Sara Paretsky: Brush Back, 9780399160578, hardback, Putnam, Penguin Random House US, (paperback: June 2015)

I have been following Sarah Paretsky and her heroine V.I. Warshawski for quite a while now, almost from book one.  The Chicago setting of her thrillers, one of my favorite towns, appeal to me as does the character of gutsy, headstrong female private eye VI Warshawski.  It is always like a trip to Chicago without leaving home.

In her latest book VI has aged, is around fifty now, with musician gentleman friend Jake living next door, her wonderful old neighbor Mr. Contreras still looking after her and her dogs plus a houseguest, Bernie, Boom-Boom’s goddaughter, living with her for the summer.

Starting to feel that climbing walls and chasing the bad guys is not quite as easy physically and appealing as it used to be, VI is not quite as confrontational as in previous novels. When her old high school flame Frank Guzzo shows up in her office asking for her help to exonerate his mother  after her release from prison, where she did 25 years being accused of murdering her daughter Annie, unpleasant memories and feelings from VI’s past of  growing up in Chicago’s dangerous South side resurface.  She has little desire to revisit these wounds but feels obliged to help her old friend.   When she reluctantly starts her investigation by asking Frank’s mother Stella some unwelcome questions,  Stella answers by becoming physically violent, making it hard for VI to believe in Stella’s innocence and easy to walk out of the case. When the Guzzo family starts slandering the image of VI’s beloved cousin and famous baseball player Boom-Boom on the basis of a supposedly recently discovered  diary of the murdered Annie, VI is upset enough that reopening the investigation seems the only way forward.  During the course of 458 pages,  VI unravels several buried family secrets, tries to find her way through a spider web of shady connections and discoveries,  gets beaten up by gangsters when confronting crooked Chicago politicians, lawyers and business men seriously endangering her and Bernie’s life towards the end of the book.

Although the book is very long, I did not feel bored, enough new worms crawl out of the can to keep you entertained until the very end.  I did feel the story could have been more compressed but all in all, Paretsky and VI Warshawski as we like her ! 

Hong Ying: The Concubine of Shanghai, 9780241950678, Penguin Books

With the skies offering only every shade of grey, pouring rain to top it, I headed for my book pile and picked up Hong Ying’s “The Concubine of Shanghai” (Die Konkubine von Shanghai), wanting just to be entertained.  I confess a weakness for novels dealing with the old China which started in my teens with Pearl S Buck.  “Concubine of Shanghai” has been sitting on my growing book pile for some time; Penguin published the translation in 2013. Hong Ying is best known for “K: The Art of Love” (Die chinesische Geliebte) which won the Prix de Rome in 2005 and was made into a film.  Hong Ying has also written an autobiography.

If you enjoy Amy Tan, Hong Ying is a good alternative, an accomplished, excellent writer in my view and a great historical storyteller, laced with some erotic elements. 

The criticism I have: this book is very long, nearly 400 pages but the story is full of interesting characters to stick with it. 

China 1907, the orphan Cassia is sold by her aunt and uncle into a Shanghai brothel run by Madame Emerald, a key character in Cassia’s future life. Her feet are unbound making her unattractive to work as a prostitute; she ends up working as a lowly maid.  Her fate changes when Master Chang, the boss of the Brotherhood, one of the Shanghai Triads, sees something different in her, awakening more than just sexual interest in him. Her intelligence and self-assuredness turn her into his most trusted alley and his favorite mistress. The violent times in Shanghai at the beginning of the century cast a shadow on Cassia’s love and happiness.  Relying on all her resources, fate forces her to reinvent herself over and over again, finally becoming one of the most prominent singers and talked about women in Shanghai during her days. 

The book has many twists and turns, interesting characters, such as her lovers Yu and Huang Peiyu or Madame Emerald,  in my view the ending was a bit disappointing and during the second half of the book, the plot showed some weaknesses.  

Bernhard Schlink: Die Frau auf der Treppe, Diogenes Verlag, 9783257243338,, € 12,-

Die meisten Leser kennen Bernhard Schlink durch seinen Bestseller „Der Vorleser“, der auch brillant verfilmt wurde, mit der großartigen Kate Winslet in der Hauptrolle. 

Am Bahnhof, wie immer Zeit totschlagend in der Buchhandlung gelandet, fiel mir seine Neuerscheinung „Die Frau auf der Treppe“ in die Hände. Ich fing an zu lesen, die Handlung beginnt wie ein Krimi, ich musste unbedingt weiterlesen. Buch schnell noch gekauft, bevor der Zug abfährt.

Bernhard Schlinks Schreibstil ist von seiner Ausbildung als Jurist geprägt, die Sprache klar, sachlich, manchmal fast emotionslos, immer präzise.

