The Obsidian Chamber

The inside cover blurb summarizes the book as follows:

"After a harrowing, otherworldly confrontation in Exmouth, Massachusetts, Special Agent A. X. L. Prendergast is missing, presumed dead. Sick with grief, Pendergast's ward, Constance, retreats to her chambers beneath the family mansion at 891 Riverside Drive-only to be taken captive by a shadowy figure from the past. Proctor, Pendergast's longtime bodyguard, springs to action, chasing Constance's kidnappers through cities, across oceans and into wastelands unknown.  And by the time Proctor discovers the truth, a terrifying engine has stirred-and it may already be too late."

The Obsidian Chamber is the 16th Special Agent Pendergast mystery.  I have only read one other book in the series, Blue Labyrinth and my lack of knowledge about the series definitely affected how I felt about the book. I felt that it was a little slow.  There is alot of back story written into the novel which I needed to know to understand what was happening, but it made the reading less suspenseful for me.  The book is described as a thriller by the publisher but I did not feel any thrill.  The plot was definitely interesting but because half of the book was back story, it fell a little flat to me.  

Runaway

I had a hard time getting into this novel but after the first 50 pages I became interested. The story alternates between events that occurred in 1965 and the present time.  I liked the 1965 story better but it ended with the present and all the loose ends were wrapped up.

The story opens in 2015 with 4 childhood friends getting reacquainted. The story then goes back to 1965 with 5 teenage friends running away from their homes in Glasgow for London with hopes of making it big in the music industry. Guitarist Jack Mackay makes the decision to leave after being expelled from high school and his bandmates decide that they don't really want to stay home either. Luke is tired of going door to door with his Jehovah Witnesses parents, keyboard player Maurie wants to give up the opera lessons his parents have forced him into taking , drummer Jeff is a school dropout selling cars and bass player Dave just wants to leave. They lose all their money from a fellow traveler who takes advantage of them and upon arrival they are taken advantage of again by a man who says he can get them a demo record that they can market to an agent.  While they are in London a new friend is killed. When the group are seniors they decide to retrace their steps in London.  Maurie gathers the group together telling them that he has something to finish in London that got started all those years ago.  With Jack's grandson as the driver they set off for London.

While this was a good book it was not as good as earlier May novels.  The plot was simpler and the characters were less developed.   It just wasn't as interesting as the usual Peter May novel.

3 out of 5 stars.

Hostage

Hostage is Guy Delisle's newest graphic novel.  It was published last month by Canada's Drawn and Quarterly.  The book recounts the experiences of Christophe Andre who was kidnapped in 1997 in the Caucasus where he was working for Doctors Without Borders.  He was held for four months in Chechnya. The story is told just as Andre told it to the author.

Andre spent his days counting them so that he could keep track of time.  He was held in empty rooms and a closet during his captivity.  In order to remain sane he would replay in his mind old military battles.  He was fed the same soup for every meal of every day.  His thoughts about what his NGO was doing to rescue him and when it might happen created some suspense as you felt that it might actually happen the way he fantasized about it.

I have read all of Delisle's travelogues and they were cute and humorous. Hostage is a different book.  Not only is it a serious book, the reader cannot help but feel the same thoughts that Andre was feeling, understanding the discomfort of being handcuffed to a radiator, and wondering along with Andre when he will next get some information about his situation.  You feel that you are in that room with him.

The color scheme is various muted greys for each page which conveys the heavy mood of the story.  It is most appropriate for a tale such as this.

I think that Hostage is Delisle's best book to date.  While his other novels were great they did not contain any suspense and as a mystery reader I appreciate that.

The Arab of the Future

The Arab of the Future A Childhood in the Middle East 1978-1984 is a graphic memoir by Riad Sattouf covering his life from birth through age 6.  It recounts his childhood in Libya, France and Syria in the 1970s and 1980s and is written from his perspective.  Sattouf is a former Charlie Hebdo cartoonist.

The book opens with his French mother Clementine and Syrian father Abdul-Razak meeting in France where both were in school at the Sorbonne.  It was not love at first sight but they eventually married and graduated.  His father had received his doctorate in history and accepted a job as an assistant professor in Libya where the family then moved.

Both mother and son stood out from their neighbors because of their blonde hair and were thought by most to either be American or Jewish.  Riad took notice of the Gaddafi regime's provocations toward Israel and America and had to deal with food shortages as well as the cultural differences between France and Libya.  When Gaddafi ordered people of different social statuses to switch jobs his father started looking for a new position. After two years in Libya they returned to France for the summer and then traveled to Syria where his father had been hired as an assistant professor at a university.

In Syria Riad suffered abuse from his cousins because they thought he was Jewish due to his blonde hair.  He saw a country in ruins and posters of Hafez al-Assad everywhere.  Again, Riad had to deal with a new culture.  The family returned to France for the summer to visit with Clementine's parents and then went back to Syria.  It is here that the story ends with a promise that the story will be continued in another book.

While the artwork consists of basic black and white line drawings there are alternating color schemes for the different locations of the author's life. France is light blue, Libya is yellow and Syria is light pink.

The name of the book was inspired by the author's father who said that he was trying to raise his son to be an arab of the future, one that would get an education to escape religious dogma.  His father, while educated, was sexist, racist and an anti-semite despite himself being an arab of the future.  He treated his wife abysmally and I have to wonder why she stayed married to him.

The Arab of the Future shows the Arabic mindset and was educational for me. The story was not as compelling to me as other graphic novels but I am still looking forward to reading the sequels to this novel.

