Category: Fiction

The Likeness by Tana French

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

It’s nearly the end of March when the Reading Ireland Month 2025 hosted by Cathy at 746 Books ends. I had a list of books to choose from and I read one of my TBRs, The Likeness by Tana French, a book I’ve had for eight years. It’s the second book in the Dublin Murder Squad Mysteries. I read the first book, In the Woods, in 2014.

Hodder and Stoughton| 2008| 574 pages| 4*

Description:

Still traumatised by her brush with a psychopath, Detective Cassie Maddox transfers out of the Murder squad and starts a relationship with fellow detective Sam O’Neill. When he calls her to the scene of his new case, she is shocked to find that the murdered girl is her double. What’s more, her ID shows she is Lexie Madison – the identity Cassie used, years ago, as an undercover detective. With no leads, no suspects and no clues to Lexie’s real identity, Cassie’s old boss spots the opportunity of a lifetime: send Cassie undercover in her place, to tempt the killer out of hiding to finish the job.

I loved this book. I couldn’t remember very much about In the Woods, but I had no difficulty in following The Likeness, so I think it’s a good standalone mystery. It’s a gripping fast paced book, set in Ireland, with well drawn characters, including a group of five friends living in a large house in the countryside. French portrays each of these friends in detail, and as the story progresses their backgrounds and relationships are revealed. The book begins as one of the friends, Lexie Madison is murdered.

Astonished by the fact that Lexie is her double, Detective Cassie Maddox, who played a small role in In the Woods, is persuaded to go undercover at the house, and assume the dead women’s identity, the police having told her friends she wasn’t killed, but was merely wounded. Far-fetched, yes, but it didn’t take me long before I found myself accepting this was feasible. If you find that impossible then this book is not for you, which would be a shame as it is well written, outstanding in its depiction of the Irish countryside and the interaction of the characters. It explores their feelings and emotions, their motivations and desires to such an extent that I was totally engrossed in the book, hoping, irrationally, that Lexie was not dead but had survived and all would be well. Of course, that was not possible and the ending was inevitable.

Now I am just as eager to read the next book in the series, Faithful Place, which features one of the other characters in the Murder Squad, Undercover cop Frank Mackay.

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Did Not Finish

Published on by Margaret15 Comments

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and now hosted by Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl. For the rules see her blog.

The topic this week is Books I Did Not Finish. I rarely give up on books I’ve bought but I borrow lots of library books and often take them back before I’ve finished them. Sometimes it’s because they’re books that are due back before I’ve finished them, or because I’ve borrowed them to see if I’d like them and decide not to read them.

These are books on the library’s list of books I’ve borrowed over the last couple of years that I had to return before I’d read them:

Pianos and flowers : brief encounters of the romantic kind by Alexander McCall Smith, a short story collection

A possible life by Sebastian Faulks

Sugar money : a novel by Jane Harris

The Shrouded Path by Sarah Ward

Cuddy by Benjamin Myers

Daphne Du Maurier and her sisters : the hidden lives of Piffy, Bird and Bing by Jane Dunn

Maltese Falcon by Dashiel Hammett

Hag-seed : the Tempest retold by Margaret Atwood

The beginner’s goodbye by Anne Tyler

Your beautiful lies by Louise Douglas

Have you read any of them?

Top Five Tuesday:Top 5 books with an emotion in the title

Published on by Margaret10 Comments

Top 5 Tuesday was created by Shanah at Bionic Book Worm, and it is now being hosted by Meeghan at Meeghan Reads. For details of all of the latest prompts for January to March, see Meeghan’s post here.

Today the topic is Top 5 books with an emotion in the title. Whether it’s happy or sad, anger or excitement, any emotion is fine!

These are all books I’ve read with links to my reviews.

All Passion Spent by Vita Sackville-West. Lady Slane is an ageing British aristocrat. Her husband has recently died at the age of 94, leaving his family with the problem of ‘What was to be done about Mother?’ The family are four sons and two daughters. Lady Slane at 88 is still a beautiful woman and quickly but quietly asserts her independence. She ignores her children and decides to live, with her maid Genoux, in a house in Hampstead that she had first seen thirty years previously. This is a novel of contrasts, beautifully written, and expressing so many emotions in a quiet unassuming manner.

