Bloody Foreigners (Inspector Low, #3) – Neil Humphreys

Based in Singapore, Neil Humphreys writes hilarious articles that tear football teams apart. He has no solidarity with any football club and all are ripe for his pointed skewering. I always get a good laugh reading his football columns. So with a lot of anticipation, I bought a signed copy just to find out if he is also adept at writing detective procedurals; he is.

It starts with a bloody hook: “Mohamed Kamal knew he was dying. The puddle told him. He was sitting in his own blood. He tried to move, but the pain stopped him. His body was shutting down… Kamal watched his killer take the bloody knife and scrawl four capital letters into the Victorian brickwork. MEGA. Kamal knew what the acronym meant. Make England Great Again.”

As story starters go, this one is a grappling hook. I had no idea this is the third book in the series and Inspector Stanley Low (pronounced as “lau”) comes fully formed. He is cantankerous, always angsty, stubborn to a T. Suffering from bipolar, Low’s mood swings across the spectrum but it seldom affects his investigative eye for details. I find him wonderfully odd and eccentric, a fascinating character. When the story begins we find him being seconded to London to give lectures because he must have pissed off somebody important in Singapore (now I need to read the previous instalments). When a Singaporean teenager is killed, his expertise is sought and the London police has no idea what they are in for.

Humphreys describes a London whose patience is wearing thin since Brexit. It is a modern city like any others where a wrong word or a badly worded social media post can lead to angry cries of racism, classism and xenophobia. Someone wants to make England great again and he is not opposed to killing foreigners who are deemed to have stolen the citizens’ livelihood. All this makes for a rip-roaring read with a pulse on today’s fractured society.

This is a fast-paced and gritty read. I particularly enjoy reading Low’s use of the Singaporean colourful vernacular including curse words that are worse than the F word. The twists and turns, cul-de-sacs are always surprising, with a storyline ripped from today’s and tomorrow’s headlines. Inspector Low is definitely a character I want to find out more. In fact, I just found out that the library at my workplace has four copies of the first book (rubbing my hands in glee now) and one of them will be mine.

***1/2

My Reading Report Card for 2020

I am fast running out of space even after I gave away a whole lot of novels to someone living in my neighbourhood

I got lazy towards the end of the year and paid more attention at my movie blog than my reading one. When it came near to the end of the year, my internet provider chose the worst time to throw a spanner in the works and my home wifi was down. So I couldn’t do my usual write-up. I will now just do a quick ramble before I get 2021 going.

2020 was just not a great year for entertainment. I managed to go to one gig (Eve Ai) before the world went on a lockdown. On hindsight this lockdown wasn’t such a bad thing – I got to spend a lot lesser on gigs and stuff, and finally had the time to enjoy the stuff I had accumulated. I had no idea I was sitting on so many gems, both movies and books.

Lots of critics posted their best movies of the year lists, but I really wouldn’t bother with them because those movies were released on obscure platforms. Who would have thought that going to the cinema can be a dangerous thing to do? Anyway, my fave movie last year is Taiwan’s My Missing Valentine (I doubt this movie got distributed in the western part of the world. If you can find it, I would highly recommend watching it). My fave TV series are Better Call Saul (S5), Paatal Lok, The Queen’s Gambit and Ted Lasso. My fave album is Taylor Swift’s Folklore and Jon Gomm’s The Faintest Idea is my next fave which is about 10 paces behind. My fave mandarin album is Hebe Tien’s 无人知晓.

Last year I read fewer books and only hit 25. The reason being I discovered Jeff Lemire and did a deep dive into his reservoir of amazing work. I love it when Lemire does genre stuff like Trillium and Sweet Tooth; I love it when he does introspective chamber stuff like Essex County and Royal City; and I super duper love it when he does superhero stuff like Black Hammer, Bloodshot and Old Man Logan.

I also rediscovered the one-of-a-kind Junji Ito. I can’t get enough of him. The man is a genius. His ability to make an innocuous situation turn horrific at the drop of a crimson cherry blossom petal is almost a superpower. Getting creeped out by his mangas is one of the best feelings ever.

On the books front, my fave novel last year is most definitely Chan Ho-kei’s Second Sister. The following are the novels I have read in 2020, not including tons of graphic novels.

