Operation Mincemeat, Oh William!, by Elizabeth Strout, and The Nameless Ones by John Connolly

In 2010, I read Operation Mincemeat:  How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory  by Ben MacIntyre, and it remains one of my favorite WWII nonfiction books.  The film with Colin Firth is coming out in 2022, and I can't wait.  Operation Mincemeat trailer.

Oh, William is such a complex mix of human emotions, memories, and revelations.  How well do we know the people we live with for years?  Parents, spouses, children?  Not always as well as we think, and the same is often true about how well we "know" ourselves.  A lovely, character-driven story of a family, Oh, William makes the reader look into themselves and their own relationships.  Now, I have to go back and read Lucy Barton and all of Elizabeth Strout's books that I've missed.

A beautiful cover and a beautifully written book, as many of you have mentioned.  I'm late to reading Elizbeth Strout, but it has been such a satisfying experience.  How ordinary, how extraordinary!

NetGalley/Random House

Family.   Oct. 19, 2021.  Print length:  256 pages.

John Connolly's Charlie Parker series is always full of violence and brutality.  The series isn't for everyone, but I've followed it for years, always rooting for Parker, Louis, and Angel as they fight against supernatural evil.

from description of  The Nameless Ones:  In Amsterdam, four people are butchered in a canal house, their remains arranged around the crucified form of their patriarch, De Jaager: fixer, go-between, and confidante of the assassin named Louis. The men responsible for the murders are Serbian war criminals. They believe they can escape retribution by retreating to their homeland.
They are wrong.
 

Anyone who has read about the Serbian Croatian war is aware of the war crimes, mass murders, and ethnic hatred of that period.  The brutality of the Serbian forces remains a particularly dark stain in history, and Connolly doesn't refrain from the atrocities.

Fans of the series can't help but love Louis and Angel, who add a great deal of dark humor to the books.  The Nameless Ones leaves Charlie Parker in the background as Louis and Angel hunt the Serbian war criminals.

Of course, there is also a supernatural element:  Zorya is an eerie, chilling associate with the Vuksan brothers.  

Trigger Warning:  the book is well-researched, but even though I'd read about some of the atrocities before, they still made difficult reading.  

 read in march; review scheduled for Oct

NetGalley/Atria Books   

Supernatural Thriller.  Oct. 26, 2021.  Print length:  388 pages.