The Whimsy Bookworm: A Book Blog from India

  Book: The Murders at Fleat House  Author: Lucinda Riley  Pages: 473 Read on: Kindle  Read in: ~5 hours  Plot Summary:  The sudden death of a pupil in Fleat House at St Stephen’s – a small private boarding school in deepest Norfolk – is a shocking event that the headmaster is very keen to call a tragic accident. But the local police cannot rule out foul play and the case prompts the return of high-flying Detective Inspector Jazmine ‘Jazz’ Hunter to the force. Jazz has her own private reasons for stepping away from her police career in London, and reluctantly agrees to front the investigation as a favour to her old boss. Reunited with her loyal sergeant Alastair Miles, she enters the closed world of the school, and as Jazz begins to probe the circumstances surrounding Charlie Cavendish’s tragic death, events are soon to take another troubling turn. Charlie is exposed as an arrogant bully, and those around him had both motive and opportunity to switch the dr...

  Book: The Resting Place Author: Camilla Sten Translated by: Alexandra Fleming  Pages: 322 Read in: 3 hours  Read on: Kindle  Plot Summary:  Deep rooted secrets.  A twisted family history. And a house that will never let go. Eleanor lives with prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize a familiar person's face. It causes stress. Acute anxiety.  It can make you question what you think you know. When Eleanor walked in on the scene of her capriciously cruel grandmother, Vivianne’s, murder, she came face to face with the killer—a maddening expression that means nothing to someone like her. With each passing day, the horror of having come so close to a murderer—and not knowing if they’d be back—overtakes both her dreams and her waking moments, thwarting her perception of reality. Then a lawyer calls. Vivianne has left her a house—a looming estate tucked away in the Swedish woods. The place her grandfather died, suddenly. A place that has housed a chilling p...

  Book: We Were Never Here  Author: Andrea Bartz  Pages: 306  Read on: Kindle  Read in: ~3 hours Plot Summary:  On holiday in Chile with her best friend Kristen, Emily is having the time of her life. Until one night, she finds their hotel suite covered in blood. Kristen claims a backpacker attacked her. She shouted, but no-one heard. She struggled, but he was too strong. She had no option but to kill him. With no evidence of the assault, Emily must help her hide the body. . . Back home, Emily tries to forget what happened, but a surprise visit from Kristen forces her to confront the events of that night. As the walls close in, Emily asks herself: can her closest friend be trusted? Things I Liked:  1. Complicated friendships- male or female- always make for interesting stories. Add to it, a friend, who is a bit of a liar.. a  gaslighter.. not who she seems to be... and that makes for a very interesting premise.  2. The depiction of the po...

  Books: Truly Devious, The Vanishing Stair and The Hand on the Wall  Author: Maureen Johnson  Plot Summary- Truly Devious:  Ellingham Academy is a famous private school in Vermont for the brightest thinkers, inventors, and artists. It was founded by Albert Ellingham, an early twentieth century tycoon, who wanted to make a wonderful place full of riddles, twisting pathways, and gardens. “A place,” he said, “where learning is a game.” Shortly after the school opened, his wife and daughter were kidnapped. The only real clue was a mocking riddle listing methods of murder, signed with the frightening pseudonym “Truly, Devious.” It became one of the great unsolved crimes of American history.  True-crime aficionado Stevie Bell is set to begin her first year at Ellingham Academy, and she has an ambitious plan: She will solve this cold case. That is, she will solve the case when she gets a grip on her demanding new school life and her housemates: the inventor, the novel...

  Book: Survive The Night  Author: Riley Sager  Pages: 336 Read on: Kindle  Read in: 3 hours  Plot Summary:  It’s November 1991. Nirvana's in the tape deck, George H. W. Bush is in the White House, and movie-obsessed college student Charlie Jordan is in a car with a man who might be a serial killer. Josh Baxter, the man behind the wheel, is a virtual stranger to Charlie. They met at the campus ride board, each looking to share the long drive home to Ohio. Both have good reasons for wanting to get away. For Charlie, it’s guilt and grief over the shocking murder of her best friend, who became the third victim of the man known as the Campus Killer. For Josh, it’s to help care for his sick father—or so he says.    The longer she sits in the passenger seat, the more Charlie notices there’s something suspicious about Josh, from the holes in his story about his father to how he doesn’t want her to see inside the trunk. As they travel an empty, twisty hig...

  Book: The Therapist  Author: B.A. Paris  Pages: 304  Read on: Kindle  Read in: 3 hours  Plot Summary:  When Alice and Leo move into a newly renovated house in The Circle, a gated community of exclusive houses, it is everything they’ve dreamed of. But appearances can be deceptive. As Alice is getting to know her neighbours, she discovers a devastating secret about her new home, and begins to feel a strong connection with Nina, the therapist who lived there before. Alice becomes obsessed with trying to piece together what happened two years before. But no one wants to talk about it. Her neighbors are keeping secrets and things are not as perfect as they seem. Things I Liked:  1. The premise of the book, like most of B.A. Paris' books, was very interesting. A couple move into a new house in a posh gated community with a mysterious past. Their neighbours are cautiously friendly but a bit cagey about the history of their house, something, which ...

  Book: The Sanatorium  Author: Sarah Pearse  Pages: 400 Read on: Kindle  Read in: 4 hours  Plot Summary:  Half-hidden by forest and overshadowed by threatening peaks, Le Sommet has always been a sinister place. Long plagued by troubling rumors, the former abandoned sanatorium has since been renovated into a five-star minimalist hotel. An imposing, isolated getaway spot high up in the Swiss Alps is the last place Elin Warner wants to be. But Elin’s taken time off from her job as a detective, so when her estranged brother, Isaac, and his fiancée, Laure, invite her to celebrate their engagement at the hotel, Elin really has no reason not to accept. Arriving in the midst of a threatening storm, Elin immediately feels on edge–there’s something about the hotel that makes her nervous. And when they wake the following morning to discover Laure is missing, Elin must trust her instincts if they hope to find her. With the storm closing off all access to the hotel, th...

