Fiction Sold Short - Kindle Singles

I've been trying out some of the new Kindle singles that Amazon are pushing, which include some of the big names in fiction.  But, although the quality is high, I'm inclined to think you can get better bargains for your money on the indie scene.  These are just two of the fiction singles I've read in the last few weeks.

Helen Dunmore - The Landlubbers Lying Down Below

A Penguin Special

Helen Dunmore’s fiction is always excellent - Amina's Blanket is one of my favourite stories of all time.  In terms of quality this story is no exception - but I felt it was a little too short to be a Kindle Single.  On the Indie market, stories as short as this are usually sold in threes, as triplets.  The story itself is slender - a black child-slave in 18th century Britain makes friends with the young Mozart.  He is humiliated by his employer and his life thereafter follows a different path. It is beautifully written, but slight - only 12 Kindle pages at normal font size for a whopping £1.99p. Come on Penguin!  We want a bit more for our money than this. One of the disadvantages of buying an e-book is that you can't see how thick it is before you hand over the credit card.

Susan Hill:  Chrystal

Published by Long Barn Books

This is a more reasonable length - about 20 Kindle pages - and a more reasonable price, at 99p.  Susan Hill has constructed a perfect evocation of an Irish Catholic childhood and the pressures on a young man to enter the priesthood.  It isn’t a cheerful story, and left me rather sad - but it is undoubtedly true to real life. In these days when we are all questioning the necessity of celibacy for priests, and the results of insisting on their sacrifice of any personal sexual life, the story has a very contemporary theme.  But I still think that we need a little more length for a satisfying read.

The Back Road: Rachel Abbott

The Back Road

by Rachel Abbott

Crime/Thriller


Having just read The Back Road in two sittings, I can understand why Rachel Abbott’s first novel, Only the Innocent, reached the Amazon no.1 slot and stayed there.  The Back Road will probably do the same.  Not only is it tightly plotted, with intricate twists and turns, the writing is also of the highest standard.

The novel opens with a punch in the gut and goes on to tantalise.  Leo and her sister Ellie have some seriously bad family history, but both girls have made good - Leo is a successful Life Coach and Ellie has an apparently perfect marriage and affluent life-style.  Ellie has just moved into their childhood home - which she has inherited - and is having a dinner party to celebrate its renovation.  Leo has come, reluctantly, and is courageously trying to face her demons.

The pace slows, momentarily, for us to meet the dinner guests - a mixture of childhood friends and their partners and a new, very attractive, policeman who has recently moved into the village.  The celebrations are overshadowed by a terrible accident that had occurred the previous evening - when a young girl had been knocked down on the back road and left for dead.  Ellie is nursing the girl in the hospital intensive care unit and the prognosis isn’t good.

It soon emerges that several of the guests were not where they should have been when the accident took place (including Ellie) and several couples are hiding secrets from each other - secrets that will put their lives in danger, because (in true Agatha Christie style) one of the guests at the table is a killer.

It’s a very complex plot, which owes as much to Ruth Rendell’s psychological thriller genre as it does to Christie’s plotting, and although I worked out who the likely killer was, a few pages from the end, it only racked up the tension and the climax was completely unexpected.  Past and present collide head on in the final pages. This novel is a very original mix of traditional crime/thriller elements that really, really, works.

Thanks Rachel - you had me hooked, and, for a puzzle addict, you gave me lots to think about!
Rachel has also, generously, given me a detailed interview talking about her writing generally and The Back Road specifically.  To read what she has to say, click here. 

The Back Road
Only the Innocent
Rachel Abbott's Blog

I'm a member of the Reading Between the Lines review collective. Take a look!

 

The Consul General's Wife: Aliefka Bijlsma

The Consul General's Wife
by Aliefka Bijlsma
Translated from the Dutch by Kate Brown

Literary Fiction

Melchior, Holland’s Consul General in Brazil, is one of the ‘old school’ of career diplomats.  He enjoys the privileges and the personal power the post confers on him.  But times are changing - budgets are being cut, there’s a new ethical code and new political masters who have sent him a young deputy, Tygo, bent on observing the new diplomatic code to the letter and with instructions to  impose strict budget guidelines.

