This Was A Man

End Of Saga

The story could have gone on over a few more books, but Jeffrey Archer brings the Clifton Chronicles to a close with the seventh book, This Was A Man. It would help if the reader had caught the last six novels, but it works just as well as a standalone book. Still, a binge reading session or two is recommended.

The sprawling saga of the Clifton and Barrington families has been written by the bestselling author with a mix of gravity, liberal dashes of humour, as much emotion as the stiff-upper-lip British aristocratic backdrop would allow, and spice in the form of the colourful Lady Virginia, who deserves a series by herself.

Her shenanigans in Book 6, Cometh The Hour, were hilarious; here the smart, resourceful but perennially luckless Lady Virginia gets up to no good again, but she is just the comic relief. At the core of this book is the bitter political rivalry between Giles Barrington and his sister Emma Clifton, who find themselves on opposite sides in Parliament, but are perfectly civil and affectionate outside

In the last book, Giles had spirited Karin out of East Germany, in this one he finds out the truth about her. Emma’s loving husband, Harry, a successful writer, embarks on his magnum opus. Their son Sebastian, a banker, deflects a hostile takeover bid with some deft moves of his own. Sebastian and Samantha’s daughter Jessica, a bright teenager, endangers her future over a disastrous fling.

Archer keeps the reader engrossed with frequent spikes—Karin’s dramatic rescue when her handler wants to kill her; the smooth defeat of business pirate Conrad Sorkin, and, of course, a ‘guest appearance by Margaret Thatcher.’

Archer is a master storyteller who knows exactly when to shock, when to awe and when to give readers a small breather from the frantic goings on. His style is direct, the writing brisk (perhaps a bit too much), dialogue workmanlike, but the twists and turns he comes up with are always satisfying.

Then, there’s Lady Virginia, who gives as good as she gets. You really want her financial woes to finally end, and for her to find some measure of peace from all that hectic scheming. Too bad she is left dangling when all the other ends are tied up in a neat ‘goodbye’ bow.

This Was A Man

By Jeffrey Archer

Publisher: Pan MacMillan

Pages: 422

Fantastic Beasts...

Magic, She Said

The film version of Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them has recently hit the cinemas, and the screenplay written by JK Rowling, has been published in an attractive, illustrated hard cover volume. Reports say that it has shot to the top of the bestseller charts. Right now, anything the Harry Potter author touches turns to gold.

The story was based on the textbook written by Rowling’s fictional “magizoologist” Newt Scamander, which is used by students at Hogwarts. In 2001, Rowling published a version of this textbook –with scribbled margin notes by harry Potter – with a large chunk of the proceeds from the book’s sales going to UK charity Comic Relief. Now a five-part movie franchise has been planned to grow out of this slim volume, the first, starring Eddie Redmayne as Newt was out a couple of weeks ago.

The film, following the screenplay, is set in 1926 New York, where Scamander arrives with his magical briefcase, in his quest to find and protect magical creatures. His encounter with a No-Maj (or Muggle) named Jacob ends up in the escape of a few of his fantastic beasts from the briefcase, into a city already terrorised by viciously destructive attacks.

There has been trouble brewing between the community of magic folk and the No-Majs. The villain here is Grindelwald, who is just as evil, if not more, as Voldemort from the Potter books.This story with its clear allusions to social problems of today—like suspicion or hatred of the outsider or ‘other’ which is far worse now than the race related problems of that era—is meant more for older people than for kids. 

When it comes to creating and naming her fantastic beasts, Rowling lets her imagination run wild--like the kleptomaniac Niffler, or the wondrous Swooping Evil, who would delight kids. The CGI team that worked on the film, must have enjoyed the challenge of bringing them on to the screen.

Those who have seen the film might be a little disappointed with the drawings in the book. Those who have not seen the film, will have fun imagining what the critters would look like. In any case, it is worth picking up.

Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them

By: JK Rowling

Publisher: Little Brown/Hachette

Pages:  288

The Whistler

Gangsters And Indians

John Grisham is one of the few writers whose bestselling legal thrillers also expose social ills in his country—that he has been able to nail so many over 30 books, should be a cause of concern to American society.

There are two interesting things that leap out of the pages of his latest, The Whistler; one that the US has an organisation like the Board on Judicial Conduct, which keeps an eye on corrupt (or misbehaving) judges; two that he has been creating more female protagonists, and in this book, a female antagonist too.

