The Outsider

King Is Zing

After a few crime thrillers and sci-fi, Stephen King returns to what he used to do best—horror. His latest, The Outsider starts out being a straightforward police procedural, with witness interviews reproduced as is; then it takes a sharp turn into the supernatural, brings back the appealing OCD-stricken, movie buff Holly Gibney from his Bill Hodges Trilogy, and the fan cannot ask for more.

The close knit community of Flint City is shocked out of its wits when the badly mutilated body of a little boy is found in the park. All fingers and forensic evidence point towards popular teacher and baseball coach, Terry Maitland.  So enraged are the cops at the severity of the crime, that they arrest Terry in the middle of a game, in front of the entire stadium of spectators, including the man’s wife Marcy and two young daughters. The men responsible for this hasty arrest are the District Attorney Bill Samuels and Detective Ralph Anderson.

Terry Maitland has a cast iron alibi—he was in another town with a bunch of fellow teachers and attended a talk by thriller writer Harlan Coben (a nice hat-tip from one master to another). The cops are completely baffled and worried, because if Terry is proved innocent, their jobs are on the line, plus they face the certainty of a lawsuit from the Maitland family.

Samuels (with his comical cowlick) has no pangs of conscience, but Anderson, a good-hearted family man (his relationship with his wife Jeannie is his strength), is gutted by the possibility of having wronged Terry.  Marcy gets her husband’s lawyer friend Howard Gold to come to her help; he hires investigator Alec Pelley to work on the case, and he calls Holly Gibney.

Holly now runs the detective agency, Finders Keepers, started by her mentor Bill Hodges, who is dead of cancer and she misses him acutely. It is Holly who starts to pull at the thread that unravels the scientific certainty that a man cannot be at two places at the same time; Holly knows better because she had encountered pure evil in the mass murderer known as the Mercedes Killer (from the Bill HodgesTrilogy). She gives the unknown but satanic killer the name—The Outsider. Her encyclopedic movie knowledge leads her to the solution out of Mexican folklore, seconded by cop, Yunel Sablo, who comes from Mexico.

This sets Anderson and his team on a chase to prevent the killer from picking another innocent victim and striking again. 

King builds up horror and suspense in layers, and there’s a tense, heart-stopping action sequence towards the end. Holly Gibney is a marvelous creation, but King’s female characters like Marcy, Jeannie and the redoubtable old dame Lovie Ann Bolton (who helps with the case to protect her son), are all strong, wise and immensely likeable. Pick up this book and be prepared to stay up till the last page is turned.

The Outsider

By Stephen King

Publisher: Scribner 

Pages: 576

Don't Let Go

Conspiracy Theory

The tribute to Harlan Coben in Stephen King's The Outsider, is quite deserved. The creator of the bestselling Myron Bolitar  and Mickey Bolitar (for young readers) series and some standalone thrillers, has legions of fans among readers of crime fiction.

His last novel, Don’t Let Go is a tensely plotted story that moves from the present to the past and envelops a very scary conspiracy that is right out of news headlines.

New Jersey cop Napolean ‘Nap’ Dumas had lost his twin brother Leo fifteen years ago, when the young man  and his girlfriend Diana were run over by a train; Nap’s own girlfriend Maura had disappeared the same night, and he still misses her. There was no rational explanation for how Leo and Diana even landed up on the tracks where they were killed, or why Maura skipped town.

Nap was so shattered by those events that he talks to his dead brother and takes great pains to remain under the radar in the small community when a single man would be viewed with suspicion. As a cop, however, he takes risks and is not averse to bending a few rules.

