Monthly Archives: April 2010

Review: Slay Ride by Chris Grabenstein

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Thanks to Ms Bookish last year I discovered the joy that is Chris Grabenstein’s John Ceepak series as read by Jeff Woodman and the series has become my ‘go to’ recommendation for people new to audio books. In an effort to space out my listening pleasure (there are only 5 books in the series so far though a 6th is on its way) I thought I’d try a book from Grabenstein’s other series for adults (he also writes YA fiction).

One of celebrated FBI Agent Christopher Miller’s neighbours has lost her grandson to a killer terrorising the cab drivers of New York and Miller feels obliged to undertake his own investigation into the case though it is officially the responsibility of the NYPD. Meanwhile, advertising executive Scott Wilkinson gets a ride to Newark airport with the limousine driver from hell. Nearly 12 months later the two men’s lives intersect when Miller is suffering the consequences of carrying out an unauthorised investigation and Wilkinson has cause to regret the complaint he made to the limousine company at the conclusion of his limo ride. Payback’s a bitch.

The machinations that get this story rolling bordered on being too contrived but they were out of the way early on and I enjoyed the rest of the tale. It whips along at a fast pace and involves a very acceptable number of twists, turns and scary moments. Though the ultimate ending is never in much doubt, the good guys are going to prevail, there’s a tension-packed story involving international jewel thieves, stolen matryoshka dolls, a gruesome scene that’ll make you think twice about sliced meat and a Christmas concert full of 6-year olds to get through before the satisfying pay-off.

Grabenstein’s characters are always thoughtfully drawn and rarely as simple as they might appear at first glance. Both Miller and Wilkinson are quite well developed and interesting but in Slay Ride the author seems to have enjoyed exploring the darker elements of personality by creating particularly nasty bad guys. Nicolai Kyznetsoff, the crazy limo driver, is disturbing at its best and Jeff Woodman’s excellent voicing of him added a deliciously creepy element to my listening experience.

Sometimes I like to escape from the real world and visit a place where the bad guys are really bad and the good guys are extra good and it’s blindingly obvious who is in which category. This book fits that bill to a tee and is a fast, funny and entertaining listen to boot.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 4/5 (It’s probably a 3.5 for the book with an extra half a point purely for Woodman’s narration).

Narrator: Jeff Woodman; Publisher: Audible Inc [2006], Length 8hrs 6mins

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I have read (and loved) the first three of Grabenstein’s John Ceepak mysteries too.

Review: Last Light by Alex Scarrow

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Following yet another recommendation from my personal librarian/reading mentor I picked up Alex Scarrow’s Last Light a few weeks ago and when my reading mood ring hit ‘thriller’ this week I read it. I can’t resist books with an environmental theme.

The Sutherland family is scattered. Andy is in Iraq doing private consulting work as an engineer, Jenny is in Manchester on a job interview, their teenage daughter Leona is at University in Norwich and their seven year-old son Jacob is at boarding school in London. When the world experiences a series of incidents which shut down global oil supplies and, in turn, cause chaos and rioting on an unprecedented scale the Sutherlands have a battle to find each other amid the rapidly collapsing society.

I have spent more than one evening sitting around with my Greenie friends speculating about what the world will look like if when oil becomes a rare commodity in the not too distant future so I was well and truly primed for a book which took this as its theme. Last Light did not disappoint, presenting a thoroughly credible series of possibilities and, I was pleased to see, not resorting to the clichéd British stiff upper lip seeing everyone through the crisis. The story unfolds at a suitably fast pace in a succession of short chapters and the depiction of society quickly crumbling was well done and quite believable given how reliant we all are these days on having life’s necessities such as food, water and energy delivered to our doorstep, often from half a world away.

My single gripe is that Scarrow saw the need to incorporate a ‘shadowy figure’ element to the story by attributing the instigating events to a sinister global cabal bent on… well… the sorts of things that sinister cabals of shadowy figures are always bent on. For me this aspect detracted a little from the otherwise authentic feel to the story. Also, I could have done with a few less pages devoted to gunfights in Iraq but I’m prepared to admit this is a personal bias against descriptions of gun play which I always find to be incomprehensible and on par with watching dust settle in the entertainment stakes.

