A person who reads is never bored, but rather entertains the ideas of the world. Reading is recreational, educational, ethical, inspirational, imaginative and artistic. It aids in the development of the mind and the spirit. The written word is one of our greatest inventions.
THANKS TO THE POST ON SEPT 13, 2012BY CAROLINE TRENT-GURBUZ FROM HER BLOG 'BOOK SHE READ' Since the death of her son, Danny, in a freak accident a year ago, Tina Evans is just starting to make sense of life again. She has moved on from her divorce, and her career as a producer in Vegas is thriving; her new 10-million-dollar show, Magyck!, an extraordinary mix of magic acts, acrobatics and song and dance, is the new “It” show in the sparkly city. What doesn’t make sense in her life, however, is the strange presence in her house, the one that repeatedly writes “Not Dead” on Danny’s play chalkboard.
New Year’s Eve is the perfect time to be in Las Vegas; the glittery lights of the desert city give the holiday that extra dose of hope and shine and extravagance. Tina Evans, a veteran of the Vegas stage, knows that timing is everything, and for her multi-million dollar production, New Year’s Eve is the ideal premiere date.
The days leading up to December 31 are busy and stressful, so much so that Tina is rarely at home and rarely notices the bizarre happenings around her house. The temperature dips, door knobs ice over, the airplanes in her son’s room begin to fly, the radio turns on. Most disturbingly, the message “Not Dead” is scrawled on various surfaces.
Tina’s son, Danny, died a year earlier, and, caught up in the whirlwind of dress rehearsals and last-minute production changes, Tina is too distracted to dwell on her loss anymore. She reconciles – sort of – with her selfish and self-centered ex-husband, and she starts a relationship with widower and lawyer Eliot Stryker. The two mesh in every way, and when Tina begins to piece together the strange messages she believes she’s receiving from her dead son, Eliot is at her side, prepared to help her untangle the increasingly peculiar and dangerous mystery.
The Eyes of Darkness, despite being one of Koontz’s earlier novels, is well-written. The haunting of Tina’s house is effectively spooky, and at first glance, this novel is more of a ghost story than pure science fiction. A word of warning, however: Koontz’s descriptions are so accurate, so eerie, that The Eyes of Darkness is best for the daytime, unless the reader is a fan of horror or psychological thrillers.
The buildup to the story’s climax – the truth behind Danny’s death and the mysterious communications Tina receives from him – is deliciously suspenseful. The chemistry between Tina and her handy love interest, Stryker, powers the plot forward, and the two make a great team, evading seemingly omnipotent “bad guys” and generally being sneaky and stealthy. After they discover Danny, however, and the whos, whats, wheres, whys and hows are explained, the plot fizzles. Still, for a science fiction novel that takes place in Las Vegas, with the main character a former showgirl whose boyfriend is former Army intelligence, The Eyes of Darkness is a good book.
“Police” is Jo Nesbo’s tenth crime novel with inspector Harry Hole.There is a tidy little set piece more than halfway through “Police,’’ Jo Nesbo’s latest Harry Hole thriller. Coming across potential clues in a suspect’s hotel room, Hole’s team engages in a spontaneous brainstorming session. The conversation quickly shifts into overdrive, hurtling forward at a breathtakingly smart, instinct-and-impulse-driven pace with colleagues finishing each others’ sentences and thoughts in a scene that’s pure pleasure to read.After nine previous novels featuring inspector Harry Hole, this pyrotechnically assured style of writing should come as no surprise, but the delight in reading a new Nesbo novel is that he never fails to surprise. This, after all, is a writer who, with his latest police procedural, will ensure that you never look at a certain domestic appliance in quite the same way again.As“Police’’ opens, picking up after the deadly shooting at the end of 2012’s “Phantom,’’ Hole is notably absent — and will remain so without explanation for about half the book (a surprise in itself and a mystery to be unwound). His crime-squad workmates are left to their own devices, triggering a sense of restlessness as well as an underlying determination to embody Hole’s exemplary lead.
Consulting psychologist Stale Aune, who’s demoted himself to therapist, spends much of his clients’ sessions mentally kicking a wall and recalling what he relished about his work as an on-call profiler for the police: “Did he miss profiling sick souls who killed people with such gruesome acts of brutality that he was deprived of sleep at night? . . . Did he miss Hole turning him into the inspector’s image, a starved, exhausted, monomaniacal hunter? Snapping at everyone who disturbed his work on the one thing he thought had any significance, slowly but surely alienating colleagues, family and friends? . . . He missed the importance of it.”
