J is for (Books About) Justice #atozchallenge

For A to Z 2018, my theme is Books About ____. If you’re stopping by from your own A to Z blog, feel free to leave a link. If you need help with how to do that, you can look here.

If you’re someone looking to read a lot of great blogs, here’s the link for the A to Z challenge.

I love a good crime thriller. Bonus points if it probes questions of right and wrong, of justice vs. law. (Because sometimes those things aren’t the same.) Here’s a list of some books about justice that I love.

To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee (literary): I only read this a few years ago, and I’m so mad that my school didn’t require it. It’s a fantastic story about the child of a lawyer, and how she follows the case of a black man accused of raping a young woman. It’s got all those interesting layers of questions about right and wrong, the way people’s assumptions influence how they think about the world, all filtered through the eyes of an interesting child. And it’s actually enjoyable to read.

A Time To Kill, by John Grisham (crime thriller): When his 10-year-old daughter is raped by white men and it doesn’t look like there’s going to be justice, Carl Lee (a black man) kills them. Everyone hates pedophiles, and so it’s easy for most of us to understand why a father would kill the animals who hurt his daughter like that. This book is a fascinating thrill ride, complete with interesting drama both in and out of the courtroom. It made me think about what justice looks like in a situation like this, and if justice even exists.

Presumed Innocent, by Scott Turow (crime thriller): The movie was good, but the book was better. Rusty is trying to solve the mystery of who killed Carolyn, the coworker he was having an affair with. When the affair comes out, he’s accused of the murder. The twist at the end was amazing. I read this book as a teenager, and I still think about it from time to time.

In Death books, by JD Robb (sci-fi crime thriller): This is a 40+ book series, starting with Naked In Death. It’s 2059, and Eve Dallas is a homicide cop in New York City. She hunts down bad guys and sometimes dispenses her own brand of justice. Each book is a self-contained “murder of the week” along with amazing character development and often interesting subplots about Dallas’s friends and family. She has a rigid definition of right and wrong, and it’s always interesting to see her go up against other characters, both personally and professionally, who have more flexible morals. While you don’t have to start at the beginning, I definitely would. It’s fun to watch how Dallas grows and changes.

I really like crime novels and crime shows, so this list could go on and on and on. But I made myself keep it relatively short. What books about justice do you love?

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I is for In Death

JD Robb has written 53 books in the In Death series in the past 21 years.  That’s a huge number of books.  (Some of these are novellas that appear in anthologies, but it’s still impressive.)

The books center around Eve Dallas, a police lieutenant in the New York Police Department, and her husband Roarke, multi-billionare businessman and former criminal. There are also multiple supporting characters that make regular appearances.

Each book centers around one or more murder that Dallas must solve.  As the series has continued, Roarke assists her more and more often.

I love reading these books, but I’ve also started studying them from a writer’s perspective.  If you’d ask me, I would have told you I didn’t think that a character arc could span over 53+ books, but I would have been wrong.

Dallas and Roarke have continued to develop, as a couple and as individuals.  Though the focus tends to be on them and their relationship, the other characters in the universe are interesting and often experience character growth of their own.  I love the fact that a married couple can continue to be the subject of a series; too often the curtain drops just after the wedding, but that’s not real life.  They argue, they compromise, they have past lovers, and yet they navigate it together.

Each story shares characteristics, but they’re not formulaic.   There are multiple series subplots, like Dallas’s past, and information about these is doled out over time.  It’s masterful the way Robb keeps my interest in these subplots.  She drags them out for just the right amount of time so that they never get stale, but also never turn into an info dump.

The books are thrillers with elements of romance and science fiction, and while the science fiction might not please hard-core sci-fi fans, they’re always a good story.

More than anything, I want the stories I tell to be compelling and interesting.  I think that’s the best rule for any author: tell a good story.

“Life is never as long as we want it to be, and wasted time can never be recovered.”
― J.D. Robb

P is for Predictions

One of the things I love most about sci-fi books and movies are the predictions about science and cultural changes in the world, and how often they’re wrong.  We’re only one year away from 2015, and we still don’t have the flying cars or skateboards that Back the the Future II promised me.

JD Robb’s In Death Novels are set starting in 2058, and in this version of the future, most of the food is vegetarian, with soy based meat substitutes, as they explain that real meat is expensive, and most cannot afford it.  I like this version of the future, and wouldn’t be surprised if it comes to pass for both economic and environmental reasons.  I should still be around to see it.

One of my all time favorite movies is Terminator II.  But August 29, 1997 came and went, and nothing bad happened.  The movie was great when it came out, because even if I didn’t believe anything bad would happen then, I still wondered, what if?  The Running Man, set in 2017, is obviously a product of the 80s.  The culture and styles of the 80s seep into that movie, making the idea that it’s set 3 years from today laughable.

Even if most books and movies get it wrong, it’s still fun to imagine what the future might hold.  I wonder how different it’s going to be from anything I imagine.

“If you learn one thing from having lived through decades of changing views, it is that all predictions are necessarily false.”
-M. H. Abrams