Breed by Chase Novak

Breed by Chase Novak

The book opens with a blissfully happy couple, Alex and Leslie, living a life of luxury in an Upper East Side townhome filled with family heirlooms and antiques.  Life is wonderful except for one thing.  They can’t get pregnant.  There doesn’t seem to be any good explanation for their childlessness but they have tried everything they can find and think of and their longed for child does not appear.  Leslie is giving up and is begging for them to adopt.  Alex doesn’t like the idea of adoption; he wants an heir of his own flesh and blood.  At wit’s end they run into a couple they have met at various support groups.  They are disheveled and almost manic, but she is quite obviously pregnant.  Alex and Leslie beg them to reveal their secret and after much negotiating they do: Dr. Kis in Slovenia. 

Dr. Kis’s methods work – Leslie is pregnant.  But at what price?  What is happening to Alex and Leslie?  Have they become a threat to the babies they sacrificed everything, their wealth, even their humanity, to conceive? 

What starts as mildly disturbing becomes horrific as the book progresses.  It really centers on the desperation of infertile couples and the shady medical practices which could come about to prey on that desperation.  I found the biology fascinating – while not described in any real detail it left a lot open to your imagination.  Which is probably scariest of all.

He Who Fears the Wolf by Karin Fossum

He Who Fears the Wolf by Karin Fossum

This is the third time I’ve read a second book in a series this month!  And just like the other two (My Soul to Take and The Absent One) this one does not disappoint.

In a remote woodland town in Northern Norway a woman is horribly murdered.  A teen, who is a resident at the local boy’s home, sees a man at the scene of the murder.  That man, Errki, is a known problem in the area: things always go wrong around him, people die around him.  Errki has very recently escaped from an asylum where he was committed because he was deemed to be a threat to himself and others.  He is, naturally, the number one suspect in the woman’s murder.  Inspector Sejer is headed to the crime scene when he is called to another.  A man has robbed a bank in town and taken a hostage.  After viewing the security footage someone recognizes the hostage.  It is Errki.

I think the reason I like Fossum’s books so much is because they are simple yet complex.  Simple, because there is a crime that takes place in the first couple of chapters (in this case two: the murder and the robbery/hostage taking); complex, because it takes a lot of footwork to unravel what has happened and why.

If you are a fan of good old fashioned whodunnits these are definitely for you.

The Third Gate by Lincoln Child

The Third Gate by Lincoln Child

Looking for a fun listen?  Combine adventure, action, curses, and near death experiences with great gadgets and gizmos and set it all down in the Sud (a HUGE nasty swamp).  Now add mummies and artifacts and all things ancient Egyptian.  Interested yet?  You should be. 

This is the latest by Lincoln Child and while it’s mostly implausible the setting and some other factors (like what lies behind the third gate) make you wonder a bit and think “what if?” 

My Soul to Take by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir

My Soul to Take by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir

Thora, the Icelandic lawyer/sometimes investigator in Last Rituals, is back again.  This time she is investigating a murder in the West Fjords.  She was originally on site to help her client Jonas with a real estate claim.  He claims that the land he was sold for his new age hotel and spa is haunted and that fact was not properly disclosed before the sale went through.   While Thora is there the hotel’s architect is found brutally assaulted and murdered on the beach near the hotel.  Jonas can’t really remember where he was because he tends to forget things while under the influence so he is a prime suspect.  Who killed the woman on the beach?  And will they strike again?

The desolation of the area is at the forefront of this book.  You know that you are in farm country where there isn’t an easy way to get from one point to another.  Through the history of the area you see how built up things are becoming, at least by Icelandic standards.  The land, its customs and its laws, are at the forefront so you experience Iceland every step of the way.

Thora doesn’t wait for the police to follow her hunches.  She persues leads with the help of her long distance (now visiting) boyfriend Matthew.  She claims it’s because she doesn’t want to bother the police unless the lead goes somewhere.  We know it’s because she simple enjoys investigating and we enjoy following the leads with her wherever they may go.

Fall of Giants by Ken Follett

Fall of Giants by Ken Follett

It is impossible to put together a summary which will do justice to this hefty historical.  If you are not a fan of meaty, detailed, long works of historical fiction you will find nothing to like here.  If, however, you like great stories, descriptions which put you “there” and you enjoy learning while you read – you’ll love this book.  I will admit the length (over 980 pages) frightened me a bit.  But I am so glad that I didn’t let it deter me.  I would have gladly read for another thousand or so.  (Good thing the sequel is due out soon!)