Hole’s other associates are equally unmoored: Gunnar Hagen, head of the squad, currently bumping heads in a most frustrating manner with new police chief Mikael Bellman; special detective Katrine Bratt, who plays, literally, by the numbers and who watches “Breaking Bad,’’ “Singin’ in the Rain,’’ “Sunset Boulevard,’’ and “Toy Story 3’’ in her downtime; Beate Lonn, the forensic expert who is blessed — and cursed — with a superhuman fusiform gyrus, guaranteeing her instant facial recognition, even if someone’s altered their looks with plastic surgery; and the red-haired and eagle-eyed forensics officer Bjorn Holm
Whether describing a biker’s technique and lactic-acid sensation, the overpowering atmosphere of a drug den, the auditory reactions of a detective who thinks he may have heard a little something, the trainee police officer you really want to avoid, or the ways in which two childhood friends still dance around each other professionally and personally in adulthood, Nesbo’s got mesmerizing descriptive powers, and longtime translator Don Bartlett ensures that the images vibrate energetically on the English-language page. (I relished one character’s unfettered delight, captured with a “smile that just kept spreading across his face like a freshly cracked egg in the pan” and, in a completely different scene, the final moments of a petty, lowlife criminal: “Then — like the curtain falling after a pathetic, tormented performance lasting forty-two years — a great darkness descended.”)
In a story that encompasses political corruption, drugs, prison politics, and questionable police action as well as downright sociopathic behavior, Nesbo’s trademark intensity never flags throughout the roller-coaster waves of this highly enjoyable ride.
Having read my way from novel A is for Alibi to V is for Vengeance, I have journeyed from suspect to crime scene with Kinsey. Her sexy, older landlord is a companion she realizes his worth his weight in gold, providing her with a safe sanctuary fashioned like a ship. She can sail away when the going gets rough. Anxious to read W is for Wasted. Thanks to Georgette Spelvin for the following:
"For me, reading a Sue Grafton alphabet series book is like slipping on a pair of comfortable old slippers. I live on the central California coast where the series is set (fictional Santa Teresa and ritzy Montebello are really Santa Barbara and pricey Montecito), and Grafton is meticulous when describing the area's lifestyles, geography, and history. I've known protagonist Kinsey Millhone, now in her late 30s, sinceA Is for Alibi was published in 1982. Obviously, Kinsey isn't aging as fast as I am.
Raised by a strict maiden aunt after her parents died in a car accident when she was five, Kinsey likes the stability of rules, although she often breaks them. She can be a smartass and lies easily. After a few years on the police force, she's now a private eye who's been married and divorced twice. Kinsey is a cheapskate who cuts her own hair with a fingernail scissors and lives in scuffed boots and jeans unless something more formal is required; then, she drags out that one black dress hanging in her closet. After a bomb destroyed her old place, home is now a compact apartment fitted out like a ship's cabin, courtesy of her landlord, neighbor, and good friend, 88-year-old Henry Pitts. Henry, his older brother William, and William's Hungarian wife, Rosie, who runs her own restaurant (currently closed for fumigation), are like family to Kinsey. A few years ago, Kinsey was flabbergasted to learn her mother's relatives live in nearby Lompoc. Apparently, her wealthy grandmother was estranged from Kinsey's mother when she married Kinsey's dad; Kinsey is as eager to establish a close relationship with her mother's family as she is to walk across a minefield. The joys and heartaches unique to family ties, the ways we damage ourselves by deceiving others, miscarriage of justice, the devastation of addiction, searching for meaning in a materialistic society, and contrasts between haves and have-nots are familiar themes in Grafton's series. In W Is for Wasted(September 2013, Putnam), these themes run through two narratives that ultimately connect two men, both dead at the book's beginning. Kinsey knew one of them: unscrupulous private detective Pete Wolinsky, shot late at night near the bird sanctuary.
