The sketeton road (2014) by Val McDermid

Before reading this novel, a primer on the Yugoslavian War (1991-2001) may be necessary. The author heavily relies on the events of this turbulent time as a backdrop for  murder. A building inspector finds a skeleton in the turret of a Victorian Gothic building.  A bullet had pieced the skull. Cold Case detective Karen Pirie used forensic science to determine the identity of the man.  He was a Croatian general who left the Balkans to marry Maggie Blake, an Oxford professor of anthropology who met him while on studies in Serbia.

Research in the field and the was crimes tribunal reveals that he had committed the atrocity of killing over 40 people in retaliation for the deaths of his wife an sons. A mutual friend of Maggie and the general discovered the truth. Maggie had to find the truth, along with Detective Pririe, who experienced her own loss due to male aggression.

The murder of Harriet Krohn (2004 Eng trans 2014) by Karin Fossum

The narrative is told by the murderer, Charlo Trop, and it is from his letters and remembrances that the reader sees the self-absorption and hopelessness of Charlo's character.  He is a compulsive gambler whose wife kept it all together, but with her death his behaviour deteriorates.  Stealing from his job as a car salesman gets him fired.  Then he borrows lots of money from friends, whom he does not repay.  His 17 year old daughter does not trust him and is beginning to carve out her own life. He determines to rob a woman he knows from a coffee shop.  The burglary goes band and in his inner conflict results in serious violence which kills her.  With her money he tries to rehabilitate himself, paying off his debts and buying his daughter a horse.  She begins to thaw and develop a new relationship with her father, but the long arm of the law is working overtime.  Inspector Karl Sojer brings him in for questioning several times before an arrest is made. The myriad of lies Charlo tells seals his fate.

Outrage (2008) by Arnaldur Indridason

Translated from the Swedish 2011

The murder victim rapes using a date-rape drug on his unsuspecting 'hook-ups'.  He, however, his found murdered (throat slit) in his home.  The woman he raped is accused and then her father is also help responsible, yet both are innocent, in spite of intense police interrogation. Yet this murder is linked to other crimes of rape and missing persons.  let's not omit two suicides also connected to the murdered man.  Connections to the man's rural home are made. This village is a place where secrets are held for generations.  All the while, the police officer must reconcile her police work with her family responsibilities. Not an easy task.

River road (2014) by Jayne Ann Krentz

Thirteen years after a wild high school party, Lucy returns to her home in Summer River (can you believe this name?) to dispose of her aunt's estate.  She finds a body buried under fireplace tiles which leads to a murder investigation. A hedge fund and winery are also involved, as are several sketchy characters who had attended the party years ago. Mason, an ex-cop, who now has a surveillance business helps Lucy with the investigation.  The chemistry between him and Lucy beomes obvious to one another as they try to solve the mystery.  Watch out for Becky, the wine maker.

Mediocre but Krentz writes well enough to allow the reader to pass the time pleasantly.

Moody bitches (2015) by Dr. Julie Holland

Psychiatrist Julie Holland examines the medical and social treatment of women and their health.  She examines prescribed drugs to treat many issues, such as diet, sleep, PMS, menopause. She also discuses sexual relationships and society's reaction to women and sex.  There is also examination of love, relationships, hormones, and diet.

I actually bought this book rather than wait in line at the library.

Lifetime (2007) by Liza Marklund

Translated from the Swedish 2013

A newspaper reporter's house burns down the same evening her husband leaves for another woman.  She and her two children get out, but she must start over. Her detective skills enable her to solve the case of a beloved police officer, who has been shot dead.  His wife is accused and her cop girl friends hold fast to their belief in the wife's quilt.  Curiously the 4 yar old son is missing and the wife also accused with his disappearance.  A peculiar cast of characters are presented and the conclusion is awkward.  I enjoyed this one.

Reichs, Kathy; Boyd, Patti; Grisham, John; Fossum, Karin

In the darkness by Karin Fossum (1995) (2012 Translated from Swedish to English)

The litigators by John Grisham

Wonderful life by Patti Boyd - ebook

Bones never lie by Kathy Reichs (2014)

Black skies (2009) by Indridason, Arnaldur Eng trans 2012

Slow, slow, slow.

A swingers' group become connected to a murder through four young bankers involved in a schme to launder money. Detective Sigurdur Oli (who hates being called 'Siggi') has his relationship with his girlfriend fail while trying to solve the murder of a woman who participated in the club.  Sigurdur discovers that a personal friend and sister-in-law have an involvement with the swingers.  Lots of side stories. glacier trips, and issues surrounding child pornography, which come to light with a young street man who wants to talk.

