It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

It's Monday! What are you reading? is hosted by Sheila at  Book Journey. For this meme, bloggers post what they finished last week, what they're currently reading, and what they plan to start this week.   

Finished this week:


Synopsis here.
I really enjoyed this book. I have read Val McDermid before and have always found him to be a good read.
I especially enjoyed the sub-plot about the Miners' Strike in Great Britain in 1984. So much so that I bought a book mentioned in there which I'll mention later.


From the book jacket:
The Complaints: that's the name given to the Internal Affairs department who seek out dirty and compromised cops, the ones who've made deals with the devil. And sometimes The Complaints must travel.

A major inquiry into a neighboring police force sees Malcolm Fox and his colleagues cast adrift, unsure of territory, protocol, or who they can trust. An entire station-house looks to have been compromised, but as Fox digs deeper he finds the trail leads him back in time to the suicide of a prominent politician and activist. There are secrets buried in the past, and reputations on the line.

I enjoyed the second book in Rankin's new series much better than the first one. I still miss Inspector Rebus whom Rankin retired a while ago. Malcolm Fox is just not as compelling a character as Rebus was. Perhaps his character will develop in future books.
Ian Rankin usually lays a foundation of current and past events in his novels. In The Impossible Dead, he creates a tale reaching back a quarter of a century, when agitation and violence marked efforts for a separate Scotland.

Started this week:

From the book jacket:
GB84, David Peace's fifth novel, is a gripping, tautly plotted dramatisation of the miners' strike in which real events (Orgreave, the Brighton bomb) and real people (Arthur Scargill, Margaret Thatcher, Ian MacGregor) mingle imperceptibly with his creations. "This novel", he notes in the acknowledgements, "is a fiction, based on fact" and those who recall The Comic Strip Present's Hollywood skit Strike will be happy, to discover that Peace does not take liberties with the strike's trajectory. Key events are faithfully chronicled here but his 1984 is, arguably, as sinisterly dystopian as anything Orwell could have envisioned.
Full synopsis can be read here.

As mentioned under A Darker Domain above I became very curious about the Miners' Strike and Val McDermid states within his book that this is an excellent book to read more about the strike. I am really enjoying it.

Also started this week:

From the book jacket:
Detective Superintendent Roy Grace is forever haunted by the unexplained disappearance of his wife, Sandy, nearly ten years ago. Ever since she went missing, he’s been consumed with finding out what happened to her. Finally, he may be moving on. He has fallen in love and is going to marry his girlfriend, Cleo, who is pregnant with their child.

But his life is put on hold when, after a wild New Year’s Eve ball, a woman is brutally raped as she returns to her hotel room. A week later, another woman is attacked. Both victims’ shoes are taken by their attacker. Grace soon realizes that these new cases bear remarkable similarities to an unsolved series of crimes in the city back in 1997. The perpetrator had been dubbed “Shoe Man” and was believed to have raped four women before murdering his fifth victim and vanishing. Could this be a copycat, or has Shoe Man resurfaced?

2012 books read:
The Coast Road - John Brady
Still Midnight - Denise Mina
The Bulgari Connection - Fay Weldon
Good Bait - John Harvey
The Heretic's Treasure - Scott Mariani 
Dead I Well May Be - Adrian McKinty
The Devil's Elixir - Raymond Khoury
A Darker Domain - Val McDermid
The Impossible Dead - Ian Rankin