The Liberation

Sorrento Secrets

Kate Furnivall specialises in historical fiction, and her latest, The Liberation takes the reader to war-torn Italy. The time is 1945, the fag end of the second world war, when Italy is just getting out of the brutal Nazi occupation, but the people are also being battered by the Fascists and the Partisans, while the Allied forces try to bring order to a crime-ridden, starving population.

The courageous heroine of the book is Caterina Lombardi, a young woman who lives in Sorrento with her blind grandfather and younger brother Luca. Her mother had abandoned them for a more exciting life in Rome and her father was killed in an air raid. Now Caterina carries on her father’s trade, making delicate inlaid wooden decorative pieces, which she sells to support her family.

While trying to sell her wares in Naples, she is almost mugged by a bunch of ragged, feral kids, who fend for  themselves in the devastated country—and is rescued by two Allied military officers, one American and the other British.

When the gruff Major Jake Parr lands up at her doorstep to question her about her father’s work, she discovers that he belongs to a division that is tracking down and returning stolen art and artefacts, and that her father is suspected of having been part of a gang of traitors and looters of the country’s art heritage.
 
She cannot believe that her gentle and hard-working father could be guilty of such a crime, but when she is attacked twice and almost killed by gangsters, she knows she has to get to the bottom of the mystery, that involves a priceless jewelled table commissioned to her father. When her long-lost mother turns up, the knots get even more tangled. At the age of just twenty-one, Caterina is fearless and goes about hunting for pieces of the jigsaw, from the forbidding mansion of a count, to the innards of the crime scene in Naples.  She is befriended by the count’s daughter, kidnapped by the street kids and falls in love with the brooding Jake Parr. The romance, however, is given little attention in the book, there is so much else to focus on.

Furnivall’s descriptions of the time and place, and of course the intricately plotted story make The Liberation a worthwhile read. A love for history and research are the bedrock of this kind of fiction and in the box below, Furnivall reveals a part of the process.


The Liberation By Kate Furnivall
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Pages: 560
 

The Chemist

The Alex Effect

Stephenie Meyer is best known for the hugely successful Twilight novels that were also turned into hit films. She was criticized for creating the character Bella Swan, the rather too passive teen, constantly mooning over the Edward, the Vampire, while Jacob, the hunky Werewolf stood by waiting for her attention..

The protagonist, Juliana aka Alex, in her new thriller The Chemist, is completely different. She is small built, but fiercely independent, totally capable of looking after herself as well as the guy she is compelled to protect.

Alex is a doctor and a specialist in chemicals—such a wiz that she is recruited right out of campus by a secret branch of the US government. The chemicals she and her mentor Dr Barnaby concoct, are used to torture terrorists. Then, her shadowy employers decide that the two know too much and try to kill them. Alex escapes by the sheer fluke of being in the bathroom when the attack takes place, but Dr Barnaby gets a painful death.

She runs and spends the next few years staying under the radar, deflecting further assassination attempts by being smarter than the hired killers, and creating an almost foolproof security system, that entails sleeping in bathtubs in a succession of nondescript motels, wearing a gas mask to protect herself from the toxic chemicals meant for the attackers. Her belt has syringes of poisons, even the jewellery she wears contains deadly chemicals. The woman who says of herself, “I am the bogeyman in a very dark and scary world… frighten people who aren’t afraid of anything else, not even death. I can take everything they pride themselves on away from them; I can make them betray everything they hold sacred. I am the monster they see in their nightmares,” is certainly not a sitting duck.

When she is tired of hiding and living like a gypsy, she contacted by the agency to take up one last job, because many lives are at stake. In spite of her caution, she finds that the man – Daniel—she I assigned to interrogate is innocent. Not just that, he is handsome and kind, and has fallen in love with her at first sight. He continues to be enamoured of her even she has had a face bashed up in a fight, and goes through most of the novel with a battered visage. She is baffled by his feelings for her and even more by the melting of her tough heart.

“I am intrinsically incompatible with being an object of romantic interest,” she says to him at one point.

 “I understand you,” replies Daniel, “I just don’t agree.”

Due to a set of very complicated circumstances—and Meyer is adept at creating many such—Alex has to go on the run again, this time with Daniel and his over aggressive twin, Kevin, dodging a bunch of very bad people, who want to kill them all.

The book is fast-paced and has a lot of action sequences, which seem to have been written as set pieces for the movie that will invariably get made.  Her last non-Twilight book, a sci-fi novel calledThe Host was a bestseller, but not even close to her vampire and werewolf series.  The Chemist is also a bestseller and with a protagonist like Alex, has the potential to be turned into a franchise, even though Meyer says she won’t write a sequel.  What she has proved with this enjoyable bookis that she is not bound to any particular genre.

