All The Light We Cannot See

Power of Sound

There was, admittedly, a reluctance to read this book, in spite of its Pulitzer and many more awards, because World War II holds little interest now. Anthony Doerr’s All The Light We Cannot See is a beautiful and delicate novel set in evil times, but still bringing out the goodness in so many people; a love story waiting to happen, tragically the two people meant for each other, meet much too late.

Marie-Laure lost her sight at the age of six, but her loving father makes sure she is as self-sufficient as possible.  A locksmith at the Museum of Natural History in Paris by profession, a maker of intricate little puzzle boxes as a hobby, Daniel LeBlanc makes a detailed scale model of their area in Paris, so that his daughter can get a feel of it; he buys her expensive Braille books and also takes her with him to work, where she learns a lot from the scientists working at the Museum.

The Museum also hides under massive security, a priceless but cursed diamond, the Sea of Flames. Whoever keeps it cannot die, but it will take a toll on their loved ones.

Parallel to the life of the LeBlancs is that of German orphan Werner Pfennig, who along with his sister Jutta, lives in an orphanage in the coal-mining town of Zollverein. He and Jutta find a broken short-wave radio, which Werner manages to repair, revealing his extraordinary skill with radio circuitry. He and Jutta listen to many programmes, including a broadcast from France hosted by a man who shares stories about science, simplified for young listeners. This broadcast becomes Werner’s way out of his sad existence.

 When the Germans occupy France, the LeBlancs are forced to move to the beautiful coastal town of Saint-Malo, with a ‘crazy’ uncle Etienne and his kind housekeeper Madame Manec.  Marie-Laure is happy for a while, till the Germans march into the town and destroy its fragile peace. 

Werner’s technical wizardly helps him escape the orphanage and gain entry into an elite Nazi military school which is brutal in the extreme. Werner’s best friend Frederick, the gentle bird lover, is broken by the school’s savage regime, but he survives again due to his skill and is sent to the front to trace enemy radio broadcasts.

Daniel is arrested by the Germans, denounced by a greedy neighbor and disappears. Madame Manec, with Etienne and Marie-Laure runs an efficient but dangerous Resistance operation from their home.

In 1944, when the War is gradually coming to an end, with deaths and broken spirits on both sides—Doerr depicts the suffering of the Germans too—Werner finally lands in Saint-Malo, to find and destroy the radio that has been transmitting intelligence information and helping the Allied Forces against the Germans. At the same time, a sadistic German military officer, Reinhold von Rumpel, suffering from cancer arrives searching for the Sea of Flames, that can save him.

Werner and Marie-Laure’s paths briefly converge and a connection is briefly forged that is beyond the madness, cruelty and destruction around them—these two strange kids, the blind girl with a thousand freckles and the pale German boy with a shock of snowy hair, brought together by the power of radio waves that offered them both hope and redemption.

An emotionally stirring story, with wonderfully etched characters—even the minor ones like Werner’s giant buddy in the army and the Saint-Malo baker, who inserts secret messages into her loaves of bread. People who find the strength to fight tough circumstances, their courage is never acknowledged by history--- only by fiction.

All The Light We Cannot See

By Anthony Doerr

Publisher: Scribner

Pages: 530

A Brief History Of Seven Killings

Savage Times

The writing career of this year’s Man Booker prize winner Marlon James is a study in persistence. His first book was reportedly rejected by over seventy publishers. His third, A Brief History Of Seven Killings, bowled the judges over and was picked unanimously—the first time an author from Jamaica won this prize.

The extraordinary novel is spans three decades and uses the true story of the attempt on the life of reggae star Bob Marley (referred to only as “the singer”) as a peg to hang a probe into Jamaican society. The language moves from slang to formal sprinkled with so much swearing, that the author said in jest that he would not recommend readers gifting it to their mothers.

 James imagines the stories of the gangland shooters, and in the style of oral history has many people contributing to the vivid narrative—including a ghost.  It is as satisfying a book as it is tough to read. Right at the start its seventy-five characters are listed and the reader has to keep track and they swoop in and out, using their own distinctive patois. For instance, the evil criminal Josey Wales, says of his meeting with CIA agents, “I don’t tell him that yo tengo suficiente español para concocer que eres la más gran broma en Sudamérica. I chat to him bad like some bush naigger and ask dumb question like, So everybody in America have gun? What kinda bullet American fire? Why you don’t transfer Dirty Harry to the Jamaican branch? hee hee hee.” The book is a veritable babel of voices in settings that are brutally violent and call out comparisons to the films of Quentin Tarantino.

