James W. Ziskin is the author of the award-winning Ellie Stone Mysteries Series, yet somehow I hadn’t read any of his work before getting an advance copy of Bombay Monsoon from NetGalley and Oceanview publishing. I love well-crafted Historical Fiction and Thrillers, and this book is all of that.

We are introduced to Danny Jacobs, an ambitious young journalist who recently arrived in Bombay, as he sets out to make his professional mark and adjust to life as an ex-pat in a country that still holds on to a “servant” under-class. Aided by the notes left by his predecessor, Danny contacts and interviews a man who claims to have set the bomb that killed a police officer in support of Marxist extremists. In an unguarded moment, Danny captures the bomber’s face on film – a piece of evidence the bomber and the people behind him cannot permit becoming public.

We share Danny’s discomfort as his egalitarian views get challenged by the complex social norms in Indian society. Each new acquaintance has a part in the mystery, from his penthouse neighbour Willy Smets with his exotic mistress Sushmita to Danny’s bigotted compatriot Harlan and even his servant Ramu. Not everyone is what they seem – and misplaced trust can be fatal.

The historical setting of the story is “The Emergency” declaration following the court-ordered nullification of Indira Gandhi’s 1975 election. The actions that the Indian government took affected human rights and civil liberties at the time, and indirectly impact this storyline. I found it worthwhile to take a break and read up on those major events since the book does assume some familiarity with them, yet thankfully doesn’t bog us down with the details. I expect that Ziskin will have a lot more to draw from that period in future books in this series.

I had a personal interest in the setting of the book because while I haven’t spent as much time in India as Ziskin has, I’ve spent considerable time between Mumbai and Pune and the locales were familiar to me. I feel that he has captured the geography exceptionally well, especially the (still!) harrowing road up and down the Ghats. A setting that was well-grounded in reality and characters with only regular human capabilities and weaknesses made the story very accessible and believable. On the other hand, some may find that too much time is spent on the descriptions of scenery and food.

I was slightly disappointed in the way the central mystery storyline ended – it felt like a movie adaptation where a sudden ending trope replaces chapters of revelation to fit time constraints. I’m left imagining that dozens or hundreds of pages were cut from an earlier draft that might have shown how the criminal network reacted to Danny’s escape and helped move the story to its conclusion more gradually.

Overall, Bombay Monsoon is extremely enjoyable. The historical setting is interesting and invites a bleak comparison to and warning for present-day politics. The main characters are accessible and feel real, and most importantly, the action is engaging. I’m looking forward to reading what Danny Jacobs does next!

Joshua Hood has followed the formula for a Ludlum thriller, but this fast-paced action story has some lazy holes in it. When a publisher cranks out a book that’s guaranteed to be a best-seller because of name recognition, they owe it to the readers to at least put an honest effort into the process, with all the resources they have available to them.

Some of the most egregious examples of slop that jumped out at me:

• Physics be damned, our hero is such a super-human that they can hear an approaching Hellfire missile: “Hayes… heard the freight-train scream of a supersonic object cutting through the air.” (Ch. 21)
• Missing words make some text unintelligible. “His team was there to assist the Afghan Army in the Taliban from their opium-rich stronghold.” (Ch. 21)
• An adversary lying outdoors on the ground after being shot ends up “filling the room with the dank stench of fear.” Maybe the “room” is leftover from an early draft that had the scene occurring indoors, but it’s just lazy writing and/or editing to leave it. (Ch. 26)
• In an airplane flying through clouds, dropping from 15,000 feet, the cabin is filled with “air heavy with the smell of rain and wet earth.” That imagery makes no sense in the setting it’s been used in. (Ch. 36)

I’m looking for more than a body count in an action thriller, but that’s about all this book has going for it. Yawn.

With everything that has happened in 2020, you might think it was the worst year ever. But it has been nothing compared to 1348 in Europe, and specifically for the city of Venice. That year began with a 6.9 magnitude earthquake across most of Italy. It triggered a Tsunami in the Adriatic that drained the Venice Lagoon before the massive wave crashed into the city, multiplying the earthquake’s destruction and washing many citizens out to sea. Within days, the worst pandemic of all time arrived; after a few months, about a third of Venice’s population had died of the Bubonic Plague.

