Peachy Reads

I wanted to return to Bruges with Inspector Pieter van In after enjoying the first installment in this Flemish detective series,  The Square of Revenge .  Bruges really is the most captivating character in this novel, providing a wonderful backdrop to the police action, its streets frosted with a magical covering of powdery snow, its gothic and neogothic towers and facades transformed into so much iced gingerbread.   The plot, however, is a bit overcomplicated-- involving murders, Nazi gold, a conspiracy involving a forged copy of Michelangelo’s Madonna, and a terrorist plot to blow up cultural monuments in Bruges in order to drive out its middle class citizens to a proposed garden suburb built on the neighboring polder... need I go on?  It really didn’t hold together and when I said that the city of Bruges is the best character in The Midas Murders , it’s because Van In is so ugly and unlikable, at least in this installment.  The series has had...

Not since David Sedaris’s Me Talk Pretty One Day have I read such a humorous and entertaining chronicle of an adult attempting to learn French. There are many funny language situations, made all the more amusing by the author’s apparent linguistic tone deafness.  Can a 58-year-old pick up a language like French?  He discusses this proposition with some experts and cites some linguistic theory behind the mechanism of language learning, interspersed with his dogged (and frequently laughable) attempts to master French. Alexander seems to eschew the traditional approach of memorizing verb forms and vocabulary (forever scarred by a battle axe school teacher), and instead embraces the purportedly effortless newfangled approaches of products like Rosetta Stone and social media with native speakers.  All of this is complicated with recurring medical drama he has with his heart (alluded to in the subtitle), problems that he speculates may be stress-induced due to his attempt...

This historical novel tells the story of abolitionist John Brown, a character already so over-the-top in every way that his persona might threaten to devour any novel that was written about him.  James McBride avoids this problem by enlisting a once-removed narrator in the person of Henry “Onion” Shackleford, also known as Henrietta after John Brown mistakes him for a girl and subsequently dresses him as one.  It’s a ruse that serves him well, as girls could more easily blend into the background and watch the unfolding action without taking part in the major skirmishes.  The story follows John Brown from the days of his Kansas anti-slavery raids, to his fund-raising lectures out east, visits with such notables as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, and finally the long-awaited, but doomed raid on the armory at Harper’s Ferry. The characters here are the strength of the book.  Some of the wild west portions (especially the part in the brothel) reminded me of L...

Here’s another book about expats that is based, at least in part, on the tragic and confusing events of the Amanda Knox case a few years ago, in which an exchange student in Perugia, Italy, was involved (to what extent?) in the murder of Meredith Kercher. Author Katie Crouch recreates a similar setting in the fictional town of Grifonia (Perugia’s symbol is the griffin) and gives a rather credible, but fictional, rendition of how things might have come about. It’s an interesting glimpse into the world of young expats abroad running amok with many temptations in an unchaperoned setting. Who has time to study and learn the language when there’s wine, and campari, and cigarettes, sex, drugs and parties? There are some interesting love triangles here and some great interpersonal tension, but it’s almost a bit over the top. It's a little like Donna Tartt's A Secret History meets The Da Vinci Code ( the compagnia subplot). Separating the known facts about the real case from thi...

I enjoyed The Expats by Chris Pavone quite a bit, so continued with this title.   Thematically it's a good one to follow Galbraith/Rowling’s The Silkworm , since it deals with the inner machinations of the publishing world, this time stateside.   Isabel Reed receives an interesting submission—a manuscript so explosive in its content, that people are willing to kill to prevent it seeing the light of day.   Anyone who previews a copy is soon dead.   Isabel guesses fairly quickly what is happening, and goes on the run, trying to erase all traces of her escape.   In the meantime, the reader gains glimpses into the damning revelations of the book, a secret history of a global media titan, who it seems has some very powerful protectors.   I liked this book, but the story was sort of all over the place.   Many characters, many settings, and shifting timeframes. There was even a cameo from Kate from The Expats .   An interesting premise, but o...

