The Winter Palace

by Eva Stachniak
This book is the story of a young woman who's father takes her family from Poland to Russia.  He is a book binder and restores some books for the Empress Elizabeth.  When her father dies the girl is brought to the palace because the Empress had agreed to look after her for her father.  At first she is given a job as a seamstress, she hates the job and is no good at it.  Then she is selected to read to the young Prince Peter whom the unmarried, childless Elizabeth, has selected as her heir.

The young girl, Varvara, soon becomes a "spy" for the Empress and also for the Chancellor, they want her to eavesdrop on people and tell them what she sees and hears especially from and about the Princess Catherine who has come to Russia as a potential mate for Peter.  I can't remember why but she seems to outlive her usefulness, or perhaps disappoints the Queen/Chancellor, and they marry her to a young army officer.  At first she is not happy with her fate however she comes to love her husband and adores the daughter they have.

A few years later she is brought back to the palace and is working as a spy for the Empress, the Chancellor and is also now a spy/confidante for Catherine.  The Empress is very moody and demanding. Peter has a mistress by this time and is ignoring possibly even plotting to get rid of Catherine.  Catherine has two children, by lovers, the Empress immediately takes the children away from her and raises them.  The second child dies in infancy.  When the Empress dies times are tense and both parties are plotting for control, Catherine seizes control while her husband is off in the country with his mistress.  Varvara plays go between for Catherine and her lovers, and also a British official and also helps arrange liaisons between Catherine and her lovers.  She tries to aid Catherine when she is ill or distressed.  Varvara also plays a key role for Catherine by going to the country palace and scooping away Catherine's son and bringing him to her in St. Petersburg.  She thinks her place is secure in the palace but is shocked to learn that Catherine is questioning her daughter about her activities.  She is shocked to find that despite everything she has done for Catherine, Catherine does not trust her.    She leaves the palace in a fury.

Catherine suggest that she and her daughter take a trip around Europe and that when they return the daughter will be made a maid of the court.  They do take the trip but Varvara buys land in Poland during their journey and decides she will not return to Russia.

I enjoyed the book, I think the main character had an unrealistic impression of her own importance, but I suppose that was the point of the story.  The Empress was portrayed as a very cruel and vindictive person and the author certainly portrayed the game playing and rumour mongering well.  Iit gave you a sense of what life was like in the royalty of Russia at the time and made me curious to know more about Catherine, I hope to read a bio about her soon.

The Case of the Man Who Died Laughing

by Tarquin Hall
This is the second book in the series about Vish Puri, head of Delhi's Most Private Investigators.  The books remind me of the No. 1 Lady's Detective Agency in that they involve a P.I. who uses a folksy approach to solving crimes.  However, while the main character in the No. 1 Series solves non-violent crimes, Puri's crimes do involve murders.

In this book a man, who goal is to show the fraud behind religious cults/leaders, is killed by a vicious spirit while participating in a Laughter Therapy session in a park.   The event is captured on a cell phone and it does indeed appear to have been a supernatural event.  Puri agrees to try to help the police, unofficially, and sets off to investigate the event and also the leader of an ahsram.  At the same time that Puri is conducting his investigation his wife and mother have their own crime to solve.  They are investigating a "Kitty Party", where a robbery occurred.  They don't staff to delegate to spy on others but they use their female network and track suspects themselves and eventually both Puri and his lady family members uncover the truth.

As it turns out the man had faked his own murder as part of a plan to discredit a Swami.  However, the man ends up being murdered by someone who wants to steal his secrets for a levitating device and the Swami, while his is shown to be a criminal, is able to escape.

The books in this series give a sense of life in India for the poor and the changes that are occurring with the growth of the midddle class.  The books include humour through the eccentric main character, his relationship with his wife and family, and his employees and the incompetent officials and other people they encounter.  An entertaining read if a bit stereotypical.

Solar

By Ian McEwan

This is the second book I have read by this author.  The first book, Saturday, was highly acclaimed but I found I that I did not find it all that interesting and I could not relate to the  main character at all.

In this book, Solar, the main character is totally despicable.  He is a physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize early in his career and seems to be trying to live off that fame for the rest of his life.  He has married five tiimes, having numerous affairs during his marriages and he continues to be unfaithful to his latest two love interests, one (who is the mother of his child-- who he did not want her to have) and another woman in the U.S.

At the beginning of the story he is incensed when he finds out that his fifth wife is having an affair.  It is okay for him to have affairs but not for her... He is then shocked to find that she is also having an affair with one of his employees.   He discovers the man at his home, wearing his housecoat.  They have an argument and the young man trips on a rug and hits his head on the table and dies.  The physicist, Beard,
instead of reporting the accident, frames his wife's other lover (who has hurt her and threatened the other lover).  The lover is sent to jail for the murder.

Beard is a slob, and totally self-obsessed.  At one point in the story he is media fodder when he makes some comments that appear to be dismissive of women in science and then he seems to put his foot even more in his mouth as he tries to defend himself and then the media finds out about all his marriages and his affairs.  But soon another story takes over the news and his "sins" are forgotten.

