Company Man, by Joseph Finder

Its funny how sometimes you can find yourself at the confluence of bad luck and bad decisions. Nick, once beloved CEO of an all-American office furniture company, finds himself in such a position. He orchestrates a cover-up after a former employee is killed at his house following months during which his family was hounded by a stalker feared to be one of thousands of disgruntled laid-off employees. Nick as a character is multi-dimentional and human, a company man and yet a family man, emotional yet strong, troubled yet utterly dependable.... in a nutshell, he is flawed but whole. The reader is immediately drawn to his side. I had to chide myself as I found myself hoping he would be able to evade the consequences of his rash actions. This was a wonderfully paced story in which you got to see all sides of it as it developed almost chronologically. The reader was never ahead of the characters and learned things as they did, had a moment to evaluate their implications as they became clearer, a moment to see through my own eyes without the exasperating presence of an omniscient narrator. I will certainly be reading another book from Finder.

SCORE: 4.5 Pearls

The Book of Murder by Guillermo Martinez

This was an interesting read, a different pace with an unexpected twist. The central theme, I gathered, was fear. Luciana is tortured by its invisible hand after her actions lead to her employer, murder mystery author Koster, losing his family. She has lost nearly everyone she loves and is in fear for her own life and that of her younger sister. The most remarkable thing about the story is the beautiful traps that she believes Koster has been setting for her. Mind traps and natural occurrences that she believes only she can see through while the world labels her insane. I can only imagine the torture that is her life as she becomes a shell of her former self. This was an easy but fascinating read. I made a mental note to broaden the selection of authors I read to other regions of the world.

SCORE: 4 Pearls

The Dead Room, by Heather Graham

I read this book for two reasons, I love New York and am intrigued by the extraordinary - yes, that includes death and the different lines of thought that surround it. As with all things that we cannot have a shared experience of, death is one of humanity's biggest mysteries. It is surrounded by as many theories as myths. We cannot believe that there are people who are attuned to the dead because the experience is not evidential. We are living in an age of reason, of numbers and hard facts... the idea of ghosts surrounding us and of people being able to converse with them is to us absurd. And to add to that, the religious systems to which most are exposed had specific beliefs about the dead and the souls of the dead, and these do not include the notion that they haunting the scene of their deaths until a wrong is righted or a final wish granted.

Lauren was an interesting character. What lingers most in my mind was her exasperatingly irrational behavior- constantly putting herself in danger, never heeding warnings, pursuing inner and outer ghosts to her own near-peril. It is hard to admire such bravery and talent when it is accompanied by mere foolishness and irrational behavior. However, her story was an interesting one and the web of mystery of her love's death and disappearances of women in New York City is a well formulated story that kept me glued to the book. The plot and wealth of characters (though most were one dimensional) managed to highlight the stratified nature of our society, human determination to attain our own desires at all costs and the power that death has over us even while we live. Lauren did not fear death as most do and yet her obsession with the departed was far more disturbing to me than a healthy fear of things that go bump in the night. All in all, The Dead Room was an enthralling read.

SCORE: 3.5 Pears