Ajay Chowdhury: The Waiter,  Harvill Secker (Penguin Random House UK), 9781787301832, paperback, pub date May 24, 2021

It was hugely entertaining to read an early proof of “The Waiter” by Ajay Chowdhury, publishing in May 2021.   This refreshing first novel reminded me in style and story line of Abir Mukherjee’s historical crime novels set in pre Independence  India which I love, so little surprise here that I give “The Waiter” a thumbs up.

Kamil Rahman is a former detective of the Kolkata police who ends up working as a waiter in a Brick Lane restaurant owned by his father’s friends Maya and Saibal. Rahman had refused to be corrupted in the murder investigation of a famous Bollywood actor in his home town losing rank and privileges which gave him little choice but to make a fresh start in London. 

When Kahman has to cater a birthday party for his boss’s rich friend Rakesh married to the much younger Neha, the evening takes an unexpected turn. At the end of the party Rakesh is found murdered by his swimming pool and all fingers point to Neha. The police take her into custody much to the gratification of Rakesh's first wife and son.  Saibal, Maya and Anjoli, their daughter, plead with Kamil to investigate on their behalf as Neha was like a second daughter to them und an improbable murderess. The book switches back and forth between the current murder investigation and the old memories of the case that brought Kamil to his knees. 

“The Waiter” is a non-bloody, atmospheric, clever and often funny crime novel, a perfect summer read.

Cara Hunter: The Whole Truth, 9780241985144, April 29, 2021, Penguin, paperback

Cara Hunter can count me as one of her fans by now; this is her fifth book in the series set around the Oxford police team headed by inspector Alex Fawley which gets better with every book.  It happens rarely that I am left so completely in the dark about whodunit and Cara Hunter manages it perfectly. 

Hunter’s mysteries usually have two crimes going, the prose of the plot is interwoven and spiced up with emails, twitter snippets, WhatsApp messages and police investigation reports.  In “The Whole Truth” , out in paperback April 2021, Fawley’s team is called in to look at an unusual accusation: a male student for a change, Caleb Morgan, accuses his female professor Marina Fisher, a leading expert on Artificial Intelligence and rising star of his college, of assaulting him sexually while babysitting her son.  The second crime is a murder which derails the Fawley team completely; I will not reveal more as it would ruin the nail biting part of the novel.  

If you are in the mood for a very clever British crime novel set in Oxford with plenty of twist and turns that will keep you guessing how on the earth the author is going to  resolve this one, ”The Whole Truth” is a very good pick. Hats off to Cara Hunter for creating such a terrific, tense crime story.  A tiny piece of critique: I like my crime novel endings very tidy and this one felt a bit too lose for my taste but perhaps just right for others.   

 

Jedidiah Jenkins: Like Streams to the Ocean, Convergent (Penguin Random House US), 9780593137239, hardback, available also by Penguin UK, Ebury

During the first lockdown in March 2020, I read Jedidiah Jenkins wonderful travel memoir “To Shake the Sleeping Self” which allowed me to travel with him in spirit through the Americas from Oregon to Patagonia on bicycle. I loved his honesty, reflectiveness and adventurous spirit paired with his struggle on this trip to come to terms with his evangelical upbringing and being gay. 

My eyes lit up when I heard that a new book was in the works, “Like Streams to the Ocean”, a very different book, essays with the under title “Notes on Ego, Love and the Things That Make Us Who We Are”.  Jedidiah examines what made him the person he had become at age 38, “talks” warmly with his readers  about ego, work, death, love, being gay, denying himself sex for a very long time due to his Christian upbringing, the meaning of family, friendships and the importance of chosen family. The book is written in snippets, an ongoing conversation one would have with a friend.  

I am probably not the target age group as a reader, could be his mother age wise really, which made some of his musings less relevant to me than it would to a younger person  but most essays are definitely universal, authentic and thought provoking. “Like Streams to the Ocean” did not mean as much to me as his travel memoir but then it is such a different book. His philosophical, kind and open thoughts made me reflect upon things in my own life during these grey days of a long lockdown winter.

 

Ruth Ware: One by one, Harvill Secker, (Penguin Random House UK) trade paperback, 9781787300422

 

Ruth Ware’s latest crime novel “One by One” is my first book by the author who already has a few books published, in Germany her publisher is DTV.  The setting of the novel in a posh French Alpine ski resort during a fierce snow storm suited my mood perfectly as the snow kept falling outside in real life and everyone currently knows what it feels like to be restricted in their movements.

