Monthly Archives: November 2008

Review: The Fifth Vial by Michael Palmer

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Title: The Fifth Vialfifth-vial

Author: Michael Palmer

Publisher: St Martin’s Paperbacks (2007)

ISBN: 978-0-312-93774-4

The Fifth Vial is a medical thriller in the ‘surely that couldn’t happen outside fiction…could it?’ vein. In what appear to be unrelated incidents a coroner in Florida finds recent surgery scars on the body of an unidentified man hit by a truck on the highway and a Boston detective is hired to investigate the situation. Medical student Natalie Reyes is suspended from duty and heads to Brazil to deliver a research paper and in Cameroon a brilliant doctor’s experimental drug is in danger of never reaching production due to his own health problems.

The characters here are all a little over the top but they’re fairly credible in the context of the story. The never-ending tragedies that befall Natalie do verge on far-fetched and I did start to wonder just how many more perilous situations one 35 year old woman could survive but you expect that kind of thing with these books and I was happy to go along for the ride. There’s more than one protagonist in this book and I enjoyed their different points of view and the way their parallel stories wound themselves together. I wasn’t overly fond of Natalie so it was nice to spend a chunk of time with different characters, especially fledgling detective Ben Callahan whom I did develop a soft spot for.

The plot is what you’d expect from this kind of thriller: lots of action and twists and revealing of things (and people) that are not as they first appear. It’s a pretty well-constructed example of the genre although the resolution is a little obvious and a couple of the plot devices seemed forced to me. Why would bad guys hire a complete stranger to be a flight attendant for a plane carrying only 6 passengers? Could they not get their own packets of peanuts rather than risk showing their entire evil empire to Joe Schmo? However, the book did keep me up past my bedtime which is a sure sign of a good story-telling.

I had just about given up on medical thrillers after reading the last couple of Robin Cook novels in which his insufferable moralising about the evils of modern health care administration overtook any pretence of story-telling. Happily though The Fifth Vial is a solid example of what the genre should be: an entertaining page turner that makes you wonder which parts might just be happening somewhere in the world right now.

My rating 3.5/5 (and would have been a 4 if it had 50 less pages)

BTT: I’m Thankful For…

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thankyouThis week’s Booking Through Thursday task is to list 7 things I am thankful for in honour of Thanksgiving Day in the US. The list doesn’t have to be about books but, because I am trying to stay on topic with this blog, my list is all book related. In no particular order today I am thankful for…

  • The Book Depository- an online bookstore that offers free shipping worldwide which is a must for book addicts in the antipodes like myself
  • Douglas Adams - for the many hours of enjoyment he has provided me
  • My mum – for passing on her love of books (read a bit about this in my earlier post about books I’ve received as gifts)
  • Aust Crime Fiction – a site I discovered earlier this year which has led to my discovery of a whole swag of new (to me) Australian crime fiction writers
  • BookMooch – since discovering this site in April I’ve given away nearly a hundred books to fellow book lovers and obtained nearly 70 new (to me) books to read
  • My iPod – which allows me to ‘read’ while I’m walking, on the bus, doing the housework and any number of other activities which prevent reading the traditional way
  • Edgar Allan Poe – the author of what is generally acknowledged as the first modern mystery (The Murders in the Rue Morgue) without which my favourite genre might never have existed (and also the author of my favourite poem of all time – A Dream Within A Dream)

Review: A Holly Jolly Murder by Joan Hess

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Title: A Holly Jolly Murderholly-jolly-murder

Author: Joan Hess

Publisher: St Martin’s Minotaur (1997)

ISBN: 978-0-312-34916-5

The 12th of 17 Claire Malloy books is, as the name might suggest, a Christmas themed novel. In the days leading up to the holiday, bookstore owner Claire is invited to a winter solstice event by a customer who is also a Druid. However, before the sun rises a man is discovered dead in his home and the Druids start behaving oddly and pointing fingers at each other.I’ve not read any of this series or Hess’ other books before so I don’t know if it’s a representative sample of her writing. Regardless, as the only example I’ve come across, it left me with that meh feeling that only an average book can produce. All I can really say is that reading it passed some time.

