MellowDrama

First Date by Sue Watson is an extremely interesting and readable psychological thriller. The book releases today and I can't stress enough that if you are a reader with a special place in yo ur  heart for mystery/ thrillers, you must get to it ASAP.  Book Blurb First Date is the story of Hannah who has  done everything to make sure her life is safe and secure. A long way from her unstable childhood growing up in foster care, she’s content with her sweet, little, messy apartment and her satisfying job as a social worker. She quietly worries that, aged 36, she might never fall in love. But otherwise her life is where she wants it to be. Until, encouraged by her best friend to join a dating app, she meets  Alex  who is  irresistibly handsome, loves the same music as her and the same food as well. Both of them would love to own a Labrador one day. It’s like he’s made for her.  It’s like he’s too good to be true. Hannah’s friends aren’t so sure about him. ...

Wow!! If you love a good murder mystery then this  classic Japanese mystery from Pushkin Vertigo is definitely a must read for you. The story is a little eerie, the crime heinous, the sleuth scruffy-looking and the other elements present in just the right proportions to make it a great read even today years after it was first published in  1946.  The book is a locked room mystery told by a writer of Detective stories who is visiting the scene of crime years after it was committed and solved to, what else, write about it. We meet the host of characters in the wealthy Ichiyanagi family which is getting ready to celebrate the marriage of the eldest son. The setting is the year 1937 and a small Japanese village and Yokomizo gives us a glimpse of the social and cultural norms of the rural life of that era. A rumour is also fast gaining weight while the village gossips about the wedding and family. It seems a dangerous  man has been asking questions about the family, And t...

Dread, Short Stories by Aseem Rastogi is a very small ebook published last month by Blogchatter during the month long e-book carnival. There are five stories in the book, of varying lengths. The thread tying them together is the emotion that finds an echo in each one of them. That emotion is FEAR. A young couple at a safari, a man who had everything working for him in life, an office goer and more make up the cast of the stories.  I can hardly write anything about the stories here without giving up the gist but I can definitely say that Aseem knows how to keep his readers glued to the pages of the e-book. Aseem is a passionate blogger  and traveller. You can get a glimpse of his well travelled soul in the various stories which take place from New Delhi to Grasslands to London.   The stories are written well, the language playing in its author's hands to instil exactly what he aims at, dread. I am no brave-heart but continued reading the 35 paged book in one sitting e...

I Could Be You by Sheila Bugler is a taut thriller that is not only good because of the storyline but is different than many others because of the heroine- an investigative journalist. The book opens with her, Dee Doran, finding a dead woman who has been hit by a car, lying on the road outside her home. The dead woman is her tenant Katie but her two-year-old son Jake can't be found though his upturned buggy is also lying around twisted and bent near to Katie. Fearing the worst, Dee being her search for the child. After the matter is taken up by the local police, Dee realises that the woman that she had identified as her tenant Katie is someone else and Katie had been living under someone else's identify. Gradually Dee's journalistic instincts that have been lying dormant for a while since she quit active journalism to come back to her childhood home to look after her ailing mother, kick in ferociously. She begins to look at various leads in an attempt to find out the w...

A complex ad intricate book, that will need your complete devotion to be able to solve the crime with the little hints that the author keeps throwing your way via the characters and their observations, some tangible others not so tangible. And no it is not a police procedural. ***************************** Drishyam may have been inspired by the book but is very different from the novel I became a Keigo Higashino fan in an instant. Via some friends in a Facebook group on reading I came to know about the fact that the film Drishyam starring Ajay Devgan is based on a book by the Japanese author. I had seen the film and had found it immensely good. Surprisingly the book was also not difficult to acquire and so I read it soon after this FB intervention.  Devotion of Suspect X was such a mind-blowing read which I had not come across till that time ( I have since then read No Time for Goodbye by Canadian author Linwood Barclay which was a brilliant mystery and It Ends wi...