Kinsey doesn't recognize the other man when a coroner's investigator asks her to view a corpse with no ID at the morgue. He was a homeless man found dead on a Santa Teresa beach. Such are the oddities of life, that a scrap of paper bearing the words "Millhone Investigations" found in a dead man's pocket makes Kinsey's life intersect with that of a morgue's John Doe. How the Kinsey who loves lying and snooping through a suspect's dresser drawers always feels compelled to do the right thing has always interested me. Somehow, she feels honor bound to find out who he is and why he needed a private investigator. Kinsey begins by tracking down his homeless companions, Pearl, Felix, and Dandy. The character portraits of these Central Coast homeless are one of this book's strengths. And so is the look at Kinsey as she follows clues to a will, an old wrong, and new family connections before discovering the nature of the ties that bind her John Doe to private eye Pete Wolinsky.
It's sleuth work 1988 style, and it's comforting to see Kinsey still using index cards, a Smith-Corona typewriter, crisscross telephone directories (some decades-old telephone directories even include occupation and spouse's name for each listed address and phone number!), face-to-face interviews, pay phones, and folded paper maps. Narrator Kinsey is still witty and engaging, although somewhat more contemplative and subdued than usual. Dialogue, especially between squabbling family members, is terrific and sounds like something I'd actually overhear. There's a reunion atmosphere as familiar series names such as cops Jonah Robb and Con Dolan, attorney Lonnie Kingman, and private eye Morley Shine pop up. Kinsey's old beaus Cheney Phillips (does he ever drive anything but this year's red Mercedes?) and Robert Deitz make an appearance, and a Japanese bobtail joins the cast of characters. It's enjoyable stuff, although some of the connections between people stretch coincidence, and plot lines bringing old characters in feel manufactured, even if welcome. And, at 484 pages, it reminded me a bit of the old Hillary Waugh police procedural classic, 30 Manhattan East: A Case for Homicide North, in which the reader watches Det. Lt. Frank Sessions open the drawer of his desk, take out a pencil, sharpen it, chew the eraser, lean back in his chair.... In other words, there is much extraneous detail.
In any case, Grafton's alphabet books are popular for good reason: Kinsey is darned likable. I had fun seeing her and the regulars again and thinking about all the ways in which "W" is for wasted: wasted lives, wasted hopes, people who are "wasted" on drugs or killed. I'll be sorry when the alphabet ends."
“This book—about a 35-year-old woman who falls for the 15-year-old son of her best friend—changed the way I read newsreports about ‘pedophiles’ who have scandalous affairs with the underage. This is a headlong heartbreaker, tender but never schlocky. It deepened my sympathy for many people under the spotlight whose real stories are so much richer and more morally nuanced than the headlines suggest." Thanks to RealSimple magazine.
Ya gotta love Rebus! Review by Alison Flood, 'The Observer', Nov 16, 2013
Ian Rankinhas found a way to bring his long-running detective John Rebus out of retirement, but the former detective inspector has been forced to take a demotion to return to the force, and it's galling him. "Same rank as 1987?" a witness asks the newly minted detective sergeant, maliciously. "The question sliced into Rebus like a scalpel.
Saints of the Shadow Bible, his 20th outing, sees Rebus reporting to his former protege, Siobhan Clarke, as the pair investigate a suspicious car crash. He's also sparring with Malcolm Fox from the police complaints department over an old murder. Thirty years ago, Billy Saunders was tried for beating a man to death. The case collapsed because of the actions of Rebus's former colleagues – Saunders was a snitch, and Fox believes that despite his guilt, Summerhall CID decided he was more use on the street than in prison.
Now, following changes to the double jeopardy law, Scotland's solicitor general wants the case reopened, and the former Summerhall police officers – a close-knit gang who called themselves the Saints, and who drew a young Rebus into their number – are up for investigation.
Without excusing – or, quite, implicating – Rebus, Rankin shows just how dirty the police force was at Summerhall, how results were all that mattered, not methods. "You ever see that programme Life on Mars? It felt like a documentary," says Rebus, who in any case would need "a space the size of Ikea" to store all his own skeletons, it is pointed out sourly. His former boss, Stefan Gilmour, took the fall for the contaminated evidence and the dodgy interviews that resulted in Saunders walking free; Gilmour is now a millionaire and a big player for the "no" campaign, against Scottish independence. He and the Saints don't take kindly to being questioned, and expect Rebus to smooth the issue over for them. Taken into Fox's confidence, Rebus isn't sure which side to play for, especially when – just like 30 years ago – key evidence starts to disappear.
