Hey!! Let's get some action going! What are we reading?

[HarryT]

Just been away on a very enjoyable week's holiday in the English Lake District, during which time I read three books:

"The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side" by Agatha Christie. This was her 64th book, and was originally published in 1962. This is a "Miss Marple" story, and is a loose sequel to the earlier Miss Marple novel, "The Body in the Library". Gossington Hall, formerly the home of the local "squire", in whose library the aforementioned body was found, is now occupied by an American film star, Marina Gregg and her husband. During an fete to raise money for charity, a local woman dies after drinking a poisoned cocktail, apparently intended for Marina Gregg. Miss Marple investigates.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. In it, Miss Marple, now a very old lady, reflects on how the world of the 1960s, and life in her small village of St Mary Mead, has changed since her own youth. Although this is far from being Christie's last book, or even the last "Miss Marple" book, it is notable in being the last book that Christie wrote to be set in a small English village, and very much represents the end of an era in that sense.

The title comes from the poem "The Lady of Shalott", by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, which is quoted a number of times in the book:

Out flew the web and floated wide-
The mirror crack'd from side to side;
"The curse is come upon me," cried
The Lady of Shalott.

One of the best of Christie's later books, to my mind. Very highly recommended.

Next I read "A Hymn Before Battle" by John Ringo. I bought this from Baen in October 2000, and it's the first book in his (and other authors') long-running "Posleen" military SF series. In this book, Earth is contacted by a confederation of alien races to warn them that the Earth is next on the invasion route of an aggressive alien race (the Posleen) who have so far conquered 70 planets. The Galactics are pacifists, psychologically incapable of fighting, so Earth is recruited to furnish troops to stop the Posleen, with the aid of Galactic technology. Very good - this was back in the good old days when Ringo wrote decent SF, rather than right-wing political manifestos, which are what he now seems to churn out.

Last, but not least, was another Agatha Christie book, "The Clocks". This was published in 1963 and was her 65th book. The book has two interwoven plots: the main plot involves a young woman from a secretarial bureau who is sent to the house of a local blind women teacher for some work. When she arrives, she goes into the woman's house and discovered the body of a man, in a room full of clocks which were apparently put there by the murderer. There is a subplot of a secret service agent investigating communist spies (the agent is the main narrator of the book). Poirot is fairly peripherally involved in the story, and the two storylines come together at the end. Pretty good, but not as good as the previous book.

[Stitchawl]

I'm in the middle of "Field of Prey" (A Lucas Davenport Novel Book 24) and John Sandford has managed to do it again! 24 books in this series and each of them a delightful view of the life and times of Lucas Davenport as he plows into yet another bizarre crime. All the usual players are along for the ride; his wife, kids (even the housekeeper,) Del, the two kneebreakers, Rose Marie, and even Virgil Flowers pokes his head in. Good solid detective novel with a slice of life added for fun.


Stitchawl

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Tarana

Abandoned my first book of the year, Where'd You Go Bernadette by Maria Semple. It's popular, so I guess it's just not my style. It was funny, but I liked the characters less and less the more I read, so I finally skipped to the end and was glad I didn't make myself read the rest. Read about 40% total. It was a book club reading selection, but this was one of the book clubs I abandoned because the books were just hit or miss for me.

I recently finished Where'd You Go Bernadette (for a local book club later this month) and I rather enjoyed it. I'd recommend it to anyone who wants an amusing, lighthearted, easy, and fun read.

Another book I've also recently finished (for yet another book club later this month) is The City & The City by China Mieville.

It started off Ok and then got harder to read and did end up getting much better.

When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. To investigate, Borlú must travel from the decaying Beszel to its equal, rival, and intimate neighbor, the vibrant city of Ul Qoma. But this is a border crossing like no other, a journey as psychic as it is physical, a seeing of the unseen. With Ul Qoman detective Qussim Dhatt, Borlú is enmeshed in a sordid underworld of nationalists intent on destroying their neighboring city, and unificationists who dream of dissolving the two into one. As the detectives uncover the dead woman’s secrets, they begin to suspect a truth that could cost them more than their lives. What stands against them are murderous powers in Beszel and in Ul Qoma: and, most terrifying of all, that which lies between these two cities.

The setup of the two cities works very well along with the mystery. The mystery would not have happened if it was not for the unique way the two cities are setup and the solution to the mystery also works because of the two cities.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

The graphic novel was good. The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic work so well together as one book, I wonder if that was always the intention.

If you haven;t seen the movie version of both of these (both in one movie) then I'd suggest you do so. It's very good.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by poohbear_nc

For years I've been a HUGE fan of Christopher Fowler's unique Peculiar Crimes Unit series

Unlike its main characters, I fear this series is beginning to show its age ....

