Peachy Reads

A destination wedding with a headline-grabbing couple takes place on a windswept island off the western coast of Ireland. One of the wedding party is murdered, that is alluded to at the start, and the book gradually unspools the events leading up to the deed, while revealing backstories and secrets. This book unfolds like an Agatha Christie novel. There are several suspects who would have had ample motivation to become a murderer, and it is up to the reader to guess who it might be.

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 clever...

The plot has a lot for which to thank Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. This time it’s not Jimmy Stewart, but a woman named Anna, an unreliable narrator á la Girl on the Train, whose pharmaceutical and alcohol-induced stupors cast doubt on her accusation of having witnessed a murder through her window in the house across the way. She is an agoraphobe, an affliction that keeps her prisoner in her house, and we only gradually find out the reason for this. There is a surprise ending and a suspenseful conclusion, which is quite the page-turner. I thought the plot was tightly developed and the connections worked well. There was a movie made starring Amy Adams, which only received middling reviews. Nevertheless, the book is a mystery/thriller that is certainly worth a read.

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.

This thriller is a story within a story. Anna is living quietly in Scotland with her husband and two children, until her he suddenly announces he’s leaving her. Her world crumbles, and exposes the lie she’s been living in her domestic cocoon. She tries to distract herself with a true-crime podcast that has ties to her previous “secret” life. Her investigations lead her to strands of her past existence and develop rather rapidly into an international chase in which her life is terribly in danger. This book had the tempo of a Dan Brown novel, but there were some loose ends, and the motivation of certain characters was difficult to comprehend. In the end it was entertaining, but just as easily forgotten.

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.