Monthly Archives: December 2008

2008 a year in reading

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Before I list my best books of the year a few statistics that sum up my reading year:

tbr-20081227

  • I started 94 books this year and finished 82 of those. That’s a few more DNFs than I usually have but I did try a lot of new (to me) authors so some uncompleted books are to be expected.
  • I acquired 158 books which is worrisome not only because it’s far more than I read but also because it is indicative of my growing ‘problem’. This time last year my TBR pile sat comfortably on a corner of my nightstand and now occupies its own separate bookshelf (see photo)
  • I bought less than half of those books and acquired the rest via mooches, gifts, review copies and borrowing
  • I tried 47 authors for the first time (a definitive personal record)
  • I joined four online reading groups and one new face-to-face one

Although it’s my favourite genre I don’t only read crime fiction and thought I should include a couple of my other great finds this year:

  • Shakespeare: A Short Life by Bill Bryson (a witty, beautifully observed ode from one word craftsman to another and I devoured it)
  • Blind Faith by Ben Elton (this saw Elton back at his best and offered a funny, if depressingly possible, vision for our collective future that is scarier than anything a crime fiction writer has ever written)
  • Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks (detailing the events of a fictional English village which isolates itself to control an outbreak of plague in 1666 it brings alive one of the most vividly depicted fictional worlds I’ve ever had the good luck to stumble into)

And now on to my 10 favourite crime fiction reads of the year. Looking at the list, which has been mulled over extensively in the last week or so, there are some common elements to all the books: fascinating characters of one sort or another and the creation of a strong sense of location being chief among them.

As I rarely read books in the year they’re published (I’m too cheap to buy them at the exorbitant new release prices in Australia)  only one of these was actually published in 08. As I wasn’t blogging all year only some of the books have been reviewed here (links where available):

  • The Broken Shore by Peter Temple (which does, without trying, a far better job of representing Australia than the film of that name which was released this year and has oodles of dry humour and wonderfully sparse writing as well)
  • The Savage Altar (a.k.a The Sun Storm) by Asa Larsson (my first foray into Scandinavian crime fiction and a thoroughly suspense-filled, unpredictable story)
  • Blue Heaven by C J Box (a book that made me feel like I’d been to North Idaho by the time I’d finished reading it)
  • Still Waters by Nigel McCrery (the book with the most disturbing opening image I read all year which continued on to do something unique with this genre I love so much)
  • Devil’s Peak by Deon Meyer (yet another innovative approach to crime fiction with marvellous characters and great scene-setting imagery)
  • A Certain Malice by Felicity Young ( the second of three new-to-me Australian authors appearing on this list who can tell gripping yarns in a recognisably Australian voice without making me cringe and pretend to be Canadian)
  • Earthly Delights by Kerry Greenwood (a book with such warmth and great characters that reading it made me want to pack all my worldly belongings and move into the apartment building at its heart)
  • The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by  Stieg Larsson (a book I was pleased to have been bullied gently encouraged to read by Kerrie due to the wonderfully unique and captivating Lisbeth Salander) (I’ve even bought book 2 in the series at new release prices!)
  • Vodka Doesn’t Freeze by Leah Giarratano (not relying on a sole protagonist this book is brimming with strong, memorable voices including the villainous Jamaal Mahmoud with his simmering violence and pull-the-blankets-over-your-head terror inducing contempt for everyone he meets)

And my number one read of the year

#1  The Collaborator of Bethlehem by Matt Beynon Rees (published as The Bethlehem Murders in the UK and Australia but I got mine from the US).

I didn’t have to look at my reading notes for this book when preparing this article. I remember it most vividly both for its content and the way it made me feel. Though reading it made me so sad I struggled to finish it through streaming tears it’s the book I reflect most upon since finishing it. There’s a reasonably straight-forward plot about a flawed but morally strong and stubborn man trying to clear the name of his friend and stand up to the bullies around him. On another level there’s the depiction of Palestinian Bethlehem which is simply breathtaking. I’ve travelled in the Middle East and do keep up with news from there as much as I can but headlines, even in-depth reporting, never tell the whole story. This book humanised the news and events I hear so much about and provided what I think, sadly, is a fairly realistic picture of the day-to-day lives of displaced refugees in the region. It wasn’t a book I could put back on the shelf and forget. I’ve picked it up countless times to re-read passages, some of which still make me cry, and have badgered others silly until they agreed to read it too. I’ve yet to meet anyone who isn’t moved by it.