My suggestion is to try the book coming out sometime 2015 and if it's just not that good, then it's time to give up on this series.

[Lusitanic]

"星虫" by 岩本隆雄 (hoshi mushi)
"Resident Evil Zero Hour" by S.D. Perry
"Awaken the Giant within" by Anthony Robbins
"Screenplay the foundations of writing" by Syd Field
"Quiet" by Susan Cain

[ATDrake]

So I finished Jo Nesbø's Phantom, which is the actual title of #9 in the Harry Hole, Dysfunctional Yet Brilliant Norwegian Sometimes-Inspector, and not The Leopard as I thought it was (and it turned out was actually #8 in the series which I finished previously) due to the omnibus edition getting the title/image order on the cover wrong. Ah, my e-book quality assurance dollars at work…

And this does indeed turn out to form a 3-book mini-arc dealing with the fallout of #7 The Snowman.

Where #8 had a parent/child theme kind of going on, #9 is a more generalized family relationship sort of thing, with both blood and surrogate families involved, from the runaway teenaged junkies trying to form a sort of bond, to the police officers who turn to their work connections as a substitute, to the low-level Russian enforcers who have their crime connections as their major human contacts, and the way these things all tie together to provide the means and motivation by which the crimes are performed and pursued.

This time around, rather than the serial killer/multiple murderer circuit, we've got a plain old drugs-related killing.

Except that it isn't quite as simple as it seems on the surface, as there are hints as to a criminal gang conspiracy involving political corruption and a dangerous new designer drug, and moreover, the case also has a personal pull on Harry, as it involves several persons quite near to him.

Harry's pretty much six for six in terms of the cases of his which I've read involving him very personally in some way, whether it's the suspects/revealed-to-the-reader guilty parties seeming to have close ties to him, or just plain cozying up to him because he's Harry Hole, Intrepid Norwegian FBI-Trained Serial Killer Catcher and they want to monitor/taunt his progress in person or whatever.

It kind of brings to mind that episode of Batman: The Animated Series, "The Trial", I think it was called, where Batman and a District Attorney are trapped in Arkham Asylum and she has to defend Batman from a makeshift court accusing him of being guilty of creating the monsters he has to catch, considering that so many of the inmates have their origin stories in Batman foiling some sort of petty scheme of theirs and then their going on to some kind of escalating vengeance/megalomania based on that initial defeat*.

And Harry's cases are kind of like that. He does have the reputation as the top killer-catcher and the only Norwegian trained for serial killers, so they naturally gravitate towards him. But in this case, the murderer under suspicion comes from Harry's own actions in relation to another of his cases.

If #8 was Harry himself dealing with the fallout to him personally from the Snowman case, then #9 shows the results of its traumatic effect on the persons Harry left behind when he sought to make his own escape from his newly-acquired demons.

We catch up on Harry's friends, colleagues, and loved ones in a rather changed Oslo, under the command of a dubious police chief who'd been one of his enemies before departure, with his old allies having more or less willingness/reluctance to work with him now, and the stresses that affected them in his absentee wake as the prodigal son left their midst, which seem to have taken one of them to the breaking point.

Once again, this is one of the deeper and more thoughtful installments in the Hole series which I've read thus far, playing out all the variations of trust and contempt and vengeance and forgiveness, loyalty and betrayal, that can come between people who are members of various types of "families", or simply wish they were part of one or another.

Unusually, the first-person monologue this time is provided not by the real-or-suspected killer, but the apparent murder victim, and the solution is quite the surprise. It's not too out-there to be believed (and in fact has a bittersweet plausibility), but it's a startling revelation even after you've expected the usual red herrings trying to misdirect you into finding someone who seems to have much more reason for being actually guilty of it to actually be guilty. (I totally thought I'd guessed right on this one, since I thought it had to be an apparently innocuous person who was not even on the regular suspect radar but yet still seemed to have potential motive that even Harry recognized at the last minute, but I was wrong.)

The arc of Harry's development is wrapped up in a manner I didn't expect, but which made a kind of sense given what went on before, and was also a little ambiguous as to where the series would go next, which I look forward to finding out once I hit the library up for any of the following books which I can find on-shelf there.

Recommended if you've been following the Hole series. Actually, the case inside is well-done enough to stand alone on its own merits as a whodunnit, and the thematic resonances within the storyline add to its appeal, IMHO. But it really does work better if you've read at least the last couple of books starting from #7 which have set the situation up so you have an idea of what these characters mean to each other.

Anyway, now currently on Nesbø's latest non-Hole standalone crime thriller, The Son, which actually was on the library shelf when I visited.

* I always liked what Robin quipped in the "Lock-Up" episode: "Another fine supervillain brought to you by a grant from the Wayne Foundation." It's funny because it's true!

