I finished both of these recently, in between a reread of S.J. Bolton’s Sacrifice , which I loved, for a book club.  Second Life had an interesting idea to play with as a story line.  One murdered sister, a surviving sister with typical survivor’s guilt muddied by alcoholism and addictive tendencies, swirled together with the son they shared and people who are probably not who or what they seem.  Throw in some international travel, a pretty judgemental husband with a savior complex, a dysfunctional childhood,  and watch it all explode.  I just feel that it should have been better than the book that came out if it all.  I wasn’t surprised.  I knew who was “the bad guy” and what was happening and even figured out much of the detail as to why.  This one just fell flat for me.

The Distant Echo is, to my knowledge, my first Val McDermid novel.  I have obviously seen her name around but haven’t picked up anything by her to read.  This case involves some college students finding a dying girl, trying and failing to save her and the fall out of those actions.  Years later they are being picked off one by one and the only recourse is to try to solve the original case to figure out what is happening. There are lots of twists and turns and characters on the way to a final resolution to solving Rosie’s murder.  A very well plotted mystery

  Leonora, or Nora as she prefers to be called now or Lee as she was known in her youth, wakes up in the hospital badly injured from an accident and not really sure what happened.  She just remembers she was at a hen party for someone she hadn’t seen in ten years and it had been an excruciatingly uncomfortable time and  something terrible had happened.

The book flips back and forth between the present and the past.  In the present, Leonora is in the hospital recovering from injuries with at least one dead friend and amnesia.  In the past, the events leading up to and during the weekend are uncovered.

Leonora’s fear for her friends and herself is palpable. Her uncertainty in the face of her inability to remember feels real.  The mounting tension as the weekend plays out with the dynamics between the characters is extremely well done and drives the novel along at a fast pace.  The only issue  was that I had no doubts from almost the beginning who was behind it all and why, but even with that I still enjoyed the book greatly and would recommend it.

  Ragdoll is  the first in a new series. The protagonist DS William Fawkes has been recently reinstated after very publicly losing his mind in court, attacking a defendant found not guilty, the so-called Cremation Killer, and spending some time in a mental hospital.  Now he is back in the saddle again a new career making case has arrived.  A body, actually a body made up of parts of multiple bodies has been found and a hit list of future victims with William’s name at the bottom.  There seems to be tie ins to the The Cremation Killer case and William, Baxter and the team are in a race to save the victims on the list, identify the body parts and find the connection.

Very well done thriller, fast paced, with good plot development and intriguing relationships between the characters.  Fawkes himself is interesting, although I find it a stretch to say that anyone would find him well enough to be back at work.  The resolution did a good job tying up all the loose ends of the case.  This novel very much had a feel like the movie Seven, but with more going on between all the characters.

The Good Widow was received from the author at BEA for a free for a fair review.  I specifically circled this one on the BEA program to pick up because I had been reading about it and it sound interesting, so I was excited to get it.  “Jacks” Morales is the good widow of the title, recently bereaved, in a strange occurrence.  Her husband died in Hawaii with another woman when he was supposedly in Kansas on business, hmmmm.

The story unfolds as Jacks and the “other woman’s” fiance decide to retrace the deceased pair’s last days in Hawaii to find out what happened and why.  Jacks uncovers some truths about herself, her marriage and her husband in the process, but that is not all she uncovers.

The pacing is excellent and the point of view shifts are well done.  The chapters shift between before and after and also between Jacks’ POV and Dylan’s, the other woman,  POV.  It is definitely a fun  and engrossing read and there are moments of psychological tension.  The only let down is that I saw the “twist” coming from almost the onset and in fact I’m almost sure I’ve seen a Lifetime movie with this twist.  So, there was no wow moment of a reveal.

I have been waiting for The Black Witch from the Library for quite a while ever since I read the controversy surround the book.  Pretty much when people tell me I should not buy a book, should not read a book, my eyeballs will bleed if I read a book,  my oppositional nature pokes through and I put it on my TBR.  I also felt that it was hugely unfair that even before the book came out there were people rating it 1 star on Goodreads and saying directly in their reviews that they had not read it.  They were rating based on other bloggers saying it was controversial.

