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

The Black Widow

The World Is Not Enough

Daniel Silva has created one of the finest espionage thrillers in recent times featuring Gabriel Allon, an Israeli spy-assassin, who is also an extraordinary art restorer. So, the books are often as much about art history as about the Israeli intelligence services battling international terrorism.

Silva is so eerily prescient that what he writes about leaps right out of the news headlines. Over eighteen books his hero tracks and destroys terrorists from Iran, to Palestine, to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Jordan, Iraq, Syria and other hotbeds of unrest and radicalisation, particularly groups that endanger Israel. In his latest, bestselling novel, The Black Widow, an ISIS run terror outfit carries out bombings in Paris and Amsterdam, which really happened a few weeks later. Silva writes in his foreword, that he began writing The Black Widow before the Paris attacks of 2015, and he considered putting aside his typescript, but made the decision to let it be published. He notes in a sad tone, “I only wish that the murderous, millenarian terrorism of the Islamic State lived solely on the pages of this story.”

His novels provide a concise history of the troubles in the Middle East, and don’t soft peddle Islamic terrorism. He names the terrorist groups Allon sets out to fight in each book, with a team of dedicated officers. Allon is on friendly terms with heads of other intelligence organizations in the world, and they often help one another in their mission to battle extremists.

Allon was a talented art student with a promising career, when he was picked by the head of the Israeli secret service to avenge the murder of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich in 1972 by Palestinian militant group Black September. He was one of the elite team that hunted and killed the murderers.  His art career ruined, he joins the Israeli security agency known simply as the Office. Allon suffers tragedy himself, when a bomb kills his young son and maims his wife; he subsequently falls in love with and marries fellow intelligence agent Chiara, and in The Black Widow tries to keep work away and look after his new born twins. He is also waiting to take over as Chief of the Office, when the ISIS bombing that kill his friend Hannah Weinberg, one among many, bring him back into the field,.

The man responsible for the bombings is the mysterious Saladin, and the only way of reaching him is by planting an undercover agent into his network. The woman chosen and trained for the highly dangerous mission is a Jewish doctor, Natalie Mizrahi, who is given a new Palestinian identity and past so that she can infiltrate the ISIS hideout.

She takes on the assignment reluctantly, but once she is in, Natalie, or Leila Hadawi as she is renamed, acts with exemplary courage, losing her nerve just once before she is to be thrown into the lion’s lair. For the reader every page is full of tension and a heart-in-the-mouth feeling for Natalie and her suffering.  It can be very difficult to become another person, to the extent that even her dreams belong to Leila. One slip could mean death not just for her, but thousands of innocents to be targeted in attacks being planned by terrorists.

The Black Widow is a terrific book, close enough to reality to be scary, but also tempered with the softness of emotions—love, friendship, loyalty and devotion to a cause. In a sense Gabriel Allon and Saladin are not that different—only one seeks to protect and the other to destroy.

The Black Widow

By Gabriel Allon

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: 544

End of Watch

The Suicide Prince Strikes

End of Watch is Stephen King’s fifty-fifth novel (hat tip) and the third of the Bill Hodges trilogy.

In the first book, Mr Mercedes, a mentally-disturbed man, Brady Hartsfield, drives a stolen Mercedes into a crowd of job seekers, who had queued up at the City Centre on a cold morning. He is clever enough not to be caught, which bothers the cop, Bill Hodges, who retired with an unsolved case on his head.

Now, living on his own, with nothing to do and no friends, Hodges starts feeling depressed. He is forced out of his self-pitying idleness by the Brady—a computer wiz—who taunts and goads Hodges into trying to catch him. He deviously pushes the hapless owner of the Mercedes to commit suicide by messing with her computer, and also plants thoughts of suicide into Hodges’s mind.

Then, Brady tries to commit mass murder at a stadium full of kids who have come to watch a popular boy band perform. He intends to do that by blowing himself up with a home-rigged bomb, but Hodges and his companions, Jerome Robinson and Holly Gibney foil his plans. Holly whacks Brady on the head with a heavy object, leading to his being hospitalized in a vegetative state.