The Whistler (short for whistle blower), starts with a calm scene, in which two BJC officers—Lacy Stoltz and Hugo Hatch—are on the way to meet a complainant. Their conversation is about their choice of music, her blissful singledom and his sleepless nights with four kids and an exhausted wife. After this the action blows up and keeps going till the end.  The two have been approached by a mysterious caller, who wants them to investigate “the most corrupt judge in the history of American jurisprudence.” His motives are not entirely altruistic—he and his invisible informers hope to make a financial killing from the share of the loot confiscated from the judge.

The seat of the corruption is a Native American-operated casino in the Florida Panhandle, and a crooked gangster-cum-real estate shark, who skims off profits from the casino and the development that takes place around it. On his payroll is Judge Claudia McDover, who sees to it that all judgments in her court favour Dubose and his ‘Coast Mafia.’ 

Dubose eliminated anybody who opposed the casino, and made sure the Tappacola tribe that owns the land made enough money to stay silent about his other legal violations. The Native American cops are corrupt, the FBI too busy with chasing terrorists, don’t care much about a money making and laundering in a casino—even though the amount runs into billions.

The BJC is made up of lawyers, not armed cops, and soon the Dubose gang strikes viciously. The attack makes Lacy all the more determined to root out this large scale corruption and get the FBI to nab the gangsters as well as the judge. Lacy’s source is the somewhat sleazy, ex-lawyer Greg Myers, but his “mole” is not revealed till the end.

Even though the book is not a whodunit, but more about how the judge and her cohorts are brought down-- which is the inevitable conclusion—The Whistler is a gripping thriller. Maybe not in the league of his own Gray Mountain (2014), but close enough.  Even though the book lays bare judicial corruption, Grisham does seem to have enough faith in the system to believe that the guilty, no matter how wealthy or powerful, will eventually be punished, and swiftly at that. Wish we could say the same about our country.

The Whistler

By John Grisham

Publisher: Hachette

Pages: 374

Two by Two

Heartbreak and Healing

Nicholas Sparks is undoubtedly one of the world’s most popular writers of romantic fiction, disproving the general notion that only women write love stories.

His 1996 novel, The Notebook started his amazing rise to bestseller fame. Twenty years later, he has come up with his twentieth book, rather unimaginatively titled Two by Two. The narrator is Russell Green, who believe that his love story has a happy end—his wife Vivian is beautiful, they have a lovely daughter, named London; his career  in advertising is doing well.

After such a build up the crash is inevitable. Vivian had given up her job to be a full time homemaker, putting a financial burden on Russell, who bore it cheerfully. Then, she suddenly ups and leaves to take up a lucrative job in another city. Russell is left holding the baby, so to say, as he is turned into a single father to a six-year-old. 

For a man focused on his work (to make this worse he also loses his job), he has to learn all the nitty-gritty of raising his daughter and doing the work of cook, nurse, driver that the urban parent—invariably the mother—has to manage. Most of the story is about Russell becoming the perfect father to London (who is unbearably cute!). But life does throw him a second chance at happiness. Russell admits he is the kind of sweet, romantic caring man, whom women like to make friends with, whose shoulder they cry on, as they have their hearts broken by the bad guys. A man like him does not deserve to be cruelly jilted.

Sparks’s fans know his style is direct and somewhat sappy, what they look for is heart-warming moments of human connection and on that he delivers each time. This book is as much about healing heartbreak as it Is about love, because in these times love stories do not necessarily end with a walk into the sunset.

Two by Two

By Nicholas Sparks

Publisher: Grand Central/Hachette

Pages: 606

The Last Days Of Night

Electric Charge

A novel about the fight over the control of electricity sounds dreary, but Graham Moore’s The Last Days Of Night is historical fiction that reads like a thriller.

The book set in 1988, when two great inventors, Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse, were fighting to control electricity and waiting to reap the monetary wealth and immense power that would accrue to the man who would win the patent battle the electric bukb.

At the centre of this legal battle is a young lawyer, Paul Cravath, who is hired by Westinghouse to represent him against Edison, mainly because a man so young, raw and eager to make his reputation would not have been corrupted by Edison’s power and popularity. The man – and the electricity generating company that won, would change America, and eventually the world forever.

The legal case, involved the light bulb patented by Edison; Westinghouse invented and manufactured what he claimed was a better bulb. The US patent office had decided that Westinghouse’s bulb violated Edison’s patent, and the latter was was demanding $1 billion in damages. Cravath had to prove that Edison’s suit had no merit, because his bulb was different.

