Sunday Salon: War Movie and War Novels

Welcome to the Sunday Salon where bloggers share their reading each week. Visit The Sunday Post hosted by The Caffeinated Bookreviewer.
Also visit Mailbox Monday, and It's Monday, What Are You Reading? hosted by Book Date. 

We saw the Tina Fey movie, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, last night, about an American journalist who signs up to become a photo journalist in Afghanistan. The Urban Dictionary says Whiskey Tango Foxtrot stands for WTF in military language!
The movie gave me a good look at some of the risks, temptations, rivalries, and on-the-edge lives war journalists face on site. It's also a comedy so the facts came with some laughs. The original title of the book by Kim Barker was The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan. 

The movie also gave me some visual prep to tackle Cambodia Noir head on, a thriller about a photographer who has seen action during the war in Cambodia and who lives on in the war-shattered country trying to score new news on the political or social scene.

 I finished yesterday a library book that I read after recommendations by several bloggers: The Light Between Oceans, published 2013 by Scribner. It 's about a lighthouse couple in Australia who find a baby girl ship wrecked or boat wrecked on their beach and who decide to keep her as their own. I will post a brief review next week.

Two new books came in last week for review/feature, thanks to Harper Collins:

It has been a while since I've read a biography, so this galley came as a pleasant surprise. The Last Goodnight: a World War II Story of Espionage, Adventure & Betrayal by Howard Blum, described as "biography of Betty Pack, the dazzling American debutante who became an Allied spy during WWII and was hailed by OSS chief General “Wild Bill" Donovan as “the greatest unsung heroine of the war.” 



A romantic comedy, advance readers edition,  also arrived for lighter reading:


The Decent Proposal by Kemper Donovan is described as a "debut romantic comedy, drama, and mystery rolled into one, about two very different strangers whose lives become intertwined when they receive an unusual proposition." 

The proposition is: meet for at least two hours every week for an entire year and then share a million dollars reward from an anonymous benefactor. I am thinking the ending is probably predictable, but the journey might be fun to read about.

Books in my Library Bag include:
The Strangler Vine by M. J. Carter, an historical thriller set in India
Thin Air by Ann Cleeves, a police procedural set in the Shetland islands.

What goodies do you have on the book shelves this week? 

Cambodia Noir by Nicholas Seeley

The Friday 56. Grab a book, turn to page 56 or 56% of your eReader. Find any sentence that grabs you. Post it, and add your URL post in Linky at Freda's Voice.
Also visit Book Beginning at Rose City Reader.

Cambodia Noir, thriller/adventure by Nicholas Seeley, to be released March 15, 2016 by Scribner. 
Source: book for review from publisher 

Phnom Penh, Cambodia. 
Once-great war photographer Will Keller spends his days floating from one score to the next.... But Will's spiral toward oblivion is interrupted by Kara Saito, a beautiful woman who begs Will to help find her sister, June, who disappeared during a stint as an intern at the local paper (publisher)

Book beginning: 
Airports kill me.
I need to stop thinking about Paris, which is close to impossible at the best of times. But in the farthest wing of Frankfurt terminal, a couple of hours before dawn, as I'm waiting for a plane to carry me away to a city whose name I cannot properly pronounce...well, it's a terrible place to be alone with one's thoughts. 

Page 56: 
This one isn't reading catalogs: she just puts her stuff in a bag and she goes.

My comments: A story of a former war journalist searching for a missing woman in Cambodia - these two people left their regular lives to forget and reinvent themselves somewhere else. Interesting character studies with a backdrop of corruption, politics, and danger in a developing country. I gave this noir thriller five stars. 

About the Author

Nick Seeley is an international journalist based over the past decade in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Policy Magazine, Middle East Report, and Traveler’s Tales, among others. His fiction and criticism has been published in Strange Horizons. He is originally from Fairfax, Virginia. Cambodia Noir is his first novel.

Sunday Salon: New Reads - Cambodia Noir and When Falcons Fall

 Welcome to the Sunday Salon where bloggers share their reading each week. Visit The Sunday Post hosted by The Caffeinated Bookreviewer.

Also visit Mailbox Monday, and It's Monday, What Are You Reading? hosted by Book Date. 

The Mad Woman Upstairs, an adventure novel by Catherine Lowell, to be published March 1, 2016 by Touchstone.
"...the only remaining descendant of the Brontë family embarks on a modern-day literary scavenger hunt to find the family's long-rumored secret estate, using clues her eccentric father left behind." (publisher)

Cambodia Noir, thriller/adventure by Nicholas Seeley, to be released March 15, 2016 by Scribner.  
Phnom Penh, Cambodia: the end of the line. Lawless, drug-soaked, forgotten—it's where bad journalists go to die. For once-great war photographer Will Keller, that's kind of a mission statement: he spends his days floating from one score to the next, taking any job that pays; his nights are a haze of sex, drugs, booze, and brawling. But Will's spiral toward oblivion is interrupted by Kara Saito, a beautiful young woman who shows up and begs Will to help find her sister, June, who disappeared during a stint as an intern at the local paper (publisher)

When Falcons Fall, the 11th in the Sebastian St. Cyr historical mystery series by C.S. Harris, to be released March 1, 2016 by NAL.
Ayleswick-on-Teme, 1813. Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, has come to this seemingly peaceful Shropshire village to honor a slain friend and on a quest to learn more about his own ancestry. But when the body of a lovely widow is found on the banks of the River Teme, a bottle of laudanum at her side, the village’s inexperienced new magistrate turns to St. Cyr for help. (publisher)

I've reviewed the 7th in the series, When Maidens Mourn, and look forward to this one. 

Private Citizens by Tony Tulathimutte, published February 9, 2016 by William Morrow
"... a sweeping comic portrait of privilege, ambition, and friendship in millennial San Francisco." (publisher)

Currently reading:

How to Start a Fire by Lisa Lutz, published May 2015 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Genre: women's fiction, contemporary fiction

I have recently finished and reviewed Lutz's most recent novel, a thriller, The Passenger, and am now reading another published last year, How To Start a Fire, a book about three college friends and their lives and relationships after.
I have the fifth in her private investigator Spellman series, Trail of the Spellmans on my TBR list. She is becoming one of my favorite authors.

What's on your reading list this week?