Review: Trick of the Dark by Val McDermid

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7

Having complained often and at length about authors who write the same book over and over again I chose to TRICK OF THE DARK up precisely because it was clear from the disparity of opinion about it that, if nothing else, McDermid had written a different book from her previous work. My main exposure to her writing has been through the Tony Hill books which are a bit bloody for my taste though I do like her writing so I was keen to try more of her standalone novels.

There were lots of things I enjoyed about TRICK OF THE DARK though my relationship with the book didn’t start well as the main character, psychiatrist Charlie Flint, is angst-ridden about whether or not to cheat on her wife Maria with another woman. I groaned audibly I think as the ‘to cheat or not to cheat’ storyline is a particular annoyance of mine both in real life and in fiction (cheat if you must but don’t bend my ear about your vacillation is my motto). But even though that thread does run throughout the novel I thoroughly enjoyed the rest of this complicated and fast-paced book.

As well as considering embarking on an affair, Charlie is in professional disgrace as the book opens due to an assessment she had made in a criminal case. Although something of a side thread I found this quite fascinating as it explored the notion of guilt and whether or not people can or should be prevented by society from committing crimes they’ve only thought about. One morning she receives some curious news clippings in the mail about a murdered bridegroom she doesn’t know. After some plot contrivances she works out that the clippings have been sent by one of her tutors from her time at Oxford and the widower of the bridegroom is Magda, whom Charlie knew as Maggot when she used to babysit her some years ago. When she gets in touch with the tutor, Corinna, she is is asked to investigate Magda’s husband’s murder. Corinna doesn’t think the two people who have been found guilty of the murder were responsible, instead she blames Magda’s new love interest, a woman called Jay who is also a former student of Corinna’s and is now a very wealthy business woman. Corinna tells Charlie that if she does not investigate and find evidence of Jay’s guilt Corinna will do whatever it takes to protect her daughter from the woman she perceives as evil.

That’s about as simply as I can summarise the early part of the book and it gets more complicated from that point on but it’s surprisingly easy to follow. Though perhaps that’s just because McDermid has the skill to make such twists and turns look easy. The book does require the suspension of disbelief but I had no trouble doing that, quickly getting caught up in the whydunnit aspects of the novel and the lives of its three main characters.

In some ways I thought Charlie the least interesting of the three (though admit that’s mainly because I was bored by the whole cheating thread). Jay Stewart, whose point of view much of the story is told from, would be intriguing I think even if you weren’t always wondering in the back of your mind if she is a serial killer. She has already published one book, a misery memoir of her horrid childhood, to much acclaim and has been persuaded to write a second biography. This volume will focus on her more recent life of ‘triumph over tragedy’ and we learn about her life as she writes different chapters though readers are always aware of the unreliable nature of Jay’s ‘recollections’. It would be a terrific sign of society’s maturity to be able to write about this book without mentioning that the three main characters (and several minor ones) are lesbians but the women’s sexuality is a significant factor in the stories. Their various experiences of coming out (or not doing so) and being on the receiving end of homophobia significantly colours the lives of all the lesbians in the story and so is an integral part of the book. Unlike some of the more vitriolic reviews on Good Reads and Amazon I thought this aspect of the book was handled sensitively and intelligently.

TRICK OF THE DARK managed to draw me into subjects and worlds I have no experience of including the cloistered atmosphere of Oxford college and its lingering pull on all who attend, as well as the tribulations of being gay and hated for that fact (in my bubble world I like to think we’re all grown up about such things now but clearly not). Having had somewhat ambivalent expectations of this book through reading very positive and very negative reviews I was pleasantly surprised and would recommend the book to those who can suspend their disbelief in the interests of a ripping, and thought-provoking yarn.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

TRICK OF THE DARK has been reviewed at Crime Scraps, Euro Crime, Euro Crime (2), Petrona and Savidge Reads

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 4/5
Author website http://www.valmcdermid.com/index.html
Publisher Hachette Digital [2010]
ISBN 9780748117017
Length 362 pages
Format eBook (ePub)
Book Series standalone
Source I bought it
Creative Commons Licence
This work by http://reactionstoreading.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Review: Trackers by Deon Meyer

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7

It’s hard to know how to talk about TRACKERS without giving away too many of the book’s surprises which come from both story and structure so I shall err on the side of caution. I don’t think it’s letting too much out of the bag to say that there are three distinct books here, and though the reader assumes the stories will eventually intertwine most connections are not made until almost the very end so you are really reading three independent stories. While this maintains suspense it does require more than the usual amount of small-detail retention on the part of the reader, something that proved quite challenging with the audio version of the book.

