Another great Barclay.

One weekend, while Andrew Mason was on a fishing trip, his wife, Brie, vanished without a trace. Most people assumed Andy had got away with murder, but the police couldn’t build a strong case against him. For a while, Andy hit rock bottom – he drank too much, was abandoned by his friends, nearly lost his business and became a pariah in the place he had once called home.

Now, six years later, Andy has put his life back together. He’s sold the house he shared with Brie and moved away for a fresh start. When he hears his old house has been bulldozed and a new house built in its place, he’s not bothered. He’s settled with a new partner, Jayne, and life is good. …

LinwoodBarclay.com

What happens when Brie unexpectedly turns up?

Portrait of an Unknown Woman is the 25th novel by Daniel Silva.

I’d say it’s one of the best.

The legendary Head of ‘the Office’ (Mossad), Gabriel Allon, has finally retired.

A career in Israeli secret service that began in 1972. One of the team assigned to hunt down and eliminate those responsible for killing the Israel athletes in Munich.

He moved with his Italian wife and children to Venice. And goes back to his roots as an art restorer.

A well deserved retirement. Until he gets a call about an Art forger.

Many favourite characters from past books return. Including the Corsican goat.

Petrie planned to be a writer, earning a MFA in fiction from University of Washington. But couldn’t get his books published, to start.

This book, finally, was a huge hit in 2017.

I’m starting this series about Peter Ash.

Ash has been compared to Jack Reacher. But the two characters are quite different in most ways.

The writing is similar to Lee Child, however.

Eight years a soldier, Peter Ash came home from Iraq and Afghanistan with only one souvenir: what he calls ‘white static’, a buzzing claustrophobia due to post-traumatic stress that has driven him to spend a year roaming the Pacific coast’s mountains and forests, sleeping under the stars.

But when a friend from the Marines commits suicide, Ash returns to civilization to help the man’s widow and two young children.

While repairing her dilapidated porch, he makes two unwelcome discoveries: The first is a dog, the meanest, ugliest dog he’s ever laid eyes on, guarding a suitcase; the second unwelcome surprise is the suitcase’s contents – $400,000 in cash and four slabs of plastic explosive.

Just what was his friend caught up in during his final days? Ash will find that the demons of war aren’t easy to leave behind…

After 8 books, Detective Sergeant DC Smith is finally going to retire.

He has 3 weeks left.

A teenager doesn’t come home on a Monday night. A mystery.

For Smith there are some strange echoes of the case that has haunted him for the past thirteen years.

Maybe it’s simply his over-developed sense of irony, or maybe, in his final days as a police officer, Smith must look once more into the eyes of a serial killer.

This is a good book.

The 3rd book in the Billy Harney series.

Patterson loves co-writing. This book does seem more sophisticated than his usual fare.

I credit David Ellis who is a practicing judge, the youngest-serving Justice of the Illinois Appellate Court for the First District. He’s a very successfully author on his own, as well.

Chicago’s #1 detective, Billy Harney, takes on a billionaire crime boss in this follow-on to James Patterson’s highly acclaimed, multi-million selling Black Book.

As Chicago’s special-ops leader Detective Billy Harney knows well, money is not the only valuable currency. The billionaire he’s investigating is down to his last twenty million. But he’s also being held in jail.

For now.

Billy’s unit is called to the jail when six inmates escape, and two others are missing. Two correctional officers are dead. Approaching the scene, Billy spots something in an empty lot …

DavidEllis.com

I also enjoyed the first two in the series:

Black Book and Red Book.

Though SLOW, I enjoyed The Widows of Malabar Hill.

It’s been optioned for a TV series.

This is Sujata Massey’s best known book series.

1920s India:

Perveen Mistry, Bombay’s first female lawyer, is investigating a suspicious will on behalf of three Muslim widows living in full purdah when the case takes a turn toward the murderous. …

Perveen Mistry — a name that reminded me of Canadian author, Rohinton Mistry — the daughter of a respected Zoroastrian family, has just joined her father’s law firm …. Armed with a legal education from Oxford, Perveen also has a tragic personal history that makes women’s legal rights especially important to her.

