A good premise for this, the 3rd book in the series.
November 1921. Edward VIII, Prince of Wales and future ruler of India, is arriving in Bombay to begin a four month tour.
The Indian subcontinent is chafing under British rule, and Bombay solicitor Perveen Mistry isn’t surprised when local unrest over the royal arrival spirals into riots. But she’s horrified by the death of Freny Cuttingmaster, an eighteen-year-old female Parsi student, who falls from a second-floor gallery just as the prince’s grand procession is passing by her college.
Freny had come for a legal consultation just days before her death, and what she confided makes Perveen suspicious that her death was not an accident. …
Some feel his 1994 novel — Praying for Sleep — was the 1st to gain Deaver wide acclaim.
It is very good.
On a savage, storm-lashed night, Michael Hrubek — a dangerously paranoid schizophrenic — escapes from a mental hospital for the criminally insane by impersonating a dead man.
He’s on a mission — to find Lis Atcheson, the woman whose testimony identified him as the gruesome Indian Leap State Park murderer. …
Racing to intercept him are his psychiatrist, Richard Kohler, a brilliant doctor — but one with his own secrets to protect; Trenton Heck, a professional dog tracker, with an uncanny skill for picking up a trail and a desperate need for the reward money offered for Hrubek’s return; and Lis’s husband, Owen Atcheson, a man of uncommon intelligence and determination — who must hunt Hrubek down before he can destroy his wife.
Yet Michael’s madness is inextricably entwined with his genius — and he proves a far greater adversary than any of his pursuers anticipated. For though his mind is tormented by his eerie delusions of betrayal and revenge, he is crystal clear on one point: he knows Lis Atcheson better than she knows herself, and as he hunts her he is bringing a terrible secret into the light of day.
I don’t know why I keep reading this Department Q books.
The lead detective, Carl Mørck, is just a jerk.
I do like his sidekick, Assad.
This 3rd book in the series (2013) has an evil serial killer of children who preys on extremely religious families. They trust God more than the police.
Towards the end of the Second World War, Charles Hayward is in Cairo and falls in love with Sophia Leonides, a smart, successful Englishwoman who works for the Foreign Office. They put off getting engaged until the end of the war when they will be reunited in England.
Hayward returns home and reads a death notice in The Times: Sophia’s grandfather, the wealthy entrepreneur Aristide Leonides, has died, aged 85.
Due to the war, the whole family has been living with him in a sumptuous but ill-proportioned house called “Three Gables”, the crooked house of the title.
The autopsy reveals that Leonides was poisoned with his own eserine-based eye medicine via an insulin injection.
Sophia tells Charles that she can’t marry him until the matter is cleared up. …
… 17-year old true crime enthusiast Pippa “Pip” Fitz-Amobi, a high school student in the fictional town of Little Kilton, Buckinghamshire (or Fairview, Connecticut in the US version).
In the novel, Pip plans to investigate a five-year-old murder-suicide case involving the murder of popular student Andrea “Andie” Bell and the suicide of her perpetrator Salil “Sal” Singh under the guise of a school project.
Her objectives are to exonerate Sal, whom she is convinced was falsely accused of killing Andie Bell, and to uncover the true perpetrator, whom Pip believes is still at large. …
I appreciate the plot based so much on smart phones and technology. It feels very contemporary.
William Wooler is a family man, on the surface. But he’s been having an affair, an affair that ended horribly this afternoon at a motel up the road. So when he returns to his house, devastated and angry, to find his difficult nine-year-old daughter, Avery, unexpectedly home from school, William loses his temper.
Hours later, Avery’s family declares her missing.
Suddenly Stanhope doesn’t feel so safe. And William isn’t the only one on his street who’s hiding a lie. As witnesses come forward with information that may or may not be true, Avery’s neighbors become increasingly unhinged.
Davis compares cultures quickly and easily, looking for lessons for us who haven’t lived with Amazon tribes for years.
Of the thousand key point, one really struck me. His discussion of how the British — on arrival — could not understand the Australian aborigines.
These are and were a people with no notion of linear time.
Theirs was one of the great experiments in human thought. The notion that the world existed as a perfect whole, and that the singular duty of humanity was to maintain through ritual activity the land precisely as it existed when the Rainbow Serpent embarked on the journey of creation.
… But in life there is only the Dreaming, in which every thought, every plant and animal, are inextricably linked as a single impulse, the inspiration of the first dawning.
Had humanity followed this track, it is true that we would have never placed a man on the moon.
But we would most certainly not be speaking of our capacity to compromise the life support of the planet. I have never in all of my travels been so moved by a vision of another possibility, born literally 55,000 years ago.