The first and most prominent of the three stories centres around a woman called Milla Strachan who, when we meet her, is just coming to the decision to leave her violent, philandering husband and their boorish, spoiled son. Although she trained to be a journalist she has not worked for many years and struggles to find a job until she spies a small newspaper advertisement. That leads to a report-writing job with a government agency. In the second book we meet a young freelance bodyguard called Lemmer who is hired for the seemingly innocuous job of escorting two endangered rhinos being smuggled into the country from Zimbabwe on behalf of a wealthy and slightly dodgy farmer. In the final book of TRACKERS we follow the trail of former policeman Mat Joubert as he starts his new job as a private investigator and takes on the case of a missing husband whose wife is unsatisfied with what she perceives to have been a fairly cursory investigation by police.

All three stories are compelling in their own right though I have to admit to finding the first one a little tough-going in parts. Although the audio narration was excellent I found the very complicated plot a little hard to follow in this format and did have to rewind quite a bit which is something I very rarely need to do. I had no such problems with the other two books within this book and perhaps for that reason I enjoyed those two stories slightly more than the first.

There are several elements which link the books, the most obvious being that each depicts some version of tracking; be it people, animals, objects or something less tangible.  This could have been clumsy in a less talented author’s hands but Meyer is a terrific storyteller and manages to use this device almost without the reader noticing it’s being done. Another theme common to the stories is that the main character in each one is at something of a crossroads in his or her life and the events cause, or force, them to learn something not entirely comfortable about their own makeup. Milla Strachan’s case is probably the most dramatic of the three but these threads are all fascinating and provide part of the depth of this book.

The remainder of that depth comes from the other thing which links the books which is the  ever-present commentary on life in modern South Africa. It is almost as if Meyer has written a non-fiction book underneath the fictional one in which he is depicting a year in the life of his country. Setting the main part of the story in the time leading up to the country’s hosting of the football (soccer) world cup offers scope to show how the country and its residents want to be seen on the all-important international stage, while the disparate stories within TRACKERS allow a broad cross-section of ‘routine’ lives to be depicted which helps readers build up a real picture of the country today. Again it is something you almost don’t notice until the book is finished when you suddenly realise you have such a detailed picture of the place that you feel like you could walk into the pages and feel at home.

I think I’ve only scratched the surface of all that is good about TRACKERS so can only recommend you read the book for yourselves, though I’d only recommend the audio format to seasoned listeners. It is an intelligent, compelling thriller with a fantastic range of characters and an absorbing sense of place. At a time when many successful writers seem content to write the same book over and over again Meyer is to be applauded for continuing to stretch himself and his readers.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Trackers has been reviewed at International Noir Fiction, Mysteries in Paradise, Petrona, The Game’s Afoot and was chosen as one of 2011′s best thrillers by Kirkus Reviews

I’ve reviewed three of Deon Meyer’s other books Devil’s Peak, Dead at Daybreak and Thirteen hours.  There hasn’t been a dud in the bunch.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 4.5/5
Author website http://www.deonmeyer.com/
Translator K.L. Seegers (from Afrikaans)
Narrator Saul Reichlin, Rupert Degas, Sandra Duncan
Publisher Hodder & Stoughton [2011]
ASIN B005OSUOAE (downloaded from audible.com)
Length 17 hours and 55 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series standalone
Source I bought it
Creative Commons Licence
This work by http://reactionstoreading.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

What Price A Comeback?

