Book Buzz

ALEKSANDAR HEMON

Lazarus is a rich and complex novel. It is a chronicle of loss and hopelessness and cruelty yet it is entertaining and well written. Having survived the 1908 pogrom in his native Bosnia Lazarus immigrated to Chicago with his sister Olga. In Chicago he is killed by the chief of police in the chief’s home. He was shot several times. They quickly pulled down his pants to see if he was a jew. In the modern era, Vladimir Brik is a struggling writer with a highly successful wife. She is a successful American neurosurgeon who saves lives from “her high position of surgically American decency.” Brik gets a grant to research Lazarus and takes a photographer friend, Rora, back with him to Bosnia and Sarajevo to find out more about Lazarus, his family and the pogrom.

An excellent read.

DANIEL JUDSON

Remer was a Private Investigator in New York until an angry recipient of his surveillance had him kidnapped, tortured and branded with the word VOYEUR. Five years later was living in Southampton operation a small liquor store and staying in the shadows. Until one of his former staff went missing with $80,000 of his money. This mystery has enough twists and turns to keep it interesting. A good read.

RENE GUTTERIDGE

YOUR PRIVATE CONVERSATIONS JUST WENT PUBLIC

Someone, somehow is listening to people’s private conversations and putting them verboten on a web page. How are they listening to conversations in people’s homes. Don’t people have the right to vent their anger and frustration? Marlo is a tight close knit community until careless comments and hurtful accusations are posted on a web page that nobody can seem to ignore. Damien is a lover of words, he creates the crossword puzzle for the local paper and a believer in the power of words. He works with the police to try and find the creator of the web page to stop what is happening until he becomes the main suspect. Listen is a series of mysteries within a mystery. Well worth the read.

STIEG LARRSON

For a book in which precious little happens, this novel is quite the page turner. This is the final book in Larrson’s Millennium trilogy. Hornet’s Nest starts precisely where the last book ended. If you haven’t read the other books you need to read them first. All excellent. This book deals with journalists, lawyers and police researching exactly what happened in Sweden during the last forty years that Salander’s rights could have been so severely abused. I often complain that books are too long, that they need editing. At over 500 pages Hornet’s Nest does not fit into that category. It is a must read.

Why were these great books covered so poorly?

JOSH BAZELL

Dr Peter Brown is an intern at a Manhattan but he has a confusing past that gets in the way of medicine. He used to be a contract killer for the Mafia. A Jewish lad, he was raised by his grandparents. When his grandparents are brutally murdered he is taken in my David Locano a lawyer with Mafia connections. Locano is able to tell Brown who killed his parents so he could exact revenge. Thus is his entrance into becoming a paid assassin.

Reaper is both an engaging thriller and funny. A Very good read.

CHRISTOPHER BRAM

AKA: A Gay Republican is an Oxymoron

Ralph is an assistant manager of a bookstore. He met Bill on-line in a gay chat room. They decide to meet F2F (face to face) and start a relationship. They couldn’t be more opposite of each other. Bill is a right wing, closeted Republican and author of a book slamming Hillary Clinton and women in general. Ralph is a open and out gay man; his best friend is a speech writer for an out spoken Democratic senator. After Bill comes out on national TV defending his controversial book, he is killed. Police  think that a hustler robbed and murdered him. When Ralph goes to police thinking that he had information that could help them find the killer, he is arrested for the murder.

The story has two surprise endings. An OK read.

GREG HERRON

Set in New Orleans before Katrina, Rue Dauphine is a trashy gay murder mystery. But why are all the characters totally gorgeous? Life isn’t like that. It gets boring reading descriptions of the same looking men. But sometimes trashy is what I want to read. Chanse McLeod, Private Eye and ex-cop, discovers his latest client dead. “Faggots Die” was written in blood staining the wall. The client claims his closeted boy friend is being blackmailed. But how does the organization GRN, Gay Rights Now, fund raise so much money?

