If America had a royal family, the Winthrops would wear the crown. The popular, charismatic Winthrops have captured the imagination of the world with their public service, their enormous charity, and their glamorous lives. But in a single year, all five members of the family are killed in a series of accidents.
Dana Evans, a beautiful young anchorwoman with a Washington television network, Dana Evans has everything a TV news anchor should have: brains, beauty, and curiosity. After returning with an adopted orphan from a stint reporting in war-torn Bosnia, she begins to investigate a story that has caught her eye. The powerful, popular Taylor Winthrop, a member of one of America's most prominent families, has been killed, and Dana senses that something more is at work here than mere bad luck. Little does she know that her efforts to prove a conspiracy will pit her against a powerful international organization.She believes there is something more sinister behind their deaths. She begins an investigation and starts uncovering compelling evidence that she can hardly believe.

In her determined pursuit of the truth, Dana never anticipated the cat-and-mouse chase that leads her through a half-dozen countries in search of a remorseless killer. As she closes in on her suspect, the shocking secrets she then unearths place Dana and her young son in dire jeopardy and -- in an unexpected turn of events -- Dana becomes the hunted.

Basically a novel is thrilling, author has successfully expressed  conspiracies blurred many incidents in people lives especially the popular and charismatic ones.  A language used by the author is simple and understandable







Can Dana outwit her pursuers and expose the truth that will astound the world? Readers should prepare themselves for the breathtaking journey through the skillful twists and turns of the plot that are Sidney Sheldon's hallmark.

 
Sidney Sheldon, an American writer, playwright and novelist, was born in Chicago, Illinois, on 11th February 1917. His father Ascher “Otto” Schechtel, was a jewelry store manager and his mother was Natalie Marcus. When Sidney was ten, he sold his poem for ten dollars making it his very first sale. He went to the Denver East High School and for graduate studies he attended the Northwestern University. There he made contributions to the drama groups with his short plays.
In the beginning of 1937 Sheldon tried his fate in Hollywood by writing and reviewing various scripts. He finally managed to sell one of his screenplays ‘South of Panama’ to a studio for 250 dollars in 1941. During the World War I he was recruited as a pilot in the Army Air Corps. After the end of the War he returned to New York where his reputation as a creative writer started building up. He wrote musicals for the well known MGM Studios and Paramount Pictures. Once he had three of his musicals at once on Broadway. They were ‘The Merry Widow’, ‘Jackpot’ and ‘Dream with Music’. This success brought him back to Hollywood. The first film written by Sheldon was ‘The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer’ which got him the Academy Award in 1947.

With the rise of television as a popular medium, Sheldon decided to try out his luck in it. He wrote a series called ‘The Patty Duke Show’ and for the next seven years wrote every episode of it. He also made, produced and wrote the show ‘I Dream of Jeannie’ using three pseudonyms ‘Mark Rowane’, ‘Allan Devon’ and ‘Christopher Gollato’. These were also used when writing ‘Nancy’ and ‘Hart to Hart’.
His first novel was ‘The Naked Face’ which was published in 1969, earning him a nomination for ‘The Best First Writer’ category. The second novel ‘The Other side Of Midnight’ was published in 1973, topping ‘The New York Times Best Seller’ list. Sheldon was very particular about the writing and validity of his books. For this very reason before writing his novel ‘Windmills of the Mind’ which was a story about the CIA, he personally met Richard Helms who was a former CIA recruit. He also went to Argentina and Romania, and spent some time in ‘Junction City, Kansas’ where one of the lead characters of the book resided. He said during an interview in 1987:

‘If I write about a place, I have been there. If I write about a meal in Indonesia, I have eaten there in that restaurant. I don’t think you can fool the reader’.