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12

I know I’ve ranted before (and at some length) about book pricing here in Australia but it’s a topic I like to re-visit every now and again; mostly to see if the issue is still the same giant mess. There’s always the slim chance that someone fixed it up while I wasn’t paying attention right? I’d hate to waste my ranting about things that aren’t problems anymore when there are so many rant-worthy subjects to be found :)

What prompted this particular post was seeing a tweet from Jon of Pages & Pages book store in Sydney saying that Peter Corris’ brand new release, COMEBACK, is only $9.99 in his store’s eBook outlet. The rest of the world might cringe at that price for an eBook but it’s damned cheap for a traditionally published, new release title by an Australian author regardless of the format. Was it a sign of a new regime of sensible pricing or an inexplicable aberration I wondered and was, as ever, bemused by what I found when I checked the price in other outlets (all prices in Australian dollars):

Kobo (kobo eBook) $7.99
Pages & Pages (ReadCloud eBook) $9.99
Readings (Booki.sh eBook) $9.99
Amazon (kindle edition) $14.99
Booktopia (Google eBook) $22.50
Booktopia (trade paperback) $23.95 + shipping
Boomerang Books (trade paperback) $26.99 + shipping
Dymocks (google eBook) $29.99
Dymocks (trade paperback) $29.99

At this stage the physical version of the book is not available from overseas outlets (neither Book Depository nor Amazon).

So I guess I have learned I can still rant about this subject without looking like an out of touch crazy lady, though for the moment I’m all out of rant. So if you are a publisher (particularly the publisher of this title) consider yourself slapped with a wet fish.

For the record I did purchase a copy of the book from Pages & Pages. I could have gotten the book $2 cheaper but I’m happy to pay a small surcharge for dealing with an Australian company. Especially given that the Pages & Pages ReadCloud store is the only eBook store that I’ve used (and I have used about 2 dozen such stores in the past 18 months) that rivals Amazon for ease and speed of use and download. If you are a reader of ePub books you should definitely check it out (and no Jon hasn’t paid me to say that but if you’d tried as many complicated checkout/download operations as I have, you too would be raving about something that offers speed and simplicity without assuming all customers are criminals in waiting).

I shall go to sleep tonight hoping that COMEBACK’s price is a sign of our publishing industry’s maturation on pricing issues, but I shan’t hold my breath :)

Review: A Room Full of Bones by Elly Griffiths

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13

In the fourth book to feature forensic archaeologist Ruth Galloway the mystery starts early on. Ruth has been asked to attend a local museum for the opening of a coffin which was found at a construction site and is thought to contain the remains of a medieval Bishop. She arrives to find the museum’s curator lying on the floor. Not being certain if the man is alive or not she phones an ambulance and the police. The man is pronounced dead on his arrival at hospital and the police investigation steps up a notch which introduces DI Harry Nelson to the action.

Of course anyone who has read the previous novels in this serious would have been waiting for this meeting as Ruth and Harry have a personal history which was left at a rather dramatic point at the end of The House at Sea’s End. I’m trying not to give spoilers to this or previous books so I won’t say much more, other than to reflect that I thought Griffiths did a good job of capturing the awkwardness realistically. She’s also done a good job of encapsulating the essence of the personal lives of Ruth, Harry and their friends and colleagues so this would be a decent place to start the series if you are interested in trying it out but don’t feel you have the time or energy to read the three earlier books.

The mystery element in this novel is stronger than has been the case in the previous novels which, while entertaining, were all fairly easy to stay ahead of, especially for seasoned crime readers. Here there are several threads that need to be sorted out including the very basic question of whether or not the museum curator was murdered or not. There do prove to be two potential motives including a possible connection to claims being made for the repatriation of Australian Aboriginal bones and skulls in the museum’s custody. Ruth’s old friend Cathbad is a member of a group which has requested the items be returned to Australia for a proper burial, as is her new next door neighbour who is an academic visiting from Australia. He is also a member of the same tribal group to which the bones belong so he has a personal stake in the repatriation of the items. The issue of such repatriation is becoming increasingly vitriolic in the real world but Griffiths handled its complexity and sensitivity well. In particular Ruth’s needing time to weigh up the pros and cons on a personal and professional level rang very true. I’m always a little wary of ‘foreign’ books which throw in Australian characters or tackle other subjects I am familiar with but Elly Griffiths has done well on both counts here.

