Peachy Reads

The plot of Sue Grafton’s eighteenth novel in her alphabet detective series definitely is one of the stronger ones from the latest installments in the franchise. A daughter of privilege, Reba Lafferty is a recent parolee, released after spending two years in the women’s prison for embezzling from her former boss. Daughter of privilege embezzling from her boss? Something doesn’t measure up here, and it’s all the more strange when she takes up with her former boss right out of the slammer. Things get messy really fast and the action is fast-paced. Kinsey also is lucky in love, which doesn’t happen much, so it was sort of a nice change of pace. I downloaded this as an eBook and it provided a nice diversion on a recent trip I made. Reacquainting oneself with Kinsey is always feels like reconnecting with an old friend.

This fascinating novel is hard to put down, even though it’s a sort of an unclassifiable collection of stories, history, points of view, politics, with a lot of magical realism thrown in. It’s set in Yugoslavia in the first half of the 20th century and also in the new states that came out of the disintegrated former Yugoslavia. So maybe the structure of the novel reflects the complex Balkan kaleidoscope in which it is set. The writing is wonderful and the storytelling the same. An intriguing glimpse into a part of Europe that I know relatively little about. The Tiger’s Wife won the 2011 Orange Prize, and Obreht was the youngest author to have won the award. A passage on the effects of war in the former Yugoslavia: The war had altered everything. Once separate, the pieces that made up our old county no longer carried the same characteristics that had formerly represented their respective parts of the whole. Previously shared things—landmarks, writers, scientists, histories—h...

Oooh, I’m glad I found this series, of which Prague Fatale is the 9th. I read a couple books by Kerr ages ago and had heard good things said of this series, so I’m glad I finally got around to picking one up. Bernie Gunther is an irreverent Prussian Polizist who is stationed in this installment in both Berlin and Prague, working closely with Reinhard Heydrich, Acting Reichs Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, the Nazi-annexed portions of Czechoslovakia. When a murder takes place at Heydrich’s estate, outside Prague, Gunther is called in to solve the mystery and the resolution is not at all what is expected. The writing is excellent, the characters multifaceted and the historical context is fascinating. I’m definitely going to come back to this series.

I don’t know what it is about apocalyptic novels that seems to fascinate me. White Horse refers to a killer disease that is wiping out 90% of the world’s population and leaving the survivors with grotesque genetic aberrations. Zoe seems to be immune and after losing her parents and sister, sets off on an international journey to find the parents of the only other person that has meant something to her. There is a somewhat annoying narrative device of alternating the time frame by prefacing the sections “Date: Now,” “Date: Then," but other than that it's pretty readable.  The first in a proposed trilogy. I see a potential movie on the horizon.