Books Read 2013

Once again (2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2005, 2004, 2003, and 2002), I’ve kept track of what I read this year.

January

Bull the the Horns (2012) by Sheila Bair, former FDIC head. This is a very sobering and detailed book about, generally, the banking system in the U.S., and specifically, the subprime debacle, the practice of securitization, the home mortgage lending industry, and the difficulty FDIC, the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Dept, and a couple of banking regulation organisations had in working together to try to solve the problems. I particularly appreciated the explanations of subprime mortgages and securitization; less interesting to me were the political meetings and machinations. I highly recommend this for anyone interested in U.S. banking.

Death in August (2011/2012) by Marco Vichi. Loosely, crime fiction set in Florence Italy, though the book meanders philosophically and meditatively — including through various memories (some involving WWII) and dinner party stories — and is not particularly compelling in terms of plot: an 60-year-old wealthy woman is found dead in her bed, apparently killed by asthma after inhaling the tropical mate plant. Set in the heat of a sweltering August in 1963 and featuring Inspector Bordelli, whose closest friends are thieves.

February

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007) by Michael Chabon, a fictional work of alternative history, set in the federal state of Sitka, Alaska, where most of the Jews of the world have been living for 60 years, in the wake of  the Holocaust and the collapse of Israel in 1948. The Revision — when the Jews are flung out of Sitka — is coming in a few months and everyone’s looking for a Messiah(a Tzaddik Ha-Dor). Homicide detective Meyer Landsman and his partner Berko Shemets are investigating the murder of a man in Landsman’s cheap hotel. It never held my attention, but parts are very funny, very well concocted, and you can’t help but marvel at the imagination of the man who wrote it. Lines like “His face displays no trace of wariness, but Landsman can see where the wariness has been carefully erased” kept me reading.

The Hypnotist (2009/2001 trans.) by Lars Kepler. Set mainly on the outskirts of Stockholm, Sweden, this is a very well-written thriller with two primary plots and some minor ones that intersect deftly, beautifully, unpredictably. The first is the brutal stabbing murder of most of a family; the second unfolds from an event in a hypnotism group that met 10 years before, which led Erik Maria Bark to renounce his use of hypnotism; but he is convinced by DI Joona Linna to use his powers now to perhaps save the life of the surviving family member. The plotting is mostly chronological, except for one major flashback, and the action is seen variously but seamlessly through the eyes of Erik, Joona, Erik’s wife Simone, and various other characters, sometimes with a slight time shift. Highly recommended.

The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times (2010) by Carol Deppe: Read for our permaculture group, though this isn’t a permaculture book. Deppe focuses on 5 crops that — with care in choosing, sowing, growing, harvesting, and processing/cooking — should see home gardeners through hard times: potatoes, corn, beans (green and dry), squash and pumpkins, and ducks/eggs. Before she gets into the discussion of each of these, she talks at some length and in some personal terms about resiliency, climate change and weather, diet, tools, soil, and water.

March

The Story of Lucy Gault (2002) by William Trevor: A lovely novel of regret, redemption and forgiveness, that reads more like a slow-moving short story. Lucy Gault is 9 when we meet her, living an idyllic country life with her happy parents near the sea in County Cork, Ireland in 1921; but because of circumstances, her family now needs to move away, and Lucy doesn’t want to leave her beautiful home. So she runs off on moving day.  All that follows stems from this action and a handful of others, none intentionally meant to lead to the consequences that ensue.  The writing is often poetic and revealing of interiority;  the mood generally languid, with a pervasive sense of inevitability.

The Nightmare (2010) by Lars Kepler. Set mainly on the outskirts of Stockholm, Sweden, this is another well-written thriller, fast-paced and complex in its plot and in its telling. First a woman is found murdered on a pleasure boat, then a top Swedish munitions oversight committee member commits suicide. How are they connected? It’s not a sequel to The Hypnotist and you need not have read that book before this one. The only carry-over character is DI Joona Linna, an intuitive, optimistic, lone wolf sort of detective. As one reviewer wrote of this book, “Everyone in the book is just a little off, and when they all start bouncing against each other, the results are anything but predictable.” Some are more off than others but in general the small eccentricities are what make these books very interesting and engaging.  Highly recommended.