1. The Miracles of the Namiya General Store – Keigo Higashino

2. The Testaments – Margaret Atwood

3. The Lost Man – Jane Harper

4. The Night Fire – Michael Connelly

5. The Institute – Stephen King

6. My Sister, the Serial Killer – Oyinkan Braithwaite

7. Into the Fire – Gregg Hurwitz

8. No Middle Name – Lee Child

9. The Turn of the Key – Ruth Ware

10. Macbeth – Jo Nesbø

11. The Memory Police – Yoko Ogawa

12. Penance – Kanae Minato

13. Vengeance in Death – J.D. Robb

14. Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World – Haruki Murakami

15. Everything I Never Told You – Celeste Ng

16. The Bazaar of Bad Dreams – Stephen King

17. Daisy Jones & The Six – Taylor Jenkins Reid

18. The Bazaar of Bad Dreams – Stephen King

19. Seven Years of Darkness – You-Jeong Jeong

20. The Hidden Girl and Other Stories – Ken Liu

21. Sweet Bean Paste – Durian Sukegawa

22. Second Sister – Chan Ho-Kei

23. The Alienist – Caleb Carr

24. Before the Coffee Gets Cold – Toshikazu Kawaguchi

25. If it Bleeds – Stephen King

Alright… that’s it for 2020. May 2021 be a great one for books, movies and music.

The Secret She Keeps – Michael Robotham

This book is the very definition of unputdownable. I finished this in only a few sittings.

My wife and I always have this little game we play. She will open her Facebook, look at all the fabulous stuff her friends are doing and then she will say in mandarin “have lots of money so good”. I will reply her in mandarin “but they are not happy, not like us”. Sometimes the order changes. But that’s the thing… how do we know our life isn’t great and others have it better? Why do we even want to compare? Everyone has an idea of what their perfect life is. For Agatha, it’s Meghan Shaughnessy’s and she has a plan in place to take it all.

This is an intriguing story of two women from vastly different backgrounds and each of them has a dangerous secret that could destroy everything they hold dear. Both will risk everything to hide the truth, but their worlds are about to collide in a shocking act that cannot be undone.

The compelling story is told in alternating voices and the twists kept on coming. The prose is clean and the pace is cracking. The beauty of the story is how Robotham fleshed out both the characters. One moment you will hate them and in a drop of a hat you will be sympathetic to them. For a dude, Robotham really knows the female mindset and delves deeply into their psyche.

PS – With this novel I hit 31 novels read, equaling last year’s record, and I still have time to squeeze in 1 or 2 more. 😊

**** / 5

The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Just three pages in and I knew I was going to fall in love with the book. This one has such an amazing hook… let’s see if it entices you.

Barcelona, 1945. Daniel, a boy on the brink of becoming eleven, is woken up by a nightmare. His father reassures him and asks him to get dressed because he wants to take him to a place called the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. Once there, the father says:

“Welcome to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, Daniel. This is a place of mystery, Daniel, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of a person who wrote it and those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens. This place was already ancient when my father brought me here for the first time, many years ago. Perhaps as old as the city itself. Nobody knows for certain how long it existed, or who created it. I will tell you what my father told me, though. When a library disappears, or a bookshop closes down, when a book is consigned to oblivion, those of us who know this place, its guardians, make sure that it gets here. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader’s hands. In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend. Now they have only us, Daniel. Do you think you’ll be able to keep such a secret?”

There, according to tradition, Daniel must choose a book, adopt it and make sure that it will never disappear and the story will always stay alive. Daniel picks The Shadow of the Wind by Julián Carax. Soon Daniel finds out he may have the last copy of the book in existence because someone is systematically destroying every book written by Carax.

I was a goner by page three. What a hook that was and the icing on the cake was realising Daniel picked the book that was in my hand. Well… that’s not exactly correct, but it was such a clever little trick Carlos Ruiz Zafón pulled on me.

The Shadow of the Wind feels like an epic 3.5-hour film in prose and what an amazing and lyrical style Zafón has. So many times, I stopped in mid-page, savouring the eloquence, admiring the words that I know I could never write in a hundred years…

“A story is a letter the author writes to himself, to tell himself things that he would be unable to discover otherwise.”

“I realized how easily you can lose all animosity toward someone you’ve deemed your enemy as soon as that person stops behaving as such.”

“Destiny is usually just around the corner. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it.”

