Archive for February, 2014

POLICE by Jo Nesbo

Suspects abound and deceit, lies and corruption are the order of the day from everyone – criminals and cops – in Police, an enthralling follow-up to Jo Nesbo’s previous Harry Hole novel, Phantom. POLICE actually takes up where PHANTOM leaves off. And my question, for over a year, while waiting in angst for this book to be published is…”Is Harry Hole still alive?” Obviously he is…or this book would not have been written. But still…there was some doubt.

February 7, 2014 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: Literary, Mystery/Suspense, Sleuths Series

NO WAY OUT by Alan Jacobson

Karen Vail finds herself in a different role and a different country in NO WAY OUT, the fifth book in the series by Alan Jacobson. Karen, an FBI profiler, is sent to England to assist Scotland Yard in a theft of a key document that she finds out may show that Amelia Bassano Lanier, a woman who also happens to have been Jewish and black, actually was the author of all of the plays and poems attributed to William Shakespeare.

February 6, 2014 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: Theme driven, Thriller/Spy/Caper, United Kingdom

BREWSTER by Mark Slouka

BREWSTER reads like a melancholy ballad sung by Leonard Cohen, Dylan, or Bruce Springsteen. It’s like driving down a remote, one-lane dark road surrounding a black reservoir, the starless sky doomy and vast. You are headed toward a forgotten city. Now and then a beacon in the distance blinks like a metronomic eye. Brewster is a static town in upstate New York, where it always feels like winter, “weeks-old crusts of ice covering the sidewalks and the yards, a gray, windy sky, smoke torn sideways from the brick chimneys.”

February 5, 2014 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Character Driven, Coming-of-Age, Contemporary, Literary, NE & New York

YOU DISAPPEAR by Christian Jungersen

In Christian Jungersen’s YOU DISAPPEAR, translated from the Danish by Misha Hoekstra, forty-two year old Mia Halling’s life will never be the same following a family vacation in Majorca. Mia notices that her husband, Frederik, who is at the wheel of their rental car, is speeding through hairpin turns like a madman. She implores him to slow down, to no avail. Although they crash, they manage to survive. What should have been a relaxing and enjoyable holiday nearly ends in tragedy.

February 4, 2014 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Character Driven, Contemporary, Denmark, Family Matters, Psychological Suspense, Translated, y Award Winning Author

THE TUNER OF SILENCES by Mia Couto

The above opening line pulled me immediately into Mia Couto’s novel, The Tuner of Silences; it raised questions for me from the beginning and these didn’t let me go until the end. Mwanito, the narrator, reflecting back on the early years of his life, recounts his experiences while living in the company of three men and his slightly older brother in a remote campside in a semi-desert. Couto, an award-winning Mozambican author, has written a novel that is part coming of age story, part family drama and part a kind of love story.

February 3, 2014 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , ,  Â· Posted in: Africa, Class - Race - Gender, Coming-of-Age, Family Matters, Neustadt Intl Prize, World Lit, y Award Winning Author

WAKE by Anna Hope

One of the aspects of this impressive debut by Anna Hope that makes me raise my hat is the effectiveness with which she handles its secondary thread. In italics interspersing the main story a page or two at a time, are little vignettes as British officials exhume the body of an unidentified soldier from the battlefields of Northern France, prepare it for a new coffin, and take it with due solemnity to its final resting place in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey. The vignettes, and the story that they enfold, span a five-day period leading up to November 11, 1920, the second anniversary of the Armistice. The First World War is over, but what has become of the survivors?

February 2, 2014 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , ,  Â· Posted in: Debut Novel, Facing History, United Kingdom, World Lit