Fired up (2009) by Jayne Ann Kentz

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Preview — Fired Up by Jayne Ann Krentz

   

 

Fired Up (Arcane Society, #7; Dreamlight Trilogy, #1)    

More than three centuries ago, Nicholas Winters irrevocably altered his genetic makeup in an obsession-fueled competition with alchemist and Arcane Society founder Sylvester Jones. Driven to control their psychic abilities, each man's decision has reverberated throughout the family line, rewarding some with powers beyond their wildest dreams, and cursing others to a life f More than three centuries ago, Nicholas Winters irrevocably altered his genetic makeup in an obsession-fueled competition with alchemist and Arcane Society founder Sylvester Jones. Driven to control their psychic abilities, each man's decision has reverberated throughout the family line, rewarding some with powers beyond their wildest dreams, and cursing others to a life filled with madness and hallucinations.

Jack Winters, descendant of Nicholas, has been experiencing nightmares and blackouts - just the beginning, he believes - of the manifestation of the Winters family curse. The legend says that he must find the Burning Lamp or risk turning into a monster. But he can't do it alone; he needs the help of a woman with the gift to read the lamp's dreamlight.

Jack is convinced that private investigator Chloe Harper is that woman. It doesn't take long for Chloe to pick up the trail of the missing lamp. And as they draw closer to the lamp, the raw power that dwells within it threatens to sweep them into a hurricane of psychic force.  

The elephant keeper's children (2010 Danish, 2012 English) by Peter Hoeg

 

The Elephant Keepers' Children is narrated by Peter Finø, the 14-year-old son of the priest on a Danish island also called Finø. The island is almost as much a character as a setting, a surreal place where tough-talking, plain-living working-class families mingle with, and sometimes become, millionaire Buddhists and nouveau riche landowners. There is an ashram in what was once Pigslurry Farm, and an ex-headmaster, Einar Flogginfellow, who likes to "offer sacrifices to the ancient Nordic deity at every full moon on top of Big Hill". (Outsiders question the status of "Big Hill" – 111m above sea level – at the risk of being beaten up by Peter's exquisite astrophysicist brother Hans, who is strong enough to lay horses on their backs and tickle their tummies; the shadow of Pippi Longstocking falls far.)
Hans has left for university in Copenhagen, where Peter and his older sister Tilte are visiting him. While they are there, their parents disappear on holiday in La Gomera, "a wannabe Finø in the Canary Islands". Finø's authorities step in, in the form of the Kommune's director "Bodil Hippopotamus", two plainclothes police officers who stick out on Finø "like two tree frogs on a fish rissole", a drug-addled count who runs a rehabilitation centre as directed by the little blue men who bring him magic mushrooms, a bishop and a forensic psychiatrist.
Tilte and Peter are illegally tagged and imprisoned in the rehabilitation centre, alerting them to the importance to the state of whatever their parents are doing. The pair escape by impersonating a non-existent lizard, stealing a car and inventing a religious cult in order to board an arms dealer's luxurious cruise ship while pretending that a dead body in the wheelchair they are pushing is the ship's doctor. Hiding from the police in a film star's apartment in Copenhagen, they must evade the forces of evil – which invariably turn out to be subject to redemption at Tilte's hands – do the right thing and, if possible, save their parents from the consequences of their own wrongdoing.
Peter Høeg displays a glorious facility for the absurd as well as the picaresque, and the hilarity of Peter Finø's narrative makes this a delightful novel even for readers who have limited tolerance of surrealism. Jokes are not easy to translate and Martin Aitken is to be congratulated. But, as one would expect from Høeg, this a book with ambitions beyond entertainment. The title comes from an "old Indian saying": "In case you wish to befriend an elephant keeper, make certain to have room for the elephant." Peter sees that almost everyone except himself and Tilte has an elephant – a passion or vocation that disrupts relationships and calls its owner to break rules and laws to fulfil a life's ambition. His father's elephant is his own charisma and his mother's is the manufacture of special effects, an unfortunate combination that leads them towards criminal lives.
Other adults – even the most frightening terrorist mastermind – are driven by other gifts and fears, and the other-worldly Tilte sees, forgives (and manipulates) all; readers of Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow know that Høeg can frighten his readers, but that gift is almost entirely restrained here. The children are clear-sighted about the philosophical questions they encounter in the course of this existential romp: exactly how far do ends justify means? What is the virtuous relationship between personal loyalty and abstract moral rectitude? Should one live with loneliness and, if so, on what terms?
However relevant to the story, these sober moments work less well than the outright comedy. Adult readers tend to have limited patience for the existential musings of even the most entertaining 14-year-old, and most authors must choose between creating strong teenage narrators (as Høeg does here, stretching credibility only as far as his picaresque narrative licenses) and obvious philosophising. Peter intersperses his tale with advice to the reader about "finding freedom" and "opening the door", introducing an element of adolescent moralising that seems – perhaps deliberately – less accomplished than the rest of the book. It's enough of an achievement to bring together Voltaire and PG Wodehouse; you don't need Salinger as well.