Years later, suddenly, Maura’s fingerprints are found in a car that was being driven by an off-duty cop Rex Canton, who was shot dead.  What sets alarms ringing in Nap’s head is that Leo, Diana, Rex and Maura were all members of their school’s Conspiracy Club, which seemed like a harmless fun activity till they found out something they were not meant to know. Of the two other members of the Club, Hank and Beth, who survived what seems to have been an attempt to wipe out the group, one is murdered and the other goes missing. Nap figures that they may have stumbled upon a secret that some powerful forces want to keep under wraps and have the means to eliminate anyone who threatens them. An abandoned military base in the town seems to hold the answers, and Nap goes out on a limb to reach the truth, even if it matters to nobody but himself.

The answer may seem a bit far-fetched, but Coben writes in a foreword, that this book was inspired by a local legend in suburban New Jersey, where he grew up, which turned out to be true. Enough to give nightmares to the sanest of readers.

Don't Let Go

By Harlan Coben

Publisher: Dutton

Pages: 400

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The Female Persuasion

The Women’s Network

Meg Wolitzer’s new novel The Female Persuasion—her eleventh-- goes into a story of two generations of feminism, that is particularly apt in these times. Rules of ‘fourth wave’ feminism are being rewritten by the #MeToo movement, perhaps without giving adequate credit to the women who fought for the rights the millennial generation takes for granted. 

Greer Kadetsky is a shy, studious girl with stoner parents who pay no attention to her. She sees education and an Ivy League college as a way out of her misery. She shares her academic brilliance and ambition with a poor Latino boy, Cory Pinto, whose family is warm and loving.

Greer and Cory gravitate towards each other with a passionate intensity, and are only separated by her parents’ failure to follow up with a college of her choice. He goes to Yale, while she ends up in the not-so-desirable local college Ryland, keeping in touch over the computer and brief weekend visits, dreaming of a life together. In college, Greer befriends the firebrand gay activist Zee Eisenstat, who is of a totally opposite temperament to the reserved Greer. When a creepy collegemate gropes her at a party, Greer is enraged enough to take action, and this indirectly leads to an encounter with leading feminist writer Faith Frank, who is described as “a couple of steps down from Gloria Steinem in fame,” and has been invited for a guest lecture at Ryland.

Faith has written a seminal book The Female Persuasion and edits a feminist magazine, Bloomer. She is as generous towards women as she is influential in a cause that is clearly losing its sheen. In her youth, Faith had issues like sexual liberation and the right to abortion to fight about, which are no longer at the top of the feminist agenda, and her voice is being somewhat drowned by the shrill rhetoric of the younger magazines and websites like Fem Fatale. Still, Greer and Zee are dazzled by Faith and dream of working with her.

Bloomer shuts down suddenly, when Greer is due to be interviewed by Faith, but the older woman remembers the brief meeting with the earnest student, and hires her for a new initiative called Loci that she is starting, as a means to give women a platform to be heard and be helped. Loci is funded by the shadowy venture capitalist, Emmett Shrader, who has a history with Faith. For reasons she cannot quite justify even to herself, Greer prevents Zee from also working with Loci, mainly because she does not want to share Faith even with her best friend. She sees Faith as a mother figure, as a harbinger of change in a world that needs a healing touch. Faith gives Greer’s life direction and purpose.

While the novel is essentially a coming of age story that sweeps through a history of feminism in the US, Wolitzer also  satirises the ‘rich white female’ idea of feminism, where women pay large sums of money to be seen as supporting the right causes, go back with manicure and a goodie bag. Of course, the ones who attract the attention of the media are donors are celebrities. As Greer immerses herself in her work, Cory’s life goes spectacularly off the rails, and he has to give up a boring but well-paid finance career and make choices about which Greer’s mother in a moment of lucidity says, look a lot like feminism.

The bitterness between the two, leads to a split neither really wants or is able to get through without much heartburn. But the book focuses more on the disillusionment Greer goes through when her idol turns out to be superficial and opportunistic.  It is only when she is forced to confront her own mistakes and misconceptions that Greer’s life finally comes together.

The Female Persuasion is written with warmth and affection for the characters, and has something significant to say, if the reader wishes to engage with the politics of the book as well as the emotions.

