Reality Check

S. Hariharan’s book Runaway Children is a true story, written in a lucid style. The author had left his home in Kerala at age 14 and survived on the streets of Mumbai with other children like himself.

He returned home, completed his education, became a very successful entrepreneur and a family man. Every runaway child does not share his good fortune or his will to undo errors. What the author reveals about the tough life in the underbelly of Mumbai comes from his own experiences. He believes these children need support and guidance to get back to a normal life. Very readable—and there’s a movie script in there.

Runaway Children
Author: S Hariharan
Publisher Jaico

Pages: 208

Invisible

Trial By Fire

James Patterson is a bestselling author and David Ellis is a Chicago attorney—together they have  thought up a serial killer more terrifying than Hannibal ‘The Cannibal’ Lecter.

In their thriller, Invisible, the heroine Emmy Dockery is an FBI analyst, which multiple problems. She is wracked by nightmares because her beloved twin Marta was killed in a freak fire accident.  Her boss Julius ‘The Dick’ Dickinson suspends her because she doesn’t respond to his sexual advances. She still has complicated feelings for her former fiancée Harrison ‘Books’ Bookman, whom she ditched at the alter. He quit the FBI and started a book store. She needs his help to convince her skeptical and nasty boss that Marta was the victim of a wily serial killer, who has murdered over 50 people by setting them on fire, but so cleverly that local cops close these cases of arson as accidental.

 She does use devious means to get Dickinson to agree to a full scale investigation, with Books returning as special investigator to head the team of investigators and analysts—among them the beautiful Sophie, who sends Emmy into a jealous tizzy.

As the investigation proceeds, in which Emmy and Sophie discern a pattern, a special forensics expert also reveals that the killer tortures his victims in the most horrific ways and then set their homes on fire to obliterate evidence. Emmy goes through additional trauma whenever more details come out, because she realizes what her sister must have gone through.

The killer also records his modus operandi, between chapters about the hunt for him, for the reader to get an idea of just how diabolical he is—it has to be assumed that a killer so merciless must be a man.

Superbly written and fast-paced, the book is what is usually described as ‘nail-biting,’ add terrifying, nauseating and ghoulishly fascinating to it. And when the monster’s identity is revealed, it comes as a shock.

Invisible

By James Patterson &

Publisher: Little, Brown & Company

Pages: 432

The Dog

Dubai Doldrums

For Indians, Dubai is a land of glamour and mystery, where film stars and gangsters party at impossibly opulent locations.

For the unnamed narrator (identified only as X—his name is so awful he hates to use it) of Joseph O’Neill’s Man Booker long-listed The Dog, it is the  “abracadabropolis” of self-invention—as intriguing as it is terrifying.

X is New York lawyer, who has a cushy job, a rent-stabilised apartment and a girlfriend called Jenn, with whom he is in a long-term but not happy relationship.  Jenn is the kind who plans her life and when her desire to have a child at thirty-four is not fulfilled, their relationship cracks under the strain. After a monologue about good men vs bad men that Jenn unleashes on the hapless X—which would have been hilarious if it didn’t sound so sadly demented-- he just flees.

 It becomes unbearable for him to stay on in New York, so when an old classmate Eddie Batros offers him a job in Dubai, he grabs it.  The job as Family Officer for the crazy and idle rich Batros clan, requires him to do nothing except be “trustworthy” and sign random papers.

He gets to live in a swank apartment, drive a fancy car and spend on anything he pleases, including high priced call girls.  He even manages to get himself an all purpose factotum Ali, who is one of those fixers, whose status in Dubai as a “bidoon” or outsider is a grey area.  Annoyance comes in the form of Alain Batros, Eddie’s overweight teenage nephew, who is sent to Dubai to intern with X and lose weight. The boy is stupid and sullen, kept busy with Sudoku puzzles as X goes about his busy life doing nothing—composing mental mails to Eddie and his brother Sandros, or having pedicures at his friend Ollie’s swish salon.

Everything about the Dubai that X encounters is big, glittering and ambitious—massive towers being constructed all over the place. Expats live well, and treat their domestic help like slaves, but also accept that they have to live by the somewhat rules of the Emirates.

Swirling round expat circles is news of the disappearance of an adman and famous diver, Ted Wilson, who, it turns out, had a second family in Dubai.  His American wife comes looking for him; her meeting with X is strange and funny, ending with him throwing a jar of lentils at her.

A dreamy life like this has to unravel and it does it unexpected ways. O’Neill’s observations about Dubai and the culture clashes are astute. He writes carefully constructed, page-long sentences, that underline X’s tone of comic bafflement, and alarming discoveries.

