Tag: mystery (Page 2 of 4)

The Lost Book of Bonn is perfect for fans of Kate Quinn’s The Rose Code. It’s a story of bravery and resistance in the face of injustice.

The novel is set in Germany, 1946, with flashbacks to the 1930s and early years of the 1940s. Our protagnoist, Librarian Emily Clarke has just arrived in Bonn. She is there at the request of the U.S. Library of Congress, which is cataloguing and acquiring books plundered by the Nazis. There are divisions in the massive depot where Emily works that are dedicated to determining if personal connections can be identified and returned to surviving family members, others that bring Jewish literature to refugees, and Emmy’s branch which takes key works stolen by high-ranking Nazis and assesses if they can be returned to their rightful owners or are available to be acquired by the Library of Congress and shipped to the U.S.

The background story is about how the Nazis tried to re-write history by stealing and destroying books and art, or by hiding and examining those works as a way to position themselves as superior. The story at the forefront is Emmy’s search to find the owner of a poetry collection by Rainer Maria Rilke that has a beautiful handwritten dedication of love on the title page: “My dearest Annelise, my brave Edelwiess Pirate.” Emmy is keen to find Annelise and her lover Eitan. Interwoven into that story is the love story of Annalise and Eitan. The chapters move between Emmy’s present day (1946) and that of Annalise and her sister Christina (1936 to 1943).

This is a quick read, an intriguing story, and a timely reminder that the consequences of war are felt well beyond the dates of the conflict.

The Lost Book of Bonn by Brianna Labuskes is published by HarperCollins Canada.

Homecoming by Kate Morton is a chilling novel about the mysterious death of a young Australian family on Christmas Eve, 1959. It’s literary fiction written in a true-crime style.

2018: Jess Turner is a struggling journalist who’s making ends meet in London when she is called back to Australia, where her beloved grandmother Nora has been hospitalized after a fall. Nora practically raised Jess after her mother Polly moved from Sydney to Brisbane without her. As Jess struggles to figure out what happened to Nora, to get Nora’s affairs in order, to deal with her estranged mother, she discovers her family’s connection to the brutal Turner Family Tragedy of 1959. As an investigative journalist, Jess is intrigued. As the connection to Nora and Polly becomes clearer, she is alarmed.

Christmas Eve 1959: Percy Summers stumbles across the sleeping bodies of Isabel Turner (English wife of a respected Australian businessman) and her three children (Matilda, John, and Evie). He does not realize that baby Thea is not present. The family is spread out on a picnic blanket under a walnut tree near a water hole, as if they were sleeping. It’s been a hot Australian day and storms and bushfires are on everyone’s mind. But all of their attention quickly focuses on finding baby Thea and figuring out if there is a murderer among them. What unfolds is an unusual story of small village dramas, love lost, and alliances formed.

Homecoming spans three generations and offers glimpses at the spellbinding nature of a family tragedy. It’s also a look at loneliness and how home is more than a place.

Home, she’d realized, wasn’t a place or a time or a person, though it could be any and all of those things: home was a feeling, a sense of being complete. The opposite of “home” wasn’t “away,” it was “lonely.” When someone said, “I want to go home,” what they really meant was that they didn’t want to feel lonely anymore.

In the acknowledgments, Kate Morton relays that the first ideas for Homecoming came to her in the Adelaide Hills, her family’s refuge during the “great unsettlement at the start of the Covid pandemic.” Instead of the hustle and bustle of London, they found themselves removed to a remote farm in South Australia. The uncertainty and loneliness of those early pandemic days must have informed the sentiments of Isabel Turner, displaced from London to a small Australian village, of Polly who never knew who her father was, of Jess, drawn to London and a busy career but never really belonging to either London or Sydney.

Homecoming is lovely and unsettling, beautiful and tragic. I really enjoyed this read.

Hard to beat Stephen King’s blurb, “Small Mercies is thought provoking, engaging, enraging, and can’t-put-it-down entertainment.”