*****

In some ways this list is a little arbitrary. Perhaps the fact that these stuck with me a little more than the others is more an accident of timing than anything else because there are another 35 or so excellent books that I read this year that I had to weed out of this best reads list.

They are all, in combination, the collective reason I’m so happy that I’m one of those people who can enjoy the simple pleasure of losing myself in a great book and am very grateful to authors everywhere for supplying me with an abundance of choices in which to get lost. Bring on 2009.

Review: China Lake by Meg Gardiner

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Title: China Lake

Author: Meg Gardiner

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton (2002)

ISBN: 978-0-340-82247-0

A young American sci-fi author and part time lawyer, Evan Delaney, is looking after her six year old nephew while her brother is posted to sea as a Navy pilot. The boy’s mother, who disappeared some months before the book starts, reappears in all their lives as a member of an extreme religious cult known as The Remnant. The cult soon moves from picketing the funerals of AIDS sufferers to more deadly pursuits and Evan’s family and friends all get caught up in the mayhem.

I added this book to my bookmooch wishlist after someone posted the opening lines to the 4 Mystery Addicts reading group:

Peter Wyoming didn’t shake hands with people; he hit them with his presence like a rock fired from a slingshot. He was a human nail, lean and straight with brush-cut hair, and when I first saw him he was carrying a picket sign and enough rage to scorch the ground.

Those lines hinted, to me, that a ripper yarn might follow. Alas, it was not, quite, to be.

Although it had potential the book missed the marks that would have made it a great thriller for me. Along with the religious cult there’s action aplenty (although quite a bit of filler too), conspiracy theories and a rejected high school crush that turns to adulthood revenge-seeking on a large scale. There are even rabid animals and impossibly cute children in peril but none of it is particularly innovative. And I am heartily sick of thrillers that portray the police/authorities collectively as either utterly incompetent knuckle-dragging morons or awesomely invincible supermen. For the record this book chose the first option but as I find both equally unconvincing the other would have been just as annoying.

Once again, because this book lacked any compelling characters, I found myself being pernickety about things like obscure words used to show-off the author’s abilities with a dictionary and scenes that adding nothing but length. And these characters were just not interesting to me. The religious zealots were so over-the-top as to be laughable rather than scary. If you want terrifying religious nutters watch Louis Theroux’s 2007 documentary The Most Hated Family in America (about the people behind the military-funeral picketing Westboro Baptist “Church”) which sends chills down my spine precisely because the zealots are frighteningly normal rather than the caricatures that Gardiner has created. And the good guys aren’t a heck of a lot better here. Our heroine is frustratingly inconsistent (she believes the church members capable of starting a major biological war but not, apparently, of having enough skills to find out her boyfriend’s surname for example) and her brother is arrogant and seemingly incapable of having a coherent thought. Only Jesse, Evan’s boyfriend, seems well-rounded and believable in the context of the book but as he gets most of the daftest lines and plot devices I’m not even that fond of him.

In the end the plot had all the elements a thriller should have but they weren’t tied together well and without any great characters it was just a standard hero-saves-the-world-in-the-nick-of-time-and-despite-the-plodding-authorities book.

