Girl on a Train, by Paula Hawkins

This book contains pure evil. It's a very effective thriller, captivating, written in an innovative style that suits the subject matter very well.

Rachel is the girl on the train, a young woman who rides to London, passing the same houses every day. On the terrace of one of them, she frequently observes a young couple whose life seems idyllic. That changes.

Furthermore, we learn much more about Rachel, as well as the other principle characters in this book, and we are led expertly down the path of mystery and suspense to its amazing conclusion.

Bleeding Hearts, by Ian Rankin

This is not an Inspector Rebus novel. It is, instead, a novel told partly in first person by a hired assassin, and partly in third person about the private detective who pursues him from England to America.

After a few Rebuses, I was disappointed to find myself noticing some cardboard-cutout characters, and not-so-great writing.

I did read the whole thing. It was well-plotted, even including a religious cult, and a fictional account of a real-time financial error made in the time of Manuel Noriega and the Iran-Contra scandal.

New York Times review.

The Paying Guests by Susan Waters

Set in the years soon after World War I, this novel evokes a time when many aspects of life were still what we would consider primitive. For example, the home that is central to the plot does not have an indoor lavatory or commode; its residents visit an outhouse in the garden. The mother and daughter around whom the plot develops, Mrs. Wray and Frances, have lost much in the war, including Frances' two brothers. Her father died soon afterward, though not as a result of military action.

The Wrays, short on funds, do a bit of remodeling and advertise for boarders, "paying guests." The couple that move in provide an instant accelerant to the plot, which becomes very fascinating and tense when one of the paying guests is found murdered near the house.

This was thoroughly enjoyable and entertaining, and gave what I believe to be a good picture of what life in England might have been like at this period of time. Furthermore, the issue of homosexuality at this time is dealt with, and we are shown a plausible image of how it might have been to be gay or lesbian then.



Sarah Waters' website

The Good The Bad and the Furry, by Tom Cox

An amusing collection of anecdotes about Cox's cats, family and life.

Cox has a Twitter feed @mysadcat.

A Conspiracy of Paper, by David Liss

The copy of this book that I have is an advance reader's edition, apparently prepared to send to reviewers before the book is released to the general public. There is a request on the back cover not to quote directly from this edition, but to refer to the official edition when it is released for exact quotes.

This is interesting, as the book I read contained many errors, mostly simple typographic errors, but also lapses of style. I noticed the phrase "I blush to own" used at least three times close enough together to be annoying. Perhaps the final edition was somewhat improved.

Conspiracy of Paper is a pretty good mystery, but I got bogged down in it toward the end and found myself wishing that the author had trimmed perhaps a hundred pages. It is set in London in 1719. The protagonist is Benjamin Weaver, a retired prize-fighter who has gone into the business of finding things and people for people, for a fee. The story begins with a request to discover the truth behind a suicide: the dead man's son believes his father was murdered--and further, believes that Weaver's own father, also thought to be a suicide, was murdered as well.

The book is written in a style that was probably intended to evoke the period in which the story is set. This is partially successful, but at times I was too aware of it.

An interesting aspect of the story is its discussion of the emergence of stock markets and paper money, and the intrigue and deception that those new inventions facilitated.


New York Times review

The Heart of the Matter, by Graham Greene

An audio book.

Ah, Graham Greene again. What a pool of calm and good sense one enters into when reading one of his books.

This is the story of Major Scoby, a policeman in West Africa during World War II. The vicissitudes of war, the clash of cultures, the threats of disease and violence, are ever present, yet Scoby presents himself as a model of reason and rectitude.

Scoby is a Catholic, which is of course the heart of many of Greene's matters, but in the course of this novel he finds himself grimly at odds with his religion, and in danger of losing his soul. In the end, we are presented with an intensely sad and difficult paradox, which left me wondering how, exactly, Greene felt about his religion.

This is such a beautifully written piece of work that I hope to acquire it on paper and read it again.