Thanks to The Guardian and Sarah Moss ( Names for the Sea: Strangers in Iceland is published by Granta.)

Wurthering Heights (1847) by Emily Bronte

® 2016 Bustle

8 Things You Didn't Notice About 'Wuthering Heights' The First Time You Read It 

By Lara Rutherford-Morrison  Mar 17 2015

SIX REACTIONS

 The first time I read Wuthering Heights, I hated it. Hated it. I was in high school, and I was just beginning what would be a life-long love affair with 19th-century literature. I had barreled through all of Austen’s novels and Jane Eyre, and I sat down with Wuthering Heights, expecting to be amazed, and instead, found myself feeling a weird combination of boredom and fury. It wasn’t until I got to graduate school that the novel “clicked” for me—I started reading it for a class, thinking, “Ugh, not this again,” and then somewhere around page 100 found myself engrossed and wondering where the hell this amazing, bizarre book had been all my life. My love has only grown upon subsequent re-readings: Wuthering Heights is one of the strangest, most beautiful, most ludicrous, and most narratively complex novels I’ve ever read, and I can’t get enough of it. Who are these insane characters and why do they feel the need to say every thought they have the second they have it? Why do they all insist on marrying each other? Why does Mr. Lockwood keep nosing about their lives? Why don’t they ever go anywhere?? 1

If you’re a fan of Wuthering Heights—or, like me, you hated it at first and are now wondering whether you should try again—read on for some things you might not have known or noticed the first time through:

1. It is NOT a romance novel

I think one reason I hated Wuthering Heights the first time I read it was that I was expecting it to be a great love story. And then I got into the book and realized that it is, in fact, a story of terrible people doing terrible things to each other. I was outraged: Where was the love? Where was the romance?? I understood later that my expectations had been set by people who knew the story from the film adaptations of the novel, rather than the novel itself.

The film versions of Brontë’s novel usually go to great lengths to cast the Catherine/Heathcliff relationship as a passionate romance, I think because it’s much easier to film yet-another-doomed-love story than it is to capture what the novel is really about: a destructive relationship between two people who are obsessed with each other. Cathy’s famous line—“I am Heathcliff!”—is often touted as uber-romantic, but it expresses something that isn’t really about love: Cathy wants to be Heathcliff, to merge with him. After she dies, Heathcliff breaks down the side of her coffin so that, upon his own death, they can be buried next to each other and literally decompose into a single, shared body. They strive to transcend the boundaries of human subjectivity and physicality—to become something that is other and only them. Their relationship in the novel is strange and fascinating, but it’s not love. 1

it’s for these reasons that I found the whole Twilight thing hilarious. In Eclipse, Bella and Mr. Sparkly Von Vampire mention Wuthering Heights again and again as a corollary to their relationship. You want to model your relationship on an angry, controlling asshole and a cruel, spoiled brat? Er, have fun with that, kids. Harper Collins went so far as to release a “Twilight edition” of Brontë’s novel, bearing the slogan “Bella& Edward’s Favorite Book.” I’m sure Emily Brontë is THRILLED.)

