| Status: | Active, open to new members |
| Leader: |
Pam O'Neill
|
| Group email: | Book club group books@u3aoliva.org |
| When: | Fortnightly on Friday mornings 2nd & 4th Friday |
| Venue: | Extremix Bar / Restaurant |
Do you love books? Are you often looking for people to discuss literature with? Lots of people love to read, but it can be hard to find someone to discuss the book you’re reading — especially if you love an uncommon genre.
July's Book
The Good Liar by Denise Mina
As this short, tense novel opens, Claudia Atkins O’Sheil is preparing to blow up her life. In twenty minutes she’s due to give a speech about her most famous case as a forensic scientist. But it’s not the speech her host and mentor, Sir Philip Ardmore, expects her to give. Rather than celebrate the way her ground-breaking system for analyzing blood spatter evidence solved the infamous Chester Terrace murders, she’s planning to explain how it got the case wrong. This will not only destroy her reputation and Sir Philip’s, it will call into question scores of convictions and will anger some very powerful people. She has to get the truth out in a way that people will find convincing, and she has to do it before she is stopped.
Flashback to a year earlier, to a gathering just a few months after her husband’s death in a car crash. As she’s fending off Kirsty Parry, an awkward upper-class acquaintance of her husband who is desperately looking for work in Claudia’s field, Sir Philip gets a phone call that unmoors him. He’s so rattled she agrees to drive him to the scene of a gruesome crime. Two people have been murdered in a Regent’s Park neighborhood on a street where the houses are worth tens of millions, many of them empty investment properties owned by secretive shell companies. Someone entered the house, killed their guard dog with a shotgun, and then attacked both occupants with a knife. The blood spatter is voluminous and even without running it through her software program, Claudia can read it like a book.
It falls to Sir Phil to identify the bodies, since the home belongs to a friend from school days. He worries the killer may have been the dead man’s son, the privileged party boy and addict Viscount William Stewart, who stands to inherit a title and properties that amount to half of Scotland. He was on bad terms with his father, and when he stumbles up to the house, he’s taken away by the police for an interview. Claudia finds the situation strange; they fail to caution him before questioning him, and she urges him to ask for a lawyer. She soon realizes he is the sole focus of the murder investigation, though it doesn’t make sense to her. Whoever killed his father and fiancee would be drenched in blood, and he is not.
Meanwhile, she has plenty to deal with. She’s having trouble connecting with her two teenage sons who, like her, are dealing with their father’s sudden death. Though she misses her husband fiercely, he had been prickly and paranoid, and she suspects his accident was actually a suicide. Her sister Gina, who is staying with them, is both beloved and bothersome, an addict who can’t seem to stay sober however much she tries.
But there’s something off about the Chester Terrace prosecution, and when Kirsty Perry raises a concern about the algorithm behind Claudia’s blood-spatter analysis tool, she faces a dilemma.
Is this sounds like the book for you, grab a copy and join in - just message Group Leader Pam for info.
About our book club
If you’re having a hard time finding people to talk with about your reading material, you might want to consider joining our book club. They’re also great opportunities to meet new people and make new friends with common interests.
Reading is a solitary activity but when a book has moved or stimulated you it's natural to want to discuss it with someone else. A reading group gives you that opportunity. Also, a group encourages you to think a bit more about the books you read - why you like some, hate others.