Hellbent

This is apparently the 3rd in the "Orphan X" series by Gregg Hurwitz. According to the author's web site:
"Evan Smoak is a man with skills, resources, and a personal mission to help those with nowhere else to turn. He’s also a man with a dangerous past. Taken from a group home at twelve, Evan was raised and trained as part of the Orphan Program, an off-the-books operation designed to create deniable intelligence assets—i.e. assassins. Evan was Orphan X. He broke with the program, using everything he learned to disappear and reinvent himself as the Nowhere Man. 
The Nowhere Man is a legendary figure spoken about only in whispers. It’s said that when he’s reached by the truly desperate and deserving, the Nowhere Man can and will do anything to protect and save them."
In this book, the call he receives is from former mentor and father figure to Evan in the Orphan X program, Jack Johns. It is a desperate call as Johns is about to be captured, tortured and killed for information regarding the whereabouts of Evan himself. Former Orphan CharlesVan Sciver has been assigned, at the highest levels, to erase all vestiges of the program. Evan will stop at nothing to track down Jack's killers, but in the meantime, his mentor's last request was to "protect the package," which, as it turns out, was Johns' only remaining protege, a 16-year-old girl named Joey. Fans of Ludlum's Bourne series will enjoy the stop-at-nothing focus, resourcefulness, and lethal skills of Evan. Will he let a girl get in the way of his revenge? Fun, fast read with well-developed and engaging characters.
Glowing reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and the Book Reporter.

I Let You Go

After reading Let Me Lie by former police officer Clare Mackintosh, I was ready to try one of her earlier books and this is her first (also a "Crime Novel of the Year" winner in England). It begins with an innocent-seeming domestic activity: a mom picks her 5-year-old son up from school and is walking home with him to prepare dinner. But as she drops his hand to fish out keys from her purse, he dashes into the street and is fatally struck by a speeding car. As she cradles his body, she sees the driver back up and drive off.
We now follow the story of the police investigation and, separately, that of Jenna Gray, a woman who has lost everything and flees her life to disappear into a small village on the coast of Wales where no one knows her. She rents a run-down cottage, has no phone, talks to no one. And she is debilitated by terrifying nightmares. We know she was a sculptor who has suffered injury to her hands. We know she was involved in the accident. But her identity is not what we are initially led to believe.
Jenna gradually begins to rebuild her life, staying anonymous, taking up photography as an outlet for her artistic nature. The local shop keeper at a near-by summer caravan park becomes a friend and offers to sell cards with Jenna's photographs on them in her shop that. Jenna rescues and then adopts a dog, beginning a tentative relationship with the local veterinarian as a result.

But her past begins to catch up with her and eventually she is arrested for the hit-and-run death of the boy, once again destroying the life she has built. We are misdirected from the very beginning. The plot is cleverly twisty, the settings very atmospheric. I will no doubt pick up her other novel, I See You. Laudatory reviews from The New York Times and Kirkus.

Parchment and Old Lace

I typically load up on lighter fare when I travel and my trip to New Mexico was no exception. I love immersing myself in the rich description of life in Charleston, South Carolina provided by Laura Childs in her "Tea Shop Mysteries" but this time I ventured into her "Scrapbook Mysteries," which are set in New Orleans. This is the 13th installment in the series featuring scrapbooking store owner Carmela Bertrand, who is also very good at solving mysteries. Carmela's romantic dinner with her beau, Det. Edgar Babcock, is interrupted by an acquaintance stopping by their table to remind Carmela of her upcoming wedding and to insist that Carmela come. When Carmela and Edgar are leaving the restaurant, they hear a scream coming from across the street in one of the famous New Orleans cemeteries and find the bride-to-be strangled to death with a piece of old lace. Trying to track down the lace is something Carmela can do to help, but she is beseeched by the victim's sister to investigate further to help find the killer. There is a long list of suspects: the fiancé, the fiancé's condescending mother, a somewhat shady real estate developer, a creepy co-worker--but surely not Carmela'a boss who is trying so hard to help. I'd never have guessed who REALLY did it!
Childs writes interesting characters, engaging plots and, as mentioned, richly detailed settings, so this was an easy and enjoyable read.

Fourth Grave Beneath my Feet

I am pretty sure I read this book some time ago, BUT my memory is so poor and apparently I did not post it on my blog, so I read it again--mainly because I was in the mood for something a bit lighter and fun. And Charley Davidson, the protagonist of this series by Darynda Jones, is forever entertaining. She names all her body parts...her brain, her heart, her boobs... and she is the Grim Reaper in her spare time.
Apparently, between the end of the last book (Third Grave Dead Ahead) and the start of this one, Charley has been captured and tortured by Reyes Farrow's step-father, Earl Walker (for the back story, see also the posts for Second Grave on the Left and First Grave on the Right). She was also arrested and put in jail because of her father, so she has quit speaking to him, moved out of her office over the tavern he runs, and isolated herself in her apartment for a couple of months, interacting only with the call center from the Home Shopping Network. Her apartment is now filled to the ceiling with boxes and she is broke. Time for an intervention from trusty friend Cookie, her psychotherapist sister Gemma, and her Uncle Bob (an Albuquerque PD detective).
When she eventually ventures out of the apartment, she is accosted by a woman who says she is being stalked and is in fear for her life. Skip to the next paragraph if you don't want part of the plot spoiled. Harper is actually already dead but does not know it and Charley doesn't have the heart to tell her, but rather agrees to take on the case and find out who the stalked/ potential killer is.

