Tag Archives: popular fiction

The Chatham School Affair by Thomas H. Cook

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I read my first Thomas H. Cook novel last year when I discovered, by accident, Breakheart Hill. I really liked that book; I liked The Chatham School Affair even  more.

I am not a mystery connoisseur by any stretch, although I admit that I’ve read a fair amount of suspense thrillers in my day. Cook belongs in another category altogether- sort of in the same way that King belongs in his own special category (and I mean that as a compliment because at the top of his game, there’s no one better than King.)

The Chatham School Affair is a richly realized mystery which unfolds as the book’s narrator, an elderly lawyer named Henry Griswald, recalls the events which transpired the year he was 15. In 1926, Henry is a student at Chatham School where his father is the director. He’s an intelligent boy, given to daydreaming and reading rather than socializing with his peers. The arrival of the new art teacher, the beautiful and well-traveled Elizabeth Channing upends Henry’s world in ways impossible to relate without revealing important plot points. Suffice to say that this book is a wonderful examination of love found and lost, of regret and honour, of sacrifice. It’s also a great mystery with a kick-ass ending.

The Chatham School Affair is not told at breakneck speed: the reader is expected to spend a little time with the characters…but it’s worth it. Cook’s writing is often lyrical – not all that common in ‘crime fiction.’ In fact,  I have a hard time with that label. Henry is a wonderful narrator, sympathetic even, but what I admired most of all about this book is how Cook walked that wonderful tightrope- never vilifying any character, allowing each of them their motivations and mistakes, their dreams and, ultimately, their fates.

Two thumbs up.

Can You Keep a Secret by Sophie Kinsella

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I was a big fan of Sophie Kinsella’s book, Confessions of a Shopaholic. I just found the book funnier than hell. Sadly, I didn’t have the same experience with Can You Keep a Secret?

Emma Corrigan is on a flight from Glasgow to London when the plane experiences some frightening turbulence. She turns to her seat-mate and divulges every single secret she has kept for the last twenty-something years.

I have no idea what NATO stands for.
My G-string is hurting me.
I weight 128 pounds. Not 118, like my boyfriend Connor, thinks.

As it turns out, the guy sitting next to her – Jack – is the American head of the company Emma works for. Of course, she doesn’t know that because she’s new to the company and Jack hasn’t been to the UK since his business partner died. What follows is a pretty predictable, though harmless enough, tale of Emma and Jack and how divulging her secrets changes her life in ways that are mostly good.

It’s fluff, people.

Losing the Moon by Patti Callahan Henry

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Patti Callahan Henry’s book snuck up on me. I wasn’t overly impressed with her writing when I started the book and I can’t say that I fell in love with the characters or the secondary story (of the main character’s quest to preserve an island off Georgia’s coast) and yet, I finished the book with a lump in my throat.

Amy is happily married to Phil. Her kids, Jack and Molly, are grown; Jack is actually away at college and Molly in her last year of high school. Her world, however, is about to be turned upside down when Jack invites her to the homecoming football game to meet his new girlfriend and her parents. Turns out, the girlfriend’s father, Nick, is Amy’s old college boyfriend. Suddenly Amy’s world turns upside down. Her feelings for Nick (and as it turns out, Nick’s feelings for her) are complicated because of the way their relationship ended. And as Amy starts to question her feelings for her husband and her role as wife and mother, she starts orbiting ever closer to the girl she once was and the way she felt about Nick.

A lot of what happens in Losing the Moon is predictable  (although Amy herself might use the word inevitable). The story tracks Amy’s feelings, but also Nick’s. While I wasn’t rooting for any particular outcome, I have to admit to feeling incredibly sorry for both Amy and Nick by the end of their story – even though Henry did a plausible job of explaining Amy’s choices.

I related to this book on quite a few levels- perhaps because I am around the same age as Amy. Her questions (as she cleans her house again) about her place in the world, about her dreams, about her role in her marriage all rang true to me. Is this what I wanted for my life? Who hasn’t asked that on occasion?

And of course Nick is a painful reminder of what she has left behind- not just the loss of his love, but the loss of her youth as well. A conversation she has with her daughter about the passage of time nearly had me bawling.

