The Butterfly Girl, by Rene Denfeld.

  

          I have never forgotten a book by the above author that I read six years ago, called ‘The Enchanted’, an astonishing story about a prisoner on Death Row, and how he got there.  It was horrifying, heart-breaking and ultimately uplifting, a story of the emotional and spiritual vandalism perpetrated upon the most vulnerable, and what turns a child into a killer:  now, Rene Denfeld has produced another searing exposé of the careless ignorance and cruelty that permeates our society, and the few – too few – good people who try to make a difference.  And she knows whereof she speaks, as a journalist, investigator and foster-mother.  She writes from  experience.

            Celia is a 12 year old street kid in Portland, Oregon.  She sleeps under a freeway on-ramp with two other boys, panhandling and turning the occasional trick to get money.  (Not much).  She left home because her mother has become a heroin addict thanks to her new husband, who introduced her to the habit so that he could move in on Celia:  when Celia reported him to the authorities she was called a liar, so she ran away and joined the homeless kids on Skid Row, but her only regret is that she left her little sister behind;  Celia knows that Alyssa will eventually meet the same fate.  She is only six. 

Celia has a single fantasy that sustains her:  her love for the grace and beauty of butterflies, instilled within her when she was very small by her mother when times were different:  Celia stays in the local library for hours reading about the gorgeous winged creatures, and when life is particularly ugly, she can lose herself in butterfly dreams.  It’s the only way to survive.

Naomi is an Investigator of missing children, and has had some success in her searches – but she cannot find her own sister, left behind as a toddler when Naomi herself escaped from captivity in a bunker when she was nine years old:  her failure to track Sarah down eats at her soul, for she promised that she would return, return to rescue her – and she hasn’t.  But she still tries, still relentlessly goes over all the old clues – and meets Celia, the Butterly Girl.

Ms Denfeld weaves a masterful spell over the reader as she takes us to the story’s end at a thriller pace;  her characters are all too tragically real, as the vulnerable always are, but hope is there too, thanks to good people like Ms Denfeld:  she puts her money where her mouth is!  SIX STARS. 

Down the River Unto the Sea, by Walter Mosley.

           Walter Mosley has a huge body of work to his name and, as always, I have been shamefully ignorant of his accomplishments until now:  his stand-alone novel featuring brilliant, world-weary and jaded Afro/American Private Investigator Joe King Oliver follows all the rules of classic crime fiction as laid down by Dashiel Hammett, Raymond Chandler et al, but lends a 21^st century perspective to crimes and corruption as old as civilisation itself.

            Joe wasn’t always a PI;  he used to be a hot-shot, ambitious Detective in the New York Police Department, until he was mercilessly framed by anonymous colleagues:  he was unwittingly getting too close to some of their horrifying scams and he needed to be removed from the scene.  This involved luring Joe into the embrace of a beautiful, supposedly wronged woman whom he was sent to arrest and he was videoed by hidden cameras used to provide ‘evidence’ when she screamed RAPE.  He was incarcerated for several months in the infamous Rikers prison;  his wife could have bailed him out, but was shown the ‘rape’ video by colleagues supposedly meant to be his friends;  now his marriage is in ruins;  he is irreparably damaged by his time in Rikers, not to mention physically scarred and, if it hadn’t been for one of his old work mates who set him up as a PI, he would be on the streets:  his life is one big grudge – except for the existence of his teenage daughter, literally the light of his life.

            She works for him after school as his receptionist and one afternoon ushers in a young woman on a mission:  Willa is a lawyer who has recently been working for attorney Stuart Braun, who has been crusading with great fanfare to free black radical activist Leonard Compton.  Compton killed two police officers he said were drugging and trafficking young, poor women and he is now on Death Row, but Braun’s zeal and enthusiasm to appeal for justice seems to have waned:  he is no longer interested in the case.  Could Joe read through the files she has brought and consider finding out what happened to make Braun lose interest?

            And Joe does, embarking on a dangerous, almost fatal journey to dig through layers of corruption so thick he thinks he’ll never reach the bottom – until he does, starts to ascend and realises that he’s climbing into the heights of wealth, gentility – and power. 

            Mr Mosley’s story is well-constructed, smart, funny and peopled with great characters, including a spectacularly evil man who is thoroughly engaging and charges Joe a dollar for all the mayhem he alone can create (he owes Joe a favour from long ago).  For lovers of Crime Noir (and there are so many of us) he cain’t be beat!  FIVE STARS.      

Silver, by Chris Hammer.

           Chris Hammer’s second crime novel is a sequel to ‘Scrublands’, his epic, page-turning tale of drought, bush fires and murder in a remote little town in Australia’s New South Wales (reviewed January 2019):  now he follows it up with ‘Silver’, a sequel blessed with all the elements that made ‘Scrublands’ so successful – strong characters, marvellous evocations of time and place, and shrewd journalistic assessments of Australian reaction to foreign investment on a federal and local government level.

