Monthly Archives: January 2010

Weekly Geeks 2010-04 – Winter Reading

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Oh how I chuckled when I saw this week’s weekly geeks topic

Share with us the books which call out to you during the cold, wintry months. Are there genres which appeal to you most? Why do you think you are drawn to these types of books during winter? Do you have some book recommendations for other readers who are looking for some escape from the blustery weather? Give us some of your favorites and tell us why you recommend them.

I know many of you are suffering through harsh winters but in the town I live in down here at the bottom of the world we had our hottest year on record last year and we’ve started the new year off with more record-breaking heat.  The average temperature for January has been 31.4°C (93°F) which is 2.3°C hotter than our previous average and the highest temperature recorded this month was 42.8°C (109°F).

So I’ve done some winter reading all right: books featuring snow, cold weather, more snow and general wintery-ness have all made their way to my reading list this summer:

I guess these books don’t look too appealing for those of you hunkered inside trying to escape the latest snow storm but being hunkered inside to escape the blistering heat this winter reading has been just what I needed.

Review: The Coffin Trail by Martin Edwards

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Daniel Kind and his girlfriend Miranda take a holiday in England’s Lake District, in a place where Daniel had spent a holiday as a child, and impulsively decide to buy a house and move there. At the same time DCI Hannah Scarlett is appointed head of a new cold case unit for the area and one of the cases the team looks at is the decade-old murder of a young woman who was, at the time, thought to have been killed by an autistic young man who died before he could be charged with the crime. Daniel has a dual interest in the case, having known the young man when they were both young boys and also because his father was in charge of the original investigation.

I grabbed this book from Mt TBR as I left the house for a walk yesterday (because I always reward myself for walking with a coffee and some reading time and the other book I am reading now was too darned heavy to carry). Starting a new book while away from the house is always risky (what if it’s no good and I don’t have a backup book?) but I needn’t have feared. I was immediately drawn into the story so one coffee turned into two and then a third as I struggled to find a place I could stand to stop so I could walk home. The series of converging events at the beginning of the book that drew me into the story so completely is really a superb piece of craftsmanship. When I finally stopped reading it was a bit of a jolt to find myself in Adelaide on a hot summer afternoon with a slightly cranky waitress asking me if I wanted another coffee as I really had been swept off to the Lake District, having conjured up rich images of the physical surrounds depicted in the book as well as of the village’s suspects inhabitants.

The two main characters were likable but not perfectly so which is just what you want in your crime fighters really. I thought the way Daniel wanted to know more about the father who had left the family many years before was handled well as was his internal struggles with other events in his past. These made his amateur involvement in the investigation very believable. I liked the way Hannah made the best of what could have been a bad situation when she was assigned to head up the cold case unit and I will enjoy seeing more of her in future books. The suspect pool also contained some well-drawn characters and I was well and truly blaming an entirely different villager than the person who turned out to be the evil-doer.

The English police procedural is a very crowded space which makes it all the more remarkable that Martin Edwards has produced a new and interesting slant on the sub genre. He’s done so with a combination of intriguing characters, solid plot and a thoroughly captivating small village setting. The Coffin Trail is the 11th book I’ve read so far this year by a new-to-me author and is yet another of that group that has proven so good I’m already scouring the planet for the rest of  this author’s back catalogue.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 4/5

Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press [2005]; ISBN: 1-59058-208-X; Length: 286 pages; Setting: England, present-day

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The Coffin Trail has been reviewed at Euro Crime.

Martin Edwards blogs about writing, crime fiction and his mostly book-y related adventures from Do You Write Under Your Own Name?

There are three more books in the Lake District series including The Serpent Pool which has just been published this month plus 8 books in a different series featuring solicitor Harry Devlin and I’m clearly going to have to read all of those if for no other reason than all the titles in the series seem to be pop song titles and I’m a sucker for a book that somehow evokes a great song.

Too Many Murders on Australia Day

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Chances are that the review below is not as objective as it ought to be. I’ve a rather large soft spot for Colleen McCullough and her work. I don’t know why she was the only female to have been included among the six literary legends immortalised on a set of stamps* commemorating Australia day this year (she’s tucked at the back, behind Bryce Courtenay in the picture) but she is one of my favourite Australians.

