A Reading Marathon with some Recommendations

Since winter arrived I have found more excuses to ‘curl up with a book’.  That and listening to selected titles on my trusty Audible App.  I’ll give a brief rundown of some books without a lot of comment and then say a bit more about recommendations.

Continuing with my discovery of the British Library Crime Series I read Cornish Murder by John Bude and Christmas in White by J. Jefferson Farjeon.  Both enjoyed as comfort blanket 

reading.  Perfect over the Christmas interval.  Feel free to borrow!

I read my first Ken Follett, The Man from Moscow, a thriller set in London in 1914.  https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/ken-follett/the-man-from-st-petersburg/9781509862344

Other titles include Exile by James Swallow, sequel to Nomad  which I thought was much better. If you like biographies you might be tempted by Becoming by Michelle Obama.  This has been widely acclaimed and very popular amongst my reading friends but I am somewhat embarrassed to say that, even though her achievements are phenomenal,  I found it a bit too self-promoting.  Perhaps it was not such a good idea to listen to it read by the author herself.

Three to recommend:

The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman

Pullman’s second trilogy following His Dark Materials is The Book of Dust. 

I read volume 1 La Belle Sauvage where the baby Lyra Silvertongue is rescued by Dr Malcolm Polstead, and enjoyed it because I do get swept up into the alternative world around which the novels are based.  Volume 2, The Secret Commonwealth finds Lyra, now twenty years old and her daemon Pantalaimon finding their relationship is put to the test in a dangerous world that finds Lyra travelling through Europe and to the Middle East in a quest to be reunited with Pantalaimo whilst Malcolm now a man with a strong sense of duty and an attachment to Lyra is sent on a journey to find out more about the mysterious roses with special properties that only grow in a desert referenced in the diary of a murdered man.  Rose growers of any kind, even those growing “normal” roses, are being terrorised and murdered by mysterious attackers from the mountains.  Both travel far beyond Oxford where the earlier novels are set to uncover secrets and solve the mystery of the Dust.  I’m not a fan of magical realism but when an author works really hard to make his narrative credible I cannot help get swept up into it.

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

I read this for my French group.  This was a rewarding novel to read. 

Ondaatje’s prose grabbed my attention and interest : the opening sentence ‘In 1945 our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals’ suggests all manner of outcomes might be possible. From the beginning I could not be sure in what direction the narrative might lead. The Moth and then the Darter seemed to be doubtful and rather dangerous adults to be left in charge of two children. Were they going to be mistreated? This seemed a likely plot. The school arrangements were decidedly dodgy, the children deciding they would rather live at home than board as the parents had directed that they should. The Moth acquiesced and his supervision of the children seemed very lax, as the house filled up with a group of eccentric, mysterious, maybe even nefarious characters who came to populate the children’s milieu in postwar London. The narrative unfolds but the reader is never sure where the story is going. In the background I was wondering where the parents were and why they, and in particular the mother, had left so suddenly. What important reasons were there for the parents’ continued absence? I found certain notable scenes and passages particularly memorable when I came to think about the book after I finished it.   For example the greyhound runs on the Thames, and Nathaniel and Agnes’ encounters in the London house. I thought the narrative was cleverly plotted and then unveiled as a story of espionage activities with which Nathaniel and Rachel were necessarily involved.   There were no dramatic twists and turns as often is the case with novels in this genre. Events and explanations were nicely understated in the concluding part of the novel. I liked the book all the more for that.

Second Sleep by Robert Harris

I’ve read most of Robert Harris’s novels (except the Cicero trilogy) and have never been disappointed.  His latest offering is described as a genre-bending thriller: ‘All my books are about power’ he says. What connects them all is a preoccupation with power at its  apogee, on the brink of collapse.