My rating 2.5/5

Review: Tough Cookie by Diane Mott Davidson

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Title: Tough Cookie

Author: Diane Mott Davidson

Publisher: Bantam Books (2001)

ISBN: 978-0-553-57830-0

The 9th book in the Goldy Bear Culinary series finds Colorado caterer Goldy Schulz (nee Bear) performing for a TV cooking show and looking for work as a personal chef because her commercial kitchen has been closed by the health inspector. A man she used to date and is now trying to sell some antique skis to dies on the ski slopes and when Police decide he may have been murdered Goldy looks a likely suspect so she investigates to clear her name. At the same time she starts looking into the deaths of two people who died in separate incidents on the same ski slopes three years earlier.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve read so many of these (there are 15 in the series and I’ve read 10 though not in order) but it was all fairly predictable. There are the requisite number of mis-directed suspects, red-herrings and scenes of turmoil for the plucky protagonist but there wasn’t a single surprise in it for me. The description of food preparation is, as always, hunger inducing but not really enough to sustain a book. In fact if I hadn’t found such a perfectly comfortable reading spot I’d have been tempted not to bother finishing simply because I felt like I’d read it all before.

I am a little tired of the characters too. All the men in Goldy’s life are too one-dimensional to be believable: her ex-husband is evil incarnate and her current husband is so perfect that neither seems particularly realistic. Goldy’s friend Marla is the only character I actually like as she has a sense of humour and also seems more credible than the rest of the cardboard cutouts that populate the book.

I think perhaps I’ve reached my saturation point with this particular sleuthing caterer and it’s time to look elsewhere for my cosy reading.

My rating 2/5

Review: Devil’s Peak by Deon Meyer

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Title: Devil’s Peak

Author: Deon Meyer

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton (2007)

ISBN: 978-0-340-89705-8

In present-day South Africa three stories unfold in parallel. Christine explains to a patient Minister what led to her becoming a prostitute while Benny, an alcoholic police officer, has one last-ditch attempt to salvage his marriage and career. At the same time Thobela, a former freedom-fighter, is devastated when his adopted son is killed as an innocent bystander to a robbery and he turns to a life of vengeance.

This book reminded me of Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore. Although they’re set on different continents both books stretch the boundaries of traditional crime fiction and use the genre to demonstrate wider social issues in an understated way. And, like Temple, Meyer paints the most spectacular pictures with often only a handful of words, as with the sentence

“Beyond George the houses of the wealthy sat like fat ticks against the dunes, silently competing for a better sea view”.

The book is littered with such startlingly clear images that make it easy to visualise the people never met and the places never visited.

At the beginning of the book I almost groaned audibly at the thought of yet another drunken copper (I’ve lost count of how many I’ve met over the years) but Meyer’s depiction of the alcoholic’s constant struggle with his demons is the most eloquently heart-wrenching character development I’ve read in a long time and I was soon internally cheering Benny’s day-by-day efforts along. In fact Meyer takes his time, and ours, establishing all three characters and their separate, but ultimately linked stories. In a lesser writer’s hands this would be annoying but here provides a solid foundation for what otherwise could be an unbelievable or far-fetched climax. Instead the stories are tantalisingly built to their inevitable but gripping combination and resolution.

While I won’t pretend that one book can give a definitive view of such a mammoth thing as post-apartheid South Africa  I think a good book can provide a valid snapshot of a time and place that helps define the bigger picture. All three characters struggle with details of ‘the new South Africa’ in very real ways that made me think more deeply than I’ve done before about what the removal of the apartheid system might have been like to live through from a variety of perspectives.

I learned since reading this book that while not strictly part of a series there are other books featuring some of these characters however I didn’t once have the sense I was missing something by not having read anything else by this author. The book works entirely as a suspense-filled standalone novel which is haunting, unpredictable and utterly absorbing.

My rating 4.5/5

Other reviews:

Euro Crime reviewed the audio version of the book in June 2008

Review: Michael Tolliver Lives by Armistead Maupin

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Title: Michael Tolliver Lives

Author: Armistead Maupin

Publisher: Black Swan (2008)

ISBN: 978-0-552-77293-8

This book fills readers in on what’s happened to the Barbary Lane crew from Maupin’s Tales of the City series since last we heard from them in 1990′s Sure of You. As the title suggests Michael (or Mouse as he was known in the early books) didn’t die as a result of AIDS as we might have assumed would happen given where the last book left off. Instead as the book opens Michael’s been married for a few years to Ben, Anna Madrigal is still the centre of an odd but loving family and there have been an assortment of hatches, matches and dispatches. As the book goes forward Michael deals with the things that happen when you’re in your late 50′s.

