Tag Archives: thrillers

#BookReview ‘Before the Fall’ by Noah Hawley #thriller #suspense

4 Replies

The premise for Before the Fall by Noah Hawley, also writer and producer of the Fargo television series, has a real hook. A private plane crashes into the sea and there are two survivors, JJ Bateman, a four-year old boy, and a man who rescues JJ and swims miles to reach land. Noah HawleyThis is a private jet plane in an alternate world of seriously wealthy, important people. The boy is the sole heir to his father’s huge media company. Scott, who rescues JJ, is a struggling artist. Also on board was a dodgy businessman about to be indicted for a criminal offence. Pressured to fill 24 hours of live news broadcasting, David Bateman’s own reporters start speculating about the crash, was it an accident or a terrorist attack. They also bug phones. News anchor Bill Milligan preys on the vulnerable. Scott, because his is poor, turns overnight from hero to suspect. Why was he on the plane in the first place? JJ is unable to talk, his Aunt Eleanor [his mother’s sister] who is caring for him refuses to talk to the press. The air and sea search for wreckage continues without success. The problem for the television channels is the void of things to say while rescuers search the seas. And so Milligan starts making things up, ‘…what we’re talking about here is nothing less than an act of terrorism, if not by foreign nationals, then by certain elements of the liberal media. Planes don’t just crash, people. This was sabotage. This was a shoulder-fired rocket from a speedboat. This was a jihadi in a suicide vest on board the aircraft, possibly one of the crew. Murder, my friends, by the enemies of freedom.’
Before the Fall is about suspicions, the spreading of false news online and television by disreputable media, the suppositions made by modern news gatherers and the public’s demand for salacious gossip, whether it is proven or not. And all of this amid tragedy.
Told from multiple viewpoints, the story of the flight from Martha’s Vineyard to New York gradually unfolds and some of the worst assumptions made by the media, and by people who thrive on gossip, turn out to be wrong. Some may be correct.
A character-led suspense thriller that I read in three days, racing through to the rather limp ending. Some of the phrasing is overtly American and I skipped the sections about American sport, but the emotions are universal. A morality tale for the modern world; beware the conspiracy theorists and television channels which run news stories based on speculation not fact. Often the simplest answer is the true one.

If you like this, try:-
‘Never’ by Ken Follett
‘Panic Room’ by Robert Goddard
‘The Partisan’ by Patrick Worrall

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview BEFORE THE FALL by Noah Hawley https://wp.me/p2ZHJe-77I via @SandraDanby

COMING SOON… THE NEXT BOOK I REVIEW WILL BE:- Mary Stewart

#BookReview ‘A Hero in France’ by Alan Furst #thriller #WW2

5 Replies

France 1941, British bombers fly every night to Germany, many aircraft don’t make it back home. The aircrew parachuting into Occupied France must somehow find their way home in order to fight again. A Hero in France by Alan Furst is a story of that individual battle within the wider war, seen from different sides by two ordinary men. This is the beginning of the French Resistance. Alan FurstThe man known as Mathieu – we don’t know his real name or identity until the very end of the book, this is the name by which he is known to his Resistance cell – escorts airmen along the north-south escape lines into Vichy France and onwards to Spain. Old clothes are sourced at jumble sales, innocent-looking shops serve as message drops, and a schoolgirl delivers messages by bicycle. In the beginning it was successful and relatively simple, but now the German command in Paris realizes there is a big problem. Word is getting around about the Resistance and people want to join, but how does Mathieu know who is genuine and who is a German spy?
In Hamburg, Otto Broehm, senior inspector of the police department, is transferred to the Kommandantur in Paris to stop the flow of downed airmen being returned to the UK by French people, working together in coordinated groups.
This is a huge subject and a story much-told, but by focussing on a few personalities and what happens to them, Alan Furst writes an engaging story which I read over a weekend. It is a low-key study of personalities, rather than a page-turning thriller.

Read my review of MIDNIGHT IN EUROPE, also by Alan Furst.

