The Paperbackers

Kim Edwards,the author of The Lake of Dreams (Penguin,Rs 399),is fast becoming a specialist in the made-for-TV movie grade of stirring family drama. Her phenomenally best-selling debut novel,The Memory Keeper’s Daughter,demonstrated her natural gift for storytelling,and for the sort of treacly phrases that hint at reflective depth and flatter its readers into thinking they’re devouring a “literary” page-turner. More flattering,however,is a lead character they can rapturously identify with. This one,for instance,Lucy Jarrett,is viewed through a haze of romance and numinous specialness,first glimpsed illumined by a comet,“a streaming jewel,circling the years,thrilling and portentous”.

At the start of the book,we find her unemployed and unfulfilled,though living in a small seaside village in Japan with her architect boyfriend Yoshi. The conjunction is called for,as his presence makes the prose fairly perspire with lust. And who can blame it? His eyes,perpetually fixed on her,are “the colour of onyx,as dark as the bottom of a lake”,she’s constantly kissing him “in the jasmine air”,while he makes murmured declarations about her body being “the only continent that matters”. When she gets a mail from her mother,who says she’s been injured in an automobile accident,she returns to her rambling homestead in the village of The Lake of Dreams in upstate New York. Here,there’s plenty in the family closet to keep her occupied: a haunting family history about a disreputable lady ancestor who was part of the early 20th century feminist movement,a child out of wedlock,a family conflict and even an old beau.

A dark thriller,The Blackhouse by Peter May (Quercus,Rs 499),also begins with a homecoming under disquieting circumstances. Police detective Fin Macleod returns to a remote isle in the Hebrides to investigate the death of a former classmate,who’s found naked,eviscerated and hanging from a rafter. The modus operandi appears similar to a case he’s investigating in Edinburgh. This return too results in the resurfacing of suppressed memories,of a trip he took to a remote outcrop to take part in an island ritual,the hunting of the gugas (gannets). The trip had ended in tragedy,and he hopes history won’t repeat itself.

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History repeats itself,first as tragedy,and then as blockbusting fiction in Tom Clancy’s fifteenth novel,Dead or Alive (Penguin,

Rs 899),a revenge fantasy about an elite super secret group of operatives,the Campus,brought together by President Jack Ryan with the “sole purpose to hunt down,locate and eliminate terrorists and those who protect them”. This “murder gang” sets off in pursuit of the “Emir”,their creepy quarry who’s gone into hiding after a series of attacks on the US,perpetrated by his network of Islamists. So,before he can plot and execute another devastating attack,they go about using waterboarding and other ingenious torture methods to extract information from “high-value assets”. The pacy narrative,plot twists,and Clancy’s expertise in military technology might make it surprisingly palatable to read,even if its politics are decidedly not.