“The children are frozen, too frightened to move closer to one of the women. The sound they heard while still in the house has advanced, roaring its way above them. There is a crash against the storm door, and they all scream, ducking with their arms held over their heads. Ellis drops his candle and, in the weak light left from the candle Mae is still holding, she sees his terrified face. Ruby is crying. Lavinia has Little Homer’s face pressed into the front of her dress as if she can shield him by blocking his sight. Mae reaches out her arms and Ruby and Ellis come to her immediately. She blows out her candle and drops it so she can hold both children tight against her. In the darkness, Lavinia cries, “Dear Lord! Oh, dear Lord!” Then the roaring moves on, like a train careering over their heads. The sound recedes and, eventually, even the wind seems to subside. When there is no longer any sound except rain on the cellar doors, the children hold utterly still, waiting to see what will come next.“

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (MAR 5, 2014)

Falling to Earth is the kind of novel that makes me want to grab the very next person I see and urgently say, ”You MUST read this.” I read this rabidly with increasing awe and respect that Kate Southwood had the chops to create a debut novel with this degree of psychological insight, restrained power, and heartbreaking beauty.

The story centers on a tragedy of unimaginable proportions – a tornado hits the small Illinois town of March in 1925, causing devastation and grievous loss in the homes of every single resident of the town.

Except one.

That one is Paul Graves, a man of dignity and integrity, who lives with his wife Mae, his three young children and his mother, Lavinia. Incredibly, nothing in Paul’s life is touched – not his family, not his home, and not his thriving lumber business…which, in fact, is even more in demand as townsfolk order coffins for the burials of their loved ones.

As the townspeople are forced to bear up under nearly unbearable grief, their envy of Paul’s “unfair” providence reaches a fever pitch and they begin to turn on him – and against him – in droves. Paul, meanwhile, labors under extreme survivor’s guilt as Mae increasingly falls into a dark depression.

Kate Southwood writes,

“A tornado is a ravenous thing, untroubled by the distinction in tearing one man apart and gently setting another down a little distance away. It is resolute and makes its unheeding progress until, bloated and replete, it dissipates. A tornado is a dead thing and cannot acknowledge blame.. If a tornado smashes your house or takes your child, it does no good to blame it…Even after you’ve yanked up another house in the place the old one stood and planted flowers in the dirt where you laid your child, your fury remains as well your desire to lay blame.”

A parable of sorts, this magnificent novel strives to answer questions that have haunted humankind since early times: how do we comprehend the forces of nature and our own fates? How do we manage the extreme hostility and envy that result from nature’s unfairness? How do we break the cycles of revenge, vengeance, retribution and reprisal? These questions transcend this book and can easily be asked of modern tragedies – Hurricane Katrina or Hurricane Sandy, for example.

The themes are universal: love and loss, family, jealousy and suspicion, guilt and survival. I will not spoil the ending but I will say this – it is masterly and seamlessly brought together all the themes of the book and literally let me gasping.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 44 readers
PUBLISHER:	Europa Editions (March 5, 2013)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Kate Southwood
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another tornado-based story: Sing Them Home By Stephanie Kallos

Bibliography:

• Falling to Earth (March 2013)

“Don’t overthink what’s happening here, Vicky. I am not a swamp monster, Vicky. I’m not an invisible man. I’m not a vampire, and I’m not God. I’m just an incredibly interesting person.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (OCT 6, 2011)

It was more than one hundred years ago that H. G. Wells penned the science fiction classic, The Invisible Man, which subsequently paved new paths in the horror genre. The idea of a mad scientist who makes himself invisible and becomes mentally deranged as a result, is one that has taken root in popular culture ever since.

In his genre-bending new novel, Chuck Klosterman borrows the essential elements from Wells’ classic with some modifications. For one thing, he fixes the science. There has been some discussion that a truly invisible man would have been blind whereas Wells’ lead character, Griffin, clearly was not. So Klosterman’s protagonist, referred to simply as Y_, is not invisible — he is the visible man. But Y_ , much like Griffin, has an ability to make himself invisible to others.

