Great Books Reviewed Online

This generation of women are BIG readers. Lots of murder and mayhem but also a wide range of tastes and interests.

We are still in love with the book; the hard copy with paper that we can curl up in bed with and read by the light of a spot lamp.

So what could be nicer than sharing our favourite authors with each other? What more interesting journey is there than finding a whole new series of books by a new author or at least, one that is new to us?

Here are some of mine. I hope you will add some of yours.

Wow. This is Urban Waite’s first novel and it is a corker. I loved this book.

His story is fresh, his characters are complex and his writing is sparse. It’s about good people caught up in bad situations and their hopes of moving through them without any genuine belief they will be successful. Still, not to try is to die.

Hunt is a horse rancher and ex-convict living a subsistence lifestyle in Washington State. Drake is a deputy sheriff who has disowned his own father, the former sheriff, after he was convicted of drug smuggling.

When a drug run goes wrong in the mountains, a cartel killer is sent to recover the drugs and remove the witnesses. In the middle of it all, a new level of chaos is introduced with the cartel itself getting involved. It’s a taunt tale with characters that resonate. Definite read.


Worth Dying For
Lee Child A Jack Reacher Novel

Lee Child is a good writer. You can lose yourself in his books and the stories are accessible and pretty straightforward. This is a Reacher novel.

If you are not familiar with the Reacher series, it is about a drifter (ah, the lone wolf stranger who glides into town, shakes things up and glides out again) travelling around America discovering wrongs and making them right.

I like the Jack Reacher character. He is logical and calm, a former military policeman and now a man of no fixed address. The thing that bothers me about Reacher is that he travels with no possessions whatsoever. The slightly silly notion of just the shirt on his back, a passport, a bank card and a toothbrush is too scant an anchoring to make the character believable. Not even a change of underwear Jack? Geez.

Still, Jack goes to the more remote backwoods of the American heartland, finds salt-of-the-earth people being bothered or exploited and deals his own version of justice.

I love the Reacher novels. They aren't literature, but who cares when all you want is a few hours of escapist adventure? Always good.


O – A PRESIDENTIAL NOVEL
Anonymous

This is not the first time a novel around the Presidency has been published anonymously, the presumption being that the writer was an ‘insider’ and knowledgeable about these things. The best well known was Primary Colors, a thinly disguised account of the Clinton campaign for the presidency.

This is a different writer and this time the story is about a thinly disguised Obama re-election campaign from the White House in 2012. The story is not bad, but there are no doubts about where the writer sits in his politics. He isn’t an Obama fan and takes regular pot shots at the president and the team around him.

It lacks the humour of Primary Colors and the sense of relentless exhaustion and crisis you would get from a good episode of The West Wing during a campaign. In fact, it’s a pretty ordinary read. But I like my politics and found the characters so thinly disguised that there was no trouble identifying who they were talking about. Until.

No fantasy or imagination until they described the protagonist…the Republican candidate for the White House. There is no one even on the distant horizon that fits the description of the larger than life Tom "Terrific" Morrison. This is what damages any credibility the book might have had. Morrison is a Republican Party dream candidate. Clever, witty, good looking serene and with no skeletons in the closet. He doesn’t exist and that makes this book all fantasy.


The Calling of the Grave
Simon Beckett A David Hunter Thriller

This was an interesting story and is a classic example of difference between those operating in the genre in the UK and those in predominantly the US in the sense of the type of action that takes place. The action here is understated but the threatening vibe throughout the book is heightened by the cold, damp references to the weather on the Scottish moors. You can feel the cold.

The main character, Dr. David Hunter trained originally as a GP but went on to specialise as a forensic anthropologist. Thus, he now works murder cases rather than healing the sick. The book has a wide range of players involved with clear personalities and the usual police politics.

The story centres around a series of kidnappings and murders committed by the deformed Jerome Monk, a genuine bogey man whose presence is everywhere in the story. When Jerome escapes from prison and his tormenters start falling by the wayside, the hunters become the hunted. Several surprising twists later, the story falls into place and what happened to the four original victims is finally revealed.

This is the fourth book featuring the character Dr. David Hunter and they’re worth a look.

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