Books by Choice - from Margitte's Wingback: Murder

Showing posts with label Murder. Show all posts

Monday, October 21, 2013

The Gospel of Silk - by Stephen Lee

Genre: Mystery, Murder, Suspense, Drama, Relationships, Memoir

Formats: Paperback, Kindle, Nook
Publishers: Createspace
Published date: October 2012
ISBN: 148003245X (ISBN13: 9781480032453)
Pages: 212
Edition language: English
Purchase links: Amazon, Barnes&Noble

Amazon Book Blurb:

William L. Payne preached silk as the salvation of the impoverished village of Rosewick in 1926. He persuaded investors his silk factory would make them rich and the region prosperous. He was mysterious, charismatic, and a little scary. He was said to have performed miracles, though he was anything but divine. He claimed to be an illegitimate son of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and nurtured the notion that he carried the German crown jewels in his little black satchel. Though Howard Godwin, 9, suspected Payne was a German spy, he became his devoted disciple . . . and his Judas.

REVIEW:

This is one of those books that I bought from reading the Amazon blurb and looking at the cover design. I thought to myself: This book is talking to me. Take it. Of course I did.

The more I got into the story of Howard Godwin, the more enchanted I became. Memories of a young boy meeting a charismatic William J. Payne in his hometown, Rosewick, got me in the end so mesmerized, I could feel my heart jumping with joy when a little bit of time became available and I could open the book to continue reading.

Payne’s presence created an element of suspense and excitement in the humdrum life of the town, but would also change the history of this community forever.

Excitement...I cannot find the right words right now. But it is there and I am smiling, shaking my head and reveling in the innocent observations of a young-man-in-the-making, about his town, his friends, his absentee father (although he suspects he was kidnapped anyway) , the racial discrimination against one of his best friends, Woodrow W. Wade - alias Scooter, and the many other people playing a role in cementing his personality through the events that played itself out around the establishment of a silkworm industry in their town.

Payne persuaded them that this poor region, no less than the exotic realms of the Orient and Europe was eminently suited to the production of this luxurious fabric, that no more was required than honest, diligent industry of the populace to make it blossom into a booming region of ordered mulberry orchards, bustling silkworm works, fine homes and genteel cultured people.

Payne would turn everything mundane or momentous into something magical. He just had with it took to turn the little town Rosewick into a place to remember for life. He was educated, sophisticated, and so refined.

Grave yards; old spooky homes; a magician who convinced the Pinewood school girls - who 'flocked to him like pigs to slop, that he was dead and buried for three days and crawled out of his grave; sixteen-year-old Amelia Hendershot who drove trucks and smoked cigarettes - all of it in the year 1926, got me losing sleep to read just a little bit more before reality knocked before daybreak again.

Somewhere, while being lost in this engrossing tale, I was thinking about the Pied Piper of Hamelin, and Huckleberry Finn, and innocent little boys becoming proud men with a wealth of memories to share. One of the people who would influence Howard's approach to life was his grandfather, who was just a teeny bit more cagier old bird than a lot of people.

I wondered where I could add words such as “prestidigitation,” and "mellifuously" in my review. The book constantly had me seeking wisdom in the dictionary. What a rich thrill!

“All of life is magic,” Payne said. “Think of it -- our birth, our life, our death, the power of herbs to heal, the feeding of our bodies, the movement of the blood through our veins. “That we know a little of the mechanics does not remove the magic. That there are explanations does not make it less a mystery in the end. We understand so little, and we make our beliefs so small.”

Mysteries are what make life interesting. It could not have become truer when a murder took place in the graveyard of Rosewick. The events afterwards would rob three young boys of their innocence forever.

How sad it will be if this book slips through the grid and get lost to an audience it so richly deserve. I cannot stress enough how overwhelmed I was by the richness of the story, the colorful descriptions of the villagers' lives, the meticulous detail of the surroundings, and the completeness of the tale. It is one of those rare treasures you only find a few times in your life.

I recommend it to anyone who believes that real life hides its own mysteries and magic. Besides, it is based on a true story.

This spur-of-the-moment buy was a brilliant decision!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Stephen Lee has worked for newspapers in places as far-flung as Maui and Manhattan. He is also a lawyer . He is married, and his wife of many years is an educator, author, and a talented china painter.

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatjie

Original title: The Cat's Table
ISBN 0224093614 (ISBN13: 9780224093613)
Edition language: English
Genre : Murder mystery, crime drama, literary fiction, cultural
Kindle Edition : 290 pages
Other Formats : Hardcover; Mass Market Paperback; Kindle, Nook, Audio CD
Publishing date: August 30th 2011 by McLelland (first published January 1st 2011)
Literary awards: Hammett Prize Nominee (2011), Scotiabank Giller Prize Nominee (2011), Dayton Literary Peace Prize Nominee for Fiction (2012)
Purchase from Amazon , Barnes@Noble

Amazon book blurp:

'What had there been before such a ship in my life? A dugout canoe on a river journey? A launch in Trincomalee harbour? There were always fishing boats on our horizon. But I could never imagine the grandeur of this castle that was to cross the sea'.

In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy boards a huge liner in Colombo bound for England. At mealtimes he is seated at the lowly 'cat's table' - as far from the Captain's table as can be - with a ragtag group of adults and two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin. As the ship crosses the Indian Ocean the boys tumble from one adventure to another,and at night they spy on a shackled prisoner - his crime and fate a mystery that will haunt them forever...

