Los dos libros

Managed to finish reading two of the four novels which I had borrowed over the past three weeks. Splendid achievement, I must say, given the hectic schedule. =)

The first book is "Bleeding Hearts" by Ian Rankins. It's a gripping story written from the perspective of an assassin, Michael Weston, who successfully guns down his female target but ends up having the police and a private investigator Leo Hoffer hot on his heels. In an attempt to find out who was his secret employer and who had tipped off the police, Weston embarks on a cross-Atlantic journey and is brought into dangerously close contact with a mysterious religious order as well as a ruthless intelligence service, with the unfortunate consequence of having a number of his friends and contacts die in the process from the collateral damage. A fascinating tale with surprising twists in the plot. :)

The second book is "The Weatherman" by Clint McCown, winner of the S. Mariella Gable Prize. A refreshing read, which opens with a prologue about a huge spider dangling precariously on the ceiling right above the protagonist, Taylor Wakefield, who is lying immobile in a hospital bed. And then the book plunges into Wakefield's childhood history, a time when he witnessed and stayed silent about a cold-blooded murder committed by his cousin William "Billy" Hatcher and when he lost the National Spelling Bee finals to another kid and went on to be a child radio-celebrity. The story then continues into Wakefield's adulthood, about how, by an odd turn of events, he joined the disreputable Alabama Broadcasting Network as a weatherman and fuelled public speculation about Hatcher's shady past through suggestive weather predictions which had nothing to do with the weather, and this, coming at a time when the "born-again Christian" Hatcher was running in the state election for Attorney-General. An excitingly vivid tale and definitely a book I would recommend.