Conspiracy of Silence by Ronie Kendig

A Review

I requested to review this latest book by Ronie Kendig because I have enjoyed her previous military thrillers. Each of those featured a special forces fighter with great skill, but relational/emotional problems, who finds himself on a perilous mission with civilians to protect. Among those civilians is a woman who eventually will become the love interest. I had hoped that this novel would be similar to those with lots of action, and in the basics, it was. However, the convoluted plot left confusion that was not part of her other novels.

Conspiracy of Silence is a military thriller along the lines of Tom Clancy or Lee Childs, with an emotionally distraught soldier sent out after an assassin. However, this novel adds archaeology and two archaeologists, references to the Bible, a certain Biblical event, and the supernatural all thrown into the mix. Yes, think of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Ah, but if only it was another “Raiders!” Raiders had one Ark, one hero pursuing the Ark, and one love interest. In Conspiracy of Silence we also have one hero and one love interest, but we also have one assassin, four censers (containers for burning incense), and three pages (leaves) from the Aleppo Codex, a bound 10^th century C.E. manuscript of the Hebrew Bible, originally kept in Aleppo, Syria, but later parts to parts of it were transferred to Israel. This book does not explain the Aleppo Codex until late in the story and in the appendix, however you can find information on Wikipedia.

In any event, at about the same time an American official is assassinated in England and our hero is tasked to eliminate the assassin, one of the archaeologists unearths a missing page from the Aleppo Codex and three censers, and somehow unleashes a plague which can be stopped only if all four censers are located and reunited along with several pages from the Aleppo Codex. This is where the novel loses its vision and lost this reader. A reader by definition must suspend their disbelief in the reality of the situation in order to become immersed in the world of the novelist. But when the novel loses its vision, the reader also loses theirs. If it had remained a novel about the search for and destruction of an assassin, it could have followed an interesting path and ended with a struggle between the protagonist and the antagonist in which the protagonist emerges bloody, but victorious. In other words, a classic hero novel.

But Conspiracy of Silence introduces a subplot which did not work. The subplot includes the theft of the censers, a plague introduced by the censers (how does that happen?), a need to find the censers and read certain marks on pages from the Aleppo Codex, which were located in different parts of the world, and the introduction of seemingly supernatural characters and situations. And, with the addition of this subplot, many more words (409 pages) than the author had in her prior novels.

The plot bogged down for me and my mind started questioning. How does a woman wrap her arms around her waist? Why do several team members smirk? Why is the team travelling with two archaeologists, putting two civilians at risk? Why does one archeologist who is skilled in martial arts never use this skill? Why does such a virulent plague only kill about a dozen people? Why is The Frenchman inserted like a super-hero? Why does one member of a covert team that had worked together on previous projects and who is very close to the team leader, why does this man have contacts and knowledge that are new to the team leader and that he refuses to disclose to the team leader? Why does the team need pages from the Aleppo Codex when they could consult any modern text of the Hebrew Bible and find the same information? Some of these questions are answered; most are not.

I also took issue with the author comparing the Masons to a terrorist organization. I don’t know her personal experiences with the Masons, but in a cursory search I found no evidence of their involvement in anything but charitable work. She could have easily compared the terrorist organization in her novel to the Muslim Brotherhood, ISIS, or any other multi-national terrorist organizations.

Those issues aside, the novel does have plenty of perilous situations where our hero can shine. Yes, after a chapter that made me question the novel’s integrity, the following chapters have a real chase for information from a contact inside the religious establishment and an assassin that pops up in unexpected places. In fact, the second half of the novel picks up nicely with only a few pauses as the team resumes its search for the assassin and a way to stop the plague, experiencing secret tunnels, confusing messages, chases, shootouts, flaming arrows, explosions, an abduction, and everything you’d want in a thriller. There are only a few confusing blips—when the team leader thinks he is chasing down mace and the lack of any role for The Frenchman. All in all, it’s a satisfactory ending with tension-filled final scenes. If you skip over the confusing parts with the censers and Codex, you have ably written military thriller will give you hours of pleasure.