Ghostwalk, by Rebecca Stott

I can't say that I'm crazy about this book, but I did read the whole thing. It is, in part, a ghost story that involves Isaac Newton and some interesting (I'm not at all sure how accurate) information about his personality, and his involvement with alchemy. The book takes place, almost completely, in the 21st century rather than the sixteenth, but Newton and shades of the past figure prominently.

Travels With My Aunt, by Graham Greene

I don't know why I didn't read this book many years ago. Greene never fails to satisfy. This is the story of Mr. Pulling, a retired banker, bachelor whose mother has recently died. His aunt comes into his life at his mother's funeral, reveals an alarming secret, and changes Pulling's life completely.

Some choice bits:

p. 79

[Pulling moves his lips when thinking. Once, in the bank...] "The habit betrayed me very badly with a woman who was stone deaf and a lip-reader. She was...very beautiful...couldn't help dwelling a little wistfully on her loveliness...One is more free in thought than in speech and when I looked up I saw that she was blushing..."

p. 146

"...as I lay in the...nursery with a night-light beside the bed to drive away the fears...I was afraid of burglars and Indian thugs and snakes and [illegible] and Jack the Ripper, when I should have been afraid of thirty years in a bank and a take-over bid and a premature retirement and the Deuil du Roy Albert."

This last item is the name of a dahlia. I should have mentioned that Pulling raises dahlias.

p. 179

[O'Toole to Pulling]

"...Have you any children, Henry?"

"No."

"You are a lucky man. People talk about the age of reason. There's no such thing. When you have a child you are condemned to be a father for life. They go away from you. You can't go away from them."

p. 218

[Visconti to O'Toole]

"...Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully."

The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield

This could be described, in a way, as a book about books, or perhaps a story about stories. Another important theme in The Thirteenth Tale is the concept of twins. The protagonist is a young woman, unusually bookish and asocial, who lives with her parents, and helps her father run a rare book business.

Review at The Independent

Glancing at the above review, I was surprised to note that this was Setterfield's first novel. Perhaps I knew that already, but I hadn't remembered. It is masterfully written, and shows no signs of inexperience. It's a true gothic page-turner with plenty of Bad English Weather, mystery, cups of tea, ghosts, and scandalous intrigue. Jane Eyre is invoked and evoked throughout its pages, as are other similar books.

The review covers the plot very well, I won't bother to paraphrase that here. I wouldn't classify this book as great literature, but I would call it very good literature, and it provided many hours of terrific entertainment.

Tooth and Nail, by Ian Rankin

An audio book.

This is the first Inspector Rebus mystery I've read. Rankin does a very good job here, creating some interesting characters and a great traditional mystery in which "whodunit" is the classic surprise.

This is not the first Rebus book in the series, which is prodigious, but it was the earliest in the series that I could get as an audio book from the library. I think I'll start reading the paper version of Rankin's "Knots and Crosses," which is the first in the series.

I wish there was a more reasonable service for renting audio books. So far what I've found has been a mandatory annual subscription at the rate of $15/month from Audible.com and other similar companies. I suppose perhaps that's not that bad, but I'd rather pay by the book than be committed to a month-by-month membership.

In this book, Rebus is called to London to aid Inspector George Flight in the investigation of a serial murderer who kills young women in a gory ritual. Plot complications include an attractive young female psychologist and Rebus's ex-wife and daughter (they live in London, and the daughter has become involved romantically with a young man of dubious reputation).

The solving of the mystery and denouement are well done.

Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson

I listened to the audio book version of this, on 9 CDs, read by Shelly Frasier.

Set in the present, even recent past. Cayce Pollard lost her father Win when he disappeared near the World Trade Center on 11 September, 2001. Win was loosely connected to the CIA.

Why did I like this book so much. I was drawn into its world and did not want to leave.

Mirror World (England). What an attractive idea, it describes the feeling of being in a foreign land so well. Those little things I used to notice about Canada when I went there as a child.