At the novel’s outset, Y_ calls a therapist Victoria Vick and sets out some pretty elaborate conditions for his therapy sessions: she will ask no questions, meetings will be only over the phone, no forms will be filled out and payments will be sent by cash. “I came to you so I could manage the guilt I don’t deserve to have,” Y_ tells her.

Not sure what to make of the situation, Vicky tentatively agrees. So begins a series of sessions during which Vicky finds out that Y_ is a scientist who has developed technology that can make him invisible. Y_ once worked for the NSA in Chaminade, Hawaii, creating a special “cloaking” device—a membranous suit which when slathered with a special cream can make anyone invisible to others.

Y_, who has always been obsessed with trying to figure out what really makes people tick, uses this device to make himself invisible and spy on all kinds of people. He slips into their homes and watches the minutiae of everyday life — an extreme form of voyeurism. Quite psychotic, Y_ never suspects this could be a problem but instead justifies his activities as essential to his understanding of the human spirit. “How was I supposed to relate to these people if I didn’t even know what they were really like or who they really were?” he asks, “I knew how they acted, but that’s not the same thing.”

The Visible Man is written in an interesting format; it is narrated by Vicky and laid out mostly as a collection of reports from each therapy session. This format allows the reader to not only peek into Y_’s bizarre temperament but it also lets us see Vicky’s increasingly impaired judgment as she lets Y_ continually break traditional patient-therapist rules.

Over the weeks, as Y_ keeps up with his stories Vicky finds herself spellbound. Her normal life is disrupted and she gets pulled into an elaborate web that Y_ weaves. “To this day, whenever I slipped into boredom, I find myself fantasizing and reimagining the stories he told me,” Vicky remembers.

As the novel moves along, The Visible Man gets incrementally creepy until the very end. Klosterman, whose Downtown Owl was a gem, does a great job of using science fiction as a frame against which to pin a very contemporary story. It is to Klosterman’s credit that the idea of a delusional man creating a suit and cream that would make him invisible, doesn’t seem extremely far-fetched.

Even more fascinating is the fact that the readers too will come to find much of interest in Y_’s subjects’ lives. By boiling down life to its very essence — to the level of mere existence — Klosterman does a wonderful job in pointing out what matters to most of us. “I learned that people don’t consider time alone as part of their life. Being alone is just a stretch of isolation they want to escape from,” Y_ says, quite observantly.

“People need their actions to be scrutinized and interpreted in order to feel like what they’re doing matters. Singular, solitary moments are like television pilots that never get aired. They don’t count. We’re self-conditioned to require an audience, even if we’re not doing anything valuable or interesting,” Klosterman writes. If that is not a mirror held up to contemporary society, I don’t know what is.

The Visible Man sometimes gets too caught up in its own ingeniousness and the story strains under the weight of the novel’s structural construct. The letters, the bullet points, they start to seem restrictive after a while.

Nevertheless, The Visible Man eventually proves to be a worthy follow-up to the fantastic Downtown Owl. It is creepy precisely because the story is just ever so plausible. When gawking through Twitter and Facebook is possible, it doesn’t seem to be too much of a stretch to have an invisible man checking you out during your most intimate and mundane moments. You’ll be sure to look over your shoulder more than once.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 66 readers
PUBLISHER:	Scribner (October 4, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Chuck Klosterman
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review: Chuck Klosterman: Chuck Klosterman IV

Bibliography:

• Downtown Owl (2008)
• Visible Man (October 2011)

Nonfiction:

• Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota (2001)
• Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto (2003)
• Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story (2005)
• Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Minds (2006)
• Eating The Dinosaur (2009)
• I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined) (July 2013)