Mistry Law has been appointed to execute the will of Mr. Omar Farid, a wealthy Muslim mill owner who has left three widows behind. But as Perveen examines the paperwork, she notices something strange: all three of the wives have signed over their full inheritance to a charity. …

Perveen tries to investigate, and realizes her instincts were correct when tensions escalate to murder.

Now it is her responsibility to figure out what really happened on Malabar Hill, and to ensure that no innocent women or children are in further danger.

In fact, the murder mystery is poor. And poorly resolved. This is not Agatha Christie.

BUT I enjoyed the worldview of an ambitious woman in 1920s India. She is Zoroastrian. Her client is a Muslim. Both are minorities in Hindu Bombay. Ruled by arrogant Brits.

I worked out of the University of Saskatchewan in the 1990s.

During those years, I read all the books of Robertson Davies, one of Canada’s greatest novelists.

His Deptford Trilogy and this book were set at the fictional College of St. John and Holy Ghost, affectionately referred to as “Spook“.

I loved how he mocked the Ivory Tower. 😀

As I recall, Rebel Angels was my favourite of his many great books.

For some reason, I decided to re-read it.

Two events spark the plot: the return of Brother John Parlabane, an ex-monk and -drug addict, and the death of Francis Cornish, a local patron of the arts. Parlabane becomes a university parasite, sleeping on couches and hitting up Maria, Hollier and Anglican priest Simon Darcourt for money. …

… Maria – no fewer than five male characters fall in love with her over the course of the novel. A sort of Helen of Troy (her first names bring to mind the presumed harlot from the Bible, while her surname means “God-bearer”), she is so beautiful that she sows conflict and heartache wherever she goes. …

The title refers to angels thrown out of heaven, and is Maria’s shorthand for the trio of Darcourt, Hollier and Parlabane. Parlabane is explicitly likened to Lucifer and Satan, making him an embodiment of evil. …

Rebecca Foster – Bookish Beck

Everyone at Kings Lake Central police station has been expecting DC Smith to finally retire.

And it seems he’s on his last case.

It’s a murder on the Norfolk saltmarshes.

As the team from Kings Lake uncover his story, they reveal another, much older one with its origins far back in the previous century. In the tide that governs the affairs of men, it seems, love and loss, betrayal and revenge are timeless themes.

Overdrive

The actual whodunnit is secondary to the police procedural machinations. The interpersonal relationships.

I do like the narrator of the DC Smith audio books – Gildart Jackson.

A Visit from the Goon Squad is a 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning work of fiction by American author Jennifer Egan.

… a set of thirteen interrelated stories with a large set of characters all connected to Bennie Salazar, a record company executive, and his assistant, Sasha.  …

Original. Well written. Well researched. BUT I only got halfway through.

Egan is a great writer. But this book centers on mostly self-destructive characters none of whom I liked nor related with.

I’ve had it with narratives with only unlikable characters — for example, Succession on TV.

When published in 2010 nobody liked this book aside from critics. I’m not surprised.

This is a book about aging.

The most impressive thing about the first 60% of this book 😀 for me was her take on how people age. It has a nonlinear chronology with different character’s point of view at different times of life.

This was also depressing.

Trivia ~ Jennifer Egan once dated Steve Jobs.

Missing Pieces (2021) is set in the same fictional world as Grainger’s DC Smith — but Smith doesn’t actually appear in this novel. He’s mentioned. Often.

I enjoyed this book. It’s a slow burn. Not much action. Plenty of detail on how murder investigations are conducted.

As the first anniversary of the formation of the Kings Lake murder squad approaches, there is a problem—they’ve run out of murders.

As a result, they are given the task of reviewing unsolved cold cases. One of these comes back to life in unexpected ways as the team try to discover the identity of the young woman whose body was found in the Norfolk countryside two decades ago.

And even if they can give her a name, how can they possibly find her killer after so many years?