The Secrets of Happiness

Sassy Sisters

Never having read a book by Lucy Diamond before, one didn’t know what to expect, but it’s not hard to see why she is popular. The Secrets of Happiness is a grown-up kind of chick lit, meaning, the women have more to them than just perfect looks, and more to do that just mooning over guys.

Rachel and Rebecca (called Becca by all) are stepsisters-- Rachel’s father fell in love and married Becca’s mother, Wendy. There is an age gap between the two, but that is not the only reason for the relationship between them to be frosty.

The pretty Rachel grows up to be a successful careerwoman with a seemingly perfect marriage and three wonderful children. The frumpy Becca flits from job to job, ending up as a menial in a pub kitchen. Then, Rachel on a mysterious trip to another city, about which she tells nobody, hoping to be back before her kids return from school, is mugged and seriously injured.

The neighbour minding the children calls Becca to come look after them. In the process of reluctantly doing her duty towards family, Becca loses her job. On reaching Rachel’s home, she finds that her sister divorced her husband Lawrence, and lost her job too.  She was trying to set up her own fitness training enterprise when life dealt her a nastier blow. Since the muggers stole her bag with her phone and id, and a head injury gives her temporary amnesia, Rachel is unable to provide the cops with her name, number or address.

Rachel’s children, Mabel, Scarlet and Luke, are distraught, when their aunt comes by to bring some order into their lives. By the time Rachel is able to contact her family, Becca has learnt to manage a home and kids and also dealt with her sister’s clients, but her own freewheeling manner.

When Rachel returns home, she requests Becca to stay a few more days, even though she hates to be dependent on anyone. There is also a misunderstanding caused by Lawrence that prevents her from truly accepting her stepsister.

Over the weeks, however, the two grow close and learn the meaning of sisterhood. It is an easy read, bright and optimistic, with simple, relatable people populating its pages, not too much angst or ugliness and everything turning out all right.  Even the kids are not horrid, precocious brats, which is such a relief.

There are other characters and their stories woven into the novel.  It is no surprise that almost everyone from a teenager to a septuagenarian find their perfect mate by the end—it is that kind of happy-making book.

The Secrets of Happiness

By Lucy Diamond

Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Pages: 480

The Paris Secret

Ghosts In A Canvas

This is something you can’t imagine in Mumbai—an apartment lying vacant for decades, without anyone trying to break in or squat.  Just such a place is at the centre of Karen Swan’s new bestseller, The Paris Secret.

Flora Sykes is a fine arts agent, working with large firm or art dealers; she enjoys her work, travelling all over the world, attending auctions, picking up paintings for clients. Suddenly her boss Angus and she are summoned to Paris by their wealthy clients, Lillian and Jacques Vermeil.

They received a mysterious communication informing them that the family owns an apartment in Paris, that they did not know of, and, according to a will, were not to enter the flat till the death of Jacques’s mother—the matriarch who lives in Antibes and ferociously guards the family’s past. But the apartment was broken into, and they need someone to check what is in there, without contravening the condition of the codicil.

Flora and Angus go to the apartment and find a treasure trove of classic art works by the great masters, believed to be lost during World War II.  Exciting as the discovery is, it has to be kept a secret, till the canvases and artifacts can be catalogued and their provenance established.

This is where Flora hits a block, because several paintings are traces back to an art dealer who worked for the Nazis during the War, which means they were probably stolen or extorted from Jewish families in distress. As Flora painstakingly solves the mystery, that involves the Vermeil family, she is also facing a family crisis involving her beloved brother Freddie.

To add to her stress she has to deal with the two obnoxious Vermeil brats, Xavier and Natascha. They are spoiled and cause scandals in their circle on a regular basis. Since it is a given that the workaholic heroine will fall for the bad boy, there is a romance thrown in half-heartedly, and a short-lived triangle as Flora dates a Vienna-based businessman, Noah Haas, who might have some details of a Renoir in the hidden collection. But for the reader, the story of the abandoned apartment and the paintings is of more interest.