I admire her attitude, her intellect and the fact she has never conformed to expectations, either in her life or in her writing. Before she worked as an author she was a teacher, librarian and journalist before studying to be a neuroscientist. As far as her writing goes she has not allowed herself to be confined to any genre, instead having a go at every kind of fiction from epic romantic sagas like The Thorn Birds to science fiction (A Creed for the Third Millenium) to literary novellas (my personal favourite, The Ladies of Missalonghi) to a superbly detailed historical fiction series, Masters of Rome.

McCullough has, of late, turned her mind to crime fiction with Too Many Murders being the second of her novels to feature Captain Carmine Delmonico and the police force of Holloman Connecticut. It opens on the 3rd of April 1967. A young student at the small city’s prestigious university is killed in a particularly gruesome way. One nasty murder would be enough to cope with in the relatively crime free city but there are 11 other murders on the same day and the small police force is stretched beyond its limits. Despite the fact that there are a variety of methods used and none of the victims appear to have anything in common Carmine Delmonico begins to suspect that there is a single person responsible for all of the deaths.

To say the book’s plot is complicated is something of an understatement. Between the alarming body count (it keeps growing after that first day) and the seemingly endless twists and turns you do feel the need to have a notebook by your side, especially in the first third of the book. Complicated is what McCullough does well though and it all does resolve itself in a satisfying way. However I’d have to admit that by incorporating so many murders and associated investigations the book has skimped a little on its tackling of the big-picture social and political issues which are intertwined with the story. Things like the women’s liberation movement and the cold war between the US and Russia are present more superficially than I’d expect from McCullough and there are tangential threads that could easily have been omitted in order to address such issues more deeply.

There are some fabulous characters though. Again, perhaps a few less would have enabled us to get to know some of them more deeply, but Carmine Delmonico and his wife, Desdemona, are thoroughly engaging, As the book opens they have yet to agree on a name for their 5 month old baby boy but their gentle arguing about the issue shows they have a quite lovely relationship which is an equal partnership possibly a little ahead of its time. Delmonico is a dedicated cop and caring about his subordinates as well as being a doting husband and father. If anything he’s a bit too perfect, also being extremely intelligent, but I can see him as a bit of an homage to the golden age private investigators like Hercule Poirot (I’ve been to see McCullough speak twice and on both occasions she has talked of her love for a good whodunnit). There’s a fabulous female ‘civilian’ working with the police called Delia Carstairs (who is eventually deputised and is instrumental in solving the case) and a cast of other intriguing heroes, villains and bit players.

I managed to keep track of this tale in the well-narrated audio version but due to the complexity of the tale I wouldn’t recommend it for audio book novices. Any way you read it though I would highly recommend this romp of a yarn with its larger than life characters and absurdly complicated story full of criminal masterminds, cold war espionage and heroic investigators. It’s not McCullough’s best writing but even her average is pretty darned good.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 4/5

Narrator: Bill Ten Eyck Publisher: Bolinda Publishing [2009]; ISBN: N/A (downloaded from audible); Length: 13hrs 4mins; Setting: Connecticut, USA, 1967

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

72 year old McCullough has, this month, undergone brain surgery to relieve trigeminal neuralgia which causes excruciating pain to all parts of the face including the lips and eyes. She was reported to have been afraid of having the surgery as it might result in permanent brain damage and leave her unable to write. I for one hope she pulls through, in tact.

Here are two snippets from Colleen McCullough’s appearance on an Australian talk show a couple of years ago.

*It’s wonderful to see writers being commemorated in this way (even though the legends list includes the author whose name cannot be spoken in my house) but it says a lot about our country that in the 13 years the Australian Legends stamps have been issued we’ve commemorated all manner of sporting identities (Sir Donald Bradman in 1997, Olympians the following year, tennis champs in 2003 and horse racing folk in 2007), a swag of other entertainers (country singer Slim Dusty in 2001, opera star Dame Joan Sutherland in 2004 and satirist Barry Humphries [a.k.a Dame Edna Everage] as well as our very own Hollywood actors in 2009) and even fashion designers (2005) before we got around to writers.

Unusually I’ve allowed this book to count for two of my current challenges

Crime Fiction Alphabet – O is for Outsider

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Now that my contribution to the Crime Fiction Alphabet meme is, for the second week in a row, featuring a horse racing thriller I’m beginning to realise my father’s favourite hobby (betting on horse racing) has had more influence on me than I thought. I have always associated betting with the sound of horse-race calling being played very loudly on a cheap radio that was never quite on the station and so was very static-y (aside from being a logical and successful gambler my dad is slightly deaf and technically troubled) but despite this I seem to have found myself reading more than a few horse racing mysteries in my time.