It’s fair to say that most fans of this series are at least as interested in the personal stories of Ruth, Harry and friends as they are in the whodunnit aspects of the books and those fans will not be disappointed with this instalment. Ruth’s daughter has her first birthday in this book but Ruth still frets about her mothering skills and seems a little preoccupied at times so she is not quite the dominant character in this book as she has been in the past and Harry’s dry humour is also quiet for a while when he undergoes a particularly nasty trauma. While I did miss the presence of my favourite two people a little, there were many developments in the lives of the lesser characters to keep me interested. I have quite a soft spot for Cathbad who is a lab technician at Ruth’s university but is also a Druid and seems willing to participate in any vaguely spiritual ritual he thinks suitable for a given situation which often has unforseen circumstances.

I look forward with much anticipation to the arrival on my doorstep of the annual instalment of this series and, once again, the reading experience lived up to my expectations, providing a very enjoyable and satisfying read with just a hint of what might happen in the next book.. I read A ROOM FULL OF BONES in a single day (again the housework was neglected) and had a very contented smile on my face upon completion, you can’t ask for better than that.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

A Room Full of Bones has been reviewed at Euro Crime

I have reviewed the first three books in the series: The Crossing Places, The Janus Stone and The House at Sea’s End

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 3.5/5
Publisher Quercus [2012]
ISBN 9781849163699
Length 344 pages
Format trade paperback
Book Series #4 in the Ruth Galloway series
Source I bought it
Creative Commons Licence
This work by http://reactionstoreading.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Dabbling in writing by Australian women #1

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7

Because I’ve only signed up for one reading challenge this year I feel I have enough time to check out what other participants are reading and saying about their challenge experience which is something I’ve been pretty slack about in my reading challenges in other years. Part of my reason for diligently checking out as many posts as I can is that I challenged myself to dabble in a few genres for the challenge so I’m actively looking for recommendations for non-fiction plus historical, literary and contemporary fiction that I might like. But I’m also just curious to investigate the breadth of writing by Australian women and I thought I’d occasionally share the posts that interest me most over the course of the year.

One of the challenge’s main champions, Shelleyrae from Book’d Out hosted a visit from contemporary fiction author Lisa Heidke who talked about her horror at seeing her first book cover (which she had no control over). It must so painful for an author to know their work is going to be judged by lots of people based on some aspect that the author has had no say in themselves.

At Whispering Gums I found a review of Francesca Rendle-Short’s BITE YOUR TONGUE, a fictionalised memoir from the daughter of a woman who was an anti-smut campaigner. Starting life so unwillingly absorbed in someone else’s agenda always seems to me to be a tough break and it’s interesting to see how this plays out.

Marg from Adventures of an Intrepid Reader wrote a lengthy review of Anna Funder’s ALL THAT I AM, a historical fiction novel set in Germany in 1930′s as Hitler came to power. The book is one that you see everywhere in book stores here and I must have had it in my hands a half-dozen times but I’ve never walked out of the shop with it, despite the accolades it has received. Marg’s review is not ultra negative but it does take a critical look at the book and I think I’m convinced to try something else instead.

Coleen Kwan assured us all that Jessica Rudd’s CAMPAIGN RUBY isn’t full of political backstabbing and I can’t be the only one who breathed a sigh of relief. For overseas readers Jessica Rudd is the daughter of our most recent ex-prime minister and therefore it was not unreasonable to wonder if the tawdry mess that was his deposing got written into the book but apparently not. Even for a politics junkie like me this would not have been interesting as we all lived through it once :)

Maree from Like the World reviewed Favel Parrett’s PAST THE SHALLOWS which is one of the books I was thinking about when I decided to dabble in genres other than my usual crime fiction for this challenge. It’s literary fiction set in Tasmania and is the story of three brothers who live with their embittered father. The book is by a young Australian woman and everyone was talking about the book last year. Maree has made it very tempting saying “it completely immerses you as family secrets unravel and the boys’ lives are revealed with quiet urgency. This is the kind of book you read in one greedy sitting”

This is just the tip of the iceberg of reviews and other discussion posts that have been written in the first weeks of the Australian Women Writers challenge 2012. It’s not too late for you to join in, or if you can’t do that at least head on over to the challenge website and check out some of the other links. You’re bound to find a recommendation for some great writing by Australian women.

