Welcome To the Cedar Grove

That night I went up to the study in the tower and sat at my typewriter, even though I knew my brain was a blank. The windows were wide open, but Barcelona no longer wanted to tell me anything; I was unable to finish a single page. Anything I did manage to conjure up seemed banal and empty. It was enough to reread my words to understand that they were barely worth the ink with which they'd been typed. I was no longer able to hear the music that issue from a decent piece of prose. Bit by bit, like slow, pleasant poison, the words of Andreas Corelli began to drip into my thoughts. The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Where do I start? When I opened the book and discovered that it was a translation, I instantly started to get a little bit nervous. I've not read many books that have been rendered in English from another language, but those I have read... well lets just say they lost a little something in translation. I was extremely happy to discover this was not the case with Zafon's novel. From start to finish, this book had me hooked, intrigued as to just what is going to happen next; and the direct the author is going to take the novel.

I don't want to give too much away about the plot by giving a detailed summary, so let's just say that the novel follows the events in the life of a struggling author who, when he's perhaps at his lowest ebb, receives an interesting and life changing offer. However... you remember that story about the little sparrow that ends up burried in a pile of sh*t? This takes that cautionary tale perhaps one step further.

The journey of the book takes you down avenues of cringing obviousness, where you find yourself shouting at the 'hero' of the story for his stupidity and/or carelessness. There are less obvious moments in the story which leave you wondering how the hell you had missed the signs that led to the particular event that surprised you, and there are a whole range of other moments and emotions in between. It was simply one of those books I didn't want to end even as I was reluctant to put it down.

It's a very dark novel, full of seedy hopelessness in places, but there are lighter, more uplifting moments, but even these manage to maintain a gritty realism that does not shy away from the overall tone of the novel. One thing I will perhaps say is that at times I found myself wishing that Zafron would pick a genre and stick with it. This particular novel seems to mix and switch genres so often it leaves you a little off balance... but then again, maybe that was his intention all along.

"Even an artificial language is real. Star Trek Fans insisted that the Klingon language be made real. Tolkien invented languages for his characters, human and non-human. Peiple are always creating languages. It's one of the things we do that sets us apart from every other creature on the planet" Prof. Lourds, The Lucifer Code by Charles Brokaw

The book is a very easy read in a kind of "Indianna Jones meets the Davinci Code" kind of way. However, an easy read doesn't mean it is a well written piece. I found myself getting wound up by redundancies in the text that should have been picked up by the editor, much less never written in the first place, for example, "dead corpse."

The other problem with the book was that it couldn't decide what genre and/or approach it was going to take. Was it to be an action/adventure novel... a mystery...? Or, with the 'twist' at the end, a little 'fantasy/horror' thrown in for good measure.

If you can see past that, and want to read a tale where everything happens, one thing after another, (you could argue that this gives the novel pace), then you'll probably enjoy this book. That's not to say that I didn't enjoy it, just that I could see there was a lot wrong with it, from a writer's point of view.

Then her gaze halted, riveted on something she had almost missed among all the splatters. Something that made the hairs on the back of her neck suddenly stand up. On the wall, drawn in blood, were three upside-down crosses
The Mephisto Club by Tess Gerritsen.

Thus begins the investigation that threads it's way through the book as the primary plot. This wasn't quite the book I expected it to be, none the less and given that I read it in four days, it was somewhat compelling. I wouldn't say it's the best written of books, nor is it not, in places, predictable, but it's entertaining, and weaves enough different threads together to keep you second guessing yourself. Who are the members of the mysterious Mephisto club and what is so sinster about them? Who is it that is committing the murders, and how does he, or she, find her way our of a locked room with locked windows without leaving evidence?

The down side that could have been a major failing is the difficulty, at times, to connect with, or care about the main character. She has flaws, don't they all, but hers seem... sometimes offputting. If you can see past that, or maybe just, as we did, accept that she's got her heart in the right place, but isn't quite all she's cracked up to be, you can follow the unfolding story in spite of this.

