely on 'time.' There are many ways to define time, but in essence, "Time is the agent of change. We move through it, or - equivalently - time flows past us, from the past, through the present, towards the future." In other words, time goes one way - from past to future.



In the first Superman movie, Superman flies around the Earth so fast that he reverses time....time runs backwards instead of forwards so that Superman can rescue Lois Lane.



Can we really go back in time? No! Sean Carroll writes, "In the actual, non-imaginary world, it never happens. Time has a direction, and it has the same direction for everybody."

A corollary is that "Paradoxes do not happen." For instance, you can't go back in time and kill your grandfather, so that you will not be born....and then you wouldn't be around to go back in time. Several whimsical examples are included in the narrative as Carroll makes this point.



Don't get me wrong. For the lay person, this book is VERY HEAVY on physics. But Carroll has a good sense of humor and his levity helps the medicine go down (so to speak). 🙂

In this review I'm going to include a few things I found especially interesting in the book, just to provide a tiny feel for the topics.

🌌 Entropy

Most people who've taken a basic science class have heard of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which (in simple terms) states that, "something called entropy, which measures the 'disorderliness' of a system, has a tendency to increase as time passes. And the reason is deceptively simple: There are more ways to be disorderly than to be orderly." It's not that hard to break an egg and scramble the egg molecules, but putting them back into the shape of a whole egg is impossible.





The Second Law of Thermodynamics has profound implications for the universe, where the entropy is increasing every second. It means that at the time of The Big Bang, the universe had VERY LOW ENTROPY....in other words was very orderly (in some fashion). So is OUR universe part of some larger multiverse? Carroll speculates about this from several angles, and he seems to come down on the side of yes.


The Big Bang

🌌 Quantum Mechanics

Classical mechanics is the study of the motion of bodies acted upon by physical forces, and refers to Newton's Laws of Motion. For instance:

First Law of Motion: an object in motion will continue to move in the same direction and speed unless forces act on it.
Second Law of Motion: the greater the mass of an object, the more force it will take to accelerate the object.
Third Law of Motion: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. An example is throwing a ball on the ground and having it bounce back up.

In the macroworld we observe around us, all this makes complete sense.



In the world of quantum mechanics (the world of the teeniest 'particles'), things work differently. Quantum mechanics doesn't jive with our intuition, and it's fascinating. Carroll uses 'the quantum cat' as an example.

Imagine your cat, Miss Kitty, has two favorite places in your house: on the sofa and under the dining room table.





In quantum mechanics, however, there is NO SUCH THING as 'the location of the cat.' The whereabouts of the cat is specified by something called a 'wave function' which says things like "if we were to look, there would be a 75% chance that we would find the cat under the table, and a 25% chance that we would find the cat on the sofa."

So far so good. That makes sense. However, according to Carroll, this does not mean there is a 75% chance the cat IS under the table and a 25% chance the cat IS on the sofa. There is no such thing as 'where the cat is.' Her quantum state is described by the superposition of the two distinct possibilities.



It gets even weirder.

Imagine that Miss Kitty has two routes to her favorite spots. She will either stop by her food dish or her scratching post, and then settle on the sofa or under the table. If we sneakily watch Miss Kitty, we observe that it doesn't matter whether she stopped at the scratching post or the food bowl....Miss Kitty ends up on the sofa half the time, and under the dining room table half the time.

However, if we don't watch Miss Kitty, and don't keep track of whether she stops at the food bowl or the scratching post, Miss Kitty ends up on the sofa 100% of the time. WOW!

Carroll observes that this experiment has been done, not with cats but with photons, and that this happens because the wave function collapses. Carroll explains this in physics terms, and it makes sense in the quantum world.

🌌 Black Holes

The classical description of a black hole is a region where gravity is so strong that nothing, including light and other electromagnetic waves, can escape. According to physicist Stephen Hawking, however, black holes do give off radiation. Thus, unless a black hole continues to take in matter, it will - over a long long long time - dissipate into nothingness.