Cravath makes up in persistence what he lacks in experience, and brings into the complicated scenario an eccentric Serbian-born inventor Nikola Tesla.  Edison was offering direct current (DC), which could be transmitted only over short distances; Tesla  worked out the higher-voltage alternating current (AC), which would revolutionize the use of electricity. When he crossed swords with Edison and was persuaded by Cravath to work for Westinghouse, his laboratory mysteriously caught fire.

Edison was not just America’s greatest inventor, he was also ruthless, according to Moore’s very readable book. With a section of the media and politicians in his pocket, he tried to emotionally manipulate the country into rejecting AC current as dangerous enough to kill their children.

The story has other fascinating real-life characters, like the beautiful opera singer Agnes Huntington and her formidable mother.  Paul and Agnes had an unlikely romance and ended up getting married. Names like J.P. Morgan and Alexander Graham Bell make an appearance in the novel. It is rather interesting to read the author’s note at the end, to find out how much is fiction and how much fact.

Running through the book is a thread about the spirit of enterprise that rules America, and the skulduggery that goes into business.  Not even a man of Edison’s eminence was not immune to it.

The Last Days of Night

By Graham Moore

Published by Scribner

Pages: 400

Before The Fall

The Man Who Cheated Death

Noah Hawley’s terrific suspense thriller, Before The Fall  begins with a routine boarding on a plane from the posh haunt of the rich, Martha’s Vineyard—the only thing is that it is a private aircraft, and the owner David Bateman is a self-made media baron. On the plane his wife Maggie, kids Rachel and JJ, his friend Ben Kipling (in deep financial trouble) and his wife Sarah, a bodyguard, and the crew.  The surprise passenger is an artist Scott Burroughs—maybe a friend of Maggie maybe something more. 

A few minutes into the flight, the plane crashes, Scott finds himself in the freezing water, along with four-year-old JJ.  Once a champion swimmer, who had turned alcoholic and then cleaned up his act, Scott swims several miles to safety with a busted arm and JJ on his back. It’s a miraculous story of survival and heroism, though Scott does not want media attention. His very reticence ends up making him a suspect. To boost the channel’s ratings, Bill Milligan, a popular anchor on Bateman’s channel, whip up a frenzy of conspiracy theories.

Meanwhile, Maggie’s sister Eleanor and her deadbeat husband Doug find themselves thrust into the role of JJ’s wards, with his large inheritance causing a lot of problems. Eleanor is embarrassed by Doug’s open greed at the prospect of such wealth, and refuses to use any of it for herself.  An unambitous woman very different from Maggie, she tries to bring some stability into the life of her nephew, too young to understand death, yet old enough to suffer the consequences of his fate.

Once the nerve-wracking event is over in the first few pages,  Hawley goes back and forth, in time, examining each character, their past, their mindset, their motivations. The secondary characters-- pilot, co-pilot, stewardess and Bateman’s bodyguard, nine-year-old Rachel also get their own backstories and each one is a wonderful red herring.  For instance, the reader would wonder what connection Rachel’s kidnapping in the past has to the plane crash that kills her.

Somewhere in there is a who, why and how, and the layers of suspense are built up brilliantly. Scott gets into trouble, in spite of his superhuman feat, because he had been painting a series of disasters; that and the fact that an impoverished artist had no business being in such luxurious surroundings  to begin with.

The reader has been with him on that arduous swim, and is on his side. But Bill Milligan does everything he can to paint him as a villain who is pulling a con on the public. How could a properly checked aircraft with very little chance of malfunctioning crash just like that? There could be people who wanted Bateman or Kipling dead, so was it an accident or mass murder?  In the midst of all the hysteria, poor JJ, who has gone through a trauma no kid should suffer, finds refuge in silence and in protesting attempts to cut his hair. Before The Fall is a very readable book.

Before the Fall

By Noah Hawley

Publisher: Grand Central/Hachette

Pages: 391 pages

The View From The Cheap Seats

The Amazing Mr Gaiman

If there’s any reader out there who has not read Neil Gaiman’s wonderful fantasy stories, graphic novels and children’s fiction, they have missed something!

Gaiman started his writing career as a journalist (“backed awkwardly away from journalism because I wanted the freedom to make things up” as he so eloquently puts it), then moved to fiction, but this collection of his non-fiction, intriguingly titled The View From The Cheap Seats, is not just a great read, but like an introduction to the world of sci-fi and fantasy writing, because a lot of the pieces here are warm and humorous tributes to the masters of the genre—like HP Lovecraft, Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, Ray Bradbury, Samuel R Delany—writers who have inspired him and some who went on to become his friends.

