Mary-Rose MacColl: Swimming Home

An extraordinary young woman

Catherine Quick spent her early life on the islands of the Torres Strait, north of Australia. It was a carefree life, playing with the children of the islanders and spending much of her time swimming in the warm waters of the ocean that surrounds the islands. When her father dies she is moved to London to live with her Aunt Louisa, a busy London surgeon.

Catherine misses her former life and finds it difficult to do what Louisa wants and get a good education. Boarding school is not easy and when a teenager Catherine takes a challenge to swim across the cold, and tidally dangerous waters of the Thames Estuary. While Louisa is shocked, Catherine's achievement reminds her of her love of swimming and memories of the past from the islands and her constant Islander companion, Michael.

American banker Manfred Lear watches her swim and offers to take her to New York to train with some of the best swimmers in the world to see if she can become the first female to swim the English Channel. With some difficulty, Catherine takes up this challenge and in the process discovers secrets that will change her life forever.

I loved Mary-Rose Macall's previous book, In Falling Snow, and was looking forward to this book to see if she could repeat the performance. While this was a good story about an independent and strong woman growing up in the 1920's and 1930's, it didn't have that special magic that put her previous book into my top reads a couple of years ago.

Ken Follett: A Dangerous Fortune

Murder, Financial Crisis and more Murder
Most of us think of Ken Follett for his medieval Pillars of the Earth sagas and the recently finished Century Trilogy. We forget that Follett is also a prolific author and master storyteller who has written some excellent spy thrillers and historical family sagas.

While A Dangerous Fortune is a family saga it is also a murder story and a peek into the almost unregulated world of banking in the late 19th century. The saga starts in 1866 on a day when a schoolboy drowns in a strange accident. Present at the accident was Hugh Pilaster and his older cousin Edward, members of a banking family and Micky Miranda, son of a brutal South American landowner.

There were other tragedies that day as Hugh's father committed suicide when his bank collapsed. Hugh gets taken in by his uncle Joseph Pilaster who is head of another more successful bank. His wife Augusta treats him badly. She is the scheming matriarch of the family who will do anything to advance her son Edward to get control of the Pilaster bank. She is a real villain who is domineering and unscrupulous - a fantastic character.

Mickey Miranda befriends Augusta and inveigles himself into the world of the Pilaster family and affects their personal and business lives.

Ken Follett has written a great family saga that will keep you entertained as you follow the webs if complicity, and the ups and downs of the Pilaster family. Highly recommended to discerning readers who want to read a good family sage and thriller with a historical background.

Susan Howatch: Sins of the Fathers

The Rich are still very different
I really enjoyed The Rich are Different about banking families in the 1920's and 1930's in the US and England who were driven by greed, cunning, ambition, revenge, love (inside and outside of marriage), need for security and hope for the lives of their many children. I wondered if Howatch could match the original in the sequel following the lives of some of the children, but sadly this is not so.

After many unscrupulous dealings, Cornelius Van Zale won the battle for his late uncle's banking empire. He is now the undisputed king of the castle over his contemporaries and his offspring and stepchildren. When his daughter Vicki who the apple of his eye tries to elope with a poor beach boy Cornelius goes into protective mode, even suggesting that his partner Sam, the same age as him, should marry her to prevent such a marriage. Sam is so browbeaten by Cornelius that he agrees.

In his banking world, Cornelius continues to encounter complicated rivalries and affairs that impact on the unfinished business when he took over the bank come back to haunt him. He suppresses his memory of his involvement in the brutal affairs of the past but is constantly reminded of them by Scott Sullivan, stepson of his sister Emily, who he had shared the upbringing after Scott's father died tragically in an auto accident which he had engineered to get rid of any threats to his position in the bank. While Scott is an important partner in the bank, he has a dark side which Cornelius never understands.

Howatch weaves a complex tale of intrigue, family problems, adultery, deceit, espionage,  adultery, murder, blackmail, impotence, alcoholism, chronic illness, perversion, revenge and split personalities. Unfortunately, I found this to be a very poor sequel to The Rich are Different with almost cardboard characters, and a mostly unbelievable plot.

Stuart MacBride: Flesh House

Shades of Hannibal Lecter
Warning - a lot of this book is not for the weak at heart or sensitive reader. It contains some of the most grisly scenes of any book I have read, including murder, dismemberment, and cannibalism.

I have been a great fan of Stuart MacBride's earlier books in the Logan Macrae series, but this one was difficult to take. All of the old characters are there, Macrae, his former girlfriend "ball-buster" PC Jackie Watson, sweet eating DCI Inch and foul-mouthed lesbian DCI Steel. The great répartit and "camaraderie" of the Aberdeen police force that makes this series different are there, but this is overwhelmed by the crimes they are fighting - slaughter, butchery, and cannibalism.

