PETRONA

Book Review: Telling Tales by Ann Cleeves

Telling Tales by Ann Cleeves
(Pan, 2005)

The second novel to feature Inspector Vera Stanhope is an involving mystery set in the fictional coastal village of Elvert in East Yorkshire. Emma and James are a young married couple with a new baby, who have recently come to live in the area. James is a pilot, regularly travelling to Hull and other ports to guide the huge trawlers into the harbour.  Emma overhears James and their neighbour, a handsome man called Dan who runs a ceramics studio, mention that Jeanie Long has committed suicide. Jeanie was imprisoned ten years ago for killing a young teenager.

As Emma thinks back to the past, it transpires that she’s rather involved in this story. She was the best friend of the murdered girl, and in fact was the person who discovered her body all those years ago. At the time, she was living a rather tedious life with an overbearing father, Robert, who had been a businessman in York but who had “found God” and retrained as a probation officer, hence his relocation to this small village near the prison. Her mother Mary, is a bit of a doormat and her younger brother Christopher more interested in his own solitary pursuits than in any of his family. Determined to escape, Emma went to university, met and married James, but is now somewhat disconcerted that he has insisted they live near Emma’s parents, so she has family around during his many absences.

When Jeanie’s death is reported in the papers, a man comes forward to tell the police that she could not have committed the crime. Jeanie’s story in her defence was that she had been in London on the day of the murder, but nobody at the time could corroborate her account. The person she saw in London was about to travel, so had missed the news and did not know that Jeanie had been convicted of the crime. His evidence is deemed convincing, so the police now have to re-open the case as well as investigate the robustness of their own earlier, flawed investigation. Hence they call in a representative from a neighbouring force who could not have been involved in any errors or cover-ups, in the shape of Vera Stanhope.

Vera undertakes her investigation in her own, idiosyncratic way. She doesn’t ask witnesses into the police station but travels round their homes, nosing about and getting them to talk in unguarded moments of gossip. She knows that Dan, the ceramics man, was on the police force at the time of the murder, but left soon after Jeanie was convicted. Why? Caroline Fletcher, Dan’s immediate superior who was in charge of the earlier investigation, also left the police force soon afterwards, and it isn’t long before Vera discovers a huge conflict of interest. Even James, Emma’s husband, seems to be hiding something in his past.

Telling Tales is a really good read. It’s a solid crime plot, and an insightful account of the way people in small, isolated communities live and think. There are plenty of minor characters who come to life, and plenty of action to keep the pages turning. My only complaint about the book is that I found the identity and psychology of the murderer unbelievable. I knew who I thought was responsible and I was wrong, but had I been right, the denouement might have been more obvious but I think it would have been more convincing. I also felt that Vera did not come into the book enough! She’s a great character, and we learnt quite a bit about her background in the previous novel in which she appeared, The Crow Trap. Here, we learn very little more about her personal life, but she’s a treat in all the scenes in which she appears, and I am looking forward to encountering her again in Hidden Depths, her next outing.

Read other reviews of this novel at: Mysteries in Paradise, DJ's Krimiblog,  Mystery Mile, and Suggestions for a Book Worm.

There are several reviews and posts at DJ's Krimiblog about (and even by) Ann Cleeves, which all can be seen here.

My reviews of another of Ann Cleeves's series, The Shetland Quartet, are at Euro Crime.

The Vera Stanhope books have been turned into a UK TV series that will be shown later this year. The novels will be reissued with new covers to coincide with the programmes.

Book Review: Day After Day by Carlo Lucarelli

Day After Day by Carlo Lucarelli

Translated by Oonagh Stransky.

Vintage, 2005. (First published in Italy 2000).

Day After Day is, after a bit of a rocky start, a tight and exciting follow-up to Almost Blue. It again follows an investigation led by Ispettore Grazia Negro of the Bologna police. The main plot concerns a series of assassinations by a professional killer -- there is no apparent reason for the choice of victim, and no careless clues to give the police a handle on events. No clue, that is, except for the allusion to a pit-bull terrier in some form at each crime scene.

By clever intercutting between different characters’ perspectives, ranging from the secretive “mother’s boy” Vittorio, a jewellery salesman with a difference, to lovestruck young student Alex who helps moderate an internet chat room to earn some spare cash, the story gradually comes into focus. It’s a taut narrative told with frenzied pace, some shocks, and with little space for rambling digressions -- though Vittorio does have time to muse:  “When they rise out of nowhere, [the] images are called fantasies. When they’ve already happened, they’re memories.”

Grazia is an extremely driven woman, with little time for personal life or even personal hygiene. Here, she's more confident, and harder, than she was in her previous appearance in Almost Blue. She acts first and thinks afterwards, which keeps the action cracking along but does lead her into some avoidable situations and, ultimately, catastrophes. I take my hat off to the author for providing a logical (I have no idea whether plausible!) explanation for the killer’s motives and actions, unlike many other thrillers about  serial criminals.


The author is a magazine editor, screenplay author and a teacher of writing, as well as being a host of a popular Italian TV series that “examines unsettling and unsolved crimes and the urban centres in which they occur”.  His earlier novel, Almost Blue, was shortlisted for the CWA gold dagger.

My review of Almost Blue, the first in this series (of which Day After Day is the second).

Reviews of Almost Blue and Day After Day at Crime Scraps, the blog that encouraged me to try this author.

Carlo Lucarelli's Almost Blue and Day After Day discussed by Glenn Harper at International Noir Fiction.

Carlo Lucarelli at the Italian Mysteries website.

Book Review: Play Dead by Harlan Coben

Play Dead by Harlan Coben
Orion, 2010 (first published in the USA 1990).

I probably should not review this novel. It’s an early book by the now-bestselling Harlan Coben which was published in the USA 20 years ago but never made it to the UK until now.  In his preface to this UK edition, the author writes “Okay, if this is the first book of mine you’re going to try, stop now. Return it. Grab another. It’s okay. I’ll wait.” (Short sentences are his forte.) I can only agree.

Play Dead is a grand guignol melodrama. An impossibly glossy and beautiful young couple – David is a basketball star and Laura a top model turned international fashion designer -- elope and honeymoon in Australia. After a few idyllic days, she goes off to a business meeting and he goes swimming – then missing, presumed dead. A few rags chewed by a shark come into it, inevitably.

Laura returns devastated to the USA after fruitlessly trying to find out what happened to David with the help of his mentor, ex-policeman “T.J.” She’s determined not to let things lie, so while running her business (going into work once, looking at some designs and adjusting the length of the skirts) she discovers more about David’s circumstances. We find out about her family – Gloria, her sister, who is a recovering drug addict; her neurotic mother; and her workaholic surgeon father. David’s disappearance or death are related to a murder that happened years ago. Gradually, Laura zeroes in on this, despite T. J.’s strange attempts to put her off the track. David’s evil brother Stan turns up at the funeral, determined to make a buck out of Laura, soon switching his attention to damaged Gloria.

I can’t bear to write any more – the novel is very readable in a “chick lit” kind of way. It is entirely devoid of realistic detail and almost completely predictable,  but at the same time it has glimpses of how the author has developed since he wrote it. The plot turns out to be both blindingly obvious and totally ludicrous – nobody’s motivation stacks up for a second, and people do the most convoluted things for years, for no reason I can discern. I only read this book because I was going on holiday and wanted a light read:  though I enjoyed it a little bit, my main reaction is to feel silly for having bothered with it.

I read the UK edition, but I posted a picture of both the US (left) and the UK (right) covers for comparison.

According to the author's website, he wrote another early novel, Miracle Cure, which also will be re-released this or next year.  You can read his introduction to Play Dead here. I can't easily find another independent review of the novel, but there are some varied reports from readers at Amazon.

Book Review: A Beautiful Place to Die, by Malla Nunn

A Beautiful Place to Die, by Malla Nunn.
Published by Picdor, 2009.

This impressive debut novel is set in South Africa in 1952, in the immediate aftermath of the election which resulted in the Boer government and specifically the Immorality Act, by which the “white”, coloured” and “black” races were not allowed to intermarry or have relationships. This cruel and totally wrong policy forms the backdrop to this story set in the small country town of Jacob’s Rest, where the chief of police, Captain Pretorius, has been shot to death just before the book opens.

The person who is sent to investigate the crime is Detective Emmanuel Cooper, who is an English veteran of the Second World War. He soon realises that he isn’t going to get any help from the local police officials, who consist of one absent officer and one very stupid, green recruit, Constable Hepple. He therefore turns to the Zulu Constable Shabalala, who is the only intelligent and experienced member of the local force. Shabalala, however, seems to know more than he is prepared to tell Cooper.

Pretorius, it soon emerges, was more than just the police chief – he, his wife and six sons ruled the town, owning most of the businesses and land. The sons are all arrogant and demand that Cooper finds out who killed their father. Cooper’s first problem is to determine a cause of death in the absence of the (white) police doctor who is travelling– he takes the body to the local convent where he is advised by the nuns to ask the “Old Jew” to undertake the task.  The “Old Jew”, who owns a general store and runs a small clothes-making operation in the back room,  turns out to be not only medically qualified but also to be an intelligent companion for Cooper as he desperately tries to make headway in investigating the crime despite being constantly hampered. (The fact that Cooper is not allowed to order a post mortem because Pretorius’s sons say their father “would not have liked it” is just the first of very many, increasingly challenging setbacks.)

The crime investigation is a tool used by the author to show at every opportunity the awfulness, meanness and worse of the prevailing administration and the attitudes it engendered in the people then living in South Africa. Not only do the Boers regard themselves as God’s chosen people living in a land that has been given to them by divine right, but very soon the infamous Security Branch step in to oversee the investigation. They want to resolve the case as quickly as possible, ideally by finding a likely “communist” and beating a confession out of him, so Cooper has to play a careful game of appearing to help while in fact continuing his search for the real perpetrator(s). Cooper’s methods are those of the traditional detective, but involve him experiencing the parallel life of the town along the “Kaffir paths” (mean little tracks that the black population had to use instead of the paved streets) and among the hovels and shacks that are the homes of the non-white population.

Malla Nunn is a great storyteller, and this novel gripped me to the end. It is somewhat of a melodrama, though, as the circumstances of Pertorius’s death become clearer in a series of dramatic sequences that occasionally stretch credibility. My main problem with the novel, however, is one of attitude -- Cooper is a character in 1952 yet he has modern sensibilities. Rather than seeming like an enlightened liberal thinker of his time, he seems to me to me more like a 2010 man who has been parachuted in. Nevertheless, he’s an attractive character, and very deserving of the reader’s sympathies, both because of his dogged determination to get to the bottom of things despite considerable personal danger, but also because he’s vulnerable. Looking at the novel from the strict perspective of the mystery, the solution depends too much on people (even his friends) not telling Cooper things until a suitable point in the narrative -- but this book is more than a crime novel, and it is one that will rest in the mind for a while.

 

I thank the UK publisher, and James Long in particular, for my copy of this book.

Other reviews of this novel are at: Reactions to Reading (Bernadette); Yet Another Crime Fiction Blog (Keishon); Mostly Fiction; and Reviewing the Evidence (Denise Pickles). Bernadette's review also provides a link to an interview with the author at National Public Radio.

Malla Nunn at Simon and Schuster (the US publisher) and PanMacmillan/Picador (UK publisher).

Book Review: The Silence of the Rain by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza

The Silence of the Rain by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza

Translated by Benjamin Moser

Picador, 2003. First published in Brazil, 1998.

I like mysteries in which the reader knows more than the detective, as one can see how the deductive reasoning takes place. In The Silence of the Rain, a successful, fairly young businessman gets into his car after a day at work, and shoots himself. When the body is found and reported by the parking garage attendant, however, the police treat the case as a murder because the man’s briefcase containing, among other crucial things, a note of explanation, is missing.

The premise is fascinating, and the chief investigator, Inspector Espinosa, is a great character. He is a bit of a world-weary cynic, as is necessary for a public official living in Rio de Janeiro, a huge city depicted with vigour and affection, which is host to the widest range of income levels and activities imaginable. The main characters in the case are drawn vividly – mainly the inspector himself and the two principal women concerned, Bia, the widow of the deceased, and Alba, girlfriend of Julio. Julio is a lecturer at the university who has eyes on Bia, who is both very rich and very cultured. He’s flirting with her in an upmarket kind of a way as the novel opens, as both of them have been on the same panel in a cultural debate. Julio is somewhat patronising towards Alba, his “official” girlfriend, as she is part-owner of a gym and he doesn’t consider her to be very intellectual. Bia, he thinks, seems much more his level.

Espinosa meets all these characters, and is very taken with both women. In fact, he spends most of the novel torn between them, although one of them makes herself more available than the other. He is determined to find the perpetrator of the crime, though the reader knows, unlike him, that the crime he is investigating is not the one he thinks he is.

There is a lot to like about this book. The atmosphere and characterisation is very good indeed, transporting the reader to Rio de Janerio and showing pretty accurately (if my experience in Caracas, Venezuela, is anything to go by) what life is like for the have-nots as well as for the haves. There are some neat plot twists that kept me glued to the page. Although I found the inherent sexism a bit hard to take, it’s a convincing representation of how certain people think – even so, Espinosa’s oscillating attitude to the two women in the book made me lose sympathy with him, somewhat. He also seems pretty incompetent, letting suspects go on the basis that they won’t abscond (then they do), or opening himself and his companion up to danger unnecessarily. Eventually, he twigs part of what is going on, and the reader is in a familiar race against time.

Unfortunately, the denouement is not convincing, to say the least – the book seems to run out of steam when a climactic event occurs about 50 pages towards the end, and there are some glaring holes in the plot. Nevertheless, it is well written and, it seems, superbly translated.  I enjoyed reading it very much, despite the various  flaws, and will probably read the second book to feature this rather intriguing detective, who is an appealing character despite, or perhaps because of, his all-too-human errors on professional and personal matters.

 

Other reviews of this book are at Mysteries in Paradise (Kerrie), whose review stimulated me to buy the novel; The View from the Blue House (Rob Kitchin); San Francisco Chronicle, whose review is titled "Unusual sanity among Rio's chaos: bookish cop wends his way through murders in Brazil". Quote from the review: "This policeman, with his existential sensibility, his exotic beat and his literary merit, seems poised to join the ranks of the great modern international fictional cops such as Sjowall and Wahloo's Martin Beck and Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander; the policeman with the philosopher's name who confesses: "I'd rather not have to fill out useless forms or write reports as an expression of police incompetence. I'd rather, when I meet a pretty woman, not have to start out with the ominous line: 'I'm Inspector Espinosa from the First Precinct.' " "

Interview with the author. with discussion at The Game's Afoot (Jose Ignacio Escribano).

Book Review: The Dragon Man by Garry Disher

The Dragon Man by Garry Disher
Bitter Lemon Press 2007 (first published in Australia in 1999).

The Dragon Man is first in a series of five, soon to be six, novels about Detective Inspector Hal Challis and his Sergeant, Ellen Destry. It’s one of my favourite kinds of novel, in that it describes in detail a police investigation into a crime, provides a strong sense of location and society, and also addresses the personal and professional lives of the detectives concerned. 

The crime in this case occurs when a woman is abducted on the Old Peninsula Highway in a (fictional) area south-east of Melbourne, Australia. Challis is responsible for crime over a fairly large area in this peninsula, where constant state cutbacks to social services make the job of the police harder – not just because of the increased likelihood of crime, but in creating a challenge for people’s daily lives, for example in organising child care when nurseries are closed down and you have to work shifts.

Challis is a serious-minded policeman, whose disastrous marriage has resulted in his wife being imprisoned. His domestic history is gradually revealed via his wife’s late-night, drunk phone calls to her husband from jail – he cannot bear to cut her off completely by divorcing her. Challis is a loner, taking refuge from his less than satisfactory personal life and his heavy workload via his hobby of slowly restoring a vintage World War Two-era plane. His sergeant, Destry, is a highly competent police officer but has her own domestic struggles in the shape of a resentful husband who is also a policeman but at a lower rank, and a sulky teenage daughter – a telling subplot which I am sure reflects many people’s experiences.

