The vault (2011) by Ruth Rendell

The impossible has happened. Chief Inspector Reg Wexford has retired from the crime force. He and his wife, Dora, now divide their time between Kingsmarkham and a coachhouse in Hampstead, belonging to their actress daughter, Sheila.
Wexford takes great pleasure in his books, but, for all the benefits of a more relaxed lifestyle, he misses being the hand of the law.

But a chance meeting in a London street, with someone he had known briefly as a very young police constable, changes everything. Tom Ede is now a Detective Superintendent, and is very keen to recruit Wexford as an adviser on a mysterious murder case.
The bodies of two women and a man have been discovered in the old coal hole of an attractive house in St John's Wood. None of the corpses carry identification. But the man's jacket pockets contain a string of pearls, a diamond and a sapphire necklace as well as other jewellery valued in the region of �40,000.

To Wexford, this is definitely a case worth coming out of retirement for. He is intrigued and excited by the challenge, but unaware that this new investigative role will bring him into extreme physical danger. (Summary thanks to Goodreads online)

The search for Anne Perry: The hidden life of a bestselling crime writer (2012) by Joanne Drayton

  

In 1994, director Peter Jackson released the film Heavenly Creatures, based on a famous 1950s matricide committed in New Zealand by two teenage girls embroiled in an obsessive relationship. This film launched Jackson′s international career. It also forever changed the life of Anne Perry, an award-winning, bestselling crime writer, who at the time of the film′s release was publically outed as Juliet Hulme, one of the murderers. A new light was now cast, not only on Anne′s life, but also her novels, which feature gruesome and violent deaths, and confronting, dark issues including infanticide and incest.

   Acclaimed literary biographer, Joanne Drayton, intersperses the story of Anne′s life with an examination of her writing, drawing parallels between Anne′s own experiences and her characters and storylines. Anne′s books deal with miscarriages of justice, family secrets exposed, punishment, redemption and forgiveness, themes made all the more poignant in light of her past. Anne has sold 25 million books worldwide and published in 15 different languages, yet she will now forever be known as a murderer who became a writer of murder stories.

    Drayton was been given unparalleled access to Anne, her friends, relatives, colleagues and archives to complete the book. The result is a compelling read which provides an understanding of the girl Anne was, the adult she became, her compulsion to write and her view of the world.(Thanks to Goodreads, online)

Lone wolf (2012) by Jodi Picoult

On an icy winter night, a terrible accident forces a family divided to come together and make a fateful decision. Cara, once protected by her father, Luke, is tormented by a secret that nobody knows. Her brother, Edward, has secrets of his own. He has kept them hidden, but now they may come to light, and if they do, Cara will be devastated. Their mother, Georgie, was never able to compete with her ex-husband’s obsessions, and now, his fate hangs in the balance and in the hands of her children. With conflicting motivations and emotions, what will this family decide? And will they be able to live with that decision, after the truth has been revealed? What happens when the hope that should sustain a family is the very thing tearing it apart? (Review thanks to Goodreads, online) 

The bat (2002) by Jo Nembo

Somehow this novel did not grab me the way Nesbo's others have.  Though it is the first of his series. Harry Hole was dispatched by his police force in Norway to liaise with police in Australia because of the death of a Nowegian woman.  She appeared to be a murder victim.  Harry got close to many of the characters, with hindsight incidating that he should not have.  The characters were weakly drawn, with the exception being the red haired woman. She was the only one who seemed sincere in the macabre cast of misfits. (Review by Carol-Anne)

The imposter bride (2012) by Nancy Richler

When a young, enigmatic woman arrives in post-war Montreal, it is immediately clear that she is not who she claims to be. Her attempt to live out her life as Lily Azerov shatters as she disappears, leaving a new husband and baby daughter, and a host of unanswered questions. Who is she really and what happened to the young woman whose identity she has stolen? Why has she left and where did she go? It is left to the daughter she abandoned to find the answers to these questions as she searches for the mother she may never find or really know.

Nemesis (2009) by Jo Nesbo

Grainy closed-circuit television footage shows a man walking into an Oslo bank and putting a gun to a cashier's head. He tells the young woman to count to twenty-five. When the robber doesn't get his money in time, the cashier is executed, and two million Norwegian kroner disappear without a trace. Police Detective Harry Hole is assigned to the case.

While Hole's girlfriend is away in Russia, an old flame decides to get in touch. Former girlfriend and struggling artist Anna Bethsen invites Hole to dinner, and he can't resist a visit. But the evening ends in an all too familiar way as Hole awakens with a thundering headache, a missing cell phone, and no memory of the past twelve hours. That same morning, Anna is found shot dead in her bed. Hole begins to receive threatening e-mails. Is someone trying to frame him for this unexplained death? Meanwhile, the bank robberies continue with unparalleled savagery.



