The World of Books

Swedish Kerstin Ekman is a very talented writer and, along with fellow Scandinavians Karin Alvtegen and Karin Fossum, a master of psychological thrillers. In her first novel published in the United States, Ekman, creates an aura of fear and malaise as she depicts a suspicious, isolated community shocked by a crime but unwilling to give up one of its own. Blackwater was first published in Sweden in 1993, and has won the Swedish Crime Academy’s Award for Best Crime Novel, the August Prize and the Nordic Council’s Literary Prize.

Blackwater is a very densely plotted psychological thriller set in northern Sweden, near the Norwegian border. Annie Raft and her six-year-old daughter arrive in the remote Swedish village of Blackwater one midsummer night to meet Annie’s boyfriend, who never shows up. In the morning, they stumble across two campers who have been stabbed to death in their tent. There are many suspects, but even so the murder case has never been solved.

Now, eighteen years later Annie again sees the mysterious young man she saw running through the woods that night. He is her daughter’s lover. Annie identifies him and by doing this sets in motion a series of events that will have tragic and shocking consequences.

Blackwater is a dark who-done-it that gives a sense of gloom and is at times difficult to read, with a large number of characters and ominous events. The translation is excellent. The story is told from several different viewpoints, and masterfully wowen together by Ekman.

To my mind, this is a brilliant novel, complex and compelling, excellently written and intricately plotted and full of suspense. I like Blackwater a lot and strongly recommend it.

Praise:

“Blackwater is rich in psychological nuance and character. Highly recommended.”
- Library Journal

Links to books by Kerstin Ekman at amazon US, amazon UK, and amazon CAN.

The Vivero Letter is an extremely fast paced thriller by the British thriller master Desmond Bagley that was turned into a great movie with the same name. All of the characters are believable, and the descriptions of the locations are so vivid that they place you firmly into the middle of the action.

Jeremy Wheale’s very well-ordered life is suddenly torn apart when his brother is murdered by a mob hit man, whose bait was a family heirloom – a sixteenth-century gold tray. The trail takes Wheale from Devon to Mexico and the wild tropical rain forests of Yucatan.

In dense jungle, he helps two archaeologists locate the rest of a fabled hoard of gold – a treasure from Uaxuanoc, the centuries-old lost city of the Mayas. But his brother’s enemies, the Mafia, are hot on Wheale’s trail, and with them are the Chicleros, a vicious band of convict mercenaries. And Wheale is in a difficult spot where it seems nobody can be trusted – perhaps not even his two archeologist friends?

The Vivero Letter is a truly extraordinary adventure tale that will make you bite your nails!

Links to the books by Desmond Bagley at Amazon US, Amazon UK, and amazon CAN. See also Bokkilden.no

Day trading is a new practice that emerged with the Internet. For a while it was extremely popular. A day trader is commonly thought of as a guy (or girl) that sits at his computer, hooked up to the net, and moves great amounts of money around electronically, usually buying and selling share of stock during the same day.

Stephen Frey, the author of previous novels such as The Vulture Fund (1996) and The Inner Sanctum (1997), is in a sense the John Grisham of financial thrillers. And in The Day Trader, it is the phenomenon of day trading he uses as a setting for his thriller. However, unfortunately this book is not quite up to the standards of some of his previous books.

The story is interesting but a tad implausible: The world of Augustus McKnight, a newcomer to day trading, is just a little too messed up and complicated, and events are just a tad too much interwoven in one another. And the character of Augustus McKnight is drawn in a way that doesn’t really make him very interesting.

McKnight is married to his high-school sweetheart, but she wants to divorce him. And he has just quit his job to become a day trader. Then his wife is killed, and he has no real alibi. If he is not convicted of murder, he stands to benefit from a one million dollar life insurance policy on his wife. And to top it off he gets involved, without knowing it, with the Mafia, who via a friend wants him to launder some money. As the story progresses, he finds that his wife has been engaged in some very dubious activities, and probably has been unfaithful as well. So life is pretty complicated for McKnight – the police are after him, his wife is dead, his married life needs reinterpretation, he is trying to make money, and the Mafia expects results from him.

So, while Augustus is investigated, he simultaneously starts his own investigation, and uncovers one unpleasant truth after the other. Hardly anything in Augustus’ world is what it seems.

Augustus is a bit of a tragic and reluctant hero, a bit naïve and stubborn, and overall a bit hard to understand. The Day Trader is an interesting and entertaining book, mostly an exciting amateur sleuth novel with some neat twists, but it isn’t really a page turner. OK for light weekend reading, though!

Links to the books by Stephen Frey: amazon US, amazon UK, and amazon CAN.

