Book Reviews by vicki rock

Delphine is a retired marine biologist who helped police break up a child trafficking ring. She and her late husband, John, lived in Sitka, Alaska. They both started out in criminal investigations.

She is now in Seattle, being treated for cancer. Her surgeon said she has a slow-moving cancer that is terminal. Delphine worries she’s become a burden to her son, Bertie, and his family. One night, while contemplating how to go on, Delphine witnesses a violent argument between a man and his girlfriend. When Delphine discovers the woman has gone missing along with her young child, Delphine embarks on a quest to find them.

What begins as a chance encounter balloons into a rescue across the Pacific Northwest. Soon, she winds up in the middle of a battle between a child-trafficking ring and an Aryan biker gang. Delphine is determined to see her mission through, knowing full well it may be her last.

Straley interweaves action, insights on whales’ social behavior, and flashbacks to Delphine’s life before she got sick. The plot relies heavily on coincidence and the whole thing isn’t believable.

I rate it three out of five stars.

East Harlem, 1982. Anthony Carter, 42, has been unemployed for two years. He is separated from his wife and daughter. He was kicked out of Columbia University for dealing drugs, but eventually got a degree in education from a minor college.

He is home in a five-story tenement when the building collapses into a hill of rubble. As the city’s rescue services and news media respond, the surrounding neighborhood descends into chaos. At day’s end, six bodies are recovered, but many of the other tenants are missing. Anthony is one of the missing.

Others there include Felix Pearl, 24, a photographer and videographer who rushes to the scene. Royal Davis is the owner of a failing Harlem funeral home. He is there to possibly get more business. Mary Roe is a veteran city detective who becomes obsessed with finding Christopher Diaz, one of the building’s missing.
While this is an interesting plot, I had a real problem with Richard Price’s writing style. The opening paragraph is a run-on sentence of over 100 words. Price also writes scenes that move quickly like they were written for television. I really didn’t get caught up in this novel as I hoped I would.

I rate it three out of five stars.

The phone rings four times in eight minutes. Armand Gamache, head of homicide at the Sûreté, ignores it as he sits with his wife in their back garden in Three Pines, a tiny village in Québec. But why is he ignoring it when only friends and family have that number.

Reine-Marie watches with increasing unease as her husband refuses to pick up, though he clearly knows who is on the other end. When he finally answers, his rage shatters the calm of their quiet Sunday morning.

Then an alarm goes off in their apartment in Montreal. Gamache calls his son-in-law, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, his second in command. He and his wife, Annie, and their children live near the Montreal apartment. Beauvoir goes over to the apartment and says it was a false alarm.

That's only the first in a sequence of strange events. The next is Gamache’s missing raincoat, followed by a note for Gamache reading "this might interest you,” a puzzling scrap of paper with a mysterious list―and then a murder.

All this propels Gamache and his team toward a terrible realization. Something much more sinister than any one murder or any one case is fast approaching. Gamache, Beauvoir, and Inspector Isabelle Lacoste can only trust each other, as old friends begin to act like enemies, and long-time enemies appear to be friends.

Determined to track down the threat before it becomes a reality, their pursuit takes them across Québec and across borders. Their hunt grows increasingly desperate as the enormity of the potential attack they’re trying to prevent becomes clear. If they fail, the devastating consequences would reach into the largest of cities and the smallest of villages.

This is very intense from almost the beginning. Readers will race through it to find out what happens, but will still want to slow down to savor the excellent writing. The plotting is complex and the characters as vivid as ever. “The Grey Wolf” is the 19th in the one of the best series being written.

I rate it five out of five stars.

James Becker works at Fairburn House in Scotland. He gets a call one morning from Will Goodwin, director of the Tate Modern museum in London. Fairburn loaned three art pieces to the Tate. A forensic anthropologist realized that one of the pieces contains a human bone.

Vanessa Chapman was the artist. Sebastian Lennox is the heir to the Fairburn Foundation which was set up by his late father, Douglas. Grace Haswell, Vanessa Chapman’s executor, lives on Eris Island, an isolated Scottish island accessible to the mainland only twelve hours a day. Vanessa’s husband, Julian, disappeared after visiting her 20 years earlier. Julian had financial difficulties and was frequently unfaithful to Vanessa.

Becker decides to drive to Eris Island to talk to Grace. She is a retired physician. He knows it will be difficult to gain her trust because Douglas sued her multiple times in the past over Vanessa’s diaries. Chapters of Vanessa’s diaries are interspersed with present day chapters.

It is difficult to like the characters. The plot is tense and dark as secrets are woven together. The reveal and the ending are shocking. Suspense novel fans will love it.