“Late on the afternoon of Tuesday the ninth of April in the Year of our Risen Lord 1468”. A young cleric, Christopher Fairfax, is making his way resentfully to a remote corner of Wessex on the orders of his bishop to officiate at the burial of a village priest. In his opening pages Harris conjures a lost England in its mix of religiosity and brutishness. When Fairfax discovers a display cabinet in the dead priest’s study, its shelves crammed with illegal artefacts, the truth of this world is revealed. Among the plastic bottles, banknotes and toy bricks displayed there, Fairfax discovers “one of the devices used by the ancients to communicate”, its back marked with the ultimate symbol of their “hubris and blasphemy – an apple with a bite taken out of it”.  Abruptly everything shifts, slotting those strange anachronisms into place. Fairfax’s 15th century is not ours but part of a new calendar that had been reset to 666, the numeral of the Beast of Revelation. In Harris’s imagined future, God has brought down the four riders of the apocalypse on the satanic civilisation of the 21st century and the church has reasserted itself at the centre of the state. “Scientism”, the curse of the ancients, is a heresy, a mortal sin. Stripped of the medical and technological advances of the Industrial Revolution, life is once more nasty, brutish and short.

To say more would truly be a plot-spoiler.  I found Harris’s writing so easy on my reading mind, a book that was enthralling.  With a great ending.

The Darkness and Our House

The Darkness by Ragnar Jonasson

I love the Nordic Noir genre of novels and Iceland, a country I have visited, provides perfect settings for crime thrillers.

A young woman is found dead on a remote Icelandic beach. She came looking for safety but instead she found a watery graave. A hasty police investigation determines her death as suicide. When Detective Inspector Hulda Hermannsdóttir of the Reykjavik police is forced into early retirement, she is told she can investigate one last cold case of her choice - and she knows which one. 

What she discovers is far darker than suicide . . . And no one is telling Hulda the whole story.

When her own colleagues try to put the brakes on her investigation, Hulda has just days to discover the truth. A truth she will risk her own life to find.

A neatly plotted thriller with a striking end.  Read more about this book and the author in a review written by a fellow fan of Nordic Noir:

https://www.on-magazine.co.uk/arts/book-review/crime/the-darkness-ragnar-jonasson/

Our House by Louise Candlish

Suggested by Liz of Splinter this turned out to be an archetypal page-turner, and much more.

On a bright morning in the London suburbs, you see a family move into the house they’ve just bought on Trinity Avenue.  Nothing strange about that. Except it's your house. And you didn’t sell it.  

Amazon says:

When Fi Lawson arrives home to find strangers moving into her house, she is plunged into confusion. She and her husband Bram have owned their home on Trinity Avenue for years and have no intention of selling. How can this other family possibly think the house is theirs? And why has Bram disappeared when she needs him most?  Unable to see his wife, his children or his home, he has nothing left but to settle scores. As the nightmare takes grip, both Bram and Fi try to make sense of the events that led to a devastating crime. What has he hidden from her – and what has she hidden from him? And will either survive the chilling truth – that there are far worse things you can lose than your house? 

What I thought:

It is a bit of a nightmare scenario, I think any house-owning reader will relate to that.A day and a half in bed nursing some sort of virus enabled me to read Our House pretty much from cover to cover because this was a page-turner where you would promise to finish at the end of the chapter and then think, I’ll just read one more……

The plot is ingenious and I’m not sure there is another novel in this genre which comes close to matching the series of events that leads up to the moment when Fi arrives home to find her home is no longer her own. 

The plot is plausible with twists and turns which never stray beyond the realms of the believable and the coincidental.  It hinges around the arrogance of a man who thinks he can ignore a driving ban and continue to drive with excess alcohol in his system to boot.  One cover up leads to another and in the end Bram and Fi are both guilty of believing they can get away with ‘murder’.

Bram makes that initial mistake which will have such unfolding and catastrophic consequences and he must then pay the price.  So, the irony in the final paragraph……. Bram still goes on thinking he can make it right and in doing so seals his wife’s fate. 

A true page-turner and I would not be surprised to see it made into a film.

Calypso, Cockroaches, Praxis

So much reading accomplished in the past month or so, and less time to find my blogs.  So, three short accounts of three books, 'yer' mixed bag of titles, and here goes:

Calypso by David Sedaris

Certainly a book to delight me for David Sedaris is a raconteur par excellence whom I have heard on Radio 4,.  He is an American humourist, comedian, author, and radio contributor. He was publicly recognized in 1992 when National Public Radio broadcast his essay "Santaland Diaries." He published his first collection of essays and short stories, Barrel Fever, in 1994. Much of his humour is ostensibly autobiographical and self-deprecating and often concerns his family life, his middle-class upbringing in the suburbs of Raleigh, North Carolina, his Greek heritage, homosexuality, jobs, education, drug use, and obsessive behaviours, as well as his life in France, London, and the English South Downs.   I have enjoyed the Sedaris radio series for years so was delighted when my Splinter friend Jan recommended the book.  Sedaris is at his best, for me, when he is on family stuff, notably his father! 

