Best-selling author Charles Todd is actually a duo: a mother and son who live in different states. I can’t even imagine how that writing dynamic works. They have also created two thoroughly fascinating series characters, the literally haunted Ian Rutledge and the formidably strong Army nurse Bess Crawford. I can’t even imagine how difficult that must be to create not just one, but two, successful franchise characters. Needless to say, I’m a fan.
In A BITTER TRUTH, the third in the Crawford series, our heroine discovers a bedraggled woman on her front stoop. She has been hit, evidenced by a frightful black eye, and is afraid. Bess takes her in, leading to a stormy and emotional adventure as she is forced to explore the woman’s past, a potential philandering husband and the prospect of a temporarily orphaned child that may end up being the ward of the abused woman.
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The first few pages of Jussi Adler-Olsen’s THE KEEPER OF LOST CAUSES can be difficult to wade through. We encounter the five-year-old case of a missing female politician, and then spend too much time bouncing between the past when she disappears, and the present which involves the creation of a special investigative bureau that looks into cold cases such as hers.
Additionally, the translation seems a bit off. Prose descriptions are perfectly okay, but the dialogue renditions by Lisa Hartford sound extremely wooden through the first 50 pages. It is only after we are introduced to the irascibly angry detective Carl Mørck and the formation of his new Department Q that will look into such cases as the missing politician that things begin to look up.
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In LEHRTER STATION, David Downing’s fifth novel featuring British journalist John Russell, he pens for us an awful and awesome picture of post-World War II Berlin in the year 1945.
Russell, who sold his soul to the Soviets so he could escape with his family, now must pay the price and is recruited by Soviet intelligence to return to Berlin in order to spy on certain “comrades” who may or may not appreciate the strict party line. Feeling trapped by the Soviet spymasters, Russell decides to play a dangerous game in cooperation with his Soviet control. Both of them fear the Soviet dictatorship, and so they also decide to work with the Americans in an effort to eventually escape the grasping tentacles of intelligence work.
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Åke Edwardson seems to have found himself yet another translator for his recently released SAIL OF STONE. This time, it’s Rachel Wilson-Broyles doing the work, and while I don’t think it’s as smooth as Per Carlsson’s previous effort, the plot seems to be a bit tighter.
While Edwardson is known for taking off on tangents and artificially increasing the length of his books, SAIL OF STONE is his most interesting book to date and shows that he is indeed one of that renowned group of Scandinavian mystery writers who now seem to clog our bookshelves.
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As the baseball season gets into full swing, and as summer slowly creeps up on us, this is the time to find a rollicking good sports book, sit on the deck in the full sun, listen to the game on the radio, and discover both the peace and excitement a fan can have in the world of sports.
Tim Wendel attempts to do something very ambitious in his SUMMER OF ’68, as he blends the storylines of the 1968 Major League Baseball regular season and thrilling seven-game World Series matchup between the Detroit Tigers and the St. Louis Cardinals, along with the chaotic and revolutionary political events of that summer.
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