“Odd thoughts were entering my head again. And like before I had no idea where they were coming from. Odd, crazy thoughts: another job just about done, after running stupidly about for weeks, all the tracking, waiting, time spent and wasted, and what do you get but another dead body, then on to the next hit, another city, another bastard to track, another doomed man, to be taken out by me or someone else, it really made no difference, dead is dead. The same story, the same routine. You pull the trigger, the man falls. But what if you didn’t pull the trigger? That would be different. That might even be exciting. That would change everything.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  SEP 1, 2011)

Calling Mr. King by Ronald De Feo is an exhilarating read. It is poignant, funny, serious and sad. It grabs the reader from the beginning and we go on a short but rich journey with Mr. King, a hit-man, an employee of The Firm, as he transforms himself from a killer to a would-be intellectual and lover of art and architecture.

Mr. King is one of The Firm’s best marksmen and, as the novel opens, he is in Paris to do a hit. Something about the job starts getting to him and he postpones his hit repeatedly. He puts off an easy mark day after day. When he finally does his hit, it is with a bit of trepidation, anger and regret, wishing that he had something better to do.

This “something better” begins to take shape in his life as an appreciation for art, especially the Georgian architecture of his adopted city, London. He gets excited, going from bookstore to bookstore and collecting books on architecture and works of art by John Constable, the artist. His employer, however, is not happy with him. They are upset about the amount of time it took for him to do his job in Paris and they decide to send him to New York on a vacation. Mr. King feels he is long due for a vacation so this is not the worst thing in the world for him.

In New York, he devours the bookstores and museums, daily increasing his knowledge and excitement about art and architecture, expanding his interests and horizons in this area. He becomes interested in Regency style and art nouveau. He goes to see the Constable show at the Frick Museum after a clerk at Rizzoli’s bookstore recommends this to him. He also becomes interested in John Turner and artists who paint the English countryside.

He was known as Peter Chilton in London and he uses this alias to its full advantage in New York, acting like a rich and well-appointed Englishman. It is hard to tell where Mr. King ends and Mr. Chilton begins. He dreams of living in a Georgian home of his own some day. He takes on an English accent and his identity becomes obscured. He is now Peter Chilton, the art aficionado on vacation from his manor in England. He decides to dress the part and purchases a $215 shirt. This is his entry into the world of fashion as well as art. The shirt represents the possibility of something more, of his presenting himself as the real Peter Chilton, a man to whom fashion is paramount.

One day while resting in his New York hotel, the phone rings and it’s a call for Mr. King. This is the code name for The Firm calling him when they want a hit to be done. He is quite put out about being disturbed on his vacation but he leaves the hotel to return the call from a pay phone which is The Firm’s way of doing things. He is going to have to do a hit in New York. He is sick of The Firm. He finds his bosses stupid, “onions,” not up to his caliber. He does his hit within four hours in the hope that he’ll be able to rest and continue his vacation. However, he is transferred to Barcelona.

Once in Barcelona, Mr. King becomes so immersed in the architecture of Gaudi and the city’s art nouveau décor that he is overwhelmed. He knows that he has an important hit to do but by this time his bag of books is much, much heavier than his clothing and accoutrements. He is a man possessed by learning and potential.

We learn a bit about his early life. His father was a rage-ridden gun-crazy man, teaching Mr. King how to shoot animals – not how to play games or sports. His mother paid more attention to cleaning the house and taking care of her flowers than she did to Mr. King. When Mr. King left his home in a small suburb of New York when he was about twenty, it was in a traumatic way, and he was never to return except for his father’s funeral.

Mr. King often wonders what his life would have been like had he been exposed to things besides guns and hunting. He is excellent at what he does but could he have been something else, something of the mind? The reader wonders this along with him because he is caught up in a life he can never leave alive. A life with The Firm is a life forever with The Firm. No matter how much art and architecture he sees or yearns for it can never be enough. And when will his time run out?

Mr. King goes through existential angst with nods to Camus and Sartre as he feels like a stranger and has an overwhelming sense of nausea about his identity and his place in the world. He is alone and a loner, someone who has never thought of himself as one with the world. Since childhood, he’s been an outcast and finally, through his intellectual endeavors he is finding himself. The irony of this is that the closer he comes to finding himself, the further he travels from his required path.