The Stranger House and other stories

Posted on
7

I finished Reginald Hill’s The Stranger House about a week ago but haven’t been able to write an even vaguely coherent review of it. Not because it’s not good but because I couldn’t think of anything new to say about how much I like and admire Hill’s writing and approach to the telling of stories. I’ve reviewed three of his books here (A Cure For All Diseases, Midnight Fugue and The Woodcutter) and on looking back I’ve been fairly repetitive in my gushing praise. I simply couldn’t think of a different way to say that I love the way this man tells a story.

The Stranger House is a standalone novel set in a remote Cumbrian village and tells the tale of two travellers, their ancestors and the village that ties them all together. A young Australian mathematician called Samantha (Sam) Flood goes to Illthwaite looking for information about her biological grandmother who she believes might have lived there before moving to Australia and adopting out the baby that was to become Sam’s father. Miguel (Mig) Midero is a Spanish man with an English mother who was studying to be a priest before ceasing his studies and embarking on a quest to uncover the details of his ancestor who was last heard of when setting sail with the Spanish armada in the 1580′s. Both Sam and Mig’s searches uncover dark secrets, recent and ancient, about the village and its families in a book that is epic in scope and somewhat gothic in feel. Above all it’s a marvellous story full of the larger than life characters, wit and intelligence that I’ve come to expect from Hill.  I think the thing I admire most is that he never seemed to be ‘phoning it in’. He was trying new things, taking risks, having fun with writing styles and genre conventions right to the end. The Woodcutter (published in 2010 when Hill was 73) is simply a perfect example of the art of storytelling.

If you’d asked I probably wouldn’t have called myself a die hard fan of Hilll’s because I don’t think I’ve read even half of his books and I haven’t liked all of the ones I have read. But two of the three books mentioned above appeared in my top ten books for the year I read them and the last one missed out by only the slimmest of margins. There isn’t another author who has appeared so consistently in my lists of favourite books. So it kind of snuck up on me while I wasn’t looking but it turns out I am  a real fan of Reginald Hill which probably explains why waking to the news of his death this morning made me very sad. I will however be forever grateful for the hours of escape, entertainment and joy that he has provided, and I will take comfort knowing there are some of his books I’ve yet to read.

RIP Reginald Hill, and thank you.

More book spin nonsense

Posted on
15

I wrote last year of my annoyance at book blurb writers but have largely managed to keep my blurb rage under control since then. However I feel the urge to ask “what the…?” with respect to the marketing of the latest book in Elly Griffiths Ruth Galloway series, A Room Full of Bones

Combine a splash of Alan Bradley with a pinch of Kathy Reichs and you have a gripping new Ruth Galloway Mystery — a good-hearted mystery series with a dark edge.

I don’t know that I actually want to spend time imagining the awfulness that would result from a combination of Alan Bradley and Kathy Reichs but I am a hundred percent sure I wouldn’t want to read it. I suppose I should be grateful they didn’t throw in a reference to Griffiths being the next Stieg Larsson :)

What’s the silliest or most off-putting book blurb or marketing material you’ve spied lately?

The swings and roundabouts of book recommendations

Posted on
29

Choosing what books to read can be a curly problem. Of course we all have favourite authors whose new works we look forward to with much anticipation and I suspect most of us also have a few trusted sources of recommendations too. For me that’s a handful of book bloggers and a couple of friends whose opinions I trust. I don’t have a chart for this (yet) but I’d guess about 65-75% of my books come via one of these channels (old favourites and recommendations from trusted sources) and the vast bulk of them are good reads. Many are excellent.

