Before I Go to Sleep

Christine has just woken up.  She looks beside her in the bed and sees a man she doesn't recognize.  Was she so blasted last night that she can't remember the man she brought home, or came home with?   And then she looks in the mirror and sees a woman about 20 years older than she is, or thinks she is!

It soon emerges that Christine is suffering from a type of amnesia whereby she loses her memories each night when she goes to sleep.  So each day is a brand-new start for her.  She begins to keep a secret journal, and is prompted each morning by a helpful doctor to look for it and read it.  So she can catch up on everything that has happened and everything she's learned since she started writing.  And what she reads fills her - and the reader - with foreboding.  Somebody is lying to her.

Before I Go to Sleep is a thriller. There are no terrorists, no spies, no bombs, no gunshots, no stolen weapons - none of the accoutrements of the usual thrillers.  But like any good thriller, the suspense draws you inexorably on towards the denouement.  I couldn't put it down.

This is a great book and I highly recommend it.  It's interesting that I've read (and posted about) several books this year about memory:  Still Alice about the onset of Alzheimer's and The Housekeeper and The Professor, about a man who can only retain 80 minutes worth of memories.  Advances in understanding the brain, and how memories are laid down and retrieved, provides great fodder for content.  Meanwhile, Baby Boomers hitting the age where memory disintegration is their greatest fear guarantees a great readership for such books.  I'm expecting we'll see more of such books.  This Baby Boomer will look forward to them.

The Garden of Betrayal

It's such a cliche to call a book a page-turner, but that's actually the best description of Lee Vance's The Garden of Betrayal.  With the Cold War long over, thrillers these days are seeking different settings and financial markets are becoming a favoured locale for a thriller.  The Garden of Betrayal delves into the narrower category of the energy sector of the financial market.  Vance, as a former partner at Goldman Sachs, delivers a believable and fast-paced plot.  

I won't spoil the plot for you, but I highly recommend it to you if you like thrillers with lots of plot turns.

The Janissary Tree

Jason Goodwin

The Janissary Tree is a mystery set in Istanbul in 1836 in the sunset years of the Ottoman Empire.  It was written by Jason Goodwin, an English historian specializing in the history of the Ottoman Empire.  It won the Mystery Writers of America award for Best Novel in 2007, somewhat to the astonishment of Goodwin's agent and publisher!

The hero, a eunuch detective named Yashim Togalu, lives in a moldering apartment and is comfortable in the sordid parts of the city, but he also has amazing access to all sorts of places, including the opulent royal palace and the restricted harem (after all, he is a eunuch).  This allows the book to give a flavour of both the top and the bottom of the social scale in nineteenth century Istanbul.  Since the author, Jason Goodwin, is an English historian and previously published a history of the Ottoman Empire, we can be pretty confident the details are all right.

The title refers to the Jannisaries, elite troops of the Ottoman Empire, who got too powerful and ended up terrorizing people.  The Sultan had banned them ten years before the period of this book and there are concerns that they might be planning a resurgence.  That's not necessarily how the mystery unfolds.

But it was a treat to read this book.  And I'll be looking forward to The Snake Stone, the next book in the series.