The story starts out with the discovery of human remains being shipped as chilled meat to an offshore oil-rig. The story then builds to the chase to catch the serial killer, nicknamed "Flesher", an old Scots term for butcher. Flesher is always one jump ahead of the police and the kill list expands as he slaughters his victims with a bolt gun which was used in abattoirs to stun animals before they were killed and dismembers the corpses. The story also has some gruesome scenes from an abattoir where human remains are mixed with animal meat.

Despite this MacBride continues to deliver some amusing sidelights. DI Steel is worried because her girlfriend wants to get married, and DI Inch gets fatter by the day. Even the Flesher has a comic side, always appearing wearing a Margaret Thatcher Haloween mask.

Stuart MacBride had been one of my favourite UK police/crime writers. Many writers of successful long-running series turn to extreme plots to keep a series alive but as Flesh House is only #4 in the series I wonder why MacBride took this step when the series didn't need such a distraction. It has made me think again about reading further books in the series, but I probably will because his other books were so good and hopefully the later ones will be better than this one.

James Swain: Take Down

How to take down a Casino
Billy Cunningham is a grifter - a person who can rip off a Casino. He works with a crew of beautiful women and other grifters to carry out carefully planned very skillful scams that have earned them a wonderful life. Billy has a luxury house, a Maserati and cash to spare. It is the kind of life that absorbs all of Billy's life and he cannot afford to make mistakes which would land him a long-term jail term.

An old-time grifter offers Billy a place in a scam that would rip off the high rollers' room of a new casino. The offer looks foolproof but soon Billy finds himself up to his neck in trouble from the casino's violent managers. To keep himself and his crew out of trouble Billy agrees to help the casino to defeat a family of cheats who are planning a huge scam at the casino.

Billy has no intention of ratting on fellow cheats and works out his own way to protect the cheats and at the same time get his own back on the casino's managers and the owner who is using the casino to launder drug money. The stakes are high, up to eight million dollars, the risk is extreme for Billy's life or a life in prison. The risk is also high for his crew which Billy will defend with his life.

I have been fascinated by several of James Swain's series about casino cheaters where Tony Valentine is on the other side of the game tracking down cheaters. This time the table is turned and Swain takes us into the world of a charming and skilfull cheater. It is exciting, challenging and a rewarding look at a most unusual world.

I was also lucky to read this as an audiobook narrated by talented voice actor Nick Podehl who brought the world of casinos and cheats to life with his marvellous representations of the players from all sides of the game. Highly recommended for those who like something a little different from the straightforward thriller.

Anthony Horowitz: Trigger Mortis

James Bond deja-vu
This is yet another James Bond adventure written by a well known contemporary thriller writer years after the death of Ian Fleming. The main difference with this version is that Anthony Horowitz has used some ideas that Fleming left for a TV series for one of the sub-plots.

Bond is once again involved with SMERSH who want to take down a famous racing driver who is competing with Russian attempts to take over the world of international motor racing. We see Bond learning to become a racing driver of a Maserati at Nürburgring to prevent a major accident. There he meets wealthy and dangerous Korean, Jason Sin who has teamed up with SMERSH to sabotage the flight of one of NASA's space rockets with possible disastrous consequences for the US.

Of course there are Bond girls, first Pussy Galore, who we find really prefers women, and Jeopardy Lane, "a girl like no other Bond has encountered".

While Horowitz writes well and closely follows the James Bond themes IMHO the book really was a bit of deja-vu and outmoded. The art of fantasy thrillers has come a long way since the days of James Bond and I don't think it really deserves to be revisited so many times. In saying that I do admit that I am bored out of my mind with the continual rejuvenation of Bond in major movies, almost in a Dr Who mode.

Paula McLain: Circling the Sun: A Novel

A remarkable tale about a remarkable woman
Paula McLain's story revisits the scene of Out of Africa with a fictional biography of the life of Beryl Markham, a record-setting female aviator who was the first person to fly solo from east to west across the Atlantic from Europe to America.

Beryl was born in England but brought to Kenya by her parents as a child. Abandoned by her mother who returns to England, Beryl grows up in a wild environment of Kenya, playing with the local natives. As she matures her unconventional upbringing and love of horses sets her on a path to become the first woman in Kenya to qualify as a horse trainer.

Financial and personal problems thrust Beryl into a loveless marriage and she only discovers herself when she is able to break out of that arrangement. This is all set amid the background of the frequently decadent life of English ex patriots living in Kenya in the 1920's. She meets with Karen Blixen (who as Isak Dinesen wrote the classic tale Out of Africa) and is attracted to Karen's lover, safari hunter Denys Finch Hatton, She not only discovers the personal love of her eventful life but also her long-term love for flying.

