Airframe

An eye opener into issues of safety and commercial aircraft manufacturing and competition mingled with boardroom in-fighting on the one hand, and the impact and modus operandi of (cable TV) journalism on the other. Norton is the manufacturer of aircrafts, and the chief operating officer (Marder) does not like the way he was passed over when the new president was picked, despite being married to the family of the founder. So he is secretly plotting to overthrow the president, using an accident involving one of their aircrafts as a ploy. While investigation is on to determine what caused the accident, the producer of Newsline, a weekly TV show, sees something worth selling to the public—the scary tale of a defective aircraft. Marder is very pleased with Newsline’s interest and does his best to both undermine discovery of the root cause of the accident and also leak confidential information to them.

But then Marder didn’t reckon with the dogged determination of our heroine, Casey Singleton, whose job put her in charge of QA/IRT (quality assurance and incidence review team) at the company. She succeeds in getting to the root causes of the accident after a tense fast-paced investigation: The captain of the aircraft had allowed his son to take his seat while he went for a coffee. And a bad part had given a wrong warning which the inexperienced son was unable to correctly handle, leading to the accident.

When Newsline could no longer air the story they had in mind, seeing Norton’s wasn’t actually an unsafe plane after all, the COO’s attempted coup had to flop in the end.

June 1, 2015. Review initially written in 2011. Novel first published in 1996 by Century Books, this Arrow Books edition being first published in 1997, ISBN 0-09-955631-6.

Burger's Daughter

This is a story of apartheid South Africa in the 1970s told from the perspective of the Burgers, a revolutionary white family fighting for black rights as communists.

It centers around the experiences of their only surviving child and graduate daughter, Rosa Burger, after the father died in prison: Her growing up used to being followed by cops, her loves, jobs, relations with friends of the parents, her visit to Europe to her dad’s first wife in France and then to London where an encounter with the black boy that had grown up in her house forced her to return and face life in South Africa.

June 1, 2015. Review initially written in 2007. Novel first published in 1979 by The Viking Press; this Bloomsbury edition being published in 2000, ISBN 0-7475-4979-6. Picture source: Yahoo (Images).

XPD

Built around the twin events of secret meetings Winston Churchill was supposed to have had with Hitler negotiating for peace (with UK) on the one hand, and stolen German fortunes and documents from “the Kaiseroda mine” on the other. It’s now 35 years after the war (World War II) in 1979 and a historical movie to be based on the missing treasures is in the offing in California. It sets alarms ringing across the secret services of the UK and Russia. The Russians want the documents stolen from the mine, including the “Hitler Minutes” that documented the secret meetings, for its propaganda value, while the British want them also but for the opposite reason. They want nobody to know about them, anyone that did must die! The reason being that Churchill was supposed to have bargained away to Germany some of its territories, and so his fame would have been rubished if these countries learn about this. XPD is the term they use for such official killing and it meant expedient demise.

The key actors include Boyd Stuart the British spy who flew around from London to the US to Europe; Willi Kleiber ex-Nazi now working for the Russians in secret; his ex-Nazi colleague Max Breslow now a US citizen and brought in as the movie director; Charles Stein one of the US soldiers that masterminded the theft of the fortune and documents that suddenly made him rich after the war, who is now pursued by the British and Russian spies for the documents.

After a lot of violence and suspense the British do obtain the Hitler Minutes. And both Kleiber and Stein lose their lives.

May 30, 2015. Review initially written in 2008. Novel first published in 1981 by Hutchinson & Co, this Panther Books (Granada) edition being published in 1982; ISBN 0-586-05447-2.

The Schoolmaster

The tragic story of Kumaca, a village in a remote area of Trinidad. The village wanted a school so that their children would be taught how to read and write. They wanted also development in the form of a road to be constructed from the nearest town, which will bring in commerce and other changes like in other parts of country. When the white Catholic priest warned them of the negative consequences they would not listen. So they had their school, and they had their wish met in the construction of a road.

Then the schoolmaster, after all the teaching and developmental ideas he’d imparted, damaged his credibility by raping Christiana, the only daughter of the man who had fought most for the school to be built. Christiana could not tell her father nor Pedro whom she was to marry for fear of what they would do. But she told the priest, who confronted the schoolmaster, who then decided to marry Christiana. But his decision came too late because the marriage between Christiana and Pedro had already been sealed.

To save herself from the shame, Christiana decides to drown herself in the river during the night. And the schoolmaster could not escape the wrath of the villagers. As he was leaving the village atop a horse, a shot hit the horse and he fell and broke his head against a stone, dying instantly.

