Sunset Beach

As Good As It Gets

Mary Kay Andrews is called the Queen of Beach Reads, and her fans who turn her books into bestsellers would agree. Her novels have female protagonists, but escape being called ‘chick lit’ because romance is just a subplot; there a lot else going on.

The heroine of her twenty-sixth book, Sunset Beach, is Drue Campbell, thirty-six years old and at the end of her tether. She has just lost her mother, is jobless, single, with a knee badly injured in a kiteboarding accident and a malfunctioning jalopy.  Drue wonders how things could get any worse, when her estranged father, Brice, turns up with an olive branch and lifeline.

 Brice is an embarrassingly pompous personal injury lawyer, who offers her a job at his office, and the keys to her grandparents’ dilapidated Coquina Cottage on Sunset Beach in Florida.  Drue has great childhood memories of the place, and accepts her father’s offer—in any case, she has no other option. There’s one more shock to come as she drives her battered car to Florida—her father has married Wendy, her former schoolmate; she is also his office manager, and hates the idea of having her stepdaughter around.

Drue shares space with two other “cubicle rats” – Jonah and Ben—who immediately show interest in the boss’s daughter. As Drue answers calls and serves as occasional receptionist, she is taken up by the case of a black woman, whose daughter died at a swanky beach resort, that ended up paying her peanuts as compensation, which is not enough to raise her sick granddaughter.  Brice says he did his best with the information gathered by his old buddy and investigator Jimmy Zee, but Drue starts snooping on her own, with her newfound pal, Corey.

While looking through the storage space in the cottage, as she repairs and refurbishes it, she finds newspaper clippings and police files about a woman who vanished sometime in the Seventies. Drue wonders why these have been preserved in the cottage and whether her father is somehow involved.

Putting a budding romance with Jonah aside, ignoring warnings by Brice and Jimmy, Drue starts to dig into both cases and finds that honesty, persistence, and a bit of courage solve the toughest of cases. Her interactions with the local cop investigating the resort case are hilarious

Drue may appear like a bimbette initially, but turns out to be a likeable and spirited.Sunset Beach is fast-paced and funny, with a large dollop of mystery. An enjoyable monsoon read.

Sunset Beach 

By Mary Kay Andrews

Publisher: St Martin’s Press

Pages: 432

Our House

Lies And Betrayals

This is the kind of thing that one could imagine happening in Mumbai.  A woman returns from a holiday to find strangers moving into her house. In Louise Candlish’s scary thriller, Our House, Fiona Lawson discovers that her ex-husband, Bram, has sold the family home without her knowledge or consent; worse still, he is missing and so are their two children.

 The couple that has bought the house has perfectly legitimate documents to prove that they paid in full for the property, so they understandably want her to stop making a scene and get out. In a few moments, Fiona’s life is shattered; the hurt and bafflement is even more than it was when she had caught her husband with another woman, and evicted him from her life.

With this gripping beginning, Louise Candlish crafts a dramatic and suspenseful thriller, in which the secrets, lies and betrayals pile up. The book moves briskly between the past and present, and uses an interesting device of a true crime podcast called The Victim, in which Fiona participates-- and some of the reactions to her predicament are cruelly funny. Bram’s point of view is put across in a suicide note he wants to leave behind, as he is hit by guilt and remorse.

Nothing is as it appears to be, in the complicated web in which Fiona finds herself trapped. The reason for Bram’s behavior may not be too convincing; it happens often with books that start with an exciting premise—they don’t wrap us as well. Still, Our House was listed as one of the best thrillers in recent months and rightly so. The lesson for all women – don’t sign anything blindly and keep important documents safely.

Our House

By Louise Candlish

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Pages: 448

Celestial Bodies

Spotlight On Oman

Jokha Alharthi’s Celestial Bodies is the first novel from the Gulf to win the  Man Booker International Prize—a book by a female Omani author at that, a scholar and academic. The judges called the book ‘A richly imagined, engaging and poetic insight into a society in transition and into lives previously obscured. 

Oman is a small Gulf country, that, like so many conservative societies, changed after the oil boom, or rather, was dragged reluctantly into urbanization and modernity. The past is—like India—feudal, unbendingly patriarchal, with the slavery being abolished as late as the 1970s.

Alharthi tracks the lives of three daughters—Mayya, Asma and Khowla—from a well-off merchant family, and moves from the traditional village of al-Awafi to modern city of Muscat, speaking in multiple voices.

It is a historian’s book as much as a writer’s (there are faint echoes of Jane Austen), as Alharthi charts the transformation of Oman with understated compassion, so that the melodrama of the lives of three generations remains controlled. Still, there are passages like this about a woman’s sorrow over her lost son: “Every day and every night, for ten years, she died a little more. She breathed and ate and drank but she was dead. She spoke to people and walked among them, dead.”)

