About Face by Donna Leon

Donna Leon is a fantastic writer, even if her last couple of books have been lacking a bit of her usual flair.The Brunetti series paints such a vivid image of Venice and the cast of characters adds to the overall sense of the city. The crime in this novel is not that uncommon in Italy and this just makes for for a very believable piece of crime fiction. A great read.

Product Description
At a dinner party given by his parents-in-law, Commissario Brunetti meets Franca Marinello, the wife of a prosperous Venetian businessman. He’s charmed - perhaps too charmed, suggests his wife Paola - by her love of Virgil and Cicero, but shocked by her appearance. A few days later, Brunetti is visited by Carabinieri Maggior Filippo Guarino from the nearby city of Marghera. As part of a wider investigation into Mafia takeovers of businesses in the region, Guarino wants information about the owner of a trucking company who was found murdered in his office. He believes the man’s death is connected to the illegal transportation of refuse - and more sinister material - in his company’s trucks. No stranger to mutual suspicion and competition between rival Italian police departments, Brunetti is nevertheless puzzled by the younger man’s paranoid behaviour. Eventually Guarino agrees to email a photo of his suspect, but by the time the photograph arrives, he himself is dead. Was he killed because he got too close? And why is it that Franca Marinello has often been seen in company of the suspect, a vulgar man with Mafia connections and a violent past? Donna Leon’s new novel is as subtle, gripping and topical as ever, bringing the sights, sounds and smells of Venice flooding to life.

About the Author
Donna Leon has lived in Venice for many years and previously lived in Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, Iran and China, where she worked as a teacher. Her previous novels featuring Commissario Brunetti have all been highly acclaimed; including Friends in High Places, which won the CWA Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction, Through A Glass, Darkly, Suffer the Little Children, and most recently, The Girl of His Dreams.

Assegai by Wilbur Smith

This is classic Wilbur Smith. It has a hero, a villain, a beautiful woman (if flawed), natives and a stunning African backdrop. WS is a master at painting the landscape of Africa. His last couple of novels have not been that great, but this one sees him return to form. It is a true ‘Boys Own’ style adventure.

Amazon Description
It is 1913 and ex-soldier turned professional big game hunter, Leon Courtney, is in British East Africa guiding rich and powerful men from America and Europe on safaris in the Masai tribe territories. One of his clients, German industrialist Count Otto Von Meerbach, has a company which builds aircraft and vehicles for the Kaiser’s burgeoning army. But Leon had not bargained for falling passionately in love with Eva, the Count’s beautiful and enigmatic mistress. Just prior to the outbreak of World War I, Leon is recruited by his uncle, Penrod Ballantyne, Commander of the British Forces in East Africa, to gather information from Von Meerbach. He stumbles on a plot against the British involving the disenchanted survivors of the Boer War, but it is only when Eva and Von Meerbach return to Africa that Leon finds out who and what is really behind the conspiracy.

About the Author
Wilbur Smith was born in Central Africa in 1933. He was educated at Michaelhouse and Rhodes University. He became a full-time writer in 1964 after the successful publication of When the Lion Feeds, and has since written over thirty novels, all meticulously researched on his numerous expeditions worldwide. His books are now translated into twenty-six languages.

Product Description
Charles McCarry has long been heralded as one of the select espionage writers who shines as a brilliant and unique novelist in his own right. Second Sight is the seventh in the series that follows the legendary spy Paul Christopher–a man ensnared by a line of work that never fails to exert its insidious influence outside professional boundaries.

Throughout the Arab world, U.S. agents are being kidnapped and brain-drained by an unidentified enemy armed with a diabolical new drug. Christopher’s old friend and superior in “The Outfit” calls him out of quiet retirement with a command he feels he must obey. But what begins for Christopher as a global manhunt swiftly turns into something far closer to home. For the key to the danger he must defuse is a secret buried deep in his own perilous past.

In a breathtaking, nerve-twisting plot that spins its way from pre-Nazi Germany to Vietnam, old scores have to be settled, grim reckonings must be made. And at the bottom of it all, a ravishing, strangely gifted Berber woman reappears like a half-forgotten memory, holding Paul Christopher’s fate in her hands. McCarry’s mastery is unmatched as he weaves past and present together in this world of secrets.

About the Author
Charles McCarry is the author, most recently, of the acclaimed thriller Old Boys. He established an international reputation as a novelist with the publication of his worldwide bestseller The Tears of Autumn in 1975 and is the author of nine other critically acclaimed novels, including The Miernik Dossier, The Secret Lovers, and The Better Angels. During the Cold War, he was an intelligence officer operating under deep cover in Europe, Africa, and Asia.

Synopsis
Bagdad, Arizona, is a town once prosperous but now in decay, a place where the lives of those shackled by age or circumstance are played out against the backdrop of the visible horizon. A weird event attracts the media and puts Bagdad back on the map.

This is a fun adventure novel set in the Jewish kingdom of the Khazars. It follows the adventures of Zelikman and Amram. They find themselves in the middle of a struggle for control of the Khazar Empire, supporting the son Filaq of the deposed (killed) former ruler. The son soon turns out to be a daughter, and the fortunes of all go from bad to worse.
It reminds be very much of novels written pre WWII, in its wording and innocence.
A very enjoyable novel, with enough twists and turns to keep you hooked. The only let down is, I found it a bit short, and it does seem like part of a larger tale, and Gentlemen of the Road could well just be a middle section of a greater and larger work.

Product Description
Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, sprang from an early passion for the derring-do and larger-than-life heroes of classic comic books. Now, once more mining the rich past, Chabon summons the rollicking spirit of legendary adventures–from The Arabian Nights to Alexandre Dumas to Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories–in a wonderful new novel brimming with breathless action, raucous humor, cliff-hanging suspense, and a cast of colorful characters worthy of Scheherazade’s most tantalizing tales.

They’re an odd pair, to be sure: pale, rail-thin, black-clad Zelikman, a moody, itinerant physician fond of jaunty headgear, and ex-soldier Amram, a gray-haired giant of a man as quick with a razor-tongued witticism as he is with a sharpened battle-ax. Brothers under the skin, comrades in arms, they make their rootless way through the Caucasus Mountains, circa A.D. 950, living as they please and surviving however they can–as blades and thieves for hire and as practiced bamboozlers, cheerfully separating the gullible from their money. No strangers to tight scrapes and close shaves, they’ve left many a fist shaking in their dust, tasted their share of enemy steel, and made good any number of hasty exits under hostile circumstances.

None of which has necessarily prepared them to be dragooned into service as escorts and defenders to a prince of the Khazar Empire. Usurped by his brutal uncle, the callow and decidedly ill-tempered young royal burns to reclaim his rightful throne. But doing so will demand wicked cunning, outrageous daring, and foolhardy bravado . . . not to mention an army. Zelikman and Amram can at least supply the former. But are these gentlemen of the road prepared to become generals in a full-scale revolution? The only certainty is that getting there–along a path paved with warriors and whores, evil emperors and extraordinary elephants, secrets, swordplay, and such stuff as the grandest adventures are made of–will be much more than half the fun.

About the Author
Michael Chabon is the author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh; Wonder Boys, which was made into a critically acclaimed film; The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize; The Final Solution: A Story of Detection; and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. He is also the author of two short-story collections and a young adult novel, Summerland. He lives in the San Francisco Bay area.