Maisie Dobbs by Jacqueline Winspear is a historical mystery novel set in London. But don't just head out and get it if you prefer your mysteries or crimes a bit on the stronger, harder, more depraved side. This novel is set after the World War 1 and is a peek into the realities and harshness of a war. Maisie Dobbs starts as a househelpat the Belgravia Mansion which belongs to the Comptons. But thats not where the book starts. The book opens in the year 1929, with Maisie setting up her detective agency and a man approaching her to investigate if his wife is having an affair. Soon after solving the crime, the book takes us back to the beginnings of Dobbs as a private investigator. We learn about her dexterity at the Belgravia mansion and how the lady of the house Mrs Compton and her friend Maurie Blanche, discover her to be an intelligent girl and decide to mentor her. She goes as far as getting admission in the university but the war breaks out and she enlists as a nurse. Sent to ...

Some major drinking is happening in the titles that I have read recently. I am though no drinker. Salted buttermilk is more up my alley than any other hard drinks. Getting back to the book at hand, or rather the book on the mobile device that I finished about a month ago but was too disheartened by lack of engagement on this amazing project of mine to write the review of. So Liliana Hart's Whiskey Rebellion happened at a good time to me when I was so down in the dumps that a murder mystery with M&B feels was the only thing that could have pulled me out. Well, this is the book review for you in a nut shell. This book like the ones that I am reading under #yearofthethriller project is the first in a series where Private Investigator Addison Holmes makes her first appearance. It would not be wrong to say that this is the book in which she, a History school teacher desperately in need to make money for buying an apartment gives a shot to being stripper, fails at the auditio...

Read it for a spunky, hardworking and hard hitting female protagonist and a villain who will send chills down your spine. ------------------- I have to say at the outset that I thoroughly enjoyed this mystery as I have seen being the case with everyone of them where a female cop who is good at her job. Credit must be given to the author JA Konrath for writing a plot that has the twists and turns of a good, gripping thriller and still has the scope for character development, more like fleshing out the character, in this book. So our heroine is named Jack Daniels, short for Jacquline Daniels is an insomniac, her boyfriend has left her for his personal trainer and in generals having a difficult time coping with life when a serial killer who calls himself the Gingerbread Man starts to leave mutilated bodies of women in dumpsters in her district. A binge eating partner, an old gangster she had busted years ago and a couple of (moronic looking and sounding) guys from the FBI form...

Read this medical thriller for a superbly knit plot, leave it aside if you can't deal with gory descriptions. ------------------------------------ I have not been so scared after reading a thriller as I have been after reading The Surgeon byTess Gerristen. It had a very deep impact on me and It is I guess a good one month after I read it that I could bring myself to write a not so long review of this medical mystery where Detective inspector Jane Rizzoli makes her first appearance. The Surgeon begins with the story of a successful doctor Catherine Cordell handling an emergency wherein an old man who has met with an accident is brought in a critical condition. Next we are told that she had escaped a murder attempt by a former student in a different city two years back and had shot her assailant dead. A new set of murders comes to light and Detective Thomas Moore realises that the MO of these murders have something in common with the attack on Cordell. The police is befud...

Still Life is lovely in so many ways. Though a murder mystery there is hardly anything dark (beyond the obvious) that clings to you on reading about murders and killings. The book is the first where Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surete du Quebec makes his appearance. He is compassionate and cerebral and this fact alone makes him worthy of being followed into every book that Penny has written with him as the central character. It must have been indeed a stellar debut by Louise Penny for it to have fetched her the Anthony Award for the Best First Novel in 2007. *************** Three Pines is a small quaint village, a heaven for its residents, which wakes up to the murder of an old beloved school teacher Ms Jane Neal one morning. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surete du Quebec and his team are sent to investigate this death which looks like a hunting accident, after all who would want Jane Neal dead. Gamache, who sees and observes everything (A certain Mr. Holmes wou...

