Nesbo steps away from his standard Norwegian detective fare with this slim new novel that starts and ends with the blood of a murdered man soaking into the snow. Blood on Snow is written from the viewpoint of a mob “fixer,” a contract killer named Olav who is kept on the payroll of Oslo’s biggest crime boss to take care of problems that his boss doesn’t want to think about. These problems range from snitches to competitors to an unfaithful wife. And until Olav catches […]
Jack Reacher in Europe, with an unexpected twist
While I won’t claim it’s his best, or even that great, I found this latest (19th) Jack Reacher story an intriguing enough premise, a rapid page-turner (including the ballistics details which others found boring but which I enjoyed), a truly scary bad guy, and an unexpected punch-to-the-gut ending. Someone has taken a long-distance shot at the French president, but special bullet-proof glass protected him from assassination. The CIA decides, along with Europe’s top intelligence agencies, that this was just a practice run aimed at […]
On Child Abuse and Redemption
I wouldn’t call this the best novel Toni Morrison has ever written, but given how high she has set the bar, God Help The Child is still a powerful read that I would highly recommend. It is about the abuse of children, and about damaged adults. It is full of Morrison’s characteristically spare but lyrical prose and disconcerting magical realism. It is full of pain and rage, but also redemption and resolution. Her main character is a little girl named Mary Lou, born with “blue-black” skin […]
A cautionary tale of middle-class entropy
My first response to this book, published in 1959, was to praise it as an early contribution to what was soon to be launched as the modern-day feminist movement, as it is a penetrating study of a woman trapped by her own outdated middle-class conventions. But then I realized that it would do this book an injustice to define it so narrowly, as Connell in his understated way brilliantly strips bare the racist, classist, xenophobic and intolerant mindset that afflicted much of middle and upper-class […]