Monthly Archives: August 2009

Review: Dead Days of Summer by Carolyn Hart

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Title: Dead Days of Summer (the 17th Death on Demand mystery)

Author: Carolyn Hart

Publisher: William Morrow [2006]

ISBN: 0-06-072402-1

Length: 280 pages

Setting: America (South Carolina), present day

Genre: Cosy/amateur sleuth

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating: 3/5

One-liner: Nicely-paced yarn about an innocent man’s arrest with a guaranteed happy ending

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Proprietor of the Death on Demand mystery bookstore Annie Darling is preoccupied with a secret: the surprise party she is planning her husband Max’s 29th birthday. Max is killing time at his office one afternoon when a new client walks in asking for his assistance in locating her missing brother. Max agrees to go with her to a seedy bar which is the last place the brother was seen but after doing so he wakes up in a strange cottage with no memory of the previous night’s events. The woman, who he was seen with my several witnesses, has been found dead and Max is covered in her blood. When he is arrested things look bleak but Annie and their circle of friends soon rally around to clear his name.

I’ve read quite a lot of the books in this series, the last being Death of the Party which I read last year and did not enjoy very much. However I needed something light that I could read while distracted* and picked this one from the bottom of my large TBR. Happily it turned out to be a much better read than the last book in the series. The romance element is still present but it was held in check this time round because Annie and Max spent most of the book separated from each other so there was a limit to the schmaltzy dialogue between the pair. I don’t mind seeing a couple in love but sometimes the way these two talk is a bit much.

The story kept up a good pace too and I am a bit of a sucker for a wronged-man yarn. I live in mortal fear of going to prison for something I didn’t do (for some people it’s heights for me it’s being locked up) and am always inclined to an emotional interest in stories that involve this kind of scenario. Max’s feelings of helplessness while incarcerated (even if only for a few days) were quite well depicted. The rallying of Max and Annie’s friends is charming but unrealistic and the resolution is quite predictable but if you’re in the mood for a well-paced and upbeat story you could do a lot worse than Dead Days of Summer.

*I had to spend a day in a series of noisy medical waiting rooms as I took my turn looking after an old family friend who has a lot of ailments and some books require less concentration than others.

Review: The Build Up by Phillip Gwynne

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Title: The Build Up

Author: Phillip Gwynne

Publisher: Pan MacMillan [2008]

ISBN: 978-1-4050-3849-2

Length: 339 pages

Setting: Australia (Northern Territory), present day

Genre: Police Procedural (well kinda)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating: 5/5

One-liner: Funny, sad, perfectly Australian story about weather and sheer bloody-mindedness.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Dusty Buchanan is a Detective with the Northern Territory Police in Darwin. As the book opens a phone conversation with her over-bearing mother causes her to miss being there when a body is found in the long-running McVeigh case and so she is removed from the case. Instead she focuses on a tip-off she received from one of the blokes at the local camp for Vietnam veterans. He says his fishing line got caught on the body of a woman in the billabong. When Dusty is further isolated from her colleagues she’s forced to look to some unlikely people for help.

Reading The Build Up reminded me how much fun it is to read a book with language, cultural references and the odd ‘in’ joke that only locals will understand. It’s a bit like watching one of those kids’ movies that has a few strategically placed lines especially for adults and, in me anyway, provoked the same kind of knowing smile. I love a story that provides a sense of its location and this one stamps Australia in general and Darwin in particular lovingly on every page. I share a fellow blogger’s curiousity about whether or not the book will generate interest (or understanding) outside Australia (what would they make of Up There Cazaly for example) but I am delighted that Gwynne doesn’t seem to have written with one eye (and his bank balance) on the international publishing scene. In real life and in this book crude language and political incorrectness exist alongside spectacular places and down-to-earth people you can rely on in a crisis. You have to take the good with the bad or you get neither.

The build up of the title refers to the in-between period between Darwin’s two seasons: the dry and the wet. It’s a period known for provoking odd behaviour in people: suicides rates go up, other crime rates go down. Everyone is affected in some way. There’s also a build up in the way the book says what it has to say about its characters and the world they inhabit. The solving of either case, while being what drives Dusty, is almost incidental to the creation of a quite detailed picture of the place and the people who live in it. It’s an almost linear narrative but not always and the sequence in which what happens is revealed makes for deceptively powerful story telling. Just like the weather, the book teased me into thinking it was a fairly laid-back sort of a tale which left me completely unprepared for the-sucker punch of an ending.