The story of the crime investigation is very well paced throughout the book as we come to learn more about the day-to-day life of people who live in the Peninsula, as well as and the inner lives of the various members of the police force, positive and negative, as they attempt to find the person who is abducting and killing vulnerable women.

There are several intriguing threads to the main plot, which gradually come together in a tense climax. I have to admit that the identity of the perpetrator was pretty obvious, but that didn’t detract from my enjoyment of this highly atmospheric novel, which transported me right into the lives and concerns of the people within its pages. I’m definitely going to seek out the subsequent novels in the series.

 

Part of the publisher description for this book:

Summer on the Mornington Peninsula near Melbourne. The heat's ramping up, the usual holiday madness building. Detective Inspector Hal Challis is already recycling his shower water and starting to dread Christmas.
But this year there's something more. Women abducted and murdered on the Old Highway. A pall of fear over the scorched paddocks. The media are demanding answers—and Challis's sleepy beat is set to explode.

I decided to read this book because the author is a favourite of Bernadette of the excellent blog Reactions to Reading. Here is what she had to say about this particular book.

Other reviews of The Dragon Man are at: Australian Crime Fiction; Allreaders.com (reviewer, Harriet Klausner); and e-opinions.com.

Question and answer session with Garry Disher and Angela Savage.

Author's website, including bibliography.

Book Review: Willing Flesh by Adam Creed

Willing Flesh by Adam Creed
(Faber & Faber, 2010).

The second in the series featuring DI Staffe (William Wagstaffe) of the City of London police is an atmospheric crime novel set among the rich financiers who always seem one step ahead even while credits crunch and bubbles burst. The story starts out with Elena, a cool and intelligent Russian beauty, who is possibly a prostitute, on solitary weekend in the country, away from her usual haunts.  Elena thinks she is in control of events in her life and that of a small circle of friends, but her perception is wrong. Before Staffe and his colleagues can get very far with investigating the crime at which Elena is the centre, other tragic events occur.

Willing Flesh is a pared-down novel compared with its predecessor, Suffer The Children. Here, there is no mention of Staffe’s obsessive investigation into his parents’ deaths in Spain, his ownership of several London houses, and only the faintest reference to his troubled sister Marie and her son Harry. This reduction in the number of simultaneous themes provides a welcome focus.  As well as investigating a series of crimes, Staffe is increasingly keen on his girlfriend Sylvie, asking her to marry him – but he seems incapable of relinquishing his close (too close?) friendship with Rosa. Rosa, it turns out, can help Staffe’s investigation but at a cost to her own safety, so Sylvie finds herself providing a refuge for someone who may be her rival.

Willing Flesh is a readable novel, despite being written in the present tense, which for me always seems rather self-conscious. The plot is by no means convincing, however. I find it hard to credit that Staffe, a rather Lord Peter Wimsey-type character, can be a police detective yet carry out his own investigation independently of his colleagues, with no comeback from anyone. This means he can, for example,  break into suspects’ houses and steal crucial letters, only telling the official investigation about them much later on – mysteriously, everyone from subordinates to superiors tolerates Staffe’s parallel, almost amateur, activities which constantly obscure the truth and seem to me to have little point.  As the book reaches a climax, Staffe is aware that he and Sylvie are in danger so asks a colleague to tail him in his car, but leaves her unguarded so that someone can just walk into her house which is apparently not even locked. The dénouement in a boat (I can say no more without spoiling the plot) is not credible to me.

Another problem is that there are far too many boilerplate suspects – the foreign entrepreneur, the city businessman and the Russian suspected drug dealer are insufficiently different from each other to involve the reader, along with clichéd characters such as the rich young drug addict, the tart with a heart, and a “cor-blimey” dad.

The author is an academic who teaches writing, and some passages in this novel are delicately moving. However, I feel that he isn’t very interested in the police procedural aspects, so for me the failure to bother with even basic attention to reality conspires to undermine the credibility of the whole. The book is certainly readable, but I think this series would be better if the somewhat snobbish Staffe operated in the same universe as everyone else rather than being somehow superior to the normal rules of life that apply to his colleagues.

I thank Karen of Euro Crime for my copy of this book.

My Euro Crime review of Suffer the Children, the previous (and first) novel in the series.

Read other reviews of Willing Flesh at: It's a Crime! ; Honest Fi (brief). See also: publisher website.

Book Review: Needle in a Haystack by Ernesto Mallo

Needle in a Haystack by Ernesto Mallo

Translated by Jethro Soutar. 

Bitter Lemon Press, 2010.

Inspector Lascano lives in Buenos Aires in the 1970s, at the time of the military dictatorship. It was a terrible regime, first encountered by me in book form in Isabelle Allende’s marvellous The House of the Spirits,  and it seems to me, a person who is lucky enough not to have lived through this experience, that the times were so cruel that they must be impossible to write about directly and without allegory or magical allusions.

Ernesto Mallo disagrees; his detached novel is measured and very well plotted. He tells the story of Superintendent Lascano, a widower who cannot get over the death of his wife, living in an apartment still containing all her clothes and other reminders of her existence. His only friend is a pathologist, and the two men meet occasionally for a drink or meal.

The story is told from the perspectives of a half-dozen or so characters, but not chronologically, so it is satisfying and illuminating when another piece of the jigsaw falls into place. At its heart, the novel is a standard murder investigation. Lascano is sent out to look at the bodies of two young people who have been shot. When he gets to the location out of town where the victims have been abandoned, he finds that there are three bodies, not two. Because Lascano cannot investigate the case of the young man and woman, as the police are not allowed to interfere with the military’s executions,  he decides to look into the shooting of the other victim, an older man. The investigation carries on in parallel with our gradual discovery of how the crimes happened, and follows through to the aftermath and beyond.

As well as being cleverly plotted crime fiction , the book is a moving love story.  By its refusal to opine and overtly denounce the terrible regime, but choosing instead to cooly report numerous “every day” atrocities that everyone has to live with, the novel achieves a powerful emotional impact. Several of the subsidiary characters really live on the page, and I enjoyed (in a grim kind of a way) finding out how their stories came to intersect. At the end, the author completely follows through on his theme, which means that unlike many examples of crime fiction there is a proper ending and a genuinely interesting potential for a future novel.

Ernesto Mallo, according to the biography provided in the book, is a former member of the anti-Junta guerrilla movement. He’s an essayist, journalist and playwright. This novel is the first of a trilogy, originally written in 2005. I’m very much looking forward to reading the other two, if we are lucky enough for them to be translated into English.

I thank Karen Meek of Euro Crime for so kindly giving me a copy of this novel. Her review was published at Euro Crime last Sunday, and can be seen here. The novel was also recently reviewed by Norman at Crime Scraps blog, and by Glenn at International Noir Fiction.

As an aside, both Karen and Glenn have likened this novel to the De Luca series by Carlo Lucarelli. I have read Lucarelli's other series (Almost Blue and Day After Day - review t/c) but clearly,  I must now read his De Luca books!

 

Book review: Acts of Violence by Ryan David Jahn

Acts of Violence by Ryan David Jahn
(Macmillan New Writers, 2009)

This novel is on the shortlist for the John Creasey (New Blood) dagger award for 2010. By coincidence I read the book recently so have prioritised a review.

Acts of Violence is inspired by a murder case in the 1960s, in which none of 38 witnesses who saw a woman being attacked did anything to help. In this novel, the woman becomes Katrina Marino, who is leaving her work as a waitress in a diner very late one night. Her car almost doesn’t start but eventually does. She drives home, just failing to see an accident that happens seconds after she drives through a road junction. When she gets home, she’s attacked in the yard outside her house. Several of her neighbours in the apartment block see or hear her cries. This novel is about them and what they did that night, as well as about Katrina herself.

The plotting is very clever, as events during this long night are told from different characters’ points of view at different times, as people go about their legal or illegal business, or have crises in their domestic lives. Gradually, a complete picture of the night builds up, and the intersections between people’s lives and motivations become clear.

Although the novel is well-written and assured in its pacing and plot -- the character of Katrina in particular portrayed with warmth and pity -- I did not like it. I just could not bear to read about everyone’s actions and concerns while a woman lay dying. The style of the novel reminds me of In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, another book that I didn’t like while at the same time appreciating that it was well-written and sincere. I think that Acts of Violence is also a sincere book, and has a moral message, but it isn’t a book that I enjoyed reading one tiny bit. On the back cover, the novel is said to be sure to appeal to fans of Bret Easton Ellis, a writer whose books I have no interest in reading, and the style to Quentin Tarantino, whose films I have (deliberately) never seen. So, I conclude that this style and subject is simply not for me, but these comparisons may help others to decide whether or not to read this book.

I thank Karen of Euro Crime for my copy of this novel.

Other books on the New Blood dagger shortlist are Rupture by Simon Lelic; The Pull of the Moon by Diane Janes; and The Holy Thief by William Ryan. The winner will be announced on 8 October 2010.

Other reviews of Acts of Violence can be found at: It's a Crime! (very positive); The Observer (brief); The Book Bag (positive); International Thriller Writers (brief).

 

Book review: Dead at Daybreak by Deon Meyer

Dead at Daybreak by Deon Meyer
Translated from the Afrikaans by Madeleine van Biljon 
(Hodder and Stoughton, 2000).

Dead at Daybreak is an exciting yet emotional thriller about a broken man, Van Heerden (we learn his first name later on in the book). At the outset, he wakes up in a jail cell after drunkenly attacking five dentists in a bar. (His justification? “Two were GPs.”) Van Heerden is bailed out by a lawyer friend, who has recommended him to a fellow-lawyer, Hope Beneke, for a job. Hope is representing Wilna van As, whose partner Jan Smit was violently killed nearly 10 years ago in a robbery at their house. In the ransacked safe, according to Wilna, was Smit’s will, leaving everything to her. Because they were not married, if the will cannot be found within 10 years of Smit’s death, his business and properties, in which Wilna was a partner, will go entirely to the state. There is a week to go before the 10-year deadline. All previous attempts by the police to track down the killer(s) have failed, so as a last-ditch effort, Wilna’s lawyer Hope decides to hire a PI. This is where Van Heerden comes in.

It doesn’t take Van Heerden long to find evidence that the police missed previously. We learn, though, that he is a former member of the police himself, having worked before his retirement at the same station as Matt Joubert, the attractive main character in the author’s previous (debut) novel, Dead Before Dying. Joubert is an occasional, comforting character in this present novel, but after he uncovers the new evidence, the main police liaison for Van Heerden is the original investigating officer, Tony O’Grady. O’Grady is torn between annoyance that his earlier competence is being questioned, and his desire to re-open the case to find out who killed Smit. An uneasy partnership develops between the men.

Van Heerden also gets off on the wrong foot with Hope by deliberately confronting and belittling her from the first moment he meets her. She’s just about to sack him, in fact, when his mother steps in to plea for her son’s continuing involvement. Part of the book tells Van Heerden’s life story in flashback, starting with the story of how his parents met. I found the parents' romance schmaltzy compared with the rest of the book, and the character of the mother not convincing through being too idealised.  Hope, however, is a more rounded character whose views of her prickly employee see-saw throughout the novel.

As the rest of Van Heerden’s story is told, in parallel with the exciting events in the present, we learn the full extent of why he left the police force, and why he’s such a mess now. In the interim, there is a fascinating subplot about his journey through academia and his views on policing, which I very much enjoyed, along with some other bleakly humorous digressions.

Dead at Daybreak is a great mix of thriller and story of personal redemption. It’s very exciting and intelligently plotted. There are some really good and original set-pieces (particularly one involving four women in Van Heerden's mother's house) and shocks. The novel certainly has some flaws, for example the final confrontation scenes and the question of how certain events became resolved under these circumstances. Also, one has to admit, the central premise of the one-week deadline is a bit contrived, though it adds such pace and excitement to the book’s structure. Even taking these downsides into account, I overwhelmingly enjoyed this novel which combines a really solid investigative and thriller plot, with an involving story of how a man has reached rock bottom and gradually realises that there might possibly still be a chance for him.

About the book at the author's website.

Read other reviews of this novel at: Reactions to Reading (Bernadette in Oz); The Mystery Site; and Curled up with a Good Book.

Dead at Daybreak at The Complete Review.

I have read and reviewed three other novels by Deon Meyer: Dead Before Dying; Blood Safari (review at Euro Crime); and Thirteen Hours (review at Euro Crime).

It won't be long before I've caught up with the author's backlist, specifically Heart of the Hunter and Devil's Peak. I have also heard the welcome news that Deon Meyer will be attending Crime Fest next year (2011) as a featured guest author.

Book review: Bad Intentions by Karin Fossum

Bad Intentions by Karin Fossum, translated by Charlotte Barslund.
Publisher, Harvill Secker.

Bad Intentions is an extremely bleak anatomy of the aftermath of a death. Three friends, Axel, Philip and Jon, are spending the weekend at a cabin on the shores of Dead Water lake. They decide to go out for a midnight boat trip, and while out on the water one of them steps over the side and drowns. Was it an accident, suicide or murder? We don’t really know, but the two survivors agree not to call for help until the morning, in the meantime concocting a plan to present the event in a way most flattering to themselves.

Karin Fossum tells of the fallout with her characteristic calmness, clarity and without judging her characters. The three young men all grew up together in the same Norwegian village. One is a commercially successful advertising executive, another is a drop out who is constantly high from drugs, and the third is in a mental hospital after suffering a breakdown. The reader gradually learns more about all three of them, partly through flashbacks to their childhood, partly through the two survivors’ feelings and actions since the death of their friend, and partly via the police investigation into the death, headed by Inspector Seger, who is fleshed out a little here as a character compared with his last outing. 

There were, for me, no surprises in this book, but I enjoyed seeing how the tale unfolded and experiencing the perspectives of the various characters. The novel is very sad: the mother and girlfriend of the dead youth are both movingly depicted. Although the sudden close friendship of the mother with another woman seemed a bit unlikely, it does add a little glimmer of a positive spirit to what is a pretty downbeat story, albeit with a strong dash of poetic justice at the end.  

Karin Fossum writes such telling mini-fables about the issues surrounding depression and despair. I very much enjoy her books, but they are certainly not exciting or uplifting. Her world is a gloomy one.

Other reviews of this novel are at: Euro Crime (by Karen Meek), Booktrust Translated Fiction, The Independent (by Barry Forshaw) and  Nordic Bookblog.

Reviews of Karin Fossum's earlier novels can be read at Euro Crime.

Book review: Vodka Doesn't Freeze by Leah Giarratano

 Vodka Doesn’t Freeze by Leah Giarratano (Bantam)

A novel bought to me by the slow boat from Australia, sent on its way by the generous Bernadette Inoz (;-) ), whose blog Reactions to Reading is essential for anyone addicted to excellent book reviews.

Leah Giarrantano’s debut novel is a very readable novel on a harrowing topic – paedophilia. Jill Jackson of the homicide department of the Sydney police force is a driven woman ever since she was kidnapped and sexually abused as a young girl. She exercises and washes obsessively, and can’t eat a meal, hence she’s very thin. She does not like men at all, and has previously fallen foul of a sexist senior cop by busting a biker drug-dealing gang – because the cop’s brother was one of the criminals. She is attracted to her partner Scott, though, which causes her quite a bit of confusion.

Jill finds herself investigating the murder of a man whose body is discovered near a children’s swimming area. It soon transpires that the victim was a paedophile. Although few of Jill’s fellow-detectives have any sympathy for the victim, Jill, representing the archetypal “pure” cop common to detective fiction, is determined to catch the perpetrator. Matters become complicated when Jill herself finds herself in danger as a direct result of her investigation – more than once.

