Finished another two books which I've been reading on and off for the past week or two.
I Remember You by Icelandic author
Yrsa Sigurðardóttir was another one of her standalone supernatural suspense thrillers. Or rather, her stealth psychological suspense thrillers semi-disguised as supernatural thrillers with paranormal elements sometimes obfuscating some very mundane explanations for apparently murderous ghostly vengeance.
Anyway, this was a mildly complex story with two intertwining storylines—one following a psychiatrist assisting with a mysterious school vandalism case which may have had roots in the distant past, the other featuring a married couple and their recently widowed friend trying to DIY renovate a summer cottage in an isolated area in order to sell and alleviate their financial difficulties after the Icelandic credit crunch—both of whom become haunted by strange occurrences that may be prompted by some unsolved disappearances in the area. (Let that be a lesson to you: it's usually not a good idea to move into and make changes to a possible murder house, even if it is selling really cheap because the last owner abruptly left the world or you can live in it for free as part of a perk of your job.)
Paranormal thrillers aren't really my sort of thing, so I appreciated that there were some perfectly human means and motives for some of the stuff going on, as well as the supernatural side. And otherwise the author did build up the tension nicely in a contrasting manner, with one set of parties trying to find a rational explanation before giving in and going along with what they thought the ghostly presence wanted, whereas the other moved from skepticism to fear to a delusional state of denial, each showing different ways of coming to realize the truth of the matter. A decent read, if not as personally engaging as her Thóra Guðmundsdóttir series of more conventional mysteries.
The Greenland Breach by French author
Bernard Besson was one of those espionage action technothrillers with an ecological twist, set ten minutes into the future where Greenland has finally gained its independence from Denmark but is breaking up in other ways due to climate change causing accelerated natural disaster with catastrophic local and eventually global effects as well as an economic scramble from other nations to exploit newly-exposed rare earth resources. It turned out to be the 1st novel in a series starring retired half-American French special agent John Spencer Larivière, who has set up a private security consulting firm with his French-Cambodian partner Victoire (also retired from the intelligence services) and their genius assistant Luc, who cheerfully uses his bisexual attractiveness skills and ability to cross-dress for bonus undercover info gathering.
I bought this on impulse when the English-language publisher Le French Book was offering it on sale, partly because I like to support affordable translated works, and because I've also an interest in Arctic-related subjects. Probably a lingering cultural heritage effect of the search for the Northwest Passage, which is pretty much one of the main reasons Canada even exists today.
Incidentally, this is the second futuristic novel by a non-Canadian author I've read in as many months which posits that one of Canada's government agencies will soon become a highly skilled, ruthless, and deadly competent internationally feared force, which normally I would laugh at, but OTOH the
author's Wikipedia page does say that he's a respected international security expert with a specialty in economic intelligence. So maybe he secretly knows stuff about some nefarious master plan behind
CSIS' tendency to lose classified documents while attending hockey games and in phone booths.
In any case, even though it was a slow start which took me a while to get into, I liked this more than I was expecting to. For some reason I usually find action/suspense thrillers kind of boring (too much seemingly gratuitous manufactured drama and hair-raising death-defying moments and last-minute revelation of double-dealing backstabbing betrayal, I suspect, and this one was no exception in that regard). But the combination of engaging personalities and activities for two out of the three leads (alas, not the one who's the star of the series) as well as a setting that I'm interested in, with some nice nods to the local culture instead of just using it as an exotic backdrop for all the corporate/international espionage stuff, helped boost my enjoyment of this.
Although I have to admit I'm kind of mildly disappointed what with all the leads being presented as sexy, liberated open-minded people who all liked and respected and held each other in high regard and thought that the others were very attractive indeed and all lived together in the same specially-reserved apartment building
cum office/spy gadget stash (I want their touchscreen video wall), they didn't end up having a friendly threesome for one of their obligatory quota of action thriller sex scenes. Eh, maybe next book, which I'm somewhat more interested in having a look at now, if some of the stuff about how global economics and the international power balance is permanently changed as a result of the climactic (and climatic) fallout gets followed up in the as-yet untranslated further installments.