In The Quarant, Graham Bullen has woven a fascinating tale of international intrigue into a background of divine destruction. Malin Le Cordier is a British maritime trader with a thriving business in Venice, recruited by the English Crown to help overthrow the Venetian government. Throughout his life, Malin’s good character has earned him the trust and love of a circle of capable friends, and he has engaged some of them in the scheme. As the day chosen for their ultimate action approaches, they face increasing peril. A key co-conspirator disappears, and there is a risk he might expose them all under torture. Malin himself fends off an attempted assassination, yet the power behind these attacks remains in the shadows; it may not be the Doge and his Councils but an agent of revenge from Malin’s past.

There are few rules in this game, and one never knows who they can trust. Businesses, reputations, and lives are at risk, with no guarantee of a happy ending. To survive, Malin needs help from his friends to reveal and unravel the threads of greed and hostility that tie their fates together. And even that might not be enough to avoid death in all its forms.

Bullen has done a masterful job of making the past feel real, and his descriptions of 14th Century Venice are immersive. For anyone who has had the opportunity to explore this timeless city, the calles and canals will seem so familiar that you’ll easily picture yourself there.

Malin’s backstory is told through flashbacks to his childhood in England, his escape to Antwerp and apprenticeship, maturation, then eventual recruitment into King Edward III’s plot. We meet a rich tapestry of characters, events, and locales that would provide ample material for several engaging prequels.

The Quarant is an absorbing story of intrigue, a first-class spy novel with a wonderfully flawed hero and a solid storyline. The plot it describes is fictional yet plausible when placed within historical events. I loved it!

Today’s blog is an update of Mission: Quest for an ARC. As I described in my first update, I requested more ARCs than I should have – I’ve learned that there are consequences to that. On a positive note, I’ve read 3 of the books I requested, so I’m starting to catch up. Let me tell you what else I’ve learned.

Good Golly, NetGalley!

I’ve already said that I had overcommitted myself by requesting more books than I could read & review. Here’s what has happened to those many requests.

I requested 15 books on November 2nd, and here’s where things stand two weeks later. I have been granted nine requests, received two rejections, and four requests are still outstanding. One of the rejects was “due to contractual obligations”, with no further explanation, while the other came with a list of possible reasons:

1. The most likely reason we are unable to fulfill the request is because we’ve hit our maximum allowance for the title in question, so you didn’t do anything wrong!
2. We sometimes decline requests due to a lack of user profile information or no company association, so please include this information, and keep in mind that we are unable to view your profile on sites like Goodreads if it’s set to private. (Note to bloggers: your blog URL can be your company association, and we greatly appreciate traffic stats in your profile info.)
3. The ratio of “Requests Approved” to “Number of Reviews” is important to us. We are only allowed to share a limited amount of egalleys, so we do our best to approve readers we think will read and review the book.  If you want to improve your ratio, please consider submitting reviews for titles you’ve been approved for in the past. Depending on your Role, reviews can be anything from a full text review, links to a post, or just a note to let us know that you’ve purchased the book for your library or bookstore. 
4. <Publisher> is based in the United States, so we primarily approve requests from readers in the United States and Canada

It reinforces the need to manage your requests because there may be consequences if you don’t keep up with reviews. The fact that the ratio of “Requests Approved” to “Number of Reviews” is essential to some publishers means that you should avoid having many requested items queued to read.

I have also been granted one wish so far, out of about 10. (I don’t see any way to track “wishes” in NetGalley, except to look at titles previously wished for. If you know the trick, please post in the comments!)

The BookSiren Sings!

BookSirens had not populated my ReaderRank with my review information from Goodreads when I wrote the update in Part Two. I contacted them, and that got sorted out. With a completed first import, anyone can see a summary of my reviews – to check it out, click on the ReaderRank widget here!