As well as the crime plot, the book also covers many issues concerning child abuse and its effect on those not only who experienced it but on those who treat or help the victims. The bleak message seems to be that there is no way out, and that the dark side of human nature is everywhere (there are very few characters or incidents in this book that don’t reveal some unsavoury fact about someone).  Yet, without wishing to reveal too much about the details, the classic themes of degradation and redemption figure for one of the characters, leaving the door wide open for various future directions.

As a first novel, Vodka Doesn’t Freeze is confident and full of energy, setting the scene for themes to be explored in more detail – the sexist, possibly corrupt police team; Jill’s family dynamics; and the relationship between Jill and her partner.  It is also admirable in the way that it does not shirk from addressing quite horrible issues, in a way that is not salacious in the least. Where it does not work quite so well is in the prosaic writing style that renders most of the characters as sketches rather than as people with whom the reader can feel an emotional connection. The author has written a pacy, cracking and very dark book, and has provided herself with plenty of room for development of her characters and their situations. All in all, an assured and fascinating first novel, with heaps of future potential.

Read other reviews of this novel at: Reactions to Reading; View from the Blue House; Mysteries in Paradise; Crime Down Under.

Publisher website.

Book Review: Afterlight by Alex Scarrow

Afterlight, by Alex Scarrow (Orion, May 2010)

What would Britain be like 10 years after the oil has run out? This stark question is the basis of Afterlight, a crackingly absorbing thriller. The novel is ostensibly a sequel to the author’s Last Light, but you don’t have to have read the earlier book to enjoy this one, even though the same family, the Sutherlands, is at the centre of the story.

Afterlight is set at a time 10 years after the “end of oil”, interspersed with flashback chapters about the days and weeks immediately after this climactic event, told in Last Light, when civilised society as we know it collapsed. The “10 years on” story focuses on a small community who scratch an existence on a defunct gas/oil rig off the Norfolk coast. The surviving members of the Sutherland family have made their way there and live with a few hundred others, mainly woman and a few older men. They manage to be self-sustaining by growing plants, keeping chickens and doing lots of fishing. One of the men has rigged up a generator producing methane from human and chicken excrement, which provides a few hours of power each evening. The group lives simply, everyone making a contribution, sleeping crammed together on the various rig platforms: occasionally, a few of them sail to Bracton, the (fictional) coastal town nearby, for supplies from the abandoned shops and warehouses.

In the “10 years ago” sections, we learn the bare outline of how the Sutherlands ended up on the rig. This part of the novel, however,  mainly focuses on one of the government-designated areas for people to collect in the event of a disaster, the ex-Millennium Dome. The Dome is the only one of these areas left, owing to Alan Maxwell, the civil servant in charge, only letting in a fraction of the number of refugees that he was told to in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. He’s used some clever tactics learned during his time as a history teacher to keep control of his mini-society in the ensuing years, but he is acutely aware that the supplies laid in 10 years ago are in danger of running out.

The first third of the book establishes what passes for the norm in this strange new world. The plot is kept taut by a commendable lack of sentimentality – no character is exempt from the authorial sentence of disaster or death. Hence, when a small group decides to leave the rig and cycle to London on the basis of a rumour that a new government has begun to re-establish order, we know that it is highly unlikely everyone will reach this destination. Similarly, we can be pretty confident that the social structure on the rig is unlikely to hold for very long, and it’s obvious even to those who don’t know their Ancient History that the management structure of the Dome’s population is highly unstable. 

The author is not simply interested in a Steven King-like schlokfest, thankfully, and nor is he interested in providing the reader with a survivalist’s handbook approach to post-apocalyptic life – though there are brief encounters with groups who have found these “solutions” to the anarchic chaos of the new world. Although characterisation isn’t the author’s strong point, he is very good on human psychology as well as plot pacing, and this is where the book fully comes into its own, as the tension increasingly builds up to breaking-point - while at the same time presenting and exploring outcomes of alternative societal values - young vs old, male vs female, passive vs active, religious vs athiest, etc.

Afterlight is a real page-turner, which just gets better and better. It’s written in an easy, accessible style and has some attractive protagonists who you’ll be rooting for while at the same time knowing that they aren’t all (or even any of them) going to make it. It’s this ability to create a nervy, paranoid atmosphere, together with a relentless pace, and a focus on individuals’ thoughts and actions rather than on spectacle, that makes this novel just a great way to spend the two or three hours it will take to read it. It’s a far superior book to Last Light, not least because the author has jettisoned the James Bond elements that for me were a weak spot in the earlier novel, and has focused on the drama of people and of society.
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In a post-script, the author writes: “This was a chance to see what a world without oil looked like...I’ve imagined it as being a relentlessly hard life of grim endurance, where every day is a constant reminder of all the little luxuries we once had, and lost...So this book has ended up being less about railing against our evil, greedy, consumer ways and more a swansong to those times...[The characters] ache for that old world. They pine for it.

Afterlight has certainly turned out not to be a manifesto for the hardcore survivalists out there. It’s not a celebration of anti-consumerism nor a yearning for a simple smallholding lifestyle. Sorry, that’s just not me. But, what it is – just like Last Light was – is a warning that we can’t go on consuming the way we’re doing now. ..Tough times ahead. Tough decisions ahead...and it’s unavoidable...The sad thing is, even though I’ve had my head in ‘Peak Oil’ for years and written these two books, I’m just as childish and selfish and shortsighted as anyone else.”

Read other reviews of this novel at: Material Witness (the blog that encouraged me to read this author's books - thank you!) and The Northern Echo. There are several enthusiastic but very brief paragraphs of approval on various book (mainly science-fiction) blogs. 

Afterlight at the author's website.

Reviews of the earlier novel, Last Light, at: Petrona, Material Witness, Reactions to Reading.

Book Review: The Twelve by Stuart Neville

The Twelve by Stuart Neville (Vintage)

In this impressively gripping debut novel, Gerry Fegan is living a miserable life after serving a prison sentence for terrorist murders. Released as part of the Northern Ireland peace process, he’s ravaged by guilt and haunted by the people he killed, spending most of his time in a drunken stupor. The only solution that occurs to his tortured mind in order to get any rest is to do what the ghosts are telling him and kill the people who helped him to murder them. This book tells the story of how Fegan embarks on his self-appointed grim task.

The best parts of this book, for me, concern the transition from a region in which criminal activity was passed off as an acceptable part of a fight for freedom, to one in which those same criminals have had to find a niche in a post-conflict Northern Ireland. Some of them go mainstream and become politicians and the like; others pretty much carry on as before with the same brutal behaviour; while others drift around without a clear role for themselves, and no skills to take part in constructing a future. There is a moral clarity to the author’s writing about these aspects, which I liked very much.

Although I began reading the novel with little interest in the advertised dispatch of fellow-criminals by one of their number, the simple and direct writing style (this is definitely an "easy read"), together with a good pace, drew me in. I was quite absorbed in the first half of the novel, and although I was pretty sure at the outset that everyone in it was doomed, there were some glimpses of possible salvation in the shape of a woman who, in the past as much as the present, had refused to conform to the expected behaviours of the day despite considerable pressures and threats of various kinds. She, together with her young daughter, gives the book life and spirit against a relentlessly grim collection of individuals ranging from the cynical to the worst kind of criminal.

Sadly, the last quarter of the book veers sharply downhill. The author could have taken the narrative in various directions as Fegan nears his end-game. To my mind, he took the least interesting one, which also involves a lot of explicit, nastily imagined violence. Other crime novelists, such as Gene Kerrigan and Brian McGilloway, have incorporated the awful recent history of Irish politics into their books, demonstrating the lasting impact on people and society to the reader without making this the main focus. Stuart Neville takes a much more full-on approach in The Twelve. It’s an interesting one but one that, perhaps due to the emphasis on narrative rather than character, I found unsatisfying – not least because I felt the author backed-off from following his premise to its logical conclusion. Nevertheless, the book is easy to read (if extremely unpleasant, particularly in the last section), and I can see why it has enjoyed so much success. Perhaps in his next novel, the author will be more ambitious with his characters, making them deeper in their promising yet not fully delivered emotional scope, as well as going the full way with his plot.

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This novel is the third of three that I recently purchased on a "3 for 2" special offer at Waterstones. The other two are Dark Places by Gillian Flynn and Black Water Rising by Attica Locke.

Read other (rave) reviews of The Twelve (US title - The Ghosts of Belfast) at: Euro Crime (review by Mike Ripley); The Observer; The Guardian; Crime Scene NI; Mysteries in Paradise; International Noir Fiction. 

Book Review: Dark Places by Gillian Flynn

Dark Places by Gillian Flynn (Phoenix/Orion)

Twenty-five years ago, a poor farming family in Florida was massacred, the only survivors being two of the children, Ben, the eldest, and Libby, the youngest. Libby was taken in by her aunt who lived in a nearby trailer park, but was so delinquent over the ensuing years that the woman finally threw her out when Libby killed the family dog (by accident, apparently). Now in her early 30s, Libby has lived with a succession of foster families before ending up in a grotty apartment. She’s never worked and drifted through life, still traumatised by the past, surviving on donations from the public and the royalties of a ghost-written “autobiography” of the killings. She’s so un-knowing that she does not realise she has to change the sheets on her bed occasionally, although she does own, and drive, a car. As the novel opens, the helpless and (in her own words) unpleasant Libby is told that her money has run out.

Simultaneous with this news, she receives a letter offering her money to come and talk to a group about the massacre, a prospect that seems better to her than getting a job. Libby’s brother Ben, who was 15 at the time of the deaths, was tried and convicted of the murders. It turns out that this group consists of a medley of obsessives who have pored over the case rather like detectives, and come up with a range of theories for who was really responsible – none of them Ben. Partly in a desire to “earn” some money, and partly as a reawakened need to remember the events and find out what really happened, Libby agrees to see her brother in prison and keep the group informed as to what she finds out. She also finally begins to go through the boxes of possessions from her childhood, ostensibly to sell as souvenirs, but in fact an action that triggers old memories and uncovers some contradictions.

The novel is told in alternating chapters: one set a flashback to the long day of the murders, and the other Libby’s present-day perspective of what happened then and how she feels about meeting her relatives and old associates of the family again, after so many years of isolation. In the flashback chapters, we learn of the extreme poverty in which Patty, the children’s mother lived. Patty had inherited the family farm after her parents died, her sister Diane not being interested and leaving home as soon as she was old enough. At first, things went well but soon Patty found herself with immense debts acquired while farming was a reasonable business but, by the slump of the mid-1980s, no way to pay them off. At the same time, she’d married Runner, a dropout loser, who had left her after fathering four children, Ben and three younger girls. During the flashback sequences, we discover (too) much about the 15-year-old Ben’s sexual awakening, excessive details about his less than salubrious activities with some deviant older companions, and about his alienation from his family – all providing a plethora of alternative suspects.

Dark Places, like its predecessor Sharp Objects, is a full-blown Southern melodrama in which restraint does not figure. Characters are at the mercy of their considerable emotional drives, often combined with low intellect, and are constantly scrabbling around to escape from the poverty trap by any means possible. It’s hard to sympathise with any of them, apart from Patty, whose struggles to keep the farm going and do the best by her children make her the only principled character in the novel. The fact that I found the characters unlikeable and non-admirable (education and self-reliance don’t feature much if at all), in addition to the seemingly endless details about bodily functions and unhygienic actions, did not help me to engage with this novel. It isn’t a bad book by any means, but in terms of a crime plot it certainly stretches credibility in too many ways (and breaks at least one genre “rule”) as Libby finds out what really went on that night in 1985 and why those still alive behaved as they did in the subsequent years. 

Some counterbalancing views: 

'Gutsy thriller of one woman pitted against her murderous brother.' WOMAN & HOME
'In a brilliantly interwoven plot, Gillian Flynn keeps the reader balanced on a knife-edge' TANGLED WEB 'Gillian Flynn is a great writer, equally able to ratchet up the suspense as create memorable characters and pervasive moods. This is a great and original piece of rural noir.' CATHOLIC HERALD

Other reviews: Michael Carlson (at the publisher's website); Material Witness; Reviewing the Evidence (review by Craig Sisterson) - all very positive, so I am in the minority view. I didn't hate the book, but it did nothing much for me and I was quite bored by half-way through (though I did finish it).

Book Review: Black Water Rising by Attica Locke

 Black Water Rising by Attica Locke (Serpent's Tail)

Feted by wondrous reviews and on any number of award shortlists (including the Edgar and the Orange prize), I was predisposed to like this first novel about a lawyer in 1980s Houston, Texas. The book opens promisingly when Jay Porter and his heavily pregnant wife Bernie enjoy a night-time boat ride on a bayou, Jay’s surprise birthday present to Bernie. Their romantic evening is rudely interrupted by the sound of a woman screaming for help  somewhere onshore. Then, shots ring out and they hear something falling into the water. Jay dives in and discovers that what has fallen, or been thrown, into the river is a woman – he manages to get her onto the boat. She is barely able to speak, but after taking a shower she is well enough for Jay to drive her to the nearest police station, where he leaves her, unwilling to get further involved.

These events, and the rest of the novel, are told from Jay’s perspective and in the present tense, which is not a style I like, in general. It rapidly becomes apparent that Jay, a lawyer, is somewhat untrusting of authorities verging on the paranoid – he’s in the past been on trial for a crime he didn’t (we assume) commit, and regards Bernie and his unborn child as his route to salvation. As the novel continues, we learn a lot more about Jay’s past in flashback as the story centering on the mysterious woman unfolds.

Jay never knew his own father, who died at the age of 21 after an unprovoked beating by white men, before Jay was born. When Jay was a student in the late 1960s, he was part of a political activist movement, campainging against segregation in the American South. He soon he realises that he’s more interested in working to improve the inequities of globalisation than in fighting for Black Power, unlike most of his fellow students. Other radical student groups at the university in those heady times were campaigning for different causes, notably against the Vietnam war. As well as much infighting between these factions, many of them have been infiltrated by the government. Eventually, Jay pays the price of his political persuasion and, he assumes, his colour, when he is unfairly accused of attacking a fellow student and betrayed by the one person he has come to trust.

Returning to the present, Jay is asked by his father in law, the local church minister, to represent a young man who has been beaten up. The police aren’t interested, even though the boy says he can identify the men who attacked him. With reluctance, Jay contacts Houston’s mayor, someone with whom he shares some secrets, to obtain help in the boy’s case. The case gets mixed up in massive industrial unrest among the dockers and longshoremen – a veritable alphabet soup of acronyms. In an echo of the disputes among the student factions of Jay’s memory, some unions are pushing for a strike; others are concerned that such action would cause them to lose their jobs via automation or cheap immigrant labour; others are more interested in the unfair treatment, such as career progression, meted out to black workers compared with white. For his part, Jay attempts to keep out of all this politics for the sake of his family, and confine himself to the case he’s agreed to take because of his past obligations.

There are many more themes and storylines in this novel, and this in itself is part of the problem, for me. None of them really delivers, and several are not developed– political machinations, the oil industry and its greed, the case of the missing woman and the man who persistently follows Jay, either bribing or threatening him – none of it adds up into a sufficiently coherent or consistent whole. Although, as we learn more about his past, it is easy to sympathise with Jay, he isn’t a very interesting person. Bernie, his wife, is unformed and bland. The only person in this long novel who leaps off the page is the mayor, whose life and career is most intriguing, and about whom I’d like to know more. The crime plot is meandering at best and unconvincing at worst – the number of times Jay interviews someone, or is followed by someone, or is treated inconsistently by people who follow, bribe or attack him, is neither suspenseful nor logical. The same is true of the final revelation of what is at the heart of many of these goings-on  – I was not convinced, nor was I persuaded that what had gone before fitted with the set-up and its disparate associated events.

