Holiday Break 2010

After reading the last eight novels of Nevada Barr in December and a wonderful mystery from Tana French (The Likeness), I started the new year with the remnants of my bookshelf: Zoo Station by Dan Downing and No Place like Home from Mary Higgins Clark. Both of them don't come close in entertainment level to the Tana French mystery, which had some issues, mainly that the story was not very believable, but still was my recent highlight.

Mary Higgins Clark: No Place like Home

I nice mystery about a woman with a hidded past that is threatened to be exposed. A grand house in New Jersey with it's posh country club surroundings, in an in-bread small town atmosphere, with envy, greed, gossip, all the good things you see in close communities.
It's entertaining, a nice easy read.
This book reminds me a lot of the 1944 movie "Gaslight". These two have several overlapping features: The house with a secret; the sane husband and the insane wife, which turn into the insane, greedy husband and innocent wife; the prosecuter that comes to the rescue; I kept thinking that I read this book before.

Dan Downing: Zoo Station

A spy novel set in 1939 Berlin. This is also nice read, however, I was wishing it would be a bit more complex. The story is interesting, as far as I can tell well researched, but is not very gripping (Es plaetschert vor sich hin). It is a good reminder of Nazi brutality, and describes the information level and the consequences drawn from it between different groups of people (polititians in foreign contries, regular people, business people, etc). I liked the way the protagonist listed all the streets and places he passed, because I know most of them, having lived in Berlin for a while. However, for somebody who doesn't know the city, the enumeration of streets might be a bit cumbersome. I'll probably read the sequel: Silesian Station.