“Hope is cruel, and has no conscience.”

“The art of reading is slowly dying, that it’s an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.”

The book has everything – extramarital affairs, forbidden love, murder, revenge, lascivious scumbags, people with big hearts and all of it is wrapped up in a potent concoction of a soul-shattering mystery. The plot is labyrinthine, expansive and rich, spanning two histories of Barcelona. It has narrative drive, heart and characters that lift off the page. Above all, it is an ode to great literature, intended for readers who crave for great storytelling like its young hero.

It is one of those rare books that I felt was almost too good to be true. For slightly over two weeks, it let me enter a gothic world, watch a sprawling magic show and ogle at an intricate mosaic art piece. If I have only one minor itsy bitsy quibble it would be about how a 30-page letter works as the deus ex machina. The story was building up so powerfully and I felt a little cheated that all the revelations come by way of a letter, “little” being the operative word, not “cheated”, because the letter was so beautifully written and what it conveyed brought tears to my eyes. That doesn’t happen very often when I read a book. All was forgiven.

That’s it… that is the end of my review.

At this point, I am rereading what I have written and I am utterly disappointed that I couldn’t capture an ounce of the wondrous experience I had while reading the book. However, I count my lucky stars I can still appreciate great literature and recognise what’s great about it. If I were ridiculously wealthy, I would buy this book by the truckloads and give one to everyone I know on their birthday because sometimes a good book can make one see the world in a whole different light, and sometimes a good book can save a life. This is one story that has that immense power.

***** / 5

Cult X – Fuminori Nakamura

After his excellent The Thief, I made a vow to read anything by Fuminori Nakamura, but Cult X was one tedious read. So this is going to be a short review because I have nothing worthy to say.

When Toru Narazaki’s girlfriend, Ryoko, disappears, he tries to track her down, despite the warnings of a private detective he’s hired to find her. Ryoko’s past is shrouded in mystery, but the one concrete clue to her whereabouts is a previous address where she lived: in a compound in the heart of Tokyo, with a group that seems to be a cult led by a charismatic guru with a revisionist Buddhist scheme of life, death, and society. Narazaki plunges into the secretive world of the cult, ready to expose himself to any of the guru’s brainwashing tactics if it means he can learn the truth about Ryoko. But the cult isn’t what he expected, and he has no idea of the bubbling violence beneath its surface.

Inspired by the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, Cult X is an exploration of what draws individuals into extremism. This multi-faceted novel is nothing less than a tour de force, capturing the connections between astrophysics, neuroscience, and religion. It is an invective against predatory corporate consumerism and exploitative geopolitics, and it is a love story about compassion in the face of nihilism.

I took the above synopsis from the back of the book and it served a huge purpose. Sometimes I had re-read it again to understand WTF I was reading. The words are like black particles floating around before my eyes and I can’t get past two chapters at a time. The story isn’t compelling, neither are any of the characters.

There is a lot of very disturbing sex, but they are hardly well-written, and they made no sense. Women exist in the cult for the pleasure of men; consent is a dubious concept. I am no prude, mind you, and I can’t understand why do the people in the cult do what they do.

The writing is abysmal. Huge chunks of it are devoted to endless rants about philosophy, culture, disenfranchisement and religion. I skipped them. I am not sure if it’s the translation that is bad, but with a story this nonsensical I doubt it matters much. I have no fricking idea why there are so many rosy raves about this novel; maybe it’s just me. I rather poke needles into my hand, while reading this. At least this way I can feel something.

*1/2 / 5

The President is Missing – Bill Clinton and James Patterson

On the cards, this certainly makes for an interesting collaboration: a bestselling thriller writer who knows the blueprint like the back of his hand and an ex-president who has the know-all in the corridors of ultimate world-changing power. Does it work?

As the novel opens, a threat looms. Enemies are planning an attack of unprecedented scale on America. Uncertainty and fear grip Washington. There are whispers of cyberterror and espionage and a traitor in the cabinet. The President himself becomes a suspect, and then goes missing…

I had a running image of Kiefer Sutherland while reading The President is Missing and I wonder if I am the only one. I was weaned on 8 seasons of 24 stretching from 2001 to 2010. Each of the 195 episodes tells the story in real-time and it was compulsively addictive even if sometimes it was a huge stretch. With The President is Missing, I was picturing Sutherland’s Jack Bauer as the President, eluding gunfire and killing bad guys out to send America to hell (by hell, I mean a world without the internet).