The author seems most at home in describing political activism – 1960s student unrest, and the struggles for equality of the 1980s are vividly depicted. This impression is reinforced by her postscript to the book, in which she writes that she was named after the Attica prison riots of 1971, and about her own parents’ stories as activists. 

While reading this (too long) novel about a lawyer seeking justice and domestic peace in the deep south, I was regularly reminded of To Kill a Mockingbird, and at the start I wondered if Black Water Rising was going to turn out to be an equivalent book for its generation. The answer is no (but it’s interesting that the author’s name is a female version of the main character in that novel, lawyer Atticus Finch) – even so, Black Water Rising is an ambitious book. It is over-written and attempts too many themes, but as it is a debut novel I hope that the author, who is a talented writer, will have got a lot out of her system and will be able to focus and deliver more in her next book.

Read reviews of this book at The Guardian, Material Witness, Wordsmithonia, and many other places.

Book Review: Shadow Family by Miyuki Miyabe

Shadow Family

By Miyuki Miyabe, translator Juliet Winters Carpenter

Originally published in Japan in 2001 with the title R. P. G. (Role Playing Game), Shadow Family is the second of Miyuki Miyabe’s novels to be translated into English (the first was All She Was Worth). The story is ostensibly about a police investigation into two deaths which occur in neighbouring districts of Tokyo, so are at first considered as separate cases and handled by different local police departments. One victim, Ryosuke Tokorada, was a 48-year-old married man with one child, a teenage daughter called Kazumi; the other is a 20-year-old female college student, Naoko Imai. Forensic evidence in the shape of fibres from an unusual jacket made by a Canadian company tie the two cases together, and soon it is clear that the two victims knew each other.

The early chapters of the book are told as a fairly standard police-procedural, as various detectives, mainly Etsuro Takegami, head of the team investigating Tokorada’s death, and a female detective, Chikako Ishizu, an old colleague of Takegami’s who has now been reassigned to his squad, assemble the case, rapidly zeroing in on a main suspect. But the senior investigating officer for both murders suddenly has a heart attack and is rushed to hospital, where he remains in a coma. Before he fell ill, however, he shared with his friend Takegami his rather different theory about the cases, a theory which Takegami gains permission to test.

Tokorada’s computer reveals numerous emails between himself, his wife, daughter and a non-existent son. It emerges that this family is not his real family but a group of people who have met online and have created an alternative, imaginary family for themselves. In this family, Tokorada is sympathetic to Kazumi when she does badly in her exams, and “Mom” tries to sort out arguments between the “son” and “daughter”. The real Kazumi, a high-achieving, angry teenager, has told the police that she’s been stalked since her father's death, and it is assumed that one of the “shadow family” might be responsible, perhaps staking out the girl as the next victim. Kazumi and her mother arrive at the police station to observe the members of the “shadow family” behind a two-way mirror as the police, who have tracked them down using the recovered emails, question each one of them, in the hope that Kazumi can identify her stalker.

The events of the novel are as illusory as the shadow family of the title. The interrogations are stylised, and we don’t know why they go on for so long against so many rules of procedure, or why Chikako, the female detective, handles Kazumi and her mother in a manner that is not in any police manual. Gradually, several nested realities emerge, as the author challenges our perceptions of identity and the plot takes one or two twists that confront our own ideas of who the characters are and makes us wonder about the pressures of a society that leads these characters, dead and alive, to behave as they have done. The novel is strongest on these points, particularly concerning the feelings and actions that result from apparently “funny” or inconsequential behaviour on the internet, where realities are different and the rules of engagement are in a bubble of their own. The effects of “secret” lives on “real” lives are viewed in several ways, not least from within the police themselves, where the role of the “shadow detective” in the coma parallels that of the case of the “shadow family” at the core of the story. Although people’s use of the internet is now far more common and sophisticated than it was in 2001 when the book was first published, this focus on the psychological effects, rather than on the technology itself, means that the novel remains fresh and has not dated. And, I should not forget to mention, the translation seems excellent.

As a crime story, the book works less well (for example, the detective characters peter out somewhat, despite some interesting hints and an undeveloped line between Kazumi’s mother and Chikako about mothers’ feelings and roles). I think the author is less interested in genre staples than in wanting her readers to experience the psychological stresses of living in a rule-bound, stratified society that makes very high academic demands of its children and that allows little room for the individual to control his or her own life, so some rather awful directions are taken (by one character in particular) in an attempt to break out. Shadow Family is an intriguing and thought-provoking novel – not a warm book or one that fits into any clear definition, but one that leaves an uneasy impression in the mind after its edgy, hallucinatory account is over.

As an aside, the paperback edition of this short book is lovely, with a shiny loose cover and a delicate little Japanese bookmark nestling in the pages about half-way through.

Miyuke Miyabe also writes fantasy, science fiction and historical novels, some for teenagers, as well as crime fiction. Read about her at Wikipedia.

More reviews of Shadow Family are at The Complete Review. Other reviews are at An Adventure in Reading, Standing and Reading, and Profmike's weblog.

My review of All She Was Worth, an earlier crime novel by the same author.

Kerrie of Mysteries in Paradise has reviewed Crossfire, a paranormal thriller by Miyuke Miyabe.

Book Review: Entanglement by Zygmunt Miloszewski

Entanglement by Zygmunt Miloszewski; translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Entanglement combines three of my favourite elements in a novel: a strong sense of place, a realistic criminal investigation, and psychotherapy. I liked it very much indeed, not least because of the faultless translation, including puns and other running black humour – an example:

“Is it long since you divorced?”
“No, not long, a year ago. And not so much divorced, as separated. We didn’t go to court. But now perhaps we’ll manage to botch it all up again”.
“Sorry?”
“Sorry what?”
“You said “botch it all up again”.
“Oh, of course, I meant patch it all up.”.....

And later: “I’m dread sure it’s because her father abused her as a child.”..

Not an easy task for a translator to make these little jokes work without making it seem forced, but Antonia Lloyd-Jones does a wonderful job here.

The main plot concerns the investigation of an apparent murder that has taken place in a converted Warsaw church during a weekend retreat in which four clients and a psychotherapist undergo “constellation therapy”, explained in fascinating style in the novel. The victim, Henryk Telak, was very depressed and for good reason,  to the extent that his death by suicide would have been accepted by his doctor and, probably, the authorities. However, Telak clearly did not commit suicide, so Teodor Szacki, a State Prosecutor, gets the case. In Poland, the prosecutor directs the police investigation and prepares the case for court, so most of the book concerns Szacki’s continually frustrated attempts to find out who killed Telak, and why. There are oodles of atmosphere as he struggles to make progress, both in his own office concerning his less than attractive boss and attempts of a careerist colleague to add a drugs case to his already groaning workload, and at home, in his stale relationship with his wife of 10 years, Weronika, and their 7-year-old daughter, Helka. 

Reading the novel, one is immersed in Szacki’s life as the story is told through the perspective of his thoughts: his worries about money, what it’s like living in Warsaw in 2005 (when the novel is set), the history of his marriage and his attraction to a young journalist  - who reciprocates his interest with alacrity. And, of course, his insistence on keeping the case on track – pressuring his irascible friend Oleg Kuzniecow, in charge of the police side of the investigation, to follow up increasingly tenuous leads that Szacki feels will eventually unravel the degrees of entanglement in this puzzling conundrum, much to Oleg’s disgust given that he, too, is overwhelmed, underpaid, and under pressures of his own. 

I was completely absorbed in the novel – even though I didn’t sympathise too much with Szacki’s actions concerning his lust for a younger woman, it is easy to see how two people can be ground down after a relationship of more than 20 years in which familiarity has replaced excitement. Both partners have demanding careers, need to look after their child responsibly, and despite their professional jobs are unable to afford a reasonable place to live and many basic luxuries such as decent coffee or the sort of birthday party the girl would like. One of the aspects I loved was Szacki’s constant worrying about the case, and his drive as well as willingness to enter fully into psychotherapeutic theories and principles to arrive at an understanding of the dynamics of what happened between the five people present in the fatal weekend that began the novel, in order to travel towards an understanding of what happened and why. 

As the book nears the end, Szacki gets closer to discovering what happened, which necessitates investigating events from 25 years ago, before the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. Although the author is very strong at conveying the social and historical context of these events, and what it is like to live through them, I think he’s less strong at weaving them into the specific plot. I found Szacki’s Agatha Christie-like exercise at the book’s climax, as well as his encounter in an Italian restaurant, to be not as authentic as the story up to that point, and slightly wished he’d got to his solution by another route, as I think the climax of the book, while perfectly logical, loses its emotional punch a bit as a result.

Nevertheless, this book is superb. It’s gripping as well as remarkably interesting and thought-provoking, in particular in its descriptions of the roles of children in families, as well as in the internal life of Szacki and his relationship with his environment – he's not entirely a likeable person but an admirable one, honest and committed, not always able to predict the emotional consequences to himself of his own actions. There are a couple of recommendations for further reading at the end of the novel which I might well follow up. In the words of Bert Hellinger, the author of one of these books, “No-one is evil, just entangled”. Not least Szacki himself, so I hope we find out more about his future one day fairly soon.
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I read this book as a direct result of reading an excellent review of it at International Noir Fiction, by Glenn Harper. Thank you for the recommendation, Glenn, Entanglement is a great read.
See also Simon Clarke's brief Amazon review, and a longer review at Blogcritics.

Entanglement is published in the UK by Bitter Lemon Press. From the publisher's website: Antonia Lloyd-Jones is a well known translator from the Polish having published translations of of works of fiction such as 'Castorp' and 'Mercedes-Benz' by Pawel Huelle and celebrated non-fiction, including 'The Other' by Ryszard Kapusciński.
(Note, the l of Miloszewski should have a diagonal line through it, in the direction of an acute accent.)

Book Review: Blue Heaven by C J Box

 Blue Heaven by  C J Box

Blue Heaven is the name given colloquially to a beautiful area in North Idaho, where it’s common for policemen from LA and elsewhere go when they retire. With beautiful woodlands and mountain scenery, the region is changing from its traditional past of an economy based on huge cattle ranches, to become a place of luxury retirement homes. An elegy for what is rapidly becoming a lost way of life in the face of modern attitudes and harsh financial structures is central to the whole novel, personified by the character of Jess Rawlins, a cowboy in his sixties who is trying and failing to keep viable the cattle ranch which has been in his family for generations. 

The plot is an exciting one. Monica Taylor is a single parent with two young children, Annie and William. One day, Monica’s handsome but seemingly selfish boyfriend Tom casually offers to take William fishing after school. The children wait for him to turn up, but he doesn’t, so they take his expensive rod and make   their way into the country alone. Pretty soon after they arrive at a river, they witness a terrible crime and, in their shock, are spotted by the criminals. They run away.

Monica gradually becomes more worried and calls in the police, in the form of the newly elected Sheriff Carey, a political appointee rather than experienced at detective work. He’s a weak man and easily manipulated. I shan’t give away any more of the plot as this would spoil a reader’s excitement with the several apparently unconnected stories (that one feels sure will turn out to be unified, but how?), unusual plot developments,  interesting minor characters, and several surprising  twists of perception and perspective. Most of the book, written by a naturally talented storyteller, is a compelling page-turner: one is desperate to know what is happening to the children. But as one gets deeper into the novel, the tone gradually shifts into a much sadder mode, as we learn more of the character of Jess and the two men who stand up with him for what is right. Despite one or two quite gaping plot flaws and (as in the previous novel I've read by this author) a somewhat contrived shootout that goes on for too long, I very much liked this book. The end of the novel is moving, and is in a very different place than one might have predicted at the start. 

I thank Rina Gill of the UK publisher, Corvus, for sending me a copy of this very enjoyable novel, which won the Edgar award for best novel in 2009. 

About the book at the author's website.

Reviews of this novel can be found at: M&C Books, A Bookaholics Review and  Books to the Ceiling (mainly a repeat of the US edition's blurb, which gives away far too much of the plot).

C. J. Box has written many novels, including Three Weeks to Say Goodbye, which I reviewed earlier this year.

Book Review: Gunshot Road by Adrian Hyland

Gunshot Road by Adrian Hyland

This is simply a marvellous book. It is a crime story, and an exciting one, but more importantly the book is a poem, full of emotion and insight. Every sentence is beautiful, as the author depicts a harsh yet rich landscape that is also a character in the story, seen through the unique perspective of the most unusual and attractive detective I have come across in a long while, Emily Tempest.  And as icing on the cake, there are science jokes – technology and science figure heavily in the plot, but more interestingly, are as much part of the words on the page as any other subject addressed by this talented writer.

Emily was the protagonist of Adrian Hyland’s debut novel Diamond Dove (a.k.a. Moonlight Downs). As in the earlier novel, Gunshot Road is a story set among the interconnected imagery of “deaths and dreams, watercourses, tracks and plains”. Emily is half Aborigine, and is half at home with the nomadic “blackfellers” who live with spirits, songs and taboos, in parallel with the “whitefeller” Australia of booze and drugs as well as an alien law and order. She is also half white, courtesy of her father, the miner and  geologist Jack Tempest, and in her education and outlook is as much part of the “white” world as she’s also part of the ancient, collective spirit of the tribal culture in the Northern Territory of Australia. 

Emily’s intuition, independence and bravery (told in the previous novel) have impressed Tom McGillivray, superintendant of the Bluebush Police Station, so he has made Emily the Aboriginal Community Liaison Officer for the region. As the novel opens, she sets off to take up her post, only to find Tom is sidelined and his replacement is less than ideal. Almost immediately, the squad is called in to the case of a murder – two old men have had a drunken argument and, it is assumed, one has killed the other with a geologist’s pick while under the influence. Emily knows both men (as she knows most people in this small but dispersed community) and is not convinced. The main thrust of what follows is the story of her determination to ignore her superiors as well as everyone else, and uncover what’s really going on. This, naturally, leads to all kinds of dangers on the way to full discovery and final resolution.

Gunshot Road is a superior novel to Diamond Dove in that Emily is a more real, mature person with a clearer sense of where she is headed, and the story is far more focused, which makes the fantastically portrayed background and culture much easier to absorb along with the quite complicated plot – the first half of the novel is packed with witticisms and delightfully pungent, astute observations, which slacken off somewhat in the second half, where seriousness and tragedy are more frequent.

Like its predecessor, what makes this book so wonderful is its empathy and poetry. Emily, and the Aboriginal people, live by different mores than white Australians, living through dreams, songs and strong   unspoken taboos about what may or may not be said. As she tries to do her job in the “whitefeller” world, Emily is both enabled to discover facts known only to the “blackfellers” as she understands their sensitivities and they trust her. On the down side, most of the “whitefellers”, police and civilians, don’t understand, like or even notice her, so she encounters hideous sexism, abuse, and worse.

This is a novel that must be read. It is superb. The reader is immersed totally in Emily’s persona and world, so different from anything that all but a few can have lived or know. The author’s achievement is simply magnificent. I am lost in admiration for this wonderful piece of writing, in effect a long prose poem; the author’s identification with his main character and the very land itself; as well as his multidimensional portrayal of a cultural group, with its contradictions and flaws, as it coexists with the “civilised” world of governments, rules and structures, in a strange parallel-but-independent way, as if the indigenous people are ghosts. The result is magic, in more than one sense of the word.

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I thank Anne Beilby of Text Publishing Australia, for giving me a proof copy of this book at this year's London Book Fair (Australian cover at the top of this post). The novel is published in the USA with the cover at the bottom of this post, by Soho Press (May 2010). It is published in the UK by Quercus on 1 July, with the cover in the middle of the post. The covers are all very different - I prefer the blue (UK) one and also like the Australian one. I really don't like the US cover (picture of person's back).

Read other reviews of this novel at: International Noir Fiction (Glenn compares and contrasts the language of Adrian Hyland with that of Peter Temple), Crime Space (Karen of AustCrime), Kittling: Books, Mysterious Reviews. 

