Lockdown by Peter May

Paperback: A CITY IN QUARANTINE

London, the epicenter of a global pandemic, is a city in lockdown. Violence and civil disorder simmer. Martial law has been imposed. No-one is safe from the deadly virus that has already claimed thousands of victims. Health and emergency services are overwhelmed.

A MURDERED CHILD

At a building site for a temporary hospital, construction workers find a bag containing the rendered bones of a murdered child. A remorseless killer has been unleashed on the city; his mission is to take all measures necessary to prevent the bones from being identified.

A POWERFUL CONSPIRACY

D.I. Jack MacNeil, counting down the hours on his final day with the Met, is sent to investigate. His career is in ruins, his marriage over and his own family touched by the virus. Sinister forces are tracking his every move, prepared to kill again to conceal the truth. Which will stop him first - the virus or the killers?

Written over fifteen years ago, this prescient, suspenseful thriller is set against a backdrop of a capital city in quarantine, and explores human experience in the grip of a killer virus.

Lockdown was completed back in 2005 during a six-week spell but was not published because British editors at the time thought the portrayal of London under siege by the invisible enemy of H5N1 (bird flu) was unrealistic and could never happen - in spite of the fact that all Peter May's research showed that it really could. It was finally published during the Covid-19 pandemic back on 30 April 2020 during the first lockdown.

About the author: An internationally bestselling crime writer, Scottish author  Peter May's first novel, The Reporter, was adapted for television, leading him into a successful career as a television writer, creator, and producer. Fiction remained his first love, however, and he continued to write crime novels alongside his other work, finally quitting to pursue a career as a novelist in the mid-1990s.

His highly successful novel, The Blackhouse, was initially rejected by UK publishers but published in French, earning critical acclaim and a number of awards before being picked up by the newly formed British publisher Quercus. The novel became the first in the hugely popular Lewis Trilogy, set in the Outer Hebrides.

Peter May is also the creator of the China Thrillers series, the Enzo files (set in France where May has lived for many years) and many successful standalone thrillers including Entry Island, Runaway and Coffin Road.

A message from Peter:

"I have taken the decision to donate the money from the advance that I have received for LOCKDOWN to various charitable organisations involved with supporting health workers, victims and others suffering as a result of Covid-19."

Rating: 3/5

The Law Of Innocence (Lincoln Lawyer Series) by Michael Connelly

Hardback: Innocence is not a legal term. No one is ever found innocent in a court of law. No one is ever exonerated by the verdict of a jury. The justice system can only deliver a verdict of guilty or not guilty. Nothing else, nothing more.

The law of innocence is unwritten. It will not be found in a leather-bound codebook. It will never be argued in a courtroom. It cannot be written into law by the elected. It is an abstract idea and yet it closely aligns with the hard laws of nature and science. 

In the law of innocence, for every man not guilty of a crime, there is a man out there who is. And to prove true innocence, the guilty man must be found and exposed to the world.

Defense attorney Mickey Haller is pulled over by police, who find the body of a client in the trunk of his Lincoln. Haller is charged with murder and cannot make the exorbitant $5 million bail slapped on him by a vindictive judge.

Mickey elects to defend himself and must strategize and build his defense from his jail cell in the Twin Towers Correctional Center in downtown Los Angeles, all the while looking over his shoulder - as an officer of the court, he is an instant target.

Mickey knows he has been framed. Now, with the help of his trusted team, including Harry Bosch, he has to figure out who has plotted to destroy his life and why. Then he has to go before a judge and jury and prove his innocence.

The Law Of Innocence (2020) is the sixth instalment in the stellar Lincoln Lawyer series and is available in the USA, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. 

About the author: Michael Connelly was born in Philadelphia, PA on 21 July 1956. He moved to Florida with his family when he was 12 years old. Michael decided to become a writer after discovering the books of Raymond Chandler while attending the University of Florida. Once he decided on this direction he chose a major in journalism and a minor in creative writing - a curriculum in which one of his teachers was novelist Harry Crews.

After graduating in 1980, Connelly worked at newspapers in Daytona Beach and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, primarily specializing in the crime beat.  In Fort Lauderdale he wrote about police and crime during the height of the murder and violence wave that rolled over South Florida during the so-called cocaine wars. In 1986, he and two other reporters spent several months interviewing survivors of a major airline crash. They wrote a magazine story on the crash and the survivors which was later short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. The magazine story also moved Connelly into the upper levels of journalism, landing him a job as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times, one of the largest papers in the country, and bringing him to the city of which his literary hero, Chandler, had written.

Michael is the bestselling author of thirty-five novels and one work of non-fiction. With over seventy-four million copies of his books sold worldwide and translated into forty foreign languages, he is one of the most successful writers working today. His very first novel, The Black Echo, won the prestigious Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best First Novel in 1992. In 2002, Clint Eastwood directed and starred in the movie adaptation of Connelly’s 1998 novel, Blood Work. In March 2011, the movie adaptation of his #1 bestselling novel, The Lincoln Lawyer, hit theatres worldwide starring Matthew McConaughey as Mickey Haller. His most recent #1 New York Times bestsellers include Dark Sacred Night, Two Kinds Of Truth, The Late Show, The Wrong Side Of Goodbye, The Crossing, The Burning Room, The Gods of Guilt, and The Black Box. Michael’s crime fiction career was honoured with the Diamond Dagger from the CWA in 2018.

Michael is the executive producer of Bosch, an Amazon Studios original drama series based on his bestselling character Harry Bosch, starring Titus Welliver. Bosch streams on Amazon Prime Video. He is the creator and host of the podcast Murder Book. He is also the executive producer of the documentary films, Sound Of Redemption: The Frank Morgan Story and Tales of the American. He spends his time in California and Florida.

