THE AUTHENTICITY PROJECT by Clare Pooley

This is truly a story for the times we currently living in, not just what we doing at the moment being physically isolated from our communities, friends and families, but also relevant for the way we live in recent times has resulted in people becoming physically disconnected from each other – the rise of social media, neighbourhood meeting places, more people living alone, relationship and work stresses and imbalances. The words The Authenticity Project have been hand written in beautiful script across the front cover of a green notebook by an aging artist, former society man about town, probably eccentric, living alone, grieving for his former life. He seems to feel the need to open about his life, writes some thoughts, then leaves the book on a table in a nearby café owned and run by Monica. Monica is a former lawyer, single, 35 years old, looking for meaning in her life. She finds the notebook and so begins its journey through the hands and writing of four other people – male, female, young, not so young, looking for meaningful relationships and friendships, finding ways to make their lives matter. There is of course considerable serendipity in this type of story, but the characters are all so relateable, so charming and so awful, the plot lines a tad ridiculous and unlikely. So don’t read this if you looking for the serious thoughts of a self-help book! But for a gentle fun read, with a deep message of how important actually being with people is then read this. We have spent much of the last 4 weeks on our own in isolation for the better good, for what matters,  and I know how much better I feel going for a walk and stopping for a chat with neighbours or others that I may meet on my circuit. Humans are social beasts, we are not supposed to be on our own, and this book will make you see this. A real gem.

THE HOLDOUT by Graham Moore

Here is a whodunnit thriller with all sorts of twists and turns, I actually got a bit confused by the time the ending came around and now some weeks after finishing I can't remember what the outcome was! Anyway ten years ago Maya was on a jury for the trial of a young black man accused of killing a white school girl, who body is never found. She is adamant that he is innocent and over the course of the deliberations manages to persuade all her fellow jurors to a not guilty verdict. The trial was a total sensation in its day, went on for months, the jury having to be contained in a hotel for almost the entire time with massive fallouts for each of the jury members in their personal and professional lives. Now ten years later, one of the jury members has announced he has new evidence that he is going to present at a special reunion TV show. The jurors are all put in the same hotel and rooms they were in 10 years ago, all going well until the juror with the evidence is found dead, and it is revealed that Maya, now a successful defence attorney, was the last person to see him. A great whodunnit - not only with Maya trying to find  out who murdered who fellow juror, and may also be after her, but also who murdered the young girl all those years ago. Honestly, I had no idea where this was going.

THE RATLINE: LOVE, LIES AND JUSTICE ON THE TRAIL OF A NAZI WAR FUGITIVE by Philippe Sands

This is non-fiction, and documents the investigation the author makes into the life and times of a Nazi, Otto Wachter, who was wanted for war crimes but managed to evade the allies after the war, dying in suspicious circumstances in a hospital in Rome in 1949. Wachter set up the  Krakow ghetto and in charge of what happened there, and then was the Governor of Galicia, an area in Ukraine also heavily populated with Jews. The author had Jewish relatives in this area who died while Wachter was in charge. Sands’ research is meticulous and vast, not only books, news articles of the day, but also pages and pages of letters between Otto and his wife Charlotte, and diaries that Charlotte had kept over the course of her life. He also spends hours and hours with Otto and Charlotte’s son Horst, and the son of a close family friend, also a  war criminal who was executed after the Nuremburg trials. The attitudes of the two men to what their respective fathers did during the war is revealing and disturbing. The legacy the families of former Nazis have to carry around is enormous, and continues to affect later generations. The Ratline refers to the process that Nazis took to escape post war Germany and Europe, beginning at the Vatican – this book shows how totally implicit the Catholic church was in its support of the Nazis and the philosoply of the Third Reich – after all it was the Jews that crucified Jesus – ending usually in Argentina which also fully supported the Nazi regime. This would appear to be what Otto was trying to do that led him to Rome. In his research Sands uncovers much more than a man on the run, and in true spy thriller fashion, there are a number of unexpected surprises – all true!  It is an easy book to read, totally engrossing, but it is very heavy on the finer detail of the research, some editing would certainly have helped.

FINDING CLARA by Anika Scott

It's great to see novels coming out about the experiences of the average German person during the terrible days of WWII and after. If you take out the borders between all these countries of Europe, then aside from the leadership the peoples weren't really any different from each other, all just trying to survive, feeding themselves and their families. And being about people just like us, such stories make us ask ourselves what we would have done in such 'survival of the fittest' times.