Book Review: Almost Blue by Carlo Lucarelli

Almost Blue by Carlo Lucarelli, translated from the Italian by Oonagh Strasky

First published in Italy, 1997; first published in translation in the UK, 2003 (Harvill Press/Vintage)

When you’ve just finished reading a 700-page large-format novel, the perfect antidote is a 169-page pocket paperback. Upon recommendation by Norman of Crime Scraps, I therefore embarked on Almost Blue, with the added incentive that it features a female detective – a rare breed in translated Italian crime fiction.

Almost Blue is told from the perspective of three characters. One is a young blind man, Simone, who spends his time alone in his room full of scanners, listening to snatches of conversation across the city of Bologna. Ispettore Grazia Negro is the only woman member of the Unit for the Analysis of Serial Crimes, an Italian equivalent to that staple of crime fiction, the FBI unit VICAP. Grazia and her boss Vittorio are trying to persuade the Questora (police) and judiciary that several murders committed over a period of years are the work of one person, and hence gain their cooperation in their investigation. The third viewpoint is that of a person who suffers intolerably from hearing imaginary bells, hence wears headphones to block out their deafening sound – and who, we come to realise, has many other bizarrely disgusting personal habits.

Grazia is a competent detective who has put together a convincing case that the murders are connected, her breakthrough coming when she realised the precise and strange signature to each slaying. The judge prefers not to believe her, though, mostly because he doesn’t want the population to panic or to assign resources to tracking down the perpetrator. Grazia and two colleagues are therefore left on their own, as Vittorio returns to Rome on unexplained other business.

Much as I wanted to like Grazia, I found it a bit hard at first. She seems more concerned about her period pains than in presenting her serial-killer case, and she is passive about the awful sexism all around her – every male policeman treats her as if she’s a sex object, and her boss persists in constantly calling her “bambina” which is very irritating to read, never mind being actually called. However, once Vittorio has decamped to HQ in Rome and Grazia can pursue her investigation pretty much on her own, she becomes much more likeable as she unearths one witness who can, she thinks, help her identify the killer before he (?) strikes again. Without wishing to give anything away, her character develops in interesting ways during the story to the extent that I was rooting for her by the end.

I really liked this book. Although it’s a violent story, the author has a brisk style so that the reader is not treated with kid gloves nor unnecessarily made to dwell on visceral gore (a book of this length leaves little room for long, descriptive passages). The plot is exciting, and the style of telling the story through the eyes of three characters provides an edgy, unnerving perspective which works very well indeed. I am not surprised that the book received such ecstatic reviews (from the various cover quotes) or that it was shortlisted for the CWA dagger. I shall definitely be reading more by this author.

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I thank Kathy and Norman for pointing me to this book: Kathy by asking in a comment to this post whether there are any female Italian detectives yet translated into English; and Norman for providing the answer!

Norman has reviewed Almost Blue and its sequel, Day After Day, at his blog Crime Scraps.

The Complete Review - review of Almost Blue and links to other reviews of it, including two in English at The Telegraph and The Times (both grade the book A).

Other reviews of the novel are at Reviewing the Evidence and Fleur Fisher reads (a typically individual and interesting review).

Book Review: This Body of Death by Elizabeth George

 This Body of Death by Elizabeth George (HarperCollins, May 2010)

Elizabeth George is back on form with This Body of Death, the sixteenth outing for Inspector Thomas Lynley of Scotland Yard. Thankfully back from his sojourn in Cornwall, Lynley decides to return to work for a trial period, and is plunged right into a murder enquiry when the body of a young woman is found in a north London cemetery. Lynley’s old boss has retired and has been replaced by Superintendent Isabelle Ardery, superbly neurotic, alcoholic, failed mother on the permanent verge of losing control. (Exaggerated characters are a trademark of this author, and this one is suitably Joan Crawford-like.) Isabelle is also on temporary secondment, and whether she gets the permanent role as boss of the squad depends on the odious Sir David Hillier, a smooth political type more interested in the Met’s public image than in supporting his detectives.

Interleaved with the investigation is the story of a group of people who live in the New Forest in Hampshire. One, Gordon, is a thatcher;  another, Robbie, is an agister (responsible for the welfare of the ponies that roam freely in that region); and a third, Meredith, is a single mother and aspiring fabric designer. The three are linked by Jemima Hastings, Robbie’s sister and Gordon’s girlfriend. As the book opens, Meredith regrets having fallen out with Jemima, her best friend, a year or so previously and so goes to Gordon’s common-land house to make amends. She finds Jemima has abandoned her business and has disappeared. Gordon has a new girlfriend, Gina, who seems less than truthful. Robbie and Meredith are worried about Jemima, especially when it transpires that her car is still in Gordon’s garage and her clothes boxed up in his attic.

Meanwhile, the Scotland Yard investigation continues in typical Elizabeth George style, which I happen to find rather engaging as I see London through a rather different perspective than my own – peopled by lovable cockneys, tobacconists and psychics, who spend their time doing eccentric things like teaching ice-skating but doubling up as a gigolo in an expensive hotel. There are lots of diverting “not quite right” details: people who have lived in London all their lives drive to go shopping in Oxford Street, that kind of thing. And of course, Lynley, Deborah and Simon St James are living their eighteenth-century lives with their butlers and silver salvers in the middle of it all, another source of reader amusement.

Pretty soon, the victim is identified and Isabelle uncovers a great lead – the paranoid schizophrenic brother of an internationally renowned Japanese cellist (yes, it’s that kind of book!). The reader can guess that this poor man is probably not the criminal as his role is revealed pretty early on in the book, but his presence provides an excuse for a fictionalised take on the de Menezes shooting of 2008. Similarly, at intervals during the narrative, the author provides a retrospective account of a fictionalised James Bulger-like case in the form of a psychiatric report, which we assume is going to become relevant to the main plot eventually.

Sergeants Barbara Havers and Winston Nkata, other series regulars, are investigating the Hampshire angle to the murder when the schizophrenic suspect crops up in London, so Isabelle recalls them, much to Barbara’s disgust as she is enjoying following up the leads she has unearthed.  Suspicious events continue to happen in Hampshire unmonitored, thereafter, while the police continue their investigation in London . 

This book is absolutely packed full (it is 700 pages long). The story itself is very slow to unfold, replete with many small details about characters’ reactions to each other, their assumptions and feelings. Everything is overblown, but in an engaging way - especially when the possibility of buried treasure is added to an already rich-enough mix of red herrings and abandoned directions. There are lots of holes in the plot and various gaps in the police investigation that are rather hard to ignore.  Barbara Havers in particular puts herself in a stupid position by not calling for back-up in a situation that obviously called for it for no clear reason at all, and Gina's many illogical actions left me dumbfounded. Typical of the author, there are plenty of loose ends even in a book of this great length. But, despite the flaws, the book is absorbing and carries the reader along. Thankfully, the strange, meandering directions of the previous two books in the series (Careless in Red and What Came Before he Shot Her) have been abandoned – and the author returns to her previous formula of police procedural plus a dash of romanticised English life with over-colourful characters. If you enjoyed the earlier books in the series, you’ll probably enjoy this one, in particular witnessing the next steps in the internally convoluted lives of Lynley and Havers.

I thank the US publisher, Harper Collins, who generously provided me with a proof copy of this novel.

Read other reviews of this book at: Euro Crime (positive), Rhapsody in Books (positive), Washington Post (negative), Random Jottings (negative).

Book Review: The Monster in the Box by Ruth Rendell

 The Monster in the Box by Ruth Rendell (publisher Hutchinson, 2009)

Ruth Rendell is such a great crime novelist, particularly her Chief Inspector Wexford series, started in 1964. Monster in the Box is the 22nd, and is a thoroughly good read. All the books are solid police procedurals, though the earlier novels tended to cover the family and personal issues of the two main characters, Wexford and Burden, whereas the later instalments, now that their children are adults, tend to focus on wider social issues and the effects of globalisation on a small, traditional community.

The Monster in the Box follows the usual theme, but has an added retrospective element. It begins when Wexford notices a man on the street – the man is Eric Targo. Wexford remembers when he was a young policeman on one of his first cases, in which a woman was killed one evening while her husband was out. In that case, the husband was convicted of the crime, but Wexford, then a humble PC, was convinced on an instinctive level that Targo, a neighbour, was responsible. Since then, he’s seen Targo on several occasions over the years- the two men never acknowledging each other but, in their different ways, keeping an eye on what the other is doing.

Wexford’s memories are also tied up with his relationships with women – he recalls Alison, who was his fiancée when he first encountered Targo, and subsequent girlfriends, leading up to his meeting Dora, the woman who was to become his wife and to whom he is still married after very many years. This is a really involving story for anyone who has read this series, with several of the investigations in previous novels neatly but lightly provided as context to Wexford’s memories of his personal life at the time.

None of this holds up the pace and plotting of The Monster in the Box, however.  The first part of the novel introduces an Asian family, in particular the sixteen-year-old daughter Tamima, who is very bright but who suddenly decides to leave school and work in a corner store. Both Jenny Burden, her teacher and wife of Wexford’s colleague; and Hannah Goldsmith, the politically correct police liaison officer with various immigrant populations, suspect that the girl is being forced by her family to enter an arranged marriage. The author uses these suspicions to examine attitudes and behaviours to those of other cultures (in several directions), tied into an increasingly tense plot about the girl’s fate.

Mid-way through the novel, a crime is committed, and Wexford has every reason to suspect Targo. It’s a really sad crime: although we know very little about the victim, the author’s economy of style makes the reader truly mourn the loss of a decent person who will be missed by family and friends. Wexford cannot find Targo, so he interviews the man's past and current wives and partners in an attempt to track him down, providing many small insights on modern mores and relationships. Although Wexford has little sympathy with Hannah and Jenny in their conviction that something untoward is going on in the case of Tamima, in a mirroring of the women’s fears, his own old convictions close his mind and blinker him as to what is really going on in his own murder investigation.

The main part of the book is set a few years ago, just before the ban on smoking in public places, a prospect much dreaded by Wexford and Burden as they eat their daily lunch of Indian food in a local pub. After the two cases are resolved, there is a coda set in the present, where we see what happened to some of the characters. The Targo plot is, to my mind, less satisfying than the Tamima plot, partly because we don’t know what makes Targo tick and partly because it is rather obvious to the reader what is going on once Wexford starts his investigation in earnest.  But the strength of this author’s writing is such that it does not matter if some elements of the novel are a bit predictable, because it is so full of rich (but lightly presented) detail, with so many very astute observations about the changes in society over the past 50 years during which this series has been written, that one is simply held to the pages, until the last one is turned.

Other reviews of this novel: Random Jottings, The Independent, The Spectator. (Many more available on the Internet.)

Book Review: The Last Child by John Hart

 The Last Child by John Hart (publisher John Murray)

Thirteen-year-old Johnny’s twin sister Alyssia disappeared a year ago. Katherine, his beautiful mother, could not cope with the strain and has become a fragile, hysterical addict; and his father, wracked by guilt as he was late to collect the girl from school on the fatal day, abandoned his family in the aftermath. Katherine and Johnny are in their separate ways dominated by the tragedy – Katherine has retreated into a world of prescription drugs and alcohol, and into dependency on the abusive but powerful Ken Holloway. Johnny spends his time either looking after his mother, driving to the supermarket for supplies and making her breakfast as well as trying to keep Holloway away from her (at whatever cost to himself), or skipping school to search systematically for his lost sister with his collection of talismans and map of the neighbourhood.

An observer of this tragically broken family is Clyde Hunt, a local detective. He keeps an eye on Johnny, offering help when he can. Hunt, too, is plagued by guilt as he was in charge of the investigation when Alyssia was lost, but failed to find her. As a result of his subsequent inability to drop the case, his wife left him and his 18-year-old son now hates him. One theme running through the book is Hunt’s feelings about Katherine – many characters assume they are having an affair, or that Hunt’s refusal to drop the Alyssia case is because of his feelings for her mother – but in fact he is as much drawn to the serious, imaginative and brave boy of the family, and admires Johnny’s commitment to his search for his sister.

This slow spiral into misery and despair is disrupted when Johnny witnesses a fatal hit-and-run car accident. Before the victim dies, he says to Johnny “I know where she is”, which the boy takes to refer to his sister.  Not only does Hunt find himself investigating the crash but he is also searching for Johnny, who has run off to continue his quest, armed with his new scrap of knowledge.

The Last Child is a compelling story with many interconnecting threads – partly a traditional detective novel and partly a study of the emotional after-effects of a devastating occurrence on a family and those associated with them.  I thoroughly enjoyed the book, particularly the character of Johnny and the imaginary world and mission he has created for himself after his life was shattered and his realisation that he can trust nobody. Some parts of the plot work very well, others less so – but this book is an overwhelmingly good read, and it is certainly easy to forgive the inconsistencies and unlikely elements. In the end, two separate crimes have to be solved in order for the truth to emerge; even though the solution to Alyssia’s disappearance is not a surprise, its unveiling has real emotional power. And the journey of Katherine, from despair into something else, as she and Johnny gradually learn more of the truth and have to revise their assumptions, is very moving. As she says to her son, “There is always more to lose”;  this author conveys the impact of human loss with great empathy, while at the same time providing a page-turner with many satisfying overlapping elements.

The book has won much praise and some prestigious awards, including the Edgar prize for best novel 2010, and the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for 2009. 

Read other reviews of this book at: The Guardian (brief); Washington Post; Musings of a Bookish Kitty; and a feature at Crime Watch (includes a link to excerpts from the book). 

Book Review: The Marx Sisters by Barry Maitland

The Marx Sisters by Barry Maitland, Orion 1994.

Kerrie of Mysteries in Paradise, then Bernadette of Reactions to Reading, encouraged me to try reading a novel by Barry Maitland.  He’s written a series about two police detectives, Brock and Kolla, so I decided to start with the first one, The Marx Sisters (not least because of the intriguing title).

The Marx Sisters focuses on a little pocket of London just north of Tottenham Court Road tube station, in which a few streets form a quaintly Dickensian relief from the modern architectural monstrosities around them.  In this small area, Jerusalem Lane, it is as if time has stood still: there is an old bookshop, a delicatessen, a small solicitor’s office and so on; people have lived in the area for many years and form a tight community of residents who know each other’s names and all about their business, going back to the Second World War when some of them emigrated to the UK. There isn’t a bank or estate agent to be found. The residents of Jerusalem Lane give the area its character – among them the titular sisters, three elderly ladies – one of them, Meredith, a widow, and the others, Eleanor and Peggy, spinsters who live in flats upstairs in Meredith’s house.  One day, the sisters reflect on how the area is changing, as many of the long-time residents are retiring, shutting down their businesses and leaving for the country. Two of them  go out for a regular outing, and when they return, the third has died. Is it a murder or is it a natural death?

Kathy Kolla is the detective sergeant assigned to investigate; and Chief Inspector Brock of Scotland Yard’s Serious Crimes Office, who has just closed a high-profile case, is, for reasons unknown to Kolla, assigned to help her. The two of them, Kolla more energetically than Brock, talk to the pathologist and to the victim’s family and friends – but although plenty of suspects and plausible motives emerge, it is hard to pin down how the old lady died. 

The novel is told in two parts – each part concerning one murder. The second section opens with Kolla being enlightened as to why Brock was assigned to her investigation, and she is not best pleased. However, she and Brock do like each other in an unstated way, and without knowing anything about their subsequent outings, I feel sure something will be going on between them before too long. And what of this particular book? It’s a competent novel – its canvas broadens considerably in part 2 as the reasons for suspicion (there are several distinct ones) and some of the minor characters in part 1 become more fleshed-out, most of them in rather interesting ways, not least historically.  In the end, though, it is Kolla’s short-sighted and to my mind unnecessary dare-devilness that provides one breakthrough, and, believe it or not, another equally (predictably) stupid action on her part that provides the decisive one. I enjoyed the novel, which seems to sit somewhere between being a classic comfortable detective story of the Agatha Christie mould that isn’t quite in the real world as we know it (as if the 1950s have been transposed directly to the 1990s), and being on the verge of something a bit darker and edgier. 

