Currently Reading (Take 2) — Page 39

Any good page-turner type mysteries you can recommend?

 

Pushkin Press have recently been re-publishing some overlooked suspense classics, and I've read a couple and greatly enjoyed them.

The Disappearance Of Signora Giulia, by Piero Chiara

Every Thursday for three years, Signora Giulia takes the train to Milan to visit her daughter. But one Thursday she simply disappears. how can a young, beautiful high society woman just vanish into thin air? Why does her husband - a prominent criminal lawyer and much older man - know nothing about it? And who was she really visiting during those trips to Milan? For Detective Sciancalepre, the mystery is darker and more tangled than he imagined.

She Who Was No More, by Boileau-Narcejac

Every Saturday evening, travelling salesman Ferdinand Ravinel returns to his wife, Mireille, who waits patiently for him at home. But Ferdinand has another lover, Lucienne, an ambitious doctor, and together the adulterers have devised a murderous plan.Drugging Mireille, the pair drown her in a bathtub, but in the morning, before the "accidental" death can be discovered, the corpse is gone - so begins the unraveling of Ferdinand's plot, and his sanity...   (Later adapted as the movie "Les Diaboliques", fact-fans!)

Hard copies are pretty hard to come by, but you can get them cheap on kindle. For more in the Pushkin Vertigo series, click here!

Also most anything by Patricia Highsmith. If you're looking for something more modern, I can't really help you.  "I Saw A Man" by Owen Sheers is pretty good. Or the Scandinavian crime canon, like Henning Mankell, Camilla Lackberg, Stieg Larsson, Jo Nesbø etc. etc. I finished "Headhunters" by Jo Nesbø a couple of weeks ago, and it's good fun.

 

 

Updated On: 3/19/16 at 10:04 PM

I, Ripper by Stephen Hunter

Mrs. Palfrey At The Claremont (1971) by Elizabeth Taylor is the best book I've read in a long while. Highly recommended! Trudged through some other stuff but this is the first one in a while that might merit a bump of this thread.

Homo Deus by Yoval Noah Harari

I haven't read a good thriller in awhile but just ordered a copy of

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*CK by blogger Mark Manson

Of course I just pre-ordered a copy of Michael Wolff's bombshell Fire and Fury.

I'm currently reading two books: 

ENEMIES & ALLIES - Kevin J. Anderson

NOS4A2 - Joe Hill 

Just finished "This Is Me" BY Chrissy Metz today, and gotta say how surprised and impressed I was by this book! Definitely a food read with humor, drama, and heartbreak, all very well told. 

Circe and Achilles both y Madeline Miller. Had really enjoyed Circe but found the character of Patroclus in    Achilles the equivalent of a teenage girl  for the first half of the book. Did eventually improve and he became a fully defined character but in the beginning  it was tuff.

A Brightness Long Ago- Guy Gavriel Kay  He does alternate historical novels( plus fantasy) but this one set in Renaissance Italy  never really came together. Great characters  but they just die and there is no through line to the story. Disappointed.

 

 

Just finished A HEART AT FIRE'S CENTER, a biography of Bernard Herrmann, the great composer of film music.  Most informative.

Up next -- MACBETH seems to be in the wind lately, so I picked up a copy and am enjoying it.