Tag Archives: book review

#BookReview ‘Cover Her Face’ by PD James #crime

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Can I remember a time when I didn’t know of the existence of Adam Dalgliesh? No. Cover Her Face, the first in the PD James series about the thoughtful detective, was published in 1962. So it was an interesting exercise to re-read this novel when I am so familiar with the last books in the series. How to describe the style of PD James’s detective: detection by deduction and perception. PD JamesThe Maxie family has a new parlourmaid, Sally Jupp, who is found dead in her bed. This is almost a ‘closed room’ mystery in that the murder takes place in a country house with a limited number of suspects. What is unclear is the real story of Sally, her background and how she became an unmarried mother. Is Sally a victim, or is she a manipulative young woman who twists situations and people to her advantage? And who feels most threatened by her? There are plenty of potential culprits and Dalgliesh’s summary at the end – leading up to the naming of the murderer – reminded me of Agatha Christie.
Any Dalgliesh fan will be curious to read about his first appearance. There is almost nothing inside his head here, something the later books do so well, showing us the thoughtful, tortured poet detective. Here, his character is still forming.

Read my reviews of the other Adam Dalgliesh mysteries:-
A MIND TO MURDER #2ADAMDALGLIESH
UNNATURAL CAUSES #3ADAMDALGLIESH
SHROUD FOR A NIGHTINGALE #4ADAMDALGLIESH
THE BLACK TOWER #5ADAMDALGLIESH
DEATH OF AN EXPERT WITNESS #6ADAMDALGLIESH
A TASTE FOR DEATH #7ADAMDALGLIESH
DEVICES AND DESIRES #8ADAMDALGLIESH
ORIGINAL SIN #9ADAMDALGLIESH …read the first paragraph HERE
A CERTAIN JUSTICE #10ADAMDALGLIESH
DEATH IN HOLY ORDERS #11ADAMDALGLIESH
THE MURDER ROOM #12ADAMDALGLIESH …read the first paragraph HERE
THE LIGHTHOUSE #13ADAMDALGLIESH
THE PRIVATE PATIENT #14ADAMDALGLIESH

Here are my reviews of the two Cordelia Gray mysteries:-
AN UNSUITABLE JOB FOR A WOMAN #CGRAY1
THE SKULL BENEATH THE SKIN #CGRAY2

And two other books by PD James:-
INNOCENT BLOOD
TIME TO BE IN EARNEST

If you like this, try:-
‘A Fatal Crossing’ by Tom Hindle
‘Business as Usual’ by EL Lindley
‘The Killing of Polly Carter’ by Robert Thorogood

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview COVER HER FACE by PD James http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1BZ via @SandraDanby

#Bookreview ‘The Doll’s House’ by @mjarlidge #crimefiction

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Vulnerable women are disappearing and Detective Inspector Helen Grace suspects another serial killer. If so, it will be her third, and her success is causing tensions amongst her team in Southampton. In The Doll’s House, MJ Arlidge tells a taut story about girls, captured and confined in dark, dismal places. MJ ArlidgeIn the first chapter, a woman wakes in a dark cellar, and a young family on a day trip to the beach finds a body buried in the sand. This ticks so many boxes for me: the real Southampton setting, the believable Helen Grace, the police politics, Helen’s continuing relationship with fellow officer Charlie.
This is a convincing portrayal of Ruby, a troubled young woman with family issues, who wants to put things right. She was adopted and had a happy childhood, but a reunion with her birth mother sours her life and she disappears. Her mother receives only brief texts and tweets, saying she is trying to sort out her life.
This is a clever killer who keeps his victims alive beyond their grave.

