The Goldfinch / Donna Tartt

My book companion for the last several weeks has been the 750+ page Donna Tartt novel, The Goldfinch. I’ll probably go through Goldfinch-withdrawal now, not knowing what’s going on the lives of Theo, Boris, Pippa, and Hobie.

I really enjoyed it, though truth be told, there were some spots where I felt it dragged just a bit. In the final analysis I thought it was really three books (or more) instead of just the one. There was the JD Salinger-ish first part of the book where Theo inhabits the Upper East Side and lives a life a bit reminiscent of Holden Caulfield, then the book drastically changes gear into a Kerouac or Russell Banks Rule of the Bone-type drug-addled foray as Theo moves in with his no-good father in Las Vegas, then finally in Amsterdam it’s like The Godfather. Tying it all together thematically is the wonderful but diminutive Dutch master painting of the goldfinch, which I’ve had the great fortune to see in a couple different museums in my life (most recently across the street at the High Museum!).

I can see this being made into a BBC miniseries for Masterpiece Theatre or the like. It really wouldn’t translate well into a movie since it is just so long. Still, it’s a great story, well written, and is one, no doubt, that will remain with me for some time to come.

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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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