Monthly Archives: April 2012

Review: NIGHTS OF AWE by Harri Nykänen

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In Helsinki the bodies of two Arab men are found, one presumably tortured before being shot and the other having fallen or been pushed from a bridge onto railway tracks. Detective Ariel Kafka of the Violent Crimes Unit, and one of only two Jewish policemen in Finland, is the lead investigator. The bodies are quickly identified and at first police wonder if the crimes are race related but, as more bodies start piling up and the security forces start poking their noses in where Kafka doesn’t want them, consideration turns to a possible terrorist attack being planned for Helsinki. Then again it could be a drug thing!

I thoroughly enjoyed meeting Ariel Kafka who is around 40, single and, mostly, unobservant of his religion’s traditions and rules. Refreshingly he is not a maverick, a loner or an alcoholic and yet he still manages to be interesting. He does have a family tragedy in his past but it does not cripple him and he rubs along well enough with his older brother while having a quite lovely relationship with his uncle. His working relationships are not beset by conflict either. He manages to get on with most of his superiors, even acknowledging the political fallout they try to save him from, and his colleagues are generally energetic and competent, though one is more interested in his hobby than his work but even he manages to help track down a vital piece of evidence when it really matters. Kafka can be a bit acerbic but his dry humour is a nice counter balance and overall he is the sort of character I can imagine as a real-world policeman which is not something I often think about fictional detectives.

The plot was a less successful element of the book for me, feeling a bit more like a Hollywood thriller script than a considered work of crime fiction. The speed with which conspiracy theories were dreamt up, bought into and abandoned in favour of a new one wasn’t really convincing. And when combined with the alarming body count (eight I think by the end of the book) I did start to roll my eyes a bit. For me the fact of Kafka’s Jewishness and the setting of the book during the ten-day period between two of the most important Jewish holidays, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, was enough to give the book the unique flavour I suspect the author was aiming for. Adding a thread about Mossad agents working in-country was a little over the top (most Jewish people I know seem to manage to get through entire days, weeks even, without encountering a single reference to the famed Agency so it kind of bugs me when every fictional Jew runs across at least one agent before breakfast).

However there is enough promise in this series opener for me to be keen to read the next instalment should there be one. The protagonist offers scope for genuinely interesting character development and there is evidence that Nykänen has the capacity to explore social themes in an intelligent way, even if in this book such exploration got a bit lost at times amidst the overly convoluted plot. For example Nykänen tackles the difficult issue of the way Israel and the broader Israeli/Palestinian conflict is perceived in Finland and Europe generally and he does so thoughtfully. NIGHTS OF AWE, a title with a clever double meaning, is a smoothly translated, smart, fast-paced read with enough depth that I could largely forgive the unnecessary ‘Hollywoodisation’ of the plot.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

NIGHTS OF AWE has been reviewed at Crime Scraps, Mrs Wordopolis Reads and The Crime Segments

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 3.5/5
Translator Kristian London
Publisher Bitter Lemon Press [2012]
ISBN 9781904738923
Length 252 pages
Format paperback
Book Series #1 in Ariel Kafka series
Source I bought it
Creative Commons Licence
This work by http://reactionstoreading.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

An update, and some gushing, on the Australian Women Writers challenge 2012

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After several years of signing up for multiple reading challenges this year I wanted a break but felt compelled to join the Australian Women Writers challenge. After all if I, as an Australian woman reader, can’t support this particular cause then who can I expect to do so?

I have so far read and reviewed seven of the 10 books necessary to complete my particular challenge and am struck by the quality I’ve discovered. There is a mixture of familiar favourites and brand new to me authors and I have dabbled in genres beyond my usual reading. There is not a dud book in the bunch.

And while I have enjoyed them all, it is the latest one, Virginia Duigan’s The Precipice, that has won a special place in my heart. It is fan-bloody-tastic. It’s not just my favourite book of the challenge but my favourite book of the reading year so far. I adored its protagonist, eighty-ish loner Thea Farmer, and expect I am going to become quite boring in the repetitiveness of my urging other people to read this book. I have gushed more about it at my other blog.

