Cloud Cuckoo Land / Anthony Doerr

All the Light We Cannot See was such a memorable tour-de-force that when the author published his next novel after a gap of seven years, I was anxious to read it. Cloud Cuckoo Land similarly interweaves parallel narratives, which All the Light did so successfully. This time it’s several stories, separated by both time and space. Most memorable was the description of the siege of Constantinople in 1453 with the characters of Omeir and Anna. It was probably this portion of the book that I enjoyed most and was most reminiscent of the stories of Marie-Laure and Werner in All the Light. There is a contemporary thread based on a solitary act of eco-terrorism in a public library in Idaho, and a future thread with climate refugees, set in a space ship on its way to a far-flung planet with an atmosphere similar to Earth’s. All these competing narratives only really start to stitch themselves together about halfway through this 600-page opus. The surprise ending, along with the cleverness of how the stories interlink and are resolved, make this an enjoyable read. It had an impossible task to live up to the magic that All the Light spun, but for readers who enjoyed that novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land should definitely be added to their reading list.

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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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