Archive for the ‘Mystery/Suspense’ Category

YOUR PRESENCE IS REQUESTED AT SUVANTO by Maile Chapman

Nestled in the pristine Finnish woods is a sanatorium for women. It’s the 1920s and medicine and its accompanying attitudes towards women’s health is moving from Victorian ideas to more modern methods of treatment, but those shifts have not yet reached the women’s hospital at Suvanto. This vast multistoried building is still part spa for the wealthy wives of the male employees for the local timber company, and part hospital for the poor. This is a building with sharp physical and mental divisions between staff and patients and also between the patients themselves. The poor patients–those who are considered “really” ill are kept on the bottom floors, while the convalescing wives of the timber employees, called the “up-patients” lodge on the 5th floor.

July 15, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , ,  Â· Posted in: Contemporary, Debut Novel, Family Matters, Finland, Mystery/Suspense, Unique Narrative

MISTERIOSO by Arne Dahl

MISTERIOSO by Arne Dahl is a unique and wonderful book. It is part mystery, part police procedural, part existential philosophy and part comedy. There is something so distinctive about this book that it resists categorization. On the surface, it is a mystery but so much of the novel lies below the surface, getting into the characters’ minds and thoughts as they live their lives and work at trying to catch a serial killer.

The title of the book comes from a piece of music composed by Thelonius Monk, a famous American jazz pianist and composer, now deceased. There is a serial killer on the loose in Sweden who is killing very rich and powerful men. The killer waits for his prey in the victim’s living room listening to Monk’s Misterioso on the stereo and when the victim arrives he is shot in the head two times. The killer views the music as “a pantomime, a peculiar dance of death.” The Swedish police put together what they call an A-Team to find this killer.

July 13, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , , ,  Â· Posted in: Mystery/Suspense, Sweden, Translated, World Lit

THE WINTER GHOSTS by Kate Mosse

Mosse gives her beguiling novel an old fashioned gothic framework that suits this eerie story of ghostly love in an insular mountain village of France a decade after WWI. The story opens in 1933 as Frederick Watson visits an antiquarian bookseller in Toulouse. “He walked like a man recently returned to the world. Every step was careful, deliberate. Every step to be relished.” Well-dressed and confident, Watson knows his appearance contrasts sharply with his last visit to Toulouse in 1928 at age 25. “He had been another man then, a tattered man, worn threadbare by grief.”

July 10, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , , , ,  Â· Posted in: 2011 Favorites, Facing History, France, Mystery/Suspense, Psychological Suspense

THE END OF EVERYTHING by Megan Abbott

There’s one thing you can count on with author Megan Abbott, you can never predict which direction her novels will take you. Abbott’s first novel, DIE A LITTLE is set in 50s Hollywood and is an exploration of the strange relationship between two women. Then came THE SONG IS YOU, based on the unsolved disappearance of actress Jean Spangler. This novel was followed by QUEENPIN, the story of a female book keeper who works for a glamorous, hard-as-nails mob-connected woman. Abbott’s next novel, BURY ME DEEP, set in the 30s, is a fictionalized account of a real-life murder. And that brings me to THE END OF EVERYTHING, a deeply engrossing book in which Abbott explores the relationship between two 13-year-old girls. I don’t care for a child narrator, but there are hints that this tale is told by Lizzie in adulthood years later.

July 7, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , ,  Â· Posted in: Facing History, Mystery/Suspense, US Midwest, y Award Winning Author

TURN OF MIND by Alice LaPlante

Dr. Jennifer White has early onset Alzheimer’s disease at 64 years old. Once an esteemed orthopedic surgeon specializing in surgery of the hands, she is now unable to remember things from minute to minute, unable to recognize her son Mark or her daughter Fiona most of the time. Her mind goes in and out from fog to lucidity but the lucidity, for the most part, are memories of her early life. In TURN OF MIND by Alice LaPlante, the reader gets deeply into the mind of a woman with dementia. It is very realistic and fascinating. Having a mother with dementia and being a clinical social worker myself, I can say without reservation that Alice LaPlante really gets it.

July 6, 2011 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: , , ,  Â· Posted in: Contemporary, Debut Novel, Family Matters, Literary, Mystery/Suspense, Reading Guide, Thriller/Spy/Caper

THE DANTE CLUB by Matthew Pearl

You could classify THE DANTE CLUB loosely as historical fiction. Or perhaps, try historical-fantasy-fiction-literary-murder-mystery. It’s definitely a work to be enjoyed by “literary types,” but also by thrill-seekers, detective buffs, psychological and social analysts and in fact anyone who enjoys a good read.

June 30, 2011 · Judi Clark · One Comment
Tags: , , , , ,  Â· Posted in: Facing History, Literary, Mystery/Suspense, NE & New York