This is a first novel by Mr. De Feo and it is an excellent piece of writing, one that had me devouring this book quickly. Mr. King made me laugh and feel deeply saddened. I was with him on every step of his journey and loved every minute of it. I hope that Mr. De Feo continues with his writing as he has quite an understanding of human nature.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 17 readers
PUBLISHER:	Other Press (August 30, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Ronald De Feo
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More hit men: For the Dogs by Kevin Wignall Hit and Run by Lawrence Block

Bibliography:

• Calling Mr. King (August 2011)

“I have the definite feeling if everybody in the world didn’t keep watching to see what everybody else did, we’d all go berserk.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage (JUL 21, 2011)

American author, Patricia Highsmith, who died in 1995, left behind a respectable body of work. Highsmith is known primarily for her psychological thrillers, so perhaps it’s not too surprising that a number of her novels have been adapted for the big screen–including The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley’s Game, Ripley Underground, The Cry of the Owl and This Sweet Sickness. Highsmith’s first novel, Strangers on a Train, was made into a film directed by Alfred Hitchcock–a man with an uncanny ability to spot new talent. While Strangers on a Train is my all-time favourite Hitchcock film, it veers away from the darkest corners of Highsmith’s tale. I like to think that even Hitchcock wasn’t ready to wrestle with some of Highsmith’s controversial and insidiously buried themes.

Highsmith is a criminally underrated writer. While her talents are recognized repeatedly by the film industry, she is not as widely read as she deserves to be. During Highsmith’s lifetime she won a number of awards, but those awards are largely granted to mystery novels, and mystery and crime novels aren’t considered on the same playing field as so-called literary fiction. In 2011, Grove Press championed Patricia Highsmith by declaring the re-release of nine of Highsmith’s books, and that brings me to the sinister, moody psychological novel, The Cry of the Owl.

The Cry of the Owl is set in a small Pennsylvania town, and the story begins with quiet, introverted engineer Robert Forrester leaving work one night. Mentally shattered from a recent vicious divorce, feeling lonely, sad and depressed, Forrester has developed a habit of stopping at an isolated country house and watching a pretty young woman as she moves through her mundane, domestic tasks. This isn’t exactly peeping tom stuff as Forrester isn’t interested in catching the girl nude or even watching the girl with her fiancé, Greg. Instead it’s as though watching the girl provides Forrester with some sort of reassurance that decency and normalcy exist somewhere in the world. Forrester thinks this is fairly harmless stuff–although to get a better look he must leave his car, creep up to the house, and watch the girl in the dark. Each time he promises himself that it will be his last, but he always returns, inexplicably drawn to the picture of domestic simplicity and harmony.

Perhaps it’s inevitable. Perhaps Forrester intended it to happen. One night, the girl, bank teller, Jenny Thierolf, spots Forrester in the gloom. We’d expect her to scream, run away and call the police. But she doesn’t. Instead she invites Forrester in:

“He stared at her in an unbelieving way, at her soft hair so close to him now, only six feet away, at her gray eyes—they had flecks of blue in them. Here. So near he could touch them, were the white curtains he had seen her put up, the oven door he had seen her so often bend to open. And something else struck him: his pleasure or satisfaction in seeing her more closely now was no greater than when he looked at her through the window, and he foresaw that getting to know her even slightly would be to diminish her and what she stood for to him—happiness and calmness and the absence of any kind of strain.”