It begins with Mayya, always at her sewing machine and silently in love with a man who is unaware of her existence; she has an arranged marriage to Abdallah (his name appears after a while, he is simply referred to as Merchant Sulayman’s son, as if his own identity is not important) and gives birth to a daughter (the women kindly point out that she will look after the sons born later), whom she stubbornly names London. As she grows up, London’s story is also included in the tangled web of relationships.

Mayya’s sisters also have their own romantic problems, but they are not as fleshed out as Mayya and Abdallah (his perspective is written in the first person). Indian, or rather Asian, readers will relate a lot more to the novel, since these societies have also gone through similar social and economic upheavals.

It is a sprawling epic, unraveled like pieces of mosaic, and trying to fit in so much, that many of the characters seem underdeveloped. It is not an easy read, but it does generate curiosity about this corner of the Arab world not often depicted in fiction. The prize will undoubtedly bring more Arabic writers into the spotlight, hopefully with fine translators, who are able to read the emotions correctly and find the right words for them.

Celestial Bodies

By Jokha Alharthi

Translated by Marilyn Booth

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

The Strawberry Thief

Love, Loss And Letting Go

Chocolat by Joanne Harris, was a bestseller twenty years ago, turned into an Oscar-nominated film, which is why, when one pictures Vianne Rocher and Roux, Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp come to mind.

Two more books followed the Vianne saga, and the fourth, The Strawberry Thief, brings her back to the lovely little French village of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes, where, in the first book, she has faced the hostility of the residents, the priest, Francis Reynaud in particular. 

In this book, Vianne is going through separation pangs when her older daughter, Anouk, leaves to live with her boyfriend in Paris. Tension flares up, when Narcisse, the village florist, leaves part of his property to Vianne’s younger daughter, the probably autistic Rosette, in his will.  He also leaves a letter of confession to Reynaud, who is terrified that a crime from his own past will be revealed.

Rosette used to spend lot of time in a wild strawberry patch in the oak woods that is gifted to her by Narcisse. The teenage girl runs around wild in the village, communicating through her drawings and strange animal noises, and an invisible monkey as her constant companion, that only people with magical powers can see. There is also her ability to control the wind, that her mother wants her to keep in check.

 Narcisse’s nasty daughter, Michele and her greedy husband, are furious at losing valuable property to Rosette, though their mentally disturbed son Yannick befriends her.

To add to the cauldron of simmering discontent, arrives Morgane Dubois, a tattooist, who rents Narcisse’s old shop, paints the door purple and covers the walls with mirrors. There is something weirdly dangerous about Morgane, as she divines people’s secrets and desires, which she draws on their skins with her tattoo pen and ink.

Vianne is afraid Morgane will take away all that is precious to her, particularly Rosette, who is drawn to the witch-like tattooist. She is aghast when even the most conservative of villagers secretly visit Morgane and get inked.

The story moves from Rosette’s point of view to the long confession by Narcisse that drives the priest to a sleepless dread.

If Chocolat was about tradition and the worldly pleasures that Vianne’s chocolates represent, The Strawberry Thief is about grief, loss and the fear of the unknown evoked by Morgane, and a group of nomadic Muslim migrants who camp by the river.  It seems likely that these characters will play stronger parts if there is a fifth book in the series. Towards the end Rosette does emerge as strong, willful and perhaps an inheritor of her mother’s melancholy, as well as her magic.

Harris writes with a feel for emotion, and does not judge any of the characters for what they did in the past.  She sympathises with a love that binds, but speaks for a love that lets go. And, of course, for all the pain and heartbreak that chocolate is capable of healing, if made by the right hands.

The Strawberry Thief

By Joanna Harris

Publisher: Orion

Pages: 368

Neon Prey

Cannibal Clayton 

This new John Sandford book, Neon Prey, 29th in his bestselling Preyseries, is not for the squeamish, featuring as it does, a cannibal as the villain. It is also a bit offensive, that characters comment on his bad breath, but joke about his peculiar fetish.

Sandford’s hero, US Marshal Lucas Davenport, gets involved in a case that would turn the most hardened stomach. Cops on the trail of loan shark Roger Smith’s hitman, Clayton Deese, find a whole lot of bodies buried behind his house adjoining a Louisiana swamp. As they scour the area for graves, under the supervision of local FBI agent Sandro Tremanty, they are horrified to find that Deese ate parts of his victims.

The man is sharp enough to give the cops a slip, and gang up with his half brother, Marion Beauchamps, who breaks into the homes of the wealthy in Las Vegas, and robs them after threatening, or inflicting, terrible violence on the hapless residents.

Davenport, accompanied by his regular deputies, Rae Givens and Bob Matees (who provide most of the wisecracks in the books), goes on a manhunt to capture the ruthless and elusive criminal, who, after joining his brother’s home invasion team, is doubly lethal. Beauchamp’s crew includes a pretty blonde, who goes by the name of Genesis ‘Geenie’ Cox, with more brains and guts than all the men put together, Davenport included. (One suspects she will turn up in future Prey books.)

