And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

 

Even if you’ve read this classic novel of mystery and suspense before, by re-reading it you will find new facets and nuances to admire. 

Ten people come to an island for different purposes but find themselves fighting for their lives. Among them is a murderer who wants his or her own type of justice. After each death, the adversary meticulously removes a porcelain figure from the dining room table.

A gramophone recording relates that each of these guests have committed an unpardonable sin and have been as of yet beyond the reaches of law. One of them has invited them all here, produced the recording, and eliminating them but who could it be? 

Could it be the young reckless Marston, the well-respected doctor, or the elderly Emily Brent? Could it be General McArthur, the reptilian judge Wargrave, the prim Vera Claythorne, or the callous Philip Lombard? 

This one of Christie's darkest and most intricate mystery. 

The Van Apfel Girls are Gone by Felicity McLean

This debut by Australian author, Felicity McClean, is a tantalizing page-turner. This exciting novel is a mystery and coming-of-age story in one. Tikka remembers her childhood--she grew up in a small Australian river valley.

One incident irrevocably changed the Tikka's life: the summer of 1992. Her neighbors, Corrie, Hannah, and Ruth, disappeared one fateful day. The police assume its a missing case but Tikka and her sister are withholding information. Tikka knows that the Van Apfel girls were planning to runaway, a fact she kept from police. Years later, as an adult, she wonders if she made the right choice.

She dwells on the Apfel girls' disappearance to the point where it begins to affect her mental health. As Corrie's memory consumes Tikka, she begins to see Corrie everywhere, or at least people who that look like Corrie.

McLean has a delightful sardonic wit. She frames the story with the Lindy Chamberlain case, a woman whose baby girl disappears while on a camping trip.

Tikka stages a skit based on the case for a school event the evening of the Van Apfel girls' disappearance. Just as it had in the Chamberlain case, the Van Apfel case causes many tongues to wag. Characters jump to conclusions about a male teacher.

Many novels focus on missing girls. Julia Phillips' Disappearing Earth focuses on how a Siberian community reacts to the disappearance of two of their own. 

Though it addresses the self-help industry and single motherhood,  Jaclyn Moriarty Gravity Is The Thing, is also about missing persons. 

Other titles about missing persons:
Lippman, Lauran. Lady in the Lake. 
Miranda, Megan. All the Missing Girls.
O'Nan, Stewart. Songs for the Missing. 

H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald (part 2)

The next stage is hunting. Macdonald loses, she says, her humanity while watching Mabel hunt. Although she has been an animal lover all her life, she enjoys the hawk's triumphs. 

Ironically, Macdonald says she regains her humanity by mercifully killing the prey that Mabel would have eaten live.

Macdonald's success in training her goshawk is punctuated by White's unsuccessful attempts to train his.

Then, one day, the hawk inexplicably attacks Helen. 

The injuries gives Helen several key realizations that are further affirmed when she speaks at her father's memorial service.

She had been losing herself--her humanity--while training the goshawk. 

What I liked best about this memoir is the honest description of  a tense human-animal relationship. The literary analyses, the historical asides, and Macdonald's astute discussion of depression and grieving process make this work even more significant.

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (part 1)

Though she is an expert who has trained many raptors, MacDonald feels compelled to train a goshawk after her father's death. Known to be the most difficult of all to train, the goshawk is a suitable challenge that allows her to grieve and escape from the world.

MacDonald's father, a photojournalist, viewed the world through his camera lens. He taught Helen to be a watcher and that is what she does while training hawks. 

For the first few weeks she "watches" them; she allows herself to become invisible while feeding them from gloved hands.

The next stage is "manning" the hawk. Manning the hawk means uncovering its head in public. Up to this point, the hawk wear a hood in public.

In this wildly original work of non-fiction, MacDonald also confronts her younger self and her disdain for fellow hawk-trainer and legendary author, T.H. White.

His loneliness mirrors her own though she does not appear to recognize this. As an adult, MacDonald comprehends White's troubled soul and his loneliness. 

MacDonald is an academic so much of the writing comes across an a beautifully-written academic essay. She is also a poet which explains the work's formidable imagery: "The hawk was a fire that burned my hurts away."

Since she is also historian, MacDonald often engages in interesting asides, like her discussion of the Pastoral movement that occurred in Britain in the 1930s. 

Mostly, though, she shares her triumphs and failures as an austringer. Though she trains Mabel to land on her fist, inexplicably, her goshawk stops doing it consistently. MacDonald feels she has failed her hawk.

