Reading on a Rainy Day

It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering... Missoula has been on my wishlist ever since it was released early this year. This book isn't a typical Jon Krakauer book - there is no outdoor adventure gone wrong here. Missoula is all about rapes in college campuses. Besides, much of the cast of his other books are predominantly male. This book, however, is filled with mostly women. (I did think that this was an interesting choice of subject for Krakauer, but he explains in the end that someone close to him had been raped in college, resulting in her adopting several destructive coping mechanisms, such as heavy alcohol consumption and promiscuity.) Missoula is a typical college town - much of its population...

In order to isolate what was possible, you had to eliminate everything that was impossible. Holy crap! What took me so long to read a Nesbø book? Oh yeah, I thought the suspense was going to be the everyday run-of-the-mill type which ends up either being so far-fetched that the mystery focuses on Alan, Becky, and Charlie, and then ends saying that Zooey, the cleaner in Chapter 1 was the murderer. Or, it would be so obvious from page 1 who the bad guy was. Or, it would be the mix of both - the author would play hard at making it look like Alan was the bad guy, so hard that it would be obvious Alan was not the bad guy. So although I have been hearing plenty of praise about Jo Nesbø's books, I didn't really TBR any of them until I had to pick an audiobook for a road trip. Into my car stereo, I popped The Snowman and waited until the moment I was going to feel justified. Nada. Never happened. Nesbø had me right from the page one. It was really hard to stop the audio each t...

As soon as he hears the name, Maggie Hunt, Ian's lips go numb, and like a low note plucked on a taut metal cord running through his middle, a strange vibration ripples through him. Nausea in F-sharp minor. He swallows. 'Maggie?' He inhales through his nostrils and exhales through his mouth in a long trembling sigh. 'Maggie,' he says, 'it's Daddy.' Ian Hunt is working a regular day at the dispatch office, receiving more prank calls than genuine ones at the job, when a call comes through from a payphone. The distressed caller is a girl who introduces herself as Maggie Hunt, Ian's own daughter who has been missing for the past seven years, and whose funeral was arranged four months earlier to give her mother closure. She had just managed to escape and is hoping for help, but her abductor manages to get her in time. Ian, now convinced that his daughter is very much alive, will stop at nothing to get her back, even if it means punching a few no...

Had she continued straight, she might have seen the Fiat moving toward the next intersection. She might have seen the intersection's green light turn yellow. She might have heard the RPMs kick up a notch as the driver of the Fiat strained the small car's small engine further, pressing the gas pedal to the floorboard. She might have seen the yellow light turn red. She might have seen the Fiat fly into the intersection despite the red light. She might have seen a green pickup truck entering the intersection at the same time from the right. Kat Marino was returning to her Queens apartment from her shift at a local bar at 4 AM in the morning, when she was attacked by a man, who was hiding beside a tree nearby. Kat had never met the man before and is completely taken by surprise and shock. A few of her neighbors whose apartment windows face the courtyard, where the action was unveiling, hadn't yet gone to sleep and were watching dazed, having been interrupted from whateve...