Monthly Archives: August 2011

Review: The Hypnotist by Lars Keplar

Posted on by

The Hypnotist by a husband and wife team writing as Lars Kepler is the latest Swedish novel to gain widespread attention in the crime fiction world. It starts out with the brutal murder of a man, his wife and young daughter. His teenage son has also been terribly injured but is not dead and there is a scramble to find out what the boy, Josef Ek, saw. Naturally enough (<– sarcasm implied) the first thought of detective Joona Linna is to engage the services of a disgraced hypnotist to get inside the boy’s head. Dr Erik Maria Bark is actually a specialist dealing in the treatment of shock and associated trauma but Linna is only interested in his hypnotism skills and when it is discovered that Josef has an older sister who is still alive but may be in danger from the killers, Bark reluctantly agrees to hypnotise the lad. Not unsurprisingly things go wrong for pretty much everyone from that point onwards.

You need clues. You need time. You need a motive. You won’t have any of them.

This is the beginning of the publisher’s summary and your reaction to it will tell you whether or not this is the book for you. If it makes you want to read more then you’ll probably enjoy the book. If, like me, this makes you roll your eyes then you should look elsewhere. I should have read the summary first and avoided the book itself.

It’s not that it’s the most terrible book I’ve ever read, merely that it’s silly and very, very long. The plot hovers around the absurd end of the credibility spectrum which is OK for a thriller except there is more than a dash of soap opera in this mix which stretches the gaps  between thrills. And I think for a thriller to be truly successful there has to be at least one character who is vaguely plausible as a real-world human being. That’s why ‘ordinary bloke who gets caught up in mayhem’ books are so popular; because readers can imagine what they might do themselves in such circumstances. Here I didn’t find any of the characters particularly believable and the more of their stories that were revealed the less credible I found them. Would an experienced detective turn to a hypnotist as his first port of call in a murder enquiry (there wasn’t much pretence at exhausting more routine investigative methods before turning to the less orthodox)? And if so would he choose someone who had been professionally discredited? I could just about buy that a disgraced hypnotist in Bark’s circumstances would allow himself to be talked into doing something he knew he shouldn’t do but his behaviour from that point on, as his family became involved in a parallel thread, was entirely ridiculous.

To me this book was a jumble of gore-infused violence, junk science and a highly implausible collection of psychopaths all focusing their attentions on one suburban family. When combined with fairly shallow characters and an awkward arrangement of plot threads the result was not to my taste at all It read more like a Hollywood treatment than  anything else and I don’t imagine I’ll remember a single detail in a couple of months. If it had been a print book I’d have stopped reading before the end, as it was the lovely narration by Eamonn Riley was enough to keep me vaguely entertained while vacuuming and doing other hum drum chores. But only just.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The Hypnotist has been reviewed (generally more favourably than I’ve done here) at DJ’s Krimiblog, Euro Crime (Lizzie) and Euro Crime (Maxine) (where I think Maxine shares some of my scepticism)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 2/5
Translator Ann Long
Narrator Eamonn Riley
Publisher Harper Collins [2011]
ISBN N/A (downloaded from audible.com)
Length 17 hours 4 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series #2 in the Joona Linna series (though as far as I know the first book is not yet available in English)
Source I bought it

Sisters in Crime Challenge Post #1: The PI novel

Posted on by

One day in 1987 I asked a librarian to recommend some mysteries by contemporary women writers. I walked away with my first books by both Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky, so the two are inextricably linked for me. Both have long-running series featuring gutsy female private investigators and my 19 year old self adored them. Until that point virtually all of the non-dead women I’d encountered in my mystery reading had been children (Nancy Drew and Trixie Beldon) (perhaps we’ll leave for another day the fact that it’s always been easier to find smart, feisty characters for young girls to identify with in fiction than to find intelligent, feisty women for adult women to look to for inspiration), elderly (Miss Marple who is at the other end of the ‘sexless’ scale) or bits on the side for the men who solved crimes (I can’t name you one particular woman) (which is, in its way, my point). The very notion of a young woman running her own business, solving crimes on her own, being at the centre of a story instead of the periphery (not to mention having a healthy sex life without being married) was a revelation. My 43 year old self is still pretty fond of both the characters that I first encountered all those years ago.

