I initially purchased the first three Clifton Chronicles during a crazy Kindle deal. I think the idea was to give away the first three and then get people hooked enough they'd have to purchase the follow-ons. However, if I hadn't gotten the first three together, it's unlikely I would have read past the first uneven installment. (You can read my review of the first book here). Best Kept Secret was another disappointment. The story is at least better written than the first book, but the plot meanders and the point of view conveniently and sporadically bounces around to the point where I didn't really care about any of the characters anymore. Additionally, the author leaves each book with a major cliffhanger which is irritating and a blatant trick to get someone to read the next installment. At the beginning of this book, we are left with the solution to the last book's cliffhanger, namely, would Giles Barrington or Harry Clifton be named the rightful heir to the Barrington name, lands, and title. Turns out it's Giles who is granted all that stuff (which is the best way to preserve everyone's happiness in the book). And Harry and Emma, although not sure if they are actually half-siblings, get married anyway and decide not to have any more children. They set out to adopt Emma's other half-sister, the baby who showed up at the end of the second book to wreak havoc and an early demise to Emma and Giles' father. So Emma and Harry move on to get married and raise their slightly ill-behaved child, Sebastian. Eventually Sebastian becomes a teenager who gets in trouble at boarding school and tries to escape punishment by agreeing to travel to Argentina on an errand for his friend's father. In the midst of this, Giles marries a terrible woman then divorces her after his mother leaves them nothing in her will due to the wife's terribleness. There is a will contest and everyone is sad, but it's all glossed over so much there's no real tension there. A villainy villain named Major Alex Fisher is thrown in the mix to try to take down Barrington's shipping company from the inside. The Clifton Chronicle villains are all bad all the time with no redeeming qualities and the heroes always triumph. It may be entertaining, but it's not great reading.
2.5/5 Stars.
This book is a must read. It's quick, but not painless. It's simple, but also difficult. Why? Because it forces the reader to ask some tough questions about their relationships and their behavior. While it may look like a business book (and it is), the lessons and implications inside pertain to much more than just work life. It's hard to just distill this down and feel like I'm doing the book justice, but essentially, we are either "in the box" or "out of the box" when it comes to dealing with others. When we are in the box we see others as objects and not as people. Once we are in the box, we harbor a lot of self-justifying beliefs in order to remain in the box, which in turn, invites others to be in the box toward us. This ends up creating a pretty bad environment all around. So how do we get out of the box? It's simple and it's not. Being out of the box is not a behavior but a state of mind. And see this all sounds confusing because you haven't read the book and you don't know what "the box" is. But read the book and you'll figure it out.
5/5 Stars
For me, reading a Gabriel Allon novel is like putting on a beloved winter coat. While it might not be the most stylish thing in the world, I feel warm and comfy and home. It's been a while since I read a Gabriel Allon thriller and I had almost forgotten how much I enjoy them. But I needed a new audio book from the library and The English Girl was available right away. In this story, Madeline Hart, a young English political party worker is on holiday on the island of Corsica when she is kidnapped. The British Prime Minister receives a vague ransom note and Gabriel is called in as a favor to Graham Seymour to find and rescue Madeline. Unfortunately, he's unable to find her in time and must then deliver $10M in ransom from the Prime Minister himself. In the meantime, Ari Shamron is demanding Gabriel finally take the job as the chief of the office, a position he has been circling around for some time. Going much further into the plot gives a little too much away. I was quite pleased with myself for figuring out some of the mystery early on. And the fact that no one in the story is quite what they seem should not be a surprise. So here I'm sitting at work, having finished up the book on the way into the office this morning and needing a book for the ride home. So I've decided to keep my ride with Gabriel going for just a little while longer before I switch out to something else. Because, well, I'm comfortable in this old coat of mine and it's not quite time to take it off.
3.5/4 Stars.
Let's be clear... the real man, Pino Lella gets all the STARS. All of them. He lived an amazing life. Did some amazing things. Struggled with PTSD (undiagnosed) and still managed to create loving children and live a life after WWII.
But the writing? Oh the writing of this book, the awkward dialogue, the hyperbolic metaphors, the repetitive clichés - that gets 2 Stars. The writing was really a mess. The book was about 100 pages too long. I feel like Pino deserved a better, cleaner narrative than the tangled mess that was finally published. The compelling nature of the story alone carries this novel to the end, were it not for Pino's incredible story, this would be a difficult one to finish.