I was pleasantly surprised to find that I rank in the top 20% in several genres; Politics, War, Thriller. I imagine that will help bring me to the attention of authors seeking reviews of books in those genres via BookSiren. However, I believe “ranking” factors in the number of star ratings, not reviews with some descriptive text. I would expect a publisher to look most closely at the “3 Reviews Written” statement and largely ignore the 290+ books I’ve recorded as “Read” but only given a star rating. Also, the genres in the ReaderRank are different from those I see in the Goodreads source data. Well, that’s a worry for another day.

Due to that updated ReaderRank, I can join more book review teams. I haven’t yet committed to any more books, but once I’ve caught up with the ones I’ve already got, I will pick some.

Reviews so far

Finally, let’s talk about my book reviews. In the past week, I’ve published another four book reviews, three of those for books obtained as part of the Quest, posted here on my blog, cross-posted on Goodreads, and sent as direct feedback to the authors & publishers through NetGalley or BookSirens. Two of the books relate to my Day job, so I also posted those reviews on LinkedIn to share with my professional network easily. The fourth review I published only on Goodreads, a short blurb for a book by Charles Todd, Tales: Short Stories Featuring Ian Rutledge and Bess Crawford.

What’s next?

Read, Review, Repeat – that’s about it. I’ll continue chipping away at my ratio of “Requests Approved” to “Number of Reviews” to get it above 85%. I have been granted a few books that don’t get published until March 2021, so the pressure to read them isn’t coming from the publisher, it’s simply my mismanagement of my requests.

I’ve got many more “wishes” pending for books by favorite authors, so I’m hopeful that one of those will get granted.

Read more:

• Mission: Quest for an ARC
• ARC Quest, Part 2: Be Careful What You Wish For
• ARC Quest, Part 3: I’m a reviewer now.

Autonomous vehicles, package delivery drones, automatic grocery restocking units: these examples of emerging robot technology are vastly different from previous task-specific devices like your Roomba or even industrial assembly-line robots. That difference involves their need to interact with our world to safely perform their complex tasks while coping with our unpredictability. They need to learn how to behave to get along with us.

In What to Expect When You’re Expecting Robots, Laura Major and Julie Shah focus on the importance of relationships between working robots and their uncertain environment, especially humans. The authors’ experience includes robotics for the aerospace, military, and autonomous vehicle industries. Their consideration of robot behavior incorporates examples across industry and academia.

We are shown connections from past human/automaton collaborations from aviation and process control to today’s commercially-available smart robots. In parallel with technological innovation, they also expound on the related sociology and human-factors engineering that accompanied it.

As a product development professional, I found that the book contained numerous gems for me that apply outside the realm of Robotics. One such example involved NASA’s classification of events based on how decisions get made, which could help guide any automation design. Type II events, those foreseeable events where we can’t predetermine the correct response, can’t be automated. Still, we could enhance the human response by focusing only on the most relevant information. This principle could be applied to improve the design of a web app used to manage and monitor a communication network, for instance, where automation can mitigate many network failures. When a Type II event occurred, the UI could focus on that failure and filter the control elements to only those relevant to the human operator for problem-solving the error. In this case, the goal is to facilitate more effective creative problem-solving, which is a strength the human excels at over any current artificial system.

I initially picked this book to read because I am deeply interested in the relationship between Artificial Intelligence and Humans. Well, that plus the brightly colored cover with the tongue-in-cheek title harkening back to a universal parenting book and the cute robot-child on it. I found an accessible exploration of the social, environmental, and policy issues to tackle so that automation and robotics can continue to make our lives better by complementing our strengths.

This book should be required reading for anyone involved in products that incorporate AI, machine learning, or robotic technologies. I recommend it to anyone interested in or worried about technology and its impact on society.

When Agent Pine corners the grandson of the man who almost killed her when he abducted Mercy, he runs before she can learn anything about his grandfather. A brief chase ends when Atlee literally runs into Puller, who was about to arrest said grandson as part of an Army CID drug investigation. The two decide to pool their resources because of the shared interest in the same suspect. 