There’s a number of reasons to like Sara Paretsky‘s work, not least of which is the character of V I (or Vic to her friends) Warshawski. I think she might be in a minority of fictional private investigators who wasn’t first in the police, though she was a lawyer with the public defender’s office. She’s independent sometimes to the point of endangering herself, can have a mean temper and is prone to sarcasm (anyone who knows me personally is wondering if I am accidentally describing myself at this point) (which probably explains my fondness for Vic).  Her business is never exactly flush with cash but she stays afloat with some steady corporate clients. The investigations that form the heart of the novels usually have some aspect of social commentary about them and it is this aspect of the books that I love most but which has also proven unsuccessful occasionally when the book has turned into more of a political rant than work of literary art. However in most of the 14 books Paretsky does a bang-up job of exploring some aspect of modern American life that undoubtedly needs some investigating. Whether it be the privatisation of prisons (1999′s Hard Time), the lengths some insurance companies will go to to weasel out of making payments (2001′s Total Recall), the aftermath of the Iraq war (2010′s Body Work) or one of the countless other social and political issues Paretsky has explored there’s always something to think about at the end of one of her novels. The BBC’s excellent monthly radio show World Book Club tackled Paretsky’s first novel, Indemnity Only, in 2007 and the show is a treat to listen to as Paretsky talks about the impetus for creating Vic, the death of the PI novel and lots of other meaty subjects.

Sue Grafton‘s work is less political in content and in some ways is even a more direct descendant of the hard-boiled PI novels that clearly inspired the series. Starting with A is for Alibi in 1982 (the same year Paretsky’s first novel was published) Kinsey Millhone has searched for missing people, investigated cold cases and generally looked into things that the police have stopped investigating in 22 books to date. The series will finish in four books’ time with (Grafton has announced) Z is for Zero. Kinsey is a real loner, a twice divorced ex-cop whose ‘family’ consists of an octogenarian landlord and a grumpy Hungarian bar owner, but she is tenacious and she does fiercely look after the few people she is close to. I know that starting all the way back at the first book of such a long series would be daunting for new readers but I think this is one series you can dip in and out of fairly easily and I think the last 2 instalments, T is for Trespass and U is for Undertow were both terrific reads. ‘U’ is particularly good being a departure from the earlier novels as it contains an entire thread of historical fiction from the 1960′s. I have to admire an author who chooses not to keep writing the same book over again even though, at this point, she could almost be forgiven for doing so.

So if I count Paretsky and Grafton as one (because I found them both at the same time) then I can mention three more ‘similar’ authors according to the rules of the challenge. Some less well-known private investigators then…

Australian author Marele Day‘s Claudia Valentine appeared in a series of four books starting with The Life and Crimes of Harry Lavender which was published in 1988. I didn’t read the book until much later but, having moved to Sydney that year I can attest to the way that Day captured the time and place to perfection. Fans of feisty female PIs like Warshawski and Millhone will enjoy Claudia Valentine too and for those who’ve never tried a female PI book perhaps you should start with a smaller series :)

An author who has crossed genres and other literary boundaries over the years is English writer Sarah Dunant but her early 90′s trilogy featuring private investigator Hannah Wolfe is another firm favourite of mine. The first book, Birth Marks, involves Wolfe in an investigation into the death of a young girl who was heavily pregnant and the case allows Dunant the opportunity to explore the complex issue of surrogate mothers. In the remaining books animal experimentation and women’s body issues are both explored in depth in these intelligent books.

I can’t talk about celebrating the women who write private investigators without mentioning the person who created this challenge and who I recently discovered as an author. Barbara Fister has written two books (so far) featuring Chicago-based private investigator Anni Koskinen. In 2008′s In the Wind Anni is asked to help a woman who is believed by some to have been responsible for the murder of an FBI agent many years earlier. Something about Chicago must prompt politically-themed writing as Fister’s work shares this trait with Paretsky’s but she’s done a first-rate job of ensuring the story came first in this book. I have the second book in this series, Through the Cracks, near the top of my TBR pile. Why don’t you?