For good measure, here is what Amazon has to say:

If you've ever laughed your way through David Sedaris's cheerfully misanthropic stories, you might think you know what you're getting with Calypso. You'd be wrong.

When he buys a beach house on the Carolina coast, Sedaris envisions long, relaxing vacations spent playing board games and lounging in the sun with those he loves most. And life at the Sea Section, as he names the vacation home, is exactly as idyllic as he imagined, except for one tiny, vexing realization: it's impossible to take a vacation from yourself.

With Calypso, Sedaris sets his formidable powers of observation toward middle age and mortality. Make no mistake: these stories are very, very funny - it's a book that can make you laugh 'til you snort, the way only family can. Sedaris's writing has never been sharper, and his ability to shock readers into laughter unparalleled. But much of the comedy here is born out of that vertiginous moment when your own body betrays you and you realize that the story of your life is made up of more past than future.

This is beach reading for people who detest beaches, required reading for those who loathe small talk and love a good tumour joke. Calypso is simultaneously Sedaris's darkest and warmest book yet - and it just might be his very best.

What I say: Recommended.

Praxis by Fay Weldon
The only thing this book has in common with Calypso is the etymology of the title word, sharing as it does with Calypso, an ancient Greek origin.

I had not read any Fay Weldon before but this book fell into my pot because it was Shortlisted for the Man Booker and is therefore, for me, a 'set book'!  I could not possibly say in a short paragraph or two what the book is about or what I felt about it.  It is variously described as 'a powerful marvellous novel.... about madness, deceit and the will to survive' and perhaps most succinctly 'Fay Weldon has compressed in her account of the life of one woman an entire spectru of women's lives.'  

Praxis tells the story of a woman from childhood to adulthood. The book begins in wartime Brighton and follows Praxis in her various personalities - whore, adulteress and finally murderer. 

Praxis Duveen is a survivor. At five years old, in 1920s England, she is still innocent, the product of an unstable mother and a flighty father who abandoned Praxis and her half-crazy sister, Hypatia. As the decades fly by, Praxis experiences many incarnations, from prostitute to rape victim, wife to adulteress and eventually becomes the accidental leader of an international women's movement.

Now, from her dingy basement apartment, where she's attempting to write a memoir, Praxis tells about the story of her remarkable journey – peppered with more than a few detours along the way...

Now in her ninth decade, Fay Weldon is one of the foremost chroniclers of our time, a novelist who spoke to an entire generation of women by daring to say the things that no one else would. Her work ranges over novels, short stories, children's books, nonfiction, journalism, television, radio, and the stage. She was awarded a CBE in 2001. 

Do I recommend this book?  I actually found Praxis rather bleak and depressing.  It really did lower my mood whilst reading it.  The book seemed to contain no joy, other than the sexual gratification which Praxis derived from her various relationships.  And even there joy might not be the most apposite word to use.  However, it was one of those books that reads itself, and is a social document of the period that it covers.  

Cockroaches by Jo Nesbo

I like Jo Nesbo's thrillers.  So, evidently, do the Norwegian people.  More than 3 million copies of his novels have been sold in Norway, which has a population of 5,300,000.   

His novels have been translated into over 40 languages. He has his official website

https://jonesbo.com/

and is best known for his protagonist, the Oslo detective Harry Hole.  His books are listed in publication order here:

https://www.bookseriesinorder.com/jo-nesbo/

Synopsis: Detective Harry Hole arrives in steaming hot Bangkok. The Norwegian ambassador has been found dead in a seedy motel room, and Harry has been sent to investigate. It’s clear that the Ambassador’s family are hiding some secrets of their own, but few people are willing to talk. 

When Harry lays hands on some incriminating CCTV footage, things only get more complicated. The man who gave him the tape goes missing, and Harry realises that failing to solve a murder case is by no means the only danger that faces the unwary.  But in an unfamiliar city, who can you trust?

I enjoyed it.  It was time to read a thriller and this fitted the bill.  That's it.  

