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James Hankins delivers a bittersweet, humorous, suspenseful, and intense crime thriller, SHADY CROSS! A complex conspiracy of kidnapping, murder, greed, and best of all–redemption. Intense, emotional, and witty, readers will dislike Stokes in the beginning, and will fall in love and sympathize with him by the ending, with his heroic behavior and may, in the end, actually have a heart. Can he save himself and the little girl? The squatters are believed to belong to a single extended family, and claim the land was given to them in the 1970s during Peru’s controversial agrarian land reform which was pushed through by a leftist military dictatorship.
The story is told from the point of view of Stokes, an habitual criminal with little empathy and less conscience, who blames the fact that, in his thirties, he has no family, no friends and no money, not on his own weak character and poor judgement, but on the fact that he's just never caught a break. I like the grand scale and involvment of both the king and the army. It felt very real that such an invention would attract attention.
Souza writes in the introduction, "The White House now emanates a constant barrage of lies and hateful comments. The president acts like he does not respect democracy or the rule of law....He does not respect women, minorities, or immigrants; he often doesn't appear to respect even his wife." Souza skewers Trump repeatedly in all these areas and more, and concludes the intro by saying, "With this book, I'm standing up and shouting out. I can't be subtle any longer." Shady Cross" has three things going for it that kept me hooked: constant tension that is delivered at an almost exhausting pace and intensity; a plot with so many unexpected turns and frustrations that you feel you have to keep reading so you can find out how it all works out; and the character of Stokes a fundamentally flawed man who is quite hard to like and almost impossible to trust but who I still found myself rooting for from time to time. If Eats, Shoots & Leaves whetted your appetite on the subject of punctuation, then you have a treat in store. Shady Characters is an authoritative, witty, and fascinating tour of the history and rationale behind such lesser known marks as the ampersand, manicule, the pilcrow, and the interrobang. Keith Houston also explains the octothorpe — otherwise known as the hashtag — and my final comment on his book is #awesome. Ben Yagoda, author of How to Not Write Bad Souza had admired the qualities in the men he had worked and spent countless hours with as their official photographer. He had observed them every day and respect them for their hard work, for making tough but well-informed decisions on important issues after having asked thoughtful questions from their qualified staff and listening to advice. He was a non-partisan but admired the qualities of qualified leadership in both Presidents Reagan and Obama. I hope we can continue to investigate and continue to recover our history because it has such an interesting message,” she added. “It was a very, very peaceful society. We have not found even a single walled settlement.”
Greg has managed to produce the equivalent to an atomic bond to take care of the ever stronger monsters that are being spawned. My favorite photograph in the whole collection doesn't feature Obama at all. It's a powerful image of Stevie Wonder running his hands over the bust of Martin Luther King Jr. in the Oval Office. Another favorite photo features Obama with 2009 Kennedy Center honorees Robert De Niro and Bruce Springsteen, another couple of my heroes. Those are three guys who won't be visiting the Oval Office any time soon. Hundreds of books about books have been published during the past century…I will not claim that this one is the very best of all time. Yet The Book is possibly the best of our time. Steven Heller, Eye MagazineKept waiting to get to this scene with the old carnival. Be patient; hold tight, you will arrive before the dramatic ending. Shortly after his release from jail, he causes the death of a man by his careless driving and, after finding a windfall of over a quarter of a million dollars in the dead man’s car, steals it. But as the story evolves, he realizes that he has stepped into the middle of a kidnapping, and that a little girl’s safety - - and perhaps her life - - are in the balance. Images of his own little girl, who he hasn’t seen in 13 years, since she was two years old, keep intruding on his thoughts, and his decisions.
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