Through each of the family members’ struggle to make it to the family home to reconnect Scarrow was able to show different aspects of how society might quickly fall apart in such circumstances and how ‘nice ordinary people’ such as the Sutherlands will struggle to accept that the societal norms they’ve been used to might no longer apply. The description of what happens when Leona and her brother make it to their suburban home and then, along with the few neighbours similarly trapped,  experience being terrorised by gangs each night is truly frightening. This along with other key scenes generated quite a few ‘what would I do faced with that scenario?’ moments for me.

The characters are about standard for a thriller in that they’re not superbly well-rounded but neither are they one-dimensional  automatons.  Interestingly for a male writer I found the female characters to be better developed and more credible than the men. Both Jenny and Leona coped with the barrage of frightening experiences and the way went from confused to afraid to resolved and back again felt very realistic . The only character to develop even a smidgen of the super human skills that heroes in thrillers tend to do was Andy, the father, and even that was of a very minor nature when compared with the sort of thing you normally see in thrillers.

Most of the thrillers I come across these days seem to either be concerned with some aspect of the (to me) nonsensical ‘war on terror’ or a variation on hidden codes in religious texts and I’ve tired of both of these so enjoyed the opportunity to explore a different theme. Also, having ranted previously about books which incorporated their messages badly by telling me what to think rather than showing me what the characters were thinking I was pleased to see that someone still knows how to incorporate a political point of view while delivering all the action and heart-in-the-mouth moments of terror that a thriller is supposed to have. I would heartily recommend it to anyone who likes the idea of an intelligent romp of a thriller.

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My rating 4/5

Publisher: Orion Books [this edition 208, original edition 2007]  ISBN: 9788752893273; Length 483 pages.

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Last Light has also been reviewed by Maxine at Petrona (thanks once again for the recommendation) and at Material Witness

Weekly Geeks 14 – Reading Globally

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The theme for this week’s weekly geeks is one I couldn’t pass up as it’s all about reading globally which is something I do try to do with my reading. Plus, it’ll give me a chance to include a chart and we all know how I love those :)

On to the questions

Do you deliberately read globally, and if so, do you track your reading in this area?

Yes and yes (tracking something means you might just get to create a chart sometime and … well…I love a chart).

I have finished 53 books so far this year set in 18 different countries (plus one set in multiple countries). As you can see I still read most of my books set in England and America but it was only a couple of years ago that I would have done all my reading in those places.

I’ll be adding another country to the table in a day or so when I finish my current book which is set in Italy.

Have you joined any reading challenges which encourage reading from around the world? If so, what are they?

I am participating in the 2010 Global Reading Challenge and am aiming for the expert level which requires me to read 2 books set in different countries of Africa, Asia, Australasia, Europe, North America and South America plus 2 books set in Antarctica. My additional personal challenge is that all the books I’m going to count have to be by new-to-me authors and my personal preference is for crime fiction. So far I’ve read 8 books and am in the middle of my 9th (A Death in Tuscany by Michele Guittari)

I also recently started the 2010 Scandinavian Reading Challenge which requires me to read 6 books set in the countries that make up Scandinavia (which according to Wikipedia are Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden).

So far I’ve only read one book for this challenge but it was a beauty: Hypothermia by Arnaldur Indriðason which I rated 5 out of 5.

Do you visit bloggers who blog outside of your country? If so, what have you learned from reading their blogs? Consider sharing a couple of links to book bloggers who motivate you to read around the world.

Yes, although it wouldn’t be hard as I’ve only got a couple of other Australian blogs in my Google Reader, the vast majority of blogs I visit are by bloggers outside my country. However I’ll highlight a couple of great blogs from people who, unlike me, can read and blog in multiple languages:

Where do your reading around the globe book suggestions come from? Magazines? Web sites which feature books in translation? Publishers? Other bloggers? If you have a particularly great site for recommendations, give us a link!

These days most of my recommendations come from my fellow crime fiction fans at the Crime and Mystery Room in Friend Feed, many of whom also like to read and discuss books set all over the place.  A special mention must go to Maxine who blogs at Petrona whose reading recommendations I have come to view as my personal reading guide.

