The twenty-second book in the Inspector Brunetti series, The Golden Egg starts slowly and unfolds at a pace fitting to its autumnal Venetian setting. The weather is turning and people are gradually retreating indoors, retiring from an outside life to an inside one and turning inwards and thus reflective, which is a good way to describe this gem of a book. It’s highly reflective – of character, human nature, identity, community and what makes family.
Asked to investigate a minor infringement among shop-keepers and their shopfronts in a sestiere as a favour for his boss, Brunetti does so unwillingly. But when his wife Paola asks him to look into the death of a kind, disabled man who worked at their dry-cleaners in the same region, a man who no-one seemed to notice much or care about, Brunetti uncovers a nest of secrets, cruelty and lies.
I wasn’t sure at first what to make of this book. It was quiet, with very little drama at one level and yet, in the telling of Brunetti’s discoveries about the man with no identity, only a mother who refuses to cooperate with the police, a tragic tale begins to emerge – one in which family is at the very heart. Of course, one of the delights of Leon’s novels is that family features in every single one – Brunetti’s. Regular readers have come to love Paolo, the children, and the ways in which the Bruntettis come together over meals and deal with the vagaries of adolescence, work and life. In this novel, the reader can’t help but compare the comfort and love the Brunettis offer each other, even when angry, tired and hurt, with what the Inspector finds; how “family” can be something that bonds and binds but also something that imprisons and ruins.
Deeply emotional and psychological, this novel plumbs some nasty depths in its quiet, understated way. Once more, Leon features the watery streets of Venice, the food, the quirky characters, but hovering in the background and shifting to the foreground at times is the idea of facades, of “shop-fronts” if you like – how we present one version of ourselves, wear a mask, and it’s only when you bother to seek what lies behind that you may be shocked at what you find. It’s also about communication – the failure we sometimes have to ask the questions we should, to “see” through language as much as with our eyes and how this can shape and break community.
In a languorous, but genuinely awful way, through patient and persistent communication/interrogation (which is always so gentle), the façade that was built around the disabled man is slowly torn down. While I guessed most of what was going on well before it was revealed, I didn’t see the final, terrible disclosure. Nor does Brunetti.
It’s testimony to Leon’s wonderful prose and story-telling abilities that, along with the Inspector, we reel at what is found, at the capacity for enduring revenge and cruelty that people are capable of and the legacy of “family.”
This is another crime book, but the subtleties and emotions that are explored make it so much more as well.
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Blessed with a quick mind and youth, the new prioress encounters not just resistance form the older monks and nuns who can’t reconcile her age and attractiveness with her abilities and who resent the of imposition of someone favoured by the king upon them, she also has a dead body to deal with.
ome with a health-warning: inclined to induce insomnia. I read Bombproof in one sitting, staying up to watch the sun sneak through the blinds and hear the birds begin to bloody well sing. Serves me right for starting it so late at night. A shorter novel than some of Robotham’s others, it’s also an incredibly fast-paced book that follows the extraordinary mis-adventures of the gorgeously named Sami Macbeth, the “unluckiest person” in the world. Not a criminal, not a terrorist and certainly not a murderer, poor Sami is mistaken for all three and faces the hefty and deadly consequences of such labels.
didn’t disappoint me one iota) and being absolutely enthralled by the Walking Dead Compendium by Robert Kirkman et. Al (and TV show), I shouldn’t have stereotyped Brooks’ novel (no relation BTW) as a lighter-weight version of what had already been done magnificently – but I did. More fool me. Admittedly, seeing shorts for the Brad Pitt film fuelled that notion and, while I love that type of full-scale action-adventure in my film, I desire something a little more intelligent, psychological, challenging and probing in my zombie novels.
Three in the Newsflesh trilogy, while a terrific read that ticks many of the boxes, didn’t leave me as impressed or as satisfied as the first two in the series. The plot is strong, the characters very good and their motivations mostly sound and plausible. Whereas Deadline was very much a quest cum road trip, Blackout uses many of the same tropes and subsequent ideas but, whereas they came across as original and compelling in the second book, in Blackout, you have a feeling of situations and outcomes repeating themselves. This also happens with manyexplanations. For example, the number of times Shaun has to justify the fact he is or is not going mad regarding Georgia is far too many. We get it. Likewise, with the explanations regarding the impact the virus had on Georgia’s eyesight and the differences between one way of imagining her and another. There was barely a description or reference to eyes that didn’t go over familiar ground and it became irritating and redundant and in the end infected the pace of the story.
ve to say at the outset that I was simply stunned by Mira Grant’s first novel in this series, Feed and, after the shocking conclusion, wondered how she could follow it up… well, she did. Deadline is another wild ride that takes the reader deeper into the post-apocalyptic, virus-ridden world where zombies, pharmaceutical companies and politicians rule.
s Kelsingra was abandoned and the dragons nearly died out becomes apparent and hope for finding this resource swiftly fades.
Jakob and Williem Grimm are scholars who decide to collect what are fundamentally “old wives” and children’s tales for publication. Obsessed with preserving what’s a part of their country’s culture and past, they search for interesting variations and folk to relay the stories which they painstakingly record. Enter Dortchen, by now a teenager and a very able and imaginative crafter and re-teller of the old tales. It’s as a storyteller that Williem, a handsome if somewhat unhealthy figure, finally views his neighbour and little sister, Lotte’s playmate, Dortchen, through different eyes, seeing her for the beautiful young woman she’s become.