The books I’ve read so far (* indicates an author I had not read before this year)

Upcoming books for this challenge that I have on my shelves, devices or on order from various purveyors of fine books are a whodunnit set in a lawn bowls club, a story about sexual harassment in the Tasmanian police force, a fictional account of Anne Hathaway’s relationship with the penniless eighteen-year-old son of a disgraced and bankrupt glove-maker and a murder investigation in a remote part of South Africa in the 1950′s. As my niece would say You Go Girls!

Review: THE THIEF by Fuminori Nakamura

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I don’t think I’d have noticed let alone read this book if it hadn’t appeared on the list of titles eligible for this year’s International Dagger Award for translated crime fiction published in the UK and that would have been my loss. It’s a great reminder of why I follow this particular award more closely than any other; I am prompted to read more widely in terms of geography and style than I otherwise would do.*

THE THIEF is an odd book, not really fitting neatly into any of the crime genre’s boxes though it is, I suppose, closest to noir even though there is a bit too much overt metaphysical symbolism for it to fully conform to the necessary tropes . It recounts a short period in the life of a Japanese pickpocket who describes his daily ‘work’ (identifying victims and the various ruses used to steal their stuff) and how he gets caught up with a gang who coerce him into crimes he would not have chosen to commit. He also, somewhat reluctantly, befriends a young boy who he one day notices shoplifting with his mother and prevents the pair from being caught by a store detective.

There are several reasons why I should not have liked THE THIEF but in an almost ornery way my brain decided to be transfixed by it. Despite me. I am sure the fact that it is a teeny tiny book amongst a landslide of doorstop-sized tomes didn’t hurt.

I know I sound like an uncaring, middle class, cow but I’m not really fond of books told from the career criminal’s point of view. In most cases I’m not sympathetic to them, regardless of the real or imagined traumas that led them to their lives of crime, and I’m rarely swayed or intrigued by their angst or their revelling in the misery they inflict. So a story told by a pickpocket should not, on past experience, have engaged me at all but it did. It may have something to do with the fact that the eponymous thief (named only once as Nishimura) doesn’t delve deeply into the morality of his actions (aside from a claim to only steal from rich people) and certainly doesn’t spend time justifying himself. He is what he is and rather dispassionately tells his story which I somehow found more acceptable than the books which give lengthy reasons for a person becoming a life-long criminal. They always seem to boil down to “it’s not my fault I turned out this way” at which point I usually mumble “cry me a river” under my breath (I warned you I’d sound like a cow).

There is also, at least on the surface, is not a lot going on here in that rather than a major story arc the book concerns itself with an almost random slice of Nishimura’s life which is another reason I ought not to have been engrossed in the book as that kind of thing often irks me. But with THE THIEF almost immediately I did want to know what troubles would befall the narrator (there was never even a glimmer that his life would bring something other than troubles). Somehow his detachment and reserve made me hang on for the few tiny morsels that would provide insight into the man, his personal history and his ultimate fate.

Some of THE THIEF borders on the surreal, the female characters are prostitutes or dead (downtrodden women are a feature of all the Japanese crime fiction I have read) and the ending is as ambiguous as it gets which are all more reasons why I would normally not enjoy a book. And yet I listened to the whole thing in a single sitting almost without noticing the time passing. There are some things that don’t really work (I don’t care how downtrodden she is I didn’t for a moment ‘buy’ the character of the boy’s mother who at a point I won’t detail for fear of spoiling utters the line “what good are kids anyway” which did cause my eyes to roll) but overall I am glad to have read the book and would recommend to those prepared for something a little different.

