‘OCME,’ ‘All the Beauty in the World’ and more

OCME:

Life in America’s Top Forensic Medical Center

by Bruce Goldfarb

c.2023, Steerforth Press $19.00 240 pages

There are, they say, two certainties in life: death and taxes.

With a little hard work and some creativity, you probably could avoid the latter but it wouldn’t be easyl and let’s be honest: avoidance wouldn’t be any fun. As for the former certainty, it’ll get us all sooner or later. Death and taxes are inevitable and, as in the new book “OCME” by Bruce Goldfarb, so are politics.

The old saying is not true. Dead men do tell tales.

More than a decade ago, that was something Bruce Goldfarb was about to learn. He’d worked as an emergency medical technician in Memphis, then with the re department there, got a nursing degree, and was “ ddling around with writing” when “one story [he penned] altered my life in an unpredictable way.” He wrote about the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death at the OCME (Of ce of Chief Medical Examiner) of Maryland; not long afterward, he had a job there as the executive assistant to the chief ME.

Once upon a time, Baltimore was not a place to die.

In the early 1800s, says Goldfarb, grave robbing was common in Baltimore because of the need for cadavers in the city’s colleges and classes. There was public outcry for better facilities for the dead and in 1887, an ordinance was passed to create a morgue but it went unfunded. A building was erected in 1890 but it was very basic; not until 1925 was a then-state-of-the-art facility created.

Nearly ninety years later, at his new job, Goldfarb says his phone rang constantly. In charge of public relations, he spent his days answering questions from the press and families whose loved ones lay in the morgue. He handled some requests; denied those that were illegal, unsafe, or just plain creepy; and he explained countless times that there’s a difference between cause and manner of death. And when someone asks him today how they can possibly go on without a loved one, he offers six simple words...

According to author Bruce Goldfarb, actor Jack Klugman’s portrait hangs in the hallway of the Of ce of Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore, because of Klugman’s lead role in Quincy, M.E. That’s about the closest television gets to real life inside this intriguing book.

And yet – don’t dive in without testing the waters rst.

“OCME” is a tale of autopsies, death, corpses, and crime, and Goldfarb doesn’t soften those realities –though this book isn’t gratuitously gruesome. He was very familiar with big cases during his time at OCME, such as those of Freddie Gray and Tyrone West, but he offers no new information because this isn’t that kind of book, either. Instead, this is a lively and educational story written with authenticity and the right amount of jaw-droppers, and it abundantly shows how bureaucracy can catch up with you, even after you’re dead.

CSI fans, true crime lovers, and anyone with a curious mind will want this book in their lap this weekend.

“OCME” is real, factual, fascinating, and never, ever taxing.

All the Beauty in the World:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

by Patrick Bringley c/2023, Simon & Schuster $27.99 240 pages

One hundred eighty degrees.

That’s where you want to be after something very bad has occurred. You want as far as possible away from it, miles out of reach, an exact opposite situation, pronto, thank you. A new schedule, different place, rearrangement, anything that’s not that anymore. As in the new book “All the Beauty in the World” by Patrick Bringley, you reframe everything in your life.

The day Patrick Bringley was supposed to be married was the day of his brother’s funeral.

As the oldest child in the family, Tom had been someone Bringley loved and admired. He was strong, smart, funny, and he was supposed to be a witness in Bringley’s wedding, but Tom died of soft-tissue sarcoma before that could happen, at age twenty-six.

In the days afterward, Bringley felt instinctively that he needed something in his life, something to replace “hospital” with healing. When he was a child, the Metropolitan Museum of Art had been a treat to visit; he remembered that his mother, an art historian and sometime performer, took him there occasionally, scraping small change together for the admission fee. Once, as an adolescent, he physically “experienced the great beauty of” a work of art, and he was somewhat abashed about it. Still, the Met was a place of awestriking grandness and serenity to him.

Bringley set aside his college years, quit his highpro le job, and he became a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Guarding the Met “was the most straight-forward job I could think of in the most beautiful place I knew.”

Being a security guard requires lots of standing solo, Bringley says; there are usually people around but there’s often plenty of alone-time. Before becoming a guard at the Met, he loved working at a high-end New York magazine where people said he was surely ‘going places.’

Standing in place, grieving, observing, thinking, he said of the museum, “I nd myself happy to be going nowhere.”

When it comes to the things you have hanging on your wall or gracing a tabletop, you know what you like. Dogs playing poker? Perfect. A folk-art bowl? Even better. “All the Beauty in the World” on a bookshelf? Yep, you’ll like that, too.

But you should know this rst: in telling his story, author Patrick Bringley doesn’t seem to care if you can’t tell Egyptian art from an exit sign. If you’re never set foot in an art museum, no problem. It doesn’t matter here.

This does: Bringley writes sometimes about the history of art and the history of the Met, but his book is more about beauty met in quiet places and the healing it facilitated. Yes, there are Cassatts and kouros here, but compassion and kindness appear brighter.

Whether it’s the art that tugs at your heart, or the sweetly-charming, soothing stories of people lost and people found that appeal to you, “All the Beauty in the World” is a unique and gently different kind of book. Just picture yourself with it.

