The Midnight Line

Reacher On The Rampage

The Midnight Line is the twenty-second book in Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series. The former military man, a big-built hulk with no fixed address but a very strong moral compass, lives a nomadic life with one set of clothes and a toothbrush. He goes where the mode of transport he has chosen takes him. But everywhere, there is a problem (read crime) he gets involved with, and once he does, he solves it—using both brain and brawn.

When this book begins, Reacher has been gently dumped by his current girlfriend (“You’re like New York City. I love to visit, but I could never live there,” her goodbye note reads), and quite uncharacteristically for him, he misses her. As he wistfully imagines what she must be doing, he gets on to a bus to go wherever it is going.

When casually strolling on the street when the bus takes a break, he passes a pawn shop and spots a West Point Ring. (West Point is an elite military academy in the US). A former graduate of the academy himself, he cannot imagine what kind of crisis must have forced an alumna to pawn a precious ring. So he sets out to hunt for the woman—it is a tiny female ring, engraved SRS 2005—and see if he can help her.

And once he starts asking questions about how the ring got in the window, he finds he has stepped on a hornet’s nest. Information from the pawn shop owner eventually leads him to a laundromat, whose owner, Arthur Scorpio, is the lynchpin of some kind of illegal drugs racket.

He finds that every link in the chain he cracks warns the next one, but even well-prepared for a Neanderthal man, the gangsters are no match for the one-man battering ram.

Reacher discovers that a private eye, neat and methodical ex-cop, Terry Bramall, is also on the same trail. He has been hired by the sister of the mysterious owner of the ring to trace her. Eventually, they join up, and find the young woman, uncovering in the process a trail of drugs, corruption and shocking apathy on the part of the American establishment towards former military personnel injured in the line of duty.

This book set in desolate towns is equal parts thrilling and moving. It shows the relatively soft, emotional side of Reacher, and ends on a somewhat hokey but still moving note. But when Lee Child’s all-American hero is on a rampage, he is at his tough and witty best.

The Midnight Line
By Lee Child
Publisher: Delacorte

Pages: 368 pages

Little Fires Everywhere

Perils Of Perfection

“Most communities just happen; the best are planned,” is the motto of the town called Shaker Heights, in Celeste Ng’s acclaimed second novel, Little Fires Everywhere.

In a clean and orderly town, with its perfectly manicured lawns, homes with coordinated paint jobs and matching trees, the first fire is lit by the arrival of a Bohemian photographer, Mia Warren and her teenage daughter Pearl.  The literal fires are, however, lit by the disgruntled Izzy Richardson, who is the black sheep of her family;  when the book opens, she has set her home on fire and disappeared.

The novel is set in the 1990s, when the Jerry Springer show on TV and pagers are the hot favourites among teenagers. The affluent Richardson family-- lawyer dad, journalist mom Elena and their four kids, Lexie, Trip, Moody and Izzy-- live happily, till Mia and Pearl appear to rent an apartment from Elena. They live like nomads, packing their meagre belongings into a small car and moving whenever Mia thinks she is done with a place. Their clothes are from thrift shops, their mismatched furniture from junkyards. Elena tries to do good and offers Mia a job as he cook and housekeeper, which she reluctantly accepts so as not to 

appear ungrateful.

Moody immediately befriends Pearl and she becomes like an extra kid in the house full of youngsters.  Meanwhile Izzy is besotted with Mia, and wishes her family was as laidback.

As the relationships between the kids get complicated, Elena starts to resent Mia and digs into her past—the book digressing into the birth of Pearl and the reason for Mia’s unsettled life. Meanwhile the two families end up on opposite sides of the town’s latest cause célèbre.  A childless white couple, the McCulloughs, take in a Chinese infant abandoned by her impoverished mother, Bebe.  But when she gets a job, she wants her child back—Mia supports her while Elena stands by her friend Linda McCullough, and her husband fights the case on their behalf in court. The Richardson’s believe they are not racist – Lexie has a black boyfriend—but scratch the surface and their hidden class and race prejudices surface. Only Izzy is surprisingly clear-sighted and vociferous, for which her family labels her as crazy.