As the death toll continues to mount, Hole becomes a prime suspect in a criminal investigation led by his longtime adversary Tom Waaler and Waaler's vigilante police force. Racing from the cool, autumnal streets of Oslo to the steaming villages of Brazil, Hole is determined to absolve himself of suspicion by uncovering all the information needed to crack both cases. But the ever-threatening Waaler is not finished with his old archenemy quite yet.

Ruby and Iris (2006) by Rosie Thomas

Cairo now and Cairo during the Second World War.The present belongs to Ruby, a twenty something who has shown up on her grandmother's doorstep in Cairo.  Ruby is pierced, shabby looking, and ill-mannered.  Slowly her realtionship with her grandmother grows into love, as a new maturity developes while Iris recounts her past to Ruby. A heart warming narrative.

The creative odyssey of Joni Mitchell: Joni (2012) by Katherine Monk

In her acknowledgments, Katherine Monk thanks “every writer who’s ever written anything about Joni Mitchell,” without whom “this book would not have been possible.” She means this literally. Her new biography of the iconic Canadian singer-songwriter relies exclusively on secondary sources, most of them previously published interviews and biographies. When one of Mitchell’s “last remaining business representatives” told Monk the notoriously prickly singer no longer grants interviews, Monk appears to have accepted the assertion at face value, which is odd given her background as a journalist, and her own observations about Mitchell’s tendency to change her mind. The singer, Monk notes ruefully, has “retired from the business so frequently not even she can keep count of her departures from the poker table.”

Monk’s motive for writing this book is a bit hard to grasp, as she admits to not being a huge Mitchell fan “before all this started.” Once she had begun, she was confronted with the “huge problem” of how to “add
anything original to the already exhaustive amount of Joni material without any new Joni Mitchell musings.”

Her solution is to focus on Mitchell’s “various creative challenges and life themes,” which she groups into nine chapters with alliterative titles such as “Impersonation and Identity” (about Mitchell’s “history of defying gender”); “Expecting and Expectation” (touching on the musician’s brief marriage to Chuck Mitchell – a “nice-faced folksinger from Detroit with a mild degree of fame” – which resulted in the daughter she gave up for adoption); and “Myth and Mythmaking” (which looks at Mitchell’s legendary non-participation in the Woodstock music festival of 1969).

Far too much time is spent, however, on awkward metaphorical musings about art, authenticity, and “the creative process.” To take just one of many cringe-worthy examples (and a mixed metaphor to boot): “[Mitchell] was more of an artist-astronaut, extracting the ore of human meaning from the act of personal creation.” Although Monk promises not to deliver “a fawning chronicle of a life,” she appears to buy wholeheartedly into Mitchell’s own ego-driven self-mythologizing, including her well-publicized criticisms of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen on the grounds that they were inauthentic and imitative. Monk’s sources often seem random – why, for instance, is the opinion of Sopranos actress Edie Falco important?

“Joni Mitchell’s creative courage certainly stoked my personal furnace,  changed my life,” Monk declares. Her enthusiasm is, regretfully, not infectious, and this uneven compendium ends up stoking little else.

 Reviewed by Emily Donaldson (from the September 2012 Quill and Quire issue)

The Nightmare by Lars Kepler

This creative couple are Lars Kepler.  Together they write from both the female and male perspective and sensitivity.


A drowned young woman is discovered on an abandoned pleasure boat drifting by the Stockholm archipelago---strangely, her clothes are dry. The next day in Stockholm, a man turns up dead, hanging from a lamp hook inside his completely bare apartment---but how could he have hung himself with no furniture to climb upon? As Detective Inspector Joona Linna begins to piece together the two mysteries, he discovers that they are a mere prelude to a dizzying and dangerous course of events. From the internationally bestselling author of The Hypnotist comes The Nightmare, another spellbinding tale of Nordic crime.(Thanks to Goodreads for another review.)

Kinsey and me by Sue Grafton

Kinsey and me by Sue Grafton  New York:  Penguin Group, 2013

Short Stories of an autobiographical nature as the author takes on the persona of 'Kit', re-living events from her childhood with her mentally ill and alcoholic mother and lawyer, alcoholic father.  Very sensitive writing, with a level of introspection nver seen in her 'Alphabet Series'. Second half of book the superior, showing her sensitivity and humanity.