These days it probably qualifies as a short book at 270-odd pages but, for me, it still managed to drag a bit because there wasn’t a lot happening. I’m pretty sure I could edit out 50 pages without impacting the story at all just by removing the repetitive passages along the lines of “I got my keys and drove to the store and did some dusting and some thinking and then I drove over to see Malthea…”

I didn’t find Claire Malloy to be a particularly interesting protagonist. She’s quite passive, a whingerand I really never bought into the premise that a community wary of strangers would almost universally trust Claire, whom none of them had before, with all of their secrets. I understand it had to be done to advance the plot; I just never believed it in the context of the story. In the cosy books that I like there is generally a less tenuous link between the amateur sleuth and the investigation than was the case here. Also, apart from Claire’s teenage daughter Caron, the other characters were very under-developed and I couldn’t summon up much interest in which of them might have committed the murder.

My rating 2.5/5

Series Review: Kerry Greenwood’s Corinna Chapman novels

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When I need a break from brooding Scandinavian detectives and blood-curdling serial killers I like a light, fun ‘cosy’ but, of late, I’ve had trouble finding ones I enjoy. However, earlier this year I did discover a great, Australian series that has the humour, quirky characters and decent plots that I enjoy. So far I’ve read 3 of the 4 Corinna Chapman series by Kerry Greenwood.

♣  ♣  ♣  ♣  ♣  ♣  ♣

Title: Earthly Delightsearthly-delights

Publisher:Allen & Unwin (2004)

ISBN: 978-1-74114-236-5

Melbourne baker Corinna Chapman and some of the other residents of her apartment building start receiving threatening notes. Next there’s a recovering junkie and a dark-eyed investigator/soup kitchen ‘heavy’ on her doorstep. And all of this before they day’s first muffins are baked.

I read this in June of 08 as part of my self-imposed challenge to discover new (to me) Australian authors but having never warmed to Kerry Greenwood’s more famous mystery series I approached Earthly Delights with a mixture of trepidation and anticipation. Fortunately I found no need for the trepidation. The characters, plot and writing are all equally solid and I was hooked by page five. This is the first of the series and accordingly takes some time to introduce the protagonist and her intriguing supporting cast. The inclusion of oddities such as a white which, a dominatrix, a vampire sub-culture and a Roman apartment building in modern-day Melbourne could have been a disaster but Greenwood has made them all, including the building and the city itself, fully-rounded characters rather than the caricatures a lesser author might have created.

Chapman’s involvement in the crimes that form the basis of the plot seems far more natural and credible than is the case with many amateur sleuth stories. This natural feel is enhanced by the quick, dry humour of the main character and just enough slightly left-of-centre social commentary to keep things really interesting. All in all this was an unexpected delight and I can’t wait to read the next one in the series.

My rating: 4/5

♣  ♣  ♣  ♣  ♣  ♣  ♣

heavenly-pleasuresTitle: Heavenly Pleasures
Publisher:Allen & Unwin (2005)
ISBN: 978-1-74114-512-0

In this outing there’s an odd religious group preying on Melbourne’s most vulnerable people and one of Corinna’s fellow St Kilda food sellers is having her produce poisoned. 

I read this one about 2-3 weeks after Earthly Delights. Perhaps for that reason or possibly something else I didn’t have quite the same reaction to this one, although I liked it a lot. I think it would have been better to wait longer and give myself a chance to miss the characters which is something I do with all series now.

Anyway, the writing is still great quality, the humour that I enjoyed from the first book is still very firmly evident and the cast of characters are an enjoyable bunch of people to spend a few hours with. In summary a light, well-written escape from reality.