Rebus, says Clarke, ruefully, to Fox, is "like one of those chess wizards, the ones who play a dozen boards at the same time". So, it feels sometimes, is Rankin, as he weaves his dual plots into an ever more tangled maze, and then smoothly, oh so satisfactorily, irons them out again. Saints of the Shadow Bible is a clever, subtle read, but most of all, it's a genuine pleasure to see Rebus back in the CID. ("I'm from the 80s… I'm not the newfangled touchy feely model," he tells a suspect, irresistibly. "Now get out of my fucking car!") It's obvious Rankin feels the same way, relishing putting his old companion up against Fox and seeing the relationship develop, having a whale of a time finding out how he'll cope with demotion, investigation, authority and – of course – crime.
"Form-filling and protocols and budget meetings were not Rebus's thing – never had been and never would be. His knowledge of the internet was rudimentary and his people skills were woeful… Because he was a breed of cop that wasn't supposed to exist any more, a rare and endangered species." We know whose side Rankin is on, and we're right there behind him. A promotion for DS Rebus, please.
At first glance I thought that this book would be fluff, but it was not. I could hardly read for my tears as the novel concluded. Last year my younger sister died from cancer and I know what it is like to watch someone you love painfully wither away.
Thanks to the author for the following:
The True Story This Fiction Writer Has To Tell Today
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Without fail, the first question I am asked at any author event is: Are your books based on your real life? Over the years I have come to realize that no matter how satisfying fiction is, it becomes that much better when it actually happened. My answer, no doubt, disappoints: No, I do not use people or events from my real life. The occasional detail, yes: how could I not? But all of my novels are crafted by my imagination.
This year, however: a plot twist.
On June 10, my novel The Matchmaker came out. In this novel (SPOILER ALERT), one of my main characters battles cancer. It was Oscar Wilde who said, "Life imitates art much more often than art imitates life." A month before the publication date ofThe Matchmaker , I discovered that I am also entering this battle. I have been diagnosed with breast cancer.
I found the lump myself, while on my annual writing retreat to St. John. The lump was small and very hard, like a pebble embedded just under my skin. St. John doesn't have a hospital, and text consultation with a dear friend who is a nurse practitioner led me to believe it was probably a calcified milk duct or a cyst. I would wait and get it checked out when I got home.
A few weeks later found me at my PCP's office at Nantucket Cottage Hospital, where the physician's assistant felt the lump and agreed I should see the breast specialist. But it was Nantucket, and the breast specialist only came on Tuesdays, and she was booked for weeks. Then it was Easter break and I was taking my three children to San Diego. Then I was going home to see my family in Philadelphia for a week. My appointment to see the breast specialist was pushed back to early May.
Although the nurses could feel the lump, it did not show up on the mammogram. An ultrasound was performed, where the doctor said, "Well, it's not a cyst," meaning it was not filled with water. It would have to be biopsied.
I cried.
The biopsy took place the following Tuesday and was performed by a doctor who had read all of my books, which I believed was a good omen. She assured me that 80 percent of all biopsies turned up benign. I was certain this would be the case with me. I had no family history, I had breastfed my three children for a year apiece without incident, I was healthy and ran 7-8 miles a day, I ate a lot of blueberries. During the biopsy, a "marker" was set into my breast, which was described to me as looking like the tip of a pen. I thought that was perfect: I was a writer with a pen tip embedded in my breast. I had a second mammogram following the biopsy, but even with the marker in place, the lump didn't show up on the film.
I waited eight days for the results. When the phone call came, I was running. The doctor asked if it was a good time to talk.
I said, Sure.
She said, Cancer.
I cried.
Two days later, I was at Mass General, meeting my surgeon, whom I immediately thought of as Elin Hilderbrand in a White Coat. She was my age, blond, the mother of four, and she wore Manolos. She described the lumpectomy she would perform: outpatient surgery, followed by 4-6 weeks of radiation. It was Userfriendly cancer. It was so easily dealt with I almost felt embarrassed.
But before I left the hospital, I had to have an MRI to make sure there was nothing else hiding. I was stoic in the loud, claustrophobic hour in the tube. I thought, Of course there's nothing else... I've already had two mammograms!