Rolling Blackouts

Rolling Blackouts:  Dispatches From Turkey, Syria and Iraq is a graphic novel summarizing a trip that the author took to the Middle East with friends who are international journalists.  It is a comic about how journalism works and is based on true events that occurred during the two month trip.

The journalists have formed a collective called Seattle Globalist and have planned a trip through  Turkey, Syria and Iraq to write reports primarily about the region absorbing refugees with dwindling resources, an underreported subject in the mainstream media.  All but one are friends from childhood and includes a former Marine who had been stationed in Iraq.  The author observed her friends interview civilians, refugees and officials including a UN refugee administrator, taxi driver, Iraqi refugee deported from the U. S., Iraqis seeking refuge in Syria and the American Marine.

The journalists use their first interview with a subject mainly to get to know them personally.  Then they meet afterward to discuss what kind of story they can get from the person and how to lead the interview.  Follow-up interviews focus on how the war affected them and if the interviewee was a refugee the journalists discussed their life before the war, how they became refugees, what their future plans and/or desires are and what kind of life they think is actually possible for them.

I found it interesting that none of the refugees wanted to resettle in the U. S. They believe the U.S. invasion of Iraq caused their life to be permanently over. It was also interesting that while the refugees were both rich and poor, most of them were formerly middle class with degrees. There is no longer a middle class in this region and that is why these countries are finding it impossible to rebuild.  All of the people with skills that are needed to rebuild are sitting in refugee camps.

I loved this serious non-fiction graphic novel and hope that more serious graphic novels are written in the future. The information inside its pages was very informative.  The artwork was created with colorful watercolor drawings done in comic panels.  This book is a must read for our national politicians as they do not seem to understand the problems facing the Middle East.  Highly recommended!

The Undertaking of Lily Chen

The Undertaking of Lily Chen begins with a quote from a July 26, 2007 Economist magazine article "Parts of rural China are seeing a burgeoning market for female corpses, the result of the reappearance of a strange custom called 'ghost marriages.'  Chinese tradition demands that husbands and wives always share a grave.  Sometimes, when a man dies unmarried, his parents would procure the body of a woman, hold a 'wedding,' and bury the couple together... A black market has sprung up to supply corpse brides.  Marriage brokers - usually respectable folk who find brides for village men - account for most of the middlemen.  At the bottom of the supply chain come hospital mortuaries, funeral parlors, body snatchers - and now murderers."

The story opens with the death of Deshi Li's brother Wei.  Deshi accidentally kills him during a fight at the air force base where he is stationed.  When he tells his parents that Wei is dead his mother sends him off to bring back a corpse bride for Wei to be buried with so that he is not alone through eternity.  Deshi hires a man to dig up a grave of a woman for him but Deshi is grossed out after seeing the bones of an old corpse and leaves him at the cemetery to seek a "crisp" corpse.  He then begins to travel looking for a bride when he runs across Lily Chen who is getting water from a well for her parents.  Lily joins him believing that he will take her away from her remote village to Beijing for a better life.  Deshi is planning to kill her though.  As they travel they run into some strange folks and Lily's sassiness begins to grow on Deshi.

What makes this book special is the incredible artwork.  The author has used watercolors, pens and inks in her drawings in gorgeous colors that leap off of the page.  She has detailed Chinese papercuts drawn in red as well as colorful landscapes and simple line drawn characters.  This could really be displayed as an art book on a coffee table.  The art is that good.

I cannot recommend this book more highly.  The story was well paced and had an interesting storyline that could actually happen in China today.  Lily is hilarious with her sass.  I love her character.

I give it a 10 out of 5 stars!

The Lost Order

The Lost Order is Steve Berry's 12th Cotton Malone mystery and his 16th book to date.

Cotton accepts an assignment from the Smithsonian Institution and travels to Arkansas to locate a lost treasure.  He becomes involved with the remnant of the most powerful group in American history-the Knights of the Golden Circle. The Knights were founded in 1854 and disappeared in the early 20th century. The KKK was an off-shoot of the group. However, there are now only about 550 sentinals of the Knights that are rumored to be guarding billions of dollars worth of Confederate gold.  The Smithsonian is not government funded and would like to have the gold to finance their museums. The only problem is that the treasure can only be found by locating 5 stones with clues to the location of the treasure.  All of the clues have been encrypted in a code that has been unbreakable for 150 years. Cotton travels from Washington, DC to Arkansas and then to New Mexico to solve the code and locate the treasure.

There is a subplot about the Speaker of the House of Representatives putting a group of Reprentatives from the House Rules Committee to make a change in their rules that the House will only vote on legislation that originated in the House.  This makes the Senate powerless. Some elected officials want to push this rule through while others want to make this change by holding a second Constitutional Convention and write a new Constitution that 3/4ths of the states will have to ratify.  The idea for the rule change originated in the Confederate Constitution.  Most of the Knights were Confederate supporters. Who wins?  You have to read the book to find out.

The Lost Order was an interesting read.  I learned alot about our country's history from the Writer's Note at the end of the book wherein he explained which parts of the story were true and which parts he created in his mind.

Cotton's family history is central to the story and that added to his character growth.  Angus "Cotton" Adams, a Confederate spy, holds the key to everything needed to resolve this hunt for treasure.

While I loved the historical facts surrounding the plot, this installment of the series was not as compelling as earlier books in the series.  The earlier books were page turners but this one had a slower pace.  However, I would give it 4 out of 5 stars.