leventmolla's reviews
1640 reviews

This is a very atypical Agatha Christie book. First of all, it is not a murder mystery at all. It is the story of government agencies in the UK tracking the disappearance of Mr. Betterton, a prominent scientist who has been involved in the design of some fission experiments. Her wife goes to Morocco on a holiday but the plane crashes and a lot of passengers are killed. Mrs. Hilary Craven is travelling to Paris, trying to get out of a depression she has gone into after her son died from meningitis and her husband left her. She buys some drugs and decides to kill herself, but is saved in time by Mr. Jessop, who is actually a government agent tracking the disappearance of Mr. Betterton and other prominent scientists. He offers Mrs. Craven an adventure. With her red hair, she looks like Mrs. Betterton. She would pretend that she is Mrs. Betterton and survived the plane crash. She would then possibly be contacted by those who are responsible for Mr. Betterton's disappearance and it would be possible to trace his whereabouts.

It looks like a suicidal plan, since the plot would be untangled when she would meet Mr. Betterton, but Hilary accepts the challenge, since she has nothing to lose.

It is an interesting book, probably because it is not a typical Murder mystery. It was published in 1954, the early periods of Cold War, just after the Rozenberg trials, thus the tone reflects that era. Not a masterpiece in the Cold War spy thrillers, but acceptable.

Tom Clancy has started this series - Net Force - but it has deteriorated into a series of incoherent books that do not show anything similar to what Mr. Clancy offered in the golden era of his career. I believe most books after the initial one were written by others. This one is about a lot of separate stories, but mostly about unknown hackers entering into highly protected military Virtual Reality software and crashing them. The Net Force goes after them. At the same time several threads are unfolding, a bit similar to what Clancy did in his Jack Ryan books. However Clancy managed to bring all the complex threads in his books to an exciting climax and all stories converged into the main one very skilfully. None of that here. You hear lots of separate stories and the result is.... mediocrity.

I am a diehard Stephen King fan and I put his books at the same level as Dean Koontz, but King can sometimes be very verbose, especially in hefty tomes like The Dome. However, both authors are masters of the supernatural and they have produced many books that you can consume in one breathless reading.

In this book published in 2014, Stephen King is - probably for the first time - not engaged in the supernatural. Mr. Mercedes is a good old-fashioned crime novel, in the comfort zone of Jeffery Deaver and similar crime writers.

King introduces a new protagonist named Bill Hodges (the book being marked as #1 of the Bill Hodges Trilogy), who is a retired detective. After many years of service, he has just retired, without having a chance to solve some of the latest crimes and he can not keep his mind away from these cases. However, one of the cases is really horrific, where a woman has allegedly left her car keys in the ignition, which has resulted in a maniac stealing the car and driving it on a crowd of job seekers, causing several deaths, including that of a child. Bill Hodges still feels angry at not being able to solve this case and his successor has not had much progress either. The woman whose car was used for this hideous crime has committed suicide, feeling guilty about her negligence. Things get heated up when Hodges receives an email from the perpetrator, explaining why he committed the crime and basically taunting the retired cop to commit suicide. Getting infuriated by this mail, Hodges forgets all about his suicidal impulses and starts his own quest to solve this hideous crime. Briefly considering going to his colleague who took his former post, he then decides to solve this case by himself.

The rest of the book is told in a high-tempo, flowing narrative reminiscent of Deaver. Admittedly, the book does not have the signature plot twists Deaver uses frequently to fool the reader about the true identity or motive of the killer, but it is still a dynamic story and you never get bored.

I have enjoyed King in this new foray into uncharted waters and would like to read him further in this genre.

Jeffrey Archer is looking into the world of Art and the handling of masterpieces. The background to the story is the 9/11 terrorist attack in the U.S.Just before that fateful day, Art consultant Dr. Petrescu is preparing her advice to one of the clients of her firm. What she doesn't know is that her boss Fenston has sent an assassin to eliminate the client so as to lay a claim to her fortune of valuable paintings. When she has a conflict of opinion with her bus, oblivious of what is happening in the background, she is flung in an adventure all over Europe to prevent the client's sister to lose all her fortune, in the meantime struggling to stay alive, followed by a vicious killer.

It is a quite gripping novel that provides a detailed insight into the world of Art collections and wealthy magnates struggling to get the invaluable paintings in their private collections. Heartily recommended.