Running Blind, by Lee Child

This is one of the most conniving mysteries Child has crafted yet. A serial killer is killing harassment victims and Reacher fits the profile of the villain. The FBI first arrests him, and then co-opts him into helping with the investigation. This novel is unlike the other Reacher novels in many ways. We get a periodic view of things from the POV of the killer. Reacher owns a house and a car and is easily found by the FBI. Several large red herrings (normally all threads tie together in a Child novel; here they are all tied up but several are orthogonal to the main plot). Almost no gunfire, and very little in the way of fighting. Highly suspenseful, though, and very brutal in its own right even without the overt violence.

One of the things I really liked was the author gave a plausible reason for Reacher not sharing his theories of the crime. Detectives in books like this never share because that would spoil things for the reader, but here it is explained away due to the rocky relationship with the FBI. Reacher resents being forced to collaborate and thus refuses to talk more than he has to. Simple. The one part of this that didn’t ring true, though, was the poor FBI relationship in the first place. In a chronologically earlier novel Reacher did the FBI a huge solid, saving a Bureau rising star and earning the thanks of the Director himself. Here, Reacher is bullied and blackmailed into helping solve a case by that same organization. Going from gratitude to outright hostility seems unlikely at best, especially for an organization with a long memory like the FBI.

First Sentence:

People say that knowledge is power.

Echo Burning, by Lee Child

Another Reacher novel, another winner. Set in Far West Texas, Reacher gets mixed up with an abused wife that asks him to do her a favor: kill her husband. From there a mystery slowly unfolds that is truly puzzling, leading to the inevitable shoot-em-up at the conclusion. The ending is quite predictable, but the journey there is fun.

I live in Texas, and I love it. Austin is a wonderful city: vibrant, alive, and largely accepting of varying lifestyles. The Texas described in Echo Burning is not at all like that: dusty and dry, filled with cowboys, with bigotry and racism a way of life. Sadly, I know this stereotype still exists in all to many parts of the state (not to mention rural areas everywhere), but I dislike reading one-sided portrayals like this. The only redeeming character other than Reacher was a lesbian, vegetarian, attorney from Harvard—about as far from a southern redneck as you can get. I hope at some point Reacher ends up in Austin where a different sort of Texas can be shared.

First Sentence:

There were three watchers, two men and a boy.

Die Trying, by Lee Child

This is easily the weakest Reacher novel I’ve read yet. It has all the action and mystery of the others, but the villain’s motivation simply didn’t make any sense to me. Painted as a typical one-dimensional right-wing militia crackpot, the bad guy kidnaps a young FBI agent as insurance against his plot to secede. This never seemed even remotely plausible and Child didn’t sell it well. That said, the initial hook was great, with Reacher an accidental kidnapping victim, and when the FBI starts to investigate they decide he is the ringleader of the plot which makes every character in the book against him. Combined with a mole in the FBI feeding information to the militia (and Child’s tendency in other books to kill off major characters), the suspense grows right to the final showdown. While still thoroughly enjoyable and exciting, I’m still glad this wasn’t my first Reacher novel.

First Sentence:

Nathan Rubin died because he got brave.

In Search of Stupidity, by Merrill R. Chapman

I love this book. On the surface it is a humorous look at high-tech marketing disasters such as Netscape, OS/2, and near and dear to me, Borland. Dig a little deeper and there is some good stuff about how to learn from these mistakes in order to not repeat them, and I imagine that some readers will thake these lessons to heart. The rest of use will laugh out loud and thoroughly enjoy reading about one catastrophe after the other in the same manner we watch NASCAR waiting for that spectacular wreck.

As interesting as the various stories are, the humor is what pushes this book from merely entertaining to magnificent. And the jokes start from page one; the preface contains this gem (and possibly the best hyphenated phrase ever written): “Yes, [Consumer Reports] is not much fun to read, and it has that annoying left-wing, tree-hugger-life-was-better-in-the-19^th-and-early-20^th-centuries-when-choo-choo-trains-belched-smoke-into-the-air attitude, but it does buy its test vehicles and this has no need to suck up to Detroit or Tokyo in the manner of publications such as Car and Driver and Road and Track.” This sort of in-your-face wit coupled with solid-but-harsh observations are repeated on virtually every page. Even the glossary was hilarious: “ROI: Acronym for return on investment. The amount of money earned on investing in a particular program or business. The concept wasn’t in use during the dot-com boom.” “Yahoo: A leading web portal that has never promised not to be evil and therefore has no compunctions about helping the Chinese government jail journalists.”

Chapman clearly has organizations and products he likes and doesn’t; Google, MSN, and Yahoo are all described quite bluntly as “evil.” Apple is largely on his good side, but he plays fair and doesn’t hesitate to scathe them when deserving. “Had Apple not been in its way every bit as stupid as IBM, the company was in a position to become the next Microsoft of OSs. But we all know how that turned out.” The chapter on Borland was especially entertaining to me as I was technically the head of Borland engineering world-wide when reading this. (Borland had been bought by Micro Focus in 2009 and become a wholly owned subsidiary so the position didn’t really mean anything, but various contracts required the company to stay in existence and I was the most senior Borland engineering employee left after the acquisition.) I had first-hand experience with the disaster that was the executive staff at Borland before Micro Focus stepped in; it was entertaining to see that the previous executives were prone to massive blunders as well. Chapman ends this section with the 2006 divestiture of TurboPascal and its progeny with the sentence, “The Borland roller coaster has not yet stopped rolling.” Fast-forward a few years and he was more accurate than he knew!

While the stories are a bit dated—this second edition was released in 2006 and the high-tech world changes very, very quickly—they are valuable lessons in hubris and arrogance. The history lesson alone makes this worth your time; I wonder how many of the youngsters entering the business today have heard of Ashton-Tate or Novell? Both insightful and funny, this should be required reading for anyone developing or marketing software.

First Sentence:

In 1982, Harper & Row published In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr.