Paradox

Prolific author Catherine Coulter has written over 80 novels ( a complete list here), from historical romances to contemporary FBI thrillers. This book is the 23rd in the FBI series. Married FBI agents Lacey Sherlock and Dillon Savich are awakened by a monitor failure alarm and find a man in their 5-year-old son's room. They effectively thwart the kidnap attempt but fail to catch the would-be kidnapper. Two days later, the police chief of tiny Willicott, MD, Ty Christie, is standing on her deck overlooking the foggy lake when she sees a man in a rowboat strike the other passenger of the boat in the head and dump the body overboard. The killer disappears into the fog, but when the body is recovered, it turns out to be a federal prosecutor. The FBI, specifically Special Agents Sherlock and Savich, are quickly on the case and discover another FBI agent tied up and left for dead in an old derelict house on the lake shore. Forensic evidence strongly suggests the perpetrators of the two crimes are the same person, Victor Nesser, recently escaped from a mental institution. The woman dumped from the rowboat was the prosecutor who got Nesser put in the mental hospital, which saved his life as he was on trial for murder. Apparently he wasn't grateful. Meanwhile, Chief Christie is dealing with the fact that the initial search for a body in the lake has turned up dozens of skeletons, and the only conclusion is that a serial killer has been operating in the area and using the lake for a dumping ground.  Well plotted with decent characterization and setting. No doubt much of the character development for Sherlock and Savich has occurred in preceding installments of this series.  Here's a brief review from Publishers Weekly.

The Girl in the Spider's Web: A Lisbeth Salander Novel

David Lagercrantz has, amid great controversy, taken over the series from deceased Stieg Larsson (see my earlier posts on Larsson's trilogy). There are several stories running on parallel tracks here. Millennium Magazine is again struggling financially and people, as usual, are out to undermine Mikael Blomkvist to keep him from revealing dirty secrets. A huge media conglomerate provided a monetary infusion a few years ago but now are threatening to pull the plug if Millenium does not change focus and put Mikael on foreign assignment, effectively getting him out of the country. In the meantime, our favorite hacker, Lisbeth, has just managed to breach the firewalls of the NSA and given them a nasty little shock; their main IT security guy, Ed Needham, is incensed and swears he is going to find and gut whoever hacked into his system. A reclusive computer genius, Frans Balder, comes home from working in Silicon Valley to take up the care of his autistic son, August, because he fears August was being abused by Balder's ex-wife's partner, an alcoholic actor. When Balder is murdered, the mute child is the only witness. Mikael has learned through his network of the NSA breach and is pretty sure Salander is behind it but he can't fathom why she would bring so much heat down on her head. He contacts her to get information about Balder. It turns out that Lisbeth was already involved and figured out which of Balder's assistants had sold his secret AI research to the highest bidder. Lisbeth rescues August from an assassination attempt and goes into hiding, discovering that he has a savant's ability to draw and can, in fact, identify his father's killer. Balder's killers were hired by none other than Lisbeth's evil and devastatingly beautiful fraternal twin sister, Camilla. HUH?! Who knew she had a sister...I don't remember any reference to this in earlier books. Camilla wants to destroy Lisbeth for helping to get her beloved father killed. Of course Lisbeth wins this round, but Camilla is still out there somewhere. The reviews vary in their praise or lack thereof: Washington Post, The Guardian, The New York Times. Still, if you liked the earlier books, you'll probably be perfectly happy with this one. There is a further sequel, also by Lagercrantz, The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye.

Blown Away

This is the 6th installment of G. M. Ford's "Frank Corso" series of thrillers. Nominated for numerous writing awards, Ford has also written the "Leo Waterman" series and several stand alone mystery/ thrillers. Corso is, in this book, a well-known and controversial journalist and book author. He has just signed a new deal with a publisher who has told him, in no uncertain terms, to investigate a year-old bank robbery in a small backwater town in the middle of Pennsylvania in the dead of winter. Corso is furious and resistant at being told what to do, but becomes intrigued when first the local police chief warns him to leave town and then he is attacked in his hotel room with the apparent intention of kidnapping. When those efforts fail, he is run off the road and nearly drowned in the town's icy lake. Now he's on board and asks his publisher to send a private investigator who can work with him. But no sooner does Chris Andriatti arrive than they are summarily confronted by the FBI and whisked off to Los Angeles, where a series of robberies have been committed with the same MO as the cold case--a person is kidnapped, wired with a bomb, and sent into a bank to get the money. If the police interfere in any way, the bomb goes off and the kidnap victim and anyone around them die. The FBI and ATF are vying for control of the investigation but it is Corso who is asking the right questions and finding the real behind the operation. Once the bad guys in LA are wrapped up--or blown up--Frank and Andriatti head back to Pennsylvania because Frank wants to know who set him up to be kidnapped and killed. However, Andriatti is not who she claims to be and Frank is taken completely unawares. This is a fast paced thriller with a good plot and interesting characters. The Pennsylvania winter is as much a character as the people. What I really did not like, however, was that one of the major characters is never explained--where they came from or why and how they are involved. And the ending was so wrong. Here's a brief review from Publishers Weekly.

