Category Archives: Adventure

Meet Amit Madoor . . .

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When reading my new novel She Knew Too Much for the umpteenth time–not as a Word document this time, but as a “real book” for proofreading–I was struck again by how much I liked not just the main characters, but also the secondary ones.

One of my favorites has always been Amit Madoor, the mafia’s Moroccan fence. He has a way of getting top dollar for stolen goods, and I was so fascinated by how his career might have started, I wrote far too much! I took out the passages not essential to the novel and turned them into a standalone short story, with its own arc and resolution, which takes place almost thirty years before the novel.

It involves a case that has always fascinated me–the still (in real life) unsolved robbery of Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The precious artworks stolen constitute the largest property theft in history, and they have never been recovered. Experts say that stealing artworks is child’s play next to trying to dispose of them afterward. That’s where Madoor excels.

In my short story, “Above Suspicion,” published in Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, I hewed carefully to the exact details of the crime. Of course, I invented the thieves, but I think my theory about who they might have been and why they’ve never been caught holds up. You can read it here!

Meanwhile, to learn about Amit Madoor’s vital role in the plot threatening American travel writer Genie Clarke, read She Knew Too Much, available from Bookshop.org, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other notable booksellers. The novel takes place in Rome, where Madoor now lives, and involves a handsome Italian police detective and a whole cast of intriguing characters.

Vicarious Adventures for the Snowbound

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If the impulse to hibernate becomes just too strong over the next two weeks, here are two adventures stories that will get that sluggish body moving again—of course, you’ll have to occupy a chair to read them.

Come and Get Her by Bruce Conord

I raced through the pages of Bruce Conord’s new suspense thriller Come and Get Her to find out what deadly hazard would our hero, Jesse Arroyo, face next and whether he’d finally take one risk too many. His first-person story starts with a gripper. Jesse says it’s “the call that no parent should receive.” In the middle of the night, his ex-girlfriend Debi is on the phone telling him their daughter Sheri is missing. She and two friends crossed the Texas border to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, to visit a night club. Leaving late, they were kidnapped, but one of the girls escaped and gave the police in Laredo, Texas, the sketchy details.

Sheri was the result of a one-night stand some twenty years earlier, and a longer-term relationship between Jesse and Debi proved impossible: too much social distance. Jesse joined the Army, buried himself in Afghanistan and the clandestine services for the better part of two decades, and communication between him and Debi is rare.

The Laredo police and the FBI are upbeat about Sheri’s safety and confident of the cooperation of the Nuevo Laredo authorities. They are sure a ransom demand will come, and if the family pays it, which of course Debi’s wealthy father will, Sheri will be set free. Jesse is far less optimistic. Nuevo Laredo is wracked by drug cartel violence, and two blonde Americans are prime targets for trafficking. He’s not counting on help from the Mexican police, who are too often in cahoots with the cartels. Just as bad, he doesn’t trust Debi’s dad to pay up.

Conord writes convincingly about the effects on Jesse of twenty years’ operating in a hostile environment where trust was scant on the ground, unlike regrets, which were plentiful. When Jesse goes after Sheri himself, you know this is a long-shot endeavor, even for someone with his skills and savvy.

Unlike Don Winslow’s The Cartel and The Border, the book doesn’t tackle head-on the problems created by the drugs, guns, and money sloshing back and forth across the US-Mexican border. Yet, that reality is here and makes the story feel all-too-real. That impression is aided by Conord’s portrayal of the intransigent attitudes and tactics of US immigration and border patrol personnel. The action is non-stop, and the frustrations baked into the system are acute, so that, by the last page, you may feel you need a long winter’s nap. Exciting!

The Hunted by Steven Max Russo

Another nail-biting adventure is the new thriller The Hunted by Steven Max Russo. I’ve liked his previous books, The Debt Collector and The Dead Don’t Sleep for his engaging characters and clever plots. The Hunted does not disappoint.

Ophelia Harris, a former CIA analyst working in Afghanistan for the private security firm GSG (think Blackwater), was the only survivor of an operation that went south in Afghanistan. She escaped with, worth mentioning, two suitcases stuffed with cash. What she learned before the shooting started was that the Americans were being ambushed, something only someone on the inside at the company could have engineered. Because she escaped, she knows the suspicions point to her, and she’s on the run.

