Thirty-three and a Half Shenanigans

Ornery Gal

A light chick-lit mystery, Thirty-three and a Half Shenanigans by Denise Grover Swank is for the vocabulary-challenged young reader, who has made the Rose Gardner series bestsellers.

It is set in a small Arkansas town, where people use phrases like “Oh my stars and garters” or “Crappy doodles”, are always placing their hands on their hips and giving each other ‘ornery’ looks (the writer could do with a thesaurus). Here, Rose runs a landscaping business with the troubleshooting Bruce Wayne and her malevolent sister Violet, but also gets involved in many “shenanigans.”

For one, she is in the midst of a love triangle between the deputy sheriff Joe and the assistant district attorney, Mason. Then, her best friend Neely Kate wants help to find her missing cousin, Dolly Parton (they have names like that!)  Rose gets sudden visions of the future, and this, for some reason makes her invaluable to the town’s underworld king Skeeter Malcolm.

In the search for Dolly, Rose and Neely Kate audition at a strip joint, Rose attends a gangsters meeting in disguise, Mason gets shot at, and Joe’s clingy ex girlfriend gets pregnant. Rose has plenty to be “ornery” about.

It’s a quick read, that can be tossed aside and forgotten. Rose is not half as efficient or likeable as so many other female solvers of mysteries, but Swank’s readers probably like a feisty young woman, who is pretty, has a drool-worthy figure and has men eating out of her hands.  And, she doesn’t swoon at the first sign of trouble...or a dead body with a hole in his head.

Thirty-three and a Half Shenanigans

by Denise Grover Swank

Self-Published

Pages: 358

Revival

Electrifying Horror

The prolific Stephen King churns out books at an alarming rate, and every book has an intriguing idea at its core and a style of writing that keeps the reader hooked. Even those who are not fans of the master of horror, suspense and fantasy, can’t but marvel at how he pulls off a bestseller each time, without compromising on the quality that one has come to expect from him.

His latest, Revival—his 58^th-- is a sprawling novel spanning half a century, with a strange pastor-scientist character, inspired by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (later in the book, there are characters called Mary and Victor, as homage). King also dedicates it to HP Lovecraft and Arthur Machen, whose The Great God Pan “has haunted me all my life.”  In an interview, King called it a “nasty, dark piece of work...It’s too scary. I don’t even want to think about that book any more.”  The book does have a disturbing effect on the reader.

The narrator is Jamie Morton, who first encounters Pastor Charles Jacobs when he is six years old, playing in his backyard.  A shadow falls over the mud fort he has made, and never leaves him.  The new minister is charming and is soon popular with the whole town. His wife and infant son also become a part of the community. Jacobs is a man of God, but his passion is electricity and he is always tinkering with wires and batteries, creating his own gizmos. He wins over the Morton family by curing one of the kids Conrad, of his muteness, using a handmade electric tool.

Then, Jacobs’s family is brutally killed in an accident and he loses his faith.  After preaching a sermon in which he says that religion is “built on the blood, bones, and screams of those who have the effrontery not to bow to their idea of God,” he quietly leaves town.

Meanwhile, Jamie becomes a musician and is spiralling out of control with a drug problem when he encounters Jacobs again. Jacobs is now a fairground huckster, wowing the hicks with his electrical tricks.  But he picks up Jamie, takes him home, looks after him and using electricity again, cures him of his addiction. The ‘cure’ has some scary side-effects, but Jamie is still grateful for being pulled out of the gutter and placed back on the road to recovery. Jacobs also arranges for a job for Jamie at a recording studio with a maverick music producer Hugh (also one of his ‘cures’), and he is at peace. But every time Jacobs makes a re-entry, he is in a new avatar, as a miracle healer or conman, and, as Jamie can see, a man so obsessed with electricity that he is losing his grip on reality. Even as he does cure some people, Jacobs also leaves a trail of tragedy behind him.

But Jacobs does not think he is doing anything wrong. He has a clear agenda and Jamie is a part of his grand plan, for which he uses threats and emotional blackmail to summon him whenever he needs a hand.

King masterfully draws the reader in, with placid passages when Jamie is almost happy, to the darkness that engulfs him every time he meets Jacobs. Even though he knows nothing good can come of it, and he promises to break ties with Jacobs, Jamie cannot stay away from the destructive power of the man.

Jamie’s and Jacobs’s lives get increasingly intertwined, till the truly terrifying climax, which has a hint of Hindu mythology.  It’s a nightmare-inducing but fascinating read.

Revival

By Stephen King

Publisher: Scribner

Pages: 405

Dark Places

Bleak & Twisted

Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl became such a publishing sensation—and deservedly so—that one of her earlier books, Dark Places has pushed into the bestseller lists again.

