Antitrust Lawsuit Against Amazon

Alleges e-Book Price Fixing

Last week Amazon was accused of fixing the price of e-books sold on the e-commerce site through anticompetitive agreements with the nation’s top five publishers. As reported by The Hill, the class action lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York alleges that Amazon and the publishers entered into price fixing agreements in 2015, allowing the publishers to increase their e-book prices by up to 30 percent while protecting Amazon from price competition from other e-book retailers. Further, the lawsuit alleges Amazon violated antitrust and consumer-protection laws through the agreements with the publishers known as the “Big Five,” made up of Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin-Random House, and Simon & Schuster. Filed by the firm Hagens Berman, the lawsuit follows a similar class action case against Apple and the so-called Big Five in 2011. That case ended with Apple settling for $400 million and the publishers settling for millions more, the firm said. “Amazon’s abuse of power proves, yet again, that when it comes to violating antitrust laws, the New Economy is up to the same old tricks,” Steve Berman, managing partner of Hagens Berman, said in a statement.

Crime Novelist John Lutz Dies

Author John Lutz, author of 40 mystery novels, passed away last week in St. Louis at 81. Lutz perhaps was best known for his 1990 novel SWF Seeks Same, which was adapted into the 1992 film Single White Female starring Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh. “SWF was a real game changer for John,” said award-winning book critic Oline Cogdill, who reviews mysteries for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and other publications. “He had written a lot of things in the 1970s and 1980s that were well-received, solid books, but SWF put him on the next level.” His wife, Barbara Lutz. said he died of complications of Lewy body dementia, Parkinson's, and Covid-19. She said they were married for 62 years and met when they were teenagers working at a St. Louis movie theater. “He was an usher and I was working as a candy girl,” she said. “He used to hate when I brought that up. He thought that was too corny.” Lutz was nominated several times for the Edgar Award, presented by the Mystery Writers of America, and he twice earned the Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America.

Bryan Fogel’s The Dissident

Recounts Jamal Khashoggi’s Murder

By now the story is familiar to everyone who pays attention to the news: On October 2, 2018, Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi entered his country’s consulate in Istanbul to pick up documents he’d requested four days earlier, stating he was divorced and could marry his Turkish fiancée, Hatice Cengiz. Believing he could not be harmed on foreign soil, he was executed by a team of Saudi hitmen who then cut him into pieces and disposed of his remains. Details are lacking, but Turkish President Erdogan declared that Khashoggi “was killed in cold blood by a death squad” and “that his murder was premeditated.” Documentary producer Bryan Fogel's latest film The Dissident, recounts the murder of Khashoggi, who got under the Saudi monarchy’s skin for championing free speech in the Arab world. As reported in Air Mail, the film adds a few more details, including the fact that among the luxuries of the Saudi consul general’s Istanbul residence is a deep patio “fire well,” for roasting whole goats and lambs on which the House of Saud likes to feast. Turkish investigators believe the journalist’s body ended up in that oven, since the consul general ordered 70 pounds of lamb just prior to the murder, apparently intended to mask the smell of Khashoggi’s burning corpse. The Dissident is available to watch on Apple TV.

Lee Child On The Three

Stages Of Gun Ownership

“The problem with American politics is that this is such a vast population, and so geographically disparate.” That’s the observation of bestselling thriller writer Lee Child, a Brit who has an “outsider” view of the American condition—especially the country's fascination with guns. In a recent Crime Reads interview with Paraic O'Donnell, he says, “All the divisions in American society are between areas of high population density and areas of low population density. I know a lot of people who are poor….[and] probably they’ve got an old deer rifle that they inherited from their grandfather. Around this time of year, they’ll go out and shoot a couple of deer. And that will feed their family until May or June. It’s useful, it has a value. It’s a lot more humane for the animal than going to the abattoir. That’s fine with me. The stuff that’s semi-fine with me is people who find handguns to be interesting little mechanical devices, which I can sympathize with. But then you’ve got the people who get an erection by buying a military-style rifle, and those are the sinister types that you have to regard as somehow unacceptable. I try to make [Jack] Reacher needle those people a little bit by saying, 'I’ve done the real thing. What you’re doing is cosplay.' Anything that becomes a fetish is stupid. And if it’s something lethal, like a firearm, that’s doubly stupid.”

TRUE CRIMES

The Most Notorious Unsolved

Crime In Every State

Across the United States there are hundreds, if not thousands, of police “cold cases” involving murder victims whose killers have never been found and—in some cases—bodies that have never been identified. As more and more books, television programs, and podcasts focus on these crimes, police departments are stepping forward with new leads, many of them driven by advances in DNA testing. Still, a vast majority of these atrocities have never been solved, and no state in the country is without its own infamous unexplained homicide. From the 1984 disappearance of 12-year-old Sherry Lynn Marler in Greenville Alabama; to the double homicide of Steven Fisher and Melisa Gregory in Newton, Iowa in 1983; to the murder of 13-year-old Mary Catherine Olenchuk in Ogunquit, Maine, here’s a list of the most infamous unsolved case in each of the 50 states.

PERSONAL REFLECTION

Alistair Maclean: A Superb Writer

Who Really Didn’t Like Writing

Before I became an avid mystery reader I was obsessed with international intrigue, and at an early age I got my fix reading the thrillers written by Alistair Maclean. I began with The Satan Bug (actually written under his pen name Ian Stuart), because it was a made-for-TV movie that the tiny antenna fixed to our chimney didn’t receive in the little New England hollow in which we lived. From that point forward I was hooked. My favorite was Where Eagles Dare, which was made into a movie starring Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton (pictured, left), since I also was an avid fan of “escape from German POW camp” books. My least favorite: Goodbye California, which featured an all-too-predictable plot about nuclear terror and earthquakes in the Golden State. In any event, Maclean was a superb storyteller who really didn’t care for writing all that much. The son of a Scottish minister, he was brought up in the Scottish Highlands and at age 18 joined the Royal Navy. He spent over two years during WW II aboard a cruiser, which gave him the background for his first novel, HMS Ulysses. After the war he gained an English Honors degree at Glasgow University, and became a schoolmaster, but shifted to writing books only because he could make money at it. According to Harper Collins, he published 29 novels before passing away in 1987 at age 64.

Recently I’ve been promoting the upcoming release of Skeleton Key (Epicenter Press / Coffeetown Press) on February 9, but I don’t want to ignore Seven-Thirty Thursday, which was released last year by Suspense Publishing. I just finished the second rough draft of the sequel to that book, titled Every Second Sunday, and I ask you to lodge it firmly in the back of your mind. Both Key and Thursday are available through Amazon, and wherever books are sold.