Because GSG is a security operation and has an inside track with military and espionage agencies, it has the resources to find her, wherever she hides. And has. First in Florida and now, as the story opens, in New Jersey. What the company’s leaders also have is motivation, not just because they suspect her of betraying her team, but also because, unbeknownst to Ophelia, one of the Americans killed in the operation was the boss’s son.

A chance meeting of someone from Afghanistan leads to an uneasy partnership in which Ophelia and former Army Ranger Austin Medford flee across Pennsylvania. The head of GSG and two of his crack assassins are hard on their heels. The fugitives have skill and nerve on their side, while their antagonists have all that, plus virtually unlimited access to surveillance technology. It’s a crackerjack story that like Come and Get Her, leaves you breathless.

My new thriller, She Knew Too Much, is on sale now (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.). An American travel writer on assignment in Rome stumbles on deadly information.

The Final Episode by Lori Roy

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I’ve missed a few posts lately because I’ve been creating an index for my family history. How detailed? What’s most helpful? These are questions I don’t have the answers to. Having studied family histories other people have assembled, I know an index is invaluable, and the best I can do may be to strike a middle ground between obsession and gloss. Future users will have to rate my success, though I probably won’t hear about it.

But I do want to tell you about a book I really enjoyed, Lori Roy’s The Final Episode. It’s one of a string of books that enter meta-territory, in a way, in that they’re about television, its coverage of true-crime and the impact of that on people involved in the original tragedy. Others in this string that I’ve reviewed are The Murder Show by Matt Goldman, Kill Show by Daniel Sweren-Becker, and one of the best, The Pain Tourist by Paul Cleave. Each interesting in its own way and each highlighting significant downsides to the genre.

I can’t always pinpoint why one story totally captures my attention and another doesn’t. It’s some ineffable yet powerful characteristic that goes beyond plot, character, and setting. For whatever reason (reasons?), The Final Episode, kept me spellbound.

Roy provides a great set-up—a true crime television series is reinvestigating the mysterious disappearance of Francie Farrow, taken from her Florida bedroom some twenty years earlier. It happened during a sleepover with twelve-year-old Nora Banks. Feigning sleep, Nora saw and heard the man who took Francie and threaten to take her to the nearby Florida swamp.

Three families’ futures and fates are entangled in this devastating crime. For Francie’s parents, the slow-moving investigation and not knowing what happened to their daughter, where she is, whether she’s alive is, in the long run, more corrosive than the worst possible news.

The neighborhood becomes a pressure-cooker, and Nora and her parents escape to her mother’s childhood home on the fringe of the Big Cypress Swamp, with its venomous snakes, alligators, crocodiles, bears, bobcats, and cougars.

There, Nora’s family find the protagonist of the story, almost-eleven-year-old Jennifer Jones. Jenny and her two best friends are simultaneously lured by the swamp and obsessed by its terrors. Every girl in South Florida knows about Francie Farrow—the posters and news coverage are unavoidable—and learning that Nora has an intimate knowledge of the event makes her friendship all the more alluring and destabilizing. The disastrous season trudges on—hot, humid, reeking of swamp smells, and plagued by insects. Worse is the maelstrom of accusations, revelations, and manipulations that the families endure. At the end of the summer, another kidnapping occurs, and everything is changed for them all.

The story of the girls’ explorations and their evolving relationships is backdrop to the story of the grown-up Jenny, trying to make a living, out of touch with her childhood friends. But now that the television series is airing, the heartbreaks of that summer are uppermost in the minds of everyone, including Francie Farrow’s poor mother Beverley, increasingly unhinged. With the television series lurching toward a conclusion, no one knows how it will end. Will it reveal what really happened to Francie, and who will be blamed for it?

Author Roy keeps the girls well plugged into the plot. As they go about conditioning their hair and painting their nails, their actions are not only realistic, but to a purpose that isn’t immediately obvious. The male characters are well developed too, including the police officers and FBI agents, the fathers of Francie, Jenny, and Nora, and the adult Jenny’s sometime-boyfriend, Arlen (who has his secrets too). I particularly enjoyed Jenny’s aging grandmother, Dehlia, who never loses faith in her family, her history, and her portents. A real page-turner!

