Since I’m traveling, my reading gets a bit neglected, but here are two recent book recommendations I’m happy to share.
Astonish Me by Maggie Shipstead. Shipstead is the author of Seating Arrangements and this is her second novel. It takes the reader into the somewhat cloistered world of ballet. The main character is Joan, who had a short-lived career as a ballerina and then left when she realized she wasn’t good enough. She marries and raises a son. Her compatriot Sandy with whom Joan has a somewhat ambivalent relationship, makes a career as a dancer. Added to this mix is a Russian dancer whom Joan helped to defect. Stir in some other complex relationships—that of Joan with her husband and son and that of Joan and Sandy with the defected dancer and you have lots of interplay. I liked this book the farther along I got and had figured out the “surprise” revelation.
To Dwell in Darkness by Deborah Crombie. This latest mystery is one of Crombie’s best in my opinion. Very up-to-the-minute with its themes of environmental activism and potential terrorist threats, it brings together British detectives Gemma Jones and Duncan Kincaid and several of their colleagues from earlier books to solve two crimes. When a protest in the busy St. Pancras train station results in an unexpected death, there are questions of suicide, murder, an unintended victim, and multiple threads to unravel. What I especially like about Crombie’s mysteries is that even the secondary characters (the other detectives, for example, and Jones and Kincaid’s children) are well fleshed out and you get a portrayal of the daily life of these people when they are not tracking down or interviewing a suspect.
