Last Book That You Read- Fiction

Prisoner Monkeys wrote:

Well, I finished Cemetary Dance. It wasn't bad, though I was a little disappointed that everything was solved rationally, and that Pendergast had to explain everything to everyone in the aftermath. I feel that the best mysteries as the ones where the readers can work out the answer before the characters do - but only a page or two ahead of the characters. That said, I did like the way they littered a few clues throughout the story, so I could at least work out who it was ahead of Pendergast, even if the motives were a little obscure. The pacing of the finale was a bit off, too, as it tried to split between half a dozen characters, and it sometimes cut back to someone I didn't care for much (like the incompetent police chief directing the barricade).

I did get the feeling that Cemetary Dance was an interlude, even before I was aware that it came immediately after a trilogy. I deliberately chose it for thsi very reason - I didn't want to get into the "Helen" trilogy without being familiar with the characters, lest I find the style of prose off-putting and giving up on what might otherwise be a good book.

Well at least now, you've experienced the enigma that is Agent Pendergast. I think the wiki blurb sums him up pretty well.

Aloysius Xingú Leng Pendergast is a fictional character appearing in novels by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. He first appeared as a supporting character in their first novel, Relic, and in its sequel Reliquary, before assuming the protagonist role in The Cabinet of Curiosities.Pendergast is a special agent with the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). He is a favorite among fans for his unique personality, cultural discernment, and his almost preternatural competence. He works out of the New Orleans, Louisiana branch of the FBI, but frequently travels out of state to investigate cases which interest him, namely those appearing to be the work of serial killers.

The authors could have easily dropped him after #2 Reliquary, and did set him aside, but when they came back to him, it was whole hog. Cabinet of Curiosities really puts him front and centre and its from this point, that the Pendergast-verse really starts to develop. The strangest character in the Pendergast world, is his young ward Constance Greene. Even the authors acknowledge they haven't quite sorted her out. Her origins are rooted in Cabinet of Curiosities but there is still much to be discovered about her.

I think the strongest work thus far, aside from Cabinet which is real creepy, is the Diogenes trilogy, although this Helen trilogy looks like it could finish real strong too.

I liked Fever Dream, though I had to re-read a few sections because the action moved around a lot.

I was disappointed by Cold Vengeance, though - as soon as Nazis were mentioned, my interest slumped. Nazis are what I like to call "easy evil" because it doesn't take much to turn the character into a villain. All you have to do is mention that a character is a Nazi, and they're automatically an antagonist. Consequently, I found Falkoner to be a very weak villain, and Cold Vengeance was just a bridging novel between Fever Dream and Two Graves. I wonder if Preston and Child even knew that Fever Dream would start a trilogy, because practically every loose end was tied up and there was no reason to believe that Helen was alive until halfway through Cold Vengeance, so the end result felt a bit contrived, like they were trying to loosen ends that had already been tied off.

Wow. What a weird coincidence. Without having read this thread in several weeks, and having no knowledge of other people discussing Agent Pendergast or the authors of Preston and Child, Monday I was in a used book store and picked up CABINET OF CURIOSITIES ( :5*:) ....never really having heard of the Agent Pendergast character or sets of novels, although I had read Douglas Preston's book Blasphemy a few years ago and was just mildly entertained.




So anyway, I'm reading the back of the book to get an idea of the overall story. I purchase it Monday. It took me 4 days to tear through this 628 page book. Even when I started to nod off and fall asleep, I would get up, splash some water on my face, get a cold drink, and try and keep myself awake a little bit longer to keep on reading. It's a real page turner. Plus, my curiosity was piqued because the bookstore owner told me she put the book down halfway through and refused to read the rest of it because it scared her so much.

The characters are very well drawn out and detailed. The dialogue is believable. The prose moves quickly. Every page makes you want to get on to the next page. There is no fat in the storyline. The authors keep the story moving briskly. I wouldn't say I was necessarily scared, but I did put a sheet of paper on the pages below the lines I was reading so that my eyes wouldn't wander down and try and read what was coming up ahead. The authors do a great job of detailing what life was like as a kid in 1871 Manhattan, then juxtapose it with the intersection of business, politics, and police work in modern-day Manhattan. You feel as if you were really in those places; the level of detail and attention paid is that terrific.

This is a definitely a book I will read again. It's creepy, moody, and maybe a little scary at times. But the characters are richly drawn out, and especially Agent Pendergast. It's hard to find real, quality writing these days that moves me. I'm hard to please, but this book just sucked me right in.