KATE WILHEM

Wilhelm’s sixth Barbara Holloway legal thriller has a compelling plos and characters. Holloway’s latest client is a brilliant young man named Alex Feldman, who has been left hideously deformed by a birth defect. He is accused of killing his next-door neighbor, Gus Marchand, a bully and a religious zealot who saw Alex’s deformity as the mark of the devil. There is no real evidence against him, but Marchand has created such hostility and fear toward Alex that it seems likely he will be convicted on the basis of his appearance alone. What makes his situation even more desperate is that he was born with part of his brain exposed: since any blow to the head might kill him, a prison term probably would be a death sentence. But did Alex do it? There is a real possibility (which Alex himself admits) that he is psychopathic, but he wasn’t the only one with a motive: the high school principal was also at odds with Marchand, and she is a close friend of Frank Holloway, Barbara’s father and mentor. This is a great mystery in which the smallest clues are important. Wilhelm does a good job of conveying Alex’s anguish and isolation.

A good mystery

ELLY BERKOVITS GROSS

Elly is a slim, clear memoir of an extremely dark time. Elly pin points small miracles that aloud her to survive in Nazi death camps. There are areas of the book that more detail would have been nice to have. I loved the photographs in the book. It helps to make the story more alive.

I believe it important to read books about the holocaust so that it is remembered. It also gives readers a chance to remember that genicide is happening in many places in the world.

CHLOE HOOPER

Man explores the systematic racism in Australia. Doomadgee is arrested for public drunkenness: or was he arrested for insulting a police officer and need to be taught a lesson? Within an hour Doomadgee is dead in a police cell. His liver had been assaulted so violently that it was forced against the spine with sufficient for to tear the liver in two. Hurley, the arresting officer, claims that Doomadgee injured himself in a fall on the step into the station. The coroner’s report said that there were no signs of physical abuse and that the death was an accident. The Aboriginal communities call this a “white wash.”

It needed some skimming but it is an excellent book.

Not the cover of the book, rather it is Aboriginal Art.

KEITH DONOHUE

An engaging book of love, loss, spirits and reconnecting. Margaret has been the town weirdo since the time her daughter, Erica, ran away under mysterious circumstances. With in four years she also lost her husband, the town doctor. When Nora arrives in the middle of the night Margaret takes her in as she would her own daughter. Nora is a mysterious child. They come up with the story that Nora is Erica’s daughter, Margaret’s grandchild.  Against my prediction she fit in amazingly well with her peers. The teacher noticed after a month how much better the entire class is doing. Students who before would not speak out in class are now participating. Strange.

The second part of book tells the story of the missing daughter. How much she is in love with her boy friend. How they get by on stealing cars and armed robbery.

The third part, brings the two stories together.

It’s a good read.

CHRIS RYALL and GABRIEL RODRIGUES

It took a graphic book to finally get me to read this classic. I hadn’t even known that it was from Denmark. This graphic novel is based on the movie screenplay by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary. Now I will have to rent the movie. So thank you to creators of graphic books for this introduction to Beowulf.

ARTHUR SLADE

An infant in a freak show has the ability to transform his his appearance. A strange man come to see him and ends up buying him, cage and all. The hunchback is taken to England and raised and educated. Modo was kept inside. Mirrors were banned so he never knew his deformity. As well as his classical education Modo was trained to be a secret agent. When he turned 14, Mr Socrates, considered his training complete. He handed Modo a mirror then dropped him off in foggy, polluted London. He was abandoned penniless to test his skills.

He gets by and later called on by another of Socrates agents to uncover a sinister plot being carried out in the severs of London. Dr. Hyde is creating monsters of street children to serve his evil purposes. It is a good read but pales in comparisons to Kenneth Opal’s Airborn series. Slade is supposedly making this into a series. I was a pleased to see this novel had a definitive ending. I hate when books end with a set up to read the next book in the series.