2. It was first published under the name “Ellis Bell”

ll three of the Brontë sisters initially published their works with masculine pseudonyms: Charlotte was “Currer Bell,” Emily was “Ellis Bell,” and Anne was “Acton Bell.” Charlotte Brontë wrote later that they did so because “we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice.” The pseudonyms caused confusion later, when some readers assumed that Ellis and Currer Bell were the same person, and attributed Wuthering Heights to the author of the very popular Jane Eyre.

3. It’s a claustrophobic, surreal dreamscape

the Victorian novel is famous for realism—a literary movement that sought to portray life as it really is, even in its most everyday occurrences. But in Wuthering Heights, Brontë goes out of her way to make the reader feel dislocated and unsteady, to make the narrative seem like it exists in a world entirely separate from our own. From the start of the novel, the geographic isolation of the novel’s setting—the fact that we, as readers, never move beyond the boundaries of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange—has us wondering where the hell we are. Add to that the novel’s multiple frame narratives (at one point, we are reading Lockwood’s account of Nelly’s account of Isabella’s account of what happened, and it's... bewildering), and the reader is left spinning, looking for something solid to hold onto, at once trapped within the novel’s complicated narrative framework and locked outside any true, direct understanding of what’s going on. 3

4. There are approximately three names in the whole book

Seriously, the names are insane: There’s Catherine Earnshaw, Catherine Linton, Edgar and Isabella Linton, Hindley Earnshaw, Hareton Earnshaw, Heathcliff, and—most ridiculous—Linton Heathcliff. The names get extremely confusing, but I think that’s the point: They contribute to the claustrophobic quality of the novel as a whole. As we watch these people grapple with each other, all bearing similar names and all related in one way or another, we get the feeling that there’s no escape from it—as in the Hotel California, “You can check-out any time you like, But you can never leave [Wuthering Heights].”

5. It was not an instant bestseller

Wuthering Heights received mixed reviews from critics when it came out in 1847. Even those who liked it seemed puzzled by it more than anything—what were critics supposed to do with this weird, but compelling book? One reviewer expressed the general sense of confusion:

Wuthering Heights is a strange sort of book,—baffling all regular criticism; yet, it is impossible to begin and not finish it; and quite as impossible to lay it aside afterwards and say nothing about it.

Others hated it full-out, and were not shy about expressing their dislike of a novel populated by “savages” and lacking a moral lesson. These are just a couple of my favorites, from two American magazines:

We rise from the perusal of Wuthering Heights as if we had come fresh from a pest-house. Read Jane Eyre is our advice, but burn Wuthering Heights….

How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery.

6. Even Charlotte Brontë felt the need to distance herself from it

After Emily and Anne Brontë died in 1848 and 49, Charlotte Brontë continued to promote the works of her sisters. In the preface to the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights, Charlotte writes of the novel’s power and her sister’s talent, but she also seems to feel the need to respond to the critics by making excuses for the novel’s “faults.” She blames the novel’s “rusticity” on Emily’s upbringing in Yorkshire, admitting that for those not raised in the North, “Wuthering Heights must appear a rude and strange production.” She also suggests that Emily was seized by inspiration and compelled to write what she did, as if she had no control over her writing; Charlotte writes that when Emily created her passionate, angsty characters, “Having formed these beings, she did not know what she had done.” We can see Charlotte here as a grieving sister trying to protect her loved one’s memory—but in the process, she strips Emily of her creative agency, recasting Wuthering Heights as the product of an almost supernatural vision, rather than artistic genius.

7. We don’t know where Heathcliff comes from

Heathcliff is one of the great mysteries of the novel. Why is he such an angry jerk? We know very little about his origins: All we’re told is that Mr. Earnshaw picked him up in Liverpool, he has dark hair and eyes, and, when he first arrives, he speaks “some gibberish that no one could understand.” Critics and readers have debated Heathcliff’s origins for more than a hundred and fifty years, without getting any closer to finding the answer. Because Liverpool was a major port for both Ireland and the slave trade, some scholars have proposed that Heathcliff may have been of Irish or African descent. The most recent film adaptation of Wuthering Heights (dir. Andrea Arnold), released in 2011, was the first to cast a black actor in the role.

