Category: Fiction

Throwback Thursday: Playing With The Moon by Eliza Graham

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

I’m linking up today with Davida @ The Chocolate Lady’s Book Review Blog for Throwback Thursday. It takes place on the Thursday before the first Saturday of every month (i.e., the Thursday before the monthly #6Degrees post). The idea is to highlight one of your previously published book reviews and then link back to Davida’s blog.

I’ve been looking at the books I reviewed in 2007 for my Throwback Thursday posts. I read Playing with the Moon by Eliza Graham in November that year. It was her first novel and I thought it was very good.

This is my opening paragraph:

It begins when Minna and Tom, who are staying at a cottage in an isolated village on the Dorset coast, east of Lulworth, discover a human skeleton on the beach and dog tags inscribed LEWIS J CAMPBELL and a number. American military officials confirmed his identity as Private Lew Campbell, believed to have died in 1944 during training exercises for the Normandy landings.

Click here to read the rest of my review

Since then I’ve read one more of her books, Another Day Gone, which I also loved (my review) and I have one more, The One I Was, in my TBRs.

Private Moscow by James Patterson & Adam Hamdy

Published on by Margaret1 Comment

Cornerstone Digital| 3 September 2020| 464 pages| Review copy| 4*

Description:

An invitation from an old friend draws Jack Morgan into a deadly conspiracy

On a cold January morning, Jack Morgan stands on a podium inside the New York Stock Exchange alongside his friend and former US Marine comrade whose company is being launched onto the market. Everyone is eagerly awaiting the moment the opening bell rings. But that moment never arrives. An assassin’s bullet rips through the air and finds its mark.

In the aftermath of the murder, Jack is approached by the victim’s wife. She needs him to find the killer. As the head of Private, Jack has at his disposal the world’s largest investigation agency. He accepts the case, but what Jack will discover will shake him to his core.

Jack identifies another murder in Moscow that appears to be linked. So he heads to Russia, and begins to uncover a conspiracy that could have global consequences

With powerful forces plotting against him, will Jack Morgan make it out alive?

My thoughts:

Private Moscow is the 15th book in James Patterson’s Private series, his latest one published – the 16th book, Private Rogue will be published in July 2021. He has written numerous books and series but Private Moscow is the first one I have read. Adam Hamdy is a British author and screenwriter. He is the author of the Pendulum trilogy, an epic series of conspiracy thriller novels.  James Patterson described Pendulum as ‘one of the best thrillers of the year’, and the novel was nominated for the Glass Bell Award for contemporary fiction, and chosen as book of the month by Goldsboro Books.  Pendulum was also selected for the BBC Radio 2 Book Club. 

Private Moscow is a change from the type of books usually read – an action packed, fast paced mystery thriller. Although it’s the 15th book in the series, I think it reads well as a standalone. The action never lets up as Jack Morgan, the head of Private, a detective agency with branches across the globe, sets out to hunt for the killer of his best friend and former marine, Karl Parker. Meanwhile in Moscow Dinara Orlova, an ex FSB agent in the Moscow office of Private and her colleague, Leonid Boykov an ex police detective, are investigating the murder of Yana Petrova, who was killed in an explosion at the Boston Seafood Grill. When it becomes apparent that the two cases are linked Jack flies to Moscow to join forces with Dinara and Leonid.

After a slow start, the pace picked up dramatically as the danger intensified and I was gripped right up to the final high octane ending. The short chapters emphasise the speed of the action. There spectacular car chases, with violent shoot outs, miraculous escapes and fight scenes, and intense danger throughout as intrigues, conspiracies, old secrets and deep-cover agents are revealed. It’s told through Jack’s perspective in the first person narrative alternating with the third person of the other characters. It’s far-fetched, but also entertaining, like watching a fast paced spy movie/thriller and although I have never been to New York or Moscow I had no difficulty in visualising the locations. Pure escapism!

My thanks to the publishers for a review copy via NetGalley.

The Classics Club Spin Result

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

The spin number in The Classics Club Spin is number …

which for me is Orlando by Virginia Woolf. The rules of the Spin are that this is the book for me to read by 30 January, 2021.

Orlando tells the tale of an extraordinary individual who lives through centuries of English history, first as a man, then as a woman; of his/her encounters with queens, kings, novelists, playwrights, and poets, and of his/her struggle to find fame and immortality not through actions, but through the written word. At its heart are the life and works of Woolf’s friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West, and Knole, the historic home of the Sackvilles. But as well as being a love letter to Vita, Orlando mocks the conventions of biography and history, teases the pretensions of contemporary men of letters, and wryly examines sexual double standards.

I hope I get on better with this book than I did with my last Classics Club Spin book, which was Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy. I did start reading it, but didn’t get very far – it wasn’t appealing to me at all!

Did you take part in the Classics Spin? What will you be reading?

Maigret and the Reluctant Witnesses by Georges Simenon

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

This week the theme for Novellas in November is Literature in Translation and I’ve chosen Maigret and the Reluctant Visitors by Georges Simenon translated from the French by William Hobson, a novella of 172 pages.

