Happy Reading

E-Book: Hostile Witness (First Book in The Witness Series) by Rebecca Forster

This story is inspired by a real-life case the author's husband - a superior court judge - handled.

In one of his cases, he had to sentence a minor to life in prison.

Rebecca Forster wondered how she felt about minors arrested for violent crimes.

How are they perceived - as adults and yet emotionally children or purely as adults because they were capable of horrible violence?

Kindle:  When sixteen-year-old Hannah Sheraton is arrested for the murder of her stepgrandfather, the chief justice of the California Supreme court, her distraught mother turns to her old college roommate, Josie Baylor-Bates, for help.

Josie, once a hot-shot criminal defense attorney, left the fast track behind for a small practice in Hermosa Beach, California.

But Hannah Sheraton intrigues her and, when the girl is charged as an adult, Josie cannot turn her back.

But the deeper she digs, the more Josie realizes that politics, the law and family relationships create a combustible and dangerous situation.

When the horrible truth is uncovered, it can save Hannah Sheraton or destroy them both.

About the author:  USA Today best-selling author Rebecca Forster worked as an advertising executive, did business in China and mucked around with sheep before turning her hand to writing her first book.  She earned her BA English at Loyola, Chicago, and her MBA at Loyola/Marymount in Los Angeles.  When she is not writing, she speaks to philanthropic and writers' groups about publishing for Kindle, Nook, and other e-readers, teach at UCLA Writers Program or having a ball at middle schools teaching with The Young Writers Conference.  Her specialty is legal thrillers.  She is the proud mother of two grown-up sons and the wife of a Superior Court Judge in Los Angeles, California.

Check out Rebecca Forster's author page for more news, updates and a whole lot of her books.

Hostile Witness (2004) is priced at £0.00 on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com right now!

Other books in the Witness series are

Silent Witness (2005)
Privileged Witness (2006)
Expert Witness (2011)

Rating:  4/5

E-Book: Mulholland Dive: Three Stories by Michael Connelly

Kindle:  Three stories.

In Mulholland Dive, a fatal accident on Mulholland Drive turns out to be part of an ingenious plot - but is it too ingenious?

In Two Bagger, a dedicated cop working for the Gang Intelligence Unit finally gets the payoff he's worked so hard for - but it's not what he's expecting.

In Cahoots, a team of scam artists meet for a high-stakes poker game but who is scamming who?  (Cahoots is particularly hard to read if you do not play poker).

About the author:  Michael Connelly is a former police reporter for the Los Angeles Times, and is the author of the acclaimed and bestselling Harry Bosch thrillers, as well as several stand-alone bestsellers, including The Poet.  Michael Connelly is a former President of the Mystery Writers of America.  His books have been translated into thirty-nine languages and have won numerous awards.  He lives with his family in Tampa, Florida.

Mulholland Dive was first published in Great Britain in 2012 by Orion Books.  It is priced at 99p including VAT.

Rating:  3/5

E-Book: The Devil's Gold (Short Story) by Steve Berry

Kindle:  Once he was called the Sphinx, a man so inscrutable that neither his adversaries nor fellow intelligence operatives could predict his next move.

Now a contract agent with a secret mission, Jonathan Wyatt has gone rogue.

For eight years he's been plotting.

Waiting.

Scheming to kill Federal agents Christopher Combs and Cotton Malone, whom he blames for the loss of his career.

But as Wyatt prepares for a final confrontation in a remote South American village, he makes a discovery that stretches back to the horrors of World War II, to the astounding secret of a child's birth, to Martin Bormann and Eva Braun - and to a fortune lost in gold.

About the author:  Steve Berry is the New York Times bestselling author of The Emperor's Tomb (2010), The Paris Vendetta (2009), The Charlemagne Pursuit (2008), The Venetian Betrayal (2007), The Alexandria Link (2007), The Templar Legacy (2006), The Third Secret (2005), The Romanov Prophecy (2004), The Amber Room (2003), and the short stories The Balkan Escape (2010) and The Devil's Gold (2011).

