Book Review: Who To Believe by Edwin Hill

A restaurateur is murdered in Monreith, a relatively calm New England community, and her husband, a gambling addict, becomes the prime suspect. When a group of six friends meet to celebrate the birthday of one of them, theories and gossip about the killing start flowing around. Slowly, it emerges that everyone of them is leading a double life and possessing dark secrets that the others aren't aware of, and anyone could be a potential suspect. One more murder committed in the same night opens all the skeletons hidden deep inside them, and from then on starts the game of blowing whistles.

Who To Believe is the latest crime mystery novel written by Edwin Hill, who is a best-selling writer of several domestic suspense novels. The novel explores how, even among seemingly peaceful individuals, a deep undercurrent of dissatisfaction with past choices lies and how everyone, who is perpetually sitting on a volcano of suppressed emotions, is capable of disturbing deeds when situations force them to. I received an advance review copy of the book from its publisher, Kensington Books, through Netgalley in exchange for my honest feedback.

The novel follows a non-linear story-telling style where we are narrated the same incidents from the varied perspectives of different characters. The book has seven parts, and each one follows the event of the birthday party and the aftermath from the viewpoint of one of the participants. We even get the perspective of the dog, Harper. The narrative, which starts as a normal murder mystery with stock characters, soon evolves into a complex web of deception, greed, revenge, betrayal, and crime. Each perspective of the participants makes us aware of new motives and inspirations for these characters, thus adding more layers to the plot.

The main asset of this book is the grip that it maintains on the reader until the last page. The plot proceeds at breakneck speed, though told in a non-linear way, with many elements of the plot repeating from different points of view. Instead of boring the reader, these elements help us see new or hidden facets of the characters. The author makes the interaction between the characters very complex and unpredictable. So the narrative has numerous twists and turns enough to keep us guessing till the end.

The characterization is top-notch. We can relate to each character, as their motivations are pretty convincingly portrayed. The author chooses every shade of grey to colour them. Even when they do abominable deeds, we kind of empathise with their angle of the story. Each of them exhibits their own distinct style, philosophy, and outlook on life. They occupy varied levels of social standing. We find a cop, a priest, a gay mechanic, a shrink, a film maker, a teenager, and a dog. Two of them confess to the reader that they used to be serial killers! We are in for a madcap ride with this bunch.

Who To Believe is a tight mystery thriller told non-linearly by multiple narrators. The writer does a great job of constructing a motley assortment of desperate characters and uses their fears, moral dilemmas, and complex psychology to create a tense narrative. Like a magician, he uses several sleight of hand tricks to control the flow of information to his readers. Even while dealing with repetition, he has succeeded in ensuring that each such instance reveals a new angle of the plot to his reader. With great pacing, the writer ties up all the narrational voices convincingly at the climax. This is a thrill ride that I have enjoyed for a long time.

Book Review: The Sanctuary by Andrew Hunter Murray

 

Ben Parr makes his living by painting portraits of wealthy families living in Villages, designed and constructed by the billionaire businessman John Pemberley. Ben is content with his life in the city. But his ambitious fiancee, Cara, works for Pemberley on one of his secret projects on an island called Sanctuary Rock. When she stops communicating, Ben decides to travel to the island. After an arduous journey, he gets there but realises Cara is no longer working there. He begins to adore Pemberley and likes the life inside the experimental settlement. But soon he realises that there are dangerous secrets connected with Pemberley, and all is not as well as it seems.

The Sanctuary is a dystopian mystery novel written by Andrew Hunter Murray, who is already a best-selling writer and who also writes for the BBC. The novel tries to explore the themes of environmental degradation caused by humans and the manipulation of the public by businesses. I received a review copy of the novel from its publisher, Blackstone Publishing, through Netgalley in exchange for honest feedback. Unfortunately, my honest feedback is that the book is a colossal bore, and the only reason I read this through is to witness the spectacle of this junk's final crash landing.

