A cry in the night by Mary Higgins Clark

Such dread inside me. It was very well written, to the point that I was glued to the book. This is a real thriller. Not a mystery, because honestly the protagonist was the only one that didn't understand what was going on. A bit of plot: Jenny, divorced with two little girls, works in a art gallery in New York. At the start of the book she's displaying the paintings of Erich Krueger from Minnesota. Looking at the big portrait of his mother Caroline, that died when he was ten, everybody thinks it's Jenny. She resembles Caroline so much that even Erich himself says so, and here to me started to get weird. How could Jenny be so light about it? She should have stopped to think about how obvious it was that he liked her so much because she was identical to his mother. Which is not normal! I mean, she didn't just cook like Caroline, this would be a good thing for a man. She physically looked like her!
Anyway, she believes everything he says because he appears to be so kind, gentle and full of attentions towards her and even more important towards her precious babies, and so she consents to be his wife a few days after meeting him.  He takes her to Minnesota, away from her world, and she finds justifications for everything he does, telling herself that they love each other, and that he's done so much for her, and that he's so kind to little Beth and Tina, but I didn't. I knew it was creepy and sick. He was scary, he wanted everything as it was thirty years ago, nothing can be changed in the house, and every little stain is a tragedy. He only makes love to her if she wears his mother's nightgown, and doesn't let her do anything without him. He interceptsw phone calls or letters addressed to her, doesn't let her talk to people or drive the car. He is insanely jealous of everyone. He is obsessed with order inside the house and day after day she becomes tense when he's around, worried that he might be disappointed or displeased by something she did wrong. It's all very difficult, but at least he appears to be very kind with the little girls, and Jenny's happy to see them happy. I wasn't. I didn't like it when it came out that 'Mummy is bad. Daddy would have let us', it seemed to me like he was trying to steal their love for her away from her.
Things starts to get really serious when her ex-husband disappears and is later found dead, and everything points to her. Nobody believes her, and Jenny's hurt that Erich doesn't seem to believe her either. Still, she forgives him and justifys him because she's pregnant and still thinks they might have a happy life together. When the baby's born, he has the same red hair as his little sisters, and this brings more problems. Instead of giving him his own name, Erich calls him Kevin like Beth and Tina's father, and  never gets really close to the little thing. Apparently everyone believes the baby is not Erich's, while Jenny knows it is, because she knows she's not been with anyone else, least of all Kevin.
Still, the baby brings so much joy to Jenny that she thinks of nothing else, now. A tragedy awaits her though, because one morning she finds him dead, and is devastated, but rumours go around that she might have killed him herself. Everything and everyone is against her; she can't go on like this anymore. Erich's insane jealousy doesn't let her live, she's afraid of saying or doing anything that might upset him, so she finally plans to leave him. They were planning a trip because he had another gallery to go to, but when the time comes, he takes the girls to the car and drives off without her. He knew all about her plans, and prevented it. Now that he has her girls, she can't leave him. He wants her to sign a full confession, but she won't, and she tries to find out what really happened, instead. She suspects a couple of women, but realises both the theories are not good enough. Finally, she wanders off in search for his secret hideout, where he said he always go to be alone and paint. She finds it, but also finds much, much more. Lots of paintings signed Caroline! He's putting his own signature to cover hers, and is selling her paintings as his own. But this revelation is nothing compared to what she finds upstairs. A horrible painting, done by Erich this time, where he is shown while he strangles Beth and Tina, sort-of dressed as Caroline. She understands everything now, and runs back to tell Mark and the sheriff the truth of how it was Erich all along. The sheriff is not sure what to believe, but she takes them to the chalet and they can see for themselves. He has killed before, a girl who saw him in there and his own mother when he was ten years old because she wanted to leave. Now Jenny's scared sich for her babies, hoping he won't kill them. She waits in the house for days, until she impersonates Caroline to lure him in and he comes: to kill her. She's saved just in time by the woman whose daughter he had killed and it'll also be her who will find out where he left Beth and Tina. They are still alive, and the book ends on a happy note. Living in a smaller house, with the money she inherited from Erich, with Beth and Tina with her, and 'uncle Mark' ofter coming to visit :-)
It was a really good thriller. Not a mystery at all because frankly Erich screamed psycopath from the first moment, but an excellent thriller. It didn't matter at all that I knew it was him, absolutely sure, never had any doubt, because that was not the real point. We follow her story, suffer with her, wait with her, wondering what he'll do to her before the end, and how she'll get her life back.
Too much descriptions, for my taste, but still an excellent thriller. It would be a great movie, if they did it well, focusing their attention on the right things and characters. Erich should be beautiful and sort-of charming, but Mark should be sexy. Jenny should be pretty but no top-model.
Poor mad Ronnie should be someone really good, because she is crazy and sometimes a bit boring, but people should like her.
I really enjoyed reading this book, and it has also filled me with anxiety at some points. That's what a good thriller should do :-)
The happy note at the end did leave me with peace, though :-D