Much of this non-fiction treatise reads like feral therapy. MacDonald is afraid to let Mabel loose of the creance as she is supposed to do: "I'm convinced that Mabel will rocket away from me and disappear for ever." 

This isn't a bond she takes lightly. During her time of grief, she has frequent angry outbursts. She finds it particularly hard to learn to trust again:

 "Flying a hawk free is always scary. It is where you test these lines. And it's not a thing that's easy to do when you've lost trust in the world, and your heart is turned to dust." 

(continued)

Magician's Lie by Greer McAllister

One night in Waterloo, Iowa, the Amazing Arden, completes a magic trick she has done many times before. She is famous for her half man trick in which she saws a man in half. This time, however, she innovates and uses a fire ax. 

The man, presumably her husband, is later found under the stage--killed by an ax wound to the chest. Virgil Holt, a Deputy Sheriff, apprehends her but Arden claims to be innocent. 

Along with the Sheriff, readers must decide whether her story is believable. Parts of her story are difficult for the sheriff to believe. Ray a maniac that she meets while still a young girl living in Tennessee, has healing powers. He is a healer and a destroyer-in-one, yet its hard to believe no one detects his treachery.

Arden, then named Ava, teaches herself ballet via the Cecchetti method, in order to escape from Ray's abuse. This plan fails when Ray breaks her leg. Ava run away from home and becomes a servant in the Vanderbilt household. 

At Biltmore, Ava falls for Clyde who has considerable talents. He is a gardener who can also turn a profit scouting talent in New York. Ava, still running from Ray, takes off with Clyde where she takes a small part in the legendary Adelaide Hermann's magic act.

Magic and performing becomes Ava's new life. Her business manager, which by coincidence is Clyde, renames her The Amazing Arden. Her show is successful and she is happy for a time until tragedy strikes. 


Macallister includes many accurate details in this historical fiction, including the Iroquois Theater fire in 1903 and details from the life of Adelaide Hermann. 

Arden is a fascinating character as are Virgil and Ray. The one flaw in the novel is Clyde who is almost too versatile. He is a rake, a hero, a gardener, and a business manager. The ending is, thus. only partly satisfying. 

If you like The Magician's Lie, you may like Erin Morgenstern's Night Circus, Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants or Chrysler Szalan's The Hawley Book of the Dead.

Other books with circus acts, magic tricks, or performing arts as their main themes are Erika Swyler's The Book of Speculation and Leslie Parry's Church of Marvels. 

Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith

Horrifying on multiple levels, Child 44 is a standout thriller.

In the so-called perfect Stalinist state, crime doesn't exist. To admit that it exists is almost an act of treason. 

So when a member of the MGB claims that his child Arkady has been murdered, Leo Demidov is told to quiet the family. He does this and more, even threatening eye-witnesses. 

He never examines the body of Arkady as the family asks. None of this is unusual. MGB do not normally detect violent crime. That task belongs to a much lower class, the militia. 

Soon, however, new circumstances come to light. Leo Demidov's communist beliefs are shaken to the core when he sees an innocent man tortured. 

He also learns that wife, Raisa, is a stranger. She married him because she feared turning his marriage proposal down. 

He was an agent of the state and she was keen on surviving. Years ago she had watched the Soviets destroy her town and all of her relatives, including her parents, for political purposes.

In Stalinist Russia, agents could be promoted one afternoon and denounced the next. When someone denounces Leo and Raisa, they barely escape with their lives. Demoted to a mill town, Leo and Raisa must start life anew.

Leo is demoted to the lowest rank in the militia, the agency responsible for handling violent crime. Recently, two children have been murdered in the woods near the railroad tracks and there may be more. 

Smith has set up the perfect conundrum for his hero to face. A disgraced MGB officer can do little to investigate the murders without risking his life. Leo Demidov must decide if  justice is more important than survival.


Plenty of riveting twists and turns, betrayals, repressed memories, mind games, and nail-biting escapes make this a first-rate thriller. Unsurprisingly, this novel has been turned into a 2015 feature film. 


Tom Rob Smith followed Child 44 with two other novels, The Secret Speech and Agent 6.

Bitter Greens by Kate Forsyth

Bitter Greens by Kate Forsyth is an enchanting read. Forsyth mixes characters based on historical people with fable.

In the novel, readers meet Charlotte-Rose de La Force after she has been banished from Louis XIV's court and sent to a nunnery. 

The real life Charlotte-Rose de La Force wrote the Rapunzel or "Persinette" story which was adapted by the brothers Grimm.

In this fictionalized version of events, Charlotte hears the tale from Soeur Seraphina, her only friend at the convent where she is imprisoned.

