What I'm reading: Romance, food and fashion in Venice: what could be better?

 Kate Zarelli: COINCIDENTALLY IN VENICE

Watching a piazza in Venice on a webcam helps London office-worker Ashley through the Covid lockdowns and a love affair that turns sour. Made redundant in 2022 she and her best friend Juliet go to Venice and seek out the square. Juliet quickly finds a dishy Italian waiter, but romance for Ashley takes the unlikely form of an Irish accountant from her old firm, beginning a new career as an art restorer.

Ashley and Juliet both start totally different lives in Venice. The wife of Ashley’s ex-boss, now launching herself as an art patron, threatens to put a spanner in the works, but …. No spoilers from this reviewer!

Kate Zarelli also writes as Katie Hutton, rich and intense historical fiction set in the English Midlands. In her Derbyshire novels I have detected a hint of Thomas Hardy. In her contemporary novels I hear sizzling echoes of Carrie Bradshaw and Bridget Jones. Ms Zarelli  brings people and places gloriously to life and light. Coincidentally in Venice has everything its magical setting deserves: romance (with titillating sex scenes) laced with a hint of danger. For food lovers there are some delicious meals, and for fashion-lovers some frocks to die for!

What I'm reading: Guilty till proven innocent

 

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My website (davidgeebooks.com) is currently out of action, so I'm back here on my old Blogger page. Bear with me, dear reader(s):    

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Michael Connelly:

RESURRECTION WALK

Mickey Haller, the “Lincoln Lawyer”, takes on the seemingly unwinnable case of a Latina woman who has served five years in prison for the murder of her husband, a murder she confessed to at her trial. She claims she was pressured into the false confession. 

Haller’s dogged investigative assistant, half-brother and now his chauffeur is retired LAPD detective Harry Bosch, hero of more than twenty thrillers by Michael Connelly and currently undergoing chemotherapy for blood cancer. This case progresses from police procedural to courtroom drama. High drama indeed in the courtroom as startling new evidence comes to light. As is so often the case in Connelly’s fiction, corruption is at the heart of the story.

Connolly has served up close to forty novels to date. This is another fine example of his writing: vivid characterisation, a taut plot with frequent revelations and enough tension to keep the reader turning the page. It’s often said – and it’s the truth – that nobody does it better than Michael Connelly.

What I'm reading: The price of Virginity

 Katherine Mezzacappa:

 THE MAIDEN OF FLORENCE

 

Florence, 1584. The virility of Vincenzo Gonzaga, heir to one of Mantua’s most powerful families, has been called into question ahead of his marriage to a princess of the Medici clan. A bridal ‘surrogate’ is called for, a virgin whose deflowerment will scotch the rumours. The chosen virgin is Giulia, a girl of rare beauty growing up in an orphanage in Florence, the illegitimate daughter of another noble family. In return for her maidenhead, she will be rewarded with a generous dowry and a respectable husband.

Prince Vincenzo is a ‘playboy’ of his time; spoilt and selfish but stunningly handsome; Giulia falls for him and he for her. Their mating is very unromantic: the ‘rules’ require medical witnesses not just to confirm Giulia’s virginity but also to verify every stage of her deflowerment. Giulia is narrating her story and both procedures are so clinical as to remove most of the erotic element. The process is fully successful; Vincenzo impregnates her, but this child, a prince’s bastard, is also confined to an orphanage.

The husband they find for her, Giuliano, is a good kind man, a musician, and they will have a happy life punctuated by a number of childbirths and, inevitably, some child deaths. But Giulia resolves to find her first child, the prince’s bastard, even though this involves further dealings with Cavaliere Vinta, the Gonzagas’ creepy majordomo.

Katherine Mezzakappa’s novel, a true historical story melding into fiction, is finely researched and fully convincing. Giulia’s narrative voice is modern, but never clunky or anachronistic; Florence, observes Giulia, is “too small for secrets to remain secrets for long,” Renaissance Italy is brought vividly to life. From a squalid episode in 16th-century history Mrs Mezzakappa has crafted a literary gem, a story richly steeped in romance and drama.

