It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

 

It's Monday! What are you reading? is hosted by Sheila at Book Journey. For this meme, bloggers post what they finished last week, what they're currently reading, and what they plan to start this week.


FINISHED THIS WEEK:

Synopsis over here.

I always enjoy an Inspector Banks story. This was no exception with no surprises  and the usual quality of plotting and suspense in this the nineteenth in the series. I've read all of these in no particular order.
The book starts with the investigation into a raid by an Authorized Firearms Officer squad that goes horribly wrong.
Banks is a deep character with many faults like the rest of us and his character has grown and developed.



With The Guilty Plea, a gripping sequel to the international bestseller Old City Hall, Robert Rotenberg has delivered another sharp, suspenseful legal thriller with an explosive conclusion.

On the morning his high-profile divorce trial is set to begin, Terrance Wyler, the youngest son of Toronto’s Wyler Food dynasty, is found stabbed to death in the kitchen of his luxurious home. Detective Ari Greene arrives minutes before the press and finds Wyler’s four-year-old son asleep upstairs. Hours later, when Wyler’s wife, Samantha, shows up at her lawyer’s office with a bloody knife wrapped in a towel, the case looks like a straightforward guilty plea.

Instead, an open-and-shut case becomes a complex murder trial, full of spite and uncertainty. There’s April Goodling, the Hollywood starlet with whom Terrance had a well-publicized dalliance, and Brandon Legacy, the teenage neighbor who was with Samantha the night of the murder. After a series of devastating cross-examinations, there’s no telling where the jury’s sympathies will lie.

As in Old City Hall, Rotenberg’s gift for twists and turns is always astonishing, but his true star remains the courtroom: the tension, disclosures, and machinations that drive this trial straight to its unpredictable verdict. 

I had read his first book Old City hall and was really looking forward to this one. I enjoyed the further development of some of the characters from the first book mainly cops, lawyers and judges. I loved reading about my city, Toronto and his great descriptions. I also liked the history of our judicial system and its many customs.
I didn't like the ending, I'm not sure why. Perhaps because I had trouble believing the ending. I also felt it was rushed and could have been built upon throughout the story.


Inspector Wexford is back! After being missing in action since 2009, former Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford returns from retirement in this standalone sequel to A Sight for Sore Eyes, Ruth Rendell's popular 1999 novel. Detective Superintendant Thomas Ede coaxes Wexford into active duty, using the lure of four recently discovered corpses and an unidentified culprit. Of course, unraveling interlocking mysteries is what Wexford does best. 

I've always been a huge Ruth Rendell fan. This is a quick read about a case that  is not particularly exciting,  it's the characters that make the book interesting, although they, too, have become somewhat set in their ways.

I, for my part, love the descriptions of the London neighbourhoods that Wexford is exploring as I am a huge lover of London. 

I was somewhat amused about Wexford venturing into cyberspace but thought this a little odd that he would not have learned to google etc. while still on the police force. he even sends his first e-mail.



They were teachers, students, chemists, writers, and housewives; a singer at the Paris Opera, a midwife, a dental surgeon. They distributed anti-Nazi leaflets, printed subversive newspapers, hid resisters, secreted Jews to safety, transported weapons, and conveyed clandestine messages. The youngest was a schoolgirl of fifteen who scrawled "V" for victory on the walls of her lycée; the eldest, a farmer's wife in her sixties who harbored escaped Allied airmen. Strangers to each other, hailing from villages and cities from across France, these brave women were united in hatred and defiance of their Nazi occupiers.

Eventually, the Gestapo hunted down 230 of these women and imprisoned them in a fort outside Paris. Separated from home and loved ones, these disparate individuals turned to one another, their common experience conquering divisions of age, education, profession, and class, as they found solace and strength in their deep affection and camaraderie.

In January 1943, they were sent to their final destination: Auschwitz. Only forty-nine would return to France.

A Train in Winter draws on interviews with these women and their families; German, French, and Polish archives; and documents held by World War II resistance organizations to uncover a dark chapter of history that offers an inspiring portrait of ordinary people, of bravery and survival—and of the remarkable, enduring power of female friendship.