Gwynne has created some truly memorable characters here. Dusty is the only human who is fully fleshed out (the other character that receives the full treatment is the Northern Territory itself) and she is terrific. She’s imperfect but not cripplingly so and is smart, funny and the sort of copper I hope there are plenty of. The rest of the people are generally quite brilliantly depicted via fairly brief but very descriptive scenes. No amount of extra words could have created a better image of a bloke called Trigger than a scene in which he can’t perform with a prostitute unless she’s wearing the football jumper of the player he believed responsible for his sidelining from the game he adored.

As often happens when I read the best ‘crime’ fiction I again thought about how genre labels ruin reading. They set silly expectations and make people worry about unimportant things when what really, really matters is for a book to capture a reader’s heart and imagination. If a book spirits you away for a while or makes you think about things in a different way, if only for a moment, then does it matter how many of the genre tick-boxes it gets right?  This book should be required reading for Aussies and while I’m not sure it’ll make complete sense to the rest of you I’d recommend you try (and I’ll happily provide translations and explanations if required).

Other stuff

The weather phenomenon known as the build up is common to tropical climates and, in Australia, usually starts around October and runs until December. It is recognisable by its unrelenting humidity and the way it teases you into thinking the relief of rain is just around the corner. I have lived through one (not in Darwin but in Far North Queensland) and I never, ever wish to do so again. You can find out more about Aussie weather here.

The book has been reviewed at Crime Down Under, Mysteries in Paradise, Books and Musings from Down Under, Aust Crime Fiction

My life according to the books I’ve read this year

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A fun meme doing the rounds that I first spotted at Petrona is

Using only books you have read this year (2009), cleverly answer these questions. Try not to repeat a book title.

If you want to  check that I haven’t cheated you can see all my 2009 reads by clicking on the 2009 tag in the cloud to the right. I’ve read 83 books this year so far. As I said when commenting on the post at Petrona I should read some more upbeat titles once in a while to avoid looking like a troubled soul when doing this sort of thing. I was going to write some explanations for my choices but decided against it. Make of them what you will.

Describe Yourself: Careless in Red

How do you feel: Alone

Describe where you currently live: The Tin Roof Blowdown

If you could go anywhere, where would you go: Valley of the Lost

Your favorite form of transport: The Night Ferry

Your best friend is: The Girl Who Played with Fire

You and your friends are: The Sweetness of Life

What’s the weather like: Dead Cold

Favourite time of day: The Darkest Hour

If your life was a: Devil’s Game

What is life to you: Trick or Treat

Your fear: Pandemic

What is the best advice you have to give: Search the Dark

Thought for the Day: Murder will Travel

How I would like to die: Death by Sudoku

My soul’s present condition: State of the Onion

Sunday Salon 2009-08-30 – Week in Review

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I’ve been a naughty Sunday Salon-er of late what with international guests, holiday time and general laziness but I’m back in the saddle. At least until the next spell of mega laziness takes hold of me.

Books then and now

I have not read as many books as I normally would during the month or so since last I posted for Sunday Salon but this week I did manage to finish

Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise will be hosting a blog tour for Christie week in September so in preparation for my contribution I am listening to my favourite Christie novel, Death on the Nile. Although I’ve read the print version, seen the movie and played the hidden object game I’ve never listened to the book before. This version is narrated by nearly everyone’s favourite Poirot, David Suchet, so it’s a high quality product and I am enjoying it.

My current print book is Phillip Gwynne’s The Build Up which I grabbed from the TBR pile because it will be discussed at Oz Mystery Readers in a few days. The book is set in Australia’s Northern Territory during the build up to the wet season and features a great female character called Dusty Buchanon. Although fiction, it’s clearly inspired by some real-life crimes and it has reminded me how much fun it is to read something with a ‘local’ voice.

I’m not sure what I’ll read or listen to next but I am, as always, spoiled for choice.

Arrivals and Departures

I’m almost embarrassed by the number of books I’ve acquired this month: 22! Seven were free and most of the rest were bought second hand but I was hardly in any great need of more books for Mount TBR.

As part of my effort to dispose of books at a similar rate to my acquisitions I’ll be starting a monthly give away on the 1st of September so keep an eye out for that. I don’t have the energy to devise difficult quizzes so you won’t have to work too hard to be in the running for a pre-loved book or two.