This novel was provided for me at no charge by the publisher for purposes of review. I was not required to write a positive review.

The Shattered Vigil by Patrick Carr

A REVIEW

I don’t read fantasy. Not for me the aliens and half-man half-beast beings. I want no eggplant suns rising over lemonade seas. Yes, I can take a few hobbits, but some race must resemble human at least in the way humans act and reason. This Patrick Carr novel is one of a very few fantasy novels that I enjoyed completely. The author adeptly weaves a tale replete with blue skies, green trees, and people that look and act like you and I might if we were in the same circumstances. The society feels somewhat medieval with horses for transportation, swords and knives for weapons. But the city looks more like Rome with its classed society, more than medieval towns with a local ruler and farmers and trades people living inside a walled community. However, as in modern times this culture boasts libraries and an efficient means of long distance communication (though restricted mostly to rulers and priests). The novel’s world comprises two major divisions: the Darkwater (an unexplored land of war and legend) and the known world where our protagonist and his friends live and travel. The kings and the four churches vie for the peoples’ allegiance along with another unknown entity. The churches each hold a different view of Aer, their god. The inhabitants of the known world are imbued by Aer, with. . . well it might be well to quote The Exordium of the Liturgy at this point.

The six charisms of Aer are these:

For the body, beauty and craft

For the soul, sum and parts

For the spirit, helps and devotion

 

The nine talents of man are these:

Language, logic, space, rhythm,

motion, nature, self, others, and all

 

The four temperaments of creation are these:

Impulse, passion, observation, and thought

 

Within the charisms of Aer, the talents of man,

and the temperaments imbued in creation

are found understanding and wisdom. Know and learn.

 

The charisms, or gifts, are limited in number. Those people who possess them generally gain wealth. The gifts are highly sought and highly treasured. They are most often handed down within a family, from one person to another, by the laying on of hands. The characters are real, questioning their destinies and their decisions.

Our hero Willet Dura received his gift unexpectedly in the first novel in this series, The Shock of Night. Willet is a former student of the priesthood, a soldier who fought in the land of the Darkwater, who alone among the fighters returned to live in the land of his birth, and to live a somewhat normal life. Willet is a reeve (detective) for the Kingdom of Collum. He examines murder scenes, interviews witnesses, and places guilt. This novel begins after an incident in which Willet acquires a gift, and a battle which changes the course of his life and the lives of others in his community, both described in The Shock of Night, the first novel in this series, which should be read prior to The Shattered Vigil.

What was missing from The Shattered Vigil? I would have liked fuller descriptions of the places in the novel. The author paints his landscapes with a broad brush but I would like a fuller description of the sights, sounds, and odors of the environment. I am thinking of The Lord of the Rings because in some way I was reminded of those books when reading The Shattered Vigil. Where Tolkien described a multi-layer forest, Carr leaves us with a few trees. There are plenty of places where the action can rest and description begin. That is my only quibble. Give me a little more description to go along with the almost breathless non-stop action and political intrigue.

Without telling you anything to destroy your enjoyment of The Shattered Vigil (or The Shock of Night), I can tell you that this novel works on several levels. First, it lets you see that good characters do not always do good, and bad characters can sometimes be life savers. Next, it explores issues that relate to our lives today, issues such as church-state relationships, political maneuvering, the appropriate use of gifts and talents, how evil functions, and others. And this is the type of novel I like: one that makes me consider and reconsider attitudes and perspectives that I may have to adjust. Just what might happen if church and state get too chummy? To what lengths might spiritual gifts be exercised? Is it ever right to do wrong from a good motive? Is it right to do good from a bad motive? What powers should people have over others? Is the right and honorable thing, really the correct action? Are there times when we should be less open and truthful? And it challenges us to consider the wider ramifications of our actions. Could we save a life or change a life for better or worse by our action or inaction?

