Friday, September 30, 2016

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

Tuesday, September 20, 2016

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