The Female Persuasion

By Meg Wolitzer

Publisher: Riverhead

Pages: 464

The Stolen Bicycle

Miles Of Memories

Taiwanese author Wu Ming-Yi’s The Stolen Bicycle, which was on the longlist for the Man Booker International Prize for 2018, is a well-researched, deeply-felt, beautifully illustrated (by the author himself) and evocative history of Taiwan through its bicycles.

The narrator is a writer, Cheng, the younger of two sons in the large family of a poor tailor—like in India, a Taiwanese couple keeps having kids till they beget a son!  The family’s memories are dominated by stolen bicycles, that devastated them when the thefts took place, because of the expense and dependence on the mobility they provided.  Cheng’s father had disappeared with his beloved cycle and when a reader sends him a query about what happened to his father’s bike in a novel that he had written, Cheng sets out to find that and other Lucky brand bicycles—that were once the backbone of a developing country, and known in the local parlance as “iron horses.”

Not only did businessmen, professionals and government employees covet these two-wheelers—till cars became more popular—soldiers were sent out to battle on cycles during World War II.  Cheng starts collecting and restoring bicycles and joins the small community of men and women, equally enamoured of old bicycles. There’s Abbas, a war photographer, whose story is woven into the narrative, along with that of—among others-- Old Tsou, Little Hsia and A-Hun, a woman who makes butterfly collages that became such a thriving industry during the 1960s and 70s that “the butterflies themselves, once ubiquitous in the hills and fields, gradually took their leave of the era and the wild, never to return again”.

Like little tributaries to a long, raging river, there are chronicles of the War, elephants and animals in the zoo; the novel takes the reader to Burma, Thailand and Malaysia, and into the minds and memories of bicycle fanatics, who who form a strange and magical network. Through the history and design evolution of the bicycle, twentieth-century Taiwan is revealed to the reader.

The Stolen Bicyle is a blend of fiction, philosophy, memoir, nostalgia that makes for a fascinating read.  Wu Ming-Yi, who is a prominent Taiwanese writer, is also an artist, designer, photographer, professor, butterfly scholar, environmental activist, traveller and blogger; this is only his second novel to be translated into English (by Darryl Sterk). Now readers will undoubtedly look out for more from this very promising author.

The Stolen Bicycle

By Wu Ming-Yi
Translated by Darryl Sterk
Published by Text Publishing

Pages: 396

The Silent Widow

A Drug Storm

Bestselling author Sidney Sheldon passed away in 2007, but Tilly Bagshaw continues to write thrillers in his style, so that his name is the main attraction for fans who buy the books.

The Silent Widow is a fast-paced, twisty-turny crime thriller, that has murder, sex, drugs and crime in the right proportion. Dr. Nikki Robert, a therapist, is still grief-stricken by the death of her doctor-philanthropist husband Doug in a car crash, when Lisa, one of her patients, is found brutally murdered with multiple stab wounds—her body shredded so badly that the killer could only be a psychopath. That has not even sunk in, when Nikki’s assistant Trey is found killed in a similar fashion.

Two police detectives, the handsome and well-behaved Lou Goodman, and the fat, rude, racist Mike Johnson, are given the job to investigate. Johnson, who hates the beautiful, stylishly dressed upper class Nikki with an inexplicable passion, is convinced she is the killer, even though his partner reminds him, it does not seem likely.

Then Nikki is attacked, she gets threatening mails; fed-up of the cops’ inaction and hostility, she hires Derek Williams a down on his luck but efficient private investigator. With links to the past, he opens a can of worms that involves drug cartels and corruption in high places.

The writing is workmanlike, but the suspense is maintained till the end, even though the strands are tied up rather too neatly—as if Los Angeles were a one-horse town with just so this many characters all involved in the plot--  and there are laughable scenes like a villain actually explaining everything in detail to a character (to the reader actually!) when  any smart crook would shoot and scoot.  Stuck at home on a rainy day, this would be book to pick up and race through.