  Book: Best Served Cold (#4 in the Janardan Maity Series) Author: Bhaskar Chattopadhyay  Pages: 217  Read on: Kindle (via Kindle Unlimited) Read in: ~3 hours  Plot Summary:  Twenty years ago, four boys were wronged by a vicious man in an idyllic tea estate. Now, they have returned to avenge the crimes committed against them.  His simplest case might just be the most challenging puzzle that detective Janardan Maity has ever faced. General Thoughts: We have read and enjoyed most of the previous Janardan Maity books. Bhaskar Chattopadhyay writes a good crime thriller  and  his ' detective' is more interested in uncovering the truth than anything else; much like Byomkesh Bakshi. We highly recommend the previous three books in the Janardan Maity-Prakash Ray series. Reviews can be found by following the links to Penumbra , Here Falls the Shadow and The Disappearance of Sally Sequeira . So, when I noticed that a new Maity-Ray book was out and was ...

  Book: Troubled Blood (Cormoran Strike Book 5) Author: Robert Galbraith (aka JK Rowling) Pages: 888 Read on: Kindle  Read in: ~8-9 hours over two days  Plot Summary:  Private Detective Cormoran Strike is visiting his family in Cornwall when he is approached by a woman asking for help finding her mother, Margot Bamborough - who went missing in mysterious circumstances in 1974. Strike has never tackled a cold case before, let alone one forty years old. But despite the slim chance of success, he is intrigued and takes it on; adding to the long list of cases that he and his partner in the agency, Robin Ellacott, are currently working on. And Robin herself is also juggling a messy divorce and unwanted male attention, as well as battling her own feelings about Strike. As Strike and Robin investigate Margot's disappearance, they come up against a fiendishly complex case with leads that include tarot cards, a psychopathic serial killer and witnesses who cannot all be truste...

  Book: The Lost and Found Bookshop  Author: Susan Wiggs  Pages: 384  Read on: Kindle  Read in: 4 hours Plot Summary:  Somewhere in the vast Library of the Universe, as Natalie thought of it, there was a book that embodied exactly the things she was worrying about. In the wake of a shocking tragedy, Natalie Harper inherits her mother’s charming but financially strapped bookshop in San Francisco. She also becomes caretaker for her ailing grandfather Andrew, her only living relative—not counting her scoundrel father. But the gruff, deeply kind Andrew has begun displaying signs of decline. Natalie thinks it’s best to move him to an assisted living facility to ensure the care he needs. To pay for it, she plans to close the bookstore and sell the derelict but valuable building on historic Perdita Street, which is in need of constant fixing. There’s only one problem–Grandpa Andrew owns the building and refuses to sell. Natalie adores her grandfather; she’ll do wh...

  Book: One by One  Author: Ruth Ware Pages: 384 Read on: Kindle  Read in: ~4 hours  Plot Summary:  Snow is falling in the exclusive alpine ski resort of Saint Antoine, as the shareholders and directors of Snoop, the hottest new music app, gather for a make or break corporate retreat to decide the future of the company.  At stake is a billion-dollar dot com buyout that could make them all millionaires, or leave some of them out in the cold.   The clock is ticking on the offer, and with the group irrevocably split, tensions are running high. When an avalanche cuts the chalet off from help, and one board member goes missing in the snow, the group is forced to ask - would someone resort to murder, to get what they want? Things I Liked:  1. The premise and setting of the book seemed very atmospheric and interesting. I mean, let's face it, work  offsites  are shyte! Those are the facts! There are no fun work  offsites! All of us gri...

  Book: Moonflower Murders  Author: Anthony Horowitz  Pages: 592 Read on: Kindle  Read in: 5-6 hours  Plot Summary:  Retired publisher Susan Ryeland is running a small hotel on a Greek island with her long-term boyfriend. But life isn't as idyllic as it should be: exhausted by the responsibility of making everything work on an island where nothing ever does, Susan is beginning to miss her literary life in London - even though her publishing career once entangled her in a lethal literary murder plot. So when an English couple come to visit with tales of a murder that took place in a hotel the same day their daughter Cecily was married there, Susan can't help but find herself fascinated. And when they tell her that Cecily has gone missing a few short hours after reading  Atticus Pund Takes The Case , a crime novel Susan edited some years previously, Susan knows she must return to London to find out what has happened. The clues to the murder and to Cecil...

  Book: Parveen Babi- A Life Author: Karishma Upadhyay  Pages: 333 Read on: Kindle Read in: 4 hours    Plot Summary:  Sensuous, glamorous and bold, Parveen Babi set the Hindi cinema screen ablaze during the 1970s and ’80s, breaking the ‘pious, nice girl’ mould of the film heroine and redefining it after her own style. On screen, she sizzled in unforgettable roles in blockbusters like Deewaar, Shaan, Kaalia and Amar Akbar Anthony – while, off-screen, her bohemian and unabashed lifestyle lit up gossip columns, and her appearance on the cover of Time magazine, a first for an Indian, created a stir nationwide. Yet, for all the sensational rumours and films her life inspired, Parveen has remained something of an enigma to generations of fans.   In Parveen Babi: A Life , Karishma Upadhyay traces the journey of a shy but ambitious girl from an aristocratic family in Junagadh, Gujarat, to a life of merciless scrutiny that comes with being in the Bollywood spotligh...