Interstellar - 2014

Well, yes and no... I was liking it enough, but then there was that final... and it all went so down. I liked the story of this father, Cooper (Matthew McConaughey, not a big fan, but he's ok) who lives with his father-in-law Donald (John Lithgow), his 15 y.o. son Tom and his 10 y.o. daughter Murph in a future Earth that is dying; people deny this, but Murph receives code messages from a "ghost" in her room library and Cooper can decypher one: coordinates to a secret place where Nasa is secretly working out a plan to save humanity. There, professor Brand (Michael Caine) tells him of a mission: find a world where humans can go. He accepts and leaves his family not knowing when or if he'll ever come back. Tom tries to be tough, but Murph can't accept to lose him. Cooper goes with Professor Brand's daughter (Anne Hathaway) and two men through a wormhole towards a system with three likely worlds, where other expeditions where sent years before. First one they visit is so near a black hole that one hour there should correspond to seven years, but the man Romilly (David Gyasi, I liked Romilly a lot) counted wrong because they didn't stay long (the world was a continous tsunami and they barely escaped, and lost their fourth man) and yet back on board 23 years had passed. Sort of what happened in a Voyager episode, but reversed.
Now Murph  (Jessica Chastain) has grown up and is working with professor Brand. Tom (Casey Affleck, apparently. Sorry, I had not recognized him) works as a farmer in the family farm and has a wife and a son. His first son died, and so did Donald.
Now the team must choose one of the remaining two worlds: Brand wants to choose the one where the man she's in love with went, but Cooper thinks she's only listening to her heart, not her science, so he chooses the other one. There they meet Mann (Matt Damon, nice surprise! I was not expecting this!) telling them the frozen world they see has potential, a surface where they could arrange something.
The whole movie I had been expecting something to go wrong; at first the robots worried me a bit, but the robot TARS was not Hal9000 at all, it was actually the best part of the whole thing. So when Cooper and Mann walked far away alone, I kept expecting something terrible to happen, and I said so. I said, I keep thinking at any moment Mann is going to hit him on the head or something, and yes, it happened. He had lied completely, sending positive results so someone would come and he could be rescued. Now he wants to steal their ship, after almost killing Cooper. Brand saves Cooper, but Romilly dies in an explosion. Mann accidentally kills himself almost destroying the ship (I guess he wasn't thinking straight, because he should have known he would be sucked out after opening the ship's door, airlock or whatever): Anyway, now there's only two of them, a robot and very little fuel.
Murph discovers on professor Brand's deathbed that he had lied, there's no chance people on Earth can be saved. He solved his equation long ago but it wasn't enough, he lacked data, so lied to send Cooper up there with embryos to recreate humanity! Murph is hurt and shocked, but doesn't give up.
Now, I thought, Cooper is going to throw himself into or so very near the blackhole in order to retrieve all the data he can about it and send it to Earth so Murph can succeed, thus dying to save his family and all of humanity, and it seemed to me a good finale. I was prepared to a few tears, but all in all a happy ending, but it wasn't enough for director Christopher Nolan, or maybe for the American producers (they probably are): they wanted a full-happy ending!! Cooper and TARS let themselves fall into the black hole to allow Brand to reach the third world, where nobody mentioned that her beloved should be much older now, at least 23 years...
Cooper is conscious the whole time, nothing bad happens inside the black hole (...) and he finds himself into a five-dimentional tesseract where he can see his 10 y.o. daughter in her room and realises he was her ghost! Also that no good aliens were involved in sending then a wormhole when they needed one, but it was humans from a distant future that did all that to help them! and that the chosen one was not him but Murph! Cooper can still communicate with TARS, because apparently black holes are not as bad as I always thought, and with his (or its) help he sends me messages to Murph.  The coordinates, of course, but also lots of data, encoded in Morse alphabet in the movements of a clock's hands. Murph gets all that, finds a solution, saves all of humanity, and Cooper finds himself still alive drifting around Saturn where humanity now lives! He's saved! and still young, he meets his now old daughter who's about to die, apparently. She tells him nobody believed her when she told them how her father helped her, and also that he can't stay because he must go to Brand, now alone in a lonely world where her man has died. Cooper leaves.
What a stupid ending! Nobody explained anything to me, just said a few things for everyone to accept!
How could adult Murph suddenly look at her library and think: it was all my dad's doing, he was my ghost! Why? There's no reason.
This thing makes other little problems, other questions look less important, for example "How could future humans help them if nobody even believed her story?" = well, maybe someone in her family did, just one is enough, telling that story to their children and so on for generations, who knows. Although we are not talking about three, four generations, we're talking about hundreds, and it seems very unlikely that any family story could survive for so long and still be believed.
The fact that he survived a black hole! Nothing, after all I don't really know them and maybe it wasn't even a black hole, or maybe future humans catched him while he entered and brought him into the tesseract, who knows.
But Murph looking at her library and going: My dad was my ghost! is absurd. Why would she think that? She can't see him, can't hear him, she's alone in an empty room where nothing's happening. Do they want me to believe that it is because of her love for him? If so, they should have done it better, because I didn't feel love. Cooper finding her is explained by a few words about his love for her, and that's it, just accept it, I love her so I find her! This is what happens to her? She loved him so she understood?? But where was the feeling? I felt nothing in that moment.
Also, for Cooper to be saved, that was too much. Only him of course because he's the protagonist.
And how could old Murph know about Brand's fate? Or that she was alone? Or that she was the only survivor? And anyway, how old should she be? I mean, many years have passed because Murph was 33 and now is old, something like 90, more or less. Cooper was thrown to her in a moment by the tesseract, but the years should have passed for Brand!!
So now what, will Cooper bring her back here or will he stay there with her? Of course her man had to be dead, so we can imagine a romantic future for them. How predicctabeìle and boring.
The ending ruined everything. It makes no sense to me. Please, anyone has a good explanation? As it is, it was very disappointing, I must say. It would have made more sense if some good aliens had given them the means to save themselves, sending them the wormhole. It would have made more sense if Cooper had died to complete his mission, instead they made him almost immortal and Murph omnipotent, apparently. She was smart, yes, but she never suspected the professor's lie until he told her!!
I didn't like the ending as they did it. Maybe the idea was good, but not well rendered, in my opinion.