Swan keeps the tone light, even though the story gets dark and intense at a point, when it brings in questions of ethics, honesty and loyalty. It is an easy, mostly appealing read, and Flora makes for a likeable heroine—scrupulous but not goody-two-shoes; strong, but not inflexible. The men in the book are not half as interesting.

The Paris Secret

By: Karen Swan

Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Pages: 352

Black Water Lilies

Cocktail of Art and Murder

French writer Michel Bussi’s Black Water Lilies (translated by Shaun Whiteside) has an unusual setting—Giverny.  This is the village where the great Impressionist Claude Monet settled down to paint water lilies. It became a kind of pilgrim spot for students and art lovers who flock to see Monet’s house and the legendary lily pond.

In this peaceful community, a murder causes some turbulence. The story begins with the murder of art lover and womanizer, Jerome Morval. In his pocket is a postcard of Monet’s Water Lilies with the words: “Eleven years old. Happy Birthday.” The killer could be someone from the art underworld that trades in stolen masterpieces, or the jealous husband of one of his many lady friends, or perhaps one of the ladies.

The narrator is an old woman who watches over the village from her high perch in an abandoned mill, ignored by all but her dog Neptune. When Inspector Laurenc Serenac and his overeager deputy Sylvio Benavides start investigating the crime, they get a lot of tangled leads that don’t make sense.

Serenec falls madly in love with a schoolteacher Stephanie Dupain, whose husband Jacques is a suspect, a man known to be insanely possessive of his beautiful wife. Involved somehow in the jigsaw is eleven-year-old Fanette, an art prodigy, seeking a way out of her squalid existence with her single mother, by winning an international art exhibition.

Fanette has befriended a vagabond American painter James, who is also killed in the same way as Morval was, but it looks like the child imagined the artist, since no trace of him can be found. Benavides unearths a very old case in which a little boy also died in an identical manner.

Bussi constructs a maze of memories, time, motive and passion, that boggle the mind and lead to a stunning and quite unexpected climax. After the bestselling After The Crash, this is the second novel by Bussi to be translated into English and it is a fascinating read, in spite of the somewhat disjointed structure and a sagging middle.

Black Water Lilies

by Michel Bussi

Translated by Shaun Whiteside

Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Hachette

Pages: 350

A Midsummer’s Equation

Mystery Wrapped In Enigma

Keigo Higashino’s The Devotion Of Suspect X is arguably one of the finest suspense thrillers ever, certainly the best book written by the Japanese bestselling author.  It is rather unfair to call him ‘The Japanese Steig Larsson’ as The Times does—quoted on the cover of his new book, A Midsummer’s Equation, because he is an original. His books are steeped in the culture of his country, and he does not imitate any Western author. The themes of love, sacrifice, nobility and loyalty that come across in his books are unique and very Japanese.

A Midsummer’s Equation may not be as complicated as The Devotion Of Suspect X or Journey under the Midnight Sun, but its slow-simmering suspense, layers of detailing, slow-paced but sharp story-telling makes it a very satisfying read. 

Manabu Yukawa, is a physicist whose powers of deduction come to the aid of the police many time, earning him the nickname of Detective Galileo. He returns in this book, first in is role as a scientist, but as soon as a crime is committed, he gets into his other mode.

The book is set in the small coastal town on Hari Cove, which is in decline after the tourist traffic trickled to a stop. The town is at the centre of an environmental battle between a company planning an underwater mining operation that threatens the fragile ecosystem of the ocean, and a section of the townsfolk who want to preserve the pristine beauty of Hari Cove.

The story begins with a teenage Kyohei being sent to spend the summer with aunt, uncle and cousin Narumi in sleepy Hari Cove. Narumi helps her parents Shigehiro and Setsuko Kawahata run a small inn, called Green Rock, and also leads the environmental lobby that wants to protect Hari Cove.