My rating 3/5

♣  ♣  ♣  ♣  ♣  ♣  ♣

devils-food

Title: Devil’s Food

Publisher:Allen & Unwin (2006)

ISBN: 978-1-74114-710-0

This time out Corinna is forced to search for her lost, but not much loved, hippie father while sorting out if someone is poisoning the young slimmers of inner Melbourne.

It’s not exactly hard-boiled crime fiction but it does, in its way, tackle some of the seedier points of living in a big, modern city, although aided by liberal doses of wit and fun and the occasional biting social comment. Greenwood’s large cast of characters are deliciously exotic and quirky although she provides enough detail to make them realistic too. They form a big, odd, wonderful family based in and around an intriguing apartment building. I thoroughly enjoyed snuggling under a blanket on a cold, wintry afternoon with this book, which even physically is gorgeous in all it’s shiny pinkness, while pondering whether I could move into one of the spare apartments to join in the fun.

My rating 4/5

♣  ♣  ♣  ♣  ♣  ♣  ♣

trick-or-treat

Title: Trick or Treat

Publisher:Allen & Unwin (2008)

ISBN: 978-1-74175-000-3

I’ve got this one on my TBR shelves but am saving it up for a reading emergency. I’ll add my review to this post when I’ve read the book

Weekly Geeks #26 – What do we have in common?

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weekly-geeks-buttonThis week’s Weekly Geeks challenge is to snoop around the blogs of five other Weekly Geek-ers that I don’t know and find something in common with them. I chose 5 blogs at random and found the following:

  1. On At Home Wtih Books I discovered that the blog’s host Alyce isn’t normally a mystery novel reader so I thought we might not have a lot in common because that is my favourite genre. However Alyce is a fan of Alexander McCall Smith, an author I discovered to my delight only this year. In her 22 November post Alyce highlights his new online novel Corduroy Mansionswhich I have been listening to via podcast since chapter one.
  2. I wouldn’t have predicted that I’d have a lot in common with a 20-year old student from Belgium but at at Pink Blue Whale I discovered that Skodder and I both started our blogs this year and both enjoy the humour and wit of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey.
  3. At Worducopia it only took me a nanosecond or two to discover that I share a love of the movie Monty Python’s Life of Brian with Ali. It’s one of my top ten favourite movies of all time and my friends are sick of me saying “He’s not the Messaiah – he’s just a very naughty boy” at odd moments.
  4. In an October post at She Reads Books I discovered that Christine is a fellow BookMooch fan. She also offers a dozen other ways to rid yourself of books you no longer need.
  5. At A Striped Armchair I found we’d both reviewed A God’s Spy by Juan Gomez-Jurado. It was the only shared review I discovered during this challenge but, given I’ve only reviewed 7 books, it’s amazing I found any at all. Her thoughts about the book are here while mine are here and it seems we both found it entertaining.

This was a fun challenge for me but it made me hope no one comes to my blog looking for things in common. As I’ve been book blogging for less than a month there’s not much source material to snoop around in.

Review: Death of the Party by Carolyn Hart

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Title: Death of the Partydeath-of-the-party

Author: Carolyn Hart

Publisher: Avon (2006)

ISBN: 9780060004774

When Britt Barlow walks into Max Darling’s investigative agency and asks for his help snaring a murderer he urges her to go to the police. When she refuses Max, and his mystery book store owner wife Annie, head to Britt’s private island off the coast of South Carolina where she has arranged a weekend party to identify who murdered media magnate Jeremiah Addison on the island the previous year. The party guests, a few friends, family and colleagues of Addison’s, were all on the island at the time of his murder and Britt says one of them is the murderer.

The book is a variation on the house-full-of-possible-murderers story that’s been written many times before. It has a bunch of angst-ridden people with a range of guilty secrets: children angry with parents, wives who suspect their husbands and journalists prying into everything. The book is suspenseful enough, with false leads and red-herrings a-plenty, but offers nothing particularly unique and I suspect if you ask me a specific question about the it in a month or two I won’t be able to remember enough to answer you.

