Best Kindle Book Of Novels

Happily, Amy Stewart has taken a true story and magnified and embroidered it into a wonderful tale of women in a changing society in Paterson, New Jersey, around the turn of the last century. Without making her heroines, three sisters on a farm in New Jersey, appear to be preternaturally emancipated, Stewart presents three people who just did what they had to do with intelligence, grit, and courage.

The tale is told in the voice of Constance Kopp, the oldest — she is in her early thirties at the beginning of the story — of three women living on their own. It is 1914 and, not unusual for the time, they do not own an automobile. When they want to go to town, they hitch their horse up to a buggy. In high spirits one day, they arrive in downtown Paterson to do some shopping, only to be hit broadside by an auto driven by the odious owner of a cloth-dying factory, Henry Kaufman.

A harrowing tale of right versus wrong and weak versus strong begins that day. Constance and her sisters, Norma and young Fleurette, request that Henry pay for the damage done to their buggy. It is only fifty dollars, an insignificant sum for a factory owner, but Henry refuses. Instead, he and his disreputable drinking buddies begin to harass the sisters. It escalates into brick-throwing, attempted arson, and horrid threats to teenage Fleurette.

With the help of Sheriff Robert Heath, Constance attempts to make Henry pay for his crimes. Along the way, Constance meets a young woman who claims Henry is the (unwanted) father of her baby, a baby who was sent away during the time she and other workers in the factory were on strike. The baby subsequently has disappeared and the mother, Lucy, is frantic. Constance, for reasons of her own, is very sympathetic and is drawn into helping the young mother.

Stewart’s rounding out of the womens’ personalities and hard-working rural lifestyle is well done. They become real people dealing with hardships and daunting adversities. From the realities of taking care of a farm — repairing a roof, unclogging ice-bound pipes, growing carrots, chopping wood, making do — to facing an uncertain future because of their dwindling savings, the Kopp sisters are shown to be resilient and idiosyncratically clever.

MBTB star!

Although “The Burning Room” showcases Michael Connelly’s terse and compact style, the book weighs in at 400 pages. That’s because Connelly presents two full stories, both featuring Los Angeles cold case detective Harry Bosch and his new partner, Lucy Soto.

A mariachi player was hit by a bullet twenty years ago and finally died from it. Twenty years ago the injury was attributed to a stray shot from a gang fight. When a postmortem dislodges the bullet, it is discovered that it came from a rifle, which tells Harry that it probably was not a gang-related shot. And, upon further investigation, Harry and Lucy conclude that the dead man was not the original target! After twenty years, exactly what clues possibly could be left?

For the second story, Lucy reveals to Harry her traumatic childhood secret. She was a poor child who was in daycare in the basement of an apartment building when it caught on fire. The daycare provider and several children died, but Lucy survived. At the core of why she became a police officer is her determination to some day figure out who caused the fire. Was it drug-related, as was determined by the police twenty years ago? The perpetrator(s) was never found.

Looking at the case material through fresh eyes, and with a certain amount of serendipity in both cases, provides Harry and Lucy with aha! moments. 

Skirting procedural correctness many times, Harry may be teaching Lucy some bad habits. Do as I say, not as I do, seems to be his lesson. The reasoning behind pairing an old-timer like Harry with a newcomer like Lucy didn’t quite have that method in mind.

Although twenty years distance provides some insurmountable obstacles to finally solving the cases, Harry and Lucy lift the heavy weight necessary to provide satisfying conclusions. Connelly’s hypnotic storytelling and insider’s look at police procedures is also satisfying.

British author Jason Goodwin is fascinated by Turkey, Istanbul, Constantinople, Byzantium, the Ottoman Empire. He wrote a nonfiction book of its history and a travel book of his journey to Istanbul. Then he created a memorable mystery series set in mid-1830s Istanbul with a eunuch for his hero.

At this point, Goodwin is up to the fifth book in the Investigator Yashim series, but this is a review of his first award-winning entry.