Taking a quick trawl through my Google Reader account here are some other great sites for finding crime and mystery fiction from around the world

Do you read books in translation as part of your global reading experiences? Share some of your favorite books in translation.

Yes. So far this year I’ve read 6 books in translation. Interestingly they have provided my equal highest rating and my lowest rating!

Is there a particular country, or countries, which you would like to learn more about? Why?

Not really. I love learning about all kinds of places. Once upon a time I did it for real with travel to all parts of the world while now I use my armchair a little more (‘cos backpacking is just not the same fun at 40 that it was at 20).

Review: Still Midnight by Denise Mina

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Denise Mina’s Garnethill was one of my ten best reads of last year so, even though I haven’t finished that series yet, I was keen to read her latest adult fiction.

In suburban Glasgow one Sunday evening two men break into the house of a seemingly ordinary family and terrorise them at gun point. After demanding an enormous ransom and making a few serious blunders the men escape, taking one of the family members with them until the ransom is paid. Things continue not to go smoothly for the hapless criminals who take their kidnap victim, who they refer to as ‘the pillowcase’, to a hastily arranged hideout. Alex Morrow is the DS from Strathclyde Police who should be assigned the case but, due to the sensitivity of the case, she has to work under the direction of another DS, a fact she struggles with throughout the book as the team try to work out if the family, which doesn’t appear to be wealthy, was targeted in error.

The thing I liked most about this book was the portrayal of the family at the centre of the kidnapping. Each member of the family is given their own thread and we are shown, quite beautifully, how they all diverge from the stereotypes which are hinted at in the beginning of the story. During the boring bits of the book, and sadly there were quite a few of those, I found myself wishing we were back with one or other member of the family and finding out something interesting about their personal stories.

The character of Alex Morrow is also well drawn and, although I didn’t particularly like her I was engaged by her character most of the time. I must admit though that her never-ending obsession with who was doing her wrong on the office political scene became tedious for me. Towards the end of the story some personal revelations about Morrow go part way to explaining her perpetually rude behaviour but it wasn’t just her colleagues who had to put up with her crude language and angry, immature outbursts for much of the book. However, she is clever, her connections with the local community are used to full advantage and her complexity did generate suspense for the otherwise fairly slow story.

The really tiresome aspect of the book for me was the time we spend with the crew of morons that had ‘planned’ the kidnapping. It’s not that I mind getting to know people on the wrong side of the law but these people were all living separate, highly improbable fantasies that were of limited interest to me. Apart from the two gunmen, one of whom sees himself as some kind of action man while the other one believes himself in love with the young daughter of the family he terrorised, we have the junkie driver, probably the best of a bad lot, and the man wh0 organised the hideout who is so befuddled by alcohol that he is unaware of his own incontinence (the effects of which are described at great length and repeatedly).  There’s a limit to the amount of time I’d want to spend in the company of these particular people and we passed it at about hour six of the audio book.

One of the words most often used to describe Denise Mina’s writing is ‘gritty’. In the case of Still Midnight I would agree that the world in which the book is set is gritty and not just for the criminals because the police here don’t have a lot in common with their comrades in flashy American TV shows. Their technology is out of date, their resources are few and they are perpetually tired which I suspect is a lot closer to the real world than what I see on CSI Miami. But this gritty realism was at odds with the fantasy-like ending of the book and the resolution to one thread in particular had me gritting my teeth and rolling my eyes. As if.

Still Midnight displays Mina’s dark humour, there are several genuinely laugh out loud moments which are quite politically incorrect and all the better for that, and skill at creating interesting characters. For me it wasn’t as tightly paced as I would have liked and I had some credibility issues with parts of the book but even when she’s not at the top of her game Mina is still pretty darned good and I did thoroughly enjoy the very Scottish narration from Katy Anderson.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 3.5/5

Publisher: ISIS Audio Books [this edition 2010, original edition 2009]  ISBN: N/A; Length 13 hours 13 minutes.

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Still Midnight has also been reviewed by Maxine at Petrona (who I seem to agree with, again) and Glen at International Noir Fiction

Review: The Curse of the Golden Yo-Yo by Robin Bowles

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I bought this book when I visited one of Australia’s very few bookstores that specialises in crime fiction in Melbourne last year (actually it’s the only one I know of in the country). I’d never heard of the book but I loved the title. I’m counting it as my book set in Australia by a new-to-me author for the 2010 global reading challenge.

