Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven / Susan Jane Gilman

Two recent graduates of Brown embark on an around-the-world tour, starting in China. Things go downhill rather quickly when the rough standards of a backpacker’s life grate on them, and they are challenged by the realities of traveling in a communist country in the 1980s where there is virtually no tourist infrastructure and nothing is in English. Their bumbling attempts to cope are laughable, but become rather tragic as their relationship begins to fray, and one of the pair begins to suffer with psychological episodes. It all goes rather wrong at the end with an unexpected and rather abrupt return to New York City.

I like the nostalgia of this. The two go abroad in the eighties and listen to the music I remember from college. It was an era before the internet and cell phones, so travelling required a bit more organization and forethought, which may be the reason their trip is doomed from the start. They seem to want to wing it, succumb to frequent illnesses, and have difficulty with the food. The author posits that the reason behind “Claire’s” psychological breakdown may have had to do with her anti-malarial drugs, which makes sense. I remember hearing a lot about it on the news years ago -- a case of this is documented here.

Comments

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...

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.

Addie Pray / Joe David Brown (more recently published as Paper Moon ) Click here to check for availability at AFPLS This 1971 novel was the inspiration for the Peter Bogdanovich movie Paper Moon . Eleven-year-old Addie and her maybe-father “Long Boy” Moses Pray crisscross the Deep South “ramifying” (scamming) people during the Great Depression. Addie’s street smarts and perceived girlish innocence, along with Long Boy’s cleverness and shrewd business acumen build their operation until they are dealing in millions. The movie remained pretty true to the first half of the book (though it moved the location from Alabama to Kansas), but the adventures continue far beyond where the movie left off. The decades haven’t dimmed the magic of this rollicking adventure, either in the film or the book. ©Ken Vesey, 17 June 2010

Peachy Reads

Search This Blog