Ng’s portrayal of shiny suburban Americana is sharp and satirical; she may not be too disparaging of the strictly regimented Shaker Heights, but her sympathies clearly lie with those who break out of set moulds, whether it’s Mia, her teacher and mentor Pauline Hawthorne, or the rebellious Izzy.

The book turned out to be a bestseller and news is that Reese Witherspoon has selected it for a Big Little Lies-style adaptation.   

Little Fires Everywhere

By Celeste Ng

Publisher:  Penguin

Pages: 352

The Word Is Murder

The Writer Investigates

A woman goes to an undertaker’s office to make arrangements for her own funeral. A few hours later she is found murdered in her home.

From this intriguing beginning, Anthony Horowitz constructs a gripping novlel--The Word Is Murder-- in which he plays a starring part. Horowitz is a bestselling author, who has written a Bond thriller,Trigger Mortis, a Sherlock Holmes mystery, The House Of Silk, his own very popular Alex Rider series for young adults among other novels, TV series and films. But, as his previous novel The Magpie Murders proved, he is adept at spinning complex suspense yarns with devilishly clever twists, and a tough-to-guess killer, even when he is staring the reader right in the face.

Disgraced police detective Daniel Hawthorne, who has been consultant on a TV series written by Horowitz, now works as a consultant with the Metropolitan police. He is assigned the job of investigating the murder of Diana Cowper, the woman who planned her own funeral, down to the casket and music. Hawthorne is strapped for cash and approaches Horowitz to write a book about him working on the Cowper murder. He cheekily suggests a 50/50 split, which, of course, does not extend to his splitting bills for travel and meals.

The first problem for Horowitz is that Hawthorne is not in the least likeable, the second is that the book will work only if Hawthorne manages to solve the case. So, over the next few days, the writer follows the cop around like a sidekick and finds his life completely taken over. Hawthorne even disrupts—in a hilarious scene-- a crucial work meeting Horowitz is having with Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson.

The dead woman’s son Damien, a successful star working in Hollywood, arrives with girlfriend and daughter in tow. He is, from all accounts, as ruthlessly ambitious as he is handsome. His mother may have had some enemies, like a theatre producer who conned her, the parents of a boy who was killed in an accident by Diana Cowper, and his twin brother severely maimed. 

Hawthorne is annoyingly rude, bigoted and invasive, but also a brilliant investigator; Horowitz who is proud of his own analytical skills is often left gobsmacked by the cop’s sharp mind.

The book is not just suspenseful but also witty, and gives a lot of insights into the world of creative people—success, failure, struggle, ambition, envy, despair. Who the killer turns out to be is not surprising, it’s the why and how that is truly enthralling.

The Word Is Murder

By Anthony Horowitz

Publisher: Cornerstone

Pages: 400

Enemy Of The State

Rapp On The Head

Vince Flynn, who created the character of CIA spy and assassin Mitch Rapp passed away leaving the fourteenth book—The Survivor-- in the series incomplete. Kyle Mills was assigned to complete this book and write two more. (It is a publishing trend now to keep bestselling characters alive, when the original writes dies.)

Enemy Of The State is the sixteenth book starring Mitch Rapp (in the film,American Assassin, Dylan O’Brien plays Rapp), who is legendary in espionage circles for having carried out many successful hits and also being virtually indestructible. He is a patriot and will go to any lengths to destroy enemies of the US and protect his country, for which he has the support of his boss, Irene Kennedy. Rapp lost his pregnant wife in an attack on his life and is just about settling down with his new flame Claudia (she has a back story to do with espionage too) and her daughter Anna, when he is thrown into a cauldron by American President, Joshua Alexander.

Saudi prince, Prince Talal bin Musaid, nephew of the old and toothless King Faisal gets mixed up with the ISIS. He is an entitled fool, who takes his position for granted. But he is spotted handing over money to an ISIS courier, and alarm bells ring in the US.  Meanwhile, Saudi Intelligence chief, Aali Nassar, is plotting and scheming a coup to seize control on the Middle East with the help of the ISIS head Mullah Sayid Halabi.

Alexander summons Rapp for a secret meeting and tells him to deal with the problem and prevent their post 9/11 alliance with the Saudis from being exposed. The problem is that he has to do it unofficially, so if he is caught or killed, the US would disown him. Rapp resigns from the CIA and forms his own rogue group with erstwhile Russian foe Grisha Azarov, former model and lover Donatella Rahn and gun-running sniper Kent Black; Claudia comes in as the logistics expert.

