The Murder of Sonia Raikkonen

Hello Inspector

Compared to the hundreds of crime series in the West (so many coming out of Scandinavia too), in India there are not too many writers attempting crime thrillers. That’s why Salil Desai’s The Murder of Sonia Raikkonen, the second Inspector Saralkar book is a welcome addition to the bookshelf.

A Finnish tourist is found murdered in Pune (the author is Pune-based), and the cops have to find the killer with very little to go on, except one white sandal found at the scene of the crime. Inspector Saralkar and his men start investigating, and while they do, characters enter and develop, complications arise in the case and the suspense builds up rather well.  It’s fun to read a thriller set in an Indian city with people who speak normally, and spot identifiable reference points. Inspector Saralkar seems set for a long innings.

The Murder of Sonia Raikkonen

By Salil Desai

Published by Fingerprint

Pages: 335

The Stranger

Devious Whispers

A man is just sitting by himself in a bar, minding his own business, when a stranger sidles up to him and just like that, without preamble, tells him a damning secret about his wife. A guy would have to have nerves of steel to let something like that not affect him at all.

In Harlan Coben’s disturbing thriller, Adam Price, happily married father of two, cannot help but check on the stranger’s dubious claim and does not know quite how to handle it, when it turns out to be true. His peace of mind is wrecked, his family’s happiness threatened. He confronts his wife Corinne, she promises to confide all, and then vanishes.

A distraught Adam has to deal with his own misery and the fears of his two young sons who are traumatized by their mother’s disappearance. He also has to answer to concerned neighbours and bat away questions by suspicious cops.

If he has to avoid being accused of somehow abetting Corinne’s mysterious absence, he has to find her first. When he sets out to do that, corpses start piling up.

Coben, master of the thriller genre, and creator of the top-selling Myron Bolitar and Mickey Bolitar (for young readers) series, knows how to set up a nail-biting situation and gradually draw the reader into a larger conspiracy.

The stranger does the same thing to other people—messing with their minds by revealing secrets about their dear ones—but the dangerous game of deception, cover-up and murder this unleashes, goes out of control.

There is also the now popular device of the dark side of technology that can destroy lives if misused by the wrong people. There is Coben’s recognizable style of creating mayhem in placid suburban settings and the intricate plotting that moves logically and sure-footedly to an unpredictable climax.

For fans of the thriller, who liked his other standalone novels like Six Years and Missing You, the latest bestseller is a satisfying read.

The Stranger

By Harlan Coben

Published by Dutton

Pages: 400

Confess & Last One Home

Two Romances

For light summer reading when on vacation or staycation, here are two bestselling romantic novels to pick up.

Colleen Hoover’s Confess has all the elements needed for a young love story and enough twists and turns to make it unpredictable.

The prologue has fifteen-year-old Auburn lose the love of her life when he dies of a terminal illness.

Still hurting years later, she runs into Owen, a handsome and charismatic young artist, when he hires her to help with his new exhibition. Auburn is a hairdresser, but needs extra money, so she accepts the temporary job.

Owen has a unique style—he asks people to leave anonymous confessions taped to his studio window and his paintings are inspired by the lines scribbled on those pieces of paper. Owen and Auburn have the same middle name (Mason), so he thinks fate has brought them together. There is a back story to explain his instant attraction for Auburn, but she does not know it yet.

She is cautious but mildly flirtatious, and tries to keep Owen away because she has a secret she is not yet ready to share. At just 21, she has lived through a lifetime of pain, and her quirky roommate Emory is all for encouraging this new romance.  But there is another man on the scene, the violent and possessive cop Trey, who will go to any lengths to keep Auburn away from Owen,  including framing him for a crime.

Owen has daddy issues as well as a painful past, but his love for Auburn washes it all away. Between the two, there are enough problems that would easily make an interesting movie of The Fault In Our Stars variety.

The confessions used in the book are real and the paintings used as illustrations were made for this Hoover book. Romance fans will enjoy the plot, appreciate the emotional tenderness and the lack of any steaminess (the sex bits are sanitized for young adult readers), which is almost de rigeur for love stories these days.