Istanbul stands (geographically and historically) at the junction of Europe and Asia and their varied cultures. As modern-day Turkey’s seat of power, it is fascinating for its continuous adoption and melding of Western and Eastern politics, religions, and rituals. Its history is one of the oldest; its obeisance to and conquest of the major empires of the time give it a rich texture. It has been the seat of power for a world-arching empire.

At the time “The Janissary Tree” opens, the sultan in residence in Istanbul is westernizing his army. Adopting the military tactics of the French (having first relieved itself of Napoleon), the British, and the Russians, Istanbul is attempting to enter the modern world. (As one character memorably points out, to anchor us in time, the Declaration of Independence is only sixty years old.) Ten years earlier, a rout was carried out against the Janissaries, the former military component of the Turkish empire. They were far too independent, cultish, and morally corrupt. (That is not to say that the Byzantine turnings of the Sultan’s retainers, advisors, and family do not stem from the same flaws.)

Investigator Yashim is a palace employee, as it were, as were most of the eunuchs of the time. As is stereotypically portrayed, quite a few are guards of the sultan’s harem, but others are administrators and trusted servants. Eunuchs, perforce, do not suffer from the same desires and failings as other men — or so the thought goes — and are more reliable and trustworthy.

As Goodwin depicts Yashim — and as Wikipedia will describe to you, if you care to visit it — not having sexual desires depends on when a eunuch is castrated. Too much information, you say? Then turn away from this series, because Goodwin gracefully deals with this issue. And having a eunuch as a central character, Goodwin is obligated to deal with Yashim’s most obvious and curious issue.

To the book. Four outstanding cadets of the new army have disappeared. The head of the military wants Yashim to find them. Rather, three of them are missing; one has been found in a large cooking pot, dead. Also, the sultan’s mother is missing some jewels given to her by Napoleon. Then strange rumors of a Janissary resurgence are heard and mysterious fires are set in the city. All fall on Yashim’s shoulders to solve. He is the appointed center of the maelstrom.

Along with his old friends Palewski, the devalued Polish ambassador, and Preen, a transsexual entertainer, and his new friend, Eslek, an open market worker and handy-to-know person, Yashim begins to unravel the obscure threads of the various problems.

I loved the hardworking historical perspective. Goodwin knows a lot and attempts to recreate the very bricks and plaster of the time. He gives us a chance to replace Disney’s “Aladdin” (I know that’s not Istanbul, don’t write me; you know what I mean) with the fervor and exotica of a dying culture attempting to recreate itself.

“Death in Sardinia” is the third book in the Inspector Bordelli series set in Florence, Italy. Although it appears that this book (and others in the series) may be a little difficult to get, it will be worth the struggle.

Marco Vichi has set this book in 1965 and has done a fabulous job of introducing elements from that era, Italian style. There are two (or three or four, depending on your point of view) separate stories for a reader’s delectation. 

The main story involves Inspector Bordelli, with all his faults and glory. The inspector travels Florence’s back alleys and country tracks to solve the murder of a brutal loan shark. In the process, we meet his friends, not all of whom are totally on the right side of the law. They all mingle, sometimes quite congenially. For instance, Botta, a minor criminal who has spent time in prisons all over the place, is an excellent and picky cook, and a good friend of Bordelli.  He is charged with producing the Christmas Eve feast for Bordelli and other friends. Sometimes reading “Death in Sardinia” was like mixing “Babette’s Feast” with poliziotteschi. But it worked!

The secondary story involves one of Bordelli’s fellow detectives, the young Piras, who has gone home to Sardinia to recuperate from an injury suffered in the line of duty. Christmas in Sardinia in 1965 has a small-town charm. Because not everyone has a television set, neighbors join Piras’ parents to watch theirs, reinforcing the bonds of their tight community. The brother of a neighbor, a country farmer, has been found dead in his living room, a probable victim of suicide. Piras suspects something fishy, but he can’t quite put his finger on it. There are 464 pages that Piras shares with Bordelli, so it’s okay that both stories are drawn out to include personal details about the two heroes.