*I see now that a delay in this book’s UK publication date has ruled it out of contention for this year’s award but I’m still glad to have read it (and can now I say I’ve started reading titles eligible for next year’s award).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

THE THIEF has been reviewed at International Noir Fiction, Mrs Wordopolis Reads and The Crime Segments

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 3.5/5
Translators Satoko Izumo and Stephen Coates
Narrator Charlie Thurston
Publisher AudioGO [This edition 2012, original work 2009]
ASIN B007EJIBOC
Length 4 hours 1 minute
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series standalone
Source I bought it
Creative Commons Licence
This work by http://reactionstoreading.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

On being reminded why I keep this blog

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I started this blog primarily because I hoped it would force me to write reviews of the books I was reading which, I crossed my fingers, would help me remember them for longer than a week. Happily the blog has turned out to have had some unforeseen and delightful side effects (i.e. you, dear subscribers, commenters and occasional passers-by) and I’ve found that writing the reviews, chore though it has sometimes been, has indeed been a great help. It’s not only their content that jogs my ailing memory when I re-read them but it seems that the very fact of writing the review makes the details of each reviewed book stick in my head more than the details of an un-reviewed book.

I have what feel like concrete evidence of this (though scientists would scoff, at best it’s anecdotal). Since the beginning of March I’ve read 15 books, 12 of which I’ve written reviews of and 3 of which I meant to write reviews of but never quite made it. Tonight I looked at that list of 3 books and realised I didn’t have enough sensible memories of any of them to write much more than “I liked it”.

Sigh.

I suppose it does me good to be reminded that I have to work at having a better recall of the books I read (I’m making a new April resolution to write a review within 2 days of finishing each book), and at least it’s only three books that have fallen through the cracks of my faulty memory.

For the record I liked all three books (in my database the first two are rated 3.5 and the last one a 3) but I can’t tell you much more than one was a Norwegian police procedural about hate crimes (and I can recall thinking I would have something to say on that particular issue in my review as I have real problems with the very notion), the next a psychological suspense tale of a woman who had been a party girl (of the kind I dislike rather a lot) until she unwittingly invited a monster into her life (a fate I would not wish even on drunken party girls) and the last a fun cosy set in and around a White House almost littered with deceased persons.

Review: The Drowning by Camilla Lackberg

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THE DROWNING is the sixth book depicting life and death in Fjällbacka, Sweden’s answer to Cabot Cove or the villages of Midsomer. Its prologue features a description of a man’s death and the story proper then opens with police detective Patrik Hedström and his colleagues searching for Magnus Kjellner who has been missing for some months and whose wife visits the police station weekly to ask for updates. But no one, least of all Läckberg, seems terribly concerned about the man’s disappearance. There are, after all, pregnancies, nappies, parenting leave, pregnancies and other domesticity to discuss. At length.

We are also introduced to Christian Thydell, a local resident and debut author who has been receiving anonymous and threatening letters for some time. He has kept these a secret even from his wife but makes the mistake of mentioning them to his mentor and fellow author Erica Falck. She tells her husband, the aforementioned police detective, and their shared publisher with the result that every man and his dog is soon aware of Christian’s problems. Eventually links are made between Christian’s story and the missing man’s but it seems to take the Fjällbacka police a lot longer than it will take the average reader to work this all out.

These stories are intertwined with flashbacks to the life of a troubled young boy who was orphaned, fostered, bullied and almost responsible for the death of his sibling. Again, the connections seemed fairly obvious but this part of the book was in some ways the most successful for me as the characters in it at least felt like their creator was interested in what was happening to them. With the contemporary story I didn’t get much sense at all that the author really cared about the characters. At least that’s my interpretation of their collective insipidness.

