Before I Go to Sleep by SJ Watson: Terrifyingly, Disturbingly Good!

There are books that entertain you. There are books that move you. And then there are a select group of books that just plain rattle you. The last group has the likes of Gone Girl, Girl On The Train, and now, it has Before I Go To Sleep, S J Watson's extremely riveting if disturbing tale of a woman who has lost her memory. It has been made into a film too, but heavens, I do think the book is so much better.

The book is the story of Christine, a woman who loses her memory every time she goes to sleep. She therefore does not where she is when she wakes up and literally has to remember her own story before she gets the day underway - her memory stops several years ago and she has no idea that she has been married and if she has any offspring. Her husband helps her by keeping pictures of her past, so that she can come to grips with it, and every day has to remind her of who she is and the reason for her condition - an accident evidently. She does not even know what a mobile phone is.

But one day Christine gets a call from a psychiatrist who tells her that she has been consulting him. And he encourages her to try and get her memory back by writing down her experiences every day and seeing if they trigger off anything. What begins as therapy however turns into something akin to a nightmare as Christine discovers things that she had no idea happened and is besieged by questions. Did she have a child? Was she cheating on her husband? Why does her husband insist that there is no chance of her memory returning? Why does he hesitate in giving her the details of her accident?

Narrated in the form of a diary kept by Christine, Before I go to Sleep is quite a cocktail of mystery and suspense. You really do not know what is coming next as Christine stumbles around trying to discover her own life. Watson begins slowly but picks up speed midway and even though the denouement is not the most satisfying we have read, we were turning the pages over feverishly to find out what happens next.  At slightly under four hundred pages, this is a two-three day read.

Pretty much a humdinger, in my opinion. A must-read for all those who love suspense. Just remember to take the rest of the day off once you start nearing the midway point. Because after that, you will not be able to tear yourself away. Click on the link below or image above to grab your copy from Amazon. If you love psychological thrillers, this is one book you miss at your peril.

Dead Simple by Peter James: the Roy Grace Saga begins

When it comes to gritty, human detectives based in Britain, readers have a whole lot to choose from: Colin Dexter's Morse, Ruth Rendell's Wexford, PD James' Dalgliessh, Peter Lovesey's Diamond, Ian Rankin's Rebus, Rginald Hill's Dalziel and Pascoe, and quite a few others. And well, I would like to add Peter James' Roy Grace to the list. He has been around for a while, our Roy, but this was his the book in which he made his debut, accompanied by the trademark "Dead"in the title (all books featuring Roy Grace have Dead in the title, for the record - a deadly quirk. Pun intended).

And well, it is quite a debut, I must concede. The book revolves around a stag night prank that goes horribly wrong. How horribly? Well, picture this:

Your friends get you drunk a few days before your marriage.
They then put you in a coffin. Dump it in the ground. Put soil over it.
All you have is a porn magazine, a bottle of whisky, a torch and a walkie talkie with which to talk to those who buried you.
Then those who buried you, promptly go off and have an auto accident.
So it's just you, in a coffin. Under ground. With air coming in through a tube. And a walkie talkie with no one answering (its recipients are in the hospital, and some are in the other world.)

Enter Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, a man who gets drawn into the search for the missing groom. Incidentally, his own wife went missing a long time ago, He has never quite gotten over her, even though he has tried (a colleague registers him on a dating site for good measure). And he is not in his superiors'good books for having admitted to using a 'medium' in the process of solving a case (detectives are supposed to be methodical, not spiritual, at least not officially).

He may have an imposing physique, but Grace is a sensitive soul, and it is this streak of humanity that makes the book work. Yes, it has the banter between colleagues, the cynical remarks about superiors who are more concerned about budgets than solving crimes. But by the time you get midway through the book, you are already in well, Graceland. You are wondering if his next date will work out, if he WILL ever have a next date, whether he is a crackpot or just a man determined to use every means at his disposal to solve a crime?

And what a crime it is. For, things keep twisting and turning - is the missing man's gorgeous fiancee just a bit too vulnerable? Why is the man's partner acting strange? As James tells the story from different perspectives - the most chilling being that of the to-be groom who has been buried alive and is desperately trying to get out - you  get sucked into the plot. There are some surprises and a fair injection of action towards the end as well. Honestly, I thought things got a bit out of hand towards the end...almost Hollywood-ian, but when the dust settled, one man stood tall among all the carnage.

Roy Grace.

The man is a cocktail of Wexford and Diamond, mixing wry humour with bouts of depression, working for the law but refusing to cow down to authority, and above all, being human. Dead Simple is worth a read just to get acquainted with him.

Does he find his wife? And what about those dates? I intend to review all his books in sequence. So stay tuned. In the meantime, if you like detective fiction and good police procedurals, buy Dead Simple. It is fluently written and notwithstanding some twists and coincidences that seem right out Hardy, a very engrossing read. The four hundred odd pages it spanned whirred past me in a day and a half of frenetic reading - the small chapter sizes do tempt one to read "just one more"!