There is of course, a lot more in this splendid collection; every bookworm will relate to his memories of libraries, and every nerd will hang on to his impressions of comics, graphic novels, the world of film and TV, and music—nuggets from his amazing and prolific career.

The book is wise, funny, amazingly gracious (writers seldom pay such tributes to other writers). A lot of pieces in this collection are forewords to books, keynote addresses at events, or homages to writers who passed away.

Besides being a very readable and inspiring book, The View from The Cheap Seats, but an invaluable cultural history of sorts. The fact that his journalistic writing can be as powerful as his fiction is proved by the piece he wrote about a refugee camp in Jordan. If such a variety of fine writing, does not induce writer’s envy, what will?  Read, keep, dip into the book from time to time and refuse to lend it.

The View from The Cheap Seats

By Neil Gaiman

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: 544

Six Four

Mystery of The Missing Girls

Six Four is Japanese author Hideo Yokoyama’s first book to be translated into English (by Jonathan Lloyd-Davies), and went on to become a bestseller.  The book is a dense and serious police procedural that plays out more in the protagonist’s mind, as he juggles multiple problems.

Yoshinobu Mikami and his wife are in anguish over their missing daughter; they have to repeatedly go over the trauma of looking at corpses of young women to check it’s their Ayumi. Mikami was pulled out of criminal investigation and put into media relations, a post where he is uncomfortable and dreams of getting back to being a real cop.

The case that runs through the book is an old kidnap-murder of a seven-year-old girl, Shoko Amamaya.  Her father had paid the ransom, still the child was found dead. The unsolved case that fascinated the country,  is a blot on the police department, and a large contingent of detectives continues to work on trying to trace the killer, in the case codenamed Six Four.

As press director, Mikami has to deal with a rowdy bunch of reporters, and his first battle with them involves withholding the name of a female driver in an accident case. The reporters demand the names of the woman and the victim, which Mikami cannot reveal due to instructions given by his superiors. It creates an ugly scene between the cops and the press, and they threaten to boycott the visit by the police commissioner from Tokyo. He is visiting on the anniversary of Shoko’s death and hopes to pay his respects at the Amamaya residence. The press boycott would mean major embarrassment for Mikami’s department.

Meanwhile, the still-grieving father politely turns down the commissioner’s visit too, which puts the harried Mikami into more trouble. In trying to find out why Amamaya turned against the cops, Mikami stumbles upon a “Koda Memo” that hints at a blunder in the Shoko case, followed by a cover-up endorsed by higher-ups in the police force.

As Mikami gradually uncovers the conspiracy, the book moves at a languid pace, taking in the minutiae of how the cops work, as well as the internal politics and rivalry between departments. Yokoyama lays bare corruption in the force along with that deep sense of honour entrenched in the Japanese psyche.  The prose is simple with no embellishment; there are too many characters and strands of the story, that somehow get connected, like an immense jigsaw puzzle.

Apart from the hunt for Shoko, and later, the race against time to catch a killer, there is very little action in Six Four. It would take a lot of patience to get through Mikami’s complex investigation, but it always remains gripping and the twist at the end is a zinger.

Yokoyama used to be an investigative reporter with a Tokyo newspaper before turning to fiction, so in this novel he gets the machinations going on between the ‘Press Club’ and the police just right. It’s a thick, sprawling, richly detailed novel, the success of which will undoubtedly result in more of his books being translated. 

Six Four

By Hideo Yokoyama

Translated by Jonathan Lloyd-Davies 

Publisher: Quercus

Pages: 600

X

The Twenty-fourth Alphabet

In 1982, Sue Grafton started her Kinsey Millhone Alphabet series, with A is for Alibi. She has gone through almost every alphabet in the English language, with W is for Wasted coming out in 2013. The latest in the series is X, just X, no ‘is for’ attached. As the bestselling author said in an interview she is entitled to break her own rules.

Kinsey Millhone is one of the most loveable characters in detective fiction, a single (with occasional, very brief romantic entanglements), independent, courageous, witty and totally kickass female, who through A to X has solved crimes and fought felons up and down her stomping ground of Santa Teresa, California. She lives in a studio apartment, owned by the octogenarian Henry Pitts, who is also an expert chef, and her best buddy. His fun family of long-living Pitts is like Kinsey’s surrogate clan, and their watering hole of choice is Rosie’s bar and restaurant owned by a ferocious Hungarian woman, who often feeds them foul-sounding delicacies from her homeland, with Kinsey’s preferred drink of chilled chardonnay.