Jones encapsulates the nexus between organized crime and politics in 1970s Jamaica (a Mumbai reader would find parallels in the city, the way ghetto boys are attracted to crime); the attempt on Marley’s life was allegedly triggered by the 1976 election campaign, the most violent in the country’s history. The CIA, anti-Castro Cubans, Columbian drug cartels further muddied Jamaican waters.

It is an ambitious novel, well-researched, sharply observed and fearless; it challenges the reader to pick up all the strands and try to make sense of the chaos. It certainly won’t encourage anyone to book a Caribbean cruise!

A Brief History Of Seven Killings

By Marlon James

Publisher: Riverhead

Pages: 704

The Survivor

Across The Border

Many thrillers using the current scenario of international political skullduggery have Arab or Afghan terrorists as villains, but The Survivor is a rare book, in which the focus is on Pakistanis.

This is the fourteen Mitch Rapp thriller by Vince Flynn, who passed away after having written just a few pages, and the book was completed by Kyle Mills. Not having read any other books by Flynn it’s hard to say whether Mills has delivered on style, but publishers and fans must have been happy because Mills will write two more Mitch Rapp books.

Rapp is a CIA assassin, who is legendary in espionage circles for having carried out many successful hits and also being virtually indestructible. He is a patriot and will go to any lengths to destroy enemies of the US and protect his country. He lost his pregnant wife in an attack on his life and is even more of a loose cannon now. But there is also an attempt to humanize him and not portray him as a remorseless killing machine. He is a man of his word, is wonderful with children, and unflinchingly loyal to his friends and associates. His relationship with his senior, Stan Hurley, who is dying of cancer, is depicted with compassion. Rapp also accords total respect to his female boss, Irene Kennedy, with not an iota of insubordination, which is in sharp contrast to the way the feudal Pakistanis or the boorish American Senator Ferris treat her. In different times, under different circumstances, he would have been a better man.

Of course, these books work if the reader takes for granted that the Americans are the good guys and that it is okay for CIA hitmen to kill anybody who steps in their way. If you start questioning why the CIA plants moles all over the world and gathers information using fair means or clandestine, then Mitch Rapp, Irene Kennedy and their small band of globetrotting assassins do not come out smelling of roses.

But in The Survivor, Pakistan’s ISI turns out to be a worthy opponent and comes close to toppling the CIA, weakening the US and controlling the Middle East. Mills has a fairly good fix on Pakistan’s internal politics and has fun pushing Americans against the wall, since it is their money that funds their enemies. The US sends aid to Pakistan and it ends up with militant groups and corrupt bureaucrats to carry out their anti-America activities.

In the earlier book, The Last Man, a CIA agent Joe Rickman who had an encyclopedic knowledge of the workings of the organisation—just where the agents and deep ‘assets’ are, which diplomat or politician is being bribed and so on—went rogue. He was killed by Rapp, along with his Pakistani cohort General Durrani, but Rickman planned the destruction of the CIA from beyond the grave.

He left encrypted files to be released at timed intervals and as CIA’s network starts unraveling one secret agent at a time, in this book, it’s a race between the CIA operatives and he ISI’s devious, power hungry chief Ahmed Taj to reach the priceless cachet of Rickman’s information before it blows up in the face of America.

Flynn and Mills may have written Mitch Flynn as a jingoistic and rougher version of James Bond, but at least this book gives credit to the Pakistanis for being just as smart and ruthless. They unscramble data faster and reach their targets before the Americans. However, Rapp is the ‘hero’ so he gets to win, though most of the info-gathering work is done by the IT wiz Marcus Dumond and the political heavy-lifting done by the unflappable Irene Kennedy.

Still, it’s a fast-paced and exciting read, with quite a few tense action sequences. Plus, India gets an honorable mention as Pakistan’s good and stable neighbour!

The Survivor

By Vince Flynn & Kyle Mills

Publisher: Atria

Pages: 400

The Japanese Lover

Love And A Little Magic

When Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits came in 1985, it became an international bestseller. The Chile-born, California-settled author’s sprawling, emotion-soaked epics (most of the 21 novels she has written) have been full of, history, memory, romance and magic realism.  Her new novel The Japanese Lover was eagerly awaited, and it has all the ingredients the reader has come to expect from her work, but somehow, it turns out less than satisfactory, like a dish that looks delicious but lacks that one spice that will make it perfect.

