Sweet Tooth / Ian McEwan

Winston Churchill once famously said of Russia, “It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key.” The same might be said of Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Sweet Tooth, set in 1972 during the Cold War, when the UK was trying to define a new role in a postcolonial world in which the US and the Soviet Union were the key players, and there was money to be spent on culture wars.

Muses, literary prizes, and bookstore readings aren’t usually the stuff of spy thrillers, and a novel that starts so promisingly as Serena is drafted as a secret agent, very quickly becomes something quite different. Sweet Tooth definitely had its moments, and McEwan’s style is always a treat, but as a novel it just didn’t work for me. The premise was credible enough I suppose, but just not that compelling in the end. And then the whole unreliable narrator thing—didn’t McEwan already try that with Atonement? I used to so look forward to anything new by Ian McEwan, but the last two novels haven’t been up to scratch in my opinion. Still, I remain true, and will not doubt pick up anything he’s written in future.

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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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