Hoffman, Cohen, Fielding, Sjowell, Lowry, Lam, Koskoff

The museum of extraordinary things  by Alice Hoffman

The break-in  by  Tish Cohen

Puppet  by Joy Fielding

Blue diary  by Alice Hofman

Roseanna  by Maj Sjowell

Gathering blue   by Lois Lowry

The Headmaster's wager  by Vincent Lam

Art deco of th Palm Beaches  by Sharon Koskoff

Fortune's daughter (1985) by Alice Hoffman

TBA

Bones never lie )1914) by Kathy Reichs

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A girl on a train (2013) by Paula Hawkins

 

Book review from the Globe and Mail

by

MARK MEDLEY

The Globe and Mail

Published Friday, Feb. 06 2015, 2:49 PM EST
Last updated Friday, Feb. 06 2015, 4:22 PM EST
Photo copied from Goodreads

Before it became the bestselling novel in Canada – a publishing juggernaut that has burned through seven printings in fewer weeks than that – The Girl on the Train was an unread e-mail waiting in Kristin Cochrane’s inbox. It was July, 2013, and the e-mail was from the publisher at Transworld, Britain’s largest fiction publisher. They had just acquired world English-language rights to a book they thought Cochrane, Random House of Canada’s president and publisher, might be interested in, though calling it a “book” is generous: At the time, The Girl on the Train consisted of roughly 45,000 words and an outline detailing the rest of the novel. Cochrane shared the submission with several colleagues and, by the end of the month, had signed Paula Hawkins, a financial-journalist-turned-author who had never published a novel under her own name, to a two-book deal.

 “The Brits use this expression that I love: It ticks so many boxes,” says Cochrane of the moment she read the finished manuscript last summer. “What she pulled off was so much beyond the elevator pitch of the book, and that’s why we’re seeing such quick word of mouth, such strong success out of the gate.”

That might be an understatement. Despite going on sale Jan. 6, there are already more than 135,000 copies of The Girl on the Train in print in Canada, and the novel has topped the fiction bestseller list in this newspaper for the past four weeks. (This doesn’t include e-book sales of more than 10,000 copies.) It is only February, but the novel – a riveting study of voyeurism and a lesson on why appearances are often deceiving, told by a trio of unreliable narrators – might just end up being the blockbuster of 2015. The book’s reception, says Cochrane, is “unlike anything we’ve seen in a long time.” Even Stephen King has done his part, recently tweeting that the novel “[k]ept me up most of the night” – the accolade that seems to have impressed Hawkins the most.

“I was taking pictures of the screen and sending it to everyone I know,” says Hawkins, who was in Toronto on Super Bowl Sunday as part of a two-week North American tour. (The novel is doing brisk business in the United States as well, with a reported 500,000 copies in print and film rights already snapped up.)

All this for a novel Hawkins, 42, describes as “the last roll of the dice.”

She was at a crossroads. A career journalist who turned to fiction at the suggestion of her literary agent (she’d also published a financial guide for women, The Money Goddess, in 2006), the Zimbabwe-born, London-based Hawkins wrote four works of commercial women’s fiction between 2009 and 2013 under the pen name Amy Silver: Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista, All I Want for Christmas, One Minute to Midnight and The Reunion.

“Three of those books had done fine,” she says. “The last one just sank without a trace.”

So she began a new novel, this one a thriller. It was centred on a woman “rendered unreliable by her problems with drink,” a character who’d been floating around in her brain for several years. (Hawkins started – and abandoned – several thrillers while in her 20s and 30s: “Those are all sitting on a hard drive somewhere,” she says. “I should go back and look at them.”) It is uncommon for agents to submit a partial manuscript to a publisher unless the author has a proven track record, but Hawkins was rather impatient. “It wasn’t a perfect way to do this,” she says. “To be perfectly frank with you, I was broke and I couldn’t afford to wait until I finished the book to get a deal. I needed some sort of income, and my agent thought the first half was very strong.”

Another understatement. The novel’s opening chapters barrel forward like an express train. A Rashomon-like narrative, it tells the story of Rachel, a thirtysomething alcoholic who wishes she was living a life other than her own. Each day she commutes from the suburbs into London, and each day her train stops at a crossing, where, for a brief moment – a minute, maybe two – she can see into the backyard of a house belonging to a young couple she’s nicknamed Jess and Jason, who seemingly possess everything missing from her own life. One morning, when the train stops, Rachel spots “Jess” embracing a different man. The next day, Jess disappears.

“The premise grabbed me instantly, and Rachel’s voice pulled me in from line one,” says Sarah Adams, Transworld’s publishing director and Hawkins’s editor, in an e-mail. “The concept is so tangible – this idea that any one of us could glance out of the window and see something we shouldn’t have seen. That a simple, split-second decision could send our perfectly normal life spiralling out of control. Or, to switch perspective, the idea that the person sitting opposite us on our commute is not at all what she seems. …”

Indeed, the woman Rachel obsesses over, whose name is actually Megan, has deep-seated issues of her own, which come out in flashbacks that chronicle the year before she goes missing. (The third narrator is Anna, who is married to Rachel’s ex-husband and – suspect alert! – lives down the street from Megan.)