The novel is intriguing and has a fresh twist every few pages, but there is also a rushed, breathless feel to it, as if the writer wanted to cram in a lot more but was hampered by a looming deadline, like this were a first draft waiting for more layering.

The book moves back and forth from the World War II era to the present.  A young Moldovian woman, Irina Bazili, with a terrible secret, comes to work at a home for senior citizens, in San Francisco. Called Lark House, the place is rather jauntily described thus: “Founded in the mid-twentieth century to offer shelter with dignity to elderly persons of slender means, for some unknown reason from the beginning it had attracted left-wing intellectuals, oddballs, and second-rate artists.”

She makes herself indispensable with her hard work and honesty (she refuses the legacy of a French dandy as “ill-gotten” gains) and is summoned by the latest entrant, Alma Belasco. A rich and sophisticated woman, she could afford a better place, but prefers to stay at the humble Lark House, away from her mansion and her caring family.  From being secretary and general helper, Irina becomes a close friend of Alma and attracts the undying love of Alma’s grandson, Seth Belasco.

In putting together the Belasco Family history, as an excuse to get close to Irina,  Seth discovers more about his grandmother’s secrets—most importantly the mysterious Japanese lover, Ichimei Fukuda, whom the old lady still goes off to meet; she receives letters and gifts from him and the reader is told the story of the great love of Alma’s life that transcends all boundaries.

Alma, was sent away by her Polish-Jewish parents to their relatives, Lillian and Isaac Belasco, to protect her from the horrors of impending Holocaust.  Lonely and grieving for her family,  Alma latches on to the Belasco’s compassionate son Nathaniel and the Japanese gardener’s son Ichimei.  (Her wise uncle observes, “Childhood is a naturally unhappy period of our existence, Lillian. It was Walt Disney who invented the notion that it has to be happy, simply to make money”—vintage Allende)

After Pearl Harbour, all Japanese families are thrown into distant camps, maybe not as cruel as the ones the Nazis built for Jews, but just as traumatic for a proud and diligent race. Alma and Ichimei keep in touch through letters and the children’s friendship develops into a romantic passion that consumes them both,  but cannot end in marriage in those racially intolerant times.

While covering the lives of Alma and Ichimei and their families, Irina’s tragic past is also revealed, which prevents her from returning Seth’s love.  It’s heartening to note that most men in Allende’s book are strong, supportive, unselfishly devoted. Most of all Nathaniel, who puts aside his own life so that Alma can thrive. Even a burly black cop who makes a fleeting appearance, is wholesomely kind.

Allende is tempted to put in too many contemporary problems into the novel—from the WW-II concentration camps to illegal abortions, sex slavery, child pornography, homosexuality, the AIDs epidemic; even minor characters are given a back story—but they read like random notes the book could have done without, since the central love story is not given the attention it deserves. In spite of all the adoring adjectives used to describe Ichimei "a wonderful man, a sage, a saint, a pure soul, a delicate, considerate lover,” he hardly ever seems like a real person. At one point Allende writes that he is a fakir who can "control his pulse rate and his temperature” but this astonishing ability is never put to the test, though Ichimei’s training in karate (a bit of a Japan cliché; there’s a samurai sword too!) and his green thumb are emphasized.

In spite of its flaws, the book is very readable and highly recommended. It might goad the reader to look for Allende’s earlier books, some of which are beautiful, robust and magical.

The Japanese Lover

By Isabel Allende

Publisher: Atria Books

Pages: 336

City on Fire

New York State Of Mind

Garth Risk Hallberg’s debut novel, City on Fire is a long, ode to New York, following many strands with characters lost and hopeless in the city, where, like in any megapolis, the rich get richer climbing the scaffolding of the poor. Those who cannot fit in, find ways to self-destruct.

The novel is set between Christmas 1976 and 13 July 1977, when New York suffered a blackout. But before that a whole lot of characters have their lives intersecting without their being aware of it. Though there is no clear protagonist, the man at the core of the sprawling book covering swanky highrises and filthy squats, is William Stuart Althrop Hamilton-Sweeny III, scion of the country’s richest family, who wants none of the wealth or power his clan has accrued, mostly by foul means and spews his rage on canvases in a hidden studio. His father has married a social climber after the death of his wife, and her “Demon Brother” Amory Gould wrenches control of the empire—a small, white-haired man “plugged into every network you can think of, public and private… There’s no manipulation he isn’t capable of.”

