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.
I read and consumed American Gods (you can read that review here) and have watched and been consumed by the brilliant take on the book through the Starz drama starring the immensely talented Ricky Whittle. The Ocean at the End of the Lane has been on my t0-read list for quite some time and I was pleased to see it show up as available on my library queue.
For such a short story, TOEL packs a lot of narrative and drama into its pages. A man returning to his hometown for a funeral decides to pay a visit to his childhood home and is drawn to the farmhouse down the lane from where he grew up. A girl he once knew, Lettie Hempstock lived there and he feels compelled to revisit her home. Upon arriving, his childhood begins to come back to him, in particular a rather harrowing few days following his seventh birthday party.
A lonely and friendless child, the boy happens upon Lettie Hempstock while his father is being questioned by police after a dead body is found in the family car parked on the Hempstock property line. Lettie decides to take the boy with her on an errand. Things around Lettie aren't quite what they seem and while on their errand in Lettie's fields, the boy is bitten on the foot by something. Later that evening, the boy finds a worm in a hole in his foot and attempts to pull it out. The following day, a woman bearing a strange resemblance to the worm arrives at the home to occupy a spare room in the house and serve as the boy and his sister's nanny while their mother returns to work. The nanny, Ursula Monkton brings with her a variety of strange happenings.
There are many things that are really impossible to briefly explain over the rest of the book, but the boy fights against Ursula Monkton for his freedom and the freedom of his family.
The book is so wonderfully strange, but very rich in detail and imagination. In finishing it last night, I was thinking about my own childhood, and what kind of truths I may have learned that are now forgotten. What kinds of things do children understand that adults will never know? What fullness and richness of experience do children live in when everything is new and instructive. I like asking myself these questions and I live even better the books which cause me to ask them.
5/5 Stars.
I
know I haven't been doing as many reviews lately. My time with the audiobooks has been seriously curtailed this last month. Back in August a friend of mine told me she was coming to Nashville to watch some live tapings of her favorite podcasts and asked if I'd be interested in attending. I agreed and set off to download a couple episodes so I could become familiar enough not to embarrass myself at the tapings.
Well, turns out one podcast, The Adventure Zone, was a 69 episode narrative odyssey so my audiobooks took a backseat for all of September and most of October as I attempted to absorb 80 hours of audio in preparation for the show. Then, coming off the finale episode, I had one of those weeks where nothing else seemed appealing. Have you ever finished a book series like Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings that left you so absorbed for so long that everything else seemed dull and pale in comparison? That is what The Adventure Zone did to me. That a graphic novel is coming out in July is delightful, but I'm really feeling sad that the journey is over. If you are into fantasy fiction at all, you should check it out. The podcast got better and better as it went along (check out this write-up in the Austin Chronicle).
But, alas, I now have a longer commute, and aside from re-listening to some of my favorite episodes (which I have done), there seemed nothing for it but to get back on the audio horse and start listening again. So I turned back to the Berlin Noir series and Bernie Gunther.
The Pale Criminal kicks off in 1938, a year or so after the last installment in the series. Bernie now has a partner, a character whose name I won't even try to spell, and at the beginning of the story, a new client. The client is a rich woman with a troubled son. The mother is being blackmailed for the return of lewd letters the son wrote to his therapist. Exposure of such a homosexual nature could result in a death sentence in Nazi Germany. Bernie agrees to find out who is doing the blackmailing and recover the rest of the letters.
In the meantime, it looks like the head of the criminal police force also needs Bernie's help in uncovering a serial murderer who is kidnapping, raping, and killing young German girls in Berlin. The investigation of which unravels quite a few insidious plots along the way.
I really appreciated the skill with which the two mysteries were wrapped together. There was so much richness added regarding the background of the times and the environment in which Bernie is trying to solve these crimes. Real characters like Karl Maria Wiligut, Otto Rahn, Himmler and Heydrich play large roles in the story. And because of the murky details surrounding Rahn's death, and Wiligut's "retirement" from the SS, Kerr has a lot of room to work in the details of those circumstances to his own fictional devices.
This continues to be an excellent series.
4/5 Stars.
Being an Air Force veteran, it's virtually impossible to be unfamiliar with Charles Lindbergh and his non-stop flight from New York to Paris in 1927. I was also aware that his child was kidnapped at some point thereafter. But the details of these things had become fuzzy if they had ever been present at all.
The Aviator's Wife tells the story of Anne Lindbergh, Charles wife and eventual widow. I was really impressed with Melanie Benjamin's detail and handling of Anne's life story. The novel did a good job of expressing Anne's desire for Charles and their complicated relationship. It also felt very honest about her grief at losing her oldest child to kidnap and murder, a horror I can't even imagine going through as a mother.
While at times I became exasperated at the repetitive nature of some of Anne's statements, it provides a a baseline for where Anne was at during her marriage to Charles. Equally satisfying was the fact that Charles motivations were murky and never really cleared up even to the end of the novel. I'm interested in reading more about this fascinating family. I wonder what Charles and Anne's children think of this book being out there in the world.
3.5/5 Stars