The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court (2012) by Jeffrey Toobin. A very readable, well-organised, rather partisan look at the Supreme Court since about 2005 (before Obama was president) until 2012. Toobin first compares and contrasts the backgrounds, goals and temperaments of President Barack Obama and Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, then sketches out cases since Roberts has been on the court (2006) and offers glimpses into the personal lives of each of the current justices as well as Sandra Day O’Connor, David Souter, and John Paul Stevens. His partisanship reveals itself in his wording when talking about Scalia in particular — he uses the words fixation, obsession and preoccupation over and over with regard to him, as well as splenetic, sneering, belligerent, and apoplectic; talks about his misplaced sense of victimhood; says that Scalia pretended that the framers had dictated that the 2nd Amendment provided the right of individuals to own guns; and finally tells us that his dissenting opinion in the Arizona immigration case in June 2012 marks his “transition from conservative intellectual to right-wing crank” — as well as Alito (particularly with respect to the Goodyear case) and Thomas — who “made little pretense of relying on the words of his colleagues and his predecessors when their interpretations conflicted with his own understanding of the Constitution’s text.” He seems respectful of Roberts’ intellect, diplomacy and graceful writing style, but in the end asserts that he’s “doing the bidding of the contemporary Republican party.” Gun control is by far the topic, besides the Court itself, that Toobin explores at most length in the book, and to a lesser degree campaign finance reform; health care reform; free speech; originalism; judicial activism vs. stability and precedence; and the contrast in policies, beliefs, and judicial decisions between those who promote laissez faire principles and deregulation and those who think that regulation helps promote the public interest in the face of powerful monied interests.

April

Helsinki Blood (2013) by James Thompson, fourth in the Kari Vaara series, set in Finland. A Goodreads reviewer sets the dark scene: “Inspector Kari Vaara is having a bad year. Still recovering from surgery to remove a brain tumor and injuries from his last case, he now has to deal with corrupt higher-ups, relatives of some of the deceased Kari and his cohorts eliminated, his wife’s trauma from her part in the last case which caused her to leave their baby with Kari and return to the U.S., and now person or persons unknown have targeted his family and friends. In hopes of proving to his wife that he can do more than mindless murder, Kari takes a missing person case.” As Vaara recovers from his surgery, he is beginning to feel more emotion, making him less psychopathic than in the previous book. But his henchmen (Sweetness and Milo) are still psychopaths and still willing to do whatever Kari asks. Lots of cruelty, blood and gore.

The Sound of Broken Glass (2013) by Deborah Crombie in the Kincaid/James series. DS Melody Talbot gets a larger role than usual in this crime novel, set mainly in Crystal Palace in South London (also in Notting Hill, Cleaver Square, Dulwich). While Kincaid spends his time at home with their foster daughter Charlotte, Gemma and Melody tackle the murder of an older man who is found naked, bound and strangled in a cheap hotel after his involvement in a bit of a dust-up at the local pub. The plot is mostly contemporary, with some flashbacks to 15 years ago. It’s a cozy police procedural.

Dearie: The Remarkable Life of Julia Child (2012) by Bob Spitz: Really an engaging, fast read for a 525+pp book. He does overuse the adjective “finchy” and there is some repetition that a good editor would have caught, but those things are minor compared with the generally strong writing, the wealth of interesting anecdotes, the detailed family histories, and the fully fleshed-out life of Julia Child.  (Read for a bookgroup.)

May

Room No. 10 (2005/2013) by Åke Edwardson, seventh in the Inspector Winter series set in Gothenburg. When Chief Inspector Erik Winter is called to investigate a young woman found hanged in a sleazy hotel room (with one hand painted white), he realises he investigated a missing person’s case involving this same hotel room 18 years before. Are there connections between the cases? Satisfying.

The Day is Dark (2011) by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, fourth in the Thóra Guðmundsdóttir series. This one is set in a very remote area of east Greenland, where the villagers are hostile and people working on a molybdenum mining project keep disappearing.  Something was missing in this thriller for me; it was slow, dreary, and not compelling. I don’t feel like I get much sense of the personality of the recurring characters in the series, either; they seem flat to me.