REVIEW: Michael was eleven years old that night when, green as he could be about the world , he climbed aboard the first and only ship of his life, the Oronsay, sailing for England from Colombo.

Unbeknownst to him, the twenty-one days at sea would become twenty-one years of schooling, molding him into the adult he would one day be, when he joined the cat's table, the least important place to eat on the ship.

The lessons he picked up from the adult company filled up several pages of his old school exercise books. He still had time to make those notes, amid the adventures in which he and his friends, Ramadhin and Cassius, engaged in on the ship. They witnessed an adult world filled with thieves, adulterers, gamblers, teachers, authority, natural healers, dreamers and schemers. Oh yes, and a shackled, dangerous prisoner. Each one of them becomes important in their lives through either their words or conduct. The ship had lots to offer for three young boys to keep them occupied. So many people, so many stories, so many intrigue. And then there was the ports of call...

Miss Perinetta Lasqueti was one of the guests around the Cat's Table. Their first impression of her manner was that of being like faded-wallpaper, but the more they found out about her, the more convinced they became that 'she was more like a box of small foxes at a country fair' . And with a good hand at shooting to prove it.

Mr. Mazappa - the boisterous, loud pianist would change their newly acquired perspective on old paintings with his approach to the angelic Madonnas in them, saying: "‘The trouble with all those Madonnas is that there is a child that needs to be fed and the mothers are putting forth breasts that look like panino-shaped bladders. No wonder the babies look like disgruntled adults." (p.213 - kindle edition)

Mr. Larry Daniels, the botanist, would teach them much more about his plants than they would ever need to know in their lifetimes.

Mr. Fonseka, the teacher, had a "serenity that came with the choice of the life he wanted to live. And this serenity and certainty I have seen only among those who have the armour of books close by."

I wanted to read this book for such a long time now. There was just something about it that told me it would roll me over and tie me down in its prose. It did. Some books just put themselves where it can be read because it is really that good. It is multifaceted. It is thought-provoking. It is excellent. It is one of those books you cannot walk away from easily. It has all the elements to promise that it will become a classic in time. I want to reread it. I just have to. Period.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Ondaatjie was born to a Burgher family of Dutch-Tamil-Sinhalese-Portuguese origin. He moved to England with his mother in 1954. After relocating to Canada in 1962, Ondaatje became a Canadian citizen. Ondaatje studied for a time at Bishops College School and Bishop's University in Lennoxville, Quebec, but moved to Toronto and received his BA from the University of Toronto and his MA from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario and began teaching at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario. In 1970 he settled in Toronto. From 1971 to 1988 he taught English Literature at York University and Glendon College in Toronto.

One Night in Winter by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Genres: Historical fiction, Russian history, murder, mystery, community, family relationships
Formats: Hardcover(480 pages)(Barnes & Noble) Kindle(Amazon)
Published date: September 5th, 2013(UK), May 2014 (USA) by Century
ISBN 1780891083 (ISBN13: 9781780891088)
Edition language: English
Purchase links: Amazon , Barnes & Noble , Amazon UK

REVIEW
1945. Moscow, Russia. Jubilance raged over the war-ravaged city. Hitler was defeated. New beginnings lay ahead for a nation with promises of greatness by Stalin. The hope for normalcy raised slowly from the ashes.

The young Andrei Kurbsky saw “crumbling buildings, their façades peppered with shrapnel, windows shattered, roads pockmarked with bomb craters. Everything – the walls, the houses, the cars – everything except the scarlet banners was drab, beige, peeling, khaki, grey. But faces of the passersby were rosy as if victory and sunlight almost made up for the lack of food, and the streets were crowded with pretty girls in skimpy dresses, soldiers, sailors and officers in white summer uniforms. Studebaker trucks, Willys jeeps and the Buicks of officials rumbled by – but there were also carriages pulled by horses, carts heaped with hay or bedding or turnips, right in the middle of this spired city with its gold domes. Sometimes, when he closed his eyes in the heat and the world went a soft orange, Andrei heard laughter and singing and he was sure he could hear the city itself healing in the sunshine.” ` Life was starting over for everyone. The top officials in the Communist party were compensated with lavish lifestyle in the high-ceilinged apartments in the Granvosky building (otherwise known as the Fifth House of the Soviets), with dazzling corridors of capacious parquet floors and crystal chandeliers. Each official owned more than one chauffeur-driven car: open-topped Mercedes and -Packards, Dodge, Cadillacs, limousines, and Rolls Royces. It was also the home of Serafima Romashkina.

A new life was also starting for Andrei and his mother who just returned from exile in Stalinabad, “The Paris of Central Asia”, also known as “The Athens of Turkestan”. Everybody knew what that meant. “It was his tainted biography all over again.” Young, poor, optimistic, ambitious, inexperienced Andrei would meet Serafima.

It is a magnificent book: well written, extremely detailed, beautiful prose, spell-binding with no unfinished characters. The story is about a group of children and their families, every member, their teachers, and what happened to them, during the reign of Stalin. There were many love stories, too many, to be told. A historical novel at its best.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Simon Sebag Montefiore is the author of the prize winning books Jerusalem: the Biography' and Young Stalin and the novels Sashenka and now One Night in Winter. His books are published in over 40 languages and are worldwide bestsellers. He read history at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge University, where he received his Doctorate of Philosophy (PhD).