The Winds of War (1971) told the story of the extended family of Captain Victor “Pug” Henry up to and including the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Captain Henry, is a military man, to some extent a scholar, a translator, and an advisor to Franklin Roosevelt and other statesmen. War and Remembrance picks up the story seamlessly from The Winds of War. Together these two wonderful, epic works capture the tide of world events even as they unfold. It covers the period from after Pearl through the surrender of Japan in August 1945.

The very compelling tale of the Henry family, a North American family drawn into the very center of the war maelstrom, is a clever device for telling the story of World War II. The books capture the drama, romance, heroism, and tragedy of the Second World War better than any of books I know of.

Herman Wouk is an exceptional writer. Wouk’s characters are real men and women – not larger than life as we find them in many historical novels. They live, breath and sometimes die.

Wouk manages to cover virtually every aspect of the struggle for world dominance that World War Two was. We follow Victor “Pug” Henry, a stoic Navy captain; his duty-bound son Warren, a Navy flyer in the Pacific; his formerly wayward son Byron, a submarine officer who marries the Jewish woman Natalie Jastrow in Europe. And we follow the Jewish Jastrow family and see – perhaps experience is a better word – the hardships of Jews in Europe, as well as the Holocaust – with their eyes. And using a fictional memoir of an imprisoned German officer, Wouk also lets us see the war from the German perspective.

Some of the reading is very chilling. Wouk’s stunning descriptions of Auschwitz and the “relocation plans” for Jews throughout Europe are the most realistic and engrossing descriptions of the Holocaust I have ever encountered.

The book is long and huge. Over one thousand dense pages. But I have rarely read a historical tale so moving, gripping and engrossing. At the same time it is very educational – I thought I knew a lot about the war but War and Remembrance told me how little I knew. And what a way to learn history! In a great, exceptionally well written and exciting book like this.

I am glad these books were recommended to me. The are both rare gems. Perhaps War and Remembrance even more so than The Winds of War. They are based on exceptional historical research, have finely developed characters and intriguing subplots – all wrapped in a compelling language and told with great compassion by a master story teller. A very, very satisfying read, and one which touched me deeply.

Links to books by Herman Wouk at amazon US, amazon UK, amazon CAN. See aslo Bokkilden.

The place of this novel in Northcote Parkinson’s series about Richard Delancey is a little strange. It fills in details of Delancey’s career during and immediately after the Peace of Amiens. It also explains his marriage to Fiona as well as his promotion to Captain.

In the book, France builds up her strength for an invasion of England, and Britain prepares for the threat. The British hear rumors about Napoleon’s new secret weapons of war: vessels driven by steam-engines, new explosive devices, and, most troubling of all, a French secret weapon named Nautilus, which can travel underwater and attach explosive devices below the waterline.

As well, there are stories of love, to some extent deceit, and of Delancey getting engaged in a sailing competition.

However, So Near So Far is in my opinion the weakest of the Delancey novels. The plot is weak and somewhat disorganized, consisting more of disjointed episodes than a larger story. I don’t actually recommend it. I didn’t much like it, even though I have enjoyed the rest of the series!

Links to C. Northcote Parkinson’s books at amazon US, amazon UK, and amazon CAN.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a delightful novel and surely one of the most extraordinary literary works of the twentieth century. It is a book with a history – a previously banned book. It was banned in England and the United States after its initial publication in 1928 due to the once-shockingly explicit treatment of its subject matter – the adulterous affair between a sexually unfulfilled upper-class married English woman and the game keeper on the estate owned by her wheel-chaired husband. After a spectacular legal battle, (a landmark obscenity trial – Regina v. Penguin Books Limited – that turned largely on the justification of the novel’s use of until-then taboo sexual terms) the unexpurgated edition finally appeared in America in 1959.

The book tells the story of Constance (Connie), a young lady who married Sir Clifford Chatterley in 1917. Shortly after their honeymoon, he returned to Flanders to keep fighting in the World War I. When he returns home six months later he is paralyzed from the waist down. Connie remains at his side, but there is considerable distance between. Eventually Connie finds herself falling in love with Oliver Mellor, her husband’s game-keeper. He is crude and anti-social, and has an honesty and lack of pretension which Connie finds refreshing. He is also quite attractive.

This is not at all a dirty book. Rather it is a tender book with lyrical descriptions, but at the same time Lady Chatterley’s Lover is frank and explicit. The sex scenes are beautiful and not at all pornographic. Lawrence is more concerned with the emotional experience of sex than physical details.

The story in Lady Chatterley’s Lover is masterful at other levels as well – the book has accurate and very interesting descriptions of the class structure in England at the time, and with character descriptions that are very finely drawn.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover is an excellent novel that deals with themes of love, passion, respect, honor, and the need for understanding. It is a masterfully written and complex character-driven novel. Highly recommended.

Links to books by D.H. Lawrence at Amazon US, Amazon UK, and Amazon CAN.

