A Shining Affliction is Annie G. Rogers’ account of the mutual healing that occurred between her, acting as a therapist, and a five-year-old boy named Ben, who had been terribly neglected as a child. Ben is untrusting, frequently unmanageable, and often violent. His clinical record notes that after the death of his biological mother, while he was still an infant, he was given to a foster family. His foster parents kept him locked in a windowless room for the first eighteen months of his life, ignoring his cries and depriving him of affection and even the most basic contact. Is it any wonder the kid has trouble relating to others? Or that he acts out in violent, antisocial ways?

San Quentin Exodus opens with Allison Anderson surveying the walls of one of California’s most infamous prisons, wondering if her escape plan will work. Allison is a private school teacher who volunteers in the evenings as a math and writing instructor at San Quentin. While she’s free to walk out of the facility anytime she wants, her escape plan is for one of the inmates with whom she has connected.

When Jesse Jackson was running for president in the 1988 Democratic primaries, I was twenty years old and excited to vote for him. I grew up in Washington, DC, where everyone was familiar with politics, whether they wanted to be or not.

After years of listening to the bland and meaningless promises of congressmen, senators and presidential candidates, I was excited when Jackson came along and actually had something to say. The man seemed to stand for something. He was eloquent, he cared about people, and he believed that government had a responsibility to improve peoples lives in whatever ways were practical and feasible.

Okay, since no one asked, today I’m going to write about motorcycles. This is a blog, after all, so I don’t always have to write book reviews.

The first bike I ever owned was a 1978 Honda CB 750F. I was twenty-two years old, sharing a car with my brother, and traveling around Washington, DC mostly by bicycle. I wanted a cheap way of getting around when I didn’t have the car. My friend told me he knew someone who was selling this bike for nine hundred dollars. “That’s a good deal,” he said. So I bought it.

Megan Abbott’s novel is set in late 1940s Hollywood, during the studios’ golden era. The main character, Gil “Hop” Hopkins, is a publicist and fixer for one of the studios. His job is to generate good press for the stars and to suppress bad press that might turn the public off. Hop has plenty of work to do because his wards are always getting into trouble. He is a glib, smooth-talking salesman type, apparently handsome and well-dressed, a bit of a seducer who’s not above bribing cops and waiters when necessary, to keep them from talking about the misbehavior of celebrities whose reputations he is paid to protect.

I give this book five stars not because it’s deep or life-changing. It’s entertainment. It doesn’t attempt the match the depth and insight of the great classics. I give it five stars because it’s a master class in storytelling, and for what it is, it’s very good.

I had not read Ed McBain before, though I had certainly heard of him. McBain is one of Evan Hunter’s many pen names. Hunter wrote across a variety of genres, including sci-fi, mystery, crime, children’s books, and possibly porn, though he never fessed up to it. In what must be one of the most unexpected collaborations in film history, he adapted one of Daphne du Maurier’s short stories into the screenplay of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.

I found this book by chance while browsing the shelves of a used bookstore. The great value of used bookstores, beside preserving some very good books, is that they provide such moments of serendipity. Browsing online just isn’t the same as pulling an intriguing tome off the shelf, opening to a random page and having it grab you.

Molly is Blake Butler’s attempt to understand his marriage to fellow writer Molly Brodak, who suffered from borderline personality disorder and died by suicide at age thirty-nine. I understand why the author wrote this book, but I wonder why he published it. When you lose a loved one so suddenly and unexpectedly, the grief is hard to process. When you’re in an intimate relationship with someone who has borderline personality disorder, the facts of who they were, what was true, and what was the nature of the relationship are hard to sort out.

Writing can help, but writing about a marriage and about the behavior and thought process of a mentally ill person exposes deeply personal information. Butler has been unjustly accused of writing revenge porn to smear his ex wife after her death. That accusation is not just wrong, but unjust.

Dorothy B. Hughes’ 1963 novel opens with Dr. Hugh Densmore driving his mother’s white Cadillac through the desert of southeastern California. Hugh, who is completing his residency at UCLA Medical Center, is on his way to his parents’ house in Phoenix to attend his sister’s wedding.

Driving through the night, he spies a lone figure stirring beneath a tree in the desert outside the town of Indio. He stops to check on the person, a girl of fifteen or so named Iris Croom. She tells him she’s trying to get to Phoenix. He gives her a ride to Blythe, near the Arizona border, buys her a bus ticket from there to Phoenix and bids her goodbye.

Melanie Agnanos’ Nightswimming opens in the early hours of a cold January night in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1979. Owner Randall Low is closing up RJ’s Taproom, a bar and strip club serving a working-class clientele in a city that’s a few decades past its heyday. Dancer Cindy Kaczorek stands with him behind the bar when an unexpected visitor arrives. Hours later, a friend finds Danny’s and Cindy’s bodies in a pool of blood by the register.