Peachy Reads

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 min

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 the book its title. There was a strange little