See Me

Bad Boy Meets Good Girl

Nicholas Sparks’s romances like The Notebook and A Walk To Remember were bestsellers and made him one of the most popular writers around.

His latest, See Me (his eighteenth) is a paint-by-numbers story of bad boy Colin Hancock, with his anger issues and criminal background, falling in love with a straitlaced lawyer, Maria Sanchez.  The difference in their backgrounds is not just education and social status, but the kind of families they belong to.  His parents gave him up as a problem child without trying to understand the cause of his violent rages. Her working class immigrant family, supports and stands by her at all times.

They meet during a storm when Colin stops to fix Maria’s flat tire and all she sees is a scary looking guy with a battered face.  When they are properly introduced by Maria’s chatty sister Serena, Colin is trying very hard to reform—completing his education, working as a bartender, gymming intensely and making some extra money as a cage fighter. He also has the kind of friends that only appear in books— Evan and his fiancée Lily, who are fiercely protective of him.

Maria has just been dumped by her boyfriend, so she concentrates on her work at a law firm, fending off the creepy boss, having occasional lunches with a sympathetic co-worker and relaxing by paddle boarding alone.

She is beautiful as all romance novel heroines are supposed to be, but a lot of words are expended to describe Colin’s brooding good looks and chiseled body. Opposites attract and just when things start becoming too boring and predictable, the thriller part kicks in.

Maria is stalked by a vicious person, who sends nasty notes and wilted flowers, threatening to make her suffer. Maria’s Mexican clan turns up to shield her from harm, but what good is a muscular, cage fighting hero if not to turn into a knight for his damsel in distress, whose response to danger is panic attacks? Especially since he has had to work so hard to reassure the Sanchez family that he won’t slide back into his troubled past and always stand by their daughter.

The few scenes of their courtship are tender and sweetly romantic—like his learning to salsa just before a dance date—but on the whole the novel is just about passable. Maybe Sparks fans will find some merit in it, despite the workmanlike plotting and ordinary prose.

See Me

By Nicholas Sparks

Publisher:  Grand Central

Pages: 486

Carry On

Potteresque

Rainbow Rowell’s new Young Adult, Carry On, has peculiar origins. In her last book Fangirl, a character creates a fictional boy wizard called Simon Snow. He goes to a magical school called Watford and is destined to fight a villain called “the insidious Humdrum” who is chipping away at the world of Mages (as opposed to Normals).

If Harry Potter comes to mind immediately, that is the idea—this is piece of fan fiction, a tribute to JK Rowling’s work. It is saved by being called a rip-off simply because it wears its Pottermania on its sleeve.

Snow was picked up from the world of Normals by the chief Mage and called the chosen one, even though the teenager is not particularly adept at magic. Simon’s roommate and greatest enemy is a vampire called Baz (this would pull in fans of the Twilight series), while his friend and chief supporter is a half-Indian girl called Penny (her mother is called Mitali), who spends more time with him than his official girlfriend, Agatha.

Simon is obsessed with Baz and in keeping with current trends, this turns into a passionate gay love story, even as the Watford buddies pool in their magic to find and destroy the Humdrum.

Rowell knows her YA readers and is aware that many grew up on Harry Potter and probably moved on to Twilight, so she brazenly aims at them.  And it worked, Carry On is a bestseller that has also made it to the lists of best YA fiction of 2015. Which also goes to show that the world has not yet had enough of wizards and vampires.

Carry On

By Rainbow Rowell

Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin

Pages: 528

The Bazaar Of Bad Dreams

Nightmare Time

In his sixth collection of short stories, enticingly titled The Bazaar Of Bad Dreams, Stephen King has prefaced each story with a short introduction on how he came to write it. In one of them he takes an amusing dig at himself, when he narrates an incident of a woman scoffing at his claim of having written The Shawshank Redemption. (“The point is, you write some scary stories and you’re like the girl who lives in the trailer park on the edge of town: You get a reputation.” )

His introductory pieces are sometimes better than the stories themselves, which are good mix of horror, humour and whimsy, some new, some previously published. Of late, the writer has been working more with the crime thriller format, so this collection is vintage King.

The first story Mile 81 (reminiscent of Christine) about a carnivorous car gets the reader right into the mood for some nightmarish chills.  King even makes the act of reading a bit spooky—in the strange story Ur which he wrote to promote Kindle, a literature teacher buys an e-reader to impress his young girlfriend, and finds himself in an alternative literary universe with masterpieces by greats like Hemingway and Poe that were never published.

Suspension of disbelief is always required with such dark tales, and King makes it easier, even when he is writing standard issue stuff like Obits in which a columnist finds that he is able to kill people by writing their obituaries in advance; there’s The Dune in which a man who owns a small island, finds the names of people about to die imprinted on the sand.