“The Girl on the Train is intense, and it’s in an Internet sense ‘shareable,’” says Bahram Olfati, senior vice-president of print at Indigo Books and Music. “By that I mean, once you read it you want your friends to read it too so you can talk about it. Once a book becomes viral like that, there’s no slowing it down.” (The Girl on the Train was an Indigo “spotlight” pick in January, while earlier this week the chain’s CEO, Heather Reisman, announced it would be a February “Heather’s Pick,” a decision certain to drive sales even higher.)

The novel has also likely been helped by the incessant comparisons with Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn’s 2012 thriller which helped spark a resurgence in the genre sometimes called “domestic noir.” While Hawkins is “immensely flattered” by the comparison, she says “it also feels uncomfortable, to some degree.

“It would be nice were it able to be judged on its own merits,” she says. “I think a lot of people have tired of hearing ‘What’s the next Gone Girl?’ Maybe we can move on from Gone Girl.”

The irony is, if the novel continues to sell the way it has, in a year or two publishers will be marketing new novels as the next The Girl on the Train.

“It’s a book that delivers,” says Cochrane. “It’s a book that people want to talk about. I think the word of mouth is just going to get more significant. We are going to be looking at every possible way to keep this going.”

Gray Mountain (2014) by John Grisham

 



 

The year is 2008 and Samantha Kofer’s career at a huge Wall Street law firm is on the fast track—until the recession hits and she gets downsized, furloughed, escorted out of the building. Samantha, though, is one of the “lucky” associates. She’s offered an opportunity to work at a legal aid clinic for one year without pay, after which there would be a slim chance that she’d get her old job back.

In a matter of days Samantha moves from Manhattan to Brady, Virginia, population 2,200, in the heart of Appalachia, a part of the world she has only read about. Mattie Wyatt, lifelong Brady resident and head of the town’s legal aid clinic, is there to teach her how to “help real people with real problems.” For the first time in her career, Samantha prepares a lawsuit, sees the inside of an actual courtroom, gets scolded by a judge, and receives threats from locals who aren’t so thrilled to have a big-city lawyer in town. And she learns that Brady, like most small towns, harbors some big secrets.

 

 

Thanks to Goodreaads for photo and summary.

While we were watching Downton Abbey (2013) by Wendy Wax

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 When the concierge of The Alexander, a historic Atlanta apartment building, invites his fellow residents to join him for weekly screenings of Downton Abbey, four very different people find themselves connecting with the addictive drama, and—even more unexpectedly—with each other…
Samantha Davis married young and for the wrong reason: the security of old Atlanta money—for herself and for her orphaned brother and sister. She never expected her marriage to be complicated by love and compromised by a shattering family betrayal.
Claire Walker is now an empty nester and struggling author who left her home in the suburbs for the old world charm of The Alexander, and for a new and productive life. But she soon wonders if clinging to old dreams can be more destructive than having no dreams at all.
And then there’s Brooke MacKenzie, a woman in constant battle with her faithless ex-husband. She’s just starting to realize that it’s time to take a deep breath and come to terms with the fact that her life is not the fairy tale she thought it would be.
For Samantha, Claire, Brooke—and Edward, who arranges the weekly gatherings—it will be a season of surprises as they forge a bond that will sustain them through some of life’s hardest moments—all of it reflected in the unfolding drama, comedy, and convergent lives of Downton Abbey.


Thanks to Amazon.com for above summary.

 

Until thy wrath be past (2011) by Asa Larsson

As spring arrives in the far north of Sweden, a young woman's body surfaces through the breaking ice of the River Thorne. At the same time, visions of a shadowy figure haunt the dreams of Rebecka Martinsson, a prosecutor in nearby Karuna. Could the body belong to the ghost in her dreams? And where is the dead girl's boyfriend?

Joining forces once again with Police Inspector Anna-Maria Mella, Rebecka finds herself drawn into an investigation that stirs up long-dormant rumors of a German supply plane that went missing in 1943--and of Nazi collaborators in the town, where shame and secrecy shroud the locals' memories of the war.

And on the windswept shore of a frozen lake lurks a murderer who will kill again to keep the past buried forever beneath half a century's silent ice and snow.

The black path (2006) by Asa Larsson

Thank you Goodreads for this summary and book jacket picture.



T

A grisly torture-murder, a haunting northern Sweden backdrop, and a dark drama of twisted sexuality collide memorably in Åsa Larsson’s masterpiece of suspense—a tale of menace, hope, longing, and darkness beyond imagining.

