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 here.

I actually preferred this to The Snowman.  It is much more violent than The Snowman, but much more
 intriguing. I can't say I'm a big fan of the main character Harry Hole, a handsome, rugged, opium-addicted, brilliant crime fighter.
There is so much going on in this book that at times it is like a three ring circus: settings in Oslo, the Congo, the mountain tops of Norway, and a cast of thousands.  There is in-fighting among the cops, treachery, and a fantastic scene in the snow-covered mountaintops involving the cops skiing in. I won't give anything away here.

Also finished this week:

From the book jacket:
The third psychological thriller from No 1 bestselling Swedish crime sensation Camilla Lackberg. 
The remote resort of Fjallbacka has seen its share of tragedy, though perhaps none worse than that of the little girl found in a fisherman's net. But the post-mortem reveals that this is no case of accidental drowning! 
Local detective Patrik Hedstrom has just become a father. It is his grim task to discover who could be behind the methodical murder of a child both he and his partner, Erica, knew well. He knows the real question - and answer - lies with why. What he does not know is how this case will reach into the dark heart of Fjallbacka and the town's past, and tear aside its idyllic facade, perhaps forever. 


I read this quickly and found that the plot was not as tight as her previous two books, in most cases I had figured out the storyline before we got to its conclusion.
I did enjoy the flipping back and forth through several generations as you try to guess the connection between the story of the daughter of a stone quarry owner beginning in the 1920s and the death of a child in the early years of the 21st century.
I have her next one to read when DH finishes it, all part of our plan to complete the "hard" copy books in the house to declutter them in a garage sale.

Also finished this week:

A highly charged, tightly written tale of intersecting lives that provides us with both an engaging and powerful story as well as a vivid portrait of life in Egypt in the late 1960's.

I have read and enjoyed his books before, he is a former Nobel Literature winner. This one, however, I had to force myself to finish, generally skimming the writing.

He tells a story from four perspectives, and from those perspectives emerges a second story, a depressing look at a country whose political deterioration had by the late 1960's ruined an entire generation. It's a decent read, but requires some familiarity with Egypt's modern history for non-Egyptians to get the most out of it.

Started this week:

 From the book jacket:

David Peace's acclaimed Red Riding Quartet continues with this exhilarating follow-up to Nineteen Seventy-Four. It's summer in Leeds and the city is anxiously awaiting the Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth's reign. Detective Bob Fraser and Jack Whitehead, a reporter at the Post, however, have other things on their minds-mainly the fact that someone is murdering prostitutes. The killer is quickly dubbed the “Yorkshire Ripper” and each man, on their own, works tirelessly to catch him. But their investigations turn grisly as they each engage in affairs with the prostitutes they are supposedly protecting. As the summer progresses, the killings accelerate and it seems as if Fraser and Whitehead are the only men who suspect or care that there may be more than one killer at large. 

This is the second book in the quartet, following Nineteen Seventy-Four. So far I am thoroughly enjoying it, even though it is extremely violent, racist and sexist, David Peace writes it like it was in the 70s.

I had read GB84 earlier this year as well.

2012 books read:
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

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 here.

Blah, did not enjoy this book at all, I skimmed through it so I could finish it. There wasn't a single character that I liked. Other than the twelve year old Ellen and the office manager Meera no one else had any common sense. They were all a bunch of whiny grownups expecting life to be a bed of roses. Just too much like a soap opera to me, an American one at that!


Not a good week so far, I abandoned the next book on page 121.

I tried, I really did to like this book. I enjoyed the trips back and forth between the generations but the main characters were the most insipid women that I had to give up. I seriously couldn't have cared less what the mystery was surrounding family.

She finds out on her 21st birthday (her father felt he had to tell her, why??) that her loving, adoring family is not her biological family. Her father had found her as a very small child and raised her in a wonderful home with great parents and adoring little sisters.
So she breaks up with her perfect fiancee who also adores her, settles for an idiot of a husband, has a  daughter, who turns into a horrible mother who in turn raises another dysfuntional child and so on.

Synopsis here.

I didn't love this book, it was ok (a really bad reading week for me). The title doesn't really reflect the story as it is more about family relationships than about learning to "fit in" in England in the 1970s. 

It is written from a small girl's view so things are explained from her point of view in very simple language. I did love all the food references. 

I also enjoyed learning more about life in Iran under the Shah and then what happened when the extremists took over. 

From the book jacket:

The night the first snow falls, a young boy wakes to find his mother gone. He walks through the silent house, but finds only wet footprints on the stairs. In the garden looms a solitary figure: a snowman bathed in cold moonlight, its black eyes glaring up at the bedroom windows. Round its neck is his mother's pink scarf.

Inspector Harry Hole is convinced there is a link between the disappearance and a menacing letter he received some months earlier. As Harry and his team delve into unsolved case files, they discover that an alarming number of wives and mothers have gone missing over the years. When a second woman disappears, Harry's suspicions are confirmed: he is a pawn in a deadly game.

For the first time in his career Harry finds himself confronted with a serial killer operating on his turf, a killer who will drive him to the brink of insanity.

I have started this book several times and gotten sidetracked. As a result of my dismal attempts to read something good this week I decided to finish this. I want to reduce the number of hard books in the house as we both use e-readers for a lot of our reading especially when we travel.

So I finished it, liked it but wasn't blown away by the author being touted as "the next Stieg Larsson". 

It was hard going at the beginning and Harry reminded me of Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallender and the murder mystery plot was fairly typical of the genre. However I did get quite involved and didn't want to put it down until I knew the outcome. There are quite a few twists and turns to the plot which keep you interested.  I  do think it was too long and there are some pretty obvious false turns that were not necessary.

STARTED THIS WEEK:

As I mentioned above I am working my way through the books in the house in hard copy.

From the book jacket:

In the depths of winter, a killer stalks the city streets. His victims are two young women, both found with twenty-four inexplicable puncture wounds, both drowned in their own blood. The crime scenes offer no clues, the media is reaching fever pitch, and the police are running out of options. There is only one man who can help them, and he doesn't want to be found. 
Deeply traumatised by The Snowman investigation, which threatened the lives of those he holds most dear, Inspector Harry Hole has lost himself in the squalor of Hong Kong's opium dens. But with his father seriously ill in hospital, Harry reluctantly agrees to return to Oslo. He has no intention of working on the case, but his instinct takes over when a third victim is found brutally murdered in a city park. 

2012 books read:
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