Link Fest

I’ve only just gotten back into the groove of keeping up with my google reader account (the mark all as read button got a work out over the past month) so haven’t got a lot of links to share this week but did want to highlight a couple of things that piqued my curiosity:

  • Author and blogger Martin Edwards posted a question about why crime fiction is so gruesome these days. It generated a load of comments and I admit I’m still thinking about the issue.
  • Did you hear who won the Ned Kelly Awards for Australian crime fiction on Friday night? Don’t worry, no one else did either as Kerrie points out in her very polite post about the news leaking through. I’ve been brought up to believe that if a job’s worth doing it’s worth doing properly which I don’t think is the same philosophy used by whoever’s responsible for the awards this year. The website is next to useless as far as information goes, they announced the shortlist too late to generate the sort of speculative interest that prompts book sales and now they can’t even be bothered letting those who weren’t at the ceremony know who won.
  • There’s a new group at Good Reads called the Crime and Thriller group. It looks to have been up and running for a couple of months but I just noticed it this week. It’s already far more active than the mysteries group there so looks like a good spot for crime fiction Good Reads members.
  • Not at all book related but one of my favourite podcasts talked this week about a nifty new website called everlater that makes it easy to keep an online record of your travel and, should you want to, meet other people who have similar travel interests. I am a travel buff so this one peaked my interest in a way that other social networking sites generally don’t.

Review: Consequences of Sin by Clare Langley-Hawthorne

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Title: The Consequences of Sin

Author: Clare Langley-Hawthorne

Publisher: Penguin [2007]

ISBN: 978-0-14-311293-8

Length: 262 pages

Setting: England and Venezuela, 1910-11

Genre: historical crime fiction

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating: 4/5

One-liner: Historically accurate, delightfully complex yarn full of wonderful imagery.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

In Edwardian England Ursula Marlow is the only daughter of a widowed self-made man. She is woken one morning by a frantic phone call from one of her suffragette friends, Winifred “Freddie” Stanford-Jones, who has discovered her lover dead covered in blood in the bed beside her. Although she doesn’t want to be beholden to him, Ursula calls upon her father’s legal adviser Lord Wrotham to smooth the waters with the Police. Despite this Freddie is soon arrested and as Ursula tries to clear her friend’s name she discovers that the murder of Freddie’s lover may relate to a troubled expedition to Venezuela’s famed Orinoco Delta that her father financed 20 years previously.

I love it when a book surprises me. I was expecting a frothy historical romp and although this book does have its frothy moments there’s also a more melancholic, even sombre, thread that I, perhaps perversely, enjoyed. Also, Ursula is also more complex and credible heroine than I anticipated. She’s not the over-the-top force of nature that Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia Peabody is but nor is she an Austen-esque woman constantly being overcome by the vapours. At times she’s a take-charge gal forging ahead regardless of danger but at other points she’s indecisive and clearly scared by unfolding events. This dichotomy is far more realistic than the extremes you often find in fiction and it made Ursula more interesting and the book less predictable than others in this crowded space.

I’m no expert on the period but the historical setting seems to have been captured rather beautifully. There were many details of Edwardian life depicted that demonstrated that the past is indeed a foreign country: one fun to visit but nice to return home from. While exploring in South America a hundred years ago or sailing first-class on the Lusitania (5 years before it sank) might have been great experiences I wouldn’t trade them for being able to vote and look after my own finances.

While I revelled in the details of the explorers of the past and Edwardian life in general there was a solid mystery playing out at decent pace although there weren’t many red herrings or alternative suspects whose guilt I could ponder. The remaining characters other than the two leads played fairly minor roles and but perhaps other characters will participate more fully in future books. The only one here that I struggled with was the policeman (in fact I’m still not sure if he was supposed to be incredibly dumb or vaguely corrupt). However the book was crammed with enough other delights to keep me occupied and I’ll even admit (as long as you promise not to tell anyone else) that I was quite engaged by the romantic element to the story (which was almost entirely lacking in soppiness thank heavens).

Other stuff

This book has been reviewd at Books and Musings from Down Under and Bookgirl’s Nightstand

Review: A Cure For All Diseases by Reginald Hill

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Title: A Cure For All Diseases (the 23rd of 24 Dalziel and Pascoe novels and published as The Price of Butcher’s Meat in the US)

Author: Reginald Hill

Publisher: Whole Story Audio Books [2009]

ISBN: N/A (bought via digital download from audible.com)

Length: 15hours 49minutes

Narrator: Jonathan Keeble

After barely surviving a terrorist blast Superintendent Andy Dalziel is convalescing at a swanky private clinic in the seaside resort of Sandytown in Yorkshire. He befriends another young visitor to the town, Charlotte (Charley) Heywood, who is the daughter of an old Rugby mate of Dalziel’s and a psychologist reviewing the benefits of alternative therapies. They are both keen observers of the people and happenings in the town and record their observations: Andy using a digital audio recorder provided by his doctor and Charley via a series of emails to her sister. As with all fairly closed communities there are a couple of prominent families whose lives seem to impact everyone in the town directly or indirectly and the same is true of Sandytown which is the setting for a soon to be opened alternative healing centre. When one of the town’s most prominent citizens is killed in a gruesome way a full police investigation, headed by Dalziel’s old partner Peter Pascoe, gears up but Andy and Charley’s continuing observations play a key role in the solving of the murder.