Not Exactly a Tour de Force

Force of Nature by Jane Harper

This was a popular choice for my Dorset Book Group, Splinter, and was suggested by Gina, as we had all read The Dry by Jane Harper as a set book for an earlier meeting.  That was Harper's debut novel and won awards.  We enjoyed that read although I seem to recall we had some minor quibbles with it.  But essentially the plotting was good and we did not guess the perpetrator of the crime.

Sadly I found Jane Harper's second novel a disappointment, a damp squib of a crime thriller.  The premise seemed to start well, five women go into The Bush and four come out.  In a nutshell you have a plot and the potential to build engagement with characters and suspense.  But it was such a slow boiler and the narrative got bogged down in minutiae both in terms of conversations between characters, and the flitting between chapters, the Searched and the Searchers, far from building suspense just became frustrating.  I wanted to get on with it, after all this was no great work of literature.  It was a whodunnit, let's keep it moving.  So it was all rather dull.

When a body did not turn up fairly promptly I thought well this is getting interesting, there is a mystery to unpick.  You can usually expect the body fairly early on, then it is about solving the identity of the perpetrator.  But no, just the unrelenting squabbling and bitching going on between the women with some fuzzy sub-plots relating to the company they all worked for.  Throw in a history of substance abuse and drinking on the part of the one flawed twin, an anorexic daughter, an explicit video shared by teenage schoolchildren on their mobile phones.  Some of the usual suspects to inject a bit of drama.  But it did not spice up an essentially very plain dish.  Even the death of Alice, had to be a composite effort by the various women in the party.  It seemed to me that the author was trying to make the denouement a bit complex but it did not work for me.  And ultimately I thought the showdown at the waterfall was just silly.

Oh dear, I do sound rather pompous about this but I just feel it was all a disappointment.

A Page of Quickies

Here follows a series of concise reviews of books that I have read. They did not warrant my normal treatment because either they were books I did not quite manage to fathom, or were what one might classify as 'holiday' reads - what I would call fast food novels.

First up is Conclave by Robert Harris.

Even a seasoned reviewer in The Guardian was moved to write "I am about to use a word I have never knowingly used in any review of any book ever. During my 25-odd years of writing about books I have done my best to avoid cliches, slipshod summaries, oracular pronouncements and indeed anything else that might appear emblazoned on a book jacket. Nonetheless, there is only one possible word to describe Robert Harris’s new novel, and it is this: unputdownable."

In a nutshell, the pope is dead and cardinals are gathering to elect his successor in this portrait of power, corruption and deceit.  There you have it.  With a fabulous denouement.  I recommended this to my discerning doctor friend, in French translation.  

                                                                   ↝↝↝↝↝

When I was browsing bookshelves in a charity shop I spotted 

After Me Comes The Flood by Sarah Perry.

I recognised it as the debut novel of Sarah Perry.  She of The Essex Serpent fame.  It is a short novel and looked accessible 200+ pages, pages not densely printed.  For me the novel was a conundrum which I never got into because I could not quite make sense of the story, such as it is.  There is one section which takes place on a beach, near a saltmarsh which involves a lost child.  Here Perry is clearly at home: saltmarshes, tides which ebb and flow, once again an upturned rowing boat.  This environment in the natural world is clearly familiar to her.  (Perry grew up in Chelmsford, Essex, alongside the Thames Funnel)  When she is in that milieu where the land meets the sea she is utterly at home in her writing.  Later she describes a powerful rainstorm which brings about the climax of the novel, again her powers of description of natural phenomena are on show.  

The novel garnered some favourable comment from the likes of Sophie Hannah, Sarah Waters (whose writing I rate highly).  Adjectives like unsettling, intriguing, eerie, dream-like, creeping, gripping are used by reviewers.  I think the novel might warrant a second reading with attention to the calibre of the writing and less focus on a search for a story.  But not just now!

My Purple Scented Novel by Ian McEwan

Amazon says:  
A jewel of a book: a brand new short story from the author of Atonement. My Purple Scented Novel follows the perfect crime of literary betrayal, scrupulously wrought yet unscrupulously executed, published to celebrate Ian McEwan’s 70th birthday.

"You will have heard of my friend the once celebrated novelist Jocelyn Tarbet, but I suspect his memory is beginning to fade…You’d never heard of me, the once obscure novelist Parker Sparrow, until my name was publicly connected with his. To a knowing few, our names remain rigidly attached, like the two ends of a seesaw. His rise coincided with, though did not cause, my decline… I don’t deny there was wrongdoing. I stole a life, and I don’t intend to give it back. You may treat these few pages as a confession.

