Cara Hunter: Hope to die, 9780241990162, Penguin Books UK, paperback

Holiday reading No 2, mysteries. Over the years, I have become a fan of Cara Hunter's cleverly constructed mysteries and have recommended her to friends looking for new English crime writing. 

"Hope to die", her latest is brilliantly plotted, loved it . Adam Fawley, DI and his team of Oxford detectives are called to a remote manor house where an apparent burglar was shot. Right from the beginning the story the owners tell has holes and Fawley discovers that they have changed their name after their daughter was sentenced to a long prison term for killing her baby. It takes 411 pages until this dark case is solved and I kept turning the pages fast. What I like about Hunter's writing is the utterly realistic and plausible  way Fawley's team operates and go about their cases. Thumbs up from me !!

 Kristin Harmel: The Book of Lost Names, Welbeck publishing, 9781982151553, paperback, read the ebook

(German edition: Das Buch der verschollenen Namen, Droemere Knaur)

Holiday reading ,  escapism book no. 1, recommended by a friend.

I love books with historical background and "The book of lost names" was no exception.  Inspired and based on true life events of forgers working in the underground French resistance in the 1940ties  risking their lives by producing false passports for hundreds of  Jewish children or anyone who needed a new identity to flee being sent to Nazi concentration camps, Harmel tells the story of Eva Traube who is able to escape from Paris with her mother, a Polish Jew, to the mountain village of Aurignon after her father was rounded up by Nazis. 

 In Aurignon Pere Clement uses his church to provide a set up for forger Remy who is soon joined by Eva who has been recruited  to the cause and becomes one of their best forgers. The story is mostly set in the 1940ties but also has a current timeline where the book of Epitres et Evangiles plays an important role. It is a great story about never giving up even if the odds are terrible, a bit smaltzy towards the end but I  found it moving and engrossing. The author  provides interesting historical data towards the end.