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Weekend Movie Pick: One Battle After Another

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Even if this movie weren’t considered darn good, and it is, it’s almost worth it to see a filmmaker—in this case Paul Thomas Anderson—try to shoehorn a Thomas Pynchon novel into a couple of hours. He’s tried before. You need only recall Anderson’s 2014 messy and occasionally hilarious film, Inherent Vice, to award Anderson extra points for tackling the writer again.

This time it works. Partly by stripping out a lot, but there’s enough left to keep viewers’ minds buzzing. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Bob, a one-time anarchist/revolutionary and Sean Penn as a far-right army colonel determined to bring him down. Not because Col. Lockjaw is a law-and-order man. Oh, no. His reasons are much more personal. (One very-Pynchon touch is the outlandish names.)

In his revolutionary days, Bob was partnered with Perfidia Beverly Hills (played by Teyana Taylor), who ends up in witness protection, and they had a daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti) who is now seventeen. She lives with Bob in a remote community where he spends his days getting high. He’s been chased so relentlessly by the authorities that he and his friends have developed a sharp sense of paranoia, and when the warning signs come, Bob heeds them. At least as well as he can in his addled state. The plot has been updated from the book (feds chasing drug dealers) to today (feds chasing immigrants), and doesn’t suffer for it.

What so impresses me about DiCaprio’s work is that he’s able to set aside vanity and just be the character, rough edges and all. So many actors (male and female) persist in preening for the camera. They may be delivering the lines, but you can almost see them thinking, “How do I look? How do I look?” DiCaprio lets all that go. And Sean Penn? Creepy, creepy. Plus Benicio del Toro as a guy who knows how to get things done.

Surprisingly (it is Pynchon, after all), the story is pretty easy to follow, and while there’s some violence, Anderson doesn’t follow the Hollywood rule of maximum-to-the-ridiculous fire-power. Some of the strongest scenes are the quietist. It’s a story about people on the fringes, and many kinds of unraveling (security) blankets are out there. I won’t give away any of the plot. See it, and decide for yourself.

Nice music choices too, though I’ll never hear the Shirelles’ “Soldier Boy” the same way again. Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 95%; audiences 85%.

The Railway Conspiracy by John Shen Yen Nee and SJ Rozan

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Second in this talented team’s genre mashup, The Railway Conspiracy builds on the characters introduced in last year’s The Murder of Mr. Ma. Set in London in 1924, the series’ main characters are Judge Dee Ren Jie, based on a real-life Tang Dynasty jurist and the traditions of Sherlock Holmes; Lao She, a university professor who plays Watson to Dee’s Holmes; Sergeant Hoong, owner of a shop selling Chinese goods, and the man you want with you when there’s a fight brewing; and Jimmy Fingers, whose business tends more to monkey but whose acquaintanceship with the London underworld comes in handy.

In this story, three great powers—Russia, Japan, and a power-hungry Chinese warlord are vying for control of the railways being developed in China. The precarious state of the Chinese Nationalist government and the persistent growth of the Chinese Communist party are ripe for political turmoil. Rumors of a conspiracy to take over the railways swirl about, including at the elegant dinner table of Madam Wu Ze Tian, to whom Dee, uncharacteristically, seems to be forming an attachment.

The next morning, one of the dinner party guests is dead. Bodies begin to pile up, and Dee and Lao must figure out how the deaths are connected and who is responsible. All they seem to have in common is an interest in the railway politics playing out several thousand miles east.

Rozan and Nee’s evocation of 1920s London is charming. Lots of cabs; lots of walking. The authors make especially good use of Dee’s ability to impersonate the Victorian folkloric character, Spring-heeled Jack. Lots of martial arts prowess is on display—perhaps a bit too much near the story’s climax—but it’s easy to follow. Jimmy Fingers always provides some humor, and Lao’s self-deprecating style doesn’t mask his substantial contribution to their investigations. The London constabulary is a source of both help and, as often, shortsighted decisions.

If Nee is well grounded in visualizing superheroes, Rozan is an award-winning writer of detective and crime fiction. Together their books are pure fun—Adventures with a capital A. Cultural insights along the way add spice.