Precious Ramotswe- Botswana's only and finest female private detective makes her debut with this book which is divided into short stories like chapters, full of warmth, wit and intuitive charm, taking our detective to solve a case in strange locations amongst still stranger people. ************* The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith is everything that you might expect from a thriller novel and then some more. The book perhaps might seem like the life story of Precious Ramotswe, Botswana's only and finest female private detective, from her birth till the time she sets up her agency and you might be tempted to give up, (if you are in search of blood and gore) but I would suggest against it. The book not only gives you the entire history of the now thirty-five years old and large (but the traditional way) Precious Ramotswe and some of Botswana as to what this place and its people are like, but I believe that the very skilled Mr Smith is just...

A spine chilling novel where Detective Inspector Helen Grace makes her first appearance. Read it for a prose that doesn't meander or wastes time in getting to the point. ************************** I have bee postponing writing about Eeny Meeny because I wanted to be in a certain mood to write this review. There has only been one other book besides this one that has given me a sleepless night. That book was Agatha Christie's 'And Then There Were None'. There is nothing graphic or gory in either of these books over which I might have lost sleep but the sheer reason for which people were being murdered, shook me up. Of course And Then There Were None is very atmospheric, that whole abandoned island, the morose weather, crashing sea waves- is enough to spook you. It is the woman herself- Agatha Christies- who is a master storyteller, you might just say. Getting back to Eeny Meeny, credit should be given to Arlidge for creating a spell binding narrative doled out in...

If you have been following me for sometime, you might know that I am on a personal mission to read as many first thrillers where a Detective or a Detective Inspector makes an appearance, from world over. So far, I have read some awesome Detectives etched by writers from the Nordic countries ( Jo Nesbo , Helen Tursten , Kristina Ohlsson ),  the US ( JK Rowling aka Robert Galbraith ) and this one that I am going to review next, from England ( MJ Arlidge , this though is his fifth on the link). I have also read some remarkable stand alone thrillers like No time for Goodbye and the Japanese masterpiece Devotion Suspect X (which I think kicked my obsession with finding the first ones of the series and which was so mind-blowing that its review isn't even comprehensible slink to another one of his works that is also so so good. Must rectify that one someday though when I can get over the awesomeness). You might wonder why am I doing it. Even I think what is this going to achiev...

Read it for the sketch that Rowling draws of her private investigator Cormoran Strike. If you don't want that or conversations between characters going around their business in the city of London then better leave it out. ************************** The Cuckoo's Calling is the first Cormoran Strike novel penned by JK Rowling of the Harry Potter fame under an alias Robert Galbraith. I must admit that I did not read this first, rather I read the last one in the series Lethal White first and found it to be good enough to read the other three in the Cormoran Strike series. But alas! I picked up The Cuckoo's Calling and never went back for the rest. The Cuckoo's Calling is an ordinary mystery wherein a model Lulu Landry, fondly called Cuckoo by family and friends, falls to her death and her brother John Bistrow refusing to believe the police's verdict that it was a suicide, comes to hire Strike. Strike is a wounded war veteran who lost one leg in Afghanistan and...

Someone is abducting small children and leaving their dead bodies with UNWANTED scribbled on their foreheads. Fredrika Bergman is an academician and a civilian, and a new entrant on the investigation team whose instincts and insights are being ignored by her senior male colleagues at the Police department. Will the culprit keep getting away or will the team come together past its differences and nab him? ---------------------- Whoever said a book will take you to places that you might not otherwise get a chance to visit. While I would say that reading any author is like going inside his head and at times there you will find how a psycho thinks and works and there you might also find the wonder and inquisitiveness of a small child. Unwanted by Kristina Ohlsson is a thriller that will take you through many Swedish towns and cities in search of the perpetrator of a crime that takes place in Stockholm. A young child of six, Lillian, is abducted from a crowded train. No one notices ...