I thoroughly enjoyed the early books in this series but this one didn’t engage me in the same way. Perhaps it’s partly because in the intervening 18 years I’ve changed and am not so taken with the soap opera-ish style of the book but that’s only part of the story. This book simply isn’t as good as its predecessors. It lacks the wonderful sense of the absurd that the early books incorporated and is far too full of worthy messages to be entertaining. I don’t know if he was trying to push some kind of envelope or achieve something else but all the endless details of Michael’s sex life did for me was induce boredom. They certainly didn’t do a heck of a lot to advance what plot there was. If you take out the sex scenes and the passages that repeat events from the previous books there’s not a heck of a lot of story left and the characters are all very under-developed.

When news of this book first surfaced Maupin insisted it wasn’t the 7th book in his famous series even though it featured a key character, referenced many events from the series and caught us up with all the original characters. Eventually he was forced to concede the book is part of the series but his reluctance to do so sums up what’s wrong with this book. It’s trying to be too many things at once and doesn’t successfully achieve any of them. He either needed to jump right in and update the series in the same style as the original books or write something completely separate (which he’s perfectly capable of doing as The Night Listener indicates). The sequel you have when you’re not having a sequel didn’t work for me.

My rating 2/5

Review: An Affinity for Murder by Anne White

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Title: An Affinity for Murder

Author: Anne White

Publisher: Oak Tree Press (2001)

ISBN: 1-892343-16-9

When Freelance writer Ellen Davies goes to interview an expert in Georgia O’Keeffe’s art for an article she’s writing she finds, instead, a smouldering pile of old clothes piled up in the middle of the floor. As if that wasn’t bad enough underneath the clothes is the charred body of a man. The house at which all of this takes place belongs to Ellen’s friend Diane, who later asks Ellen to look after an ugly painting so that her ex-husband doesn’t get hold of it. Are there missing works of one of America’s greatest artists to be found in Lake George, New York or is there a sinister art fraud racket going on?

It’s a fairly standard amateur sleuth plot although Ellen is less intent on discovering whodunnit than writing her article about O’Keeffe. It’s the teenage daughter of a friend that really wants to play detective and Ellen goes along for the ride for a good part of the book. Perhaps I wasn’t paying as much attention as I normally would due to seasonal silliness but on multiple occasions I thought the author made reference to things that hadn’t happened in the book but readers were supposed to know about. It’s the first book in a series but the many vague references to past events were disconcerting and made it seem like the second or third book in a string. Even Ellen’s love interest treats her the same way the hapless partners of more seasoned amateur sleuths do; making multiple comments about how she should stop getting involved in these kinds of events. Why would he do that if it’s the first time Ellen has done something like this? However the plot was resolved satisfactorily even if there were loose ends that didn’t make a lot of sense.

Where the book fell down for me was that the characters who were all a bit too stereotypical and not terribly engaging. Ellen as a protagonist is a bit dull and I felt the author was trying too hard to make her seem feisty and independent and the rest of the cast were not people I’d want to spend much time with. Kevin, Ellen’s boyfriend, was downright annoying and Diane, the friend who got Ellen muddled up with the mystery in the first place wasn’t much better with her continual whining about her ex-husband and never-explained clandestine affair with a bar tender. Aside from small glimmers of personality from the teenage Josie there wasn’t a hint of a sense of humour in the entire book which is something I look for in my cosy reading.

I picked the book because I’m a fan of O’Keeffe’s paintings and thought a mystery about her work would be a nice way to pass some lazy summer reading time but didn’t really get what I was looking for. However the book’s won several awards and there are now four books in this series so clearly these characters appeal to others.

My rating 2.5/5

secret santa sent…

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A box arrived for me about a week ago but somehow it got put on a side table and covered by a coat and I forgot about it until I tidied up today and put the coat away (no comments about my housework please). The box contained my Book Bloggers Christmas Swap gift and it was a little treasure trove of goodies which I was delighted to unpack this afternoon.