From this point on, a dreadful atmosphere of growing menace lurks over the story as its damaged, emotionally disturbed characters interact and form dangerous, obsessive relationships. Right after the dreamy, moody Jenny enters Forrester’s life, his ex-wife, the toxic, psychotic man-eater Nickie begins pestering him with intrusive phone calls. Tormenting men is a favourite sick game for Nickie, and she’s not about to give up the sport of hounding Forrester–even though she has fresh meat at home in the form of a new pliable, rich husband. Jenny’s boyfriend, Greg, a pharmaceutical salesman with broken relationships in his past doesn’t appreciate Forrester’s presence in his fiancée’s life, and these four characters: Jenny, Greg, Nickie and Forrester find themselves emotionally tangled on a collision course with death. There’s the sense that the events that occur are unique and could only occur in this fatal cocktail, stirred by a death obsession, dependant personalities, and fueled by violent jealousy.

This is a Highsmith tour-de-force–a must read for those who’ve tested Highsmith territory with the Ripley novels. The Cry of The Owl moves with precision skill to its stunning conclusion even as it explores the inherent dangers of crossing the boundary between fantasy and reality, the repressive horror of small town living, and the monstrosity of society’s collective judgment.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 19 readers
PUBLISHER:	Grove Press; Reissue edition (July 12, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on Patricia Highsmith
EXTRAS:	Guy Savage review of Eleven
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Best American Noir of the Century edited by Otto Penzler and James Ellroy The Sinner by Petra Hamesfahr

Bibliography:

• Strangers on the Train (1950; 2001)
• The Price of Salt (1952; 2004)
• The Blunderer (1954; 2001)
• Deep Water (1957; 2003)
• A Game for the Living (1958; 1994)
• The Sweet Sickness (1960; 2002)
• The Cry of the Owl (1962; July 2011)
• The Two Faces of January (1964; 1994)
• The Glass Cell (1964; 2004)
• A Suspension of Mercy (1965; 2001)
• Those Who Walk Away (1967; 1994)
• The Tremor of Forgery (1969; 1994)
• Eleven: Stories (1970; July 2011)
• A Dog’s Ransom (1972; 2002)
• Little Tales of Misogyny : Stories (1974; 2002)
• The Animal Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder: Stories (1975; 2002)
• Edith’s Diary (1977; 2002)
• Slowly, Slowly in the Wind: Stories (1979; 2004)
• The Black House : Stories (1981; 2004)
• People Who Knock on the Door (1983; 2001)
• Mermaids on the Golf Course : Stories (1985; 2003)
• Found in the Street (1987; 1994)
• Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes ( (1987; 1994)
• Small g: a Summer Idyll (1995; 2005)
• Nothing That Meets the Eye: The Uncollected Stories (2002)
• The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith (2005)

Ripley Novels:

• The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955; 2008)
• Ripley Under Ground (1970; 2008)
• Ripley’s Game (1974; 2008)
• Ripley Under Water (1991; 2008)
• The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980; 2008)

Movies from Books:

• Strangers on a Train (1951)
• The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)
• Ripley’s Game (2004)
• The Cry of the Owl (2009)

“Frozen with fear and anxiety, he felt lost, displaced, and without any idea of what to do next. It was inconceivable. The perfect, organized, meticulously planned Charlie Giles might be the most out-of-control beast imaginable.”

Book Review:

Review by Eleanor Bukowksy  (JUN 25, 2011)

Daniel Palmer’s Delirious is a nightmarish tale in which Charlie Giles, “an electronics superstar,” suddenly loses his job, his reputation, and quite possibly, his mind. Charlie is no stranger to mental illness. His father was schizophrenic and his older brother, Joe, also suffers from the disease. Their mother has devoted her life to helping Joe become more stable, but Charlie has carefully distanced himself from his family and his past. He is a workaholic who made a small fortune from the sale of his start-up company, and is still putting in long hours to earn more money and accolades. One day, everything comes crashing down and he has no idea why. It seems as if he is committing a series of crimes, but he has no memory of having done anything wrong.

This plot, although familiar, works surprising well because Palmer fleshes out his characters and inserts realistic details into the story. The stage is set when we observe Charlie, who cares for his dog more than anyone else, pushing his employees mercilessly. He is a control freak who avoids feeling such “messy emotions” as compassion, empathy, and forgiveness. He prides himself on inspiring fear in his team; he believes that if his workers are anxious, they will produce at a higher level. Soon, the shoe will be on the other foot. Not only will Charlie learn what it is like to be stressed out, but he will also become all too familiar with panic and hysteria. Adding to Charlie’s burdens are serious health issues affecting his mother and brother. For the first time, Charlie sees Joe as a good and valuable person in his own right who deserves love and respect.

