Stillhouse Lake by Rachel Caine Review

After wandering through multiple locations under forged identities Gina Royal and her two children settle in a new home by the side of Stillhouse Lake. Since The Event they have been hounded by trolls both inside and outside the internet. Living like a fugitive is draining. It turns Gina jumpy and paranoid. They want to live, like normal people. Here Connor and Lanny do something they once thought was too dangerous to do. They make friends. So does their mother Gina. Taking root is risky, she knows. But one has to settle some time. With strong allies like Sam, Javi and Absalom on her side she now has a sense of security. Maybe it’s time to reach closure. She needs it. Connor and Lanny need it even more. Suddenly something happens. The mutilated body of a young woman is found floating in Stillhouse Lake. She realizes, no matter how hard she tries, she can’t outrun the dark, ominous shadow of Mel Royal.

The Event took place long ago, a long time before they made Stillhouse Lake their home. Mel, back then, was not an ex-husband yet. He was a good husband, a great father and a hard-working, amiable human being. Gina used to be a dutiful housewife, mostly busy with their children among other things. One day there was an accident. A SUV crashed into their garage, exposing the entire place Mel called ‘his workshop’. Inside, was dangling the mutilated corpse of a woman. The place they once called home suddenly turned into a crime scene. Later they found out, the dead woman in the garage wasn’t the only one Mel killed. This was followed by his arrest, trial and a death sentence. Gina was also arrested on the charge of being an accomplice, but was later acquitted. The Event – a name she’d used to refer to those gruesome memories – had wrecked their lives and turned them into fugitives. People weren’t happy with the acquittal of Mel’s Little Helpers. The punishment isn’t complete, as some of them had suggested, as long as Mel’s family is still alive. To protect herself and the children from this all-consuming hatred, she had no other option but to go into hiding.

It doesn’t matter if Mel’s in prison. He’s got people watching them, he tells Gina. His letters aren’t meaningless blabbers of an unhinged mind. They are filled with threats, deliberate and detailed. Back in Stillhouse Lake, among the familiar faces, there must be someone who’s working secretly to destroy Gina, leaking information on her whereabouts. She doesn’t know whom to trust. If Mel wants to reach her, he’s probably going to do it through her children. Mel’s psychopathic manipulations turn Stillhouse Lake into a cord that starts tightening around her neck. Mel Royal’s very own Modus Operandi.

Rachel Caine’s gripping tale is about a serial killer, yet it has nothing similar to anything I’ve read – fiction or non-fiction – on the subject. The story of Stillhouse Lake starts after the arrest. The public opinion, the mob mentality, the displaced anger, the revenge-mongering – they take control over human reasons. It shows, how some of us, innocent as we’d like to think ourselves to be, could very well turn into killers without the restraint of law. It was clear that Mel Royal controlled several individuals who worked for him, killed for him. But why and when exactly did they decide to help him? How could he wield such power over them, sitting in a small prison cell? What did he have to offer in return? He surely had no money and not everyone who helped him, worshiped him as a hero. These questions were not clearly dealt with. But this is the first book in Rachel Caine’s Stillhouse Lake series. I hope more explanations will follow in the next book. It took me less five hours to finish. Treat yourself with a big-Mac before you start. Once you get past The Event, you may not want to take a break.

Back to Thriller Bookshelf

Review: Tom Pagdin, Pirate by E. J. Brady

Download eBook

It was settled. When Tom Pagdin became the captain of a pirate ship, Dave would be his first-mate.

The two thirteen-year-olds escaped the tyranny of their parents to pursue a career in piracy. They didn’t have a ship. As the pirate crew, they had only each other. Tom had found a stray boat and had hidden it somewhere along the riverbank. The two runaways decided to escape in that boat. Before they sailed off, they accidentally overheard two mysterious men hatching a plan to rob a bank. Seemed like their boat had been discovered by these robbers, who now wanted to ‘borrow’ it for the occasion. After the robbery was carried out, one of the criminals stabbed the other and threw the body into the river.

Tom Pagdin and Dave Gibson, hidden behind a bush, watched it all. Little did they know, the murderer was none other than the vicious, French outlaw Jean Petit, who had escaped from jail, had sailed across Pacific in a small boat. George Chard, the bank clerk was unjustly accused of having involvement in the robbery. Would the two teenage pirates be able to save George? Would Jean Petit, who had walked his way over dead bodies of innocent men, manage to escape once again?

Tom Pagdin, Pirate by Edwin James Brady is a wonderful book that is sure to entertain both a child and an adult alike. E. J. Brady was an Australian poet educated both in the United States and Sydney. In his early life, he had worked as a wharf clerk, a farmer, and a journalist. His familiarity with the landscapes of rural Australia has its unmistakable impressions on the pages of Tom Pagdin, Pirate. The major characters of Tom, Dave, and Jean Petit were made alive mainly through conversations. Tom had a thick, Australian rural accent,

“Pick up your swag an’ foller me,” ordered Tom. “I’ll take yer right away.”

while Jean Petit spoke the sibilant English of a Frenchman.

“Ah! Zen vere shall ve meet – you an’ I, eh?”

Some, especially today’s mentors of creative writing, recommend against using dialectical dialogues. The cluster of apostrophes, misspellings – they say – distracts readers away from the plot. In a prose laden with conversations, they probably do. However, there is a certain advantage of this style; the readers don’t just read the conversation, they can actually hear the characters talking among themselves.