The Elin Hilderbrand-as-Surgeon called me the next day. The MRI had turned up three additional tumors in the right breast and one in the left.
I cried.
Tomorrow, three days after the publication of my book, I will undergo a double mastectomy.
I have never been a particularly private person, probably because I live on an island that is 4 miles by 13, and my house has large windows that are three feet off the street, and everyone on Nantucket has always known my business, sometimes even before I have. I allow, indeed encourage, photos at my events. I tell people the designers of my clothes and of my shoes (duh, Manolo.) But it was a delicate and much-deliberated decision to disclose that I am sick. I have, after all, been dubbed "the Queen of the Summer Novel." Nobody wants to hear that the Queen has cancer. Readers want the Queen where she belongs -- in her beach chair scribbling away her next best seller as the gentle ocean waves lap at her feet.
I make a living telling stories, and yet my desire to tell the truth here is so overwhelming that it cannot be denied. Just like so many of my beautiful readers, I am facing a serious health crisis. I am anxious, I am scared, I have started crying every time my eldest son throws a strike from the pitcher's mound because life has changed in an instant and I fear, oh how I fear, I won't be around to see him pitch next year. My friends say, You will fight, we are here, you will beat this. And yet as anyone who has been diagnosed with cancer knows, we are all alone when it comes to our bodies. No one can alleviate the burden. It is solitary confinement.
I cannot help but draw parallels with the protagonist of The Matchmaker, Dabney Kimball Beech. I spent many months trying to put myself in Dabney's penny loafers, asking myself: What would it feel like to find out you had cancer? How would you react? Would you do things differently? Would you do things the same? I tell my audiences that I don't write from real life, and yet I had Dabney handle her situation the way I thought I would have. She is brave, she prays, she sets her affairs in order, she smiles, she cherishes the days she has left, and she is most worried for the people she is leaving behind.
I told myself that if I could write a character like Dabney, then I could be like Dabney. I would accept the fact that my body and its current failings were my own, and I would fight and I would smile and I would do everything in my power to live to write thirteen more novels and sit on my throne and let the ocean lap at my feet. I would see more strikes thrown.
My children, raised in the age of Twitter and Instagram, have created the hashtag #mamastrong when talking to their friends about my condition -- so at least I have managed to fool them. But having cancer has left me stranded in a landscape of confusing emotion. My mind goes everywhere, despite my best efforts to keep it positive. My reactions to my diagnosis have not been charming or admirable. I love my life; I don't want to die. I want to wake up and hear the birds and get my coffee. I want to drive my children to the bus stop. When I'm done enumerating the million reasons I want to live, I want to know why I got cancer. I lie awake in the middle of the night and think: What caused it? Chapstick? Advil? Veuve Clicquot? Airport security? The extra sides of mayonnaise?
I have come to grips, but only very recently, with the fact that I am not a fictional character whose emotions I can control. My story will have an ending, but it will not be me who writes it. I pray for the ending where I walk out of the hospital cancer-free, wearing a t-shirt over my new, surgically perfect breasts that reads #mamastrong. And it's the truth.
John Grisham’s “Sycamore Row” revisits Clanton, Miss., the site of his first and still most famous book, “A Time to Kill.” Just three years have passed since young Jake Brigance crusaded his way through Clanton’s most racially inflammatory murder trial. It is 1988, and Jake now has a small practice, a big reputation and a housing problem created when Ku Klux Klan members torched his lovingly restored Victorian home.
Alessandra Montalto/The New York Times
John Grisham
Bob Krasner
John Grisham
Mr. Grisham does not seem to have revisited his most popular character for the usual writerly reason: desperation. The unstoppable Energizer Bunny of legal fiction, Mr. Grisham does not need to cannibalize old hits to create new ones. Instead, “Sycamore Row” sets Jake in the midst of what is now a historical novel, resurrecting the Clanton of 25 years ago. That gives the author a new perspective on the town’s racial tensions and a chance to resurrect Jake, who by now feels like an old friend. All it takes is one big twist of fate, and Jake is back on center stage.
