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Journalism of Courage
If you like novels,not telenovelas,to provide your drowsy dose of escapism,swoon along to Barbara Taylor Bradfords Breaking the Rules (Rs 299,HarperCollins). It begins with erudite flourish an epigraph from a John Donne poem: Come with me and be my love. But the rest is physical rather than metaphysical. On 5th Avenue we meet M,an exotic beauty with a sleek ponytail to her waist,on her way to becoming the next Kate Moss of Blane Model Agency.
M has a troubled past,which she has left behind in London,along with the rest of her name. But theres enough in New York to distract M from all that,such as her impossibly gorgeous,high-living friends: artist Georgiana,actor Dax,and Portia,Pandora,Horatio,whose mothers seem to have rifled through the casts of characters in Shakespeares plays to find something suitably poncey to name them. M manages to shun the limelight until she meets the dreamy blue-eyed actor Laurence Vaughan at a Park Avenue party. The sight of him afflicts her with a sudden weakness in her legs,a need to stare back at him boldly and a helpless inability to tear her eyes away the classic symptoms of paperback love.
Not far from where the ground threatens to give way beneath Ms feet,it caves in with a cataclysmic explosion on Wall Street,leaving a 15-ft crater,38 people dead and 143 gravely injured. Its here,at the site of the Wall Street Bombing of September 16,1920,that The Death Instinct by Jed Rubenfeld (Rs 295,Hachette) begins. Walking through the debris,looking at hooves without their horses,and bodies without their heads,is war veteran Streatham Younger,whod pulled his companions detective Littlemore and French radiochemist Colette Rousseau to the ground instants before the explosion. Rousseau soon finds herself the target of mysterious attacks,which slowly unravel a more complicated mystery behind the explosion.
This thriller deftly links up several historical dots: the perpetrators of the bombing,the $1 billion that went missing from the US Treasury the same day,the New Jersey warehouse where the Radium Girls were dying a slow,grisly death ingesting the glow-in-the-dark paint they put on watch dials,and Sigmund Freuds home in Vienna,where he explains Rousseau his new death instinct theory.
This instinct can be held responsible for the two corpses which turn up in Hampshire,England,in the beginning of This Body of Death by Elizabeth George (Hachette,Rs 595). Georges is the England of bleak council estates,a far way from Agatha Christies stately manor estates. A maggot-ridden woman is found in a disused cemetery and a child in a canal. Scotland Yards finest are put on the job the terminally fashion-impaired Sergeant Barbara Havers and her former partner,gifted Inspector Lynley.
