Category: book

5 Stars: Midnight Fire, by P.K. Adams

Midnight Fire, Book 2 of the Jagiellon Mystery series, marks the suspenseful return of Caterina Konarska to Poland, where she goes seeking medical care for her ailing son. Queen Bona Sforza is delighted to see Caterina again and agrees to arrange the requested medical care, but in return she demands that Caterina travel to the Duchy of Lithuania to dissuade the heir to the throne from undertaking a disastrous marriage.

Faced with this near-impossible task, Caterina arrives in Lithuania just as a puzzling series of murders strikes the ducal court. Can she find the murderer before the heir’s consort is killed? Will the murderer kill Caterina to stop her investigation?

Fans of Tudor-era and European historical fiction will love this book. I highly recommend Midnight Fire.

Book Review: Silent Water (A Jagiellon Mystery Book 1), by P.K. Adams

5 Stars

Silent Water is an engrossing historical mystery that focuses on a series of murders that grips the royal court of Krakow, Poland, in the year 1519. The book’s first-person protagonist is Contessa Caterina Sanseverino, chief Lady-in-Waiting to Queen Bona Sforza of Italy, who two years earlier had married King Zygmunt of Poland and Lithuania. Caterina keeps watchful vigil over the young girls who serve as the queen’s attendants, but she—and the court around her—are roiled by the discovery of a stabbing victim during the Christmas Night banquet.

The murder at first appears random, but as Christmas turns into the New Year, a second murder occurs. Clues point to the inner circle of Queen Bona, who is controversial not only for the agricultural reforms she is implementing, but for her hawkish advice on how to wage war against the kingdom’s Teutonic and Crimean enemies. At Bona’s request, Caterina sets out to investigate. As her investigation takes her from the castle’s rat-infested dungeon to its kitchen storerooms, she is aided by Sebastian Konarski, a junior secretary to King Zygmunt.

I was particularly intrigued by the book’s setting in 16th-century Poland and how it contrasts the customs of the Polish court with those of the Duchy of Bari, Italy, where Caterina grew up. The book touches on so many fascinating themes, including the religious discord fostered by Martin Luther and his edicts. Also, the book illustrates the many limitations on women’s roles during this era in Poland, which makes Caterina’s bravery and willingness to transgress those limitations exciting. Caterina’s intelligence and inquisitiveness mirror the best qualities of the queen she serves and makes her a strong protagonist, one whom I would follow into the twisty depths of any medieval jail.

Fans of historical mysteries, particularly those of the Tudor period in England, will love Silent Water and appreciate its unique setting in the royal court in Krakow. I highly recommend Silent Water and am eager to read future books in the Jagiellon series.

Book Review: House of Spies, by Daniel Silva

5 Stars

I bought House of Spies because it won Kirkus Best Book of the Year—and I am thrilled that I did. The book deserves the award and the bestselling status it has enjoyed

House of Spies is the only book I have read (so far!) in Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon series, and I am hooked by the strong characterization, the sense of danger, and the tenuousness of the lives that Israeli spy chief—and ostensible art restorer—Gabriel Allon seeks to protect. The plot centers on capturing the Iraqi terrorist Saladin, who has perpetrated a series of deadly attacks on western cities that have scarred national treasures like The Lincoln Monument. A committed jihadist, Saladin seeks to install a caliphate that will destroy the very freedoms those monuments celebrate.

I especially loved the various settings of the novel, which take the reader from London to Provence and Marseilles and, in the climactic scenes, to the Berber lands of Morocco. Any book that has me drinking tea at sunset in a Bedouin tent in the Middle Atlas Mountains is going to enthrall me.

One caveat: other reviewers have criticized the repeated sentences, which should have been edited out. I agree, but these were minor foibles in an otherwise strong narrative.

When I finished House of Spies, I downloaded The Kill Artist, Book #1 in the Gabriel Allon series. If the other 19 books live up to House of Spies, I will read the entire series.

Fans of spy novels will love this book.

#thrillers #suspense #spy #espionage #fiction #danielsilva #houseofspies

Book Review: Queenie, by Candice Carty-Williams

5 Stars

A reviewer has described Queenie as a black Bridget Jones, a comparison that doesn’t convey the full scope of Carty-Williams’ complex, unflinching examination of a young woman and the emotional toll her childhood has taken on her.

