Harriet Devine's Blog

Missing You by Harlan Coben

Harlen Coban is not a writer I would necessarily make a beeline for, and I would almost certainly not have read this if I hadn't been offered a review copy by, of all things, Sainsbury's e-books. Yes, not content with selling paperbacks, the supermarkets are now breaking into the e-book market. And -- which I suppose is their USP -- they are selling many of them at very low prices.  Now I'm not a great lover of ebooks, and I haven't got a Kindle, but I do sometimes read them on my iPad or my phone, and that's how I read this one. Having a Kindle wouldn't be any good anyway, as you can't use it for these -- I downloaded a Sainsbury's e-reader onto my iPhone (you can get them on Android too, I believe), and passed some surprisingly happy hours.

But what about the book, I hear you say. It was good. I picked it because I had a vague memory of reading and enjoying one of Coban's books in the distant pre-blogging past -- no idea which one -- and was quite taken with the blurb: 

It's a profile, like all the others on the online dating site. But as NYPD Detective Kat Donovan focuses on the accompanying picture, she feels her whole world explode, as emotions she's ignored for decades come crashing down on her. Staring back at her is her ex-fiancé Jeff, the man who shattered her heart 18 years ago. Kat feels a spark, wondering if this might be the moment when past tragedies recede and a new world opens up to her. But when she reaches out to the man in the profile, her reawakened hope quickly darkens into suspicion and then terror as an unspeakable conspiracy comes to light, in which monsters prey upon the most vulnerable. As Kat's hope for a second chance with Jeff grows more and more elusive, she is consumed by an investigation that challenges her feelings about everyone she ever loved - her former fiance  her mother, and even her father, whose cruel murder so long ago has never been fully explained. With lives on the line, including her own, Kat must venture deeper into the darkness than she ever has before, and discover if she has the strength to survive what she finds there.

Clearly, online dating sites provide wonderful food for the crime novelist -- by chance, they feature very prominently in the book I reviewed here a few days ago, SJ Watson's Second Life. Like all online social media, they offer the possibility of assuming a false identity, and have the added bonus of appealing to the lonely and desperate, who are only too ready to be duped. Kat Donovan is not desperate, or even all that lonely, but she is alone and wouldn't mind a relationship. Her problem seems to be that she has never managed to forget Jeff, even after eighteen years. She thinks, briefly, that she's actually found him again, but his online responses don't measure up, and she soon realises that something very dodgy is going on. Meanwhile she has been contacted by a teenage boy who is desperately worried because he hasn't heard from his mother for some days. All he knows is that she met a man online and has gone off somewhere to spend some time with him. Alarm bells all round, then, especially when the site in question turns out to be the very same one where the possibly fake Jeff was hanging out. Luckily this lad is a skilled computer hacker, and he and Kat start getting very worried indeed by what he discovers, though they don't know the full magnitude of what is going on. We, the readers, do know it, however, and very horrid and scary it is. I don't think I'm giving too much away when I say everything turns out OK in the end for most people, though not for the bad guys -- well, this is a crime novel, so that's what you'd expect.

So this is good, entertaining, sort of middle of the road crime. Harlan Coban doesn't need any help from me as he's already a 6-year New York Times bestseller. But even though I won't be immediately seeking out any more of his books, I'd certainly pick one up if it came my way and I was in the mood. And if you like the sound of it, you can buy it at Sainsbury's ebooks for only £2.99. If you don't, why not check out the site anyway -- there are some great titles on there for as little as £1.99. And apparently you can also use your Nectar points if you have them.  

Ten Things I've Learnt About Love

It's awfully nice of publishers to send me books to review, especially as I'm rather picky and quite often don't actually review them. But I picked up Sarah Butler's debut novel, read a page or two and was hooked enough to whizz through the rest in record time.

This is the story of Alice. In her late twenties, she has been travelling in the far east, partly to recover from a broken relationship, partly because she has never felt totally settled or accepted at home with her family. But she has come back to London because her father is dying of cancer, and she is trying to cope with the inevitable emotional turmoil, not helped a great deal by her two much older sisters, who have their own issues to deal with. 

It's also the story of middle-aged Daniel, who is homeless. An art-school dropout who has never settled to a job or a home, he has for many years been wandering the London streets hoping some day to be reunited with the daughter he has never seen.

Switching back and forth between the narrative voices of these two characters, the novel tells of their separate lives and their gradual coming together. This could all have been rather corny and predictable, but I can assure you that it isn't. There are many rather fascinating elements in the story -- in particular, perhaps, the fact that Daniel has synesthesia, or more properly "grapheme → color synesthesia", though it's never named as such in the novel -- he sees letters of the alphabet as individual colours. He hopes his daughter may have inherited the condition, in which case she may be able to read the gifts he leaves outside her door -- found objects of the colours that spell her name, carefully fashioned into tiny works of art. 