Puller’s drug investigation quickly evolves into something else. First, a member of Puller’s team gets murdered. Second, that murder case is closed after only a cursory investigation. Unconvinced that the obvious explanation is the correct one, Pine and Puller continue to dig and face increasing peril as they uncover a web of crimes and violence. With Puller sidelined as collateral damage of a witness assassination, Agent Pine continues on her own to uncover the conspirators who are working against them. The story’s threads come together in a dramatic rescue of Carol Blum and John’s brother, Robert. The FBI arrives to dot the i’s and cross the t’s, and Atlee gets to resume the search for her sister.

Agent Pine has gathered a family name, a photo, and letters that provide clues about Mercy’s life after her abduction. That takes Atlee back to Georgia, and what she learns there will probably keep me from sleeping tonight.

Daylight, the third installment in David Baldacci’s Atlee Pine thriller series, will be published on November 17th, 2020, by Grand Central Publishing, and distributed through most regular outlets.

Navigating the complex challenges presented by coworkers and their humanity can make or break a manager. In The Messy Truth about Leading People – It Ain’t Easy, Nicki Roth and Gavin Fenn-Smith take us on a journey through a career’s worth of leadership insights via a retrospective narrative in the voice of CEO "Micah." The book is structured like a novel, an unconventional choice for a business/self-help subject, but one that keeps the lessons fresh and memorable.

I can’t claim that I wasn’t warned – Ramona did say, “It’s… important to not overwhelm yourself by requesting a ton of books that you will then feel obligated to read before their publication dates.”

Clearly, I am someone who prefers to learn through their own experiences, ignoring the advice of sages. As a result, I am now drowning in books! Most of the books I’ve been granted access to are newly published, so I don’t have the time pressure that would come with true “advance” copies, but I still received kindly-worded reminders like:

• “We are counting on your feedback and look forward to hearing from you once you’ve finished reading the book.”
• “Publish your review as soon as you’re able.”
• “Let us know if, for any reason, you are unable to post a review.”

Ok, so there is a little bit of pressure!

If I could do it over, I would search out all the books that appear interesting but prioritize my requests and submit only a few so that there was no way I’d get overwhelmed.

Getting started with NetGalley

One of those “connecting” sites I signed up with is NetGalley. Registration was straight-forward; from the home page, I just had to click the “Become a Member” link to open the registration form then fill it out. Once you create your account, you can update your profile by recording your reading (or listening) preferences, add your Send-to-Kindle e-mail address if applicable. Most importantly, you should write a Bio to promote yourself as a reviewer. Your Bio will only be visible to publishers. I wrote a few short paragraphs:

With all that set up behind me, I browsed for books to read. You can access their Catalog without an account, and I did that before deciding to create one.

NetGalley is used by a large selection of publishers, including Avon Books, Ballantyne Books, Random House, Harvard University Press, and hundreds more. I had no problem finding books I was interested in since there is something for everyone.

Every book listed in NetGalley is available to “Read Now,” “Request,” or “Wish” for. You will be automatically approved for any “Read Now” book (or “Listen Now” audiobook). Most books are available to “Request,” and clicking that option will notify a publisher that you are interested in the book. There is no guarantee that you’ll get the books you request – but NetGalley provides helpful information about how to improve your chances. (TLDR; Make sure your profile matches what the publisher is looking for, and be certain to provide feedback for books you’ve received previously.)

There was a wonderful surprise for me in NetGalley! I read David Baldacci, and his latest book in the Atlee Pine thriller series, Daylight, is available for pre-order with a release date of November 17. Since I’ve read quite a few of his previous books, I’d already put a hold on the e-Book with my library and was #242 in the queue. Now I don’t need to wait because I was able to obtain an advanced copy through NetGalley.

The BookSirens’ call

The other service I signed on with is BookSirens. The sign-up experience is similar to that for NetGalley, so I won’t bore you repeating it.

The selection of books here tends towards small publishing houses and independent publishers.

