This is the second featuring featuring war veteran Peter Ash — Burning Bright — and it’s even more entertaining. I’m hooked.
If you like the Jack Reacher books, you’ll like these.
… Peter Ash sought peace and quiet among the towering redwoods of northern California, but the trip isn’t quite the balm he’d hoped for. The dense forest and close fog cause his claustrophobia to buzz and spark, and then he stumbles upon a grizzly, long thought to have vanished from this part of the country. In a fight of man against bear, Peter doesn’t favor his odds, so he makes a strategic retreat up a nearby sapling.
There, he finds something strange: a climbing rope, affixed to a distant branch above. It leads to another, and another, up through the giant tree canopy, and ending at a hanging platform. On the platform is a woman on the run. From below them come the sounds of men and gunshots. …
I’d put Blake Crouch in a group of speculative fiction writers including Michael Crichton and Robert Sawyer.
Crichton doomsday. Sawyer looking at the potential upsides of ever changing technology.
Personally, I was super psyched by Jennifer Doudna, one of the co-creators of CRISPR, an astonishing new technology. Precisely editing DNA.
BUT it turns out Doudna had nightmares about someone like Hitler getting hold of CRISPR.
This book is set a few years from now in a dystopian future. Climate change flooded New York. Wildfires have devastated many parts of the world.
Lead character, Logan Ramsey, is the adult son of a defamed scientist whose CRISPR-like technology caused millions of people to die. His Mom was trying to change DNA for the better — but the unintended side effects were catastrophic. Famine.
In hiding, his Mom decides to hack her own children — Logan and his sister.
Logan becomes an “upgraded” version of himself: he can focus better, read faster, and operate on a lot less sleep. But his upgrade comes at a cost.
Ultimately the book is a look at whether or not our species will survive on Earth.
And should we try to improve our odds by changing our DNA?
The Stranger Diaries is a 2018 murder mystery thriller by British crime novelist Domenica de Rosa, writing under the penname of Elly Griffiths. …
The novel is primarily told through the viewpoints of English teacher Clare Cassidy, Detective Sergeant Harbinder Kaur, and Clare’s daughter Georgia “Georgie“.
Interspersed throughout the novel are portions of the short story “The Stranger”, written by fictional author R. M. Holland, a long deceased author that Clare is researching.
The Stranger Diaries won the 2020 Edgar Award for Best Novel and is the first in a series centered upon DS Harbinder Kaur. …
The short story is set around Halloween.
And before Halloween in the present things start mirroring the tale.
Murders.
In Liverpool, while listening to the audio book. I came across this scene …
This was supposed to be the final book in the series featuring Enzo Macleod, a half-Scottish, half-Italian Enzo MacLeod who in lives in Toulouse, working as a university professor. In French.
Series: Enzo Macleod / the Enzo Files
Book Number: 6
Read this book for: French setting – rural and urban, good pacing, cold cases, personal/relationship drama, tense thriller, highly readable page-turner
Quick Review: The final instalment (published 2017) of this engaging series, satisfyingly weaving many of the ongoing threads together to create a page-turning last novel.
I was sorry to see Enzo solve the last of his cold cases.
The more books I read in the Dordogne Mysteries series, the more I like them.
Bruno is the Chief of Police in a small French town in the Périgord region.
Bruno’s friends remind me a bit of the folks in Three Pines, Quebec.
Charming.
Each murder is almost incidental to the scenes of rural life. Especially the food!
In this one, after a death seemingly from heart attack, Bruno discovers that both a local retirement home and their insurance company are scams with links to a Russian oligarch.
If you like the Gamache books for the quaint townspeople of Three Pines, this one may not be for you.
It’s set entirely within the monastery of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups, hidden deep in the wilderness of Quebec.
Ironically, for a community that has taken a vow of silence, the monks have become world-famous for their glorious voices, raised in ancient chants whose effect on both singer and listener is so profound it is known as “the beautiful mystery.” …
But when the renowned choir director is murdered, the lock on the monastery’s massive wooden door is drawn back to admit Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir of the Sûreté du Québec. …
Benoît “Bruno” Courrèges is the superhuman village policeman in a small town in the Périgord region of France.
The British author has a home there. Walker is an excellent writer though I found this book somewhat overly complicated and detailed. It slowed down the story which revolves around Russians trying to disrupt Spain around the issue of the Catalan independence movement.
… a wonderful mix of crime investigation, scrumptious food, Périgordian history, Bruno’s friends and colleagues, and of course, Bruno himself.
And readers also get a healthy dose of Bruno’s basset hound, Balzac, and Balzac’s adorable new pup, “the Bruce”. …