The pursuit of Deese, that includes plenty of narrow escapes on the part of the gang, gets Davenport and Tramenty angry, exhausted and frustrated; even Deese’s boss, fed-up of his constant blackmail, would be happy if the revolting man was caught, or better still, killed.

Neon Prey is fast-paced and gripping thriller, even though the brutality inflicted on characters—a kidnap victim in particular—is distressing; more so because Sandford treats it so casually.

Neon Prey

By John Sandford

Publisher: Putnam

Pages: 400

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Redemption

Decker’s Dilemma

David Baldacci’s unusual creation, Amos Decker, the man with a perfect memory, returns in the fifth book of the series—Redemption.  

For those who may not have encountered Decker before, a football injury in his youth, rewired his brain so that he is unable to forget anything--a medical condition known as hyperthymesia. He also suffers from synesthesia, which means his brain associates different emotions with a particular colour—like blue for death. 

In previous books in the series, Decker hit rock bottom and lost his job as a cop, when his wife, daughter and brother-in-law were brutally murdered, and fingers pointed at him—the ordeal made worse by his inability to forget the sight of them lying dead in his house. Later, he is rehabilitated and absorbed into the FBI by the sympathetic Ross Bogart; he has as partner and friend, former journalist, Alex Jamison. 

Decker’s gigantic size, strength and unique memory make him an asset for the force, even though he is emotionally messed up. Every year, he returns to his hometown on his daughter’s birthday to visit the graves of his family. At the cemetery, a called Meryl Hawkins approaches him and claims, that twelve years ago, Decker had sent him to prison for multiple murders he did not commit. Now, he is dying of cancer and demands his name be cleared.

His former partner, Mary Lancaster, thinks the man who has spent so many years in jail, deserves a hearing at least. By the time, they reach his hotel room to talk, he has been shot dead.

Who would kill a man with a few days to live, unless there is a reason to silence him. Now Decker is convinced Hawkins was indeed innocent, and his conscience will not let him rest till he finds out the truth, even it means putting his own career on the line. From what Hawkins tells him, Decker suspects that in his enthusiasm to crack his first homicide case, as a rookie cop, he may have overlooked certain vital clues.

As Decker starts digging, it does look like all the clues they found on the scene of the crime, that helped indict Hawkins were too conveniently planted. When he is at the lowest rung of despair, and Jamison is pulled off the case, who should turn up but his buddy Melvin Mars? Decker had saved Mars from death row in the second book of the series, The Last Mile. Mars has become a sidekick, who rallies around to help Decker, just for the adventure.

When the body count starts growing, Decker realises he is up against a powerful enemy. Baldacci’s writing is always smooth; this book has more twists than the usual investigative thriller, even if the solution to the mystery is  bit far-fetched.  Redemption allows for breaks when Decker handholds Lancaster through a crisis and the impeccably dressed Mars gets to flirt with the town’s beautiful and mysterious entrepreneur, Rachel Katz.  Maybe it’s time Mars got his own series in which Decker makes ‘guest’ appearances, since his total recall plot device has stretched as far as it could go.

Redemption

By David Baldacci

Publisher: Grand Central

Pages: 432

A Noise Downstairs

The Talking Typewriter 

There is a funny bit in Linwood Barclay’s A Noise Downstairs, where a man has to explain to his son what a typewriter is, because, looking at the noisy gadget without a monitor, the kid cannot understand what the thing is used for.

The typewriter plays a starring role in the book, however, as the clack of its keys spook a man who has a lot more to worry about. Paul Davis is driving home, when he sees Kenneth, a colleague at the college where he teaches, driving a car with a broken taillight and erratically at that. Paul follows him to check whether is he drunk or asleep at the wheel. Kenneth’s actions are suspicious—he stops to throw something heavy into a dumpster, and then stops at an isolated spot. Paul approaches the car and what he sees in the backseat shocks him; the next thing he knows, Kenneth has hit him on the head with a shovel.

Thanks to a police car driving past, Paul is saved from being murdered, but suffers some brain damage and has PTSD for which he has to see a therapist, Anna White, who has problems of her own, including a father slipping into dementia and a troublesome patient.

 Paul figures that he will only be able to really cope with what happened that night if he can reconstruct the event, for which he is willing to overlook his unease and meet Kenneth in prison. If anything positive comes out of the traumatic incident, it is the healing of the rift with his estranged wife.

Then, a typewriter that his wife gifted him, starts clacking in the middle of the night, and after all rational reasons have been eliminated, it leaves the supernatural.

Barclay strews the story with red herrings, so the suspense holds to the end. The novel is structured well, the protagonist is likeable, and the reader cannot see the final twist coming. Plenty of reasons to pick up this one.

The Noise Downstairs

By Linwood Barclay

Publisher: William Morrow

Pages 368