Books

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

Every bookshop now has a huge cookery section. With all the latest ‘healthy eating’ ideas, every kitchen needs a range of specialty cookbooks. At least one Paleo, another gluten free, and now the latest sugar-free. Hachette is joining this market with their ‘Healthy Eating’ series.

I have been through many sugar-free books over recent months. Most simply substitute raw sugar or honey for refined sugar. But Sue Quinn’s offering is radically different. This is a cookbook full of sweet recipes – desserts, baked goods, breakfast yummies – and no honey, sugar or even syrup in sight. She uses fruit to obtain a tempting sweetness, mashed bananas. figs, dates and applesauce. If fruit isn’t appropriate, then Greek yoghurt is often found as the ‘sweetening’. Most recipes are practical and require only basic cooking skills.

Be warned, this is not intended as a weight loss guide. Her ice-creams use full cream. Many of the recipes call for full fat ingredients. Instead this is a book intended for those who are looking to satisfy a sweet tooth with a whole food alternative. My immediate thought was for parents wanting to teach youngsters about healthy food choices. Make it sweet and tasty without refined sugar, and just maybe they will eat it.

At the price – certainly worth adding to the kitchen collection.

“Twenty years after the Unseen War, powerful mages known as Augurs are no longer so powerful. They have been stripped of their standing in society and their powers have failed them. In their place are mages who possess the Gift, but their rise is only a result of the strict rules called the Four Tenets—not unlike Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics—under which they must operate. Though these Gifted individuals are able to use their form of magic—the Essence—they are not looked upon with great favor by society at large. Unfortunately, the world is still under threat of attack from those on the other side of the Boundary, a dark army sealed nearly two thousand years prior to the novel waiting to escape and reap their revenge. As the novel begins, characters are concerned that the Boundary is not going to hold for very much longer. Against this backdrop, the lives of young Davian, Wirr, Asha, Dezia, and Caeden unfold under the auspices of the school for the Gifted where many of them meet. Although using the term school might be generous since the ‘students’ are afforded too much freedom as their Administrators watch over them.”

It’s the usual stuff.

Islington devotes a great deal of the novel to providing background information about his characters and the depth of history of his world. The connections between the characters and that prior history is revealed over the novel’s nearly 700 pages giving a great deal of detail to them. Each of the primary characters possesses a mystery or secret about them, they aren’t exactly what they seem. Adding to the “secret mystery” is that most of these primary characters have meagre memories of themselves, only going back to just before the novel began.

While some of the characters and mythology in the novel felt as if they had some meat to their personalities, others  were not quite as developed. The weakening “Boundary” was continually referenced, but through most of the novel, the consequences and threat lacked urgency. There was no “why” to the threat.

Having read many epic fantasy novels and series, “hints of things to come” in later volumes is to be expected and probably part of why longer series are popular. However, the balance between those hints of something substantive being revealed in later volumes and revealing information in the immediacy of the current volume was uneven. The character’s journeys also suffered from a sense hollowness. They were told to go places, but the destination wasn’t always clear and the reason for their journey wasn’t always clear.

Unfortunately, too much of the nearly 700 pages of The Shadow of What Was Lost was world-building and showing what the characters were rather than getting to know who the characters were.  So at times many times) it was difficult to get into the novel.

In the end, The Shadow of What Was Lost offers some promise, but is ultimately patchy like so many  debut novels.