ENTITLEMENT by Rumaan Alam

Brooke is a young, beautiful, Vassar-educated Black woman who goes to work for Asher Jaffee, a white billionaire in his eighties.  Her job is to help Asher give away his money, and she becomes his protégé, undergoing a transformation in the process.  Brooke first comes to Asher’s attention with her outspokenness and her attempt to return a $200 expense check that she claims to find unethical.  However, her ethics seem to dissolve as she inserts herself into Asher’s lavish lifestyle and comes to feel that she deserves the same perks, such as a chauffeur and a gorgeous New York apartment.  Does she expect Asher to look the other way when she charges expensive clothing to the foundation’s credit card and exaggerates her income in order to qualify for a mortgage?  Brooke is delusional and, from this reader’s standpoint, unlikeable.  Asher has encouraged her to go after what she wants, but she takes that advice to an extreme.  For a book that is largely about a charitable organization, this novel seemed heartless to me.  Asher, whose intentions appear altruistic on the surface, is trying to minimize his tax liability and paying almost a million dollars for a painting for his wife’s birthday.  He is still making more money than he gives away.  All this money being thrown around so casually and carelessly for personal use by a supposed philanthropist is a little nauseating, but maybe that’s the point.

GOOD MATERIAL by Dolly Alderton

Thirty-five-year-old Andy is a mediocre comedian, wallowing in self-pity.  His breakup with Jen has rocked his world, and even his longtime friends no longer want to hang out with him.  Dolly Alderton, please do not write another book like this, as a whiny novel does not make for a good read.  I loved Ghosts and kept expecting this novel to veer in a more positive direction or for Andy to incorporate some of his more outrageous post-breakup experiences into his comedy routine.  His short-lived residence on a boat, his therapy session under false pretenses, and his landlord’s correspondence with Julian Assange would all seem to provide some good fodder for laughter, and I guess they do eventually.  However, we don’t receive any real relief from Andy’s pathetic obsession until late in the novel when Jen explains exactly why she had to end her relationship with him.  Any sympathy that I could muster for Andy went straight down the tubes after hearing her side of the story.  I would be more optimistic that Andy has learned from this experience if Jen would share with him what went wrong.

WILD DARK SHORE by Charlotte McConaghy

Dominic Salt and his three children—Raff, Fen, and Orly—are caretakers of the remote island of Shearwater near Antarctica and are tasked with preserving the United Nations’ seed vault.  These seeds are intended to enable humans to survive when all else is destroyed by climate change.  Shearwater was at one time a research station, but now the Salts are there alone until a boat comes to remove them and the seeds from Shearwater in 6 weeks.  And what an eventful six weeks they will be, beginning with Fen’s rescue of a woman named Rowan who is barely alive, while the captain of Rowan’s boat did not survive their shipwreck.  As Rowan is being nursed back to health, we discover that her husband, Hank, was the head of the research station, but we don’t really know what happened to him.  Clues emerge one by one, but the Salt family has secrets galore, including the big one regarding Hank’s whereabouts.  This novel fits into multiple genres, as it is a mystery, a survival story, a love story, and perhaps even a ghost story, all rolled into one.  I found the briskly paced plot to be gripping, as this family is beset by one disaster after another, but the book tugged at my heartstrings as well.  A scene with beached whales moved me almost to tears.  The characters are few, and each one is grieving a tragic loss or shouldering almost unbearable guilt.

THE HUNTER by Tana French

Cal Hooper, the ex-Chicago detective whom we met in The Searcher, is still trying to live peacefully in rural Ireland, with little success.  Trey, the teenage girl whom Cal has taken under his wing, is now his carpentry business partner, thus improving her standing in the community.  Then her con-man father, Johnny, reappears after a four-year absence with a smooth talker from London and a plan to swindle the local farmers.  Trey is seemingly all-in on the scam, since she still blames the locals for the death of her older brother.  However, Trey is possibly in over her head, and Cal is at a loss as to how to protect her, since she has not confided her plans to him.  Then someone is murdered, and law enforcement gets involved, in the person of a very competent detective from Dublin.  Reading this book is a pleasure from beginning to end, and I think it stands on its own for those who haven’t read its predecessor.  I read The Searcher too long ago to remember much, other than the characters of Trey, Cal, and Cal’s girlfriend, Lena.  What intrigued me the most was trying to figure out who the murderer was, and every possibility I came up with seemed unlikely.  The murderer’s identity was the most satisfying revelation in the novel, as that person was not even on my radar.  This book is much richer than your everyday whodunit, and Tana French proves that she can write a mystery novel as well as anybody.

