You really have to be a people person to understand and enjoy this latest novel about the “The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency.”
How Alexander McCall Smith, an English Medical Professor, manages to capture the essence of Bostwana is amazing, but you just grow to love Mma Ramotswe and her offsider Mma Makutsi. Then there are the fabulously named Fanwell, Phuti RaRadiphuti, J.L.B. Matekoni, Violet Sephotho and Mma Potokawni. There are plenty of cups of tea looking into a gentle, kindly lifestyle, where the main cases are lost dogs,a lost woman looking for her past, the “Fat Cattle Club” pyramid selling scheme and the niceties of Botswana middle class life.
“Precious and Grace” take you on a collective visit into their lives and how a white male medico manages to write this wonderful stuff is a story into itself.
4 Stars.
Books
It’s hard to find a new way to murder, or a different take on why murders are happening. But in this latest novel by J.D. Robb, there is a twist. Life imitating art. Or Murder imitating a good novel.
It starts straight forwardly enough. A murder. But its a twisted scene. A woman is murdered in a cinema with an icepick while watching Pyscho, a film with an ice pick. There is not apparent motive. It’s no random act of violence and poor budding actess Chanel Ryan, didn’t stand a chance.
Eve and her sidekick, Detective Amelia Peabody, have barely started to question the obvious witnesses when “really famous novelist” Blaine DeLano comes to the station to advise that one of her thrillers provided a detailed blueprint for the murder—and indeed for the killing of Rosie Kent, who was strangled a month ago in a scenario clearly borrowed from another of Blaine’s bestselling novels.
Eve and Peabody stumble over a second murder and realise they have a seriously disturbed individual on their hands. And you have to like the murderer/ She is deliciously oddball, so well fleshed out that, you can see her rationale. It’s so perfectly logical! Loxie Flash doesn’t stand a chance! Number three goes down in a blaze of poisoned drinks, well aware she is the next target but stupidly blind to then danger posed by Elizabeth Smith, the crazed seamstress with the poisoned mind.
It was comfortable getting back with Quincy and Rainie, and this story was a very acceptablefor these two characters.
Telly and Sharlah, brother and younger sister, have bounced around in foster care after the deaths of their parents. They’ve been separated for eight years. Sharlah is about to be adopted by Quincy and Rainie, but Telly is close to aging out of the foster system. Then two bodies are discovered at a convenience store, and the plot is off and running.
Lisa Gardner can tell a story! She supplied information that led me down a path, then she made me stop to think on just where this was going? Several ideas on plot line came to mind. I read some more and I had to stop and evaluate. So that was wrong! .I would adjust my thinking and continue.
Telly and Sharlah were immediately working on my emotions. Their memories and their stories, although they experienced the same event, were so very different. These two characters were enjoyably well written. With one of the trackers, Cal, my feelings wavered. I was not sure about him. And I have to mention Luka; he was an interesting addition to the plot.
Although this is part of a series, there is a big gap between this book and the previous books. This one works very well as a standalone.
Ray Connolly
As the world’s first “rock star” there was no one to tell Elvis what to expect, no one who could help him, guide him, or advise him. On the outside he was full of charm, sex appeal, confident on stage and gifted in the recording studio. He had it all. With his voice and style influencing generations of musicians, he should have been able to sing any song that he liked, to star in any film he was offered and to tour in any country he choose. But he wasn’t.
The circumstances of his poor beginnings in the American south, lack of education left Elvis with a life long vulnerability. His teaming up with ‘Colonel’ Tom Parker, was a disaster and he lost control over his own life. The book covers all, in an easy to read and informative stye.
‘Being Elvis was published on the 40th Anniversary of his death. It is an easy read and fills in the details, especially around his relationship with his mother,drug addiction, the Memphis Mafia, time in the army, movies, and his wife (ex) Priscilla.
Muhammad Ali put it best: “I felt sorry for him…he didn’t enjoy life. He stayed indoors all the time. I told him he should go out there and see people. He said he couldn’t because everywhere he went, they mobbed him.”
-Hachette Australia
How a senior Medical lecturer at a Scottish University can write about a female detective agency in Botswana with such warmth, such skill, such characters amazes me.
The warmth and ambling read with no real pot boilers, no savage fighting, no super villains clothed in casualness, makes this read as calming as the red Leaf Tea Ma Ramotswe likes to drink to think things through. The thing is these characters are so real, that after going through a few of them, I’d like tot hink i couldf visit Botswana and go ther the No 1 Ladies Detective Agency and meet Grace, her erstwhile partner Grace Makutsi ( the now, J.B. Matakuni and Fanwell the apprentice, have some sea, maybe go out to the Children’s Orphanage from some wonderful cake and discuss the cases.