Queenie is the story of a 25-year-old Jamaican-British woman who is falling apart, a disintegration that begins when her fiance Tom—the love of her life, who nonetheless tolerates his racist uncle calling Queenie the n word—initiates a break in their relationship, right after Queenie suffers a miscarriage. Heartbroken but determined to view their separation as temporary, Queenie endures several disastrous, even abusive interracial encounters—she fears black men don’t want black women, no matter how light their skin—who fetishize her body, trample upon her self-respect, and even hurl false accusations of harassment at work, leading to her dismissal.

As her life disintegrates, Queenie reluctantly seeks therapy, which uncovers the traumas and multiple abandonments of her childhood. Her eventual healing is demonstrated in a two-hour shouting match with a neoNazi skinhead, where she bravely defends her commitment to the BlackLivesMatter movement.

Numerous characters prevent Queenie’s story from turning bleak: her domineering grandmother, who shelters Queenie when she is fired from her job as a reporter; her hilarious friend Kyazike, whose own dates demonstrate the strength that the weakened Queenie must learn to show; and her empathetic colleague Darcy, who eases her panic-stricken transition back to work. Her friends, nicknamed the Corgis (like The Queen’s favorites), are full characters in their own right, with idiosyncratic personalities that add depth to the book. Every woman needs a Kyazike and a Darcy in her life.

I happily give Queenie 5 Stars. By the time she deletes Tom’s contact info from her phone, I was silently cheering for her recovery. I can’t wait to read more of Carty-Williams’ writing.

Book Review: The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen, by Hendrik Groen, Hester Velmans

3 Stars

 

I have a secret affection for stories about cantankerous old people, appreciating their disaffected views of the care homes to which they are banished when arthritic joints, heart troubles, and high blood pressure start ravaging their bodies. I love a caper led by a wheelchair-bound rebel, and the more insubordinate the elderly, the more hilarious the story.

Hendrik Groen, who is 83 ¼ in 2013, is conducting a secret war against the governing body of his Amsterdam nursing home, which establishes new rules on a whim, often in response to his own escapades. He recruits a spy in the managing director’s office, who smuggles him the minutes of board meetings, and even hires a lawyer to sue the nursing home for greater transparency.

His affection for his fellow residents—the ones he likes, at least—is endearing. Together with a select band of non-whiners, he establishes The Old but Not Dead Yet Club, which becomes the envy of the nursing home for the outings they undertake twice a month. It is during these trips to museums, wineries, and golf clubs that he falls in love with Eefje, a woman who is comfortable with silence, doesn’t complain, and kisses him on both cheeks when he takes her out for an elegant dinner.

My only suggestion is that the book needed a stronger overarching theme, greater than the year-long diary he keeps. I would have loved it if the book delved more into the tragic death of Hendrik’s daughter, who drowned at the age of 4, or into the decades-long confinement of his bipolar wife. These story lines would have provided greater emotional depth and allowed the reader a sense of who Hendrik was as a father and husband.

Fans of the 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared will enjoy this book.

 

 

Book Review: The Witch Elm, by Tana French

5 Stars

 

The Witch Elm, a psychological suspense novel set in Ireland, upturns its author’s preoccupation with how the Dublin Murder Squad nabs a killer; instead, it focuses on a shallow, self-absorbed young man, who comes to believe himself guilty of murder—and the evil he inflicts when slammed with that knowledge. Like a feral cat toying with food, Tana French reveals all the little deceits and treacheries that build on one another to produce a corpse rotting in an elm tree.

Toby Hennessy views himself as a lucky man. He was born to wealthy, Anglo-Irish parents, is good-looking, did well in school, and has spent his childhood summers playing with his cousins, Susanna and Leon, in Elm House, their Uncle Hugo’s expansive home. Now in his late 20’s, he has a flashy job in a Dublin art gallery, a BMW and a gold watch, and an apartment that his parents helped buy. He’s also dating Melissa, a sweet woman whose nurturing nature serves him well when he is grievously injured during a burglary.

Struggling with a droopy eyelid, a faulty memory, and a bad limp, Toby returns to Elm House to nurse both himself and Uncle Hugo, who is dying from brain cancer. For a few weeks, he enjoys a rebirth of the golden summers of his childhood, helping Uncle Hugo with his genealogical research, healing, and reconnecting with Susanna and Leon, who had—for reasons unremarked by him—broken off their friendship years earlier.