The twist is the suicide of a wealthy white man named Henry Seth Hubbard. He had a will that made beneficiaries of his two grown children, Ramona and Herschel. But on the last day of his life, Hubbard supposedly changed his mind. An envelope is delivered to Jake’s office containing a final, handwritten will that reverses the first one. Hubbard’s primary beneficiary is now Lettie Lang, his housekeeper, who is black and spent a lot of time alone with him. And Hubbard anticipates his family’s outrage at this move. “These are not nice people and they will fight, so get ready,” he warns. “Fight them, Mr. Brigance, to the bitter end.”
The legal issues raised by two differing wills, and the smell of money, invite a large crew of eager lawyers into the fight. Mr. Grisham’s gift for manipulating and explicating legal battles makes this multifaceted one satisfyingly cagey. But a curious phenomenon makes it too easy to be distracted from a Grisham novel in its early stages, before the fight really gets rolling. It’s not the fault of Mr. Grisham’s clean and clear prose. It’s because he is accurately capturing all the tedium, repetition, red tape and soporific rhetoric with which lawyers contend. If they must plod through discovery and suffer death by deposition, readers do too.
Mr. Grisham knows what lawyers have been taught to do. More important, he also knows how they actually behave. Although “Sycamore Row” is a bit crude at first, treating Lettie as a long-suffering saint and the Hubbards as racists who neither know or care when they insult her, it snaps into shape as soon as Clantonites realize how high the stakes are in this fight. Lettie’s potential inheritance would make a black maid the richest woman in Mr. Grisham’s Ford County. And the Ford County of 1988 is not about to let that happen.
Mr. Grisham lets the Hubbards stay happily oblivious for a while, as Jake, chosen by Hubbard as his executor, quietly tracks down the dead man’s assets. Yes, this is a book about probate and appraisals and other nonscintillating processes that a will sets in motion. But it is also about the feeding frenzy that initially surrounds the Hubbards, who have no idea a second will exists. The jolt of that potentially more valid will sends shysters heading for Lettie, who is almost too shocked to understand her situation. Mr. Grisham cleverly positions Jake in the middle, as a lawyer well liked by the judge in the case, Reuben Attlee. Judge Attlee and other holdovers from “A Time to Kill” become strong, calculating characters in this book, too.
“Everything is about race in Mississippi,” Jake is told by Lucien Wilbanks, a disbarred lawyer and drunk who won’t stay out of the case — or out of Jake’s office, since Lucien is the landlord. Regardless of whether Lucien has that right, everything in “Sycamore Row” is about racial nuances and how they play. Lettie becomes shark bait for the high-profile black lawyer Booker Sistrunk, “an infamous bomb thrower” with an imposingly flashy style. He drives a Rolls-Royce, grandstands in the courtroom and seems guaranteed to alienate any white jurors, in the case where the jury will be mostly white. Jury selection is one more legal process that is described here in all of its authentically monotonous yet, from the lawyers’ standpoints, make-or-break detail. Mr. Grisham prefers grinding reality to a hyped-up sense of excitement.
Jake is blindsided with realizations that his actions can cause trouble, too. Jake makes one well-intentioned but bad mistake by helping Lettie’s husband, who proves so disreputable and dangerous that Jake can be tainted by even a distant connection. He is warned not to find too nice a place for his family to live; any suggestion that Jake is being well paid for his efforts could also taint him. And he fails to match the opposing lawyers’ research capabilities — which means he can be gobsmacked in the courtroom by a witness who was unknown to him beforehand. Mr. Grisham details the dirty tricks, data dumping and witness dumping, routinely used by a large legal team to flummox the other side.
As “Sycamore Row” finally reaches its trial phase, the author hits his full stride. He knows the courtroom inside out, and he helpfully describes each little step of these proceedings. Even if sharp-eyed readers already know how the book’s surprises may arise — has there ever been a long-lost relative who did not show up in a work of legal fiction? — they will still miss the final whammy that Mr. Grisham has in store. Hubbard hanged himself from a Sycamore tree, but that is not why this book is called “Sycamore Row.”
“We haven’t had this much excitement since the Hailey trial,” says Dell, the local waitress, speaking of the sparks that flew in Mr. Grisham’s 1989 debut. She’s right. And this may not be the end of it. Mr. Grisham leaves Jake ready and waiting to be seen again.
A version of this review appears in print on October 31, 2013, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: More Vexing Challenges For That Mississippi Lawyer.