If there is a villian it is Violet Sepotho, if there is a hero it has to to be Mr. Polopetsi, this is a story about family about an adopted sister, about “not jumping the gun,” a missing sister and revenge of a mild and ingenious nature.
And for both ZMma Makutsi and Mma Ramotswe, the wise words of their mento Clovis Anderson – “the needle swings in confusing ways,” has never been more evident.
Five stars.

“Eddie Leonski – The Smiling Psycopath” terrorized wartime Melbourne with a series of appallingly brutal murders in May 1942. This book Ian Shaw details how a good looking young American soldier managed to cold bloodedly strangle three innocent women.
It is also a look into the mind of a psycopathic murderer, a man who felt no guilt or shame in the murders he committed and who in the end felt no emotion when he faced the gallows hangman at the end of his short life.
Tried and convicted by an Australian court, captured by Melbourne Homicide Squad detectives, executed on the orders of the American High Command directly to Douglas Mcarthur himself, the Leonski murders were a unique example of allied co-operation.
The book is well written by Shaw and there are a unique set of photos that humanize his victims and the facer of the man himself. A man of prodigious strength who used to walk across bars on his hands.
Some of the places could still be visited, though much of this part of Melbourne is sadly no longer present, as is the absence of the winter fogs so common at that time of winter.
A good read for those interested in historical Melbourne, or those de,ving into the mind of the a psycopathic murderer.
“End Of Watch” is the final book in the “Mr. Mercedes” trilogy. You can take it as part of that series or it stands the test as a stand-alone novel about madness, the Supernatural, detective novel or comment on modern society. It ticks all the boxes.
Retired Detective Bill Hodges now runs a two-person firm called “Finders Keepers” with his partner Holly Gibney. They met after murderous killer Brady Hartsfield has run down and killed a queue of people waiting in a line for jobs.
Time moves on as does Book 23 in the series where Brady is clobbered to an “unresponsive mental state,” by Holly trying to avoid another Brady style massacre.
But Brady isn’t dead, or unresponsive. Unable to move, we discover Brady’s supernatural power to control others and a particular skill to manipulate through a game device known as a “Zappitt.”
Through his ability to move into the minds of others, he plans another range of murders and it is up to Bill, Holly and Jerome to win the day.
“End of Watch,” is a good read. Not so far fetched as to be unbelievable and with an uncanny ability to predict the future, I found King’s latest novel to be especially relevant in what is happening in the world today. Mowing down innocent people with a heavy vehicle, youth’s dependancy on eletronic media that overrides their common sense, all seem very reral even if you don’t accept the supernatural side. But heck it wouldn’t be Stephen King withouty the Supernatural would it? And the best aprt of the “Supernatural” event is that it is not beyond belief, it merely stretches it.
“End of Watch” is up with the first of the seriers, beats the second book, and paints characters you can relate and ejoy.
-4 Stars
Ray Feist has begun a new series! ‘King of Ashes’ makes a triumphant return for one of the world’s most loved sci-fi writers. But it is a different read for fans used to the style of novels such as ‘Magician.’
Buzz Mag caught up with Ray Feist in San Diego prior to an extensive Australian and South African tour.
At 72 years of age Raymond Feist comes from a family of Hollywood Royalty. His mother was a Big Band singer in World War 2, his father (Felix Feist) was a respected and well known director, many of the Stars of the 50’s including Kirk Douglas, Joan Crawford, Nancy Reagan, Lee J. Cobb, Robert Taylor and many a party was held and many a movie plot sold and discussed in the Feist home.
In the Feist household young Ray grew up in a world where story telling was held in really high regard. “I read all the time, my father read all the time. We had some great discussions. I grew up around writers. I used to sit in the living room and listen to my father and his buddies yack about stuff.”
“One of the “guys” arguing in the Feist living room was Gene Coon, is well known by sci-fi fans as the writer who created Khan, in the Star Trek series.”He and my father would argue about stuff for ages. My father knew some great writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker. For me being a writer was normal, it wasn’t a weird thing. I was brought up to believe I could write and there was no doubt in my mind I wouldn’t be making a living out of writing.”
In fact the ‘Empire’ Series had its origins in a Lawrence Durrell’s four books “Alexandria Quartet,” a series suggested to the young Ray by his father Felix.
“Under such illustrious circumstances is was perhaps inevitable that the young Raymond Feist would grow up to be one of the giants of the Fantasy World.
“I would have argued with you about that till I was in my mid thirties,” he admonishes. ‘It never crossed my mind that one day I would be a novelist. Yet here we are!”
Are you a bit like your father or would they be “fighting words?”