The idyll ends when a playing child makes a gruesome discovery: a skeleton stuffed inside an elm tree in Uncle Hugo’s back garden. The police investigate and quickly determine that the body is not some random victim of Ireland’s civil war, but Dominic Ganly, a teenager who was thought to have committed suicide ten years earlier.

Like a garrote squeezing a bully’s neck, the police zero in on Toby; out of self-interest, he had failed to confide in them a disreputable scheme he concocted at the art gallery, which they suspect as the reason for the burglary that left him with post-traumatic stress disorder. Under the police’s growing pressure, Susanna, whom Toby had always dismissed as the quintessential “good girl,” confides that she sees herself as ruthless—and that she has acted on that ruthlessness. While stoned, Leon screams the real reason for the break in their friendship: Toby had ignored and dismissed tortures Dominic had inflicted on both the cousins. How these revelations play out results in some seriously cold-hearted scenes.

Two caveats: this is a gloomy book. French’s description of the symptoms of a head injury almost had me believing burglars had bashed my head in with a candlestick. Also, Toby’s poor memory begged credulity; even before his concussion he couldn’t remember anything except the fun that he had when younger. Anything that impacts negatively on his self-image, like the casual cruelty he had wielded against his cousins, is quickly forgotten.

The Witch Elm illuminates the determining nature of one’s self-image, through the luck that Toby sees as the very essence of his character. With his luck depleted, he is forced to confront the reality that he is no better than the track-suited skangers whom he continuously derides.

Readers of Liz Nugent’s Unraveling Oliver will love this book.

 

Book Review:  Telling Tales (Vera Stanhope #2), by Ann Cleeves

4 Stars

I read Telling Tales because I am a fan of Shetland, the BBC television show based on the novels of Ann Cleeves.

If you love crime writing—and I do, then you’ll enjoy Cleves’ Vera Stanhope series. Vera Stanhope is a sharp-witted Inspector on the Northumbria police who relishes in eavesdropping, enjoys drinking, suffers from eczema, wears shapeless dresses and sandals—and evinces occasional flashes of bitterness over her lack of a man. She thrives in the hills of northern England but develops claustrophobia in the flatlands surrounding the prosperous village of Elvet, where she is sent to investigate a long-solved murder case.

Jeanie Long, convicted ten years earlier for the murder of 15-year-old Abigail Mantel, has hung herself in the Spinney Fen women’s prison, after alienating even the other prisoners with her constant protestations of innocence. Vera’s assignment is to determine if police ineptitude resulted in Jeanie’s wrongful conviction and subsequent suicide.

Within days of her arrival, Vera’s abrasiveness pisses off the local police force and demonstrates the flaws in their earlier investigation. If Jeanie didn’t kill Abigail, Vera must find out who did, and the list of potential suspects only worsens her discomfort with the villagers.  The local potter—one of the original investigators, who suffered a nervous breakdown over the case and left the force, becomes the object of both Vera’s romantic interest and her suspicions. Emma, Abigail’s constant companion and frenemy, comes under scrutiny for finding the body immediately after the murder and for her stalkerish attraction to the potter. Even Emma’s father, Robert, appears too saint-like for a man who fled his former home in York under mysterious circumstances.

My only reservation about the book was there wasn’t much character development of the murderer and there were a lot of unresolved story lines. I was especially disinterested in the story of Michael, the father of Jeanie. The character of Vera jumped off the page and I wanted Cleeves to maintain the story from her perspective.

Fans of British crime fiction will love this book. I did and am eager to read The Crow Trap, the first book in the series.

Book Review: The Confession, by Jo Spain

The Confession is a psychological thriller that starts out with the murder of a reviled Irish banker, himself single handedly blamed for the destruction of the Irish economy and the slaying of the Celtic Tiger. During the attack, his wife Julie sits by frozen (with fear? with relief?) and only calls the police after carefully cleaning herself up.

A troubled young man, JP, quickly confesses to the murder. Alice, a gritty policewoman on Dublin’s murder squad, should have an easy win to add to her high solve rate, but she suspects something more sordid behind his facile confession. Despite heavy pressure from her boss, she digs, expertly playing off Julie’s and JP’s vulnerabilities to reveal the warps in their lives and alibis.