The event that loosely binds all the strands together, is the apparently random shooting of a young woman at Central Park. William’s sister Regan, breaking up with her unfaithful husband Keith has problems of the typical single mother. It is Keith’s young girlfriend who is shot,; the victim, Sam, is found by William’s boyfriend, a teacher and aspiring writer, Mercer Goodman. Sam was involved with a punk band and her best friend Charlie (“a timorous weed sprouting from his combat boots” ) is drawn into that drug-fuelled hell of men like Nicky Chaos, Sol Grungy and a female groupie called Sewer Girl, who believe they are revolutionaries in a class war.

A polio-afflicted cop, a Vietnamese girl, her Austrian boss, an Italian fireworks maker, a journalist and many other are tossed into the rich and spicy cauldron of stories that whets the appetite of the reader and keeps at it over 944 pages of often dense prose -- have a dictionary handy, Hallberg never uses a simple word when a difficult one can be found.

It is not easy to describe the plot of this ambitious novel, because it contains many novels in its belly, including that maze-like whodunit – who shot Sam and why. Along with this are pages from a handmade fanzine that Sam brought out, a letter from a father to his son, transcripts of radio broadcasts, and other devices that offer breaks in the bleak narrative.

When the power outage hit New York—and Hallberg describes as frightening orgy of looting, arson and anarchy—it actually became the foundation for many real estate fortunes, when property was snapped up cheap by businessmen who went on to become real estate tycoons.

This book, that took Hallberg seven years to write, brings to mind another definitive New York novel, Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, but this one is humorless and solemn—not a satire, but a meticulous word capture of an age that is recent enough to remind readers familiar with New York of the time of racism, unemployment, urban decay, youthful rebellion; it sounds like any city, today that has grown without any thought for the underprivileged. And rebellions have been doused effectively by consumerism.

City On Fire

By Garth Risk Hallberg

Published by Alfred A. Knopf

Pages: 944

Rogue Lawyer

No Holds Barred

John Grisham’s last book, Grey Mountain was a grim indictment of the coal mining lobby’s destruction of the environment, and the committed lawyers who fight them. His latest, Rogue Lawyer is comparatively a light read, probably written to be picked up by Hollywood.

Grisham has created a rabble-rousing hero, Sebastian Rudd, who takes cases nobody else will touch and enjoys the media attention his notoriety gets him, and, of course, the admiration his courtroom wins fetch. Since he often butts heads with cops as well as mobsters, his office was firebombed and he functions out of a bulletproof van equipped to function as a mobile office. (Probably inspired by Michael Connelly’s Lincoln Lawyer books).

Rudd believes, “A lawyer like me is forced to work in the shadows. My opponents are protected by badges, uniforms, and all the myriad trappings of government power. They are sworn and duty-bound to uphold the law, but since they cheat like hell it forces me to cheat even more.”

The first case that he handles as the book opens, is that of a brain damaged, grimy teenager named Gardy who is accused of the double murder of two girls in a small town called Milo. No lawyer wants to defend him, so Rudd does, because he hates the small town smug righteousness that proclaims a boy guilty in spite of enough evidence of his innocence. Rudd also loves the idea of having to “claw and raise hell in a courtroom where no one is listening.” The townsfolk are so hostile that Rudd and his buddy/bodyguard called Partner, have to keep changing motels to avoid attack.

He wins this case, which is like a prologue to the rest of the hell-raising he does. Gardy does not appear again, but the other cases are linked.  The most moving is that of a senior citizen whose house is mistakenly attacked by cops conducting a narcotics raid. In the melee, his wife is killed and a cop injured. Even though the error is established in no time, the cops won’t admit to it and want to haul the hapless old man over the coals. How Rudd brings the city’s (it is not clear which one) administration to its knees makes one accord to the ‘rogue’ a grudging admiration. Grisham also lays bare the corruption, wheeling-dealing and biases in the US legal system, which people outside the country seem to think is above board.

Then there’s a gangster client on death row and Rudd has no scruples about that.  He says in his first person narrative, “My clients are almost always guilty, so I don’t waste a lot of time wringing my hands about whether they get what they deserve.” How the gangster deals with his imprisonment and conviction is hilarious – and very likely to be copied by Bollywood filmmakers (provided they read, of course.)