The Uncommon Reader

This novella by Alan Bennett is a pleasant little fantasy about the Queen (you know, the one in England) discovering the wonders of reading. Of course she already reads, but it's all work. One day the corgis dash off and in going after them, she comes upon a mobile library parked by the kitchen door of Buckingham Palace, making its weekly rounds. Out of politeness, she inquires and then feels she should check out a book. A kitchen boy who is checking out books on his break offers some guidance for her first selection; she slogs through Ivy Compton Burnett and then devours Nancy Mitford. After that she she becomes a regular visitor... until her Secretary arranges for the mobile library to be assigned. So she sends Norman to the town library to borrow her books.  The staff, and even the Duke, get rather annoyed that the Queen seems always to have her nose stuck in a book. She still performs all her required duties, but now feels them to be more of a burden. She learns to surreptitiously read while riding in her carriage and waving at people they pass simultaneously. And instead of asking the people she meets at these various events such innocuous questions as "How far have you traveled to come here?" she starts asking what they have read recently--which intimidates people and slows down the timetable. Norman initially gets moved from the kitchen to a position as page, stationed in the hall immediately outside the queen's chambers so that he is available for consultation at any time. That is, until the Secretary disappears him to East Anglia University. The unsuspecting Queen just starts using the libraries at her various homes, expanding her repertoire to the classics. At one point she decides she wants to meet and talk with authors, but that's a bust and she concludes that meeting authors in their books is preferable to meeting them in person. Her Secretary enlists the Queen's trusted advisors to try and dissuade her from reading. When eventually she encounters Norman again at a university event, she figures out what happened and sends her Secretary back to New Zealand. At some point, because she has always been a "do-er," she decides reading is not enough and that it's time to move on to writing. But she can't do that while she's the Queen. It's a charming little fantasy that highlights many of the benefits and pitfalls of falling in love with reading. There is a lovely and glowing review of the book by the NYTimes, with more from The Guardian, Kirkus, and The Telegraph.

If Books Could Kill

This is the 2nd installment in Kate Carlisle's "Biblophile Mysteries;" see also my post on the first one, Homicide in Hard Cover,  in which we meet protagonist and rare book restorer, Brooklyn Wainwright. Brooklyn is excited to be attending the Edinburgh Book Fair and presenting a couple of seminars on recognizing fraudulent books and how to restore books. While at a local pub, one of her ex-boyfriends, Kyle McVee, shows up with a tantalizing tale about uncovering a manuscript that could change the world's view of Robert Burns and throw the orderly succession of the British monarchy into chaos. He wants Brooklyn to authenticate the manuscript for him and she agrees to at least have a look, storing it safely in her hotel's safe.  When she goes out with a friend/colleague, Helen, for a walking tour of the historic city, their first stop is an old basement tenement with a dead body in it--Kyle's!  Helen completely breaks down and Brooklyn learns she was secretly engaged to Kyle; Helen and Brooklyn are both shocked when a woman claiming to be Kyle's wife turns up at the funeral. The police at first suspect Brooklyn, but there are plenty of suspects and she is determined to clear her name, find the real killer and hopefully figure out the authenticity of the manuscript. Of course the handsome love interest, Derek, is still in the picture and Brooklyn's parents show up in the company of Brooklyn's best friend Robin from home, who is going to take them to some of the spiritual sites of Scotland. And never to be left out is Brooklyn's nemesis, Minka LaBoeuf, who is constantly trying to throw Brooklyn under the bus. All in all an entertaining read set in one of my favorite cities.

