7 book reviews

The Cabinet Of Dr. Leng by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child - The latest in the FBI Special Agent Pendergast novels. At the end of the last book, Constance, rebuffed by Pendergast, uses the time machine to go in the past of an alternate universe/timeline to save her siblings Mary and Joe and kill the evil Dr. Leng, destroying the machine in the process so that Pendergast cannot follow her. But he has other plans and locates a man brilliant enough to be able to reconstruct it and enlists the aid of friend and sometimes partner D’Agosta to help him save Constance from a mission doomed to failure. I really like these books and read it fairly quickly and got to the last page and dammit…to be continued. Now I have to wait til the end of August when the conclusion is released.

The Guest by B. A. Paris - Iris and Gabriel return home to find their friend Laure, wife of Pierre and their best friends who live in Paris, has moved into their home in London while they were gone for a hopefully romantic weekend. Laure and Pierre are childless by choice while Iris and Gabriel have a 20 year old daughter. They met at a resort during a first anniversary vacation for Iris and Gabriel and a honeymoon for Laure and Pierre and hit it off immediately and became fast friends. Laure had left Pierre when he confesses he just found out he has a daughter from a one night stand years ago while they were married. Pierre refuses all communication from best friend Gabriel, Laure overstays her welcome by months and gets involved with the part-time gardener Joseph and disappears after Iris heard them arguing. A murder mystery when a search finds Laure dead and the investigation proceeds. It’s an engaging story which kept me guessing until the end when the murderer reveals all musing about the past four months.

Dirty Thirty by Janet Evanovich - The further adventures of Stephanie Plum, bounty hunter and her sidekick Lula and the two men in her life Morelli and Ranger. Typical fun read with an ending I did not expect.

She’s Not Sorry by Mary Kubica - The way this is written it’s as if it’s a straight timeline but it actually jumps back and forth between the recent past and the present which doesn’t become apparent until near the end. Meghan, a nurse, is a divorced single mom of a 16 year old daughter, Sienna. Meghan is assigned to a woman, an apparent attempted suicide from jumping off a bridge and miraculously survived and who is in a coma, in the ICU where she works and it’s doubtful the woman, Caitlin, will survive. One day Meghan, who is something of a bleeding heart, runs into a friend, Natalie, from high school who needs rescuing from an abusive husband and Meghan responds, caring for Nat and confiding in her her own secrets. Things start to unravel as these two story lines eventually merge. Was Caitlin pushed, is Meghan being targeted? Then one day, Caitlin opens her eyes.

The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters - Joe and Ruthie are the youngest of five siblings from the M’ic Maw indigenous in Canada. Every summer the family travels to the blueberry fields in Maine to pick berries. The summer Joe is six and Ruthie is four and the rest of the family is out of sight elsewhere, Ruthie is sitting on a big rock not far from their small cabin eating her sandwich while Joe wanders down to the lake out of sight of Ruthie. When Joe comes back, Ruthie is gone. The family searches but she is never found. In Maine, Norma is growing up the only child of a very restrictive but loving mother and father, not allowed out to play, who dreams for years of another mother and another life until they finally start to fade. The story is told alternately by Joe and Norma as they grow up and reminisce, Joe who carries the guilt of Ruthie’s disappearance and how it affected his life and Norma who comes to realize that there is a family secret that she eventually thinks she knows until she learns the full truth. This is a really good book, the story well told and I really enjoyed it.

The Frozen River by Ariel Lawson - Martha Ballard is a midwife and healer in her 50s in a small community in Maine on the Kennebek River in the late 1700s and as such she is privy to the lives and secrets of the townspeople which she records in her daily diary. One November a body is discovered in the frozen river. It is hacked out and brought into town and Martha is called to come examine the body. She declares him murdered, beaten, hung, and thrown in the still running part of the river where it floated downstream until it became caught at the bend and encased in the ice. The new Harvard educated doctor in town disagrees with her assessment, calls it accidental drowning, no investigation is begun. When a local woman accuses the dead man and the leading citizen and judge in town of rape, Martha becomes an important witness to the injuries and is determined that justice be done. Her insistence puts herself in danger as well as a member of her family as she investigates the murder and rape on her own. I really liked this book as Martha relates the births in the town, the herbal remedies she provides, the flashbacks of her own life, the lives of the women in a society ruled by men and the laws that punish women but rarely men. 

Angel Of Vengeance by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child - the conclusion to The Cabinet Of Dr. Leng. Just as it seems Constance, Pendergast, and D’Agosta have failed with Leng having killed her sister Mary and abducted Joe and her younger self, Pendergast’s evil brother Diogenes, who they all thought had dies when Constance pushed him into a volcano, walks through the door claiming to be their salvation. He informs them that the man who reworked the time machine has come through and got himself arrested, that Diogenes was the last to come through as it self destructed having been left on maximum for too long. Constance, Pendergast, D’Agosta, and Diogenes, seemingly trapped forever in the past of this alternate timeline, plot to deprive Leng of his victims and kill Leng in the process and then once again all seems lost. I’m going to stop here in case you are a fan of these books.