Like a master tapestry weaver, Forsyth weaves the stories of the three women: Charlotte, Margherita, and  and Maria, the "strega bella," who renames herself Selena.

Most readers are familiar with the Rapunzel story but Forsyth revitalizes it. Selena kidnaps Margherita from her home in Venice and entraps her in a high watchtower in Manerba.

In this is a multi-faceted story, Forsyth also gives us the witch's story. When her mother is horribly mistreated, Maria learns what injustice feels like and it marks the beginning of her transformation into wickedness. 

Maria who renames herself Selena acquires a lover, Tiziano, whose paintings immortalize her. Forsyth has some fun here with Titian, imagining that Selena is Titian's Venus. 

Selena stays young because she drinks the blood of the young red-headed girls she has kept in the tower. Tizano, on the other hand, sinks into old age.

Forsyth switches back and forth easily from Margherita and Selena's story in Italy to Charlotte de la Force's adventures in France during the reign of the sun King.

After losing the King's favor, Charlotte determines to marry a Marquis and pays a witch for a love spell. She lands in prison, but upon release, she chooses to marry for love.

What is remarkable is the way all of the women's lives parallel each other. All face terrible choices and are forced to choose between their happiness or safety. 

A sweeping and sensual drama, Bitter Greens is one of the best historical novels of 2014. 

For more information about this novel and about Kate Forsyth, see Sarah Johnson's interview of Forsyth in Johnson's blog, Reading the Past.

http://readingthepast.blogspot.com/2012/05/interview-with-kate-forsyth-author-of.html

Isle of Youth: Stories by Laura Van Den Berg

Laura Van Den Berg's stories have a quirky feel much like  Rivka Galchen's stories. Characters are "at sea," weathering one emotional disturbances or another. All of the stories feature disappearances or marital break-ups.

In "Opa-Locka" a pair of sisters form a detective agency but seriously undermine their business when they acts recklessly. They track and then lose a client's husband. The incident weirdly mirrors their own childhood when their father disappears.

In "Lessons," a group of outlaws runaway from their sheltered existence.Dana takes her younger brother, who has Asperger-like symptoms, with her on a crime spree and later regrets the decision. 

In "Antarctica," a troubled young wife has left her husband without explanation. Her scientist husband dies in an explosion in Antarctica. 

The daughter of a magician in "The Great Escape," has always believed that her father had disappeared during a magic trick. The truth is far worst and more ordinary. Facing theft charges, the girl tries a disappearing trick of her own. 

Clearly, Van Den Berg's primarily deal with is  abandonment. Dana in "Lessons" is afraid the "gorillas" will leave Pinky behind. In "Opa-Locka," the sisters are still recovering from their father's disappearance.

A second motif is a crumbling marriage. The women in "Acrobat," "Isle of Youth" are each in a failed marriage; in its disintegration they come to a moment of enlightenment.

Laura Van Den Berg's latest work is a novel called Find Me. 

Lost and Found by Brooke Davis

Brooke Davis is a vibrant new voice in fiction. She gives the viewpoints of three characters--a lonely old man, a crochety old woman and a seven-year-old girl who contemplates death. Her father has just died and her mother has abandoned her in a department store. 

Davis mixes just the right amount of pathos and humor when she gives voices Milly. When her mother does not return for her, she imagines that one of the manikins is her friend. She record dead things in her dead things journal. She leaves notes that will supposedly help her Mum find her: "In here Mum."

She also befriends Karl, a touch typist who writes messages to his deceased wife in the air. By accident, Karl joins Milly and Agatha on a bus journey to Kalgoorlie. 

The bus trip is followed by an outlandish train trip through Nullarbor Plain. The three of them are determined to find Milly's Mum or, at least, a relative to take care of her.

Lost and Found is completely different from anything else I've read. Very few novels, after all, feature a seven-year-old who run away with two octogenarians. Very few novels features a seven-year-old who is obsessed with death. 

What makes Milly so unique, however, is her ironic innocence and intelligence.She nearly meets her match though on the train when she meets another little boy who calls himself "Captain Everything."

She Is Not Invisible by Marcus Sedgwick

This young adult novel tackles the slippery nature of coincidence. While researching a non-fiction book about coincidences, a disabled girl's father he mysteriously disappears.

Laureth, a blind teenager, leads an unofficial investigation into her father's disappearance. Her mother refuses to help her and seems on the verge of splitting up with her father. 

Readers can immediately identify with Laureth, not because of her blindness, but because they recognize her plight. She is in real trouble--the starting point for any great narrative.