Contemporary Russia. Oligarchs.

Pilates. Starbucks

Cayce has a sort of allergic reaction, to certain brand names / logos. One that is mentioned, and used against her in the plot is The Michelin Man, Bibendum.

"The footage" is a film that's being revealed one little segment at a time via anonymous Internet postings. YouTube is not mentioned, and indeed may not have existed at the time this was written, or if it did it was such a minor whistle stop on the Info Railroad that no one would have known what it was.  I was attracted by the retro-Internet world of people on a forum, Hotmail, Ethernet connections in hotels. Saying "hello" when answering a cell phone, being surprised at discovering who is calling -- pre caller ID?

I really loved this book, was sorry when I played the last CD. I'm thinking about getting the print version to read and see if it makes a similar impression.

 http://www.bearcave.com/bookrev/pattern_recognition.html

http://www.sfreviews.net/patternrec.html

The Beekeeper's Apprentice, by Laurie R. King

Picador Books, 1994. 346 pages. ISBN 978-0-312-42736-8

A wonderful novel in which we are introduced to young Mary Russell, a British orphan of some means, who meets Sherlock Holmes. Holmes has become a retired gentleman living in the country and keeping bees. Russell becomes, as one would guess, his apprentice.

This sort of thing could be done very badly. The Apprentice is done extremely well, and is an absolutely delightful read. There are more books in this series, this is the first, one wonders if they will be as good.

Holmes and Russell have several adventures together in this book, culminating in one enormously complicated effort to identify and capture a master criminal who attempts to kill Russell, Holmes, and Watson (yes, Dr. Watson lives, too) during the course of events.

The House on Fortune Street, by Margot Livesey

Harper Collins 2008 311 pages. ISBN 978-0-06-145152-2.

Margot Livesey has written five other novels, according to the dust jacket on this book. Further information from that source tells us that while she is from Scotland, she is presently living near Boston, and is a writer in residence at Emerson College.

This novel is written in four major parts. Each part deals with a different point of view, but with the same story. Now, this is not simply a retelling of the story from four vantage points. That doesn't sound very interesting or original to me, and this book is both. As a matter of fact, this is easily one of the very best books of any type that I've read.

The principal characters are Sean, Abigail, Dara, and Dara's father Cameron. Sean is a scholar who gave up a business career to return to school and study Keats. Abigail is the woman who stole Sean away from his idealistic, nearly-idyllic marriage -- only to disappoint him with coldness and infidelity later on. Dara is Abigail's close friend from college, who lives in the flat downstairs from Sean and Abigail, in the house of the title, which is Abigail's by virtue of an unexpected inheritance.

Cameron is the older person in this group of four, and his part of the novel flashes back in time to when he was the age of the other characters, in order to tell the story of his uniquely problematic life. Cameron is the older of two boys, but his younger brother Lionel was killed in an accident at age fourteen.

There are many other people involved in this story, including Abigail's parents, who provided her with a great deal of uncertainty and insecurity, moving her all over Britain during her childhood. Dara has, of course, a mother -- divorced from her father when his secret becomes apparent to her. Sean has a brother to whom he turns when his life becomes a morass of betrayal and despair.

The characters in The House on Fortune Street are complicated. No one is excessively good, nor is anyone supremely bad. At times, Abigail seems to qualify as the Evil one of the cast -- but her story is more complex than that. We get a good background on all these people, who they are, and why they behave as they do. Character development is extremely complete and believable in this book.

The story itself is fascinating, and I won't reveal any more of it here. I encourage you to read this novel -- I think nearly anyone would enjoy it. The plot is neatly done, thoroughly fascinating, and perfectly wrapped up at the end. This is not a particularly happy story, dealing with some of the saddest aspects of human experience, but there is much about it that is attractive and warm -- it is not completely pessimistic about the resilience of human spirit.

This is the first book I've read by Livesey's, I'm glad there are others.