When he finds out that his current lover is having an affair with another man he is again incensed.  She knows that he plays around and seems to be okay with that.

Beard takes some of the ideas from his dead employee and develops them into processes for using solar energy to create energy on earth.  He is on the verge of a major demonstration of the processes.  However as the book ends his lies and deceits are all coming tumbling down on him, his skin cancer has returned, he is in terrible shape healthwise, he is being sued for stealing his employees ideas and passing them of as his own, which means that all his funders will back out leaving him with millions in debt; he finds out someone has smashed all the solar array panels (likely the ex-con lover because he refused to give the man a job at his project) and his two girlfiriends and his 3 year old daughter are coming towards him in a restaurant.  He will not be able to ignore or blunder his way through all these difficulties this time!

I found the main character totally disgusting and of course wonder how he was able to be so appealing to so many women?  It was an okay story but a bit wordy.  I skipped through the last 70 pages just to get to the end.  I'm glad that the book ends with him having to face the consequences of his bad behaviour throughout his life.

The September Society

by Charles Finch

This is the second book in this mystery series about an affluent English man in the late 1800's who is an amateur sleuth.  In this story a friend asks him to investigate the disappearance of her son.  Charles Lenox finds some strange clues in the boy's room at Oxford, a business card with the words "The September Society" written on it, a dead cat with a letter opener in it and a piece of paper with some strange code on it, some dirty boots, a line of tobacco on the floor.  Charles does some preliminary investigating then returns to London.  He receives a telegram saying that the boy's body has been found.  He feels guilty that he did not stay in Oxford, he feels he might have prevented the death if he had.

As the investigation progresses Lenox finds that the September Society is a group founded of Officers who served in India, at a particular time, a very small club indeed.  He later finds out that the boy's father, who died under mysterious circumstances while in India, was an officer in India at the same time as the members of this society.   What is the connection?  Things get really serious and  worrisome when Lenox's next door neighbour receives a threat for him to back off the case.

Lenox decides to try to hide while a meeting of the society is underway and eventually the truth comes out the boy is not really dead, nor is his father (who has been hiding for years as the member of the Society thought they had killed him because he knew and did not support their illegal activities).
The book ends with the crime solved, one friend of the boy has died, and Lenox has finally gathered the nerve to ask the love of his life, his neighbour, to marry him.

This book was a light read but was as entertaining as the first book in the series, great depiction of Victorian England.

The Submission

by Amy Waldman
This is one of the most thought provoking books I have read in quite a while.  I don't think I have ever read a book with some many unappealing characters.  The story is about a jury that is tasked with choosing a memorial for the site of the September 11th attack in New York.  One of the jurors, an independently wealthy woman who lost her husband on Sept. 11th, is the representative for the families of the victims.  How she can represent this group, when she is so out of touch with the life of regular Americans is questionable.  She is arguing vigourously for a garden design while many of the other jurors seem to favour a  large monolith.  She succeeds in convincing the jury to go for the garden design.  They then discover that the architect is a Muslim.   The jury thinks this might be controversial and decides to hold off announcing the results but a member of the admin. team leaks the news to a sleazy journalist who publishes the news and the reaction is swift and angry.

The book then discusses the lives of the woman juror, a man who's fire fighter brother was killed when the buildings collapsed and he is now trying to please his parents/replace his brother by being an advocate against the design, the architect, and a young illegal alien from Bangladesh whose husband was also killed in the attack

The anger leads to demonstrations, head scarves being pulled from the head's of young muslim women, the female juror feels threatened in her home and the architect has to move out of his home because he fears being attacked.

There are other characters in the book and it seems that all of them, while they seem to be seeking the right thing to do and justice are actually behaving more out of self-interest than honour and honesty.  The architect, who has never followed his faith fasts at Ramadan and grows a beard.  And, he is reluctant to explain his design or and refuses to respond when people ask him if the garden represents Islamic paradise.  This exacerbates the situation.  It does appear that his design idea might have come from a garden of a Mongol ruler that he saw being rebuilt in Kabul.  The head of the jury asks him to withdraw his design and he refuses, but after public outcry and the murder of the young Bangladesh woman he does that and leaves the U.S. to pursue his career worldwide.  Why does he refuse to defend his design or explain its source?  On the one hand he is correct in arguing that as an American citizen, born and raised, he is American and his design should not be questioned because he is a Muslim.  But, if he had been more forthcoming all the anger and turmoil likely could have been avoided.  The woman juror wants to meet with him, to get to understand his design, but it seems that she wants him to apologize for the Muslims who killed her husband and he won't do this, why should he?  He wasn't responsible for the act.

I think the only person who was truly honest and innocent in the book was the young woman from Bangladesh.  She is in the U.S. illegally which of course is a crime but she does try to do the right thing, trying to stand up to a wife beater, speaking out at the public hearing when she runs the risk of being deported.  She ends up being killed (before they are able to deport her and her son).  Her son is sent to live with family in Bangladesh.

