More Books I read in Sep 2011 (Part 2 of 2)

I had to split the post because I couldn't include enough tags. <shrug>

The Thomas Berryman Number by James Patterson (thriller). It's weird to realise James Patterson was writing bestsellers in 1976. What a different style he had. I'm also beginning to notice style differences between decades. Books in a certain decade have similar writing styles, even among widely-different writers. Rating: Good

Down the Long Hills by Louis L'Amour. A young boy takes a young girl across the plains of the old West (USA) after their wagon train is massacred. Villains get after them, while the boy's father hunts for him equally desperately. Sweet story, happy ending. Rating: Very good.

Risk by Dick Francis (thriller). One of his better ones, and the hero is a chartered accountant. This was the book that made me feel CAs were not boring; something for which I am very grateful now. Rating: excellent.

Reign in Hell by William Diehl (thriller). After a bit, I realised this was the middle book in a series. Lawyer Martin Vail tries to bring down a parallel government/militia in the USA, under direct orders from the General (Attorney General, ha!), and mixes up with his old nemesis, the evil mass-murderer Aaron Stampler. Rating: Good.

Stone Cold by David Baldacci (thriller). The third in the series, and equally good. Rating: Very Good.

Part 2 of 2. Part 1 is here.

The angst of an adopted forensic pathologist

Thriller | Tess Gerritsen | Body Double

Tess Gerritsen says in the introduction to one of her novels that she started writing romances with some mystery, and then moved to mysteries with a bit of romance. This is one of the transition books, heavier on the mystery.

Body Double starts with Dr Maura Isles returning from a trip to a forensic conference in Paris to find the police camped at her doorstep. Everyone acts as if they are seeing a ghost. She finds there is a dead woman in a car near her house, who looks just like her. Eeeee. OK, no eeee, you knew that from the back cover.

Things get creepier. The dead woman has been shot. She only has a six-month history, nobody can find a trace of her before that. And then her DNA turns out to match. Maura, being adopted, starts on a quest to find out more about who her twin was, why she died, and who her biological parents were.

Oh, spoilers? No, no, you can read all this off the back cover. It even says there that she finds her mother, a cruel and cunning woman. But the woman she finds in the book is actually feeble, old and schizophrenic. [Must. Resist. Spoilers.]

OK, diversion: she has a permanent love interest in a Catholic priest she fancies. (Why do Catholics have celibate priests, and why do Catholic women find them irresistible? It's a gaaah! moment, every time I run across it in any book.) Fortunately, the detective who was helping her sister is a possible romantic interest, having recently separated from his wife, except that his impossible teen daughter turns up at inopportune moments.

Maura's main help in resolving the clues, though, comes from Detective Jane Rizzoli, who, despite being 8-months-pregnant and incapable of kicking in doors anymore, unearths a bunch of true and ghastly crimes, all linked with the very first one which we get to know about way back in the prologue.

The story is as much about Maura wondering what her genetic heritage has made of her as the pair solving a set of very creepy crimes and tracking down the criminal(s).

We meet en route, an obsessive executive, a monster-seeking psychologist, and an upset forensic pathologist, a not-upset forensic ditto (with an Indian name, to boot).

This was a reasonably well-written thriller, except for the aforesaid gaaah! moment. I'll check out a couple more by T Gerritsen before coming to a less wishy-washy conclusion. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, this is ample for a lazy Sunday, and though it has awfully creepy crimes and motivations for the crimes, it's not an off-putting adrenaline creep-out. Fortunately, T Gerritsen is not as graphic as Patricia Cornwell or James Patterson. I might well be reading Gerritsens long after my Cornwells and Pattersons have mouldered due to lack of rereads since my middle-aged body can't stand the adrenaline jolts any more.

Oh, and why are female characters almost always referred to by their first names, and male ones by their last ones? Fortunately, while Dr Isles gets called Maura mostly, the detective gets called Rizzoli. Balance of sorts.

Time travel with Duke Vimes

Fantasy | Terry Pratchett | Night Watch

What I forgot to mention in the last post was that Jingo featured one of the most immediately recognisable gadgets in all the Discworld books--the Disorganiser, which desperately and futilely attempts to remind Insert Name Here of his appointments throughout the book. In a twist that only the Discworld could come up with, Vimes tells the device in exasperation that it's no use reminding him of appointments he already knows about. How about telling him of appointments he doesn't know about. And that's what happens. Except that, at one point, Vimes in this world makes a decision he doesn't make in the parallel world (if this kind of stuff makes your head hurt, you should avoid science fiction and fantasy entirely), and picks up the wrong Disorganiser, with the result that as the two time paths diverge, he gets to know how narrowly he avoided disaster all around. Bingelly-bingelly-beep!