I was going to try to be polite about the book because, on one level, it’s a perfectly competent cosy mystery. There’s oodles of domesticity, a straightforward whodunnit and the inevitable cliffhanger ending that gives the book something of a soap-opera feel. My problem is, I suppose, that the books are marketed as psychological thrillers or suspense novels and this one at least is nothing of the kind. Partly this is because the day-to-day lives of the series’ continuing characters occupy more time than the actual mystery despite the fact that nothing terribly new is happening to any of them. All the ones who are pregnant have been pregnant before and, honestly, there is a limit to how many discussions about how to fit parenting leave into their lives I am interested in (for the record that limit was probably reached about half-way through the previous book in this series). The endless consumption of buns with or without coffee, the repetition of jibes about Erica eating for two (she is pregnant with twins which I don’t count as a spoiler as it is revealed very early on) and being unable to stand up on her own whenever she sits down grew tiresome.

Perhaps if the mystery story had been stronger I’d have felt differently about this book but I thought the plot fairly obvious and it didn’t seem to tackle anything new either. In most of her previous books the mysteries have delved into an interesting area, such as THE HIDDEN CHILD‘s exploration of nazism in Sweden in both historical and contemporary times. Here a cast of insipid characters strolled through a story that expressed mild rebuke at poor parenting – a topic Lackberg has address in earlier novels (with better results). The psychological twist in the resolution was both predictable and unconvincing.

To me THE DROWNING feels like a book churned out to formula and it verged on treating its readers like idiots. At one point early on for example Patrik, who has been described as turning Magnus Kjellner’s life inside out in the period before the book opens, has a conversation with the man’s wife asking who his friends were. Surely this would have come up somwhere in the three months of exhaustive searching for the man? Especially as he only had three?

In its favour the book did pick up towards the end with the last third having a decent pacing and I did, as always, enjoy the narration of the audio version by Eamon Riley (in fact I’m not sure I’d have bothered finishing the book if I’d been reading it in print). Having enjoyed this author’s previous books I will give the next one a go on the grounds this could be an aberration. But the quality will have to be substantially improved if I’m not to consign this series to the “once good, now formulaic” list that so many other long-running authors have been added to.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I have reviewed the earlier novels in this series The Ice Princess, The Preacher, The Stonecutter, The Gallows Bird and The Hidden Child

In the interests of fairness there are far more glowing reviews of this book at Bookish Magpie, TheBronteSister,

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 2.5/5
Translator Tiina Nunnally
Narrator Eamonn Riley
Publisher Harper Collins Audio [2012]
ASIN B007HN3ZQO
Length 15 hours 28 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series #6 in the Erica Falck/Patrik Hedström series
Source I bought it
Creative Commons Licence
This work by http://reactionstoreading.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Apps that enhance my reading

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I have owned my iPad for nearly a year now and though I still won’t claim it’s a necessary item for my survival I am surprised at how indispensable it has become for both work and fun. I have already talked about which apps for reading books I like (and which ones I don’t like) so today I will discuss apps that are an adjunct to my reading life. If you have any apps that you use (on any device or even the good ol’ interwebs) feel free to share in the comments.

To keep track of all my books I use a desktop application called Book Collector (from Collectorz) and to be honest I don’t need the iPad app (CLZBooksHD) as well. But boy has it come in handy. You can’t use it as a standalone (i.e. you have to have the desktop version on a PC or Mac) but when you synchronise the mobile version with the desktop version you can carry around a read-only copy of your database which, at least in my case, prevents the buying of duplicate books and ensures I don’t buy books that aren’t on my wishlist (well almost never anyway). Given my TBR pile is made up of physical books, eBooks on two devices and audio books I find the flow view that you can see in the screen shot below to be the perfect guide to help me choose which book to read next as it’s like looking at a single virtual shelf.

Probably my favourite application of any kind that I use for far more than my reading is Evernote. It is basically a cloud-based clipboard that you can save anything to – web pages, documents, links, pictures, recipies, notes you type yourself, voice memos…the list goes on. You can also access your evernote account from anywhere (web, desktop, mobile device) and many services (such as RSS readers, most web browsers) allow you to send things of interest to your evernote account with one click. One of my virtual notebooks is called Book Wishlist and I send all the blog posts, newspaper articles and reviews I see that pique my curiosity to this notebook. Then when I have time I browse through the clippings and decide which books I’m really interested in (at which point they get added to my Collectorz wishlist). I often find I’ve sent 2 or 3 different clippings about the same book to Evernote which is a pretty good sign that the book is going to be right up my street. Although I can access the app anywhere, the iPad version is my favourite way to browse and sort through my clippings.

