With a pastel-ly cover I knew this was going to be a chick book. Good story of a woman in the UK recounting the travails of growing up, her love/hate relationship with her mother, and her relationships with men. Good thing she learned how to cook, it turns out. Good reviews on Amazon, too.
Rick joins the army and becomes a dog handler. His dog was donated to the army by a young boy named Willie. Rick and Cracker are sent to Vietnam. Good story, I was in tears for the last third of the book. I'm glad the book has a happy ending, because for most of these animals, it was not.
Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov and an FBI agent investigate a kidnapping.
QUOTE:
"Why do you like doing this?" the girl asked as they put the tools away and cleaned up the mess they had made. "This is very simple. The work I do as a policeman is very complicated," he said. "Why?" "Because I must deal with people, and people are seldom simply good or bad. It is rare for a policeman to be able to fix a problem. One problem creates another one. It doesn't end, and when it does, the end is not simple and the system is not working any better. Does this make sense?" "A little," she said. "It's like what happened to my grandmother." "Yes," said Rostnikov. "When I fix plumbing, I search for the problem, find it, repair it, and receive the gratitude of those who live with the system. Like this leak."
Rostikov heads to Siberia to investigate the murder of a Canadian geologist in a diamond mine. Other members of the team are in Kiev, and of course, Moscow. Diamond smuggling is the theme.
Words I Had To Look Up:
...permafrosted to a depth of 4,760 feet. (pg. 110) -- I didn't know permafrost went down that deep. Wow!
...whether she was twitting him. (pg. 178) -- To taunt, ridicule, or tease, especially for embarrassing mistakes or faults.
What may be the last Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov book as the author passed away in 2009, I find. There's a serial killer in a park, and there's a boxer accused of murdering his wife and his sparring partner. Elena and Iosef get married!
Lew Fonesca is hired to prove that a teen didn't kill a guy everyone hated who was trying to shut down the local high school for gifted students. The Dairy Queen is closed; Lew moves AND buys a car for sixty-six bucks. Victor goes home, too. A small quibble with "twelve hundred years" and "twelve hundred centuries" on page seven, but I'll get over it.
Quote:
There were consequences, but there was the promise of windmills. (pg. 146)
Inspector Rostnikov looks for a missing cosmonaut, Sash looks for who stole a motion picture negative, Karpov looks for the murderer of an ESP researcher.
A cop shoots his wife and her lover and then threatens to blow up the building. Lieberman wins the first confrantation with Frankie Kraylaw. Seconnd book in series.
Lew Fonesca agrees to find the sister of a mentally-impaired neighbor. And Adele has run off, possibly with all the unpublished manuscripts of a famous reclusive author she met. Plus, people are getting killed. It's all rather depressing... I've decided that Kaminsky's books are peopled by charactors who have had some tragedy in their life, and are often searching for some kind of redemption.