As I started reading I was surprised how quickly the book drew me in and kept me hooked,  reading at a quick pace.  Having read so many thrillers in my professional life, I have to confess that after 70 % of the book I figured out which way the plot could go which was correct but that still left several possibilities for the book to end open which kept me guessing.  “One by One” is a cleverly constructed thriller set around some smartass young employees and their shareholding owners of a hot music app who come together for skiing fun and brain storming retreating to a high class ski chalet in France with cook and full service.  As the company’s group dynamics begin to unfold, an avalanche cuts off the chalet when the group returns from skiing and they realize that Eva, one of the shareholders, has gone missing.  Liz, a young shareholder and the odd one in the group and Erin, the chalet manager, narrate the chilling events as another employee is found dead in his room.  The idea of a group of people caught in a house by some unforeseen event with a murderer on the lose is not a new one, but Ruth Ware has crafted a solid thriller with a special dot com edge which I had great fun reading during monotonous winter days.

 

Yaa Gyasi: Transcendent Kingdom, Knopf (Penguin Random House USA), 9781524711771, C format paperback

Yaa Gyasi’s follow up novel to her exceptional debut “Homegoing” which I absolutely loved is made up of very different material.   “Transcendent Kingdom” deals with loss, depression, addiction, grief, science, religious faith and unmanageable hurt that tore at my heart and moved me very much,  sometimes I had to put it down.  One of the reasons I hesitated to pick up this novel was that I too had a mother suffering with severe depression and the experience of this will always be raw.  But Gyasi is such a fine, brilliant writer, her prose so vivid and exquisite – it was worth it to have read this heart wrenching story.  

The novel centers around Gifty who is a PhD candidate in neuroscience studying reward seeking behavior associated with addictions hoping to find answers in science real life is refusing her. Her mother, an evangelical Christian, immigrated to the US from Ghana to create a better life for her children only to have her husband, the Chin Chin man, return to Ghana leaving her to raise their children Nana and Gifty by herself.  The downward spiral for her family begins, when Gifty’s brother Nana, a promising teenage basketball player insures his ankle and is put on OxyContin, setting him up for years of addiction and finally,  after the families desperate struggle to save him, ending in an overdose death.  The loss of her son sends her mother into severe depression from which she never recovers creating a double loss for Gifty of the two people she loved. 

Gyasi describes Gifty’s feelings of watching beloved family members drifting off into addiction and depression and the feeling of helplessness with such sensitivity and so vividly, it feels like she is familiar with losing someone close under similar circumstances.  For me it was an emotionally hard book to read sometimes but written so beautifully and sensitively it will be one of these books whose characters will resonate with me for a quite some time .

 M.L. Longworth: A Noel Killing, Penguin Random House USA, paperback, 9780143134060

I took a break from the craziness of the world, escaping into the Provence, Aix to be precise, with the lighthearted mysteries of M.L.Longworth, which I have been enjoying from the debut novel  'Death at the Chateau Bremont" when I was still working at Penguin. These novels always do their job in improving my mood, thinking about the food, landscape, wine, smell and light of the Provence. 

And of course the mystery, in "A Noell Killing" an American tour operator and later a priest are killed during a christmas market and Antoine Verlaque, Bruno Paulik and Marine Bonnet are doing their best to find the killer. Atmospheric and delightful as ever...

 

Catherine Menon: Fragile Monsters, 9780241439296, C format paperback, Penguin Random House UK, January 2021

I started Catherine Menon’s debut novel “Fragile Monsters” in the old year and finished it on New Year’s Day 2021. I am still astonished that this is a debut, the writing is so exquisite, the story so full of imagination, the characters so complex and colorful.  I was completely captured by the narration that alternates between Mary’s voice, her recollections of her family starting with her British father and Indian mother and their troubled lives, and that of her granddaughter Druga’s.  The book comes with a deserved quote from none lesser than Hilary Mantel who says “Takes an immediate grip on the reader’s imagination and doesn’t let go”. I underwrite this 100 %, it gripped me from the first page.

Set in Malaysia between the 1920 to the present, this could have been a historical novel except it isn’t at all.  The fragile monsters being unspoken  ghosts of the past that give this book an Asian magical realism touch, drifting  between  past reality, what might have been and  the current situation.  Druga is visiting her testy, sharp tongued, difficult grandmother Mary in her small home town in rural Malaysia after having lived in Canada for some time, now working as a mathematician at the university in Kuala Lumpur.  An accidental fire and Mary’s admission to the hospital is the beginning of the reappearance of the “fragile monsters”, unspoken dark secrets every generation of this family seems to have suffered and is haunted by anew .  Druga’s own troubled life and her probing questions are answered by her grandmothers ever shifting recollections which often made me think of fairy tales. A great literary debut that I am positive will find many enchanted readers.