Book Reviews

MacNeal writes clever, enticing mysteries set in London during World War II with an inventive mathematician named Maggie Hope as her sleuth.

Set in 1938 in Paris, this spy thriller reveals an interesting chapter in history. America had no CIA or equivalent intelligence agency. Roosevelt had the foresight to realize he had to prepare for the inevitable war. Frederic Stahl, the main character of Mission to Paris, is a movie star with no training in being a spy, but while in Paris making a movie he becomes one.

If you like your Homer with a postmodernist twist, Mason’s boundlessly imaginative redo of the Odyssey will charm you. Reading Mason’s fourty-four “books,” about two to six pages each, reminds me of the experience of turning a prism and launching completely different colors across the room. Sometimes you’re in a bizarrely modern environment, say a sanitarium or a place where books have pages and bindings (i.e. not the ancient world), other times you’re in a variation that skims close to the Homeric narrative but is tipped on its end somehow.

Under the Lemon Trees, set in the small Northern California town of Oak Grove in the Sikh immigrant community, moves between 1976 and 1947 to tell the story of love and finding one’s way in a world that seems at times both too big and too limited in this classic coming-of-age story.

The Officer’s Daughter reminds me, oddly enough, of Huck Finn, if it’s possible to say that about a book set in World War II and crossing much of Poland, the USSR, and into Iran with a stop in England later on. It’s a tale of a young person’s epic journey and ongoing moral crises.

Post World War II spy intrigues, war criminals seeking new friends, allegiances shifting yet again between America and Russia, battered Jews looking for refuge, illicit romance, the legacy of harems and the labyrinthine streets opening onto the wide waterway connecting two continents. Where better than Istanbul to set this morally complex thriller?

The Crown, set in 16th century England, follows a young nun as she tries to save her family, her priory and her faith, armed primarily with a stubborn streak and a good mind. There are a number of pleasures to reading this book.

Set in post World War I England, The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton is an unconventional but compelling mystery where even the landscape and church will enter into the intrigue. A little girl who disappeared one night, an unidentified dead woman, a village scarred by war–lots of suspense but the character development is an even more gripping aspect of this mystery.

Cantrell always succeeds in creating nail-biting suspense while building a thematically rich story. This time Hannah Vogel is trapped in Berlin in 1938, on the eve of Krystallnacht. Cantrell’s central idea in this superb book: each person faced with great evil has a choice either to protect the vulnerable at the cost of his or her own safety or to turn away. Take a guess what Hannah chooses.

In The Rug Broker Nora, a determinedly independent, newly widowed Oriental rug broker struggles to balance her business, her troubled son, and her love life, but her worst enemy might be herself. If you’re drawn to the beauty of Turkish carpets and the emotional roller coaster ride of family drama, The Rug Broker offers an enjoyable read.