Review of A Serpentine Affair

Goodreads | Eric_W Welch (Forreston, IL)'s review of A Serpentine Affair:

The title is appropriate and a delicious pun. Think of a bunch of newly born snakes all intertwined yet separate. Or the serpentine belt on your car. Or an affair that goes sour. It's the name of the river where the women decide to have their annual picnic.

Everyone has had the experience of watching how friends from school evolve as their lives become more complicated with children, one or more spouses, and jobs.

In this very entertaining novel, (thanks, Karen for the heads up) seven British women who had been friends at university meet once a year to renew their friendship. Now in their forties, the meetings have become more of a chore than a pleasure, and, fueled by more than a little wine, the secrets begin to emerge.

All of the friends are damaged, some of the injuries self-inflicted, others caused by the friends, some imagined. Events of the night will have a long-lasting effect. Here's a wonderfully descriptive paragraph before things begin to go south.

The atmosphere was poisonous now, and not even the languidly liquid disappearance of the sun into a cooler, more peaceful place could rescue the evening. JoAnne and Juliette sat stiffly next to each other and didn’t appear to be speaking at all anymore, there may as well have been a fence between them, and poor Sissy looked as though she was going to faint with the stress of it all. Natasha was sullen ( as she had been most of the evening) and Siobhan was trying to paper over her appalling insult of Juliette’s husband, daring to imply that Stephen had somehow had something to do with Nigel’s death. Katie started tidying up, grimly, as if she were picking up dog-shit – tipping the remaining quarter of Sissy’s pasta salad into an M&S bag she’d designated for rubbish without even asking Sissy whether she wanted to keep it; scraping plates like they were potatoes to be scrubbed (or perhaps children to be bathed); scrunching used napkins with unnecessary force into tight mucky balls that were tossed into the carrier bag too, not bothering with recycling, just chucking the empty wine bottles in with the mess; flicking stray flakes of sausage roll towards Siobhan, perhaps deliberately.. 

Some GR friends have remarked on the difficulty of keeping the seven characters straight. I did not find that to be difficult, the author skillfully mingling the backstory of each woman with the picnic in the present as all the secrets flow together into an explosive mix. 

I admit to feeling a bit like a voyeur (or even like the man who is following one of the woman for his brother-in-law) as I watched their friendship dissolve amidst charges and recriminations, but goodness it was fun.

My thanks to the publisher for an ebook copy of this book in return for my always honest review.
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Review of Death at Charity's Point

Goodreads | Eric_W Welch (Forreston, IL)'s review of Death at Charity's Point:

I love Tapply's stuff and was dismayed to hear of his death in 2009. Fortunately all of his work is being issued as ebooks.  This is the first in his Brady Coyne series and sets the stage for the following books in the series.  All are worth reading.    

 Charity's Point is a cliff named after a Puritan accused of being a witch who jumped to her death in the 17th century. Now, George,  the son of Florence Gresham has been found washed up at the base of the same cliff. He was very different than his brother, Win, who was described as a real killer by his mother.  Win had been killed in Vietnam.  Or was he?    

Florence is quite a character.   Dud, her husband, blew his brains out with a shotgun in the bathroom, preferring that to a slower death from cancer.  They had talked about it.  Two weeks later, Florence, while taking a bath, castigated the maid for not cleaning the bathroom up well as she had just found a piece of Dud's skull.   

She asks Brady, whose law practice is as much about catering to the whims of his rich clients as it is providing legal advice, to research George's suicide. And then to check into Win's death as well. The elite prep school where George taught history has an interesting set of characters including a strong skin-head contingent.  And did the football star's plagiarized paper have anything to do with George's death?  

This is a fine start to a wonderful series.  Coyne is a great character to follow and I an so glad the series is being re-released as many of the originals had gone out-of-print. 

One joke I must relay.  Brady and his friend Charlie, who works in the Justice Department, are having dinner and Charlie is describing a recent scene in which the Coast Guard ship he was on stopped a boat on which the smugglers began breaking open bales of marijuana and throwing it overboard to the hundreds of circling gulls.  