The big scuttlebutt in the publishing world last summer was the debut of crime writer Robert Galbraith, who, it was discovered in pretty short order, was none other than Harry Potter’s creator J.K. Rowling.  Of course after the true identity of the author was revealed sales skyrocketed, but the attention, it turned out, was warranted. In the first novel in the series, The Cuckoo’s Calling , Galbraith/Rowling introduced the reader to a London-based detective by the name of Cormoran Strike, an ex-soldier from the war in Afghanistan, illegitimate son of a famous British rocker.  The Silkworm starts its narrative thread several months after the events in Cuckoo , in which Strike embarrassed the metropolitan police force by more or less independently solving a high-profile case involving a young Kate Moss-type character.  This time the story centers on the grisly murder of a midlist author, which grabs the tabloid headlines and captures the imagination of the capital. ...

David Baldacci is one of those authors who’s always on our bestseller shelf, and seems to crank out a new title every six months, so I thought I’d check out something light and give him a try for the July 4th long weekend.  The Hit is a Washington-based thriller with CIA operatives and CIA operatives-gone-rogue spilling brains all over our nation’s capital. It’s certainly a page-turner and if you like thrillers in the style of Robert Ludlum, Baldacci is for you. The government assassins don’t reveal much about their identities, that’s their modus operandi, but it makes for somewhat wooden characters… but then I suppose you’re not supposed to feel warm and fuzzy about guns for hire.

If you’ve ever read one of Donna Leon’s Inspector Brunetti mysteries, set in Venice, you may be interested in this collection of essays as I was.  If you’re expecting a love letter to Venice though, you may be disappointed as the “and Other Essays” part of the title represents the majority of the book, in which Leon covers topics as varied as her passion for Baroque opera, fat Americans, and an indictment of Saudi Arabian men.   Leon, in my mind, comes across as somewhat curmudgeonly, and like many expats, scrutinizes her country of birth with a highly critical eye. It sounds like this collection of essays was written less for her American audience and more for her UK or perhaps German readership. Leon has unapologetically ripped the rose-colored glasses from her face and crushed them underfoot, offering her unvarnished opinion of all and sundry. 

This is the second or third Bernie Gunther novel I have read, this one taking place in Berlin in 1938 when the excesses of the Nazis begin to boil over and their hatred of the Jews culminates in Kristallnacht.  Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich's Main Security Office (including the Gestapo, Kripo, and Sicherheitsdienst) reenlists Gunther in the Kriminalpolizei to investigate a series of murders of typically Aryan maidens, who are kidnapped and ritually killed in a manner that seems to suggest a sadistic Jewish plot.  Gunther's investigations uncover a plot that is anything but what it appears to be upon first inspection. What makes the Bernie Gunther series work is his skepticism and barely disguised disdain for the Nazi administration, and his attempts to work for justice in a society that increasingly devalues it.  The historical context of these novels is what fascinates me—there’s a lengthy discussion about the burning of the Reichstag, for example; a train le...

An American financier relocates his young family to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, but the details of his job are sketchy.  His wife starts snooping around, especially when agents of the FBI begin to monitor the family.  She tries to uncover his secrets, while keeping her own not so insignificant secrets hidden. The expat existence is accurately portrayed, and the charm of Luxembourg nicely described.  Other European settings include the Alps, Amsterdam, and Paris, which makes this thriller great for the armchair traveler!  The story is intriguing, though ultimately a bit complex, at least for this reader.

US cover It’s been awhile since I’ve visited the campi , canals, and calli of Venice with Commissario Guido Brunetti.  For a long while I was more partial to Aurelio Zen and even read some books by Andrea Camilleri, but I really enjoyed my reunion with Donna Leon in this slim novel.  The writing is really good, the story was engaging, and the cultural insights are astute.  I felt like I was following alongside Brunetti, drinking in the atmosphere of Venice, and seeing it through the eyes of a native.  Granted, Leon is not a native Veneziana, but after thirty years she's as Venetian as any American could hope to be. UK cover, which I think is so much better   Brunetti is called in to investigate the vandalism and theft of some priceless books at a Venetian Library.  The plot thickens when one of the library’s readers turns up murdered. Was it the mysterious American scholar with credentials from a university in Kansas, or someone else?

