Frere Mathieu Entre Les Loups/Brother Matthew Among the Wolves

The monastery lit up with rainbows, prisms and cheerful natural light is the scene of an ugly dark crime.  I am fascinated by the contrasts and the ironies in this story Beautiful Mystery set at an isolated monastery in Quebec called Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups translated as St. Gilbert Among the Wolves.  However it was Frere Mathieu who was among the wolves because he is dead and it appears that his murderer is one of his brother monks who sing Greorian chants in his choir.  The Gregorian chants are likened to the voice of God yet one singer of the Divine is a murderer. These monks have taken a vow of silence yet they are famous in the outside world for their singing voice.   Twenty four voices used to sing in harmony and the death of one has left the community of  twenty three unbalanced and the divisions among them are about to be revealed to Inspector Gamache and his assistant Beauvoir.  The two must investigate what started the rifts.

I believe I see evidence of foreshadowing when Inspector Gamache suggests that if the killer flees the monastery he would have to leave through the door guarded by Frere Luc who holds the key.  Could Luc be in danger of being hurt or killed?  Communication with the outside world is limited and I suspect that bit of information may be important later in the story.  Gamache and Beauvoir are able to communicate with the love of their lives by Blackberry adding realism to the story.

The story reminded me of Dissolution when Matthew Shardlake and his assistant had to live at a monastery until they could find a murderer.  In that story the monks pointed fingers at outsiders but in this story the monks know that one among them is a killer.  I am on page 105 and I am enjoying the story.  This book has won the Agatha Award for Best Mystery in the USA and has been nominated for the Anthony Awards  scheduled for September.

Book Club Selection: The Passage

I am entertaining a house guest and am trying to focus on The Passage, a dystopian fiction by Justin Cronin.  Very mysterious so far.  I just found out this is the first of a trilogy. Several characters, many settings. I am at page 68 and about to see how all these characters are connected.

The first characters I met were Amy and her mother Jeanette.  Amy's Dad was Jeanette's abusive boyfriend.  She and her daughter Amy met on hard times to the point that Jeanette found it necessary to turn to prostitution. Then the story took me to emails from Dr. Jonas Lear to a Paul Kiernan in Cambridge.  Dr. Jonas was writing from the jungles of Bolivia.  There were no emails from Paul for us readers to read but it was clear that there was communication from him to Dr. Jonas.

By page 23, Dr Jonas emailed that his team was attacked by bats and some had died.  By page 26, I was meeting Anthony Lloyd Carter death-row inmate number 999642. He did not seem to have a vivid memory of the murder he committed.  By page 29, I was meeting Special Agent Brad Wolgast who was in Texas to meet with Carter and get him to agree to sign his life over to "Project Noah".  He was to get the agreement without actually telling Carter that Project Noah was a scientific experiment.  Wolgast's side-kick is Phil Doyle.
 
The story goes back to Amy who was abandoned by her mother, Jeanette, at a nunnery.  Sister Lacey took Amy under her wings. On page 68, Wolgast and Doyle were on their way to pick up Amy for Project Noah. 

I look forward to reading more of the story.

Vivaldi's Virgins

I am reading the epistolary novel and historical fiction, Vivaldi's Virgins. It is not an exciting fast paced book but it is holding my interest because I want to see how the issues are resolved in this story set in a nunnery/orphanage/music school in 18th century Venice. The protagonist is Anna Maria dal Violin, a gifted violinist, who like some of the other children in the orphanage, has no last name so she has been given the instrument she plays as her last name. Her issue is to find out who is her mother and why has she been abandoned. I noticed the character was not as concerned about her father's identity. The cruelty of some of the nuns, the hypocrisy of the catholic priests and the nobility, and the discrimination against the Jews in the area were highlighted. I want to know if Anna Maria will choose music over marriage. Apparently in this century, a woman could not choose both.

I am reading the Testimony

The Testimony is an interesting story and very topical since it covers young people having drunken group sex, taping it, and posting it on the internet and the resulting media frenzy over the scandal.


This book was unusual and sometimes confusing in that it was written from the first, second, and third person perspective plus an epistolary narrative voice in the very last chapter. As you can imagine, we heard the "voices" of several characters. Silas was a character that was speaking to "you" and the you was his girlfriend. The character Ellen was addressed in the second person; "you". Sometimes the you refers to Jacqueline Barnard, a researcher who is contacting the main characters two years after the scandal.

We see the action that takes place days leading up to the sex scandal, the day of the scandal, and the days after the scandal and then two years after the scandal.

The message essentially is that one's negative actions can trigger catastrophic consequences for so many others.

Silas is the character that I thought was a little unrealistic. His fury was realistic but I also think that a teenager in his siutation would have confided in his girlfriend and perhaps his fate would have been different. I noticed that the writer did not make the teenaged girl, at the center of the teen sex orgy, sympathetic. She was just a spoilt, out of control, lying brat.

Overall this was a good story.