Five families are followed in the narrative from just before the start of WWI through to the end of that war and the beginning of Prohibition in the United States.  We follow families from Wales, England, America, Russia and Germany to get very different perspectives of the war and its aftermath.  I always thought the war started because of an assassination and we entered the war to help our allies.  How simplistic my thinking was.  This book was enlightening and eye-opening.  If you have any interest in this time period I can’t recommend this book highly enough.

The Absent One by Jussi Adler-Olsen

The Absent One by Jussi Adler-Olsen

Department Q, a division of the Danish police assigned to investigating cold cases, is being steered towards its next project.  A closed case file is left on Inspector Carl Mǿrck’s desk.  He isn’t supposed to be solving cases which were already solved, but this one doesn’t seem as tidy and tied up as it should be.  But why would a man confess to a horrific double murder ten years after the fact unless his did it and couldn’t live with the guilt?  What other reason could there be? 

I wrote recently about the book The Keeper of Lost Causes.  I enjoyed it so much I instantly put the sequel on hold.  I was disappointed that the reader was not the same, but the book was so good that I found myself not caring after the first disc.  I eagerly await the next installment.

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter

Richard Burton is in Italy working on Cleopatra.  We all know how that story goes.  But this is the story of a young woman, Dee, who played one of the handmaidens to Cleopatra in the film and how her relationship with Burton changes her life forever.  Sick, and unable to work, she is sent by the film company to recuperate at the Hotel Adequate View in a small Italian coastal village.  There she meets Pasquale, and her story makes him rethink his life.  Fast forward to the present and Pasquale comes to America to find Dee and see what has become of her after she left Italy.

Told in narrative, flashbacks, chapters of a novel (within the novel) and excerpts of plays this is a complex creatively told tale of love, obligation, genes and the unpredictability of life.  I must admit I was expecting something light and fluffy.  Instead I got a literary love story (of a sort) that made me a little sad.  But it is definitely staying with me and will for quite some time.

The Girl Next Door by Brad Parks

The Girl Next Door by Brad Parks

New Jersey reporter Carter Ross works for the Newark Examiner-Eagle.  (The writer is a reporter with the Star-Ledger so you can tell what he’s really talking about here.)  He’s an investigative reporter which means he is at liberty to pick and choose his own stories most of the time.  He’s intriuged by the obituary for a newspaper delivery person who has died young, so he attends her funeral to write about her.  Since she delivered the paper he works for he thinks it only fitting.  At the funeral he learns that she died in a hit and run accident (should have read the crime blotter in his own paper a little more closely) and one of the deceased’s relatives wants Ross to look into who killed her sister.  Did a drunk driver kill the delivery person?  Or was it murder?

Told in a sarcastic and witty style with plenty of New Jersey landmarks thrown in this is a great quick read.  The mystery is good but he giggles are better.  If you’re in the mood for something on the lighter side this is a good pick.

The Snowman by Jo Nesbø

The Snowman by Jo Nesbø

Stieg Larsson started the Scandanavian mystery craze and Jo Nesbø is the man to keep it going.  His troubled police inspector, Harry Hole, is the biggest character to come out the arctic reaches since Lisbeth Salander.  He’s dysfunctional, crass and brash, and you can’t help liking him.

Women are disappearing.  Most are never found again.  Are these random episodes?  Did the women leave of their own volition or was something sinister behind their disappearances?  Harry Hole is called upon to view a crime scene where a woman was brutally murdered and a few days later to home where a woman disappeared.  At both scenes stands a snowman that no one in the household or surrounding houses has made.  As Harry looks back to other crime scene reports of cases of missing women more snowmen start popping up.  Could the first known serial killer in Norway be stalking women?

This is a series I do not recommend reading from the beginning.  I read TheRedbreast, the first in the series, years ago and frankly I didn’t like it.  It could have been a bad translation, but I didn’t think I’d be reading another one.  I’m glad I decided to give listening (yes, it is great on audio) to another Harry Hole book a try.  

Syndrome E by Franck Thilliez

Syndrome E by Franck Thilliez

After watching an unmarked film he bought from a recently deceased film collector a man goes blind.  He contacts his ex-girlfriend, a local detective, and she promises to look at the film and into its origins.  As she begins to dig into the history of this bizarre film from the 1950s people she has questioned are being silenced, in gruesome ways.  Enter Inspector Franck Sharko, a very damaged man and brilliant profiler for the Paris police.  Together they try to track down the origins of the film, and other possible related deaths, before the same fate befalls them.

Starting in France and moving to Belgium, Cairo and Quebec, this is a compelling mystery with the dark history of neuroscience at the center.