Baldacci brings John Puller back for another attempt at a Reacher-like hit, but –while slightly better than the first book Zero Day—The Forgotten doesn’t come close to his early stuff. Indeed, Baldacci had a hit-em-out-of-the-park winner with one of his earliest novels Wish You Well, and I’ve been waiting ever since for something with the same degree of character, substance and, frankly, beautiful writing. In The Forgotten, Baldacci tries to capture our interest with the hot-button topic of human slavery in the modern era, but […]
Gothic crime and Victorian intrigue
A Victorian novel in the form of an epistolary, this is the supposed journal of 17-year-old Richard Shenstone, who has just been sent home, or “rusticated,” from Cambridge because of misdeeds that are only slowly revealed in the course of the novel. Richard has recently learned that his father, once a respected deacon of the church, has died of a heart attack while under suspicion of embezzlement of church funds–and worse–and that his mother and older sister are living in dire circumstances in a delapidated […]
A Who-Done-It Modeled on Greek Tragedy
I was expecting another courtroom drama, which Turow is famous for, but instead got a complicated who-dun-it which meshed power struggles and politics with family feuds and Greek mythol0gy. As Turow himself admits in his concluding notes, inspiration for the story came from the Gemini myth of Castor and Pollux, twins who shared in each other’s fates and spent half their time in Hades and half on Mount Olympus with the Greek Gods. Knowing that myth before reading the book gives added dimensions to Turow’s […]
Perhaps not Staggering Genius, but Heartbreaking and Profound
After reading his The Circle and then his latest, Your Fathers, Where Are They…?, I decided it was high time to go back to Egger’s first major work and see what all the fuss was about. Written when he was a mere twenty-two, this memoir/novel describes a difficult life starting with the death of both his parents from cancer within a month or two of each other, when Eggers is just 21, his younger brother Toph is just eight, his sister Beth is in law […]