The book is set against the magnificent wild country of 1920's Africa, and the growth of Nairobi into a major city. It is a powerful and frequently emotional tale of historical fiction about an amazing independent woman who was really ahead of her time. This is an extraordinary story that I would strongly recommend to the most discerning reader of historical fiction.

Pat Conroy: Prince of Tides

Superb emotional story by Pat Conroy
Many of you will have seen the Oscar winning movie of Prince of Tides with Barbra Streisand and Nick Nolte. It was a great movie but you are really missing something of this great emotional story if you don't read the book as well.

Pat Conroy is one of my favourite contemporary American authors. His prose is almost poetic and his love for his the beauty of South Carolina's low country stuns the imagination.

Prince of Tides is the story of the Wingo family living in comfortable poverty on a small island of the South Carolina coast. It is the turbulent story of Tom Wingo and his supremely talented but very troubled twin sister Savannah as they come to grips with the legacy of their extraordinary family and the dark things that happen to them during their childhood. It is also the story of their elder brother Luke, a Vietnam War hero with dreams of how his home country should remain.

A lot of the story is set in New York where Savannah is recovering from yet another suicide attempt. Tom, now an unemployed English teacher and football coach, leaves his family and travels to NY (which he hates) to help Savannah, now a renowned poet telling the world about the Carolinas. To help Savannah he must tell her psychiatrist, the beautiful but enigmatic Dr Susan Lowenstein, things about his family history that he and Savannah have repressed to try to keep their sanity.

While the story is really about the Wingos, the sub-story about Tom's relationship with "Lowenstein" is also laced with psychiatric and romantic undertones as Tom and Susan discover how to help one another.

This wonderful book is arguably Conroy's most acclaimed and well-known novel. While I have seen the movie several times I am so pleased that I chose to read the novel as an audiobook narrated by the late Frank Muller. In his introduction to the audiobook Pat Conroy said that Muller "gave me ... a work of art". I totally agree as it took me into the dark world of the Wingos and the strange relationship between Tom and Lowenstein in a way that would not have been possible reading the book myself.

Joel Goldman & Lisa Klink: All In

A great high-stakes romp
Cassie Ireland and Jake Carter have the same objective but totally different reasons to take down Alan Kendrick, an unscrupulous billionaire hedge fund manager. Cassie is a bit of a modern-day Robyn Hood recovering assets from people who think they are above the law. Carter is a high-rolling gambler who travels the world trying to win fortunes off mega-rich but less skillful gamblers.

Cassie plans to be a cat-burglar and overcome Kendrick's extreme security system using information obtained by befriending his disenchanted wife. Carter has got to know Kendrick around the poker table, winning some and losing some and is patiently waiting for the opportunity to pounce and use his skills take him out for megabucks.

Cassie and Jake just happen to live in the same exclusive apartment block where Kendrick owns the penthouse. Things fizzle when they meet but they don't spark because it would spoil their individual plays with Kendrick. Cassie gets in first and the feathers start to fly and Kendrick plans his revenge.

While waiting for the big coup with Kendrick, Jake defeats and humiliates Theo Kalogrides, another mega-rich gambler who is "blessed with his father's money but none of his brains or charm". Theo accuses Jake of cheating. While this is a normal risk for Jake the loser is a dangerous man, verging on the psychotic, who will not give in until he recovers the money he has lost.

This is a fast moving romp through the world of the megarich and international poker on the high seas with the strange pair working together and against one another to protect their lives.

Joel Goldman & Lisa Klink have collaborated seamlessly in producing a fast paced, easily readible escapist thriller. Well done - highly recommended to those looking for something fairly light,  different and enjoyable. 4.5 stars.

Lee Child: Small Wars

A great short dose of Reacher at his peak
This is one of the best e-singles that I have read. Many authors write a poor short story as a promo for their next book which is invariably better. In this case the short story is great but the next book (Make Me) was a bit of a disappointment.

In this short story Child takes us back to the days of Major Jack Reacher MP at the peak of his investigatory powers. By chance Reacher has to fill in for someone else and is asked to look into the murder of a female Colonel on a remote forest road in Georgia. What makes the situation interesting is that the Colonel used to be with the elite War Plans area of the Pentagon. She seems to be on a fast track to higher rank, apparently wealthy because she drives a Porsche sports car. She was shot professional assassination style - two shots in the chest and one in the head.

This is Reacher at his best as he quickly works out a possible scenario and killer. A couple of phone calls to his brother Joe, also a Colonel at the Pentagon, tells him more about the victim's background and possible motives.

It was great to see Lee Child at his best writing a very good short story. IMHO the Reacher series is starting to run out of steam and Make Me was pretty repetitious with a similar plot and formula to many other books in the series.