The Cuckoo’s Calling / Robert Galbraith (J.K. Rowling)

UK cover

This detective novel gained popularity this summer when it was revealed that the enigmatic debut author was really none other than J.K. Rowling of the Harry Potter series.

Cormoran Strike is a struggling gumshoe who doesn’t really need, and can't afford, the temporary office assistant the agency sends him one morning at the start of the book. But they become a very good team as they untangle the mysterious circumstances surrounding the apparent suicide of a supermodel named Lula Landry.

I quite liked this novel—for its sense of place in London, the strong and very contemporary characters, and their interpersonal dynamics. My only criticism is that pace became a bit plodding in the middle of the book, but in the end it was a rewarding read overall. Maybe if they had really been dealing with a debut author and not the publishing powerhouse that is JKR, the editor could have done his or her job and cut the manuscript down into a leaner, meaner machine.

Comments

And the Mountains Echoed / Khaled Hosseini

The latest book by the author of The Kite Runner reads like a collection of short stories, but they are all interconnected. The link between stories isn’t always immediately apparent and there are some diversions that take the reader far from Kabul, and sometimes confusingly so (the detour to Greece was interesting, but a bit disconnected from the rest of the storyline, I thought). There were some great narratives—one in particular that I think was worth the whole of the book— a story about Afghani-American cousins, Idris and Timur, who return to Kabul to attempt to regain an ancestral home, abandoned after the Soviet invasion. While Timur goes out and carouses and flaunts his American wealth, Idris spends most of his time showing charity to a young girl in hospital, a victim of an unspeakable act of violence which leaves her in need of surgery in a western nation. Idris, himself a doctor, promises to arrange the needed medical intervention, but when he returns to the US, the...

Here we are / Graham Swift

This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.

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.

Peachy Reads

Search This Blog