In this novel there are three people, all badly damaged and traumatised by the war years. Clara Falkenburg is the young woman of the title. The book opens in 1946, Clara living under a false name and identity, from those now in charge of Germany - the English, the Americans, and the Russians. She is a wanted woman, having been a poster girl for the German propaganda machine, and supposedly implicit in her father's war crimes. During the war she ran her father's ironworks factory that made munitions for the German army,  employing slave labour to do so, effectively making her guilty too. She is desperate to get back to the town, Essen, where she lived, where the factory was, where her oldest friend and family live. Clara is fearless, scared, dangerous and a risk taker. On Clara's return to Essen, with an English captain on her tail determined to arrest her, she finds everything changed, her town as she knew it gone, along with the people in it who were so dear to her.

Then there is Jakob, recently returned to Essen from the Russian front, where he has lost a leg and everything else. He is desperate to find and look after his own family, and as a black marketeer used to living by his wits, he has plenty of skills and charm to get what he wants.

Lastly there is Willy, a teenage boy, who has spent most of the war holed up in a cave guarding a huge Wehrmacht stash of food and essential supplies. Deeply traumatised by his experiences he has disintegrated into a feral like state, unable to trust anyone or want to rejoin the real world.

With so many people all out for themselves, exhausted, desperate, hungry, cold, trying to survive each day, you would think there would be little room for reaching out, for kindness, for recovery, to find meaning or goodness in daily life. The core of the story is Clara's moral dilemma - her need to resolve within herself whether she was guilty of war crimes or was she not? How much of her idea of caring for the Ukrainian slaves employed in the factory was really about caring? How corrupted had she become by the propaganda whirling around her during her months of running the factory and being held up as the perfect German fräulein? That there is also a bloke as nice and rascally as Jakob and a badly damaged boy in the mix only highlights the moral flaws of all us.

You can see then that the title is not only about the Allies' hunt for Clara, but also about Clara coming to terms with her own war years. This is such a great story, with great characters. I loved them all, so well developed. The town of Essen and how hideous life would have been in post war Germany is also graphically described, not only the physical nature of the place, but the sense of hopelessness, loss and tragedy emanating from the people. Terrible times, and so important that we continue to have great reading coming out of this time in our history.

A MADNESS OF SUNSHINE by Nalini Singh

Now it is school holidays and if we weren't in covid 19 bubbles many people and families would be in holiday homes around the country, swelling the populations of small towns, coastal, lake side and river communities. Sounds idyllic. Golden Cove is one such town, fictional of course, situated on the rugged, in places quite isolated and insular West Coast of New Zealand. They breed the people tough in these pockets of NZ, it's a man's world - hard men, where the women have to be tough too, able to hold their own in these places. There are dark secrets here too, with mysterious disappearances of young women some eight years previous. But there are plenty of good people too, as in all communities who look out for each other, and it is in times of crisis that a community really comes together.

Into this town returns Anahera Spenser-Ashby who some years before escaped the small town, making her way to London, and marrying what would be deemed well. Turns out he is not such a good husband and she decides to come to back to Golden Cove, licking her wounds, to live in the small house close to the sea that was where she lived her mother before her mother's death, possibly suspicious as Anahera's father was a violent man. And still lives in the area.

She is warmly welcomed by childhood friends and others. There is also a new cop in the place, recently sent from Christchurch, demoted to a small town for misdeeds that are slowly revealed. An immediate frission of sexual tension is apparent. There is also a beautiful young woman, Miriama, who works in the local cafe, saving money for her own escape from the small town to university and beyond. All the males in the place clearly adore her and it is all a little creepy how blatant their lust/adoration/glorying of this gorgeous creature is. Naturally she disappears, and a large chunk of the book is devoted to searching for her. At the same time the characters, possible motivations and interpersonal relationships of the locals are revealed.

In a nutshell then this is a whodunnit, where almost everyone is a suspect, and other women in the town, such as Anahera, begin to feel threatened and anxious about the men in their lives. The undercurrent tone of fear, intrigue, and imminent danger is very real, making this book a great page turner. The setting is also perfect for the tone of this story - the wild West Coast can be a darkly beautiful and threatening place, dense native bush, stormy beaches and windy sand dunes, small bleak towns, winding roads - a character all on its own.

But despite a great story there are also niggles - yet again we have a novel where young women are the victims, brutally murdered. All over our TVs, movie screens, the daily news this is what we are confronted with - violence against women. And usually done by men they know. Same same here, and not different. I don't know if this is the author's point, to highlight again this situation, but if it is she offers no solutions to this never going away soon problem. Do we really need to read another novel with young women being murdered as its premise? Despite this, the author's talent as a writer is out there plain to see and read, making for a really engrossing and thrilling novel. In the end the baddy really was quite a surprise. 