This is short story published as a stand-alone booklet.  It's a quick read and deals with plagiarism.  Everything you ever wanted to know to pull it off!

It was first published in The NewYorker Magazine in March 2016.  You can read a full transcript here:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/28/my-purple-scented-novel-fiction-by-ian-mcewan

And the transcript of an interview with McEwan about the story in the same periodical here:

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/fiction-this-week-ian-mcewan-2016-03-28

I Am Pilgrim

I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes

One of my fellow Splinters has been banging on about this book!  I hadn't taken the bait as the title didn't grab me; somehow the Bunyanesque handle put me off.  800 pages of someone on a pilgrimage?  I didn't warm to the idea.  So get the idea out of the head, quite simply this novel is a gripping thriller.  It's scary, an inventive spy/terrorist narrative with plausible plot-lines.

Terry Hayes is a former journalist and screenwriter.  He has been an investigative reporter, a political correspondent and columnist.  He is writing on his own territory.   If, like me, you like to intersperse seriously good, top notch, intelligent writing with a well-written and compelling page-turner then Pilgrim fits the bill.  Think Jack Reacher, but so much better on all fronts!

Amazon says:

Pilgrim is the codename for a man who doesn’t exist. The adopted son of a wealthy American family, he once headed up a secret espionage unit for US intelligence. Before he disappeared into anonymous retirement, he wrote the definitive book on forensic criminal investigation.

But that book will come back to haunt him. It will help NYPD detective Ben Bradley track him down. And it will take him to a rundown New York hotel room where the body of a woman is found facedown in a bath of acid, her features erased, her teeth missing, her fingerprints gone. It is a textbook murder – and Pilgrim wrote the book.

What begins as an unusual and challenging investigation will become a terrifying race-against-time to save America from oblivion. Pilgrim will have to make a journey from a public beheading in Mecca to a deserted ruins on the Turkish coast via a Nazi death camp in Alsace and the barren wilderness of the Hindu Kush in search of the faceless man who would commit an appalling act of mass murder in the name of his God.

WHAT I THOUGHT

‘Two psychos enter, and one psycho leaves. Good entertainment for readers with a penchant for mayhem, piles of bodies and a lethal biochemical agent or two.’ Kirkus Reviews

This is certainly a page-turner, a race against time between two sharp minds, determined to prevail.  In a nutshell, a former intelligence agent who wrote a book on forensic pathology becomes involved in a case where someone uses his book to commit untraceable murders. Because of the agent’s earlier career, he also gets involved in another case involving a threat involving an ex-Afghan fighter who uses the network he established fighting the Soviets to reverse engineer a virus which threatens humanity.  The fighter is turned as an eleven-year old boy when he witnesses the public beheading of his father in a Saudi Arabian square.

In trying to get inside the mind of the Saracen, Pilgrim has to use his intuition and intelligence from the highly sophisticated technology which is available to the intelligence agencies, i.e. the FBI.  From all the data that is gleaned from signals, mobile phone calls etc that are being picked up by the FBI ultimately there is one trace that the human intelligence machine determines is likely to be ‘the one’.  They run with that link.  Then there is the coincidence of the relationship between the meeting of the policewoman Leyla Cumali in connection with the murder of the American woman in the run-down apartment.  She happens to be the sister of Saracen.  These threads spun just so make for clever plotting.   

What I admire about this thriller is that Terry Hayes switches between providing detailed character studies of the two protagonists with a narrative of roller-coaster action which shifts across continents leading to the denouement where there is the inevitable encounter between Pilgrim and the Saracen in Turkey.

Terry Hayes is an author, screenwriter and film producer who started work as a journalist in New York.  He surely wrote I am Pilgrim with an eye to a film. 

Here is a review by the New York Times which is not a plot-spoiler.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/17/books/i-am-pilgrim-by-terry-hayes.html

The Leopard

The Leopard by Jo Nesbo

Jo Nesbo is a Norwegian writer, musician, and former economist and reporter. As of March 2014, more than 3 million copies of his novels have been sold in Norway, and his work has been translated into over 40 languages, selling 30 million copies worldwide.  He is known primarily for his crime novels featuring Inspector Harry Hole.

