The Bitter Season

Good Cop Bad Cop

In our country, major crimes often go unpunished due to inadequate investigation. So it is strange to read about the US police force spending time and resources on cold cases, that is, cases that remained unsolved. The idea being that time and a fresh perspective might just help catch the perpetrator.

In Tami Hoag’s new bestseller, The Bitter Season, the reopening of a file on the murder of, Ted Duffy, a cop who worked with the sex crimes division of the Minneapolis police force, causes a tumult in the life of detective Nikki Liska. She had opted to leave Sam Kovac, her partner of many years, so that she could get off active cases and spend more time with her growing sons, since cold cases did not require that much footwork. She soon realizes that there is no rest for a hard-working cop.

While Nikki finds a lot that was left to slide in the earlier investigation,  Sam is thrown into a shockingly brutal case—the double murder of an Asian studies professor, Lucien Chamberlain and his wife Sondra. Even hardened cops were left reeling at the sheer savagery of the crime. There seems to be no motive for the killings, even though a few people could have wanted him dead, including his own children Charles and Diana, and his professional rival Ken Sato.  From all accounts Chamberlain, was an unpopular man and a terrible father. His son suffers from OCD, his bipolar daughter and assistant has accused him of harassment. It is a mess and somehow the two cases are connected, and the two investigation end up running parallel.

Duffy’s disgruntled wife, ended up marrying his rich twin, making them suspects. Years later, they are naturally reluctant to cooperate with Nikki, but they have not bargained for her persistence and deductive prowess.  When she starts questioning Duffy’s daughter, Jennifer, now a reclusive librarian, she attempts suicide. Nilkki’s only other lead is the Duffys’ adopted daughter Evi, who has left her sordid past so far behind that she does not want painful old memories to impinge on her perfect present with a loving husband and daughter.

Hoag has written a tense and pacy psychological thriller, with the suspense maintained to the very end—it is hard to guess who among the many suspects is the killer and why. Some amount of humour is provided by one of the newbie cops who is so handsome, that his looks lead to his being mercilessly ribbed by his colleagues.

The Bitter Season

by Tami Hoag

Publisher: Dutton

Pages: 368

Host

No End To Greed

Doctor-cum author Robin Cook, is an expert writer of medical thrillers, whose bestselling reputation was built on his second book, the shocking Coma (1977).This novel that was also turned into a film and TV mini-series, was about the medical malpractice carried out by a Boston hospital, of deliberating putting patients into a coma, in order to steal and sell their organs. The book was terrifyingly real, well plotted and suspenseful.

Now nearly forty years and thirty-two books later, Cook rehashes the plot for his new novel Host—the only major difference being that the villains are Russian oligarchs and greedy pharmaceutical companies. In the interim his books have covered a wide spectrum of medical evils, and it is perhaps understandable that he ran out of fresh ideas.

Like in the earlier book, the protagonist is a medical student, Lynn Pierce, whose boyfriend, a healthy young lawyer, Carl Vandermeer goes in for a knee surgery and does not wake up. Lynn’s friend and fellow student, Michael Pender tells her that he knows of a relative who suffered in the same way in the  Mason-Dixon University Medical Center, part of Middleton Healthcare conglomerate. Comatose patients are shifted to the Shapiro Institute, a state-of-the-art-facility nearby. It’s an affiliate of Sidereal Pharmaceuticals, a high-tech drug manufacturer owned by a Russian billionaire.

Risking their careers and lives, Lynn and Michael set out to investigate and find a huge scam. Hospitals are meant to cure patients, not abuse their trust and profit from their suffering. But, writes Cook, pharma giants care more about money than healthcare and anything goes in the name of research. They have enough clout to ensure that their machinations go unreported and unchecked.

The story moves at a sluggish pace, there is too much medical jargon and procedural details thrown about (the anesthesiologist’s preparations for the operation, for example, are yawn-inducing), but Cook still manages to warn readers about the unscrupulous side of the medical profession. Honest and earnest though it is, this one would require some speed-reading skills.

Host

By Robin Cook

Published by: Pan Macmillan, India

Pages: 400

Pretty Girls & Find Her

Missing Girls

Two recent books describe the trauma families go through when a child goes missing. It is worse when it’s a daughter, because of the horrible sexual assaults girls can be subjected to. Sometimes parents wish they get news of the child’s death, so at least they can grieve and find closure.