Palmer keeps the adrenaline rush going for close to four hundred pages. He masterfully describes Charlie’s horrible mental decline. Should he trust his senses or accept the evidence that condemns him? The author’s familiarity with computer software and music come in handy, since Palmer finds ingenious ways of integrating this knowledge seamlessly into the narrative. The roller coaster ride finally stops when we reach the shocking revelations and final confrontation. Although the ending is implausible in a mind-boggling way, strangely enough, it does not completely detract from the book’s entertainment value. Delirious is an exciting, mind-bending, and suspenseful thriller that explores the dangers inherent in our digital world; the crucial role that family plays in our psychological development; and the ways in which connecting with others helps us realize our full potential as human beings.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 27 readers
PUBLISHER:	Kensington; 1 edition (February 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Daniel Palmer
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:  The Discrete Charm of Charlie Monk by David Ambrose

Bibliography:

• Delirious (February 2011)

“She’s there inside me somewhere, but I don’t want her there. I want her here, so badly I can taste it, the acid tang of need sickeningly fresh and surprising every time. The face in the mirror is blurring before me and suddenly it doesn’t look like either of us. It doesn’t look like anyone I know. I blink the tears away. I whisper my own name to myself, wanting to hear it as she used to say it. Louise. It’s not the same, never the same.

I step back from the mirror, addressing myself in my head. You thought that this would be enough – to see him, to satisfy your curiosity. You were wrong. Nothing you can do will bring her back, but you have the right to know. This man murdered your mother. You need to understand why.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody  (OCT 01, 2010)

Rebecca Connell has written a finely fraught literary thriller and romance in her debut novel, The Art of Losing. It examines the legacy of loss and betrayal and the extent to which a person will go to seek out the truth.

Louise was ten years old when her mother died in a horrible automobile accident. She believes that Nicholas, her mother’s lover, is responsible for her death. Louise decides to infiltrate Nicholas’ life in order to find out the truth. When she is in her twenties, she changes her name to Lydia, her mother’s name, and heads off to Cambridge to find Nicholas who is a lecturer in a college there. Her first plan is to sit in on one of his lectures in order to get a feel for who he is. Serendipitously, at the lecture she meets his son, Adam, and he takes a liking to her. They begin to see each other and party together. She also goes to a cafe that she knows Nicholas frequents. She meets him for a brief moment and ends up crying.

Adam is a college student but “Lydia” is not. She is wholly involved in finding Nicholas and learning about her mother’s death and their relationship. When the college term ends, Adam invites “Lydia” to stay with his family during the break. How much more convenient a setting can that be for her! She notices, when introduced to Adam’s parents, that they cringe when they hear her name. They comment that it’s an unusual name but their reactions are like it’s a frightening and sorrowful memory from the past. “Lydia” keeps a straight face, not divulging any emotions. She and Adam share a room and she proceeds to infiltrate the family.

The novel is told in alternating chapters from the viewpoints of Nicholas and Louise. The chapters are also from different times in the relationship between Nicholas and Lydia. The reader finds out that Lydia was married to Martin when she met Nicholas but that they began their affair anyway. Their affair was passionate and on-going for several months. Nicholas wants Lydia to leave her husband, Martin, and be with him. She, however, decides to stay with Martin. Lydia and Martin move away and it is several years before Nicholas and Lydia cross paths again. Meanwhile, Lydia has a child, Louise, and she and Martin settle in Cambridge where Martin teaches. Nicholas also marries but he can’t let go of Lydia’s memory. He and his wife Naomi have a son, Adam. Ironically, they also live in Cambridge where Nicholas lectures.