A Climate of Fear by Fred Vargas, a Commissaire Adamsberg murder mystery. I like Adamsberg; he’s original, a thinker, who doesn’t like to express his feelings, but mulls things over. He’s an expert at untangling mysteries, an invaluable skill in this, one of the most complicated and intricate mysteries I’ve read. He’d compared the investigation right from the start to a huge tangled knot of seaweed. A woman is found bleeding to death in her bath, having apparently committed suicide, there’s a secretive society studying and re-enacting scenes from the French Revolution, and two deaths ten years earlier on an isolated island off the coast of Iceland, where the afturganga, the demon who owns the island summons people to their death.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Steinbeck’s writing conjures up such vivid pictures and together with his use of dialect I really felt I was there in America in the 1930s travelling with the Joad family on their epic journey from Oklahoma to California. What a long, hard journey with such high hopes of a better life and what a tragedy when they arrived to find their dreams were shattered, their illusions destroyed and their hopes denied. Throughout the book, Steinbeck shows the inhumanity of man to man and also the dignity and compassion, the essential goodness and perseverance of individuals against such appalling conditions and inhumane treatment. 

Stone Cold Heart by Caz Frear, a police procedural written in the first person present tense narrated by DC Cat Kinsella who is part of the Murder Investigation Team 4. Naomi Lockhart, a young Australian woman was murdered and at first it looked as though her flatmate had killed her. It’s a most convoluted and tangled tale, filled with secrets and lies, most of which are complete red herrings.  Alongside the murder mystery, the book follows the story of DC Cat Kinsella’s family and the mystery surrounding Maryanne Doyle that was told in Sweet Little Lies – you really do need to read that book first to understand what is going on in her family life in this book. Cat is a conflicted character to say the least and although other readers have found her a warm and likeable character I found her one of the most irritating fictional detectives in crime fiction.

Cruel Acts by Jane Casey. A year ago, Leo Stone was convicted of murdering two women and sentenced to life in prison. Now he’s been freed on a technicality, and he’s protesting his innocence. DS Maeve Kerrigan and DI Josh Derwent are determined to put Stone back behind bars where he belongs, but the more Maeve digs, the less convinced she is that he did it. Then another woman disappears in similar circumstances. Is there a copycat killer, or have they been wrong about Stone from the start?

Bleak House by Charles Dickens: Book Beginnings on Friday & The Friday 56

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

Every Friday Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Gillion at Rose City Reader where you can share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading. You can also share from a book you want to highlight just because it caught your fancy.

I’m featuring Bleak House, one of the books I’m currently reading.

Chapter 1 In Chancery

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.

Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice, but she is taking a break and Anne at My Head is Full of Books has taken on hosting duties in her absence. You grab a book and turn to page 56 (or 56% of an eBook), find one or more interesting sentences (no spoilers), and post them.

I found it a quite delightful place – in front, the pretty avenue and drive by which we had approached (and where, by the by, we had cut up the gravel so terribly with our wheels that I asked the gardener to roll it) at the back, the flower garden, with my darling at her window up there, throwing it open to smile at me, as if she would have kissed me from that distance.

The narrator in this passage is Esther Summerson. She and the two wards in the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case, had arrived at Bleak House and she is describing the scene that she saw from her bedroom window on their first morning at Bleak House.

Description:

Bleak House is the ninth novel by Charles Dickens, published in twenty monthly installments between March 1852 and September 1853. It is held to be one of Dickens’s finest novels, containing one of the most vast, complex and engaging arrays of minor characters and sub-plots in his entire canon. The story is told partly by the novel’s heroine, Esther Summerson, and partly by an omniscient narrator. Memorable characters include the menacing lawyer Tulkinghorn, the friendly but depressive John Jarndyce and the childish Harold Skimpole, as well as the likeable but imprudent Richard Carstone.

At the novel’s core is long-running litigation in England’s Court of Chancery, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which has far-reaching consequences for all involved. This case revolves around a testator who apparently made several wills, all of them seeking to bequeath money and land surrounding the Manor of Marr in South Yorkshire. The litigation, which already has consumed years and sixty to seventy thousand pounds sterling in court costs, is emblematic of the failure of Chancery. Dickens’s assault on the flaws of the British judiciary system is based in part on his own experiences as a law clerk, and in part on his experiences as a Chancery litigant seeking to enforce his copyright on his earlier books. His harsh characterisation of the slow, arcane Chancery law process gave memorable form to pre-existing widespread frustration with the system. Though Chancery lawyers and judges criticized Dickens’s portrait of Chancery as exaggerated and unmerited, his novel helped to spur an ongoing movement that culminated in enactment of the legal reform in the 1870s. In fact, Dickens was writing just as Chancery was reforming itself, with the Six Clerks and Masters mentioned in Chapter One abolished in 1842 and 1852 the need for further reform was being widely debated.

I first read this book many years ago before I began my blog.