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Plums, Paprika, and Ghosts

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Plums, Paprika, and Ghosts, a wonderful book by my friend and fellow crime-writer A.J. Sidransky, is a success on many levels. This nonfiction book is part travelog, part family history, part culinary adventure, and part coming of age story, as seen through a father’s loving eyes, and it satisfies on many levels.

I particularly liked the author’s writing style. It was as if he and I were sitting at a tiny outdoor café table somewhere in Hungary and, over a plate of cherry strudel (not apple for me), he was telling me a story. It’s that personal, immediate, and written from the heart.

You don’t have to be Hungarian as he and I (not my Texas half) are to enjoy the touches of Old Europe he found, interspersed with enough history to make events unfolding there today more meaningful. He tells the story of his Jewish immigrant ancestors and how they came to America from Hungary and Slovakia (which was part of Hungary until after World War I) and made new lives here. Not all came, though, and many of those who clung to their homeland perished in the Holocaust.

My grandparents were likewise Hungarian and Slovakian, from the same part of the country, though they were Roman Catholic, and I treasured each detail and scene. But you needn’t share his family’s history to find a thrilling tale in his forebears’ determination, their courage in embarking on the long journey and starting their lives anew, their daily difficulties in a country whose language they didn’t speak. When Alan found remnants of the family’s homes and the businesses they left behind, it was compelling evidence of their past lives, like a lingering fingerprint in the community.

Alan had envisioned taking this trip ever since he became interested in family history several decades ago. Finally, as his son Jake graduated from law school, they decided to do it together. As a result, you see several Central European countries not just through Alan’s eyes, a man who has “lived it” vicariously for a long time, but through the eyes of his son Jake, who came of age more than a half-century after the Holocaust. Alan wasn’t sure Jake would be interested, but the young man’s observations proved him a perceptive, compassionate observer. In this way, it’s a story about the maturing of a father-son relationship that is heart-warming to read amidst all the tribulations and disconnects in the world, past and present.

Alan is also a trained chef, and you’ll be extra-pleased to find several family recipes he’s collected at the back of the book. They are just another way he transforms the abstractions of history and culture into something meaningful in daily life. Jó étvágyat!

P.S. I’m told my grandmother’s strudel dough was so thin, your could see the pattern of the cloth beneath it, as in this photograph. Alas, none of her six daughters did what Alan has done and preserved those precious recipes. — VW

Gabriel’s Moon & Havoc

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Pack your traveling clothes. These two books will take you on adventures far afield.

In Gabriel’s Moon, the new espionage thriller by William Boyd, a brief prologue tells how thirty-something Gabriel Dax is haunted by the house fire that took his widowed mother’s life and destroyed his childhood home. Gabriel has become a book author and travel writer, speeding off to one destination after another, trying to outrun the flames.

Now Gabriel is in Léopoldville (Kinshasha), capital of the newly established Democratic Republic of the Congo. A friend arranges a spectacular journalistic coup: an interview with the prime minister, the controversial, pro-Soviet Patrice Lamumba—a poor political choice for a leader sitting on a “gold mine” of uranium. Gabriel works hard on the Lamumba article, but his editors spike it. Lamumba, apparently, is old news. Kidnapped in a coup.

Rumors say Lamumba is dead. His editor says that’s not true, and if it were, he’d know it. Of course, it is true, and Gabriel slides into a mirror-world of truths, half-truths, and lies, delivered most convincingly of all. Someone desperately wants his interview tapes, in which Lamumba claimed US, British, and Belgian government operatives were out to get him. He named names.

It’s an exciting read as Gabriel zooms from one assignment to the next, from one strange encounter to another, and develops the self-preservation skills he seems increasingly likely to need. The story is packed with interesting, richly developed characters. Aside from Gabriel, there’s a Spanish artist whose star is falling; a young American woman with a dubious agenda; a CIA operative who uses a minor French author for his nom de guerre; his louche, hard-drinking, and slippery contact in Cadiz; an irritating Liverpool journalist; and a dogged insurance investigator who decades earlier doubted the official story about the deadly fire.

London, Warsaw during the Cold War, Spain, the Congo—Boyd captures them all as effectively as travel writer Gabriel himself might. It’s no surprise that award-winning Scottish author Boyd’s writing is top-notch. He’s a two-time finalist for the Booker Prize.