Like Dick Francis who I wrote about last week John Francome is an ex-jockey turned thriller writer (and also a race caller for the BBC I believe). Outsider is the eighth of 25 standalone novels he has written so far and tells the tale of an American jockey, Jake Felton, who leaves the US for England after encountering troubles with the New York racing mafia. In England Jake is met with some resistance from the racing establishment, reluctant to have a ‘yank’ in their midst, but he does gain acceptance and goes on to become a leading jockey. Which is when he experiences a series of ‘accidents’ (a near-fatal car crash and almost getting shot for starters) and it soon becomes clear he is being targeted by a professional (though slightly inept) killer.

Outsider is a solidly entertaining book with a hint of romance (between Jake and Camilla Fielding who is the daughter of one of the owners he rides for) and a decent thriller all wrapped up with suitably page-turning speed. There are a suitable number of potential candidates for someone wanting to bump Jake off including his jockey mate Mick (who begs Jake to let him win a particular race and is angry when Jake won’t) and an ex-lover who won’t take no for an answer.

I’m sure Francome was influenced by the success of Dick Francis but his books are different enough in style to allow him to carve out his own niche. Besides, fans of Francis’ books only get one per year (at the most) and must be needing something else to read too.

My previous contributions to the Crime fiction alphabet are

  • A is for Absolution [Caro Ramsay]
  • B is for Bones [Jan Burke]
  • C is for Contest [Matthew Reilly]
  • D is for Deadlock [Sara Paretsky]
  • E is for Entombed [Linda Fairstein]
  • F is for Fortress [Gabrielle Lord]
  • G is for Gambit [Rex Stout]
  • H is for Heartsick [Chelsea Cain]
  • I is for Inheritance [Keith Baker]
  • J is for Jigsaw [Anthea Fraser]
  • K is for Kisscut [Karin Slaughter]
  • L is for Lost [Michael Robotham]
  • M is for Marker [Robin Cook]
  • N is for Nerve [Dick Francis]

    • Mini Review: Snake in the Glass by Sarah Atwell

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    Snake in the Glass is a cosy mystery set in Tuscon, Arizona in which Em Dowell, a local glass blowing artist, gets caught up in hunting down the murderer of someone involved in gem tampering and is increasingly worried by the fact her brother seems to have disappeared. The book is on the more credible end of the cosy scale though it treads the well-worn path of having the heroine in a relationship with the police chief to achieve some of that believability. I’ve no idea if the premise of the book (that rough gems can be improved upon by heating them to extreme temperatures and that this is perfectly legal) is real but Atwell did a decent job of making me believe it could happen.  The characters are interesting and well-developed and there’s a nice mix of background information on glass blowing (and the gem selling industry) and if it had been about 50 pages shorter I’d have rated it higher (there was a quite boring section near the beginning where nothing at all happened except people ate a lot of meals).

    ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

    My rating 3/5

    Publisher: Berkley Prime Crime [2009]; ISBN: 978-0-425-23031-2 Length: 290 pages Setting Arizona, USA, present-day

    ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

    Review: Black Ice by Matt Dickinson

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    My third book for the 2010 Global Reading Challenge took me to cold and lonely Antarctica

    World-famous English explorer Julian Fitzgerald and a Norwegian colleague Carl Norland aim to be the first men to cross Antarctica at its widest point on foot. When things go wrong and they are forced to call for help the only chance of rescue is by land from a private scientific research base nearly 500 kilometres (300 miles) away. The base leader Lauren Burgess and her small team put their work on hold and race the clock to see if they can save the explorers before the long winter sets in and any form of rescue will be impossible.

    This book had a strong sense of its setting. The isolation, vast distances, extreme weather and the razor-thin line between humans taming nature and becoming its victims are all extremely well depicted. I would like to have seen some exploration of the idea that perhaps it’s an inhospitable place for a reason and we should leave it alone but I admit that’s a personal bias. I did get a bit sick of everyone being talked about in heroic terms though, especially the two explorers. My take on people who do extreme things just because they can is more ‘arrogant fool’ than hero, especially when they expect other people to risk their own lives to save their sorry arses.