Convinced someone on the Internet has her Dad's notebook and may know his whereabouts, she books a plane to New York. She has told no one and her only guide to the seeing world is her seven-year-old brother. 

She had no idea where her father may be staying; she has no idea where she and her brother will stay. She only goes on a hunch that her father is in trouble and needs her help. 

Wearing dark glasses, she must also keep up the pretense that she is not blind. She needs to be seen as the one caring for her brother instead of the other way around or someone may call authorities or notify her mother in England.

Every encounter--from navigating the airport to New York's public transportation--carries the risk that Laureth will be uncovered as a blind, and, thus, invisible person.  Laureth's ability to find her way in New York and find her father proves the title. 

The Boxtrolls by Elizabeth Kimmell

The Boxtrolls is a wonderful children's story that, among other things, show kids how awful it is to stereotype and scapegoat others. 

Boxtrolls starts with a  scenario that sounds a lot like many other dystopias. The above ground society, the Cheese Bits, are terrified of the underground society, the Boxtrolls. 

The Boxtrolls literally live underground; They eat insects and use odds and ends from the world above them to make things like a music maker. A manhole is a portal to and from worlds.

Because they are terrified of the Boxtrolls, the Cheese bits and their secret police, the Red Hats, hunt the Boxtrolls as monsters. The White Hats, who govern the Cheese bits, support the Boxtrolls hunts. One of the Cheese bit, a baby, was kidnapped and killed by the Boxtrolls. But was the Trubshaw baby really taken?

Eggs doesn't think so. He knows the Boxtrolls aren't monsters. Eggs knows this because he lives with them, They are his friends who assure him his peach skin is fine even though theirs is green or grey.

Eggs feels ok about his appearance until a girl who lives above ground, Winne Portley-Rind, calls him a name he never heard before, "boy."

The Bat by Jo Nesbo

In Nesbo's first Harry Hole mystery, Hole, goes to New South Wales, Australia, to discover why a fellow Norwegian and gap-year student, Inger Holter, was murdered. 

The local police chief, Andrew Watkins, immediately tries to undermine Hole. Harry is told to take a vacation--enjoy the food and scenery--while the locals do the actual investigation. Naturally, Harry does the opposite, immersing himself in the case.

Readers are introduced to the flawed hero, Hole, who is a reformed drunk as well as many quirky characters. Andrew Kensington is an ex-hippie and ex-boxer while Otto Rechtnagel is a clown who discusses politics. 

Local detectives and Harry Hole, argue whether Holter's death is a random killing or the work of serial killer. 

Aboriginal myth pervade the story, including the "bat" of the title which is the aboriginal symbol of death.  In the aboriginal stories, the bat is called Narahdarn and plays an important part in their dreamtime myths.

Thoroughly enjoyable, The Bat has a fast-paced plot and a detective who makes intelligent observations and somewhat erratic decisions. I like the Norwegian title (Flaggermusmannen) better than the prosaic-sounding title in English (The Bat).

A BBC interview with Jo Nesbo below:
http://jonesbo.com/en/

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

Imagine a ruined house, an inheritance, a mysterious set of feral twins, a topiary garden, a murder, a ghost--these are just some of the Gothic elements that permeate The Thirteenth Tale.

 

Vida Winter, a successful novelist, contacts the bookish narrator, Margaret Lea, because she has one more tale to tell--the titular 13th tale. For years she has created falsehoods rather than reveal her past. She tell Margaret Lea she intends to tell the truth, at last, before the "wolf" catches her.

The Thirteenth Tale is a Gothic novel that explores how secrets and dark obsessions can destroy a family. More than that, however, it playfully looks at the slippery notion of self-hood--the small and cataclysmic changes that affect us and shake our identity.

If the novel is about abandonment--there's more than one abandoned child; it is, joyfully, also about reclaiming your family and your place in the world. 

Fans of this novel might enjoy seeing BBC a mini-series adaptation starring Olivia Holman and Lynn Redgrave. Setterfield's latest novel is Bellman and Black: a Ghost Story.

Pictures of You by Caroline Leavitt

Pictures of You by Caroline Leavitt.

A car wreck nearly ruins a young photographer's life in this riveting novel. A runaway at 15, Isabelle becomes a successful photographer. She marries but never has what she yearns for--a child.
 

When her she learns her husband has been cheating on her, she runs away again. Unfortunately, Isabel's car collides with an approaching car while driving down a lonely, fog-filled backroad near Hartford.

Pictures of You offers a tantalizing mystery. What was April, the other driver, running away from? Why was her car faced in the wrong direction? Why was she standing in the middle of the road? 

