Mailbox Monday

Mailbox Monday is a weekly meme hosted by Marcia at The Printed Page.

Here's what came through my door this week:



Christopher Brookmyre - A big boy did it and ran away

Back when they were students, just like everybody else, Ray Ash and Simon Darcourt had dreams about what they'd do when they grew up. In both their cases, it was to be rock stars. Fifteen years later, their mid-thirties are bearing down fast, and just like everybody else, they're having to accept the less glamorous hands reality has dealt them. Nervous new father Ray takes refuge from his responsibilities by living a virtual existence in online games. People say he needs to grow up, but everybody has to find their own way of coping. For some it's affairs, for others it's the bottle, and for Simon it's serial murder, mass slaughter and professional assassination.

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Miranda Innes - Cinnamon City

Step into the dreamlike city of Marrakech. Where passionate music, magic potions and the drama of Africa are cooled by the intuitive genius of Arabic culture. Miranda Innes and her partner were lured into buying a beautiful long-neglected riad in the heart of this pink-walled city. Only after they'd begun their restoration work did they find that nothing in this place of smoke and mirrors was quite what it seemed. In CinnamonCity, Miranda Innes takes you beyond the tourist track, behind the bolted doors and deep inside the romance that is Marrakech. With lyrical and evocative descriptions of the swirling colours, flavours and aromas, this glorious book will open your eyes to this most exotic of North African cities.

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Margaret Forster - Over

This is a novel about what happens after a tragedy in a family. Not the tragedy itself but its aftermath, what's left when the tide recedes and it's over. A daughter has died, suddenly, shockingly, and the different ways in which her mother and father respond to the tragedy, how this plays out within the family and affects the other siblings, is at the heart of things.

The sad story is narrated by Louise, mother and primary school teacher, trying to hold herself together and get on with life, trying to understand not 'what happened', but what has happened to them all in the wake of the accident, and why.

At first the reader knows only that something bad has happened to one of the family, but not what or to whom. Gradually we learn some of the details - a storm blew up, a yacht hit rocks and capsized, but the body was never found. Louise's husband cannot come to terms with the lack of knowledge and certainty, and wants someone to blame. He becomes obsessive in his quest for a reason, and travels everywhere, neglecting work and family in pursuit of the 'truth'. His wife just wants to come to terms with it, can't think of blame, moves out into a tiny flat of her own and goes back to work at the infant school where she used to teach.

Their other children handle the tragedy better than their parents. What they can't deal with is the way their parents are tearing each other and the family apart.

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Peter Robinson - The summer that never was

A skeleton has been unearthed. Soon the body is identified, and the horrific discovery hits the headlines ...Fourteen-year-old Graham Marshall went missing during his paper round in 1965. The police found no trace of him. His disappearance left his family shattered, and his best friend, Alan Banks, full of guilt ...That friend has now become Chief Inspector Alan Banks, and he is determined to bring justice for Graham. But he soon realises that in this case, the boundary between victim and perpetrator, between law-guardian and law-breaker, is becoming more and more blurred

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Ruth Rendell - The veiled one

A Reg Wexford mystery. In a desolate subterranean car park, Detective Chief Inspector Wexford has been too preoccupied to notice anything out of the ordinary - just a teenage girl in a red car, driving rather too fast. Only later does he learn of the car park victim, murdered with a length of wire.

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Ruth Rendell - Wolf to the slaughter

Anita Margolis has vanished. Dark and exquisite, Anita's character is as mysterious as her disappearance. But with no body and no apparent crime, seemingly there's nothing to be investigated. Until Wexford receives an anonymous note claiming 'a girl called Ann' was killed the very night Anita disappeared. With only one questionable lead to follow, Wexford and Inspector Burden are compelled to make inquiries. They soon discover Anita is wealthy, flighty, and thoroughly immoral. Burden has a very clear idea of what has happened to her. But Wexford has his own suspicions...