Apparently, all I need in life is a pile of books, a fridge full of cheese and diet coke and a massive tent.
The Clinic (Cate Quinn) **
Certified tough chick (™) Meg checks into an exclusive rehab clinic, not to treat her own burgeoning drug problem, but to discover what happened to her sister Haley, a famous actress who died on the grounds. The clinic claims suicide, but Meg doesn’t buy it and sets out to investigate what really happened.
I read this book in a hotel room when I couldn’t sleep at night, and it’s pretty much perfect for that because it doesn’t really require any focus whatsoever – if you do pay attention, the plot holes might start to bother you. Meg is a fairly likeable protagonist in that she’s got moxie and drive. She’s in denial about her own issues; the author, in the foreword, states that the idea for the book came to her when she was staying at a similar clinic. Good for her, I guess, and in that sense it has an extra layer that it sorely needs. Unfortunately that’s as deep as it goes. The rest of the book is shallow and outlandish. It had a lot of potential, and the setting is great, but the ludicrous plot and the largely flat characters stop it from being truly interesting.
In Memoriam (Alice Winn) *****
England, 1914. Henry Gaunt and Sydney Ellwood attend a posh Public School. Inured to the school’s institutionalised bullying, they have found their way around the system as they wait to go off to university. The threat of war looms in the background. But Henry, who is part German, is relentlessly harangued until he signs up for military service, partly to escape the harassment, but mostly to get away from Sydney, with whom he is madly in love.
There were things I didn’t like about this book, but ultimately it’s a book that I still think about weeks after I’ve read it. Winn does an excellent job describing the bleak folly that is World War I. The descriptions of battle, seeing the main characters’ boarding school friends being killed or maimed for life one by one, are unflinching and brutal. At the same time there is time for love, tenderness, but also bleak humour. Above anything else, the book is sweet and tender.
I’m not sure how realistic the portrayal of two gay men in a similar situation is, and the ending of the book almost felt like a cop-out, but I’m hard-pressed to think of a way that’d be more fitting within the reach and feel of the novel. Ultimately, Henry and Sydney are two memorable characters, and their story stuck with me long after I closed the book.
The Dry (Jane Harper) ****
Detective Aaron Falk returns to his hometown in the Australian countryside to attend the funeral of his childhood friend Luke. The area is suffering from a prolonged drought and the local farmers are desperate, and Luke has shot his wife and son before ending his own life. Aaron is horrified; though he had been largely out of touch with Luke for years, he finds it hard to believe that his friend would do such a thing. He begins to investigate, but the town doesn’t quite trust him because of his shared past with Luke, and their connection to a murder victim a decade and a half ago.
It can be hard to find thrillers that apply a degree of finesse to their plot. So many books tend to trip over themselves as they race to put in as many plot twists as possible, at the detriment of both credibility and quality. The Dry isn’t entirely free of that either, but it does have nuance and subtlety. Aaron is a likeable character, determined and smart but not obnoxiously so. The plot itself is taut; the ending ties up just a little bit too neatly, but having it any other way would be a different kind of disappointing. Meanwhile, Harper is the one to watch if you like your crime fiction with a bit of flair.
Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (David Grann) ****
The US government’s – and public’s – treatment of native Americans has never been great, and at the turn of the century they’d just gotten to the point where they’d pretend civility in the guise of something far more insidious. Therefore, it took a while for people to notice that the Osage – the wealthiest of tribes, thanks to an ingenious system of land inheritance in an area with many oil wells – were dying of mystery illnesses, suspicious accidents and straight-up unsolved homicide. For J. Edgar Hoover’s burgeoning organisation, this was a chance to prove their mettle.
A lot has been written about this book. I haven’t seen the movie so I can’t compare, and I’m not American so my experience with both Native Americans and the FBI is limited to what I see on TV. To read the way in which they were treated is both stunning and entirely expected; they were allowed to earn millions, but were seen as too incapable to spend their own money. Instead, their fortunes were managed by white guardians, many of whom took off with the money leaving their wards penniless. The scale on which this occurred and the response of those responsible for it, are infuriating, but sadly unsurprising.
The book is occasionally hard to follow due to the many, many people involved in it, and the ending is almost too unexpected; I felt like some aspects could have been expanded a bit more. Nevertheless, it’s an engaging read about a dark subject.
A Sincere Warning about the Entity in your House (Jason Arnopp) **
This one is more like a longer short story than an actual novel. It’s a letter, addressed to the new owners of a house, about the spirit that dwells within. The writer of the letter explains where the spirit has come from and the lengths to which they went to get rid of it. It advises the new owner to do likewise.
Honestly, this sort of found footage book can work, but this one doesn’t really. It falls kind of flat, and goes for the outrageous rather than the scary. It’s an interesting premise, but ultimately a dumbed down, condensed version of House of Leaves.
The Only One Left (Riley Sager) **
Kit is mid thirties, lives with her father and her savings account has been depleted by a prolonged absence at work. When she returns, her boss gives her a choice: work at the creepy house on top of the hill with the lady who is said to have murdered her entire family, or quit. She chooses the former, though not without regret. Of course, once she arrives, she quickly discovers all is not well. Did Lenora really kill her family, or was she framed like she claims?
This book is hardly Sager’s best work; his plots are frequently odd, but this one is convoluted to boot. ‘Twisty’ is a good way to describe it, and in this case that’s not a compliment. The setting is promising – big old mansion on top of a hill slowly crumbling into the sea – but that’s it. After the umpteenth red herring, I wanted to throw it off a cliff myself. Still, it’s a fast read and I wasn’t bored when I read it. That’s the best I can make of it, though.
Cold Comfort Farm (Stella Gibbons) ****
Orphaned socialite Flora Poste needs a place to live, and so she sends off letters to a list of distant relatives asking if they’ll have her. The Starkadders of Cold Comfort farm in Sussex come through, though as Flora arrives, she soon notices that their lives are entrenched in abject misery. Matron Ada Doom, locked in her attic room, prophesies the downfall of the family and dictates their daily lives: none may leave the farm. Not one to take things lying down, Flora sets off to improve their lives one by one.
Cold Comfort Farm was written in the early 1930s, and I feel like I might not have read enough of the literature it parodies to really understand the full extent of the satire employed here, but nevertheless it’s still very funny. Flora’s no-nonsense approach is a delight to behold in front of the Starkadders, whose woe-is-me’ing is exhausting. It’s also surprisingly cheerful, which is refreshing as most satire seems to be rather biting and bleak. It was a quicker read than I thought it would be and a lot more fun.
I would still like to know what Aunt Ada saw in the woodshed, though.
Echo (Thomas Olde Heuvelt) *****
Nick and Sam are a happy couple, living the good life in Amsterdam, when Nick is injured in a mountaineering incident on a remote mountain, Mont Maudit, in the Alps; he is maimed for life. His climbing partner is dead. Soon, strange things start to happen around Nick. 32 people at his hospital die of hypothermia. People who come near him suddenly end their lives or disappear altogether. Sam, meanwhile, is trying to deal with the fact that his boyfriend no longer looks like he used to, when he slowly realises that something more insidious is going on.
I rarely reread books, but I was in the alps and this book is about mountains. I remembered liking it, but I couldn’t recall the plot very well. Seeing Mont Maudit – the name means Cursed Mountain in French – in real life adds an extra dimension to what is already a solid novel. It’s an original thriller, downright weird at times. The parts where Nick describes what happened on that mountain are true cliffhangers – literally and figuratively – and though the book sags a bit in the last half, it’s still a cracking read that proves that Olde Heuvelt is the one to watch in the horror genre.