Archive for the ‘Thriller/Spy/Caper’ Category

NORTH OF BOSTON by Elisabeth Elo

North of Boston is Elisabeth Elo’s debut novel, and to me it is a real winner. It certainly held my interest and I found that, at times, I was unable to put this books down.

Pirio Kasparov, heir to a very successful perfume business which her Russian immigrant parents founded, is our protagonist. She is a gritty, smart and complex woman. When Pirio’s mother died, the girl was just 10 years old. Her deceased mother’s will stipulates that when Pirio turns 21 years old, she will inherit her mother’s share of the extremely successful business, Inessa Mark, Inc. and that if she wants full ownership, the company would revert to her upon her eccentric father’s death. Pirio has joined the company where she works as “CEO in training.” Scent permeates much of the novel – the scent of perfume, ambergris, herbs, flowers, etc. And the smells of the sea also play an important part in the author’s descriptive passages.

May 11, 2014 · Judi Clark · Comments Closed
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Canada, Debut Novel, NE & New York, Thriller/Spy/Caper

THE ACCIDENT by Chris Pavone

Isabel Reed, a literary agent for ATM, spends all night reading, “The Accident” by Anonymous, the new manuscript from her assistant Alexis who was very enthusiastic about it. The book has startling information about Charlie Wolfe, a major media figure with major political connections that is hoping to run for office himself. The information in the manuscript, if true, would certainly end Wolfe’s career as it describes a crime he apparently covered up while a student at Cornell University.

April 6, 2014 · Judi Clark · Comments Closed
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: California, Denmark, Edgar Award, New York City, Switzerland, Thriller/Spy/Caper, y Award Winning Author

THE CAIRO AFFAIR by Olen Steinhauer

THE CAIRO AFFAIR takes place in Egypt and Libya during 2011 with flashbacks to Serbia in 1991. It is set during the period when the regimes of dictators Hosni Mubarek, Egyptian President and military commander from 1981 to 2011, and Muammar Gaddafi, a Libyan revolutionary and the de facto ruler of Libya for 42 years, came to a violent end. The revolutionary events of the “Arab Spring” brought to conclusion various repressive Arab governments. The “Arab Spring” is widely believed to have been instigated by dissatisfaction with the rule of local governments, though some have speculated that wide gaps in income levels may have had a hand as well. Numerous factors led to the protests, including issues such as dictatorship or absolute monarchy, human rights violations, political corruption, (demonstrated by Wikileaks’ diplomatic cables), extreme poverty, and a large percentage of educated, jobless and dissatisfied youth. The storyline of THE CAIRO AFFAIR, takes place around the above events…and the events are often current, which makes this novel more interesting.

March 19, 2014 · Judi Clark · Comments Closed
Tags: , , ,  Â· Posted in: Africa, Egypt, Thriller/Spy/Caper, World Lit

NO WAY OUT by Alan Jacobson

Karen Vail finds herself in a different role and a different country in NO WAY OUT, the fifth book in the series by Alan Jacobson. Karen, an FBI profiler, is sent to England to assist Scotland Yard in a theft of a key document that she finds out may show that Amelia Bassano Lanier, a woman who also happens to have been Jewish and black, actually was the author of all of the plays and poems attributed to William Shakespeare.

February 6, 2014 · Judi Clark · Comments Closed
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: Theme driven, Thriller/Spy/Caper, United Kingdom

NIGHT FILM by Marisha Pessl

This psychological, genre-bursting/ busting literary thriller took me on a high-speed chase into a Byzantine rabbit hole into the quirkiest, eeriest, darkest parts of the soul. Investigative reporter Scott McGrath is on a quest to exhume the facts of a young piano prodigy’s tragic end. Ashley Cordova, 24, daughter of cult-horror film director, Stanislav Cordova, was found dead–allegedly a suicide. The now reclusive director (30 years isolated from known whereabouts) is the reason for McGrath’s ruined reputation five years ago, and Scott is hungry to turn things around, upside down, and inside out to pursue Cordova again and save himself. And to disinter the “truth,” which itself can be an illusory concept in this cat and mouse thriller.

January 11, 2014 · Judi Clark · Comments Closed
Tags: , , , , ,  Â· Posted in: 2013 Favorites, Horror, Literary, Mystery/Suspense, New York City, Reading Guide, Thriller/Spy/Caper

THE PROFESSOR OF TRUTH by James Robertson

On December 21, 1988, almost exactly twenty-five years ago as I write, Pan American flight 103 from London to New York was brought down by a bomb and crashed over the small town of Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 259 people aboard and eleven more on the ground. Although others may have been implicated, only one man was convicted of planting the bomb, a Libyan national who was released several years later on compassionate grounds; he died of prostrate cancer in 2012. His death may well have been the trigger for Scottish author James Robertson’s imaginative and morally profound novel; it is certainly the event with which it opens.

December 28, 2013 · Judi Clark · Comments Closed
Tags: , , , ,  Â· Posted in: Facing History, Thriller/Spy/Caper