Finally, The Shattered Vigil leaves you wanting more, needing more. You need more time to ponder the line between the people in the known world and those in Darkwater. Will those in the known world survive? What would it mean to survive? Would they become evil? And what will happen to Willet and his comrades? Will they survive? Or will they succumb to the Darkwater? Is survival even possible with the tools of their enemy arrayed against them? I guess we’ll all have to wait for the next book in the series.

NOTE: While reading the prepublication version of this novel, which was provided for me at no charge solely for purposes of review, I noticed several major errors that should have been corrected. I also logged onto Amazon prior to writing this review and found that the Kindle edition was already being sold. It is my hope that these errors were corrected prior to the Kindle edition being released.

WHAT IS TRUTH?

Pontious Pilate, sitting as judge, heard Jesus say “The reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth.” Pilate’s response?  “What is truth?” His response summed up the world of the judge with the words of the jaded, the one who has heard it all, all the lies, the half truths, and so many truthful witnesses giving very different descriptions.  That was in the 1st century A.D.  In the 21st century, the question is still the same: What is truth?  Police detectives ask it, as they sift witness statements and physical evidence.  Each witness may portray a different truth.  Politicians claim to have the truth?  Do they?  We think we know the truth based on our own education and experiences.  Do we?

The truths we see may run contrary to the truths others see, and we assume they are wrong.  But what if they are right, and we are wrong?  What if we both are wrong? Could we be wrong?  What if, like witnesses to an accident, who see a red car, a black car, a dark green car, with a woman driver, a man driver, a man with a mustache and glasses, a man without a mustache or glasses, a passenger, no passenger, a tinted windshield, one with no tint, what if, like those witnesses we see only part of what is true.  What do we really know?  What have we actually observed?  Who knows the truth?

If if we are completely and sincerely honest to the best of our ability we are still going to be caught out someday. Yes, we will be wrong.  So, where is the truth?

Jesus said it.  “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”  If we want to know the truth we must know the One who is the truth.  We can be wise, we can demonstrate our wisdom, but unless we are honest with ourselves all we may be able to say for sure is that we saw a dark car.  We can be sure of only one thing. And if that one thing is truth, it’s the most important thing.  So where do you find your truth?  Is it with yourself, you parents, your classmates, your teachers?  Sure, they will all have some of the truth but which bits are the right ones?  Jesus is the only one who has all the pieces.  He is the one who embodies  truth.  He’s the only completely reliable teacher, and He’s the only one who can teach you the truth, show you the truth, and be the truth in your life.

The Apostle Paul said it well when he said that some want wisdom and some want signs but he would teach only Christ.  If it’s truth you’re after, it’s Jesus.  If it’s life you’re after, it’s Jesus.  If it’s a way you’re after, it’s still Jesus.  There no way, no life, and no truth without Jesus.  And there you have it.

 

Photo By Stéfan Le Dû from Nantes, France [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Landlords and Tenants and their Circumstances

 

EVICTED by Matthew Desmond   

I was drawn to Evicted by my own circumstances. I had made friends with a poor family living about an hour away. We hosted their daughter’s 18^th birthday party and invited her to live with us while she attended school. When they were losing their home through financial ignorance (they thought they could pay ahead and then stop paying for a while), I offered to sell them a property which I was preparing to rent—to sell it to them on land contract because they had bad credit: no bank accounts, no credit cards. In the back of my mind I carried the idea that everyone should be given the opportunity to own their own home. After all, isn’t that the American dream? What this family lacked in financial stability, they had in friendship. There was nothing they would not do to help me, going out of the way to find a part for one of my appliances, offering to mow my lawn, not asking for anything at all in return. I believed that I could give them the means to improve their lives financially, to learn how to make regular payments, to gain an asset, and ultimately to qualify for a bank loan.