Readers will probably notice that there’s a hierarchy of characters in Edwin James Brady’s Tom Pagdin, Pirate. Importance was given to individual characters according to their roles in the main plot. Jean Petit, the uber-villain, was like a shadow of a predator lurking behind the thicket. He was nowhere, at the same time everywhere. He appears and disappears from the scenes, leaving behind him a trail of blood. Though his identity was not revealed until much later, his evil presence was felt right from the beginning. Tom and Dave, being the main characters, lead the story to its destination. George Chard though he was one of the many who benefitted from Tom’s adventure, remained in comparative obscurity. Jacob and Maria, the farmer -couple, in whose house Tom had stayed for a few hours, appeared on the scene and then quickly passed by.  A similar thing happened with the character called Hans Holterman, the wine-maker. He fell in the way of Jean Petit and was disposed of. Jean Petit’s kissing the knife after he murdered the poor old man, however, left its mark. Jean Petit’s total absence of conscience, his ruthless efficiency in crime, and his treacherous tactics made him a formidable adversary of Tom Pagdin.

Back to Children's Fiction 

Book Review: Dipy Singh Private Detective Ketan Joshi

Book Review of Dipy Singh Private Detective by Ketan Joshi

I downloaded Dipy Singh Private Detective by Ketan Joshi only this morning. By evening I finished the book and decided to write a review – partly because I like Ketan Joshi’s writings and partly because I think I should point out a few things that if the author does care for my humble opinions, could help him improve his writings.

This is the second book by Ketan Joshi that I picked up this year. The earlier one Three Amigos on Motorcycles was a pretty impressive work of literature. In fact if you have already finished his Dipy Singh series, you will definitely see the big leap his writing has taken in Three Amigos. If you reverse the order then there is a possibility that you may judge the author harshly.

The first thing you notice in Ketan Joshi’s writings is his remarkable grip over language. He knows how and when to create humour. Now that quality alone will make you fall in love with him. Humour – the carefree and extravagant sort of fun – that you find in his writings is rare. We come accross dark humours, satires, sarcasms everywhere – and that seems to be normal considering all sorts of unfortunate things we had to deal with in last decade. Literature of our times mirrors everything perfectly without bothering to know how much we are capable to face. This journalistic matter-of-fact way of telling stories deprives literature of much of its charm. Just when you are about to lose all hope, writers like Ketan Joshi arrives with their utterly ridiculous, dumb-and-dumber kind of original fun. It brightens you up, makes you giggle like crazy. Can one help but adore such writers?

The Adventures of Dipy Singh Private Detective, however hides most of Ketan Joshi’s art. While reading it I found out a few lines, paragraphs, that if were written otherwise could substantially improve the stories. This I am going to discuss now. But first let me tell you what this book is about. Deepinder Singh Gehlot or in short, Dipy Singh is a private detective. The writer made Dipy’s acquaintance at a party and became friends. The Adventure of Dipy Singh Private Detective is a collection of short stories. They are cases solved by Dipy. He loves Tandoori with beer.

The stories however gave me the impression that they were hurriedly finished. In the case of the blood bank Vampire the owner of the blood bank suspects one of his employees, Bhalla to be a Vampire. When Dipy asks why he hired Bhalla, the answer he came up with is,

Well, I ... I don’t know ... I just thought that he could do the administration and clerical jobs and other odd jobs ... but ...

The same man when Dipy asked him to fire Bhalla said,

On what grounds? If he goes to the courts or to the press, the local corporator ... or anybody at all, I will be permanently disgraced s a complete nutcase.

The two answers somehow don’t go together well. The inherent fallacy has the risk of being interpreted as a badly finished plot.

In the case of the Tantric dreams, though the culprit was caught, several things remained unexplained or explained half-heartedly.

And we were even more startled when an answer came ... from the goat!

How the dead goat spoke up, that too in human voice and vernacular was never explained.

The perpetrator burned one of the victims hand while the latter was lying in a hospital bed. It was done so perfectly that there was no trace on the bedsheet, or the shirt the victim was wearing and yet it was explained later that the culprit,

...probably burnt his hand with acid or some plant extract which causes blisters ... ruthless and cruel ... clever too ... no sign of burns on kurta or bedsheet ...

Simply saying something was ingenious isn’t the same as explaining it.

In Three Amigos Ketan Joshi was remarkably discreet in character formation. But then the three friends there and the wife were all important characters. I think in Dipy Singh he was  less focused on the minor characters. There was nothing distinguishing in their speeches. They all sound the same. For example, in The case of the Uncatchable Thief, two different characters described two different safes, placed in two different locations by using the same phrase – the Huge Bloody Thing. The author has to work on these things.

What I found absolutely unforgivable, however appears in the last story where the author could find no other solution to the Agatha Christie’s locked door puzzle and comes up with the logic of teleportation. What’s worse is the lack of surprise Dipy Singh shows at discovering such a thing as teleportation. He takes it as if it was an already popular, nothing-extraordinary method of transport. He says,

The scene that flashed over my eyes had me doubling over with laughter. The sigh of me laughing, and the memory of that day got Dipy laughing too, and for the next few minutes we laughed until I got a stitch in my side.

Fine. But my sufferings became unbearable when after the thief teleported back to his house, Dipy Singh who was already present there made him a cup of tea.

After he had calmed down, we chatted about his gift of teleportation that I found very interesting.

So instead of jumping and shouting “Eureka” at the top of his lungs, Dipy Singh decided the chat because he found the phenomenon of teleportation interesting. And the thief gave up his life of crime and started a business of Instant Courier.

And that left me completely shattered.

The book cover of The Adventure of Dipy Singh Private Detective gives you the impression that its an utterly meaningless, ridiculous comedy. In fact, the book could very well be so. But the seriousness with which each case starts added to the megalomania of Dipy Singh made the stories a breed between Sherlock Holmes and The DefectiveDetective by Stephen Leacock. It is a thoroughly enjoyable book and fun to read.

Back to Humour Bookshelf

---