Don't pick it up if you are looking for a fast-paced thriller but do read it for a female detective who has not been hardened by the difficult work that she does and leads a life as ordinary as you and me, yet is  gifted at her work. --------------------------------------- Detective Inspector Huss by Helene Tursten is the first in the series of crime fiction featuring the Detective Inspector Irene Huss of the Gotenborg Police Department . Hardly the hard boiled, cynic that we know our fictional detectives to be ( From Holmes to Harry Hole almost everyone of them is fighting inner demons! ), Irene Huss is every bit wife and mother as she is a professional in a male-dominated job. Tursten began writing when she could no longer continue working in dentistry due to arthritis. The novel came out in Swedish first in the year 1998 and was translated into English in 2003. The story of this novel is both a murder mystery and a tale of a household with its share of eccentric characters...

The Chopra Sisters is Rahul Vishnoi's third presentation after Who Burned The Moon? and a collection of shorts called Love Littering the Lanes. I have read the debut book and one of the 4 stories featured in the collection. Then I read this and I can summarise all that I have to write by saying that he is getting better at his craft. But as a had-been editor, I won't be justifying my previous job title if I do not talk about the lacunae. The story outline first. The main cast of the story that Vishnoi presents to us here is quite apparent from the title of the book. This is about two sisters who are actually more or less disasters. Always at each other's throat, the girls are just too much to handle for their father, especiallyafter the mother dies. (Reminds one of the trailers of Patakha, a film about two forever fighting sisters.) Anyway they go their separate ways once the elder one decides that she wants to marry the boy who was chosen by their father to marr...

Another book by Keigo Higashio that is simple yet complex in terms of plot development, Salvation of a Saint might have strained my nerves because of its length but was in no way a disappointment. I started the year 2018 with the Devotion of Suspect X by the acclaimed Japanese author and was blown away, and so when nothing seemed to work in terms of my reading in 2019, I went back to him, knowing whatever I might pick I will enjoy it and break the jinx that the year seemed to have started on. As soon as the book begins we know that a murder has been plotted. We are introduced to the killer and the victim in almost a single breath. You might wonder then what remains to be revealed. And this is where Higashino's expertise lies. The HOW- How was the murder committed? He presents you the settings for a perfect crime. No one seems to be able to figure out how was the deed done even if the detective at times might already know who did it. This seemingly impossible thing to figure ou...

The title of the book is enough to let you know that this is not a book belonging to the romantic genre.  It is not even a murder mystery per se because by the end of Chapter 1 the stage is set for murder and in the very beginning of Chapter 2 the deed is done right infront of your eyes and you, the reader, for sure knows who did it. But then I don't think it is right to not label The Devotion of Suspect X as "not" a thriller or a mystery. So where do we put this part suspense and part philosophy novel by the Japanese writer Keigo Higashino? The story revolves around a single mother,  Yasuko Hanaoka, an ex-night hostess now working in a  shop selling boxed lunches,  and her next door neighbour Ishigami, a high school maths teacher. The book begins with him leaving house to go to the shop to buy lunch. Here we are introduced to the city they live in and quietly to an other important character in the book- the surroundings. This is also where the author's immense t...

Umm.....The book makes for a light reading. If you are an Indian reading this book, chances are you will be supremely impressed by Mr. Hall's knowledge (or research) on Indian towns and how things work here. I may add here that he is a British journalist living now in India with his wife. That said, I found the book enjoyable to a great extent but also found some bits and parts quite irritating.  The most enjoyable things first. The caste of characters and their names. Consider these- Facecream, Flush and Tubelight. The plot is thick and quite absorbing. You do want to find out what is going on with the characters and do want to get to the bottom of things. The plot takes you from Khan Market in New Delhi to a pilgrimage to Vaishno Devi to the villages of UP. The author is very particular about the details of the gulleys and the lanes that he mentions in the story and I felt as if he might have visited each one of them standing there thinking about how to further the pl...