Before the Rising, by Keryn Powell.                Young Adults.

 

 

           How many visitors to the beautiful New Zealand East Coast city of Napier have had their photos taken next to the lovely statue of Pania of the Reef, legendary sea-nymph who defied her people for love of Karitaki, a handsome human, only to have her love betrayed and tragedy ensue, but not before having a child.  In Maori legend the descendants of this union still exist, as Keryn Powell’s debut novel attests, and it is up to them to prevent their world from certain destruction.

            And that’s not so easy when you don’t even know you’re a descendant!

            Eighteen-year-old Rebecca lives with her adoptive mother Mary, a midwife at the local hospital.  She has just finished high school and is trying to decide what career options appeal the most – hopefully, something connected with the sea, for which she has a great love.  She is excited too, because her best friend Polly’s older Marine Biologist brother Martin is back in Napier trying to finish his thesis for his PhD;  he has asked her to be his assistant for a week as he studies pods of dolphins and other sea life on a chartered boat – how lucky is that?  What a great start to the holidays, and Rebecca cannot deny that Martin is even more interesting than the creatures of which he is so knowledgeable – until she realises that another ‘crew-member’ is Jessica, Perfect Jessica, she of the gorgeous looks and figure, and Rebecca’s long-time bully and tormentor. 

            It will obviously be another of those weeks.  Rebecca will just have to bite the bullet:  so much for her timid feelings of attraction – Jessica will be all over Martin – he doesn’t stand a chance!

            But the very opposite happens, and Rebecca finds that her natural swimming and diving skills in the water, especially near Pania’s reef, introduce her to a people she has never known before until they decided to reveal themselves:  her own Sea-people, relatives of whom she would never have been aware, had they not shown themselves.  And they revealed their identity because the world as we have always known it, is in mortal danger – from the Rising.  The implacable, unstoppable rising of the sea-level everywhere, resulting in terrible coastal destruction and huge loss of life, thanks to unscrupulous trickery and misinformation by WeatherTech, a huge international profit-driven firm now established in New Zealand:  only Rebecca as a direct descendant of Pania, holds the key (which she doesn’t even know she has) to averting tragedy.

            Ms Powell takes us on a wild but importantly credible ride with the Sea-people, Kaitiaki (guardians) of an environment the human race has so shamefully desecrated.  And her great affection for Napier and its still-beautiful coast and wondrous wild-life shines;  she has done her city proud.  Not every ‘t’ is crossed at the conclusion of this great story – can this mean there will be a sequel?  Hope so!  FOUR STARS.         

 

Eddy, Eddy by Kate de Goldi.

 

  

          Teenager Eddy Smallbone, orphan, lives with his uncle Brian (unkindly called Brain by Eddy, for Brian’s absurdly knowledgeable vocabulary) in Aotearoa New Zealand’s South Island city of Christchurch.  Christchurch has recently been devastated by a huge earthquake which reduced the city to ruins and killed 185 people:  recovery of any kind will be a long-term process, and Eddy is not doing so well at it.  He hates his life with middle-aged bachelor Brain, despite Brain legally adopting him so that he wouldn’t be lost to the family, thereby changing Brain’s life plans irrevocably;  he hates the Catholic secondary school he attends and manages to get himself expelled after organising a ‘survey’ proving (he said) that two thirds of the school’s pupils didn’t believe in God.

            Yes, Eddy is an angry young man, and his attempts to make sense of his life so far are causing distress to the people who love him the most – Brain, and Brain’s eclectic and ‘catholic’ variety of friends, which include a disgraced Catholic priest, an atheist union organiser and Eddy’s godmother Bridgie, proud lesbian companion to the atheist – and, as much as all these loving, well-meaning people irritate him, they are the only constants in a life which seems to have little purpose – unless he finds one.

            And that is what this marvellous story is about:  Eddy’s attempts to carve out a different future for himself, beginning with a pet-minding business that he starts through word-of-mouth advertising that inadvertently turns into minding the children of the pets of one particular harried and divorcing family as well.  He is surprised to find that he has some success at it, having a natural affinity for animals which seems to go down well with the kids, too, especially when they meet Mother, a male cockatoo belonging to a nun (!) called Sue who has just had a hip replacement.  BUT!  The very best thing to happen is the return of his beloved ex-girlfriend Roberta – but for how long?