This was a very hard book to read but I couldn't put it down. In 2012 we visited Nuemberg, Terezin (a concentration camp), Budapest Jewish Interest Tour, and Normandy so this book was very relevant and provided me with the detailed history to fill in the blanks from these visits to these World War II sites.

While I found her writing a little cumbersome I could look past it as the stories of these women were so riveting. It is a little hard to keep track of each one's story as they blended together. However, the details of the horrendous existence they had to endure under the Nazis is mind boggling and heart breaking.
This book has some of the most explicit descriptions of camp survival that I have ever read.

STARTED THIS WEEK:



Is the perfect murder the one you can't forget or the one you can't remember?

Dr. Jennifer White, a brilliant former surgeon in the early grips of Alzheimer's, is suspected of murdering her best friend, Amanda. Amanda's body was found brutally disfigured — with four of her fingers cut off in a precise, surgical manner. As the police pursue their investigation and Jennifer searches her own mind for fractured clues to Amanda's death, a portrait emerges of a complex relationship between two uncompromising, unsentimental women, lifelong friends who were at times each other's most formidable adversaries.




2012 books read (76 to date):
The Coast Road - John Brady
Still Midnight - Denise Mina
The Bulgari Connection - Fay Weldon
Good Bait - John Harvey
The Heretic's Treasure - Scott Mariani
Dead I Well May Be - Adrian McKinty
The Devil's Elixir - Raymond Khoury
A Darker Domain - Val McDermid
The Impossible Dead - Ian Rankin
GB84 - David Peace
The Emperor's Tomb - Steve Berry
Stonehenge Legacy - Sam Christer
Inquisition - Alfredo Colitto ABANDONED!
The Troubled Man - Henning Mankell
Nineteen Seventy-Four - David Peace
Faithful Place - Tana French
Dead Like You - Peter James
Brother and Sister - Joanna Trollope
The Forgotten Garden - Kate Morton ABANDONED!
A Beginner's Guide to Acting English -Shappi Khorsandi
The Snowman - Jo Nesbo
The Leopard - Jo Nesbo
The Stone Cutter - Camilla Lackberg
Miramar - Naguib Mahfouz
The Gallow's Bird - Camilla Lackberg
Nineteen Seventy- Seven - David Peace
Timeline - Michael Crichton
Millennium People - JG Ballard
The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins
Catching Fire - Suzanne Collins
Mockingjay - Suzanne Collins
Birdman - Mo Hayder
Clara Callan - Richard B. Wright
The Paris Vendetta - Steve Berry
Little Girls Lost - Jack Kerley
The Reutrn of the Dancing Master - Henning Mankell
Nemesis - Jo Nesbo
Dublin Dead - Gerard O'Donovan
City of Bohane - Kevin Barry
This Beautiful Life - Helen Schulman
The Copenhagen Project - K. SandersenPrague - Arthur Phillips
Fortunes of War - Gordon Zuckerman
The Cold Cold Ground - Adrian McKinty
Before the Poison - Peter Robinson
The Mozart Conspiracy - Scott Mariani
Dancer - Colum McCann
Pig Island - Mo Hayder
Old City Hall - Robert Rotenberg
The Paris Wife - Paula McLain
The Last Good Man - A. J. Kazinski
Homesick - Roshi Fernando
Black Friday - Alex Kava
Only One Life - Sara Blaedel
A Perfect Evil - Alex Kava
People Like Us - Dominick Dunne
The Ottoman Motel - Christopher Currie
Even the Dogs - Jon McGregor
The Red Book - Deborah Copaken Kogan
Faith - Jennifer Haigh
The Salesman - Joseph O'Connor
The Last Hundred Days - Patrick McGuinness
The Girl Below - Bianca Zander ABANDONED!
Hocus Pocus - Kurt Vonnegut
Drowned - Therese Bohman
Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn
The Paris Directive - Gerald Jay
Criminal - Karin Slaughter
The Reluctant Fundamentalist - Moshin Hamid
The Good Muslim - Tahmima Anam
My Korean Deli - Ben Ryder Howe
The Ghosts of Belfast - Stuart Neville

Bad Boy - Peter Robinson

The Guilty Pleas - Robert Rotenberg
The Vault - Ruth Rendell
A Train in Winter - Caroline Moorehead