On a casual walk in Cambridge, Nicolas runs into Adam and the two couples meet for dinner. The affair recommences with disastrous impact for the two families. Nicholas and Lydia respond to to one another like moths to a flame. Martin and Naomi are two innocents caught up in their partners’ frenzy.

As the novel takes up with “Lydia” in Nicholas’ home, Nicholas chooses to tell her the whole story of the affair, not realizing that she is Lydia’s daughter. He feels comfortable opening up to a perceived stranger. The story takes all kinds of twists and turns, making it eerie and unsettling. It has a gothic feel to it.

The book is a real page-turner and an excellent read. It is hard to put down because the thrill of what’s next beckons with each page. Connell has the knack for holding the reader’s interest and it’s hard to believe this is a debut novel. I look forward to more of her work.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 6 readers
PUBLISHER:	Europa Editions; Reprint edition (September 28, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Bonnie Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Rebecca Connell
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt An interview with Rebecca Connell His Futile Preoccupations review of The Art of Losing
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More psychological thrillers: Matala by Craig Holden The Point of Fracture by Frank Turner Hollon The Dead Lie Down by Sophie Hannah

Bibliography:

• The Art of Losing (2009; September 2010 in US)

“I had a vague idea, just as I was vaguely aware that I was about to cross a threshold that night. Or maybe I’d already crossed it.”

Book Review:

Review by Guy Savage (AUG 14, 2010)

The Past is a Foreign Country from former anti-Mafia prosecutor, Gianrico Carofiglio is primarily a psychological tale. While the novel contains a crime story, the main focus, and perhaps even arguably the main crime, is the complete and utter corruption of one human being by another.

Giorgio is a serious young man, a law student dedicated to his studies and committed to his long term girlfriend, but his life changes radically when he’s befriended by the charismatic, good-looking Francesco. They meet at a party when Giorgio intervenes in what threatens to develop into a full-blown beating, and then gradually the two young men form a dangerous relationship. Francesco is a cardsharp, and he introduces Giorgio to his criminal lifestyle. Soon Giorgio partners with his “mentor” Francesco to spend endless nights bilking suckers in the seedy back rooms of bars and clubs. Giorgio’s moral code is systematically stripped away as he finds himself eased into an exciting life of gambling, booze, drugs and casual sex with bored women.

Giorgio’s corruption is an insidious process, and at first Giorgio isn’t even aware that’s it’s happening. When he does realize it, the recognition is punctuated with denial. He’s distanced from everyone who loves him and just like any addiction, he’s in too deep to be able to get out….

While Francesco begins as Giorgio’s mentor, it’s clear that Francesco’s designs on Giorgio are motivated by power and control. Giorgio is seen as a hollow human being who’s swayed by Francesco’s Ubermensch-inspired bizarre moral arguments. Here’s Francesco arguing why cheating at cards isn’t immoral:

“People manipulate and are manipulated, cheat and are cheated constantly, without realizing it. They hurt other people and are hurt themselves without realizing it. They refuse to realize it because they wouldn’t be able to bear it. A magic trick is an honest thing because we know in advance that the reality of it is different from the appearance. And in a way, on a universal level, cheating at cards is honest too. I mean, we’ve taken control of the situation away from pure chance and put it in our own hands. I know you understand. That’s why I chose you. I wouldn’t say these things to anyone else. We’re challenging the mindless cruelty of chance and defeating it. Do you understand? You and I are violating commonplace rules and choosing our own destiny.”

If you’ve ever wondered how the demonic partnerships of people like Leopold and Loeb or Ian Brady and Myra Hindley got started, then you’ll be interested in The Past is a Foreign Country. Ultimately this is a novel that examines the issue of identity and its relationship to morality. The process of maturing includes discovering exactly what one is and isn’t capable of, and in this story, Giorgio’s sense of self is gradually eroded by the much stronger-willed, Francesco. Under Francesco’s tutelage, weak-willed Giorgio becomes his “mentor’s” doppelganger and his willing pupil. While the reader may experience some frustration at Giorgio’s inherently weak nature, the story is riveting. The tale gathers momentum with shades of foreboding and the irresistible fascination of watching an imminent train-wreck. Carofiglio pulls the various threads together for an explosive collusion course in this elegant Italian crime novel. (Translated by Howard Curtis.)

