Peachy Reads

I went through a Sherlock Holmes stage when I was a preteen.  More recently I had downloaded an omnibus edition of Holmes mysteries to my Nook account for practically nothing since the stories are well out of copyright.  It wasn’t until now that I revisited one of the tales that I read years ago, one of the signature titles, The Hound of the Baskervilles .  I only remembered a vague notion of the plot, so it was definitely worth  taking up again.  There's a wonderful sense of place on the dark moor with the dusty ancestral home.  It’s a clever plot and the character of Holmes is unforgettable and survives the decades.

Bernie Gunther is sent to Smolensk, in Nazi-occupied Russia, to investigate possible war crimes that involve the assassination of thousands of Polish officers in Katyn Wood by Russian operatives.   Ironic that the Nazi regime would want to investigate war crimes, but the thought is that it will give them leverage against the Soviets when they reveal this heinous act on an international stage.   During the course of the investigation Bernie stumbles into other murders and intrigues and unmasks a double-agent in the process.   There are so many nuances and subplots in this complex novel, it really provides an excellent lens into the true history during a most complex moment in the second world war.

We were briefly in London in March and witnessed some of the transformative construction projects taking place at Paddington Station and along Oxford Street at Bond Street and Tottenham Court Road.  Currently Europe’s biggest engineering project, Crossrail will represent, when it is finished, the newest extension of the London Underground, soon to be called the Elizabeth Line.  This book gives a historical context for the East-to-West path across greater London and delves into some of the history that was literally uncovered during the extensive works to tunnel this line through Europe’s largest metropolis.  Bits of the book are truly fascinating, but it repeats somewhat, leaves other parts out  (Whitechapel, for example, since “it could comprise  a book on its own”) and a geographic approach clashes with a strict historical sequencing, sometimes making it a somewhat confusing read. If you are a London aficionado or a transport fan, this could nevertheless be for you.