Murder in Chianti

 by Camilla Trinchieri

This story is set in Tuscany.  The main character is a former New York Police Officer.  He and his Italian wife spent a lot of time in Italy and after he is dismissed from the force because he destroyed evidence in a case he and his wife return to Italy.  His wife dies of cancer.  The man is now renting a house and trying to figure out what to do with his life.  He helps out for free in a local cafe.

One day as he is having breakfast he hears a gunshot.  Shortly after when he goes for a walk in a nearby forest he finds a dead man whose face has been shot off.  The man is wearing an expensive watch and gold running shoes, the shoes make the man think the victim must be American.

He contacts the local police who have limited experience with murder cases.  When the local police officer finds out the man is an ex-cop with homicide experience he seeks his help with the case.

The book then follows the police work as they find out the man was actually an Italian who is now living in California.  As they try to figure out why he had an expensive bracelet in his pocket with a charm with a specific date on it, they interview various local people.

There are lots of quirky characters in the book, including one man who constantly spouts Dante or his version of Dante.  The main character wants to help but he finds his affection for some of his friends, who might be potential suspects, clouding his judgement.  There are rumours about the victim having raped a woman and possibly fathered a local child,

Eventually we find out that the victim's estranged sister hired a local young man to kill her brother so she could get some inheritance from him.  

The book was an okay story with lots of local colour.

Silverview

by  John Le Carre

This book is about the British spy establishment at the present time.  

In one part of the book a "spy chief" is sent to investigate a former spy to determine if there could have been some leaks in the past.  He goes around interviewing various retired members of the spy service.

The other part of the story involves a young man who had a successful career in the financial sector in London but decides to leave it all behind to buy a bookstore in a small town.  Shortly after he opens a local man comes and after a few casual meetings the man convinces the young man to devote part of his store to a special collection of rare, intellectual books.  The young man agrees and sets the man up with a computer to help him develop a list and even source books for this collection.

The man asks the young man to deliver a letter to a woman in London for him.  The young man assumes the woman is the man's mistress and awaits a reply to the letter.

The young man finds out that his "partner" lives in a house called Silverview with his wife who is dying of cancer. The young man is invited to dinner and meets the man's wife and their daughter, who has a small child.

We find out that the man's dying wife was a key official in the spy service, her husband also played a role.

One day the young man comes to his store and finds all the computers, including the one his book partner was using have been stolen.

As the story goes on we learn that the person the "spy chief'" is investigating is the young man's partner.  The man's wife dies and the spy service is about to descend on the husband but he has anticipated this and escapes by jumping in the van of the local mailman when he comes to drop off the mail.

The book concludes with the service assuming the man was indeed leaking information because he had fallen in love with a woman who lives in the middle east.  They assume he is off to unite with her.

The young man seems to be falling for the man's daughter.

This was Le Carre's last book, finished by one of his sons.  It was an okay book but as I haven't read any of his other books I am not sure how it compares to his other books.

The Man Who Died Twice

 by Richard Osman

This is the second book about the Thursday Mystery Club, about some seniors who like to solve crimes.  This time a crime comes to them.... One of the women was a former MI-5 person receives a note to meet a man who is supposed to be dead.  He was from a case years before where they faked a death as part of a case.

When she goes to meet the person she is shocked to find that the man who contacted her was actually an ex-husband.  He has still been working and is now in protection because he has been accused of stealing diamonds from a case he was working on.

Soon after the ex and his "keeper" are both found murdered.  The faces are so damaged that they suspect one or the other of the bodies are not really who they think they are.

The woman is convinced her ex probably did steal the diamonds.  He leaves her various clues.  Eventually after dealing with some really nasty characters they do find the diamonds and donate the proceeds to a good cause.

These are entertaining books, there are a lot of spunky characters and a lot of humour. The plot development was really interesting.

The Island of Missing Trees

 by Elif Shafak

This is a beautiful, very unique book.  I really enjoyed it though the basic stories were quite sad.