The story opens with the arrival of a young intern, the daughter of one of Melchior’s old friends.  Nikki is very attractive and very aware of her own powers over men.  More than a match for the licentious Melchior.  Quite unconsciously, Nikki, will contribute to her boss’s downfall.

The Consul General is cared for by a Ghanaian woman, Mercy, who was ‘rescued’ by him 18 years ago, and who cooks, washes and cleans for him, managing his household in the way a wife would do.  Melchior’s actual wife, Leandra, a gifted photographer, considerably younger than her husband, lies in a guest bedroom, suffering from ME, often referred to as chronic fatigue syndrome.   Leandra is a convenient scapegoat for Melchior when things begin to unravel for him.

The author explores the physiology and psychology of ME with great insight.  Leandra is being destroyed by it.  But she is determined to regain her health and get her life back. Her long sojourn in solitude forces her to think very deeply about her life and her career and what kind of future she wants to have.

The novel is very, very well written - a wonderful exploration of the relationships between five people - Melchior, Leandra, Tygo, Nikki and Mercy.  The book touches on some interesting subjects and makes the reader think about a lot of different issues. There is more than one type of colonialisation -  and what exactly is national identity? To what extent are we the product of our childhoods?  How are the mind and body interlinked?

Originally published in Holland by traditional publishers, Aliefka Bijlsman has commissioned an English language edition and published it independently.  She was the first Dutch author to Crowd-Fund the translation of a book.(Aliefka tells the story of how she did it here.)  I really can’t understand why the novel wasn’t taken up commercially world-wide. The story is high quality literary fiction (it’s been compared to Graham Greene). The translation is expertly done. I had no sense that the novel had not been written in English - I can’t praise the translator enough.  There are half a dozen typos the proof-reader missed, but they didn’t spoil my enjoyment - there isn’t an e-book out there, whether it’s a Random House or an Indie, that doesn’t have some digital glitch or 3.

The book is a slow burn - but it repays close attention.  After I’d finished the book (a very satisfying ending and not at all predictable!) I went back to the beginning to read the first chapters again.  The Consul General’s Wife comes very well recommended - and not just by me.

Scott Pack said:
“It is uncomfortable reading at times, but also quite captivating. I was reminded of Borgen in places because of the look inside the home lives of political individuals, but most of all of Thomas Kennedy's Falling Sideways which I read earlier in the year."


I'm a member of the review collective 'Reading Between the Lines'.  For more book reviews and recommendations please go to Reading Between the Lines.

Linda Gillard: The Glass Guardian

I don’t normally buy paranormal fiction, though I read the 'Turn of the Screw' at university and last year very much enjoyed Dee Weaver’s indie published novel ‘The Winter House’.  So I wondered how I’d feel about Linda Gillard’s new novel ‘The Glass Guardian’.  The ingredients intrigued me - a musical mystery, a concealed stained glass window, a first world war journal, and a love affair with a ghost, all set in a magnificent, dilapidated house on the Isle of Skye.

Ruth Travers, a TV gardening presenter, has been recently bereaved, losing her lover, her father and her beloved Aunt Janet within the space of a year.  Living alone on the island in the house she has inherited from her Aunt - a famous classical composer - Ruth believes she may be losing her mind when things begin to go bump in the night and a strange red-headed figure in a kilt begins to materialise in the shrubbery.

‘For a start, [ghosts] don’t exist. Obviously.  And even if they did, you aren’t the kind of sad weirdo who’d see one. Ghosts only happen to attention-seeking fantasists with over-active imaginations’.   Ruth is a very normal woman who doesn’t seem to fit any of the categories she mentions, although her life has been so disrupted by grief, if does cross the reader’s mind that she might not be the best person to make an assessment.  Can her judgement be relied on?