"So we asked one of the guys what the hell he thought he was doing, feeding the gulls like that. Know what he said?” “What did he say?” Charlie stared at me. “He said, ‘I wanted to leave no tern unstoned.’” 

And another sample: "Charlie and I sat across from each other at one of the long tables covered with a stained, yellowed tablecloth. Next to Charlie sat a fat couple from Arizona, each of whom was hunched over a big sirloin, well-done. The couple’s two kids, a girl and a boy maybe eleven and nine, split a bowl of spaghetti. The boy complained that he hated spaghetti. The father told him to shut up, as he shoveled chunks of thick, overcooked beef into his mouth. The girl asked her mother for a french fry. The mother told her to eat her spaghetti first, then proceeded to gobble down all her french fries so that when the girl was finished there’d be none left."  

My thanks to the publisher for this free advance copy through Netgalley in return for my always honest opinion.

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Review of Death Benefits

This book is about insurance fraud and claims analysis. Yawning yet? Be in for a surprise as Thomas Perry weaves a terrific investigative tale built around precisely those seemingly soporific plot elements. Max Stillman, a new character for Perry, and John Walker, an insurance analyst who's really good with numbers, team up to discover how a man could impersonate another to make off with millions in death benefits. What they uncover has much larger ramifications and leads them to a town in New Hampshire with a rather sordid past. Mix in Serena, a.k.a Mary Katherine, a delightfully vampish hacker, and all the ingredients are there for a fun read.

Listened to as an audio book that had me sitting in the driveway much too much to hear what was next. Read by a favorite reader, Michael Kramer.

Review of Fatal Frost

Goodreads | Eric_W Welch (Forreston, IL)'s review of Fatal Frost:

I was a huge fan of Wingfield's Frost series.  They had mystery and humor and excellent writing, so it was with great trepidation that I tried James Henry's re-creation of Frost. (Henry is actually the pseudonym for two authors.) I was happy to see he has succeeded.  It must be a very difficult thing to do and is not often well accomplished.  Robert Goldsborough occasionally succeeds in recreating Archie and Nero, but no one has managed to authentically reproduce Fleming or Ludlum, and they weren't that good in the first place. 

Henry's Frost has just the right combination of humor and mystery. It's 1982, Frost is a DS, and Denton is getting its first black policeman.  Mullet happens to be on the golf course (a source of both embarrassment and amusement to the regulars) when the eviscerated body of a young boy is found.  Overworked with a spate of local burglaries, Frost finds to the murder a welcome distraction and then the boy's sister disappears.  Soon he begins to wonder if this isn't a reprise of a school-girls' Wicca adventure from years previous. 

Listened to as an audiobook.  Delightfully read by Stephen Thorne. Another one of those books that encourages mowing the lawn twice.

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Goodreads | Eric_W Welch (Forreston, IL)'s review of Trench Coats, Episode I: The Meeting

Goodreads | Eric_W Welch (Forreston, IL)'s review of Trench Coats, Episode I: The Meeting:

Generally, I am not a reader of this genre, nor am I a fan of serialized fiction., but I got  the first three installments of James Seeley's Pia Sobel novel for free so I thought, "WTF" I'll give it a shot.  I won't review the installments separately, however, but will instead, refer back to this location, site of the first section.  

Each thriller writer must have some kind of shtick: the protagonist is a quadriplegic, a cat, a dog, a mute dog, a paraplegic dog, an undertaker, an alcoholic, black, green, Indian, lives at home, cook, whatever, an ex-SEAL or seal. Rarely is s/he a relatively "normal" person.  Seeley's Pia is a former star soccer player. Having been a semi-professional soccer ref, that certainly appealed to me and knowing what extraordinary athletes they are certainly lends credence to some of her physical prowess. 

The background is that she runs an international security agency and has a particular interest in protecting children. She lets herself be drawn into the lair of the enemy who has (apparently, since we're only at the end of chapter 3) designs on kids and contacts in the State Department who seem more than happy to do his bidding. 

Since this is a serial, each section ends with a cliff-hangar as one would expect.  The story does hold your interest and I'll probably read Seeley's full-length novel. 

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