In suburban Melbourne Cornelia Finnigan starts work as a private investigator at the firm of the son of her next door neighbour. The cases come thick and fast as she tries to find a young woman who has disappeared, investigates the suspicious arson attack on a $350,000 Ferrari and ascertains who poisoned two Pekinese puppies. All the while she’s trying to get her hands on a golden yo-yo that was once owned by Elvis Presley for a client who is desperate for the item’s return and some nefarious crooks are trying to get their hands on whatever is hidden in Cornelia’s new apartment.

Perhaps needing a break from her work as one of Australia’s leading true crime writers Bowles appears to have had a lot of fun writing this modern-day caper and that energy translated to me as a reader. This was a fun book to read.

Claudia has big feet, loves to shop but works hard too and has a nice line in sarcastic internal monologue. The references to fashion labels were a bit wasted on me (I am assuming they’re fashion labels) but easily ignored and I liked the fact she was depicted as being clever alongside being ‘girlie’. So often we see one or the other in fiction. As is the way of books in which mayhem ensues from the get go there are a plethora of wacky characters including 2 potential love interests who nearly come to blows, Claudia’s flamboyantly gay brother, a flatulent dog called Kissiface and a host of eccentric clients.

Reading this book felt like going to a theme park for the day: filled with loads of laughs and odd things to look at with the occasional moment of eye-covering terror thrown in and a nice contented feeling at the end. It’s probably not the kind of thing everyone would like but it reminded me of the first couple of Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum novels that I read and enjoyed if that helps you at all.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 3.5/5

Publisher: Five Mile Press [2007];  ISBN: 9781741785333; Length 262 pages;

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Review: B-Very Flat by Margot Kinberg

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I have a number of challenges on the go and several books to read for each one piled up but when Margot Kinberg’s second Joel Williams novel arrived on my doorstep on Friday I decided it had to skip to the top of the TBR list even though I can’t count it for any of my challenges.

Just as with the first installment in the series, Publish or Perish, this book opens with a series of deliciously intimate portraits of people at Tilton University whose lives are interconnected in interesting ways. Among the deft depictions we meet student Serena Brinkman, a violin major whose campus fame is on the rise and who is in the running to win a major music competition. Michelle Park, also a gifted violinist and Serena’s rival, is under immense pressure from her parents for whom the only acceptable outcome at the competition is a win. Troy Brinkman is Serena’s cousin and friend but he’s having money troubles causing him a lot of stress. Marcie Bratton is a dormitory advisor to Serena and her roommate Tessa who dreams of a career in the military but worries about a secret she has that might prevent her from fulfilling that dream. One of the Music Department’s staff covets Serena’s antique Amati violin and seems to think such a beautiful object is wasted on Serena and one of the campus newspaper’s photographers does not take kindly to Serena’s rejection of his romantic advances. Of course things do go horribly wrong, this is crime fiction after all, and although at first the death which occurs appears to be an accident the Police and one of the university’s professors, ex-policeman Joel Williams, do accept that it was murder and start investigating.

Once again Margot Kinberg has created a delightful whodunnit with a plethora of clues, red herrings and potential suspects. The book drew me in immediately as it revealed snippets of information about all the players with nice pacing and a really strong sense of credibility. Both the university setting and the day-to-day lives of the cast of mostly young characters all felt very realistic to me. When a writer of Kinberg’s calibre creates this kind of picture it starts to seem perfectly reasonable that multiple people would see murder as the solution to their particular problem and, for me, that’s what makes a thoroughly enjoyable whodunnit.  Though I did chuckle at the beginning when several sets of parents select Tilton University believing the small town setting would be safer for their children than a big city. If only they were crime fiction fans they’d have known not to trust those idyllic looking small towns!

Unlike many of the great tomes being published these days, the book comes in at a very satisfactory 202 pages which just goes to prove that a good writer can tell a good story without requiring the deforestation of a small country to provide the paper and I’m also impressed by the fact that you could easily read and enjoy this book without having read the first book in the series (though you should read that one too, you just don’t need to in order to understand what happens in this one).

