Book Review - 2/14

I am really enjoying the ability to speed the books up a little while I am listening to them on the iPod! I finished 2 this week!

The first book I finished was And When She was Good by Laura Lippman. Helen Lewis grew up in a home with abuse and she planned to get away as soon as she could with schooling and a college education. She ended up outside of Baltimore living with a pimp and earning money as a prostitute. When she gets pregnant, she turns the pimp in for murder and spends the next 10 years setting up and running a high end escort service with the pimp as the ‘brains’ behind the operation so that he doesn’t suspect her of turning him in.

Now, there is a chance that the pimp will get released from prison and Heloise (after she changed her name) is scared that he will get out and realize that she had his son. And then a suburban madam in a neighboring county is murdered and the police pay a visit to Heloise.

I enjoyed this book as much as any of Lippman’s other novels that I have read. I thought it was an interesting premise to set up the business and report taxes. There are several people that are trying to cause problems for Heloise and, to protect her son, she handles everything. I did have to rewind a few times in the beginning when the story jumped back to 1990’s or early 2000’s until I got used to it happening. Overall, a pretty good read.

The second book I finished was The Associate by John Grisham. Kyle McAvoy is months away from graduating from Yale Law School and he has many career options open to him. Until one night a few FBI agents ‘encourage’ him, to meet with a detective about an alleged rape that occurred 5 years prior in his undergrad days. While Kyle wasn’t involved directly with the incident, there is a new video that could be very damning to his career options. He is blackmailed into taking a job at a prestigious NYC law office to become a spy for the fake detective.

I think this was my second Grisham novel that I have read and it was OK. There was not as much action as I though there would be. As I got closer to the end of the book, I kept waiting for something else to happen and it just never did. There was a lot of set up and I was anticipating a big blow out or a few twists and it just never panned out and then the book was over. It was just a bit of a let down, I think.