Rudd also funds a Hispanic cage fighter, who beats a referee to death in full view of an audience and then expects to walk out of jail. Then there’s the sinister flesh trader, who kidnaps the daughter of a cop, and leads Rudd and the entire police force to distraction with his lies and subterfuge. The cops are not exactly spotlessly clean—when they want information from Rudd, they kidnap his son. Rudd’s troubled relationship with his lesbian ex-wife is the weakest part of the book; Grisham makes the mother sound like a harridan because she disapproves of Rudd’s belief that a boy should be manned up by being exposed to violence.

This hitch aside, Rogue Lawyer is a hugely entertaining thriller and it looks like Rudd will star in a series. A character like that can’t be abandoned after just one book.

Rogue Lawyer

By John Grisham

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Pages: 344

All the Single Ladies

The Sisterhood

Dorothea Benton Frank sets her stories in South Carolina and focuses on women. Her last book, The Hurricane Sisters, was a family saga and at the centre of her latest All the Single Ladies is a group of friends—all women over the age of fifty, the demographic that is so often ignored by popular fiction and cinema.

The three single women of the title are Lisa, Suzanne and Carrie; Lisa, who works as a nurse in an assisted living facility, meets the other two at the funeral of their mutual friend Kathy. Their friendship is sealed by their fight against Kathy’s horrid landlady, who wants to steal the dead woman’s belongings.

The women also bond over their single status, and their fondness for Suzanne’s wonderfully eccentric ninety-nine year old grandmother, Miss Trudie.  Lisa and her cute pooch Pickle end up living at Miss Trudie’s sea-side home, when she is unexpectedly ousted from her rented house. The deep friendship that develops between the three, and the romance that enters their lives almost at the same time, are heartwarming. Dorothea Benton Frank’s books are emotional, humorous, have lovely descriptions of places and food. That’s why they are always on the bestseller lists.

All the Single Ladies 

By Dorothea Benton Frank

Publisher: William Morrow.

Page: 368

A Man Called Ove

Grumpy Ol’ Man

When every day brings dark and depressing news, a little bit of sunshine is needed and Frederick Backman’s charming novel A Man Called Ove hits the spot. Backman, a Swedish blogger, wrote about a crotchety man called Ove (pronounced Oover), and the character became so popular that a book resulted, beautifully translated by Henning Koch.

Men like Ove could be found all over the world—widowed, no family, no friends, looking like "a middle-aged man who expects the worthless world outside to disappoint him." He is a meticulous keeper of schedules, a stickler for rules, a creature of habit (he hates everyone who does not drive a Saab), every day being exactly the same. He lived a tough life of struggle and toil, and the death of his wife, Sonja, took away all happiness and desire to live. At 59, all Ove wants is to die in peace.

 His careful preparations to hang himself are disrupted by a noisy, friendly family moving in next door. They first annoy Ove by knocking down his mailbox, and then drag the reluctant grouch out of his self-imposed solitude.

The husband is the mild-mannered and clumsy Patrick, his wife, the very pregnant Parvaneh and they have two daughters, one quiet and studious, the other a complete riot. A mangy cat attaches itself to Ove too, much to his annoyance.

The writing is simple and very funny, moving back and forth in time, alternating Ove’s current state of irritation and helpless surrender to Parvaneh, with his harsh childhood, romance, marriage and life with Sonja.  As the book proceeds and the reader gets to know the true nature of his devotion to his wife, the admiration for Ove grows.

Parvaneh does not let on, but she understands Ove’s state of mind, and has an uncanny knack of interrupting her neighbour’s latest suicide bid.  Ove’s objections and rudeness have no effect on Parvaneh, or on Jimmy, the overweight computer geek next door, who envelop him with the warmth of being needed—whether it is driving to the hospital Patrick who broke his leg falling off a ladder borrowed from Ove, or helping a neighbor fight a nasty care worker who wants to take away her ill husband to an institution, or supporting another gay neighbour against his homophobic father. Early on he saves a man who has fallen on to a railway track (where he had gone to die), and resists the local journalist’s insistence on telling his story and turning him into a hero. The journalist later joins Ove’s fight against heartless bureaucrats “men in white.”

Ove, who spent his life building things, has the magical ability to fix anything; what he doesn’t know is that he is capable of repairing broken emotions too, till Parvaneh barges into his misanthropic life.