March 30, 2015. Review initially written in 2001. Novel first published in 1968. Picture source: Yahoo (Images).

A Case of Need

A medical whodunit by the author (writing as Jeffery Hudson): Karen Randall, a young college student, has just bled to death following an abortion. Art Lee, a Chinese-American doctor is accused by her stepmother and thrown in jail. But the man is innocent. He’d seen the girl all right but he’d turned her away on hearing the pregnancy had advanced to 4th month. But then Dr J. D. Randall, Karen’s father, is a powerful man, from a powerful Boston family. And it appears everyone is willing to have Lee pay the price just for having the guts to do some abortions when necessary. It is left to his friend and colleague, Dr John Berry, to take time off work and play detective, trying to find out who did the abortion and so prevent Art’s professional reputation from being ruined by a court trial. He does succeed in the end, but it came at a big cost, of near brain damage following an injury meted out to him by Roman Jones, one of the key players in Karen’s abortion. The racial animosity wrongly aroused by the case—culminating in a mob attack at Lee’s home, burning a cross and throwing stones shattering window glass and injuring Lee’s kids—meant Lee had to relocate back to California after his release.

Dr Berry’s investigation turned up a lot of shocking secrets about Karen and her family: She was a rebellious girl who hated her father; her father had been promiscuous and unfaithful to her mother even before she died; her stepmother Ev was having an affair with Peter, Karen’s uncle; and Peter himself also did abortions, including three for Karen, while Lee once aborted Mrs Randall his accuser. There are a lot of medical terms, and footnotes and an appendix to discuss them and other related issues.

Being written in the sixties, blacks were called Negroes, and the narrator admitted that when he was much younger, they weren’t regarded as people really, more like “musical side shows” (p. 331). There were two notable black characters, Lee’s attorney George Wilson that said whites would see him as an “uppity Negro” (p.278), and Roman Jones, one of Karen’s ex-lovers who eventually forced a nurse to do the abortion that turned fatal.

May 30, 2015. Review initially written in 2012. Novel first published in 1968, this Signet (Penguin Group) edition being published in 1969; ISBN 0-451-18366-5.

Burning Grass

This is the story of the nomadic cattle-rearing Fulani of northern Nigeria during the colonial era. It’s a bit of a folklore with its mix of beliefs in magic and superstition.

The acquisition of a Kanuri girl by a village chief forms the incident on which the story develops. The chief’s two sons fall for the girl and the older runs away with her. The chief’s rival to the village throne curses the chief with the “wanderer’s disease,” making him wander off with a restlessness, and thereby stealing his chieftaincy and destroying his home. As the chief and his family move from village to village we are told about the life and customs and beliefs of the Fulani and a bit about the role of the colonialists at the time, in healthcare and taxation. The chief meets his sons as he wanders from village to village. Eventually the family is reunited and returns home to drive out the impostor, before the death of the chief.

May 28, 2015. Review initially written in 1998. Novel first published in 1962. Picture source: Yahoo (Images).

Flatmate

Lyndsey, a young woman, graduates from theater school with honors. But her promising future is shattered when she is gang-raped by all eleven drug-high members of a cricket team hours later. While receiving treatment at a hospital justice was perverted to protect the offenders who were sons of wealthy or influential people, including a police chief, and a trumped-up charge was instead brought against Lyndsey. She however disappears from hospital, never to be seen again until the end of the story.

Several years later all but the captain of the cricket team have met violent deaths, mostly sex-related. Right from her disappearance from hospital, we are made to believe that Lyndsey’s sister Linda was hiding her and taking revenge by seducing and killing the men. The problem then is how to find them and prevent the final member from extermination. The ending however is a disappointing anti-climax. Linda fails at killing her last victim who in turn rapes her in anger, an act which terrifies and transforms her into the persona of the helpless Lyndsey. We are told that all along, Lyndsey has in fact been acting out three different personalities—Linda, a cunning, rich, manipulative professional call girl bent on revenge; Deborah, a shy computer wiz kid who became Linda’s tenant and flatmate; and herself, a helpless woman needing protection.

Excepting the disappointing ending, the book was mostly interesting reading. It was current in world events (as at 1998, the time of reading), with a reference to the genocide in Rwanda. It was particularly very current in computing—information technology, networking, the Internet, programming, Windows and so on.

May 28, 2015. Review initially written in 1998. Novel first published in 1997. Picture source: AbeBooks.com.