            For Eddy has more than family and religious problems to contend with, if he can’t face up to the fate of his very best friend.

            Kate de Goldi is queen of the marvellous metaphor and a superb writer, marshalling her dazzling array of characters with great humour and wit. Her skilled and beautiful language  describes the ruination of a city, its cautious renaissance, then the return of that most elusive of feelings:  hope – for all.  SIX STARS.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

 

Violet Black, by Eileen Merriman.                   Young Adults.

 

            Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand:  the time is the foreseeable future, and a huge new Measles pandemic has swept the region, infecting children and teenagers with deadly accuracy.  Scientific modelling so far has revealed a shocking 95% fatality rate, leaving myriads of families grieving for those they have lost, and the 5% who survive find it a long, hard road back to recovery – until ….. until some of the few survivors realise that they are equipped with a frightening new knowledge:  they can read the thoughts of those who are speaking to them.  They know what those people are thinking – whether they want to know or not!

            Violet Black is such a survivor:  seventeen years old and thankful to be alive, she is nevertheless frightened of her new ability, especially when she learns that all is not above board with the people who are managing her recovery.  In her search for others who share her ‘gift’ she meets teenager Ethan Wright in hospital and, aside from the fact that they find each other irresistible, it becomes obvious that certain ‘authorities’ are very interested in their new-found talents and want to exploit them for their own mysterious purposes.

            This is the first book of an action-packed trilogy that Young Adult author Eileen Merriman has written, and international terrorism is the theme:  it eventually becomes clear – after hair-raising kidnappings and misunderstandings – that the shadowy ‘Foundation’ who, after snatching them from hospital has published false death notices for them, all supposedly suffering relapses of the dreaded M-fever – are the Good Guys:  they want to harness this new talent to monitor people’s thoughts by sending (with intensive training) the Thought recruits to infiltrate various worrisome Far-Right and Ultra-National Groups and Cults, thereby learning in advance of plans for violence and murder.

            All fine in theory, until the first mission:  Violet is sent to Germany – not with Ethan as she’d hoped, but with ex-soldier Phoenix:  they are to get as close as they can to a couple who have a handicapped child – a couple who are planning terrible violence.  Sure enough, everything turns pear-shaped, Violet is seriously wounded by someone not calculated for at all, and tragedy overtakes her in her efforts to stay alive.

            Ms Merriman has done herself and her readers proud here – I already have Book Two ‘Black Wolf’ lined up next. An extra treat, quite apart from the clever plotting and suspenseful action, is her view of Auckland in the not-so-distant future:  everyone gets around in Zubers – and they appear to be free.  That’s my kind of transport!  FOUR STARS.   

 

Violet Black, by Eileen Merriman.                   Young Adults.

 

            Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand:  the time is the foreseeable future, and a huge new Measles pandemic has swept the region, infecting children and teenagers with deadly accuracy.  Scientific modelling so far has revealed a shocking 95% fatality rate, leaving myriads of families grieving for those they have lost, and the 5% who survive find it a long, hard road back to recovery – until ….. until some of the few survivors realise that they are equipped with a frightening new knowledge:  they can read the thoughts of those who are speaking to them.  They know what those people are thinking – whether they want to know or not!

            Violet Black is such a survivor:  seventeen years old and thankful to be alive, she is nevertheless frightened of her new ability, especially when she learns that all is not above board with the people who are managing her recovery.  In her search for others who share her ‘gift’ she meets teenager Ethan Wright in hospital and, aside from the fact that they find each other irresistible, it becomes obvious that certain ‘authorities’ are very interested in their new-found talents and want to exploit them for their own mysterious purposes.

