Book Review

In the heart of summer, the country swelters in a fug of heat. In the beautiful forested lake-town of Sorbinowo, Sergeant Merino Kluuge’s tranquil existence is shattered when he receives a phone-call from an anonymous woman. She tells him that a girl has gone missing from the summer camp of the mysterious The Pure Life, a religious sect buried deep in the woods. Chief Inspector Van Veeteren is recruited to help solve the mystery.

Book Review

THE setting is Russia in the twentieth century, 1916, 1939 and 1994.

In 1916 the eponymous heroine is the 16-year-old daughter of a Jewish bourgeois industrialist. Despite her privileged life Sashenka joins the Bolshevik cause and is, surprisingly, accepted.

The story is taken up in 1939, just after the Terror, Stalin’s decisive purges that ensured he had no opponents.  Sashenka and her new family are now part of another kind of bourgeois élite: as Party members they enjoy a style of living eons away from the starving proletariat.  They have a flat in Moscow and a country dacha; the very best of food, and are blessed by a visit from Stalin himself at a Mayday party.

Book Review

By Sandra Howard

 - THIS is the third political novel by Sandra, wife of Michael the former leader of the Conservative party.  Again it features Victoria Osborne, now promoted to Home Secretary.  A Muslim terrorist bomb in the West End gives her political opponents ammunition in their argument to prove that a woman is not up to the job.  Meanwhile, her husband William, a Fleet Street editor, decides to send a young journalist, Ahmed Khan, undercover to Leeds to see what he can discover about young British Muslim terrorist cells.  Not, however, before Victoria’s daughter, Natalia, meets Khan at a newspaper office party.