Book #3/2018 Tell Me the Truth about Love

Tell Me the Truth about Love by W.H. Auden
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Perhaps noticeable by my absence for a while. Saturday 6th January I was rushed to hospital; severe back pain turned out to be caused by a massive aortic artery aneurysm. Five hours later I was on the operating table - for 4.5 hours - on bypass, for a repair to the aorta. Six days of ICU and high dependency care. Discharged nine days ago and now on the long road to recovery. It has knocked me sideways and has (only temporarily I hope) ruined my love of reading. My enthusiasm is lost.

Tell Me the Truth about Love - fifteen poems by W.H.Auden - I had finished on 5th January. It is a small joy and contains one of his best known works: Funeral Blues. Fortunately I have avoided this becoming more appropriate....

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Book #2/2018 The Controller

The Controller by Linda Coles
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

My thanks to Linda Cole for a Kindle pdf of The Controller - a novella, easy to read in one sitting.

Pete uses a drone to spy on owners walking their dogs. Establish where they live and leave it to his cohorts to nap the dog and hold for ransom. Pam is a delightful lady, ready for retirement, when her dog is stolen. Like any pet owner she is totally bereft until she receives the 'phone call demanding money for her dogs safe return. Pam pays up. But the crime takes a much nastier turn when the gang see a way to make more money...

The Controller introduces Detective Sergeant Amanda Lacey and her sidekick DC Jack Rutherford. He has spent many years as a Detective Constable and is happy with his lot. These are two very likeable coppers and get stuck into this dastardly crime.

Well written, likeable characters (well, the good ones!) and a very satisfying read.

I loved it.

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Book #1/2018 Larchfield

Larchfield by Polly Clark
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I completed reading Larchfield on New Year's Day. It is an unusual book, weaving the lives of historical characters with Dora Fielding, a young poet, who moves with her husband to Helensborough on the west coast of Scotland. This is small town life at its most excrutiating and it starts to smother Dora, who is looking to find her true self. What to do?

When Dora discovers that the poet Wystan H. Auden lived in Helensborough in the 30s Dora finds a way to escape reality. This is handled by Polly Clark with great imagination. Auden taught at Larchfield school where he is mocked for his Englishness. He is rightly suspected of homosexuality and spends his holidays with Christopher Isherwood in Germany. Dora and Auden 'find each other' and Dora's imagination becomes all consuming. These are vulnerable people and Larchfield is beautifully written; a haunting novel about heroism and repression - a story that draws you in with a compelling sense of danger.

This is an ambitious story, which Polly Clark handles perfectly. Highly recommended.

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Book #88 The Salmon Who Dared to Leap Higher

The Salmon Who Dared to Leap Higher by Ahn Do-hyun
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A gentle, heartfelt fable for our time. Ahn Do-hyun is a multi-million copy bestselling, award-winning Korean poet. Told through the eyes and the heart of Silver Salmon as a shoal cross the great ocean towards their spawning grounds on the Green River, facing the dangers of humankind, not just from net fishing and fish eagles but the pollution of river water caused by man. He falls in love with a female: ”My name is Clear-Eyed Salmon”. The salmon will swim upstream to the place of their birth to spawn, and then to die. A tale about aching and ardent love as Silver Salmon and Clear-Eyed Salmon pursue their dream, to swim upstream, to leap high over rapids, to continue the existence of their species.

To those who believe hope and love still exist in this world - this book is for you.

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Book #87 Murder on Christmas Eve

Murder on Christmas Eve: Classic Mysteries for the Festive Season by Cecily Gayford
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Perfect for this time of year. Ten stories edited by Cecily Gayford, not all include a murder I should add. My favourites are The Trinity Cat by Ellis Peters, about a cat that knows who killed its owner (perfect for any cat lover!), A Wife in a Million by Val McDermid, a rather chilling story told in just sixteen pages, As Dark as Christmas Gets by Lawrence Block, masterful tale about a missing manuscript told in forty pages and No Sanity Clause by Ian Rankin.

This collection of tales probably would not have the same impact if read at any other time of year. They all feature Christmas Eve. Perhaps get yourself a copy for Christmas 2018, then….

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Book #86 The Hazel Wood

The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This has confirmed that I should be more circumspect in the ARCs I accept to read. The Hazel Wood was not for me. Unfathomable, well almost. Is this a dark fairy story, a story within a fairy story, is it supernatural, is it ”an unfathomable vastness, like lentils scattered through ashes”?

I can say it’s about seventeen-year-old Alice and her mother Ella, spending life on the road, no permanent abode, habitually having to avoid bad luck - until Ella is taken - to the Hazel Wood, the Hinterland? The abode of Alice’s recently deceased grandmother, author of supernatural fairy stories, Tales from The Hinterland. Her mother leaves behind a message for Alice: Stay away from the Hazel Wood. But, like a magnet, the Hazel Wood pulls Alice into a nightmare world of dark characters and monsters, stories within stories, as Alice seeks her mother. It’s all rather bewildering.

One character says to Alice: ”The quickest way to end this is to begin it, and that’s no way to start, is it?” Well, I rather wish I hadn’t. I struggled to finish The Hazel Wood, almost abandoned it, several times. Not my cup of tea at all.

I must still thank NetGalley and Penguin Random House for the opportunity to read this ARC.

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Book #85 The Woman In The Window

The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

With thanks to NetGalley and HarperCollins UK for this ARC of The Woman In The Window.

I had heard so much about this book by A.J. Finn; so much praise from highly regarded authors including Stephen King ”unputdownable”, Val McDermid ”twisted to the power of max” - such comments I often ignore. How wrong can I be?! WOW!…

Without a moments hesitation let me say that The Woman In The Window is a read-in-one-sitting-book. No doubt. I know. Half way through I was faced with the distraction of meeting good friends for drinks and dinner. That’s the evening gone I thought. I almost cancelled, to my shame. I didn’t. My wife and I got back home at 10:30pm. I picked up where I left off and read into the early hours. (I still count this as a one-sitting-read. It would have been if an evening out hadn’t interrupted). I could not read fast enough! Page turning in a blur. Pulse racing. Short chapters racking up the unbearable tension. The first reveal, when it comes, smacks you in the face! Everything you thought you knew turned on its head… as Dr Anna Fox haunts the rooms of her old New York house that she hasn’t left for ten months, suffering with agoraphobia. And for understandable reasons. Separated from her husband and daughter, a separation that is heartbreaking. Anna is just too terrified to step outside. Uses her Nikon camera watching her neighbours, through her window, particularly the Russells, on the face of it a happy family of three and a reminder of what once was hers. And then…

The scream. It hurtles across the silence and Anna witnesses something - dreadful. What to do? Does she report what she has seen? Given her state of mind will anyone, including the police, believe her? Can she uncover the truth? Can she believe herself?

Haunting, harrowing, creepy, frightening - the last sixty pages or so are a real white-knuckle ride, really left me stunned and breathless. As Ruth Ware said: ”Hitchcock would have snapped up the rights in a heartbeat”. There is no doubt about that!

My thriller of the year…


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