 His marriage to Jorja Curtright Sheldon, an actress and interior designer, lasted for thirty years. After her death in 1985, Sheldon married Alexandra Kostoff in 1989. His legacy includes 18 novels which have sold three hundred million copies, 200 TV scripts and 25 major films along with 6 Broadway plays. Sidney Sheldon died due to Pneumonia in California on 30th January, 2007. He was buried in Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery.

 
The God Who Made Mistakes, is a novel about a black man living what might be the South African dream (corporate job, German car, house in the suburbs, pretty wife), but stands to lose it all because of a secret that’s threatening to disturb the performed perfection of his life. It doesn’t take much imagination to figure out what Themba’s life-altering secret is, but Duker writes about it with such delicateness and simultaneously in such a raw manner that its reveal doesn’t feel cheap or fake.
Ayanda, the pretty wife, feels trapped in a marriage with a husband like Themba who doesn’t love her and doesn’t even pretend to. Unappreciated at home and at work, she takes to dancing as a refuge from her otherwise unpleasant life.
Themba is his mother’s favourite son: he’s an attorney, has his own home in the suburbs, he’s married (although it’s to a woman she detests). He made it out of the streets of Alex, to the pride of his mother and the dismay of his older brother, Bongani.
Bongani’s resentment for Themba is amplified by the thought that Themba might be the one who inherits their mother’s house when she dies, even though Bongani is the one who has never moved out of home.
Duker is not an emotional writer. So if you’re looking to clutch your chest in despair over a lethal combination of adjectives and adverbs, please read something else or turn on a soppy Lifetime channel movie.
The God Who Made Mistakes is intense. It’s interesting that the author can deliver a book this potent while using simple, to-the-point language. Duker has no time to explain the intricacies and complexities of human beings: he just rips off the skin to show us the bare bones of the worst in people.
There is no “good guy” in this book. The closest to a decent person we get is Ayanda. His mother is an overbearing, controlling woman (the proverbial mother-in-law from hell) and his brother is a loser who blames everyone but himself for the way his life has turned out.
This is not to say Themba is a saint; far from it. He’s quite unlikeable – a mentally weak man who thinks the only way to prove his masculinity is by treating his wife terribly. But once Themba admits his secret to himself and eventually those around him, it humanises him, softens him.
For all its intensity, The God Who Made Mistakes is surprisingly witty and sharp, with acerbic asides like this one on the current state of menswear: “All the men wore blue suits these days, even the president. They thought it expressed their individuality when in fact it did the opposite.”
(He also writes great analogies and figures of speech.)
The book makes for great – and at times difficult – reading. One of its strengths is that Duker presents his characters, their lives, their thoughts, emotions and actions (and sometimes the disconnect between the last two) to the reader and leaves them there. It’s not Duker’s job to tell you how to feel; he’s not pushing the reader’s thoughts in any particular direction.
That doesn’t mean it feels as though he does not care about the subject matter and topics raised: quite the opposite.
No one could write so fiercely about something unless they cared about it deeply. But refraining from forcing your views down the reader’s throat is a skill to be admired, and The God Who Made Mistakes does this so well.