About this book at the author's website.

Amazon reviews of this book.

Book Review: The Neighbour by Lisa Gardner

 A domestic thriller in the tradition popularised by Harlan Coben and Linwood Barclay (even down to the white picket fence on the cover of the UK paperback, the edition I bought), The Neighbour is a tense thriller that's fast to read. The basic premise is simple and shocking: Sandy (Sandra), a teacher and 23-year-old mother of Ree, vanishes from her home one night, in some violent fashion after someone breaks in. Sandy's husband Jason is a journalist for the Boston Daily who works nights. He reports his wife's absence to the police a few hours after he gets home - and is singularly uninformative and unhelpful to the ensuing investigation.

Sergeant D. D. Warren is in charge of finding Sandy. She is highly professional and competent, not only in her organised strategy in the search, but also in her awareness of what will make evidence admissible or inadmissible in court - particularly in the case of the testimony of 4-year-old Ree, the last person (presumably) to see Sandy before she disappeared.

Not only is Jason a chief suspect, but a neighbour, Aidan Brewster, is soon identified as a registered sex offender and hence a "person of interest". When he was 19, Aidan slept with his 14-year-old stepsister. He's served 2 years in prison and is now working at the local garage. Quite a chunk of the book is taken up with showing Aidan's life and how his one bad act will always affect him in many practical ways as well as psychologically. Later on, a couple more characters are introduced: a 13-year-old schoolboy who seems infatuated with Sandy; and his uncle, a state trooper. Despite all these distractions, Warren and her team are most convinced that Jason is the perpetrator, and when it becomes clear to them that he's operating under a false name and has secrets to hide on his computer, they close in on him.

Although the pages fly by, I was not entirely convinced by this novel. The set up in chapter 1, when Sandy disappears, is a great hook but the denouement does not mesh properly with it: it's a bit of a cheat. Jason and Sandy both have deep secrets, and one kept feeling that if only they'd spoken to each other a bit during their 4-year marriage, they could have avoided a lot of trouble! (I also found it hard imagining Jason as a journalist.) Their little girl Ree is portrayed realistically enough but with that awful saccharine, Disneyfied way that is common in Hollywood movies, so I did suffer from cuteness overload as far as she was concerned. Nevertheless, putting these flaws to one side, there is lots to like in this book - D. D. is a great character, Aidan's plight is well told without sentimentality (although the focus of the novel is not on him, so I am a bit puzzled by the title), and there is genuine tension in the search to find and uncover the secrets in the computer near the end of the novel. 

Other reviews of this book at: The Madhouse Family reviews; Lesa's Book Critiques; Google book search (includes PW editor's review).

Author website, where I found that The Neighbour is the third in a series of books about D. D. Warren. The author has also written an FBI profiler series and several standalone novels.

Book Review: No-one loves a policeman, by Guillermo Orsi

No-One Loves a Policeman

By Guillermo Orsi, translated from the (Argentinian) Spanish by Nick Caistor
MacLehose Press (Quercus), May 2010. 

Pablo Martelli, known as Gotán, is retired from the police force (“the National Shame”) in Buenos Aires, and is now selling bathroom fittings – though we witness none of this particular professional activity in this novel.  As the book opens, Gotán answers a late-night phone call from his old friend Edmundo, who asks him to come immediately to see him.  Edmundo lives 400 kilometres away on the beach at Mediomundo, near the town of Bahia Blanca. When Gotán arrives at his friend’s house, he finds him lying dead on the floor, shot. He calls the local police, but they insist the death is a suicide. He also calls Edmundo’s daughter Isabel, of whom he is fond. Isabel is distraught and says she and her mother (no longer married to her father) will immediately travel to the region to supervise the funeral.

While the shocked and grieving Gotán is waiting for the women to arrive, Lorena, Edmundo’s young girlfriend, turns up. This event is cue for Gotán to be plunged into a whirlwind of violent, confusing and increasingly dangerous events which continue in ever-widening circles of impact without rest until the novel’s end. First he suffers a bruising encounter with the local police; then he finds himself driving south with Lorena, who vanishes while he is in the bathroom at a desolate petrol station. Totally confused about what is going on, but determined to find out for his friend’s sake, Gotán refuses to be intimidated by various dangers, bizarre characters and events that happen with increasingly frenzied pace, pursuing his quest to get to the bottom of his friend’s death.

What makes this book stand head and shoulders over most novels of this genre is the mixture of black comedy and knowing cynicism through which the reader experiences the story, and above all, the setting. Argentina in December 2001 is melting down, as the currency collapses and the banks refuse to give savers their money. Riots are the norm on the streets of Buenos Aires, the “bloated hydra’s head” of the country, teeming with shanty towns built by once-hopeful peasants flooding into the city when their lands or jobs were taken from them; immigrants from other South American countries or from further afield; as   well as thousands of striking or protesting citizens trying to live a “normal” life of work and leisure . All this is going on against a background of endemic evil – organised drug dealing, institutionalised corruption of every kind imaginable in all the professions (even hospitals are not exempt), family violence, sinister authorities, and extreme poverty – all of this gradually creeps up on the reader as what starts out as an apparently simple tragedy becomes more and more tangled with bigger-picture events going on in the capital and the entire, ruined land. Gotán himself provides a running internal commentary to the reader and to his cat of the events he is experiencing, in a country where “there are more supporters of the final solution than there are of Boca Juniors football club.”

As the characters of this energetic and blackly funny novel - including local police, an eccentric pathologist, a journalist, a magistrate and numerous quasi-military, police and armed factions of unknown origin - drive up and down route 3 between Buenos Aires and Bahia Blanca, as often as not blind drunk and falling asleep at the wheel,  Gotán finds himself similarly travelling back and forth in his mind to try to make sense of the nightmare he’s in, as well as working out strategies for his own survival. Bahia Blanca is on the edge of the pampas, the rich and vast farmland of Argentina, but increasingly exhausted, ruined by owners or left uncultivated. In the final chapters, events and geography continue to mirror each other as we move with the protagonists further down into the southern, windy deserts of Patagonia, where finally Gotán discovers what’s at the heart of all the madness, and we discover why he is no longer a policeman.

The novel contains a wonderful mix of characters (including the cat) who all have their own ways of dealing with the misery and cruelty all around them. The stories of poverty in the hospitals and the corruption of the government and police are particularly well-integrated in the plot of this exciting, absorbing book. The author is a journalist, and (unsurprisingly) a pretty cynical one, infusing his tales of tragedy with in-depth knowledge of current affairs but also sufficient humour and feeling that one is carried along to the end. The translation of the novel is masterly, in that the ‘running commentary’ that provides the framework for the plot, and that eventually merges into it, almost unconsciously gives the reader a vivid sense of experiencing events alongside the characters.  

The final chapters of the book go on for too long, with too many twists and turns of plot, necessitating occasions on which Gotán is attacked, captured, escapes or himself attacks others – and the other protagonists, some introduced right at the end of the book, are over-complex in motivation, rationales and actions -- believability is somewhat sacrificed, not least in the illogical character of “Negra”. Yet at the very end, the novel returns to the core of the track it’s been on throughout: the strong basic plot of what happened to Edmundo and his daughter Isabel and why, together with the true story of how Gotán has come to be in a Patagonian mine with a woman who is after his life. It’s a powerful story, and a strong novel – one which I highly recommend.

“Argentina was like some huge, sleeping beast, a mythical elephant like those the ancients believed held up the world. It had just shaken off a president and all its ministers. It got rid of them because they did not know how to steer it, could only torment it with their absurd decisions on a journey to nowhere.  Today the beast was resting, digesting, occasionally regurgitating its favourite, its only nourishment:  madness.” 

Publisher's website

Guillermo Orsi was born in Buenos Aires, where he lives and works as a journalist. His previous novel Suenos de perro won the Semana Begra Umbriel Award in 2004.

Nick Caistor has translated many novels from the Spanish, including The Buenos Aires Quartet by Manuel Vazquez Montalban. 

I thank the publisher, MacLehose Press/Quercus, for so kindly sending me a copy of this book.

Book Review: The Past is a Foreign Country by Gianrico Carofiglio

The Past is a Foreign Country

By Gianrico Carofiglio, translated by Howard Curtis. 

Published by Old Street, 2007 (first published in Italy 2004).

Gianrico Carofiglio has written three excellent novels* in a series set in the Italian seaside town of Bari. The Past is a Foreign Country is also set in Bari but is not part of this series. The book opens with a chance meeting between the unknown narrator and a woman in a bar. The woman finishes her fruit juice, comes over to the narrator’s table and stands there. He does not remember her. She says her name.

This act brings back a flood of memories to the narrator, now revealed as Giorgio, who in the early 1980s was a 22-year-old law student, living at home with his parents (as is common for students in Italy), going out with an attractive but boring girlfriend, Giulia, and living a life of predictable routine. One night, Giorgio and Giulia are at a party at a friend’s house when Giorgio witnesses an attack by some drunken men on a fellow guest. He impulsively head-butts the main aggressor, and the men are subsequently thrown out. The man Giorgio has rescued introduces himself as Francesco, and the two become friends. Francesco introduces Giorgio to a far more exciting lifestyle than he could imagine – but as well as adrenalin rushes there are hints of darkness, hints that escalate into horror.

Interspersed with the story of Francesco and Giorgio is another narrative, that of Chiti, a young lieutenant in the carabineri (the Italian military police). He is charged with finding a man who has sexually assaulted several young women over the course of the past couple of years. Chiti is a lonely man, prone to debilitating headaches, an outsider both in Bari itself and to the culture of the carabineri, even though his father was also in the force. 

The book is a superb Italian version of the existentialist nightmare, as Giorgio becomes increasingly alienated from his parents, his studies and everything he knew. He feels himself being sucked into a vortex, but is helpless to resist its attractions. And in the counter-story, Chiti is a parallel version of the same dilemma of self, mortality and one's place in the world, but from a more subdued if no less nightmarish perspective.

Although The Past is a Foreign Country is in part a crime novel, it is also a fascinating psychological and philosophical character study, not pretentious or hard-going, drawing the reader into its web  as much for its atmosphere as for its plot. My favourite part in the novel was the closing chapters, when Giorgio meets his long-estranged sister and when we learn the background of the encounter in the bar which began the story.

* Involuntary Witness, A Walk in the Dark, and Reasonable Doubts.

About the author at Wikipedia and Bitter Lemon Press, UK publisher of the three series titles.

Book Review: The Demon of Dakar by Kjell Eriksson

 The Demon of Dakar

By Kjell Eriksson, translated by Ebba Segerberg. Minotaur.

Dakar is a restaurant in downtown Uppsala, owned by Slobodan Anderson – a larger than life figure – and funded by very dubious money. Manuel is a youngish Mexican man. Two of his brothers have escaped the hard life of their village by becoming involved in an international drug-running ring. One of them, Angel, has been killed in Germany and the other, Patrico, has been caught and imprisoned in Sweden, so Manuel plans to find Patrico and bring him home. He sets off on his long journey with an innocent hope that seems bound to lead to crashing disappointment.

Eva Willman is a ground-down woman – she’s divorced her good-for-nothing husband and is raising her two teenage sons on her own. The family lives in a run-down apartment block, and as the novel opens Eva has just lost her longstanding job in the local post office as part of a national rationalisation programme. She wonders how the old people will cope in collecting their pensions, and whether they will be lonely – for many of them their weekly chat with “the post office lady” was the height of their social life. After being somewhat needled by her friend and neighbour Helen, Eva decides to follow up a suggestion made to her by Patrick, her elder son, and go for a change of career. His friend’s mother works at Dakar, and has heard there’s a vacancy for a waitress. After some doubts, Eva applies and, to her surprise, gets the job- which despite its meagre pay, she enjoys very much.

Eva soon has even more to worry about as Patrick does not come home one night. It is all over the news that a man has been wounded after being attacked by a gang of teenagers. To Eva’s shock, the police come round to her flat to ask about the boy’s whereabouts; Eva covers up for him, but is terrified that he’s involved in gangs and drugs, and roundly tells him off when the police have departed.

Ann Lindell and her team of Uppsala police soon have more serious matters on their hands when a body is found in a nearby river. The victim has had what seems to have been a tattoo removed from his upper arm, and this is the clue that begins the slow process of uncovering a drug-smuggling operation. The reader knows the identity of the perpetrator and the victim early on in the book as the police stumble around trying to connect up the dots. (This device is used effectively by the author in this and previous books.)

Manuel, in the meantime, has visited his brother Patrico in prison, learning more about the death of Angel and that Patrico’s “employers” (the dealers) had promised to send his family $10,000 for his role in the drug operation. Naturally, they haven’t come good on their promise, even though Patrico has remained silent throughout his trial and sentence. Manuel determines to find the men and force them to pay up. Again, we are convinced that this innocent in a strange country is bound to land himself in dangerous trouble by this plan.

As well as being a good thriller, this book has a great character – Eva. Her thoughts and actions within her little family, her neighbours in the grotty apartment building and among her new colleagues at Dakar are truly endearing and sharp, without being at all sentimental. Manuel, also, is an unusual and strangely attractive creation.

I enjoyed reading this book and seeing how the various narratives joined up, and how the police eventually cotton on to what is happening and try to sew up their case. I thought, however, that the initially promising character of Slobodan Anderson, the “drug lord”, turned out weakly  – he seems to tread water for a large part of the book rather than dealing with his situation, which seems to me incompatible with his “drug baron” status. That’s a minor flaw, though – The Demon of Dakar is a very good, rounded read. It is best enjoyed after reading the previous titles in the series  – so far available in English are The Princess of Burundi and The Cruel Stars of the Night , though there are earlier novels that have not yet been translated. The three that have so far been translated into English are American editions; there is not (yet?) a UK publisher for these books.

Read other reviews of The Demon of Dakar at International Crime Fiction and Mysterious Reviews.

Book Review: Supreme Justice by Phillip Margolin

Supreme Justice by Phillip Margolin, June 2010 (HarperCollins).
 

What do you do next when you’ve just written a thriller in which the president of the USA is bought down? Unfazed by this challenge, Phillip Margolin here turns his attention to the Supreme Court. Brad Miller, the young man who uncovered the conspiracy in Executive Privilege, is now a clerk for Felicia Moss, a liberal Supreme Court Justice. His fiancée Ginny is employed by a big DC law firm. The couple are happy in their life and working hard (in Ginny’s case to pay off college loans) but, as they are characters in a legal thriller by Phillip Margolin, the reader can trust that this state of affairs is not going to last for long.

Sure enough, the justices are one day considering a death-penalty appeal, specifically the legal question of whether state security can overcome personal freedom in the aid of a defence. The criminal in this case, police officer Sarah Woodruff, was convicted of killing her lover John Finley, but her defence was blocked from bringing into evidence the fact that Finley was involved in a covert investigation back in 2006, involving a Mexican drug-smuggling cartel and government agencies, possibly the FBI and CIA, but certainly the much-hated Department of Homeland Security. The prosecution had argued successfully that this background was irrelevant to the fact that Sarah had killed Finley, and so had kept it out of court. The appeal is based on the defence argument that Finley was killed by either one of the Mexican drug dealers or by government agents to keep him quiet about the operation. One of Felicia Moss’s fellow-justices argues strongly that there is no case to allow this argument into the public domain. Moss wants to find out more, so successfully argues for a two-week stay while she looks into the case more deeply – and this is where Brad comes in, as it is he who Moss tasks with the investigation.