I rate it four out of five stars.

It is spring 1963 and George Smiley has left the Circus, the British overseas intelligence agency. He is living a more peaceful life.

But Control has other plans. Mikhail Bortnik, a Russian agent, has defected, and the man he was sent to kill in London, Laszlo Banati, is nowhere to be found. Smiley reluctantly agrees to one last simple task: interview Susanna Gero, a Hungarian émigré and employee of the missing man, and sniff out a lead. It is to only take 48 hours at the most.

Soon, he is back in East Berlin, and on the trail of his most devious enemy’s hidden past. Tom Lake, another agent, is helping Smiley. Susanna comes along because she knows Laszlo.

This is set in the missing decade between two iconic instalments in the George Smiley saga, “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” and “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” written by John le Carré, the pen name of John Cornwell. Nick Harkaway is the pen name of Nick Cornwell, his son.

While it starts off slowly, it soon builds the suspense. It is character driven. You don’t have to be familiar with the John le Carré books to enjoy it, but his fans will agree that his son was the right person to continue the series.

I rate it four out of five stars.

Renée Ballard is a detective with the LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit. She is surfing before work and when she gets back to her vehicle, she finds that her badge, gun, and ID were stolen. She can’t report the theft without giving her enemies in the police department ammunition to end her career.

Ballard is the only detective in the Open-Unsolved Unit. The others are retired detectives who volunteer their time. The unit clears, on average, three cold cases a month. Then they get a DNA connection between a recently arrested man and a serial rapist and murderer who went quiet twenty years ago. But Nicholas Purcell, the arrested man, is only 24, so the genetic link must be familial: His father was the Pillowcase Rapist, responsible for a five-year reign of terror.

When Ballard tries to find her stolen property, her mission draws her into unexpected danger. With no choice but to go outside the department for help, she calls on Harry Bosch, who was her mentor.

At the same time, Ballard takes on a new volunteer to the cold case unit: Bosch’s daughter Maddie, now a patrol officer. The reason behind the thefts is bigger than Ballard first thinks. And Maddie has reasons of her own for joining the unit.

Connelly’s writing is precise. His narrative style allows the tension to build. The characters are good and their relationships are natural. This is book six of the Ballard and Bosch series.

I rate it five out of five stars.

It is the Year of the Wood Dragon, and puzzle expert Mike Brink has been invited to Tokyo, Japan to open the legendary Dragon Box, a 19th-century puzzle that has remained unsolved for over 150 years.

The box was constructed during one of Japan’s most tumultuous periods, when the samurai class was disbanded and the shogun lost power. In that moment of national crisis, Emperor Meiji placed an Imperial secret in the Dragon Box, locked it, and hid it in a temple far from the palace. Only two people knew how to open the box: Meiji and the box’s constructor, Ogawa. Both died without telling anyone the secret.

Since then, the Imperial family has held a contest to open the box every 12 years. The Dragon Box is difficult, filled with tricks, booby traps, poisons, and mind-bending twists. Every puzzle master who has attempted to open it has died in the process.

But Brink is not any puzzle master. With his abilities, he may be the only person alive who can crack it. He suffered a traumatic brain injury as a teenager that left him with savant syndrome. His injury made him a mathematical genius with the ability to solve complex puzzles. Sakura Nakamoto is his Japanese-American contact. She escorts him to Japan. Her aunt, Akemi, is secretary to the empress.

Yet, Brink’s determination is echoed by the faction, a radical group who have vowed to claim Meiji’s secret. The leader of the women is Sakura’s sister, Ume. When the group aligns with Brink’s archrival, Jameson Sedge, Brink is up against the most dangerous challenge of his life. Brink finds himself Sedge’s target although he witnessed Sedge die two years earlier.

This is a sequel to “The Puzzle Master,” but it can be read as a stand-alone. “The Puzzle Box” is reminiscent of “The Da Vinci Code” by Dan Brown. It is intense and non-stop as readers will race through it to find out how Brink gets through the various traps. The illustrations of puzzles are beautiful. You don’t have to be a puzzle enthusiast to enjoy “The Puzzle Box.”

I rate it five out of five stars.

Dr. Kay Scarpetta, chief medical examiner, is called to an abandoned theme park in Virginia to retrieve a body. Her niece, Lucy Farinelli, a Secret Service agent and helicopter pilot, is the one who calls her.

Scarpetta is finishing the autopsy of a child when Lucy says a Nobel laureate, who was kidnapped, was found dead. Scarpetta knows the adult victim. She had an intense love affair with Sal Giordano, the victim, that led to a lifelong friendship.