This is, more than usually, a review specifically of the audio version of A Cure For All Diseases narrated by Jonathan Keeble. Because, regardless of how good the original content is, Keeble added a truly wonderful element that I don’t think could exist in the print version. His portrayal of the two main narrators of the story, ageing male Dalziel and young, somewhat excitable female Charley is truly magnificent and he rounds out the reading with an entire cast of minor players that are equally beautifully depicted. Coming back to my iPod each day became a real treat over the past week or so and I now have a sense of the anticipation people used to get as they ‘gathered round the wireless’ to hear the latest radio play in the days before television.

The format and, to some extent, the content of this story is actually Hill’s homage to Jane Austen but I don’t think it matters all that much if you’re an Austen fan and can recognise what he’s done or not. Far more important is that it provides an interesting, different approach to the standard police procedural. As someone who has lamented the formulaic writing by other well-known authors of late I applaud both the decision to do try something new and the successful execution of that decision. About half of the story is told via the recorded observations of Charley and Dalziel and I thoroughly enjoyed their dual points of view, especially the brave inclusion of a significant narrative voice that wasn’t Dalziel or Pascoe. The rest of the story is told via a more traditional narrative but the two forms are pretty seamlessly integrated.

There’s a strong undertone of humour through this book that I haven’t noticed in the series before (although I’ve not read a large number of them so maybe it has been present). Both Dalziel and Charley’s epistles are full of humour that suits their respective characters: Dalziel’s is coarse and reminiscent of a 1970’s comedian dripping with barely concealed sexual innuendo while Charley’s is full of the biting observations that a modern young woman might share with her friends in an online chat room. I found this added a very natural component to the characterisations and, particularly in the case of Dalziel, provided a layer of credibility to a character that I’ve struggled to believe in previously. He’s still all-seeing, all-knowing Fat Andy that nearly everyone is instantly afraid of, but the humorous monologue provides an insight into what makes him tick and because of it I cringed less and saw him as a more well-rounded character.

The book isn’t the fastest paced story you’ll find, especially where the two narrative voices overlap and recount the same events from their different perspectives, but the relatively slow revelation of events allowed the myriad of characters to be more fully developed than would otherwise have been the case. Rather than being ‘filler’ content of the ‘a book must have 500 pages’ variety this was a highly nuanced building up of a picture of the town and its inhabitants and I was completely captivated. I have to admit the final conclusion bordered on contrived but I forgave this minor lapse in what was otherwise a thoroughly enjoyable read.

Hill is to be congratulated for maintaining interest in his long-running series by trying something innovative with this book. I also admire the fact you don’t need to be a die hard fan of Dalziel and Pascoe to enjoy the book (although I doubt it hurts if you are). If you’re at all keen on audio books I’d highly recommend you relax and let Keeble’s narration spirit you away to Yorkshire for a few hours.

My rating 5/5

Other stuff

As Hill as a huge legion of fans his book has been reviewed by lots of fellow book bloggers including those at Mysteries in Paradise, Reviewing the Evidence, Euro Crime, Aust Crime Fiction and Ms Bookish

Review: Murder Packs a Suitcase by Cynthia Baxter

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Title: Murder Packs a Suitcase

Author: Cynthia Baxter

Publisher: Bantam [2008]

ISBN: 978-0-553-59035-7

Length: 304 pages

Mallory Marlowe is newly widowed when she goes for a job interview at a Travel magazine. She wins the job and is immediately sent to Florida to discover if it has any of its old charm remaining after ‘Disneyfication’. When one of her fellow journalists on the press trip is murdered Mallory, who had a verbal altercation with the victim earlier that day, is considered a suspect. So, in between visiting some of the kitschier tourist attractions in Florida, Mallory tries to uncover who else might have had a motive for killing the unpleasant man.

