Book Chatter

Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End Book Cover

Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End: The Story of a Crime
Leif GW Persson
Knopf Doubleday
September 2010

Here’s the blurb form the publisher:

A young man falls to his death from a window in a student dorm in Stockholm, his loose shoe striking and killing the little dog being taken for his evening walk by an old man. It seems to be a mundane suicide—at least that’s what the police choose to think. But the young man is American, not Swedish, and there are a couple of odd things about his room when they search it. . . .

From these tiny beginnings, Leif GW Persson slowly begins to unravel a puzzle that gets larger and larger as it becomes more and more complex, until it sweeps us into a web of international espionage, backroom politics, greed, sheer incompetence, and the shoddy work of Sweden’s intelligence force that leads to the murder of the prime minister.

The first novel in a dark and dazzling trilogy that has become the defining fictional account of the unsolved 1986 assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme—an event that triggered the biggest criminal investigation in recorded history—Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End is a riveting insider’s combination of black satire, thriller, psychological drama, and police procedural by a writer universally acknowledged as Sweden’s leading criminologist.

I’m not terribly big on crime fiction but this author is being compared to Mankell and Larsson. Don’t you love the cover? It’s the first book in a trilogy too. Trilogies seem to be pretty popular these days. I love them because the anticipation over each release is great in and of itself, but when you pick up a book that’s part of a trilogy, it’s like seeing an old friend that you haven’t seen in awhile. I feel as if I must have this one.

The Last Town on Earth Book Cover

The Last Town on Earth
Thomas Mullen
Random House
July 2007
432pp

The Short of It:

The Last Town on Earth is an interesting story about trust, right and wrong and what people are willing to do when lives are on the line.

The Rest of It:

A friend recommend this book to me well over a year ago. In my mind, I thought it would be more dystopian in feel, but it wasn’t that kind of book at all. The story is about Commonwealth, a small town in the Pacific Northwest that gets hit with the flu during the 1918 epidemic that swept through the nation. In an effort to protect the town, the town folk decide to enact a quarantine. This means that the residents must stay within the town, and no one from outside of the town can come in.

At first, this works fine. The town is self-sufficient to a degree. There is plenty of food and other supplies and most of the folks feel that the quarantine is a necessary precaution. But as the flu ravages other towns and there is talk of war spies, the people of Commonwealth realize that they may have to protect their town from more than just the flu.

While on guard duty, Philip & Graham encounter a soldier looking for shelter and food. Graham’s handling of the situation disturbs Philip and causes him to replay the incident over and over again in his mind. The encounter affects him so deeply, that when he is faced with a similar situation, he makes a decision that puts the entire town at risk.

The story was a bit slow for me. It took a good 200 pages for me to get into it but there was something about the writing that kept me going. The depiction of the town itself was spot on. I could easily picture the setting in my mind and the main characters and the situations they faced were well-developed. I had some issues with the development of some of the other characters though. Their demeanor did not match their age, but in a frontier town in the early 1900’s, that is to be expected. Young people held more responsibility in those days.

Although this story deals with a pandemic it’s not like any of the other novels I’ve read that deal with the same topic. The flu itself takes a backseat to the other themes within the novel which include, fierce loyalty, the will to survive, trust and honor. Not a page-turner but I liked it.

Mullen’s most recent book The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers looks very good. I’d definitely read another book by him.

Source: Purchased

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