A lot of the action takes place in dusty South Sudan, taking in Iraq, Morocco, Monaco, Paris and Brussels as the gang rushes about trying to douse the fires Nassar has lit.  Nassar puts an old FBI investigator Joel Wilson on the job to trace Rapp, well aware that the man hates Rapp with a passion.

It is all fast-paced fun, if the racism can be tolerated; the book makes no bones about making the Americans look like the smartest, bravest people on the planet.

Enemy Of The State

By Vince Flynn & Kyle Mills

Publisher: Atria

Pages: 400

Tell Tale

Short And Wicked

After completing the multi-volume Clifton Chronicles, Jeffrey Archer comes out with Tell Tale, a collection on thirteen enjoyable short stories.

The first story, Who Killed the Mayor, is the best, and sets the tone for the others, in a few of which clever people get away with crime. In this story, a young Neapolitan detective is sent to an idyllic town in Campania to investigate the murder of a thuggish man who had threatened the peace and prosperity of the town. The problem for the cop is that everyone wants to confess to the murder, and since he knows how it was done, he is aware that they are all lying for some strange reason. The story has a delightfully wicked twist in the end.

There is a charming story, A Wasted Hour, in which an aspiring writer hitches a ride with a man, without recognising him as her icon; in Senior Vice President, a diligent banker is forced to go rogue when he is treated unfairly by the management. A trip to a Holocaust site causes the preset career of a rich student to veer of course in A Road to Damascus.

A Gentleman and A Scholar  is about  Shakespeare scholar who fights the chauvinism of her time to become the first female professor at Yale. The Holiday Of A Lifetime, has three alternative ending the reader can pick from.

There are a couple of flash fiction tales, in which Archer takes up the challenge of writing the exact number of words demanded.

He seems to have fun writing the stories—some of which are set in places he has been to and people he may have met—and the reader can zip throughTell Tale in a single sitting and put it back on the shelf with a smile.

Tell Tale

By Jeffrey Archer

Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Pages: 288

Manhattan Beach

The Girl And The Sea

Anna Kerrigan and Dexter Styles do not belong to the same world, but their paths cross in Pulitzer prize-winning author Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach, a sprawling historical-cum-crime novel, set during the Depression and World War II.

When the novel begins, 11-year-old Anna Kerrigan accompanies her father Eddie to visit Dexter Styles at his house in Manhattan Beach. She plays with the host’s kids, charms Styles and almost forgets that strange meeting. What she does not know the is that Styles is a gangster, and that Eddie who has fallen on bad times, which force him to work at low wages for a corrupt union official, has approached the mob boss for a job. He needs money to buy a wheelchair for his severely disabled younger daughter, Lydia. Anna’s mother used to be dancer, but now stays home to care for Lydia and does some sewing for money. Lydia is lovingly cared for by her mother and sister, but Eddie is always uncomfortable around her. One day, he disappears and leaves the family to cope by themselves. Anna is heartbroken, but after days of grieving, stops waiting for him

Years later, when Anna is 19, she works as the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The War has taken away all the young men, and women are doing what was always considered men’s work. But Anna is not satisfied inspecting ship’s parts like an automaton; she fights discrimination and ridicule to be allowed to be a diver. At the yard, divers wore very heavy outfits and went underwater to repair ships. Nobody believes that a woman could move in a 200-pound costume, leave aside dive in it, but Anna shames the men into respecting her determination.

She run into Dexter Styles, who is more powerful than ever, and single-mindedly pursues him to find out what happened to her father.

The story elaborates on Anna’s life, as well as Styles’s complicated marriage and relationship with his wife’s family, particularly his father-in-law. Egan gradually reveals events from the past that have an impact on the present, and brief encounters in the present that change lives forever. 

There are is a large chunk in the book, set on a ship that is a dull read, but whenever the focus in on Anna, the story sparkles. Egan brings the thrill of diving alive—for Anna is not just a challenge to prove herself in a man’s world, but an almost spiritual path to fill the void in her life. Anna is such a remarkable young woman that the soap opera-ish fate Egan charts for her in the end comes a disappointment. Still, there are passages of exquisite prose, that make Manhattan Beach worth a visit.