    The story is quite compelling although it would have been more so with a bit tighter editing. However there are several suspenseful story arcs and some genuine surprises. Although marketed as a thriller it was far more subtle and introspective than the all-guns blazing kind of book that the ‘thriller’ term would suggest but I was nevertheless very keen to find out what happened in the end.

    Where the book fell down for me was in the character development. I can’t really go into much detail without giving away huge spoilers but I think the characters lacked any real depth. The impact of this on the book was to have people at several key points engage in behaviour that I don’t think was at all realistic in the circumstances. Probably the best character was the narcissistic Julian Fitzgerald whose degeneration into paranoia did seem fairly credible given the things he was experiencing and doing but the rest were all a bit too unselfish for me to really believe in.

    Overall though I enjoyed this book far more than I thought I would at the outset (the first 30-40 pages are a bit slow) and as it’s the first book I’ve read specifically for a reading challenge (i.e. I would never have read it but for the need to read something set in Antarctica) I’m quite chuffed with this outcome.

    ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

    My rating 3.5/5

    Publisher: Hutchinson [2002]; ISBN: 978-0-312-98932-3 Length: 392 pages Setting Antarctica present-day

    ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

    Do check out the Global Reading Challenge blog to see what exotic locations the 69 (so far) challenge participants have been visiting

    Review: How to Murder a Millionaire by Nancy Martin

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    I have ‘emergency books’ stashed all over the place including my car glove box, an un-used backpack pocket and my desk drawer at work. I can cope with any amount of unexpected heavy-duty waiting if I have something to read. This week I relied on the emergency book in a small pocket of my laptop bag to get me through several hours I hadn’t planned to spend in a waiting room.

    How to Murder a Millionaire is the first novel in what has become a series of seven (to date) featuring three formerly well-to-do sisters whose parents left them with huge debts before jetting off to a tax haven in the Caribbean. Nora, Emma and Libby Blackbird have also each been widowed (though Libby is re-married). Facing a 2 million dollar tax bill on the farm she inherited from her parents Nora seeks help from and old family friend Rory Pendergast. He gives her a job on the society pages of the Philadelphia paper he owns but she gets more than she bargains for when she attends one of his functions and finds him dead.

    This is a fairly run-of-the mill cosy which seems to be trying a bit too hard to be quirky and, for me anyway, it fell a little short of that mark. All of the people surrounding the sisters were just a bit too over the top to be credible and too one-dimensional to be interesting: Libby’s husband too obsessed with the Civil War, Nora’s boss too paranoid about Nora potentially being in line for her job and almost everyone else too obsessed with erotic art. I didn’t find any of them particularly engaging.

    The story held together well enough and I didn’t pick the culprit until slightly before the big reveal. However I found the shenanigans of people who spend the equivalent of a small country’s GDP on a party a bit hard to maintain an interest in. I also found it a bit ludicrous that the detective assigned to the murder case was so willing to enlist the help of Nora, who he’d never met before. I know that kind of thing used to happen to Jessica Fletcher all the time but she was at least famous for being an amateur sleuth.

    How to Marry a Millionaire is a light, fun read and I would recommend it for fans of the early Janet Evanovich novels and those who like their mysteries mixed with romance.

    ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

    My rating 2.5/5

    Publisher: Signet [2002]; ISBN: 0451207246 Length: 254 pages Setting Philadelphia, USA, present-day

    ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

    Review: Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin

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    I am indebted to Norman (alias Uriah) (or is it t’other way ’round?) from Crime Scraps for introducing me to this book and the rather magnificent Adelia Aguilar. As is usually the way when I fall in love with a book I can’t quite explain why. Oh I can (and will) describe the things I liked about it but I can never seem to explain what sets the books I love apart from the books I like immensely. I find this annoying. Never-the-less, on with what will be a gushing review.

    Mistress of the Art of Death drew me into its medieval English setting immediately with a present-tense opening description of a cavalcade of pilgrims, and three important foreigners, returning to Cambridgeshire after Easter in Canterbury. The foreigners are from Salerno in Italy and they are Simon of Naples (an investigator of renown), Adelia Aguilar (a qualified doctor who can ‘read’ corpses) and her manservant Mansur. They have been sent to Cambridgeshire because King Henry II asked the King of Sicily to send his best people to investigate a crime. One young boy has been horribly killed (crucified so they say) and several other children are missing. The town’s Jewish population, having been blamed for the atrocities, have been provided sanctuary in the King’s local castle but still they are hounded, afraid and, more importantly from King Henry’s point of view, unable to earn money from which they can pay him taxes.

