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Saturday November 30, 2013

Books in November

  • A Question of Belief and Beastly Things [read by David Colacci]
    by Donna LeonBOM-BeastlyThings.jpg BOM-AQuestionOfBelief.jpg
    As usual excellent themes binding the stories together in each book - and as usual there are two layers of the crimes - one layer poignantly sad, sympathetically illustrating all human weakness, and the other demonstrating the despicably evil depths of human nature.
    Annoyingly true to life, in the Question of Belief, the morally guilty party disappears without facing justice, (and it's debatable what laws he actually broke in person).
    In Beastly Things the we are led to believe the murderer will face the law in due course. However, the strong sub plot (if it can even be called that - shall we say the background to the murder story) may influence you never to eat meat again. Alison told me she was forced to skip passages in the reading - I listened to the narrative in the car, and was not able to skip any of it....

  • The Impossible Dead by Ian Rankin [read by Peter Forbes] BOM-TheImpossibleDead.jpg
    Initially our hero is leading his Internal Affairs team to follow up on suggestions of wider corruption in another police force after one of their number if convicted. However, Malcolm is drawn into re-investigating a 25 year old cold case, which seems to involve a cover-up at the highest levels within the force. A nicely interwoven tale of the type we can rely on from this author.
    Malcolm Fox is still in "the complaints" but since it's a fixed assignment role, we find him considering his abilities to take up a post in CID once again. Clearly (I hope) this is shaping up for future books with wider potential for the story lines.

  • V is for Vengeance by Sue Grafton [Read by Liza Ross] BOM-VisForVengeance.jpg
    This book seems to be a slight departure in the author's writing style - or maybe it's evolving. Much of the story is from the perspective of characters other than our heroine. The author has certainly done this before but maybe not to this extent. I really enjoy the fresh approach in a book series, where the author can maybe avoid getting trapped in a sequential narrative.
    Unusually, some of the organised crime "baddies" seem to achieve an apparent happy ending (you have to assess for yourselves how "bad" they actually are - though pretty bad is my assessment, even though my sympathies were with them) - whereas the author seems to have a truly zero-tolerance attitude to shop-lifting. The latter I suppose is to point out to ones such as I that shop-lifting is not a "soft" victimless crime but simply stealing, and someone has to pay for it.

Posted by Christina at 12:58 PM. Category: Books of the Month

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