Manhattan Beach

By Jennifer Egan

Publisher: Hachette

Pages: 448

No Middle Name

The Nowhere Man

Lee Child’s creation Jack Reacher is a fascinating character. Leaving his army past behind, he lives like a vagabond, travelling to random places with no more luggage than a toothbrush in his pocket. He moves about constantly, sleeps whenever and wherever he can; when his clothes get too dirty, he simply buys new ones and chucks the old. He takes life as it comes, but does not hesitate in interfering if he sees a crime being committed or some injustice being done. His body is built for endurance, his mind never shuts down and his wisecracks bubble up at just the right moment.

He is tall, muscular, hefty and a fighter no ordinary mortal can take on in hand-to-hand combat. Very few can match his astute reading of people—their behavior and their motives. No Middle Name is a collection of short stories starring Jack Reacher, that gives some glimpses of his growing up years and indicates what makes him the way he is.

The younger son of a marine, Reacher and his smart older brother Joe, grew up on several military bases, which is probably why he never formed any deep friendships or connections with other people.  Reacher does not have a middle name, but his first name, Jack, is also never used. 

Even as a kid, as the story Second Son, set in Okinawa, shows, he is prepared for a fight and his “lizard brain” is as sharp as ever.  In High Heat, set in New York in 1977,  he is a teenager travelling alone, looking for adventure and no-strings-attached romance, when he gallantly step in to save a woman from being beaten in the street, only to discover that she is an FBI agent and the man belongs to a notorious gang. Soon the mob is after him, and the city suffers a sudden blackout. In the dark and in sweltering heat, Reacher gets a girl to drive him around, thrashes the gang boss, and also manages to point the cops towards dreaded serial killer Son of Sam.

The compliation begins with Too Much Time, in which Reacher, just taking a walk in a small nondescript town, sees a bag-snatch taking place, catches the thief, is persuaded by the local cops to give a witness statement and finds himself in the midst of a conspiracy. He is arrested for being an accomplice and somebody up in the chain wants him dead for a reason he fathoms as he goes along.

The reader is grabbed by the neck with the intrigue and suspense in this one, and Lee Child simply does not let go till the last page has been turned. This story leads to The Midnight Line, the the 22nd Reacher novel, just out.

No Middle Name: The Complete Collected Jack Reacher Short Stories

By Lee Child

Publisher: Delacote

Pages: 432

The House Of Unexpected Sisters

Always Precious 

The House Of Unexpected Sisters is the 18th book in Alexander McCall Smith’s bestselling No 1 Ladies Detective series and comes just a few months after Precious And Grace.

These books, set in Botswana and featuring the “traditionally built” Precious Ramotswe, the country’s first female private detective, with her colleagues, family and friends, are simple and warm-hearted. The writer makes Botswana sound like heaven on earth, and the African country must have been added to every fan’s must-visit list.

Over the year, the books, set in the capital city of Gaborone, have covered the setting up of the Agency, Precious’s marriage to the very gentle Mr JLB Matekoni (garage owner and expert mechanic), her adoption of two kids, her friendship with Mma Potokwane, who runs an orphanage and makes divine fruit cake. Then there’s Grace Makutsi, who started as a secretary, leaving her poverty-stricken past behind, married the rich furniture shop owner, Phuti Radiphuti, gave birth to a son, and kept promoting herself to partner, associate and in this book, Principal Investigating Officer. And, in most books, the vamp is the pretty, ambitious and ruthless Violet Sephotho, the bane of Grace’s existence since her secretarial college days (where Grace got an unmatched ninety-seven percent).

There are crimes committed in these books, but nothing ghastly enough to give the reader sleepless nights; as much as solving the cases that come to the Agency, the books are about family, loyalty, friendship and nostalgia for the old days when people were kind and gracious.  (In an earlier book, Mr LJB Matekoni had to regretfully sack Charlie, one of his apprentices, because of financial constraints; on seeing his distress, Precious hired him to help at the Agency--much to Grace’s annoyance-- even though she did not need, and could not afford another assistant.)