So, yeah, good book.

Off Season by Jack Ketchum

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There’s no way to describe Jack Ketchum’s book, Off Season other than to call it torture porn. I was called out for this label, but I stand by it. It’s so gruesome, so over-the-top, it’s impossible to call it straight up horror.

This book caused quite a sensation way back in 1980 when it was first published. It was Ketchum’s debut novel and the editorial team at Ballantine wanted to make substantial changes to the book’s vivid (for lack of a better word) writing and pretty damn depressing denouement. Ketchum was reluctant, but also pretty excited about having his first novel published. Ultimately, he went along with the changes. He tells the whole story in the Afterward of the Leisure Fiction edition  of  Off Season, which is uncut and uncensored (and by this I mean, the story appears as Ketchum had intended it to appear all those years ago.) And, likely for some readers, the book is unpalatable.

I’ve got a pretty strong stomach. Thank God because this book was pretty horrific. It tells the story of a group of six friends who are about to spend a week together in a remote cabin on the coast of Maine. This is Deliverance country, folks, only ten times as nasty. Ketchum does a good job of moving the story along (the whole thing plays out over a couple days), of giving us characters we can root for (although not necessarily keeping them alive) and of grossing us out even as we’re turning the pages.

It’ll only take a couple hours to read the book, but I don’t recommend you do it at night or if you have a queasy stomach.

And, while I’m here: I read Ketchum’s novel The Girl Next Door a couple years ago. Based on true-life events, that book was a riveting story of how people are able to justify extreme cruelty against innocence. It was even scarier, for me, than Off Season because the narrator was, despite his compliance, likable.

Sleep No More by Greg Iles

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Stephen King said “should come with a red wrapper marked DANGER: HIGH EXPLOSIVES” about Greg Iles book Sleep No More. People magazine said: “Irresistible Pass-the-popcorn fun.” And somewhere in the middle is the truth.

There are three different types of books – fun books without a lot of literary merit and intelligent books that are, often, dry as toast and books that fall in the middle- well written prose with characters that jump off the page. Iles isn’t a bad writer and Sleep No More isn’t a bad book- but it’s not literature. I read the book in a day and a half, but I had to suspend all disbelief to do it because the premise of this book is ridiculously silly.

John Waters lives in the south with his wife and young daughter. The blurb on the back of the book would have you believe that he’s got all his ducks in a row- happy marriage, successful business, but that isn’t true. His business (oil dilling) and his marriage (his wife has been depressed for four years after the loss of their second child) are both floundering making John the perfect candidate for an infidelity. So, he cheats. Only he cheats with someone from his past and things get slightly more complicated than he might have expected.

It’s impossible to say much more about the plot without giving away the book’s central conceit- the one you’ll have to suspend disbelief for. The book is filled with illicit couplings- though none of them are very titillating, so you won’t be getting your thrills that way. The characters aren’t particularly sympathetic and the whole thing tidies up just the teensiest bit unbelievably. Still, if you want to haul a book to the beach this summer, this will be reliably entertaining so long as you don’t expect too much.

Seven Crows by John Vornholt

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I picked it up at the little second-hand shop we visit almost every Saturday with the kids. I discovered fandom late and so I haven’t read more than a handful of these novelizations, probably because I discovered fanfiction first. Later, when I did try a couple of these sorts of books I found them to be lacking- fic was always better (and pornier!)

Seven Crows was okay, though. Vornholt’s plot about vampire smugglers on the US/Mexico border (set in an alternative season 7) was interesting. The writing was so much better than the Nancy Holder books I tried years ago. And best of all- the story features Riley and Sam Finn in need of some help and who better to call than Buffy and Angel, who haven’t seen each other in months and still have all these complicated and very real feelings for each other. For the B/A shipper- it was a great little book to kill a couple hours.

The Lake by Richard Laymon

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This almost never happens to me. I couldn’t finish this book. It was CRAP…I mean, crap in the sense that it was poorly written, unbelievable and stupid…not crap in the sense of lots of fun– the sort of entertainment I generally read quickly in between books. Sort of a palate cleaner.

I bought it on the bargain table and paid very little for it…but 100 pages in I wish I’d saved my money.