The story opens with a young girl, daughter of a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, in London having a meltdown in class.  She has been asked to interview a family member about their life.... she has no family that she can contact.  She is devastated further when she finds her meltdown has made it onto the Internet.

The girl's mother has died and she feels that her father cares more about his job and the plants he works on than he does about her.  

The book then describes how the father buries a fig tree he brought from Cypress (illegally) every fall.  The tree cannot survive the English winters so he buries it every year til spring.  He doesn't just bury it he goes out and talks to it.

We then learn that the girl's parents were lovers in Cypress just before all the violence started.  Their parents would not approve of their relationship but two gay men who run a tavern, which has a fig tree growing in the centre of the tavern, let the kids meet at their restaurant.  The boy's mother has seen one son killed and another join the fighting and she fears for her youngest son so she ships him off to England to live with a relative.  The boy doesn't know that his girlfriend has become pregnant.

Suddenly the girl's aunt arrives from Cypress for a visit.  The girl doesn't trust her and is rude to her.  She is angry the woman never came sooner.  She learns a little about her parent's love affair as young people and also that the aunt couldn't come sooner because she had to look after her mother.

A unique and fascinating part of the book is that part of the story is told by the fig tree in the tavern.  It is a branch of this tree that the girl's father brought to England.

As the story progresses we find out the girl's mother gave her baby up for adoption but the baby died of a fever that plagued Cypress killing many infants.  The two gay guys were tortured and murdered.

Eventually the girl's father returned to Cypress on a business trip and reconnects with his lover.  At first the father thinks his girlfriend had an abortion and he is furious with her.  But eventually he finds out the truth. She is a forensic scientist trying to document and identify all those who died in the conflict.  He convinces her to marry him and they return to England where the daughter was born.

The mother, perhaps because afflicted with depression or PTSD eventually dies of an overdose.  The father is devastated.

As the book ends we find that the girl now has an understanding of what has happened in her family and is starting to re-develop her relationship with her father.

As the book ends we find the spirit of the mother has moved into the little fig tree.

A sad, but powerful, fascinating and well crafted story.

Blue Sky Kingdom

 by Bruce Kirby

This is a memoir by a BC adventure traveller from Kimberly BC.  The man takes his wife and two young sons, one of whom is autistic, on a very challenging journey to stay for several months in a monastery in the Himalayas.  First they canoe to Kamloops, or somewhere near there, to catch the Rocky Mountaineer Train to Vancouver.  There they board a container ship to sail across the ocean to Korea.  After that they eventually trek up some steep and dangerous paths, with the man carrying one of his sons a lot of the time, til they get to the monastery.

They spend six months or so living with one of the monks and trying to teach the young buddhist trainees English.  Their host is quite a character and the man and his family are welcomed into the monastery.  They are pleased at how their sons thrive, even sitting still to do some meditation.

The book talks a lot about their interactions with the locals, the changes that have occurred and will occur and what impact this will have on the valley and the monastery.  The trip was life changing for them in more ways than they expected.

One of the sad things is of course how the world is encroaching on the monastery, but also in the past the monastery used to provide the young buddhist monks with an excellent education, this seems to have declined so what future will face them.

It was a fascinating story with a lot of engaging stories and great description of the people and the country.

A Line to Kill

 by Anthony Horowitz

This was a strange book.  It is by the author who is behind Midsomer Murders and Foyle's War.  He is also the author of a series of children's book.  In this story, an author, this author actually, goes to an island with a detective he is writing books about for a book festival

It turns out there is conflict on the island about a potential technology development.  The detective has some past history with an employee of the person who has funded the festival.  The detective was accused of pushing the man downstairs and crippling him, while pursuing him on pedophile charges.  The festival funder is not a likeable person either.

The rich man and his wife end up getting killed.  It appears the employee may have done it.  But in the end it turns out it was one of the other authors at the event who was angry at the festival sponsor because her son committed suicide after becoming addicted to the man's gambling site.

It was an okay story but I found it very bizarre that the author would insert himself and his real life into the story so much.  I like Midsommer Murders and Foyle's war much more.  The stories are much more interesting, the characters more intriguing.

