Little Red Hen's Winter Book Club Part 1 - New Authors

It's been awhile since the Book Club has convened so come on in, pour yourself a glass of wine and have a seat.  Tonight's topic is new-to-me authors.


Fever - Deon Meyer
A virus has killed off 90 per cent of the world's population and we find Nico Storm and his father Willem driving across a deserted South Africa on the look out for packs of feral dogs, Mad Max-like motorcycle gangs and nuclear contamination.  They are also looking for a place to start a new community, a haven of light and hope in this now dark and frightening world.  They get themselves set up with electricity, start growing their own food and develop small industries and trade with travelling peddlers.  Through exploration of the country-side, they know theirs is the largest community in the area. But  things seem off - people have seen helicopters but wonder where the fuel is coming from, the peddlers are trading food from contamination zone but how have they got this food and there have been sightings of people in some sort of uniform.  Who are these people?  Willem gets murdered by these uniformed people and Nico's discovery who is behind all these oddities is a plot twist that I did not see coming.


Thirteen Hours - Deon Meyer
I enjoyed Fever so much I went looking for more from Deon Meyer.  He has a series with a detective in the Cape Town police force named Benny Griessel.  He's an alcoholic, stalled in his career and mentoring the new black and coloured detectives in the new South African police force.
An American back-packer has been brutally murdered and her friend goes on the run through the streets of Cape Town.  Benny and his team has thirteen hours to find the girl.  They don't really have much to go on but through dogged detective work and team work manage to find the girl and crack a conspiracy as well.  
It was quite tense and suspenseful, a real page-turner.  It is translated from Afrikaans which seems to work.  Sometimes the translations are kind of clunky and wrong words stop you in your tracks as you're reading.  But there was none of that here.  Cape Town plays such a big part of the story that a map would have been helpful.  I'll read the rest of the series.

Slow Horses series - Mick Herron

   

Slough House is where washed up MI5 spies go to spend the rest of their failed careers.  River Cartwright would have blown up King's Cross if it hadn't been a training exercise, somebody else left a classified CD on the train which ended up on the evening news, someone else is an alcoholic. They spend their days transcribing mobile phone conversations or going through somebody's garbage or any other mundane task.  They all hope they'll get back to MI5 headquarters but MI5 hopes they'll get fed up and quit.     





Slow Horses
A young man is abducted and it's threatened he'll be beheaded live on the Internet; River Cartwright sees this as a chance to redeem himself.  But things are not quite as they seem - what's the connection the kidnappers have with a disgraced journalist?  Is the victim who he first seems to be?  The clock ticks down to the execution and the Slow Horses have to work together to save the young man's life.




Dead Lions
A couple of the Slow Horses are seconded to babysit a Russian mafia boss who MI5 is trying to recruit.  Meanwhile, an old Cold War operative ends up dead on a bus to Oxford and Jackson Lamb, the head of Slough House believes him to be murdered.  Who would be bothered with a retired low level spy?  His death leads the Slow Horses into a tangled web of Cold War secrets.  And who is this Russian mafia boss really?



The Holy Thief  - William Ryan
Set in Moscow in 1936 just as Stalin's Great Terror is beginning.
Captain Korolev is a member of the Criminal Investigation Division of the Moscow Militia and sent to investigate the murder of a young woman dismembered and left on the altar of a deconsecrated church.  Things get murky when it's discovered   she's an American citizen and the NKVD, a secret organization within the KGB, get involved.  Korolev's every move is under scrutiny and he can't trust anyone anymore.

That's all for now.  Come back for the next meeting when we revisit some old friends.