2024 Reading List: Highlights and Reviews

I planned to share comments by year’s end about books that I read in 2024. I missed my deadline by a bit, but I am sharing the list now. Two other books are of such importance that in future I will write about them separately. They are A Brief History of Equality, by French economist Thomas Piketty, and Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast, by John Vaillant.  

In the past year, I went back to some books that I had long planned to read. Others, as you will see, are new releases.

 A Heart Full of Headstones, Ian Rankin

My reading in 2024 was bracketed by two novels written by Scottish crime writer Ian Rankin. I have read most of his two dozen books about John Rebus, a curmudgeonly detective who habitually breaks the rules but always solves the crime. In this book, Rebus is retired after a long career. He mixes it up with an old adversary, ‘Big Ger’ Cafferty, who has run a criminal ring for years but whose empire is now crumbling. By the end of the book, Rebus is on trial for a crime he allegedly commits against Rafferty. Rebus, who had often been called upon as a police witness, is now the accused.

Midnight and Blue, Ian Rankin

In this book, Rebus is not only retired, but he is in prison. There is a murder inside and authorities cannot solve it. Now a convict himself, Rebus goes to work. He is assisted from the outside by his friend, Detective Inspector Siobhan Clarke, with whom he has solved many crimes. She is investigating the disappearance of an adolescent schoolgirl, and a murder. Her case and that of Rebus come together as plot and sub plot, arriving at yet another surprise ending.          

The Truth Shows Up, Harvey Cashore

This book is sub-titled: a reporter’s fifteen-year odyssey tracking down the truth about Mulroney.  When the former prime minister died in February, 2024, he was widely celebrated by the Canadian political and media establishment. Virtually none of them mentioned that he had pocketed $300,000 in cash stuffed into envelopes from German arms dealer and lobbyist Karl Heinz Schreiber. Mulroney took the first installment days after his retirement as prime minister in 1993, while he was still an MP.

I went down a rabbit hole, reading or re-reading five books about Mulroney and his entourage. Cashore’s book is the most detailed and trenchant. He is an investigative journalist with CBC Television’s The Fifth Estate. He spent years following a money trail that began with Airbus, a European owned conglomerate which sold a fleet of passenger jets to Air Canada in 1988.  Airbus paid $20 million in “grease money” that made its way through Schreiber to a variety of Mulroney’s friends, among others. But there was never proof that Mulroney received any of the money.

He sued the RCMP and the Canadian government for linking his name to Swiss banking authorities in a money laundering investigation. The government caved and settled out of court, but that was before the revelation that Mulroney had taken cash from Airbus’s man Schreiber.

The ensuing public outcry forced Prime Minister Stephen Harper to create a judicial inquiry. But its frame of reference forbade investigating allegations about Mulroney related to Airbus. Harper said that had already been litigated and settled. Mulroney, however, was never able to explain credibly to the inquiry why he had accepted the cash from Schreiber, and why he had not declared it as income to be taxed. I wrote a blog piece about the whole sordid affair and invite you to read it.

The other books I read related to the Mulroney saga were:  Presumed Guilty, and A Secret Trial, by Robert Kaplan; On the Take, by the late Stevie Cameron; and The Last Amigo, a joint effort by Cameron and Cashore.

The Diamond Eye, Kate Quinn

This historical novel plays off the true story of a young Russian woman named Lyudmila Mikhailovna Pavlichenko. She was a bookish librarian who became a celebrated Red Army sniper against the Germans when they invaded the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Lady Death, as she came to be called, was sent by the Soviets on a goodwill speaking tour of the U.S. in 1942. While there, Pavlichenko met, and was befriended by, Eleanor Roosevelt. Quinn creates a fiction that involves Pavlichenko in a plot hatched by right wing conservatives in the U.S. to assassinate Eleanor’s husband, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and to have Pavlichebnko blamed for the crime.    

The Pigeon Tunnel, John Le Carré

I have read most of John Le Carré’s spy fiction and was looking forward to reading this book, which is sub-titled Stories from my Life. It was published in 2016. I was disappointed. Le Carré’s best fiction creates a cast of imperfect anti-heroes operating in the shadows of the spy world. Here, he is on automatic pilot.

One review described it in this way: “With its disconnected set of anecdotes, lack of synthesis, and staccato rhythm, the whole thing feels like a rushed job rather than a sustained meditation with the kind of intricate narrative arc for which its author is so well known.”

Le Carré traveled widely, often to do research for his novels. His fame gave him access to many prominent people. He describes encounters with actors Richard Burton and Alec Guinness, and writer Joseph Brodsky. He endures numerous frisk downs before spending one New Year’s Eve with PLO leader Yasser Arafat. Le Carré was a talented raconteur, but these reminiscences lack the nuanced complexity of character and plot that characterizes his best fiction.

Conclude

I will post soon about several other of the books that I read in 2024. If you have a favourite from last year, please add it to the Comments section of this blog and briefly say why you liked it. I will post your comment.