As an amateur sleuth Mallory falls on the more believable end of the scale in terms of how she gets involved in the investigation and the methods she uses to solve the crime. However she’s a wee bit earnest and worthy for my tastes. I’m sure that seeing her discover she can cope on her own as a new widow is inspirational for some but I found that aspect of the book dull. The parts of the story that dealt with travelling through modern Florida looking for attractions that hadn’t been Disney-fied were more entertaining for me. I also enjoyed some of the characters accompanying Mallory on her trip such as the woman who wrote for a budget travel magazine who was constantly on the lookout for a cheap deal. Having backpacked my way around a good part of the world I could empathise with the penny pinching.

This is the first book in what I assume the author is looking to turn into a series and there is certainly much potential for brand new storylines with Mallory being a travel writer. If the series does continue on its present course I’m sure it will find many fans looking for a well written story featuring a heroine they can relate to and a hint of romance. For my tastes I’d like to see Mallory travelling beyond the US and also for the series to be a little more humorous but that’s just my personal tastes and I suspect others will be very happy just the way things are.

My rating 2.5/5

Other stuff

Murder Packs a Suitcase is reviewed at A Book Blogger’s Diary

Am I the only person who reads books based on their physical size? I packed this book for a trip away solely because it was tiny and fitted in the bag I indented to carry round with me while away. As someone who does quite a lot of reading away from home the physical size of books is a constant issue for me.

Intervention, Awards and Redesign

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KillCityHaul11I’ve just returned home from a trip to Melbourne (about 900kms to the east of the city I live in). The primary purpose of the trip was to spend time with family I don’t see very often but somehow reading featured heavily in all sorts of ways and I have started to wonder if I need an intervention.

One of the things that made me worry was my visit to Kill City which is a used book shop specialising in crime fiction books. Obviously for someone of my reading preferences it’s a pretty sweet place to visit but it was hardly a necessity. Before the trip I had something like 100 crime fiction books in my dedicated TBR shelves (and another 50 or so non crime related books). So why did I even go to the store? And why on earth did I walk away with all these —>?

What really made me wonder about whether or not I need an intervention was seeing the ‘X days to go’ Dan Brown widget on a website and wondering if I could fix one of those for the 3rd book in the Stieg Larsson millenium trilogy.

My name is Bernadette and I am an addict. Despite a complete absence of need it seems I cannot stop myself from acquiring more reading choices. What about you? Are you more controlled? Do you have any tips on controlling your acquisitive nature? Or should I stop worrying?

I arrived home to discover some delightful blog-related news. Firstly, Danish blogger Dorte from DJ’s Krimiblog awarded me the Kreativ Blogger award. It’s always nice to be recognised by fellow bloggers and I would urge you to visit Dorte’s blog if you haven’t already done so. As well as bilingual reviews the blog features her own short fiction, some author interviews and the fiendish Bait in the Box posts which offer opening lines from a book she is reading and blog readers are urged to leave clues about the book title and author. I am supposed to list 7 of my favourite things as a recipient of the award. So, in no particular order: taking a great photo, walking in the early morning, lying in bed listening to the rain on the roof and knowing I don’t have to get up, scrunching through autumn leaves, sharing a great bottle of wine with friends, singing Billy Bragg songs at the top of my voice and the tingle of anticipation when opening the pages of a book by an author I’ve never read

My second piece of good news was that someone nominated me for the Reviews category in Book Blogger Appreciation Week. When I spent an hour or so going through the BBAW award categories making my own nominations it honestly didn’t occur to me that I might get nominated. So I am very chuffed and very grateful to you. Whoever you are.

And my final piece of blog-y news is that I’ve had a bit of a redesign of the site. You’ll have worked this out if you’re reading this post at the blog but a lot of you read via an RSS reader so you’ll have missed all the excitement. The redesign is partly due to me having some time on my hands today (well technically the time was for things like housework, grocery shopping and other chores but I didn’t fancy any of that) and partly due to my frustrations with some of the limitations of the other wordpress template I was using. This one seems much easier to use and allowed me to use a custom header (which you’ll notice I very creatively added a photo of some books to – you haven’t seen that before on a book blog have you?).

Review: Gone Tomorrow by Lee Child

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Title: Gone Tomorrow

Author: Lee Child

Publisher: Bantam [2009]

ISBN: 978-0-593-05704-9

Length: 441 pages

It is late night/early morning. Jack Reacher is on a New York subway train. He spots a woman he thinks is a suicide bomber. He decides to talk to her. This action sets off a trail of unexpected events.