            This is the first book of an action-packed trilogy that Young Adult author Eileen Merriman has written, and international terrorism is the theme:  it eventually becomes clear – after hair-raising kidnappings and misunderstandings – that the shadowy ‘Foundation’ who, after snatching them from hospital has published false death notices for them, all supposedly suffering relapses of the dreaded M-fever – are the Good Guys:  they want to harness this new talent to monitor people’s thoughts by sending (with intensive training) the Thought recruits to infiltrate various worrisome Far-Right and Ultra-National Groups and Cults, thereby learning in advance of plans for violence and murder.

            All fine in theory, until the first mission:  Violet is sent to Germany – not with Ethan as she’d hoped, but with ex-soldier Phoenix:  they are to get as close as they can to a couple who have a handicapped child – a couple who are planning terrible violence.  Sure enough, everything turns pear-shaped, Violet is seriously wounded by someone not calculated for at all, and tragedy overtakes her in her efforts to stay alive.

            Ms Merriman has done herself and her readers proud here – I already have Book Two ‘Black Wolf’ lined up next. An extra treat, quite apart from the clever plotting and suspenseful action, is her view of Auckland in the not-so-distant future:  everyone gets around in Zubers – and they appear to be free.  That’s my kind of transport!  FOUR STARS.   

 

Pieces of Her, by Karin Slaughter – and the sequel,

Girl Forgotten.

 

            It’s obviously best to read Book One first (Duh!), where we meet Andrea Oliver, a 31-year-old college drop-out who is finding it hard to get out of bed, let alone get her life into some kind of order, even though she has an enormously supportive mother who lives and works in a lovely Delaware seaside community as a speech therapist:  Andrea lives above her mum’s garage in a very small apartment – and wishes she didn’t, but can’t summon the will and determination to organise herself away from there and Mum’s loving but smothering apron strings.

            Until a coffee morning at the local Mall turns into a bloodbath, with her life being threatened by a disturbed (I’ll say!) eighteen-year-old with a gun:  two people die in the carnage, but her mother, in an act of impossible bravery, saves her – by knifing the shooter.  It transpires that in the subsequent investigation, Andrea’s mum is the complete opposite to the façade she has always presented to the world, in fact she is in a witness-protection program instituted by the US Marshal Service, part of a plea-deal she made with authorities to incarcerate a band of would-be domestic terrorists many years ago. All were intent on blowing up various parts of down-town New York to protest at the corrupt capitalist world-order.

            Needless to say, Andrea is in shock, and finally gets enough gumption to start investigating the past.  What she discovers will change her life forever.

 

            ‘Girl Forgotten’ starts in a flash-back to the Eighties in the same seaside town that was Andrea’s home:  Emily Vaughn, a hugely pregnant high-school student, is determined to attend the school Prom, regardless of her rich and powerful parents’ orders not to.  She wants to confront her former friends who have all blanked her since she found that she was pregnant, the friends who were known as The Clique, envied, admired, intellectually and culturally superior – they were all going to make such an impact!  Until Emily appeared and embarrassed them, especially their charismatic ‘leader’ Clayton Morrow:  he expected to go farther than anyone – for God’s sake, get her out of here. 

            Emily’s naked body is eventually found in a dumpster.  The murderer is never found, and The Clique disbands, all going their separate ways, until Andrea Oliver, newly graduated as a US Marshal, is sent to the town to protect the late Emily Vaughn’s mother, a prominent Supreme Court Justice, from recent death threats.  Yes, Andrea has finally gotten herself together;  she has discovered some terrifying secrets about her origins, but they have energised and given her focus at last, and Emily’s cold-case is just one of several mysteries she wants to solve.

            This is the first time I have read anything by Ms Slaughter, and I greatly admire her ability to keep the many and complicated threads of her plot powering along at a mighty rate.  The suspense almost never flags, except for a time just before the end of ‘Girl Forgotten’, but that’s a small quibble when viewed overall.  She is an immensely enjoyable and entertaining writer and deserves her best-seller status.  FIVE STARS EACH.    

 

These Days, by Lucy Caldwell.