The Chemist

By Stepenie Meyer

Publisher: Little Brown

Pages:  518A

The Girl From Venice

Fisherman In Love 

Martin Cruz Smith’s 1981 crime novel Gorky Park, set in the erstwhile Soviet Union is a thriller classic. Subsequently he wrote several books with the same central character, an incorruptible investigator, Arkady Renko.

His new standalone book, The Girl From Venice, is set in 1945 Venice, amidst a lot of crime an subterfuge. But at the centre of all the World War II mayhem is a tender love story between a fisherman, Cenzo and a young Jewish girl, Giulia, he vows to protect from marauding Nazis.

Evert since Cenzo’s lookalike brother Giorgio ran off with his wife, he has become a loner. He lives away from his family in a tiny shack and paints when he is not fishing. One day he finds the corpse of a girl floating in the lagoon, and pulls her out. Turns out the girl is not dead, and is being hunted by the Nazis because she escaped while her family was butchered. 

Smith describes with empathy, life in the Venetian backwaters in the village of Pellestrina, where ordinary folk, who just want to get on with their lives, are under attack from the Germans, the fascists and the partisans fighting a guerilla war. It is a time when Italian dictator Benito Mussolini capitulated to the Nazis and set up in the  northern Italian town of Salo, the headquarters of his puppet state. The victorious Allied Forces are on their way to liberate Italy from the Germans, but in the in-between state of flux, the Nazis are even more vicious in defeat.

Giorgio, who has become a movie star and fascist spokesman, keeps flying down to Pellestrina in his two-seater Stork airplane and rubbing Cenzo’s nose in the dirt out of spite. Cenzo ends up killing a Nazi officer to save Giulia, and manages to hide her from the many people looking for her by dressing her as a boy and teaching her to fish. He sends her off to Salo with a friend, and then is lured there himself by Giorgio, who wants him to find the girl again.  Cenzo has, of course, fallen in love with Giulia, though admitting to himself that his passion is hopeless—why would the rich, educated girl want to spend her life in a village with a fisherman?

Salo has some of the novel’s most interesting bits, as the town’s rich live lavishly and try to pretend everything’s alright. Maria Paz, the wife of the Argentinian consul becomes the axis around whom the characters revolve, and even she has a shameful secret. In the meantime, Mussolini is amassing wealth to escape Salo, and the wartime rumour mills speculate about who he will take with him—his wife or his mistress.

Cenzo’s plight is palpable, as he skirts around danger from many quarters to look for Giulia. It is a beautifully written book, with well-developed characters, a thread of suspense running through it, and an utterly sympathetic hero, who always does the right thing.

The Girl From Venice

By Martin Cruz Smith

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Pages: 308

Searching for a Silver Lining

Age Is Just A Number 

The best thing about Miranda Dickinson’s Searching for a Silver Lining is the built-in playlist of Fifties rock. Everybody is clued in to the post Elvis music scene, this book introduces the reader to a fresh bout of nostalgia.

Mattie Bell fell out with her beloved grandfather Joe and is shattered when he dies without contacting her. She promises to make amends somehow, and her way of doing it is befriending a retired singer Reenie Silver from a band Joe loved.

Mattie runs a vintage shop in a English village and accidentally runs into the feisty octogenarian Reenie when she visits the home for senior citizens where she lives. Mattie’s idea of pleasing her dead grandpa is taking Reenie in a road trip to connect with her former bandmates.  Reenie had abandoned her group, The Silver Five, just before their big gig at London’s iconic night club, the Palm Grove, and has lived with the regret for sixty years.

Mattie and Reenie convince the new owners of the club, grandsons of the Palm Grove, to back the reunion.  One of them, Gil, comes along for the ride with the two women. It’s not quite clear why they go on a road trip in a vintage car that the acerbic Reenie calls a rustbucket, instead of flying to their destinations, but then the book would have been much shorter.

The novel is not high on style, occasionally too melodramatic, but its consistently sunny disposition carries the reader along. Reenie is an interesting, if self-absorbed character, who would make a great poster girl for geriatrics with her boundless energy and undiminished talent. When Mattie and Gil are ready to crash after a long drive, Reenie totters over to a nearby pub to belt out songs on the karaoke system. Her bitchy battle of wits with a former bandmate is hilarious.  Mattie comes across as a wimp compared to Reenie.  Of course, it’s no spoiler that Mattie and Gil fall in love. At least in books two attractive thrown together by circumstance, always turn out to be single!

Searching For A Silver Lining

By Miranda Dickinson

Publisher: Pan MacMillan

Pages: 448

The Four Legendary Kingdoms

Fight Or Die

Never having read Matthew Riley book before, one did not know what to expect. The Four Legendary Kingdoms is a Jack West thriller after The Seven Ancient Wonders, The Six Sacred Stones and The Five Greatest Warriors. As the titles suggest the books are a mix of action and mythology.