Kyohei befriends Yukawa on the train to Hari Cove and is surprised to see him land up at the Inn. The only other guest staying there is MasatsuguTsukahara, who has ostensibly come to attend a conference to debate the pros and cons of the mining project. The quiet of the town is shattered when Tsukahara is found dead—it looks like he fell off the sea wall and smashed his head on the rocks below.

Turns out he was a former policemen, which brings a whole bunch of Tokyo cops down to the town to investigate. The local cops are ready to file it as an accident, but Tokyo cops insist on an autopsy and find that  Tsukahara died of carbon monoxide poisoning and there is a possibility that his death could be murder.

Cops in Hari Cove and Tokyo (here Yukawa’s buddy detective Shunpei Kusanagi is on the case) get on the job, of tracking every possible person and clue. Yukawa solves the mystery in no time, but keeps his findings to himself. For the reader, the thrill is in discovering one piece of the jigsaw puzzle after another—till the last chapter there are surprises.

Gently blended in are the customs and traditions of the country, the attitudes, the food, the changing lifestyle. Like his hero Yukawa, Higashino is in no hurry to reveal whodunit, and makes no moral judgments about the killer. Yukawa stays a silent observer because he knows that the truth will affect an innocent life; for him, compassion is more important than blame and punishment. It’s a book the reader will savour long after it is over.

A Midsummer’s Equation

By Keigo Higashino

Publisher: Abacus/Hachette

Pages: 480

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

Potter Grows Up

JK Rowling’s Harry Potter books changed publishing history by creating a new generation of young readers, who then also became consumers of the movies, games, merchandise-- making the writer one of the wealthiest people in the world.

After seven bestselling books, each of which triggered fresh rounds of Pottermania, Rowling decided to stop. She also started writing non-Potter books, but her wizard hero refused to vanish.

So back he comes, older, sadder and helpless before his spoilt brat, Albus Potter, the only one of his three children (James and Lily remain in the background) who is chronically sullen and has a problem with his father’s fame.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is the dramatic script of the recently staged London production, which was written in two parts by playwright Jack Thorne, based on an original story by Rowling, the director John Tiffany and himself. The play picks up where the last novel,  Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007) left off. It is set nineteen years after Harry Potter got out of Hogwarts and defeated the Dark Lord Voldemort. He is married to Ginny Weasley and works with the Ministry of Magic. His buddy Ron married Hermione and they have a daughter, Rose.

The kids are going to Hogwarts, when the play (book) opens and Albus manages to befriend just one other boy, with as big a chip on his shoulder as he does--Scorpius Malfoy, the son of Harry’s nemesis, Draco Malfoy. He is a sweet-natured child burdened with the rumour that he is Voldemort’s son, so nobody wants to be near him.

Anyone who has not read Potter books and is unfamiliar with the back story, the characters and the mythology would not be able to follow the story, but Potter fans can plunge right in as if the gap between Book 7 and this one never happened.

The story has a lot of twists, turns, action, emotional turmoil, magic and time-travelling, which from all accounts, made for a magical and riveting stage production, and will undoubtedly make for a successful film. The book leaves a lot for the reader to imagine, because the layers a novel would have brought in are missing.

There is suspense too-- even though Voldemort is dead, Rowling and Thorne find a fiendishly clever way to have him return.  Albus is not an appealing hero, a rude busybody, whose rebelliousness causes his hapless father and others a great deal of grief.

He drags an unwilling Scorpius into time-travelling misadventures, that re-introduce some characters and the past at Hogwarts, as what-if alternative realities are created. Because it is in the form of a play, the book is an easy read; so much to-ing and fro-ing would have made a novel unwieldy and perhaps boring. Here all the conflicts and emotions are there, without excessive verbiage. And the climax has all the fireworks one would expect from a classic confrontation between Good and Evil.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (Parts One and Two)

By Jack Thorne, based on an original story by J. K. Rowling, John Tiffany and Jack Thorne

Publisher: Little, Brown & Company /Hachette

Pages: 327 pages

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