Deceit by James Siegel

This is what I am listening to, actually. I have recently finished this book on CD and now I am going back and reading everything James Siegel ever wrote. He's a mesmerizing writer with a fertile imagination and pitch-perfect understanding of moral ambiguity and human flaws. Maybe not too surprising for the author is Senior Creative Director and Vice President of the BBDO advertising agency in New York.

Tom Valle, ignominiously dismissed from a newspaper the level of the NY Times finds himself in the backwater burg of Littleton, California where he is the reporter for local paper.

His editor sends him out on a routine automobile fatality story but he recognizes almost immediately that something is hinky. Trouble is, nobody seems to see what he sees. He continues to uncover cover-ups, lies, twists and turns that go back decades in his quest for the truth.

The truth. For Valle that's an interesting ideal. He was fired from his last job because he fabricated news stories and it led not only to his dismissal but to the fall of a great editor. Now he's on the trail of a very important, potentially world changing mystery which could re-establish him ... if only he would be believed.

I'm not sure I believed him and I'm not sure to this moment whether or not Siegel wanted Valle to be believed. Is everything that Valle finds out true, a delusion, a lie? Some of it seems so fantastical, yet somehow possible, almost plausible that this reader found herself asking this question at every turn. Has his firing sent Valle 'round the twist? Is he calculating that a big lie is more believable than small ones? Has he really stumbled one of the most significant cover-ups of all time ... quiet and masked in this little California town?

Well, dear reader, that's up to you to decide.

Mill Valley resident Phil Sheridan was a perfect choice as the reader for this novel. His voice teases out the quirkiness of each character and beautifully conveys the transformation of Tom Valle from world-weary and burnt out to reinvigorated and determined.

I highly recommend this. It is available as a book, a book on CD and a book on cassette. (link to our catalog here.)

~mel

The Devil's Feather by Minette Walters

What do they say? "Torn from today's headlines comes a story of ... " Minette Walters sets the beginning of the Devil's Feather in Sierra Leone and Baghdad. Connie Burns, a war correspondent for Reuters, encounters a mercenary with a questionable past. Where he goes brutal, misogynistic murders follow. In war, though, how can she know which is the unfortunate cost of war and a destabilized economy and which is a deliberate act of a psychopath.

Burns goes to the mercenary's employer and to the police but the employer is protective and the police helpless. Then she's taken hostage for three days while in Baghdad. In the aftermath she moves to an isolated village in England to recover. That isn't the end and what happened to her in Baghdad is not the only mystery.

I like Walters. She's that odd writer who can write dark novels convincingly and still end in hope. However, it has been awhile since I've set everything else aside and buried myself in a book -- but I could not put this one down. The story is not that unusual, a riff on the woman-in-peril plot. Burns seems, on the surface, not much more than the standard issue heroine. But she's not. Readers, keep your eye on her. Even now, reflecting back, I wonder at Walter's writing and the clues I missed along the way.

Walters also manages to convey the chaos and violence of war in Baghdad and Zimbabwe, takes a shot at the modern day use of mercenaries and the "if it bleeds, it leads" news mentality. While not graphic, I found some scenes (especially the flashbacks to her captivity) uncomfortable.

There is as much mystery in Burns as there is in the plot and it makes for a compulsive read.

~mel