Like Patricia Highsmith’s novels, this fictionalised account of a part of Patricia Highsmith’s life is well written and emotionally cool. It’s engaging enough to amble through, but nothing to write home about. Perhaps it would appeal more to great fans of Highsmith.
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Clock Dance by Anne Tyler
Beautiful, classic Tyler. Her sentences contain multitudes. We meet Willa Dance at eleven years old, coping with her temperatmental mother’s absence and the silence and secrets and frequent bewilderments of childhood, all the while adoring her gentle, calm father. Then the narrative skips to ten years later, when Willa becomes engaged to Derek, a startingly […]
The House on Half Moon Street by Alex Reeve
Really quite good. Leo Stanhope is a coroner’s assistant in Victorian London. He is also a woman dressed as a man and in love with Maria, a prostitute. When Maria turns up dead he is determined to find her killer even though that puts him in contact with a bunch of lowlifes who repeatedly cause […]
We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
Wow. What an incandescent ball of light this book is; a scorching, eviscerating examination of nature versus nurture and the limits of parental love. Shriver shines a unflinching light on the bits of being parents we’d all prefer to keep hidden and unsaid. What do we do if we regret becoming parents, and it’s too […]
The Principles of Uncertainty by Maira Kalman
This is not so much a book as a trip around Kalman’s mind, and what a beautiful place to be that is. Maira Kalman is an American artist but she’s anything but pretentious. She’s more like the eccentric great aunt you see at someone’s funeral and wish you knew better, ‘cause she seems like a […]
Missing, Presumed by Susie Steiner
Pretty good, but you do feel Steiner hasn’t quite hit her stride yet. Detective Seargeant Manon Bradshaw is good company, smart and big-hearted with an impressive vocabulary of swears and blasphemes. The others characters around her are, however, less interesting and SPOILER ALERT the resolution of the missing persons case, while plausible, may leave you […]
The Dry by Jane Harper
I am somewhat baffled as to why The Dry has attracted so much attention and praise. The characters are uniformly one dimensional, and the main protagonist, Aaron Falk, is so boring he is almost invisible. What I really object to, though, is the portrayal of a country town and its people. All the people locally […]
An Act of Silence by Colette McBeth
A good juicy political thriller with lots of twists and turns. The former UK Home Secretary, now a disgraced recluse, doesn’t entirely believe her troubled son when he turns up at her house claiming he is being framed for the murder of a woman. But there is much, much more to the story. Everybody has […]