I can wholeheartedly recommend this book, especially to those of you who like a good puzzle to solve and enjoy matching wits with the professionals as they unravel the clues. Perhaps you’ll have more luck than I did at predicting the culprit in this fine novel.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 4/5

Publisher: Publish America [2010];  ISBN: 9781448971213; Length 202 pages; Setting: America, present-day

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My review of Margot Kinberg’s first Joel Williams novel Publish or Perish.

B-Very Flat has also been enthusiastically received at DJ’s Krimiblog and Petrona.

Margot Kinberg shares thoughtful and intriguing ideas about what makes crime fiction tick at her excellent blog Confessions of a Mystery Novelist.

A Review of a kind: If the Dead Rise Not by Philip Kerr

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The first two-thirds of If the Dead Rise Not is set in Berlin in 1934. Hitler’s National Socialist Party has been in power for 18 months which made Bernie Gunther’s life as a homicide detective untenable because he is a supporter of the previous regime. So he is now a house detective for an up-market hotel. In that role he becomes embroiled in several investigations including gangster involvement in the bidding for building contracts for the upcoming Olympiad. In the second book last third of the book we jump to Cuba in 1954 where Bernie is playing with model trains and having sex with a selection of prostitutes when some of the people from 1934 reprise their roles bit-players in Bernie’s life in a sequence of events that had, to my ears, less to do with crime fiction and more to do with Bernie proving some more how witty and sarcastic he can be.

If I had read the excellent review at Crime Scraps before embarking on this book I wouldn’t have. Embarked on the book that is. Because 30′s hardboiled detectives in the style of Chandler, Hammett et al is just not my cup of tea. Where Uriah Robinson in his review sees a sharp first person narrative and clever lines I see a bunch of blokes who exhibit a blasé attitude to violence and a leering, lecherous quality that I find tiresome.

So my first problem is the style of the book which, it turns out, I still don’t  like even though it was conceivable that my tastes might have changed in the 20 or so years since I read a hardboiled PI novel.

Then we come to the fact it felt like two separate books rather than a single entity. The audio version of the book is 16 hours long. A little more than the last 6 hours takes place in Cuba after the rather abrupt ending to the first part. A handful of the same characters are present, including the woman he fell in love with and an American gangster who nearly killed him, but I’ve seen separate books in a series have more connection with each other than the two parts of this book. Also, the Cuba portion of the book incorporated even more real characters from history in a way that I find trite. As soon as we jumped to Cuba I was waiting for Ernest Hemingway to make an appearance. Which of course he did. Ho hum.

What I did like about the book was Kerr’s ability to create a sense of time and place. His early period Nazi Germany is oppressive and sinister and there is a tangible quality to the sense that no one comprehending how bad things will get. It really is quite chilling. I found the Cuba portion a little more ‘hokey’ but I admit that’s at least partly because I was, by then, over it. And to be fair, when he wasn’t belting people or describing every woman he encountered in terms of how much he would like to have sex with her Bernie was quite witty and had random moments of moral clarity. I have to say too that Jeff Harding’s narration was a perfect match for the tone and style of the book.

To be abundantly clear I am in the minority in my feelings towards this book. Reviews at Crime Scraps and Reviewing the Evidence are indicative of the majority view and even though she has some misgivings Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise feels far less negatively than I do. And if there was any doubt that mine is a minority view If the Dead Rise Not won the 2009 CWA Ellis Peters Award for historical fiction.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 2/5

Narrator: Jeff Harding; Publisher: ISIS Audio Books [2010, original edition 2009]; ISBN: N/A (downloaded from audible); Length 15 hours 58 minutes; Setting: Germany 1934, Cuba 1954

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Review: Hypothermia by Arnaldur Indriðason

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Prior to this book I’d only read one of Arnaldur Indriðason’s Erlendur series, Jar City which I liked but didn’t love. However, when Hypothermia became available at my local library I thought I’d use it as my first book to count towards the 2010 Scandinavian Challenge being hosted by Amy at The Black Sheep Dances.