Vichi excels in providing the realistic (and often humorous) details of the detectives’ lives. For instance, Piras has a girlfriend, Sonia, and he talks with her frequently by telephone. He doesn’t wish to discuss her with his parents, especially his mother. She employs not-so-discreet subterfuge to find out more about the girlfriend. Piras is “tricked” into revealing his girlfriend’s name is “Francesca.” Piras’ mother is happy, and Piras is happy to have successfully concealed information about Sonia.

Bordelli has an eccentric and vivacious girlfriend, the prostitute Rosa. In his mid-fifties, Bordelli regrets many past relationships and missed opportunities. He treasures Rosa but they are not moving towards marriage, and that suits them both. He was a young man during WWII and scenes from that horrible time haunt him almost daily. American soldiers were able to come home to an America physically unscathed by the bombs of war, but Bordelli and his countrypeople had to live with physical and political reconstruction. Enemies needed to be forgiven in order for Italy to move forward. Vichi writes a moving narration when telling about those times and expediencies.

“Death in Sardinia” has a richness and color that exceeds the basic level needed to tell the crime stories. In the end, will Bordelli do what is right according to the law or according to his moral lights?

P.S. I recently read a book in which the author said that when a person commits suicide with a gun, it is impossible to hold on to the gun. In the Sardinian part of the story, the dead farmer is found clutching the gun. I thought, aha!, is that the trick? But no, that wasn’t a part of the story.

If a person kills an older or younger version of him- or herself, is it murder, suicide, sci-fi, magic, or just really, really strange? It is questions like this that have made Jonathan Carroll a cult figure.

Maybe it was that the wind changed (à la Mary Poppins), but I suddenly felt in the mood to read “The Wooden Sea,” a book that has been tickling the back of my mind for a while. It is a goofy, thought-provoking, funny/serious book. Indeed, there are murders, thus qualifying it for this blog (not that lack thereof has stopped me from writing about a book), and witty, hefty helpings about the mystery of life.

But I can see why this book might not appeal to everyone.

Frannie McCabe is the chief of police of Crane’s View, New York, the town in which he grew up. He was more likely to be on the opposite side of the jail cell in his youth, but the Vietnam War and an overdue maturity have settled him. He has a wonderful wife, a shy stepdaughter, and a three-and-a-half-legged, one-eyed, droopy dog named Old Vertue. Frannie is happy with his life and is good at his job. After all, he solved (off-stage) only the second murder Crane’s View ever had.

What then is Frannie to do when his three-legged dog expires, is buried, and resurfaces — still dead — in the trunk of his car the next day? By the way, instead of smelling corpse-like, Old Vertue exudes all the smells that Frannie finds most wonderful and evocative. How about when Frannie discovers that a battling couple — regulars on the call circuit — has mysteriously disappeared from their home? And someone(s) has tidied and scrubbed their once disgustingly chaotic house (and it smells wonderful). One minute they are screaming at each other and the next they are gone. The neighbors, standing watch outside the home and waiting for the police to show, did not see the couple leave. Hmmm.

Why do a colorful feather and a sweet-tasting bone-but-not-bone pop up every which way Frannie turns? Why did the corpse of a dead teenage girl talk to him? Who is the stranger who apparently can stop time? Is he an angel? Why is Frannie sent into his future sixty-something-year-old body to live his last week on earth? And the story just gets stranger and stranger.

Underneath the strangeness, Carroll tells the story about a regular kind of guy, someone you might be happy to have in your life. Yeah, he was a hellraiser and nasty piece of work when he was younger, but the past is long gone. Isn’t it? Frannie must travel on an existential journey to find the meaning of his life and what his true purpose might be, and it is to Carroll’s great credit that he keeps that journey moving right along from strange event to even stranger event and gives it an everyman voice besides.

Before you know it, you are at the end. Has Frannie learned anything? More importantly, do you know how to row on a wooden sea?