WWW Wednesday: 12 March 2025

Published on by Margaret11 Comments

WWW Wednesday is run by Taking on a World of Words.

The Three Ws are:

What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?

Currently I am reading Resistance by Owen Sheers, The Likeness by Tana French and Bleak House by Charles Dickens. They’re all what I call ‘wordy’ books and are taking me quite a while to read.

Resistance is an alternative history novel by Welsh poet and author Owen Sheers. The plot centres on the inhabitants of the isolated Olchon valley in the Black Mountains of south-east Wales close to Hereford and the border.  It’s set in 1944–45, shortly after the failure of Operation Overlord and a successful German counterinvasion of Great Britain.  It has beautiful descriptions of the Welsh countryside and farming life. I’m enjoying it but finding it slow reading.

The Likeness by Tana French, book 2 of the Dublin Murder Squad. I enjoyed reading the first book In the Woods, in 2014 but I don’t remember the details. No matter it reads well as a standalone. Detective Cassie Maddox is shocked to find out that a murdered girl is her double. At nearly 500 pages this will take me a while to read!

Bleak House by Charles Dickens is another chunkster, over 1000 pages full of description and lots of characters, about the complex and long-drawn out lawsuit of Jarndyce v Jarndyce. I’m only on page 43. I love the beginning – London in the fog.

The last book I read was Islands of Abandonment: Life in the post-human landscape by Cal Flyn, a remarkable book, about abandoned places: ghost towns and exclusion zones, no man’s lands and fortress islands – and what happens when nature is allowed to reclaim its place.

I began reading this book in October and have been reading it slowly since then, only finishing it yesterday. It’s not a book to read quickly, but rather one to take your time to take in all the details. It’s fascinating, thoroughly researched and beautifully written.

What will I read next? As I’m currently reading the three novels shown above, which will probably take me until the end of the month and beyond I’m not planning to start any more novels. However, I like to have a nonfiction book on the go to read with my breakfast, so tomorrow I’ll start reading Wintering by Katherine May. It’s described as  ‘a poignant and comforting meditation on the fallow periods of life, times when we must retreat to care for and repair ourselves. Katherine May thoughtfully shows us how to come through these times with the wisdom of knowing that, like the seasons, our winters and summers are the ebb and flow of life.’ (Amazon UK)

Top Five Tuesday:Top 5 books with a place in the title

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

Top 5 Tuesday was created by Shanah at Bionic Book Worm, and it is now being hosted by Meeghan at Meeghan Reads. For details of all of the latest prompts for January to March, see Meeghan’s post here.

Today the topic is Top 5 books with a place in the title – any location or place in a title is fine. I decided to feature books in different countries than my own (UK) – namely Italy, Japan, Greece, Russia and France.

These are all books I’ve read with links to my reviews.

Pompeii by Robert Harris – one of my favourite books. Vesuvius erupts destroying the town of Pompeii and killing its inhabitants as they tried to flee the pumice, ash, searing heat and flames. The story begins just two days before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and builds up to a climax. 

Nagasaki : Life After Nuclear War by Susan Southard, nonfiction, an amazing, heart-wrenching book. On August 9th 1945, two days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, a five-ton plutonium bomb was dropped on the small coastal town of Nagasaki. The effects were cataclysmic. It follows the lives of five of the survivors from then to the present day. 

This must be one of the most devastatingly sad and depressing books I’ve read and yet also one of the most uplifting, detailing the dropping of the bomb, which killed 74,000 people and injured another 75,000. 

The Doctor of Thessaly by Anne Zouroudi, the third in the series of her Mysteries of the Greek Detective, about Hermes Diaktoros, a mysterious fat man. I was never sure who he worked for, or how he knew of the mystery to solve. Each of the books in the series features one of the Seven Deadly Sins – in this one it is envy, a tale of revenge and retribution.

Midnight in St Petersburg by Vanora Bennett. It begins in 1911 in pre-revolutionary Russia with Inna Feldman travelling by train to St Petersburg to escape the pogroms in Kiev hoping to stay with her distant cousin, Yasha Kagan. The book is split into three sections – September – December 1911, 1916-17 and 1918-19 as Russia enters the First World War and is plunged into Revolution and life becomes increasingly dangerous for them all.

Last Seen in Massilia by Steven Saylor, historical crime fiction set in in Massilia – modern day Marseilles. It’s 49BC during Caesar’s siege of the city., featuring an investigator called Gordianus the Finder. I really liked all the details about Massilia – how it was governed – the hierarchy of the Timouchoi its ruling officials, its relationship to Rome, its traditions and customs. This is the 8th book in Saylor’s Roma Sub Rosa series set in ancient Rome.