The series has remained in the 1980s, so no cell phones, computers just about making an appearance, phones are rotary, and notes typed on manual typewriters or handwritten on index cards. The most advanced gizmo of the age is the copier.  Even if this makes the books seem old-fashioned, it also lends them an unhurried charm.

In W, the down-at-heel detective Pete Wolinsky had been killed. In this book, his wife Ruthie, mysteriously threatened with a tax raid, requests Kinsey to check a box of his papers for any useful financial documents. What she find among other things, is a coded papers with six women’s names on it—all connected to a serial offender Ned Lowe-- and a package meant to have been delivered to his daughter April, fifteen years ago. While she is puzzling over this mystery, she has a problem of her own.

She was invited to a swanky mansion by a stylish, rich woman called Hallie Bettancourt, who wants her to track down her son, she gave up for adoption. The son, Christian Satterfield, happens to be a safe cracker and bank robber, just out of prison. Hallie pays Kinsey with marked currency notes that brings the cops down on her trail. Worse, when she goes back to check, the mansion shows no sign of habitation and her client cannot be traced. This gets Kinsey’s hackles up—how dare anybody cheat her?

As her work proceeds, in the backdrop is a severe water shortage turning to drought in California, that gets Henry into water-saving schemes, even if it means digging up his garden. Meanwhile, the new neighbours, an old couple Edna and Joseph, take full advantage of Henry’s kindness and pull their own little cons on him, much to Kinsey’s annoyance.

There are X’s sprinkled all over—a bank of X. Phillips, a wealthy transport baron Ari Xanakis and his divorced wife Teddy, the cause of a lot of Kinsey’s problems, a Father Xavier, and so on.

The culprit on whose trail Kinsey sets out, is just a small part of the book, but has left his vicious mark on several women. Even the usually equanimous Kinsey spooked out when she finds that he has trespassed into her office and left it off kilter. 

Although there is murder, burglary, cheating and corruption in Sue Grafton books, the times are still relatively peaceful and most people inherently decent. The world is protected from terrorism, computer hacking and religious fundamentalism. Fans wonder what will happen to Kinsey Millhone when Grafton completes the ‘Z’ book. There are still a quite a few months to go, but the suspense is killing.

X

By Sue Grafton

Publisher: PanMacmillan

Pages: 416

Love You Dead

Slithery, Slippery, Snaky

In Love You Dead,  the twelfth book of the Roy Grace series, popular crime writer Peter James, creates a heroine/vamp for whom you can’t help having a grudging admiration, even though she is a ruthless killer.

As a child, Jodie Danforth was the ugly duckling of her family, constantly being compared to her pretty sister, Cassie.  The sister dies in a mysterious fall off a cliff. And with this sly murder, Jodie embarks on a life in the pursuit of wealth.  Plastic surgery takes care of her looks, and her already devious brain does the rest. 

When the book begins, she cleverly kills her elderly husband on a ski slope, making it look like an accident. Her modus operandi is to look for rich lonely old men on the net, ensnare them with her beauty and then kill them.  At her secluded home, she has a hidden room full of deadly reptiles and insects; these creatures that would frighten the bravest, are her hobby.

Detective Inspector Roy Grace, is at a relatively peaceful stage of his life with loving wife Cleo and infant son, Noah, when his nemesis, a serial killer, Ed Crisp escapes from prison. To add to his woes, his ex-wife Sandy, who had walked out on him years ago, surfaces in a hospital in Berlin, in battered condition.

Meanwhile as Jodie kills husband number three with snake venom and plans the next hit, a British assassin called Tooth, working for a brutal Russian gang is on her trail, because she stole money and a memory drive from a gangster. The drive contains secrets that cannot fall into the wrong hands, and Jodie does not know that her life is in danger.

When a petty burglar and car thief dies with symptoms that look like snake poison, Roy Grace is called in to investigate and the various strands of the story start coming together. Grace makes a plan to trap Jodie, which involves the kind of subterfuge that would beat even her Machiavellian plots.

The subplots are not too interesting, and tie up rather too neatly, but the book is readable because of the smart and fearless Jodie; this femme fatale makes Roy Grace look like a rather tepid hero, as he plods away at his investigation and copes with the emotional turbulence in his life.  