Following the traumatic Snowman case,  a forerunning novel featuring police inspector Harry Hole, Hole  has exiled himself in Hong Kong. Kaja Solness, a new Norwegian Crime Squad officer, tracks down Hole and asks for his help investigating possible serial killings in Oslo. Hole is convinced to return when told that his father, Olav, is seriously ill and will not live much longer. Hole returns to Norway to find that the Crime Squad is in the middle of a power struggle with Kripos and its power-hungry head, Mikael Bellman, who seeks to puts his agency in sole charge of the country's murder cases. Hole finds himself the target of Bellman's hostility, though Bellman is keen to take credit for the result of Hole's work. 

Goodreads says:
In the depths of winter, a killer stalks the city streets. His victims are two young women, both found with twenty-four inexplicable puncture wounds, both drowned in their own blood. The crime scenes offer no clues, the media is reaching fever pitch, and the police are running out of options. There is only one man who can help them, and he doesn't want to be found. Deeply traumatised by The Snowman investigation, which threatened the lives of those he holds most dear, Inspector Harry Hole has lost himself in the squalor of Hong Kong's opium dens. But with his father seriously ill in hospital, Harry reluctantly agrees to return to Oslo. He has no intention of working on the case, but his instinct takes over when a third victim is found brutally murdered in a city park.

The victims appear completely unconnected to one another, but it's not long before Harry makes a discovery: the women all spent the night in an isolated mountain hostel. And someone is picking off the guests one by one. A heart-stopping thriller from the bestselling author of the The Snowman, The Leopard is an international phenomenon that will grip you until the final page.  

Compared to the other novels in the series, The Leopard has a more cinematic and action-oriented style, taking place across three continents. The Leopard also contains excessive violence. Nesbø has expressed regret for a couple of scenes in the book.  

What I thought:
As with the Nordic Noir genre of tv series, I enjoy crime thriller literature located in Scandinavian settings.  The chill and dark of the northern landscape and the gritty temperaments of the characters in those landscapes add to the brooding atmosphere in which the detective action takes place.  The Leopard is a fat paperback, some 600 pages in length, and I did find the novel was a shade longer than it needed to be with one or two red herrings leading to false endings as bit by bit all possible candidates for the killer were dangled in front of the reader and then ruled out.  All the same it was a good read and at the time of reading, the violence in the narrative did not particularly strike me as more excessive than that which I have come to expect of a Nesbo crime novel.

The Boys from Brazil

The Boys from Brazil by Ira Levin

Amazon says:  In this classic thriller, Ira Levin imagines Dr Josef Mengele's nightmarish plot to restore the Third Reich. Alive and hiding in South America, thirty years after the end of the Second World War, Mengele gathers a group of former colleagues for a sinister project - the creation of the Fourth Reich. Ageing Nazi hunter Yakov Lieberman is informed of the plot but before he hears the evidence, his source is killed . . . Spanning continents and inspired by true events, what follows is one of Levin's most masterful tales, both timeless and chillingly plausible. Praise for Ira Levin: 'Levin is the Swiss watchmaker of the suspense novel' Stephen King 

A brief plot summary:

As well as being a successful playwright, screenwriter and composer, Ira Levin has written several bestselling and well-known novels including these classic thrillers: Rosemary's Baby, The Stepford Wives, A Kiss Before Dying, as well as The Boys from Brazil. All these books have been made into equally successful films.  

Published in 1976, The Boys from Brazil opens with the outline of a compelling plot: six men are instructed by a white-suited, evil kingpin to kill 94 men across the world on certain dates, all of whom are civil servants around the age of 65. It seems a strange target demographic, but then we discover that the operation's guiding hand belongs to Dr Josef Mengele, the German SS officer and physician who earned the epithet "Angel of Death" from his gruesome medical experiments in Auschwitz.

Yakov Liebermann, an elderly Jewish Nazi-hunter (Mengele's nemesis who is a conflation of Nazi-hunters such as Simon Wiesenthal and Serge Klarsfield, who attempted to capture Mengele in South America) uncovers the plot at an embryonic stage. He proves to be an unthreatening – but very tenacious – protagonist, whose patience and brainpower finally unravels the horrific and insane reason for the murders.