Now, here's the thing, Night Watch, too, has time travel. This time of the physical pick-up-the-person-and-dump-him-in-the-past type. Vimes, by now Duke, still hasn't learned to delegate chasing villains to his underlings. And the High Energy Magic building's roof is not the place to tempt fate, anyway. So Vimes and the villain end up back in Vimes' past, where he has to protect everyone he loves from the machinations of the 'who, me?' baby-faced and black-hearted villain.

In Night Watch, we meet the monks who manage time and have these large rotating cylinders that warp time. (Somehow, ever since Larry Niven's short story Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation {in turn, swiping the title from a physics paper which describes real-Universe physics, mind-boggling as it may be}, I've had the impression that the large cylinders should be planet-sized or larger LARGE, but on the Discworld, faux-Tibetan cylinders manage well enough.) I suspect that Pratchett realised these monks would mess up any other book of the Discworld, so we don't quite meet them again.

Instead, we also meet, and this is a delight, Vetinari as a student assassin. And the early Sam Vimes, the early Fred Colon, and Nobby Nobbs as an urchin. We also meet the surprise of the citizens and watchmen at the idea of trolls or dwarves in the Watch, which is Pratchett's way of pointing out how the world changes in just half a lifetime. Things which were normal then are unacceptable today, and vice versa. Hey, just look around.

Pratchett has invented many villains, most of whom are plain bigots or ignoramuses with power, but this book has his first frisson-up-the-spine pure psychopath, the type James Patterson or Jeffery Deaver would scare us with, or Stephen King would use to mess with our heads. And, yet, you don't quite think he's the very worst villain in this book.

This is one of Pratchett's best Discworld books. Thud!, which came later, is not as good. But I'm not going to get to Thud! again for a nice long time. You can, instead, consider how singing the national anthem proves that you are a rebel in need of putting down. Go on, read it and realise how many assumptions you live with.

Let me close here, and move on to David Baldacci's Hell's Corner.

[Oh, in closing, the book cover doesn't have the hourglass or weird ring on it. That's just me trying to be artistic, rather unsuccessfully.]

Come September 2011

Scimitar by Peter Nieswand (thriller). It's always interesting these days to read a book written in the 1980s. The Afghan mujahideen were the good guys then, and the Russians were unadulterated villains. The protagonist in the book keeps turning out to be an unmitigated creep. Still, some good points, though avoidable overall, unless you  want to specifically read an 80s book.

The Secret of the Nagas by Amish (myth/fantasy). I loved the first book in this series, The Immortals of Meluha, despite its sometimes too-modern dialogue. This one goes smoother. The book introduces Sanskrit/Hindi words in italics, and, within the next line or two, their meaning in English, also italicised (for dummies). It gets a bit annoying (gee, it's for dummies!) but is probably greatly useful for people who don't know the words. I loved this book too, and am bouncing and screaming for the next (and last) one. For less than Rs 500, you can get both books. Paisa wasool, these books are worth every paisa.

High Citadel by Desmond Bagley (thriller). An excellent light read from the 70s. If you like stories in which medieval weapons turn the tide, also try Mother of Demons by Eric Flint (science fiction).

The Quick and the Dead by Louis L'Amour (western). My son asked me if the book came first or the movie. Heh! A very typical Louis L'Amour book. The good guys win; the Indians are not evil, just different. Rating: Good

The Thomas Berryman Number by James Patterson (thriller). It's weird to realise James Patterson was writing bestsellers in 1976. What a different style he had. I'm also beginning to notice style differences between decades. Books in a certain decade have similar writing styles, even among widely-different writers. Rating: Good

Down the Long Hills by Louis L'Amour. A young boy takes a young girl across the plains of the old West (USA) after their wagon train is massacred. Villains get after them, while the boy's father hunts for him equally desperately. Sweet story, happy ending. Rating: Very good.

Risk by Dick Francis (thriller). One of his better ones, and the hero is a chartered accountant. This was the book that made me feel CAs were not boring; something for which I am very grateful now. Rating: excellent.

Reign in Hell by William Diehl (thriller). After a bit, I realised this was the middle book in a series. Lawyer Martin Vail tries to bring down a parallel government/militia in the USA, under direct orders from the General (Attorney General, ha!), and mixes up with his old nemesis, the evil mass-murderer Aaron Stampler. Rating: Good.

Stone Cold by David Baldacci (thriller). The third in the series, and equally good. Rating: Very Good.