The last 25-35% of reading is much more of a hit or miss affair. These are books I read because they fit some esoteric reading challenge, or someone outside my trusted circle has forced them on me, or my book club has chosen them for our discussion. About a year ago I also made a conscious effort to read more Australian crime fiction, especially by debut authors. The books that come to me via these channels are far more likely to end up  with lower ratings or, as my leisure reading time reduces, as unfinished.

Sometimes, like right now, I wonder whether it is worth bothering at all with books that come via these less failsafe channels. I could certainly keep myself well supplied with excellent reading by only using the first category of recommendations entirely skipping the challenges, the book club selections and the debut novels from Aussie writers.

This weekend for example I gave up on a book by a debut Australian author that made me really cross about the state of publishing. The book’s blurb claimed it to be ‘in the tradition of Peter Temple’ which, frankly, set the warning bells ringing. I know it probably wasn’t the author’s doing but surely publishers know the dangers inherent in comparing a brand new writer to such a highly respected author whose last book won the country’s major literary (not genre-based) award. They are big shoes to fill and the odds of a debut author managing the task are pretty small so it really is setting the book up to fail. Even disregarding the frankly ludicrous comparison though I found this particular book harder going than leisure reading ought ever to be. By about page 100 the protagonist had been the subject of sustained child abuse at a notorious orphanage, drafted into the Army for a tour of Vietnam (where an American soldier’s brains ended up in his hair), lost his wife to a terminal illness which he nursed her through, lost one son to a drug overdose, lost complete touch with his other son, become an alcoholic, been demoted from his job and posted to the back of beyond. My internal ring-of-truth-o-meter (patent pending) broke at this point and I decided that even though I’d paid full Australian retail price for the book I wasn’t going to waste another minute on a book in which the main character had experienced too much to make him even vaguely credible. Besides all that eye-rolling was playing havoc with my contact lenses.

Why bother with these debut authors I grumbled to myself? Why not just read the books recommended by those I trust and let someone else wade through the crap?

On the other hand there’s Y.A. Erskine’s THE BROTHERHOOD.Out of the 178 books I finished last year it came in at number 2 on my list of favourites for the year. It is an outstanding book and the only reason I read it was because it was a debut crime fiction novel by an Australian author, just like the book described above. I had not seen a single other review for it when I bought it and I just don’t think I’d have come across it via any other channel and that would have been my loss.

So is it true that what you lose on the swings you make up for on the roundabouts? I suspect the crap to gem ratio from this second, almost random channel of books is pretty low (again I’ve no hard data but I’d guess 1 book in 20 or 25 is very good). Should that be enough?

I haven’t really decided on an answer yet. I shall try to be more philosophical about choosing not to finish a book that’s not good even if I’ve pad hard-earned cash for it and will continue reading at least some books via these random channels (though I’ve cut back severely on reading challenges this year and have become more selective about which book club choices I read). But I do like the idea of finding the occasional undiscovered gem.

What about you? What are your trusted sources for book recommendations? Do you only read books that come via these sources or do you have some random channels that provide hits and misses? Do the misses bug you a lot or are you accepting of the idea that their presence makes the hits that much more valuable?

Review: Matilda is Missing by Caroline Overington

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5

Matilda is Missing is narrated by Barry Harrison, a pensioner from a typical working class suburb in Melbourne. As the book opens we learn that Barry’s wife Pat is struggling to cope with the loss of access to her grandchildren after her son’s marriage collapses. At the same time Barry inherits some documents from an old friend of his, Frank Brooks, who was a judge in the Family Court. Frank believes he made a mistake in a case he presided over and, knowing he is dying, thinks Barry will know the right thing to do and so arranges for the case files to be passed on. Barry has no clue why Frank chose him to deal with the matter but he is not the sort of bloke to shirk a duty so he starts to review the documents. As he does so  the troubling story of Garry Hartshorn and Softie Monaghan and their struggle for their daughter Matilda unfolds.

