Darkest, Most Ancient Parts

Sisterland by Curtis Sittenfeld

Hardback:  Identical twins Kate and Violet are about as unlike as two peas from the same pod can be.

Except in one respect - they share a hidden gift they call 'the Senses', a special kind of intuition that can allow them to see things that are yet to come.

After Kate inadvertently reveals their secret when they are thirteen years old, they are set on diverging paths into their adult lives.

Twenty years later, Kate is a suburban housewife who suppresses her premonitions in the hope of leading a normal family life, while Violet lives alone and works as a psychic medium.

Then one day Violet ignites a media storm by predicting a major earthquake in the St Louis area where they live.

As the day Violet has announced for the earthquake draws nearer, the sisters must grapple with the legacy of the past, the confusion of the present and the unsettling glimpses they both have of the future.

Funny, haunting and thought-provoking, Sisterland is a book about the obligation we have toward others and the responsibility we take for ourselves.

It is also a mesmerizing novel of family and identity, loyalty and deception, and the delicate line between truth and belief.

About the author:  Curtis Sittenfeld is the author of the word-of-mouth bestseller American Wife (2008) which was longlisted for the Orange Prize, as was her first novel, Prep (2005), a New York Times bestseller.  It was followed by The Man of My Dreams (2006).  Sisterland (2013) is her latest book.  Her books are translated into twenty-five languages.  She is also the author of an e-book called A Regular Couple (2012), available exclusively for Kindle.  She is married, with two young children.

Rating:  5/5

Death Angel by Linda Fairstein

Hardback:  In New York's Central Park, Assistant DA Alex Cooper and Detective Mike Chapman race to track down a serial killer before yet another young woman is found dead.  Is the body in the Ramble the first victim of a deranged psychopath or could other missing women be connected to this savage attack?

The enormous urban park, a sanctuary in the middle of the city for thousands of New Yorkers and tourists who fill it every day, may very well become a hunting ground at night for a killer with a twisted mind.

Death Angel (2013) is the fifteenth and the latest book in the excellent Assistant DA Alexandra Cooper series.

About the author:  Like Assistant DA Alexandra Cooper, Linda Fairstein was once a top New York City prosecutor.  She is one of America's foremost legal experts on crimes of violence against women and children.  For three decades, she served in the office of the New York County District Attorney, where she was Chief of the Sex Crimes Prosecution Unit.

In 2010, she was presented with the Silver Bullet Award from the International Thriller Writers Association.  Fairstein's Alexandra Cooper novels have been translated into more than a dozen languages and have debuted on the Sunday Times and the New York Times bestseller lists, among others.  She lives in Manhattan and on Martha's Vineyard.  Follow her on Twitter @LindaFairstein.

The next and sixteenth book in the Assistant DA Alex Cooper series, Terminal City, will be out in June 2014.  Hurray!

Rating:  5/5

Merry Christmas To All

The Virgin today brings into the world the Eternal.  And the earth offers a cave to the inaccessible.  The angels and shepherds praise him and the magi advance with the star.  For you are born for us, Little Child, God Eternal. - Kontakion of Romanos the Melodist.

Dr Seuss (1904-1991)

Nelson Mandela (1918-2013)

Thomas Moore, Irish Poet (1779-1852)

Robert Heinlein (1907-1988)

Ernest Hemingway Part II

Prisonomics: Behind Bars in Britain's Failing Prisons by Vicky Pryce

Hardback:  In March 2013, Vicky Pryce was sentenced to eight months in prison for accepting her ex-husband's penalty points on her driving licence some ten years earlier.

After a very public trial, she was sent first to the notorious Holloway and then to East Sutton Park, an open prison in Kent.

Inside, she kept a diary documenting her views and experiences;  from this diary, Prisonomics was born.

Faced with the realities of life behind bars and inspired by the stories of the women she met, Pryce began to research the injustices she found within the prison system.

In this informed and important critique, she draws upon her years of experience in economics to call for radical reform and seeks to change how we look at crime and punishment.

Prisonomics (2013) is not only a personal account of Pryce's experience in prison.  It is also a compelling analysis of both the economic and the very human cost of keeping women behind bars.

As Pryce wrote in her Introduction (excerpts), "Combining my prison diary with various data sources and interviews with individuals and organisations engaged with the prison service or campaigns for penal reform, this book has tried to put as much evidence together as possible to show that in fact the system is broken and a major rethink needs to take place."

"It is absurd that as crime goes down we put more people in jail at a huge cost to society when money is tight and there is a public deficit to deal with.  From a strictly economic and public expenditure point of view, the Ministry of Justice bangs too many up but delivers far fewer bangs for the taxpayer's buck than the equivalent ministries in better-run countries."

"Prison is the wrong sentence for a large number of offences.  The women I met had rarely, if ever, caused serious damage to others and pose no threat to society.  The custodial sentences mostly male judges enjoy imposing do not act as deterrents for crime;  if anything they increase the chance of those released reoffending."

"There is also overwhelming evidence that the children of prisoners suffer from being separated from their parents, and those who lose contact entirely or end up in care have a much higher chance of offending themselves than children who stay close to their families, particularly, but not exclusively, to their mothers.  The despair of many of the women I met in my brief stay in prison was heartbreaking."

"Throughout this book, I try to give some pointers on how money could be saved through different sentencing guidelines, more community service, more mental health and other support, by keeping families together or at least in touch with each other and, crucially for the economy as a whole, by providing more and better education in and out of prison to improve further chances of employment."

"But this book really belongs to the amazing women I met in Holloway and East Sutton Park."

