BOOK MARKS
EVANESCENT Carlyle Labuschagne Fire Quill Publishing
THIS is the second book in a trilogy, so it’s important to read The Broken Destiny before delving into this complex fantasy saga.
Struggling to cling to memories, to uncover the truth, Ava is slowly being engulfed by the Shadowing Disease.
It is changing her, twisting her, breaking her and seems there is no way to control it.
The only light in the darkness is Troy. His touch returns sensation to her numb form and helps her focus on memory. There’s a war brewing and she appears to be the catalyst.
Labuschagne has crafted a complex world with a multifaceted host of characters. Her writing is detailed and descriptive and the action plays out gradually. The twists she peppers the novel with, will have fans thrilled and begging to find out what happens next.
– Terri Dunbar-Curran
THE INVISIBLE
GUARDIAN Dolores Redondo
HarperCollins
SET in the Basque country in and around Pamplona, The Invisible Guardian is a novel on many levels: reality, superstition and the demons that come back to trouble a detective – the competent and welltrained inspector Amaia Salazar. The series of murders, all young girls, has no logical explanation… a bear?
Or is it a basajaun or gentleman of the forest? A spectre? The mother come back to haunt her? A jealous sister? You become quite certain who is responsible for the deaths, but you may find you are wrong before you get to a tidy ending. Well, almost tidy!
The supernatural is just an underlying presence in a very real and complex thriller; jealousies and love, and the question marks against the young and not altogether innocent. Redondo will keep you hooked.
– Shirley de Kock Gueller
ATOMS UNDER THE FLOORBOARDS Chris Woodford
Bloomsbury
HERE is the book that should be given to every high school science teacher as curriculum support.
Chris Woodford, who also runs a website, www.explain thatstuff.com, takes us on quite the most accessible and enjoyable tour through the average house and the stuff found inside it.
Questions answered include: why laptops get hot; why you can see through glass but not thin metal foils; whether you can “go to work on an egg”; why it’s better to buy a CD than download an MP3… the list goes on.
Without a single equation or quick quiz to test whether you have taken in the information presented, it is a pleasure to read good science clearly demystified.
And, for the pedantic, the book is properly indexed and footnoted! – Sue Townsend
THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF AMNESIA Louisa Lim
Oxford
LOUISA LIM explores the legacy of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. Lim finds and interviews those still haunted by what happened – from the artist Chen Guang, a soldier who participated in the brutal crackdown on the student protests and who now paints to assuage his guilt, to the so-called Tiananmen Mothers who bravely campaign on behalf of the victims.
Lim makes unsettling discoveries, such as the silver watches given to the soldiers of 1989 as souvenirs to celebrate their “Quelling of the Turmoil”. Reading this, I felt the same sort of revulsion as when watching Joshua Oppenheimer’s recent documentaries about the Indonesian genocide; it’s that sense of looking on helplessly as history is retold by the victors, and warped in the retelling.
– The Independent
FIRST ONE MISSING Tammy Cohen
Doubleday
EMMA REID and her husband Guy’s marriage has been put under the utmost strain since the abduction and murder of their daughter Tilly.
Emma goes through the motions with her other children, but the joy has been leached out of her life.
Then there is police family liaison officer Leanne who is dealing with the break-up of her marriage to fellow copper Pete. When more girls start to go missing and turn up on a wild health in a wealthy part of London, the hunt is on.
Tammy Cohen delves into the psychology of loss, and violent death.
At timesthe book feels a little like a textbook on how to deal with grief and trauma, and a little light on the thriller. As a police procedural novel, it works well, with a wonderfully unexpected twist in the tale.
– Jennifer Crocker
CRASH & BURN Lisa Gardner
Headline
GARDNER ticks all the right boxes in a psychological thriller centred on a woman who has just crawled from a car crash, but with no memory of it – nor of the man who purports to be her loving husband of 22 years.
As each scrap of her remembrance returns, so the line between reality and the imagined shifts and reshapes, with the plot line darkening at every new twist along this exploration of one of our more horrific social crimes.
Latest in the Tessa Leoni series, there is an engaging backstory, with soupçons of romance to remind us that love indeed conquers all.
For a little fun, enter Gardner’s “Kill a Friend, Maim a Buddy” contest for chance to appear as the “Lucky Stiff” whose name is conferred upon a not-so-lucky character in her next whodunnit.
Moira Richardson