I’ll be up front and say this is not the sort of book I would normally read. I was wary of comparisons in the book’s own marketing material to the works of Jodi Picoult as I’ve read a couple of those and found them too manipulative of reader emotions and opinions for my taste (to me they have an air of the author pushing the reader to be in a flood of tears by the end and if you’re not there’s something wrong with you). However, when I signed up for the Australian Women Writers challenge I opted to dabble in genres beyond what I typically read and I chose Matilda is Missing as one of the “out of my comfort zone’ books. In the end I had a couple of misgivings about it but overall there was much more to like than I anticipated.

One of those misgivings concerned the contrivance used to make Barry the teller of this particular story. Aside from questioning the legalities of such a handover of documents (one component in particular is illegal where I live) it was a little too convenient to be wholly believable that the court documents would include a series of taped sessions with a psychologist that were perfectly ordered and complete in the details they provided about the histories and shared life of the two main characters. But while I’d have preferred some other method for enabling Barry to be the narrator, I think Overington made a great choice in using him for the role as the novel did need to be told from the perspective of an outsider to the central relationship. He was far enough removed from the heart of things to allow him (and by association us as readers) some objectivity but involved enough to offer some authentic insights into the events being depicted and the emotions experienced by the various players.

Barry was also a very realistic character, often sounding like my own dad (who is a bit older but has a very similar background and philosophy to Barry’s). I particularly liked the way Overington used him to help show the generational differences in the way men display their thoughts and feelings about their families. I warmed to Barry’s laconic, pragmatic voice very quickly and wanted to give him a great big hug at the end when he took a practical approach to his own family’s problems. My dad would approve too.

The couple at the heart of the story are also realistically depicted, as is their tale of misguidedly getting together. I know some people whose lives have panned out exactly as they planned when they were eleven, but I know a lot more (myself included) who have muddled their way through and often found themselves astonished at the situations they’ve gotten into. Garry and Softie fall squarely into this second category and the book does a great job of showing us how easily such things happen, irrespective of how smart the participants are or how many warning bells ring. Overington shows us why Garry and Softie either couldn’t see the disasters looming in their relationship or why they chose to plough on regardless. The plot device used is a series of taped sessions the two participated in individually with a psychologist as part of the court process and so we see two vastly different interpretations of the same events on multiple occasions and this is fascinating. Their first date for example is described truthfully by both of them but it sounds as if they are talking about two entirely different events because, as with most things in life, the truth is often a matter of perception. As a whole though the two were shown with an almost complete lack of moralising about their behaviour and choices; another benefit of the narrative device and another strong point in the book’s favour.

My only other misgiving is about the ending. The bulk of the book is an even-handed and thoughtful exploration of the fallout from family breakdown in a modern setting. Through the various scenarios depicted we see that whether you go down the route of using the Family Court or trying to sort things out amicably between the parties, splitting one family unit into two can’t result in happiness for everyone (or in many cases anyone). For me that provided enough drama but the story takes a final, fairly sensationalist twist that I found a little disappointing. Funnily enough I liked the very end which some reviewers who otherwise love the book struggle with due to its ambiguity. But life is full of such loose ends in my experience so I thought this a perfect ending to this sad but realistic story.

All in all this was a very enjoyable read with a terrifically authentic narrative voice which allowed an objective exploration of a difficult subject. Matilda is Missing manages to depict the family breakdown scenario from multiple viewpoints, including that of the often-forgotten extended family members, without demanding that readers take a side. I suppose if you had been through a similar scenario yourself you might find yourself identifying more with one party or the other, but not having been through that experience (thankfully) I found Overington’s characterisations of both Garry and Softie to be even-handed and judgement free. I eagerly gobbled the book up in a couple of sittings and recommend it to all.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Caroline Overington is a Walkley Award winning investigative journalist and has published two non-fiction books as well as three novels to date including Ghost Child and I Came to Say Goodbye in addition to Matilda is Missing.

This is my first book counting towards the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2012 in which I am aiming to read and review 10 books by female Australian writers (actually I’m hoping for a number somehwere closer to 25 by year’s end but the offical challenge is for 10 books). I’ve opted to be a dabbler as far as genres go. I’ve no idea what genre this book belongs to (which kind of supports my premise that genre labels are silly) but in the absence of anything else will go with contemporary fiction.