The PI novel has a long history within the crime fiction genre, allowing authors to explore storylines and themes that other sub-genres sometimes can’t. There are things that would simply be incredible in a police procedural that a PI novel can get away with and there is an appeal about the idea of a private investigator that has never gone away. For much of the genre’s history though the field was dominated by male writers and their male creations and it wasn’t until the late 1970′s that American Marcia Muller’s first Sharon McCone PI novel gained general acceptance then Paretsky and Grafton followed in the early 80′s. Personally I think these women writers have contributed significantly to the depth of the genre in terms of storylines, thought provoking themes and female characters who are a force to be reckoned with in their own right.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Sisters in Crime (US) author, blogger and current Sisters in Crime board member Barbara Fister issued book bloggers the challenge of writing about women’s contribution to crime fiction. There are three levels of the challenge and I’m aiming for the expert level which requires me to write ten blog posts about works of crime fiction by a woman author and, for each, mention three similar women authors whose works I would recommend.  Though I am taking Barbara at her word and using the “whenever” deadline as a concrete goal, so it may take me a while to do all ten posts. And it turns out I might find it hard to stick to recommending just 4 authors per post. Even if you only occasionally blog about crime fiction why not join in the challenge and help celebrate the women who write it?

Review: White Sky, Black Ice by Stan Jones

Posted on by

In the first novel of what is, to date, a series of four books, State Trooper Nathan Active has been assigned to the (fictional) small town of Chukchi, in north-western Alaska. Although he was born in the town and is an Inupiat (Eskimo) himself he was raised in Anchorage by his white adoptive parents and as the book opens Active is counting the days until he can leave the small town again and head back to the comforts of the big city. He can only speak a few words of his native language, doesn’t hunt or engage in any of the other activities the Inupiat people traditionally love and is a bit sick of having all the single women in the vicinity foisted upon him. However when a young man is found dead and everyone else assumes it is just another in the long line of suicides of indigenous men Active is the one who thinks there might be something more sinister afoot. He observes a few discrepancies about the crime scene and starts looking into the man’s recent history, particularly his employment at the local copper mine. Even when a second death occurs Active has to fight his own organisation’s hierarchy and the entrenched beliefs of some of the indigenous people about their own futures to ensure a proper investigation is undertaken.

Given my only ‘knowledge’ of Alaskan culture comes from a love of early 90’s TV show Northern Exposure I can’t claim to know if this book has depicted its setting realistically but it certainly has a very credible feel to it.  The physical setting, including the beauty, isolation and potential danger of the location, all feel very authentic to me. And I can at least attest to the fact that the way cultural issues, particularly the tensions and complex relationships between the traditional Inupiat culture and that of the white man, ring true as they are similar to issues evident in contemporary Australia. One of the toughest issues explored in the damage inflicted by alcohol to the Inupiat people; it is partially blamed for the high number of suicides and generates such strong arguments for and against that there is a campaign to have the town become an alcohol free (or dry) town. What I really loved about the book was that it explored this and other cultural issues with sensitivity and intelligence without succumbing to the temptation for overt sentimentality or simplistic explanations for the state of affairs. Once again fiction proves far more adept at examining complex social issues than the bulk of what passes for media commentary these days.

As a balance to these issues there is also a lot of humour and warmth in the novel, some of which comes from Active’s status as not quite considered white or Inupiat. The locals like nothing more than to poke fun at Nathan for not knowing about some aspect of their beliefs or practices that he would have been well aware of if he’d grown up in the town but they’re not cruel about it. There’s also a lot of gentle humour in some of the depictions of the minor characters in the town, like the elderly bingo player who throws her grand daughter at Nathan (almost literally) because she thinks he needs a woman. She likes to be driven to bingo in Nathan’s trooper car with the lights flashing.

To top it all off there’s a cracker of a crime story here which doesn’t tread a predictable path at all. Nathan is quite a young man to be responsible for such a major investigation but Jones does a good job of contextualising this. And in many ways Active’s youth offers a refreshing perspective. He makes mistakes because he’s relatively inexperienced but he’s also tenacious and proves himself the kind of crime solver I will be happy to re-visit in future novels. The resolution to the mystery element of the book is both satisfying and in keeping with the rest of the novel which is an increasingly rare thing in this era of Hollywood-style endings.

White Sky, Black Ice wraps many of the things I really love about crime fiction into a tidy 201 pages. There’s a terrific sense of place and people, a thoughtful exploration of complicated issues which don’t always have an answer let alone an easy one, and a solidly entertaining whodunnit. What more could a reader want?