    Although it runs to 502 pages I gobbled up this book in a couple of settings, wishing I had the patience to take things more slowly because I didn’t want it to end but being unable to resist the pull of just a few more pages. The character of Adelia Aguilar would have been enough to capture my heart as she is a feisty, intelligent woman who is not afraid of telling things as they are as evidenced by this extract

    It wasn’t that she had anything against the faith of the New Testament; left alone it would be a tender and compassionate religion…No, what Adelia objected to was the Church’s interpretation of God as a petty, stupid, money-grubbing, retrograde, antediluvian tyrant who, having created a stupendously varied world, had forbidden any enquiry into its complexity, leaving His people flailing in ignorance.

    Eschewing romance (though not necessarily love) for science and the practice of medicine Adelia is unconventional in many ways but is very humane and thoughtful too. If she’s not enough for you there are a swag of other terrific characters here too. The housekeeper Gyltha and her grandson Ulf who both ‘test’ the foreigners in their way before giving them support and information in equal measure are treasures. As are Simon of Naples, a wise and moral investigator deeply in love with his wife; Prior Geoffrey, grateful for Adelia’s ministrations to his delicate prostate problems; and Sir Rowley Picot, initially a suspect in Adelia’s eyes but who goes on to become an object of her affection. Even the unsympathetic characters like Prioress Joan are well drawn.

    I’m sure there are period scholars who could pull apart the book and find inaccuracies but I can’t and probably wouldn’t care if I could. From my limited knowledge there do not appear to be too many liberties taken with important factual elements incorporated into the story and the rich detail of daily life fascinated me. Medical practices, the grittiness of the Crusades, the treatment of women, the bigotry between religions, the interesting role played by Henry II in history (who always is upstaged in the history books by his later namesake and all his wives) are all depicted in a very engaging way. These details wrap themselves around a horrific crime, the essence of which at least was factual according to the author, which was recounted in such a compelling way that I was forced to stay up way past my bed time to finish.

    Mistress of the Art of Death offered a delicious reading experience loaded with wit, terrific period imagery and details, an intriguing mystery and unpredictable, fascinating characters. I have already ordered the next adventure to feature Adelia and whoever else she takes with her on her next adventure.

    ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

    My rating 5/5

    Publisher: Bantam Books [2007]; ISBN: 978-0-553-81800-0 Length: 502 pages Setting England, year 1170-71

    ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

    Mistress of the Art of Death is reviewed at Crime Scraps (thanks again for the recommendation Norm), Dear Author, Euro Crime,  again at Euro Crime and at My Fluttering Heart. It is also used as the basis of an interesting commentary on historical fiction at Detectives Beyond Borders.

    Crime Fiction Alphabet – N is for Nerve

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    For my contribution to the Crime Fiction Alphabet this week I’m highlighting one of my favourite books by a prolific English author who is still writing (albeit with help from his son) at the ripe old age of 90. I know in some circles Dick Francis is out of favour but I will always have a soft spot for the second crime writer I discovered (the first being Ms Christie of course).

    Nerve is the second of Dick Francis’ 42 novels and was published in 1964. It is one of the few crime novels I’ve read that doesn’t involve any murders. There is a death, on the very first page in fact, but it is a suicide which, regardless of the pressure that the person may have been under, can’t reasonably be defined as murder. Robbie Finn, a relative newcomer to the English steeplechase scene, is present when a fellow jockey shoots himself in the head in the parade ring of a racing meeting. Finn goes on to observe that several other jockeys are experiencing problems with their careers before his own career takes a downward spiral just as it seems he will be a success. Finn searches for the common denominator affecting all the jockeys and arrives at a surprising result.

    As well as there being no murder in Nerve there’s barely a crime, at least in the strictly legal sense. The story explores the damage that obsessively wanting what one cannot have might do to a person and what damage that person might then do to those who do have what is coveted. It’s quite intriguing.

    Francis is in the minority of crime writers whose novels are mostly standalones (the exceptions being a series of four books featuring an investigator called Syd Halley and another two featuring trainer Kit Fielding). However all his novels do follow a fairly rigid formula and so share characteristics with series including the familiarity that people look for. His books always feature horses in some way although his protagonists are not always jockeys or trainers, his heroes are always intelligent men with an inner core of strength and there’s always the sense that some kind of justice (legal or otherwise) will be forthcoming before the end.