 

  

          April, 1941:  Doctor Philip Bell and his wife Florence live with their three children in a leafy suburb of Belfast.  As one would expect they are prosperous, able to have a housekeeper and a cleaning girl for several days of the week and all should be hunky-dory;   eldest daughter Audrey is in a deepening relationship with Richard, a young hospital Doctor; middle daughter Emma is a night-shift volunteer at the local First-Aid Post, and youngest child Paul, at thirteen, is dying to be seventeen so that he can enlist in the Air Force and blast those Germans out of the skies!  So.  Even though there is a World War taking place on their doorstep, they are all managing, so they are.

            Until German pilots drop incendiary bombs on the docks and industrial parts of Belfast to disable Britain’s war effort.  Belfast suddenly has its very own Blitz and the entire city reels in shock:  at the First Aid Post, wardens are bringing in people who should be in the hospitals, and the hospitals are dealing with corpses.  Belfast is not managing any more.

And neither is the Bell family:  Audrey has accepted Richard’s marriage proposal, partly because Richard was so distraught at the thought of losing her to the bombing (his declarations of love were irresistible!), but marriage means giving up a job in the Tax Office that she really likes – married women don’t ‘work’ after marriage – and the friends and workmates that she enjoys seeing.

Emma is still on the night-shift at the First-Aid Post which suits her admirably, for she has begun a passionate love-affair with her Supervisor, Sylvia.  She has never known such heady, ardent emotions and is prepared to devote the rest of her young life to Sylvia, and damn the consequences!  She can’t imagine what her prim and proper mother Florence would think if she knew – but Florence has secrets and longings of her own, memories of another war, and another love.           

Ms Caldwell moves her various characters expertly through their reactions to the first bombing and the second fire-storm;  she is a superb storyteller and from her thorough historical research recreates a searing, tragic  account of a terrible chapter in Belfast’s history, where the only certainty is that one’s life will never be the same.  No-one is immune to tragedy and woe:  it’s how they react to it that determines their lives.  ‘Belfast is finished’, said so many:  how wrong they were!  SIX STARS.   

             

 

The Last to Disappear, by Jo Spain.

 

 

         The last woman to disappear in Jo Spain’s taut thriller is a temporary Hotel tourist guide in the winter wonderland of Lapland in Northern Finland, but unlike the others, her body surfaces thanks to the efforts of an ice fisherman on the lake looking for other prey.  It is the height of the tourist season, being close to Christmas, and the town of Koppe depends heavily on its tourists:  ‘The Home of Father Christmas!’  ‘See the Northern Lights!’  ‘Skiing – Saunas – ice swims!’  A dead body could be very off-putting, so the local police inform the unfortunate woman’s British family that she has had a fatal accident, and would anyone care to come and collect their loved one’s remains?

            Alex Evans, Lobbyist (he hates his job but loves the money), makes the trip, for the awful news has left his parents in disarray;  his mother is felled by a heart attack and his father won’t leave her side – Alex himself feels enormous guilt because he didn’t get on with his sister Vicky;  he considered her irresponsible and a spendthrift and, at the age of 26, capable of making more mature decisions about her life:  now she’s gone, and he didn’t even let her know his new phone number months after he changed it.  He is bereft.

            And totally unprepared in his Burberry raincoat and leather shoes for the subzero climate of Koppe;  fortunately local police chief Agatha Koskinen is aware of his ignorance and has brought boots and jackets to the airport, saving him from certain weather-induced death - and the awful news that the post-mortem has revealed that Vicky’s death was not accidental:  she has been murdered.

            It was agonising enough to have to be the family member to identify ‘the body’, but to think that his sister met her death by someone else’s hand infuriates Alex. He decides to stay on for a few days to see what he can find out and, apart from hearing about the other missing women (the locals are great gossips), it is clear that Agatha has a murky history of her own:  this is the Town of Secrets, as well as Santa Claus.

            There are parallel flashbacks to 1998 throughout the story, recounting the circumstances of the first young woman to go missing and revealing the Viper’s nest a small town can be as people try to survive in a land of extreme weathers.  Jo Spain has painted a bleak but beautiful picture of life, love and lust in a cold climate and all her characters are credible and well-drawn without being the least formulaic.  This book is the ideal holiday read (if you’re lucky enough to have one!)  FIVE STARS.