The Silent Widow

By Tilly Bagshaw as Sidney Sheldon

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: 438

A House Among The Trees

The Writer’s Life

A House Among The Trees is the sixth book by award-winning writer Julia Glass, at the centre of which is Mort Lear, a bestselling and beloved writer-illustrator of children’s books, and the actor, Nicholas “Nick” Greene who is to play him in a Hollywood biopic. The link between the two, is Tomasina Daulair, aka Tommy, Lear’s longtime assistant, who was everything ("daughter, mother, gatekeeper, amanuensis”), but a lover to the gay author. When Mort dies suddenly after a fall, Tommy finds that he has left her his fortune (including the house in the picturesque village of Orne), but also put on her the responsibility of setting up a half-way house for runaway boys.

Mort dies just before Nick is to visit him, so Tommy is left to deal with the actor and all the problems that crop up when she is faced with the difficult task of settling all the demands made on her.  The book is entirely character-driven and quite unpredictable.  If the reader expects a romance between the reclusive Tommy and the glamorous Nick, that is nipped by her being old enough to be his mother; if a satire on Hollywood’s tendency to appropriate and twist anybody’s life to make “the kind of movie you watch in order to be swept away by crisis or intrigue or menace or laughter or the conquering power of love,"  is expected, there is very little of behind-the-scenes revelation.

The book is reportedly loosely based on life of gay author-illustrator Maurice Sendak, but Glass is equally invested in the stories of Tommy, her brother Dani who was the model for Mort’s iconic character Ivo, Mort’s self-centered lover, Soren Kelly (who dies of AIDs) as, well as the Oscar-winning, newly-minted celebrity Nick and a museum curator, Meredith, who loved Mort and wants to set up a section on his work in a new museum devoted to children’s literature. Mort had a dark secret, which when hinted at in a magazine interview, takes on a different direction altogether and neither Nick not Tommy can set it right.

The tone is gentle, humorous and sensitive, and though nothing too dramatic takes place, the reader gets fascinated by, and invested in, what happens to the characters—particularly Tommy, who is never able to emerge from Mort’s prison of dependence and is even sidelined completely in the film, in which the spotlight shifts to Soren, and an animated Ivo.  One would like to know how she copes with life away from that house among the trees—Tommy may not be heroine material, but then everyone deserves a story; Tommy’s started when, at age 12, she met Mort in a park.

A House Among The Trees

By Julia Glass

Publisher: Pantheon

Pages: 368

The Night Of Broken Glass

Paradise Lost

The word Kashmir no longer brings to mind beautiful snow-capped hills, or houseboats over Dal Lake; the romantic place where Bollywood stars sang romantic songs; today Kashmir is associated with conflict, militancy, army excesses, stone-pelting youth, pellet-shooting soldiers. This is the Kashmir Feroz Rather captures in poignant, unsettling detail.

Rather’s debut book, The Night Of Broken Glass--takes its title from Kristallnacht, the night of anti-Jewish pogrom by the Nazis in Germany in 1938, the crystals referring to the shards of broken glass on the streets after homes and shop windows had been smashed.

His book of connected short stories, is about the rage, fear, suspicion and mourning that afflicts both the people of Kashmir and the armymen stationed there to enforce order. The people are angry because of the cruelty of the soldiers, who torture, kill and rape; the soldiers are jittery because they do not know when they will be ambushed by insurgents, or where the next stone, bomb of bullet will come from. In the midst of all this trauma, ordinary people strive to get by—the student, baker, cobbler, imam, the young men and women in love, the families that are not sure their loved one will return in the evening. A young man seeing his cousin home, is shot because his car stalls at the wrong place; another is made to clean graffiti on the rough wall of his shop with his tongue. Is it possible to live with the constant threat of violence—the people just trying to stay alive are caught between the devil and the deep sea—which is the militant and which the military is hard to tell.

The Night Of Broken Glass

By Feroz Rather

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: 232