Dubai will never again seem like the benign and glittering place where Bollywood is so fond of shooting its blockbusters.

The Dog

By Joseph O’Neill

Publisher: Pantheon

Pages: 241

First Frost

Food For Love

A light piece of chick lit from Saran Addison Allen, the second about the Waverly family of the town of Bascom in North Carolina. The Waverly women have special gifts, which do not necessarily make life easier for them. And they have an eccentric, almost human apple tree, that blooms in winter and chucks apples at people it doesn’t like.

Claire Waverley’s gift is her culinary expertise—she has just started manufacturing candy that has special powers, due to increasing dedmand. The business is successful, but it takes her attention away from her family and what she loves doing—cooking.

Her sister Sydney Waverley’s gift is working with hair, but she is desperately trying to have a child with her second husband Henry, who is a loving father to his stepdaughter Bay. Bay is a pariah in her school and mocked for wearing her heart on her sleeve for rich guy Josh, because she believes her gift is knowing who belongs with whom, and impossible as it may seem to other, she knows she belongs with Josh. 

Then, a mysterious, grey-suited stranger shows up and tries to stir up trouble. The Waverly women and their men come together to battle this threat.  The way characters are introduced and blended into the story—like an elderly cousin whose gift is giving the right object to people just when they need it—there is always scope for more books in this series. The first was Garden Spells, and there’s more magic where that came from. First FrostBy Sarah Addison AllenPublisher: St.Martin’s PressPages: 304 

Flesh And Blood

Super Sniper

It is an unwritten rule of the thriller: when an elaborate meal is cooked, it won’t be eaten; if a holiday has been planned with great effort, it will be cancelled. If a character has a birthday, the day will be wrecked.

All of the above happen to Dr Kay Scarpetta, Patricia Cornwell’s gusty forensic investigator heroine, when she is in the mood for romance with her husband, Benton Wesley of the FBI, in her 22^nd novel in this series. Dr Scarpetta first appeared in the rather obviously titled Post Mortem in 1990, and hasn’t stopped since.

While she is lovingly whipping up an exotic meal, and getting set to leave for a Florida vacation to celebrate her birthday, she notices seven pennies on a wall behind their Cambridge house. They are copper coins all dated 1981 and shining like new. She remembers receiving a weirdly sinister poem by a person who has the Twitter handle, Copperhead.

 As she ponders over this, her colleague, Detective Pete Marino calls to tell of her of the murder of a school teacher nearby, by a sniper. Nobody saw anything; the man was unloading groceries from his car when he simply fell down dead.

Marino suspects that this murder connects two others with a similar modus operandi and a common factor—special copper bullets. There is seemingly no connection between the three victims, so there is no pattern to be discerned.  There is no way of predicting where the sniper will strike next, though Dr Scarpetta suspects her family is on the killer’s radar.

Her holiday is cancelled, husband and niece Lucy (who happens to be gay, and yes, that is a clue) get involved in the pursuit of the sniper—Lucy being the super efficient ex-FBI operative, whose skills with helicopters, guns and computers are unparalleled.

Then, a teenager is found dead in the pool of a senator’s empty mansion, a creepy insurance investigator pops up, the latest victim’s wife is hiding something. And to make matters – and traffic—worse, President Obama is about to visit the town, and there is tension all around. This is soon after the Boston marathon bombings and racist feelings run high—so there could be a terrorist or vigilante angle to the last killing.

Cornwell spreads around a lot of police and forensic procedures and red herrings. It takes some stretching of the  imagination to connect the dots, and think like the unhinged killer, who plays mind games with Dr Scarpetta and the others working on the case.

Dr Scarpetta keeps having hunches and feelings in the pit of her stomach, while Lucy hacks away into the depths of the internet to get impossible-to-find information. 

There are many dry pages of ‘how-it’s-done’ and the gruesome autopsy passages that are not for the squeamish—but then why would they pick up a book about a forensics expert?

Flesh And Blood

By Patricia Cornwell

Publiser: William Morrow

Pages: 369

The Maze of Memory

After the release of the film, Still Alice, that fetched Julianne Moore a richly deserved Oscar, there has been renewed interest in Lisa Genova’s debut novel.

The book was first self-published in 2007, and sold by the author out of the trunk of her car, before it was picked up by Simon & Schuster and went on to become a bestseller.

Genova is a neuroscientist herself, so her book about a woman who is diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s Disease, is very detailed and informative.