AUDREY NIFFENEGGER

Lies and secrets. The amazing relationships of twins. Twin daughters of a twin. Cemeteries centuries old. Supernatural. Ghosts. Afterlife. Feeling trapped. Wanting escape. Amazing twists and turns.

A must read. Definitely a page turner, especially as the end approaches. Though I found it difficult to visualise this book set in modern time. I wanted to dress the twins in Victorian clothes. Interesting. Horrible view of the afterlife.

THE TYGER                     William Blake

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

JEFFREY ROUND

Time for a trashy, light mystery.  P-town is the story of Brad Bradford an undercover detective. When Brad receives an anonymous tip that his former lover has been killed in Province Town, Brad goes to deal with the body. He leaves his assignment of stopping a possible assassination of the Dali Lama in New York.  P-Town is portrait as heaven on earth. Especially for gay people. But more people are dieing in P-Town on a daily basis. Brad stays to solve the crime. The book is a campy look as the under world of gay life and death. Fun read.

CHRIS CLEAVER

Completely sorrowful yet at times full of joy. Little Bee is a refugee in Britain from Nigeria.  In Nigeria people are killed because they witnessed the things that Little Bee saw done to her sister, her parents, her friends and her village. “All the bad stories start with, “And then the men with guns came.” The soldiers were eliminating the people in the way of an oil company.

Only when she manages to get to Britain,  she is kept in a “immigration removal centre.” For two years she is detained in this virtual prison  until she is released by accident. She has the address of a couple who she had met on a beach so she sets out to find them.

It is not an easy book. The horrors modern war are not pretty. One of the themes is the power of stories – telling the stories of people who died terrible and senseless deaths. There is power in the many. One alone is weak.

JOHN IRVING

TWISTED RIVER could have been called the Fugitives, or John Irving on Writing.

Twisted River is about the relationships among three men: Dominic Baciagalupo, an Italian-American cook with a warm heart and a bad limp; his son, Danny, who resembles his father, save for the limp; and the outdoorsy, hard-drinking Ketchum, their friend and protector. In 1954, after an inadvertent tragedy, Dominic and Danny flee the rural New Hampshire logging camp where they lived in order to escape the wrath of a vengeful cop.bad cop named Constable Carl.

It is yet another excellent book that could have used serious editing. It did not need over 550 page to convey these themes.

PATRICK NESS

The New World is a harsh and dangerous place. We don’t know why people left the old world but the first settlers were religious people seeking a simple life. They came to create a utopian society but what they formed if far from perfect. On the New World men’s thoughts are open and broadcast for all to see. They call it Noise. But women’s thoughts are quiet. It makes for interesting and bizarre sexual politics.

“The first thing you find out when your dog learns to talk is that dogs don’t got nothing much to say ” is the first sentence. Highly engaging. The narrator comes from an isolated town where there is no women. They all perished in a plague. He  is the youngest in the community, soon to become an adult. But his “parents” tell him he has to flee days before his adulthood.  They can’t tell him why because then his noise would draw too much attention.

KNIFE is an excellent book; it’s a page turner. But is does have a couple of drawbacks. Length: it did not have to be 500 pages. Ending: books need a definitive ending rather than setting up for the next book in the series.

SUSAN KUKLIN

Kuklin has written a well balanced look at the issues surrounding capital punishment of teens. She tells the stories of the perpetrators: one who killed someone, but another one who maintains his innocence. I was just reading a report in Macleans magazine of yet another Canadian wrongly convicted of murder. And the scary thing about that is the murderer is in a position to commit more violent crime. Wrongful convictions is the strongest argument against capital punishment for me. But back to NO CHOIRBOY. KUKLIN also looks at how the victim family is affected and the family of the perpetrator of the crime. This well balanced approach makes for a most thought-provoking read.

I did have to ask my self why did all these kids have guns? That idiotic belief that it is a right to bear arms might have been necessary in 1800 but makes no sensense today.