I found the novel pretty unputdownable, and stayed up late finishing it almost in one gulp. Of course you long to know what the outcome is going to be and hope for a happy ending, but I cannot possibly tell you any of this. I thought Daniel and his life were extremely well evoked. I've had some experience fairly recently of working with homeless people in Oxford, and that makes you realise what a lot of sad stories there are behind those rather daunting facades. The novel is beautifully written, though I sometimes found it a little bit too crafted, if that's the right word. Each chapter is prefaced by a list of ten items -- for Alice, for instance, 'Ten things I will say to my father', 'Ten things I know about my mother', and for Daniel, 'Ten ways othe people might describe me', 'Ten things I've found that spell your name'. Clever stuff, and a good way of moving the plot forward without the need for too much explanation and back story, but it slightly got on my nerves after a while. I was also less enamoured of Alice than I'd like to have been, and wanted to tell her to pull herself together at times, though of course her life has been blighted somewhat by the early death of her mother and the fact that her father and sisters have a secret that they refuse to share with her. And the title made me ponder a bit -- Learnt or Learned? I googled it and gathered that though they are interchangeable in the UK, Americans prefer the ed form of verbs. 

Well, I said I was picky, didn't I, and I certainly wouldn't want to put you off what is an extremely impressive first novel. I stayed awake even after I'd finished the final chapter, thinking about the implications for the futures of the two characters, and that's always a good sign.

Fancy visiting an art gallery?

Well, now you can, without stirring out of your living room. The Google Art Project has just got off the ground and will take you, via the same technology they use for Street View, to a whole range of galleries around the world. I've just has a stroll round the Palace of Versailles, where I've never been before -- not as good as the real thing, obviously, but still a nice way of passing your time, should you happen to have any to pass. You can read more about it here.

Typepad on my ipod

I am on London for the night and just discovered I can get typepad on my iPod touch. So that's where this is coming from. On the bus I was listening to an audio book (Caroline Miniscule by Andrew Taylor, his first book, I think) and playing solitaire -- in a minute I'll be checking my emails and later I can read one of my ebooks -- something by Trollope, maybe, or Thomas Hardy. And all thanks to a little item that sits so comfortably in the palm of my hand. Amazing.

Embracing Technology

 I don't get cross very often these days, but I did get very cross a year or two ago when my friend Lewis said that women over fifty "couldn't handle technology". I'm getting cross now just thinking about it. But never mind that. The fact is I have always loved gadgets, and most of all ones that allowed you to communicate. On the left here you will see a picture of my very first computer, the Amstrad PC 1512. I bought one in the late 1980s, when I was writing up my DPhil thesis, and very useful it was -- no more pages of illegible notes covered in asterisks marked "insert C" or whatever. It nearly gave me a nervous breakdown, though, when, with ten days to go before my submission date, it suddenly swallowed up large chunks of a chapter that had proved to be too long for its floppy disk -- especially as it did this by removing every fifth word. I had to retype the whole thing from rough notes over Christmas, not a happy experience.

It wasn't all that long afterwards that I fell in love with my first Apple Mac, which looked a bit like this.  And, though this clunky looking thing doesn't bear much resemblance to the nice little Macbook I'm writing this on, I've stayed loyal to Macs ever since. I used to get a lot of stick for this, but as I spent many years with a PC at work and a Mac at home I really did have enough information to make what seemed to me to be a clear and sensible choice. And of course I've branched out into ipods, and now I have an ipod touch which I am completely in love with, and which I use for for reading books, listening to music, playing games, emailing, and much much more.

Naturally I leaped on email and the web with huge enthusiasm and I simply cannot any longer imagine what life could have been like without them. But it took me a while to cotton on to blogs and I think this had something to do with the name, which I found repellent. Also I got the idea that they were just for people who wanted to tell you about their rather boring lives. Then I discovered dovegreyreader, and things just took off from there. I've been on facebook for a while and because my family is rather scattered around the place it's a good way to see what they are all up to.

But it has taken me a long time to even consider the possibility of twitter. Not only, again, is the name so hideous and off-putting, but also the whole concept seemed to me profoundly unappealing. Too short, too self-obsessed, too boring. But I've got curious lately, as some bloggers I respect seem to have taken it up. So that's why I thought I'd give it a go. To be honest I don't yet even fully understand how it works (perhaps that's because I'm over fifty?) but I'm willing to experiment and see what happens, if anything. I'm still pretty dubious, but time will tell.