Winter Reading Suggestions – a whole bunch of choices from the Indie and one special thriller from Manila

Thinking about your winter reading now the nights are drawing in and its cold? the Independent did a long and good list of the 50 best best winter reads this year (in which I got a plug admittedly) but might also offer some choices.

However, for regulars at this blog I’d like to recommend one book that really wowed me recently – it’s a deep noir thriller and mystery from the Philippines set in the crumbling run down Chinatown at the heart of Manila. Charlson Ong’s Blue Angel, White Shadow is a great read and the winner of the 2011 Philippine National Book Award – and only GBP2.60 on Kindle!!

No one is safe, no one is wholly innocent in Charlson Ong’s “Blue Angel, White Shadow.” What seems to be a suicide attempt by a lounge singer in an obscure part of Manila’s Chinatown leads to a complex web of murder, corruption, romance, ambition, and vengeance. Everyone is somehow linked to the crime, and disgraced inspector Cyrus Ledesma cannot trust the police nor the mayor. When Cyrus Ledesma’s past catches up with him, his only ally seems to be an aggressive former crime journalist, who has secrets of her own.

“She reminded him of a small bird with its neck broken by a giant hand, laid to rest on a bed of dried leaves. Her head tucked against the left shoulder blade seemed anxious to leave the rest of her. There was blood on the sheets, blood everywhere. So much blood, he thought, she was soaked in her own blood, how could anyone have so much blood, until he realized that she was wearing a shiny red cheongsam and red heels. Then he saw that the blood was really just from the right wrist that had a sharp object protruding from it. She seemed to have been nailed to the bed. He looked closer and saw that it was a hairpin. An elaborate one with a phoenix head, nearly ten inches long, part hard wood and part stainless steel. It was one of those contraptions Chinese ladies used to wear in their hair. His own grandmother had one. She had shown it to him once when he was a boy to scare him off, then told him a story about how her own mother had stuck the brooch into the small of her husband’s back, the tip of his spine, to stop “his stream” and “ebb the swell of his tide,” once when they were “riding the tiger” and he could not “dismount.” “That’s why every mother must give one to a maiden daughter who marries,” his grandmother had said, poking the hairpin menacingly at his eyes.”