The readers who regularly follow my book reviews (who can be counted on fingers; incidentally, good news to the publisher and the author of the book) may be aware that it is very rare that I dislike a book so vehemently. But I realise that when I opt for advance review copies of unpublished books, there is bound to be an end to my streak of reading good books. It's inevitable that I end up with a stinker at some point in time. So I am not complaining. The going was pretty solid while it lasted.

The Sanctuary is an exhibition hall of cliches that inhabits thriller and mystery novels. It follows every beat and every turn that better novels have already established, albeit in an unimaginative manner. The use of tried-and-tested plot devices only tires out the already redundant story line. The twists are visible from miles ahead. Being a novel set in the future, it miserably fails in world-building too. The mainland never looks too terrible, and the Sanctuary never feels as enticing as described in the novel. Even the social issues it tries to address failed to connect with me.

The character development in this novel is a joke. The protagonist doesn't show any defining traits and seems to just flow the way the story flows. The antagonist is supposed to be an imposing figure. The reader realises this only when the author uses the word imposing to describe him a few times in the story. His plans for the world are also supposed to be revolutionary, but they are never convincingly explained. The other characters are all one-note characters and never get a chance to show off their personalities. Cara, the fiancee of Ben, is an invisible presence throughout the plot but gets relegated to just an adjective for him most of the time. There is a portion where Ben converses with her in his imagination. That part wasn't any good, but considering his interactions with other characters, it was kind of tolerable.

The conversations between John and Ben were, to some extent, readable and had a chance to take the story to some interesting levels. The writer never followed up on the sparks, and that possibility was also missed. The climatic showdown was pathetic, to say the least, and never created any impact. Overall, The Sanctuary failed to impress me. It isn't well written, it doesn't build an interesting universe, its characters don't possess individuality, their motives aren't convincing, and it fails to build any suspense or tension that could captivate me.

 

Book Review: An Oak Tree in the Garden by Narendra Murty

 Zen stories are always either a hit or a miss for the common reader. Some of them bring to you an 'aha' moment, unveiling the mist that covers your intellect and making you observe the entire world around you in a new light. But most of them go right above your field of perception. You are not able to make any sense, but you always get the notion that if you were able to appreciate the story, it would change you profoundly. It's not that Zen stories are very long, complex, or confusing to the reader. They often use ordinary settings and feature ordinary people and snippets of their ordinary lives, but somehow they come out extraordinarily dense. This ordinary nature of them makes it too embarrassing to accept our failure to grasp them.

For example, consider the story where a monk asks a Zen master the reason for Bodhidharma's arrival in China. His reply is simply, "an oak tree in the garden." That's it! There is no punch line, no final revelation, or a surprise twist. What sense can be made out of this? Is it just a wise reply with a profound inner meaning, or is there a botanical metaphor in it? How should our minds approach the story in order to decipher it? I have read some collections of Zen stories before and have had this unsettling feeling inside me while reading such stories. They defy our common sense and try to escape out of the reach of our intellect.

In his book, An Oak Tree in the Garden, Narendra Murty attempts to demystify such stories and take his readers more deeply into Zen living. I used the expression 'Zen living' consciously because, after reading the book, I feel that it cannot be called a philosophy or religion in a practical sense. A philosophy or religion needs scriptural backing that uses human intellect, knowledge, and authority in its construction. Zen is beyond such a conventional approach. To understand Zen, conventional knowledge is a hindrance. One must come out of the shackles of knowledge, preconditioning, prejudices, and learning and get ready to unlearn. Only with an empty cup can one comprehend it fully and immerse oneself in it.

In one of his previous books, Eating His Money, Narendra Murty tried to decipher the hidden philosophy and metaphysics of Mulla Nasruddin's jokes. He has tried something similar in this volume with Zen stories. The author recounts thirty short stories pertaining to Zen Buddhism and explains them so that a reader who isn't familiar with the concept of Zen can understand it. It is different from the book about Mulla Nasruddin because his jokes are open to interpretation, but Zen stories are not. They are like those sharp arrows designed to pierce the toughest of armour at precise points. The explanation needs to be accurate and to the point, and any deviation from the intended meaning of the stories will do a great disservice to its reader.