Horrified that a young mother has died, Isabelle tries to make a connection with the victim's family. Slowly, as they heal, Charlie and Sam, grow to love Isabelle. Complicating matters, however, is Sam's asthma and his tendency to romanticize the ordinary. Sam is conviced that Isabelle is an angel who can help him reconnect with his deceased mother.

Pictures of You is A bittersweet story about second chances, overcoming fear, and finding love.

http://carolineleavitt.com/
 

 

Cold Light by Jenn Ashworth

Cold Light by Jenn Ashworth. Cold Light is an amazing book that takes readers for a dark ride. Primarily a mystery, Cold Light is also a psychological exploration into the minds and psyches of three British school girls.

Lola is friends with a much more popular girl, Chloe, who often gets in trouble. Lola, also known as Laura, has to clean up all of Chloe's messes. Even though Lola knows she's being played, she thinks it beats the
alternative--being thrown down the stairs and bullied by the other teenagers in her form.

Meanwhile another girl, Emma, is rallying to take Lola's place as Chloe's best friend. Chloe has already been distancing herself from Lola by spending time with an older man, her boyfriend, Carl.

Lola does not like Carl or Emma's intrusions but what disturbs her most is what happens in the park on Boxing Day. Add to the mix, a flasher tormenting the community and a missing person who may or may not be the flasher. 

A novel about friendship, secrets, trust, betrayal, and misplaced loyalty. The novel surprises with many reversals. Those who appear guileless are actually crafty and those who seem sophisticated are actually naïve. The young girl at the center of the story, Lola, feels responsible for two deaths. In fact, she is not culpable for these deaths but is quite possibly responsible for the demise of two others.

 

When asked what she wants to do for a science project, Lola responds without thinking too much about it, "Ice." Ice will play an important part in this story as will light. Lola's father's who displays early signs of dementia is enthralled by bioluminescent sea animals. Lola's father suffers from the delusion that he is a scientific researcher and readies himself to go on a scientific expedition. 

 

This is in a sense what Ashworth puts readers on--a scientific expedition to discover the truth of how Chloe died. Ashworth has written a surprising, heart-breaking, and thought-provoking novel.

If you like this novel, you may also enjoy Alex Marwood's Wicked Girls. 

 

A Certain Slant of Light

A Certain Slant of Light by Laura Whitcomb.

Whitcomb begins with an intriguing premise. What if, after you died, your spirit continues to linger among those living on earth for years to come? What if one of the ones called Light found a recently abandoned body and decided to inhabit it?

After a boy overdoses on drugs, James enters Billy's body. Though James is far older than a teenager, he becomes "Billy" to all those around him. As Billy, James can "see" Helen in his high school classroom, even though no one else can.

Helen is a first flustered and then delighted to be able to communicate with someone. For 130 years, she has simply lived as Light, haunting people she calls Hosts. Her last host was Billy's teacher, Mr. Brown, but everything changes after Billy/James can see her.

Helen and James become romantically involved, with James urging Helen to borrow a body, too. Though she has qualms about it, she borrows the body of a teenage girl. With their borrowed bodies each of them begins to have memories of their previous lives. James had been a soldier and Helen had been a mother of a two-year-old.

Helen and James both know they cannot keep the bodies they inhabit, so they devise a way to help the departed return.

This a young adult novel with a lot to offer to adults and teenagers. Characters, especially James, are well-developed and believable. The premise, though far-fetched, is one that intrigues and, in the end, delights.

Book of Someday

The Book of Someday by Dianne Dixon.

The lives of three women, Livvi, Micah, and AnnaLee, collide in this fascinating, fast-paced novel by Dianne Dixon. One object--a photograph of a woman in a silver dress and pearl-button shoes--holds a clue about their past and future.  

Broken and needy, Livvi, seeks love that she never received from her father and absent mother. As a child, the most loving family was the family she viewed through a telescope across the street. Will she find love and acceptance with Andrew or is he selling her a bunch of lies?

Beautiful and ambitious, Micah is a famous photographer with a guilty conscience. Diagnosed with a life threatening illness, Micah makes a point of revisiting everyone she has hurt in the past. She hopes to make amends but her journey takes her on an unexpected collision course.

AnnaLee is a stay-at-home mother who desperately wants to launch her husband's career. AnnaLee has to sell her valuables bit by bit to stay financially afloat. Is opening her heart to a rebellious teen who needs direction a mistake?

This is a satisfying read -- one that makes readers think about the conscious and unconscious choices they make in their lives. For some, life is shaped entirely by the past, but for a courageous few, the putty of life can be shaped by their own choices. The Book of Someday makes readers think about the big questions.