Daily Archives: January 2, 2010

Review: U is for Undertow by Sue Grafton

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Who’d a thunk it? 21 installments into a series and, far from being a return to a comfort zone, Sue Grafton’s latest effort is something of a departure from the routine. As the book opens private investigator Kinsey Millhone is asked to do a day’s work by a young man, Michael Sutton. When he was six years old he saw two men burying something in the woods and, due to a recent newspaper article, he now believes they may have been burying the body of Mary Claire Fitzhugh, a four-year-old child who was kidnapped in 1967 and has never been seen since. Kinsey soon learns that it’s not as clear-cut as Michael thought but, as always, she doggedly nuts out all the facts and builds her case.

With respect to the doggedness of Kinsey the book is as familiar as an old cardigan but the surprising element for me was that Kinsey’s is only one of several stories that unfold in this book. In addition there’s a thread that takes place in the 1960′s featuring people who may, or may not, have had something to do with the kidnapping of the young child. The person who features most strongly in that thread is a woman called Deborah Unrah whose grown son returns home greatly changed by the flower power movement and drug culture of the 1960′s. There’s also a parallel thread to Kinsey’s in 1988 featuring a middle-aged man called Walker McNally who is a rather repugnant alcoholic. These two characters, and several others who orbit around them both, are deeply and perceptively depicted as their colliding stories are told.

In some ways the ending of the book is fairly predictable but this book isn’t the same kind of procedural as its predecessors and relies less on that kind of suspense for its drama and conflict. Instead I was gripped by Grafton’s exploration of a single concept across all the disparate threads. All of the stories, even Kinsey’s own, relate in some way to the notion of family and the myriad ways that concept can manifest in society. This book is really about why things happen rather than what happened and it’s this that is something of a departure for this series.

Grafton is one of the few authors whose books I have read in order roughly at the time they were published and due to familiarity breeding a little contempt I have tended, of late, not to look forward to them with the same anticipation that I once did. However this outing shows that Grafton still has her story telling abilities well to the fore and she is not afraid to take the risk of trying something new. Apart from discovering anew that 69-year-old Grafton is still at the top of her game I’ve also been reminded that some authors stay on the best seller lists because they are good, not merely because they have great publicity machines.

I would highly recommend the book to both Grafton’s fans, who will have just enough of the familiar to satiate their needs (though not enough Henry for most I admit), and those who have never read Grafton before because this, more than most of her other alphabet tales, is a standalone book of the highest quality. All of the niggly things about the series (such as Kinsey’s failure to age and the ever-increasing gap between the technology available to Kinsey and that available to the rest of us) really take a back seat in this installment because here stories with undercurrents are all that matter.

I can also recommend to audio book fans the added treat of listening to Judy Kaye’s excellent narration which really did make the long-ish book simply fly by.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating: 4.5/5

Narrator: Judy Kaye, Publisher: Random House Audio [2009], Length: 14hrs 5mins, Setting: California, USA 1960′s and 1988.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

On the day ‘U’ was released Sarah Weinman’s article based on her interview with Sue Grafton appeared in the LA Times and a Q&A by Carol Memmott also appeared in USA Today.

U is for Undertow has been reviewed at Lesa’s Book Critiques, Book Dilettante and Reviewing the Evidence but if you’re looking for a negative perspective you’ll have to trawl through the Amazon reviews and even then you’ll have to look hard.

The only other novel in this series that I have reviewed here is T is for Trespass which received the same rating for vastly different reasons.

Revew: The Black Path by Asa Larsson

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One night the body of a woman is discovered in an ice fishing hut near Kiruna in northern Sweden. Inspector Anna-Maria Mella and her colleague Sven-Erik Stalnacke soon discover the body is that of Inna Wattrang, a senior executive with Kallis Mining company but they can’t so easily learn who killed her. Was it her brother Diddi? Her boss Mauri Kallis? One of the many men she was intimate with? Or something to do with the company’s dealings in strife-torn Uganda? The police meet a wall of silence when trying to interview Inna Wattrang’s family and associates so can only piece together the case slowly.