Set in the summer of 1974, during Boston’s heatwaves and on the eve of the desegregation of schools, there is a murder of a young Black man on a subway station in “Southie”, a neighbourhood known for poverty, drugs, and housing projects. The Irish immigrants and descendants of Southie are in an uproar about sharing their school and having half of their kids bussed to a nearby Black school. So on the surface the novel is a police drama and the crime seems to be that four Irish-American teens have attacked an up-and-coming Black man, whose only crime was having his car breakdown in the wrong neighbourhood while he was en route home from his retail management training program.

That indeed is the crime, but the novel unveils the systemic racism and rule of law that undermines the welfare of those four teens who are fed lies from early on and jacked up on drugs fed to them by the neighbourhood watchmen who are running girls, guns, and drugs.

The Irish mob has a stronghold on the community of Southie until Mary Pat’s daughter is one of the teens on that subway platform. Mary Pat is one tough Broad and she has now lost both husbands and both children to Marty Butler’s gang of thugs and way of life. She disrupts his shit in a way that not even the police can, and it’s her story of hate, poverty and crime that is the real power of the novel.

This is America’s version of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, where human folly and racism lead to greed and cruelty at a scale that is nauseating.

If you enjoyed The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters or Hell of a Book by Jason Mott then Small Mercies explores the same depraved indifference to human life, and the corruption the erodes democracy and exacerbates inequality, poverty, and division among communities.

Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane is published by HarperCollins Canada. And NPR has a a great, indepth review.

Rebecca is a 1938 Gothic novel written by English author Daphne du Maurier. I believe it’s never been out of print and there’s a new Netflix movie out starring Lily James. I remember the basics of this novel in that it’s got a Wuthering Heights vibe of love, passion, deceit, and consequences. But watching the Netflix version had me grasping for the book to settle some confusion in my mind about the storyline. The film does take some liberties but I actually think the film plays out the last half of the book better way than the novel.

The novel is about an unnamed young woman who is working as a lady’s companion and finds herself swept off her feet in Monte Carlo by the wealthy widower, Maxim de Winter, of the renowned country estate Manderley. After a romantic courtship in Monte Carlo and honeymoon in Italy, Rebecca is whisked off to Manderley, where she is quickly unsettled by the stone-cold housekeeper Mrs. Danvers. What follows is some supreme gaslighting, a weird bit of nerves and misunderstandings, and then the abrupt and emotional discovery that Maxim’s first wife was murdered.

Rebecca is a dark psychological tale full of secrets and betrayal. The 1930s language can be a bit dull, but if you’re a Bronte or Austen fan then definitely give this one a go.

I listened to the audiobook off Libby, which I recommend. But I also discovered this reader, who has a great voice for the book too.

I become a huge fan of Kate Quinn after her book The Shrines of Gaiety and I have since inhaled The Rose Code and The Alice Network. The Rose Code is a masterful spy novel that alternates between flashbacks to the the 1940s wartime activities of at Bletchley Park and the days leading up to the royal wedding in 1947.

Three headstrong women answer the call to join the war effort at Bletchley Park. They do not know what they are getting into. Osla is a beautiful and wealthy debutante who puts her fluent German to use as a translator. Mab is an east-end London powerhouse who is a towering beauty with a sharp set of eyebrows. And Beth is a mousey, downtrodden local girl with a panache for crosswords. She is a brilliant puzzle cracker and becomes one of the Park’s few female cryptanalysts.

But Beth also sniffs out a traitor and finds herself locked up in a sanitarium before the war is over.

Osla, Mab, and Beth are estranged because of a series of small betrayals between the friends. It means that Beth’s accusations are buried and Osla and Mab are not aware of the traitor until they receive a message from Beth that she has managed to smuggle out of the sanitarium. Will they help her?

The Rose Code is a fantastic story about the layers of friendships, betrayals, and loyalty. It’s fast paced, fun, and taps into some of the real history of the Park. I listened to this on audiobook and the narrator did a great job of the various British accents and creating a veil of mystery.

See the Author website for more info.