“Actually not. My father and I are very different personalities. The one thing we have in common is that my father loved to tell stories. But when it came to telling about his own life, he was very close to the chest. When he was around he would tell me these great stories, but never about himself.
“I remember my father saying to me once ‘If you’re not writing action, you’re writing talking heads, if you’re writing talking heads, they had better be saying something important.” It’s something that has guided me through my entire life.’
“King of Ashes” was interesting to me because for the first time, there was no hint of mythical creatures until half way through the book. I was wondering how limited some of the creatures are going to be in future novels.
“I wanted a very different world to Midkemia, Garn is a very different world. It has a few ‘fantastic creatures,’ but that is not a focus. In Midkemia, everyone knows someone who has had a run in with the Gods, in Garn there are people of faith who believe in divine power, magic here will be very, very different. The difference will be that only women can manipulate magic, there are males who are repositories of power, but you’re not going to see thunderbolts, alien planets, magic will continue to be subtle for the most part.
“King of Ashes” actually follows a different writing style. I was used to the classic one liners opening a chapter. Not to see here.
‘That was actually one of my editors,’ explains Ray. “He hated those one liners. I was halfway through ‘Magician’ before I realized I had turned it into a pattern. It’s a different way of communicating to the reader, this is a different narrative. It’s a bit more dull, it’s a bit more timely. I think I wave evolved a bit as a writer, but the readers have really evolved in almost forty years,
“With this book we start with Hatushaly which is a lot of man against himself, With his other main character Declan it’s man against man, and we twist that, there will be conflict. Declan and Hatushaly are very different potentially and they have different skill sets. In the course of the series there will be some serious changes. Hatushaly is a character in turmoil from childhood, Declan on the other hand has two feet in the ground, life is pretty ideal, but of course I am not going to let that hang around for too long. Characters have to change otherwise it is a really boring narrative.”
I thought that Hatu and Declan would meet up at the end of Book 1?
“Oh their paths will cross many times before the series concludes,” admits Ray.
“Most of Hatu’s problems are internal while most of Declan’s problems are external. I am going to put them through a lot.”
‘Then there’s Hava, who is taking over the book despite what I thought I was going to do. She keeps insisting on a bigger role, the next book in the series is “Queen of Storms,” and she is a major, major character! They all get back together in the third book which I hope is a satisfying dramatic climax.
I wondered about Dante, last seen as a slave to the evil supernatural ‘Sisters of the Deep.’
“He is going to be interesting,” explains Ray. “A real wildcard!”
People will be saying “What? How can you do that to them?” The first books lays down some characters that come into their own later on. ‘The Church Of The One’ will play a much bigger role as will those mysterious protectors, seen meeting in the dim recesses of the church by Hatu.
“I am trying to get a story going here on multiple levels. I am trying to get characters whose behaviour is understandable, in the context of basic human behaviour. The consequences of what happens when you have people with impulse control over real power. It’s a pretty timely story in America right now.
I was thankful that this series doesn’t hold too much in the way of “horrific,” but Ray tells me otherwise.
“In terms of the Supernatural stuff, yes, but in terms of horrific human behaviour I won’t be holding back. That’s the thing about drama. All drama is conflict.”
Feist explains hat this series will be different to the past series. “It is at the tale end of magic, the tale end of the the supernatural, which is slowly going away.”
Finally I wanted to know why we hadn’t seen Peter Jackson directing a version of “”The Magician?”
“He is very busy, explains Ray, “Besides he’s not the only talented person in the business. I get this question all the time “When are the going to make a movie. My answer is when I get the right film! I have made some serious money for “Fairytale” and “Magician.” I don’t really take the deal seriously until the production company says “We’re going public!”
“I had a deal with Columbia Pictures years ago for ‘Fairytale.”
‘I don’t want to name names, it didn’t happen. But I have made serious money on movies and television shows that have never been shot. I’ve had Producers come to me and say “I want to do a film about “Magician” or “Daughter of Empire,” you don’t get that for free. You get a year or eighteen months and you’re going to pay me a decent five figures to get that option. You get a year to put together your production, get a director attached stars, serious money. After a year we get together and if it hasn’t progressed I get the option back and I keep the money! That’s been going on since 1991!
I used to hang out with a guy that rote “Lucifer’s Hammer” and he would say to me “I hope we never make the movie, I’ve had six options on this book!”
I suggested it was pure Hollywood and Ray laughed. I suggested that maybe we make a movie about him. They might provide some more options. Ray laughed louder. “I doubt that.”
I doubted that!
Oh boy! Meyer doesn’t hold back with her principal character in this novel! , an new adult thriller “The Chemist.”
