The Girl on the Train / Paula Hawkins

Rachel is a troubled soul who lost her husband and her job due to her uncontrolled drinking. Now she spends her days in a charade—travelling back and forth by rail to the city (thus the title) in the pretense of commuting to the job she no longer holds, whiling away the days in public libraries, and making frequent stops at the off-license. From the train she spies on a Victorian terrace home in her old neighborhood that backs up to the rail line and imagines a fantasy existence for the couple living there, perhaps it’s the fantasy she never was able to experience herself.

The night that the woman from her fantasy musings disappears and later turns up murdered, is a night that Rachel was nearby on a bender. Only nebulous memories of that evening remain, but somehow she thinks they may hold important clues to an intricate web that involves her ex-husband, his new wife, the missing woman, and a mystery man.

This is the new Gone Girl by all accounts. It has shot straight to the number one position on the bestseller list since its release in January and the movie rights have been snapped up.

I enjoyed it well enough, but my criticism is that it is a bit of a slow-starter and the characters, at least for me, remained somewhat indistinguishable. The women somehow all end up being sort of similar, the men all are rather one-dimensional and have a dark side, and the peripheral characters are even more forgettable—Cathy, Tara? One by one the reader shifts suspicions on the next person. Was it the therapist, the husband, the new wife, the red-headed man, her ex, Rachel herself? So, okay, it’s a good story, and keeps you guessing until the end. I just think it could have been something better with some deeper character development.

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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.

So Much for That / Lionel Shriver

This novel comes from the 2005 Orange Prize winning author of We Need to Talk About Kevin , a disturbing book in which a parent with ambivalent feelings towards motherhood deals with the aftermath of a Columbine-style school killing perpetrated by her son. Lionel Shriver has said that she prefers to create characters that are hard to love, and So Much for That certainly contains some flinty characters, who although they may be hard to love, are nevertheless very believable. The topic this time is healthcare in America. Shep is all ready to launch into an exotic early retirement on the island of Pemba off the eastern coast of Africa, but when his wife reveals a diagnosis of mesothelioma, he must hold on to his job to maintain family health coverage to see her through her devastating illness. His work colleague and friend, Jackson, experiences a medical dilemma completely of his own doing, which proves to be his un doing. Jackson's daughter suffers from an unusual genetic disorde...

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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