Murder Between the Covers

Of course I could not resist picking up a used copy of this title, a mystery with bookstore employee Helen Hawthorne as the protagonist. This is actually the 2nd installment (of 15 books to date) in the "Dead End Job" mystery series by prolific mystery writer Elaine Viets. Helen works a dead-end job in each book, many of which Viets claims to have worked in herself. Viets has written several other mystery series, which she says allows her to appeal to a wide variety of reader preferences. This series is her "funny and traditional" one.
In this book, Helen is working as a cashier at the Page Turners bookstore in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, getting paid off the books and keeping her head down to avoid an abusive ex-husband and the long arm of the law. We don't find out what she's done until midway through the book. She is living in a funky, run-down old apartment, infested with termites and run by a very colorful landlady. She has rather eccentric neighbors, but her philosophy is live and let live. No one is surprised when her misogynistic boss, book store owner Page Turner III, gets murdered. He had a lot of enemies--ex-wife, ex-employees, etc., but Helen is upset when her neighbor Peggy is accused of the murder. She decides to try and find out who did it to keep her friend out of jail.

The Last Woman in the Forest

Diane Les Becquets is not an author I am familiar with but is a good writer who weaves a complex tale. The killer is obvious almost from the beginning, but it doesn't diminish the suspense. The protagonist is an unusual one. She's 26-year old Marian Engstrom, whose peripatetic existence as a "conservation gypsy" on one quest after another to save the environment. But when she joins a conservation study in Alberta, and starts working with rescue dogs trained to find scat for various species conservation projects, she feels like she has finally found her true passion, i.e., as a conservation canine handler. Already an avid outdoorswoman, the author did a lot of research with the Center for Consrvation Biology at the University of Washington, the Conservation Canines organization, and with Working Dogs for conservation in Bozeman, Montana. So we learn a lot about scat detection and analysis as a way to survey various species of animals in their wild habitats.
Marian's love for dogs threads through the story as does the recent loss of her lover, Tate Matthias, the man who trained her to be a dog handler. He was fatally mauled by a bear while working on another project to a bear attack. When Tate's sister comes to claim his body and belongings, certain inconsistencies begin to surface, leading Marian  to question her relationship with Tate. Desperate to clear her mind about Tate, she contacts a retired forensic psychologist about a series of murders in the same areas where Tate had worked. As she reconstructs her history with Tate to the psychologist, Nick Shephard, more and more discrepancies in Tate's personal history come to light. He lied to Marian about where he was born, who his parents were, where he went to college, and maybe about where he was at the times when the women were murdered. Marian does not want to believe that she could have been so badly misled. And throughout the story, we get hints that someone is stalking Marian. But Tate is dead, isn't he? The settings and the wildlife are lovingly rendered so this will appeal to those who also love the wilderness, as long as you have a strong stomach for the evil that humans can do to one another.  Reviews from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus.

The Elephant of Surprise

A take off on "the element of surprise" and no doubt the watch word of this unlikely PI duo of a "gay, black, Republican Vietnam vet" and a"self-proclaimed white-trash rebel" who work together out of a small town in East Texas, LaBorde. This is the newest (the 12th) in the "Hap & Leonard series" by Joe Lansdale. There are posts for the 1st and 2nd in the series (Savage Season and Mucho Mojo, respectively). Sundance originally picked up the option for made-for-TV movies, and now apparently they are available on Netflix streaming. We don't subscribe to either, so I haven't seen them.
In this installment, while coming home in a driving rain, they nearly hit and then stop to rescue a young woman who is bleeding badly. Someone tried to cut out her tongue. Before they can even get back on the road, they are being shot at and chased. They manage to elude the hit and get the young woman to the hospital. But the men who hurt her are not giving up, in spite of a hurricane that seems to be headed right for town. It's a relentlessly paced game of cat and mouse under adverse conditions, but Hap and Leonard have the elephant of surprise on their side since no one expects a couple of low-profile PI's to withstand the heavy firepower of the local mob boss and his hired thugs. A quick and engaging read. Not necessary to have read previous books in the series, although that would certainly enhance your feel for the characters. Reviews available from Kirkus, and Publishers Weekly, and a blow by blow rundown of the storyline from the New York Journal of Books.

Americanah

I'll open with an excerpt of the review from The New York Times. "Americanah examines blackness in America, Nigeria and Britain, but it’s also a steady-handed dissection of the universal human experience — a platitude made fresh by the accuracy of [Chimamanda] Adichie’s observations.

'So an African-American is a black person with long generational lines in the United States, most likely with slave ancestors. She might write poetry about 'Mother Africa,' but she’s pleased to be from a country that gives international aid rather than from one that receives it. An American-African is an African newly emigrated to the United States. In her native country, she didn’t realize she was black — she fit that description only after she landed in America. In college, the African-American joins the Black Student Union, while the American-African signs up with the African Students Association.'"
This book is all about race and culture and how those concepts and realities can affect one's sense of self.