8. This song

OK, so this song really has nothing to do with the book’s writing—it was released by British singer-songwriter Kate Bush in 1978—but I love it. Written when Bush was only 18, “Wuthering Heights,” like most of Bush’s music, is beautiful, haunting, and really, really weird. In a high soprano, Bush takes on the role of Catherine’s ghost, beating on Heathcliff’s windows, wailing, “Heathcliff, it’s me, I’m Cathy, I’ve come home, I’m so cold….” The video is wonderfully bizarre, with Bush dancing and cartwheeling across the screen. And if you can’t resist performing this very special dance when you’re alone in your apartment, well, that’s completely normal, right? (That’s what I tell myself, at least.)

Bonus Fact: There’s an MTV version

MTV made an adaptation of Wuthering Heights in 2003, and it’s precisely as terrible as you would imagine. Seriously, it is full-on, grade-A awful, and I watched the whole thing because I love Wuthering Heights that much. I think all I need to say about it is that Heathcliff gets his revenge by becoming a Rock Star! Just as god and the Brontë sisters intended.

 

 

The girl in the ice: A Konrad Simonsen Triller (2010, 2015) by Lotte and Soren Hammer

Brother and sister writing team. Second novel of the Konrad Simonsen series. Opening of book with the girl in the ice very disjointed from the later elements of novel. Cannot imagine writing ome og these scenes with my brother!  Hope their later novels have more fluency and follow through of events.


Kirkus  review (thank you)

A killer who preys on beautiful women faces off against a team of Danish investigators.
Konrad Simonsen—variously referred to as “Simon,” “Konrad,” and “Simonsen”—is Copenhagen Homicide’s Chief Inspector. When he’s called in as he’s about to leave on a rare holiday and asked to lead the investigation into the murder of a woman found frozen in the ice not far from the site of an American installation that has since been decommissioned, he and his partner, Arne Pedersen, realize they may have a serial killer on their hands. Maryann Nygaard has been dead since she disappeared back in 1983, but her body shares one odd trait with another dead woman: they both had their fingernails cut by the killer. Gathering his team—investigators Pauline Berg and the Countess—the Danish detectives soon connect Maryann's killing to the solved murder of Catherine Thomsen, who died in 1997 and whose father killed himself after being accused of her slaying. Filled with guilt and determined to find the culprit, Simonsen and his detectives soon settle on a suspect and begin to unravel his life. The Hammers, a brother-and-sister team, have created a universe populated by some of the least interesting and most wooden characters ever to lead a police investigation, and they toss in clumsy, often bizarre dialogue for good measure. Rather than showing a steadily progressing inquiry as a good police procedural should, their meandering investigation seems more like a series of lucky guesses and chance discoveries. The foreshadowing reads like padding, and the presence of a character known as “the Countess” on a modern-day police department is mystifying. Readers will care little whether or not the murderer is apprehended and even less about the team assembled to find him or her.
Fans of Scandinavian noir won’t find much to like about this jumbled entry in the field.

Wurthering Heights (1847) by Emily Bonte

The children act (2014) by Ian McEwan

The best kind of people (2016) by Zoe Whittall

I do it with the lights on: And 10 more discoveries on the road to a blissfully shame-free life (2016) by Whitney Way Thore

Thanks to Goodreads for the review and image!

 I Do It with the Lights On: And 10 More Discoveries on the Road to a Blissfully Shame-Free Life       From the star of TLC’s My Big Fat Fabulous Lifecomes an empowering memoir about letting go of your limitations and living the life you deserve. Right now.