Not only does Brad quickly find inconsistencies in the old case, but other factors soon come into play. Characters from Executive Privilege become involved in an extended mesh of subplots, including, I am pleased to say, Dana Cutler, the tough private investigator and, in a cameo role, Pat Gorman, proprietor of the sleazy tabloid Exposed. New characters also make an appearance, for example a local police chief Daphne Haggard and Sarah’s defence attorney Mary Garrett, as well as Sarah herself. The author specialises in writing varied, meaty parts for women, which is one of the reasons I like his books. 

Phillip Margolin rings the changes with his customary flair and speed in Supreme Justice. Although one could pick holes in the novel’s style and characterisations, I am constantly amazed at how the author seemingly effortlessly keeps up a blistering pace while at the same time providing tons of fascinating details about what it is like to work in the supreme court, a law firm, the FBI, the police, as a private investigator, a spy or a journalist. There are lots of strands to this exciting story, and a good few twists in the tail at the end. Perfect summer reading –  I am now joining the tons of Phillip Margolin fans who will be queuing up to read his next book (as I’ve already read all his previous ones).

I am exceedingly grateful to the kind publisher, HarperCollins (USA), for sending me an advance proof of this novel. 

My review of Executive Privilege, the first novel in this series, of which Supreme Justice is the second.

Author's website, including bibliography and synopses.

Book Review: In The Wind by Barbara Fister

 In The Wind by Barbara Fister, St Martin's Minotaur, 2008.

Anni Koskinen resigned from the Chicago police department after testifying against a fellow-officer for beating an unarmed youth. Although she feels she did the right thing in telling the truth, her colleagues fail to provide back-up when she’s called out, so she decides the risks to her safety aren’t worth it. At loose ends, Anni spends her time renovating her house and working when she can as a private investigator. The action begins when the local priest calls Anni and asks her to help a parishioner and volunteer helper, Rosa Saenz.  When Rosa turns up at Anni’s door, she asks for a lift to Minnesota. Anni agrees, but before they get very far, disaster strikes.

It turns out that Rosa is suspected of shooting and killing Arne Tilquist, a senior FBI investigator, back in the late 1960s. At that time, Tilquist was head of a unit which monitored activist groups, of which there were many, mainly anti-Vietnam war, but also supporting plenty of other ‘radical’ and fringe causes. One of these groups was an extremist breakaway movement fighting for the rights of Native Americans. In one   disastrous raid led by Tilquist, all the members of this group were killed except one. When Tilquist himself was found shot to death a little later, this activist became the prime suspect but was never found.

Forty years later, in the aftermath of the 9/11 atrocities, the patriot act is once again threatening civil liberties on a similar scale. Anni is hired by a radical lawyer who specialises in Native American issues and who is convinced of Rosa’s innocence, to dig into the old case to find out who was really responsible for the Tilquist shooting. Most of the book from this point is taken up with Anni’s quest, which she has to carry out amid threats and escalating harassment from the FBI, and with little support from the police, apart from one apparently nice cop who seems very taken with her. 

In the Wind is a fascinating novel: it reminded me of reading fiction about teenage rebellions many years ago, in particular the excellent Vida, by Marge Piercy. The crime plot is very well constructed and the environs of the poorer areas of Chicago, where Anni lives, and the characters who live there, are very well done. The political and personal heart of the novel is committed and passionate. Less successful, I think, is Anni’s back story, which is exceedingly convoluted and takes most of the first 150 pages of the book to tell. Anni’s personal history and life is interwoven with the case in many ways, but I  felt that these could have been conveyed more succinctly to improve the pace of the first chunk of the book. For sure, though, Anni is a fascinating and well-developed character, whose life, family and friends contain plenty of rich fodder for future outings. In the Wind is a very good read indeed: if you enjoy series such as Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone, Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski, or Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone,  you will certainly find a great deal to like in Anni Koskinen, who can more than hold her own in this company.

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The author's In The Wind scrapbook of reviews, interviews and other material about the book.

In The Wind is available in paperback edition as a Print on Demand book at Lulu. The author writes: "I decided to make this paperback edition available just as the sequel, Through the Cracks, hits bookstore shelves so that people reluctant to invest in hardcover prices will have a less-expensive starting place for the series. Also, it was a kick doing my own cover and page design. [Petrona note: this cover design is much better than the one on the St Martin's edition!] All profits from this limited-edition paperback version of In the Wind (originally published by Minotaur in 2008) will be donated to the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill."  See more at the author's website.

Read another review of In the Wind at Reviewing the Evidence. Reviewing the Evidence has also recently run a review of the sequel, Through the Cracks.

Book Review: Far Cry by John Harvey

Far Cry is the second in John Harvey’s series set in the Fens of eastern England, and is simply a superb type-example of a crime novel. The recurring characters are the unlikeable DI Will Grayson and his sergeant Helen Walker, a more interesting yet somewhat enigmatic, less realised, figure. They are based in Cambridge, though Will lives in the remote countryside outside Ely with his wife Lorraine and their two young children, and there are certainly domestic tensions in their set-up.

This novel is about the disappearance of children. Three years previously, a 12-year-old girl who had gone missing a few days before was found collapsed by the side of a road. Will had been part of the investigation that had eventually found the man responsible for the abduction, Mitchell Roberts. Now, Will, to his disgust, finds that Roberts has been released from jail, so decides to follow and threaten him a few times, causing Roberts to break the terms of his probation and run away. Will’s bullying tactics are doubly idiotic because not only does Roberts’s disappearance potentially put other girls in danger, but when another local girl does vanish, he’s the obvious prime suspect.

In another flashback, a woman called Ruth remembers a summer of ten or more years ago, when her 12-year-old daughter vanished on a camping trip to Cornwall with a schoolfriend and her family. To all outside appearances, Ruth has adapted to her loss, having moved from London to Ely and remarrying, but this is just a facade. Her internal devastation is conveyed brilliantly and movingly, as she goes about her daily life  --  those around her occasionally and inadvertently scratch the surface of her inner and constant despair, and are uncomprehendingly shocked by it.

Will and Helen’s investigation of the newly missing girl turns up other similar incidences over the past 15 years or so. When the old Cornwall case comes into Will’s sights, he wonders whether there could there be a relationship between them or whether the similarities between that case and one of the recent ones is mere coincidence. Will's and Helen's attempts to dig into the old cases, as well as follow up all the leads they can about the new one, provide the tension in the novel as the hours and days tick by and the chances of the girl turning up alive and/or unhurt recede.

The book is measured and superbly plotted, perhaps not containing many real surprises in the outcomes of the cases, but it is a tale wonderfully told, with great feeling, and complete with many small observations of the ‘civilised’ lives of people in professional jobs, who appreciate culture, but who may be living with secrets, or who are closer to the edge than they themselves realise.

There are plenty of enjoyable subplots and twists to the novel that I’ll not address here – my only slight dislike was for the odd unnecessary interlude of casual or crude sex that did not seem to fit in with the more subtle story that is unfolding. This minor criticism does not detract significantly from an otherwise excellent book. I continue to be intrigued as to whether or not Will’s unlikeable, somewhat sexist and not very bright character is intentional on the part of the author. Will is interesting because he is definitely not a typical “gruff but sympathetic” protagonist of a detective series – he’s a bit of a macho prat, frankly. But in this novel he is certainly shown the error of his ways by the intelligence and sensitivity of his female colleagues, and the bravery of his wife, so perhaps he’ll have matured a bit by the next novel in the series!

Euro Crime review of Gone to Ground, the first book about Will and Helen. Review by Geoff Jones.

Another review of Far Cry at Reviewing the Evidence (review by Sharon Wheeler).

Books by John Harvey.

Author website.

Book Review: All She Was Worth by Miyuki Miyabe

All She Was Worth by Miyuki Miyabe.
(this edition published by Oriel, an imprint of Orion,1998).
 

On one level, All She Was Worth is a traditional type of detective novel. A young woman, Shoko Sekine, goes missing. Her distraught fiancé contacts his uncle, Shunsuke Honma, a police detective on long-term sick leave because of a knee injury, to ask him to find her. Honma lives in an apartment block with his ten-year old son Makoto. We soon learn that Honma’s wife, Chizuko, died a few years previously in a car accident. Their son is looked after by Isaka, a neighbour who enjoys cooking and keeping house, so makes his living childminding and looking after apartments in the block (his wife is the family’s main earner).

Honma is therefore able to accept the task of searching for Shoko, and it is this search that forms the main part of this excellent book. Honma begins by visiting the woman’s last employer, and it isn’t long before inconsistencies and surprises appear. Soon, he begins to suspect he may not be looking for one lost person but two, and two lives begin to be uncovered in parallel – or do they? 

 Honma has to travel from the Tokyo suburb where he lives to Osaka and other towns and districts as he refuses to give up on his seemingly hopeless assignment, each clue failing to support his intangible   hypothesis yet leading him on into yet further insubstantial directions. Honma is a great character, somewhat dour and slightly insecure about his long absence from work and at sea without his wife, to whom he was devoted in a lovely quiet, domestic way (he cannot bear to cut the spare buttons out of the lining of his new clothes because it is something she always did, keeping the buttons in her sewing box). He loves his son, yet cannot find words to express his feelings. I loved the little male family that is gradually created at Honma’s home as the book continues, first by the addition of Isaka, then a colleague from the police department, then a young man who Honma meets on his search, who in their different ways contribute to Honma's mission. These relationships are portrayed touchingly yet unsentimentally, and give the book a real warmth, especially when the little boy is cruelly upset and all the men rally round him in their different ways.

But the novel is very far from being a ‘cosy’. First published in 1992 and translated into English (actually American English, by a conglomerate according to the publisher, by Alfred Birnbaum according to Wikipedia) in 1996, it is strongly critical social comment of the personal and family devastation caused by the uncontrolled rise in consumer spending and credit of the 1960s, when regulations in Japan were relaxed. For me, this book ticks all the boxes – I learned a lot about attitudes and the ways of life of people in Japan, and about the country, as well as thoroughly enjoying the strong if tragic plot, the social commentary (occasionally digressive but I didn't mind), and the combination of toughness and humanity that characterise the best crime novels. The title is also apt, as becomes apparent.

I first read about this author (pictured) in newbooks magazine, and was encouraged to try her by Kathy, a commenter at this blog. I am very glad I did, and will soon be reading another of the very talented Miyuki Miyabe’s crime novels (sadly, not many of them have been translated into English).

Amazon reviews of this novel.

Other reviews at: Three Steps Over Japan blog, Book Crossing journal, My Friend Amy blog.

About the author at Wikipedia.

Book review: The Janus Stone by Elly Griffiths

The Janus Stone is every bit as good as its predecessor, The Crossing Places, and in most ways even better. The protagonist, Dr Ruth Galloway, head of the forensic archaeology department at North Norfolk University (a fictional institution), is as instantly easy to like and to identify with as she was in the previous novel.  Here, she is involved in advising on a dig on the coastal salt marshes, in which Dr Max Grey of a university in Sussex is supervising the uncovering of Roman remains. In addition, Ruth is called to assist at a site in the local town, where an old mansion is being demolished in preparation for the building of a large number of “luxury” (i.e. poky) apartments on the same site. A few archaeologists have been allowed to spend some time digging for artefacts before the main construction work begins, but they discover bones that are a lot more recent than from any archaeological era.

We experience these events through Ruth’s eyes – she is a 40-year-old, slightly overweight, single woman, highly intelligent and individual, whose mind has the academic’s blessing and curse of cutting straight to the point of everything she experiences. This mental unvarnished yet quiet commentary on local events and people as well as on the wider world, is for me what lifts these novels into truly enjoyable, engaging experiences. Ruth’s lack of modern political correctness is a much-welcomed articulation of many of life’s modern irritations. In addition, perhaps because of her stifling childhood, Ruth is a tolerant and sympathetic person, and hence finds out a lot more about people and what they are up to than she might do otherwise.

At the end of The Crossing Places, Ruth made an unexpected and interesting discovery. That theme is continued in The Janus Stone, providing many amusing and warm touches throughout the novel, once again leaving a personal cliffhanger at the end which I can’t wait to see resolve itself! 

Personal considerations aside, The Janus Stone is a satisfying mystery novel, involving fascinating  information about ancient gods and ritual practices, and a set of multilayered conundrums which have to be teased out in time as well as in place. In some ways, the plot is too similar to that of the first novel, and I hope that in future the author might develop some of the rather sketchy aspects outside of her archaeological dig scenes-of-crime-and-violence, in order to broaden her themes a bit – perhaps she could reveal more about Ruth’s daily university life, which is only vaguely sketched in the first two novels. There is also a dearth of suspects in The Janus Stone, although the crime plot is certainly well-thought-out, no complaints there, and the build-up of tension as well as the thriller climax are well done.

The two main protagonists of these novels, Ruth and DCI Harry Nelson, are well-rounded and engaging individuals, whose differences contribute to their friendship and collaboration, as well as to the readers interest in them. In The Janus Stone, we are introduced to some more of Nelson’s police colleagues, and a couple of Ruth’s associates from the first novel make further appearances. So there is plenty of opportunity for this gifted author (pictured) to broaden her canvas in future. I hope she will do so, because I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Janus Stone and would like to know more about Ruth’s world and what happens regarding Nelson, as this oddly matched pair encounter further crimes and trouble.

Author website.

I thank the publisher, Quercus, for sending me a copy of this novel, which was published in the UK in February 2010. Other reviews of The Janus Stone (all positive!):

Euro Crime (Pat Austin)

Independent (Jane Jakeman) (review contains spoilers about Ruth's personal life)

Daisy's Book Journal

The Star (Canada)

Book Review: Water-blue Eyes by Domingo Villar

Water-blue Eyes by Domingo Villar

Translated from the Spanish by Martin Schifino.

First published in translation in the UK, 2008. First published, as Ojos de Agua, in 2006.
 

Water-blue Eyes is simply a perfect short crime novel, 176 pages long. It is a debut novel, but the character of Inspector Leo Caldas has lived a life before the book opens, and  I am sure continues to live outside its pages. When we first encounter him, however, he his fulfilling his weekly stint on the local radio station’s phone-in programme “Patrol in the Air” in which he answers questions from listeners between musical numbers. Caldas really does not like the programme or this part of the job, partly because most of the callers complain about noise and other matters for the city police, not relevant to homicide, the department in which he works. By the end of the introductory chapter, and this week’s edition of the programme, Caldas has noted in his book “City police, nine; crazies, two; Leo, nil”. 

The novel is set in the town of Vigo in the Galicia region of Spain, which sounds extremely beautiful. Galicia is in the north-west of the country, with Vigo in the south-western part. Along the Atlantic coast are archipelagos, little islands and rias (drowned valleys, pictured). Inevitably, progress and commercialism are eating into the distinguished, long history of the region, and Caldas’s case takes him to one such project – a huge apartment block on a tiny offshore island connected to the mainland by a bridge. It is in one of these apartments that a body has been found. 

One of the many joys of this book is the mismatched partnership of Caldas, imbued in the traditions, proud history, and rambling, leisured manner of the region; and Rafael Estavez, the huge, irate, sweaty sergeant who has been transferred under some kind of a cloud from his native Zaragoza and assigned to Caldas by his boss, Salo, to keep him out of trouble and out of his hair, as far as possible. One of the many running pleasures in the novel are the myriad ways in which Estavez is a fish out of water, blundering around crassly and threateningly, getting the pair into trouble or alienating witnesses via his lack of any form of patience or internal anger management.  

But to return to the plot. No sooner is the first chapter over and Caldas off the air, than he is plunged into the case. Estavez is waiting for him at the studio to tell him that a murder has occurred. He drives Caldas to the scene of the crime, where the detectives discover the savagely brutalised body of a saxophonist, tied to his bed.  Although the reader is not spared the (extremely) gruesome details, they are conveyed in a brisk, detached style in the manner of conveying necessary information rather than dwelling on them for their own sake. 