My assumptions were that someone acquiring ownership in a home would improve the home. I also assumed that a friend would make regular monthly payments and would follow through on everything they promised to do. Both of these assumptions proved false. After about 5 months, the payments stopped. I gave them more time—a few months and then confronted them. They told me about a work injury and hung their heads in shame. I gave them even more time and told them that I would not throw them out because of an unforeseen injury. Now, 20 missed payments later and a trashed house, I must do something, but how can I throw out a mother and three minor children? Even though I no longer trust the mother (who is now divorcing the father), what about the children who have not only lost the stability of a two-parent household but now might lose their friends, their teachers, their coaches, and their school? What might an eviction cost them? It sickened me to think of evicting these children whose birthdays I had celebrated, baseball performances I had cheered, and who had cut and colored my hair. Their mother cleaned my vacation rental in the area and their father performed carpentry and other work for me. I had an entanglement that is far more complex than the ordinary landlord/tenant relationship.

The stress of my decision convinced me to read and review the book Evicted. Maybe it would give me a different perspective. Maybe it would help me understand people who seem so irresponsible and uncaring. Maybe it would help me find other options.

The book was not as I expected from a major publisher. Cheap paper and large print do not create a pleasant reading experience. I only hope that the copy I have is not the final version. However as bad as the paper felt, I quickly forgot it when I encountered the real people within the book, landlords trying to make a living and provide for Milwaukee’s poor and tenants who take measures that seem reasonable only to themselves. This is an ethnography, a book relating a culture through the eyes of the people within it.

EVICTED follows the stores of 2 landlords and several tenants in a poor section of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. One landlord, a former elementary school teacher buys distressed properties and with her husband fixes them well enough to rent to the poorest of the poor. She and her husband work full time on their properties and bring in about $10,000/month. When a tenant fell behind, she said, “I guess I got to stop feeling sorry for these people because nobody is feeling sorry for me. Last time I checked, the [county treasurer, loan officer, electric company] still wanted their money.” My feelings exactly. Doesn’t my tenant realize that I have bills to pay? The other landlord profiled in EVICTED owned a trailer park and had hired a manager and office helper to rent the trailers, handle repairs, and collect rents. This is not part of my experience and as I read about the drug dealers renting in the trailer park, it was as though I was peering into an alternate reality. I simply could not relate to someone whose only interest was achieving the highest return on his property with no concern for the quality of his tenants or his properties, or what extreme measures were taken to collect rent. Still, it was an education to see the lengths to which he went to get cash in hand from a defaulting tenant. The author rented from him and could not even get this landlord to supply him with hot water. That’s my definition of a slumlord.

All of the tenants were low income, but shared little else in common. Most of them were desperate to provide for their children. Some of the tenants were on drugs; others would not touch drugs, and still others were recreational marijuana users. These were people who could not plan for the future, who simply spent each day trying to survive. Those who made paying rent a priority often had little left to live on, and found themselves scrimping on food, medications, and clothing.

And the landlords? One had the time (and money) for week-long island vacations, but found herself scrimping the last week of the month—a week before the rents would roll in. Some landlords would not rent to people of color, people with children, or people who had even a single eviction on their record. Evicted shows us the landlord using self-help means to collect rent: knocking on doors the day welfare checks arrive, showing up at odd hours with hands out, asking for money, going to court and working out a settlement . . . or not, and then the sheriff and moving company walk in, empty the house of all items down to the ice cube trays, leaving a pile at the curb, or in storage where the tenants’ treasured belongings remain in rented storage space until redeemed, or more likely, until rent goes unpaid and the things are sold or discarded.

Landlords get tired—tired of handling evictions, tired of fixing broken plumbing and appliances. Tired of physically knocking on doors to collect rent. Tired of tenants who make empty promises to pay in full when their income tax refund comes in, or from money borrowed from a tapped out relative, or when they receive their welfare check. These promises are recycled in various forms at various times by various tenants trying to stay in their homes. Landlords hear them at the eviction hearing where the tenants try one last time to convince the landlords to give them more time.