Åsa Larsson creates memorable characters like few other people I’ve read. In this book, the third of what Larsson says is a 6-book series, there are half a dozen people who slowly but intriguingly reveal themselves over the course of the book. There’s Rebecka Martinsson, the main protagonist of the series, who is struggling with depression after the events of the previous two books. At the beginning of the book she is institutionalised and throughout the story she continues to struggle in a very realistic way. Each of the other characters also displays their own psychological problems including Inna’s brother Diddi whose dependence on drugs makes him increasingly erratic. Mauri Kallis and his sister Ester had separate but equally fractured upbringing and this plays out in the disturbed adults both have become. Somehow Larsson made me feel as if I were inside the heads of this disparate and disturbed group of people and their different perspectives on their worlds were utterly fascinating.

For 90% of this book the plot builds at a steady pace with details being teased out gently as each person’s story adds another morsel. Unfortunately the final 10% reads a bit like someone bought Michael Bey in to finish it off and the high-action sequences offer a jarring conclusion to an otherwise excellent story. It’s not that I’m opposed to thriller-style endings but sometimes they are out-of-place.

I certainly don’t subscribe to the view that all Scandinavian crime fiction is bleak but this is one title that does fit that category. Even the usually optimistic and upbeat Anna-Maria Mella has her share of gloomy moments in this book and I have to say it was nice to be able to walk out into the bright Australian summer sunshine after finishing. However, don’t be turned off by the dark nature of this superbly translated tale because it contains some of the finest characters you’ll read: you probably won’t like them all but I doubt you’ll forget any of them in a hurry.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating: 4/5

Translator: Marlaine Delargy, Publisher: Bantam Dell [2008], ISBN: 978-0-385-34101-1, Length: 381 pages, Setting: Sweden, present-day

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The Black Path has been reviewed perceptively (as always) by Norman at Crime Scraps, Barbara at Reviewing the Evidence (who seemed to share the exact same reactions as I did to both the good and not-so-good aspects of this book) and Maxine at Euro Crime

2009 – The Favourites

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I don’t rely entirely on my ratings for including a book into my favourite reads of the year. There’s also an indefinable ‘something-about-it-stuck-in-my-head-long-after-finishing’ quality that comes into play and that element is unknown when I give my rating (which I do within a day or so of reading the book). So, to arrive at my top ten books for the year I looked at a list of all the books I’d read and rated 3.5 or above (81 out of the 127 books I finished) and reflected on each one (sometimes skimming my review, sometimes not needing to) and slowly whittled them down to the ones with the most ‘stickinmyheadedness’. The result (in alphabetical order of the author’s surname) is:

I didn’t take any of this into account when narrowing down my list but noticed something curious once I’d finished:

  • Three of these are by women.
  • I read three of these in audio (unabridged of course), the rest in old-fashioned print
  • Three of these qualify as historical fiction although the past they are set in is quite recent (two in the 1950’s and one in the 1970’s)
  • There is one each set in Australia, Laos, Scotland, South Africa, Palestine, Russia, England and three set in Sweden (which is odd because I read 43 books set in the US this year but none of those made it to the list and only six set in Sweden)
  • Only three of these were by authors I had read previously

There are procedurals and whydunnits and whodunnits and thrillers and books where crime-solving is incidental to a different kind of story in the list.

There are light books and dark ones and a few in-between ones.

What they all have in common is characters that are memorable and stories that have captured my imagination. I’ve met people who are strong, funny, poignant, awe-inspiring, evil or tragic. Their stories have made me angry, happy, wistful, sad and nostalgic. Each one of them has made me badger friends, family, colleagues and, in at least two cases that I can recall, strangers on a bus to read them.

Hearing this year about the struggles new (and new-ish) authors must go through to get published made me count my blessings for all the wonderful books that do get published and make their way to my hands. To the authors of all the great books I read this year, the ones on this list and the ones that narrowly missed a spot but still entertained and engaged me, thank you for your endurance and your stories.