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Stan Jones has lived in Alaska on and off for most of his life and has participated in many of the activities depicted in the novel (such as being what we’d call a bush pilot here in Oz). As an investigative journalist he won awards for his coverage of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. He modelled his fictional town of Chukchi on the town of Kotzebue where he lived for many years.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 4.5/5
Author website http://www.sjbooks.com/index.html
Publisher Soho [1999]
ISBN 1569473334
Length 201 pages
Format eBook (ePub)
Book Series #1 in Nathan Active series
Source I bought it

Review: Blue Monday by Nicci French

Posted on by

The first book in a planned series from husband and wife writing team Nicci Gerrard and Sean French features therapist Frieda Klein as its nuanced protagonist. She is a very private person but spends her working life delving into other people’s secrets in an effort to help them cope. One of her new patients tells her something that she links to the case of a kidnapped child that has been in the media for many days and, with misgivings, she goes to the police with her idea. The detective in charge of the case is Malcolm Karlsson who, desperate not to be known as “the copper who didn’t rescue Matthew Faraday” and having no real evidence to go on, acts on Frieda’s vague speculations.

Although I read this book easily and quickly there was something about it that left me thinking I would be unlikely to seek out future books in the series. The best way I can describe my reaction is that I thought it had the feel of having been a book written by committee, and I’m not referring to the fact it has two authors. There just seemed to me to be a few too many details and features that had been carefully inserted to take advantage of current trends and marketing opportunities, and I felt like they took precedence over any story demanding to be told. Each (of the many, many) characters has the feel of having been very carefully chosen to offer as broad a cross-section as possible of each kind of demographic one might meet in a big city (and thereby appeal to the broadest possible cross section of readers). There’s one with a Scandinavian-sounding name (which had me hearing the wheels of a bandwagon rolling along), one immigrant builder, one self-harming teenager and so on but none of these are really dealt with in much depth. Even the book’s title is meant to offer some kind of branding that will link future titles together using days of the week but this is also a surface-only element as nothing at all is made of the title in this book.

The main plot of the book, the desperate search for young Matthew Faraday, is well-handled, if predictable in parts and has a satisfyingly complicated resolution. The use of snippets of story seen from the kidnapped boy’s point of view is restrained and therefore does add drama and intensity to this aspect of the story and the use of Frieda as the tenacious amateur sleuth adds originality to a crowded space. There is some exposure to some interesting scientific ideas that I would actually like to have seen further explored, perhaps at the expense of some of the more random elements of the story.

I wonder if I’ve been harsher on this than I usually am with first books in a series but this writing team does have a dozen standalone novels to their name (of which I’ve only read a couple) so they shouldn’t be making the same mistakes as a debut author might be forgiven for. In the end I enjoyed Blue Monday enough to read another one in the series if it crosses my path (as this one did for my face to face book club) but I’m not really interested enough to actively seek one out.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Blue Monday has been reviewed at Euro Crime

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 2.5/5
Author website http://www.niccifrench.co.uk/
Publisher Michael Joseph [2011]
ISBN 9780141970257
Length 401 pages
Format eBook (Kindle Edition)
Book Series #1 in Frieda Klein series
Source I bought it

Introducing The Cosy Knave by Dorte Hummelshoj Jakobsen

Posted on by

It would be a bit misleading of me to offer a review of The Cosy Knave, a newly published cosy mystery set in Yorkshire and penned by Danish writer and blogger Dorte Hummelshoj Jakobsen. Having been one of the beta readers of earlier versions of the book I don’t think I could claim my usual objectivity when setting out to review. But I do want to tell you about the book whicb I enjoyed as the original chapters made their way to me from Denmark and enjoyed again when I read them as a collective whole this week, following the book’s official launch last Monday.

It was nearly a year ago that the first three chapters of The Cosy Knave arrived in my email box and I leapt into a story about which I knew very little. I’d been a reader of Dorte’s crime fiction-related blog for some years and when she asked for volunteer readers for a new novel I was curious enough to raise my virtual hand. I do, after all, like to read cosy mysteries occasionally and one set in England but written by a Dane (who is an English teacher) should, I thought, prove a curiosity if nothing else.

