Peachy Reads

A destination wedding with a headline-grabbing couple takes place on a windswept island off the western coast of Ireland. One of the wedding party is murdered, that is alluded to at the start, and the book gradually unspools the events leading up to the deed, while revealing backstories and secrets. This book unfolds like an Agatha Christie novel. There are several suspects who would have had ample motivation to become a murderer, and it is up to the reader to guess who it might be.

All the Light We Cannot See was such a memorable tour-de-force that when the author published his next novel after a gap of seven years, I was anxious to read it. Cloud Cuckoo Land similarly interweaves parallel narratives, which All the Light did so successfully. This time it’s several stories, separated by both time and space. Most memorable was the description of the siege of Constantinople in 1453 with the characters of Omeir and Anna. It was probably this portion of the book that I enjoyed most and was most reminiscent of the stories of Marie-Laure and Werner in All the Light . There is a contemporary thread based on a solitary act of eco-terrorism in a public library in Idaho, and a future thread with climate refugees, set in a space ship on its way to a far-flung planet with an atmosphere similar to Earth’s. All these competing narratives only really start to stitch themselves together about halfway through this 600-page opus. The surprise ending, along with the clever

The plot has a lot for which to thank Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. This time it’s not Jimmy Stewart, but a woman named Anna, an unreliable narrator á la Girl on the Train, whose pharmaceutical and alcohol-induced stupors cast doubt on her accusation of having witnessed a murder through her window in the house across the way. She is an agoraphobe, an affliction that keeps her prisoner in her house, and we only gradually find out the reason for this. There is a surprise ending and a suspenseful conclusion, which is quite the page-turner. I thought the plot was tightly developed and the connections worked well. There was a movie made starring Amy Adams, which only received middling reviews. Nevertheless, the book is a mystery/thriller that is certainly worth a read.

Book 30 of the Guido Brunetti mystery series. I haven’t read them all, but enough to enjoy a visit back with a familiar character in a setting I love. Two female American college students are left wounded and unconscious outside the hospital emergency room in the middle of the night. Brunetti soon discovers who left them there, but the question remains why? The plot involves a nephew indebted to his criminal and abusive uncle, and illegal human trafficking. The book ends rather abruptly, and you may get the sense that after twenty-nine installments of the series, the author might just be phoning it in. Nevertheless, this book represented a nice little trip back to a Venice where real people live and work, and this to me is never a waste of time. I downloaded this to my iPad.

This thriller is a story within a story. Anna is living quietly in Scotland with her husband and two children, until her he suddenly announces he’s leaving her. Her world crumbles, and exposes the lie she’s been living in her domestic cocoon. She tries to distract herself with a true-crime podcast that has ties to her previous “secret” life. Her investigations lead her to strands of her past existence and develop rather rapidly into an international chase in which her life is terribly in danger. This book had the tempo of a Dan Brown novel, but there were some loose ends, and the motivation of certain characters was difficult to comprehend. In the end it was entertaining, but just as easily forgotten.

This intriguing police procedural, set in and around Dublin, chronicles two cases that take place in the same locale, but years apart. Detective Ryan is assigned to the modern day case, even though he (secretly) was one of the victims in the previous case that happened to him as a preteen. With all of the conflicts of interest this entails, the story is made even more complex by Ryan’s psychological demons, his trauma-induced amnesia about the past, and the fact that he seems to be an unreliable narrator. This is a complex story, and I felt it took some time to get moving, but the complexity is what makes it compelling, and while the ending is not wholly satisfactory with no resolution regarding the first case, it was well worth the read.

This novel starts out a little like Murder on the Orient Express when a severe snowstorm and then avalanche cuts off an Alpine hotel (formerly a tuberculosis sanatorium) after the disappearances of several staff members. Elin, a vacationing police detective, is deputized by the Swiss police to investigate the murders that transpire at the snowbound hotel under unusual circumstances. The premise and the setting are great for this novel, it even has hints of The Shining , but the unlikable and unbelievable characters and the overly complex plotting sort of ruined it for me.