    The books are not particularly deep (though ones like Nerve do at least make you ponder what you would do in similar circumstances) but if you like astonishingly well researched books with very good yarns of the modern-day fable sort you could do a lot worse that Mr Francis. Nerve is always a book I recommend when people ask for a mystery without any murders (and people do ask).

    Review: The Rule Book by Rob Kitchin

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    Rob Kitchin’s The Rule Book arrived on my doorstep* at precisely the moment I closed the back cover on P D Martin’s The Killing Hands.  I decided this was a serendipitous event and rather than waste any time pondering which book to pluck out of the TBR bookcase next I headed straight to Ireland for my second book in the 2010 Global Reading Challenge.

    At a Centre for Peace and Reconciliation in the mountains outside Dublin a young woman has been killed: affixed to a bed via a sword threading through her mouth and neck. Detective Superintendent Colm McEvoy is put in charge of the case which soon turns from a routine murder investigation into something far more sinister. The girl’s killer, who calls himself The Raven, has left calling cards and the first chapter of a book about how to commit the perfect series of murders. If he is to be believed there will be six more murders over the subsequent days and McEvoy and the team don’t have nearly enough information to even know where to start looking for him.

    This book is the best I can ever recall reading in the way it depicts the wretched desperation that the police must experience in the face of something as truly awful as people being randomly and brutally killed and being unable to wade through the morass of evidence in time to save lives. So often in fictional hunts for serial killers (especially on TV shows like Criminal Minds) investigators take such things in their stride which is at least as disturbing to me as the killings themselves. The Rule Book really gave me a sense of how hideous it must be to know people are relying on you for their safety but despite the fact you’re working all hours and trying your best you just can’t get the right answers in time.

    On top of feeling like he’s letting down an entire city McEvoy struggles throughout the book to deal with his own recent widowhood, the increasingly nasty office politics that inevitably surround such a high-profile case and the pure madness that is the modern media (another aspect to the story that I thought was depicted in a depressingly accurate way). He’s a fantastic character: far from perfect but never giving up despite provocation and I can’t be the only one who just wanted to give the man a hug. The other characters are also realistic though not all as sympathetic. McEvoy’s immediate superior, DCS Tony Bishop, whose skills seem to be more in the arse-covering line than the detecting line, is an all too familiar beast but there are friends too for McEvoy in the form of a humorous pathologist and a profiler brought in towards the end of the case.

    When I saw that the book was a about a serial killer I was a little worried because they’re not my favourite kind of crime novel (I know there are not nearly so many serial killers in the world as there are in fiction so I sometimes struggle with the credibility factor) but the subject was handled well. Even though there are snippets of action seen from the killer’s point of view the book is really about the events that happen and the people who are investigating them. The story is full of suspense as ‘we’ (and it does feel like ‘we’) race along with police to see if The Raven can be stopped in time.

    I was also pleased to find The Rule Book has a very solid sense of its location. From the iconic picture of the statue of Big Jim Larkin in Dublin’s city centre on the cover to the use of local language, particularly in dialogue, to descriptions of an interesting variety of locations in and around the city this is a very Irish book. I have visited Dublin a couple of times and I found myself easily able to transport myself back there while reading along.

    On one level this is a ripping crime fiction yarn which would be pleasing enough but there’s more to it than that. It also made me ponder about the role we all play in making things impossible for police in such circumstances with our insatiable desire for gory details and our seeming unwillingness to accept that real life is rarely, if ever, as simple as portrayed on shows like CSI. The Rule Book is more polished, intelligent and compelling than we have a right to expect from a debut crime fiction writer. I truly hope that Kitchin’s problems in finding a publisher for his next project are only temporary.

    ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

    My rating 4.5/5

    Publisher: Pen Press [2009]; ISBN: 978-1-906710-57-6 Length: 352 pages Setting Dublin, Ireland, present-day

    ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

    The Rule Book has also been reviewed at Crime Scraps, DJs Krimiblog and Mack Captures Crime

    *That is literally true, the delivery guy lands my packages from Book Depository on my front porch welcome mat without ever bringing his snazzy vespa to a complete halt and no, thank you, we will not be discussing how much practice he’s had to perfect his throwing techniques for the easily recognisable packages from Book Depository.