 
Sebastian Barry once said that “language is almost not about language, it’s possibly more about music”. And nowhere is this more evident than in this acclaimed Irish novelist’s new and ninth novel, Days Without End.
Narrated by Sligo-born Thomas McNulty, who journeys from Ireland to the New World on a “coffin ship” after the great famine of 1847 leaves him orphaned and starving at 15, it reads as if Barry has ridden those wild “unbroken horses of language” that he has so often spoken about on a surefooted, rhythmic gallop all the way from Ireland to the American Mid-West.
Days Without End is a mesmerising, melodic account of McNulty’s life as he recalls his years fighting in the Indian wars and in the American Civil War alongside the love of his life, John Cole. It is also a deeply affecting, redemptive love story and an unblinkered portrait of what Barry calls “the murderous birth of the young American nation”.
Barry is, of course, as famous for his melodic prose as he is for transforming half-buried family memories and the scraps of long forgotten lives into novels of heart-stopping beauty. Novels that chronicle a forgotten history of Ireland and have won him two Booker nominations, the Costa Book of the Year award, the Irish Book Awards Best Novel and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, to name some.
But it is as if the 61-year-old poet, playwright and novelist has hit a soaring grace note in the writing of Days Without End, which, too, owes its genesis to a scrap of family lore. A scrap divulged to him as a child by his grandfather whose own story Barry told in The Temporary Gentleman.
“He said that his great uncle had gone off to America somewhere in the previous century and had fought in the Indian wars. I don’t think he knew anything more.”
For Barry, that was “an absolute gift. With The Temporary Gentleman I was struggling in a way with knowing too much. With a book like this you can leave yourself completely open to the voice when you’re fortunate enough to start hearing it.”
Barry says “writing is a fatal activity for a writer; seeing and hearing is the thing”. He read extensively about the history of the era for a year (he does this for all his novels), including obscure first-hand accounts of ordinary people who had been alive in the US in the middle decades of the 1800s, “to get a hold of the whistletune of the day”.
He then spent another year waiting on the voice of McNulty and the opening lines of the novel. He describes this as “literally a process of sitting stiller and stiller at my work table in the old rectory in Whitlow, so that he could enter in and prove Einstein’s theory of continuous time to be correct; that we may regard these things as past and ‘the past’, but in a way everything is happening all the time, still. I’ve been a happy person since that day, because it was as if you have received a handshake up through the decades.”
It’s no accident either, that the book is dedicated to his son Toby who three years ago came out as gay at the age of 16, and who “gave me this whole new terrain to think about. And I do feel that this book is kind of my magic spell for Toby and for all people who in their glory have had suggested to them that they’re inglorious, which I think is one of the most disgusting things in our lifetime.”
It’s a novel that, like almost all his novels, reaches into the past, yet somehow posits a way forward. “You’re writing out of the past, but it’s a kind of spell or a secular prayer to play something in a future.”
He is acutely aware too, that books have their own purpose independent of the writer. “Books have their secret undertaking and it intrigued me greatly that this book had its own arguments to make with history and politics and the present.”
Indeed, Days Without End has taken on a contemporary resonance with Donald Trump’s strident US election campaign, in which the note of “exultant hatred” toward immigrants and people of colour — which was so rife in the 1800s world of the novel — resurfaced.
“That’s why I don’t think there’s any such thing as an historical novel as such, there’s only a book that is talking into the present, which of course,” adds Barry, “is shortly to be a history itself.”

 

A novel’s title is Just Another Suck written in 1961 by James Hadley Chase. The characters are Harry (who’s potrayed as a main character), Mr Malroux, Rhea (Malroux’s wife) John Renick,  Nina and others, a  novel setting is in Palm City.

A novel starts when Harry finishes his three and a half year jail sentence, after being wrongly accused for manslaughter, he was a gossip columnist at Herald before wrongly accused for the felony. After being released Harry finds difficult to get another job that could push forward his life due to his damaged trust and reputation. The situation drives him nuts and finally being set in a trap of faked kidnapping deal engineered by Rhea, a wife of successful businessman, Mr Malroux.

Harry is promised fifty thousands dollar if he successfully carries out the deal; unfortunately it fades away and put him into trouble. The circumstance determines Harry’s fate; he is in a situation of hardly denying such kind of deal.( It seems  our behaviors are shaped by the circumstances) Though the faked kidnapping deal puts Harry into a serious trouble again with enforcement agency, finally he walk away with trouble and reunites with his wife Nina.

From my point of view, a novel is fantastic and author has succeeded to share his mind in  different themes like love, social class, betrayal, corruption and so many. For the case of corruption Harry is portrayed as a character who devout his skills and abilities to his job as a gossip columnist at Herald, hence dislike any form of bribery which can mess his career up, but his dislike character  put him into ‘a serious trouble and finally being wrongly accused for manslaughter .  Here we come to see that a good conduct is not necessary to benefit the doer, this seems to draw a philosophical attention. Why abiding to the laws and norms sometimes harm a person?

