In a bedroom community outside of Stockholm, a couple has been discovered brutally murdered in their home. The only survivor, their teenage son, found with multiple knife wounds all over his body, is still nearly catatonic with shock. A homicide squad headed by detective Joona Linna at the helm begins an investigation with very little to go on--despite the horrific crime scene, the killer left no clues. Linna persuades Dr. Erik Maria Bark, a noted psychiatrist, to help extract information from the young victim and though the veteran trauma specialist is initially averse to employing the tactics of hypnosis, a method he used many years earlier but has now given up, Dr. Bark eventually relents and is able to get just enough from the young boy for Linna to hit on a suspect. And just in time too. It turns out that the youth has an older sister who lives away from home and may now be in danger from a very cold-blooded figure indeed, a man who is every bit as menacing as Linna had feared and who most certainly will try to kill again.
This book moves really fast, as swift as Stieg Larsson's Millenium trilogy and with almost as many plot-boilers. The character of Detective Linna isn't so particularly distinctive--he's as much like many another clever, daring, relentless and often rogue homicide detective--and there's no Lisbeth Salander character to endear the reader, but the story still catches on fairly quickly and its pace keeps the attachment. Lars Kepler is actually a pseudonym for the husband and wife writing team of Alexander and Alexandra Coehlo Ahndori, and much like another author couple from a generation earlier, they've managed a great deal of success with their debut book and it's sequel (yet to be released stateside). At times the stories of both Dr. Bark and Detective Loona can be a bit hard to juggle. It's very back-and-forth. But seasoned Scandinavian crime fiction readers will soon get the hang of it. As with many other similar Nordic Noir thrillers, this book is not for the faint of heart. There is plenty of blood and mayhem, guts and violence on the pages and 'Kepler' spares no one, even the most innocent, from their destiny. (MYS KEPLER)
In post-World War II America, Tom Rath is just another New York City businessman. His life revolves his job to which he commutes by train every morning, his wife Betsy and their three young children. As modest middle-class Americans, Tom and his family are just trying to make ends meet. So when an offer for a riskier but higher paying job comes his way, he takes it. The gamble pays off. Before long Tom catches the eye of his new boss Ralph Hopkins who wishes him to be his personal assistant, a prestigious but far more rigorous position meaning Tom will now have to choose between becoming a workaholic businessman or be just another 9-to-5-er who at least has time for his family. As he mulls his options, his homelife becomes more complicated. His only living relative, a grandmother, has died and left her estate home to Tom who now has to decide if he and his family should live on the property or accept the offer to sell the land as a potential housing project.
There's something else too. Even ten years later, the war is never far from Tom's thoughts. On his way to and from work, he reminisces about his harrowing combat experience as an Army paratrooper, the violence involved in killing enemy soldiers at close range and the loss of his best friend (partly of his own error). There's also a girl he knew in Rome, an Italian refugee named Maria, whom he'd had an affair with while on leave. When by chance he meets an old Army buddy and learns that Maria gave birth to his son after he left Italy, he must decide between keeping the love child a secret, hoping he can somehow forget about it, or letting his wife know and hope she'll understand. For Tom Rath, just another man on the street in a gray flannel suit, it seems like the entire world is held in the balance.
Penned in 1955, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit is the quintissential 1950's story, one which entails the baby boom of the post war years, the suburbanization of American families, expanding American enterprise and the still lingering after effects of the war itself. Rath is a great character (Gregory Peck as Tom in the 1956 film version gave a sound performance). A man of admirable qualities, he's also plagued by many problems. Reading about Tom, the time and place he inhabits and the life which pulls him in so many different directions, creates intrigue about every aspect of the book right down to the peculiarly sad life of mega-mogul Ralph Hopkins. Here we see an individual feeling the grind of the corporate sinkhole, the decentralization of home and work, the burden of an ambitious wife and, not to be sold short, the first real problems confronting American veterans in quite some time. The book is a solid snapshot of an American decade more associated with conformity and standardization than indecision and uncertainty. Touching on the kind of America Updike would depict a decade later, it is one which brilliantly concentrates all of the trials and inadequacies, the ambiguity and suspicion inherent in post-war life into one identifiable character and condition. (FIC WILSON)
A graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio, Eric Bogosian was actually born in Massachusetts to first generation Armenian-Americans. Following college, he moved to New York City where he's worked as a
n actor and writer and been called one of the most influential conventional playwrites of his generation. His 1987 off broadway play "Talk Radio", based on the real life of Denver Disc Jockey Alan Berg, won him a Pulitzer Prize with Bogosian later starring in the Oliver Stone film version of the same name. Another play, "suBurbia", about a group of slacker college-age kids who never left their hometown, was adapted to the big screen by Richard Linklater in 1996. Mall, published in 2000, is his first novel.