About the author:  Vicky Pryce is an economist and commentator.  Following a number of positions in the banking and oil sectors, she worked as senior managing director at FTI Consulting;  was the director general for economics at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS);  was a partner and chief economist at KPMG;  and was the joint head of the UK Government Economics Service.  In 2000, she co-founded the Good Corporation to promote corporate social responsibility.  Pryce is the author of several publications, including Greekonomics (2012) and Restarting Britain (2011).  She lives in south London and has five children.

The Sunday Before Christmas

A Christmas Wish

Darker Than Night (True Crime) by Tom Henderson

Darker Than Night (2006) is the true story of a brutal double homicide of two deer hunters from the Detroit area in the woods of northern Michigan in 1985, the surprising developments that shone light on the case eighteen years after the events unfolded, and the quest for justice.

Paperback:  On a cold snowy night in November 1985, two men begged for their lives.

Two friends, Brian Ognjan of St Clair Shores and David Tyll of Troy.

They were only twenty seven years old.

They left their suburban Detroit homes for a weekend of deer hunting at the Tyll family cabin near White Cloud, a small town on the western side of the state.

They never arrived.  They were never seen or heard of again.  It was scary.

Their families and police suspected foul play.

For eighteen years, no one could prove a thing and their killers went free.

It made no sense.  How?  Why?  Where were they?

Then, a relentless investigator got a witness to talk, and a horrifying and chilling story emerged.

In 2003, this bizarre case hit the glare of the criminal justice system as prosecutors charged two brothers, Raymond and Donald Duvall, with murder.

With no bodies ever found, the case hinged on the testimony of one terrified witness who saw a bloody scene unfold and who was still nearly too frightened to talk.

Later, more than half a dozen witnesses cited terror and threats as factors in not coming forward sooner with information.

Now, the truth behind an 18-year-old mystery is revealed against the backdrop of an unusual, electrifyingly dramatic trial.

Raymond and Donald Duvall bragged to friends that they killed their victims, chopped up their bodies and fed them to pigs.

Even though several witnesses told police that others might have been present that night in 1985 when Ognjan and Tyll lost their lives, only the Duvall brothers were arrested, tried and convicted for the crime.

After a seven day trial and 120 minutes of deliberation, the jury found both brothers guilty of two counts of first-degree premeditated murder.

Nine days short of the eighteenth anniversary of Ognjan and Tyll's disappearance, the killers were brought into the courtroom for sentencing.

After the victims' impact statements, the presiding judge sentenced the brothers to life imprisonment without parole.

Raymond is currently incarcerated at the Newberry Correctional Facility and his younger brother, Donald, is detained at the Chippewa Correctional Facility in Michigan.

"It won't bring my son back, but it will help," said Arthur Tyll.  "It's about time somebody paid for it.  It's kind of justice but they owe me eighteen years and a son, and they can't give me that.  I was glad to see them cuffed and I can't wait to see them in chains."

Helen Ognjan, in the early stages of Alzheimer's, said softly after the verdict, "I'm glad, I'm just glad."  Brian Ognjan was her only child.

Sadly, neither Tyll nor Ognjan's remains were ever found.

What of the motive?  There was no motive.  It started as an argument which escalated into a beating and ended in a brutal and barbaric crime and "completely unjustified by any circumstance imaginable."

In her closing arguments, the prosecuting attorney said, "There is no understanding of the whys of Ognjan and Tyll's death, because it's pure evil, and there is no understanding of pure evil, only recognition of what it is."

After all, how can there be enough justice for the ruthless and senseless obliteration of two human lives?

About the author:  Tom Henderson was a copywriter and sportswriter for the Detroit Free Press in the 1970s, covering the University of Michigan football team and the Red Wings hockey team.  He began a weekly running column for the Detroit News in the 1980s that ran for nearly 20 years, and also regularly profiled high-tech companies for the paper's business section.  In the 1990s, he was senior editor of a monthly publication called Corporate Detroit.  His first true-crime book, A Deadly Affair, was published by St Martin's Paperbacks in 2001, the same year he helped launch a website, www.smalltimes.com, and a print magazine, Small Times Magazine, both based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and devoted to micro- and nanotechnologies.  His second true-crime book, Blood Justice, was published in 2004.  A veteran of 40 marathons, he has coached the American Diabetes Association's marathon fundraising team and is a frequent contributor to Runner's World Magazine and Running Times Magazine.  He covers banking, finance, accounting, venture capital and technology for a weekly business publication, Crain's Detroit Business, and teaches feature writing in the journalism department at Wayne State University.  Darker Than Night is his third true-crime book and his fourth, published in 2009, is Afraid Of The Dark.

American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld

Paperback:  On one of the most important days of her husband's presidency, Alice Blackwell considers the strange and unlikely path that has led them to the White House.

Thrust into a position she did not seek - one of power and influence, privilege and responsibility - Alice must face contradictions years in the making:  how can she at once love and fundamentally disagree with her husband?

How complicit has she been in the trajectory of her own life?

American Wife is a beautifully written novel that weaves race, class, wealth and fate into a brilliant tapestry - a novel in which the unexpected becomes inevitable, and the pleasures and pain of intimacy and love are laid bare.

Curtis Sittenfeld wrote that American Wife is a work of fiction loosely inspired by the life of an American first lady, Laura Bush.  Her husband, his parents, and certain prominent members of his administration are recognisable but ultimately, American Wife is a work of fiction.

About the author:  Curtis Sittenfeld is the gifted author of two previous novels, Prep (2005), which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction in the Best Novel category in 2006, and The Man of My Dreams (2006).  Her third novel, American Wife (2008), was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction in the Best Novel category in 2009.  She is married and lives in the USA.  Her latest and fourth novel, Sisterland, (2013) is out now.  For more information about the author and her novels, please go to her website.  The author is on Twitter.

Curtis Sittenfeld talked about American Wife following its publication in 2008:



Rating:  5/5