[Luffy]

I am still trying to complete books that I've chosen a week or so before. On Sunday I spent 10 hours reading The Demon Haunted World, but could only read 28% of it. From a slow start, it matured into a stunning book, and if all goes well, I'll finish the book by tomorrow and give it 5/5 as well. Carl Sagan was a good writer.

[Rev. Bob]

I'm two-thirds of the way through my fourth Star Trek alternate-universe book out of an expected six. The first three completed the "Mirror Universe" storyline, and these next three are "what if" collections (three short novels each) where something went differently and we get to see the ramifications of that. Neat stuff, especially the Voyager alternate that deals with Species 8472.

After those, I might read some "main line" Trek, or I might jump track to read the final "Hollows" book that's coming out Tuesday.

[MickeyC]

Originally Posted by Luffy

On Sunday I spent 10 hours reading The Demon Haunted World, but could only read 28% of it. From a slow start, it matured into a stunning book, and if all goes well, I'll finish the book by tomorrow and give it 5/5 as well. Carl Sagan was a good writer.

Luffy, when you finish, you should give us more details in the Science EBook Recommendations section here https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=62517

[ATDrake]

Finished Jo Nesbø's The Son, a standalone Norwegian crime thriller.

This was on the "Fast Reads" 1-week loan section of the library New Releases shelf and it was indeed a fast read. I managed to get through most of it on the bus ride back home (admittedly, I had some extra time because I missed a connection and had to wait a while).

The setup of this is that Sonny Lofthus, son of an apparently corrupt cop who suicided rather than faced exposure, has due to this troubled background willingly taken the rap for murders he didn't commit in order to spend his life safely imprisoned with the means to feed his resulting heroin addiction via a corrupt justice system.

But, as these things happen, one day he finds reason to escape, and what he does next has a profound effect on the people who get swept up in the wake of his journey.

This is very different in style and tone from Nesbø's Harry Hole crime cases, or even his other standalone thriller Headhunters. In fact, it kind of reminds me of Paulo Coelho's novels which I read a few years ago.

Sonny is presented as a near-messianic figure, with almost preternatural serenity and ability to gain and inspire trust and transformation in the people whose lives he touches. I'm not sure if this is truly meant to be allegorical (what with the entire son of a mythical departed figure who suffered for other peoples' sins returning to the world that sent him out of it and revealing truths unto his followers and all that) or I'm just reading too much into coincidental common characterization elements.

The novel is entirely written in constantly shifting 3rd-person limited perspective, probably very deliberately, as we only ever see Sonny through other people's eyes, as he appears to them varyingly as a prison confidant, an escaped multiple murderer, a homeless recovering addict, a naive but generous client, a troubled but essentially decent young man, a suspected home invader, a mysterious heroic figure, the prospective victim of a planned hit, and a terrifying instrument of incomprehensible violence.

Ultimately, it seems that despite being the central figure of the story, Sonny himself is not so much important for who or even what he is, but for what he means to the other characters who are following him in one way or another, from Simon Kefas*, a former colleague of Sonny's father who may know more about the circumstances of his death than he lets on and is also on Sonny's trail along with his new partner Kari, to Markus, a lonely neighbour boy who spends his days watching the empty Lofthus residence and becomes thrilled by apparent new activity in the "ghost" house, to Martha, a social worker at the drug treatment clinic who only sees and knows him under a false name as a random addict, and many others who may or may not be aware of his apparently criminal past and/or working to ensure that their complicity in it stays hidden, and who are all affected by his spiritual mana.

While there is a slowly-unravelling mystery in this story, of exactly what happened in the past as well as what Sonny's intentions and end goals are, it's really much more of a gradually-building suspense, where the nature of his plans and the revelations of their purpose don't matter so much as how far he'll be able to get in accomplishing them with the balancing forces of opposition and enablement standing in his way.

Overall, this was an interesting read which seemed to take a very different structural approach to a standard sort of unveiled corruption maybe brought to justice crime thriller and remix its basic elements to end up with an unusual genre-bending† sort of presentation.

Medium recommend if you think you might be interested in this sort of approach to a crime thriller.

* Incidentally, I like that Kefas used to work in what the book calls the Serious Fraud Office division of the police. There's just that pleasant implication that somewhere out there, there may also be a Not-So-Serious Fraud Office, although there probably isn't.

† Mind you, I don't read all that many unveiled corruption maybe brought to justice crime thrillers, so for all I know, fully 50% of them could be just like this one.