The Vegetable Gardener’s Guide to Permaculture: Creating an Edible Ecosystem (2013) by Christopher Shein with Julie Thompson: Read for my permaculture discussion group. Pretty basic, with chapters on Why Permaculture?, Permaculture Basics, Designing the Permaculture Garden, Building the Soil, Permaculture Edibles, Growing from Seed, and Permaculture and the Community. Beautiful and helpful  photos and drawings. Hits all the highlights — polyculture garden, fruit tree guilds, seed starting and seed saving, and goes into some detail on many crops: fruits, nuts, vines, fruiting ground covers, perennial and annual vegetables, mushrooms, edible flowers and herbs, and grains. Useful addition to the permaculture library.

Watching the Dark (2012) by Peter Robinson, in the Alan Banks series, set in the Eastvale area and also in Estonia. Banks is investigating the murder of a fellow police officer, felled with a crossbow while convalescing at the the police rehab center.  Photos he had hidden in his room, and a missing girl case he investigated  years ago, lead Banks — and, against Banks’ will, Professional Standards Inspector Joanna Passero — to Talinn, Estonia to learn more. Good.

Citizens of London: : The Americans Who Stood with Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour (2010) by Lynne Olson. Read for a bookgroup. I liked it (everyone else in the group loved it). Focuses on Gil Winant (ambassador to Britain), Ed Murrow (CBS broadcaster) and Averill Harriman (U.S. Lend-Lease manager, later ambassador to the Soviet Union, then to Britain, and later still married to Pamela Churchill), and their crucial behind-the-scenes influence on Roosevelt and Churchill during World War II. Well-researched and -written, the book is chronological from 1939 until 1945 or so, in addition to filling in the backgrounds of the three men and then filling us in on their lives after the war. I learned a lot of new information about the U.S. and Britain militarily and politically in the European theatre in World War II, life in London during the war and particularly during the Blitz, the ongoing friction between the two Allies, Eisenhower’s role, and about Churchill and Roosevelt themselves.

The Violent Bear It Away (1960) by Flannery O’Connor, for a bookgroup. More of a novella, the story of a 14-year-old boy raised by his fanatically religious great-uncle to be a prophet. When his great-uncle dies, the boy leaves the homestead without burying him as he’s been told to do, and seeks out his other uncle, a secular humanist whose “dim-witted” son the boy has been told to baptise.  A dark, deeply cynical story of murder, rape, arson, thieving, and probably some other crimes, whose message seems to be that you can’t escape your destiny.

June

April Fool Dead (2002) by Carolyn Hart, #13 in the Death on Demand series, just a lazy beach vacation re-read. Her writing and caricatures (hitting readers over the head with the daily (hourly?) sexual vibes between Annie and Max, the arrogant forcefulness of Emma, etc.) are off-putting but the location, on a SC island, with all the ambiance that brings, is enticing. The mystery plots themselves are so-so.

Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kenedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis (2012) by Alice Kaplan, non-fiction about these three American women and how each of their one-year time spent in Paris (all around college age, between 1949 and 1964) influenced their lives ever after. A bit contrived as a theory but the book provides an interesting contrast between the aesthete (Kennedy), the bohemian (Sontag) and the political activist (Davis). None of the women particularly appealed to me but the section on Sontag was my favourite because it contained so much information about the French avant garde movement. The section on Davis bogs down in detail, in my opinion, but it was the favourite of most in my bookgroup.

Dead, White and Blue (2013) by Carolyn Hart, #23 in the Death on Demand series. Shell Hurst is a careless, cruel young woman who enjoys toying with people. One of the people she toys with, at a Fourth of July dinner dance, doesn’t find it funny and takes care of Shell. This mystery strains credulity more than most of Hart’s, which is saying something. The Darlings seem to spend 80% of their lives snooping in other people’s business, and other people let them, even while they complain about it. The Darlings ask 100 people to come reenact a murder and those people (including the murderer) all come. You would think by now the islanders would have all signed a petition to export the meddling, pushy Darlings. The only plus to this series, and the reason I occasionally read one (besides being desperate for something to read) is the lure of the SC island setting. (There was also basic grammatical error in this book, infer used when imply was meant. Hello, editors?)

July

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (2009) by Alan Bradley, the first in the Flavia de Luce series, set in 1950s small town England. Flavia is an 11-year-old misfit, a precocious amateur sleuth and chemist. The writing is rich, the plots have the feel of an English cozy, but I’m not sure how I feel about Flavia and her relationships with the rest of her family; it feels a little too much like a caricature. The plot of this book centers on stamp collecting.

