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Jack Yu is a detective who is assigned to New York's Chinatown beat, where he grew up. There's a crime and an investigation and I really enjoyed that it involved shoe leather and collecting clues and not jumping to conclusions. But the heart of the story is really about Jack Yu navigating being second generation, and being a cop on behalf of a white-led power structure policing his own community. He's no dupe, but he also doesn't think Chinese people should prey on their own. A childhood friend was murdered by a Chinese gang. Jack Yu's is to become law & order. Another friend's response is to become the leader of another crew that exacts revenge. Years later, they come in contact around the crime at the center of this story.

The ethical lens is presented by the author as complex, and the portrayal is a series of fuzzy compromises rather than easy, sure answers. That feels better than a black-and-white view, but being a non-immigrant white dude, I'm missing experience and perspective.

Floyd Betts returns to his hometown Old Cypress to bury his unloved father when his aunt Constance refuses to pay the $10 the preacher charges for digging a grave in the church cemetery. Nellie and Hank Abernathy are the orphaned children of a witch, late of Old Cypress. Betts, not wanting to leave the children to beg in front of the church in Old Cypress, loads them up to take back to Galveston where he boards. Charlie Fish is... well, read the book. But suffice to say he joins Floyd and Nellie and Hank when they return to Galveston. Nellie and Hank and Charlie all have gifts, and they are going to need them as scoundrels pursue them into the face of the hurricane that wiped out Galveston in 1900.

Extremely engaging story. There's danger. Ghosts. Scoundrels. Hell and high water. Rountree has also put effort into defining his characters. Not just their backstories, but also their values.

It's also one of the best I've read recently at establishing a sense of place through description. Old Cypress and Galveston are not just described visually, but also in the sense of what it feels like to be there, the vibe of each place. This is done without feeling like an info-dump.

All packed into a long novella or a short novel. I'm not sure where it qualifies technically, but it's nowhere near doorstop weight. There's no sense of "finally done with this!" and more like "I wish this weren't over yet."

My economics background is limited to the intro macro and micro courses I took as an undergrad and in which it seemed to me every question could have numbers going up or down and I always picked the wrong one. So when presented with books like these I just look at the presented graphs and nod, and say that sounds reasonable, especially since I mostly pre-agreed with the sentiments expressed. Not that I would call myself a socialist, and I don't really think the policies recommended here are particularly radical - reducing inequality through progressive taxation and investment in education, yada yada, and endorsing Bernie Sanders (this book was published during the first Trump term) who was not above campaigning against gun control in New Hampshire and coded appeals to racists in the name of anti-globalism when he was running against Hillary in the previous race (one credit to the Trump years is that it made that kind of Democratic have-it-both-ways campaigning that got Vincent Chin killed more unpalatable these days). That is my biggest complaint about this book, it doesn't just presume but flat out states that xenophobia will not be a problem if we just have less inequality, which at least is an improvement over Robert Reich's oligarchy book where did the people-aren't-racist-it's-racist-resentment thing (which I first heard on Geraldine Ferraro's Fox News sour grapes tour after Hillary lost to Obama). Seriously, go to Reich's website where a search for "oligarchy" returns hundreds of results and "racism" has no hits. But anyway back to this book, what I found most interesting is the prescriptions for how to improve or worst case replace the EU, because really I had no idea how that thing works, just complaints from Brexiter colleagues about "unrestricted immigration" while raking in tidy salaries in California. Yeah, a UBI is really gonna change their tune.

Mickey Barnes has the job of "expendable." He's sent into hazardous jobs with a high risk of dying, which he often does. Then his body is cloned and his brain is restored from a recent backup, and he's sent out to do something else dangerous. In order to put some tension in the story, Ashton has made it so having more than one multiple alive at the same time is illegal. In the backstory, it's because of a rich multiple who murdered an entire planet and used the biomass to create copies of himself. Oh, also the head of the colony thinks multiples are an abomination because clones have no soul.

That's what he's up against. What he's got going for him is one clone is left for dead but doesn't die. He and his next version (Mickey8) get to put their heads together to save the colony on a harsh planet and figure out how to keep the rest of the colony from knowing about them.

There's a bunch of little things that just don't quite mesh together super nicely, but the characters and plot are much fun.