The Black Witch is about a young woman who lives in a very “racist” society, although I would think that specist would probably be more correct since we are talking here about discriminating against Dragons, Kelpies, Elves, etc. but obvious metaphors for racism.  Elloren is the descendent of the last Great Black Witch and has disappointingly, as far as her aunt is concerned, thus far shown no aptitude to be the next one.  Her uncle whisked her away to be raised in a small village in the country sheltered from the  evils occurring in the city.

The story is engaging and the world and its political system/history is explained enough without being drawn out for pages and pages.  Despite being almost 600 pages, I found the book to be a really quick read.  Elloren is understandingly naive and unaware of her own prejudices and indeed the evils of her society until she goes to University and engages with others who are different from herself.  She is racist, classist and elitist.  She is all of those things and completely lacks self-awareness.  She can see the evil of the Kelpie in distress in a cage, but doesn’t connect that to the field Urisk that worked in the fields surrounding the village where she lived.

The critiques of this book as racist, in my opinion, miss the point.  The book is directly addressing issues of racism, classism, sexism, mental illness, elitism in University settings, immigration and deportation, and  sweat shop and child labor.  The weakness is that the book is written on about the same level as  Harry Potter.  In fact, I think kids who liked Harry Potter would really like it, but they might not get all the issues being addressed.  (It is a little darker than the first Harry Potter, but later books in the Harry Potter series got darker and this is on par with them in that aspect).

I found The Third Girl lovely!  The first in a new mystery series, set in a small village in France.  The protagonist, Molly, just has purchased and opened a small bed and breakfast type establishment as she finds her feet after a divorce.  The village is home to a small exclusive art school and one of the students goes missing and though Molly does not set out to investigate she becomes mixed up in the case.

The strong point of this book is the sense of place.  You come away feeling that you really know the community, the village in France, the people, the cafe, the neighbor who hangs out her La Perla lingerie, the barman and the police officers.  That is what really drew me into this book.  The mystery was entertaining and wrapped up well in the end.  There were enough red herrings to keep the reader guessing.  I look forward to reading more in this series.

Family Matters is one of the British Library Crime Classics that I collect.  I received this one for a Mother’s Day gift.  The story concerns Robert Arther Kewdingham, a self-absorbed failure of a little man and the people in his orbit, his wife, his doctor, his relations, and neighbors.

Robert and his wife, Bertha are stuck in a horrible marriage, in which he feels entitled and self-important while she looks on in growing resentment at the reality of their situation.  There is more than one person trying to kill Robert and when he finally dies, it really is a question of who succeeded.

This is an elegantly written crime classic.  The characters are well drawn and the sense of slow suffocation that Bertha feels in her marriage and at the expectations of society are so well depicted.  She has no options, no assets of her own, no near by family support or family home to return to in desperation.  The book really excels at this female point of view, especially the sense that it is not just Robert keeping her in this prison but the female members of society in the form of his family members as well.

A very good read with an interesting twist of competing killers.  Highly recommended!

The Bookshop on the Corner by Jenny Colgan was such a fun read.  I really enjoyed the entire premise and story.  Nina is a librarian, whose library has been closed.  Finding herself without a job and surrounded by boxes and boxes of lovely books she takes a leap of faith.  She buys a van, moves to Scotland and opens up a mobile bookshop.  traveling to local communities she makes friends and builds a life for herself she could not have imagined before.  Lovely book themed romantic fiction!

Thirty-Two Going on Spinster was a total Amazon impulse buy.  I got suckered into reading the first few pages for free and then I just needed to know what happened so I had to buy the book.  Julia is 32 and still single, still living at home with her parents, and still at the same dead end boring job she has been at for 10 years.  Julia is defined by the fact that she doesn’t like change and sees herself as doomed to always be alone.  A new man enters the company and shakes things up, including Julia.  She finds herself acting out of character and although it is scary at first, she ends up embracing the changes.  This was an okay chick lit type read,.  I’m a little out of the demographic here so some it just makes me roll my eyes a little, but someone younger might enjoy it.