            Sacked journo Martin Scarsden is once again the main protagonist;  he is joining his new love, Mandy Blonde and her baby son Liam in Port Silver on the NSW coast.  Mandy has inherited a large property there and she thinks it’s the perfect place for a new start for them all – time to put the horrific events of the past year in their proper place:  behind them.  The only problem is that Martin hasn’t been completely honest with Mandy:  unbeknownst to her, he was born in Port Silver and when he was eight, suffered the terrible loss of his mother and twin sisters in an accident;  then he had to watch his father drink himself to death.  The day Martin left Port Silver was the happiest day of his life, and he doesn’t know how he will settle back into normal living (doing what?  He is no longer a journalist) when he has so many ghosts to haunt him.

            Their new life is off to a very shaky start, he thinks – until he calls round to the townhouse Mandy has rented, only to find her with hands bloodied, shaking with terror, and a stabbed and dying man stretched out in her hallway.  To make a horrendous situation even worse, Martin recognises the victim as that of his old school friend Jasper Speight who, presumably, had called round particularly to see Martin:  he had damning evidence of local corruption and wanted Martin to investigate.  Now he is dead and Mandy, of all people, is a suspect.  The situation could not get any worse, thinks Martin, and God hears that and laughs.

            Mr Hammer has written a big novel – some 560 pages – and it’s chock-full of minor characters and situations, a lot of which feels like unnecessary padding:  there are more murders and even more suspects:  when the final unveiling is flourished I have to say that it’s almost an anti-climax.  It’s true that I never suspected whodunnit, but I nearly drowned with all the red herrings.  Having said that, ‘Silver’ is still a fine, suspenseful read.  (You just have to have strong wrists!)  FOUR STARS. 

The Testaments, by Margaret Atwood.

            It has been thirty five years since Margaret Atwood’s brilliant Dystopian novel ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ was published, a tiresomely lengthy time for her myriad fans to wait for answers to What Happened Next to the Handmaid Offred and her precious children:  now, our curiosity has been satisfied by Ms Atwood at her most sublime:  ‘The Testaments’ has it all - a gripping plot, magnificent characters, and a heroine who was forced into villainy but redeems herself utterly:  Vengeance, Thy Name is …..  nope, no spoilers in THIS blog!

            This book was worth waiting 35 years for, especially after the wonderful TV series. It centres on Offred’s daughters – Agnes Jemima, who started life in freedom as Hannah before a calamitous Civil War transformed the United States into Gilead, and Baby Nicole, Offred’s child of bondage in the new totalitarian society, planned to be given to ‘pretend’ parents, Fred and Serena Waterford to raise. 

Agnes remains in unhappy thrall to her Gilead parents;  her loving first ‘mother’ Tabitha has died and her ‘father’ Commander Kyle wastes no time in taking another wife, who wants Agnes out of the house, and the best way to achieve that is – marriage.  Marriage to the elderly but immensely powerful Commander Judd, who enjoys a worrying propensity for very young wives, all of whom eventually become sickly and die.

            Agnes’s fate appears to be sealed, until in desperation she applies to Aunt Lydia, one of the Founders, to be an Aunt, a so-called guardian of the various classes of women in Giladean society.  It is not an ideal fate;  she will never have children, the sacred destiny of all Gilead women, but at least she will still be alive.

            By contrast, her unknown little sister Baby Nicole has been abducted from her pious family and spirited off to Canada, where she becomes Daisy and grows up with foster parents, unaware of her origins and in an atmosphere of freedom unimaginable to any Gilead inhabitant – until her foster parents are cruelly murdered by those over the border who have never stopped looking for Baby Nicole.  It’s time for Daisy to grow up, and return to Gilead – not as Baby Nicole but as Jade, a homeless street kid who wants God in her life:  she has had a crash course as a spy and is expected to bring back vital information from an important inside source to American revolutionary groups in Canada – if she can pull it off.

            Ms Atwood pulls it off in spades.  This is an astonishing, masterly sequel to her most famous and beloved novel, and is a fitting testament to today’s 21^st century ‘democracy’.  SIX STARS.  

    

             

Masters and Mages Trilogy

Masters and Mages Trilogy

Cold Iron,

Dark Forge

Bright Steel

            Miles Cameron is not an author I am familiar with, but he has a vast body of fantasy work, according to the fly-leaves of his books, that I have never heard of, so where have I been all my literary life?  Well, never mind – I have soldiered through this mighty trilogy, and lived to tell the tale.

            I have to say that I spent a fair bit of the first book trying to square Mr Cameron’s parallel fantasy world with the helpful map he provided in ‘Cold Iron’ (which is the name of a secret society of spies bent on saving the known world from destruction), with our European world in Medieval times (I have to know these things!), and have cleverly deduced that the action takes place around the Mediterranean, between Greece and Turkey, where lowly farm boy  Aranthur Timos is a scholarship student at the prestigious Studion in the great city of Megara.  He is reminded often of his lack of status by the other students but manages to survive because he is resourceful, naturally gifted with magic powers (which is why he is at the school) and a clever swordsman – he even spent his rent money on a mysterious old sword that he purchased at the market, never dreaming that it would save his life more than once - because it can talk. 

