Book Review: Frozen Heat by Richard Castle

Frozen Heat is by far the best novel in the Nikki Heat series. In here we have lots of action, mystery, secrets and lies, and a love affair that comes to full blossom in the streets of Manhattan, Boston and Paris.

While reading this book I have somehow felt that Nikki Heat and Jameson Rook have stepped into Derrick Storm’s shoes; however that’s because the novel at hand reads not only as a classic whodunit but also as a spy story.

The body of a woman, stubbed to death, is discovered in a suitcase and Nikki Heat is called to the scene to investigate. And before too long she’s shocked to discover that the suitcase used to belong to her. It was stolen by the man who murdered her mother.

But why? Why did he use that specific suitcase to dispose of the body? What does he seek to achieve by leaving such an obvious clue behind? Was the dead woman in some way connected with her mother? If yes, how did she know her? And when?

She feels at a loss at first, and as the story unfolds, she doesn’t get to feel any better. In fact, if it wasn’t for Jameson, she’d probably go nuts. Her partner in bed and in crime solving, is always there, for whatever she needs. And since he took a bullet for her, while trying to save her life, he’s become a hero of sorts for the cops. And it’s exactly this newfound popularity that they are going to use in order to solve the crime; but also, oh yes, some of his money.

As we follow Nikki and Jameson from place to place, while they retrace her mother’s footsteps and she’s trying to make peace with her dad, we see this strong and determined woman at her most vulnerable moments. The past seems to haunt her all the way, and until she finds the answers she’s looking for, she’s not going to rest. But will the answers give her the peace of mind that she needs? By the looks of it, no, they won’t.

So, what do you do when you find out that your mother was not at all the person that you remembered her to be? How do you react when her dark secrets come to light? How do you live today and plan for tomorrow when you come to realize that most of yesterday was nothing but a lie?

The reader watches Nikki closely as she takes a deep breath and dives into her mother’s secret past, and in the end he can feel nothing but sympathy for her plight. However, at the same time, one can say that that poor soul is blessed since right there, standing next to her, is Jameson, somebody who would do everything in his power to help and protect her, and, most important of all in times of darkness, make her smile.

Well-written, action-packed, rich in character development and with light touches of humor, Frozen Heat is the complete package. Read and enjoy.


By the same author:

A Brewing Storm
A Raging Storm
A Bloody Storm

Book Review: Swimming Home by Deborah Levy

Swimming Home by Deborah Levy is a work of beauty. Every year I read a novel or two that take my breath away with their prose. Last year those were Please Look after Mom by Kyung-sook Shin and On Canaan’s Side by Sebastian Barry. So far this year, this was the only book I’ve read and thought: wow! I’m sure I’ll squeeze another one in before 2012 expires.

What did I like about this novel? Well, it would be easier to say what I did not like; the fact that I wasn’t the one to write it.

At first the story seems quite simple. A couple, Joe and Isabel, a poet and his war correspondent wife, arrive for a holiday in the hills above Nice, France, accompanied by their young daughter and a friendly couple. So far so good, one would say. The thing is though, that there’s more to this group of people that at first meets the eye. To start with the poet he is an egocentric man who’s in love with his own voice and a womanizer. His wife doesn’t really like him anymore, and seems to be looking for a way to break up the marriage. The other couple hides a big secret, and as for the daughter, well, to put it in a Chinese proverb way: she was cursed to be born in interesting times, and under unusual circumstances.

Things get even more complicated when Kitty Finch, a young and almost ethereal woman, shows up all of a sudden in their holiday villa. She claims that there was a mix-up in the reservation dates and now she has no place to stay.

Well, normally, given the setting and the circumstances, one would offer her a cup of tea and sent her on her way. Isabel though things differently, so she invites her to stay with them, knowing all too well that, sooner rather than later, Joe will go after her.

The daughter, 14 year old Nina, can’t really understand her mother’s decision, but she can’t really question it, so she keeps quiet. Besides, she likes Kitty, with her green fingernails and her wide knowledge about flowers and plants, and the, to put it mildly, strange way she behaves.

Little by little the tension starts to mount in that holiday villa, but it’s not so much the agony that the reader comes to enjoy the most but the author’s masterful turns of phrase, the seemingly simple way she writes.

“Couples were always keen to return to the task of trying to destroy their lifelong partners while pretending to have their best interests at heart. A single guest was a mere distraction from this task.”

Well, that says it all. But if you are wondering whether there’s nothing more but beautiful language in this novel, I’d say, wait until you reach the last pages of it before you pass on a verdict. Even though the prose was good enough for me to proclaim Swimming Home as one of the best books of the year, the end did take me by surprise and made me think: That’s how you write a story; a very good story.

Highly recommended.