The rest of the novel tells the story of the investigation: how Caldas and Estavez initially develop some leads, how they follow them up, are led astray, and seem to get stuck between a dearth of suspects and  no evidence. They are also attempting to avoid contact with Salo, their boss – on Caldas’s part, he fears being taken off the investigation because he’s questioned a rich benefactor who has plenty of political influence; and in Estavez’s case because of a legal complaint that he attacked a young man in a gay bar. (In fact, Estavez was resting his foot, which had been stung by a weaver fish, an act which is misinterpreted in a hilarious set-piece.) 

Another running gag in the novel  is Caldas’s despised radio programme. Although he hates it, it gains him entry into almost every situation, as people he wants to question have inevitably heard his show and treat him as a celebrity rather than as a police officer.  Estevez, low on tact to put it mildly, keeps on making the point that it is only the radio show that is opening doors, adding even further to Caldas’s annoyance.

Caldas is a fully rounded character, but we only see some aspects of his life in this novel. He’s the son of the owner of a vineyard, and has a complicated relationship with his father, who is critical of his choice to live in the city, possibly because he cannot admit he wants his son to live with him. Caldas has had a relationship with a woman called Alba which is currently on hold, possibly to do with whether or not they want children. He’s a man who loves his environment; his appreciation of food is almost on a par with Salvo Montalbano’s*, in particular the delicious (we are told!) little crustacea and molluscs of the sea. The meals throughout are described in truly mouth-watering fashion.

You simply can’t beat this book for plot, character, atmosphere, a sense of place and poetry, and sheer readability. Although one does not feel one is reading an excessively detailed book - far from it - it is full of lovely touches, such as the book found by the victim’s bedside, and the conversation about it that Caldas holds with some university dons in the bar while waiting for their luras (small marine cephalopods) to be cooked. And most of these observations, even when apparently irrelevant, turn out to be part of the plot. All in all, the author is a naturally talented writer, who constantly brings a smile to the lips by his engaging asides and observations of human nature, yet who knows his craft - he never loses his control over the direction of this lean novel.

I can’t recommend this book highly enough as crime fiction of the best kind, and hope so much that the author, as is stated in the short biographical preface, is writing a second book. Martin Schifino, who also translates Carlos Fuentes, does a great job in this novel, so well portraying the different mores and cultures of the Spanish regions and the many humorous aspects of mutual misunderstandings. Don’t think this book is a comedy, though; it’s a morality tale with a sharp sting, much sharper than that of a weaver fish.

*Inspector Salvo Montalbano is the protagonist in a superb series of books by Andrea Camilleri, set in Sicily.

Why did I decide to read this book? Well, I had enjoyed so much reading all the books on Arcadia's Eurocrime current list  (Consorts of  Death/Staalesen, Che Committed Suicide/Markaris, Affairs of State/Manotti, At Close Quarters/Fuentes, etc) that I thought I should try this one! Then, Jose Ignacio of the blog The Game's Afoot reviewed it, so I just had to prioritise it. And I am so glad I did. I also see that Glenn has reviewed the book at International Noir Fiction.

I thank the publisher, Eurocrime/Arcadia, for sending me a copy of the book.

Book Review: Twisted Wing by Ruth Newman

Twisted Wing by Ruth Newman

Have you ever read the first 100 pages of a book and given up? That is what I nearly did with this one. But I persevered, and I am glad I did. The remaining 250 pages more than make up for the weak start.

The plot is a staple one, that of a serial killer in a Cambridge University college (this one called Ariel). As the book opens, a female undergraduate has been horribly murdered. It turns out that she is the third person to have been killed in less than 3 years. DCI Withers is now assigned to the case, having previously been sidelined for trying to convince his boss that the previous two deaths at the same college were related. Now that a third woman has been killed, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that one person, dubbed by the unimaginative media “the Cambridge Butcher”, is responsible. As well as the Withers back-story, we also get to know the group of undergraduates at Ariel who were in the victims’ circle. They are a disparate group, rather too Evelyn Waugh for my taste. A third aspect to the narrative is Matthew Denison, a forensic psychiatrist who is an old university friend of Withers and who is called in not only to examine the victims’ bodies but also to help investigate the crimes from the perspective of the mind and motivation of the killer(s). He has a very bland domestic set up with an always-understanding woman called Cass, which I could certainly have done without.

After about 100 pages of this I was getting quite bored and finding it hard to fix (or care about) the half-dozen or so examples of privileged youth who are presumably intended to be the chief suspects for the murders. However, when one of them becomes traumatised and hospitalised by having witnessed the third murder, as well as being a suspected perpetrator, the book begins to grip. And the grip continues to tighten, as we travel through a case of multiple personality disorder while Matthew tries to disentangle objective truth from present and past traumas. Suddenly, the story of the events surrounding all three murders is told chronologically, which brings the whole book into focus as the characters shift into three dimensions, and their reactions gel. I became more and more absorbed, as the temperature dropped lower and lower (figuratively and literally), and twist after twist caught me on the hop. In the end, I would say this novel is almost Scandinavian in quality as a piece of crime fiction, and that is praise indeed.

Twisted Wing was first published by Long Barn Books (warning: spoilers in blurb at the link) in the days when they published first novels that won their competition.  It was then published in paperback by Simon and Schuster (blurb is brief but fairly spoilerish), which is the edition I purchased and read.

Other reviews of this book:

Reviewing the Evidence (Sharon Wheeler, excellent review, as usual)

Fleur Fisher (a very perceptive review)

The Spectator 

Book Review: The First Rule by Robert Crais

The First Rule by Robert Crais

Billed as a “Joe Pike” novel, The First Rule is a ripping yarn that I wasn’t very sure about at first but once the introductory phase was over and the main plot kicked in, I enjoyed so much I missed my tube stop and hence my train home from work. 

The novel opens unpromisingly when a suburban family is gunned down by a gang. This massacre is not random. The father, Frank Meyer, was a mercenary (or at least, a shadowy military person who is a staple of crime fiction) who had served in a unit with Joe Pike and other pals some years ago doing brave but patriotic deeds in distant, dangerous lands: again, as one does in a certain type of novel. Frank had then met Cindy, who had sensibly told him she would only marry him if he quit the fighting life. Frank complied and got a regular job; the couple were married, had two sons and embraced the LA suburban lifestyle. Then, disaster struck.

Joe Pike usually features as an enigmatic sidekick of Elvis Cole, a private investigator and the main character in an excellent series by this author. He’s been awarded a couple of novels in which he is the main character, however, and The First Rule is one of these. Although Cole helps out Pike quite a bit as the game plays out, this novel is emphatically Pike’s show. As soon as he finds out about Frank’s death, he vows vengeance and rounds up his previous military associates, who are the usual clichéd, damaged addicts who nevertheless exist to maintain the honour of the group and to avenge any one of them who is in trouble or worse.

Joe Pike is a curate’s egg of a character. In one respect he is very boring – an invincible superman, supreme fighter, tight-lipped hero, never takes his sunglasses off,  etc.  The author often seems too much in love with him for the good of the novels in which he features. When Pike is a sidekick of Cole, this is OK. But when he has to carry a whole book on his own, it can be problematic. Yet in another respect, Pike holds the reader’s interest, when his vulnerabilities, history and more human side are allowed to show through. 

Returning to The First Rule, as soon as we get all the Pike-worship and the initial carnage out of the way and the book shifts to the plot – how Pike finds out who killed his friend and why – the momentum is revved up and the novel really takes off. I won’t provide any hints here that might spoil your experience, but suffice it to say there is plenty of detection, surprise, misdirection, strategy and tension as Pike plays off good guys against other good guys (and girls), bad guys against bad guys (and girls), and keeps his own counsel about what he is really up to. 

Characterisation is not a strong point in this book, though the main characters of Pike and Cole are straight arrows who are pleasant to identify with, and who deliver a solid chunk of action and mutual support, as well as some amusing yet touching anti-macho actions. The twists and turns of the plot, both in terms of detection and, later, as thriller, work very well. I highly recommend this novel, although it would not be the best introduction to the characters of Cole and Pike, who are so well established previously that here their personalities are mere sketches. 

Other reviews of this book at:

Reviewing the Evidence (review by Craig Sisterson)

Suite 101

Spinetingler magazine

The mystery reader

The drowning machine

Round up of reviews and quotes from reviews at the author's website.

Book Review: The Shadow of your Smile, by Mary Higgins Clark

The Shadow of your Smile
Mary Higgins Clark (published by Simon and Schuster).

I love the Mary Higgins Clark (MHC)  formula. Chief protagonist: independent, decent American young woman who works for one of the professions for a living. Thriller element. Lots of suspects and dodgy situations waiting to be unearthed. Romantic male interest. Cracking pace, easy read. If I read more than one a year, they would  probably cloy. But at an annual frequency, a book by MHC is a perfect way to spend a couple of hours on a rainy Sunday morning.

The Shadow of your Smile is no exception to the MHC rule:  in fact I think it is one of the author’s better novels of recent years.  The novel opens with Olivia Morrow’s physician giving her less than a couple of weeks to live. Olivia is in her eighties and is reconciled to her fate, but has one major unresolved worry. Many years ago, her cousin Catherine gave birth to a baby when a teenager (Olivia was a very young child at the time). Committed to her vocation as a nun, Catherine left the country to have the baby, giving it up for adoption. It was only when Olivia’s mother, Regina, died many years later that Olivia learnt the truth, but was sworn to secrecy by her confused parent. Now that Olivia herself is facing death, her dilemma is whether to pass on the documents that her mother gave her, revealing all about Catherine’s early life, to her descendants, who are unaware of this relationship. The situation is complicated by vast sums of money being involved, and the deviousness of those who want to protect their lifestyle that they enjoy because of it. 

Catherine became a famous nun, a sort of Mother Teresa of the USA, and died after a long career of selflessness and religious service. Catherine devoted her life to helping ill children, and is credited with curing at least one little boy who had an inoperable brain tumour. At the time of the novel's opening, she is being considered for beatification by the Catholic Church, adding another element to the mix.

There are many characters in this novel and many strands to the plot. All these are held together in a tight and professional style, as we have come to expect from this author. The setting is Manhattan: a world of charity bequests, post Madoff fallout and fears among the rich of other Ponzi schemes; tireless doctors, babies, spinsters, widowers, hopeless Broadway investors, reliable Irish cops, society women and mothers, and medical foundations. Every character, whether a cleaning lady or chauffeur with a small part to play, or a major protagonist, has his or her moment on the page to represent a viewpoint or situation, successfully in almost all cases. Everybody and everything is interconnected – perhaps too much to stretch belief on occasion, but who cares? I don’t, particularly as the plotting, if a tad mechanical on occasion, is very tight, and the range of decent people that fill the pages quite uplifting. I can usually trust MHC to provide a great comfort read, and she’s excelled herself this time. 

I thank Karen of Euro Crime for so generously sending me a copy of this book.

The Shadow of your Smile at the publisher's website (includes a "getting to know" video of the author). Oddly, the description of the book at this web page bears no resemblance to the plot at all. The only thing that is right is the name of one of the characters, Olivia Morrow. So don't think that the blurb there has any relation to the novel, it doesn't. I also don't think the cover is very representative of anything in the book.

Author website (including a more accurate description of this novel!)

Book review: Money to Burn by James Grippando

Money to Burn by James Grippando
HarperLuxe, March 2010.

What would you do if you checked your bank account one day and found it empty? This dilemma faces Michael Cantella, a young-ish and very successful investment banker on Wall St. It’s much worse than that – Michael rapidly discovers that not only his bank account but all his investments, including his shares in his own company Saxton Silvers, have also vanished.

Michael immediately reports his loss, which he puts down to identity theft, to his firm’s legal counsel and, through her, to the FBI. Unfortunately for Michael and exacerbated by a larger-than-life TV financial journalist who dons boxing gloves and steps into the ring to deliver his hyped-up reports, he himself comes under suspicion for having stashed away the money. Saxton Silvers, barely recovered from its earlier exposure to the sub-prime mortgage market (an escape made possible by Michael having forced through a company ruling to stop this type of investment, creating some internal enemies among his colleagues who were doing very well out of it), is now teetering on the brink. Whoever sold Michael’s shares in the company did so at a considerable loss, which causes other investors to lose confidence in the company and dump their shares. 

The novel rushes on at a cracking pace, as Michael tries to cope with disaster after disaster – losing his money, being thrown out of his fancy apartment by his wife who tells him she wants a divorce, coming under suspicion from his boss (and mentor) as well as from the police and the FBI – could life get any worse? Well – yes, it could.

A second plot running through the book is that of Michael’s first wife, Ivy. Some years previously, the couple had met (over an investment, of course) and married very quickly afterwards, while on holiday (at the company’s expense, naturally) in the Bahamas. No sooner had Michael and Ivy tied the knot than she vanished from the boat on which they were staying, presumed drowned and her body eaten by a shark. Michael has never really recovered from her death, and some circumstances about his missing money make him suspect that she might still be alive. Whether this is true, and how all these elements fit together, forms the basis of this financial thriller.

Money to Burn is a lightweight, fun read. I found the corporate espionage part of the plot much the strongest, and was not so taken with the gangster conspiracy aspects. It is certainly a bang on-trend book and taught me a few lessons about spyware, passwords and being careful with my accrued millions and my blue-chip portfolio!

I thank the publisher, Harper Collins in the USA, for so kindly sending me a proof copy of the novel.

Other reviews of this book at: Huffington Post, Reviewing the Evidence and Book Reporter.

Book review: The Dinner Club by Saskia Noort

The Dinner Club

By Saskia Noort, translated by Paul Vincent. Bitter Lemon Press.

Karen, her husband Michel and their two young daughters move out of Amsterdam for a more rural lifestyle in an upmarket village. Karen works as a freelance graphic designer from home while the girls are at school, soon becoming restless and lonely as Michel works very long hours as a film producer and their city friends gradually fade out of their lives. She finds it hard to make friends with the other mothers at the school gate, but eventually succeeds in her “girlfriend offensive” and becomes close to the well-off but hard-drinking Hanneke. Soon, Karen, Hanneke and two other mothers whose children are at the same school become part of a “dinner club” in which they socialise once a week while their husbands look after their children. And boy, do they drink! Karen is the only one of the women who has a regular source of income; the other wives are supported by their successful husbands and can pursue a life of tennis, shopping and other pleasures of the rich and idle.

Naturally, all is not what it seems, and as the book opens, one of the fathers of this social group dies in a fire at his home. Karen reflects on the initial friendship of the families and their gradual disintegration as alcohol removes judgement and restraint, as previously hidden tensions and hypocrisies come to the surface. Another member of the group dies by falling from a balcony window in an Amsterdam hotel. Karen is convinced that neither death is an accident, but the rest of the club pull together and ostracise her. She becomes desperate, having embarked on a hasty affair with one of the fathers in the club, Simon, who seems to have everyone in his power. 

Eventually, Karen joins forces with the most appealing character in the book, the idiosyncratic woman detective Dorian Jager, who is investigating the case, or trying to. Karen comes to a turning point where she has to decide what is most important – finding out what has happened to her dead friends whatever the cost to her and her own family, or whether her doubts are in her imagination and she should stay loyal to those who are left. At the same time, the author constantly shifts the reader’s perception of the roles of the different members of the group, so that the eventual truth is something of a surprise.

The Dinner Club is an amusing but perceptive satire of the shallow, materialistically aspirational life. It’s slight, quick and easy to read, and is no work of great literature — but it leaves a strong impression in its modern approach to the old themes of corruption and redemption. I particularly like the character of Dorian, and hope that she will be reprised in a future novel. She has some echoes of Ann Cleeves’s Vera Stanhope, but is a truly eccentric maverick in her own right. 

Other reviews of The Dinner Club are at: Euro Crime (Karen Chisholm); International Noir Fiction (Glenn Harper); and The Book Blog (Debra Hamel).

Another novel by Saskia Noort has been translated into English, Back to The Coast (link goes to my Euro Crime review).