This is psychological thriller along the lines of Girl on a Train and the like.  Some gaslighting and some maybe-not-so-reliable narrator due to consumption of lots of alcohol and in the case of The Woman in Cabin 10 some sleep deprivation and prescription drugs as well, are all part of the plot.  Laura, who refers to herself as Lo, has an assignment to go on a high end exclusive cruise ship and network and report on it for her employer.  She meets another passenger, who seems to inexplicably disappear during the night.  Lo is convinced she has been murdered and dumped overboard and proceeds to investigate.

The story is told by Lo in first person and also in emails from Lo’s friends and family as she fails to report in from her assignment and later in news reports about the cruise.  Very fast paced read, the story just flies by.  There is no lagging or unnecessary detail here.  The misdirection is a little heavy-handed and I didn’t really buy into it.  I had a pretty good idea about what had happened before the reveal, nonetheless I still enjoyed the book.  This has definitely piqued my interest in  In a Dark, Dark Wood.

I read Olive Kittridge and liked enough that I decided to try another by Elizabeth Strout and picked up My Name is Lucy Barton from the library.

I am really glad the book was as short as it was.  A rambling meandering mess of a book.  Lucy is an older adult looking back at a time when she was sick in the hospital for an extended period.  Then, she  was married with kids but her husband was  a wuss afraid of hospitals and she had been estranged from the rest of her family for years.  Her husband arranged for her mom to fly in and come see her in the big city in the hospital and they had this …totally non-bonding .. time.  They talked about everything, except the important stuff, about random people  you never meet or hear about again in the book.  The visit is so surreal, at one point I wondered if it really happened.  I thought perhaps she had a high fever in the hospital and hallucinated her mother being there.

This episode is spliced between Lucy’s current life as a writer and her childhood, which she remembers as abusive and poverty stricken.  The poverty is the truth.  The abuse seems pretty ordinary coming from a generation in which kids were pretty regularly told to go pick a switch from tree for a whipping.  Not that I am agreeing with it, I am just saying that it is not something extraordinary that the book was exploring.  It was just boring.  There was no big reveal. She never really reached any understanding of her mother or herself.  She didn’t resolve the conflict with her father.  There was no resolution or even understanding reached.  On top of that,  Lucy wasn’t even that likeable.   A disappointing read from an author that I hear great things about.

I read Long Lankin, the book that preceded The Mark of Cain and really enjoyed it so I  picked this one up when I saw it.  The Mark of Cain serves as both a prequel and a sequel, as it were, to Long Lankin.  It explains the history of Cain Lankin  from the point of view of the woman who loved him, Aphra, and then jumps to the events that take place after Long Lankin.   Cain and Aphra’s back story is so compelling that it makes the reader empathize with them even while realizing they are the villains in the end.

The transitions between points of view and time period is very clear and easy to follow.  I will say that I am glad I read Long Lankin first because the characters were familiar to me and that was helpful.  The writing is just excellent.  This is English folk horror at its finest.  Dripping, damp and earthy atmosphere riddled with references to ash groves, manikins, iron, witch bottles, runes, bone magic, and charms makes for a dark and moody read.  Highly recommended for horror fans.

Stonemouth is my second Iain Banks novel.  I read The Wasp Factory not long after his death and although I found it very well written I was really disturbed by all the animal cruelty in it.  Stonemouth is nothing like The Wasp Factory, in fact is difficult to believe it was written by the same  author.

In Stonemouth, a young man is returning home to a town that is rife with corruption ruled by two crime family clans.  He left home 5 years ago, escaped really, and now must return for the funeral of one of the heads of the clans.   He has made a huge success of his life after leaving this close knit community.  The crime families still seem to have their fingers in all the goings on everywhere.  He has since graduated art school and has been made partner in some type of architectural firm lighting buildings.