I was quite taken with those first three chapters, which introduced the small Yorkshire village of Knavesborough to which its prodigal son, a world-class violinist, was returning. This fact was the subject of much gossip at a village knitting group but it’s not until all the villagers gather together at Ye Cosy Knave (a tea shop) to watch a football (soccer) world cup match that they meet Sir Marco Bellini (who had been Mark Baldwin) when he left the village all those years ago. The first of several deaths follows shortly thereafter which offered the opportunity to meet a hard-working hero, a young constable, and his ambitious wife-to-be along along with a succession of amusingly named characters who form the suspect pool. Over the next month or so I eagerly awaited the arrival of each new batch of chapters until the conclusion arrived late last October (for someone who reads several books a week it was near-torture to spread a single book across 4-5 weeks).

I have kept up with Dorte’s progress on reviewing and editing the book via posts on her blog and I was keen to see the finished product when it was officially published last week. How different would it be I wondered? It’s still easily recognisable as the book I read but has acquired the kind of polish that the editing process allows for. I had a quick look today at the first of those original chapters and can see the changes that Dorte has made and appreciate the reasoning behind those changes. I hope at least a few of my suggestions helped her in this process.

And now the book takes on a life of its own and you can read it to. Here’s its official description

A humorous cosy mystery, set in Yorkshire 2010.

The vicious attacks begin when the prodigal son of Knavesborough, Mark Baldwin, returns to the sleepy village after forty years in Argentina, fully equipped with fame, fortune and effeminate butler.

Small wonder that the spiteful nosey parker Rose Walnut-Whip is stabbed, but how could the murderer get away with shattering the perfect, English tearoom idyll in front of twenty villagers?

Constable Archibald Penrose is in dire need of assistance as his superior, DI Mars-Wrigley, is preoccupied with England´s chances in the football world cup. Penrose´s enthusiastic fiancée, the mint-new librarian Rhapsody Gershwin, is more than willing to help as she sees this as Penrose´s route to promotion (and a welcome raise).

As she is the vicar´s daughter, Rhapsody´s treasure trove of local knowledge may come in handy, and to be perfectly honest, the young sleuth may also be a tad curious. And of course the crimes do not stop here. A dangerous criminal is on the loose in Yorkshire. Can the young couple stop the perpetrator in time?

I think the book displays the best elements of a cosy mystery, including that insular village life they are so famous for and a minimal amount of violence. Happily (for me at least) the book eschews the elements of cosies I’m not as fond of, including talking animals and ghosts. It is recommended to those of you who enjoy a light-hearted traditional mystery with lashings of red herrings and a nomenclature that will keep a smile on your face throughout.

The book is available from Smashwords in a variety of eBook formats and here’s a coupon code, provided by the author, which brings the price down to $2.99US: PN22N 

Review: Burned by Thomas Enger

Posted on by

On his first day back at work after nearly 2 years’ absence Henning Juul, a reporter for an online news outlet, is immediately thrown into a major investigation. A young female film student has been found (by the ubiquitous dog walker) stoned to death inside a tent in an Oslo public park. Due to the manner of death and the specific body mutilations, and the fact the girl’s boyfriend is Muslim, the official investigation is quick to focus on a possible religious angle to the crime but Henning feels there is more at play. However he’s not even sure he can function as a journalist after so long out of the game, and takes a while to find his feet.

There was much to like about this book though, for me, the plot was a bit of a let down. Starting with the positives though the characters are all first rate; even the ones I hated were entirely believable and well drawn. It’s not a spoiler to reveal that Juul is a damaged man, both physically and psychologically, since losing his young son Jonas in a house fire two years previously. The guilt, the obsessive changing of smoke alarm batteries, the disconnection from the people around him, the desperation to find something ‘normal’ to cling on to, all help to build up a very credible picture of Henning Juul. What I liked most is that he is not an entirely sympathetic character and I suspect this must have been harder to tease out than someone who engenders nothing but compassion in the reader.

The character I particularly despised was Detective Inspector Bjarne Brogleand who is one of the two police investigators on the case and he spends his every waking moment fantasizing about his partner, a female cop. The language he uses in his thoughts is crude and disgusting and the thoughts themselves made me angry more than once but it is a realistic depiction of the kind of man who sees women as nothing more than sexual objects. Credible though he undoubtedly is I’m really not going to line up to spend any more time in his repugnant company.