Before sunrise - 1995

It was... nice, yeah. There were good moments and others where I thought they talked too much, which I admit is silly because the whole plot is: the two of them talk for a whole night! Well, it's actually: American boy and French girl meet on a train and start talking, then he must get out at Vienna's station, and asks her to keep him company until the next morning when he has a plane home. It's like 6pm and they walk around, talk, kiss, don't know if they go further or not, but then talk and walk again until the moment to say goodbye, when they propose to meet again there in six months. Will they or not? I don't know, the film ends here, but I heard they made a sequel, so I'll find out sooner or later. Both Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) were very pretty, and it's nice to watch a quiet, peaceful film with no special effects, for once. They just walk and talk about everything, from serious things to silly ones. They talk about life, about sex, about feminism,  about love and God and souls and parenthood and technology and loneliness and ex-partners and ... you know, lots of different things.
I liked many little pieces: the two men being sarcastic about the American guy not knowing German; the woman that reads Celine's hand was charming and kind of magnetic, I liked her. The guy that asked them money if they liked his poem, I liked him and I liked the poem. This surprised me.
The different expressions on Jesse and Celine's faces while he was reading it to them.. :-D
All the time except those moments, it was just the two of them talking. About everything. There were discussions more interesting and others less so, anyway I guess back in 1995 Celine had not watched a lot of shows like Criminal Minds , otherwise she would not have been so light and happy of her decision to remain in Vienna with him, with nobody on Earth knowing she was there, and I had a rapid image of a crime episode where her unidentified body was found in Vienna and nobody could tell anything about her... :-/
Anyway, don't think that I didn't like it. I did. I think that with another actor I would have liked it more, though. One day they might make a remake of this with maybe an English actor and a Spanish girl, or a Scottish man and an Italian girl... oh yes, I like this one. Remember to call me if you like the idea, okay? :-D

