The Good Liar by Denise Mina
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Professor Claudia O'Sheil is about to make a life-changing decision. She is scheduled to deliver a lecture at the reception of the Royal College of Forensic Scientists in London, a lecture that would cement her leading position among forensic science experts. Claudia's most important achievement is developing the BSPS (Blood Spatter Probability Scale), which has become one of the fundamental tools in forensic science. Yet Claudia has found out that there is an error in BSPS and that many convictions secured based on using the tool may have been wrong. Will she decide to destroy her professional life by telling the truth?

The struggle with the ethic dilemma forms the narrative flow of the novel. Yes, there is a murder mystery involved, very skillfully presented, suspenseful, and full of plot twists. Yet, at least to me, that story constitutes the secondary flow. The two mysteries are masterfully connected and intertwined. The narration alternates between two timelines. One relates the current events just minutes before the lecture. The other describes the fateful events of the preceding year. The combination of these two dualities is an extraordinary successful literary device!

There is so much more in the novel! Biting critique of the class system in the UK, the system that offers unearned privileges to people who have the "right" parents as opposed to all others, who can get just a little closer to the world of privilege by having actual talent and working extremely hard. There is also a family thread in the plot: Claudia's husband has died and she is raising two young sons on her own. I am impressed by how skillfully Ms. Mina portrays the struggles of a single mother with the boys' onset of puberty.

An outstanding mystery and a very good novel. Highly recommended!

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Amy and Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In an interview with The Guardian, Elizabeth Strout said, "All ordinary people are extraordinary." I share that sentiment, which is why I like books about the ordinary lives of ordinary people. Not for me are imaginary universes, wizards, and magic spells. I like Strout's Amy and Isabelle a lot.

The novel presents the dynamic and the evolution of a difficult mother-daughter relationship. Traumatic events in the daughter's life force the mother to face the secrets of her own past. Life in a small town is shown with depth and insights. The psychological portraits of the two women are well-drawn and convincing. The events feel realistic so that I believe I have learned something about human nature when I read the book.

So why only three stars? First, because three-and-a-half is not an option. Seriously, though, this is my sixth novel by Ms. Strout; I liked all other five a lot (three of them to the tune of four stars), and I am now familiar with the author's excellence in writing about the ordinary lives of ordinary people. She has raised the bar too high! Anyway, I highly recommend Amy and Isabelle!

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Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal by Ben Macintyre
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An entertaining read! The book belongs to the non-fiction genre as the story told in Agent Zigzag actually happened in real life. This story could not be told in a work of fiction: no one would publish something so incredible!

Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal tells the story of Eddie Chapman, a master con man and a criminal, who served time in prison, and who became one of the most successful agents of British intelligence. The story of a man, who was simultaneously a traitor and a hero, a German agent, a double British agent, and an unreformed thief. The only British person who had ever received the German Iron Cross for outstanding service to the Reich, but who was also highly regarded by the British intelligence community for his extraordinary service to the United Kingdom.

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The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I wanted to like The Three-Body Problem. Some people whose judgment I usually trust recommended the book highly, so when I heard opinions that it is a serious novel about contact with another civilization, I immediately put it on my "To read" list. Alas, I ended up disappointed. For the most part, I found reading the novel to be a tedious task. If not for a few special features, my rating would barely reach two stars.

Trying to avoid spoilers I will list the few factors that save the novel from a "Do not recommend" rating. First of all, the very beginning of the novel describes dramatic events during the Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960s, the purges, "struggle sessions," public humiliations, and political murders committed by ideologically crazed teenagers. It provides a sobering commentary on the dangers of ideology and human propensity for evil.

Then there is mathematics, which is, for me, the best thing about the novel. The three-body problem is an actual problem in mathematical physics of three masses revolving around each other, whose trajectories we want to compute/predict. Unfortunately, an explicit solution of such a model does not exist, and most initial conditions of the system lead to chaotic solutions. The author of the novel well explains the model (three suns orbiting each other) and presents the practical consequences of the chaotic solution.

To continue with mathematics, the author also writes about the unfolding of a higher-dimensional space into a lower-dimensional one. A nine-dimensional structure is unfolded into a two-dimensional one. The topic is close to my heart, as I supervised students' project on unfolding a four-dimensional cube into 3D and 2D.

Finally, and most importantly, there is Trisolaris, the system of three suns orbiting each other, with all its chaotic motion. Solaris is a wonderful, serious sci-fi novel by Stanisław Lem, the master of the genre, about the impossibility of contact with alien beings. Lem's His Master's Voice remains the best novel about SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). Coincidentally, The Three-Body Problem was published in 2006, the same year that Lem died. I would like to believe that Cixin Liu's novel about Trisolaris is a kind of homage to Stanisław Lem.

