Skip to main content
By
La’s Orchestra Saves the World / Alexander McCall-Smith
Click here to check for availability at AFPLS

Alexander McCall-Smith hits another homerun with this standalone novel set in England during World War II. As usual, his characters drive the novel, but there is a wonderful sense of place and time that is different from his other writings.

Lavender, known as “La,” has been unlucky in love and sets off from cosmopolitan London to a lonely refuge in Suffolk. The Blitz keeps her marooned in the countryside and she looks for things to do to keep her busy. She forms a small orchestra, made up of townspeople and airmen from the nearby field, and they practice once a month, preparing for a victory concert that is too long in coming.

Alexander McCall-Smith just seems to have a knack for painting wonderful pictures with words. Like a Vermeer genre painting, his books create a picture of domesticity that is so accurate, it’s like watching a movie in your head.
©Ken Vesey, 7 June 2010

Comments

  1. wclaspyJune 9, 2010 at 5:52 AM

    I think this one will have to join me at the beach this summer!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Silent Patient / Alex Michaelides

By
A woman viciously murders her seemingly doting husband. We meet up with her several years later in a mental facility, where a therapist tries to get her to speak and to reveal her story. Who is innocent and who is the victim? The answer isn’t straightforward. The resolution to the novel features a real twist that will have the reader questioning the chronology of the different narrative threads in the book. A real page-turner.
Post a Comment
Read more

Transient Desires / Donna Leon

By
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.
Post a Comment
Read more

Murder in Passy, An Aimée Leduc Investigation / Cara Black

By
If you like your mysteries set in European locales, here’s a Parisian detective series that is sure to please. Aimée Leduc is a private eye, born of a French career detective and an absentee American mother (brief hints of angst over this in this installment). She’s appeared in about ten adventures, always set in iconic Parisian neighborhoods : Murder in the Marais, Murder in the Bastille, Murder in Montmartre, and Murder in the Latin Quarter , to name a few. In Murder in Passy (Paris’s tony XVIe arrondissement), Aimée finds herself mixed up in a murderous intrigue involving the French arm of the Basque nationalist movement. The final chase involves the kidnapping of a Spanish princess, a secret torture chamber used by the Gestapo in WWII, and a rooftop escape. The author sprinkles enough French words into the dialogue to either annoy you or make you feel your French 101 was not for nothing— Zut alors! très chic, c’est parfait, désolé, c’est tout! Oh, and Aimée’s frequent stop...
2 comments
Read more