Read Dead Simple. To find out who Roy Grace is. Oh, and to be entertained. Thoroughly.

Dead Simple
By Peter James
Pan MacMillan
Rs 249 (on Amazon)

(You can buy the book from Amazon by clicking here.) 

The best travel book I have ever read: Jerusalem by Guy Delisle

Yes, I know somewhere there will be someone who will go "how on earth can a comic be a great travel book?" Honestly, I do not know why not. It is written nowhere that all great works of literature should be just words and not come with illustrations. I mean, Asterix is awesome, right?

And so is Guy Delisle's Jerusalem, or to give it its complete name Jerusalem: Chronicles From The Holy City. He is not the most elaborate illustrator alive - in fact, some might find his sketches a bit basic - but Delisle has a gift for capturing the essence of a place and its people with a few lines and with hardly any colour. And if we saw him in fine form in his books on Burma and China, he is downright magnificent when tackling the holiest and most controversial city of them all - Jerusalem.

The first thing you have to do is to ditch any expectations you have of this being a politically charged narrative. Delisle is no Joe Sacco, but that does not mean that he turns a blind eye to the Palestinians and the religious issues that dog the city. No, he just tackles them in his role of being an illustrator dad at home who travels with his partner, Nadege, who works for Medicins Sans Frontiers (MSF). Delisle travels along with her and takes care of their child, while staying at home. Which means, of course, that he has to figure out things like where to shop, where the park is, and so on, and while this is on, pull out time for his sketches.

And he is not only able to do so but captures his experiences of the city so brilliantly, that you can almost hear the shouts of the street vendors, the roll of traffic, the inevitable security arrangements,  and the mutter of tourists at holy sites. He takes no sides and narrates what he sees - this is a travelogue and not a treatise on Jerusalem today. The result? You get not just an idea of the city, but a 'feel' of it, and of its people. No, there is no detailed study of the psychology of the population or the history of the place - this is just a man living in Jerusalem going about his day to day life and writing about it. The result? After putting it down, I might not become an expert on the Holy City, but  I think I could actually find my way around in a particular part of the city and know how people behave. I would also know where to get the best views of some of the best known monuments of the city and at what time they open to the public.

Which is why I consider this to be the best travel book I have ever read. It is not about history or culture or the people.

It is about the place. And what you do there.

And Delisle handles them both in a masterly fashion. Read it if you are interested in Jerusalem. Read if if you like to travel. Read it if you like comics. Read it if you like a good book.

In sum: read it. It is a great book about modern day life in a great city.

What more can I say?

(Guy Delisle's Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City is available on Amazon. Click on the image above or the link below to get your copy).

More than matching Gone Girl: The Girl On The Train by Paula Hawkins

If you had told me a year ago that I would be hailing a book as on par and maybe even a notch above Gillian Flynn's nerve wracking thriller  Gone Girl, I would have put you down as an optimist. An hour after having finished the last page turn of The Girl On The Train by Paula Hawkins on my Kindle (the paperback edition has only just arrived in stores and I really could not wait),  I must confess that Gone Girl has not just met its match, but perhaps even its master (or should that be mistress).

The Girl On The Train has been compared endlessly with Gone Girl. And with good reason. There are more than a few similarities in the plots. Both stories are told from different perspectives, often from different points of time, converging towards something horrific. And yes, once again, the ladies hold the whip hand in the plot, and errant husbands come under the microscope.  But Paula Hawkins manages to weave her narrative more deftly than Gillian Flynn did in Gone Girl, and that is no mean fit. I started the book two days ago, and put it down today, feeling slightly dizzy.

For it is the switching of perspectives and reconstruction of events that lies at the core of The Girl on the Train. The story is basically about Rachel, a girl recovering from a broken marriage, who travels to London by train every day and on the way, sees a couple whom she names Jason and Jesse (she does not know their real names) from the train in a house in the neighbourhood where she used to live herself before her marriage broke down.

Rachel wonders about the couple, their lives and is a bit envious of just how happy they seem to be. And then, she sees something from the train that changes things. Shortly afterwards,  one of the couple goes missing. And Rachel has to wrestle with a tough decision: should she go to the police and tell them about what she saw? Or should she go down and talk to the person who remains of the couple she used to see? Her cause is not helped by the fact that she is a bit of a drunk and has a leaky memory. Top that off with the fact that her presence in the neighbourhood is viewed with suspicion by her former husband and his new wife, both of whom have complained to the police about her, and accused her of even attempting to kidnap their child, and you can see that Rachel on slippery turf.

And it just keeps getting more slippery as Rachel tries to blunder her way through to a logical decision. To the extent that midway through the book, she seems to be viewed with deep suspicion by just about everyone. But is she imagining things or did she actually see something that could have led to a shocking crime?

