January 2012 books

I've done very little in the way of writing any book reviews this month. Too much going on at home. Cold house. Very cold. No central heating. Single-glazed windows upstairs.  Draughts whichever way you look. Snow.  Main task has been to collect firewood from the local woods for open fire in Living Room. Only warm place in the house. Landlord of this tied cottage has much to answer for. However, to books ....

I started my Non- Fiction reading this month with John Suchet's My Bonnie: how dementia stole the love of my life. It is an incredibly sad story of how their incredible life together slowly disintegrated over a period of years. It brings tears to your eyes. Not only is the book beautifully written, but Suchet's love for Bonnie spills over on every single page. Henry Davey's Thomas Tallis: Elizabethan Musician is a short, factual biography concerned more with the musician than with the life.  Justin Marozzi's The Man who invented history is a wonderful sort of travelling biography of Herodotus, the Greek historian. Anna Timofeeva-Egorova's Over Fields of Fire: flying the Sturnovik in action on the Eastern Front 1942 - 1945 is a carefully written account of her career in the Soviet air force. It tends to focus on heroic deeds both by her and her comrades. It also records deaths of her close friends with regret. It really only tells about her love of flying with little or nothing about the rest of her life. I do wish it had filled out her personal life. Never mind. I'm grateful we've got what we have. Tracey Engelbrecht's The girl who couldn't say No: Memoir of a teenage Mom is a well-written account of the difficulties she had being pregnant and then rearing her baby single-handedly. It's quite inspirational reading. David Catchpole's Jesus People is about the teachings of Jesus and how the earliest Christian communities came into being and what they believed. Excellent book with a thorough Bibliography. And, an important trifle, Charlotte Bronte's brief  Notes on Pseudonyms used by the Bronte sisters.

The best Fiction I have read this month is pretty eclectic. It starts with Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, that wonderful 19th century classic. Then Sofi Oksanen's Purge a brilliant novel set in Estonia controlled by the USSR. It says a lot for the translation, as well as the original, that this book keeps you turning the pages.

So Thrillers next. Cecilia Peartree's Crime in the Community is a pretty good read. As is Sarah Spann's romantic Wildflowers Come Back and Sue Fineman's On the Run. Katy Madison's Presumed Guilty until proven innocent is the story of the wrong person being identified by the community as a  serial killer. He had a bad past, so everyone assumed he was responsible. They didn't know he'd turned his life around. Until he was able to prove that the real killer was the sheriff who was the one leading the campaign against him. Gripping.

I only read one completely Romantic novel this month. It was Carol Manicelli's medical Emergency: Wife Lost and Found set in hospital. It's a really satisfying read when so many romances are rather straightforward.

And the last, is a rather silly Ghost novel S A Hunter's Scary Mary.

December 2011 books

Let's start with Sarah Wheeler's biography of Cherry - a life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard. This is a stunning book that fills in a lot of gaps in his own book of The Worst Journey. Nathaniel Philbrick's Mayflower: a voyage to war is an excellent account of the voyage across the Atlantic to New Plymouth, the founding of the settlement, relations with the Indian tribes there and how things went awry. Gripping. The last Non-Fiction I read this month was Harriet Anne Jacobs' Incidents in the life of a slave. It took her a long time to escape to freedom and is filled with her fear of recapture.

Historical fiction this month includes Edward Marston's The Repentant Rake, a murder set in Restoration London and two set in early white Australia by Kate Grenville: The Secret River and The Lieutenant. Both books explore the relations between Aborigines and the convict settlers, a consideration of Australia that is too often ignored.

I enjoyed reading Joanne Harris's Blackberry Juice concerning the relationship between a young boy and an old man and how the latter influenced the former. Haruki Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicles is an extraordinary book. It's long, but the trouble is that once you've got beyond page two, you don't want to put it down, much to the irritation of your other half. And what happened during World War II keeps on coming back and being mirrored in the present.

Ken McClure's Pestilence was the only sci-fi I read this month. I did enjoy it, even though this is not my favourite genre.In the thriller/murder-mystery line I read a few. Alex O'Connell's Lost in Shadows is about gruesome gangland murders. Darcia Helle's Enemies and Playmates is both a romance and a murder-mystery as is Eve Gaddy's Too close for comfort. Tess Gerritsen's Freaks was my final murder of the month. They were all pretty well written and definitely enjoyable. I don't think it was obvious who the killer was in any of them, so the author's did their job well.

I always tell myself to leave the romances to one side, but each month I fail. They are all easy reads and most are page-turners, as well. So that explains why I tend to read them: light relief, I suppose. So to start with there was Lisa Mondello's  All I want for Christmas ... is you. Then Maureen Child's entertaining Wedding at King's convenience. Ruth Ann Nordin's A Chance in Time is a rather good romance set in the wild west before the 1848 Gold Rush. Linda S Clare's The Fence my Father built is pretty good. There is a really wierd family involved and war with a greedy landowner.