Kinsey Millhone is permanently stuck in 1988, which is probably about when I read A is for Alibi, the first in Sue Grafton's alphabet detective series.  It's fun to time-travel back to that nostalgic era each time a new installment comes out.  X,Y, Z is all that is left. Anyway, in W is for Wasted we learn a bit more about Kinsey's distant family ties when a homeless man dies and lists Kinsey as family.  Not only is the family link a surprise, but the fact that this seemingly destitute hobo has left half a million dollars to Kinsey, bypassing his own children.   The book ends with an exciting fight in which Kinsey fends off a crazy doctor with murderous intents with a pair of garden shears.

My book companion for the last several weeks has been the 750+ page Donna Tartt novel, The Goldfinch . I’ll probably go through Goldfinch-withdrawal now, not knowing what’s going on the lives of Theo, Boris, Pippa, and Hobie. I really enjoyed it, though truth be told, there were some spots where I felt it dragged just a bit.  In the final analysis I thought it was really three books (or more) instead of just the one.  There was the JD Salinger-ish first part of the book where Theo inhabits the Upper East Side and lives a life a bit reminiscent of Holden Caulfield, then the book drastically changes gear into a Kerouac or Russell Banks Rule of the Bone -type drug-addled foray as Theo moves in with his no-good father in Las Vegas, then finally in Amsterdam it’s like The Godfather .  Tying it all together thematically is the wonderful but diminutive Dutch master painting of the goldfinch, which I’ve had the great fortune to see in a couple different museums in my life (...

In the latest novel by the author of A Hologram for the King (2012 National Book Award finalist in fiction), Dave Eggers describes a future dystopia not so far from our own time.  Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon are just footnotes in the history of the all-encompassing information network called The Circle, which makes all information public domain, everything and everyone transparent, and assures that everything is recorded, calculated, surveyed, and monetized. Dave Eggers seems to have a knack for channeling the zeitgeist of our current info-based post-industrial society.  This time he channels Michael Crichton with his familiar theme of technology-run-amok.  There is a lot of food for thought, and I can see this becoming a popular book club choice.

The latest book by the author of The Kite Runner reads like a collection of short stories, but they are all interconnected. The link between stories isn’t always immediately apparent and there are some diversions that take the reader far from Kabul, and sometimes confusingly so (the detour to Greece was interesting, but a bit disconnected from the rest of the storyline, I thought). There were some great narratives—one in particular that I think was worth the whole of the book— a story about Afghani-American cousins, Idris and Timur, who return to Kabul to attempt to regain an ancestral home, abandoned after the Soviet invasion. While Timur goes out and carouses and flaunts his American wealth, Idris spends most of his time showing charity to a young girl in hospital, a victim of an unspeakable act of violence which leaves her in need of surgery in a western nation.  Idris, himself a doctor, promises to arrange the needed medical intervention, but when he returns to the US, the...

I'm a sucker for a thriller set in Sweden, even though I was somewhat disappointed by the previous novel from the Swedish husband/wife author team who go by the penname Lars Kepler.  Novels like those of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson, and even John Ajvide Lindqvist are just hard to resist.  So when The Fire Witness came out, I just had to read it.  I must admit it was pretty hard to put down.  Though not perfect, I think the plot worked better than the previous title.  The central storyline focuses on a double murder in a home for wayward girls not far from Sundsvall.  Suspicion focuses on one of the resident girls and a large part of the novel charts attempts to discover her whereabouts.  There is an interesting subplot on a psychic medium’s supposed insight on the murders.  By the end of the novel the tension crescendos into a nail-biting conclusion and finishes with a scene that seems to lend ...