THE INSIDE MAN
By Jeff Abbott, Hachette, $29.99 ebook $16.99
Sam Capra’s best mate is murdered and he’s on the warpath. Insinuating his way into one of Miami’s best known and most dangerous families, he tries to make out a connection between his mate and a beautiful stranger. It doesn’t take long before things start going pear-shaped.
Sam finds himself up against a powerful, unhinged mastermind who wants to divvie his business empire between his three adult offspring, each of them serious pieces of work with murderous secrets in their cupboards.
Dragged deeper and deeper into the mire, he finds himself hearing echoes of his own mangled personal life. He finds dark, unsettling places where the law doesn’t count, where money’s not the issue and where no amount of power can hold sway.
Then his cover’s blown …
Hang on with this heavy, white-knuckle roller-coaster.
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THE NEWS: A User’s Manual
By Alain de Botton, Penguin $29.99
Air crashes, murders, celebrities, political scandals – what rates is news a subjective thing at best. Sensibly, de Botton argues we should remain sceptically alert to the potentially gross idiocy that may lie concealed beneath pretty fonts and clever headlines.
Beware any slightly too consistent level of consensus, he says. Question more diligently. It’s a point that might be made to more journalists, also many consumers of the media’s varied and pervasive output.
De Botton takes the reader through a potted world newscape with exquisite insight to the human condition and its need for news, its synthesis of news, its manufacturing of news … and also where it sometimes just need to shut down the information flow.
Intriguing, captivating read.
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A WAR OF WORDS
By Hamish McDonald, UQP $32.95
War wasn’t the only danger Charles Bavier faced in his strange double life as a World War 2 propagandist. Son of Swiss silk merchant but brought up by his Japanese mistress, he was ostensibly a son of Nippon, but served as an Aussie solider in Gallipoli, was involved in China’s revolution against the Manchus and took up with the British Secret service in Singapore during WW2.
This details various sections of that life, many of them rollicking accounts, but it is his unique knowledge of Japanese culture and language that led him into an Allied psych-war against his Japan during the war. Vexed is an under-statement; one of his sons fought with the Allies, the other with Japan.
One thing, Bavier is credited in the book’s subtitle with talking 4000 Japanese into surrender. It’s clear he didn’t this alone, or by himself, but rather over time and in a team. Notwithstanding, this account is an intriguing one.
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WAYFARING STRANGER
By James Lee Burke, Hachette $29.99
Wheels within wheels, and the strange drops of circumstance, observation and opportunity, align meticulously in this terrifically crafted tale from master story-teller Burke.
Weldon Holland, teenage grandson of a tough old Texas ranger, trips over Bonnie and Clyde – shoots at them, actually – before later finding himself among the horrors of World War 2’s Battle of the Bulge and a Nazi extermination camp.
He rescues his sergeant from beneath a Tiger tank, escaped execution and finds a girl alive amid the stacked bodies of the camp, who he later marries. But the war’s also a windfall for him after he discovers the secret to the strength of the Tiger tank’s – its unique welding process.
Together with his sergeant, Holland returns to Texas and sets up an oil pipeline corporation. But if they thought the cruelty and greed of war was left behind in Europe they soon discover they should think again.
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THE PROTECTED
By Claire Zorn, UQP $19.95
Spare a thought for young Hannah McCann. All she’s wanted to do is get through high school quietly. No Facebook hate pages, no dunny-wall graffiti, no bullying. Nothing easy about being an harassed teenager.
But when her sister dies, and with her mum severely depressed and her father injured, life’s not about to get any easier. Odd thing is, suddenly she feels less afraid, can even discern a glimmer of hope in her life after years of misery.
Grief, guilt and angst aren’t necessarily the easiest subjects for reading but this is a giving kind of book, one that captures the nuance and fragility of family, the strength and influence of friends.
Keep the tissues handy ….
— NOEL MURPHY