There are two other, rather more substantial, men in Ruth’s life; the first is her childhood friend Tom who has been working as a gardener for her Aunt Janet. Tom is single, muscular, and not only attractive, but attracted to Ruth.  Then there is a persistent Canadian musicologist, anxious to look at her Aunt’s papers and resolve an old mystery regarding one of her most famous compositions.  But it’s the ‘phantom lover’ who occupies Ruth’s thoughts, to the point of obsession.

This novel sits firmly in a genre I didn’t even know existed, which is listed on the internet as ‘Adult Paranormal Romance’.  The contents of books in this category are pretty much what the label implies - adult romance with paranormal elements.  I had a quick skip through some examples and quickly realised that, although the Glass Guardian fits the description of the genre, it is much, much better written than most - as you’d expect from an author whose books are described on Amazon as ‘Women’s Literary Fiction’.

Linda Gillard knows how to write a page-turner.  Among her novels House of Silence is still my favourite, though I also loved Untying the Knot.  Many of her readers have liked the Glass Guardian more than her other novels, but I wouldn’t go as far as that.  I’m a complete cynic when it comes to the paranormal - there’s always a knot of cold logic in the centre of my brain that won’t suspend its disbelief, however much I’m enjoying the tale.  But enjoy it I did, in spite of my scepticism.  I wanted to stand in the garden facing the sea and feel the wind blowing in from the Atlantic and glimpse the mountains at my back.  I wanted to be in that kitchen with its warm Aga, a glass of Talisker in my hand, and a very attractive piece of Scottish talent doing the washing up.

The author has already anticipated readers’ reservations - as one of the characters remarks: ‘I used to be more sceptical myself, when I was young and not easily impressed, but I have a clever little sister who’s a particle physicist. Believe me, by the time you’ve had String Theory explained to you, ghosts seem really quite mundane and the existence of time travel only a matter of - well, time.’

I finished reading the novel on a ferry, at night, in the middle of the north sea, and I thought how rare it is to find an author whose books you can trust to be a reliably good read without being the same novel written over and over again.  I have to agree with a fellow reviewer  who wrote that ‘Linda Gillard writes convincingly and authentically about emotions and relationships, creating believable female characters and attractive male leads, incorporating serious elements, and humour, as well as always delivering a highly readable, compelling storyline that keeps me engrossed.’   I still haven’t read 'A Lifetime Burning' or 'Emotional Geology', so it’s back to the Kindle store.  I’m a quick reader, so I hope she has more in the publishing pipeline!




This review first appeared as the Hallowe'en choice on the Indie E-Book Review which features independently published e-books.  The Glass Guardian is my October E-book of the month.

Sophie Nicholls: The Dress

Today I'm reviewing over at the Indie E-Book Review website and The Dress is my July E-book of the Month, a romantic novel (in the best sense) from a Salt-published poet who proves that Ewan Morrison in the Guardian is wrong, wrong, wrong.  There is some good stuff out there. (And there's quite a heated spat going on if you look in the comments after the article and at the Guardian's Facebook page - JA Konrath, Authors Electric and others taking EM on with no holds barred!).

But back to The Dress and my review:-

'Reading about an independently published novel by a first-time novelist who makes it to the top of the Amazon best-sellers’ list sounds like a fairy tale.  But this isn’t the much discussed Amanda Hocking, this is UK author Sophie Nicholls, whose novel, The Dress, has been an E-book sensation.  It isn’t sci-fi, or fantasy, or crime, or erotica, or any of the other ‘fashionable’ genres at the moment - just straight-forward fiction likely to appeal to a predominantly female audience right across the age spectrum.  

Of course, as it implies in the title, ‘It all began with a dress....’   Read more ......


I will be interviewing Sophie Nicholls to find our how she did it on the Authors Electric blogspot on August 5th. The answers to my questions were a surprise and very interesting.