The picture below shows my haul which included a book by a new (to me) author in my favourite genre which I look forward to reading plus some note paper, a funky hair clip, a souvenir pencil and some stickers. My now not secret santa is from Malaysia and included a postcard which shows a temple that’s popular as a marriage registry spot.

I am very grateful to Betty from Betty’s Books for my gifts. I would apologise for the delay in opening it and letting her know that it arrived OK except that I am really glad I didn’t open it last week because today I needed the lift that an unexpected treat gives you. It was lovely to get home from a long day at work where everything seemed to go wrong and (re) discover the box and the goodies it contained. Thanks Betty.

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Review: Relentless by Simon Kernick

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TITLE: Relentlessrelentless

AUTHOR: Simon Kernick

ISBN: 978-0-552-15312-6

PUBLISHER: Corgi Books (2006)

The hum-drum suburban life of software salesman Tom Meron is thrown into chaos one afternoon when an old friend rings him moments before dying horribly at the hands of unknown assailants. Within the next couple of hours Tom is accused of murder, his wife seems to be missing, he goes on the run from Police and has an alarming altercation with some very (very) bad guys. And then things get really dangerous.

It’s a fairly standard ‘average guy’s life goes to hell in a hand-basket’ kind of thriller. The pace is speedy, swapping often between points of view to help create the impression there are lots of things happening at once and cramming lots of action into a short time span. Personally I find fight scenes and car chases a bit tedious in the written word and there quite a few of these but I skimmed over them without seeming to lose the gist of the story.  The plot was pretty well constructed and logical although it did have some threads that seemed to be thrown in for shock value rather than adding much to the overall story.

For me to get truly swept along for the ride that thrillers want to take you on there has to be an interesting character or two. I don’t mind if it’s good guys or villains but I have to want to find out what happens to someone no matter how ludicrous it turns out to be. Without this element I tend to pick fault with what would otherwise be forgivable plot discrepancies and the incredible happenings that are de rigeur for the genre.  The largely under developed characters in Relentlessdid not offer me anyone to care about. All of them, heroes and bad guys alike, said and did things I didn’t find natural within the circumstances of the story and the narrative often seemed at odds with their actions. Tom and Kathy were said more than once to be devoted parents but both of them managed to curl of for a good night’s kip without once mentioning their children or, more realistically, trying to check up on them. People had just tried to torture, stab, shoot and blow he and his wife up but Tom assumes that the same bad guys wouldn’t be able to unearth his children in a matter of moments. The villains in the story were more stereotype than individual character to me and now, only a few hours after finishing the book, I can’t remember the main bad guy’s name.

Thrillers should be gripping yarns full of larger-than-life characters regardless of the subject matter (heck Michael Crichton managed to make the building of aeroplanes and edge-of-your-seat ride in Airframe) but this one missed the mark for me. The characters and setting were all a bit too generic for me to get caught up in it at all.

My rating 2/5

Other reviews of this book

Eurocrime reviewed it in June 2007

Review: Still Waters by Nigel McCrery

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Title: Still Watersstill-waters1

Author: Nigel McCrery

Publisher: Quercus (2007)

ISBN: 978-184724-075-0

In what is one of the most alarming openings to a book I’ve ever read, a children’s war-time tea party goes horribly wrong and readers spend the rest of the book trying to work out the connection to a modern-day crime. In the present day an old lady’s body is discovered on the fringe of some woodlands at the site of an unrelated car accident and Police have to unravel the story of how she came to be there. In parallel we meet another elderly lady called Violet (or is she?) who makes a habit out of befriending lonely, isolated women. Then killing them.

Called in from what is euphemistically known as ‘gardening leave’ to investigate is DCI Mark Lapslie who suffers from a neurological condition in which most sounds he hears trigger overwhelming taste sensations in his mouth. For example his mobile phone ring triggers the taste of chocolate (which sounds like yummy-ness without the calories) while the sound of a busy office triggers the taste of blood (less appealing all around I imagine). The book does a great job of demonstrating how such a condition impacts Lapslie’s life and the lives of those around him and seems quite realistic in its portrayal of how such a thing might drive and shape a person. In the end there isn’t a great deal of plot-driving point behind Lapslie’s condition but it would be a different story without this element because the condition does shape the Lapslie character.

