The Dinner / Herman Koch

What could be more civil than a dinner among family at a highly-rated restaurant where the plates come out of the kitchen looking like works of art and the waiter describes the culinary creations in exquisite detail, pointing out the featured ingredients with his perfectly manicured pinky finger?

As the courses are served, a horrible family secret gradually comes to light until an almost unimaginable ending is revealed. Paul is an unreliable narrator, so it isn't clear that his stories all ring true, and the reader is left wondering if he really is the monster that is suggested. No doubt there is a character flaw shared in his immediate family, an apparent genetic predisposition to violence and a cold removal from normal human compassion (reminding me a little of Patricia Highsmith’s character Tom Ripley). I liked Paul's snarky tone at first, but then realized that he wasn't what he first appeared to be.

This book came out a couple years ago. Since my conscious decision to spend less on eBooks, I’m checking titles out that have waned somewhat in popularity and that I missed when they were red-hot, on the top of the bestseller list. This one was worth the wait, and is a great choice for a book club. Some people have called it the European Gone Girl, though I thought that title was already taken by The Girl on the Train, but nonetheless, The Dinner offers the reader its own rewards. I think a movie is in the works.

I downloaded this from the library.

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