[HarryT]

The Serious Fraud Office exists in many countries. Eg here's the British one:

http://www.sfo.gov.uk/

[Luffy]

Originally Posted by MickeyC

Luffy, when you finish, you should give us more details in the Science EBook Recommendations section here https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=62517

I'll certainly drop in a word or two, more if the book hasn't been discussed. Maybe I'll post my review.

[bfisher]

Currently reading two books about Big Tobacco

"Ashes to Ashes America's Hundred-year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris" by Richard Kluger

and

"The Cigarette Century The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America" by Allan Brandt

Kluger won the Pulitzer Prize (General Non-Fiction) in 1997 for his book, as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1996. Brandt's book is somewhat later (2007). I find them complementary. Brandt's book is centered more on public health (he's a prof in the history of medicine at Harvard Medical School). Kluger is a journalist, so there's a wealth of detail in his book on the workings of the tobacco trade.

These books hit home for me. My mother, a lifelong smoker, died early of lung cancer in 1998. I was a heavy smoker for 25 years until I finally got that monkey off my back in 1992. I quit then because by that time there was enough grass roots campaigning that my workplace became smoke free.

I found it very interesting to read just how effective the tobacco companies were at leveraging the lavish profits they got from selling a deadly product to prevent any effective public regulation or public education campaign for so long.

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The Serious Fraud Office exists in many countries. Eg here's the British one:

Cool. I thought that had just been a quaint translation of whatever the Norwegian name for it was.

Financial crimes like that just seem to go to the RCMP or the Auditor General's Office in Canada, depending on who's involved. It doesn't get a special division name, AFAIK.

Made the walk to the local library branch which lo and behold, turned out to have all of Jo Nesbø's Harry Hole series which I'd been "missing" from my omnibus purchases.

Accordingly, the first I read was Police, 10th and thus far latest in the series, in order to find out what happened after the end of #9 Phantom.

NB: If you are thinking of picking up the series or have not already read through #9, DO NOT so much as skim any kind of opening sample for #10, as the prologue completely spoilers everything significant that happened in #9, as well as telling you who was behind it.

At first I wondered why Nesbø didn't simply start with his usual cold open of finding "another year, another dead body", as the Amelia Peabody books would put it, and not bothering to recap anything at all for the Gentle Reader who skipped a book/forgot what happened last time, only vaguely alluding to previous installments now and then. But now I suspect it's so he can cause the maximum chaos and confusion to reader expectations going into this one.

The ostensible case is that someone is targeting former police officers who've worked on cases where they failed to catch previous killers and this puts a number of characters we've managed to get acquainted with over the course of the series at risk.

In addition to this, some fallout from the events of the previous book is still ongoing, with additional maneuvring and plotting to cover things up.

And you can probably guess upon whose person it all intersects. It's like that RL guy who had a documentary made about him because he kept being struck by lightning again and again.

It all becomes very typical Nesbø, as he indulges his decided love for multiple fake-out danger moments*, suspected hidden identities, conveniently-appearing dubious connections/behaviour which imply guilt on the part of persons who may not actually appear guilty (at least not of that particular crime), enabling the mistaken belief that one is on the trail of the right person when actually they're not, thrilling sneaking around/chase scenes on the desperate trail to collect overlooked/illegal evidence which turns out to not be helpful after all, etc., to an even higher degree than I've seen him do it in the past.

This is a pretty straightforward making-and-wrapping-up-the-connections kind of thriller, with what seems to be a good deal less of the reflectiveness and thematic depth of a few of the past installments in the Hole series. There's an ongoing crime (well, several of them), and it eventually gets chased down and (mostly) solved, at some cost yet to be determined, as several loose ends are left ambiguously hinted at, and that's pretty much it for this episode; To Be Continued…

That said, you do get a good deal of catch-up on what's been happening with the characters you've gotten to know over the course of the series, and there are several important interpersonal developments which will likely have ramifications if and when the next book in the series gets written.

Medium recommend if you've been following the series. A typically-handled sort of case for the Oslo Police in this one; nothing really outstanding in the idea or execution, but kind of a comfort‡ read follow-up to the series to date. And like me, you'll probably be rather curious as to what happened after some of the surprises in #9.

* And by the way, thanks for making me think that a half-dozen or so sympathetic characters were going to/already had died horribly when they didn't, and then actually killing off some I'd grown to really like instead of one of the other ones you could have conveniently gotten rid of instead. Why do all the authors I read almost always† do the latter?

Eh, I suppose we're getting the same lesson that Harry receives with each book: don't get too attached, they're probably a crazed killer or future victim and it's just going to turn out badly.

† Clearly my favour confers DOOOOOM. And backdated DOOOOOM at that.

‡ Except for the bits where it killed off characters I really liked and had been looking forward to seeing more of.

Oh well, I guess I still have 3 more unread earlier Hole books that they might have made appearances in.