In some ways the book is now fairly dated - it was first published in 1976 - and at the time of publication the inclusion of real or near-real characters must have added a chilling dimension. What scares today is Levin's premise based on biological engineering: in the 1970s, although scientifically possible, Mengele's plan belonged firmly in the realm of fiction; now it's not nearly so far-fetched.

Ira Levin's narrative is a compelling page-turner and makes chilling and disquieting reading in the light of genetic advances and also in the context of political upheavals and machinations in the current day.   

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boys_from_Brazil_%28novel%29

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

One of the good things about belonging to a book group is that, if run democratically, you will often find yourself reading books you would not have chosen for one reason of many reasons.  So with Rebecca which had slipped past me at various points in my reading life when I might have stumbled upon it.  For example at the time that we were taking annual holidays in Cornwall I found a copy of Vanishing Cornwall in a local bookshop and found it both informative and engagingly written: readable but writing of a very high calibre.  This was my first literary encounter with du Maurier.  I subsequently read The House on the Strand (written more than thirty years after Rebecca)which is a compelling read:

Wiki:  "Like many of du Maurier's novels, The House on the Strand has a supernatural element, exploring the ability to mentally travel back in time and experience historical events at first hand - but not to influence them. It has been called a Gothic tale, influenced by writers as diverse as Robert Louis Stevenson, Dante, and the psychologist Carl Jung, in which a sinister potion enables the central character to escape the constraints of his dreary married life by travelling back through time. The narrator agrees to test a drug that transports him back to 14th century Cornwall and becomes absorbed in the lives of people he meets there, to the extent that the two worlds he is living in start to merge. "

And then I found another title in second hand, A Cornish Childhood, by A L Rowse and then I moved on.

And now thanks to the Val de Saire book club I have met Rebecca.

Rebecca is a thriller novel by English author Dame Daphne du Maurier. A best-seller, Rebecca sold 2,829,313 copies between its publication in 1938 and 1965, and the book has never gone out of print. The novel is remembered especially^[1] for the character Mrs Danvers, the fictional estate Manderley, and its opening line:

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again."

— The second Mrs de Winter

Literary technique

The famous opening line of the book "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." is an iambic hexameter. The last line of the book "And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea" is also in metrical form; almost but not quite an anapestic tetrameter.

What I thought:

A novel that has never been out of print and sold nearly 3 million copies in the 30 year interval after its publication.  In 2017, it was voted the UK's favourite book of the past 225 years in a poll by bookseller W H Smith!!!

For me it started as a slow-burner of a novel. Mrs Van Hopper and her companion are staying at a hotel in Monte Carlo. Both these characters made me squirm a bit, Mrs Van Hopper’s shameless pushiness and the younger woman’s reticence and self-effacing manner. These are the opening chapters and then with the marriage of the young woman and Max de Winter the narrative takes off. Our ‘heroine’ was led like a lamb to slaughter. Du Maurier cleverly drew the creepily manipulative and poisonous Mrs Danvers well and the new young wife’s fearfulness and blind innocence at times made me want to shake the book at her! It was hard to feel sorry for her you just wanted her to show some mettle. She does finally gain confidence and become more assertive when Mrs Danvers is humbled. It was hard to warm to any of the characters except the man on the beach who refused to give up his secrets even though it was for fear of being locked into an asylum. 

Gradually the novel shifts from a psychological drama about obsession to a thriller: will the killer be unmasked and brought to justice. I thought this plot was cleverly written and at just the right pace. The twists with regard to Rebecca’s visit to the gynecologist and her confrontation with Max in the boat hut were clever. I did guess that Rebecca’s shooting was something which she engineered. 

A great ending to the book, rightly famous in the world of literature.

Two further comments: As the story reaches its climax I found myself wanting Max to ‘get away with it’. This sometimes happens when I read a book and a character is so obviously guilty but the author has contrived to make you engage with the guilty one. I think that is skillful writing because the author has manipulated her reader. Secondly it never occurred to me until I came to write this review that the second Mrs de Winter is never named. I went to the opening chapters to check what it was, assuming I had forgotten it, only to find we are never told. I wonder what prompted du Maurier to use that device? Perhaps it was to emphasize her identity as the second Mrs de Winter rather than a person in her own right and perhaps also to subordinate her to Rebecca whose ‘presence’ is constant and who is mentioned so often in the text."