I’ve tried at least a dozen RSS readers on my iPad but have lately settled on Mr Reader as the one for me. While they all allow you to synchronise with a Google Reader account Mr Reader is the only one I found that allows you to add or change feeds on the iPad rather than waiting until you’re back at your desktop. It also has a pretty nice looking interface which you can see from screen shot below (the dark theme is my choice, there are several options). Of course an RSS reader is vital to my book reading life as I have loads of subscriptions to book blogs and I find that since I’ve had the iPad I tend to visit more blogs as I can do it on the bus or (don’t tell my boss) during the occasional boring work meeting. I can send items of interest directly from Mr Reader to Evernote.

These are the three non-reading apps that I think are essential to my reading life. I should note that Collectorz for iPad is $10 (on top of what you pay for the desktop application which is between $29-49 depending on which version you spring for) and Mr Reader is $5 but for me they have been worth the money. The main features of Evernote are available for free (a premium account is available if you need a huge amount of data storage or feel like supporting the app developers).

Before I finish there are some honourable mentions to hand out. Having mobile access to google translate, XE ( currency converter) and google maps makes reading books set in exotic locales so much easier than it used to be. Funnily enough I probably use the currency one most of all because when someone mentions a sum in Swedish kroner I simply have no reference point for whether it’s a lot or a little and it often seems important to know. XE is free and you can save 10 most-used currencies in a list so it barely takes more than a few nanoseconds for me to find out how much an amount is in Aussie dollars.

What about you? got any favourite apps that help you to read? Doesn’t have to be for an iPad…I’m sure there are good web apps I’m missing out on.

Review: A DARKER DOMAIN by Val McDermid

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If the world could be ordered to my specific tastes all books would be available in audio format and all of those would be read by people with Scottish accents, even the ones set in outback Australia. I blame my mother’s crush on Sean Connery (and the fact a portion of my developmental years was spent in darkened theatres watching his movies instead of going to kindergarten) for the fact I find it the very best way to hear English spoken. I was pre-disposed then to liking A DARKER DOMAIN, one of Val McDermid’s standalone novels, given it is narrated by Scottish actress Eilidh Fraser. Happily the story is a damned fine one too which made my listening experience complete.

Being something of a latecomer to the Val McDermid appreciation society I was, once again, impressed with the superior storytelling skill on display in this big novel that a lesser author probably couldn’t pull off. It opens in the contemporary setting of the Fife Constabulary cold case unit. DI Karen Pirie is asked to track down Mick Prentiss who has been missing for more than twenty years, since the brutal miner’s strikes of the 1980′s when he was thought to have gone to work as a scab in Nottingham. But now that his daughter is desperate for a bone marrow donor for her very ill son she cannot find a trace of her father and turns to the police for help.

At the same time Pirie is given a much higher profile missing persons case to re-open. The local laird is Broderick Grant and twenty years earlier his only daughter and her baby son were kidnapped and held for ransom. However the exchange went horribly wrong which resulted in the daughter’s death and the grandson’s permanent disappearance. Now  a journalist has found some evidence that provides a concrete link to the old case and Grant wonders if he can find out what happened to his grandson once and for all.

These historical stories unfold concurrently throughout the novel, often hinting at how they will connect but I’m sure (at least I hope) I’m not the only reader who made several errors of guesswork before stumbling across the actual connections. McDermid really is a master of this kind of twist-filled plot because it is, at least until just before the end, continually surprising while maintaining a credibility that is often lacking from this kind of book.