The story started well, incorporating its gruesome but not gratuitous opening scene into a broader narrative that seemed to be heading in an interesting direction. It also gave a great depiction of modern journalism where online news has an insatiable need for new content to the point that veracity and accuracy are less important than having something new a few minutes before the competitors have it. The discussion of the disparity between what people say they want to read and what online outlets know (from click-through data) people actually read was particularly poignant given recent events in the UK media. But about half-way through the book I really did lose interest in what I found to be an increasingly disjointed and, at times, downright nonsensical, plot. I can’t say too much without giving spoilers but there was quite a bit that didn’t ring true for me. Things like Juul having a highly placed ‘Deep Throat’ style informant (who never slept and knew absolutely everything going on in official circles) and the triple-twist to the crime’s resolution just felt a bit too contrived for me. In the end it felt like a few too many ideas had been thrown in at the last minute and one or two could have been saved for a future outing. I did like the loose-end feel to the story though (which is not one for those obsessed with justice being done).

I didn’t deliberately pluck this book from my TBR pile in light of recent events in Norway but once I had decided to read it I hoped it might shed some light on its setting. In that I was for the most part disappointed, though perhaps learning that Norwegian society is very similar to my own is the lesson I’m meant to learn from my global reading. Overall I thought this a solid debut novel, particularly with respect to its characters, with a nicely unnoticeable translation by Charlotte Barslund (I tend only to think about translations when the language doesn’t feel right and that never happened here). The plotting will need to improve though for the series to deliver on the promise it shows here.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Burned is Thomas Enger’s first crime novel and it has been reviewed at Nordic Bookblog

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 3/5
Translator Charlotte Barslund
Publisher Faber and Faber [2011]
ISBN 9780571275175
Length 399 pages
Format hardcover
Book Series #1 in the Henning Juul series
Source I bought it

Reading in the cloud: pros and cons

Posted on by

Last weekend I decided I really wanted to read Adrian Hyland’s book about Victoria’s Black Saturday bushfires and my local bookstore didn’t have copies yet. In checking out eBook options the only one available to me right then was to buy a web-based book from Booki.sh (via Readings, a Melbourne-based independent chain).

Essentially what you’re buying with one of these is a URL which renders a book in your (limited) choice of font size and style on any device with a modern web browser. I had heard of the service before but apart from lamenting the stupid placement of the . in the company name (yes I get why but I still find it annoying) hadn’t given it much thought. However as I recently acquired an iPad I thought I’d give it a go.

Having read the book here are my initial reactions to cloud-based reading.

The pros

Device independence: this is a truly wonderful thing. I’ve changed computers since buying my Sony eReader last year and it was ridiculously difficult to bring my library to my new computer (and if I had been using Sony’s recommended settings for the device I would have lost the lot) (and count yourselves lucky I was too tired and grumpy to relay my rant about the morons in my local Sony store who were supposed to specialist reatailers and couldn’t have been less helpful if they’d been dead). But my Booki.sh book is available to me wherever I have an internet connection and I could change devices every day if I were so inclined (you never know, I might be being pursued by shady government types and need to hide my identity behind a series of random IP addresses) (and yes I probably would still want to read in such circumstances).

Price: Australians will think $15 is a pretty reasonable price to pay for a book and the rest of you will be smirking. It’s OK, we’re used to it. At $15 the book is expensive for an eBook but here it is slightly less than half the price of its paperback counterpart and even $3.50 cheaper than the Kindle version which was due for release a couple of days later. Australian books and editions are often not available at the $9.99 or lower that US readers enjoy.

The cons

No notes: unlike ePub books or Kindle editions you can’t take notes as you read or highlight text. There’s a bookmark feature but it seemed to me to only mark the beginning of a chapter. As I was reading on an iPad I could use one of the gazillions of free sticky note apps I have installed but that was a clunkier process than I’m used to with my Sony and there’s no substitute for being able to highlight some text for later reference which probably limits the format’s use for non-fiction and text books (0r reviewers).