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My rating 4/5
Publisher Bantam [2011]
ISBN 9781742750385
Length 353 pages
Format trade paperback
Book Series standalone.
Source I borrowed it from the library
Creative Commons Licence
This work by http://reactionstoreading.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Review: V is for Vengeance by Sue Grafton

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8

The 22nd outing for Kinsey Millhone, private detective in the fictional California town of Santa Teresa starts with a brief prologue in which a young man is thrown to his death from the top floor of a Las Vegas parking garage after failing to pay his gambling debts to a loan shark, Lorenzo Dante.The story proper then starts two years later when Kinsey spots two shoplifters in a local department store and after alerting the store’s security to follow one of the woman Kinsey trails after the other. The first woman is Audrey Vance and she is arrested, but shortly after being bailed out of jail by her boyfriend her body is found, apparently having committed suicide from a local bridge. Kinsey is then approached by Audrey’s boyfriend who doesn’t believe she was shoplifting and wants her good name cleared. However Kinsey soon becomes convinced that Audrey was a professional shoplifter, part of a large operation. While all this is going on we’re introduced to a woman called Nora who is married to a wealthy Hollywood agent but soon experiences an upheaval in that relationship. She meets Lorenzo Dante who is tiring of his life of organised crime and becomes smitten with Nora which has unforeseen circumstances. Of course the two stories eventually connect, in several ways by the end of the novel.

This book is a return to a more traditional storytelling format after the departure into part historical fiction of 2010’s U is for Undertow. From a plotting perspective it is complicated but in Grafton’s assured hands the different elements are juggled well, always keeping the reader’s interest There are plenty of twists and turns along the way as Kinsey unravels the shoplifting racket and Nora and Lorenzo do their separate dances with fate. There is a one unlikely coincidences at the very end which I could have done without but I forgave it. I did think it a nice change for a crime novel to spend most of its investigative energy on the crime of organised shoplifting which I had no idea could be so lucrative and…well…organised! Who’d work in retail?

It’s fair to say that Kinsey has never been the most deeply drawn character in crime fiction but here she does seem to be even more solitary and one-dimensional than usual. In the past couple of books she has made tentative connections to the extended family she has discovered, after being orphaned as a young child, but there is no mention of her relatives here. Even Henry, her octogenarian landlord, plays only a minor role as he is out of state for most of the book. So for character development we turn to others including Nora and Lorenzo whose backgrounds are vastly different but whose current dissatisfaction with the direction their lives have taken is interesting to watch unfold.

I have written before about my fondness for this series and have even admitted a certain lack of objectivity which might result in me being a bit more generous about these books than others I read so you’ll have to excuse me a little. Though even I can admit that V is for Vengeance is not the best of the series.It’s a bit long for example. The first books in the series were never 450+ pages long and this one didn’t need to be either. For instance fans of the series already know about Rosie the bar owner’s dodgy Hungarian cooking and I’m sure even readers new to the series would have gotten the gag with less than a dozen or so references to it. There seemed to be a bit of unnecessary filler content like this that in earlier books was either never there to begin with or was edited out.

That said I still enjoyed catching up with Kinsey again and am philosophical about the slight waxing and waning of quality that happens with any long running series. I think i’m still objective enough to be able to say that this series is not on a downward spiral like several I’ve stopped reading all together (e.g. Patrica Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta series). Essentially this book is well in keeping with its predecessors and the main characters didn’t do anything ridiculous. I will look forward to the remaining 4 installments of the series. If you’re new to the alphabet books and are curious I would recommend you read the previous novel, U is for Undertow, which I think works much better than this one as a standalone novel or as an introduction to the series. But long time fans will be happy enough with this outing, though most will probably wish for a bit more Henry as I did.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 3.5/5
Publisher Mantle [2011]
ISBN 9780230756212
Length 437 pages
Format trade paperbak
Book Series #22 in the alphabet series.
Source I bought it
Creative Commons Licence
This work by http://reactionstoreading.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.