Mesmerized, by Gayle Lynds

High-powered attorney Beth Convey gets a heart transplant, becomes enmeshed in a dastardly plot to assassinate the new Russian President, Vladimir Putin (the novel was published in 2001) -- right in the White House Rose Garden -- and finds herself endowed with a whole new set of skills and abilities as she fights to prevent the plot from succeeding.

Her adventures quickly team her up with Washington Post investigative reporter, undercover FBI operative, and undeniable hunk, Jeffrey Hammond. Together they battle US-embedded rogue KGB agents, anti-government American militia members, a mole in the FBI working for the Russians, and the various National Security agencies of the United States, who, as usual in these thrillers, get it all wrong.

If nothing else, Lynds manages a lively pace, but for what is basically a romance novel, there is only one sexual encounter between Beth and Jeff and it is painful to read. "He pressed his lips into her belly and tasted her, savory as buttermilk." Could be a yeast infection.

I'd been looking forward to the scene for most of the novel, because Beth's heart donor turned out to be a male Russian agent skilled in karate and general hand-to-hand combat, firearms, and high-speed driving, among other things, and Beth had "inherited" (I'll spare you the pseudo-science) his skills, his thought processes, many of his memories (which she relived through dreams), and apparently, something of his sensitivities. How would this manifest itself when, "panting," she kicked off her "thong" and opened her legs to Hammond?

First, she's wearing a thong through all this action?! Second, why aren't the two fighting for the top position? Third... well, I don't want to go there.

I admit I skimmed a lot of the book. I just wasn't that mesmerized.

The Girl With All the Gifts

by M. R. Carey

I finished this last night, and then tried to sleep -- Ambien helped. This book is very hard to put down, and very hard to stop thinking about. Read it before you see the movie.

The Girl With All the Gifts, by M.R. Carey

The book is now being made into a movie. I think it will be good. Here's the trailer for The Girl With All The Gifts, directed by Colm McCarthy and starring Sennia Nanua, Gemma Arterton, Glenn Close and Paddy Considine. Coming soon.

Pretty Baby: A Novel, by May Kubica

Review by Bethanne Patrick

Mary Kubica's second novel, Pretty Baby, plays both with the timeline and with the notion of who is most harmed. Heidi Wood, a social worker, lives in downtown Chicago with her husband, Chris, and their bright but newly sullen 12-year-old daughter, Zoe. While commuting, Heidi notices a disheveled teenage girl toting a filthy, miserable baby. After seeing the pair more than once, Heidi approaches the girl — who gives her name as Willow Greer — and invites her to a local diner for a meal, ostensibly to discover whether the girl needs to go to a shelter.

We learn a lot about Heidi, Chris and Zoe in the first half of Pretty Baby, especially after Heidi invites Willow and baby Ruby to move in to their apartment. Chris travels a lot on business, but although a colleague is eager to get him into bed, he adores his wife and daughter — even when the latter tests her parents' nerves by shutting her mother and father out of her thoughts and room.

It's the perfect setup: Willow, seedy, suspicious and even scary (is that blood on her undershirt?), is going to worm her way into this family and destroy them. Will she steal all their valuables? Have an affair with Chris, who struggles to reconnect with Heidi after a serious health scare? Ruin Zoe's life and reputation? Heidi is so preoccupied with getting the sick baby well (it takes awhile for a doctor to diagnose a urinary tract infection, brought on by Ruby's dirty diaper) that she fails to consider most of the possible complications.

Kubica patiently constructs a tableau offering glimpses of Willow's before and after stories: She landed in a foster home with a dangerously abusive father figure — and, at some point, wound up in juvenile detention being questioned about murders (yes, plural). When and where did Willow give birth to Ruby? Who is Ruby's father? What does Willow want from the Wood family? When and how did she get taken to detention?

Most readers will get caught up in these questions as they watch Heidi try to take over all responsibility for Ruby's care. And when Chris engages a private detective to find out more about Willow, the story teeters on the edge of a climax in which one family's kindness is repaid with evil.
But Kubica has delicately misdirected our attention. I normally dislike endings that unspool quickly, seeing them as the result of fatigue or even laziness on the author's part, yet for Pretty Baby, the stage has been set while we were looking up toward the balcony. The fast-paced final chapters show us how easily we all ignore hidden infections in favor of surface wounds, and why "the ones you never hear about" may carry the deepest secrets.
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My rating 3.5 / 5

The Girl on the Train

Paula Hawkins said in an interview, "Nobody expects this, do they?" about the phenomenal success of her thriller, The Girl on the Train. I wouldn't have. Don't get me wrong. It's a good read. Something to take with you on your vacation to that B&B on the Oregon Coast. But the prose is prosaic, and the first-person point of view of the three women narrators has one wondering how one of the women, who ends up dead, manages to tell her tale. I mean, this isn't The Lovely Bones.

The main character -- our protagonist -- is Rachel, and she is a drunk, and as such, her narration of the story is unreliable. She has memory lapses (to say the least), she mis-remembers things, and she believes things that her husband (now ex-husband) told her that may or not be true. In addition, she lies like a rug. All this serves to keep the reader guessing -- it did me -- but it also becomes a bit tedious. In fact, at one point I was hoping that Rachel would become another victim and once in the afterlife, be more or less compelled to tell the truth -- I mean, who lies in the afterlife?

The other women who relate the story are Anna and Megan. They are both flawed women, as is Rachel. In fact, halfway through the book one has to ask, 'why do we care about these women?' The answer is, we don't. We just want to get to the end and find out 'who done it.' Because The Girl on the Train is, after all is said and done, a thriller.