This is the 16th book in Hart’s Death on Demandseries, named for the bookshop run by Annie Darling, and the 9th I’ve read. I normally rather enjoy the references to mystery writers and crime fiction books that pepper the stories but this one didn’t contain many of those and it was also lacking the humour evident in the earlier novels. In fact I found the characters, including Annie and Max, a bit too schmaltzy and earnest for my liking on this outing.

Although they’re not my favourite kind of crime fiction I do like the occasional ‘cosy’ mystery for light relief after spending time with serial killers and brooding detectives but I think I’ll look elsewhere next time I’m in the mood for a light-hearted read.

My rating 2/5

To finish or not to finish

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267439_running_track_21It’s a curly question for avid readers. For years I slogged my way through every book I started regardless of my enjoyment level. It was thanks, mostly, to my favourite high school English teacher who said that’s the way good people read. She was right about a lot of things so I persevered. But last year I stopped finishing books I wasn’t enjoying. And I’ve never felt better about my reading.

It’s been roughly a year and I’ve stopped reading 15 books before the end (out of a total of 83 books started during that time). Not only do I enjoy my reading more, because I stop reading when I’m not enjoying, but I’ve been far more adventurous with the authors and genres I’ve tried.  It no longer matters if I try something and don’t like it: I don’t have to finish it. I’ve found loads of great books I probably wouldn’t have tried in the old days.

Also, and quite perversely, knowing I can quit has, on a couple of occasions, been enough to get me through a rough spot and go on to finish a book and really enjoy it. I read The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo earlier this year the first few pages completely failed to gab my attention. Knowing I could stop whenever I liked made me quite relaxed and willing to read a few more pages (at around page 40 or so I was hooked). In the old days I’d have been gritting my teeth and avoiding the book all together because I didn’t want to face reading 480 pages of something I wasn’t enjoying. Of course I’ve always, or at least since I left Mrs Mac’s class, been able to stop reading whenever I liked but I never believed that and never did it until I made a conscious decision to read for pure pleasure.

Generally, once I’ve decided not to finish a book I don’t go back to it. I take it back to the library, add it to my bookmooch inventory or give it away. This week though I’ve decided not to finish Batya Gur’s Literary Murder: A Critical Case but, for reasons I can’t quite put into words, I’m keeping the book and will try it again in a year or three. Perhaps it’s because I really, really wanted to like this book (it’s set in Israel which is just about my favourite place on earth that’s not my home) but whatever the reason I’m happy with this decision too.

So while I’m grateful to Mrs Mac for the wonderful things she taught me I’ve decided that not finishing a book doesn’t make me a bad person, just a happy reader.

Books as presents…again

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imbuyingbooks_buttonChristmas is not my favourite time of year. In fact I have been known to utter the words Bah Humbug on a regular basis from November each year. One (of the many) reasons I’m not fond of the holiday season is that it forces me to shop. I know it’s somehow being a traitor to my gender but I don’t like shopping and I particularly don’t like shopping when everyone else in town is in the shops too.

So when I caught wind of the books for the holidays campaign I liked the idea immediately. Not only is it relatively inexpensive (a necessity in these troubling economic times) and a way to help spread the joy of reading to more people but it’ll mean I don’t have to shop. Because, for me, time spent in a bookshop doesn’t count as shopping: it’s relaxation.

I’ve always bought books for people who I know share my love of reading but this year I’ll go further and find the perfect book for everyone. Naturally I can’t buy crime fiction for all but there are other sorts of books :) . Earlier this year the Australian Government ran a campaign called Books Alive 50 Books You Can’t Put Down so I think I’ll start there. The list offers great books in a variety of fiction genres as well as interesting non-fiction categories such as history, biography and even looking after the environment. Of course the books for the holidays blog also has great gift ideas from a range of contributing book bloggers. Or perhaps I’ll find inspiration among the year’s award nominees and winners:

However I find them I’m sure this year’s holiday shopping will be more enjoyable now that I’ve decided to concentrate on finding the right books for everyone.