The Survival of Thomas Ford: John AA Logan

This is my second E-book this month after Catherine Czerkawska’s Curiosity Cabinet, and both books really demonstrate the quality that is available on the E-platforms.  Both books were turned down by publishers after ‘rave rejections’, for marketing concerns and decisions that had nothing to do with the books themselves.

That both books have been in the top 5 sellers on Amazon demonstrates just how off-the-mark publishers have been recently.  Even celebrity memoirs aren’t selling as well and Dickens is languishing behind them too.

The Survival of Thomas Ford is a thriller that is at times extremely dark.  John Logan manages to get inside the mind of a teenage psychopath with chilling reality.  Thomas Ford loses his wife in a car crash caused by Jimmy and his friend Robert.  Ford is the only survivor and spends months in hospital recovering.  Despite his injuries he remembers, very clearly, the car and its occupants.  The police find it hard to believe him and for a while both the police and his in-laws suspect that Ford may have caused the accident himself.

Jimmy’s girl-friend is a cleaner at the hospital.  When he discovers that Thomas Ford is not only alive, but has given the police a description of him and his car, he decides that Ford must be removed.

The novel is very well written (crime fiction so often isn’t) and gripping all the way to the grisly end.  If you enjoyed the Wasp Factory and Train Spotting, or even if (like me) you didn’t, you’ll like this.    

March's E-book: The Curiosity Cabinet by Catherine Czerskawa

If you like well-written romantic fiction with a happy ending, hunky heroes, spectacular scenery and a historical backdrop, then you can’t do better than Catherine Czerkawska’s Curiosity Cabinet.  John Burnside thought so too, when he selected the novel for the Dundee Book Prize.

The cabinet in question is on display in a hotel on Garve - one of Scotland’s more remote islands where Gaelic is still spoken and the distant past still feels relatively recent.  No one knows where the cabinet and its intriguing contents have come from, but Alys - desperately looking for tranquility while her small son holidays elsewhere with her former husband and his new wife - is fascinated by it and determined to find out.  

Alys had been to the island as a child.  She and her brother had made friends with a boy called Donal who was around the same age.  Alys is surprised to find that he’s still there, and his family own the cabinet. There's an instant attraction between the two, but Alys has been badly mauled by the breakdown of her marriage and Donal is also elusive.

In a parallel story, several hundred years earlier,  the young Henrietta has been snatched from her Edinburgh home, leaving behind her baby son, and taken to the island of Garve where she is put into the custody of Manus McNeill - laird of the isle.  Initially distraught with grief for the loss of her child, she gradually begins to make sense of her situation and construct a new life for herself.  She is both attracted and repulsed by her captor.

The story of the Curiosity Cabinet and the part it plays in the lives of Henrietta and Alys is a very good read - the descriptions of the wild landscape are particularly vivid.  It’s what’s referred to as ‘a page turner’ and highly recommended in the romantic fiction category.   I wasn’t too sure about the way everything worked out so conveniently for everyone at the end - but that’s only cynical me - most people will love it!

The Orchid House: Avril Joy

I made a resolution quite a while ago to read (and hopefully review) one self-published e-book a month.  This month my chosen read is Avril Joy's 'The Orchid House', with its luscious cover -  positively inviting you to pick it up.  Sadly on Kindle it comes up as black and white - but maybe soon Kindle will get its act together and discover full colour!

If you love romantic fiction with a darker undertow, gardening and garden history then the Orchid House will please you.   There's a lot of (very good) sex in the book too - and it takes real talent to write about sex well.  Gardening, when you think about it, is all about sex - breeding plants, fertilising seeds, earth, nurturing fruit and flower.  I have to say that this is one of the most erotic novels I've read for a while.  From the steamy tropical ambience of Sri Lanka to the hot-houses of Trescombe in England, the reader is treated to sensual prose unfolding a plot that is both tragic and compelling.