In The House Of Unexpected Sisters, Precious’s friend and voluntary assistant, the mild-mannered Mr Polopetsi, asks for help—gratis-- for Charity Mompoloki, who was fired from her job at an office supplies store, for alleged rudeness to a customer. Charity is a widow with children, and Precious’s heart melts at the unfairness of the situation.

While the ladies and Mr Polopetsi set about investigating, Precious learns that her abusive ex-husband the trumpet player Note Mokoti, has returned to Gaborone, which causes her some discomfort. She also discovers another Ramotswe she has never heard of, and this leads her to question the character of her dead father Obed, whom she idolizes.

In a peaceful scene, having tea with his wife, Mr JLB Matekoni says: “It would be good to talk to you all day. To talk to you that is – not to other people. Talking to you Mma, is very… very restful, I think.”

Reading No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency books is also restful…and pleasing.

The House Of Unexpected Sisters

By Alexander McCall Smith

Publisher: Hachette

Pages: 240

Sleeping Beauties

 The Ladies Vanish

Stephen King has collaborated it his son Owen to write Sleeping Beauties, a horror fantasy fable for the times. As innumerable cases of sexual harassment and atrocities against women are reported, at least some must have wished for a world without such men.

Sleeping Beauties is set in a small town of Dooling, at the centre of which is a women’s prison. The town’s sheriff is Lila Norcross, whose husband Clint is the prison psychiatrist.  One day, Lila is called out to a crime scene, where a strange semi-nude woman who calls herself Evie, has killed two drug dealers and blown up their meth lab.

When Evie—who seems to trigger all manner of supernatural occurrences-- is taken to the prison, she is unperturbed. But slowly, women in the town start falling asleep, covered with a web-like cocoon. It they are disturbed, they violently assault the person who attempted to awaken them.

This sleeping sickness, given the name of Aurora (after the heroine of Sleeping Beauty), spreads throughout the world, and baffles scientists. The Kings stay in Dooling, however, and write an intricate, somewhat overpopulated (70 odd characters, listed in the beginning) novel with multiple backstories, subplots and even a teen romance.

Women inside and outside the prison start dozing off and nobody can tell if they will wake up, or are gone forever. Lila and some of her police colleagues struggle to stay awake on uppers and cocaine. The town goes berserk, the hospitals are overrun by desperate families, medical supplies stores and supermarkets are looted and destroyed.

Eventually word gets out that the only woman not afflicted by Aurora is Evie. The town’s hothead Frank Geary, who wants to save his daughter’s life, instigates the men to arm up and attack the prison to capture Evie and send her to a lab to find an antidote. Dr Clint Norcross gets his posse together to defend the prison and save Evie.

The Kings write with perspicacity about what is means to be a man today—Frank and a bunch of school bullies think violence and aggression is manly.  Clint and Lila’s son Jared is kind and protective, but the girl he loves prefers a nasty thug-ish kind of boy.

Smaller stories unfold under the huge 700 plus page umbrella, Lila’s unhappiness with her husband’s possible infidelity, a tender love between two prison inmates, and, amusingly a Mercedes owned by a doped out doctor makes an appearance.  (Stephen King’s novel Mr Mercedes was a bestseller with two sequels).

A fake social media post says that the cocoons should be set on fire to end the epidemic and hordes of rabid men go around hunting for women to burn alive. One soap box speaker rants that this virus is punishment for women wearing pants and trying to get ahead of men. In this apocalyptic scenario,  gender politics rear up eventually—it would be a spoiler to reveal what happens to the sleeping women, but the novel tends to get dull and repetitive after a point. There was no need for so many characters that it is difficult to keep track of them—some are totally redundant.

What the book, rambling on over peace and war, asks in Evie’s voice, “I think it might be time to erase the whole man-woman equation. Just hit delete and start over. What do you think?”  It is an idea whose time has come.

Sleeping Beauties

Stephen & Owen King

Publisher: Scribner

Pages: 702

The Rooster Bar

The Big Scam

John Grisham seemed to have taken a beach holiday with the pleasantly breezy Camino Island, and, with his new book The Rooster Bar, is back to the kind of taut legal thriller his fans expect of him.

The general assumption is that the law is not such a big ass in the US, that justice may be occasionally denied but it is seldom delayed. The Rooster Bar exposes not just how scam-ridden the legal system is, but how rampant corruption is in banking and education sectors.