Love You Dead

By Peter James

Publisher: PanMacmillan

Pages: 560

The Secrets of Happiness

Sassy Sisters

Never having read a book by Lucy Diamond before, one didn’t know what to expect, but it’s not hard to see why she is popular. The Secrets of Happiness is a grown-up kind of chick lit, meaning, the women have more to them than just perfect looks, and more to do that just mooning over guys.

Rachel and Rebecca (called Becca by all) are stepsisters-- Rachel’s father fell in love and married Becca’s mother, Wendy. There is an age gap between the two, but that is not the only reason for the relationship between them to be frosty.

The pretty Rachel grows up to be a successful careerwoman with a seemingly perfect marriage and three wonderful children. The frumpy Becca flits from job to job, ending up as a menial in a pub kitchen. Then, Rachel on a mysterious trip to another city, about which she tells nobody, hoping to be back before her kids return from school, is mugged and seriously injured.

The neighbour minding the children calls Becca to come look after them. In the process of reluctantly doing her duty towards family, Becca loses her job. On reaching Rachel’s home, she finds that her sister divorced her husband Lawrence, and lost her job too.  She was trying to set up her own fitness training enterprise when life dealt her a nastier blow. Since the muggers stole her bag with her phone and id, and a head injury gives her temporary amnesia, Rachel is unable to provide the cops with her name, number or address.

Rachel’s children, Mabel, Scarlet and Luke, are distraught, when their aunt comes by to bring some order into their lives. By the time Rachel is able to contact her family, Becca has learnt to manage a home and kids and also dealt with her sister’s clients, but her own freewheeling manner.

When Rachel returns home, she requests Becca to stay a few more days, even though she hates to be dependent on anyone. There is also a misunderstanding caused by Lawrence that prevents her from truly accepting her stepsister.

Over the weeks, however, the two grow close and learn the meaning of sisterhood. It is an easy read, bright and optimistic, with simple, relatable people populating its pages, not too much angst or ugliness and everything turning out all right.  Even the kids are not horrid, precocious brats, which is such a relief.

There are other characters and their stories woven into the novel.  It is no surprise that almost everyone from a teenager to a septuagenarian find their perfect mate by the end—it is that kind of happy-making book.

The Secrets of Happiness

By Lucy Diamond

Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Pages: 480

The Paris Secret

Ghosts In A Canvas

This is something you can’t imagine in Mumbai—an apartment lying vacant for decades, without anyone trying to break in or squat.  Just such a place is at the centre of Karen Swan’s new bestseller, The Paris Secret.

Flora Sykes is a fine arts agent, working with large firm or art dealers; she enjoys her work, travelling all over the world, attending auctions, picking up paintings for clients. Suddenly her boss Angus and she are summoned to Paris by their wealthy clients, Lillian and Jacques Vermeil.

They received a mysterious communication informing them that the family owns an apartment in Paris, that they did not know of, and, according to a will, were not to enter the flat till the death of Jacques’s mother—the matriarch who lives in Antibes and ferociously guards the family’s past. But the apartment was broken into, and they need someone to check what is in there, without contravening the condition of the codicil.

Flora and Angus go to the apartment and find a treasure trove of classic art works by the great masters, believed to be lost during World War II.  Exciting as the discovery is, it has to be kept a secret, till the canvases and artifacts can be catalogued and their provenance established.

This is where Flora hits a block, because several paintings are traces back to an art dealer who worked for the Nazis during the War, which means they were probably stolen or extorted from Jewish families in distress. As Flora painstakingly solves the mystery, that involves the Vermeil family, she is also facing a family crisis involving her beloved brother Freddie.

To add to her stress she has to deal with the two obnoxious Vermeil brats, Xavier and Natascha. They are spoiled and cause scandals in their circle on a regular basis. Since it is a given that the workaholic heroine will fall for the bad boy, there is a romance thrown in half-heartedly, and a short-lived triangle as Flora dates a Vienna-based businessman, Noah Haas, who might have some details of a Renoir in the hidden collection. But for the reader, the story of the abandoned apartment and the paintings is of more interest.

Swan keeps the tone light, even though the story gets dark and intense at a point, when it brings in questions of ethics, honesty and loyalty. It is an easy, mostly appealing read, and Flora makes for a likeable heroine—scrupulous but not goody-two-shoes; strong, but not inflexible. The men in the book are not half as interesting.