His books have been translated into forty languages and sold in fifty-one countries.  He lives in the historic city of St Augustine, Florida, and is working on his next novel.  He and his wife, Elizabeth, have founded History Matters, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to preserving our heritage.

Surprisingly, The Devil's Gold is currently unavailable on Amazon.co.uk

Rating:  3/5

E-Book: Freaks (A Rizzoli & Isles Short Story) by Tess Gerritsen

Kindle:  In this FREE Rizzoli & Isles short story from Sunday Times No 1 bestselling author Tess Gerritsen, a bizarre death comes with a supernatural twist.

Homicide cop Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles have seen their fair share of mortal crimes, but the death of Kimberly Rayner may qualify as inhuman in more ways than one.

When the corpse of the emaciated seventeen-year-old girl is discovered next to an empty coffin in an abandoned church, mysterious bruises around the throat suggest foul play.

Caught fleeing the scene is the victim's closest friend, Lucas Henry, an equally skeletal, pale teenager who claims he's guilty only of having a taste for blood - a craving he shared with Kimberly.

But the victim's distraught father doesn't believe in vampires, only vengeance.

And now, another life may be at risk unless Rizzoli and Isles can uncover the astonishing truth.

About the author:  Bestselling author Tess Gerritsen is also a physician, and she brings to her novels her first-hand knowledge of emergency and autopsy rooms.  Her thrillers starring homicide detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles inspired the hit TV series Rizzoli and Isles.

But Tess's interests span far more than medicine and crime.  As an anthropology student at Stanford University, she catalogued centuries-old human remains, and she continues to travel the world, driven by her fascination with ancient cultures and bizarre natural phenomena.

Freaks was first published in Great Britain in 2011.

Rating:  3/5

E-Book: John Doe (A Rizzoli and Isles Short Story) by Tess Gerritsen

Kindle:  It should have been a night to remember, but Maura Isles can't recall a thing.

Maura is at a party.

A handsome man approaches.

He's charming and sophisticated.

She flirts and drinks champagne.

And then nothing.

Total blackness.

Nothing, that is, apart from these two facts:  a man is dead and her address is found in his pocket.

About the author:  Bestselling author Tess Gerritsen is also a physician, and she brings to her novels her first-hand knowledge of emergency and autopsy rooms.  Her thrillers starring homicide detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles inspired the hit TV series Rizzoli and Isles.

But Tess's interests span far more than medicine and crime.  As an anthropology student at Stanford University, she catalogued centuries-old human remains, and she continues to travel the world, driven by her fascination with ancient cultures and bizarre natural phenomena.

John Doe was first published in Great Britain in 2012 priced at £1.49 including VAT.

Rating:  3/5

Happy Lantern Festival

The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng

My take:  The story of the Japanese occupation and the Malayan Emergency in Malaya is written to an  exhaustive extent by a number of Asian authors so much so that I approached this book with a sense of dread, wondering what else is there to write or read about those terrible times in the 1940s.

To my chagrin, The Garden of Evening Mists is such a poetically elegant piece of work - cleverly written and -thought-out - that I read it with wide-eyed interest and fascination.  Tan's so-beautiful prose sets off both visual and emotive reactions at every turn of the page, in his understated descriptions of nature and its surroundings, scenes and of his characters.

One gets the sense of a paradox here;  on the one hand, the book exudes calmness and serenity in the harmony of a created garden and on the other, the backdrop of continuing war and healing in the aftermath of unimaginable brutality persists.  Of the two scenarios, the former reigns supreme.  There is something to learn from the book and I derived great enjoyment from the book and if that does not constitute a good book, I don't know what does.

Tan Twan Eng is an author to watch out for, now, and in the future.  I highly recommend his works.

My favourite line from the book:  I found the viewing tower half hidden in trees, like the crow's nest of a galleon that had foundered among the branches, trapped by a tide of leaves.  (Chapter One, page 18)

Paperback:  Teoh Yun Ling was seventeen years old when she first heard about him, but a war would come, and a decade would pass before she would journey to see him.

A survivor of a brutal Japanese camp, she has spent the last few years helping to prosecute Japanese war criminals.