No page numbers (or even locations:) because the book is only ever served up to you a little bit at a time it never knows how many pages there are. You do get told how many pages in the current chapter (which I found more useless than nothing at all). You also get a percentage completed marker if you look at the menu (I didn’t work this out until I’d finished reading the book as it was not particularly intuitive) but there’s nothing obvious as you read or even when you look at the book in the catalogue. I may be old fashioned but I do want to know if a book is a short read or the virtual equivalent of a 600+ page doorstop before I embark on it.

The in-betweens

You never own it: I don’t know which category to put this in. On one hand I figure I should get to own something I pay $15 for but then again it costs about that to go to the movies here in Oz and they don’t give you a disc as you leave the cinema. And is there really any difference between having permanent access to a unique URL than having some bytes on a device? I guess Booki.sh could go out of business and I’d lose access to the URL but then I could lose a device too and the book-selling market is nothing if not volatile. Do we really own any eBooks? We generally can’t loan them, sell them on or donate them to charity shops like we can with the old faithful paper books. I don’t think I care that much about owning them as I’m really unlikely to read that many of my books again and I’m slowly changing my buying habits so that I buy the books as I want to read them rather than months (or years) in advance.

The interface: buying the book was easy straight-forward (much simpler than many other stores I’ve used including the Borders and Kobo stores) but I didn’t find the interface of the book itself terribly intuitive. Perhaps I have been spoiled but I didn’t need instructions to navigate through my first ePub book on my Sony or my first Kindle edition on the iPad’s Kindle app. Once I’d read the instructions I was ok though.

You need internet access to read as well as buy: For me this is not that big a deal. I have computers at work and home and an iPad and phone with both wi-fi and 3G access so it’s rare for me to be out of contact with the web. I realise this might not be the case for some readers though. It’s worth nothing that most devices (including the iPad I read on) can cache the average size book so it is available offline if internet access is going to be unavailable (or you want to turn off your wireless to conserve battery life).

Would I do it again?

Assuming the price is right and I can find out elsewhere how big the book is I’d be happy to read another book this way as the cons are niggles more than show-stoppers. I do think though that my preference will remain with downloadable books that I can highlight and take notes on and that this will be a backup option for situations like the one I encountered last weekend.

And for the record you should all read Kinglake-350 in whatever format you can get it.

Has anyone else tried the Booki.sh service or other cloud-based eBook reading? If so, did you like the experience? If not, would you consider it?

Review: The Stonecutter by Camilla Lackberg

Posted on by

Patrik Hedström and his partner Erica Falck have a 2 month old daughter Maya and neither of them are getting much rest. Patrik at least gets to escape to office but Erica feels trapped, especially with Patrik’s judgemental and domineering mother staying. Her friend Charlotte is concerned about post-natal depression. But then Charlotte’s world falls apart when her own eight year-old daughter is found dead. At first she is thought to have drowned accidentally but then evidence appears to indicate the death was more sinister.

In Australia during my youth there was an ad campaign for Claytons non alcoholic whisky (this is not the place to ponder the sheer pointlessness of such a product) with a slogan which said “the drink you have when you’re not having a drink” (it’s worth noting the slogan has become part of the local vernacular, the drink itself fell quickly into obscurity). Though I enjoy them a lot I do think Camilla Lackberg’s novels are the crime fiction you have when you’re not having crime fiction.

The first reason for me thinking that this is not entirely a crime fiction novel is that there is, as always with Lackberg’s books, so much else going on. As well as Erica and Patrik coming to grips with their new bundle of joy/horror we have Patrick’s (useless) boss learning a secret about his own past, a colleague at the police station moving in with his new girlfriend and we learn a little more about Erica’s sister’s abuse-filled relationship. And we haven’t even gotten to the suspects yet. Even before the tragic death of Charlotte and her family (she, her husband, mother and terminally ill stepfather all live together) have enough gruesome family secrets and psychological problems between them to keep a barrage of psychiatrists busy for months and their feuding neighbours don’t fare much better. Lackberg is a skilful storyteller though because she depicts these people very believably (they could easily be your neighbours) and draws the reader into caring about how these hastily glimpsed lives will resolve themselves. It is always a sign that an author has created good characters when I start muttering under my breath at some action or statement by someone I don’t like (and there were several someones not to like here).