Device Free Weekend: A Thrille

by Sean Doolittle

c.2023, Grand Central Publishing $28.00 288 pages

You have a lot of catching up to do.

How long has it been since you were all together last? Doesn’t matter, the years fall away when you’re with your oldest, longest friends. There was a time when you were inseparable and man, it feels good to reconnect but, as in the new novel, “Device Free Weekend” by Sean Doolittle, how well do you still know them?

Had it actually been twenty years since the Stillwater Seven was together?

Stephen Rollins added it up on his Chicago-to-Denver ight. Yep, it had been every bit of two decades since his college chums had all been in the same room. Last time was Will and Perry’s wedding day, and yeah, it’d been awhile.

He’d kept up with everyone, sometimes, more or less. Will and Perry lled him in on Emma’s life in Minnesota; he’d semi-followed Beau and Lainey (known as Blainey) on YouTube. As for Ryan, well, Stephen watched from afar: his old roommate was too busy running a multinational, multi-multi-million-dollar social media corporation to stay in frequent touch.

So when the fancy invitation arrived with glitter and silver and a number on the back, Stephen waf ed: did he want to keep the window shut, and skip the weekend at Ryan Cloverhill’s private Paci c Northwest island? Then again, how could he pass up an allexpenses-paid three days of boating, whale-watching, and reminiscing?

He was really glad to see Emma on the same ight, Denver to Seattle. Once, Stephen was in love with her and so was Ryan, and there were regrets – but reconnecting with her felt right. This would be good.

Not good, though: once they’d arrived, Ryan con scated everyone’s cell phones, tablets, and watches, and he acted weird. Also not good: Ryan looked awful, and he singled Stephen out to say that he had cancer, and that the weekend was his last hurrah.

It was so unlike him.

He begged Stephen not to tell the others.

And then he drugged everyone at supper the rst night, and Ryan disappeared....

Draw the connections however you want, between social media, the online world, ubiquitous devices, techxperts and all – the fact is that with one nger on a digital pulse and one on a trigger, “Device Free Weekend” is a pretty ne thriller.

While you might sense what’s going to happen in the rst few pages – and you’d be right – author Sean Doolittle keeps readers guessing on the details of this novel – details that readers will be happy to note are believable without going full I.T. on anyone. Reading this book doesn’t take you into CPU territory; no, it’s current but with the usual, comfortingly familiar elements of a thriller – revenge, bullets, spy devices, high-speed chases – perched on a tightrope between good and greed and killers with morals.

Like many thrillers, “Device Free Weekend” can lag sometimes, but take it as a chance to snag a breath before being plunged back into a story that turns you every which way. If you’re up for that, it’s a book to catch.

Storm Watch

by by C.J. Box c.2023, Putnam $29.00 353 pages

You just can’t see it.

There’s something in the way, bad weather, a roadblock, a geographical shape that blocks your view, something physical. You can’t see it. Or you can’t see because you’re unfamiliar, dubious, uninformed, or you just plain don’t want to see it. But as in the new novel “Storm Watch” by C.J. Box, you really need to watch out.

For the rst time since he’d moved to Saddlestring, Wyoming, Game Warden Joe Pickett hated the winter weather.

Snow hadn’t bothered him much before but when he got a call about a wounded elk cow that needed to be put down up on the Double Diamond Ranch, he eyed his easy-chair and wished he were anywhere else. A snowstorm was coming over the Big Horn Mountains, but it was Joe’s responsibility to see to that elk.

He tracked the animal a fair ways before he found her, and the source of a whooshing sound that echoed loudly through the valley.

Someone had erected a small shed there, crammed with large fans that screamed like airplanes on tarmac. Hanging from a window was the bottom half of a man who’d been shoved head- rst into those fans. But when deputies went to retrieve what was left of the guy, there was no blood, no body. And Joe was told to keep the whole thing under wraps.

Just north of Joe Pickett’s new house, Nate Romanowski plowed his driveway with a modi ed 1948 Dodge so that fellow falconer and friend, Geronimo Jones, could get to Nate’s compound safely. Jones was on his way with a business proposal but the rst person up the driveway was a stranger with a different kind of offer.

Jason Demo invited Nate to a meeting to talk about how “coastal elites” see folks in the West, and how his group, The Keystoners, weren’t going to “stand down.” Yep, things were going to change in this country, starting in Saddlestring, Wyoming...

So, have you followed the news much lately? Maybe brushed up on your current events? You’ll need ‘em before you tackle “Storm Watch.”

Take that as a bit of a warning: author C.J. Box ripped newspaper headlines pages one through six to craft this very ne thriller, and you’ll be happier and have a better understanding of this tale if you’re at least a little bit in the know. Like Box’s last couple novels, this one brushes against the edges of the newest technology and the bad guys get savvier. It should be noted that they’re also more violent, angrier, but more purposeful than you might nd in a usual thriller; the outlaws inside “Storm Watch,” aren’t madmen, which is a bit unsettling and can remain so for awhile, long after the semi-cliff-hanging ending of this book.

Still, fans of western thrillers won’t want to be without this novel on the table next to their easychairs. Just brush up on your current events rst, is all, know what’s going on in the world, and yeah, “Storm Watch.” You could see it.