Despite her hatred of the Japanese, she asks the gardener, Nakamura Aritomo, to create a memorial garden for her sister who died in the camp.

He refuses, but agrees to accept Yun Ling as his apprentice 'until the monsoon' so that she can design a garden herself.

As Yun Ling begins working in the Garden of Evening Mists, another war is raging in the hills and jungles beyond.

The Malayan Emergency is entering its darkest days;  communist guerillas are murdering planters, miners and their families, seeking to take over the country by any means, while the Malayan nationalists are fighting for independence from centuries of British colonial rule.

But who is Nakamura Aritomo, and how did he come to be exiled from his homeland?

And is Yun Ling's survival of the Japanese camp somehow connected to Aritomo and the Garden of Evening Mists?

About the author:  Tan Twan Eng was born in Penang, Malaysia.  He worked as an intellectual property lawyer in Kuala Lumpur before becoming a full-time writer.  His debut novel, The Gift of Rain, was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2007 and has been widely translated.

The Garden of Evening Mists (2012) is his second novel and was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2012 and won the Man Asian Literary Prize.  He divides his time between Kuala Lumpur and Cape Town.

Do visit Tan Twan Eng's website for more news and updates.

The author tells us what the story is about:



Tan Twan Eng reads the first two paragraphs from his book:



Rating:  5/5

The Greatest Gift

Henry Ward Beecher

The Black Box by Michael Connelly

The Black Box (2012) is the latest and the eighteenth book in the outstanding Harry Bosch series.

Hardback:  Los Angeles, May 1992.  Murder just got a whole lot easier.  And investigating them got a whole lot harder.

After four LAPD officers were acquitted following the savage beating of Rodney King, LA is ablaze.

As looting and burning take over the city, law and order are swept away in a tidal wave of violence.

But under threat of their lives, homicide detectives like Harry Bosch are still stubbornly trying to do their job.

When Harry finds the body of a female journalist in an alley - apparently executed - he is forced to hand the case over to the Riot Crimes Task Force, knowing that it will never be solved.

And twenty years later, Harry has still not forgotten the woman for whom he was unable to deliver justice and since then, there has been five other murders.

Possibly just one gun used in all six murders.

New ballistic evidence now confirms her death was not a case of of random violence but something much more personal.

This time Harry is determined that the killer isn't going to escape - even if it means stepping back into the darkest days of the city he loves.

About the author:  A former police reporter for the Los Angeles Times, Michael Connelly is the author of more than a dozen acclaimed Harry Bosch thrillers and several courtroom dramas featuring Mickey Haller, as well as stand-alone bestsellers such as The Poet (1995).  Michael Connelly is a former President of the Mystery Writers of America.  His books have been translated into 39 languages and have won numerous awards.  He lives with his family in Tampa, Florida.  For the latest information, check out Michael Connellly's official website.

The next Harry Bosch book, The Burning Room, will be out on 6 November 2014 in hardcover, eBook and audio formats.

Rating:  6/5

Baking Cakes in Kigali by Gaile Parkin

Baking Cakes in Kigali (2009) is a uniquely charming, gently moving, deliciously funny novel about life, love and cake.  Ultimately, it shows how the human spirit - even when pushed to its limit - endures and unifies us all.  What a great book to read at the end of a long day!

Paperback:  In Rwanda's capital, Kigali, Angel Tungaraza runs a small business, baking cakes for the celebrations of her neighbours.

As her customers tell her their stories, Angel comes to realize how much each of them has to mourn as well as what they have to celebrate.

And, finally, she comes to accept how much that is true of her too.

About the author:  Gaile Parkin was born and raised in Zambia and lives in Africa.  Her first job was in Soweto still simmering from the violent uprising of the school students who had begun to loosen apartheid's control of the education system in South Africa.  She has worked in Rwanda, counselling women and girls who had survived the genocide.  She is also a published author of children's books and numerous school textbooks.  Baking Cakes in Kigali is her first novel.  When Hoopoes Goes to Heaven (2012) is her second novel and also a sequel to the first novel.

Rating:  5/5

Carpe Librum!

Be Still