After reading the entire collection of the thirty stories, I could understand the logic that the author has used in the order of their placement. It is intended for the reader to lay a strong foundation in the concept and then to go to a higher level progressively. For example, the first story, The Zen Transmission, that explains the starting point of Zen also makes us realise how it is not something to be understood by conventional learning by hearing the talks of a master. We understand that the aim of Zen is enlightenment. Then we go on to learn more about the state of enlightenment and how to attain it. We also appreciate the importance of shedding all preconceived notions in order to attain enlightenment. We realise that the fear of the future and the despair about the past are two roadblocks on our path, and complete awareness of the present moment is important.

I was enamoured, particularly by a concept that compares religious scriptures to menus in restaurants. The reason we enter a restaurant is to have good food. But instead of that, we just read the menu of the restaurant and come out. We never strive for the complete spiritual experience, but find ourselves satisfied by filling ourselves with knowledge from texts and considering ourselves spiritual beings. By the end of the book, we also realise that the ultimate Zen experience is not just about enlightenment. That experience only reaches fulfilment when the enlightened master reaches back to the world and works among the poor, emanating his Zen to others, as established in the final tale of The Laughing Buddha.

An Oak Tree in the Garden is another achievement for the author, in which he helps the readers on their first step towards a concept that sounds very simple but is rather tough to follow through. It is so important to not miss the forward by Abhay Mishra, in which he gives a perfect preparatory introduction to Zen. Also considerate is the detailed list of works by different philosophers that the author consulted, as it can help the readers continue their journey towards Zen and finding their inner Buddha.

Book Review: Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick

 

An unnamed bureaucrat is sent to the planet Miranda on a mission to track down Gregorian, a supposed magician, who is accused of smuggling forbidden technology from the Outer Circles. Miranda is a planet on which the proliferation of the latest technology is strictly forbidden. It is a place of magic, shapeshifters, witches, and surreal happenings, and it will soon be underwater due to a heavy tide called the Jubilee Tides. While the bureaucrat is searching for him and juggling with a corrupt system, Gregorian, who is way ahead of him, already has his plans ready for him.

Stations of the Tide is a science fiction masterpiece that was published way back in 1990 by the author Michael Swanwick. Tor Essentials has published a new edition of this seminal work that won the Nebula Award, and this one is also equipped with an introduction by John Clute, an expert in the history of science fiction. I received a review copy of this work from its publisher through Netgalley in exchange for my feedback. I am not a connoisseur of science fiction and have dabbled only very rarely in the genre. But Stations of the Tide is not a standard sci-fi novel and possesses high literary value.

The plot of the novel is narrated like a fever dream, with heavy surrealism and fantastic elements thrown liberally in. It is intentionally ambiguous and demands that its readers pick and place everything that the author throws at them in a seemingly random manner to make any overarching sense. This is a very dense novel and not at all an easy read. The author mentions several technological advancements in its plot but never describes them in detail. The same can be said about the magical elements mentioned in the novel. Several characters are thrown into the plot, and most of them are thrown out as unceremoniously as they come in. But all these elements, which may sound threatening to the reader, come together beautifully to form a literary behemoth that demands respect.

The novel is told from the point of view of the bureaucrat, its protagonist, in the third person. We find him totally out of his element from the opening. He doesn't have a clue about the antagonist, and everyone whom he meets plays him while he flits in and out of various misadventures, some of them orchestrated by Gregorian. The only quality that we find in him is his dogged perseverance, even when he finds that on one side the entire mission was a betrayal and on the other side assured death.

The planet Miranda is another important character in the novel. It's on the verge of becoming uninhabitable, and large-scale evacuations are going on. We find the entire planet in a dilapidated state. The people of the planet are unpredictable and seemingly superstitious. The prohibition of technology has affected the entire population. The prevalence of magic is another peculiarity, and magic offsets the need for technology to some extent. It is mentioned that there was a time when Miranda was at the pinnacle of technological advancement. It is implied that it is about to share the fate of Earth, which became uninhabitable and humans immigrated to different planets, destroying the indigenous inhabitants of that planet like the haunts of Miranda. Earth exists in the form of an AI construct at the Puzzle Palace, a place where all the technical marvels converge.

