Book Review (1)

Book Title: Cat O’ nine tales
Author: Jeffrey Archer

The book comprises of 12 short stories, which are mostly true, namely “the man who robbed his own post office”, “Maestro”, “Don’t drink the water”, “It can’t be October already”, “The red king”, “The wisdom of Solomon”, “know what I mean?”, “Charity begins at home”, “The alibi”, “A Greek Tragedy”, “the commissioner”, “In the eye of the beholder”.

“The man who robbed his own post office”, is a story about a couple who sells Fish and chips, soon after that, they got a post office at a low price, however, there was a change, the post office was no longer a category A, it was downgraded to category B. If they sell the post office, they will lose a lot of money, thus they decided to get back the money by stealing the money from their post office. Exactly how they steal it and what happen to them next, read the book to find out.

“Don’t drink the water” is the story about a company chairman who tried to poison his wife while on a trip to St Petersburg- both with unexpected consequence. He had wanted to poisoned his wife as he knew that his wife wanted a divorce, fearing of his assets to be given to his wife, he plotted a cruel method to kill his wife, in the end, he lose everything, including his life…

“Maestro”, an Italian restaurateur ends up in jail, unable to explain to the tax man how he can own a yacht, Ferrari and a home in Florence, while only declaring a profit of $70,000 a year,

These twelve stories are satisfying because they are ingeniously plotted, include richly drawn characters and have deliciously unexpected conclusions. They feature the mad, the bad and the dangerous to know as well as some more poignant and telling characters. The author was in five different prisons and he picked up several stories that were not appropriate to include in the day-to-day journals of a prison diary.

Reflection:
This book allows me to learn phrases to describe incidents and people, example “Doug was half an inch less than six feet, with thick, black, wavy hair that was going grey at the temples, and a stomach that hung over his trousers.” This sentence was used to describe a man who has been sent to jail for smuggling, in the story “Know what I mean”.


Besides that, I think I know more about the jail system there. Example, they can work in the jail, as a librarian or working in pig farm, kitchen, the stores or cleaning out lavatories. I think short stories are equally great as long stories. For short stories, you can finish that story very quickly and just in one book , you can actually read many stories. However, the disadvantage is that you may want to continue reading that story, but the story ends very quickly.

YunLi =D