So, I went looking for book reviews…and strangely, other people seemed to like it.

This totally absorbing crime thriller will have readers enthralled and unable to put it down until the last page is turned, says one review.

But when one of the characters is chased by a man wearing a chef’s hat carrying a cleaver turns out to be, in fact, a crazy chef her mother recently fired…well, you can see where I’m going with this.

I have no idea what happens…and I don’t care.

Save your money!

Darkness Bound by Larry Brooks

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Two strangers meet. A woman without inhibitions…a man without limits…for a private game between two consenting adults.

Yeah, so it’s obvious why I chose this book- but it didn’t turn out to be the book I expected. Instead of a book filled with kinky sex, this turned out to be a well-written crime story, filled with lots of twists and turns. Dillon Masters and his wife, Karen, separate. Dillon’s a stock broker with a penchant for kinky sex– something his wife doesn’t exactly share. So, when the mysterious woman of his dreams – a woman who seems to know all his dark desires– walks into his life, he can’t resist indulging in his fantasies. Turns out that this ‘Dark Lady’ is far more dangerous than Dillon had first giddily anticipated.

Lucky for the reader, though, Dillon’s no slouch– he’s able to more than hold his own with her and Darkness Bound turns out to be not so much a book about naughty sex, as a cat and mouse thriller where the players try to outmaneuver each other.

I read it in an afternoon and had a ball.

The Ruins by Scott Smith

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Smith’s book has been on my to-read list for a while. I have had a life-long love affair with horror novels…both the truly creepy (Peter Straub’s Ghost Story springs to mind) and the truly schlocky (just about anything by John Farris) but I don’t read them too much anymore. Still, The Ruins came with quite a pedigree. Smith wrote A Simple Plan a kick-ass book about how the discovery of a crashed plane and millions of dollars irrevocably changes the lives of three average guys. If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend it.

The Ruins follows the fortunes of four friends on vacation in Mexico. They go to the site of Mayan ruins with Mathias and Pablo to search for Mathias’s missing brother. What follows is an entertaining enough story of pure fantasy- meaning that the horror they encounter isn’t the worst thing to happen to them. (And it’s not all that believable, even for a horror fan.) Smith’s true talent is in scraping at the dark things people do to each other and themselves when they find themselves in a bad place.- For my money though, A Simple Plan does a much better job of making us both wince and shudder.

Stephen King called The Ruins “the best horror novel of the new century.” I’m a King fan, but I’m going to have to disagree. If you want to go to the dark place, read A Simple Plan or better still, read King’s classic, It.

Twilight by Stephanie Meyer

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“Propelled by suspense and romance in equal parts, this story will keep readers madly flipping the pages of Meyer’s tantalizing debut.” – Publishers Weekly

I picked up Twilight by Stephenie Meyer despite the fact that it is geared for a teenage reader. How could I resist this?

About three things I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was a part of him- and I didn’t know how dominant that part might be- that thirsted for my blood. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.

This is the story of 17 year old Isabella (Bella) who moves to Forks, Washington to temporarily live with her father, Charlie, the local Chief of Police, while her mother goes off to Florida with her new husband. Bella hates Forks; her childhood memories of the place include the devastating end of her parents’ marriage.

At her new school she gets her first glimpse of the Cullens, their faces “so different, so similar… all devastatingly, inhumanly beautiful.” She is particularly taken by Edward Cullen, who turns up in her Biology class and also turns out to have taken an immediate and hostile dislike to her.

But Edward is hiding a dark secret. And, of course, Bella is drawn to him– moth to flame.

There are, of course, lots of vampire stories out there. But I have to say that I liked this one quite a lot, even though it was rather tame. (As it would be given that it was written for teens.)

Bella is a smart, likeable character and Edward is haunted and beautiful– perhaps too perfect. The prose is clear and straightforward and the story (all 498 pages of it) moves along at a good clip.

You begin these sorts of stories with a willingness to suspend disbelief anyway. And my view of vampires is coloured by my love of those in the Jossverse. Although Edward (and the vampire mythology employed here) is quite unlike any I’ve ever read about– he was a seductive character.

And apparently the book has legions of fans…there are lots of sites dedicated to Edward and Bella.