The Fire Witness (2011/2013) by Lars Kepler, transl. Laura Wideburg. Third in the Joona Linna series set in Sweden. A girl and a nurse at a home for troubled girls are murdered on the same night, and soon afterward a woman who pretends to be a medium to make money starts to have visions of the murdered girl. Only Joona Linna — still under official investigation for his actions in another case — will listen to her when she calls the police.  I guessed the murderer fairly early but there are enough plot twists (including one concerning Linna’s own past) to keep the reader enthralled anyway. I read this 500-page book (made up of 195 very short chapters) in about 4 hours.  Very fast-paced. Excellent writing. Themes include parenting, adopted and foster children, and troubled teenaged girls.

Death and the Olive Grove: An Inspector Bordelli Mystery (2012/2013) by Marco Vichi, transl. Stephen Sartarelli. Second in the series. The spectre of World War II is not far away from Inspector Bordelli’s thoughts or the events in this introspective crime novel, set in spring 1964, Florence.  Bordelli chain smokes, dreams, and relives the past as he investigates the strangulation deaths of young girls left out in fields.

The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag (2010) by Alan Bradley, second in the Flavia de Luce series, set in 1950s small-town England. I didn’t enjoy this one nearly as much as the first in the series but I’m not sure why. Plot centers on an abusive, philandering puppeteer electrocuted during his show, and the hanging death of a young local child years before. Think I am finished with this series.

The General in His Labyrinth (1989) by Gabriel García Márquez, a fictional tale of Simón Bolívar’s last few months, when he journeys down the Magdalena River in 1830.  This is a classic “nothing really happens” story: As the General and his entourage travel, he remembers glory days gone by, romances, and ordinary and traumatic events as he becomes sicker and sicker, is sometimes reviled and sometimes worshipped (and often not noticed at all), and feels the weight of all his decisions.  I read this for a small bookgroup, and the others thought it a depressing read, but I found it dreamy and realistic, an interior journey through the labyrinth of one’s life — in this case, of a very eventful, action-filled life that as it winds down becomes a time for reverie, regrets, nostalgia, hope, despair, and a kind of acceptance.

Lost (2013) by SJ Bolton, with Detective Constable Lacey Flint (officially not on the case, and seeing a psychiatrist to deal with some past trauma) and Detective Inspector Mark Joesbury. In this novel, pre-teen boys are being dumped near the Thames, their bodies first drained of blood. Is it vampirism? Renfield’s Syndrome? Or maybe the work of the rather absent father of Lacey’s 11-year-old neighbour Barney? Perhaps my favourite so far of her books, though if you don’t like reading about children in peril, you might want to skip it.

The Bat (1997/2012) by Jo Nesbo, the first in the Harry Hole crime fiction series, but one of the last to be translated into English. This one is set in Australia. Norwegian police officer Hole, is, as ever, fighting his alcoholism, as he investigates the murder of a minor Norwegian TV celebrity, Inger Holter He’s paired with Sydney homicide detective Andrew Kensington, an Australian aborigine, who may already suspect Holter’s murderer. Hippies, prostitutes, heroine users, aborigine boxers, gay circus clowns and other fringe characters figure in this tightly-woven novel.

August

Midwinter Blood (2011/2012) by Mons Kallentoft, the first in another Swedish police series, featuring troubled single mom Malin Fors. In this one, a mutilated body is found hanging from a tree.  It is a pagan ritual or something more prosaic? Lots of child cruelty in this book; that is, cruelty done to children and rendered by children (and teens).  Well-written and -plotted. I’ll definitely read another.

Skin Tight (1989) by Carl Hiaasen, a comic crime novel set in Florida and focusing on plastic surgery. Hilarious! I was laughing aloud as I read it on the beach in Delaware. The many means of murder are ingenuous and varied, the protagonist (Mick Stranahan, a former detective for the Fla. State’s Attorney’s office) likeable and fun to be with, and the dialogue trenchant. Wikipedia has a good plot summary.