If you like thrillers about serial killers in turn of the century London or New York, I'd consider reading Caleb Carr's THE ALIENIST. Another 5 star effort in the genre.

Right - Cabinet of Curiosities is definitely on my shopping list. I'm not sure about The Alienist though. Is that the one where Freud turns into Sherlock Holmes and Jung is cast as some charlatan fraudster type?

Ravenstone wrote:

Right - Cabinet of Curiosities is definitely on my shopping list. I'm not sure about The Alienist though. Is that the one where Freud turns into Sherlock Holmes and Jung is cast as some charlatan fraudster type?

Not sure I understand the question about THE ALIENIST, so I'll play it straight. THE ALIENIST is set somewhere between the late 1880's and the early-to-mid-1890's....in Manhattan and outer areas. Alienists were apparently what we would call today "psychiatrists" or "psychologists". Like James Cameron's Titanic, Caleb Carr's 'Alienist' uses real life people (Teddy Roosevelt) and situations as the backdrop for a much bigger, more interesting story.

Dr.Kreizler is a controversial alienist in 19th century Manhattan, who brings together a diverse group of people to help solve the identity of a serial killer murdering teenage and pre-teen boy whores. His techniques are considered "controversial" because they're cutting edge (for 1893 New York) and have never been used before (like fingerprinting, psychological profiling).

This book takes you back in time...to an era where children were viewed very differently than they are today...especially poor children (at least in the U.S.). It wasn't uncommon or odd to see kids working in dangerous jobs in factories at the age of 10 or 12.....working in bars....or selling themselves as prostitutes. The lead character, Dr. Laslo Kreitzler (think Johnny Depp), takes an interest in them and tries to better their lives, including solving a string of murders aimed primarily at these "throw away" kids. The story details the sort of opposition Kreitzler would have received from the police force back then, as nobody would have spent any resources to solve these murders.

The book is very good at detailing how cutting edge and forward-thinking Kreitzler has to be to solve this almost impossible task without any of the benefits of modern technology that we take for granted.

I came to this book about 3 or 4 years ago after reading an article in MOVIELINE(?) Magazine about the 20 Best Scripts Never Filmed in Hollywood. Caleb Carr's THE ALIENIST was on the list. At different times, different studios had developed a script for movie based on the book, but for different reasons it never got filmed. The main reason that stood out was that Hollywood wasn't sure a movie about murdered boy prostitutes was going to be a big sell.....so it sits un-filmed at this time.

Here's a description from Amazon:

The year is 1896, the place, New York City. On a cold March night New York Times reporter John Schuyler Moore is summoned to the East River by his friend and former Harvard classmate Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, a psychologist, or "alienist." On the unfinished Williamsburg Bridge, they view the horribly mutilated body of an adolescent boy, a prostitute from one of Manhattan's infamous brothels.

The newly appointed police commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt, in a highly unorthodox move, enlists the two men in the murder investigation, counting on the reserved Kreizler's intellect and Moore's knowledge of New York's vast criminal underworld. They are joined by Sara Howard, a brave and determined woman who works as a secretary in the police department. Laboring in secret (for alienists, and the emerging discipline of psychology, are viewed by the public with skepticism at best), the unlikely team embarks on what is a revolutionary effort in criminology-- amassing a psychological profile of the man they're looking for based on the details of his crimes. Their dangerous quest takes them into the tortured past and twisted mind of a murderer who has killed before. and will kill again before the hunt is over.

Fast-paced and gripping, infused with a historian's exactitude, The Alienist conjures up the Gilded Age and its untarnished underside: verminous tenements and opulent mansions, corrupt cops and flamboyant gangsters, shining opera houses and seamy gin mills. Here is a New York during an age when questioning society's belief that all killers are born, not made, could have unexpected and mortal consequences.

Ah - no, that's not the story I was thinking of, and actually sounds interesting.

The one I'm thinking of really is Freud investigating a murder, the style of which reminded me of Sherlock Holmes. And Jung was portrayed as a particularly nasty vicious piece of work. I think it was called The Interpretation of Murder, if I remember correctly, now I come to think about it.


Ah - now I remember where I've heard the name Caleb Carr. He wrote a Sherlock Holmes pastiche I reviewed once. The Italian Secretary. It was not a good read, nor a particularly favourable review.

Ravenstone wrote:

Ah - no, that's not the story I was thinking of, and actually sounds interesting.