Read my reviews other books in this series:-
EENY MEENY #1HELENGRACE
POP GOES THE WEASEL #2HELENGRACE
LIAR LIAR #4HELENGRACE
LITTLE BOY BLUE #5HELENGRACE
HIDE AND SEEK #6HELENGRACE
LOVE ME NOT #7HELENGRACE
DOWN TO THE WOODS #8 HELENGRACE

If you like this, try:-
‘Cover her Face’ by PD James
‘No Other Darkness’ by Sarah Hilary
‘The Various Haunts of Men’ by Susan Hill

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE DOLL’S HOUSE by @mjarlidge http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1B8 via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The Bone Church’ by @vicdougherty #war #WW2

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The Bone Church was a difficult story to get into for me, which surprised me. The premise by Victoria Dougherty seems so good – Czechoslovakia, wartime, fugitive lovers, a faked religious icon, and a plot to assassinate Josef Goebbels – the promise of which kept me reading. But I found the time shifts, the point of view shifts, and the way the action changed from paragraph to paragraph quite confusing. Assuming this was a formatting issue with my Kindle copy, I kept reading. Victoria DoughertyThe story starts in Rome in 1956 in the Vatican City with a Cardinal and a man called Felix. Then we see Magdalena and her son Ales in Czechoslovakia, a man arrives and takes away her son. Then the action switched to 1943, as Felix and Magdalena are on the run in Prague. He is a famous hockey player, a celebrity, she is a Jew. By this point, the story should have gripped me but I’m afraid it didn’t, I hadn’t read enough about the two characters to care. I think my basic problem is the way the story was told, not the actual story itself; the writing is rich with description and the author certainly knows her history. Halfway through, things started to make a little more sense though at times the plot seemed unnecessarily complicated.
The best bit? An assassination scene, involving a birthday cake, a gun, and Josef Goebbels.

If you like this, try:-
‘Life After Life’ by Kate Atkinson
‘The Little Red Chairs’ by Edna O’Brien
‘Dominion’ by CJ Sansom

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE BONE CHURCH by @vicdougherty http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1Bl via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘No Other Darkness’ by @sarah_hilary #crime

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Amongst children’s books and tins of peaches, two bodies are found in an underground bunker. Two children, curled around each other like commas. For investigating officers DI Marnie Rome and Noah Jake, the case disturbs their own difficult childhood memories. Are they searching for a sadistic murderer, or someone who intended to hide not kill? Then it gets worse, as the plans for other forgotten bunkers are discovered. This is No Other Darkness by Sarah Hilary. Sarah HilaryThis is the first Marnie Rome book I have read, and there were things I liked and things I didn’t. I didn’t like the grotesque description of the inside of the bunker. But I did like the storyline, full of fresh ideas. It is about families: broken ones, cracked ones, and how the past affects the present. Can the past ever be forgotten? Is it possible to start again after tragedy, to have a second chance of getting it right? Or is any attempt bound to fail?
This is an underground mystery of tunnels, bunkers, sewers and dark hiding places. What is the murderer trying to hide, and who from? And what role do the mysterious preppers play? These shady people who plan in case of nuclear attack, storing food and specialist equipment should the worst actually happen.

If you like this, try:-
‘Eeny Meeny’ by MJ Arlidge #1HELENGRACE
‘Due Diligence’ by DJ Harrison #1JENNYPARKER
‘Business as Usual’ by EL Lindley #1GEORGIECONNELLY

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview NO OTHER DARKNESS by @sarah_hilary http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1Bb via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Wolf Winter’ by Cecilia Ekback #thriller

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This book had me gripped from page one.  It is difficult to categorize: thriller, yes; beautifully-written, yes; sexually-charged, yes; ghosts and spirits, yes. Wolf Winter by Cecilia Ekback is a chilling Nordic thriller set in a bleak winter landscape deep in snow, the mutilated body of a man is found by two young girls and the ramifications reverberate throughout the winter months. Cecilia EkbackThis disparate community of families, residents and itinerant Lapps, feel threatened by something on their mountain, Blackåsen. It is a hard life for newcomer Maija and her two daughters Frederika and Dorotea. Maija’s husband leaves them for the winter to get a job on the coast, and so Maija deals with the unnamed threat in her own way, a way which some locals see as suspicious, perhaps even witchery.
The mountain is there on every page, the wind, the snow, the cold. The Swedish expression ‘wolf winter’ means two things: an unusually bitter and long winter, and the darkest time in a person’s life. Both apply to this novel. Excellent. This is Ekback’s debut novel and I look forward to the second.