It is this plot that Hawkins (it is amazing that it is her first novel) takes and twists and turns it around and around like a mazy dribble from a football forward. You get perspectives from  Rachel, often addled with alcohol and trying desperately to cling on to a modicum of respect even while she still loves her husband; from her husband's new wife; and well, from the victim of the piece.

No, it is not as complicated as it sounds. Hawkins handles the different narratives brilliantly - and what makes the book work are not events that occur but the inner turmoil and uncertainty that torments the narrators. Rachel wonders if she can trust her own brains and melts at the sight of her ex-husband's smile, Anna hates Rachel and keeps wondering if she is trying to win back her lost love, and the victim...the victim has a few surprises up their ample sleeves too. The Girl On The Train is no action-packed thriller replete with car chases and blazing guns. No, it is a taut psychological thriller where you spend most of the time inside the heads of the main protagonists, your mind tensing at very twist in the plot, even the ones that you know WILL occur, because the narratives do converge some times.

Where I think Hawkins has an edge on Flynn is the tautness of the plot - things seem to flow more fluently and the denouement when it comes does not seem as forced as the one in Gone Girl. No, there is no single "oh my God" moment in the book as there was in Gone Girl, but that is because Lawson keeps building up the tension right through and does not depend on sudden spurts to get things moving. If Gone Girl was terrific junk food with flavours jumping out at you, The Girl on the Train is more like a three-course meal, each morsel of which is to be savoured. Both will chill you to the bone, but I think The Girl on the Train will stay with you a bit longer.

And it will certainly make you look out of the window of not just trains, but whichever vehicle you are travelling in. It might tempt you to look into houses.

For, as Rachel found out, you never know what you will see. And you might wish you never had. She certainly did wish so...but shush, I am not telling you any more.

My advice? Read it. But only if you have a day or two to spare. Buying it is as easy as clicking on the image above or the link below. Putting it down after starting? Ah, that will be...difficult.

The G File by Hakan Nesser - Another Van Veeteren Masterpiece!

Think "Scandinavian Thriller" and it is a fair chance that your mind will conjure up snow-laden landscapes, small villages in which a handful of not-too-social-people dwell, all drenched more often than not in a fair bit of depression and gloom introspection. No, we are not saying that the folk who write on crime in the upper regions of Europe are bad thriller writers - nay, we actually think they spin better yarns than most of their brethren in England and across the Atlantic. It's just that they tend to be a bit on the morbid and moribund side when it comes to tone. You can almost see the darkness and the fog floating across the pages as you read most of them.

But not Hakan Nesser. 

No, Nesser does not write what people call 'comedic crime.' He is as much a thriller writer as a Henning Mankell or an Arnaldur Indridason. However, unlike those worthies (who are both very good incidentally), his books are lit up with rays of wit and humour. If he reminds me of anyone, it is of Peter Lovesey. Their business is grim, and crime is never trivialised, but the main characters do not roam around moping and philosophising to glory.  No, they do pull each other's leg occasionally and there is a fair bit of wit in the pages to keep you entertained, without making you go "oh, lord, what is the point of it all and why are we here."

The Fight by Norman Mailer: The Best Sports Book EVER Written?

Right, that was a rather long heading, I know. But then The Fight is that sort of book.
You know, when you think of boxing, somehow you don't think of class. You think of two big, muscular men, each trying to beat the other to the canvas, cheered by hundreds of people, baying for blood.
Boxing evokes images that are gladiatorial. Brutal. But not elegant. Not classy.
But then it is not often that someone like Norman Mailer writes about the sport. The man considered by many to be one of the literary greats of the last century, was one of the dozens of writers who flocked to Zaire in 1974 to see what many had hailed as the fight of the century - Muhammad Ali vs George Foreman.
Ali had lost the world heavyweight title a few years ago. Foreman had won it off the man who defeated Ali. Ali was supposed to be old and past it. Foreman a monster who destroyed rather than defeated opponents.
And they were fighting not in Las Vegas or Madison Square Garden, but in the middle of Africa. In Kinshasa, Zaire.
It was a battle not just of two people, but two styles, two religions (Ali insisted on making it a Holy War) and indeed two cultures.
NOW imagine one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century writing about it.

Book Review: Strange Shores (Murder in Reykjavik)

The likes of Stieg Larsson, Jo Nesbo and Henning Mankell might have grabbed most of the spotlight in the recent (indeed ongoign) Scandinavian thriller writer wave, but they are only the tip of what seems to be quite an astounding crime and thriller writing iceberg. And perhaps one author who actually more than matches that illustrious trio is Arnaldur Indridason, with his Murder in Reykjavik series, featuring Detective Erlendur, a quiet, efficient man with a keen sense of justice.

Strange Shores is being called the last book in the Erlendur series. It is the first one I have read (I have not seen others in bookstores, alas - time to head to the Kindle once again) and I certainly hope that Indridason does not retire him. For, Strange Shores has a feature that one does not often see in thrillers.

Elegance.