If there’s a wealthy air crash survivor in the grip of a charlatan healer (he could be out King’s novel The Revival), there’s an ageless bad kid tormenting the narrator, who is convicted for killing the child, but knows that nobody will believes his story.

He has actually moved beyond monster-under-the-bed kind of scary stories, so King knows he is pandering to his old fans, he calls them “Constant Reader” and occasionally adopts a self-deprecatory tone-- “I may be a Professional Writer to the I.R.S. when I file my tax return, but in creative terms, I’m still an amateur, still learning my craft.”

It is a measure of his enormous skill, honed by prolific writing, that even in the most ordinary story in this mixed bag of twenty, he is able to create credible characters (Blockade Billy) and believable scenarios. He can always be witty, moving (the story about two aging poets), and of course, disturbing.

This Bazaar lays out its selection of curios in a neat row, readers can pick their own kind of bad dream.

The Bazaar Of Bad Dreams

By Stephen King

Publisher: Scribner

Pages: 496

Crimson City

Once Upon A Time...

Writing historical fiction requires huge amounts of research and the ability to conjure up a bygone era for the reader. Madhulika Liddle’s series of books featuring a nobleman-turned-reluctant detective, Muzaffar Jang, set in the seventeen century Mughal era are such gems, because she gets the period details down so brilliantly. Thrillers today are fast-paced, violent, full of guns and gizmos. Back then—like Sherlock Holmes mysteries—all Jang had was his powers of observation and deduction, the ability to see minute clues that others miss.

The crimes in Liddle’s latest Muzaffar Jang book, Crimson City, are the same as today—kidnapping, murder—but to solve them without the benefits of forensic science requires skill.  More than the whodunit, what is so fascinating about these books are the descriptions of old Dilli, the clothes worn by the various characters, the food they eat, their manners and mores. She even includes scenes gently criticizing religious intolerance (Hindu households not serving food to Muslims).

Crimson City is set in of 1657 in the times of  Emperor Aurangzeb. There is war in the Deccan, which causes a touch of turmoil in the bazaars of Delhi. A cloth merchant is found murdered in his place of work. Jang’s brother-in-law, the Kotwal of Dilli, forbids him from interfering in police work, which strains their friendship somewhat. Other crimes are committed, a money lender’s son is kidnapped; a rich man is found dead in a hamaam (bathhouse).

Jang may be of noble lineage, but he has no qualms getting his hands dirty; he dons disguises to question the servants, and where he can’t reach, his lovely and intrepid wife Shireen goes in and extracts information from the zenanas.  One will wait for the next Muzaffar Jang mystery!  

Crimson City

By Madhulika Liddle 

Publisher: Hachette India

Pages: 328. 

Foreign Affairs

Stone’s Throw

Stuart Woods does whip them up—soon after Naked Greed, his latest Stone Barrington novel is out, titled Foreign Affairs.

Barrington is a dashing, fabulously wealthy lawyer, who jets around piloting his private plane, stays in luxurious suites, has friends and lovers in high places, homes in glamorous locations, and the habit of slithering out of trouble with enviable ease. In fact, if a man like him did not invite trouble it would be surprising!

In the 35^th Stone Barrington novel, the hero has to leave for Rome in a hurry, where his partner Marcel DuBois has closed the deal for a new hotel. As always, he meets a beautiful (but, of course!) artist called Hedy Kiesler on the plane. He doesn’t even have to make an extra effort to seduce the women, his swish lifestyle is enough—Hedy is upgraded to first class on the flight and installed in his expensive suite in Rome. (Though Hedy is an heiress herself, and her well-connected stepfather makes an appearance later.)

But a Roman gangster Leonardo Casselli, won’t let the hotel be built unless he gets his pound of flesh, so the under construction building is torched and Stone’s car set on fire. But the mafioso doesn’t know he is up against a man who has the US President on speed dial. It doesn’t come to that though, Stone simply calls his old friend Dino Bacchetti, the police commissioner of New York and his buddy Mike Freeman who runs a security firm, to take care of Casselli’s goons and protect Marcel, Hedy and himself.

In retaliation, Casselli kidnaps Hedy, and Stone will not stand for that. She may be a temporary girlfriend, but she is his responsibility. With so many resources at his disposal, it does not take him too long to find out that Hedy is imprisoned in Casselli’s well-guarded mansion on the Amalfi coast.

It happens only in a Bollywood potboiler that a don in hiding would throw a lavish party in his new home, so that Stone and his aides can infiltrate as musicians!  It’s a laugh-out-loud, silly climax, and the book is a light, enjoyable read— with such lazy plotting, it’s no surprise that Woods writes a new one in a few months’ time!  

Foreign Affairs

By Stuart Woods

Publisher: Putnam

Pages: 320