Der Ich-Erzähler des Buches, ein mittlerweile älterer Jurist stolpert während einer Dienstreise in Australien über ein Gemälde, das einmal eine zentrale Rolle in seinem Leben gespielt hat.  Die mysteriöse Schönheit im Bild mit dem Namen „Die Frau auf der Treppe heißt Irene, Geliebte des Malers Karl Schwind, aber das war sie nicht als dieser im Auftrag ihres sehr wohlhabenden Mannes Gundlach das Bild bei ihm in Auftrag gibt. Es kommt wie es kommen muss,  Irene und Schwindt  verlieben sich in einander und ziehen zusammen.  Zurück bleibt ihr Mann mit dem Gemälde.  Der dritte Mann, der in den Sog von Irene gerät ist der Ich-Erzähler, als Schwind und Irene die Kanzlei in der er arbeitet mit einem merkwürdigen Anliegen konsultieren.  Gundlach bittet Schwindt  immer wieder das Gemälde nach seltsamen Beschädigungen zu restaurieren und verweigert Schwindt den Rückkauf seines Lieblingsbildes. Der Anwalt soll nun intervenieren, auch er verliebt sich im Laufe der Monate kopflos in Irene.

Die alte, immer noch in ihm nagende Verletzung und Enttäuschung aus der Vergangenheit veranlasst ihn nun Jahre später seine Heimreise aufzugeben,  um sich auf die Suche nach Irene und dem Warum dieser verlorenen Liebe zu machen, seine Recherchen haben ergeben, dass sie in Australien lebt.  Er trifft auf eine alte, kranke Frau, was folgt ist eine  anrührende Liebesgeschichte, ich will hier nicht zu viel preisgeben. 

Dies ist ein Buch der leisen Töne, auf der Spur nach den großen Themen des Lebens wie Liebe, Verrat und Vergebung, was uns antreibt die Dinge zu tun, die unser Leben verändern und uns noch Jahre später verfolgen. Leser, die viel Handlung suchen, sind bei diesem Buch fehl am Platze. 

Stewart O’Nan: West of sunset, Penguin Books US, 9780143128243, $ 16,00

O’Nan’s brilliant, intimate portrait of Scott Fitzgerald’s last years in Hollywood as a scriptwriter is   full of melancholy and bittersweet memories of lost fame and his marriage to Zelda.  I read the novel during a week where the skies only seemed to have shades of grey available and it was a very befitting mood background to this masterful story.  O’Nan’s fine writing transports you straight into 1937’s Hollywood, adorned with all the famous stars and movie bosses of the times.

When Fitzgerald heads for Hollywood in the Thirties to earn some much needed cash rewriting and writing scripts for the big movie houses, he leaves his daughter Scottie in a boarding school and Zelda permanently installed in a mental institution.  Medical bills are piling up, not to mention the debt they accumulated during their years of reckless living with Scott’s success as a writer fading into near oblivion. He has troubles getting advances for his books or selling short stories. 

It’s the golden years of Hollywood, Scott’s old friends Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway or Humphrey Bogart try to ease his settling in but only when he falls in love with gossip columnist Sheilah Graham does he feel he has a new life in Hollywood. Fitzgerald feels guilty about his new love and happiness, becoming more and more estranged from Zelda. His trips to a not only mentally but also physically very different Zelda and her family become a burden; he tries to fly Scottie in to visit him whenever his finances allow. With his world falling apart, remembering  their  famous  years in Europe of the Twenties, the roaring years on the East coast, trying to get over rejections and being fired from writing jobs repeatedly,  booze,  his old friend,  becomes a new problem.  Sheilah does not put up with his drinking and leaves him frequently, only to return to her older but still very charismatic, handsome lover, staying with him until the bitter end. Stewart O'Nan captured the mood of Fitzgeralds sad, tragic and self-destructive last years perfectly. 

It almost hurts that Fitzgerald died not knowing his body of work would become Modern Classics. 

The book will be published in German in March 2016 by Rowohlt in German, titled "Westlich des Sunset".

Natasha Pulley: The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, 9781408854280, hardback (paperback in May 2016), Bloomsbury UK

Usually I am not known to pick novels with fantasy elements, except novels from authors of the school of magic realism such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  Which is why I was so very surprised how much I loved Natasha Pulley’s debut novel “The Watchmaker of Filigree Street”.  I felt a little bit like entering a fairy tale.  If you enjoy historical novels, fantasy and Sherlock Holmes type of settings - this is your book!  It is a perfect novel to cuddle up with on the sofa when the weather becomes dismal outside or during the upcoming holiday break.