The one I'm thinking of really is Freud investigating a murder, the style of which reminded me of Sherlock Holmes. And Jung was portrayed as a particularly nasty vicious piece of work. I think it was called The Interpretation of Murder, if I remember correctly, now I come to think about it.


Ah - now I remember where I've heard the name Caleb Carr. He wrote a Sherlock Holmes pastiche I reviewed once. The Italian Secretary. It was not a good read, nor a particularly favourable review.

True The Italian Secretary was a dissapointment in that it would have worked as a shorter story but due to some reasons was stretched up to a full novel.

There is a second Kreizler novel "the Angels of Darkness" by Caleb Carr which is pretty compelling reading as well.

I've got those novels next to the Matthew Pearl novels which are based in the same time and are actually pretty decent.

Not yet available on the Kindle, but I've clicked the request button.

Yes, The Italian Secretary was actually originally intended for a collection of short Sherlock Holmes' stories, but Carr said it was too long. He really should have just edited it down. From memory, about half of the story is a completely unnecessary and thoroughly boring conversation during a train journey.

saint mark wrote:

There is a second Kreizler novel "the Angels of Darkness" by Caleb Carr which is pretty compelling reading as well.

I've read that one also. It was a good read, but didn't engage me quite like THE ALIENIST did I think, in part, because the guilt of the woman was never really in question (if I recall correctly). The story required less of the elements from the first novel that made it so interesting to begin with.

London- Edward Rutherfurd

1300 pages of historical fiction detailing London through about four families, the first and oldest from Julius Caesar's invasion BC through Saxon, Medieval, Tudor times up to 1990 (when the book was written). Took me a week this time round (saying how many books I got through in December, an agonisingly long time) and intriguing again to track the families over a 1000 years. Slightly irritating how the 20th century portion feels sped through but perhaps by then it doesn't matter.

Onto Spies of Warsaw (Alan Furst)

Presuming that's the same 'Spies Of Warsaw' on which the starting-tonight David Tennant-starring 2-part Beeb 4 drama is based? Am intending to watch :) .

BATMAN: NO MAN'S LAND :3*:



SLEEPER :3*:



This one definitely didn't go where I thought it might. Turned out to be quite different than I was expecting. Different, but good. However, I have read better thrillers related to the Pentagon, even if not in the exact same genre (QUIKSILVER comes to mind).

Blunt Instrument wrote:

Presuming that's the same 'Spies Of Warsaw' on which the starting-tonight David Tennant-starring 2-part Beeb 4 drama is based? Am intending to watch :) .

Aye, one reason why I read it. Though I've read a couple of Furst's a year or so ago.

Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson's A Memory of Light, the fourteenth and final book in The Wheel of Time series. I read it in a single sitting ... which lasted fifteen hours, since the book is over 900 pages long.

I'd been waiting for this one for a long time, but I felt a little let down by it. It revolves around the final battle between humanity and the forces of darkness, and while battles were to be expected, I wasn't expecting over 800 pages' worth of them. At times, it is immensely - and some might say unnecessarily - complex, with four different battle fronts and lots of jumping back and forth, since everything happens simultaneously. I was also a little let down by the revelation of who one of the key villains of the series was; the books are seeded with plenty of contradictory evidence implying who he is and what role he played, but the end result was that he was none of them, and was instead working somewhere else that never played a big role until this book. He's a strong character and does plenty of damage, but the way he was introduced felt like the authors were just drawing things out even longer. Likewise, a secondary villain who spends most of the previous thirteen books threatening to kill the main character (and very nearly doing so when the primary villains could not) shows up right at the end and does nothing, making his whole story arc a little pointless.

The ending was, however, satisfying. The book just felt a bit like QUANTUM OF SOLACE, really: an extended epilogue to what had come before, with a few interesting ideas and themes that get drowned out by the sounds of constant battle.

FATHERLAND (1992) :5*:



I'm on a roll this year. Two weeks into the year and I've read two 5-star books.

I'd read a book by Harris before (Pompeii), but was not overly impressed. FATHERLAND takes a few pages to really get into, but once you start it up, it was hard to put it down.

It envisions a world where the Nazi's won World War 2, but many of its people aren't aware of the costs associated with that win, and a routine investigation into an apparent drowning threatens to bring down the entire Third Reich.

