Daddy's gone a hunting (2013) by Mary Higgins Clark

In her latest novel Mary Higgins Clark, the beloved, bestselling "Queen of Suspense," exposes a dark secret from a family's past that threatens the lives of two sisters, Kate and Hannah Connelly, when the family-owned furniture firm in Long Island City, founded by their grandfather and famous for its fine reproductions of antiques, explodes into flames in the middle of the night, leveling the buildings to the ground, including the museum where priceless antiques have been on permanent display for years.

The ashes reveal a startling and grisly discovery, and provoke a host of suspicions and questions. Was the explosion deliberately set? What was Kate—tall, gorgeous, blond, a CPA for one of the biggest accounting firms in the country, and sister of a rising fashion designer—doing in the museum when it burst into flames? Why was Gus, a retired and disgruntled craftsman, with her at that time of night? What if someone isn't who he claims to be?

Now Gus is dead, and Kate lies in the hospital badly injured and in a coma, so neither can tell what drew them there, or what the tragedy may have to do with the hunt for a young woman missing for many years, nor can they warn that somebody may be covering his tracks, willing to kill to save himself . . .

Step by step, in a novel of dazzling suspense and excitement, Mary Higgins Clark once again demonstrates the mastery of her craft that has made her books international bestsellers for years. She presents the reader with a perplexing mystery, a puzzling question of identity, and a fascinating cast of characters—one of whom may just be a ruthless killer . . .

Minister without portfolio (20 ) by Michael Winter

Nothing makes me swoon like a good title, so let it be said right off the top: Michael Winter’s fifth novel has a very, very good title. Recognizable but intriguing, it can rattle around the reader’s mind for a long time without giving away all of its secrets. In this case, however, the title quickly becomes too much of a good thing. As an abstract concept, “minister without portfolio” is an apt description of Henry Hayward, an aimless Newfoundlander who wanders off to the war in Afghanistan to get over a bad breakup, witnesses a friend get killed, and then spends the rest of the book trying to make sense of life back home.

Instead, Winter awkwardly puts the phrase in the mouth of more than one character, none of whom pull it off. “Let’s be outlaws,” says Tender, Henry’s soon-to-be deceased childhood friend, early on. “Except for Henry – he’s our minister without portfolio.” Henry asks what that means. Tender’s reply: “You’re not committed to anything but you got a hand in everywhere.” Nobody would say such a thing. It has simply been parachuted in to make a thematic point.

As it happens, the two engines that fuel Henry’s restlessness – his relationship falling apart, and his traumatic stint in Afghanistan – make up only a brief opening segment of the novel. The vast majority of our time is spent back in Newfoundland, where Henry begins a new romance with Tender’s former spouse Martha, which is triply complicated by the fact that Henry may be responsible for his friend getting killed in the first place. The pair also embark on a mission (really, more of a fool’s errand) of figuring out who is the rightful owner of an abandoned house that Henry wants to restore and move into.

There are some vivid scenes. The rigmarole of running a business in small-town Newfoundland is captured with wit and love, as is the patchwork bureaucracy. When Henry asks a bank teller where he might find a justice of the peace, the woman yells over to her coworker, “Is Linda still doing that?” And just as Winter has made use of his real life in past books – the protagonist of his first novel, This All Happened, struggled to piece together notes for a book that would, four years later, become Winter’s own The Big Why – the new novel also pulls from life: in this case, the author’s accidental fall into an industrial garbage incinerator in 2006. Genuine horror overtakes him as the reality of his situation becomes clear. “His lungs felt warm,” Winter writes. “A new shock. He wasn’t going to burn to death: he was cooking.” (He is later rescued, as was Winter himself, by two men who just so happened to be standing nearby.)

But the novel as a whole is unfocused and opaque, in large part due to what seems like an error in perspective. Winter creates a sizeable cast of characters, only to then stick us with by far the least interesting one among them. Henry rarely displays any outward signs of heartache or mourning, and Winter’s staccato prose doesn’t let us get very far inside his head. So if his supposedly traumatic experience overseas doesn’t inform the rest of the book, why couldn’t he instead be given the far more compelling personality of, say, the neighbour who’s lost both of his hands in a pipe-fitting accident – and who is so stubborn and/or stoic that, after spilling a bag of nails in a hardware store, he spends the next half an hour using his hooks to pick them up, one at a time?