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street is set in the very atmospheric, late 19^th century Victorian London; several strands come together in this delicately woven plot.   Thaniel Steepleton, the main character, works as a telegraphist in the Yard and narrowly escapes a bomb attack on the Home Office. A special watch someone had placed in his flat went off to warn him, saving his life.  Steepleton traces the unusual mechanics of the watch to Baron Mori, a watchmaker of Japanese origin working from his shop in Filigree Street.   His visit to Keita Mori’s house changes his life forever; he finds a kindred soul and friend.  Entering Mori’s magical world where a mechanical, playful octopus called Katsu lives with his creator, he soon finds that his friend is also a clairvoyant.  Grace Carrow studying to be a theoretical physicist in Oxford is doomed to be married off by her mother very soon, a fate she is desperately trying to avoid at all costs as she much prefers to proof the existence of ether in her research.  As events speed along, the fate of these three main characters are dramatically entwined with each other, racing towards a climatic ending which finds you longing for more.  It is hard to believe this is Natasha Pulley’s first book, her prose is exquisite.

Rebecca Scherm: Unbecoming, Penguin Books US, 9780143128311, 16,00 $, paperback

“Unbecoming” comes with powerful recommendations by such well-known authors as Kate Atkinson, Tana French, Elizabeth George and Karen Joy Fowler, all with glowing quotes.   And the book does not disappoint, I can barely believe this is a debut novel.  Rebecca Scherm has written an extremely well-plotted story, a great delight to read, a mixture between suspense and coming of age and the publisher’s comparison to Hitchcock or Patricia Highsmith fits perfectly in my opinion.  

Grace or Julie as she calls herself now, lives in Paris, working as a restorer in a shady workshop where she repairs objects of art or bric a brac, probably not all of them legal or belonging to the clients her employer Jacqueline claims.  But Julie’s/Grace’s background is far from what she tells people it is, supposedly from California she claims to be on the run from an abusive boyfriend.  In truth she comes from Garland/Tennessee, where she spent a nearly picture perfect teenage life with her childhood sweetheart Riley, being virtually adopted by his mother Mrs. Graham who sees in her the daughter she never had. Her own flaky parents are too busy with twins to care much about their older child. Slowly cracks in Grace’s life appear and things start to unravel with every page.  Grace heads off to New York to study, getting a job as an assistant to an appraiser.  She becomes fascinated by the world of art, furniture and jewels she learns to appraise for auctions and estates and the people who are so very different from what she is used to in Garland. 

Shifting back and forth between Paris, New York and Garland, the puzzle is slowly put together.  In Paris Grace nervously follows the daily news of the newspaper back home. Finally she hits on what she has been looking for: the release of two young men from prison who served time for robbing the Wynne House, a museum in Grace and Riley’s hometown. They are none  other than Riley and Alls.  Alls also belonged to Grace’s inner circle, a guy very different from Riley and the secret object of her lust.  Grace was the architect of that heist gone bad but she escaped to Prague. A cat and mouse game unfolds after the release of the two and one becomes a helpless bystander as Grace’s old life catches up with her in Paris.

From the very first page Rebecca Scherm has you hooked, I hope this book finds many readers but sadly I don't think the cover treatment quite portraits what an excellent story is between the covers. I really look forward to the next novel Rebecca Schem hopefully has up her sleeves.

Jane Gardam: The Man in the Wooden Hat, Europa Editions 9781933372891

Jane Gardam I have just discovered for myself being tipped off by a friend from the publishing world. German publishing companies have discovered this wonderful author at the same time,   “Old Filth” has just come out in German as “Ein untadeliger Mann” although it was already published several years ago in the UK.

Having read “Old Filth” about a month ago, I had to read the second part of this trilogy which tells the story of mainly 3 people who are very connected with each other throughout their lives,  Sir Edward Feathers, his wife Betty and his old enemy Terry Veneering who plays an important part in Betty’s life.  The third part of this trilogy ,“Old Friends”, is on my reading list for sure.

“The Man in the Wooden Hat”  tells Betty’s version of life with “Old Filth” , Edward Feathers , beginning after WWII in London, Hong Kong and finally their retirement in Dorset.  I had missed more of Betty’s voice in “Old Filth”, her side of the story felt equally important and I was not disappointed– she is an immensely likeable, upbeat character as I imagined her to be.  I will not gallop ahead and reveal much more. Betty’s secrets come out in the open as you read on, be it why her life remained childless or about her relationship with Terry Veneering and his son Harry. Or why she married Edward Feathers to begin with. Other colorful characters appearing in “Old Filth” like aforementioned Terry Veneering, his son Harry, Isobel Ingoldby or Albert Ross - they all play an important part in  Betty's life.

Jane Gardam is a master storyteller, in her stories no one is really who they appear to be to outsiders. She paints the English stiff upper lip and the tragedies hiding behind it like no one else with her short, clipped sentences.   I was very surprised to discover that she is already 87 years old now and am really glad this wonderful writer has been discovered for German readers. I hope she achieves the same success here she had in the UK, she deserves to be high up in the German bestseller list.