Peachy Reads

This intriguing police procedural, set in and around Dublin, chronicles two cases that take place in the same locale, but years apart. Detective Ryan is assigned to the modern day case, even though he (secretly) was one of the victims in the previous case that happened to him as a preteen. With all of the conflicts of interest this entails, the story is made even more complex by Ryan’s psychological demons, his trauma-induced amnesia about the past, and the fact that he seems to be an unreliable narrator. This is a complex story, and I felt it took some time to get moving, but the complexity is what makes it compelling, and while the ending is not wholly satisfactory with no resolution regarding the first case, it was well worth the read.

This novel starts out a little like Murder on the Orient Express when a severe snowstorm and then avalanche cuts off an Alpine hotel (formerly a tuberculosis sanatorium) after the disappearances of several staff members. Elin, a vacationing police detective, is deputized by the Swiss police to investigate the murders that transpire at the snowbound hotel under unusual circumstances. The premise and the setting are great for this novel, it even has hints of The Shining , but the unlikable and unbelievable characters and the overly complex plotting sort of ruined it for me.

This nearly 100 year epic family history is set against the fraught background of the Japanese empire’s colonial control of Korea and the subsequent war and post World War II years when expatriate Koreans were second class citizens in Japan.  The pachinko machine is not only the focus of the family business in the later generations, but the gambling machine itself seems to serve as a metaphor for their fate, their lives like so many metal balls falling downward and ricocheting  off of obstacles, launching again and again, only rarely succeeding in winning a payout against the odds. Fascinating insight into history and a family’s history. Here's a short vid of a pachinko machine: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v= 7RTg89WEsXQ

Cassie is the flight attendant of the title.  She’s about as reliable a narrator as Rachel from The Girl on the Train .  Overindulgence in alcohol causes her to black out, not pass out.  After a one-night stand with a man she met on her flight to Dubai, she wakes up to find that he has been brutally murdered in the bed next to her.  She’s pretty sure she didn’t do it, but not 100%.  She runs from the hotel after cleaning up the evidence and it isn’t long after her return to the US that the FBI starts sniffing around her door.  The subsequent action leads to shady international investment funds, Russian oligarchs, an international chase, and a rather surprising ending.  Apparently this was made into an HBO miniseries, with some of the book’s details changed.  I think I may give the TV version a try.  It is a good story.

We know what we get with Carl Hiaasen.  It’s always over-the-top characters caught up in improbable capers in wackadoodle Florida.  This time he writes about a president who has a Winter White House in Palm Beach.  But satirizing a real president who is already over-the-top may be a bridge too far.  There are Burmese pythons who are unleashed at inopportune times to create maximum havoc, which is the bulk of the plot and where the title comes from.  But ultimately I found that the novel seemed almost too cartoonish for me to enjoy…  or maybe it was too close to recent reality.

Nature is therapeutic.  Certainly this is one thing I’ve learned during this pandemic year.  The author bonds with an 800 year-old English oak and recounts the psychological and healing powers of that connection.  This book has history, biology, and ecology.  The Oak Papers is a wonderful meditation on one man’s connection to nature.

This is an extremely well-written family saga of twin girls from Louisiana, so light-skinned that they could pass for White.  One does exactly that, concealing all clues to her African-American identity, severing ties to her family and her hometown.  The other twin embraces her heritage, returns home, and gives birth to a daughter so dark, that it shocks even the townsfolk.   This novel has way more complexities than I’ve hinted at here, and it is a wonderful study of race, gender, and identity.