A woman is found hanged in her weekend cottage but all indicators point to suicide. Erlendur of the Reykjavik Police must talk to the woman’s husband but it seems to be a matter of routine. At around the same time Erlendur is reminded of one of his earliest cases: the disappearance some 30 years previously of a young man named David whose father is now dying and Erlendur feels obligated to look into the case one last. Although there is no identifiable action to take on either case Erlendur finds them occupying his thoughts and he becomes somewhat obsessed by uncovering the facts relating to each incident.

I’ve been trying for a couple of days but I can’t seem to explain why I found a book in which there’s not a great deal of action as quite as compelling and moving as I did.

As I read the book almost in a single sitting, I fell asleep at about 2:00am with a handful of pages to go and quickly devoured them the next morning, the word that kept popping into my head was yearning. Maria, the woman whose body was found hanged, is yearning so much for her mother who recently died and her father who died many years earlier that she is driven to seek out psychics and mediums. Erlendur too is yearning for a resolution to his own childhood tragedy which saw his only brother disappear forever in a wild storm one night. Erlendur adult daughter forces her estranged parents to talk with each other so that she might know the kind of family life she never had. And what dying father of a long-disappeared young man wouldn’t yearn to know what had happened to a much-loved son?

The way this is all teased out is via a rather simple but effective plot which involves Erlendur talking to the friends, relatives and acquaintances of both Maria and David and slowly piecing together each jigsaw puzzle. He does it without any official warrant so has virtually no assistance from his colleagues but the book is still a procedural of sorts I suppose.

Frozen Lake Þingvellir

Of course it’s impossible for a monolingual person like me to know for certain but I feel, by virtue of its invisibility if nothing else, that the translation is sensitive to the author’s original intent. It is certainly a very readable book in its English form. The sense of place in the book too is strong. Physically this is primarily due to the setting of several key scenes in and around Iceland’s lakes, in particular Lake Thingvellir (when Erlendur and his daughter spend a day driving around to see several lakes I couldn’t help but hit google for some images). Intellectually we see the interconnectedness between people and events that must be a part of life in a country of only 300,000 people and there is an undercurrent of the country’s folklore sitting, however uncomfortably, side by side with things modern.

Hypothermia is without the kind of explosive drama that a lot of crime fiction thrives on but, for me anyway, the subtle drama of these exquisitely depicted, intertwining stories was equally as intriguing. It is sad, though not depressing, thoughtful and ultimately quite beautiful.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 5/5

Translator: Victoria Cribb; Publisher: Harvill Secker [200]; ISBN: 9781846552625; Length 314 pages; Setting: Iceland, present day

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Hypothermia is reviewed beautifully, as always, by Maxine at Euro Crime,

Review: In Cold Pursuit by Sarah Andrews

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I’m aiming for the expert’s level in the 2010 Global Reading Challenge which requires me to read, among other things, two books set in Antarctica. It was surprisingly difficult to find anything other than testosterone-fuelled thrillers or sci-fi adventures for this setting so I was quite pleased to stumble across 2007’s In Cold Pursuit which is a genuine murder mystery for my 7th official book in the challenge.

Valena Walker is a young glaciology graduate student who has secured a place on Professor Emmett Vanderzee’s Antarctic team. Unfortunately upon arrival in Antarctica she is told that Vanderzee  has been arrested and taken back to the US and she too will have to leave as soon as there’s a spare seat on a flight out. Walker discovers that during the previous year’s work on the continent a journalist who was critical of Vanderzee’s work died from what was thought to be altitude sickness while on a visit to Vanderzee’s camp but now new evidence indicates the death was not an accident. Desperate not to leave Antarctica she decides to investigate the matter to see if she can determine what really happened.

The standout feature of the novel for me was the picture it painted of life in Antarctica. Unlike other books I’ve read that are set there, the action in this one takes place in and around McMurdo Station which is a temporary home to more than 1300 people and I’d never really thought about Antarctica having its own small town before. With talk of ‘the season’, the need to haul in all the equipment and supplies one might need from half a world away and the competition between research teams for resources and kudos I was reminded of the many books I’ve read (fact and fiction) based in and around early archaeological digs in Egypt. I don’t know if the author has been there (her website says she was hoping to go there but it hasn’t been updated for quite some time) or has just spoken to people who have but she certainly made it seem very realistic and provided quite fascinating details of day-to-day life in the crowded isolation. Not surprisingly, because Andrews is a geologist and a professor, the scientific details and discussions about science-related issues such as global warming have an air of authenticity and add an interesting aspect to the book.