This nearly 100 year epic family history is set against the fraught background of the Japanese empire’s colonial control of Korea and the subsequent war and post World War II years when expatriate Koreans were second class citizens in Japan.  The pachinko machine is not only the focus of the family business in the later generations, but the gambling machine itself seems to serve as a metaphor for their fate, their lives like so many metal balls falling downward and ricocheting  off of obstacles, launching again and again, only rarely succeeding in winning a payout against the odds. Fascinating insight into history and a family’s history. Here's a short vid of a pachinko machine: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v= 7RTg89WEsXQ

Cassie is the flight attendant of the title.  She’s about as reliable a narrator as Rachel from The Girl on the Train .  Overindulgence in alcohol causes her to black out, not pass out.  After a one-night stand with a man she met on her flight to Dubai, she wakes up to find that he has been brutally murdered in the bed next to her.  She’s pretty sure she didn’t do it, but not 100%.  She runs from the hotel after cleaning up the evidence and it isn’t long after her return to the US that the FBI starts sniffing around her door.  The subsequent action leads to shady international investment funds, Russian oligarchs, an international chase, and a rather surprising ending.  Apparently this was made into an HBO miniseries, with some of the book’s details changed.  I think I may give the TV version a try.  It is a good story.

We know what we get with Carl Hiaasen.  It’s always over-the-top characters caught up in improbable capers in wackadoodle Florida.  This time he writes about a president who has a Winter White House in Palm Beach.  But satirizing a real president who is already over-the-top may be a bridge too far.  There are Burmese pythons who are unleashed at inopportune times to create maximum havoc, which is the bulk of the plot and where the title comes from.  But ultimately I found that the novel seemed almost too cartoonish for me to enjoy…  or maybe it was too close to recent reality.

Nature is therapeutic.  Certainly this is one thing I’ve learned during this pandemic year.  The author bonds with an 800 year-old English oak and recounts the psychological and healing powers of that connection.  This book has history, biology, and ecology.  The Oak Papers is a wonderful meditation on one man’s connection to nature.

This is an extremely well-written family saga of twin girls from Louisiana, so light-skinned that they could pass for White.  One does exactly that, concealing all clues to her African-American identity, severing ties to her family and her hometown.  The other twin embraces her heritage, returns home, and gives birth to a daughter so dark, that it shocks even the townsfolk.   This novel has way more complexities than I’ve hinted at here, and it is a wonderful study of race, gender, and identity.

This book seems something like a mix between Rosemary's Baby and The Shining .  The story opens with a tragic plane crash.  The pilot survives, though emotionally wounded with PTSD, and seeing ghosts of passengers who haven't made it to "the other side".  His recovery is complicated by the family's move to a New England village which seems to feature an overabundance of odd inhabitants who grow strange herbs and are overly interested in the family's twin girls.  This will not end well.

George Takei is largely famous for his role in the cult classic Star Trek.  In this graphic novel he retells the story of his childhood, and his imprisonment with his family in two subsequent Japanese internment camps after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.  It’s a story that unfortunately resonates today with the xenophobia that seems to be more and more evident in many corners of our country and our world.

This graphic novel is like a scrap book gradually exposing the history of author Nora Krug’s family.  A child who grew up in Germany decades after the end of World War II, she attempts to understand German guilt and responsibility for Hitler's rise, the war, and the fate of European Jews.  Were her family members innocent and unknowing bystanders, or is there more to their experience in Nazi Germany than they reveal? Interesting fact for German speakers-- the title in the German is Heimat.

This historical thriller set during World War II in “neutral” Sweden, shows that Sweden was not so blameless in its dealings with the Nazis.  But it isn’t so much the Nazis who are the villains in this story, as much as certain Swedish white supremacists.   There are a lot of characters and a lot of threads to follow here.  It is at times a little confusing and the translation felt a little rough, but the narrative crescendos into an exciting conclusion with more than one surprise in store.

This is an issues novel that is a great read in the era of Black Lives Matter.  Emira is an African-American babysitter for a white family in Philadelphia.  When she takes her young charge to a local grocery store, the store security guard questions her guardianship.  It turns into an ugly incident that is filmed by a bystander with a cellphone.  This is only the start.  Other issues of race crop up—fetishization, Blacks as accessories, manipulative relationships, the white savior…. There is a lot of food for thought here.