Betrayal theme, author again uses Harry to portrait it, who betrays his wife Nana by having an affair with Odette, a daughter of Mr Malroux who’s a subject of the faked kidnapping. Rhea (Mrs Malroux) also betrays her husband by having an affair with their chauffeur O’Reilly. This shows howJu infidelity is treated as a something normal in our daily lives, love has become a thing not to trust. In finishing his story, author does not  show how  Mr Malroux respond after learning that the one who killed his lovely daughter is chauffeur in cooperation with his wife Rhea.

Though a couple of decades have passed since a novel was written, it still stands as a fantastic and fascinating novel and  I would like to suggest you  find it and I assure  you won’t regret yourself for consuming your time reading it.

 

In a note written in 1917 about his novel “Lord Jim,” Joseph Conrad referred to “the acute consciousness of lost honor.” “Lord Jim” deals with the first mate of a ship who, in a moment of crisis, panics and jumps to safety and is later excoriated by an official inquiry so that his very name and presence become anathema to those who care about codes of decency. Jim is a hunted man, moving away, in the narrator Marlow’s account, from his own substance to become a strange shadow that leaves ­merely clues and hints about his identity or motives.

Ian McGuire’s riveting and darkly brilliant novel “The North Water” also dramatizes a disgraced personality. The Irish surgeon Patrick Sumner became involved in an act of pure, abject, reckless greed during the siege of Delhi in 1857. Friendless now, addicted to opium, he has signed up, since no one else will have him, to become the surgeon on the Volunteer, a whaling ship in the north of England. As the ship sets out on a voyage to the Arctic Circle, some of the other members of the crew are far more villainous, unpleasant, treacherous and unfortunate than any characters created by authors of adventure stories in the 19th century.

Just as Conrad will not offer his Lord Jim any easy redemption, and seems, in any case, more concerned with the texture of the prose and the ­novel form itself than he is with his wayward story of guilt and loss of honor, so too McGuire seeks to use this tale of unredemption as a way to animate his own style and allow it to flourish. His ship going north toward destruction is propelled by a vision that is savage, brutal and relentless, but that same vision also loves adjectives, sonorous sentences and a sort of jagged, grim lyricism. “The North Water” feels like the result of an encounter between Joseph Conrad and Cormac McCarthy in some run-down port as they offer each other a long, sour nod of recognition.

The central characters are all men. The novel begins with the most vicious and unpleasant of them, Henry Drax. As he wanders the town on the night before the ­Volunteer sets sail, he visits a brothel, tries to get free drinks in a bar, and eventually rapes and murders a young boy. He is presented as a man with no history, just all appetite. We are not burdened with how he thinks or what his worries are or his plans. We merely see what he does. He is, like many of the characters in “The North Water,” a force of nature, a piece of fierce and willful energy.

Patrick Sumner is handled more ­tenderly, but his back story comes mainly in his dreams. His addiction to opium and the guilt he feels hit against his innate decency. But, most of the time, decency and morality seem almost futile and are certainly useless against the incessant violence and pitilessness that emerge in scene after scene in the book.

McGuire has an extraordinary talent for picturing a moment, offering precise, sharp, cinematic details. When he has to describe complex action, he ­manages the physicality with immense clarity. He writes about violence with unsparing color and, at times, a sort of relish. The writing moves sometimes from the poetic to the purple, but McGuire is careful not to use too many metaphors or similes or too much fancy writing when he needs to make clear what cold feels like, or hunger or fear.

Slowly we learn that the purpose of the voyage is not to bring back seal skins or blubber from whales but, with another ship close by, to commit a dangerous act of insurance fraud.