The witch's daughter (2011) by Paula Brackston



My name is Elizabeth Anne Hawksmith, and my age is three hundred and eighty-four years. Each new settlement asks for a new journal, and so this Book of Shadows begins…

In the spring of 1628, the Witchfinder of Wessex finds himself a true Witch. As Bess Hawksmith watches her mother swing from the Hanging Tree she knows that only one man can save her from the same fate at the hands of the panicked mob: the Warlock Gideon Masters, and his Book of Shadows. Secluded at his cottage in the woods, Gideon instructs Bess in the Craft, awakening formidable powers she didn’t know she had and making her immortal. She couldn't have foreseen that even now, centuries later, he would be hunting her across time, determined to claim payment for saving her life.
In present-day England, Elizabeth has built a quiet life for herself, tending her garden and selling herbs and oils at the local farmers' market. But her solitude abruptly ends when a teenage girl called Tegan starts hanging around. Against her better judgment, Elizabeth begins teaching Tegan the ways of the Hedge Witch, in the process awakening memories--and demons—long thought forgotten.
Part historical romance, part modern fantasy, The Witch’s Daughter is a fresh, compelling take on the magical, yet dangerous world of Witches.Readers will long remember the fiercely independent heroine who survives plagues, wars, and the heartbreak that comes with immortality to remain true to herself, and protect the protégé she comes to love.(Review by Goodreads)

Six years (2013) by Harlan Coben



Six years have passed since Jake Sanders watched Natalie, the love of his life, marry another man. Six yearsof hiding a broken heart by throwing himself into his career as a college professor. Six years of keeping his promise to leave Natalie alone, and six years of tortured dreams of her life with her new husband, Todd.

But six years haven’t come close to extinguishing his feelings, and when Jake comes across Todd’s obituary, he can’t keep himself away from the funeral. There he gets the glimpse of Todd’s wife he’s hoping for . . . but she is not Natalie. Whoever the mourning widow is, she’s been married to Todd for more than a decade, and with that fact everything Jake thought he knew about the best time of his life—a time he has never gotten over—is turned completely inside out.
As Jake searches for the truth, his picture-perfect memories of Natalie begin to unravel. Mutual friends of the couple either can’t be found or don’t remember Jake. No one has seen Natalie in years. Jake’s search for the woman who broke his heart—and who lied to him—soon puts his very life at risk as it dawns on him that the man he has become may be based on carefully constructed fiction. (Review by Goodreads)

The Hypnotist (2009) by Lars Kepler

Solving two unrelated, but peculiar, serial killings becomes the mission of Stockholm police detective, Joona Linna., Very suspenseful.



Touch & Go (2013) by Lisa Gardner

The Shoemaker's Wife by Adriana Trigiani

The Shoemaker's Wife by Adriana Trigiani  New York, NY:  Harper Collins, 2012

This review by Carol Memmott, USA TODAY April 01, 2012. 

 "At first glance, there seems to be a disconnect between the sturdy, simple title of Adriana Trigiani's new novel, The Shoemaker's Wife, and the breathlessly gorgeous photo that graces the book's cover. It ran in Harper's Bazaar in 1949 and its model, decked out in a strapless, fiery red gown, is the epitome of sophistication. But within the pages of this novel, Trigiani's 10th, is a gloriously romantic yet sensible world that seamlessly blends practicality and beauty.The novel's real-life back story is as arresting as the one Trigiani creates. It's inspired by the love between the author's grandparents, who grew up in the Northern Alps of Italy but did not meet until they emigrated to the United States. That's the gem of an idea that Trigiani nurtured in her imagination for more than two decades before she put it on paper. The Shoemaker's Wife begins in the Northern Alps in 1905 and follows the lives of Ciro and Eduardo Lazzari, brothers who grew up in a convent because their widowed mother could not care for them. It's also the story of Enza Ravanelli and her big-hearted family whose financial struggles come to a fateful bend in the road when Enza decides to go to America to earn money. She would not know until a chance meeting in New York that Ciro, a boy she kissed and thought never to see again, had also traveled to America to seek his fortune.
What transpires is a classic immigrant success story, but the tale of Enza and Ciro transcends the commonplace because of their great love. It's a love so big that Enza, whose seamstress skills have earned her a spot creating costumes for the Metropolitan Opera House's biggest stars, gives up her dream job. She leaves a fiancé at the altar and marries Ciro. They move to Minnesota, where he makes shoes for working men. Like other period pieces set pre- and post-World War I (think Downton Abbey) that are capturing our imagination, The Shoemaker's Wife is built around the staggering cultural and social changes the war years swept in. In America, the flood of mostly European immigrants changed the country's look and landscape. You don't need to have an immigrant family history to adore this novel — it ranks as one of Trigiani's very best."



You only need a deep appreciation for exquisite writing and a story enriched by the power of abiding love.





Reader Reviews - From Goodreads