GREAT READS FOR JANUARY, 2015
Blue Labyrinth, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Special
FBI Agent extraordinaire Aloysius Pendergast returns yet again to do battle
against the forces of evil – and not before time, I say! His myriad fans have been languishing without
him, and it’s all very well for Messrs Preston and Child to throw them a bone
from time to time with various solo novels and the combined authorship of a
series featuring a new hero, Gideon Crew, BUT.
All
that secondary activity is a mere distraction until the Master resurfaces, this
time to fight a mysterious new villain, one who has hidden his identity so well
that more than half the book is (greedily) consumed before his identity is
revealed.
In
common with all the other evil ones that Pendergast has dispatched to the
hereafter, (see 2013 review below) Mystery Man is festering with hatred towards
our pale hero - but he is no ordinary
Dastard, for he is motivated by revenge:
thanks to an awful genetic curse wrought upon his family by one of
Pendergast’s ancestors, Mystery Man contrives through absolutely genius
planning, to infect Pendergast with the same fatal malady - but not before
leaving the dead body of Pendergast’s twin son on the Agent’s front doorstep as
a calling card and to start the ball rolling.
Pendergast’s days are numbered!
Now. Because Pendergast knows something about
absolutely everything he is able to self-medicate for a while as he searches
for his killer, but as the horrid disease starts to have its wicked way, raising
his temperature uncomfortably in his black wool suits, he realises that the
cavalry will have to be summoned – and who better to ride to his rescue than
Margo Green, anthropologist and ethnopharmacologist, doughty companion on many previous bloody
adventures at the New York Museum of Natural History. It will be her job to manufacture ASAP an
antidote from rare ingredients pinched
by none other than Constance Green, Pendergast’s mysterious ward – well, she’s
certainly mysterious to ME, as I haven’t yet found the book (and I thought I
had read them all) where she makes her first appearance.
By
any reader’s calculation she must be about 150 years old, but is as young and
glowing as the dawn; the only clue to
her advanced years is her curiously formal way of speech, and her retro fashion
sense, but – but the woman is an Amazon!
And she knows HEAPS about various acids, and how to administer them to
nasty men who should know better than to try to stop her at the Brooklyn
Botanic Garden from stealing a super-rare plant to save Pendergast’s failing
life. Constance Green is a warrior, and
she accomplishes grand larceny and mass murder in minimum time and maximum
efficiency (he’s definitely worth it!) clad only in a silk Teddy. Sorry, Constance: chemise.
Does
Our Hero survive? Well, what a silly
question: of course he does, returning
to his healthy pallor in no time at all, and enjoying a fresh supply of Armani
funeral garb. And he and Constance are
closer than ever, which is only right:
she rubbed out half an army of mercenaries that he might live! Do you suppose she fancies him? Watch this space.
White
Fire, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
As
patient readers of this little blog will know, I have long been a fan of
Preston and Child’s fearless protagonist FBI Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast,
along with millions of other dedicated followers of his hair-raising adventures
as he deploys his considerable intellectual and physical powers to defeat all manner
of dastardly villains. Sadly, ‘Two
Graves’ the white-knuckle adventure preceding this latest title was so absurd,
so defying of all credulity that I couldn’t in all conscience write my usual
ecstatic review – I mean, come ON: a
nest of evil NeoNazis in the South
American Jungle conducting eugenic experiments so that they can breed another
Master Race, and who should be involved but Pendergast’s great love Helen,
mother of twins he didn’t know he’d fathered (gasp!), one of whom is bred
specially for great things, and the other (double gasp!!) for slavery.
Our
hero destroys the nest of evil Nazi vipers, but at great personal cost (Helen
really does die this time), causing Pendergast to sink into a slough of despond
from which he has great difficulty extricating himself, BUT!
His
creators need to bring him back from his hell of substance abuse and depression
for this latest adventure, and I am happy to say that ‘White Fire’ is a
complete success, with only limited reference to ward Constance Green ( meditating
in a monastery in the Himalayas) and his good and evil twins (of the nasty one
no trace; the good one is getting an
education at an exclusive Swiss Academy).
