Stacy Alesi's BookBitch.com™

Click to purchase

A Detective Varg Novel, Book 1

The novel is set in Malmo, Sweden and describes the activities and antics of a small group of policemen that have been set up to handle sensitive crimes that are strange and different. It is wrapped around a series of vignettes that are handled by the group.

Smith brings to bear a droll sense of humor that takes situations and shapes their form via a definite tongue in cheek delivery. No murder, no bank holdups, no mob beatings but a series of “crimes” adroitly handled by the members of the squad.

There is a case of someone stabbing another person in the knee. Why? What caused this heinous crime? A lonely girl trying to impress other girls who have boyfriends makes up a boyfriend via taking a selfie with a young man she meets on the street. Then in order not to produce him, tells a tale of him moving to a facility at the north pole. Problem is the police work on the premise that he was murdered and the girl making him up is the murderer.

Finally, an investigation is requested by a police executive into the weird goings on at a hotel that his cousin owns. These happenings are causing the hotel to begin failing. This one leads via a circuitous route into investigations of a werewolf being the cause of what is going on at the hotel.

A free and easy read. The characters are likable with a dedicated man in charge. One woman working for the group who is more than a little in love with Ulf (the man in charge of the group). Carl who loves filling out paperwork and can sit and do that all day, and Erik whose main interest in life is fly fishing. While the setting is in Sweden the group can exist anywhere and do supply a great deal of fun in a nice departure from more serious police procedural novels. I certainly look forward to learning about future escapades of this pleasant group of policemen.

4/19 Paul Lane

THE DEPARTMENT OF SENSITIVE CRIMES by Alexander McCall Smith.  Pantheon (April 16, 2019). ISBN 978-1524748210. 240p.

Kindle

Click to purchase

Fiction Without Frontiers

A quick look at Cacek’s latest book could possibly deem it a horror story. [Especially if you like to judge a book by its cover. BookBitch.] It deals with possession by the essence of a person now dead of the body of another person in the process of passing away. Certainly one of the major themes of literature devoted to horror stories. This is very far from the reality of what is a fascinating book actually devoted to a brilliant treatment of human nature under great stress.

The beginning section covers the deaths of four people of different ages and in different years. There is a potential suffragette attending a meeting in the early part of the twentieth century and killed by a man completely opposed to the concept of women’s rights. Another is a little boy, with another a 16 year old girl. The final individual is a man dying from the effects of dementia.

The next phase of the novel involves those individuals in the process of dying that are possessed by the spirits of the first four. A doctor views the people being “resurrected” by the new life process coincidentally in the same hospital and about the same time. He indicates to the families of those expected to pass away that this situation has occurred before although not very a very common one. It is in this stage of the book that Cacek turns an interesting novel into one that becomes a fascinating study of human nature.

First, how do the previously dead persons react to finding themselves not only alive again, but in a different body than they had. Also, the reactions of the families of those expected to die when finding that their loved one is recovering, but is not the same person that had been brought to the hospital with the expectation of imminent death. And if their relationship is still the same or if previously families, if found have those rights.

The author has successfully written a powerful study of what could happen to all concerned if the postulated situation could ever happen. Human nature is of course, based on normal progression and ending of life at a certain point with no further contact with the decadent. There is no speculation of what happens normally after death as this is not germane to the described events. Very well done.

4/19 Paul Lane

SECOND LIVES by P. D. Cacek. FLAME TREE PRESS; New edition (April 11, 2019). ISBN 978-1787581593. 304p.

Kindle

Click to purchase

Altman presents an extremely well planned and written novel about a sleeper spy living in the United States on behalf of the regime of North Korea.

The stark difference in ideas and life between the two countries has never been better presented than in this book. Song Sun Young was born in North Korea. She grew up in an environment of repression, semi-starvation and with even the slightest deviation from proscribed activity, punishment by death. In spite of this, Song has tried several times to escape along with her brother to South Korea. The last attempt meets with capture, but instead of executing her the government recognizes her intelligence and initiates a program to prepare her to become a mole; i.e. a sleeper agent in the United States.

Fast forwarding from her insertion into the U.S., Song is married to an American whom she loves and two children with him that are her pride and joy. But after seven years of this happy life she is called by North Korea to start the work she was trained for. Song’s brother has been held over her head with the threat that if she does not do as required he will be killed and she has no choice but to follow orders.

Song is not aware that the CIA knows of her and follows her as she moves forward with her mission for North Korea. Working with the CIA is Dalia Artzi a retired Israeli operative that Altman has used in other novels. The reader follows the counter actions of the CIA through the thinking of Dalia while working with them.

The culmination of the novel is a crisis that may lead to very unforeseen consequences and if you haven’t slept while reading the first part, what is happening will keep your eyelids open even wider. A very well done and well plotted adventure into international politics and conflict between nations.

4/19 Paul Lane

THE KOREAN WOMAN by John Altman. Blackstone Publishing; Unabridged edition (April 9, 2019). ISBN 978-1470826970. 272p.

Kindle

Audible