A new legal battle is brewing. This time between publishers and copyright owners over the right to digital versions, or e-book versions, of published titles. Facing declining book sales, both the family of William Styron and his publishers want to produce e-book versions of titles like “Sophie’s Choice,” “The Confessions of Nat Turner” and Mr. Styron’s memoir of depression, “Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness,” New York Times writes.

According to New York Times:

Mr. Styron’s family believes it retains the rights, since the books were first published before e-books existed. Random House, Mr. Styron’s longtime publisher, says it owns those rights, and it is determined to secure its place — and continuing profits — in the Kindle era.

To be sure, this question applies to a large number of books, some of them very valuable commercially. The digital fate of e-book versions of most so-called backlist books seem to be open to dispute. This concerns books by a huge number of famous authors, for instance, Joseph Heller, Ralph Ellison, John Updike and others.

E-books, with no printing costs and cheap digital distribution, represent an increasingly attractive and potientailly profitable publishing channel. And, of course, the only one that is growing for the moment.

A major reason for this is that more and more readers seem to buy e-book readers. Kindle, by Amazon, is a huge hit. And now Barnes & Noble has released its own e-book reader, the Nook. The third major contender among consumers is Sony’s e-book reader, the PRS-600BC and PRS-700BC.

New York Times has published a comprehensive review of e-book readers, but these for the moment seem to be the major competitors.

Nook is the device on the top right, and below are pictures of Kindle and the Sony reader.

It’s hard to say which is the best. They all seem to be very good. Their prices are fairly similar too. I suspect that to a large extent it is a question about what your shopping and reading habits are and which company you have the strongest relationship to.

It will be interesting to follow what is happening in this area in the near future. Readers are faced with several good choices, and with more to come. Publishers and copyright holders, on the other hand, seem to be destined for huge battles in court until the merits of copyrights and publishing rights can be clearly established.

Links to the e-readers: Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Amazon’s Kindle, and Sony’s e-book readers.

P.D. James has been extremely successful as a writer. Her series about the famed Adam Dalgliesh, who now along with his creator P.D. James is nearing retirement (P.D. James is 89 years old) has enjoyed millions of readers all over the world. If anything, the series have told us two things about P.D. James. The first is that she has a devilishly analytical mind, capable of the most marvelous feats of deduction. The second is that she has a way with words – she is as elegant, as lyrical and as deviously backhanded when she wants to as any mainstream fiction writer. And one adds to those factors that she also has acquired some seniority as a crime fiction writer, it becomes obvious that this is a person to listen to when she speaks about detective fiction. After all, she is talking about her own back yard, more or less.

And her little slim book, Talking About Detective Fiction, with eight delightful, elegant and at times pretty frank analyses of the genre, the detectives and not least the writers of detective stories is indeed like amphetamine for a crime fiction addict. She does away with the whole so called Golden Age of crime fiction with a series of first serves so hard and so well placed that they sure would have given her a 90% serve ace score on any tennis court.

Agatha Christie gets a rough treatment in the book. Elegant, backhanded and smart, to be sure, but devastating all the same! P.D. James says Agatha Christie  “hasn’t in my view had a profound influence on the later development of the detective story. She “wasn’t an innovative writer and had no interest in exploring the possibilities of the genre,” and lacks “the disturbing presence of evil.” And then she goes on to finish poor Agatha Christie off with a delicately placed, backhanded compliment that turns out to be a forceful topspin lob: “Perhaps her greatest strength was that she never overstepped the limits of her talent.”

I am not going to enter into a discussion with P.D. James’s views or analyses, neither will I give away too much of the content in this must-have of a book about detectives and crime fiction. Sufficient to say is that it is an engaging, intelligent, well written and well argued book that has multiple layers and is pleasure to be stimulated by.

Links to P.D. James’ books at amazon US, amazon UK, and amazon CAN.

See also the interview with P.D. James on The Globe and Mail about this book.

The world literature is full of treasures. One of them is Gulliver’s Travels, a truly remarkable and excellent book. It is a book everybody has read. But most have read it as a children’s book, and many in an edited version where some of the social critique and some of the sexual content in the book has been edited out. For this is not a book for children. It is rather a harsh satirical novel, full of biting social critique, written by Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift. Swift was well known for his sharp, biting wit, and his bitter criticism of 18th century England. Gulliver’s Travels was first published in 1726, and became tremendously popular as soon as it was published. In this book, Swift satirizes what he considered the foibles of his time, in politics, religion, science, as well as society.

As many of the other most cherished books in world literature, Gulliver’s Travels is a book that has much to offer along several different dimensions. It addresses fundamental questions about humans and their societies, and brings a very satirical view of the state of European government, and of the petty differences between religions. As well, it asks the old philosophical question about whether men are inherently corrupt or whether they become corrupted.