Confess

By Colleen Hoover

Publisher: Atria Books

Pages: 320

********************

From Debbie Macomber, author of Blossom Street and Cedar Cove series, comes another romantic novel Last One Home. It is about family and second chances at love and peppers the story with a social message about standing up against domestic violence.

Cassie Carter escapes a violent marriage with her daughter Aimee, but she is left to cope with her difficult life all alone; she had abandoned her loving family to elope with her boyfriend when she was just eighteen, and they never forgave her.  Twelve years later, her parents are dead and her two sisters have cut off all ties with her.

She works as a hairdresser (another one!), volunteers at a shelter for battered women, and does odd jobs to make ends meet. Then she is given a chance to work on a construction site in return for a home of her own, and there she meets the supervisor Steve.  The two begin by sniping at each other ( a romance staple); she can’t understand why he is so nasty, but he is stand-offish because he is still grieving over his dead wife.

 Cassie receives a curt letter from her sister, which. Nonetheless opens that sealed family door  crack, for which she is pathetically grateful.

As the Cassie-Steve love story develops, Macomber also follow the lives of her smug sisters Karen and Nicole in seemingly happy marriages. But underneath the polished suburban exterior, trouble is brewing that takes the two women by surprise. Last One Home is a quick read with likeable characters and a relatable plot-- what’s interesting is that both Cassie and Steve are ordinary people, not in the least glamorous or complicated.

Last One Home

By  Debbie Macomber 
Publisher: Ballantine Books

Pages:  338

The Dressmaker or Khair Khana

Women Of Courage

Newpapers and TV reports and quite a few books have revealed the traumatic time the women of Afghanistan had during the Taliban rule.

The beautiful mountain country was ravaged by war for many years and then the Taliban took over in 1996, imposing strict Sharia laws, forbidding women from stepping out of the home without an all-covering chadri and a mahram (a male relative as escort). This effectively meant girls could not go to school or college, women could not work outside the home. Any real or imagined infraction of rules could result in a public beating or jail. Most men for fear or being caught the crossfire between the Taliban and their opponents, simply fled to Iran or Pakistan, leaving their womenfolk to cope. Many families reached the verge of starvation.

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon’s book, The Dressmaker of Khair Khana: Five Sisters, One Remarkable Family, and the Woman Who Risked Everything to Keep Them Safe is a fictionalized account of a true story. Lemmon was an MBA student at Harvard Business School, and wanted to research the subject of women entrepreneurship in war zones like Rwanda, Bosnia and Afghanistan. It took her a while to find an Afghan female whose story she could tell and eventually she found the perfect candidate in Kamila Sidiqi.

Kamila, was one of eleven children—nine sisters and two brothers—trained to be a teacher when the Taliban forces overran Kabul. Only one of the Sidiqi girls was married with three children of her own—and she was the one who had learnt to sew from her mother.  Not one to sit home and brood over the dreadful fate to befall them, seventeen-year-old Kamila learns sewing from her sister and starts a business from home, along with her younger sisters. Her brother Rahim becomes her mahram,as she takes great risks to go to the market to negotiate with shopkeepers to buy the dresses they make.

 Kamila was not just a good seamstress and smart businesswoman, she had all the makings of a community leader. She realized that other women in the Khair Khana neighbourhood were also in dire need of money as well as something to keep them occupied.  The educated girls who had seen life outside the home found the forced isolation stifling. How many times could they read the same books and watch the same pirated movies?  (There is an amusing portion about the huge impact ofTitanic on the local populace).

As her business grew, Kamila trained and employed other girls from Khair Khana; together they survived the terrible times.  The book about the courage and tenacity of women is inspiring, even though the writing is bland and the dialogue stilted. There have been other better books on the terrible conditions under Taliban rule (Khalid Hosseini’s work) or about the continuing fight against oppression (Half the Sky and Three Cups of Tea). Still Lemmon’s best-selling book gives the reader a sense of the terror and deprivation the women of Afghanistan went through, and also chronicles their heroism.

Subsequently, Lemmon has written Ashley’s War: The Untold Story of a Team of Women Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield about a female soldier, the movie rights for which have reportedly been bought by Reese Witherspoon.

The Dressmaker or Khair Khana: Five Sisters, One Remarkable Family, and the Woman Who Risked Everything to Keep Them Safe

By Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

Publisher: Harper

Pages: 258