My three holiday fiction reads all turned out to be sort of detective stories in one way or another. But they were all very different, and all brilliant so it worked out fine...
The Interpretation of Murder won Richard and Judy's "Galaxy British book Award" in 2007. but I overcame my natural snobbishness and read it anyway. Set at the turn of the 20th century it's an historical detective story weaved around Sigmund Freud's visist to New York. The brilliance of the book lies in the page turner plot and the way that real people and events are birlliantly weaved into the fiction. Superb.
Snow Falling on Cedars is also set in the US but on the Pacific Coast. Essentially a courtroom drama it recounts the events surrounding a fictional trial following the death of a fisherman in late 1940s America. The brilliantly evocative description of the landscape sets the tone for the book and the characters are deftly drawn and profoundly interesting. And the ending is very clever!
Finally William Boyd's latest book, Restless, like all the rest of his work is the pick of the crop. Although this book isn't as brilliant as his Brazzaville Beach (one of the the best novels of the C20th in my view) it is a beautifully written narrative, switching between the early 1940s and the life of spy Eva Delectorskaya and 1976 Oxford and the life of her daughter Ruth - who suddenly has to come to terms with the fact that the mother she thought she knew never really existed. If you can only read one of these books make it this one.
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