Ryder and Piper Bailey are the parents of the child victim, Luna, 7. They own the now closed Oz theme park where Giordano, an astrophysicist, was found. His body was ejected from an aircraft. There is a circle of pink flowers around his body and Giordano’s skin is strangely red.

Benton Wesley, Scarpetta’s husband, is the Secret Service’s top threat analyst. He tells her that the body will be moved to an undisclosed location for autopsy. Lucy flies Kay and her investigator, Pete Marino, to the site. As the investigation continues, Scarpetta begins to suspect that an old enemy is back.

I’ve always enjoyed reading the Scarpetta novels. The characters are great. The science behind the plots is fascinating. This is the 28th in the series and can be read as a stand alone.

I rate it five out of five stars.

In the first book in this series, “The Plot,” Jacob Finch Bonner, a novelist, is teaching a class when student Evan Parker boasts he has a great plot for his first novel. After a few years without Parker’s novel being published, Bonner learns that Parker died before finishing the book.

Bonner uses that plot for his novel, to great success. But he gets threatening emails about stealing the book and kills himself. His widow, Anna Williams-Bonner, is touring book events, talking about her husband. And enjoying royalty checks and the movie adaption rights. Then she tells an interviewer that she is writing her own novel, “The Afterword.” After all, how hard can it really be to write a bestseller?

But when Anna publishes her book and indulges in her own literary acclaim, she begins to receive excerpts of a novel she never expected to see again, a novel that should not exist. Then during a book signing, someone slips her a note that makes her aware that someone knows of her past. She decides to find out who is behind this harassment.

This is a series that should be read in order. The great thing about “The Plot” was that the underlying story driving the novel was a bombshell. Now that readers know the secret, “The Sequel” isn’t as stunning. But the plot is intricate and the reveal of the person behind the harassment comes as a complete surprise. Anna is a dark, brilliant character. The ending has several twists which I never saw coming.

I rate it five out of five stars.

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common. 

Peter, 32, is a successful Dublin lawyer. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two women: Sylvia and Naomi.
Ivan, 22, is a competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman.

This is mainly the story of the two brothers trying to understand each other and their mother. The romances play a smaller role. Peter’s chapters are rambling. Ivan is more focused. The book is a little too long and sections are over-stylized. Sally Rooney’s fans will like this novel, but it wasn’t a right fit for me.

I rate it three out of five stars.

Steve Wheeler is a retired police officer, now living in a small village in England. He has an investigations agency.

His daughter-in-law, Amy, works for Maximum Impact Solutions, the world’s largest close-protection security firm. She’s currently on a remote island off of South Carolina, protecting bestselling author Rosie D’Antonio after someone tried to abduct her at a book signing.

Then Instagram influencer Andrew Fairbanks is murdered. Maximum Impact Solutions CEO Jeff Nolan realizes the murder was committed by the same man who killed two other people. When Amy is in danger, she calls on the one person she knows she can trust: her father-in-law.

This is a new series by Richard Osman, who also wrote The Thursday Murder Club series. It is enjoyable and the characters are good. The plot is far-fetched, but readers will get caught up in it. The story has funny, quirky elements and most readers won’t guess who is behind the murders.

I rate it four out of five stars.

People board a flight at Hobart Airport in Tasmania, Australia. The flight to Sydney is delayed, but the flight will be smooth. Everyone who gets on the plane will get off. But almost all of them will be forever changed.

No one can describe the petite lady who sat in an aisle seat. She later becomes known as “The Death Lady.” Because on this short flight, she tells people how they will die and their age when they die. As if in a trance, she says “I expect” then adds the cause and age. For some, their death is far in the future. But for six passengers, their predicted deaths are not far away at all.

Leo Vodnik sits across from the lady. He is in the same row as Sue and Max O’Sullivan. While the lady says that Sue will die in three years and Max will die at 84, Leo is to die at 43, which is coming in a few months. The lady says, “Fate won’t be fought.”

A few months later, one passenger dies exactly as she predicted. Then two more passengers die, again, as she said they would. Soon, no one is thinking this is simply an entertaining story.

Chapters of the woman speaking in first person are interspersed with those of what she said. Her name is Cherry Lockwood. But after the plane lands, Cherry has no memory of the flight or her actions.

How do people react after the predictions? Do they try to change their future or do they just shrug it off? Is it a prediction or a curse?

It is interesting how each person decides what to do with the pronouncements. The reason why Cherry did what she did is both fascinating and complex. This is about destiny, grief, free will and how we interact with others. This is my favorite Liane Moriarty book. I was torn between wanting to finish the book to find out what happens and not wanting to finish because I didn’t want it to be over.

I rate it five out of five stars.