If you like this, try:-
‘Burial Rites’ by Hannah Kent
‘The Killing Lessons’ by Saul Black
‘I Refuse’ by Per Petterson

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview WOLF WINTER by Cecilia Ekback via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1Af

#BookReview ‘Housekeeping’ by Marilynne Robinson #classic #Americanwriters

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Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson had been on my shelf for a while, bought because of reputation, and anticipated. Perhaps I expected too much of a first novel because, though it has amazing reviews, I struggled to connect with the story. The writing, however, is beautiful, poetic, elegiac. Marilynne RobinsonIt is the story of Ruth and Lucille, orphans, who grow up beside a haunting lake in the vast open countryside of mid-America. The lake dominates the life of everyone who lives around it, it floods every year, and floods the house where the two girls live, first with their grandmother and then with their Aunt Sylvie. We see Sylvie’s attempts at housekeeping dwindle as the house floods each winter, as her care for the house fails, so the two girls are uncared for. Not abused, but not clean, not sent to school, not disciplined. It is a novel about the failure of housekeeping in this house, and in the family, and it is the two who girls who suffer.
The sad story moves at a slow pace, and until halfway through I had no clear picture of how the two girls were different. It is Ruth who narrates, much of which is description of the house which lays at the heart of the story.
All the description, though, is poetic. Ruth’s grandmother in her elderly years “continued to settle and began to shrink. Her mouth bowed forward and her brow sloped back, and her skull shone pink and speckled within a mere haze of hair, which hovered about her head like the remembered shape of an altered thing.”
This is not an easy read, often obscure. There was no strong thread to pull me through the book, to keep turning the pages.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THIS BOOK AT AMAZON

Read my reviews of Robinson’s other novels:-
GILEAD
HOME
JACK

Try the #FirstPara of GILEAD here.

If you like this, try:-
‘A Thousand Acres’ by Jane Smiley
‘Summertime’ by Vanessa Lafaye
‘Barkskins’ by Annie Proulx

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview HOUSEKEEPING by Marilynne Robinson http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1zG via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland #historical #art

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‘The front cover of Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland features a painting by Dutch master Jan Vermeer called ‘The Painter in his Studio’. In it we see the back of a painter, brush in hand, studying a young girl in blue, holding a book, who stands by a window.  This real painting was the inspiration for Vreeland’s novel. Susan VreelandScene-by-scene  the story takes you back in time, following through the centuries the owners of the painting which author Susan Vreeland imagines Vermeer was painting . First, we meet a maths master who has a secret. A painting, inherited from his father, which came to him in the Second World War. The painting is passed from owner to owner, sometimes as an inheritance or gift, sometimes as payment of a debt, sometimes stolen. Vreeland tells us the story of each owner, what the painting meant to them and how it affected their lives: for some it means quick money, or guilt, or beauty, or a hidden secret. Effectively this is a series of short stories, linked by the painting.
It is a charming tale, set mostly in the Holland of dykes, poverty and farms. The painting illuminates the lives of everyone who owns it, no matter how briefly. A charming story about how a painting is viewed differently by everyone who sees it, starting with the artist’s intentions as he conceives and executes it. Vermeer says: “A man has time for only a certain number of paintings in his lifetime… He’d better choose them prudently.”
If you enjoyed Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring or Jessie Burton’s The Miniaturist, you will enjoy this.

If you like this, try:-
‘The Glassmaker’ by Tracy Chevalier
‘Disobedient’ by Elizabeth Fremantle
‘The Figurine’ by Victoria Hislop

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview GIRL IN HYACINTH BLUE by Susan Vreeland http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1mi via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The Humans’ by @matthaig1 #humour #contemporary