Instead this adventure centres on Corrie Swanson, Pendergast’s sponsored
protégé and student at the prestigious John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Corrie has decided to base her thesis on the supposed slaughter by a bear of
eleven miners 150 years ago in a remote area mined for silver in Colorado.
By
great coincidence the rough mining camp of Roaring Fork has now become the
exclusive ski resort and winter vacation wonderland of the megarich and famous
– and others who find Corrie’s desire for information and request to examine
the exhumed bodies of some of the miners intrusive and unhelpful: she must be discouraged permanently from her
investigations and with a ruthlessness that takes Corrie’s breath away, she
suddenly finds herself in prison facing a ten-year sentence for ‘desecration of
a corpse’ and various other lesser charges.
Her
devastation is absolute – until Pendergast, finally roused from his torpor by
her desperate situation arrives in Roaring Fork complete with the necessary
evidence to refute the charges and send a message to the villains that their
nefarious plans are not going to succeed.
Oh, it’s great stuff, and as an added bonus Oscar Wilde, Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle and his great hero Sherlock Holmes are connected to Pendergast’s
modern day sleuthing in an entirely credible subplot, forming the basis of his
ultimately successful solving of The Mystery – but not before Corrie undergoes
some truly death-defying experiences (she has her little finger shot off and
nearly goes up in smoke for being unwittingly lippy to a madman), as required
in any suspense novel worth its salt.
It
is a pleasure to welcome Pendergast back to the land of the living –at least as
portrayed by Preston and Child: his
mourning period is now thankfully over and he can attend to his usual business
of conquering evil, striking fear into the black hearts of villains everywhere
with his pale eyes, pale hair and an inexhaustible supply of money and black
designer suits. Lincoln and Child are
back to their best: sound scholarship,
good research and a great plot. Who
could ask for more? This is the ideal
holiday read.
The
Woman who Stole my Life, by Marian Keyes
Stella Sweeney is a
beautician in Dublin. Her husband Ryan
is a thwarted artist (his talent was never recognised or appreciated but he has
channelled his gift into making posh bathrooms for posh people); they are
parents to a teenaged boy and girl who
require a lot of supervision and organising, and it is a source of great pride
for her to know that despite she and Ryan’s working-class origins, they can
afford (just) to send their children to an exclusive private school. Nothing but the best for Jeffrey and
Betsy. They are Stella’s main focus in
life; her reason for getting up in the
morning. Ryan is another matter – his
main focus seems to be on his business, then Ryan: the grand passion that controlled their young
lives has now disappeared, lost in the stresses and strains of everyday living
– so what else is new? This is what
happens to us all, and that is the secret of Marian Keyes’s success: her great ability to recount stories of
people just like us, her readers; people
we can identify with so easily.
Where Ms Keyes starts to
leave reality behind is the unbelievable misfortune Stella suffers when she
contracts Guillain-Barré Syndrome, ‘an
auto-immune disorder which attacks the peripheral nervous system,
stripping the myelin sheaths from the nerves’.
Got that? The body can recover
eventually, but until that happy day, Stella spends a huge amount of time in
hospital, paralysed and unable to communicate at all – except after a time to
establish a winking, blinking code with a hunky neurologist who – quelle
horreur! – eventually becomes her (gasp) lover!
How could this happen to someone who couldn’t move a muscle for more
than a year? And what about hubby and
the kids? A? A?
More importantly, how does a writer convince her readers that this is
just an everyday occurrence? Well, I
have to say with some regret, that she didn’t convince ME – which is a shame,
because I was entirely willing to suspend belief – up to a point.
Never mind, though: for the most part, Ms Keyes writes
beautifully of what she knows i.e. the publishing world, this time exposed in
all its two-dimensional ugliness, and her supporting characters are as strongly
drawn as ever. Lastly, let us not forget
her biggest virtue as a writer:
humour. That wonderful Irish
variety of humour, so inimitable and so vital;
such an arsenal against all the troubles that beset us ordinary folk and
without which we would be defenceless indeed.
Ms Keyes may have missed the bus with ‘The Woman who Stole my Life’, but
I’ll be waiting for her at the next stop.
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