Whitney Way Thore stands five feet two inches tall and weighs well over three hundred pounds, and she is totally, completely, and truly . . . happy. But she wasn’t always the vivacious, confident woman you see on TV. Gr From the star of TLC’s My Big Fat Fabulous Life comes an empowering memoir about letting go of your limitations and living the life you deserve. Right now.

Whitney Way Thore stands five feet two inches tall and weighs well over three hundred pounds, and she is totally, completely, and truly . . . happy. But she wasn’t always the vivacious, confident woman you see on TV. Growing up as a dancer, Whitney felt the pressure to be thin, a desire that grew into an obsession as she got older. From developing an eating disorder as a teenager, to extreme weight gain in college, to her ongoing struggle with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), Whitney reveals her fight to overcome the darkest moments in her life. She holds nothing back, opening up about the depths of her depression as well as her resilience in the face of constant harassment and mistreatment.

Now Whitney is on top of the world and taking no BS (Body Shame, of course). And she’s sharing the steps she took to get there and the powerful message behind her successful No Body Shame campaign. She even reveals her favorite “F” word (it’s probably not what you think), the thrill of doing it with the lights on, and the story behind the “Fat Girl Dancing” video that started it all.

Exuberant and utterly honest, I Do It with the Lights On is the inspiring story of how Whitney finally discovered her fabulousness when she stepped off the scale and into her life, embracing herself unconditionally—body, heart, and soul.

While they slept (2008) by Kathryn Harrison

 

 

A Kirkus Review

 

Novelist and memoirist Harrison (Envy, 2005, etc.) revisits a 1984 killing.

The author conducted six three-hour interviews with Billy Gilley, now serving multiple life sentences after being convicted at age 18 of murdering his abusive parents and younger sister Becky. Harrison also spoke with the surviving sister, Jody, who claimed to have been sexually abused by both Billy and their father. Although Jody managed to rise above her sordid past, eventually graduating from Georgetown and becoming a successful businesswoman, she was guarded in her account of the killings and the troubled family life that preceded it. Harrison tried to bond by revealing that she too had experienced sexual abuse at the hands of her father, but Jody remained wary. Billy proved even more evasive. Arrested for burglary and arson several times before the murders, he argued that he clubbed his parents to death with a baseball bat to rescue himself and Jody from routine beatings and constant psychological abuse. That he was beaten and tormented by both parents seems undeniable, but Billy failed to explain why he went on to kill Becky and sidestepped the question of whether he felt any remorse. Harrison has clearly done diligent research, but she too often resorts to quoting psychological reports and court testimony. Overreaching for connections between her own troubled past and Jody’s, she produces an overwrought text that isn’t as revelatory as it aspires to be. She does convincingly draw the Gilleys’ downward spiral into abuse, alcoholism and violence, a descent with family precedent (Billy’s maternal grandmother had shot and killed her cheating husband). But readers may balk at a tawdry tale more depressing than meaningful, populated by characters more pitiable than complex.
Worthy enough, but nowhere near the level of such true-crime masterpieces as In Cold Blood.

Where they found her (2015) by Kimberly McCreight

From the author of the New York Times bestseller and 2014 Edgar and Anthony nominee Reconstructing Amelia comes another harrowing, gripping novel that marries psychological suspense with an emotionally powerful story about a community struggling with the consequences of a devastating discovery.

At the end of a long winter, in bucolic Ridgedale, New Jersey, the body of an infant is discovered in the woods near the town’s prestigious university campus. No one knows who the baby is, or how her body ended up out there. But there is no shortage of opinions.

When freelance journalist, and recent Ridgedale transplant, Molly Anderson is unexpectedly called upon to cover the story for the Ridegdale Reader, it’s a risk, given the severe depression that followed the loss of her own baby. But the bigger threat comes when Molly unearths some of Ridgedale’s darkest secrets, including a string of unreported sexual assaults that goes back twenty years.

Meanwhile, Sandy, a high school dropout, searches for her volatile and now missing mother, and PTA president Barbara struggles to help her young son, who’s suddenly having disturbing outbursts.