Other than the math bits and the grim stories of the Cultural Revolution, I don't find much to recommend in the novel. The plot, which in my view lacks coherence, is quite silly and bordering on laughable in some places. I found it hard not to giggle at passages like "The fate of the entire human race was now tied to these slender fingers."

In the conclusion, I will repeat that for a serious, well-written, and interesting sci-fi novel about contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, I recommend His Master's Voice by Lem.

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The Strangler's Honeymoon by Håkan Nesser
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This is the fourth novel by Håkan Nesser that I am reviewing here. I absolutely loved his Hour of the Wolf and rated it with five stars, an unusually high rating for a novel in the police procedural genre. I found The Inspector and Silence very good (four stars). I also liked Münsters Case, and gave it three stars. Alas, I am unable to recommend The Strangler's Honeymoon, the ninth installment in Nesser's long-running Van Veeteren series.

While the plot that involves the familiar trope of a serial killer is relatively interesting, the book is certainly too long, at 630 pages in the paperback edition. The reader may be tempted—as I was—to just turn the pages, scanning the text instead of reading it, hoping to find the next important fragment. There is so much extraneous stuff in the novel that I am wondering whether the author was under contract to deliver to the publisher a certain number of pages...

Many dialogues sound unnatural and stilted. They often involve repetitions; "What do you mean?" or its equivalents appear too many times in the conversations. I thought that maybe the awkwardness of style was the fault of a new translator, but that was not the case; Laurie Thompson was the translator of all Nesser's novels that I have read.

To sum up: after deleting about 300 pages, it could become a pretty good police procedural.

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The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I feel that one can either write too little in a review of The End of the Affair or too much. I choose the "not enough" option, pretending that it is not laziness that affects my choice but the desire to avoid spoilers.

Graham Greene's novel offers a deep psychological analysis of an adulterous affair and a study of obsessive jealousy that becomes the driving force of human behavior. This anatomy of jealousy shows its connections and intersections with love, hate, pride, and pity, where all these feelings make up a dark aggregate of human suffering occasionally relieved by flashes of happiness.

The End of the Affair is a very serious book demanding the reader's full attention. Yes, beyond the psychological study, there is a story happening in London in the 1940s, but the story is certainly not the most important aspect of the novel. Bargaining with God enters the picture, and the author seems to offer love of God as a sublimation of that messy, deeply human amalgam of love, hate, and everything in between.

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The Illustrated Etymologicon by Mark Forsyth
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An entertaining and illuminating read! Mark Forsyth presents the etymology of several hundreds of English words and phrases and often surprising connections between them. We begin with "book" and end with "book," which justifies the subtitle "A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language." So a book, via gambling, leads us to pool, from which we go to gene, then to testicle, and from there to codpiece..., etc. It may seem random, but the author convincingly justifies the chain.

Below are some snippets or quotes taken from the chain of connections that I found most interesting or amusing. As a mathematician teaching probability, I found "[...] if probable comes from the same root as prove, can you guess why the proof of the pudding is in the eating?" On a similar topic, the origins of the arithmetic signs, such as plus and equal sign are explained.

We learn the origins of the word "spam," and as a bonus, Monty Python is mentioned, which is always a good thing, particularly if it leads to bringing up Python, a programming language. The author clearly shows that the two most popular four-letter swearwords are not acronyms, despite the popular urban legend claiming so. Speaking about legend, how can we not admire the author's cool turn of the phrase, "According to legend (the beautiful elder sister of truth [...])"?

I found fascinating the history of language(s) spoken by people inhabiting the current teritory of Britain, whom the ancient Greeks called "Prittanoi," which meant "tattooed people." Also, I learned a new word: woad. The etymology of "Starbucks" and "serendipity" were further highlights for me.

One can find plenty of humor in Etymologicon, like, for instance, in the fragment detailing Ovid's story about Halcyon: "Of course, modern biologists scoff at Ovid's story and dismiss it purely on the base that it isn't true. However, poetry is much more important than truth, and, if you don't believe that, try using the two methods to get laid."

The book ends with a series of quizzes checking the readers' intuitions about etymology of various words and phrases. But let's not talk about the quizzes, as my scores were rather distressingly low...

I would otherwise rate Etymologicon with four stars, for its educational value and humor, but the flood of illustrations and, generally, the graphical form of the book are, to me, totally distracting and greatly reducing the fun of reading. There are also a few pages with gold letters on black background rendering the text virtually unreadable for me.


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