Jack West is one of the world’s five greatest warriors, along with Moses, Genghis Khan, Napoleon and Christ—seriously!—so he is well nigh invincible. In every book, he saves the world from increasingly outlandish threats, in which his fighting skills help as much as his knowledge of the classical texts. You know he will vanquish his foes and get out of the worst crises alive, it’s the how that is thrilling for his fans who turn his books into bestsellers.

This time, the world a threat of extinction from a collision with the superior Hydra Galaxy, unless mere mortals of Earth can prove that they are worthy of living. The four kingdoms of the title are Land, Sea, Sky and The Underworld, which are ruled by immensely powerful kings. Interestingly, the Underworld is India, which is where our hero is headed—unwillingly this time.

The rulers of the four kingdoms organize a set of deadly challenges, and pit the best warriors against one another and perform the rituals that would deflect the fast approaching Hydra Galaxy. West is kidnapped and forced to compete in these ‘Games’ or his family and friends—also kidnapped along with him—will be killed.

There are sixteen well trained and fully prepared contestants, and every time one is eliminated, their families held hostage are slaughtered too. 

The challenges are tough and so bizarre that the book has drawings explaining them, to enable the reader to visualize them too.  While the Games are on, there are other sub-plots involving Minotaurs enslaved by Hades, the King of the Underworld, and the danger to West’s adopted daughter Lily, who is a prize catch for the nasty son of Hades.

Readers of Reilly’s thrillers obviously go for pacy action, and very simple dialogue. So the bookgoes on a breathless ride to see how West survives. As an ally here is the hero of another Reilly series—Captain Shane Schofield of the US Marines, better known as Scarecrow. The scene in which they have to fight each other to the death is truly chilling.

The book is aimed at young readers and has a comic-book core, but grown-ups who do pick it up, will be absorbed enough to go to the very end. And yes, Jack West’s mother Mae Merriweather (she threatens serious bodily harm to anyone who calls her Mae West), is quite a character too!

The Four Legendary Kingdoms

By Matthew Reilly

Publisher: Orion/Hachette

Pages: 430

Magpie Murders

The House That Christie Built

Anthony Horowitz has been labelled a pasticheur, for writing in the style of other writers, like Arthur Conan Doyle (The House of Silk) and Ian Fleming (the racy Trigger Mortis). In his latest Magpie Murders, he pays homage to Agatha Christie. 

A part of it is set in 1955, in a small English village, where everyone knows everyone, but it is a book within a book. Susan Ryeland, a book editor at Cloverleaf, a small publishing house, is handed the latest manuscript by writer Alan Conway. His detective Atticus Pund series has been hugely successful, keeping the company afloat during the ongoing publishing crisis. Though she discovered Conway, who was a not-very-popular school teacher before making it as an author, Susan doesn’t quite like him.

A chunk of Horowitz’s book is then Conway’s story about the goings on in Saxby-on-Avon. Mary Blakiston, the housekeeper at the mansion, Pye Hall, has died after falling down the stairs. It seems like an accident, but the villagers are not so sure, more so because the dead woman’s surly on Robert, was heard threatening her.

Robert’s fiancée, Joy, goes to meet Atticus Pund and his assistant James Fraser for help in clearing his name.  Pund, who is suffering from a terminal illness, gently turns her down, but when Mary’s employer, Sir Magnus Pye, is murdered in a particularly gruesome manner, he cannot stay away from Saxby-on-Avon. 

Like Christie’s Hercule Poirot, Pund is a foreigner; what makes it worse for him is his German name and giveaway accent, which, soon after the WW-II made people just a bit unfriendly towards him. In Christie style again, Horowitz lines up a series of suspects all of whom have good reason to kill the obnoxious Sir Magnus. He had made enemies in the village by selling a picturesque piece of forest land to developers, but as people tell Pund, it’s not the kind of place where people would kill; still, a murder has been committed and the culprit must be found.

To Susan’s chagrin, the manuscript given to her by her boss Charles Clover is incomplete. Then, Conway commits suicide after sending a note to his publisher. Susan sets out to hunt for the missing pages, begins to suspect that Conway could have been murdered, and gets down to playing sleuth herself. There are too many parallels between the real and fictional, and she puts her life at risk in tryin to get to the bottom of the mystery.  Fans of crime fiction would be pleased to find that the killer who emerges after a series of very plausible red herrings, is quite unexpected.

Magpie Murders is a wonderful read, with amusing diversions into other styles of writing, and many nuggets from the world of publishing.

Magpie Murders

By Anthony Horowitz

Publisher: Orion/Hachette

Pages: 258