HUNTED by Abir Mukherjee

A bomb is detonated in a Los Angeles shopping mall, killing dozens of people, including the young woman who planted the bomb.  Shreya is an FBI agent investigating the bombing, and when she is focused on a case, nothing will stop her, including orders from her boss.  Meanwhile, an American woman, Carrie, travels to London to meet with a man, Sajid, from Bangladesh.  Carrie has a letter from her son that indicates he likes a girl who is Sajid’s daughter and that they may both be involved with the terrorist group who bombed the mall.  Carrie then whisks Sajid off to the U.S. so that they can find and save their respective offspring.  The narrative follows these two on their ill-advised escapade, plus the workings of the terrorists and the FBI.  The author deftly handles each narrative and keeps the action flowing with plenty of suspense.  The terrorist group is basically a cult, helmed by a white-haired woman named Miriam, with no access to news media.  She assigns her young Muslim acolytes to plant the bombs, making them appear to be suicide bombers but using their deaths as a smokescreen for the group’s real purpose. The naïve recruits, however, are not aware that they are going to be sacrificed.  Carrie’s son, who is the one assembling the bombs, realizes after the mall bombing what is going on and plans his and Sajid’s daughter’s escape.  Though not an edge-of-your-seat thriller, the pacing is very good and so is the writing.  The action, which includes lots of chase scenes, moves from the West coast to Florida in the blink of an eye, and several twists come to light in the final pages. 

WHAT WE CAN KNOW by Ian McEwan

Critics didn’t dub this author Ian Macabre for nothing, and this book solidifies that reputation.  For the first 150 pages, the highbrow plot treads water as Thomas Metcalfe in 2120 narrates his search for a lost poem from 2014.  Not much has changed in 100 years except that a bunch of landmasses and species of flora and fauna have disappeared, thanks to climate change upheaval and a tsunami caused by a manmade screw-up. The missing poem’s celebrated author read the poem, an homage to his wife, at a dinner party and insisted that there be no other copies.  The poem was a gift, and his wife could do with it as she pleased.  No one has seen it since.  The poet’s wife was a published author herself but abandoned her writing career to become basically a tradwife.  Finally, our first half narrator, Thomas rediscovers a forgotten note in his coat pocket, and things start to get rolling.  His tedious search for the lost poem morphs from an archive search to a more literal hunt for buried treasure.  Part II is something else entirely, but readers will recognize the narrator and the other characters from the 21^st century dinner party.  This is where the storyline indeed becomes macabre, and a lost boy in a train station is just a tiny warmup for what is to come.  Unfortunately, some readers will probably abandon this book before they get to the good stuff.

THE SAFEKEEP by Yael van der Wouden

Isabel lives alone in her family home in the Netherlands in 1961.  She has a sharp tongue and doesn’t mind using it, even with strangers like her older brother’s new girlfriend, Eva.  When her brother has to leave the country for a month on business, he insists that Eva stay with Isabel.  Isabel can’t really object, although she does try, because she has no claim to the house, which will eventually belong to her brother.  For the first two weeks these two women are like oil and vinegar, but then things change when Isabel comes in from a date and describes her discomfort with the whole evening.  Their détente segues into desire for one another that both view as forbidden, although Isabel’s younger brother lives with his male lover. This development, however, is not the most jaw-dropping aspect of the novel.  A startling disclosure--well past halfway through the novel--changes the whole timbre of the book, rewarding your patience for sticking with it.  This book may not be a thriller, but it definitely has a twist that I did not see coming.  I failed to pick up on several clues that could have prepared me for the unexpected revelation, and I was glad to have an electronic copy so that I could go back and search the pages I had already read.  The manner in which the plot unfolds is exquisite.