“The Secret Adversary” is one of Tommy and Tuppence mysteries – and the only one from this series I’ve so far managed to lay my hands on. It’s a perfect thriller, and I absolutely love it. I read it for the first time thirteen years ago, and now just had to refresh it in memory before reviewing it – but I remember the first time, and how completely mystified I was.
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Simon Morley (Si for his friends), a young talented artist, has to sketch soap bars in an advertising agency for a living, which is as boring as it sounds, until one single day changes his life completely. He is invited to participate in a top-secret project of the USA government. Before long he finds out that it has to do with time travels, but no time machines are involved – just careful recreation of the old surroundings where participants can live and absorb the atmosphere of the past, telling themselves they are already there – and then a little hypnosis does the rest.
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If you’d like to see the happiest woman in the world, you should have seen me on the day when I emerged from the library carrying under my arm an enormous volume. “The Complete Sherlock Holmes” published in the USA in 1988 is one of the greatest treasures the library has, and since the day I discovered its existence I wanted nothing else. Alas, another reader took it from under my nose, so I had to wait two more months before it was finally in my hands.
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This political detective story starts when people aboard the British military frigate Ariadne – one of NATO’s most advanced vessels of its time (the book is written in 1986) witness the crash of a mysterious plane they can’t identify. Engulfed in flames, it sinks in the Aegean, in the vicinity of Thera Island. About the same time they witness the last minutes of the plane they receive a SOS message from a sinking private yacht, also burning badly after an explosion. They arrive just in time to rescue six survivors from the yacht, but there is nobody to rescue from the plane.
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The story starts when Dorothy Wynant, a pretty girl of twenty, asks Nick Charles, a retired private detective, to help her find her father and arrange a meeting with him. She hadn’t seen her father since her parents’ divorce and misses him, but knows her mother would strongly disapprove of the meeting. Still, the beginning seems innocent enough until the personal secretary of Dorothy’s father is found dead in her own apartment with four bullets in her body.
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This is the first novel about Philip Marlowe – a young and hard-boiled Californian private investigator. As always, he won’t bend to either the police, the client or the most sinister criminals – so at one moment he finds himself in a very awkward situation – but escapes miraculously. And he never compromises his values.
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This book is a typical American bestseller with a nice collection of testimonials printed on the back of the cover – all rapture and delight. Inside we’ll find a collection of fine characters – half of them total weirdos, but still calling for sympathy, others of a more self-confident, perfectionist type. Breda Burrows represents the second type. So does the mysterious fugitive.
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“A Blood Affair” is yet another book about the Mafia. No, not the Russian Mafia, but the more classic version – American with Italian roots. It’s also about IRA and their deadly clashes with each other, about drug addicts – and about a young, beautiful, fragile woman caught in between.
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“The Moving Toyshop” is a charmingly funny book about the adventure of Richard Cadogan, a prominent poet, in Oxford in 1938. On his arrival he finds a body of an elderly woman in a toyshop, but gets a strong hit on the top of the head. Once he recovers to fetch the police, he can’t find either the body or the toyshop itself. There is a grocery there instead, and the interior is quite different from what he remembers. No wonder the police think he imagined it all as the result of the concussion.
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It happened in the USA, in Virginia, during the last days of 1995 and the first month of 1996. It started when, instead of cooking lasagna for the New Year Eve Dr. Kay Scarpetta, the chief medical examiner of Virginia, had to dive into the cold water of the Elizabeth river just so she could personally examine an apparent drowning victim – and, immediately after that, personally, do the post-mortem.
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