The tenants are tired, too, and overwhelmed. Instead of fixing a constantly clogged kitchen sink, they just ignore it, throwing old clothes on the floor to soak up the overflow. They close the kitchen door and do dishes in the bathroom, until that sink clogs. The heat fails and they turn on stove burners. The toilet fails and they go in a bucket and empty it into the trash. The refrigerator fails and they live on McDonalds. When children’s services comes calling, they purchase cheap half-working appliances just to keep their children. Why do they do this? To avoid any contact with the landlord to whom they owe money. And no, this is not the heart of Appalachia, this is Milwaukee, Wisconsin a major metropolitan area.

In Milwaukee, as in every American city, we see families forced to endure sub-standard housing, living in shelters, searching for the elusive “home.” This book isn’t even about home ownership, but about the ability to have a safe and stable housing situation. Ownership is too far away from many people to be even a glimmer in their minds, but a safe and stable living situation is their desired goal. They scramble to find rent by begging, borrowing, and stealing, selling drugs, and even their own bodies. The author allows us to peer into their world and see “solutions” that are not working and the desperate search for housing.

I had never considered the author’s idea, statistically supported, that neighborhoods have a life of their own which can be fragile. We in the “burbs” enfold ourselves in subdivisions where houses and yards look similar and we have our “standards.” But inner city neighborhoods are formed from people who have a common interest. When people remain in a neighborhood and get to know their neighbors, they can band together for the safety of their homes and children. One man in the book was struggling to raise his two teenage sons in a stable environment. He was a double amputee but was unable to obtain Social Security disability payments. He survived on welfare payments, with next to nothing left over after his rent payment. Despite his circumstances, his place was where the neighborhood teenagers would come to hang out in safety, play cards, and talk about growing up. He was a stabilizing influence on his block. When people are shunted in and out of a neighborhood through eviction (or foreclosure) the neighborhoods become unstable and unsafe. Drug users and sellers move in, gangs are formed, and crimes increase. Stable neighborhoods, where people can move in and out freely and are not evicted or otherwise forced out of their homes, are safer and make the entire community safer. The author believes that decent housing should be a basic right afforded to all people for the common good.

The current system is broken. That’s clear. No one can survive in northern winters and no one should have to survive without a safe place to lay their heads. Landlords cannot give away rental property. They should and must make money from their investments. And tenants are not all the same. Some will treat property well and even improve its value. Others will allow their children to run wild, tattooing hardwood doors and trim with ball point pens, tearing doors from their hinges, smashing holes in the drywall. Discouraged tenants live in squalor and disgruntled landlords give up performing more than make-do repairs and just go after the money.

The solution offered by the author, vouchers or rent subsidies, does not currently work because landlords can and do raise the rent above what is customary in the locale simply because the voucher authority sets high rent caps. In many cases, access to vouchers are limited—many poor cannot get them and the program sets standards for the housing which might exceed a landlord’s improvement budget, especially in older homes. The author’s solution would require universal vouchers for every family below a certain income level, less onerous requirements for landlords to accept the vouchers, and a demand that all landlords accept vouchers. But who will fund this? It’s been successful in England and the Netherlands, but those are small countries. Is some legislator in the United States willing to try? Or could there be a better solution?

Something must be done. I’m almost persuaded to leave the rental market due to the stress of broken relationships and a trashed property that I put so much time, energy, and money into making beautiful and up to code. On the other hand, my erstwhile friend and her three children need a safe place to stay. Maybe the electric companies have the right solution. The poor can pay drastically lower utility bills through a program that gives them an incentive to make regular on-time payments. For each payment (at about 10% of income), the remainder of what they would owe each month is forgiven and they have a percentage of their payment applied to past debt. But how many of the poor keep up the utility payments? The utility company has an out. They can turn off their service. Landlords’ only recourse is to convince a defaulting tenant to move or to evict them. And there is no evidence that the utilities have success with their program. If someone will not pay rent for more than a few months, perhaps they will also stop paying for their utilities. Maybe we landlords can come up with something better for tenants who fall behind. I don’t know what that may be, but private solutions are often better than ones provided by the state. Just look at public housing.

This book was provided to me free for an unbiased review. I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review.

Want to read more? For current information on the US rental market: http://www.jchs.harvard.edu/americas-rental-housing