HOW THE DEAD SPEAK by Val McDermid

Never read a Val McDermid before, and with so many great reviews of her books, here I am giving it a go! She wrote Wire in the Blood, which was made into a successful TV series. So why not start with her latest in the Tony Hill and Carol Jordan series. It is definitely a risk to start with the latest in an established series - this is her 11th in the series, the first one being published in 1995 - so long ago and still  going strong by all accounts.  Sure it would help to start from the beginning, but I was told I would not need to, so I didn't. And the advice was quite correct, with sufficient background given so that I had a reasonable idea of what had been going on previously.  I guess most readers have followed the series for more than just the latest and would get frustrated with rereading what they know.

Tony Hill is a clinical psychologist, who has worked extensively for the police as a criminal profiler. He is currently in prison for something momentous that happened in the previous novel. He has worked closely with DCI Carol Jordan for a long time - are they lovers? I suspect so but not having read any others, can't say for sure. She has been booted out of the force for reasons related to the previous novel - I really do need to read this! She is very much at a loose end, having the lost the job that gave her a reason for living, and her close relationship with Tony. She finds herself involved in an organisation that looks at miscarriages of justice, and continues to have contact with Tony from afar.

Meantime work on a construction site, which happens to be a former convent, is stopped when what appears to be a graveyard of the bodies of young women is discovered. Around the same time another set of graves are also discovered on the same property but these bodies are of young men. A man is in prison for the murders of these young men, but it becomes clear he is not the murderer, and when another young man goes missing, Carol finds her investigative skills are working overtime.

I love a good thriller, especially of the psychological variety, and this filled the brief nicely. Great characters in Carol and Tony, very imperfect and real in how they behave, think, react to the different and unsettling turns their lives have taken.  This is also a good story, surprising twists, well paced, and a solid outcome. Time to read more! 

A MURDER AT MALABAR HILL by Sujata Massy

I have to admit I have a bias to books written by and/or about India, having lived there for a bit. Everything about India is complicated, contrary, disturbing, often impossible for Western eyes to understand or make sense of, but always intriguing and surprising with so much to discover and learn. And here is another to tempt me! This novel is the first in a series featuring a young woman lawyer in Mumbai during the 1920s. Perveen Mistry is the only female lawyer in Bombay at this time - seen as a novelty, a threat, a misfit, subject to prejudice, rudeness, spite. None of this is going to get her down, and working in her father's very established practice gives her considerable kudos and protection. Even though she is forbidden from working in court, she is a valuable asset to the firm for her investigative skills, her ability to talk with and listen to clients.

This becomes particularly handy when the firm is engaged to investigate a suspicious will on the behalf of three widows living in full purdah in a large house on Malabar Hill. The dead man, husband to all three women, was a valued client of the firm, and when Perveen notices something unusual in the will, she begins digging. Being female of course gives her considerable advantage, because she is the only person that is able to interview, meet with and so gain the confidence of the three widows. It becomes clear quite quickly that something very underhand has taken place, and we are soon in the middle of a whodunnit, with Perveen finding herself in some danger.

On starting this novel, I thought I was going to be reading something light, bit frivolous  - zealous and earnest young woman taking on the baddies - very Nancy Drew. . But  I misjudged - never judge a book by its cover, no matter how enticing and attractive. A sinister element creeps in to Perveen's life in the first few pages, we learn that she has graduated from Oxford University - a highly unusual status for any woman in the 1920s, let alone a young woman from India. Her closest friend from her Oxford days happens to the be the daughter of a very high ranking British official living in Bombay, her friendship with Perveen leading to considerable social issues with her friend's parents.

From the beginning I was wondering how does a young Parsi girl from a deeply religious and conservative sect of Indian society go to Oxford University by herself, get a degree, come back and work in her chosen field in the 1920s? As I said earlier this is a country full of surprises. The appearance of that troublesome character in the first few pages takes Perveen back some years earlier when a marriage is being arranged for her. This does not go well, in fact it goes very badly. The author has tapped into the underbelly of much of conservative religious India, highlighting the often appalling treatment that young women, seen simply as possessions of their families to be sold off, suffer from in the marriages made on their behalf. Even though Perveen's parents are educated, cultured and sophisticated in Western ways, they too fall victim to the ancient rituals and ways of doing things their religion and unique culture demands. The three widows Perveen is helping are also victims of the society they are born into.

So we have here a good story, well told, but also with considerable social commentary on the state of women in India. This may be set in the 1920s, and things have improved enormously for women in India in the decades since, but we must never lose sight of how women in many many societies and cultures continue to be suppressed and controlled by the men who supposedly love them.

I see now that there is a second Perveen Mistry novel - can't wait to read that - no more Nancy Drew for me!