Like the calculative protagonist of Gone Girl, the main character in this book too has plenty to be angry about. When Libby Day was 7, her 15-year-old brother, Ben, killed their mother and two older sisters; she remained “the lone survivor of the Prairie Massacre” – a tabloid darling.

The Days’ home life was far from ideal and the wretchedness seeped into her soul. “I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ.. I was raised feral, and I mostly stayed that way.”

The charity hand-outs that kept her going all these years are running out, so she takes up an invitation to appear at the Kill Club, an underground cult that follows true crime cases, only to discover that these crazies believe Ben to be innocent and want her to help them prove it, when it was her testimony that sent him to prison. There’s money to be had, but also, 24 years later, Libby wants to dig to the truth.

Flynn’s characters are so twisted, you are relieved that they live within the pages of her books. Dark Places is as bleak and macabre as can be.

Dark Places

By Gillian Flynn

Publisher: Random House

Pages: 349

Leaving Time

Memory of Elephants

Sara Gruen’s Like Water For Elephants gets top of the mind recall when it comes to books about the pachyderm. Jodi Picoult has thrown her hat into the ring with her bestseller, Leaving Time, which has a story of family, respect for life and an unbroken mother-daughter bond, woven around the world of elephants, which is closer to that of humans than we might imagine, especially when it comes to maternal love and grief.

Since two of the lead characters in the book are elephant researchers, it has an impressive amount of information on elephants, which is not in the least boring.

Thirteen-year-old Jenna Metcalfe, lives with her grandmother, and is haunted by vague memories of the night when her mother disappeared, and her father ended up in catatonic state in a mental hospital. Her parents ran an elephant sanctuary in New England, for circus or zoo animals nobody could care for. As can be expected, funds were tight and expenses immense. One night, there is a tragedy at the sanctuary and the little girl is left with just a haze of grief and a heap of her mother’s journals.

  

A decade later, now a precocious teen, Jenna wants to find out what happened; even if her mother died, she needs to know and get closure.

She hires Serenity Jones, a once-famous psychic at the end of her powers, and a grumpy, alcoholic private detective, Virgil Stanhope, who was the cop on duty when the incident took place.

Picoult’s characters speak in their own voices and all have their own torments to bear. Jenna, is the perky teen. “Let’s talk for just a second about the fact that my grandmother is going to ground me until I’m, oh, sixty. I left her a note, but I’ve purposely turned off my phone because I don’t really want to hear her reaction when she finds it,” he says when she stows her way across to another distant town in pursuit of a lead. She is a little too smart for her own good, but utterly lovable.

The introduction of Serenity is an obvious indicator of some supernatural ingredient being stirred into the pot, and the end is a complete shocker, though not so much to those who have seen a certain famous Bruce Willis film. Any more, and it will be a major spoiler. A really enjoyable read, this one.

Leaving Time

By Jodi Picoult

Publisher: Ballantine

Pages: 405

Windigo Island

On The Reservation

Cork O’ Connor is an unusual private eye—he is part Native American, used to be the sheriff of his town, runs a burger joint and takes up cases as and when something comes up. He has a cop-like thoroughness to his investigation, but does not dismiss traditions rites as mumbo-jumbo.

William Kent Krueger’s Windigo Island is the fourteenth in the Cork O’Connor series, and has all the nail-biting suspense and action of a good thriller.

Cork lives around the Native American Reservation, which the locals call ‘rez’ and is a peaceable sort. Against the backdrop of an island on Lake Superior that is rumoured to be home to a mythical beast, the mystery of one dead and one missing girl unravels. Rez lore has it that if anyone hears the Windigo monster calling their name, it means their days are numbered.

 When the books open, a bunch of boys discover the body  of a teenage girl called Carrie Verga. She had disappeared  along with her Ojibwe friend Mariah Arceneaux and after  some cursory questioning the local cops had ignored the  case, since teens from the Reservation were always  running off in search of better opportunities. Most of them  were hit hard by the racial discrimination in the outside world and returned on their own; or were never found.

  Mariah’s crippled mother, Louise requests her grandfather  a native clairvoyant Henry Meloux for help in tracing her  daughter, and he summons his disciple Cork to do the job.    Cork is prevailed upon by his daughter Jenny to take up the  case and search for Mariah.  Jenny leaves her own adopted  child Wooboo behind to assist her father.

 What they discover is a shocking flesh trade ring that is the  best kept secret on the reserve. For years, young Native girls have been forced into prostitution, brutalised by the pimps and killed off if they rebel or outlive their utility. The cops conveniently look the other way, and locals pretend nothing is wrong. Cork is up against a particularly vicious villain, whose inhuman nature has also made him fearless.