His visit home is causing him to reflect back  upon his life.  The woman he left behind.  The life, family, and friends he left behind. His art, which he is not really pursuing except in a very corporate manner, etc.  It is as though he is having this huge mid-life crisis, except he is 25, so I guess it is a quarter-life crisis.  I just didn’t feel that a young man who left home at 20 and has only been gone 5 years, five years that have been spent going to school and traveling the world, beginning his career; he just this minute made partner, would be all full of wistful reminiscing and regretful longing.  He seems pretty attached to the “toys” his success has brought him, his phone, his nice clothes, access to pretty young women,  etc.   He also seems very anxious to avoid the real thugs that prowl the roadways and pubs of his hometown.  I think this would have worked better, if he came back  20 years later or more.  Some of this would have been more believable at 40 or even older than at 25, especially given the ending of the book.

My  other issue really is that nothing really happens.  I don’t really care about the protagonist or his old girl friend and her sister and their thuggish family.  The events in the town are just not that interesting, even ones that should be, like the pool room scene. I have no doubt that Iain Banks is a talented writer, but this didn’t work for me.

  I had read about this book in a magazine and put it on my TBR list.  Unfortunately, this series is impacted by the whole “Translated Out of Order Syndrome” and it really did matter here.  There are references to happenings in the character’s lives that happened prior to the events in The Princess of Burundi, which is somewhat confusing.

I am usually a big fan of Nordic/Scandinavian fiction in general but I struggled with this book and it is not a long novel, under 300 pages.  It felt like a slog to get through and then the ending was just there in a rush and finished with no real denouement at all.  I don’t know whether my problems with this book are due to the translation or the writing.  I couldn’t really connect to the main character, Inspector Ann Lindell.  I did find the victim Little John and his brother’s dynamic interesting and actually his brother’s redemption arc was the best part of the book.  I don’t believe that I will read more in this series.

The Census-Taker is my first China Mieville book, it is a novella and a contender for a Hugo award for best novella.  The book concerns a post-now world in which a young boy,  initially lives with his mother and father, on a hill above the town.  His mother is a reticient woman who cares for her garden and teaches him some reading and writing.  His father is a maker of keys, this is shown as the story unravels.  What also becomes clear is the sense of malice and perhaps magic and other-ness that his father exudes.  What is also clear is the willful blindness of the townsfolk  due to their desire for his skills.  The census taker, who also seems to be an “other”, finally arrives and the boy must choose to trust or not, to believe or not, to follow or be left.

The book excels at presenting the story from the point of view of the child.  A child’s understanding and confusion and fascination are all laid out here in a realistically child-like manner.  The voice is compelling, the story seems to be a cross between The Road (but not as dark) and The Ocean at the End of the Lane (but not as fantastical).  It meets somewhere inbetween them.  An excellent read with themes about innocence lost, trust, sacrifice,  and loyalty.

The F Word here is not what you think, it is fat.  Apparently, there was a book prior to this one and perhaps if I would have read it I would have more understanding of the background of the characters.  As it was, I read this as a standalone.  This is a basic chick lit novel, attempting to elevate itself by including issues of self-image, the treatment of fat people, particularly women, bullying, infidelity, and women’s struggle to “have it all”.  – Spoiler Alert –

Basically, Olivia was once the fat girl, in high school.  She has grown up to now to be super-perfect girl, perfect husband, perfect home, perfect-car, friends, fitness, routine, and high-profile career as a celebrity publicist.  You get the picture.  When you are up that high, there is only one way to go.

She runs into a former crush from high school, the stereotypical “man who knew her when”, and it begins her downward trajectory.  Basically her entire life is a lie and it implodes.  High school jackass  crush swoops in and they dance off into the sunset together.  Yep.  So. many. problems.   The victim blaming.  The lack of true apology and acceptance of responsibility without any excuses.  The celebrity worship culture.  The “wise crone stereotype” updated to a women’s locker room shower scene.  (no, just no, get the eye bleach now)  The “the protagonist needs a man, God forbid she is alone and happy  at the end of the book…”   High school crush Ben Dunn (been done. get it. hee. hee.  wink wink, nudge, nudge.  I think my eyes rolled so hard they got stuck.)  is just not, well.  I’m just going to stop here.