Karin Slaughter’s Pretty Girls is so horrifying that you can’t believe that a female writer thought up all those tortures on young women.

 When nineteen-year-old Julia Carroll disappeared, her family fell apart. Her father, Sam, made it a mission to find out what happened to her, when the cops gave up.  His obsession destroyed his marriage and led to his suicide. The mother Helen Carroll kept Julia’s room as she left it, in the hope that she would return. Every time a girl goes missing, the Carroll’s relive the trauma again.

One of the sisters, Lydia Delgado, a single mother, went into a downward spiral of self-destructive behavior. The only who remained remained relatively unscathed was another sister, Clair Scott, who had a happy marriage to architect Paul Scott. She is estranged from Lydia, who, in the past, accused Paul of molesting her.

Then, one evening Paul is murdered by muggers in the presence of his wife. When Claire starts looking into Paul’s things in his ‘man cave’ she discovers a bunch of snuff porn videos, that are so brutal that she is convinced by the investigating cop that they are staged for the sick pleasure of perverts.

She finds that her rich and outwardly caring husband had a secret side to him and she is devastated. The only person she can trust is Lydia, whom she hasn’t spoken to twenty years. Together they pick at the thread that could unravel the mystery of the missing girls, Paul’s involvement, and hopefully find out what really happened to their sister. They put themselves in danger, because the men involved are very powerful and would stop at nothing to prevent being exposed for their crimes.

The scenes of torture and killing are so graphic that they are enough to cause nightmares, and make one wonder about a society that breeds such beasts in the guise of men.

Pretty Girls

By Karin Slaugter

Published by William Morrow

Pages: 400

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Flora Dane is a carefree student on a summer break in Florida when she is kidnapped by a sexual predator. It is unimaginable that any human being could do to another what the man subjects the young girl to. She is locked up in a coffin, starved, beaten and raped; then the man gives her food and water, turning Flora into a frightening case of Stockholm Syndrome. She feels so debased by this experience and convinced that her family has given her up for dead, that she does not escape even when she can. Her abductor breaks her down completely, mentally and physically, till she is like a puppet controlled by him. It takes superhuman will to survive this ordeal for 472 days, and after she is rescued, she becomes a different person—fearless and hardened. What could possibly happen to her that is worse than what she already suffered? Her mother and brother put their lives on hold, hoping against hope that she would turn up alive, but the girl who was returned to them was just a shell of her former self.

 Lisa Gardner’s disturbing thriller, Flora becomes a self-styled vigilante—deliberately putting herself into situations that would attract monsters like her captor,  and she fights them. The last man was preyed on her, ended up burnt to death. A female cop, DD Warren in charge of the case – this is Gardner’s eighth Warren book—is caught in a bind. Can a murderer who deliberately posed as a victim be pardoned for her crime? Does her past agony give her license to kill?

Then, much to the shock of Warren and Samuel Keynes, FBI’s victim counselor who had helped Flora come out of her trauma, she is kidnapped again. And this time the abductor is even more cruel.

It is much more frightening to read Find Her than any horror story. Flora evokes equal parts admiration and dread. But the same question can be posed again—what kind of society creates such fiends?

Find Her

By Lisa Gardner

Published by Dutton

Pages: 416

My Name Is Lucy Barton

Words Unsaid

Pulitzer-winning author Elizabeth Strout’s new book, My Name Is Lucy Barton, is slim austere and intermittently moving.  It’s one of those novels you wish would go on for a little longer, you’ve just about started to understand and sympathise with the characters when it ends abruptly.

The eponymous heroine is lying in hospital after an appendix operation, when her mother suddenly materializes at the foot of her bed. Her husband, who has to cope with work and two kids, has called her and made all arrangements for her travel.  It might seem like the most natural thing to do, but Lucy’s relationship with her mother has been strained, and her German husband is the cause.  Lucy’s father fought in the War and hates Germans, and his wife behaves towards the son-in-law the way her husband expects her to.

The mother’s solid presence reassures Lucy—the older woman seems to be awake at all times, and eat nothing or very little. But what the two women do in between visits by nurses (to whom they allot nicknames) and a very kind doctor, is talk about the past. The mother tells her what happened to the people Lucy used to know back in their old home.