            And in return for becoming his arm of fire, the sword wants a favour, too:  to be freed from its metal prison, so that it once again may become a mighty Paladin. 

            Oh, there’s something for everyone here!  From Aranthur’s reluctant initiation into Cold Iron, to his blooding as a warrior in the war against The Pure, the terrifying hierarchy of powerful Mages so determined to control universal power that they manage to split the sky asunder, making a Dark Forge that grows bigger every day.  It is up to Aranthur and his loyal band of friends (and a supernatural lover) to defeat these ghouls so that the world can survive – all very well, thinks Aranthur as he wields Bright Steel, but he loathes killing, and he must do much of it on his reluctant path to be a Lightbringer, a Magos powered for good.

            Mr Cameron has a mighty imagination and a tremendous gift for writing thrilling, heart-stopping prose.  Poor old Aranthur is under attack on every second page, but as this is fantasy he wins each encounter – sometimes by the skin of his teeth, but he’s the larger-than-life hero, so it’s only fitting, and his mates deserve a special mention, too – a more motley band couldn’t be found anywhere else.  And there’s even a Chinese Dragon on the side of the good guys:  what more could one want!  FIVE STARS    

  

           

The Last to See Me, by M. Dressler.

  

          This is a big story packed into a little volume.  Ms Dressler is writing a series entitled ‘The Last Ghost’, and Book One contains only 264 pages, but enough action to fill a book twice the size:  narrator Emma Rose Finnis is a very busy spirit!

            She died more than 100 years ago, and haunts a stately old home in a small tourist village in Northern California.  Benito used to be a timber town until the trees were all felled and the mills closed;  now, it bolsters its faltering economy by promoting itself as a charming tourist destination, a restful and scenic coastal break from San Francisco to the South.  The mansion Emma ‘occupies’ was the home of the Lambry family, the original timber barons and uncrowned royalty of the area;  now old Alice Lambry has died and her distant heirs, who have no interest in the property, want the place sold.

            So far, there has been scant interest – until local agent, ‘timid little Ellen DeWight’ (Emma likes her and hasn’t tried to scare her silly – yet.) brings Mr and Mrs Dane to visit.  He is a rich developer, interested only in the land and the house’s position;  his wife wants to gut the place, removing all the wonderful architectural features that make the property a treasure, but their whispered plans in the butler’s pantry enrage Emma so much that she locks them in, turns off the lights and starts filling the pantry with water.  There.  That will teach them a lesson!

            And it does.  They are almost in a state of collapse (Mrs Dane wet herself!), but Emma reckons without Mr Dane’s zeal and determination to close the deal:  he wants that property now more than ever, and hires a ‘ghost cleaner’, the very best, to get rid of her.

            Emma had this reader in an iron and ghostly grip as she recounts her tactics to outwit Philip Pratt, the man who states that he was born to eradicate ghosts, shades and phantoms.  He is absolutely committed to hunting down and sending Emma off to the local graveyard, where she rightly belongs:  she, naturally (or not) resists with all her supernatural might, and as the story progresses we learn the sad circumstances of Emma’s eighteen years of life, and her efforts to remain what she has always striven to be – a free spirit.

            Ms Dressler has given us a beautifully written, tightly plotted introduction to her series.  I could say I’m dying to read Book Two, but that doesn’t sound right – I’ll look forward to it, instead!  FIVE STARS

It’s that time again …….!

When all the August Publications and Flash Mags bring out their Best of the Best lists for the year. 

So here’s mine.

Well, why not, I say!  I’ve read some pretty amazing titles this year and while I can’t list a mighty Top Twenty, I have come up with Seventeen Stunners (sorry, sorry!).  These are books that I have rated more than five stars;  it’s not easy to award six stars out of five, or even seven – so the quality of writing is stratospheric in my August Opinion.  Should you wish to read individual reviews, please use the search drop box;  for some mysterious reason I can’t provide a title link. 

The titles are in chronological order, not in order of preference.  Happy New Year, everyone, and keep reading.  As if we could ever stop!

1                   Country, by Michael Hughes

2                   The Rosie Result, by Graham Simsion

3                   November Road, by Lou Berney

4                   The Border, by Don Winslow

5                   The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock, by Imogen Hermes Gowar

6                   Necessary Secrets, by Greg McGee

7                   The Hoarder, by Jess Kidd

8                   Boy Swallows Universe, by Trent Dalton

9                   The War that Saved my Life, by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley (Junior fiction)

10              Flight of the Fantail, by Steph Matuku (Young Adults)

11              Good Girl, Bad Girl, by Michael Robotham

12              In the Shadow of Wolves, by Alvidas Slepikas

13              Auē, by Becky Manawatu

14              Elephant secret, by Eric Walters (Junior fiction)

15              The River, by Peter Heller

16              Bridge of Clay, by Markus Zusak

17              Akin, by Emma Donoghue