The heroine, 27 year old Roma, has just lost her lover, who drowned  while body-surfing in rough seas off the coast of Sri Lanka.  She returns to England, unable to move on with her life, until she takes up a project, illustrating the 19th century diary of the head gardener at Trescombe - a stately home in Cornwall.  She begins to make a relationship with Will, the current head gardener, though neither of them seem able to commit to each other.  He is curiously withdrawn, and his real passion is for rare orchids, the most beautiful and mysterious of plants, and he spends a great deal of his time in the hot-houses where they grow.  But the orchid house conceals a terrible secret, and there has been another death by drowning ......

Into Roma's emotional twilight comes the sadistic Max, owner of Trescombe, and sexually irresistible to both men and women.  The whole situation becomes explosive and the lives of Roma, Will and Trescombe itself are all put in jeopardy.  But, of course, as a romance, all is healed in the end, the heroine gets the right hero and all is well.   I really didn't know how it was all going to work out and was very happy with the way the story was  concluded.

This is Avril Joy's second published book - the first was The Sweet Track, published by Flambard Press and very well received.   The story of  how it got into print and the reasons why she decided to publish her second novel herself are told on Avril's blog here.   The Orchid House nearly made it to Headline and Bloomsbury.  You have to ask yourself why they didn't take the plunge, since this is a very good read that's pleasing many people at the moment (8 four or five star reviews on amazon).   Are publishers going mad at the moment?  Or just lost in the new landscape of BookWorld?  They do seem to be turning down some very good reads. 

For me, there's only one little niggle - as with most Kindle books (even - alas - the top publishers) there are a few typos and formatting errors,  but these are easy to overlook when the story is so good.  What all e-published authors need is a good editing service at an affordable price - it's quite a different art to the usual kind of copy-editing.  Having fallen foul of the conversion process myself, I'd be first in the queue to sign up!


Avril talks about her life as a writer in prison 'Twenty Five Years Behind Bars',  and her writing, over on the Authors Electric Blogspot. 

E-Book - Wendy Robertson; Paulie's Web

I’m pledged to read one E-published book a month and this time it’s Wendy Robertson’s novel ‘Paulie’s Web’.  Wendy is a much-published author with more than 25 titles on the bookshelves.  Paulie’s Web is the novel her publishers didn’t want because they thought it too ‘difficult’ for her readership because it’s about women in prison and the challenges they face when released.  It came from several years spent working as a writer in prisons, an experience Wendy describes as ‘challenging and life-changing.’  

‘It has taken me ten years to digest the extremities of my experience in prison,’ Wendy says, ‘and write my novel as true fiction in a way that pays tribute to the many  women I met while working there. If, by the by, it goes some way to cracking the absurd stereotypes of women in prison it will be an extra delight.  While there are dark passages here I make no apologies for the ultimately optimistic tone of this story which is a true reflection of the humour, stoicism and kindness that I was witness to in my prison experience.’

The novel tells the story of 5 women locked in the same white van to be taken off to the remand centre.  One of them, Paulie, has been wrongly convicted and when she’s released, 6 years later, she’s determined to track down the other women and find out what’s happened to them. 

Paulie is a great character.  Wendy says that ‘If you are interested in the experiences of people on the margins of our comfortable lives, you will like Paulie! She is great – clever, resourceful and capable of surviving the hardest challenges that life throws up at her.’  In the prison, Paulie has become a writer and the women’s stories are interspersed with extracts from Paulie’s notebook. 

This is an honest novel - neither a misery memoir - which so many prison books are - or a romanticised version of unimaginably hard lives.  It offers a picture of a sector of society most of us know nothing of - except what we read in the papers.  I grew to love some of the characters - particularly Queenie, the elderly schizophrenic given to wandering and having visions, locked up in prison (like so many people with mental health issues) because there’s nowhere else to go.

There’s an underlying message in the book - Paulie finds redemption through the prison education system - through literature.  Wendy intended the novel to confront the issues of  ‘justice and injustice in ordinary people’s lives’, but it does more than that.

