The Lost Man

A Death Foretold

Jane Harper has made the Australian outback the playground for her bestselling books—the large, flat arid land she describes thus in her latest novel The Lost Man: “The horizon was so flat and far away it seemed possible to detect the curvature of the earth.”  The area is dotted with homesteads so far apart that the ‘next door’ neighbour would be a three-hour drive away.

The only way to make contact is over the radio, and if a person ran out of fuel, water or supplies, death would be quick and brutal. A few days before Christmas, the dehydrated body of Cameron Bright is discovered—he dropped dead of thirst. Neither his brothers Nathan and Bub, nor the cops can understand why, because his car is parked nearby, full of food and water. His body is found by the Stockman’s Grave, a place that ha spawned dozens of ghost stories and local legends about the nameless man buried in the middle of nowhere. Cameron had no reason to be in that vicinity.

Moreover, Cameron, a successful cattle farmer, happily married to Ilse and the father of two young daughters, had no enemies who would want to murder him, and no provocation for suicide, at least not in this painful way, when he had a loaded gun.

The devastated family—including the mother Liz, loyal estate manager, Harry, and Nathan’s son Xander visiting from the city-- gather at the Bright home to grieve and plan the funeral. Nathan, who lives a lonely life and struggles to make ends meet—a state for which Cameron was indirectly responsible—realises that there was a lot going on in the family, that he was not aware of; Cameron was not what he appeared to be to the townsfolk, and the Brights had too many secrets waiting to spill out of the cupboard.

Harper words are so vivid, that the reader can almost feel the heat on their skin, and simmers her plot on a slow flame, till she reaches the explosive, and quite unexpected climax. A book that is very difficult to put down.

The Lost Man

By Jane Harper

Publisher: Flatiron                                     

Pages: 352

Where The Crawdads Sing

Wild Child

It is the stuff of nightmare—a child abandoned by her family, and left to fend for herself. She lives in an isolated area by the marshes, miles away from the nearest town. The people who should care, either shun her, or try to regiment her life. Six-year-old Kya shuns them right back and escapes the grip of the authorities to look after herself. 

Where the Crawdads Sing, the debut novel by Delia Owens, a wildlife scientist, has turned out to be a big bestseller. Reportedly, Reese Witherspoon is planning a film on it, and what a stunningly beautiful film it will be, going just by the location described by the author.

The book begins in 1952, when Kya’s mother, fed-up of her husband’s drunken violence, walks away leaving her five children behind. Kya’s older siblings drift away too, and finally the father disappears.  She grows up alone in a primitive shack, coping with crushing loneliness;  the only help comes from a kindly black couple, Jumpin’ and Merle. It was the time of racial segregation, so a white girl accepting the charity of black people gives the townsfolk more reason to hate Kya, who is referred to as swamp trash or the Marsh Girl.

 When she is a little older, in the manner of a fairy tale, she is befriended by Tate, who teaches her to read, and falls in love with her. But he sees her as a hindrance to his career as a scientist and cruelly leaves her too. The other boys in town see her with the eyes of predators, only Chase realizes that she is to be handled with care.

The prologue of the book has Chase lying dead in the swamp, so Kya’s story is interspersed with the cops investigating, and later arresting Kya for his murder. There is a terrific section in which her case is fought by a fierce old lawyer, Tom Milton, who comes out of retirement to defend the young woman.

The novel combines crime and romance with social commentary and a coming-of-age tale. Owens mixes the ingredients well; her descriptions of swamp life are vivid and fascinating; Kya is a girl with superhuman courage and intelligence, and the reader’s feeling of protectiveness towards her soon turns to admiration and awe. It’s not difficult to understand this book’s long reign on the bestseller charts.

Where The Crawdads Sing

By Delia Owens

Publisher: Putnam

Pages: 384

Winter In Paradise

Caribbean Interlude

Irene Steele thinks she has a perfect marriage, and a gorgeous home that will keep her afloat as her career as a magazine editor starts to slide towards a younger rival. She is shattered when news comes of her husband Russell’s death in a plane crash; worse, is the discovery that his long business trips were cover for a secret life on a beautiful Caribbean island of St. John. 

Elin Hilderbrand’s Winter In Paradise, the first in her proposed ‘Winter’ Trilogy, then takes Irene and her sons—Baker and Cash-- to St John, where they are ushered into a palatial villa that belonged to her husband, known as “Invisible Man” to the locals, who knew of his existence, but never saw him—none except his lover and her daughter.`

Irene’s attempts to find out what really happened are stonewalled, and his mysterious employer is impossible to track down. There is no trace in the villa, of her husband or his girlfriend Rosie, who also died with him, in the same crash, leaving a grieving daughter Maia, stepfather Huck and best friend Ayers.

The town has a close-knit community that cares for Maia and Huck. Baker and Cash both fall for Ayers, who has broken off with her unfaithful boyfriend, and there is some romantic tension going on there, while Irene forms an unlikely friendship with Huck.

 It’s a lightweight beach read, which ends with a tantalizing hook that leaves the reader guessing about the truth of the crash, which will, hopefully, be revealed in the next book.

Winter In Paradise

By Elin Hilderbrand

Publisher: Little, Brown

Pages: 272

Newcomer

Cool Cop

The Devotion Of Suspect X  won Keigo Higashino a worldwide fan following, and his books have not disappointed since. Newcomer, just out in Giles Murray’s English translation, stars the supercool and very, very sharp cop, Kyochiro Kaga.

For reasons mentioned in Higashino’s earlier books, Kaga has been transferred, or rather demoted, from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department’s Homicide Division, to the quiet, almost crime-free Nihonbashi Precinct.

Kaga gets a feel of his precinct by walking around the main street and talking to the shopkeepers. Since he is casually dressed—and his clothes are described often—in jeans, T-shirt and short-sleeved shirt, and talks with calm curiosity, nobody is intimidated by him. He also has the peculiar habit of buying things from the shops he visits and gifting them to the people he questions as part of his investigation.

A woman called Mineko Mitsui, estranged from her husband and son, is found strangled to death in her apartment. The book begins with short stories that could work by themselves, but they all connect somehow to the murder. In the very first chapter,The Girl At The Rice Cracker Shop, the said girl, Naho Kamikawa, gets a glimpse of Kaga’s powers of observation. He notices, for instance, that businessmen walking from subway station towards home still have their jackets on, while the men going in the opposite direction have them slung over their shoulders? And this fact actually helps get a suspect off the hook.

 The quaint shops on the street include a clock repair shop, one selling china and artifacts, a traditional restaurant, a bakery—all of which become part of the intricate maze of Kaga’s investigation, which drives his immediate superior, Hiroshi Uesugi, up the wall.

Kaga is eccentric, charming, gentle and infallible—to call him a Japanese Sherlock Holmes, would be paying him a compliment. Through his eyes, Higashino portrays life in a small town, suspicious of change, and fearful of outsiders. That Kaga gets himself to belong there so quickly, without giving away anything about himself, is his strength as a detective.

Newcomer

By Keigo Higashino

Translated By Giles Murray

Publisher: Hachette India

Pages: 352