A bit of a disappointment.

Cloud Cuckoo Land

 by Anthony Doer

This is a highly anticipated book by the author of All the Light We Cannot See, which I enjoyed.  I looked at some of the reviews/ratings for this book and they ranged from 1 star to 5 stars.  I can understand this.  This was a long book and a bit of a hard slog.  All the parts came together at the end but I am not sure it was worth it, in my opinion.

First of all, the author obviously values libraries and books, in fact he seems to bemoan the loss of anything written that has disappeared.  I am not sure all books are worth mourning....

The basic thread linking all the various lives/times in this book is a partial book that has been discovered Called Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes.  It is the story of a Shepherd who seeks to become a bird and make it to a land in the sky Cloud Cuckoo Land which is supposedly a paradise.  As the man strives to make it there he meets gods who first turn him into a donkey, he is treated harshly by his masters; then he becomes a fish inside the belly of a whale; then he becomes a raven and makes it to CCL where he still isn't happy.  When he goes to see an Oracle he basically discovers that he wants to be back where he came from and goes home.

There are several stories that relate to the book

- A girl from 14th Century Constantinople and a young boy from a farm outside Constantinople.  The girl discovers the manuscript while scrounging for books to sell to booksellers during a siege of constantinople.  Eventually she flees from the city and meets up with the young boy who is leaving the seige and returning to his family.  They eventually marry and after she dies her husband returns the scrolls to Urbino where the story appears to have originated.

Another character is a gay man, who was a prisoner of war in the Korean war.  As an old man he is working with children at a library to act out the story.  While they are preparing the play a young autistic boy who is angry because the forest next to his mother's property was razed for development and the owl he loved has disappeard.  The boy has gotten into anti-establishment posts on the internet and decides to bomb a real estate office but as he cannot get into the real estate office undetected he decides to put the bomb in the library.  He has used the library a lot.  The bomb is discovered, in a panic the boy shoots a Librarian and the old man ends up dying when he runs out of the library with the bomb.

The first story is about a space ship leaving earth with a destination hundreds of years away.  One of the families includes a young girl, her father and mother.  The ship gets a virus, many people get sick, the mother disappears (has died or been quarantined).  The father tosses his daughter into a room with the main computer, Sybil, with supplies and locks her in.  Why would a father want his daughter to survive alone??  The girl also has been told the CCL story by her father.  The girl is able to access a library using 3D goggles, supposedly the library has all knowledge.  She is also able to go see parts of the earth in a snapshot like a googlearth shot of a street.  Eventually the girl realizes that Sybil and the library do not have all info or are not willing to give her access to all info.  She discovers that if she finds an owl icon somewhere she can actually break through the images to get active views of things and see the devastation, tragedy in the world.  Ultimately the girl suspects that she is  not really travelling through space at all.  She breaks out and finds a community on Greenland where she spends the rest of her life.  The company that planned the space ship had programmed the library to show their preferred views of the world.

The young bomber, while in jail, learns to translate the CCL story.  When he gets out he asks the children who were at the library when he bombed it to meet him.  When they come he gives them copies of his translation of the books.  We also find out that the young bomber was hired by the spaceship company to "edit" clips of reality for the library files on the ship.  He eventually starts to sabotage/edit the system, using the Owl icons to allow people to access the truth rather than the sterilized views of earth.

The book certainly stressed the value and power of stories to engage us.  It was interesting how the author wove the various lives together because of their involvement with the book.  However, I did find it a hard slog to get to the end.  This may have been an interesting, challenging, intellectual exercise for the author but my final thought was, you took us on this long journey, so what, for what?? The character in the main story, after his trials and tribulations decides he wants to be back home.

Book Jacket quote: "Dedicated to 'the librarians, then, now and in the years to come'. Cloud Cuckoo Land is a beautiful and redemptive novel about stewardship -- of the book, of the Earth, of the human heart.  I am not sure it was all that redemptive, only one of the character, the Turkish girl and the spaceship girl seem to have ended with a happy life....