The Paris Secret

By: Karen Swan

Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Pages: 352

Black Water Lilies

Cocktail of Art and Murder

French writer Michel Bussi’s Black Water Lilies (translated by Shaun Whiteside) has an unusual setting—Giverny.  This is the village where the great Impressionist Claude Monet settled down to paint water lilies. It became a kind of pilgrim spot for students and art lovers who flock to see Monet’s house and the legendary lily pond.

In this peaceful community, a murder causes some turbulence. The story begins with the murder of art lover and womanizer, Jerome Morval. In his pocket is a postcard of Monet’s Water Lilies with the words: “Eleven years old. Happy Birthday.” The killer could be someone from the art underworld that trades in stolen masterpieces, or the jealous husband of one of his many lady friends, or perhaps one of the ladies.

The narrator is an old woman who watches over the village from her high perch in an abandoned mill, ignored by all but her dog Neptune. When Inspector Laurenc Serenac and his overeager deputy Sylvio Benavides start investigating the crime, they get a lot of tangled leads that don’t make sense.

Serenec falls madly in love with a schoolteacher Stephanie Dupain, whose husband Jacques is a suspect, a man known to be insanely possessive of his beautiful wife. Involved somehow in the jigsaw is eleven-year-old Fanette, an art prodigy, seeking a way out of her squalid existence with her single mother, by winning an international art exhibition.

Fanette has befriended a vagabond American painter James, who is also killed in the same way as Morval was, but it looks like the child imagined the artist, since no trace of him can be found. Benavides unearths a very old case in which a little boy also died in an identical manner.

Bussi constructs a maze of memories, time, motive and passion, that boggle the mind and lead to a stunning and quite unexpected climax. After the bestselling After The Crash, this is the second novel by Bussi to be translated into English and it is a fascinating read, in spite of the somewhat disjointed structure and a sagging middle.

Black Water Lilies

by Michel Bussi

Translated by Shaun Whiteside

Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Hachette

Pages: 350

A Midsummer’s Equation

Mystery Wrapped In Enigma

Keigo Higashino’s The Devotion Of Suspect X is arguably one of the finest suspense thrillers ever, certainly the best book written by the Japanese bestselling author.  It is rather unfair to call him ‘The Japanese Steig Larsson’ as The Times does—quoted on the cover of his new book, A Midsummer’s Equation, because he is an original. His books are steeped in the culture of his country, and he does not imitate any Western author. The themes of love, sacrifice, nobility and loyalty that come across in his books are unique and very Japanese.

A Midsummer’s Equation may not be as complicated as The Devotion Of Suspect X or Journey under the Midnight Sun, but its slow-simmering suspense, layers of detailing, slow-paced but sharp story-telling makes it a very satisfying read. 

Manabu Yukawa, is a physicist whose powers of deduction come to the aid of the police many time, earning him the nickname of Detective Galileo. He returns in this book, first in is role as a scientist, but as soon as a crime is committed, he gets into his other mode.

The book is set in the small coastal town on Hari Cove, which is in decline after the tourist traffic trickled to a stop. The town is at the centre of an environmental battle between a company planning an underwater mining operation that threatens the fragile ecosystem of the ocean, and a section of the townsfolk who want to preserve the pristine beauty of Hari Cove.

The story begins with a teenage Kyohei being sent to spend the summer with aunt, uncle and cousin Narumi in sleepy Hari Cove. Narumi helps her parents Shigehiro and Setsuko Kawahata run a small inn, called Green Rock, and also leads the environmental lobby that wants to protect Hari Cove.

Kyohei befriends Yukawa on the train to Hari Cove and is surprised to see him land up at the Inn. The only other guest staying there is MasatsuguTsukahara, who has ostensibly come to attend a conference to debate the pros and cons of the mining project. The quiet of the town is shattered when Tsukahara is found dead—it looks like he fell off the sea wall and smashed his head on the rocks below.

Turns out he was a former policemen, which brings a whole bunch of Tokyo cops down to the town to investigate. The local cops are ready to file it as an accident, but Tokyo cops insist on an autopsy and find that  Tsukahara died of carbon monoxide poisoning and there is a possibility that his death could be murder.

Cops in Hari Cove and Tokyo (here Yukawa’s buddy detective Shunpei Kusanagi is on the case) get on the job, of tracking every possible person and clue. Yukawa solves the mystery in no time, but keeps his findings to himself. For the reader, the thrill is in discovering one piece of the jigsaw puzzle after another—till the last chapter there are surprises.