The three protagonists of this novel—Mark, Todd and Zola—discover just a semester before they are to complete their law course in a college called Foggy Bottom (how could a law school with a name like that even exist?) that they were victims of a huge education scam.

They were taken in by the career success fairy tales on the Foggy Bottom brochures, and took loans to enroll. They did not stop to think why they got the big loans so easily or how mediocre students like them were even admitted. They realized that the well-paid jobs they were promised did not exist, they could not possibly pass the bar exam, and that they had no means to repay the loans. One of their friends, the bipolar Gordon, digs into the workings of Foggy Bottom and its elusive owner Hinds Rackley and before committing suicide, tells them how the system has taken them for a ride. Rackley hides behind several shell companies and rakes in billions from hopeful, trusting and desperate students.

All three are in a financial soup with their massive debt; things are worse for Zola, whose family is about to be deported to Senegal, as illegal immigrants after twenty-six years of a tough life in the US.

Disheartened and disillusioned, the three decide to drop out of law school, head for the overcrowded courts and start hustling clients caught in minor cases, like drink driving, for cash payments. They rightly figure out that nobody will actually ask to see their licences. The set up a fake office about The Rooster Bar, where Todd is a part-time bartender, change their names and print cards for their phony law firm

For some time they are successful and dizzily happy at pulling off the stunt; it’s when Mark gets into a medical malpractice suit for big money that their deception starts to come apart at the seams. Their third rate college has not even equipped them with the basics they need to know to practice in courts.

In his author’s note, Grisham writes that his book was inspired by an investigative piece titled The Law School Scam, by Paul Campos, published in The Atlantic; around the facts he builds a somewhat convoluted by always absorbing thriller. The reader actually hopes the three get away with it, because the big guys who run their shady businesses seldom get caught. The book is not just an enjoyable read, but also wraps some eye-opening legal information in its pages.

The Rooster Bar

By John Grisham

Publisher: Hachette

Pages: 374

Glass Houses

Conscience Comes Calling

In Louise Penny’s bestselling Armand Gamache series, the Canadian village of Three Pines, outside Montreal seems like heaven on earth. The tiny village that does not even appear on most maps, is where Chief Superintendent of the Surete du Quebec, comes home for warmth and peace after the chaos of his days dealing with crime in the city.

His loving wife Reine-Marie, his friends, his daughter and son-in-law, have the village’s charming bistro sun by Gabri and Olivier at the centre of their lives in Three Pines. In the thirteen book of the series, Glass Houses, one Halloween night, when they have guess from Montreal, a dark, hooded figure appears on the village green. It just stands there, doing nothing, but the tranquility of the village is shattered. Everybody expects top cop Gamache to do something, but since no crime has been committed he is unable to get rid of the spooky character.

One of the guests, a journalist, recalls a story he did on an old Spanish tradition, of the cobrador or “debt collector” who is hired to just follow a debtor or stare at him, so that he is scared into paying up. Gamache’s son-in-law and second-in-command, Jean-Guy Beauvoir does some research and finds the story of the origins of the cobrador, which was like a conscience calling out not a financial but a moral debt. Gamache realizes that “someone in the village had done something so horrific that a Conscience had been called.”

Then a murder is committed, the cobrador vanishes, and Armand Gamache is called upon to testify in court. Oddly enough, the prosecuting lawyer, Barry Zalmanowitz grills his own witness so vicously, that the judge Mauteen Corriveau suspects that there is something more to it that meets the eye, and she is right.

Gamache’s career and several lives are at stake, and the outcome of the case is crucial to a plan the Chief Superintendent, Beauvoir, and their Surete colleagues have been working on secretly for months, to fight the drug trade in Canada.

The suspense builds up as slowly as the heat in the courtroom becomes stifling. The case tests the nerve and loyalty of everyone in Gamache’s circle, and they all rally around wonderfully.

Conscience, duty, and love of family and friends are always underlining these books about Armand Gamache and Three Pines.  Glass Houses is one of Loiuse Penny’s finest. It is difficult for the reader to step out of beautiful village when the story (with its terrific climax) comes to an end.