If you like this, try:-
‘Inflicted’ by Ria Frances
‘After the Bombing’ by Clare Morrall
‘The Paying Guests’ by Sarah Waters

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview A HERO IN FRANCE by Alan Furst http://wp.me/p5gEM4-21g via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The Ends of the Earth’ by Robert Goddard #WW2 #thriller

7 Replies

Don’t do what I did, and read the first two books in this series by Robert Goddard and then leave 12 months before reading The Ends of the Earth, the third. Ideally this trilogy should be read back to back, in full sun when sitting on a sunlounger. The story runs along at a cracking pace, with dense plotting, loads of characters, politics, spies and locations from Europe to Japan. The pace of this, the third book, is constant, hardly time to draw a breath. Robert GoddardQuestions that I had forgotten about from the first book are revisited, challenged and solved. Japan is the scene for the climax of this tale of James Maxted, ‘Max’, and his hunt for the truth about his father’s death. But this is so much more than a single case of murder, on it hangs the future of post-Great War Europe and the twentieth-century relationship of Japan and America. At times things happen which seem a little convenient, a person turns out to have a skill or history of which we knew nothing before, but I forgave Goddard for this. He is a prime storyteller. It is clear he knows his settings – Paris, Marseilles, Switzerland, Japan – and this adds to the verisimilitude.
In this rollicking spy story, Goddard examines the nature of courage. Max finds himself drawing on the type of bravery he needed to survive in the Royal Flying Corps. “He was not surprised by how calm he felt, how undismayed by what lay before him. He had discovered his aptitude for taking risks early in the war. ‘You should be more careful, sir,’ Sam had said to him more than once. And Max had always given the same reply. ‘Being careful is what gets a chap killed.’ Eventually, he had come to believe that. And it was a belief that had served him well. So far.”

Read my reviews of Goddard’s other books:-
THE WAYS OF THE WORLD #1WIDEWORLD
THE CORNERS OF THE GLOBE #2WIDEWORLD
PANIC ROOM
THE FINE ART OF INVISIBLE DETECTION #1UMIKOWADA
THIS IS THE NIGHT THEY COME FOR YOU #1SUPERINTENDENTTALEB

If you like this, try:-
‘Midnight in Europe’ by Alan Furst
‘Stay Where You Are and Then Leave’ by John Boyne
‘Slow Horses’ by Mick Herron #1SLOUGHHOUSE

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE ENDS OF THE EARTH by Robert Goddard http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1O8 via @SandraDanby 

#BookReview ‘The Bear’ by Claire Cameron #mystery #suspense

4 Replies

Claire Cameron knows the forest where The Bear is set, and it shows. I could not put this book down. From page one I was hooked. Claire CameronIt is important to say that although the point-of-view of The Bear is a five-year old girl, Anna, the voice is not like Emma Donoghue’s Jack in Room. The two books are completely different in tone, the children are very different. The tension in The Bear comes from the dual vision of the story – Anna’s perspective, seeing but not understanding; and the reader’s imagination filling in the reality of the scene as Anna describes it, worrying about the consequences.
Anna is almost six, her brother Stick is almost three. Anna is pre-occupied with trying to behave as her mother and father have schooled her; despite the horror of the situation, she worries about doing what her mother tells her to do, being polite, remembering that Stick is too young to understand. The threat is always there: when the two children are trapped in Coleman, the family’s metal anti-bear food store, and Anna is wishing her mother would let her have a Barbie, I was worrying about what was outside Coleman.
It is a harrowing tale, and the writing made me catch my breath at times. Anna tries to be the grown-up sister, a babysitter for Stick, to have fun, to make him laugh, to distract him from the horror. “And Stick laughs and laughs like when it’s really funny and he starts to walk around and his head rolls because it is so funny and his eyes are tearing but not tears like he is sad. They look like the same tears but they aren’t when you laugh and they come from a different place, like they drip out from your throat and through your eyes. Tears when you are sad drip up from your heart.”
I learned to see the world through Anna’s eyes. The dirty water they drink from a pool is ‘chocolate milk’. The story is interlaced with Anna’s memories of ‘being four’, of trying to do as her mother has taught her. “Manners!”
She waits for her parents to come, as they always have. “Mummy said to me, ‘Daddy and I will be there.’ I am a good girl and our family is four. I don’t want to wait here because I don’t like it but I am supposed to watch Stick when Mummy is not here. I am not old enough to be a babysitter because that is a girl who has long hair and her jeans go loose around her shoe and nail polish that is pink like a pink popsicle except dark. I want nail polish but Mummy says no and I can’t babysit yet so I just have to watch Stick. I don’t know how long until Mummy and Daddy come.” But the reader knows they can’t come.
I read this in one sitting on holiday.

If you like this, try:-
‘Barkskins’ by Annie Proulx
‘A Sudden Light’ by Garth Stein
‘At the Edge of the Orchard’ by Tracy Chevalier

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE BEAR by Claire Cameron http://wp.me/p5gEM4-P5 via @SandraDanby