So for the good stuff - Pino Lella was a young man living in Milan during WWII and the German invasion following Mussolini's ouster. Didn't know Mussolini was ousted? Me either. This book did provide a lot of unknown detail for me about the role Italy played in WWII and what happened to the Italians. Anyway, Pino is living in Milan when the city begins to be bombed by the Allies in 1943. Desperate to keep him safe, his mother and father send Pino to Casa Alpina, a mountain monastery/summer camp run by Father Re. Father Re immediately begins training Pino to make the mountain crossing into Switzerland, it turns out so that Pino can ferry Jewish refugees to safety. Over the course of approximately 10 months, Pino leads dozens of such refugees over the mountains through harrowing conditions of snow and avalanche.
Upon returning to Milan from Casa Alpina, a now 17 year old Pino is in danger of being drafted into the Italian army and sent to the front lines, where the German high-command is more than happy to place the Italian boys in the front row. Again in order to keep him safe, Pino's parents convince him to enlist in the Organization Todt, a non-German Nazi organization. After Pino is injured in the bombing of the Milan train station he meets General Leyers, the German in charge of the Nazi occupation of Italy. General Leyers is pretty evil, but also a little weird. Anyway, Pino becomes Leyers driver and in doing so acts as a spy for the Italian resistance. One day, as he is dropping off General Leyers at his girlfriend, Dolly's home, Pino runs into Dolly's maid, Anna, a woman he saw at the beginning of the bombardment and hasn't been able to stop thinking about (seriously she gets mentioned a bunch in the first couple hundred pages of the book and it's not clear why because it happens A LOT).
Anna and Pino fall in love with the backdrop of espionage and war and bombing and the Holocaust. Pino sees some pretty sick stuff - including the execution of his cousin, the enslavement of Jews, and the deportation of children. Finally the war ends and Pino is out partying when he discovers that Dolly and Anna have been arrested as collaborators. And.... well I'll leave the last few bits a surprise.
I was sincerely impressed with all that Pino did and lived, but again just disappointed in the quality of the writing. I'm sure this book has been a big success because of Pino, but it really is a shame that it wasn't given a better "script" as it were.
3/5 Stars.
It's 1948. The War is over, and at first, we're not really sure what Bernie has been up to that whole time. We do know that he has a wife, but it doesn't seem to make him as happy as he thought he could be during the last book where he felt his own biological clock ticking.
What is clear, is that post-WWII Berlin of A German Requiem is not a good place to be even BEFORE the blockade. Bernie has to navigate the various occupied zones and life again as a private detective and he's not doing that great of a job at any of it. Meanwhile, his wife Kirsten is waiting tables at an American bar and coming home with unexplained gifts.
Bernie is approached by a Russian colonel with a proposition, go to Vienna and clear the name of his former police colleague Emile Becker who stands accused of murdering an American officer. The money and his home life lead Bernie to agree and so we get to see Bernie a little of his normal game, in a new city full of more uncertainty. And as the story progresses we learn that he was drafted from the police squad into an SS regiment, requested a transfer as the mass-murdering of civilians was not his style, and fought on the Russian front until captured and held in a Gulag. On the way to his execution by the Russian government, he escapes and makes his way back to Berlin.
But it seems the war, and the SS just can't leave Bernie be. He's entirely too moral and this makes him an unknown player in post-war espionage. The book is very well done and I always appreciate the final twists and turns that I don't really see coming. I also really liked the book's treatment of collective guilt and the shades of truth that exist in that examination. Women again don't fair very well in this story, even where they do try to have some agency of their own.
The audio version continues to amuse me as Christopher Lee narrates Bernie with such a cynical British accent, but the Russian and American characters got accents all their own. Poor British sounding German Bernie.
3.75/5 Stars.
The Plumb family has a problem and it's not the problem that initially appears in the pages. The four siblings, Leo, Beatrice, Jack and Melody are all middle-aged and impatiently awaiting the birthday of Melody, the youngest sibling, as that will usher in payments from a trust their father set up many years ago to provide them with a small estate gift. (The Nest - as they all annoyingly refer to it). However, oldest sibling Leo is a selfish a-hole who nearly kills a waitress in a car accident necessitating the almost liquidation of the nest in order to reach a settlement with the family.
Leo, a charismatic, early success has become a used up former addict with none of the shine left on his apple. So as the siblings squabble with him and amongst themselves for their lack of funds, we are also shown the startlingly flawed characters of the other siblings, who have made serious financial mistakes.
D'Aprix does a fantastic job weaving together the various plot points. While some of the dialogue seems a bit too contrived, overall the story and the characters work well together to produce a readable and entertaining story with just a little bit of heart. In the end, the siblings become actual humans instead of caricatures of themselves and grow more likeable as the story develops.
3.75/5 Stars.