March (2005) by Geraldine Brooks, for a bookgroup. Historical fiction set during the start of the Civil War, the book follows Concord (MA) idealist and abolitionist Mr. March — the absent father from Little Women, whom Brooks has modelled on Alcott’s father, Bronson Alcott — as he goes off to be a chaplain in Virginia, leaving his family in reduced circumstances (thanks to having given all their wealth to the insurrectionist John Brown, whom his wife admires). While away, he writes home to his wife, withholding from her much of what he sees, does, and feels, as she later learns. He becomes ill with a recurring fever, and his illness, coupled with a brutal “skirmish” near the plantation where he has found his calling teaching almost-former slave children and adults, results in his being transported to a hospital in down-at-heel Washington DC, where he meets up again with Grace, an intelligent, literate and wise black woman, now a nurse, whom he first met, and fell for, when he was an 18-year-old peddlar making his fortune selling items house to house in the South. Most of the chapters are told from March’s point of view, though a few near the end are from his wife, Marmee’s, perspective as she visits him in hospital. For me, the book reads like a historical romance mixed with, as the New York Times review puts it, “moral exhibitionism.” I found the book sentimental (e.g., all the black people are virtuous and good-hearted, with only one exception, and most of the white people are not) and the main character (March) an idealist who regularly misreads other people (particularly his wife, as we learn) and who enjoys self-flagellation and the narcissistic belief (or pride, as his wife calls it) that only he can effect a change in others and in society. The New York Times review describes him thus: “March, who lives on vegetables and guilt, must continually learn that Northern troops can be as racist as Southern landowners.” I don’t mind a protagonist who’s a coward, or one who’s a prig, but March and the other characters felt like contrivances created to make a point.  One thing that did work for me with this book was the setting of each chapter with a dissembling letter from March to his wife, followed by the events that really occurred and the memories and thoughts that were really in his mind.  The book won a Pulitzer for fiction in 2006.

Native Tongue (1991) by Carl Hiaasen: Not as laugh-out-loud funny as Skin Tight but even wilder and more improbable in conception. Joe Winder — a journalist, now a press writer, for the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills, a wannabe Disney in Key Largo run by an ex-mob informant in the FBW witness protection program — gets involved in various people’s schemes to thwart the amusement park owner’s planned new golf course and other land developments. Wikipedia again has a good plot summary.

Death Angel (2013) by Linda Fairstein, 15th in the Assistant D.A. Alex Cooper series set in Manhattan. This tale, set almost entirely in Central Park, involves the murder of a homeless young woman and leads Alex and the others to events from the past, with a focus not only on the geography and landmarks of Central Park but also on The Dakota and one wealthy family who lived there for decades. Before we’re entirely immersed in the Park, though, Alex and Special Victims Unit Detective Mercer Wallace’s wife, Vickee, go to the Vineyard for a weekend, where their conversation sets the stage for the next phase of Alex and (NYPD Detective) Mike Chapman’s relationship. 

Strip Tease (1993) by Carl Hiaasen. Erin, a strip club dancer with a druggy psychopathic wheelchair-stealing ex-husband (who has custody of their young daughter), becomes involved in  the degenerate life of a U.S. congressman, David Dilbeck, who avidly supports Big Sugar. The strip club bouncer, Shad, and a Florida homicide detective Sgt. Al Garcia, try to protect Erin from a multitude of dangers.  Set in Fort Lauderdale. Some funny bits but not as good as Skin Tight.

September

Old Filth (2006) by Jane Gardam: First in a trilogy. Excellent. Summary truncated from Good Reads: “Sir Edward Feathers has had a brilliant career, from his early days as a lawyer in Southeast Asia, where he earned the nickname Old Filth (FILTH being an acronym for Failed In London Try Hong Kong) to his final working days as a respected judge at the English bar. Yet through it all he has carried with him the wounds of a difficult and emotionally hollow childhood. Now an eighty-year-old widower living in comfortable seclusion in Dorset, Feathers … slips back into the past with ever mounting frequency and intensity. …  Feathers’ childhood in Malaya during the British Empire’s heyday, his schooling in pre-war England, his professional success in Southeast Asia and his return to England toward the end of the millennium, are vantage points from which the reader can observe the march forward of an eventful era and the steady progress” of the man and the century.

The Man in the Wooden Hat (2009) by Jane Gardam: Second in the trilogy, the story of her marriage to Filth told from Betty’s point of view (mostly).

Little Face (2006/2007) by Sophie Hannah, a gripping psychological thriller that I read in less than two days. Alice returns home after her first outing since her daughter was born to find that it’s not her daughter in the nursery now but another baby who looks almost the same. The police are called, but they doubt her story, as do her controlling mother-in-law and husband. But DC Simon Waterhouse, who feels an instant affinity for Alice, thinks she may be telling the truth. The psychological nuances are fine.

