Summertime Thrillers continued…..

Flynn Berry: A Double Life, 9780735224964, Viking / Penguin Random House US, hardback, pub date: 31. July 2018

 

Flynn Berry won the 2017 Edgar Award for Best First Novel with “Under the Harrow” , she is also a recipient of the famous Yaddo fellowship.  This says a lot about her credentials as a writer.  After having finished “A Double Life” which kept me turning the pages breathlessly particularly during the last third of the book , I can confirm she has exceptional talent.  Her sentences are spare and beautifully crafted portraying the protagonist with razor sharp precision, with an excellent plot at the heart.  The New York Times have just recommended this mystery as recommended summer reading.

 

“A Double Life” borrows the idea for the novel from one of the famous unsolved crimes in English criminal history, the Lord Lucan case who attacked his wife and murdered the nanny.  But this is where the similarities end, Flynn spins her own yarn

Told from Claire's perspective, she lives a simple, quiet life as a dedicated NHS doctor but no one suspects that this isn’t her real name. She is  the daughter of a criminal, her brother an addict and her father a Lord who disappeared after he killed his children’s nanny while they slept upstairs injuring his estranged wife. The police never found him; the only evidence he left behind was his blood stained car near the English Channel. 

Claire’s life is disrupted when the police inform her that they belief they have found him.  When this Investigation also turns cold, she decides to follow some of her suspicions, that he must have had help from his privileged powerful clique of friends if he was indeed the murderer.  Trying to find answers who this man she called father really was, the memory of her mother and her struggles to raise a family on her own make her even more determined to get to the bottom of the truth.  Was he really the cold blooded murderer from a wealthy, privileged background who married down and got bored with the responsibilities of a family? But why would he murder the nanny and not her mother and why bother anyway since her parents were already separated?  She is convinced her father is alive and hiding.

I could not find a German translation for her first novel  which is really surprising.  As an editor in Germany, I would pick her up quickly.

 

  

C.J. Box: The Disappeared, 9780399176623, Putnam (Penguin Random House USA) hardback,
Paperback:  9781784973193, Head of Zeus, October 2018,

Joe Pickett is one of my favorite characters in American crime fiction I unashamedly admit, a Wyoming based game warden that always ends up in trouble chasing the bad guys.  

“The Disappeared” is C.J. Box's  18^th Joe Pickett novel, they are fun to read and I never get tired of his new cases while taking an armchair trip to Wyoming at the same time.  Check them out if you like a cross between Western & crime fiction, he has also been translated into German but they seem to be out of print currently, you can buy them online used.

Joe Pickett and the new governor Colter Allen are not exactly friends, unlike Rulon, his old boss who has used his knowledge of wild life and the human psyche in numerous more or less concealed operations.  Joe is very surprised to be summoned by Allen and told to start a secret investigation into the disappearance of a wealthy British business woman called Kate Sheldon-Longden who vanished into thin air after vacationing at the Silver Creek Ranch in Saratoga which is outside Joe’s jurisdiction as a game warden.  It is also the very place where Sheridan, Joe’s daughter, is currently working as an outdoor guide and horseback trainer for the high paying clientele.  The police have failed to find any trace of Kate and journalist and family members poking around are causing bad publicity the new governor doesn’t need.  How falconry, seemingly green wind energy and other rogue characters come into the picture is for you to find out yourself when reading “The Disappeared”.