As far as characterisations go I thought the best of these were at a group level rather than an individual one. We are shown the scientists (beakers), the tractor drivers (with their own very Pythonesque club), the administrators and so on and, as much as any group generalisation can be realistic, these felt quite natural and showed what kinds of people might be drawn to work in such a place and how they might react to the location. We don’t really get to know any single person other than Valena in any depth and for me this is a bit of a disappointment as I’d much rather get to know individuals. Valena is depicted quite realistically for the most part: generally strong with some credible glimpses of the uncertainties that a woman of her age would display in the kinds of stressful situations she encountered. I didn’t fall in love with her but liked her and wanted to see how things would turn out for her.

The only part of the book that was a bit of a letdown was the mystery itself. Although there are the requisite number of suspects and red-herrings there really isn’t much  in the way of suspense and for a good deal of the book there’s barely any action on the mystery front at all as we observe the day-to-day goings on at McMurdo. At times it felt like the author was trying to squeeze in all the interesting things she knew about living and working in Antarctica to the detriment sometimes of plot development.

Although it’s not the best example of a mystery you will find In Cold Pursuit is a good read, especially for those with an interest in science. It hasn’t convinced me that any scientific knowledge humanity has gained from our presence in Antarctica will prove to have been worth the cost of finding the last pristine bit of the planet and covering it in buildings, vehicles and all the other detritus that accompanies us wherever we go but I did enjoy it as a unique reading experience. It appears that all of Andrews’ previous novels feature a forensic geologist and amateur sleuth Em Hansen, a character who makes a brief appearance at the other end of an email in this novel, and I enjoyed this one enough to seek out another book in this series.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 3.5/5

Publisher: St Martin’s Paperbacks [2007]; ISBN: 9780312945961; Length 368 pages; Setting: Antarctica

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Goodbye to the Crime Fiction Alphabet

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For the past few months Kerrie from Mysteries in Paradise has hosted the Crime Fiction Alphabet meme which has been contributed to by a varied group of dedicated crime fiction fans. I’ve mentioned before that most memes don’t do a lot for me but I have enjoyed this one for a couple of reasons.

Selfishly it has made me trawl through my reading past and remember some delights (and a couple of clunkers). Having a giant TBR pile I tend to always be thinking about the next book so it has been pleasant to reflect on books past and to share with others some of the great books (and a couple of clunkers) that I read before I started blogging.

Secondly, reading other people’s contributions has added countless titles to my own reading list.  Happily this hasn’t led to my complete financial ruin because other contributors have also shared their thoughts about older books and many of these have been available cheaply or at the library. For someone with poor impulse control it’s essential not to always be reading about great books that are (costly) new releases.  Of the alphabet-inspired books that I’ve already read some have become new ‘keepers’ (Ariana Franklin’s Mistress of the Art of Death and Gene Kerrigan’s The Midnight Choir for example), others have entertained (Lindy Kelly’s Bold Blood) and challenged me (George Pelecanos‘ The Way Home) and many more glimmer at me from my TBR Shelves (including a couple of books by Simon Brett, Leif Davidsen’s The Serbian Dane, two books by Willian Deverell, The Ghostway by Tony Hillerman, The Irish Village Murder by Dicey Deere and Last Light by Alex Scarrow).

In homage to one of my favourite crime fiction authors, Sue Grafton, my contributions all discuss books with one word titles (with a couple of liberties taken for the pesky last letters of the alphabet):

  • 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]
  • O is for Outsider [John Francome]
  • P is for Postmortem [Patricia Cornwell]
  • Q is for Quantico [Greg Bear]
  • R is for Reflections [Jo Bannister]
  • S is for Stranglehold [Jennifer Rowe]
  • T is for Timeline [Michael Crichton]
  • U is for Undertow [Sydney Bauer]
  • V is for Vanish [Tess Gerritsen]
  • W is for Watchdog [Laurien Berenson]
  • X is for X-Esquire [Leslie Charteris]
  • Y is for Y2K [R J Pineiro]
  • Z is for Z4CK [Kevin Milne]

    • Thanks for hosting the meme Kerrie.