Last Friends (2013) by Jane Gardam, last in the Old Filth trilogy, this one focusing on Pastry Willy’s widow, Dulcie, Terry Veneering and his childhood in Herringfleet, and everyone’s pal, Fred Fiscal-Smith.  I’m going to miss these people.

October

The Wrong Mother (2008) by Sophie Hannah, the third in the thriller series featuring Simon Waterhouse and Charlie Zailer.  When Sally Thorning sees the husband and father of a murdered woman and child on TV, she recognises his name — but his face doesn’t match the man she knows by this name, someone she spent a week with the year before.  This is a complicated plot featuring several sets of mothers and young daughters, with numerous twists and small details,  the mothers sharing a degree of reactions to their children ranging from irritation to all-out desperation at being on-call 24/7 servants to small beloved tyrants, a taboo topic for many moms and a clever focus for a crime novel. Gripping.

When We Were the Kennedys (2012) by Monica Wood, my second reading of this book, for another book group. Just as good — compelling, moving — the second time around.

The Truth-Teller’s Lie (2007), by Sophie Hannah, second in the Waterhouse/ Zailer series.  When Naomi Jenkins’ lover doesn’t show up for their regular Thursday afternoon tryst, she contacts the police, who don’t seem keen to do much until she tells them that he raped her three years ago.

And the Mountains Echoed (2013) by Khaled Hosseini. For bookgroup. I was not looking forward to reading this, as I didn’t like his first book, The Kite Runner, at all. But this novel was charming, the tale of a brother and sister ripped from each other when the brother was 10 and the sister 7, and their long trip back to each other. At time, the novel reads like a series of short stories, or vignettes, pieced together, but that didn’t detract for me from the whole, from humanity and gentleness of the book’s vision.

Orphan Train (2013): YA or adult novel about two orphans: Vivian, one who was on the National   Orphan Train in 1929, from New York to Minnesota (and her life in Minnesota and later, as an aged woman,  in Spruce Harbor, Maine), and Molly, a 17-year-old living in Spruce Harbor, Maine. The book is simple in plot and simply written, another gentle story told with humanity.

November

The Things They Carried (1990) by Tim O’Brien. Genius collection of short stories that read like a novel, about the Vietnam War but more so about the acts of experiencing, perceiving, remembering, and telling stories that are true, whether factual or not.

How The Light Gets In (2013) by Louise Penny, in the Chief Inspector Armand Gamache (of the Sûreté du Québec) series. One of her best yet in this humane, soulful, psychologically insightful series. The characters — police colleagues and Three Pines residents alike — are revealed as more and more complex as the series continues, so that having read the previous books — while not absolutely necessary to enjoying the current one — lends such depth and nuance to it. Two stories alternate in the novel, one involving the murder of one of a set of famous Canadian quintuplets and the other the ongoing saga of the corruption at the highest levels of the Sûreté.  I read it in two days.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (2012) by Rachel Joyce: Fiction about a 65-year-old man who spontaneously begins walking from the south of England to a hospice in Northumberland where a friend(Queenie) lies dying, as a way to save her (or himself, as it turns out). It takes him about 3 months and during that time he takes an inward meandering path as well, learning and relearning and letting go, and knowing and being bewildered, not knowing. His thoughts and actions and his (angry, depressed, disillusioned, bitter) wife’s are contrasted throughout the book. They both face regrets, disappointments, betrayals. I liked it.

Dust (2013) by Patricia Cornwell, in the Scarpetta series, this one set around Cambridge MA, with Lucy assuming a greater role and Mike and Benton smaller ones. A serial killer has been at work in the DC area and in Cambridge but the FBI (Benton’s bosses) are obviously manipulating evidence and covering up for the killer. Good plot — but it’s important to read the earlier stories if you want to understand the characters and relationships in this series.

December

Some Kind of Peace (2009/2012) by Camilla Grebe and Åsa Träff: In the psychotherapist Siri Bergmann series.  This is the first I’ve read in this series (not sure whether it’s the first book or not; they are translated from Swedish) and I liked it. Bergmann, a 35-yr-old widowed psychotherapist living in an isolated house by the water, is being watched by someone who wishes her harm.