David at the Movies: Stephen King's vampire saga hasn't lost its bite!

  SALEM'S LOT

I'm glad I didn't let all the negative chat about this remake put me off seeing it. In my opinion the movie does justice to Stephen King's source material (and I note King has a co-writer credit). Yes, there's a lot left out, but all the key ingredients are here: the arrival of Barlow's coffin à la Dracula in Whitby; the Glick boys, including the famous "let me in the window" moment; the jumpy graveyard scene; Ben's relationships with Susan and Mark. Young Mark has a beefed-up role, which makes a powerful impact; and the mother-from-hell surprise and the huge set-piece climax are welcome innovations. 

This pacy version has some of the freshness and pizzazz that made The Lost Boys and Fright Night so much fun, and I say a big Bravo to writer/director Gary Dauberman.

What I'm reading: Daniel Silva's Russian President takes us to the nuclear precipice

 Daniel Silva: THE COLLECTOR

Gabriel Allon has retired to Venice with his wife and children after five years heading the most lethal branch of Israel’s secret service. He resumes his other career as an art restorer (the best in the business) but accepts a commission to investigate the murder in Amalfi of a shipping tycoon who happened to own a missing Vermeer portrait, stolen more than thirty years ago.

The trail leads, as it often does in Daniel Silva’s stories, to the decadent Kremlin of Vladimir Vladimirovich (only in the post-script does he add the surname beginning with P). A honey-trapped Danish oil tycoon is an intermediary for the stolen art and implicated in a daring scheme to escalate the Ukraine war into a nuclear Armageddon.

To thwart this apocalyptic plan, Gabriel recruits a newcomer to his team, an IT hacker, also Danish, with a sideline as a cat-burglar (she stole the stolen Vermeer but didn’t kill the tycoon), who reminded me of Modesty Blaise, a superwoman from the era of Ian Fleming’s original Bond books. Like Peter O’Donnell’s Modesty, Silva’s Ingrid should be – and almost is – too good to be believed, but the author brings her and his story to a nail-biting climax on the Russian-Finnish border, where the skills from Gabriel Allon’s first career as a Mossad assassin come in handy.

Daniel Silva’s twenty-third Gabriel Allon adventure is one of the most outlandish and dangerously close to being a parody, but the sheer pace of this ‘caper’ carries the reader breathlessly along. Another terrific read from my long-term favourite thriller writer.

What I'm reading: Gay love in the trenches of World War One

 

Alice Witt: IN MEMORIAM

 

At a boys’ private school in rural England teenage Sidney Ellwood is infatuated with Henry Gaunt. They both write poetry (in a postscript Alice Winn admits that she drew inspiration for her two lead characters from Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Graves) and have been dabbling in adolescent sex with other pupils. But this is 1914 and Britain is going to war with Germany. Girls are giving white feathers to young men accusing them of cowardice if they are out of uniform.

As soon as they are old enough (18) Gaunt and Ellwood join up and find themselves reunited with other old boys from their school in the trenches of Belgium and France, culminating in the Somme, where wave after wave of British soldiers fight to advance a few yards into German-occupied territory. We already know the casualty rate: thousands die; thousands more will go home scarred and mutilated physically and mentally. The “war to end all wars”; of course, it didn’t.

Alice Winn is not the first female author to write about men at war. Pat Barker wrote a Booker-prize-winning trilogy and an early Susan Hill novel has gay love flourishing in the trenches. Like her predecessors, Winn writes beautifully and does eloquent justice to the theme of gay love in wartime. In Memoriam moved me to tears several times. This is an outstanding novel, one of the best I have read since the turn of the century and, right now, a timely reminder that wars don’t only happen to other people. Our fathers and grandfathers became cannon fodder 110 years ago, and it could very easily happen again to us and our sons and brothers.