Wendy is an expert story-teller and wordsmith and Paulie’s Web is a delight to read, even though the subject matter is dark.  Hanging and flogging members of the House of Commons should be made to read it.




Wendy has an excellent blog on www.lifetwicetasted.blogspot.com

If you're interested in E-books and authors doing it for themselves, check out www.authorselectric.blogspot.com
           

E-Books, Linda Gillard and The House of Silence

Another respectably published author whose publisher didn't think her latest book was 'commercial' enough, so Linda took the business into her own hands and has already sold 12,000 copies of her novel over the internet without any hype, reviews, or marketing campaign.

Linda Gillard is one of my fellow authors over on what used to be 'Kindle Authors UK' before Amazon complained and is now 'Authors Electric'.

I liked the plot summary of House of Silence (Rebecca meets Cold Comfort Farm) so I downloaded a sample and was soon captivated enough to buy the book.   Like a lot of E-books, it's an affordable bargain at £1.90, unlike the outrageous £11.49 you have to pay to read Philippa Gregory on Kindle - twice the price of her paperbacks. How do they justify that?

This is a very well written novel, easy to read with a fascinating plot.  Gwen,  an orphan, meets Alfie, the actor, on the set of a BBC TV historical drama and begins an affair.  Things get a little sticky when he goes home for his annual Xmas visit and Gwen insists on being taken along too.

Alfie's mother is a famous children's author who has written a best-selling series based on her son.  She has four daughters, all outrageously neglected and is currently a senile figure confined to her bedroom (the mad woman in the attic).   Home is a 17th century manor in Norfolk (the aptly named Creake Hall)  and the family turns out to have more secrets than the Pentagon. 

I enjoyed every minute of  this book.  It's written with considerable panache and humour, despite the fact that there's a very serious underlying thread to the book - how do we, as individuals and families, deal with tragedy?

If publishers are going to turn down sure-fire bestsellers like this one (as they seem to be doing) then I'm afraid the industry is in for a crisis.  Authors don't need publishers any more.  Not when they can do it for themselves as successfully as this.


If you're interested in E-books and authors doing it for themselves, check out www.authorselectric.blogspot.com

Some Light Summer Reading

I’ve been working quite hard recently, have Italian exams looming and so not had much time for books that need a lot of concentration.  So I’ve been enjoying a bit of frivolous reading.

I read about Dee Weaver’s novel ‘The Winter House’ on the Strictly Writing blog and was intrigued enough to download a sample and then buy the book at the generous price of £2.14.

Dee is one of a new breed of Indie authors by-passing the publishers and going straight onto Kindle and other E-book platforms.   The Winter House is a gothic romance with elements of the supernatural and the pagan.  Dee is a pagan herself and knows the world of alternative relation well.  While not a believer in religion of any kind, re-incarnation, or the supernatural, Dee made me suspend my disbelief for the duration of the story.  It brought back the rather guilty pleasure I used to feel reading my mother’s Victoria Holt novels  - but Dee’s are very, very, much better written and the comparison should probably be with the Mysteries of Udolpho, Castle of Utranto, Northanger Abbey and others in that genre.   I notice from my trawls around the book world that novels with elements of the paranormal are coming back into fashion again.

The plot is quite complicated, involving a haunting and a state of possession, but begins when two people glimpse a house through the bare winter trees and become determined to own it.  Both are convinced that they have been there before, and then .......  very strange things begin to happen.

The Glassblower of Murano,  (a much pricier £4.67 on Kindle) by best selling author Marina Fiorato, was recommended by DoveGreyReader, so I approached it with great anticipation.  It had all the ingredients I like - a 17th century Venetian story of mystery and suspense involving a famous glass blower called Corradino Manin, and his beautiful 21st century female descendent  who goes from England to Venice in search of a new life.  The novel weaves back and forth between the two stories and quickly lost my interest.  I found the structure a bit clunky and the writing less than satisfying.  There was a distinct absence of rich historical texture and an unwillingness to go deeper into the issues and ideas the subject matter raised (unlike the Venetian novels of Michelle Lovric for instance).   The plot was just a bit too much Mills and Boon for me (another blog reviewer has described it as historical chicklit!) and the writing nowhere near as good as Dee Weaver’s.    Mainstream publishing really lost out here against the Indie E-book and I won’t be buying any of Marina’s other books.    Apparently she secured a £250,000 advance for her Venetian series, so my small abstention won't make any difference to her at all!