Glass Houses

By Louise Penny

Published by: Hachette

Pages: 391

Autumn

An Enduring Friendship

“What you reading?” Daniel Gluck asks whenever he sees Elisabeth Demand in Ali Smith’s latest novel, Autumn. They have a strange friendship that easily transcends the sixty-nine year age gap between them.

This relationship, Brexit and the colourful life of British pop artist Pauline Boty form the core of this moving novel, the first of the four Ali Smith plans to write with the seasons as titles.

Autumn, shortlisted for the Man Booker Award this year, moves between 2016, when Daniel is 101, lying comatose in an elder care hospital, and different points in the past when he becomes a friend, philosopher and mentor to his young neighbour.

He unwittingly nudges Elisabeth into doing her dissertation on Boty, who fought male prejudice against female painters to do her bold and original work, but slowly fell out of favour.  When he is lying in hospital, Elisabeth visits him regularly, pretending to be his granddaughter, and reads to him.

In the world outside,  Britain has voted to leave the European Union, and the people are shocked.  The country as Daniel, Elisabeth and her somewhat batty mother Wendy know it, turns into a suspicious, hate-filled, barbed-wired place. Someone has spray-painted the words “GO HOME” on the house of a family, presumably immigrants.  Later, when passing the same house, Elisabeth sees the words “WE ARE ALREADY HOME THANK YOU” painted right below, with a tree and bright red flowers. A gracious response to boorishness.  

The writing is non-linear-- dreams, memories, impressions,  interspersed with reality.

Then there are the playful bits that portray the friendship between Daniel and Elisabeth.

 “Very pleased to meet you,” Daniel says when he meets the eight-year-old for the first the first time, “Finally.”

“How do you mean, finally?” Elisabeth asks. “We only moved here six weeks ago.”

“The lifelong friends,” Daniel says. “We sometimes wait a lifetime for them.”

The next book in the series will be Winter, and Ali Smith admirers can only wait with eager anticipation.

Autumn

By Ali Smith

Publisher: Pantheon

Pages: 272

Y Is For Yesterday

Alphabet Soup

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, and with Y Is For Yesterday, she has written 25 bestselling novels starring the feisty private detective, with just Z Is For Zero to go.

Kinsey Millhone is one of the most popular characters in detective fiction, a single (with occasional, very brief romantic entanglements), independent, courageous, witty and totally kickass female, who through A to Y 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.  By 1989, when this one is set, VCRs have made an appearance.

Y Is For Yesterday starts with a prank that snowballs into a tragedy. A girl calls Iris steals a question paper to help her friends Troy and Poppy pass a tough test. An unsigned note to the principal gets them caught and suspended. The school bully Austin claims that their classmate Sloan snitched, and instigates a social boycott of the poor girl.

Austin is also the mastermind behind a porn tape in which his friends Fritz, Ted and Bayard sexually assault a drunk Iris. Sloan steals the tape so that she can force Austin to call off the ostracism. She ends up dead, with Fritz and Troy going to jail.  Bayard turns informer and is released, Austin vanishes without a trace.

When they are released, Fritz’s parents receive a copy of the revolting tape with a demand for money if they don’t want it to reach the police and send the boys right back in prison.  Which is when Fritz’s mother Lauren calls Kinsey to try and trace the blackmailer. They don’t intend to pay and open themselves up for more blackmail demands, but the flip side is their beloved son being arrested again if the tape reaches the police.

The novel moves between 1979, when the cheating, rape and murder occurred, and 1989, when Kinsey starts investigating.  She has problems of her own, when the psychopath Ned Lowe, who tried to kill her in the last book reappears, and starts stalking her.

Much to Kinsey’s annoyance, the genial Henry agrees to play host to a couple of homeless tramps and their dog.  There is a minor subplot involving Kinsey’s cousin Anna and her romantic shenanigans.

Kinsey is still her brave, likeable self, but the students who had caused the scandal, now grown up into not-very-nice adults, make her efforts to help them feel like a lost cause.  Since it is written in a flashback-flashforward style, in which the same incidents are seen from the points of view of the various characters, large sections of the book seem repetitious.

 Still, for fans who have been with Grafton right from the start, the ending of the series would be like losing a friend.