The novel contains several allusions to other classics, the most prominent being Shakespeare's The Tempest. Miranda, Prospero, and Caliban appear as celestial bodies, along with Pantagruel and Gargantua, lifted from the novel of François Rabelais. The journey of the bureaucrat reminded me of the arduous one that is taken by Captain Willard in the movie Apocalypse Now. The fate of him, for most of the novel, made me think of Kafka's The Castle. The plot has a mysterious maze-like structure, and we find the bureaucrat struggling to make any progress.

Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick is a delightful read for those who love enigmatic novels, enriched by combining several philosophies and strands of thought. It confuses, scares, and unhinges its reader in a marvellous manner. The novel explores the standard themes common to good sci-fi, like the invasion of technology, the identity of AI constructs, and the concept of thought and freedom in a dystopian world. But along with them, it also touches upon other philosophical and mystical thoughts that normally occupy literary fiction books.

Book Review: How Can I Help You? by Laura Sims

 Margo works in a library. She is efficient, considerate, and takes on any additional responsibilities happily. Her co-workers like her. Her boss is happy with her. The patrons adore her. But she has a past. She is an absconding serial killer nurse. The entry of the employee, Patricia, a failed writer, clicks open a lock inside Margo's brain that hid her old urges. All hell breaks loose when an old patron is found dead in the library and a suspicious Patricia digs deeper into the past. Her fixation soon becomes an all-consuming obsession to revive her career as a novelist. Thus begins a cat-and-mouse game inside the silent, cosy library, which could turn violent at any moment.

How Can I Help You? is a suspense thriller set against the background of a library. The novel is written by Laura Sims and comes with much critical praise for its suspense and thrills. More than that, it is an intense character study of two women who could go to any depths for the sake of fulfilling their acute longings. I received an advance review copy of the UK edition from Verve Books, its publisher, through Netgalley in exchange for my honest feedback.

The novel is narrated from twin perspectives. The characters Margo and Patricia take turns narrating their respective versions of the story in alternating chapters. Both narrations happen in the first person and give the reader a panoramic insight into the minds of both of them. We see several events from alternating perspectives and observe how the same thing can be interpreted differently by different minds. This is also an efficient way to break the reader's concentration and subtly use diversion tactics inside the plot.

We realise that even when one of them is the perpetrator and the other is the detector of crimes, both of them have a skewed perspective on the world they live in. While Margo is a slave to her desires and is incapable of escaping them, Patricia, on the other hand, uses Margo to further her career as a writer. I feel Patricia, with all her sophistication, is more in the wrong and even accomplices Margo knowingly. Her behaviour with her boyfriend also shows a side of her personality that is brutally selfish. But as the writer uses her perspective to tell her side of the story, the reader will take time to realise this streak that is within her.

The novel also points fingers at the crumbling state of libraries and how they struggle to find their relevance in the age of the internet and sources of easy access to knowledge. The crowd that throngs the library is no longer the studious kind, with a thirst for knowledge and an interest in books. We find that it is thronged by senile elderly people on the edge of losing their sense of reality, unemployed or unemployable ones who use it just as a hangout, and many perverts. The reference phone calls that Patricia has to attend as part of her job are useless prank calls or those asking for irrelevant questions, like the TV schedule.

How Can I Help You? is a novel that excels in contrasting the setting of a library, which is usually considered the quiet sanctum santorum, with a tense atmospheric terror where unprovoked bad things can happen at any moment. The novel is essentially a slow burn, where the two characters eye each other, intently studying the opponent's state of mind and intentions, all the while trying to find the right moment to strike. It is through this close observation between the two opposing forces that the plot generates the much-needed tension and claustrophobia within the reader's mind.

Laura Sims has succeeded in producing a slow-paced thriller that generates enough suspense through the psychological battle between two contrasting figures. It is also satisfying to the addicted reader in me that the setting of a library and the importance of the plot points of certain books to the plot have been used wisely by her.