All the Old Knives / Olen Steinhauer

Henry and Celia are two CIA operatives who worked together at the Vienna office when a large scale hostage-taking event occurred on a passenger jet on the tarmac at the airport. The event goes horribly wrong and there is speculation that one of the CIA operatives in the field office was feeding info to the terrorist ringleader. Was it Celia? Was it Henry? They were lovers, nearly to the point of long term commitment, but then their paths abruptly diverge after the terrorist event. When they meet up again years later, they hash out the details leading up to that awful day, in alternating chapters that offer differing perspectives on how events may have unfolded.

All the Old Knives has the unusual distinction of being both a spy novel and a relationship novel, a mix that is mostly unheard of. It also distinguishes itself by being structured as an extended conversation between two people at a restaurant table a la “My Dinner with Andre”. It's a short but sophisticated novel that keeps you guessing until the end, at which point there is a bit of a surprise resolution.

Comments

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...

Peachy Reads

Search This Blog