Like the TV series, the novel is far from high art but it is an entertaining read while munching on popcorn. How I wish it opens up the White House with some interesting insights never privy to anyone, but alas no. If you are a fan of House of Cards (2013-2018) and The West Wing (1999 – 2006), nothing new is revealed here.

The main conceit is a silent wiper virus that will wipe out all software on devices – “your laptop computers will be useful only as doorstops your routers as paperweights. The servers will be erased. You will have no internet service… elevators stop working. Grocery-Store scanners. Train and bus passes. Televisions. Phones. Radios. Traffic lights. Credit-card scanners. Home alarm systems. Laptop computers will lose their software, all files, everything erased. Your computers will be nothing but a keyboard and a blank screen. Electricity would be severely compromised. Which means refrigerators. In some cases, heat. Clean water in America will quickly become a scarcity. No websites, of course. No e-commerce. Conveyor belts. Sophisticated machinery inside manufacturing plants. Payroll records. Planes will be grounded. Even trains may not operate in most places. Bank records. You think you have ten thousand dollars in your saving account? Fifty thousand dollars in a retirement account? You think you have a pension that allows you to receive a fixed payment every month? Not if computer files and their backups are erased…” And it goes on and on.

The writing is content with ramming everything down your throat with little subtlety. I don’t know about you but I had the privilege of straddling between two eras – with and without internet, and I can tell you it’s not a bad thing to go back to the time without it. I love those simpler days and human beings were a lot nicer.

The President is Missing reads like the equivalent of having a McDonald’s burger with lots of added cheese. It will no doubt fill your stomach and keep the hunger pangs at bay for a while, but it will not reawaken your dormant tastebuds to new sensations. It will not be a memorable meal.

***1/2 / 5

Elevation – Stephen King

My favourite Stephen King novel isn’t a horror one; it’s Different Seasons (1982), a collection of four novellas, each one capturing an aspect of the four seasons. There was a time, come December, when everything would start to wind down, I would read Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption again and be reminded that I am doing okay as long as I have at least one true friend. I will let you in on any another tidbit: when I was learning the ropes to become a teacher, all the newbies were tasked to read a one-page text of our choosing so that our tutor can check on our enunciation and articulation. I read from the prologue of The Body from Different Seasons. When I was done, the Caucasian tutor immediately asked me where was the text taken from and I could see my fellow teachers scribbling it down likewise. King manages to elucidate ever so succinctly a particular human behaviour in that prologue. Presently, I own the third copy of the novel because the first two were loaned out to friends and they didn’t come back to me. It’s absolutely fine; I like to think that the novel has found its way into their heart just like it did for me. Elevation, just like Different Seasons, is a novella and it isn’t horror, and it is a gem of a read.

Part of the fun of reading is to find out as little about the plot as possible, so I will not divulge much, except to just say it’s a story about a man with a rather particular weight problem and how he saved a small town called Castle Rock from their worst selves.

Using weight loss as a narrative lynchpin isn’t new to King. He first did it in Thinner (1984) which is a helluva psychological horror-thriller. But Elevation approaches the weight loss idea in a unique way with free-flowing prose that brims with witty charm and nuggets of wisdom. King nails that small town vibe and speak effortlessly.

For me, one of the hallmarks of a good story is not being able to guess what will happen in the next page and with Elevation, I couldn’t, but perhaps it’s more correct to say I didn’t want to. It’s so easy to fall in love with Scott Carey who is stricken with the weirdest malady ever and hope against the inevitable.

The second act is devoted to the Turkey Trot, the Castle Rock long distance foot race where Scott’s dire affliction brings out the best in people who have mollycoddled with the worst in themselves and others. I devoured that section with a smile on my face. I must have looked really silly in the train on my way to class.

Back in my younger days, I used to run the full marathon every December. One week before the run, I would prep myself psychologically by reading King’s The Long Walk (1979), an early version of The Hunger Games where 100 people competed in a race and losers get shot. I loved running the arduous marathon with that crazy story in my head and believe me when I say I would never stop to walk. Now with Elevation, and with me being older and less springy, I think I may have found my new running companion story prior before running my annual marathon, albeit half-marathon now.

****1/2/ 5