Told from the perspectives of Molly, Barbara, and Sandy, Kimberly McCreight’s taut and profoundly moving novel unwinds the tangled truth about the baby’s death revealing that these three women have far more in common than they realized. And that their lives are more intertwined with what happened to the baby than they ever could have imagined. (less)

A great reckoning (2016) by Louise Penny

Thanks for this  Kirkus Review

Within a police force, some members must be trained in the science, and art, of solving murders. But does this training create people highly capable of committing them?

In Penny’s 12th Gamache novel, the former chief inspector takes up a new post. He’s not back to active investigating—not after finally having the chance to heal in the Québécois village of Three Pines. But he can’t pass up the chance to complete his yearslong fight to end corruption within the Sûreté. By taking the job as commander of the Sûreté Academy, he can clean the rot from its wealthiest source—the impressionable minds of cadet trainees. But Gamache makes a questionable decision in choosing to fight fire with fire. He decides to keep the most corrupt staff member, Serge “the Duke” Leduc, the former No. 2 of the Academy. Gamache’s choices verge on madness when he announces he will also bring on Michel Brébeuf—the original domino to fall within the Sûreté—as an example of how corruption can ruin you.

 In his lessons, Gamache invites his cadets to internalize these mottos: “Don't trust everything you think”—words for bettering their minds and investigative skills—as well as “a man's foes shall be they of his own household,” from Matthew 10:36—words of warning for what they may face ahead. These lessons become all too relevant when the Duke is found murdered and it’s clear the murderer is one of them. And then a copy of an old map is found at the crime scene, the same map Gamache is using as an exercise with four cadets he has brought under his wing and into his home (one lost soul in particular, freshman Amelia Choquet).

Gamache is forced to accept that Leduc’s grip on the Academy is stronger and more suffocating than he thought possible. Is the household he has vowed to protect more unsafe than ever before? Young, learning minds are precious things, and Penny is here to make us aware of the evil out there, eager for a chance to mold—and poison—them.
A chilling story that's also filled with hope—a beloved Penny trademark.

White Heat (2011) by M.J. McGrath

By Beth Jones of The Telegram

5:53AM GMT 13 Mar 2011

The cold, bleak tundra of the Canadian Arctic holds something of a fascination for Melanie McGrath. In 2006 she published a non-fiction book, The Long Exile, in which she wrote about Inuit families who, during the Cold War years, were lured to the wastes of the High Arctic by a government eager to populate these northern territories and so assert their sovereignty, and then abandoned.

In White Heat, a crime thriller written under the name MJ McGrath, she returns to the Arctic, this time to the tiny settlement of Autisaq. Here, on the “immense and uncompromising” tundra, a visiting tourist, Felix Wagner, is killed while on a shooting expedition led by the local guide Edie Kiglatuk, a half white, half Inuit former polar bear hunter. The local elders are keen to dismiss the death as an accident. Only Edie is left unsettled.

Edie is a struggling alcoholic who, by her mid-twenties had “already drunk away her hunting career and was well on the way to drinking away her life”. She spends her days watching old movies, making ear picks from bones and eating seal blood soup. But while the death of an outsider can be ignored, when someone within the community is suddenly killed, Edie takes it upon herself to find out the truth, even if it is “like hunting a fish in murky water with nothing but your hands”.

Edie is an ingenious and original creation backed up by a cast of crazy scientists, corrupt officials, placid policemen, Russian oil men and locals lost in “a fog of drink, boredom, unwanted pregnancies, low expectations and educational underachievement”.

But the most addictive character – both hero and villain of the piece – is the Arctic itself. It makes a seductive location for a thriller, a land of wonder and terror shut in darkness for months of the year, a place in which temperatures rarely rise above freezing and, in winter, regularly fall below -40ºC.