The seven dials mystery by Agatha Christie

This is of course written very very well, but the story is very different. It's a spy story, involving young men and women playing spies and detectives. The big switch of this book is that the seven dials club that Bundle thought was made of murderers is in fact a club of volunteers as spies, led by Detective Battle, to try and discover what professionals had not been able to do. Which actually seemed a bit silly, in a way. I don't think Battle should have approved this. Anyway, it all starts when a young man dies, but at first it is believed to be accidental. Then another young man is clearly murdered, and the young lady of Chimneys, nickname Bundle, investigates. She's nice enough, and intelligent, but I didn't like how she treated poor guy Alfred, in clear aristocratic manner, ordering him around as an inferior. Which is probably how things worked back then, at least. I don't know how they are now, still, when I hear or read that people sort of regret past times when roles where more clear and all that kind of stuff, I think they all see themselves as the one having servants, not as being the servants .
What I liked was the presence of detective Battle, an intelligent one and a good man, and the fact that it was him to reveal the truth to Bundle at the end, because she was totally on the wrong track :-)
It waws well written and captivating, but I prefer usual crime stories to spy ones.
Ita: I sette quadranti

The moving finger by Agatha Christie

I don't understand what the title has to do with it, but it was a good book. Jerry and his sister go to the countryside to rest after he had a bad injury. Anonimous letters start going around, saying silly lies. At first they don't think much about it, and when a woman apparently commits suicide it is believed in the village that she did it because the letter she received probably contained a truth, this time, but when later her maid is clearly murdered things change, and it all becomes a much bigger thing. It is at this point that a woman goes to Jerry yelling that something must be done, that this story must end, and when Jerry asks her what exactly does she think could be done, she replies that she'll call an expert on that sort of things, an expert on human behavious... can you think of someone? :lol: Yes, she calls Miss Marple.
There's also a double love story in the book because both Jerry and his sister Joanna fell in love for someone in the village, and decided to stay and get married :-)
This was a good book, yes :-D
Ita: Il terrore viene per posta

Death in the clouds by Agatha Christie

I love this book, very nice and of course very well written. I've always loved Poirot much more than Miss Marple because he's sweeter, kinder, a nice person. She's a good person too, of course, but not remotely as sweet.
Here, Poirot is flying from France to England when a woman is found dead, murdered, on the plane. It was a funny moment when the jury's verdict was that Poirot wasw the murderer :lol: a bizarre foreigner, it's all they needed to suspect him :lol: British people have really no consideration at all for foreigners..
All the more reason for finding the murderer, if ever he needed one. The only possible suspects were on the plane, of course. Among them are Jane Grey and Norman Gale that after that episode start going out together. We follow Poirot's investigation, meet from time to time inspector Japp but not so much as to be annoying, since I don't particularly like him.
SPOILER for everyone who hasn't read it, but also for future me who will probably have forgotten it.
I had no clue, this time, although of course I never stop thinking about it because it takes away the pleasure of the reading and of the surprise, so I sort of like not having a clue sometimes.
It was norman gale, dressed as a flight assistant so nobody paid him any attention, nobody noticed it was him and not a real steward. That second coffee spoon really was interesting, wasn't it? This is what I love about Agatha: it's all there, you have all the clues that they have, it's fascinating.

Ita:Delitto in cielo