The TS Eliot prize for poetry shortlist

The TS Eliot prize for poetry shortlist has been announced today. The shortlisted books are:

The Death of King Arthur by Simon Armitage
Bee Journal by Sean Borodale
Ice by Gillian Clarke
The World's Two Smallest Humans by Julia Copus
The Dark Film by Paul Farley
P L A C E by Jorie Graham
The Overhaul by Kathleen Jamie
Stag's Leap by Sharon Olds
The Havocs by Jacob Polley
Burying the Wren by Deryn Rees-Jones

Mo Yan wins the Nobel Prize for Literature

It has just been announced that Chinese author Mo Yan has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2012.

Mo Yan was born Guan Moye to a peasant family in Gaomi in Shandong Province in 1955. His education ended in 1966 when the Cultural Revolution broke out when he worked as a peasant. He subsequently worked in a factory before joining the army, where he became a member of the cultural department. His main inspiration still remains the Gaomi area though he combines both the urban and the rural and the historical and the present. His pen name means don't speak.

To read more about him visit Wikipedia

The 2012 National Book Award Finalists

The finalists for the (US) 2012 National Book award finalists were announced yesterday. The shortlisted books are:

Fiction

This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz
A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers
The Round House by Louise Erdrich
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain
The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers

Nonfiction

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956 by Anne Applebaum
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo
The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 4 by Robert Caro
The Boy Kings of Texas by Domingo Martinez
House of Stone by Anthony Shadid

Poetry

Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations by David Ferry
Heavenly Bodies by Cynthia Huntington
Fast Animal by Tim Seibles
Night of the Republic by Alan Shapiro
Meme by Susan Wheeler

Young People's Literature

Goblin Secrets by William Alexander
Out of Reach by Carrie Arcos
Never Fall Down by Patricia McCormick
Endangered by Eliot Schrefer
Bomb: The Race to Build — and Steal — the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon by Steve Sheinkin

Samuel Johnson prize longlist

The Samuel Johnson prize longlist has been announced. The longlisted books are:

Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo
One on One by Craig Brown
Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest by Wade Davis
The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin by Masha Gessen
Feathers by Thor Hansen
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
The Old Ways by Robert MacFarlane
Inside the Centre: The Life of J Robert Oppenheimer by Ray Monk
Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius by Sylvia Nasar
Winter King by Thomas Penn
The Better Angels of our Nature by Steven Pinker
The Spanish Holocaust by Paul Preston
Strindberg: A Life by Sue Prideaux
Joseph Anton by Salman Rushdie

The winner will be revealed on 12 November.

Book Review: Mulholland Dive by Michael Connelly

I’m a big fan of Michael Connelly and as such I guess I should wear a kind of blindfold when it comes to his work, but alas that is not the case, so I just have to say that, in my humble opinion, Mulholland Dive is not as good as his two previous three-story ebook collections, Suicide Run and Angle of Investigation.

I don’t know if it’s the Harry Bosch component that’s missing here, but I do know that these stories seem a bit flawed. Yet again maybe that’s only because when it comes to short stories I really set the bar high.

When it comes to the stories themselves the best one is the last, Two-Bagger. A meth cook that goes by the name Eugene Vachon has just got out of jail, and two cops, Stilwell and Harwick, are waiting for him to arrive by bus in Los Angeles. According to the info received by the Gang Intelligence Unit, during his stay in jail Vachon was under the protection of the Road Saints Gang, which means that now that he’s out he’ll somehow have to return the favor. How? Most probably by killing someone, following Sonny Mitchell’s, the gang leader’s, orders. Who’s the indented target? Nobody knows. And that’s exactly why Stilwell and Harwick are on Vachon’s tail. The end arrives with a bang, and it’s exactly then that all the pieces fall together.

Cahoots, the first story of the three, takes place in the early 1930’s. The narrator is an unnamed man who’s playing cards with another five men, one of whom is a cheat. McMillan, the bad apple, talks to his co-players about a big heist, which involves stealing the gold and silver Olympic metals, melting them and selling them as bars, thus making themselves rich. The narrator, who tells the story in the present tense, though it has already come to pass, is certain that what McMillan is really trying to do is distract them, so he can take their money while feeding them tales of wealth and glory.

In-between the aforementioned stories, comes Mulholland Dive. Detective Clewiston, a reconstructionist for the LAPD, is heading to Mulholland Drive, where a man in an expensive car has taken a… dive down the hill. The man is dead, and it’s up to Clewiston to determine whether what happened was an accident or not. The victim, a celebrity of sorts, was in the middle of divorce proceedings, so if his death is ruled a homicide his almost ex-wife will become the prime suspect. If not, she’ll walk away richer than ever. What is the verdict going to be? Maybe the expected. The result? The unexpected.