There are not too many Native American characters in mainstream American fiction (or movies), so through the medium of a cop thriller, Krueger also tells the story of the neglect, exploitation and abuse of the Native population that has led to poverty, alcoholism and a self-destructive frustration.

Krueger has not just created interesting and sympathetic characters, but has also vividly described the beauty of the region, and also laid bare the ugliness that lies just beneath the surface. 

Windigo IslandBy William Kent KruegerPublisher: Atria BooksPages: 339 pages 

FaceOff & Save The Date

Combo Pack

FaceOff is a collector’s item for thriller fans.  It is an unprecedented collection of 12 stories in which some of the world’s best thriller writers and their characters pair up to solve cases.

David Baldacci is the editor, which is a good enough reason to pick up this book. Now imagine Michael Connelly’s Hieronymous “Harry” Bosch teaming up with Dennis Lehane’s Patrick Kenzie in the story Red Eye, or John Sandford’s Lucas Davenport with Jeffery Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme in Rhymes with Prey; Ian Rankin’s John Rebus with Peter James’s Roy Grace in In The Nick Of Time; Lee Child’s Jack Reacher with Joseph Finder’s Nick Heller in Good and Valuable Consideration... and more exciting combos.

  

Needless to say, the book is unputdownable! 

FaceOff

Edited by David Baldacci

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Pages: 397

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Mary Kay Andrews’s Save The Date is a simple and simple romance, with all the ingredients in the correct order. The heroine is Cara Kryzik, who is trying to make a living as a florist in the snobbish and traditional Southern town of Savannah and the big bucks come from designing floral arrangements for society weddings.

The ‘meet cute’ comes when Cara’s beloved goldendoodle puppy is mistakenly picked up by historic-building restorer Jack Finnerty, since he owns the same breed.  They are clearly made for each other, but Cara’s recent divorce has left her emotionally bruised and Jack’s ex hasn’t quite exited the scene; besides, she has to make a success of her business to prove a point to her disapproving father. Jack’s persistence wins over Cara, but there is a long list of problems to be overcome first. Save The Date is breezy read with generous lashings of humour--fans of the genre won’t have anything to complain about.

Save The Date

By Mary Kay Andrews

Publisher: St Martin’s

Pages: 400

Gray Mountain

Heart Of Darkness

While reading John Grisham’s latest bestselling legal thriller, Gray Mountain, set in America’s coal belt of the Appalachia Mountains, you have to remind yourself that you are not in Dhanbad, Bihar.  The way the big coal corporations destroy the land, exploit workers, use goon force to intimidate people, have politicians on their payroll and stop at nothing in their pursuit of profit is shocking, because it is taking place in the US, where the law is not as big an ass as it is in India. Grisham, however, disabuses you of that notion rather quickly. The only difference is that in India, there wouldn’t be a free legal aid centre to help poor miners in their fight against injustice.

When the book opens, bright and ambitious 29-year-old New York lawyer Samantha Kofer has her life on the fast track come to a screeching halt. In 2008, the US economy faced a crisis and ‘downsizing’ became the word of the day.  Samantha is axed too, but given a consolatory deal, if she agrees to work as an unpaid intern for a non-profit, she can keep her health benefits and when the conditions get better, have the chance of being rehired without loss of seniority. With several out of work lawyers on the streets, this is the best on offer.

With some misgivings, Samantha accepts and finds herself at the Mountain Legal Aid Clinic in a small town called Brady. Her new boss is Mattie Wyatt, who runs the clinic on courage, compassion and hope. Unlike Samantha’s well-heeled clients in her NY job, the people who come to the Clinic are poor and desperate.  There are cases of domestic violence and wrongful termination, but the biggest problem is the denial of benefit to miners who get the debilitating Black Lung disease after working in the coal mines for years.

The coal companies strip the mountains, pollute the air and water, and don’t care if people die in the process.  Initially, an outraged Samantha keeps spluttering, “This can’t be legal,” till she realises that the law can easily be manipulated by the powerful.

She meets the Gray Brothers—Donovan and Jeff—who, like their aunt Mattie, have made it their mission to fight the big coal corporations.  Samantha’s parents, both in the legal profession, are divorced, but willing to help her if she decides to return to New York to the city girl life that suits her. She tries to keep out of the battle, sure that she won’t be in this town for much longer, but she is drawn into it, and soon there’s no escape.  Mid-way an important character is killed, and Samantha becomes the only hope of the clients who have no other support.

The reader shares Samantha’s outrage, understands her reluctance and appreciates her idealism—Grisham has not made Samantha or any of the other characters larger-than-life, but they are all willing to make sacrifices for the people crushed by ruthless business conglomerates.

Gray Mountain is a hit  like all Grisham’s books, but this has an extra portion of rage, which is very welcome in these cynical times.

Gray Mountain

By John Grisham

Publisher: Doubleday

Pages: 384