At the end of the book the time is 20 years later and we are told that Muslims are now an accepted part of American life and culture.  A new design competition was held and the site is a field of flags.... and the widow juror regrets this choice.  The architect has become world renowned.  He did end up building his garden for a rich Arab.  When the widow juror finds that the garden has been built and that words of the Quaran are written on the walls (the original design would have had the names of the World Trade Centre victims), she is outraged and seems to take this as confirmation that is design was an Islamic garden and thus would have been an affront to the U.S.  She has learned nothing in twenty years!  She prided herself on being rational and trying to consider the needs of others but she is still irrational and racist.  It seems to me that she was disappointed in her marriage and how her needs were discounted by her husband and this anger spills out as a reaction to the design by the Muslim architect.

This was an upsetting but interesting book.

Before the Poison

by Peter Robinson

Robinson is famous for his mysteries featuring Inspector Banks.  This book is a departure from the Banks series.  It is the story of a composer who writes scores for movies who has bought a house in England.  He was born in England and his family moved to the US when he was a child.  He has decided to move back to England after his wife died of cancer.

He hadn't seen the house he bought, before he purchased it, and is surprised at how large it is.  He is also surprised to learn that there was a murder in the house.  The wife of a previous owner, a Doctor, was hung for having murdered her husband in the house in the 1950's.  The man is intrigued by this partly because he now owns the house and because the prison she was hung in was next door to the school he attended as a boy.

He becomes intrigued by the story and wonders if she was really a murderer.  Is he seeing her ghost in the house?  He finds out that the woman served as a nurse during the war.  He then sets out to find out as much as he can about her, talking to locals who knew her and her family, meeting her former lover (in Paris)and another young man who knew her (in South Africa).  He eventually finds out what happened to her son who was orphaned after the death of his father and hanging of his mother.  He is able to provide answers to the woman's Granddaughter who shows up at the house one day and she assists him in digging out more information.

It is when he locates the second young man that he learns that the woman's husband was going to be involved with experiments with chemical weapons.  After her experience in the war where she saw the effect of chemical experiments, would this drive her to murder her husband.  As the book ends we find another reason why the composer was so intrigued with exploring whether the woman did kill her husband, he gave his wife morphine to put her out of her pain.

I have enjoyed Robinson's Banks novels but I think this was much better than all his Banks books.

The Virgin Cure

by Ami McKay

This is a story set in the late 1870's in New York.  It is the story of a young girl named Moth who is sold by her mother to be a lady's maid for a rich woman.  Moth's father is the person who gave her her name, he abandons her mother and her and they are struggling in poverty.  The woman wants the young girl to show her affection but beats her all the time. She cuts the girl's hair off.  Finally she girl can't take anymore and she runs away.   Moth returns to her mother's place to find that her mother is not longer there.  Moth later hears news that her mother's body has been found in the river.  She was badly beaten.

Despite her poverty, Moth always dreams that she will some day be independently wealthy and live in a grand home.

Moth survives by begging and stealing until she meets a young girl who invites her to come with her to be trained to be a prostitute.  The girl agrees and is accepted by a Madam who starts to train her on how to behave and dress, provides her with a wardrobe and room and board.  This particular Madam is catering to high class clients and takes her time in getting the girls ready to meet her clients.  The first meetings involve going to a local "freak show theatre".  Two of the girls sneak away from one of their dates and one of the girls is attacked and gang raped and likely will get syphyllis because one of her attackers was diseased.  The book gets its name from the belief that men had that they could be cured of venereal diseases if they had sex with a virgin.

The young girl is terrified about becoming a prostitute but doesn't think she has much choice.  Her "coming out" is delayed when the owner of the freak show asks her boss if he can have her services to sell  postcards as souvenirs of the show.  She is dressed in a dress with pockets sewn on it where she can hold the cards she has for sale.

A female doctor works for the Madam to help look after the health of the girls.  She tries to convince Moth that she can get her away from this life.  Moth resists because she cannot see that she has any options.

One day, the husband of the woman who had beat her comes to the show.  He is smitten with her and asks her Madam if he can take her out.  The Madam agrees.  She gets a higher price from men for offering them a virgin.  Moth has a date with him and then he comes to have sex with her.  He is very brutal with her.  When he is done she  pretends to read his palm and tells him their is ill will in his house and that he is in danger... getting back at his wife... He is furious at what she says.After this Moth runs to the Doctor and asks for her help and the doctor takes her in.  Moth then goes to the owner of the freak show to ask him if she can be one of his performers and he hires her.  She is able to make enough money so that eventually she is able to have a place of her own and takes up her mother's trade of telling fortunes for rich women.

This was a very interesting book.  The author gave you a real sense of how hard life could be for the poor at that time, and the options for young girls.  It was nice to have a book that had a happy ending for a change.