Review: Blue Heaven by C J Box

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blue-heavenTitle: Blue Heaven
Author: C J Box
Publisher: St Martin’s Minotaur (2007)
ISBN: 978-0-312-36570-7

When 12-year-old Annie Taylor takes her younger brother fishing in the woods of North Idaho the children witness the murder of ‘a wavy-haired man’ and are soon running, literally, for their lives. They manage to flag down a car belonging to an old boyfriend of their mother’s and just as they think themselves safe things take another bad turn. At the same time a retired police officer comes to town because there might be a link to an old case he investigated but never solved. Slowly people start to wonder if there’s any connection between all these events and the fact that retired Californian cops have moved almost en masse to the area.

In this standalone novel Box has created a ripping yarn. It grabbed my attention immediately with a combination of beautifully described places and fast-paced action sequences. I’ve never been to North Idaho but I almost feel like I’ve seen it thanks to the beauty of Box’s words. On the very first page as he sets the scene where the two children will encounter the murderers he writes:

When the grey-black fists of storm clouds pushed across the sun, the light muted in the forest and erased the defining edges of the shadows, and the forest plunged into a dispiriting murk. The ground was black, spongy in the forest and sloppy on the trail. Their shoes made sucking sounds as they slogged upstream

I felt like I was right there watching the kids trudge through the mud and, if anything, the writing gets better as the book progresses.

There’s a cast of memorable, credible characters too and the book doesn’t really rely on a single protagonist. Jess Rawlins, an ageing ranch owner struggling to keep his land in a changing world is certainly a key character but there are other interesting people too. Eduardo Villatorro, the retired cop on the trail of the most bothersome case of his career and Monica Taylor, the children’s mother, both learn a lot about themselves as events unfold. And the bad guys too are well-rounded, believable people.

I’ve not heard of C J Box before and therefore have not read any of the Joe Pickett series for which he is well known. However, I can thoroughly recommend this standalone story which is perfectly encapsulated between two covers: an increasingly rare treat from this reader’s perspective.

My rating 4.5/5

Review: Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell

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faceless-killersTitle: Faceless Killers

Author: Henning Mankell

Publisher: Vintage Books (this ed 2000, originally 1991)

ISBN: 978-0-099-445522-7

There’s lots of chatter about Mankell’s Kurt Wallender at the moment with a new book just released (in English) and a new TV version of the character about to air. In addition, several friends have highly recommended the series to me so when a local bookstore had the entire Wallender series on sale I ploughed in.

This novel opens with the discovery by a farmer in rural Sweden that his elderly neighbours have been viciously attacked: one is dead and the other close to it. Niether the police nor friends and family of the victims can posit a reason for the senseless crime and the detective in charge of the case, Kurt Wallander, is battling uphill from the beginning. There are many false leads to be investigated and the frustration the police feel is palpable. The story is a good one and still very timely today, nearly 20 years after it was originally published, as it tackles such important issues as urbanisation of rural areas and the impact of immigration on societies and individuals.

So, while I enjoyed the story I didn’t like Wallander much (which I can live with) and didn’t entirely believe in the character either (which is less acceptable by far). Essentially, he’s a recently divorced, middle-aged, doggedly persistent cop with an alienated child and poor eating habits. Even his love of opera is not new for fictional cops. All of that is reasonably credible but in the same way that female stereotypes have always irritated me, the ‘man who can’t look after himself when his wife leaves him’ character often stretches my believe-o-metre. In this case I found it hard to accept that a senior police officer in charge of multiple investigations at once would be quite so flummoxed by having to buy a pair of socks all by himself. Then again there was a bit too much realism in Wallander’s repeated bouts of bowel problems and his juvenille behaviour with the new female prosecutor. Ugh on both counts.

There really weren’t a lot of other characters portrayed in any depth which, given I found the protaganist so annoying, was a problem for me and led to my wandering attention I’m sure. However I did find the book got better as it went so I will read another in the Wallander series but I’ll have a break for some other other reads first.

My rating 3/5