It’s a sad story too, but uplifted by so much kindness and wit that you wonder why people don’t help others and make the world a better place.  All it takes is will.

A Man Called Ove

By Frederick Back

Translated by Henning Koch

Publisher: Atria

Pages: 352

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

Love & Books

Another heartwarming story with humour and community spirit so lacking today, is Gabrielle Zevin’s The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry.

The novel is meant for book lovers, the protagonist being a lonely, middle-aged widower, A.J. Fikry (of Indian origin), who owns a failing bookshop on an island.  He stocks the books he likes, and manages with his meager earnings, living in small apartment above the bookshop.

Each chapter begins with his notes in books he likes; the book snob that he is, he tells Amelia, a publisher’s representative, whom he later falls in love with, “I do not like postmodernism, post­apocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be — basically gimmicks of any kind. . . . I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and — I imagine this goes without saying — vampires.”

He has no friends, except for the local thriller-loving cop, and his sister-in-law; his life is peaceful if uneventful. Then, his priceless first edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tamerlane is stolen, and a precocious child, Maya, is left in his bookshop. The two events have a life-changing impact on him and make for a book worth reading (pardon the needless melodrama that creeps in) ...a book about the transformative power of words. And, of course, love.

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

By Gabrielle Zevin

Publisher: Algonquin

Pages: 258

Career of Evil

Striking Back

By now everyone knows Robert Galbraith is J.K. Rowling’s pseudonym—presumably when she gets sick of writing about her famous boy wizard, she thinks seriously about a one-legged war veteran, who runs a detective agency.

Cormoran Strike is not the garden variety gumshoe—he has an interesting back story and a complicated love life. He is the son of a rock star and a doped out groupie. His hippie mother raised him and his half siblings in a slapdash way and was possibly murdered by her latest toy-boy husband when Strike was a boy. That man, Whittaker makes an appearance to mock and torment, in Career of Evil, the third Cormoran Strike book after The Cuckoo’s Calling and The Silkworm.

In the first book, Strike had hired smart and pretty Robin Ellacott as his assistant; by the end of the book, she was promoted to partner. Their relationship has a strange push-pull quality—they deny the powerful attraction they feel for each other, by trying extra hard to keep it all strictly professional. Robin has a fiancé, Matthew, who hates Strike and is jealous of him. The feeling is reciprocated by Strike. In every book, while mysteries are solved, these complicated matters of the mind and heart are also being coped with.

 When Career of Evil begins (after a grisly prologue), a female leg is delivered to Robin, accompanied by a note quoting Blue Öyster Cult (lyrics by the band begin each chapter) — a reference to Strike’s mother, which only he gets. Robin is understandably horrified, but it is soon clear that a pervert serial killer is on the loose, who enjoys mutilating the women he kills. The reader is made privy to the fact that the killer wants to destroy Strike, by targeting Robin. If the whiff of such fiendish events hovers over Strike business, and he is unable to protect his own partner, who will ever hire him?

Like in the first book, Strike is pushed to the brink of professional and financial disaster and he has to find the killer even as the cops blunder around. He knows that the murderer knows him and has some old revenge motive. Strike and Robin have to trace the possible suspects and investigate the how and why, before more women, and Robin, become victims of the lunatic’s carving knife.

Galbraith has written a chilling book and also gone into the dark world pedophilia and of people with body integrity identity disorder — “the irrational desire for the removal of a healthy body part”—that might give many readers nightmares. To help him, Strike has just a scarred and scary-looking childhood buddy, Shanker, who surfaces from some criminal netherworld when summoned--as loyal as he is mercenary. 

More is revealed about the past of Strike and Robin—she is still fighting demons of an old trauma, that does not allow herself to be as emotionally open with Matthew as would like her to be. She and her sympathetic parents are preparing for Robin’s wedding with Matthew when this horrible case comes up and strains her already problematic relationship with Matthew. 

From idyllic towns to sordid strip joints—the search for the psychopath takes Strike and Robin all over the place, courting danger and risking heartbreak. The big, burly, hairy Cormoran Strike, who refuses to let the loss of his leg handicap him, is one hell of a hero, and Robin a perfect foil. They are made for each other—at least at work.  And the wait will be on for the next part of their story—the cases will get solved anyway.