The route to becoming a reviewer is different on BookSirens than NetGalley. On BookSirens, you provide information about your reading interests such as genre, publication date (pre-publication, less than 90 days ago, more than 90 days ago), length (pages), and type of publisher (publishing house / Indie). After a day or so, you will have books made available to you – in my case, there were 189 of them, so there’s no shortage of reading material!

With that invitation, I returned to my account to see what was on offer – and started clicking “Not Interested” on titles that didn’t interest me to reduce the field to something less daunting.

I selected a couple of books to start, and both have a time limit for reading them and posting a review – 30 days. There’s that pressure!

One “bonus” feature of BookSirens is that they measure and report on your review-related activity, so you can have evidence of your influence. I’m not yet influential, but maybe I will be someday!

A reviewer reviews!

Great – I have access to some books, and I’ve even lucked into a new one by a favorite author. The Quest, though, is not complete – I need to be a reviewer.

I wrote my first review on Goodreads, which was another one of my objectives for this Quest. It was about a book in the Inspector Ian Rutledge series by author Charles Todd, not a book I got as part of this Quest. I have thoroughly enjoyed that series and highly recommend it. Like binging a TV Series, it’s gratifying to be able to close one book and open the next without waiting months or years for the next installment!

What’s next?

I will be reading the ARCs I’ve received then writing reviews for them in the coming weeks. I’ll cross-publish the reviews in this blog and describe that experience in a future update.

Read more:

• Mission: Quest for an ARC
• ARC Quest, Part 2: Be Careful What You Wish For
• ARC Quest, Part 3: I’m a reviewer now.

Everything new is old again

I love books, but my habit has sometimes threatened to get me crushed under a pile of previously-read tomes or empty my bank account in my quest to purchase my next great read. After a job change, I found myself commuting via public transit for two hours a day, and the additional reading time that gave me forced me to renew my acquaintance with the public library, which really helped tame the cost and storage problems resulting from buying 2 or 3 books a week.

Read more:

• Mission: Quest for an ARC
• ARC Quest, Part 2: Be Careful What You Wish For
• ARC Quest, Part 3: I’m a reviewer now.

Problems might show up as unexpected behaviours, or it might be benign but contribute to your script execution limits and slow your scripts.

To the machine, the existence of multiple gs files is moot – they are simply a convenience for the author. All functions and global variables in all files are available to code in every individual file. All statements outside the scope of functions get executed.

As a consequence, if you have something like var sheet = SpreadsheetService.getActiveSheet(); at the top of every gs file, it will execute multiple times – so you just need such a statement once in the project.

Let’s say, like the user who asked this question, you’ve been copying and editing scripts and snippets that you’ve found on the web, and eventually find that things just aren’t working anymore. During this exercise, you’ve ended up with multiple gs files in your Google Apps Script project. How can you unravel what’s going on?

Your options at this point are:

• Make sure your data is still valid. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with the code.
• Look at the Execution Transcript after a failed run, to see if you get clues of where things went wrong. At the very least, you’ll know where it stopped.
• Review your manual merge, comparing to the original code, to ensure that you’ve copied the code properly. If you can engage a colleague as a second set of eyes for this, even better!
• Use the debugger or Logger to carefully walk through functions that you have observed misbehaving.  It makes sense to start debugging with observed problems, and work backwards from there.
• Go back to the original and start over. (Renew your New Year’s resolution to begin version controlling your scripts!)

Any ideas on what might go wrong when merging scripts?

• Misplaced braces ({ and }) can change data structures and functions.
• Multiple copies of functions are allowed in gs, although only the bottom one will execute. You’ll get no error message in this case, but things may not act the way you expect. If, for instance, you copied functions from a companion gs file into Code.gs, then commented out the BODIES of the functions in the original file, a call to any of those functions would execute the empty version from the companion file, NOT the copy in Code.gs.
  Use the editor’s search function across all files to verify that you have just ONE copy of each method, global variable, object declaration, or function.
• Operator error. We’ve all been there. Sometimes the problem is in front of the keyboard!