1. Adam Hall. I found 4 of the Quiller spy novels. I have yet to try the first but I will at least read one this year.
"The fly fell down." Quiller sent the message off to London as requested. He had just seen a supersonic jet plunge 60,000 feet to its destruction. It was the 36th crash, and more were to come - unless Quiller finds out who is to blame.
That meant entering the deadly shadow world between East and West, where the name of the game was betrayal and the stakes were sky-high."
"At the Tango briefing Quiller got his orders. Orders that sent him on a bizarre undercover operation, a double-suicide mission in the Sahara. His assignment: find and destroy a mysterious downed aircraft before the world learns of its existence, before its cargo is disclosed, and before enemy agents destroy the plane and possibly Quiller along with it!"
"Quiller is in Hong Kong, where he thinks he's on vacation. But every alleyway leads dead to danger, and Quiller gets the message: he's never off duty.
The plot moves into a high gear. Quiller always enjoyed his rides, but this one is taxing. He finds a woman as faithless as she is beautiful; he fails to reform her, but enjoys the effort. He takes on villains one, two and three at a time and dispatches them on land with karate and in the South Seas with its aquatic equivalent"
"A Yugoslavian plane crashes in the south of France; a fuel tanker explodes at Rome airport, a British diplomat is shot dead in Phnom Penh. In each case Quiller, Adam Hall's relentless British agent witnesses the violence as he pursues a fanatical terrorist group known as Kobra"
2. George Orwell. I have been collecting Orwell's books and found two of his earlier publications.
"London, 1936. Gordon Comstock has declared war on the money god; and Gordon is losing the war. Nearly 30 and "rather moth-eaten already," a poet whose one small book of verse has fallen "flatter than any pancake," Gordon has given up a "good" job and gone to work in a bookshop at half his former salary. Always broke, but too proud to accept charity, he rarely sees his few friends and cannot get the virginal Rosemary to bed because (or so he believes), "If you have no money ... women won't love you." On the windowsill of Gordon's shabby rooming-house room is a sickly but unkillable aspidistra - a plant he abhors as the banner of the sort of "mingy, lower-middle-class decency" he is fleeing in his downward flight."
"A searing account of George Orwell’s experiences of working-class life in the bleak industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire, The Road to Wigan Pier is a brilliant and bitter polemic that has lost none of its political impact over time. His graphically unforgettable descriptions of social injustice, slum housing, mining conditions, squalor, hunger and growing unemployment are written with unblinking honesty, fury and great humanity."
Fiction / Adventure (not mystery)
"1805: The Early Days of Horatio Hornblower's Captaincy -
IN WHICH HE supervises the funeral of Britain's beloved Admiral Nelson;
IN WHICH HE recaptures His Brittanic Majesty's brig, Amelia Jane, from a French prize crew;
IN WHICH HE recovers a quarter million sterling from the transport, Speedwell, sunken in Turkish waters;
IN WHICH HE sails his small, swift Atropos against a mighty Spanish frigate.
HORNBLOWER AND THE ATROPOS being another stirring adventure in C. S. Forester's epic saga of English sea-power in the Great Days of Sail."
"In Paris around 1900, Arthur and Margaret are engaged to be married. Everyone approves and everyone seems to be enjoying themselves. Until Oliver Haddo appears. Sinister and repulsive, Haddo fascinates Margaret's spinster friend, Susie Boyd. Yet it is not Susie who ultimately falls prey to this peculiar charm. It is Margaret, and a fate worse than death awaits her in the form of the evil Haddo."
"At the Angler’s Rest, a bucolic English pub, drinking hot scotch and lemon, sits one of Wodehouse’s greatest raconteurs. Mr. Mulliner tells fabulous stories of the extraordinary behavior of his far-flung family."
"It's 2008 and things are falling apart: Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers are going under, and the residents of Pepys Road, London - a banker and his shopaholic wife, an old woman dying of a brain tumor and her graffiti-artist grandson, Pakistani shop owners and a shadowy refugee who works as the meter maid, the young soccer star from Senegal and his minder - are receiving anonymous postcards reading "We Want What You Have." Who is behind it? What do they want? Epic in scope yet intimate, capturing the ordinary dramas of very different lives, this is a novel of love and suspicion, of financial collapse and terrorist threat, of property values going up and fortunes going down, and of a city at a moment of extraordinary tension."
Mysteries
I found a mix of books from series I've already started and a couple of new ones.
"He was right. His guards slain, the brilliant, insane pathologist of Eyes of Prey flees to New York, there to continue his research into aspects of death. Carefully, he conducts his experiments, searching the eyes of his dying victims for what they can reveal, the mounting body count causing an uproar in the city.
In desperation, the police reach out for the man who knew Bekker best, but when Lucas arrives, he finds unexpected danger as well. For Lily Rothenburg, the policewoman whose intense affair with Lucas has never completely faded, is there too. Now, consumed with her own investigation of a group of rogue killers within the police department, she draws Lucas into her orbit again, until their hunts merge, their twin obsessions driving them ever closer to the edge . . . and then over."
"The discovery of Elizabeth Nightingale's broken body in the woods near her home could not have come as a bigger shock. Called in to investigate, Chief Inspector Wexford quickly determines that the Nightingales were considered the perfect couple - wealthy, attractive and without an enemy in the world.
However, someone must have been alone with Elizabeth that night in the woods. Someone who hated - or perhaps loved - her enough to beat her to death.
The case seems straightforward. But Wexford soon learn that beneath the placid surface of the Nightingales' lives lie undercurrents and secrets no one ever suspected."
"A sadistic practical joker is haunting the popular music halls of London, interfering with the actors and interrupting their acts by orchestrating humiliating disasters that take place in view of the audience. A trapeze artist misses her timing when the trapeze ropes are shortened. A comedian who invites the audience to sing along with him finds the words of his song “shamefully” altered. Mustard has been applied to a sword swallower’s blade. A singer’s costume has been rigged. The girl in a magician’s box is trapped. Then the mischief escalates to murder. Or was murder intended all along? That indomitable detective team, Sergeant Cribb and Constable Thackeray of Scotland Yard, must track down the elusive criminal."
"In the third book in Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano series, the urbane and perceptive Sicilian detective exposes a viper's nest of government corruption and international intrigue in a compelling new case. When an elderly man is stabbed to death in an elevator and a crewman on an Italian fishing trawler is machine-gunned by a Tunisian patrol boat off Sicily's coast, only Montalbano suspects the link between the two incidents. His investigation leads to the beautiful Karima, an impoverished house cleaner and sometime prostitute, whose young son steals other schoolchildren's mid-morning snacks. But Karima disappears, and the young snack thief's life-as well as Montalbano's-is on the line . . ."
"Marshal Guarnaccia's job with the Carabinieri usually involves restoring stolen handbags to grateful old ladies and lost cameras to bewildered tourists. So when he is assigned to work with the Florence police in trying to track down a vicious serial killer, he feels out of his league. The crimes he must try to understand are grotesque, the case materials harrowing. To make matters worse, the Proc he must report to is Simonetti, the same man he knows drove an innocent man to suicide several years earlier in his blind quest for a conviction."
There you go. If I go to the last day I'll let you know if I find anything else on Saturday. Take care!
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