Friday, February 14, 2014

The Resistance Man: Bruno a Chief of Police novel by Martin Walker

  • The blurb:
  • Bruno Courrèges—provincial French police chief extraordinaire—is back in another delectable tale of mystery and suspense that unfolds in the gastronomically ravishing Dordogne.

    A veteran of the Resistance dies, and among his possessions are documents that connect him to a notorious train robbery. A former British spymaster’s estate is burglarized, the latest in a spree of expert thefts. An academic’s home is broken into just as she is finishing a revelatory book on France’s nuclear weapons program. An antiques dealer is found brutally murdered, and his former lover, the number one suspect, is on the run.

    It’s just another summer in St. Denis for Bruno, who must balance the constant barrage of demands on his time and expertise—including the complex affections of two powerful women, town politics (the mayor is having romantic problems of his own), his irrepressible puppy, Balzac, and nights entertaining friends and visitors with ever-sumptuous repasts—with a new focus on the mounting crime wave, whose seemingly unrelated events Bruno begins to suspect are linked. His search for clues to crimes old and new leads to stunning revelations about both his country’s history and his own, and puts several more lives—including Bruno’s—in deadly danger. In a thrilling denouement that proves the past is never really past, Bruno fights to secure the future of his beloved community and those he cares about most. 

    As charming and compelling as its hero, The Resistance Man offers fresh joys for loyal readers and newcomers alike.
Review:
The latest Bruno, Chief of Police novel, delivers the same characteristic adventure and glimpse into the French countryside that drew me to the series. The peace in St. Denis is disrupted with the violent murder of a wealthy, antiques British dealer renting a cottage with his gay lover. The man is found bludgeoned to death - a possible crime of passion. Around the same time as this murder, St. Denis residents deal with a string of break-ins and the latest robbers' haul includes substantial art and wine holdings of the second home of wealthy and well connected British retiree. Add to the mix, an unlikely link to perpetrators of an infamous train robbery of Nazi loot by French resistance fighters.

As Bruno unravels the unlikely relationships between and among these crimes, Bruno also faces dramatic changes in his romantic relationships with tough, ambitious, Isabelle, and his longtime lover Pamela.

The Resistance Man is a fun addition to Martin Walker's irresistible series.

  • ISBN-10: 0385349548 Hardcover $25.95
  • Publisher: Knopf (February 25, 2014), 336 pages.
  • Review copy courtesy of the publisher and the Amazon Vine Reviewers Program.

The Author describes himself, courtesy of Amazon.com:
Former foreign correspondent in USSR, USA, Europe and Africa for the Guardian (UK), author of histories of the Cold War and 20th century USA, and of studies of Gorbachev, Clinton, the extreme right etc.
Now I write mystery stories set in the Perigord region of rural France, home of truffles, foie gras, great cheeses and wonderful wines.
In 2013, I was made a chevalier of foie gras, in the confrerie of pate de Perigueux, and also an honorary Ambassador of the Perigord, which means I get to accompany the traveling exhibition of the Lascaux cave as it goes on display at museums around the world. I also help promote the wines of Bergerac at international wine fairs, and was chairman of the jury for this year's Prix Ragueneau, the international culinary prize,
The hero of my mystery stories is Bruno, a French country policeman and former soldier who was wounded while serving it UN peacekeepers during the siege of Sarajevo. Bruno hunts, cooks, tries never to arrest anyone and, hates to carry his gun (but sometimes must. He loves his basset hound, his horse and a complicated array of firmly independent women.
The Perigord also contains more medieval castles per square kilometre than anywhere else on earth and is home to the prehistoric paintings of the Lascaux cave. Most of what we know of prehistory comes from this valley of the river Vezere, where humans have lived continuously for some 70,000 years or more. Devoted to the area and his adopted home of the small town of St Denis, Bruno instinctively understands why our ancestors chose this spot.

Monday, February 10, 2014

Antigoddess by Kendare Blake


The blurb:
Old Gods never die, or so Athena thought.  But then the feathers started sprouting beneath her skin, invading her lungs like a strange cancer, and Hermes showed up with a fever eating away his flesh.  So much for living a quiet eternity in perpetual health.

Desperately seeking the cause of their slow, miserable deaths, Athena and Hermes travel the world, gathering allies and discovering enemies both new and old.  Their search leads them to Cassandra -- an ordinary girl who was once an extraordinary prophetess, protected and loved by a god.  

These days, Cassandra doesn't involve herself in the business of gods -- in fact, she doesn't even know they exist.  But she could be the key in a war that is only just beginning.

Review:
Imagine that the Roman and Greek gods do exist and that they've reappeared in our world.  The mortals whose lives they'd played with, twisted, blessed, ruined, fought over have been reborn and live with us as well.  These humans are blissfully (or naively) ignorant of their old lives and of the ways that the gods touched their lives in the past and these humans are doomed to repeat their fates.  The same gods are still drawn to them and still reach out to them, calling and manipulating.   The ways that the gods play are different now, some gods have adapted to our present better than others.  

In Antigoddess, Kendare Blake gives us a fun account of what it would be like to have the characters and gods of the Trojan War living in our time as teenagers.  Witty and imaginative, Antigoddess is the first part of a widely popular new series (the Goddess War) and a highly enjoyable read!

  • Age Range: 12 - 18 years
  • Grade Level: 7 and up
  • ISBN-10: 0765334437 - Hardcover $17.99
  • Publisher: Tor Teen; a edition (September 10, 2013), 336 pages.
  • Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

About the Author:
Kendare Blake holds an M.A. in creative writing from Middlesex University in northern London.  She lives and writes in Lynnwood, Washington.