This is the 53rd Inspector Maigret book, originally published in 1955.

It is November and Maigret, nearing retirement, is in a melancholy, nostalgic mood. He has been called out to the home of the Lauchaume family where Léonard, the eldest son has been shot dead. The name Lachaume brings back memories of his childhood in the countryside where the village grocer sold Lachaume Biscuits. But the family is now in dire straits, living in a large house on the Quai de la Gare, Ivry and their biscuit factory is failing. Their house was once an impressive three storey building but is now in a state of decay, cold and damp. The rest of the Lachaume family, his younger brother Armand, Paulette Armand’s wife and his elderly parents, are not only reluctant to talk to the police, they don’t appear to be grieving.

It looks initially that the murder may have been part of a burglary, although only a wallet is missing, but Maigret is suspicious right from the start. His attempts to question the family are held up by their lawyer and also by the Examining Magistrate, Angelot who insists on taking charge of the case. But he makes headway when he visits Véronique Lachaume, Léonard’s estranged sister and eventually Paulette reluctantly talks to him.

The book as a whole has a nostalgic feel, the sense that the world is changing – the Lachaume family has been left behind. Their business has only been kept afloat by the money from the sons’ wives, but they are still proud and reluctant to face the true facts of their situation. Maigret, too, is beginning to realise that his world is changing. for one thing he is getting older, the new magistrates are the younger generation bringing in new methods and he is aware that he only has two years left before his retirement. However, he solves the case mainly through his own intuition, and so he casts off his melancholy.

I’ve now read several of the Maigret books totally out of order, so now I’ve decided it’s time I read the first book, Pietr the Latvian first published in 1931.

Nonfiction November: Week 2 Book Pairing

Published on by Margaret10 Comments

I’m taking part in Nonfiction November again this year. It runs from Nov2 to Nov 30. Each Monday a link-up for the week’s topic will be posted at the host’s blog for you to link your posts throughout the week. 28 to Nov 30.

Week 2: (November 9-13) – Book Pairing (Julie @ Julz Reads): This week, pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title. It can be a “If you loved this book, read this!” or just two titles that you think would go well together. Maybe it’s a historical novel and you’d like to get the real history by reading a nonfiction version of the story.

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell and Shakespeare’s Wife by Germaine Greer

I’ve recently read Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell, historical fiction inspired by Hamnet, Shakespeare’s son. It is a story of the bond between him and his twin sister, Judith.  Shakespeare isn’t the main character and he is never named in this novel, which really focuses on Ann Hathaway and her children. Little is actually known about her and she comes across to me in this book as a rather wayward, wild young woman when Shakespeare first met her, flouting convention and set on getting her own way, manipulating the people around her.

So, I’d like to know more about Ann Hathaway. Germaine Greer’s book, Shakespeare’s Wife explores what is known but I haven’t read it, so I don’t know how much is supposition and padding. I think it sounds interesting from the description on Goodreads:

Until now, there has been no serious critical scholarship devoted to the life and career of the farmer’s daughter who married England’s greatest poet. Part biography, part history, Shakespeare’s Wife is a fascinating reconstruction of Ann’s life, and an illuminating look at the daily lives of Elizabethan women, from their working routines to the rituals of courtship and the minutiae of married life. In this thoroughly researched and controversial book, Greer steps off the well-trodden paths of orthodoxy, asks new questions, and begins to right the wrongs done to Ann Shakespeare.

If you have read Shakespeare’s Wife I’d love to know what you think about it.

The Searcher by Tana French

Published on by Margaret10 Comments

Penguin| 5 November 2020| 400 pages| Review copy| 5*

I enjoyed The Searcher very much. For the most part this standalone mystery novel moves quite slowly, but it held my attention right from the beginning. It certainly isn’t a book to rush through, rather it’s one to savour. The main characters are Cal Hooper and thirteen-year old Trey Reddy living in Ardnakelty, a remote Irish village. After twenty five years in the Chicago police force, Cal has recently moved to the village, wanting to build a new life after his divorce. He is a loner and wants a quiet life in which nothing much happens. But he finds himself getting involved in the search for Brendan, Trey’s older brother who had gone missing from home.

Cal is a methodical man, slowly doing up his run-down cottage and getting to know the locals – his neighbour Marty, Noreen who runs the village shop, her sister Lena and above all, Trey. I liked the slow build up to the mystery, and I loved Tana French’s beautiful descriptions of the Irish rural landscape. It’s the sort of book I find so easy to read and lose myself in, able to visualise the landscape and feel as if I’m actually there with the characters, watching what is happening.

But this is no ‘cosy’ crime fiction novel. Trey is like a dog with a bone and won’t let Cal give up when it looks as though they will never discover why Brendan left and what had happened to him. I realised after a while what could have happened to Brendan, but I hadn’t foreseen the twists and turns in this book, one of which really surprised me. The ending is terrific. The tension builds and builds as Cal and Trey find themselves in danger. Above all, it is about family relationships, responsibility and friendship. It is atmospheric, spellbinding, and compelling reading. Tana French is a great storyteller.

Many thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for my review copy.