Peachy Reads

I wanted to return to Bruges with Inspector Pieter van In after enjoying the first installment in this Flemish detective series,  The Square of Revenge .  Bruges really is the most captivating character in this novel, providing a wonderful backdrop to the police action, its streets frosted with a magical covering of powdery snow, its gothic and neogothic towers and facades transformed into so much iced gingerbread.   The plot, however, is a bit overcomplicated-- involving murders, Nazi gold, a conspiracy involving a forged copy of Michelangelo’s Madonna, and a terrorist plot to blow up cultural monuments in Bruges in order to drive out its middle class citizens to a proposed garden suburb built on the neighboring polder... need I go on?  It really didn’t hold together and when I said that the city of Bruges is the best character in The Midas Murders , it’s because Van In is so ugly and unlikable, at least in this installment.  The series has had...

Not since David Sedaris’s Me Talk Pretty One Day have I read such a humorous and entertaining chronicle of an adult attempting to learn French. There are many funny language situations, made all the more amusing by the author’s apparent linguistic tone deafness.  Can a 58-year-old pick up a language like French?  He discusses this proposition with some experts and cites some linguistic theory behind the mechanism of language learning, interspersed with his dogged (and frequently laughable) attempts to master French. Alexander seems to eschew the traditional approach of memorizing verb forms and vocabulary (forever scarred by a battle axe school teacher), and instead embraces the purportedly effortless newfangled approaches of products like Rosetta Stone and social media with native speakers.  All of this is complicated with recurring medical drama he has with his heart (alluded to in the subtitle), problems that he speculates may be stress-induced due to his attempt...

This historical novel tells the story of abolitionist John Brown, a character already so over-the-top in every way that his persona might threaten to devour any novel that was written about him.  James McBride avoids this problem by enlisting a once-removed narrator in the person of Henry “Onion” Shackleford, also known as Henrietta after John Brown mistakes him for a girl and subsequently dresses him as one.  It’s a ruse that serves him well, as girls could more easily blend into the background and watch the unfolding action without taking part in the major skirmishes.  The story follows John Brown from the days of his Kansas anti-slavery raids, to his fund-raising lectures out east, visits with such notables as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, and finally the long-awaited, but doomed raid on the armory at Harper’s Ferry. The characters here are the strength of the book.  Some of the wild west portions (especially the part in the brothel) reminded me of L...

Here’s another book about expats that is based, at least in part, on the tragic and confusing events of the Amanda Knox case a few years ago, in which an exchange student in Perugia, Italy, was involved (to what extent?) in the murder of Meredith Kercher. Author Katie Crouch recreates a similar setting in the fictional town of Grifonia (Perugia’s symbol is the griffin) and gives a rather credible, but fictional, rendition of how things might have come about. It’s an interesting glimpse into the world of young expats abroad running amok with many temptations in an unchaperoned setting. Who has time to study and learn the language when there’s wine, and campari, and cigarettes, sex, drugs and parties? There are some interesting love triangles here and some great interpersonal tension, but it’s almost a bit over the top. It's a little like Donna Tartt's A Secret History meets The Da Vinci Code ( the compagnia subplot). Separating the known facts about the real case from thi...

I enjoyed The Expats by Chris Pavone quite a bit, so continued with this title.   Thematically it's a good one to follow Galbraith/Rowling’s The Silkworm , since it deals with the inner machinations of the publishing world, this time stateside.   Isabel Reed receives an interesting submission—a manuscript so explosive in its content, that people are willing to kill to prevent it seeing the light of day.   Anyone who previews a copy is soon dead.   Isabel guesses fairly quickly what is happening, and goes on the run, trying to erase all traces of her escape.   In the meantime, the reader gains glimpses into the damning revelations of the book, a secret history of a global media titan, who it seems has some very powerful protectors.   I liked this book, but the story was sort of all over the place.   Many characters, many settings, and shifting timeframes. There was even a cameo from Kate from The Expats .   An interesting premise, but o...

The big scuttlebutt in the publishing world last summer was the debut of crime writer Robert Galbraith, who, it was discovered in pretty short order, was none other than Harry Potter’s creator J.K. Rowling.  Of course after the true identity of the author was revealed sales skyrocketed, but the attention, it turned out, was warranted. In the first novel in the series, The Cuckoo’s Calling , Galbraith/Rowling introduced the reader to a London-based detective by the name of Cormoran Strike, an ex-soldier from the war in Afghanistan, illegitimate son of a famous British rocker.  The Silkworm starts its narrative thread several months after the events in Cuckoo , in which Strike embarrassed the metropolitan police force by more or less independently solving a high-profile case involving a young Kate Moss-type character.  This time the story centers on the grisly murder of a midlist author, which grabs the tabloid headlines and captures the imagination of the capital. ...

David Baldacci is one of those authors who’s always on our bestseller shelf, and seems to crank out a new title every six months, so I thought I’d check out something light and give him a try for the July 4th long weekend.  The Hit is a Washington-based thriller with CIA operatives and CIA operatives-gone-rogue spilling brains all over our nation’s capital. It’s certainly a page-turner and if you like thrillers in the style of Robert Ludlum, Baldacci is for you. The government assassins don’t reveal much about their identities, that’s their modus operandi, but it makes for somewhat wooden characters… but then I suppose you’re not supposed to feel warm and fuzzy about guns for hire.