Книжный клуб обсудил три новинки: исторический триллер о жемчуге, готический детектив на острове и сериал про детектива с аутизмом

PHOTO 72501.0 The latest gathering of The Book Circle was held on Wednesday, 8 July and a variety of books were shared. The Pearl Thief - Fiona McIntosh Severine Kassel is asked by the Louvre in 1963 to aid the British Museum with curating its antique jewellery, her speciality. Her London colleagues find her distant and mysterious, her cool beauty the topic of conversations around its quiet halls. No one could imagine that she is a desperately damaged woman, hiding behind her chic French image. It is only when some dramatic Byzantine pearls are loaned to the museum that Severene's poise is dashed and the tightly controlled life she's built around herself is shattered. Her shocking revelation of their provenance sets off a frenzied hunt for Nazi Ruda Mayek. Mossad's interest is triggered and one of its most skilled agents comes out of retirement to join the hunt, while the one person who can help her, the solicitor handling the pearls, is bound by client confidentiality. As Severine follows Mayek's trail, there is still one lifelong secret for her to reveal and one for her to discover. From the snowy woodlands outside Prague to the Tuileries of Paris and the heather-covered moors of Yorkshire comes a confronting and heartstopping novel that explores whether love and hope can ever overpower atrocity in a time of war and hate. All her fault - Andrea Mara A crime thriller set in Dublin. Marissa arrives at a house expecting to pick up her young son Milo after his first play-date with a boy at his new school. To her surprise, an unknown woman opens the door. She isn’t the mother or the nanny, she doesn’t have Milo, and so begins a parent’s worst nightmare. There are many twists and turns throughout the story, and a sudden shock at the end. Recommended. The bookbinder of Jericho - Pip Williams The story is about book-binders at Oxford University Press in the early years of the twentieth century. It was a very easy, comfortable book to read. The interesting description of how books were bound and who worked in the various sections was also interesting. Women in some parts, men in others. The folding techniques too were interesting. The women working here were from ‘town’ and the people in Oxford were ‘gowns’. A distinction that becomes very difficult to remove. With the beginning of WWI things began to change, men were not at their work stations and women had to fill the places and do the work. Then the awful realities of war began to be shown with the returning wounded who were nursed by volunteers. Some men would never return to work. But in amongst all this the focus of the story is on the bookbinder, ‘a town’ who wanted to become ‘a gown’. She had the knowledge and ability; indeed, her narrow boat was full of books that had a fault in the binding and were not suitable for the university, and she read everything. There is a bit of a romance entwined in all of this as well, but she does eventually receive her degree. The author’s note at the back of the book is very extensive, giving more detail of the history of the time and some of the books mentioned are worth reading. I can recommend this book to anyone. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The wolf tree - Laura McCluskey The story is set on a remote island in the northern Hebrides, with a population of around 260 people. Two detectives from mainland Scotland arrive to investigate the apparent suicide of an 18-year-old island boy. They find the local people hostile and suspicious, and their religion to be an odd mixture of strict Catholicism and folklore superstitions, condoned by the local priest. As the story develops the island comes to feel more and more threatening, with the bleak island itself, the strange populace and their folklore beliefs adding to the build-up of a creepy Gothic feeling. How will the detectives ever arrive at the truth? Recommended. Wangaratta Library has a copy of the book, and it is also available as an audio on Audible and Libby. The dentist - Tim Sullivan This is the first in an entertaining police procedural series featuring Bristol detective, Sergeant George Cross. He is well and truly on the autism spectrum, and he is rude, difficult and awkward with people. His kindly female colleague endeavours to teach him what to say in interviews, and he writes everything down assiduously. After a murder, he used to say baldly to the victim’s relatives, ‘Well, did you do it?’ She teaches him to say ‘I’m sorry for your loss’, and to soften his approach. His great skill is ferreting out the true villain, after his superiors have most likely made the wrong arrest in their haste to close the case. There is humour in some of the situations he finds himself in, yet the reader admires his persistence and at the same time sees and understands his quirks and vulnerabilities.