In the second book, Finders Keepers, Hodges has recovered from a heart attack suffered during the stadium attack and set up a detective agency with Holly, who is a “bundle of nervous tics and strange associations” but fiercely devoted to the older man, and very fond of young Jerome. A case connected to the first book turns up; Hodges who goes to visit Brady regularly is convinced he is faking mental damage to avoid trial for his crimes. The nurses at the hospital are scared of Brady, because he makes strange things happen through telekinesis.

In End Of Watch, the full extent of Brady’s diabolical powers are unleashed. An unscrupulous doctor, Felix Babineau, experiments on Brady with some drugs which give the criminal supernatural abilities that the doctor is unable to control, and which lead his downfall. Brady’s damaged brain gets fully functional, though he continues to pretend being catatonic. But with the help a defunct electronic gadget called Zappit, which he has contrived to place with survivors of the foiled concert attack, and his former co-worker, Freddi, he triggers off a spate of suicides.

Alarm Bells ring in the Hodges camp when Bill’s old partner, Pete Huntley, tells him about a fresh case of murder-suicide linked to the Mercedes massacre, and then Jerome’s cheerful kid sister Barbara tries to kill herself. Hodges, pushing seventy and low on energy, discovers he has pancreatic cancer, and his precarious health adds a layer of urgency and tension to the proceedings.  

If Hodges and Holly catch on to Brady’s modus operandi very soon, the “architect of suicide” never underestimates his nemesis and always skips one step ahead of them. The two have to trace and stop Brady themselves, because nobody will believe what he has been up to and how. And by the time, they can convince the cops, Brady will have succeeded in his evil plot.

The friendship between the young and moviestar handsome African American Jerome, the middle-aged eccentric Holly and the old cop is suffused with a rare warmth, and makes the reader wish the series would go on for a few books more.

Stephen King’s mastery over the thriller makes the story totally plausible and hence, very scary.  The book can be a standalone read, but it is better to read all three books for full impact—the first being arguably the best.

End Of Watch

By Stephen King

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Pages: 368

Stars Of Fortune

Fantastic Six

 

Best-selling author Nora Roberts kicks off her new Guardians trilogy with Stars of Fortune. It’s the mix of fantasy, magic, the supernatural, romance and action that is working well with young readers these days, and also in cinema.  It is very likely these this set of books will end up as films too.

 

The prologue talks of three good goddesses and the stars they protect, and one evil one—Nerezza— who wants those stars to increase her beauty and power.

 

On earth six special people have been picked to find those ancient fallen stars and prevent Nerezza from getting her hands on them.  Sasha Riggs, a reclusive artist, has vivid dreams about six strangers and a picturesque  island, which she captures on her canvas. She figures the place she has been seeing in her dreams is the Greek island of Corfu and decides to go to there on an impulse. In her hotel, she immediately meets archaeologist Riley Gwin and magician Bran Killian, who are two of those she painted without ever having met them.

When the three decide to rent a lovely beach side cottage, they soon find the remaining three -- Sawyer, Annika and Doyle, all of whom have special powers and secrets.  Sasha always suspected she was different and suffered for it with enforced loneliness, but now she realizes she is a seer, that her dreams and visions are directions to the hidden stars.

 

The six know they are the chosen ones, and when they commence their search in caves around Corfu, they are attacked by strange creatures unleashed by Nerezza. Their fighting together creates a strong bond between them and the others slowly reveal their secrets. Once they are a unit, they train and get battle ready for the big fight that is bound to come—the skirmishes that shake them up, were mere threats.

 

Romance is Roberts’ forte and the sparks between Sasha and Bran sizzle with passion. The more interesting character than Sasha, is the kick-ass Riley, who is fearless and has leadership skills that bind the other five disparate people into a fighting team.

 

Young readers, and maybe the author’s adult fans, will like the book for its pace and consistently layered suspense.  Stars of Fortune should serve as an appetizer for the other two books in the trilogy—Bay Of Sighs and Island Of Glass.

Stars of Fortune

By Nora Roberts

Publisher:  Piatkus/Hachette

Pages: 340