Christopher Bollen’s protagonist in the new psychological thriller Havoc is Maggie Burkhardt, an 81-year-old widow from Milwaukee, residing at a somewhat unfashionable hotel in Luxor, Egypt. She’s lost everything—husband, daughter—and is making up for their absences by trying to become a presence in other peoples’ lives and “fixing” their problems. Truth told, she’s an interfering busybody, and you may wish she’d get her comeuppance.

Probably you won’t expect her nemesis will turn out to be an eight-year-old boy. Otto Seeber is cunning, fearless, and the orchestrator of much of the havoc that descends on the Royal Karnak Palace Hotel. (This fictional hotel was in part inspired by Luxor’s Winter Palace Hotel, where Bollen got his first notion for this story and Agatha Christie wrote part of Death on the Nile. I’ve been there myself and can attest to the loveliness of the garden with its exotic birds, a frequent meeting place for Bollen’s characters.)

Only Maggie—and her archaeologist friend Ben—see through Otto’s mask of childish innocence to the demonic personality underneath. Ben’s husband, Zachary, having a belated stirring of paternal interest, draws the boy into their circle, and Maggie cannot avoid Otto. He has her in his sights and keeps her there.

Maggie attempts to arrange situations that will prompt Otto’s mother to return with him to Paris. Her plots only succeed in drawing her deeper into a cycle of retribution from Otto. It’s a chess game between them, with a core of malevolence that has prompted comparisons to Patricia Highsmith’s writing.

Bollen’s vivid descriptions seem exactly right. Egypt is a distinctive, “romantic” place, but an unfamiliar world. The rules are different there. Things can go wrong. And do. Maggie is a completely believable, if not completely likeable character. I thought I understood her and her flaws, but in the end, Bollen has some revelations in store that may lead you to reevaluate her. In short, Havoc is a beautifully stage-managed trip to another world.

The March of Television

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This spring promises several new television seasons and series that should be worth watching. But first, let me praise the extremely quirky Interior Chinatown, which we’ve watched over the last few months. It’s based on a 2020 novel by Charles Yu, which won the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. A couple of episodes in, I realized I’d actually read this book. I did not get it at all. My reaction: “Huh?”

But someone must have, and the transition to the small screen is terrific. Jimmy O. Yang plays Willis Wu, a background character in a police drama set in a fictional city. His parents, especially his mom, have some hilarious moments, as does his fellow waiter, Fatty Choi, who thrives on insulting the restaurant’s customers. The plot is essentially indescribable, but Wu is on a quest to find out what happened to his older brother, whom the TV show calls “Kung Fu Guy.” Many hilarious and heartfelt moments. Watch it on Hulu.

On TV this spring, I’m looking forward to the televised version of Liz Moore’s Long Bright River, a book I enjoyed immensely. In it, a cop who works in Philadelphia’s rough Kensington neighborhood, scene of a series of prostitute murders, never escapes the fear that one day what she’ll find is the body of her renegade sister. Amanda Seyfried plays the police officer, Mickey Fitzpatrick. Excellent family interactions in the novel; I hope they’re preserved. Coming on Peacock March 13.

Damian Lewis will reprise his role as Henry VIII in Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, the third book in the late Hilary Mantel’s riveting series about Tudor political shenanigans involving the King, Thomas Cromwell (Mark Rylance), and Cardinal Wolsey (Jonathan Pryce). The books were great, and the acting in this series, first aired in 2015 as Wolf Hall, is exceptional. Wolf Hall was the ancestral home of Henry’s third wife, Jane Seymour, the one (out of eight) he presumably most loved. It’s premiering March 23 on PBS.

Another season of Dark Winds arrives March 9 on AMC. This crime series, set on Arizona’s Navajo reservation, is based on Tony Hillerman’s popular books featuring Sheriff Joe Leaphorn and his deputy Jim Chee. Leaphorn is played by Zahn McClarnon, an actor I came to admire in the Longmire series, and Chee by Kiowa Gordon. The rest of the mostly Native American cast is also strong. And you can’t beat the beautifully stark Southwestern landscape.

I’ll also give a try to the British detective drama Ludwig, which aired on the BBC in 2024, but will be available on BritBox starting March 20. The title character (played by actor-comedian David Mitchell) is a puzzle-maker, and Ludwig is his pen name. His identical twin brother (I know, I know, beware of twins) is a Cambridge police DCI who’s gone missing. Ludwig poses as his brother to get access to police information about the disappearance. He is, of course, taken for the detective, and becomes caught up in the department’s investigations. Puzzle-solving should come in handy.

