The Cue Card

Just picked up the mass paperback and boy is this a quick read — nearly all-842 pages of it. Now I know what all the fuss was about. Apparently Stieg Larsson was the second bestselling author in the world in 2008 (even though he died in 2004) — thanks to his Swedish “Millennium” trilogy, of which “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” is the first. The trilogy has sold more than 12.5 million copies, and soon enough I’m sure to pick up book number two. I can’t recall being so consumed by a murder mystery, thriller since perhaps Scott Turow’s “Presumed Innocent” in 1987.

“Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” starts out as protagonist Mikael Blomkvist, a middle-age financial journalist and co-owner of Millennium magazine in Stockholm, hits rock bottom when he’s found guilty in court of libel against shady businessman Hans-Erik Wennerstrom, despite the fact that he knows his story is right but can’t prove it. Exhausted by the case, Blomkvist decides to take time off from the magazine, and accepts an offer from industrialist Henrik Vanger to investigate the disappearance of Vanger’s great-niece 40 years ago from the secluded island that the powerful family owns, three hours by train to the north.

On remote Hedeby Island, Blomkvist finds himself in the depths of winter, trying to make sense of a case long grown cold, and a family that is more than a touch unsettling. The backdrop of the place and the frigid landscape are described vividly enough to make frostbite and darkness feel very real. It might conjure up memories of the 1992 Danish murder mystery “Smilla’s Sense of Snow,” which comes to a head on a glaciated island off of Greenland. Brrr.

Simultaneously, “Dragon Tattoo” also delves into the world of Lizbeth Salander, a 24-year-old pierced, tattooed whip-smart computer hacker whom Blomkvist comes to enlist in time to help crack the case. Salander, who at the beginning is on the verge of being institutionalized for behavioral problems, is a hell of a character, prepared to kick ass and take names later. In a grisly scene, she’s been abused by an appointed guardian and takes it into her own hands to wage a heavy payback.

Blomkvist and Salander make a great investigative combo. Getting to know them in the beginning and middle parts of the book are the best, as new evidence surrounding the creepy Vanger family and disappearance slowly start to emerge. The fact that Blomkvist and Salander start sleeping together while on the case, even though she is half his age, adds an element of complexity (though I don’t think I like it for the characters) with Blomkvist still linked to his partner, Erika Berger, at the magazine. The last part of the book seems to get a bit too tidy with almost all of the pieces falling neatly into place, case cracked, and some of the earlier intrigue losing hold. The ending goes on a tad long and isn’t as good as the rest. But still “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” proves to be the quickest page-turner of the year.

Ps. A Swedish film of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” came out in 2009 but apparently didn’t get wide release in the States. Catch it if you can.

This 2003 suspense novel has one of those twisted endings that make you want to throw it against a wall after you’re done. It seemed to be going along just fine, slowly building in momentum, taking you on a steady course of suspense to its conclusion and then thunk: an ending so opposite of where you want it to go it sets you off to curse that you ever got it.

I had picked up “Shutter Island” because I heard it was coming out as a movie in October 2009 with Leo DiCaprio and directed by Martin Scorsese, and because Dennis Lehane wrote it and his other novels “Gone, Baby, Gone” (1998) and “Mystic River” (2001) became somewhat intriguing movies.

Set in 1954, the story begins as U.S. Marshals Teddy Daniels and Chuck Aule are called to investigate the disappearance of a patient at a hospital for the criminally insane on Shutter Island, off the Massachusetts coast. Daniels, whose beloved wife died in a fire two years prior, has ulterior reasons for taking the case, notably finding the insane criminal housed there who caused her death.

Soon though the deputy marshals find that the medical staff at Shutter Island, especially the director, is stonewalling their investigation, and they discern that radical, illegal treatments are being administered to the patients as part of a secret program. (For other novels on nefarious experimentation taking place on islands, you might also recall: “The Island of Dr. Moreau” (1896), “Dr. No” (1958) and “Plum Island” (1997) to name just a few.)

“Shutter Island” picks up steam as a hurricane hits, cutting off communication to the mainland and enabling more insane patients to escape from their cells. Aule disappears, and Daniels believes he’s being slipped psychotic drugs. He makes a dash to leave the island but is intercepted. As clues unravel, he begins to doubt everything, including his memory, his partner and his sanity.

Lehane gives the book a surreal and really creepy kind of ending, but it’s sort of just lame and leaves you wanting something else. Perhaps they will do better with the movie, which has an all-star cast (even Ben Kingsley and Patricia Clarkson!), and of course, also Scorsese who’s directed “Cape Fear”-freaky-kind of suspense movies before.

