Lorelei's Secret by Carolyn Parkhurst


Paul's beloved wife Lexy is found dead having fallen from the branches of the great apple tree in their back garden.  The only witness is her Rhodesian Ridgeback Lorelei.  Paul, a university professor in linguistics, is desperate to know why.  Did she slip and fall, did she commit suicide.  As Paul delves further into his memories of his time with the woman who was everything to him and further into a kind of madness trying to enable Lorelei to tell him what happened he maps beautifully the torments of the shining artistic soul who was the love of his life.

One of few non thriller / action / crime books which has gripped and held me from the first page to the last, poignant, and deeply comforting in that Lexy's feelings of inadequacy, being lost and fearing her own self were a mirror to my own 3am reflections on my self.

The Pact by Jodie Picoult

AZ: "For eighteen years the Hartes and the Golds have lived next door to each other, sharing everything from Chinese food to chicken pox to carpool duty. Parents and children alike are best friends - so it's no surprise that in high school Chris and Emily's friendship blossoms into something more. They've been soul mates since they were born. When the midnight calls come in from the hospital, no one is prepared for the appalling truth: Emily is dead at seventeen from a gunshot wound to the head as part of an apparent suicide pact. The gun holds a single unspent bullet that Chris tells police he intended for himself, but a local detective has doubts. And the Hartes and Golds, in a single terrifying moment, must face every parent's worst fear: do we ever really know our children at all?"

Picoult is now an author I turn to with relief, becuase as with Francis, Koontz, Faulkner and Jasper Fforde, I know that what I'm about to read will be a pleasure. The Pact is the desperately sad story of two children who grow up next door to each other (Em and Chris) and as teenager begin going out together. Em is conflicted in two ways, one by loving Chris very deeply but there being incestuous elements of brotherly love, and by a moment of sexual assault that drives her to self-loathing and suicidal tendencies.

Grasshopper by Barbara Vine

AZ: "Blamed by her parents for the tragic death of a friend, Clodagh has been banished from their home in the countryside to a dingy basement flat in the city. Her life is transformed when she meets the inhabitants on the top floor of 15 Russia Road. An exotic range of young people who explore a London of roofs, eaves and ledges, thrilling in the freedom and danger. Clodagh, haunted still by the accident, finds that running the roofs brings her back to life, but it seems that tragedy and misfortune may not be done with her yet"

Very good but I thought overlong, I understand that Vine was trying to speak about the characters as much as the precipitating events but although the events (the death on a pylon of a childhood friend and the stabbing of another character) were interesting and the characters did linger in my head I thought it was too long. Like Vine's Brimstone Wedding which I have on tape I felt it was missing something.