Alice Howland and her husband, John, both professors at Harvard, are in a happy and stable marriage. Their daughter Anna is a corporate lawyer trying to get pregnant; son Tom is in medical school and the youngest, Lydia, is an aspiring actress and the black sheep in the mind of her mother, who would rather she went to college and got a proper education.

 Alice is a popular professor and much in demand speaker; the first hint of trouble comes when in the midst of a lecture, she forgets a word. Then, while running on her usual route, she gets lost. She forgets to go to a conference where she was scheduled to speak. Believing that her increasing forgetfulness is a symptom of menopause, she goes to see her doctor and is put through tests that indicate Alzheimer’s Disease. She is just fifty, fit and healthy, so the first reaction is disbelief and then denial.

There is no cure for this mental ailment, medication can just slow down the cognitive impairment caused by the disease, it cannot be halted. Alice’s decline is rapid and she is disturbed to note that her friends and colleagues start treating her like a pariah, because of their fear of mental illness. She can only rage against her misfortune—in a heart-breaking scene, she smashes dozens of eggs in frustration, as she cannot remember the recipe of the Christmas pudding she makes for her family every year.

Alzheimer’s Disease is tough on the family and the caregivers too, as a lot of patience is required to deal with the patient’s memory loss and resultant mood swings and tantrums.  It is rare in the ‘me-myself’ American society, but the Howland family rallies together, going so far as to vehemently oppose John’s decision to move to New York for the sake of career growth.

While she still has moments of lucidity, Alice is able to repair her relationship with Lydia, who comes across as sympathetic and willing to make sacrifices to care for her mother.   Early testing shows that Anna has inherited the mutated gene that causes the disease, but she goes ahead with her plans to start a family and is relieved that her kids are clear. The hope is that by the time her symptoms shows, medical science would have found a way to deal with it.

Genova spares the reader the full impact of the trauma caused to Alice and her family, by ending the story before she is completely wrecked. In one of the novel’s highs, she addresses the Annual Dementia Care Conference. “Being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s is like being branded with a scarlet A,” she says, “but I am not what I say or what I do or what I remember. I am fundamentally more than that… Please don’t look at our scarlet A’s and write us off.”

The book moves the reader by its compassion, though is a depressing read. Ultimately, the disease is such that there is no hope, only the slow stretching of the tragedy over a period of time, till the patient is reduced to a hollow shell, empty of life-affirming memory.

Still Alice
By Lisa Genova

Publisher: Gallery Books

Pages: 352

History Of The Rain

Life And Literature

Niall Willaims’s Man Booker-longlisted History Of The Rain,is a booklover’s book. The narrator is 19-year-old Ruth Swain, confined to bed in an attic room, because of “something in her blood.” But the tiny room is full of books that her father left for her, which she refers to in her “meandering” narrative, with number, publisher, and edition. At the end, a reader can compile from it a list of must-read classics.

Ruth’s home is on the banks of the river Shannon, in the Irish village of Faha "where everyone is a long story."  Her family’s history is strange, with dashes of magic. Like, her grandfather Abraham, running away from his stern religious father, fighting in the World War, being shot by a German, who also saves his life; then, as he is about to give up, the mother of the doctor who treated him, comes by to leave him her son’s legacy, which brings him to Ireland.

He lets the inherited mansion go to seed, as he spends all his time salmon fishing and recording his catches, till a formidable woman marries him and produces four children, including the restless Virgil Swain, Ruth’s father.  Virgil goes off to sea and washes up in Faha, where Ruth’s beautiful mother Mary falls in love with him and marries him.  Virgil is a voracious reader and poet and in spite of all his efforts just does not make a good farmer. The household runs on miraculously somehow, under the watchful eye of Mary’s mother, Nan.  Ruth and her twin Aeney are as happy as can be, even though Ruth’s passion for books marks her as the unpopular girl “too clever by half,” and in a perverse way, also marked for tragedy.

Williams’s tone is part comic, part lyrical; the writing—as Ruth tells it—eccentric with random capitalisation and digressions into the ways of the Irish village inhabited by really good people, trying to cope with global recession, that has not even spared their distant rain-soaked community.

There are sweet characters, like Ruth’s sympathetic tutor Mrs Quinty and her persisted suitor, the gentle Vincent, who is not driven away by her caustic tongue.  History Of The Rain is both epic and intimate, and an absolute delight to read, made more so by the rediscovery of the great writers who are scattered through the pages.

History Of The Rain

By Niall Williams

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Pages: 368