The other major character in the story is Violet/Daisy who’s own character is equally well developed. Very early on we know she’s a killer but knowing that doesn’t detract at all from the building up of tension in the story. I found myself wanting quite desperately to know how she came to be the person she was and wondering what kind of connection she had (for there must have been one) to the awful event that opened the book.

There were quite a few story threads and potential plot devices that went nowhere or were left unresolved but I rather liked that. In many of the best-selling thrillers these days it seems as if everything that happens has to tie up neatly at the end which is so unlike real life. Here there were things that just happened and turned out to have no deeper meaning which made the whole thing more credible (and helped keep me guessing right to the end). This all added to the book’s unpredictability. There were several times when events happened and I thought I knew exactly how that particular thread would be resolved (having read a police procedural or three in my time) but in each case the predictable, forumulaic thing didn’t happen. The main story was resolved to my satisfaction so the loose ends that remained actually added to my enjoyment of the book rather than detracted from it.

The underlying reason for the events in the book were also, sadly, credible. Rather than larger than life serial killers making suits out of human skin (Thomas Harris) or similarly fantastical yarns this was a story that one can imagine happening in the real world. It’s about people who live on the fringes of society and to whom grizzly things can be done without much consequence. In fact a variation of this kind of thing did happen in my very own city not so long ago (google The Snowtown Murders if you’re interested).

I borrowed this book from a friend several months ago but, due to the ever growing TBR pile of my own books, was planning on giving it back un-read until I noticed it was scheduled for a Buddy Read at the Murder and Mayhem bookclub and I do enjoy discussing a book with others. I’m grateful to the person who scheduled it because I found the book to be a totally engrossing read with beautifully created imagry. On top of that it managed to do something quite different with a very familiar genre.

My Rating: 4.5/5

Other reviews of this book

Euro Crime reviewed it in August 2007

Aust Crime Fiction reviewed it in February 2008

Review: The Embroidered Corpse by Brian Kavanagh

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TITLE: The Embroidered Corpseembroidered-corpse1

AUTHOR: Brian Kavanagh

ISBN: 1-905202-36-9

PUBLISHER: BeWrite Books (2006)

In the second Belinda Lawrence mystery our heroine and her friend Hazel visit Kidbrooke House, a Tudor mansion full of glorious antiques and a mysterious piece of tapestry. Soon after their visit the House’s owner is killed in a grizzly manner and when Hazel buys some furniture from the estate sale she discovers the tapestry in a drawer. She gives the tapestry to Belinda who in her quest to find out more about its origins becomes embroiled in a thousand-year-old conspiracy and a modern-day religious cult.

The characters in this series are developing nicely. Belinda seems much more assertive than she was in her first outing (Capable of Murder) and is more of an instigator of events in the story than in the first book where she seemed to react only to the things that happened around her. I also found her boyfriend Mark more agreeable this time around and my only quibble with the characters is that I’d like to see more of the bloke-mad, gin-drinking Hazel Whitby as she adds a nice humorous element to the stories.

The plot is complex although not difficult to follow although I did struggle in a couple of spots because so much of the story relates to the intricate details of the piece of tapestry which we readers never see. There is a partial picture on the front cover of the edition of the book I read but it doesn’t contain the all-important borders and I couldn’t always visualise what the characters were talking about.

I’m not terribly familiar with this period of history but my inner conspiracy theorist was thoroughly engaged by the well-researched details and intriguing speculations about the Bayeux Tapestry, the historical events it portrays and the royal lineage of England. The resolution to the story was very much in keeping with the events that preceded it (not always a given in crime fiction these days) although far more gruesome than the average ‘cosy’ reader might like.

All in all this is a thoroughly entertaining read and especially recommended to those who enjoy stories with a historical twist.

My rating 3.5/5