Fiction

I started out with good intentions yesterday, but somehow never made it over here to start the weekly thread. I was having an absolutely miserable day - high heat, high humidity, sick dog, and so much smoke in the air coming down from the Canadian wildfires that it was hard to breathe. I was definitely not in a good mood.

As I said last week, I haven't had much time to read lately. The last time I checked in and actually talked about a book I was reading was on June 7 - I was about to start reading book #10 - Six and a half Deadly Sins - of Colin Cotterill's Dr. Siri Paiboun mystery series, set in 1970s Laos. I love this series, and this latest entry did not disappoint. Not heavy, not deep, but the characters are so delightful, the plots so convoluted, and the political and cultural background so intriguing, that these books are wonderfully satisfying. They are so very human, and written with such love for the characters, that reading them has never failed to leave my heart and soul lighter.

I next read a relatively newly published book that had popped up as a GoodReads recommendation, The Ice Twins, by S.K. Tremayne - a pseudonym for a supposedly well-known author. It was described as a "psychological thriller", and I suppose it was, but I was not particularly impressed. It was dark and weird, but by the time I got to the end I just felt like it was rather pointless. The setting had some promise - a tiny island off the coast of Scotland in the region of the Hebrides - but aside from providing a certain amount of isolation, one didn't get much of a feel for that part of the world. The plot felt contrived and it is not a book I would recommend.

My next pick was more satisfying, Elizabeth is Missing, a first book by a new British author, Emma Healey. The narrator is a woman in her 80s who is gradually succumbing to dementia. I was very impressed with the writing, you find yourself inside a mind that is no longer capable of holding a thought or a memory of what happened just a minute before - yet older memories rise to the surface in great detail. It's something of a murder mystery as well, but the reader only gradually realizes that there was a crime committed over 60 years ago because of the unreliability of the narrator's memory and her totally fragmented train of thought. Really well done, if rather sad. I would recommend this one for the quality of the writing, the uniqueness of the story, and the beautifully-drawn character of the elderly woman struggling to keep as many of her wits about her as she could, even as her mind was deteriorating.

Meantime, two books that had been on order at my library for months both came in while I was reading the Emma Healey book: Gathering Prey by John Sandford, and Buried Angels by Swedish author, Camilla Läckberg. Both books are the latest in each author's respective series.

I was still in a somewhat melancholy mood from the previous book, so I decided to set the Sandford book aside - it's #25 of his Lucas Davenport series, and having read every entry in this series, I knew it was going to be full of blood and violence and I just wasn't in the mood for that. So I started in on the Läckberg book instead. It's #9 of her Detective Patrik Hedstrom series - I've read all of them, as well.

This series is set in a coastal area in the south of Sweden. While Läckberg isn't among my very favorite Scandinavian mystery writers, her books up to now have been serviceable and interesting, and generally entertaining reads. This one just didn't do it for me. Some of the plot elements seemed utterly ridiculous, and it felt like she had grabbed a bunch of different story line fragments and decided to just mash them all together into one book. It was sadly disappointing. And by the time I had finished slogging through this one, the Sandford book was due back at the library - I returned it unread, maybe I'll put in an order for it somewhere down the line.

Which brings me up to today. I've had my eye on a completely new (to me) crime/mystery series for awhile, and just started on book #1, The Skull Mantra. I think I'm going to like these. The author is Eliot Pattison, and the series is Inspector Shan. They are set in Tibet, and Inspector Shan is a former Chinese official who fell into disfavor and was sentenced to hard labor in a Tibetan province where he is held in a prison camp with a number of Tibetan monks. There are 8 books in this series, so far, spanning the years from 1998 to 2014. The author writes with great sympathy for the fate of the Tibetan people under Chinese rule - which is where my own sympathies lie as well. I believe I will be very happy that I've taken on this series.