Y Is For Yesterday

By Sue Grafton

Publisher: Marion Woods/Putnam

Pages: 483

My Absolute Darling

Dangerous Love

Gabriel Tallent’s first novel, My Absolute Darling is a bleak disturbing yet always gripping story of 14-year-old Julia ‘Turtle’ Alveston, who lives with her father Martin in a distant shack. Her grandfather, Daniel, lives in a trailer nearby and disapproves of the way the kid is being raised by her father.

On the one hand he teaches her to handle guns be tough and on the other mentally and physically abuses her so badly, that the girl loathes herself and is confused about her feelings for him. Because Martin discourages interactions with anyone outside, Turtle has no friends at school, and is not even allowed counselling when a sympathetic teacher, Anna, want to help her.

Martin is a despicable monster, who idea of expressing love is violence. But, like victims of Stockholm Syndrome, who get attached to their abductors, Turtle is tied to her father, because, as he keeps emphasising, “You are mine.”

In Turtle’s decrepit home, she eats raw eggs, the dishes are left outside for the raccoons to lick clean, and she runs about the forest barefoot, with her gun for company.

The fierce-yet-vulnerableTurtle realizes that other people do not live like her when she encounter two boys lost in the woods, Jacob and Brett, who treat her as a buddy and invite her into their clean, warm, loving world.  They jokingly call her “the chain-saw-wielding, shotgun-toting, Zen Buddhist, once-and-future queen of postapocalyptic America,” as fascinated by her toughness as she is with their wit.

When Jacob and she fall in love—though she has trouble understanding or articulating the emotion—her father goes wild.  And when he turns up after a long absence with another little girl, Cayenne, Turtle knows it is time to escape.

If description of the lush landscape are poetic, the violence is brutal, and the story moves towards a predictable tragedy, still, the reader avidly waits for the explosion.  This is not an easy book to read, but heralds a brave new voice in literary fiction.

My Absolute Darling

By Gabriel Tallent

Publisher: Harper Collins

Pages:  417

History Of Wolves,

Girl Interrupted

Emily Fridlund’s debut novel, History Of Wolves, has made it to the Man Booker Awards shortlist; to be listed alongside some of the finest novelists is quite an achievement for a young writer.

It is a moving coming of age story about 14-year-old Melinda (shortened to Linda), whose life changes over one bitter-sweet summer. She is a lonely kid, called “commie” and “freak” by her schoolmates, because her parents used to be a part of a commune. The others drifted away, but they remained behind in the shabby lake-side shack in the middle of nowhere.  Linda, who narrates the story when she is 37, says of herself, “I was flat-chested, plain as a bannister. I made people feel judged.”

A new history teacher, Mr. Grierson gives her an opportunity to represent the school and make a presentation, that wins her a prize. It is about wolves, that gives the book it title. Linda gets fixated on Mr. Grierson, even when he is fired on charges of pedophilia, on the complaint of a dyslexic student, Lily.

What also causes an upheaval in Linda’s life is the family that comes to spend a summer across the lake. A young woman, Patra, is left alone with her four-year-old son, Paul, while her husband Leo does some important-sounding work in Hawaai. Patra hires Linda to babysit Paul, but it’s more because she needs someone to talk to, stuck as she is in the wilderness.

Paul is a sweet kid and comes to love Linda, but things unravel when Leo arrives. He is a Christian Scientist who has a strange power over his wife and child.  When it becomes clear that Paul is seriously ill, Leo lets him die (it’s no spoiler, the death is mentioned right at the start), because his faith does not allow medical intervention.  Later, there is a trial and Linda is summoned to testify.

The aftermath of both incidents is hazy,  what remains firmly in focus is Melinda’s state of mind. Due to her  circumstances, she is not a normal teenager, and her responses to events around her could be seen as off kilter. The novel does not follow the usual trajectory of a novel about a young girl—there is no romance, no sexual awakening, no major life-changing experience, still Linda’s future is oddly tainted by incidents in which she was just a bit player.

Maybe the book could be faulted for underplaying the drama, but she keeps up the chilly mood she sets describing the Minnesota landscape; except for a small beam when Patra befriends Linda, sunshine rarely shines on this set of damaged, wounded people. Still the book makes one care for Linda and what happens to her, and the prose is remarkably precise.

History Of Wolves

By Emily Fridlund

Publisher: Grove Atlantic

Pages: 304