Gulliver’s Travels spins a compelling, wild, intriguing and challenging tale of one of the most fantastic voyages in classic literature. It describes the four fantastic voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, a kindly ship’s surgeon.

In the first part of the book, Lemuel Gulliver is shipwrecked on Lilliput, a strange land where the inhabitants are only 6 inches tall. Gulliver is a giant observing tiny people. There the rivalry between Britain and France is satirized.

Then he is marooned on the subcontinent of Brobdingnag where the inhabitants are giants. Now Gulliver is the tiny person in a land of giants, and he is exhibited as a curiosity at markets and fairs. In this part the insignificance of many of mankind’s achievements are there satirized.

And in the third part Gulliver is taken aboard the floating island of Laputa. Now Swift seizes the opportunity to satirize medicine and science altogether – Swift did actually not make up the crazy experiments he describes; they were all sponsored at one time or another by the Royal Society.

Finally, in the fourth part, Gulliver is marooned by mutineers in his own crew on the island of the Houyhnhynms. Here it is gentle horses who rule the land. Now Swift fires his parting shot at human society, and presents them in degraded form as the Yahoos.

Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels has withstood the wear and tear of time and progress exceedingly well, in my opinion. It is a brilliant satirical adventure, and still a must-read for book lovers. An intelligent book with charm, whimsy and wit. A book that makes you laugh, as well as a book that makes you think.

Links to Jonathan Swift’s books at amazon US, amazon UK, Amazon CAN, Amazon DE, Bokkilden and Haugenbok.

Inspector Irene Huss, stationed in Goteborg, is called through the rain-drenched wintry streets to the scene of an apparent suicide. The dead man landed on the sidewalk in front of his luxurious duplex apartment. He was a wealthy financier connected, through an old-boys’ network, with the first families of Sweden. Suicide seems obvious, but some counter evidence quickly surfaces that indicates that it may have been a murder. Irene Huss of the Violent Crimes Unit investigates the von Knecht death with a word of caution that the victim is connected to the Swedish elite.

So begins this exciting crime novel, Detective Inspector Huss, written by yet another talented Swedish crime writer, Helene Tursten. Helene Tursten has been compared to PD James in her native Sweden. Her two subsequent Irene Huss mysteries have been highly praised. She was born in Goteborg, where she now lives, in 1954. So far three of her books have been translated into English.

Detective Inspector Huss is an intriguing police procedural from Swedish author Tursten, the first in a new series. Its heroine, Huss, is a sympathetic 40-something detective attempting to juggle a demanding job and her family life.

Rather quickly Huss and her competent team trace von Knecht’s life into the criminal underground of drug dealing and motorcycle gangs. Then the case turns deadly again when a bomb blows up Von Knecht’s business office, killing two people. Huss and her squad struggle with finding the motive. Fuss, however, has a feeling that von Knecht’s underworld and business connections have crossed at a fatal junction. This makes her worry that more killings will follow if she is unable to stop the unknown perpetrator.

Remarkably, there’s little about the mystery, the characters’ personalities and motivations or the police approach to solving the crimes that couldn’t easily be transposed to a contemporary American setting. Huss herself is an entirely plausible creation – smart, competent, but fallible – and the exchanges between the various police officers with whom she works help define them as three-dimensional as well. Through solid, patient police work, the good guys catch the murderer, whose identity, while not a total surprise, provides a nice narrative twist.

The characters, from the police to suspects and witnesses, all are exceedingly well-drawn and believable. Detective Inspector Huss is especially likable, as a 40-ish woman in a male dominated profession filled with casual sexism. Her coworkers are all intriguing, from enigmatic Hannu, to wheezing supervisor Andersson, bright young Brigitta, arrogant Medical Examiner Stridner, and the many technicians who assist the investigation. Huss’s personal life adds great depth and sympathy to her character, especially the subplot involving one of her daughter’s flirtation with neo-Nazism. Ethnicity comes into play as well, with several characters having Finnish backgrounds that render them quite alien to the Swedes.

The pacing of Detective Inspector Huss is quite good considering the book’s length and complexity. Also, the translation is exceedingly smooth and readable. We strongly recommend this book!

Order from amazon US: By Helene Tursten: Detective Inspector Huss, The Torso, and The Glass Devil

Order books by Helene Tursten from amazon UK here: Detective Inspector Huss, The Torso, and The Glass Devil.

Order books by Helene Tursten in German from amazon DE: Feuertanz, Die Frau im Fahrstuhl, Tod im Pfarrhaus, Der erste Verdacht, Die Tote im Keller, Die Tätowierung, Der zweite Mord, und Der Novembermörder.

You may also want to take a look at our reviews of books by Ake Edwardson, Arnaldur Indridason or Karin Fossum!