Where Legends Lie

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My friend Michael A. Black, a retired Chicago police officer, writes crime fiction and westerns. Now, I grew up with television (and movie!) westerns and spent a lot of time in what I thought of as the West—that is, West Texas where my grandparents lived—so I have a kind of sentimental attachment to the genre. When I was a kid, it seemed heroes and villains were made of very different stuff, and there was no doubt which was which. You could tell by their clothing, if nothing else (think of the Lone Ranger’s perfectly pressed shirt. What?) I met Roy Rogers and Trigger when I was 3. Clint Eastwood and the man with no name spaghetti Westerns began to add ambiguity and complexity, but in recent years, I found Walt Longmire and fell in love again.

Naturally, I’ve eagerly read several of Mike Black’s Westerns and, in his latest one, he pulls off quite a comfortable literary marriage. He manages to combine both traditional Western tropes and the 20th century’s most powerful cultural interpreter and mis-interpreter—Hollywood!

This is one of those split-narrative books that, when you’re reading one thread—say, events that occurred in Contention City, Arizona, in 1880—and the next chapter switches to the other narrative—the 1913 movie-making about those events—you’re momentarily jarred and possibly a bit disappointed because the 1880 (or 1913) story is so captivating.

In 1913, a veteran of the war in the Philippines, Jim Bishop, arrives statewide having no discernible job prospects. But his buddy has a relative working as a chef for a movie company in southern California. He’s counting on a job there and thinks they may take on Jim, too. En route, they befriend, of all people, journalist and fiction-writer Ambrose Bierce, always up for adventure, who disappeared that year. Jim and his friend get the movie jobs and Jim, especially, proves himself useful to the film company in various ways.

In 1880, Sheriff Lon Dayton hopes to end the reign of one of the Arizona’s outlaw gangs by offering the governor’s amnesty if they will turn themselves in. They agree. Unbeknownst to Dayton, the Mayor and his unscrupulous henchmen have other plans.

The chance to experience (fictional) 1880 events and the filmmakers’ recreation of them provides a nice contrast between two realities. The title of the book suggests that what we know about past events can be both unearthed, where they lie, and untrue, as they fib.

I greatly enjoyed the character of Jim, whom you first meet in a truly hair-raising battle overseas, which displays not only Black’s skill in creating a vivid scene, but reflects the multiple aims of a soldier at war. Staying alive, sure, but also saving whom you can and appreciating the enemy too. Dayton is a western hero in the full Gary Cooper tradition. No wonder Hollywood latched onto him like a rattlesnake on a mouse. If you’re looking for a story packed with adventure, as well as a reflection on how we mold the past to suit our present, you’ve found it!

Order from Amazon here.

Weekend Movies? Fun, but not Must-Sees

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The Widow Clicquot

We liked the movie The Widow Clicquot, because, well—France, champagne, why not? You know, the orange label (trailer). The scenery was beautiful, and the film was directed by Thomas Q. Napper. Though the predictable plot didn’t break any new ground, it lulls you into a deep sense of enjoyment. In the early 1800s, the unexpectedly widowed Barbe-Nicole Clicquot (Haley Bennett) can either give up or resolve to implement the vision of her late, adored husband (Tom Sturridge) as to how a champagne winery should operate. The odds are against her.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 85%; audiences: 85%.

Thelma

It’s exhilarating to see June Squibb, as an irrepressible 93-year-old woman doing her thing, not to mention the last performance of the late Richard Roundtree (trailer). Both of them made the film worthwhile, though it was a little disappointing that director Josh Margolin didn’t stretch them beyond the predictable. In the story, grandma Thelma is bilked out of $10,000 by a scammer pretending to be her grandson (Fred Hechinger). How she resolves to get her money back and becomes a superannuated action hero to try, is the plot. I must say that, although there are comic moments, having seen most of them in multiple viewings of the film’s trailer, not much was left to discover! Parker Posey, as Thelma’s daughter, is a terrifying helicopter mom. But, if you’re feeling old and cranky, it’s a good one.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 99%; audiences: 83%.