Alex is a medic and an interrogator who worked for a shadowy branch of the US government torturing terrorists before her bosses turned on her. Now she is a fugitive. Having already seen off three would-be assassins from” the agency,” she sleeps wearing a gas mask in whichever nondescript room she’s renting, various deadly chemical compounds rigged up to go off if anyone breaks in. That’s a main character!
Known as “the Chemist,” because she used to squeeze the truth out of her suspects with excruciatingly painful drug concoctions, she was brilliant at her job, “batting a thousand”, she’s told at one point, with a perfect record. “I am the bogeyman in a very dark and scary world,” she says. “I frighten people who aren’t afraid of anything else, not even death. I can take everything they pride themselves on away from them; I can make them betray everything they hold sacred. I am the monster they see in their nightmares.”A little like “Miss Marfple of old, , we first meet her in a library, where she’s reading spy novels for ideas to keep her safe from her former employers. She doesn’t know why they want her dead, but she’s getting tired of running, and when she reads an email asking her to take on one last job for the agency, because “many, many lives” are on the line, she hopes her days as a fugitive might be at an end. At least, she hopes, she’ll be able to find out what they have on her. But as Alex delves deeper into the case – it involves biological warfare, and she’s able to rig up a few scenarios where her own particularly dark talents are made use of – she finds that nothing is as it seems, and that the corruption goes right to the highest levels.
The Chemist is not Meyer’s first adult novel – that was The Host, a story of alien invasion. There are no traces of the supernatural here, unless you count the preternaturally intelligent German shepherd that saves the day on more than one occasion. Rather, Meyer, clearly a major fan of the genre, has dreamed up a fast-paced thriller, and a tough, mysterious heroine with a penchant for decking herself out in dangerous jewellery, concealing syringes of poison in her belt and switchblades in her shoes. There are some great pitched battles leading up to a conclusion that it’s easy to imagine in the cinema
4 stars
Elevation doesn’t seem like a Stephen King novel on first sight. It is thin small in stature and seemingly lightweight. Yet in its deceptive prose I think it is one of the best things King has written in many years.
So what elevates Elevation? For one thing, King is working in an area he loves best. Small-town America (Castle Rock), where neighb ours know neighbors and fun runs involved the whole community and the town’s best locations.
In Castle Rock there is one Scott Carey who is losing weight, lots of weight. Very quickly. But Carey’s body shows no sign of change. His clothes still fit, his middle-aged belly still protrudes, his muscles, designed to bear his overweight form, propel his descending kilos with increasing ease. But what’s really weird is that Scott weighs the same clothed as unclothed, with his pockets empty or filled with change. Anyone he touches is also thereby rendered weightless. It’s like (as one character hypothesises) an anti-gravitational force field has surrounded him in a tender embrace.
In Elevation, Carey’s loss of kilos does not slow him down anywhere except his bathroom scales. Divorced but content, his work as a website designer is on the up and up, and physically and mentally he has not felt better in years.
The only blot on the horizon are his neighbours, Missy and Deirdre, married lesbians who run a local restaurant called Holy Frijole. When they aren’t working or (according to local bigots) throwing their unholy matrimony in people’s faces, they jog together with their dogs, who in turn do their doggy business on Scott’s front lawn. All attempts at complaint are met with disdain by Deirdre, who regards Scott as the sort of homophobe that seems to fill Castle Rock.
I’m not sure why, but Scott decided to befriend Deirdre. it doesn’t work in the ratrurant when he faces up some difficult customers, but he finally overwhelms her defensiveness at the end of Castle Rock’s Thanksgiving runathon.
Scott bets Deirdre he can beat her at a canter, which at least makes Deirdre, a former world-class runner no less, smile.
Little does she suspect that Scott now weighs less than her shoe laces and, he keeps up with her until the end, when a freak thunder storm throws them both together. A photograph in the local paper of Deirdre, Missy and Scott in amiable embrace rehabilitates everyone involved, and the Holy Frijole thrives.
The sad thing is that Scott’s impersonation of a deflating balloon is no joke. When he isn’t hanging out at the Holy Frijole or skipping up and down stairs, he is calculating the exact moment he will hit zero.
How will he die? Is he set for take-off? Death it seems is inevitable.
At a final dinner with his newly cherishedfriends, Scott says goodbye, insisting he faces the end with only Deidre by his side. When his long-time mate Dr Ellis asks how he feels, Scott says: “Elevated.”
In this end its a strange novel. As Scott slips away heaven bound. No longer held by gravity. he seems happy, enobled, free. Somehow his death is an uplifting experience. I wasn’t expecting that. There is no explanation as to his condition. No alien, no transformation just a peaceful float ever upwards. As Scott says in his final words “Elevated.’