A nice light bit of fluff among the 'crime writing' genre - if you like your fluff bloodied, and with occult overtones.

No treasure. A tiny book. Or at least a section of a book. It had a hard front cover, but looked like it had been torn apart. She flicked through it and saw that it was handwritten, but realised immediately it could not be her grandmother's: the first page was headed with a date in 1793. The Resurrectionists by Kim Wilkins

I definitely enjoyed this book more than the previous one. To a degree it kept me guessing, and was more vibrant and interesting. Basic premise is that a disenchanted cellist decides to go and find her maternal grandmother in a little town in Yorkshire. She comes all the way from Australia to do so. Arriving she finds her granmother has died, and the townsfolk don't seem particularly fond of visitors. It seems the town has a secret, and one which the inhabitants don't want discovered. Of course Masie does... by virtue of finding an old diary hidden in her grandmother's house... and she has strange and terrifying things happen to her too - all to do with the reason why the inhabitants of Soulgreve live well into their hundreds.

Much of the story is told through Masie's reading of the diary and while there's nothing wrong with that it does leave the book with two distinct 'voices,' and if asked to choose which was the better of the two, I would say the first person of the diary is more compelling than the third person narrative.

The one thing that I didn't really like about this book was the choice of names. They all seemed to me to be either old fashioned (and while you can excuse that to a degree with the townsfolk, and of course in the diary), it felt a little bit affected in the rest of the story. Still, it's a writer's prerogative to name her own people, I suppose.

Definitely better than Fallen Angel but still not a masterpiece of writing, though it is entertaining.

"Ladies and gentlemen... meet the kamikase of computer invaders... the worm... no complex structures, just instinct - eat, shit, crawl. That's it. Simplicity. Dead simplicity. It does what it's programmed to do and then checks out." Head of systems explaining the difference between viruses and worms. Digital Fortress Dan Brown

Okay so this guy's books have a hell of a lot of hype surrounding them. It's one of the reasons it's taken us so long to even contemplate reading any of them. It was the same with the Harry Potter stuff. As a rule we're resistant to hype. Ordinarily you can count on us to ignore something that is hyped for a long time.

However... that said... I was simply rivited by this book. It is well paced, written with a simplicity that is elegant in and of itself, and moves so fast, with so many twists and turns that it's a very difficult book to put down. There is maybe a small element of the 'how can one guy be so damned unlucky/lucky' process in some small part of the book, but what's going on with all the rest of it helps you to overlook that, because you're so emersed in the story itself. I love the Sys-sec head. In a lot of ways he reminds me of me... except that I'm not a blubberbelly... but in the way he thinks about computers and systems - yeah, definitely me.

So once again I've been surprised by a book that I didn't think anyone in Cg would like... and yes, maybe it's obvious that I should be the one to like it, because about computers and stuff as is kind of is... but I wasn't the only one.

"With due consideration given to the other variables, I'd say there's a ten percent chance of that. If not, there is every reason to believe that what we have in our possession here is nothing less than a list of the Dark Brotherhood's innermost council. Seven names: Seven is a profane as well as sacred number." The List of Seven by Mark Frost.

I love a good adventure book as much as the next person, so I'm not having a go at the genre when I say that this book falls /way/ short of the high accumen in adventure given to it by the Seattle Times. If you want to know what life was like in Victorian England as far as crime and investigation is concerned look elsewhere... or go get a Sherlock Holmes novel.

Speaking of Holmes... The one thing I did like about the novel was the main character being one Dr Arthur Conan Doyle... now where have we heard that name before? That however is where the "well played" in the story ends. There is no clear building of the tension in the story... you jump right in and stay at a peak the whole way through. Far from making it an nailbiting ride what it actually does is mean that the ending just... fizzles out. It's worse than an anticlimax... it just fades away into nothing ness with only a weak twist in the two page epilogue of the book.

Very disappointing.