The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared – Jonas Jonasson (Review)

Publisher: Hesperus Press Limited, 2012 (UK edition)
Pages: 387
Genre: Literary, comedy
[Translated by Ray Bradbury]

“Instead, he thought that he had probably been mistaken all those years when he’d sat in the Old People’s Home, feeling that he might as well die and leave it all. However many aches and pains he suffered, it had to be much more interesting and instructive to be on the run from Director Alice than to be lying rigid six feet under.” p9

Allan Karlsson is not your typical 100 year-old man. Tired of life at the old people’s home where he resides, on the day of his 100th birthday party Allan decides to escape – by climbing out of his bedroom window. This escape marks the start of the centenarian’s adventure across Sweden as he meets a host of unlikely companions along the way.

I Am Pilgrim – Terry Hayes (Review)

Publisher: Bantam Press, 2013
Pages: 700 pages
Genre: Thriller

“There are places I’ll remember all my life – Red Square with a hot wind howling across it, my mother’s bedroom on the wrong side of 8-Mile, the endless gardens of a fancy foster home, a man waiting to kill me in a group of ruins known as the Theatre of Death.” p11

Recently, I seem to have developed a taste for thriller novels, and so when I read the blurb of Terry Hayes’ bestselling novel I Am Pilgrim, I knew I had to give it a go.

The narrator, known (among other aliases) by his codename Pilgrim, is a former spy for a US intelligence secret espionage unit. The novel itself opens with the grisly murder of an unidentified woman in a New York hotel, where Pilgrim present at the scene to help with the investigation. The victim’s identity remains a mystery as the killer has gone to extreme lengths to cover this up – it is essentially the perfect murder. There is a further twist as it is revealed that the murderer has apparently read a forensics manual outlining the perfect murder – written by our narrator, Pilgrim, under a pseudonym. Soon the plot shifts to encompass the narrative of a jihadist doctor from Saudi Arabia, known as Saracen, who aims to destroy the United States by synthesising smallpox, a virus with no known cure. It is Pilgrim’s mission to track him down and put an end to the deadly plot.

A Commonplace Killing – Siân Busby (Review)

Publisher: Short Books, 2013
Pages: 283
Genre: Mystery

‘Holloway was a dump, peace not yet a way of life, and the war had laid waste to everything, leaving common decencies bereft and clinging on for dear life, shrapnel-pocked, shuddering in the aftermath of the great prolonged shriek as they let go of the old certainties.’

Siân Busby’s A Commonplace Killing is a compelling tale of murder set against the sombre backdrop of post-war Britain. It is July 1946 in London when a woman’s body is found in a disused bomb site. What at first appears to be the usual tale of the sexual assault of a prostitute – a “commonplace killing” as one dispassionate officer observes – soon turns out not to be the case. The novel follows Detective Inspector Jim Cooper’s investigation as he attempts to identify the woman’s murderer among the seedy belly of London’s criminal underclass.