To The Last Page

Moved by the love he feels for the Florence Nightingale-like figure of Maman Coralie, First World War veteran and war-hero Captain Patrice Belval, despite having lost a leg during the war, springs into action when he learns of an attempt to abduct her by unknown foreign individuals. His disappointment at finding out that this beautiful, kind-hearted woman is already married however is compounded when he finds out that her mysterious husband, an international banker, is mixed up in a dangerous gold smuggling operation that threatens to weaken the financial position of France in a troubled world market. But there are other mysterious forces at large and a strange fatalistic connection that exists between Patrice and Coralie, one that they discover is linked to the suspicious deaths of another Patrice and Coralie. In danger of falling victim to the same diabolical forces, there is only one person with the romantic sensibility to understand their predicament, one person with the means to u...

Turgenev's second novel is indeed closest to the ideal of pure Turgenev, certainly reminiscent of his dramatic work, depicting the lives of the gentry, Russian society and family relationships, while maintaining a humanistic stance towards the circumstances of the peasantry, all with a deep connection and love for the country and the landscape itself. It's even initially staged like one of Turgenev's dramas, each of the principal characters making their walk-on entrances at the Kalitin household, but Turgenev novelistically fills out the relevant background detail of a number of the characters with depth and precision. It's at the Kalitin household that Lavretsky, on his way back home to his estate after the break up of his marriage in Europe, calls in on his relatives and falls in love with his cousin Liza Mikhaylovna. Liza is however being courted by an important but dull government official who Lavretsky feels is unworthy of the deeply religious young woman, but Lavr...

The concept for the House of Night series is not a promising one; Vampyre Finishing School. It just shouldn't work. Apart from being an obvious Harry Potter moneyspinner rip-off, it just feels like there is something basically wrong in the concept. Vampires are solitary creatures of the night, predators, driven by bloodlust, so how many lessons are you going to need to learn how to suck blood from a neck? Evidently the concept needs a twist and it's in the fact that we are in an alternate world here where vampyres are if not an acceptable part of society, at least one that dominates the arts, with nearly every prominent musician, movie-star and writer (going right back to Shakespeare) having been chosen to wear the mark of the Vampyre. So when a dead man appears and places the mark of the crescent moon on her head, 16 year-old Zoey Redbird Montgomery almost welcomes the opportunity to escape from an unhappy life with her weak, inattentive mother, religious fundamentalist Step-l...

The former State Counsellor Erast Fandorin becomes involved once again in official affairs of the highest order when Mikhail, the son of Grand Duke Georgii Alexandrovich one of the eminent members of the Russian Royal family is abducted in broad daylight in Moscow, only days before the coronation of Nicholas II. The abduction has been carried out by Dr Lind, a ruthless and highly dangerous criminal that Fandorin has been trailing for a number of years across Europe. Even though he is at the scene of the crime with his faithful Japanese servant Masa, Fandorin is once again unable to prevent Lind from carrying out the kidnapping. The stakes are high in this Fandorin adventure. Not only is the life of a young Prince in grave danger (Lind is not usually inclined to allow his hostages to live), but worse, the, the ransom demanded, a precious stone from the royal sceptre, threatens to derail the imminent coronation and tarnish the reputation and international standing of the Romanov Royal Fa...

Stylistically quirky and even somewhat undisciplined, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is all over the place really. It's a thriller, a murder mystery, a serial killer investigation, an exposé on financial crime and journalism, a baroque family drama, a commentary on modern Swedish society and on the abuse of women, and it's a romantic drama. To be fair, Larsson does well to bring all these elements together into a fairly gripping drama, even if some of the developments go a little over-the-top, but the novel is over-long, sprawling and badly in need of editing, full of eccentric touches and veering off into irrelevant areas. It's the creation and exploration of the two intriguing characters of Blomkvist and Salander that hold everything together, but other than that, there is little that is exceptional about the crime plot and its investigation, nothing certainly to justify the book’s surprising popularity. The main revelations and exposés of both the murder and the financ...

Divided into 4 parts and reworked from a number of short-stories written by the author dating right back to the 1920s, The Hamlet covers the arrival of the Snopes clan into Frenchman’s Bend and how Flem Snopes becomes a force to be reckoned with in Faulkner’s Yokanaptawpha County. The Hamlet is a difficult book to read, and not just in the usual manner of Faulkner’s labyrinthic syntax and flowing poetic prose - though it is certainly often difficult here to tell one member of the Snopes clan from another, just as much as it is following exactly what is going on for long periods at a time. What is difficult rather is how different it all seems from the mythology of other Faulkner novels, lacking the familiar historical references to the Civil War, to Colonel Sartoris, the Compsons or the Sutpens. With The Hamlet (continued in The Town and The Mansion ), we see rather the seeds of another generation forming – not a separate one, as the Snopes crop up now again in other Faulkner novels...