November 2011 book reviews

Green River Killer; a true detective story

Jeff Jensen and Jonathan Case

Dark Horse Books, 2011; 242

ISBN: 978-1-59582-560-5

In 1982 five women were found near Green River. They had all been strangled and most were naked. All were thought to be prostitutes. There were distinctive sexual activity associated with them all. By 1985 the number of victims had risen to twelve. Detective Ted Jensen was certain that they had all been killed by one man. He had served in the Navy for years and was married in the 1960s when he was required to work undercover on troublesome university campuses, identifying core ‘troublemakers’. Then he joined the Seattle Police Department as a detective in 1980.  Green River was more or less his first case.

            No killer was ever identified and so the case was reduced in importance, though Jensen was allowed to continue collecting information that might be useful. Over the following twenty years he accumulates 10,000 pieces of information that are eventually digitised.

            Eventually, in 2005, Gary Ridgeway admits to the killings. After preliminary interviews, they create a bunker in the police headquarters where Ridgeway is kept under lock and key. Jensen, by now, has retired from the police force yet is kept on for his knowledge of the Green River killings. He is involved in the extensive interviews with Ridgeway that take place over a total of 188 days.

            To start with Ridgeway would admit to killing certain women. The number steadily rose to about 48. But there was key information he was withholding in the interviews that really would identify him as the killer. Eventually, after being promised that he would only get a life sentence and not the death sentence, he admits that in every case he had had sex with each woman he killed. Sometimes several times. This was the key information the police were looking for. They now had the Green River killer.

            I’m not sure that the form of a graphic book is the best way to tell this fascinating story. I think a conventional text would have allowed for a more detailed account of this extraordinary tale. So much is missed. I’m sure that Ted Jensen told his son Jeff, the author of the text, so much more over the years. The graphics by Jonathan Case are good, but they don’t add anything to the tale being told.

 

Yours to Keep

Shannon Stacey

Carina Press, 2011;

ASIN: B004XVSVQW

Sean Kowalski returns home from completing his service in the army which included tours in Afghanistan. After a welcome from his family he arranges with his brother Kevin to stay in an apartment above his bar. Hardly has he moved in and put his kitbag down than an attractive girl knocks at his door. She announces herself as Emma Shaw, his temporary fiancée. He is shocked. It turns out that his sister, Lisa, and Emma are friends and that, in order to solve a problem, Emma has to have a fiancé.

She lives by herself in a large house owned by her grandmother. Her parents died when she was young and Cat, her grandmother, brought her up in this house. Later, she moved to Florida leaving Emma behind to run her landscaping business from the house. Emma is afraid that Cat wants to sell the house because it is too big for her. So when Cat says she is coming to stay with her for a month, she decided to find someone to act as her fiancé and live in the house with her. She hopes that this will stop any ideas of selling the house.

When her grandmother arrives, she and Sean meet her. And are awkward together. Cat notices this but says nothing as she is introduced to Emma’s fiancé. Sean and Emma share her bedroom but not the bed. They don’t know things about each other that they should have done had they known each other for as long as Emma says they have.  At a family BBQ Cat and Sean’s mother have a conversation in which they agree to conceal the fact that they both know that the engagement is a false one.

Over the period of the month they work together on her landscaping. Sean turns out to be very good at certain aspects of the hard work they have to do. Working together helps them begin to learn about each other.

By the end of the month, what had been a fiction becomes a reality. Cat hands over ownership of the house to Emma as she had intended doing all along. At the same time she has met a man her own age who might be suitable as a future partner.

This is a well written book that keeps you reading until you reach the end, when you wish it were twice as long.

 

Under Total Eclipse we will tremble like birds without song

Lee Vidor

Shakespeare-X Publications; 2^nd edition, 2011;

ASIN: B005IPR7WI

The focus of this book is the activities of the French Resistance in and around Cherbourg between 1941 and the D-Day landings of 6 June 1944. It demonstrates the commitment of men and women to undermining the German occupation. The book explores the continuous battle of wits between them and the local militia and German army/Gestapo. Jews are rounded up and sent to Auschwitz by train, which allows the author to spend a few pages describing the selection, the gas chambers and the crematoria in that death camp. He also spends a few pages describing the massacre of 30,000 Jews at Babi Yar at Kiev. One is a Cherbourg woman who makes her way back to Cherbourg by sleeping with every man who could help her travel back. Once back in Cherbourg she commits suicide after a short time.

            I’m not sure quite what the intentions of the author were in writing this book. Despite all the pretentious quotes and acknowledgements at the beginning that imply we are about to read a book full of new perspectives or details on World War II. In fact, so far as I can see, there is nothing new between the first and last pages. It is entirely derivative. More to the point, having said the novel is closely linked to factual events of the War, there is no bibliography or  further reading suggestions giving the interested reader an opportunity to explore the subject further.

            If you want to read an original publication on World War II why not read The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell, Life and Fate by Vassily Grossman, Anatole Kuznetzov’s Babi Yar,  Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem of the same name (incorporated in Shostakovitch’s Thirteen Symphony). I would have thought that Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad or Berlin 1945 would be most useful as well. There are so many good fictional and non-fictional accounts of World War II, the resistance in France and the Holocaust that I would recommend you read any of them before you read this book.