Space debut disappoints
The tale opens with a robbery and closes with a reconciliation. In between these bookends, John Grisham’s Camino Island is populated with ruthless thieves, witty writers and enough intrigue to fill a bookstore’s mystery aisle. At the heart of the story is the theft of five priceless, yet heavily insured, original manuscripts by F. Scott Fitzgerald, including The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night.
After the successful caper turns sour — the feds quickly nab a few of the crew — the story moves south with an abrupt turn. The reader is introduced to Bruce Cable, a bookstore owner in the town of Santa Rosa on Camino Island, off mainland Florida, who just happens to make the occasional black market deal for stolen books.
Next we meet Mercer Mann, a novelist who cannot get her new book going and has recently lost her teaching job at the University of North Carolina. She’s soon recruited by an outfit working for the insurance company as the perfect sleuth to suss out the fate of the manuscripts — she spent much of her youth on Camino Island. Mann discovers a town filled with successful and failed writers, from romance novelists to struggling literary fiction authors.
Camino Island makes a fine beach read no matter what island you end up on this summer. But I’m not sure if this novel’s Camino Island, filled as it is with writers, is Grisham’s idea of This Side of Paradise or The Beautiful and Damned. Jonathan Elderfield, The Associated Press Scribner
Anne Holt’s finely constructed novels continue to pull back the curtain on Norwegian society as seen through the eyes of insightful police detective Hanne Wilhelmsen.
In Odd Numbers, Holt skilfully melds terrorism and parental issues in an absorbing compact plot. This ninth novel featuring Hanne maintains high suspense while emphasizing the myriad characters’ personalities.
Wheelchair-bound since she was shot in the spine by a deranged cop, Hanne lives a quiet, if unfulfilling life, with her wife, Nefis, a Turkish Muslim, and their inquisitive 10-year-old daughter, Ida. Despite her mobility issues and depression, Hanne has decided to return to the Oslo police force on the same day she is visited by Billy Thorvald, her friend and former police partner.
Billy is worried that his son, Linus Bakken, has become involved with a fundamentalist group. A bomb explodes at an Islamic centre, killing 23 people and spurring anti-Islamic sentiment.
Holt illustrates Oslo’s multicultural society while showing the humanity behind hate that can lead to terrorism. Odd Numbers also shows parents trying to do the right thing, but not always succeeding. Oline H. Cogdill, The Associated Press Berkley Jamie Allenby, veterinary scientist on the planet Soltaire, has a lot on her mind in The Space Between the Stars, a debut novel by Anne Corlett.
She’s not sure if she misses Daniel, her lover of 13 years. His last known address was on another planet. When they separated, she told him she needed space. Now she has more space than she bargained for because she may be the only survivor of an interstellar supervirus.
Finding other survivors is Jamie’s first concern. Then she needs to get to Earth.
But she’s reluctant. Daniel wasn’t all that great. Jamie ponders her relationship troubles with Daniel when more pressing problems need to be solved. Like finding food, staying warm, rebuilding a culture. No, it’s Daniel who is on her mind. Daniel. His name — in a single-word sentence — plunks again and again. Daniel. This becomes tedious.
Fortunately, Jamie isn’t the only survivor so other characters provide relief from her Daniel obsession.
She and the others hitch a ride on a spaceship. They make another stop and find someone unexpected. Daniel. In all his plunking glory.
Corlett sets up a hero’s journey narrative so at this point Jamie, our hero, is tempted to abandon her quest. After all, she’s found Daniel, not on Earth, but on another planet called Alegria.
Why go on? That isn’t sufficiently answered, but it’s a hero’s journey, so she must get to Earth. She must go on. She must gain wisdom and mastery.
In sci-fi, the science doesn’t need to be fully spelled out or even plausible, but some of the fun is missing when it lacks this much substance.
Corlett has spaceships travel magically between worlds without explanation except that this is the distant future. The supervirus turns victims to dust. We learn that colonization of other worlds involved forced emigration and that authorities applied travel IDs onto people’s ring fingers with lasers. We don’t learn much, however, about how that history played out or how it affects Jamie.