A more obvious contender for protagonist is Martha, Tender’s former spouse, who soon reveals herself to be pregnant with Tender’s child. There are so many opportunities to plumb around at this all-too-real intersection of grief and new life. Instead, Winter keeps us on the outside, in the process missing his chance to justify some pretty hard-to-read behaviour. At one point Henry recoils while they’re having sex, saying he felt as though Tender were nearby. “But Tender is in the bed with us,” Martha replies. “We’ve said that. He will always be there. Is that something we can live with?”

If that’s meant to be a demonstration of her inner strength of character, we need to see more. Ditto if it’s meant to show her self-delusion. The more likely scenario, unfortunately, is neither: Winter has Martha say this not to illustrate anything at all about her, but to have something about Henry’s own guilt parroted back at him. The real victim ends up having to comfort the sad-sack male hero. It’s a depressing image, but not in the way Winter intends.

In The Big Why, Winter gave us a similar story about building a home in a place where you may not be wanted – and in the painter Rockwell Kent, he gave us a more dynamic and sympathetic protagonist, to boot. Minister Without Portfolio covers much of the same territory, but much less convincingly.

Michael Hingston is the books columnist for the Edmonton Journal. His first novel, The Dilettantes, will be released by Freehand in September. Thanks for his review.
Special to The Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Aug. 30 2013,

At risk (1988) by Alice Hoffman

With this moving novel, Hoffman has written a story about a family attacked by tragedy, and has given it a larger relevance by confronting one of the most frightening issues of our times. The Farrells are a middle-class family living in a small New England town. Ivan Farrell is an astronomer, wife Polly a photographer, eight-year-old Charlie a budding biologist and 11-year-old Amanda a talented gymnast. Hoffman has few rivals in depicting domestic scenes: the bickering between siblings, the tension between spouses, and withal, the humor and love that holds families together. Suddenly the Farrells are singled out for grief. Amanda, who has been winning gymnastic meets despite a summer-long malaise, tests positive for AIDS, contracted some five years before when she was transfused with contaminated blood after an appendectomy. In unsensationalized detail, Hoffman depicts the effects of her illness. Too stunned, angry and anguished even to turn to each other, Polly and Ivan retreat into separate worlds. Charlie is abandoned by his best friend and shunned by his schoolmates. Amanda, an average adolescent who loves Madonna records, must come to grips with the process of dying. The hysterical reaction of some members of the community is a further blow. Hoffman's sensitive handling of this material is both matter of fact and heartbreaking. Ivan's friendship with a man he meets through the AIDS hotline, Polly's search for comfort with Amanda's pediatrician, Charlie's stoic bewilderment, Amanda's bond with a young woman who is a medium (the only evidence in this novel of Hoffman's characteristic feeling for the supernatural) are all beautifully portrayed.

Thanks to Goodreads

The diaries of Jane Somers (1984) by Doris Lessing

The Diaries of Jane Somers, first published pseudonymously and separately as The Diary of a Good Neighbour and If The Old Could, appear here in one volume for the first time under Doris Lessing's name, together with a new preface by the author. While marking a return to the most realistic subject matter of Doris Lessing's early fiction, they are also a provocative new departure.At the centre of both novels is attractive, intelligent magazine editor Jane Somers, whose wry perception informs and animates every page. Jane was an ambitious journalist concerned with success, clothes and comfort when her life changed. Her husband died, then her mother. Suddenly understanding her real inadequacy, Jane becomes deeply committed to the very old and deprived, making particular friends with one old woman, Maudie, whose life has been all struggle and poverty.
The contrast between these two lives produces the framework for a difficult growth towards self-knowledge. At the end of The Diary of a Good Neighbour the future is hinted at when Jill, a clever hard girl, as Jane once was, moves into her flat and takes over her life, Jane understands young people as little as she did so recently the old.
If the Old Could, Jane falls seriously in love for the first time in her life. By now, she is in her fifties. So is Richard Curtis, who loves her. Both are weighed down with responsibilities which are always preventing them from enjoying each other. But with whom is Jane really in love? Who really is she longing for if not her dead husband, whom she did not value at all when he was alive? This new lover is the old one in disguise, just as bright ambitious Jill is Jane when young. Jane seems surrounded - like the very old - by mirrors, by echoes.Who, then, in this gallery of mirrors is niece Kate, with whom Jane is landed by a process of emotional logic which she understands very well? This all-competent woman cannot begin to cope with the poor helpless Kate: they are opposites, extremes - or so it seems.

Thanks to www.dorislessing.org