Ifemelu and Obinze are high school sweethearts, separated when Ifemelu goes to America, the land of Obinze's dreams, to attend college in Philadelphia. After years of near destitution, Ifemelu finds success, writing a wildly popular blog that makes observations about race in America, and then getting a fellowship to Princeton. Obinze attends university in London, overstays his student visa, works illegally to try and get money to buy a bride with EU citizenship, and is eventually caught and deported. Back in Nigeria, friends introduce him to a man who helps Obinze launch into a lucrative real estate career. Obinze marries and has a child, but he never forgets Ofemelu, who, for reasons unknown to him, cut off all contact just a couple of years after going to America. When Ifemelu decides to return home to Nigeria, they eventually reunite, and find they still love one another.

Although the writing is occasionally evocative and lyrical, and the observations about race and culture and human nature in the 3 countries (U.S., Nigeria, England) are astute, the book felt overlong. I found Ifemelu's character wearying. Obinze was a more empathetic character-- solid and thoughtful and not so contrary and self-destructive. 

There was general agreement regarding the fine quality of writing and the length of the book by other book group members and it generated a lively discussion. One of the members noted that it was also a book about the difficulties of "going home" once one has emigrated. I was surprised how much discussion there was about hair! Some of my favorite (evocative, lyrical, pointed) quotes from the book follow:
Describing her malaise just before she decides to return to Nigeria, Ifemelu says, "It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, a bleakness and borderlessness. It brought with it amorphous longings, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness." Of her relationship at the same time she said it "was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out."
Obinze was given some notable quotes, too. He said of his wife, Kosi, "There was something immodest about her modestly: it announced itself." And of another friend complimenting him on how humble he was, Obinze thought "humility had always seemed to him a specious thing, invented for the comfort of others: you were priased for humility by people because you did not make them feel any more lacking than they already did. It was honesty that he valued..."
One of Ifemelu's comments about race was this: "The only reason you say that race was not an issue is because you wish it was not. We all wish it was not. But it's a lie. I came from a country where race was not an issue; I did not think of myself as black and I only became black when I came to America."
And this lovely observation about writing to Ifemelu from Obinze: "He began to write to her about his time in England, hoping she would reply and then later looking forward to the writing itself...Writing her also became a way of writing himself."
The book has received widespread praise. I would agree with The Guardian that this is a book that changes the way you look at the world and with their assertion that "Adichie is particularly good at exposing the contradictory ebb and flow of America's painful attempts to reconcile itself with its recent past, when segregation still persisted in the south." There are many more reviews, e.g., from NPR, Kirkus, The Telegraph, The Boston Globe,  The Independent.

Murder in the Mystery Suite

Hoo boy I am way behind on book reports after my vacation, which involved 2 long days of plane travel and, therefore, a lot of reading. Hard to believe I have lived all these years as a mystery reader and book lover and never previously known about a whole slew of cozy mysteries centered around books (see also my posts on books by Kate Carlisle, Miranda James, and Elaine Viets).
This book by Ellery Adams is the first in her "Book Retreat" mystery series; I posted about the 3rd installment, Murder in the Secret Garden, about a month ago and decided to start at the beginning. These are cozy mysteries, so nothing mind-bending here, but the premise of an old mansion, moved stone by stone from England to Virginia and turned into a hotel for book lovers is appealing. The main character, Jane Steward, is officially the resort manager, but in this first book, we find out a bit of the history of Storyton Hall, its precious secret library of rare manuscripts, and Jane's unexpected new role as one of the stewards who protect and preserve it.
We also meet the other stewards of Storyton Hall who have day jobs as butler, head librarian, head chauffeur, and head of recreation, but in their past were heavy hitters with special forces or other jobs that gave them  unique investigative and/or defense skills. We meet other members of the small town, several of whom are in Jane's book group, including Jane's best friend, Eloise, who runs the local book store. Jane also has 2 rambunctious 6-year-old twins, named--appropriately enough--Fitzgerald and Hemingway, or Fitz and Hem for short.
In this series opener, Jane is struggling to find ways to pay for much needed repairs at Storyton Hall and decides to use a themed "Murder and Mayhem" week to promote bookings. Guests are invited to come in character as their favorite detective. There will be trivia games, a costume ball and--unexpectedly--two very real deaths. When Jane's elderly resident aunt has a stroke, it comes out that she had mistakenly given Jane the wrong copy of a book that was awarded to a guest as a game prize. It is a rare first edition with a letter from the author. But when Jane goes to retrieve the book and exchange it for the correct edition, she finds the man dead, apparently poisoned. The stewards put their heads together to try and solve the murder before the investigation scares away the hotel's clientele, but soon afterward their prime suspect is also found dead.
The plotting is complex, the characters and settings well drawn and this is an altogether enjoyable read.