"The mall was the same, fully lit up but devoid of its warm-blooded content." (p. 243).
Malcolm "Mal" is a thirtysomething slacker who lives in his mom's basement. A speed freak who cooks his own methamphetamine, he's gotten so sick of his mother's consistent prodding and nagging that one day he shoots her dead, sets fire to his home and sets off to the local mall with a sackful of loaded weapons and a frenzied plan to implement further destruction. Among the shoppers and pedestrians on this particular day is Danny Marks, a jet-setting businessman with a fetish for underwear models and a penchant for peeping at girls in department stores. Danny's been scoping out the action in JCPenney's when he's caught by mall security and taken into custody. Elsewhere, Jeff is a mopy teenager who's just dropped another acid and is casually doing his people watching, sort of a habit of his, from a local bench. Donna is lonely housewife who's looking for a man and Michel, a Haitian immigrant, is a mall security guard who only wants to work hard and live honorably. As Mal and his personal armory converge on the mall and pandemonium invevitably ensues, all 5 characters, their needs and wants seemingly drawing them together, cross paths at the modern promenade of possibility in the most unlikely of ways.
Whether he's writing or acting, Bogosian seems to be at his best when he's jumping around from place to place at warpspeed. Something about a lot of characters, multiple backstories and a conflux of motivations converging over a very small window of time is where his ability really shines. "Talk Radio" and "suBurbia" were like this; both elucidating with candid, visceral authority the quiet desperation of malcontented middle-classers. But in the post-Pulp Fiction era, where hell-bent characters, drug-addled rage and trigger-happy lunatics are something to almost be expected in media of all forms, the approach can be risky. It doesn't matter. Bogosian's writing, his terse alternating sections thrust out by an omniscient narrator, ring true even as much of the time the action does the talking. Easy to read, with concepts and internal psyches that aren't hard to grasp, Mall is a candid look at the most normal of normal lives in the most pedestrian of places, illuminating a world in which we live and an atmosphere we think we know. (FIC BOGOSIAN)
Laura Lippman's long entertained readers with her mystery novels featurin
g Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan. Her loyal fans will be sure to enjoy her first published collection of short stories, brief, flighty episodes as inventive and sassy as the plots and entanglements she depicts in her novels. Initially, Lippman observes a versatile collection of women getting into all sorts of drama, schemes and mayhem; from murder-accessory babysitters, drug deals gone wrong and retiree-aged adult entertainers, even a high profile working girl who, in addition to her soccer mom commitments, is currently embroiled in a treacherous cat-and-mouse game involving a deathrow inmate.
The rest of the book follows similar, if slightly more pragmatic, suit. Stories focus on murders, scams, betrayals and fiendish plots all perpetrated by sly, world-savvy women eager to see wrongs righted, rights returned and scales evened. From sleek, classy career women to housewives and normal teenage girls; the characters all have a knack for getting themselves into scrapes involving some the criminal elements most detestable characters. Feminism is a clear, well-represented theme in this book in which women seek revenge on their male counterparts, either through devious underhanded dealings, clever manipulations and well-conceived acts of sudden violence. Lippman brings reality to her characters, most of which are sympathetic on at least one leve. Most maintain some type of integrity and endings to most of the tales are even-handed, characters and circumstances fitting tightly into each story's context.