I should also mention that the eponymous stonecutter is not a present-day character at all. He is a stonecutter living in the 1920′s and his rather tragic story unfolds via a separate historical thread that is woven throughout the novel. It won’t surprise anyone that the two threads are linked but the way this is done does take a bit of working out. For the majority of this part of the tale we’re more concerned with melodrama than we are with crime and I thought this thread had less of an engaging feel to it than the present-day story as it was all a bit inevitable.

And when you get right down to it the crime which is the nub of this novel could have been solved a lot more quickly by anything approaching a competent police force (though the resort town of Fjällbacka in Sweden where the novel is set appears to only have only 3 even vaguely competent people working at their police station). Even Patrik, who is a decent man and policeman, makes some fairly rudimentary mistakes at the outset of the case and he gets the inspiration for the crime’s solution only after he watches an American crime show on TV!

Despite this not-quite-crime-fiction feel though I enjoyed The Stonecutter as translated by the always-excellent Steven T Murray and read to me engagingly by Eamonn Riley (I should consume all my translated fiction this way and learn the proper pronunciations of names instead of the butchery I make of them in my head). Lackberg has created entirely credible characters who range across a spectrum that starts with ‘like a lot’ and ends with ‘would like to see boiled alive in a vat of hot tar’ and she makes the reader care about what happens to them all. I can live with the slightly haphazard crime solving in these circumstances.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I’ve reviewed the first two books in this series The Ice Princess and The Preacher

This book has been reviewed at Crime Scraps, Euro Crime (Karen reviews the audio book) and Euro Crime (Maxine reviews the print book)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 3.5/5
Translator Steven T Murray
Publisher Harper Collins [this translation 2010]
ISBN N/A downloaded from audible.com
Length 16hours 1 minute
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series #3 in the Erica Falck/Patrik Hedström
Source I bought it

Books of the Month – July 2011

Posted on by

Books of the month

I was lucky enough to read several excellent books this month but my favourite crime novel was the third of Johan Theorin’s quartet set on the Swedish island of Öland. Theorin is a master at creating atmosphere, at making you feel as if you are in the locations he is depicting and The Quarry is yet another superb example of his craft. This one intertwines the story of the island’s spring awakening with several threads involving the lives and crimes of its inhabitants and visitors.

I haven’t read much non-fiction lately but did feel compelled to read Adrian Hyland’s account of the bushfires that devastated the area he lives in called Kinglake-350. I figured that if anyone could deal with a tragedy like that with sensitivity and intelligence it would be Hyland but I was still wary about reading it. I needn’t have worried though, Hyland has done a superb job of painting a very human picture of the awful events and even provides some lessons if we’re smart enough to learn them.

Books read this month

Just Because (i.e. not for a challenge)

Global Challenge (11 read, 3 to go)

Nordic Challenge (9 read, at least 2 to go)

What’s in a Name (3 read, 3 to go)

  • P.D. Martin – Kiss of Death (read for the book with a life stage in the title category) (it’s hardly surprising mine was gonna be a death title is it?) (3 stars) Aussie Author

Toppling that TBR

I still have 179 books to read. I suck at this.

Well I have actually stopped increasing the pile for several months and am basically reading at the same rate as I acquire books now. But I still have all those leftover books from my giant TBR.

What’s up for August?

I’ve let my challenges lapse a little so plan to get a move on in August. I’m reading Burned which is the first book by Norwegian author Thomas Enger and am listening to The Stonecutter which is the third book in Camilla Lackberg’s Swedish series. So that’s good progress on the Nordic challenge at least.

I’ve got 3 books left to read to reach the medium level of the global challenge. I’ve had Stan Jones’ White Sky, Black Ice on my TBR all year for the American leg of the challenge. It’s set in Alaska and I’m really looking forward to it. Although I read plenty of books for the Canadian book challenge I didn’t double-count any of them so need to read another one for this challenge. Then I’ve got several Asian books to choose from on my shelves to finish off the challenge.

For my book club I’ll be reading the first book in Nicci French’s new series. I haven’t anything by this writing duo for some years and am curious to see how they tackle new characters and setting. I only have one book from the library at the moment, Unity Dow’s The Screaming of the Innocent which is set in Africa.

What about you? Read anything remarkable during July? Got any recommendations to make? I’ve been hankering for some non crime-related reading of late…read any good history books? or historical fiction? or something else that might tempt me away from the crime shelves?