My main problem with the book is that Julie is such a sniveling, whiny character that you almost wish JP had taken a golf club to her head also. It isn’t until late one night, after she humiliates herself at a tony party, that she reveals any personal agency beyond excessive drinking. The gruesome act that follows isn’t totally a surprise, but it ties the plot together well.

Fans of Tana French will love this book.

Book Review: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

5 Stars

 

I was mesmerized by this book.

In 1951 Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman suffering from severe abdominal pain and bleeding, entered Baltimore’s John Hopkins Hospital, where the wards were still segregated, and the care of Black patients was rumored to be inferior to that accorded Whites. Baltimore’s Black community even claimed that Hopkins kidnapped people in the dead of night, right off the city’s streets, to serve as unwilling subjects of gruesome research projects. Unsurprisingly, Black patients like Henrietta went to Hopkins only when they were critically ill or dying.

Henrietta was quickly diagnosed with an aggressive form of cervical cancer. During her radium treatments, cells from Henrietta’s cervix were harvested and given—without her true understanding, her family would later maintain—to Dr. George Gey, a Hopkins researcher who was trying to create the world’s first line of immortal cells, or cells that could regenerate themselves indefinitely.

Dr. Gey was successful and the HeLa cells were born. The immortal HeLa cells became a medical miracle that would give rise to life-saving drugs like the polio vaccine and various cancer therapies.

Within weeks of her entering Hopkins, Henrietta died, and her name was quickly lost to history. Some later articles said her real name was Helen Lane, but there was little immediate interest in discovering the true identify or life story of the woman behind the HeLa cells. Her husband and children were left uninformed even as to her diagnosis and had no idea what happened to her during the autopsy that Dr. Gey performed.

At the heart of Rebecca Skloot’s story is the desperate longing of Henrietta’s children to know who their mother really was. Skloot focuses on daughter Deborah, who has only a lock of her mother’s hair, a treasured possession that she keeps in the family Bible. Deborah pursues obtaining official recognition of her mother’s contribution to science and worries that her mother’s cells experience pain in the research she imagines as inflicted upon them.

Henrietta had been born in Clover, VA, in the home-house that had served as her ancestors’ slave cabin. She was a wife, a loving mother to four children, a woman who adored dancing, and a caretaker in both her family and her community. In her life, her greatest journey was from Clover to Baltimore’s Turner Station neighborhood, but her cells would travel to outer space on rockets, studying the impact of space travel on human beings.

The HeLA cells were harvested and grown just before the birth of the Civil Rights movement, and at the confluence of so many issues: healthcare parity for impoverished, minority, and disadvantaged patients; medical privacy; and especially, informed consent. Her husband and children have long maintained that Henrietta never donated her cells. They wonder why her cells could jump start a multi-billion-dollar industry, while they themselves could never even obtain health insurance. Most poignantly, they struggle even to pay for the hearing aids they need to treat their congenital deafness.

Fans of nonfiction and medical science histories will love this book. I certainly did.

Book Review: A Double Life, by Flynn Berry

5 Stars

 

I loved this book. Flynn Berry creates an indomitable character in Claire, a British General Practitioner who displays great courage and resourcefulness in investigating, as an adult, a vicious murder that she witnessed when she was only 8 years old.

A Double Life is a psychological suspense thriller set in present-day London and Scotland. It is loosely based on the story of Lord Lucan, a Member of Parliament who disappeared in 1979 after being accused of murder. The real Lord Lucan had several children; Berry imagines how such a man’s daughter and son would have coped with the fallout from the murder and their subsequent life in Witness Protection, where their greatest fear was that their father might one day return.

A Double Life reveals the depravity of the scions of the Upper Class—those Oxford men who speak with cut-glass accents and throw their privilege around like a medieval torture device against those less endowed with cash, connections, and real estate. It shows how the crimes they committed as students—for the sheer arrogance of proving they could escape punishment—led to repercussions that haunted their children for decades afterwards.

My one quibble is with the editing:  the book contains many independent clauses or sentences that should have been separated by a period or semicolon. I read—and loved—Berry’s previous book, Under the Harrow, and noticed this error in that book also. This seems to be one of the few weaknesses in her writing style, one a good editor should correct.

Fans of Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train and Liz Nugent’s Unraveling Oliver will not be able to put this book down.