Career Of Evil

By Robert Galbraith

Publisher: Mulholland

Pages: 497

Make Me

Small Town Secrets

Make Me is Lee Child’s twentieth Jack Reacher novel. The six-foot five giant of a man, ex army intelligence, lives like a gypsy. He owns nothing but the clothes on his back and a toothbrush in his pocket.  When his clothes get too filthy he buys a new set and throws away the old. He is constantly on the move, and gets involved in all kinds of adventures he does nothing to seek, but does not avoid either. He has nowhere to go, and nothing to do, except, maybe, kill bad guys when they cross his path. He is a unique hero, which Tom Cruise could not quite nail in the only Jack Reacher movie made in 2012 (based on the 2005 novel One Shot) Still, another Reacher novel,  the terrific Never Go Back is being made into a film to be released next year.

Make Me has more violence than other Reacher books, which are by no means squeamish about bloodshed. It starts harmlessly enough, with Reacher getting off a train at a station called Mother’s Rest, because he is curious about the name. All he wants to do is walk around the wheat-growing town and find out the origin of the town’s peculiar name.

He runs into a woman called Michelle Chang, who is a detective, looking for her partner Keever, who came to Mother’s Rest and disappeared. The reader knows he has been killed, what has to be determined is why and by whom; also how Chang will solve the mystery all on her own.

She won’t be alone, obviously. Reacher offers help, for no reason but that he is the kind of guy who would. He is also intrigued by the sinister goings in the town and the overt hostility of the menfolk. That, and the odd fact that nobody knows why the town is called Mother’s Rest.

When Reacher is threatened with bodily harm, he cannot but fight back and leave some seriously damaged men in his wake. (His actions are justified thus: he is “a craftsman going about his business, calmly, using his natural born gifts.”)

Reacher and Chang (who casually jump into bed soon enough, though there are no steamy antics described), set out to find out what happened to Keever and somehow connect with a journalist, Westwood, who goes along for the ride to get a scoop and book rights for whatever can of worms is opened.

More violence is unleashed as the trio inch towards the truth. What they find is so horrifying, that the book leaves one a bit shaken. The overlong climax is not too interesting to read, but it seems to have been written with a screenplay adaptation in mind.

The plot is complex, the pace is unhurried, the dialogue laconic and the humour wicked. At one point, to test Reacher’s memory that may have been affected by a head injury, Chang makes him recite the Gettyburg Address when the are together in the bathroom. Westwood’s baffled reaction is priceless.

Make Me

By Lee Child

Publisher: Delacorte

Pages: 402

Everything I Never Told You,

Tragedy Foretold

Right at the start of Celeste Ng’s debut novel, Everything I Never Told You, it is revealed that a girl called Lydia is dead.  As her family and the police hunt for the missing girl, whose body is found at the bottom of the lake, the story of her family and Lydia’s tragedy is gently unfolded,

The novel is set in the Seventies, but the issues of race and alienation of the ‘outsider’ never go away. Linda is the beloved daughter of a mixed race family—her father, the quietly courageous James is Chinese, her mother Marilyn is white. Lydia, with her blue eyes and blonde hair, looks like her mother, but that does not spare her the racist cruelty her siblings face.  Worse, the full force of her mother’s thwarted ambition is put on the fragile girl’s shoulders. Her brother Nathan plans on escaping, while her kid sister Hannah skulks around ignored by the family that didn’t want her. Her only friend is the town’s ‘bad boy’ Jack, but he has problems of her own.

As the cops come asking questions, it is revealed to her shocked and grief-stricken family that Lydia had been living a lie and trying to be the over-achieving daughter her parents wanted her to be, even if it killed her. It’s a heartbreaking story, which deftly combines the thrill of suspense with the melancholy of broken hearts. In the novel’s most moving scene, Marilyn finds a bunch of her daughter’s diaries, that she gifted to her each year, sure that Lydia wrote in them. Then, “With one finger, she tugs out the last diary: 1977. It will tell her, she thinks. Everything Lydia no longer can. Who she had been seeing. Why she had lied to them. Why she went down to the lake.

“The key is missing, but Marilyn jams the tip of a ballpoint into the catch and forces the flimsy lock open. The first page she sees, April 10, is blank. She checks May 2, the night Lydia disappeared. Nothing. Nothing for May 1, or anything in April, or anything in March. Every page is blank. She takes down 1976. 1975. 1974. Page after page of visible, obstinate silence. She leafs backward all the way to the very first diary, 1966: not one word. All those years of her daughter’s life, unmarked. Nothing to explain anything.”