Rating: 5/5

John le Carré (1931-2020), British Author Of Espionage Novels

A Depressed Alcoholic Cop Solving Horrifically Violent Murders

I Like To Sip

One...More...Chapter

Live In Sunlight

From Advent To Pentecost: Carthusian Novice Conferences by A Carthusian

Paperback: To this last sentence, 'Be my joy in the heart of the Church', the writer of these conferences for Carthusian monks adds a note: 'That is a definition of Carthusian life which is as good as any other, it seems to me.' 

And from the heart of that life he speaks to the whole Church, in publishing these conferences on the great seasons of the Christian year. 

'The Liturgy is a sea. We are plunged into it and transformed by it. Year after year the liturgical seasons come back like the tides over stones...always the same cycle, but shaping us slowly but surely, into living stones (1 Peter 2:5)'.

The author writes with warmth, with learning, with passion and with humour. The reader can enter into something of the accumulated wisdom of an Order whose members 'have carried out the same little series of exercises since the eleventh century'. 

Each season has its special appeal for Carthusians - as the Conferences on Mary and on John the Baptist in the Advent and Christmas seasons show. The great Sunday Gospels of Lent - the Transfiguration, the Samaritan woman at the well, the raising of Lazarus - are expounded; the Passion of Christ is the subject of meditations that are profoundly and sometimes startlingly direct in their candour.

But perhaps the most remarkable part of this unusual book is the author's capacity to speak at length and to the point about the Resurrection and the coming of the Spirit. Here, where Christian teachers and preachers have so often been either hesitant or dogmatically remote, we have someone who clearly participates in the mysteries of which he speaks. 

It is a priceless gift to us all.

From Advent To Pentecost (1999) offers an illuminating, even dazzling, insight into Carthusian ways that are little known, indeed traditionally hidden. Here are men who for all their silence need to be heard. From Advent To Pentecost is translated from the French by Carmel Brett, done with great love of Carthusian liturgy. 

Interpreted By The Storyteller

A Time For Mercy (John Brigance Series) by John Grisham

Hardback: Can a killer ever be above the law?

Deputy Stuart Kofer is a protected man. Though he's turned his drunken rages on his girlfriend, Josie, and her children many times before, the police code of silence has always shielded him.

But one night he goes too far, leaving Josie for dead on the floor before passing out. Her son, sixteen-year-old Drew, knows he only has this one chance to save them. He picks up a gun and takes the law into his own hands.

In Clanton, Mississippi, there is no one more hated than a cop killer - but a cop killer's defence lawyer comes close. Jake Brigance doesn't want this impossible case but he's the only one with enough experience to defend the boy.

As the trial begins, it seems there is only one outcome: the gas chamber for Drew. But, as the town of Clanton discovers once again, when Jake Brigance takes on an impossible case, anything is possible.

A Time for Mercy (2020) is the third book in the superb John Brigance series.

About the author: John Grisham is the author of thirty-five novels, one work of non-fiction, a collection of stories and seven novels for young readers. The recent critically-acclaimed Netflix series, An Innocent Man, was based on his non-fiction bestseller. His works are translated into forty-five languages. He lives in Virginia. Stay in touch via Facebook at John Grisham Books.

Rating: 5/5

Nonfiction and Novels

There Is More

On A Rainy Day Like Today

 

Guarding The Flame: The Challenges Facing The Church In The Twenty-First Century, A Conversation With Cardinal Péter Erdő by Robert Moynihan and Viktoria Somogyi

Hardback: Where is the Catholic Church going? How will it face the challenges of the 21st century? Do the recent advances in modern technology pose a threat to the human soul? 

In this wide-ranging, candid conversation, Cardinal Péter Erdő, Archbishop of Budapest, Hungary, and one of the most respected cardinals in the Catholic Church, speaks with Dr Robert Moynihan, founder and editor of Inside the Vatican magazine, about the Catholic Church's faith in an increasingly secularized world.

As the two-time president of the Council of the Episcopal Conferences of Europe, Erdő is one of the leading bishops of Europe. And as the continent has descended into a deep secularism - more pronounced and rapid even than in the United States - he is uniquely positioned and qualified to identify and address the issues that secularism presents. 

Here for the first time in English is the wide-ranging and now updated interview in which the cardinal speaks forthrightly about the situation the Church faces today, the need to "guard the flame" of the traditional Christian faith, and the most effective way to do so in our post-Christian society. His 2018 lecture at Columbia University on The Role of Religion and the Churches in a Secular State serves as an effective capstone to the main text. 

Guarding The Flame (2019) is translated from the Italian by Christopher Hart-Moynihan from the original Italian edition, La fiamma della fede. Un dialogo con il cardinale Peter Erdő (2015).

Guarding The Flame was prepared on the basis of four days of interviews with Cardinal Erdő in his residence in Budapest in the summer of 2011 and three days of interviews in New York City in January of 2018.

About the authors: Cardinal Péter Erdő, Archbishop of Exztergom-Budapest and Primate of Hungary, was born in Budapest in 1952, the first of six children. He was created Cardinal by Pope John Paul II in 2003. He has published more than 250 articles and 25 books on Canon Law, as well as other spiritual works.

Robert Moynihan (Harvard College, BA 1977 and Yale University PhD 1988) founded Inside the Vatican magazine in 1993. He has covered the Vatican and Church affairs for more than 30 years and is the author of books on Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis.

Viktoria Somogyi, born in Hungary, has lived and worked in Rome at the Hungarian language desk of Vatican Radio. She studied International Relations at the University of Rome.