Jane Eyre / Charlotte Bronte

Jane Eyre. I've seen several film versions of it, but until now I'd never read the novel. Shame on me. I was motivated to read it after it appeared on my daughter's English literature syllabus this year. I didn't read it simultaneously with her class, but nearly so-- I was a month or two late. Most literature from the 1800s always frightened me off in the past (Jane Eyre was published in 1847), and I'm still not over my somewhat inexplicable Dickens-phobia (but maybe I'm coming closer to a cure). Jane Eyre is amazingly accessible and a real page-turner full of unique characters and plot-twists. Of course, I knew the secret of the madwoman in the attic, but what a treat it must have been in 1847 to read it with no spoilers. Such suspense! It really is a haunting story, full of tragedy, but one that is full of life and love as well. I think I would have to say it's definitely a girls' book and I was surprised at some of the hints at feminism at such an early time. Anyway, I'm glad to have checked it off my list. I'm now reading Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, which is a prequel to Jane Eyre and attempts to tell the story of Bertha Mason, Rochester's insane wife who came from the Caribbean.

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The Silent Patient / Alex Michaelides

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.

Transient Desires / Donna Leon

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.

Murder in Passy, An Aimée Leduc Investigation / Cara Black

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...

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