The novel was picked as Amazon’s Book of the Year for 2014, beating giants like Hilary Mantel and Stephen King, which is not a minor feat.

Everything I Never Told You

By Celeste Ng

Publisher: Penguin

Pages: 297

Journey Under the Midnight Sun

Dark And Twisted

One of Keigo Higashino’s earlier books, The Devotion Of Suspect X made his international reputation as a master of crime fiction and his cult has only grown since.

His latest book, Journey Under The Midnight Sun (translated from the original Japanese by Alexander O. Smith and Joseph Reeder) is an intricately plotted book with unpredictable turns and a really shocking twist at the end.

The thick novel begins in 1973 in Osaka, with the discovery of a body in an abandoned building.  Detective Sasagaki gets to handle the case and he does all he can to find the killer, but every lead is a dead end. Still, for twenty years he stays obsessed with the case, long after the statute of limitation sets in.

The murdered man was a pawnbroker, Yosuke Kirihara, whose son Ryo is a sullen and strange child, who knows more than he lets on. The main suspect is a struggling single mother, who may have been the man’s lover. But then her daughter Yukiho,discovers the her mother’s corpse and the cops conclude suicide due to strained circumstances. Yukiho, a very self-possessed child, is then brought up by a kind relative. She grows up to be a smart and successful entrepreneur, but with secrets tucked away behind her beautiful (“There are thorns in her eyes,” a friend says about her) and friendly exterior.

The complex story with minute detailing (the sound of a bell tinkling in bag connects to a horrific crime, as does a broken key chain) has a cocktail of inflammable ingredients—sex, obsession, brutality, perversion, betrayal—that Higashino expertly blends. 

The book is like peeling an onion with layers and layers revealing new characters and fresh subplots, all of which are connected to the main plot. At the heart of it is a dark and twisted love story that emotionally destroys the two people involved, so that they are capable of enormous cruelty.

The story follows Ryo and Yukiho through their unsettling childhood (young girls are kidnapped and raped around their school) to adulthood. The people who love them cannot quite understand their furtive behavior or their devious minds.

As the years pass, Higashino introduces computers, gaming, piracy and computer hacking, and organized crime.  But at the centre are echoes of that that long ago murder and the link between Ryo and Yukiho. Sasagaki asks "Ever heard of the goby and the shrimp?" and explains, “Yukiho Karasawa and Ryo Kirihara have what biologists call a symbiotic relationship. One can't live without the other. They're a pair for life."

But they are never together, yet never apart. The story swirls around them, many characters enter and exit and push it towards its intriguing climax. A fascinating unputdownable read.

Journey Under the Midnight Sun 

By Keigo Higashino 

Published by Little, Brown

Pages: 554

Wind/Pinball

Begin Again

Haruki Murakami is the most popular Japanese author today, whose name comes up every year as a contender for the Nobel Prize. 

His books are an enigmatic mix of social comment, mystery, sci-fi, fantasy and romance that no other writer has managed to put together with such dexterity. But how did this remarkable career begin?

           

Pinball, 1973 was first published in in 1980,  the second book in the Rat Trilogy, preceded by Hear The Wind Sing (1979) and followed by A Wild Sheep Chase (1982). Now Wind/Pinball  have been translated (by Ted Goossen) and published together, with an introduction -- The Birth of My Kitchen-Table Fiction -- by Murakami himself, in which he reveals how he started writing.  They contain all the classic Murakami tropes, but are relatively simple as compared to his later, increasingly surreal, books.

The protagonist is a chain-smoking, heavy drinking drifter, with an oddly apathetic attitude to life. Both short novels feature this unnamed young man and his even more mysterious buddy, the Rat, hanging out at J’s bar and having desultory conversations.  In Pinball, the narrator  sets up a translation company, lives with submissive twins who could only come out of an adolescent’s fantasy, and becomes fixated on a particular pinball machine.

There is not much of a plot in either book, but a lot happens with the characters’ mindscapes. His books have been described as “super-elliptical pop-noir” and that’s about accurate. For Murakami fans, dazzled by his literary artistry in his books like Kafka On The Shore, The Windup Bird Chronicles, 1Q84 and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, this slim volume is a must read, to discover the making of a master.

Wind/Pinball

By Haruki Murakami

Published by: Alfred A. Knopf

Pages: 234