Peachy Reads

Rachel is a troubled soul who lost her husband and her job due to her uncontrolled drinking.  Now she spends her days in a charade—travelling back and forth by rail to the city (thus the title) in the pretense of commuting to the job she no longer holds, whiling away the days in public libraries, and making frequent stops at the off-license.  From the train she spies on a Victorian terrace home in her old neighborhood that backs up to the rail line and imagines a fantasy existence for the couple living there, perhaps it’s the fantasy she never was able to experience herself.  The night that the woman from her fantasy musings disappears and later turns up murdered, is a night that Rachel was nearby on a bender.  Only nebulous memories of that evening remain, but somehow she thinks they may hold important clues to an intricate web that involves her ex-husband, his new wife, the missing woman, and a mystery man.  This is the new Gone Girl by all accounts.  It has shot straight to the

Douglas is the nerdy scientist-type and displays all the stereotypes that go along with that.  Connie is a Bohemian artist-type on the rebound, and Douglas seems to be everything her last boyfriend was not.  This book charts their unlikely romance, the uneasy marriage, the dysfunctional family, and finally the inevitable but nevertheless reluctant separation.  Connie decides to inform Douglas that she’s through with their marriage just before their son is off to university and right before they’ve planned to depart en famille on a grand tour of the continent.  Against common sense, they decide to go forward with the plan, which results in predictably unpredictable consequences. I’m not sure that in real life the ill-fated grand tour would really have made it to the first hotel, but as a plot device it was pretty clever.  Perfect for the armchair traveler, there is wonderful description of some of the great art museums of Europe sandwiched in between the frequent episodes of family di