At the end of these stories you can find a generous forty pages of Michael Connelly’s next novel, The Black Box, which comes out on November 26.

Book Review: Play Him Again by Jeffrey Stone

Play Him Again by Jeffrey Stone is a novel that doubles as a crime story and a movie industry history.

The events take place in the late 1920’s in Los Angeles. The prohibition is in place and the bootleggers make tons of money by supplying booze to the people who can afford it. One of the aforementioned men is Matt Hudson, a street-wise guy, who does big business with the movie crowd and who dreams of shooting the first all-talking-picture ever.

Before doing that though he has to solve a murder. His oldest friend, and great conman, Danny Kincaid has been brutally tortured and killed. Who was it that killed him and why? Did Danny cross roads with someone too clever or powerful for him to handle?

Well, since the police decided to rule his death an accident, now it’s up to him to bring the perp or perps to justice, even though his chances of doing that seem to be quite slim. He has no clue what his friend was up to, he has a business to take care of, and he does have a dream to pursue and a woman to please. Quite the busy man, isn’t he?

Luck though will decide to give him a helping hand, so he’ll soon discover what the latest con his friend’s put into place was. And he’ll be devastated, since it was his idea that he used, and which had probably got him killed.

Now he has more than one reason to investigate the case, while at the same time he’ll have to deal with a local gangster who’s started stealing his booze supplies, and keep trying to convince some studio executives to give him the green light for his movie.

There are a lot of action scenes in this book, but one could also read it as a document of a whole era: the Hollywood in the 20’s, the fabric of a society in its high and lows, the prohibition that made some people rich and led others to death, the corruption inside the police force, the past of a future to be.

The author does a great job recreating that period in history and delivers to the reader a hero with many flaws, who tries hard to find a balance in a world where doing the right thing could land you into trouble. Hud’s psyche is a tortured one. People don’t get him, not the ones that matter the most anyway, and that makes him every now and again question himself and his own motives. He may be a bootlegger but he’s also a man with principles. He may be an honest man but he more often than not has to deal with crooks. He may cherish life but he may have to kill to survive.

Placing this novel under a particular genre is not such an easy thing to do. I can say one thing though: I really enjoyed reading it.

Booker prize shortlist announced

The Man Booker prize 2012 shortlist has been announced a few moments ago. The shortlisted books are:

Narcopolis by Jeet Thayil

Swimming Home by Deborah Levy

Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

The Lighthouse by Alison Moore

Umbrella by Will Self

The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng

Book Review: A Wanted Man by Lee Child

A Wanted Man has managed to put me into a dilemma. How do I rate this book? Should I give it a four star or a three star review? At first I went for four, but then I’ve changed my mind, since, well, this is Lee Child we’re talking about and, like it or not, we expect better from him.

No, I’m not saying that this is not a good book, it is; what I’m saying is that it could be much better. To start with it could be a bit, or rather more than a bit, shorter. There’s just not enough juice in the story, to make it so long, and I think the author himself knew that, and that’s why he started improvising, adding math statistics and… blinks into the equation. Then there are some overwritten scenes. And finally we have that one-man-army act that’s really hard to believe even if you are a hardcore Jack Reacher fan.

To the story now. It all begins when a car stops to give Reacher a ride in the dead of the night. There are two men and a woman in it, which of course, is not by itself something strange. What’s strange though is the fact that even though the men seem to know each other well, the woman acts like she’s a complete stranger, as if she doesn’t belong there. And that, somehow, doesn’t raise any alarms in Reacher’s mind, though it does raise a couple of questions which he hurriedly brushes aside.

The ride though will not prove as easy as he wanted it to be. For starters they encounter a couple of police roadblocks in the almost deserted highway leading away from Omaha, and then one of the men asks him to drive, something he’s not too eager to do, since he’s not the best of drivers.

As the journey continues the mystery deepens, and as the background information accumulates, it starts to take form. Later rather than sooner Reacher realizes that there’s something fishy going on. It’s not only the men’s disposition that makes him suspicious, but also the message, a kind of Morse-code-with-the-eyes that the woman, Karen, blinks to him from the back sit: M-Y-C-A-R.

By the time he decides to take action though it’s too late already. He’s left behind at a motel reception, after an incident with one of the men, and now he’s determined to right his wrongs and save the woman from whatever the two perps have in store for her. But to do that he needs help, which he receives from an unexpected source: a female agent of the FBI.

Despite the fact that they are suspicious of each other, the two of them decide to work together for the hostage’s sake, while trying at the same time to sort out, how it all began. In the meantime, the CIA and the State Department are trying to intervene with the case, and as the truth comes out bit by bit, we come to realize that there’s more to the story than we thought. The finale arrives with a bang, but the slow-drawn events that led to it, take away some of the reading pleasure.