The short sentences in that synopsis are similar to the writing style in this book. The mostly short sentences are full of details about some things (e.g. gun models and fight sequences) but no details about other things (e.g. the people). The story unfolds via a series of events which happen so quickly that, apparently, there’s no time for anyone to display an emotion or reveal much in the way of motivation. Even the sex is rapid and seemingly as uninteresting to the participants as it was to me.

I know thrillers generally focus more on plot than character development but this one takes that to an extreme. Reacher is a character about whom we know virtually nothing: he’s ex-army, has big feet, has no home and possesses only 9 things all of which he can carry with him. I haven’t read any of the previous 12 novels in the series but I’m prepared to bet no one who has knows much more about Reacher than this as it would be appear to be a feature of the series. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that approach but it just didn’t appeal to me. I like to read not only about what people are doing but why they are doing it and Gone Tomorrow had almost none of that second element. The result was a book I simply didn’t connect with at all.

For me reading this book is like the meal you eat when you’ve got 20 minutes to spare at work and you bolt down a sandwich while checking your emails: it quells the hunger pangs but you barely taste it and wouldn’t be able to describe it to someone the next day if your life depended on it. I read this book on a leisurely interstate train trip in what was basically a single sitting but if you ask me in a week what happened I doubt I’ll be able to recall 3 distinct things about the book.

My rating 2/5

Other stuff

Although the book isn’t for me many others enjoyed the tale including Mack from Mack Captures Crime

Review: The Ice Princess by Camilla Lackberg

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Title: The Ice Princess

Author: Camilla Läckberg (translated from the Swedish by Steven T Murray)

Publisher: Harper Collins [original edition 2008, this edition 2009]

ISBN: 978-0-00-725392-0

Length: 393 Pages

30-something author Erica Falck has returned to her small hometown in Sweden to take care of her parents’ house and possessions after their tragic deaths. While there, the body of her childhood friend Alex is discovered in the bathtub. Police treat the death as a suicide but Alex’s parents do not believe their daughter killed herself and they beg Erica to write a glowing article about her. As Erica interviews various people important in Alex’s life she starts to uncover some of her secrets and when it’s confirmed that Alex couldn’t have killed herself the police also start investigating. Patrik Hedström, another childhood friend of Erica’s, is the lead investigator and he and Erica soon join forces and start a personal relationship too.

I’m going to start my review talking about the translation which is a feature I often overlook unless it’s not done well. This is terribly rude of me because I am sure it is a very difficult thing to get right. I imagine it’s even more difficult to capture the subtleties of both languages well enough to translate humour which Murray has done to perfection here. Not only is there an over-the-top laughable character, in the form of Superintendent Mellberg, but there’s a lovely gentle humour in Erica’s internal dialogue as well as in some of her conversations with Patrik and I think it’s a sign of excellence in translating that I kept forgetting the story wasn’t originally told in English.

And it’s a really good story. There are so many layers to it that I soon gave up thinking I’d worked something out because whenever I did a new discovery would be made that took the story in another unpredictable direction. Somehow all these twists and turns managed to feel completely natural though, as I never felt that sense of being manipulated that some twist-y books give. The resolution was at least partially unexpected and quite satisfying in the way it wrapped things up. I particularly liked the way the novel was bookended by two vignettes about a man who barely featured in the rest of the story. I could have done with a little less of the teenage-like romance between Erica and Patrik but it was quite nice to see at least one relatively normal relationship depicted among the couples of the town.

Both Erica and Patrik are well developed and quite credible characters although Erica does do a couple of things which could have screwed up the investigation and I thought Patrik was a little too accepting of her meddling. Some of the other minor characters are quite brilliantly drawn and I found myself developing a real picture of this small group of people who’d been connected in one way or another for 25 years.

It’s virtually impossible to categories this book neatly into any of the crime fiction sub-genres as it contains elements of a police procedural, psychological thriller and even a hint of the amateur sleuth ‘cosy’. Whatever label you give it though ultimately it did what all good books should do: kept me engaged from beginning to end. If you like a book that focuses on people and what makes them tick (and kill) and doesn’t have a lot of blood and gore then I heartily recommend this one.

My rating 4/5

Other stuff

Reviewed by Norm at Crime Scraps (who along with his excellent review also makes some pertinent points about book blurbs and their often total lack of connection to the book they are blurbing about), Karen at Euro Crime and Glenn at International Noir Fiction.

Läckberg’s second book translated to English, The Preacher, was released this year (and will be making it to my TBR pile just as soon as I can afford another virtual trip to Book Depository).