The book, which is over 400 pages long, contains a lot more stuff and is very interesting (if a bit dense for the non-physicist). I'd urge folks who want to know more to browse through the book themselves.

Rating: 4 stars

Review of "The Final Curtain: A Kyoichiro Kaga Mystery" by Keigo Higashino

This review was first posted on Mystery & Suspense Magazine. Check it out for features, interviews, and reviews. https://www.mysteryandsuspense.com/th...

In this fourth book in the 'Kyoichiro Kaga' series, the police detective helps his cousin investigate two murders. The novel works fine as a standalone.



Police Detective Kyoichiro Kaga, who's stationed in the Nihonbashi Precinct of Tokyo, endured a traumatic incident as a child. When Kaga was twelve years old, his mother Yuriko left home.....



......leaving Kaga and his father to fend for themselves.



Kaga heard nothing more about his mother until she died sixteen years later, and Kaga was asked to collect her ashes. At that time, Kaga learned that - years after his mother left home - she developed a relationship with a man named Shunichi Watabe.

It's now a decade after Yuriko died, and Kaga is drawn into two murder inquiries that may shed light on his mother's life.

The first case begins when a woman named Michiko Oshitani, who recruits clients for a cleaning contractor, is found strangled in a Tokyo apartment.



Michiko lived far from Tokyo, but was visiting a former schoolmate in the city. Afterwards, Michiko was killed in the home of a man called Mutsuo Koshikawa, who seems to have disappeared.



A week later, an identified homeless man is found strangled and burned close to where Michiko was killed.



The fact that both Michiko and the homeless man were strangled lead the Tokyo Metropolitan Police to believe the murders are connected. One of the Tokyo homicide detectives, Shuhei Matsumiya, is cousins with Detective Kaga, who's legendary for catching killers. So Matsumiya asks Kaga to help investigate the two homicides.



The police speculate that the homeless victim might be the missing Matsuo Koshikawa, in whose apartment Michiko was found. This is hard to prove, however, because Koshikawa left nothing behind that could identify him.

A prime suspect for Michiko's murder is the woman Michiko was visiting in Tokyo, a theater director called Hiromi Asai.



Michiko and Hiromi went to junior high school together, but haven't seen each other in years.



When the investigators interview Hiromi, the theater director says Michiko had something important to tell her, and that Michiko planned to return home right after they spoke. Hiromi says she knows nothing more about Michiko's activities in Tokyo.

The Tokyo homicide squad, along with Kaga, dissect Hiromi's life bit by bit. They discover that Hiromi's mother deserted the family when she was in junior high school, and her father's subsequent death landed Hiromi in an orphanage.



Nevertheless, Hiromi's ambition and talent helped her become an actress, a writer, and a director.

In an effort to discover why Hiromi might have killed her old friend Michiko, the homicide detectives try to interview people who know (or knew) Hiromi well. These include Hiromi's junior high school homeroom teacher;



Hiromi's ex-husband;



the producer of Hiromi's smash hit play;



an actress Hiromi worked with; and others.



In the meantime, a police sketch artist produces an image of the missing apartment resident Koshikawa, drawn from descriptions of his neighbors.



Kaga uncovers evidence that leads him to think Koshikawa might also be known as Shunichi Watabe - the man with whom Kaga's mother had a romance before she died.

The dual murder investigations of Michiko and the homeless man get very complicated as various clues are uncovered. These include a calendar that lists twelve bridges in Nihonbashi Precinct, one for each month; train timetables; an extramarital affair; and a suicide.



As the story unfolds many secrets are revealed, and it's clear that not everything is as it seems. Kaga's detective skills cut through the chaff, however, and he uncovers the truth.

I enjoyed the police procedural plot and the glimpses of Japanese culture, such as the Nihonbashi bridge-washing ritual; sleeping on futons; kendo workshops; and more.



Thanks to Netgalley, Keigo Higashino, and St. Martin's Press for a copy of the book.

Rating: 3.5 stars