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I irritated and intrigued by husband by my constant chuckling while reading The Humans by Matt Haig. I wish I had read it sooner, it was a breath of fresh air. I read it in two sittings over a weekend. If you feel a little jaded with your reading, this is my prescription for you. Matt HaigProfessor Andrew Martin is not feeling himself. He has been walking naked through the street and finds humans really odd-looking. That is because the real Andrew Martin is dead, and the human who looks like him is really an alien. The alien has come to earth to delete the mathematical breakthrough achieved by Professor Martin before it does damage to humankind. The alien Andrew just does not get humans, in fact his first source of information on human behaviour is from Cosmopolitan magazine.
This is a funny book with a serious message about mental health, about our acceptance of others for what they are, the expectations and selfishness of modern society. Bit by bit, the alien Andrew discovers humans are not as he has been warned; they can in fact be generous, charitable, empathetic and brave.
Here’s a small excerpt. Alien Andrew is recovering from his period of temporary insanity by watching television:
“The term ‘news’ on Earth generally meant ‘news that directly affects humans.’ There was, quite literally, nothing about the antelope or the sea-horse or the red-eared slider turtle or the other nine million species on the planet.”

Read my reviews of these other Matt Haig novels:-
HOW TO STOP TIME
THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY

If you like this, try:-
‘The Diary of a Nobody’ by George & Weedon Grossmith
‘The Blessing’ by Nancy Mitford
‘Trio’ by William Boyd

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE HUMANS by @matthaig1 via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1zD

#BookReview ‘Inflicted’ by Ria Frances #WW2 #holocaust

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Theo is sixteen, and unhappy. He stumbles into the life of an elderly neighbour, Anna. Together they share their secrets and Anna, by telling the story of her own life as a teenager, helps Theo face up to his difficult emotions. Inflicted is the debut novel of English author Ria Frances and, despite the unflinching approach to a difficult subject, is I think aimed at teenagers. Ria FrancesIt tells the story of Anna, a teenager in the Second World War, on the run with her parents from the German army. Her mother dies and Anna is separated from her father as they are taken to Theresienstadt, the city-turned-ghetto run by the Nazis. Anna’s story of hardship is a difficult emotional read, the author does not sweeten the hardships, but the central message is one of hope, courage and love amidst suffering.
I wanted to know how Anna’s story ended, even though the adult Anna was telling her own story, because I was curious about her journey from the Czech village of Lidice, to Theresienstadt, Berlin and finally to Sussex in 2010. Curiously, it was Anna’s story which drew me on not Theo’s.
I found the ending rather rushed and difficult to follow, perhaps in the author’s effort to tie-up all the loose ends. But I don’t mind some loose ends at the end of a novel, it leaves the story fresh in my mind and gives me something to consider.

If you like this, try:-
‘The Little Red Chairs’ by Edna O’Brien
‘The Bone Church’ by Victoria Dougherty
‘All The Broken Places’ by John Boyne

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview INFLICTED by Ria Frances http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1q8 via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘Kings and Queens’ by @TerryTyler4 #family #romance

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Kings and Queens is the first novel by Terry Tyler that I have read. It is the rollicking story of property developer Harry Lanchester. A property developer you may think, hardly your usual hero type? But he is not just any Harry, he is King Henry VIII updated to modern times. Terry TylerI started reading this after a heavyweight novel and in need of light refreshment, having already started then discarded one book on my Kindle after two pages. This provided the page-turner my weary brain required, the story race along and is an ideal read for holidays, a long train or plane journey, or just when you want to cosset yourself.
If you like Tudor-set novels, you will have fun with this. It is easy to work out that that Cathy is Catherine of Aragon and Annette Hever is Anne Boleyn, but I enjoyed recalling my Tudor history – and reading of Philippa Gregory novels – to work out the Tudor equivalent of the modern characters. Of course, as we know the story of Henry and his wives, we can work out what happens to Harry and his, though Tyler puts a modern twist on each story that draws you in. I found myself comparing her writing style to the ultimate page-turner Jilly Cooper. I wonder if Ms Tyler has written about polo?
Just one small criticism: I found the beginning a bit underwhelming and almost stopped reading, I am glad I didn’t.

Read my review of LAST CHILD, second of the two Lanchester books by Terry Tyler.

If you like this, try:-
‘Dark Aemilia’ by Sally O’Reilly
‘The Other Eden’ by Sarah Bryant
‘The Fair Fight’ by Anna Freeman

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview KINGS AND QUEENS by @TerryTyler4 via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1yT