"Sadly, this review does not mention Edie's stepson, Joe, as he struggles to overcome his isolated and negative environment. Her ex-husband is a loser who only drags her down, while his brother is campaigning to be mayor and is embroiled in the worst of politics." CA

The boy in the snow (2013) by Melanie McGrath

 

www.melaniemcgrath.com/the-boy-in-the-snow.html  Thanks for review from: www.melaniemcgrath.com/the-boy-in-the-snow.html

The Boy in the Snow first published 2013 (Fourth Estate) When Arctic guide Edie Kiglatuk stumbles across a boy's body in the Alaskan forest, she little imagines what her discovery will lead her to. With the local police convinced the death is linked to the Dark Believers, a sinister offshoot of the Russian Orthodox Church, Edie's friends insist she leave the investigation to the proper authorities. But remaining in the area as back-up for her ex-husband Sammy's bid to win the famous Iditarod dog sled race, Edie cannot get the frozen corpse out of her mind. While Sammy travels across some of the world's toughest and most deadly terrain, Edie sets off on an investigation which will take her into a dark world of sex, politics, corruption and greed - as a painful secret from her past finally catches up with her... Excerpt Where the tracks gave out onto the packed snow of the path, not far from the snowmobile, Edie Kiglatuk spotted a bright yellow object lying at the base of a spruce, protected from the snowfall by the tree’s branches. Closer up she was surprised to see that the yellow object was a tiny wood-plank house of the sort you might make for a small dog, about a metre long and half as wide. A very thin layer of snow had collected on the roof but there was none banked up against the sides, suggesting that the house had been there since the last snowfall, but most likely not much longer. There were no animal or human tracks around and the little house sat as if it had always been there in the snow, as if it belonged to some other reality. Crouching down with her right hand she turned the lever on the little door. Inside she could see something but it was too dark to pick out any details. She went back to the snowmobile, took her flashlight out of the pannier. The light revealed a package wrapped in a very elaborately embroidered red cloth. Edie reached out carefully and touched it. Whatever was inside was long frozen and very hard. She stood up with the package in her hand and moved over to the snowmobile, resting it on the saddle so she could take a better look. Tucked under the ornate fabric was a square of white linen-like cloth. She pinched it between her finger and thumb. Almost instantly, the cloth came away, exposing what lay inside. There, lying on the saddle of the snowmobile, was the body of a baby boy, a month or maybe two in age, lying on his belly, dead and hard frozen. The boy’s arms were raised, the hands balled into tiny fists, the legs angled down from the body as if in repose. His skin glittered with ice crystals. Reaching out, she slowly turned the boy over. His face was veiled with ice, the eyes closed, and he wore an expression of softness and calm. Onto the delicate new skin of the boy’s body someone had smeared grease and what looked like charcoal, or maybe ashes, in an elaborate, inverted cross.

---

 

Harbour Street (2014) by Ann Cleeves

 

Harbour Street is the sixth book in Ann Cleeves' crime novel series VERA - which is a major TV detective drama starring Brenda Blethyn on ITV. As the snow falls thickly on Newcastle, the shouts and laughter of Christmas revellers break the muffled silence. Detective Joe Ashworth and his daughter Jessie are swept along in the jostling crowd onto the Metro. But when the train is stopped due to the bad weather, and the other passengers fade into the swirling snow, Jessie notices that an old lady hasn't left the train: Margaret Krukowski has been fatally stabbed as she sat on the crowded train. Nobody, including the policeman himself, sees the stabbing take place. Margaret's murderer is seemingly invisible; her killing motiveless. Why would anyone want to harm this reserved, elegant lady? Arriving at the scene, DI Vera Stanhope is relieved to have an excuse to escape the holiday festivities. As she standing on the silent, snow-covered station platform, Vera feels a familiar buzz of anticipation, sensing that this will be a complex and unusual case. Soon Vera and Joe are on their way to the south Northumberland town of Mardle, where Margaret lived, to begin their inquiry. Then, just days later, a second woman is murdered. Vera knows that to find the key to this new killing she needs to understand what had been troubling Margaret so deeply before she died - before another life is lost. She can feel in her bones that there's a link. Retracing Margaret's final steps, Vera finds herself searching deep into the hidden past of this seemingly innocent neighbourhood, led by clues that keep revolving around one street...Why are the residents of Harbour Street so reluctant to speak? Told with piercing prose and a forensic eye, Ann Cleeves' gripping new novel explores what happens when a community closes ranks to protect their own - and at what point silent witnesses become complicit. Also available in the Vera Stanhope series are The Crow Trap, Telling Tales, Hidden Depths, Silent Voices and The Glass Room. Ann Cleeves' Shetland series (BBC television drama SHETLAND) contains five titles, of which Dead Water is the most recent.  