The dead woman was found on a frozen lake, her body riddled with evidence of torture. Instantly, Inspector Anna-Maria Mella knows she needs help. Because the dead woman—found in workout clothes with lacy underwear beneath them—was a key player in a mining company whose tentacles reach across the globe. Anna-Maria needs a lawyer to help explain some things—and she knows one of the best.

Attorney Rebecka Martinsson is desperate to get back to work, to feel alive again after a case that almost destroyed her. Soon Rebecka is prying into the affairs of the dead woman’s boss, the founder of Kallis Mining, whose relationship with his star employee was both complex and ominous. But what Rebecka and Anna-Maria are about to uncover—a tangled drama of secrets, perversion, and criminality—will lay bare a tale as shocking as it is sad…about a man’s obsession, a woman’s lonely death, and a killer’s cold, cold heart.   

The Dressmaker of Khair Khana (2011) by Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

 

 

The life Kamila Sidiqi had known changed overnight when the Taliban seized control of the city of Kabul. After receiving a teaching degree during the civil war—a rare achievement for any Afghan woman—Kamila was subsequently banned from school and confined to her home. When her father and brother were forced to flee the city, Kamila became the sole breadwinner for her five siblings. Armed only with grit and determination, she picked up a needle and thread and created a thriving business of her own.

The Dressmaker of Khair Khana tells the incredible true story of this unlikely entrepreneur who mobilized her community under the Taliban. Former ABC News reporter Gayle Tzemach Lemmon spent years on the ground reporting Kamila's story, and the result is an unusually intimate and unsanitized look at the daily lives of women in Afghanistan. These women are not victims; they are the glue that holds families together; they are the backbone and the heart of their nation.

Afghanistan's future remains uncertain as debates over withdrawal timelines dominate the news. The Dressmaker of Khair Khana moves beyond the headlines to transport you to an Afghanistan you have never seen before. This is a story of war, but it is also a story of sisterhood and resilience in the face of despair. Kamila Sidiqi's journey will inspire you, but it will also change the way you think about one of the most important political and humanitarian issues of our time.      

 

Thanks to Goodreads for this summary.  Found the writing to be very slow, somewhat tedious, yet it did give a good account of the restrictions under which women lived.



The fatal gift of beauty (2011) by Nina Burleigh

 

 

Thanks to Goodreads for this synopsis

 

 The sexually violent murder of twenty-one-year-old British student Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy, on the night of November 1, 2007, became an international sensation when one of Kercher’s housemates, twenty-year-old Seattle native Amanda Knox, as well as her Italian boyfriend and a troubled local man Knox said she “vaguely” knew, was arrested and charged with the murder. The Fatal Gift of Beauty is award-winning author and journalist Nina Burleigh’s mesmerizing literary investigation of the murder, the controversial prosecution, the conviction and twenty-six-year sentence of Knox, the machinations of Italian justice, and the underground depravity and clash of cultures in one of central -Italy’s most beloved cities.      When Perugia authorities concluded that the murder was part of a dark, twisted rite—a “sex game”—led by the American with an uncanny resemblance to Perugia’s Madonna, they unleashed a media frenzy from Rome to London to New York and Seattle. The story drew an international cult obsessed with “Foxy Knoxy,” a pretty honor student on a junior year abroad, who either woke up one morning into a nightmare of superstition and misogyny—the dark side of Italy—or participated in something unspeakable.      The investigation begins in the old stone cottage overlooking bucolic olive groves where Kercher’s body was found in her locked bedroom. It winds through the shadowy, arched alleys of Perugia, a city of art that is also a magnet for tens of thousands of students who frequent its bars, clubs, and drug bazaar on the steps of the Duomo. It climaxes in an up-close account of Italy’s dysfunctional legal system, as the trial slowly unfolds at the town’s Tribunale, and the prosecution’s thunderous final appeal to God before the quivering girl defendant resembles a scene from the Inquisition.       To reveal what actually happened on that terrible night after Halloween, Nina Burleigh lived in Perugia, attended the trial, and corresponded with the incarcerated defendants. She also delved deeply into the history, secrets, and customs of Perugia, renowned equally for its Etruscan tunnels, early Christian art, medieval sorcerers, and pagan roots.      The Fatal Gift of Beauty is a thoughtful, compelling examination of an enduring mystery, an ancient, storied place, and a disquieting facet of Italian culture: an obsession with female eroticism. It is also an acute window into the minds and personalities of the accused killers and of the conservative Italian magistrate striving to make sense of an inexplicable act of evil. But at its core is an indelible portrait of Amanda Knox, the strangely childlike, enigmatic beauty, whose photogenic face became the focal point of international speculation about the shadow side of youth and freedom.
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