This book worked on so many levels. The protagonist is a complex German homicide investigator; Harris doesn't make him an angel. He has a past, and he also loves, or thinks he loves, at least some aspects of modern Nazi Germany, and abhors what he has heard about America. Harris does an absolutely five-star job of bringing home the horrors of WW2 for the Jews in ways I've not really ever wanted to think about (too terrible to contemplate), not to mention the political and social forces that Harris is up against as he tries to investigate a death in a country that doesn't want its citizens to stray from the herd or stand out in any way.

As I said, the story takes a few pages to get into, mostly because you have to read through some German words, but once you get the hang of reading words like Oppergruppenfuhrer, the prose flows right along.

The book has also got a few neat little twists and plot turns that genuinely threw me off, but you never feel cheated by the author.

Pompeii is the best of Harris' Roman books, though I've read them once I couldn't quite get into Imperium and Lustrum and the Fear Index was rather disappointing. Fatherland is the best and Archangel and Enigma close on its heels. Harris has a new one out this year, D I think it is but who knows how good that'll be.

Wasn't there a Craig-starring adap of Archangel by the Beeb?

Blunt Instrument wrote:

Wasn't there a Craig-starring adap of Archangel by the Beeb?

there was indeed.

THE LIGHT OF OTHER DAYS :4*:


Fairly deep book that gets into worm hole theory, virtual reality, quantum physics....looks at the ramifications of inventing a device that sees through walls, from any angle, any time of the day or night. It imagines a world where privacy completely breaks down. Everyone can see what everyone else is doing.

THE GHOST :5*:



I didn't know the movie THE GHOST WRITER was based on this book (haven't seen the movie, but now I will). It's a good, old-fashioned thriller that's hard to find these days.

So, obviously, Adam Lang is a thinly-veiled jab at Tony Blair. Does this book accurately reflect the view of any in Britain that Tony Blair was inexplicably George W. Bush's lap-dog? That he was manipulated by someone close to his inner circle that was a lifelong CIA operative? It never came across to me that way during the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

funnily I'm driving through The Ghost at the moment. I put it in my 'to read' pile after watching the film. I read it before the film of course but reading it with view to how it came across on screen. Brosnan fairly captures Lang and Lang is fairly close to Blair but subtle differences (Oxford/Cambridge for example). It's not a bad back but after Pompeii the other day, fairly jarring.

Polanski was going to film Pompeii but it got cancelled through the writer's strike. Would've been interesting. Supposedly he's going to do a film of Harris' as yet unreleased D.

After Ghost I'll likely plunge through Archangel, Imperium and Lustrum (Conspirata in the US)

Always tend to read Harris en masse.

I enjoyed THE GHOST. Read it before I saw the film, which I also enjoyed. I'd say it's a rare instance of book and film being equally satsifying. It's the only Harris I've read. Might give FATHERLAND a go.

Loomis wrote:

I enjoyed THE GHOST. Read it before I saw the film, which I also enjoyed. I'd say it's a rare instance of book and film being equally satsifying. It's the only Harris I've read. Might give FATHERLAND a go.

I have to say that there was never any intention of picking up and reading three Robert Harris novels. I go to used bookstores and I tend to look mostly in Fiction, and I tend to key in on several different words or phrases; it also helps if it has a good cover. I sort of go into the book store without any idea of what I am looking for; I just browse and whatever catches my interest I buy.

So, it's mostly a coincidence that I have read three different Robert Harris novels within a year. I read Pompeii sometime last year, and gave it about a 3-star review. A bit of time went by and I then picked up FATHERLAND early this year or late last year. FATHERLAND was a 5-star book. I then picked up THE GHOST last week, and I suspected as I read the back cover that it was the basis for the 2010 Brosnan movie, but when that movie came out I did not know it was based on a book. I do remember being *vehemently* against seeing the movie (over at CBn) because of Polanski's involvement.

I'm guessing THE GHOST gives the "liberal" perspective of "The War On Terror". If so, I can say that even if you disagree politically with the premise of the book, I don't think the political inclinations of the writer so overwhelm the narrative that libertarians and conservatives can't enjoy the book either. It's a fair political; I don't think it tilts to an extreme ideology one way or the other. And for that, I thank Mr. Harris.

POMPEII :3*:
FATHERLAND :5*:
THE GHOST :5*:

Currently reading Atonement... 8 chapters in, thought the first page and a half cemented that it is a deftly written book!

Restless, William Boyd.

largely as to see the BBC dramatisation which I've still got 'taped' from Christmas. Also for the future Bond book but having read Any Human Heart and liked that, why not. Not a bad book, though somehow wished he hadn't used the first narrative for the daughter.