 

Thank you Goodreads for this summary.

Broken Harbour (2012) by Tana French

Tana French returns to the quiet intrigue of the family psychodrama in her fourth novel, Broken Harbour, revelling once again in the slyly ironic and layered implications of the title to point the reader in the right direction.

And once again we have an unreliable narrator and an event from the past that alters his perceptions and affects his ability to recognize parallels in the present. Dublin Murder Squad shining star Mick (Scorcher) Kennedy is called out to a crime scene with his new rookie partner, Richie; a family has been slaughtered, something even a seasoned cop would describe as evil.

Things have gone very wrong indeed in the decayed domestic paradise of Ocean View, Brians-town, disparagingly known as “Broken Harbour” – victim, like many others, of Ireland’s recession: “rows of half-built houses, crowded stark and ugly against the sky, a long banner of plastic flapping hard from a bare beam.” It’s evidence of Ireland’s devastating boom and bust in real estate, where humankind’s mark on the landscape is crumbling while the landscape remains vast and beautiful.

Moral devastation exists here too: The children have been smothered in their beds and the husband and wife viciously stabbed. But there’s a survivor – the wife. Though severely injured, she might recover and be able to tell her story.

In the meantime, Kennedy investigates, and what originally seems fairly cut and dried – husband goes crazy and kills family and self – looks as if it might be something altogether different. For in the otherwise well-kept house are gaping holes in the walls, all kinds of video monitors, as well as a vicious animal trap in the attic that’s big enough for a bear. Paranoia? Delusions? Or has someone been stalking this seemingly happy family?

Kennedy firmly believes that, 90 per cent of the time, this kind of crime doesn’t happen out of nowhere. People invite murder and chaos into the house, and the roots of evil are in the heart of the home, the family. Broken Harbour does double duty as a domestic horror novel about boundaries and transgression: When earth is outside where it belongs, it is soil; when it crosses the barrier of the threshold, it becomes dirt, and no longer belongs.

In French’s previous novel, Faithful Place, the cop dug relentlessly into the past. Here, Kennedy refuses to examine his own history too closely, a history inextricably and secretly linked to Broken Harbour itself. Instead, his entire life is about control. He is happy enough to delve into the lives of the murder victims, but the implications and effects of the darker moments of his own childhood remain opaque. But who can blame him? His mother committed suicide, and one of his sisters is schizophrenic or just plain crazy – whether due to nature or nurture is unclear. Control is the key to everything from handling suspects to wearing immaculate suits and ties, allowing him to present an unassailable front.

Kennedy refuses to see the contradictions in his own life. He states that he doesn’t like “dealing with unusual people,” but his whole life has been spent doing that very thing, from his own family to his chosen profession – a Murder Squad detective who hunts down the unusual people who have broken the ultimate rule. But Kennedy’s famous control starts to unravel, and his own flaws, and his inability to recognize the weaknesses of his partner, help to almost destroy the case.

And though a solution is provided, order does not prevail; the chaos of ordinary lives wins out – tragic losses, crazed siblings, the weight of years spent denying old truths. As Kennedy wonders “whether anything in families is ever innocent,” so does the reader. Broken Harbour shows us the terrible sacrifices people make and the awful things they do based on love, and sometimes, terror and need.

Tana French leaves us lost in a dark labyrinth in which the Minotaur is never conquered, navigating a deceptively placid, reflective sea under which the terrible reefs of the past wait patiently to wreak havoc with the most seasoned traveller
 

Sandra Kasturi is most recently the co-editor and publisher of Imaginarium 2012: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing. Thanks for this in-depth review.