Meanwhile, Reyes is out of jail and apparently fighting demons that are stalking Charley, whose terrible post-traumatic fears provide a scent they can track. They seek to use her as a portal for evil beings to enter heaven. The relationship between Reyes and Charley is heating up; the question is, is he trying to protect her or kidnap her. As if that isn't enough, Charley is presented with two other cases that are currently stumping the Albuquerque PD, a series of bank robberies by the "Gentlemen Bandits" and several building fires, which to date have harmed no one. She is just sure there is something familiar about the robbers even though they are wearing masks. Charley is helped along by the usual suspects from the world beyond--a protective rottweiler named Artemis; her own PI and Reyes finder, former gang-banger Angel; and Rocket, the boy who knows the names of everyone who has died and maybe those of some who haven't yet. On to Fifth Grave Past the Light!

Warlight

I never read Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize winning book, The English Patient, but I loved the movie, so I decided to grab his newest novel and read it. Set primarily in and around blitz-traumatized London in the years immediately following the war and in Suffolk a decade later, it is told from the perspective of Nathaniel, initially a 14-year old boy, and later a man in his late-twenties. Nathaniel and his 15-year-old sister Rachel are left by their parents in the care of a somewhat mysterious man, a boarder in their home who the children refer to as The Moth. Supposedly the parents are going to Asia for a year as part of the father's business. What ensues is a rather lengthy explanation of all the adventures that Nathaniel has with a variety of visitors to the house, especially a man he calls The Darter, who takes Nathaniel on clandestine night-time barge trips in and around London transporting mysterious crates and not very legal greyhound racing dogs. Frankly this part of the book really seemed slow and somewhat surreal. Perhaps that was intentional, and according to reviewers (see below) it is typical of his writing. The second chunk of the book commences when his mother shows up after an attempted kidnapping of Nathaniel and Rachel, in which The Moth (actually named Walter) is killed defending them. Their father never re-appears. Rachel barely registers in the first part of the book and virtually disappears in the latter half, supposedly because she is so angry about her parents' abandonment of them that she can't stand to be around her mother. Nathaniel is sent off to various boarding schools and his mother returns to her family's home in Suffolk, where Nathaniel joins her on holidays. As an adult, after his mother's death, Nathaniel goes to work for the intelligence services, supposedly clearing out any embarassing materials from the war-time archives, and begins to piece together his mother's past as an intelligence agent. This part of the book is much more intriguing although still told in a somewhat disjointed fashion that never allows the reader to fully know how much is fact-based conclusions from Nathaniel's access to archival materials and how much is conjecture. Ondaatje is an elegant writer and that makes the book worth the effort. It is also an intriguing if somewhat hazy look into how the war was carried out behind the scenes. I thought the reviewer from The New York Times summarized Ondaatje's style of writing well when he said: "By now we know what we are going to get from an Ondaatje novel: A moody, murky, lightly pretentious and mostly nonlinear investigation of lives and stories that harbor tantalizing gaps. There will be disquisitions on arcane topics including...The nature of storytelling will be weighed and found fascinating. The spine of the plot, unlike the spine of a steamed fish, will be nearly impossible to remove whole."
Needless to say, there are lots of reviews worth considering: The Guardian, The Washington Post,  NPR, and Kirkus.

The Immortalists

This novel by Chloe Benjamin is oriented around a single childhood event. In the summer of 1969, 4 siblings--Varya, age 13, Daniel, age 11, Klara, 9 years old, and 7-year-old Simon--sneak out of their family apartment to go see a gypsy woman who can supposedly tell you your future, including when you will die. They each have to promise not to share the information with anyone else. And each of them take the predictions to heart, living their lives focused on their individual expiration dates. Sections of the book are oriented to each sibling, starting with the one who is predicted to die first. It seems that no one really has time to come to terms with their life, much less their impending death. Each in their own way insulates themselves not only from each other, but also from intimacy in general. Two of them will leave children behind. The ultimate question is, Do they die on the predicted date because it is, in fact, their fate, or because they structure their lives in response to the prediction?
More detailed summaries and reviews are available from The Guardian, Kirkus, NPR, The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and Publishers Weekly. Overall, this book did not knock my socks off. I tend to agree with Kirkus that the added characters, such as the policeman who stalks Klara, often felt contrived, and with the Chicago Tribune which said Daniel's story "feels a little retrofitted to lead to a pre-ordained conclusion." I felt sorry for the main characters, but never came to really care about them.