Gently blended in are the customs and traditions of the country, the attitudes, the food, the changing lifestyle. Like his hero Yukawa, Higashino is in no hurry to reveal whodunit, and makes no moral judgments about the killer. Yukawa stays a silent observer because he knows that the truth will affect an innocent life; for him, compassion is more important than blame and punishment. It’s a book the reader will savour long after it is over.

A Midsummer’s Equation

By Keigo Higashino

Publisher: Abacus/Hachette

Pages: 480

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

Potter Grows Up

JK Rowling’s Harry Potter books changed publishing history by creating a new generation of young readers, who then also became consumers of the movies, games, merchandise-- making the writer one of the wealthiest people in the world.

After seven bestselling books, each of which triggered fresh rounds of Pottermania, Rowling decided to stop. She also started writing non-Potter books, but her wizard hero refused to vanish.

So back he comes, older, sadder and helpless before his spoilt brat, Albus Potter, the only one of his three children (James and Lily remain in the background) who is chronically sullen and has a problem with his father’s fame.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is the dramatic script of the recently staged London production, which was written in two parts by playwright Jack Thorne, based on an original story by Rowling, the director John Tiffany and himself. The play picks up where the last novel,  Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007) left off. It is set nineteen years after Harry Potter got out of Hogwarts and defeated the Dark Lord Voldemort. He is married to Ginny Weasley and works with the Ministry of Magic. His buddy Ron married Hermione and they have a daughter, Rose.

The kids are going to Hogwarts, when the play (book) opens and Albus manages to befriend just one other boy, with as big a chip on his shoulder as he does--Scorpius Malfoy, the son of Harry’s nemesis, Draco Malfoy. He is a sweet-natured child burdened with the rumour that he is Voldemort’s son, so nobody wants to be near him.

Anyone who has not read Potter books and is unfamiliar with the back story, the characters and the mythology would not be able to follow the story, but Potter fans can plunge right in as if the gap between Book 7 and this one never happened.

The story has a lot of twists, turns, action, emotional turmoil, magic and time-travelling, which from all accounts, made for a magical and riveting stage production, and will undoubtedly make for a successful film. The book leaves a lot for the reader to imagine, because the layers a novel would have brought in are missing.

There is suspense too-- even though Voldemort is dead, Rowling and Thorne find a fiendishly clever way to have him return.  Albus is not an appealing hero, a rude busybody, whose rebelliousness causes his hapless father and others a great deal of grief.

He drags an unwilling Scorpius into time-travelling misadventures, that re-introduce some characters and the past at Hogwarts, as what-if alternative realities are created. Because it is in the form of a play, the book is an easy read; so much to-ing and fro-ing would have made a novel unwieldy and perhaps boring. Here all the conflicts and emotions are there, without excessive verbiage. And the climax has all the fireworks one would expect from a classic confrontation between Good and Evil.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (Parts One and Two)

By Jack Thorne, based on an original story by J. K. Rowling, John Tiffany and Jack Thorne

Publisher: Little, Brown & Company /Hachette

Pages: 327 pages

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The Fishermen

A Family Tragedy

Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen is a dazzling literary addition to the list of books that have been written by African authors. In recent years, writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Teju Cole have left their mark on the scene, after forerunners like Ben Okri and Chinua Achebe.

Obioma is Nigerian, like Achebe, and writes of the traumatic times in the 1990s under the military dictatorship of General Sani Abacha. The narrator is nine-year-old Benjamin, one the large brood of a bank official and his wife, who runs a food stall in the local market. Their father wants his children to get a good education and become successful professionals.

When the patriarch is transferred to another town, the boys run riot and play at being fisherman in the town’s sewer-like polluted river the Omi-Ala, while their mother is out at work. Walking home one day, the encounter a mad, soothsayer, Abulu, who prophesies that the oldest Ikenna will be killed by one of his own brothers.

The prophecy wrecks the happy household, as Ikenna seems to self-destruct. The mother has a nervous breakdown, the father is shattered. Around them the country falls apart too.

The novel that was shortlisted for the Booker Award last year, is moving and disturbing. In an interview Obioma said that thebook was “a critique of the British occupation of Nigeria,” suggesting that he madman who destroyed a happy family/country is like the colonialists, who took advantage of a society divided by tribes. But even without this interpretation, the book is a deeply felt chronicle of a family—a striking debut by a young writer.

The Fishermen

By Chigozie Obioma

Publisher: Little, Brown & Company

Pages: 297