I needed a quick read for a flight and came across William Boyd’s spy novel “Restless,” which did the trick and more. It’s an absorbing thriller about an aging mother, Sally Gilmartin, who thinks her life is in danger and reveals in a series of written accounts to her daughter, Ruth, of her clandestine past — born Eva Delectorskaya, a half-Russian, half-English émigré recruited into the British Secret Service in 1939. Ruth, a single mom and graduate student, thinks at first her mother is going crazy, but is drawn into her account as details of “Eva’s” life emerge.

The story unfolds with chapters alternating between her mother’s life as a spy in 1940-1941 and Ruth’s life in Oxford in 1976, procrastinating her thesis and earning a living teaching English as a second language. Undoubtedly, the chapters of Eva and her work under boss Lucas Romer are more suspenseful, but Ruth’s life also contains a couple of mysterious characters (dubious house guests Ludger and Ilse from Germany and an Iranian suitor Hamid) that keep things up in the air.

Boyd has cleverly based the novel on the history of a covert propaganda group called the British Security Coordination, whose aim was to change the minds of isolationist Americans and lure the U.S. into World War II. In the book, Eva’s work, as part of the secret unit under Romer, includes “feeding clever false information out into the world” through the medium of a small press agency and couriering a forged map of Hitler’s South American ambitions to bait the U.S. into action.

But after a couple missions go badly, Eva realizes someone in her unit has betrayed her and she flees, using her spy training to live life on the run. The BSC unit is rolled up after Pearl Harbor, and Eva (now Sally Gilmartin) marries, keeping her former life hidden.

Thirty-five years later, Sally, still on the lookout for someone who might bring her down, decides to try to put an end to her life undercover by writing her account of the BSC and getting her daughter to track down her former boss.

The 2006 novel, one of the first on the BSC, makes for a snappy, interesting read, conjuring a time in the run-up to WWII when Britain had a secret agency of news manipulation and black propaganda operating right out of N.Y.’s Rockefeller Center.

For more on this hardly heard of agency and the role of British agents in the U.S. before Pearl Harbor, read Boyd’s fascinating article in the Guardian.

The follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize winner’s book “March” in 2006, “People of the Book” is another of Geraldine Brooks’s intricately woven historical novels. In it, Brooks spins a fictional tale based on the spare details known about the real-life medieval artifact, the Sarajevo Haggadah, one of the oldest Jewish illuminated texts, whose survival through centuries of wars and purges seems nothing short of “a series of miracles.”

It’s narrated in part by Hanna, a rare book conservator hired in 1996 by the United Nations to inspect and restore the ancient Haggadah so it can be put on exhibit. Under examination, Hanna finds various clues in the book to its history, whereabouts and guardians, including an insect’s wing, wine stains, a white hair and salt crystals.

As Hanna pursues unraveling these mysteries, alternate chapters of the novel flash back to various points in the Haggadah’s history and those who possessed it during such turbulent times as: Sarajevo 1940, Vienna 1894, Venice 1609, Tarragona 1492 and Seville 1480. “Inquisition, Nazis, extremist Serb nationalists … the book at this point bears witness to all that,” says one of Hanna’s colleagues.

Indeed, yet the Sarajevo Haggadah also bears witness to those of various faiths who risked their lives to save it from destruction: including a Muslim, Dervis Korbut (his real name), who saved it from the Nazis in 1941; a Catholic priest, Vistorini, who spared its burning during the Inquisition around 1609; and another Muslim, Enver Imamovic (his real name), who hid it in a bank vault during the Bosnian War of the 1990s.

The flashback chapters are consistently rich in detail of the eras and lives of those who heralded the Haggadah. For the most part, the novel is a suspenseful, at times harrowing read, retracing the persecution of the Jews and the Haggadah’s many close calls, as well as Hanna’s contemporary challenges as its conservator. It seems a faster moving novel than Brooks’s “March,” with a bit more to it as well. Only at times does Brooks’s elaborate story lose readers among its many characters and eras, with some abrupt transitions requiring readers to stay quite focused. It’s not exactly your airhead beach read. It packs a lot in in the span of a few hundred pages.

Only in a couple instances did I think that Brooks was stretching it a bit to become a Jewish type of “Da Vinci Code” thriller. Mostly, “People of the Book” doesn’t get that crazy. Despite occasional quirks, Brooks weaves a memorable Sarajevo Haggadah story that stays true to its source.

ps. Apparently Catherine Zeta Jones has acquired the film rights to “People of the Book.” But how you make a film out of it, is anyone’s guess.