Snowdrops: A.D. Miller

This was my first Kindle book and, because I bought it after seeing a review on a Book-blog, it seems to epitomise everything about the New Age of publishing. We publicise on the internet, we buy in the cyber-sphere and we read on the electronic page.

Initially I downloaded the book onto my computer via the free’Kindle for PC’ application that Amazon offer - it was perfectly readable on my net-book, but when I bought Neil a Kindle for his birthday present the novel became something different. For one thing I could read it outside in the sun; secondly I could read it without glasses because you can select a comfortable text size; and thirdly, it’s easier to hold than a book if, like me, you have Writer’s-Wrist syndrome.  (I'm not being paid to advertise Kindles, just in case anyone is wondering!)

I had a lot of worries about the electronic read, but it was very enjoyable - page turning in an instant and automatic book-marking (am I going to miss those random train tickets, envelopes, post-cards etc that fall out of the books on my shelf as mnemonic surprises?)

The title - Snowdrops - comes from Russian slang for the bodies that reveal themselves when the snow begins to melt after the long winter.  The novel itself is well constructed, with a strong narrative voice - a thirty something male lawyer called Nick, in Moscow at the height of the post-Glasnost feeding frenzy that created the new class of oligarchs. Nick is engaged in facilitating finance for an oil project headed by an ex KGB entrepreneur, and learning to cultivate the required level of moral blindness, when he meets two beautiful Russian girls, Masha and Katya, in the Metro. He is instantly attracted to Masha, the older of the two. Lonely, although he can’t admit it, he is easy prey for what he thinks are two innocent girls using him only for some great nights out and uncomplicated sex.

But neither are what they seem, and his habit of not asking questions means that he is soon morally compromised, plunging deeper and deeper into what he eventually realises is a dangerous game involving the murder of an innocent citizen.

The book is written in the first person, as a confession to the woman he is about to marry. It contains some of the most evocative descriptions of Moscow I’ve ever read, and conveys the heady, morally confused atmosphere of post Glasnost Russia with complete credibility.

The hero sins (as most of us do) by omission, and the message is that weakness can do more harm than positive action because it can facilitate evil. Not that any of the characters can be said to be evil - they are fully rounded individuals all looking after their own interests at the expense of everyone else in direct contrast to the old Soviet ideal.

Andrew Miller was a foreign correspondent for the Economist in Moscow for several years, so he knows the world he’s writing about. I will definitely be watching out for more books from this author.

The E-Book creeps in .....

I have done something quite earth-shaking - I have just bought my first Kindle book.   I saw a review of a thriller on DoveGreyReader's book blog and really fancied reading it.  When I looked at the price online it was going to cost me almost ten pounds with postage for the paperback, but the Kindle price was only £2.39.   As I consume thrillers like chocolates (and pass them on to the charity shops) I didn't think I could justify the price of the paperback.  But I don't own -   can't afford  - a Kindle!  
Then I noticed that you can download the Kindle software 'for PC' free from Amazon.  So I did just that, downloaded the book onto my little netbook and now I can read it on the sofa, in bed, or on the train.  Don't know how easy it will be on the eye, but it's an experiment.  Oh, and I got three free e-books from Amazon at the same time.  Great!
And The Book?  It's called Snowdrops, by A.D. Miller, set in Russia.  Apparently he was a journalist - correspondent for the Economist in Moscow, so knows his subject.   Had a peek at the first pages before I bought and it looks good.