What Lucy remembers mostly is being so poor that her schoolmates didn’t want to be near her. (“We were oddities, our family, even in that tiny rural town of Amgash, Illinois.”)  She has struggled to get out, and become a writer, the memories are not too pleasant. Her creative writing teacher, a taciturn author named Sarah Payne, tells her,  “You will have only one story… You’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about story. You will have only one.”  What is a writer to do if that story is on of deprivation and crushing solitude?

Lucy’s childhood has been unusually isolated—there is little food, no books or TV and no social circle. She writes, “Loneliness was the first flavour I had tasted in my life, and it was always there, hidden in the crevices of my mouth, reminding me.”

Because they are unable to talk about their pain and estrangement, the conversations the two women have in hospital are a way of the mother conveying to her that her life did turn out right after all.  Unlike Kathie Nicely, who ran off with another man and was spurned by her husband and children when the affair failed; or Mississippi Mary, whose seemingly perfect life fell apart when she discovered her husband’s affair with his secretary. And so on...a series of unhappy lives.

There is a sense of stillness in the novel, where silences and emotions not expressed also say a lot. Lucy became a writer because of her loneliness. Books, she says, “made me feel less alone. This is my point. And I thought: I will write and people will not feel so alone!”   Her own loneliness she continues to wear like armour.

My Name Is Lucy Barton

By Elizabeth Strout

Published by Random House

Pages: 193

After You

Echoes Of Grief

Jojo Moyes’s last bestseller Me Before You (2012) was about an unusually passionate love story between the rich quadriplegic Will Trantor and his carer Louisa Clark, which ended with his assisted suicide.

In the sequel After You, Moyes catches up with Louis eighteen months later. Will’s legacy and his advice to her to “just live well” has allowed her to buy an apartment, but she is still grieving and punishing herself by doing a humiliatingly menial job at an airport bar.  In Louisa’s hometown, people still shun her because of the euthanasia scandal following her like a shadow. She attends grief management sessions and spends her time gloomily ruminating her on the the apartment’s terrace.

Two strange things happen to her—she falls off the terrace, lands up in hospital because of broken bones, and meets a man who will be important in her life. Worse, Lily, the disturbed, delinquent daughter that she never knew Will had, turns up at her doorstep, and demands to be looked after. There are other interesting characters like Louisa’s parents, her senile granddad, her resentful sister, and Will’s parents, also trying to cope with their grief.

Louisa’s life is turned upside down and not necessarily in a good way, though, like all romantic stories, it has a happy ending. Though one wouldn't wish a manipulative whiner like Lily on one's worst enemy.

After You 

By Jojo Moyes

Published by Pamela Dorman Books

Pages: 368

The Good Liar

Wicked Old People

The word ‘old’ is used to describe anyone over 60, but the octogenarian protagonists of Nicholas Searle’s The Good Liar are so delightfully wicked, they could beat people half their age.

At the age when so many seniors are battling loneliness or trying to survive in care homes for senior citizens, the dapper conman Roy Courtnay is planning one last job that will not only give him a jolt or energy, but also enough money to let him retire in peace once and for all.

In flashbacks Searle gives the reader a view of how cleverly and coldly Roy operates, how he has always managed to get away and how easily he changes his identity.

 When the book opens, he is going on a blind date with yet another wealthy old widow with the idea of swindling her of her nest egg.  Betty McLeish is beautiful and sophisticated, which adds to her appeal as a potential target-- Roy being fussy about the ‘quality’ of his prey.  Soon, he has moved into her cosy country home, much to the annoyance of her family.

In neat chapters, Searle’s flashbacks give details of Roy’s transformations and operations, right from the World War II to the present when he runs an elaborate con on a bunch of his buddies and then stages his own death. Ruthless though he is, there is something darkly fascinating about his utterly immovable eye on his goal. But Betty has her agenda too, and the deadly chess game of oneupmanship between the two is hugely enjoyable. One can’t but admire Betty for her luck, survival skills and razor sharp brain.

The book has both suspense and humour in large measure, even though at some point one can guess where it’s headed. Still, Roy getting his comeuppance is most satisfying.

The Good Liar is the the pseudonymous Nicholas Searle’s first book and the author bio says he  “was a civil servant who spent much of his time working on security matters."  A writer as elusive as his leading man.

The Good Liar

by Nicholas Searle

Publisher: Viking

Pages: 288