Sumner’s spirits are kept high by the opium, but there is always a darkness at the core of him. He is not going to be redeemed by endurance or anything as simple as that. When one of the crew talks religion, it sounds more like magic or prophecy. The novel is more attracted by action, by the next cruel discovery or possible catastrophe, than by character. There is little time, in any case, for introspection; this, oddly enough, makes Sumner more forceful and physically present in the book. He is, or he has become, what he sees.

What is exciting is the idea that no one on this ship is going to learn anything, or change in any way. They will be lucky to survive, that is all, the ones who do survive.

McGuire’s characters do not ­merely have fierce weather and pure evil to reckon with, they also have the fearful, encroaching shadows of characters from Melville and Conrad and Patrick O’Brian who have also gone down to the sea in ships with all the elaborate, manly descriptions of winds and storms and para­phernalia at their disposal. “The North Water” is careful to avoid pastiche; there is not a trace of irony or a moment when the author descends into period-piece writing. McGuire moves briskly and ­forensically with no time for colorful ­episodes or long maritime descriptions or technical asides about ropes.

Even when he writes about bears — a feat I had imagined highly inadvisable if not impossible for any contemporary novelist — McGuire almost manages to make us believe that these bears were ­actually present. He is careful, I suppose, not to ­allow the bears to stand for untamed ­nature or any large question, and this is a relief. Although a she-bear’s head is “like the pale prototype of some archaic undersea god,” calmness and credibility are soon restored as “Drax, standing upright in the still-­rolling whaleboat, lifts up the boat spade and plunges its chisel edge hard down into the bear’s back.”

McGuire takes pleasure in the body and how much it can endure, as he does in setting scenes. Late in the book, when all seems lost, the survivors set up their tent on the ice: “At night, they camp on the floe edge, raise the bloodstained tent, attempt to dry and feed themselves. Near midnight, the bluish twilight thickens briefly to a gaudy and stelliferous darkness, then an hour later reasserts itself. Sumner sweats and shivers, dips in and out of an uneasy and dream-afflicted sleep. Around him bundled bodies grumble and gasp like snoozing cattle; the air inside the tent feels iron cold against his cheeks and nose, and has a stewed and crotch-like reek to it.”

Soon, we have descriptions of what it is like to suck and swallow the juice from a seal’s eyeball. And then we have Sumner drinking the “hot black liquid — blood, urine, bile” — from a bear’s innards. And then, as Sumner operates on a priest’s infected abdomen, the discharge first spatters across the table and then “it pulses out from the narrow opening like the last twitching apogee of a monstrous ejaculation.” This would be all good fun, except that McGuire manages to hold and wield his dark story in full seriousness. The tone throughout remains somber, direct, tense, fierce.

The tightness of the tone suggests that there is, behind the narrative, a theory being worked out of how historical fiction can be credibly managed now. Although there are no anachronisms in the book, there are also no long, wearying pages describing the clothing of the period, or the system of belief, or set pieces about the political or social background.

This means that McGuire can isolate his characters, and because they are on a ship and going through immense physical trials, they can be further set apart. This gives them a sort of purity of line; there is an intensity in the way they live, breathe, and respond to the world that etches them more deeply on the page and on the imagination of the reader.

Even though there are many minor players and moments where the camera of the novel moves away from its main characters, McGuire makes sure we know this is, in fact, the story of two men, Sumner and Drax, and it is their fates (rather than the fate of the ship or its crew or its owner) with which we are concerned. This focus is managed with tact and intelligence so that, even in the passages of the book that do not deal with the two figures directly, it is clear they are not being sidelined but are merely waiting to emerge more powerfully again.

By the end of the book, their story becomes even more vivid. It is possible at certain moments to sense the battle between them as a clash between darkness and light, good and evil. It is a mark of McGuire’s subtlety as a novelist, however, that he leaves this in the shadows while placing at the forefront enough felt life and closely imagined detail to resist any simple categories. He allows each of the two men their due strangeness and individuality.

Review by Colm Toibin