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. 


We arrived back home to chilly Canada on Friday from Nicaragua where we had been since December 27.


FINISHED THIS WEEK:


Synopsis over here.

This was a disappointing read especially since I really like Fay Weldon and had recently read Chalcot Crescent
which I had enjoyed immensely.  The Bulgari Connection was a fluffy and sometimes quite funny beach read about money, marital and extra marital relationships, power, and people getting what's coming to them.
I kept thinking about Dorian Gray as I read about the "dumped" wife getting younger.



From the book jacket:

When a seventeen-year-old Moldovan boy is found dead on Hampstead Heath, the case falls to DCI Karen Shields and her overstretched Homicide & Serious Crime team. Karen knows she needs a result. What she doesn't know is that her new case is tied inextricably to a much larger web of gang warfare and organised crime which infiltrates almost every aspect of London society, from the back streets and high rises of Tottenham to the multi-million pound hideaways of the new international entrepreneurs.

Several hundred miles away in Cornwall, DI Trevor Cordon is stirred from his day-to-day duties by another tragic London fatality. Travelling to the capital, determined to establish the cause of death and trace the deceased's daughter - an old acquaintance from Penzance - Cordon becomes entangled in a lethally complex situation of his own. A situation much closer to Karen's case than either of them can imagine ...


This was a great read, the story is brilliant but it is his characters that you get drawn into. John Harvey's writing is always great and the way he weaves the story between  DCI Karen Shields, Head of Homicide and DI Trevor Cordon a small town policeman. 



From the book jacket:
An ancient fortune has lain hidden for thousands of years, one so powerful that men will kill to protect it. And only one man can unearth it...

Ex-SAS operative Ben Hope is living a peaceful life in rural France - until a phone call from an old army comrade turns his world upside down. Eminent Egyptologist Morgan Paxton has been brutally murdered while working on the mysterious 'Akhenaten Project' in Cairo, and Colonel Harry Paxton wants Ben to find his son's killer. Ben is unable to refuse the request from the man who once saved his life - but when Harry asks him to avenge his son's death he's in dangerous territory. Made worse by the fact that he finds himself attracted to Zara Paxton, Harry's new bride. Carving through the seedy Cairo underworld, Ben soon realises that there was more to Paxton's research than meets the eye as he is plunged into one double-cross after another. His mission leads him from Italy and Paris via the coast of Scotland to the banks of the Nile, climaxing in a tense showdown in the war-torn Sudanese desert. At the end of the trail lies the ultimate treasure, hidden away by three rebel High Priests during the reign of the 'Heretic' Pharoah Akhenaten - a collection so valuable that some will stop at nothing to possess it! 

I loved this book with all the Egyptian history as part of the plot. We've been to Egypt so it was fun picturing the various spots featured in the book. It didn't matter that this is the fourth book in the Ben Hope series. I now plan on finding the others to read.

I didn't find the love story line very believable, no one falls in love that quickly. There were also a few scenes that bordered on the unrealistic, but all in all a great fun read.

STARTED THIS WEEK:

From the book jacket:


This Irish bad-boy thriller -- set in the hardest streets of New York City -- brims with violence, greed, and sexual betrayal.
"I didn't want to go to America, I didn't want to work for Darkey White. I had my reasons. But I went."So admits Michael Forsythe, an illegal immigrant escaping the Troubles in Belfast. But young Michael is strong and fearless and clever -- just the fellow to be tapped by Darkey, a crime boss, to join a gang of Irish thugs struggling against the rising Dominican powers in Harlem and the Bronx. The time is pre-Giuliani New York, when crack rules the city, squatters live furtively in ruined buildings, and hundreds are murdered each month. Michael and his lads tumble through the streets, shaking down victims, drinking hard, and fighting for turf, block by bloody block.







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