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 4 readers
PUBLISHER:	Minotaur Books; 1 edition (July 20, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Guy Savage
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Gianrico Carofiglio (in Italian) Wikipedia page on Gianrico Carofiglio
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Reasonable Doubts

Bibliography:

• Involuntary Witness (2002; 2005 in US)
• A Walk in the Dark (2003; 2006 in US)
• Reasonable Doubt (2003; 2007 in US)

Stand-alone fiction:

• The Past is a Foreign Country (2004; August 2010 in US)

“That was the last statement that Viktor heard clearly. For a fleeting moment, everything became apparent. He knew exactly what had happened. The awful truth appeared before him, revealing itself briefly like a dream in the moment of consciousness, then slipping from his grasp.  Momentarily the whole business was laid open: Josy’s illness and the pain that had haunted her for the past eleven months. He knew what had happened, knew what had been done to her and, with a lurching feeling in his stomach, knew they would be after him too. Sooner or later they would get to him, he knew it with unshakeable conviction, but the moment passed and the horrifying truth escaped him, disappearing as forlornly as a single drop of water in a flood. “

Book Review:

Reviewed by Eleanor Bukowsky (MAY 03, 2009)

In Sebastian Fitzek’s Therapy, forty-seven year old Dr. Viktor Larenz is “an eminent psychiatrist with a successful clinic in central Berlin” and “is the author of numerous books and was once a regular guest on radio and TV.” He has a wife, Isabell, and an eleven-year old daughter, Josy, whom he adores. Sadly, Larenz experiences a mental breakdown and is admitted to a facility for treatment. What precipitated his emotional collapse? It seems that his little girl had been ill for almost a year, with symptoms that her doctors could not trace to any obvious cause. Josy starts out with vomiting and diarrhea and later suffers from seizures, infections, and nosebleeds. Then, something even more dreadful occurs. Josy vanishes, and her father is beside himself with grief.

Therapy veers from the present to the past and then back to the present, as Larenz’s therapist, Dr. Roth, attempts to unlock the secrets of his patient’s disordered psyche. Viktor recounts his stay in his family’s island cottage four years after his child’s disappearance. One day, an intruder enters his house. She is a mysterious woman named Anna Glass, who may have important information about Josy’s fate. Although he no longer practices medicine, Larenz agrees to treat Anna, hoping that they can bring one another the closure that they desperately seek.

Sally-Ann Spencer skillfully translates this tale of obsession and self-delusion from the original German. Fitzek plays with us, allowing us glimpses of the truth and then throwing us off the scent. The canny reader will probably guess what is going on long before the book’s denouement, but there are some surprising developments that few will foresee. Larenz is a tragic yet sympathetic hero. We identify with his pain and torment, even as we dread finding out the reason for his bizarre behavior. When Viktor decides to face reality, he suspects that doing so will cost him the little sanity that he still possesses. Therapy is a bit too gimmicky to work as a literary thriller, but it is a mesmerizing and fast-paced novel that effectively explores the most twisted recesses of the human mind.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 2 readers
PUBLISHER:	St. Martin’s Press; 1 edition (March 17, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Eleanor Bukowsky
AMAZON PAGE:	Therapy
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Sebastian Fitzek
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Author John Katzenbach recommends Therapy. Readers who enjoy this book may also enjoy: THE DISAPPARATION OF JAMES by Anne Ursu PRINCE OF LOST PLACES by Kathy Hepinstall

Bibliography:

• Therapy (2006; March 2009 in US)
• Dialing Amok (2007)
• The Child Breaker (2008)
• The Spirit Breaker (October 2008)
• Splitter (June 2009)