But underneath the rollicking plot there is a real depth, particularly as McDermid describes life for the striking workers and their families. This is a subject I’m not terribly familiar with (in my defence I was 16 at the time and lived half a world away) but the details of day-to-day life included here had a very authentic feel to me. The real poverty being experienced by the striking workers, their disappointment in the strike’s leaders, the good and bad sides to the power of the local community are all deftly depicted and really made me feel like I have some small sense of this turbulent period. I’d recommend the book for this if nothing else.

The characters in the book are also enjoyable to meet, even the unpleasant ones like Broderick Grant who uses his money and influence in the way that such people often do. There are two strong female characters though in Karen Pirie and the journalist involved in the Grant case, Bel Richmond. Pirie is particularly engaging as she is constantly skating on thin ice with her superiors but because she has a history of good results she gets away with most of her unorthodox behaviour. And she does have a good offsider in DS Phil Parhatka who is, sometimes, able to reign in her wilder ideas.

McDermid somehow manages to avoid the sickly sentimentality that could easily overwhelm a book that tackles the kind of emotional storylines and themes as this one does. The undercurrent of dark humour probably helps, as does its almost entire lack of judgement about the people involved in the story and the actions they take. The more I read the more I realise just how rare a thing this is and the more I am grateful for those books which achieve it.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

A DARKER DOMAIN has been reviewed at Aust Crime Fiction, Petrona, Reviewing the Evidence

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 4/5
Narrator Eilidh Fraser
Publisher Whole Story Audio Books [2009]
ASIN B0036KXP94
Length 11 hours 54 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series standalone
Source I bought it
Creative Commons Licence
This work by http://reactionstoreading.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Review: OR THE BULL KILLS YOU by Jason Webster

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In Valencia, Spain it is the beginning of the Spring Fiesta and Chief Inspector Max Cámara is unhappy. At the last minute he has been forced to stand in for his boss as the honorary master of ceremonies for the day’s bullfight. Cámara despises bullfighting. But he performs the duty with competence if not enjoyment and is relaxing in a nearby bar afterwards when word reaches him that Jorge Blanco, the matador who had so masterfully beaten the bull in the day’s fight, has been found dead. In charge of the investigation Cámara struggles with his own personal demons, office and city politics and a plethora of potential suspects in his quest to solve the case.

Blanco was famous and much-loved, almost single-handedly responsible for reviving the city’s interest in bullfighting. Is that why he was killed? There are local elections due in which one party has made the banning of bullfighting its top priority which could have prompted someone to want Blanco out of the way. But the fighter’s personal life is also ripe ground for suspects as there are rumours about his sexuality which seem at odds with his engagement to a much-loved entertainer.

Surprisingly, to me, the thing I enjoyed most about this book was its richly depicted setting which included more information about bullfighting than I could ever have anticipated being intrigued by. Which is why it is sometimes good to read things you think you might not like. Webster, who is not a native Spaniard but has lived there for twenty years and has published several highly acclaimed travel books about the country, really does bring the city alive for the reader with quite lyrical descriptions of the city, the festival, the food and the bullfighting. Early on Cámara meets a female journalist who is so much an acknowledged expert about the sport that she was the only reporter who had ever interviewed Jorge Blanco. She and Cámara debate the merits, or lack thereof, of the sport and she fills him in on any history and symbolism that might be relevant to his investigation and it is these exchanges that allow readers to absorb information about a subject most of them probably know little about. I really liked the way this was done, especially they way it enabled Webster to present both sides of the debate without being judgemental.

The rest of the book was not quite as successful for me. I was not as taken by the character of Max Cámara as other reviewers seem to have been which of course is a highly personal thing. Perhaps I have had my fill of alcoholic detectives who argue with their superiors and are, in the end, fairly self-absorbed (in this instance Cámara’s inner life revolves around his worries over his fertility which I literally could not have cared less about). Ultimately I didn’t find him quite engaging enough to care that much whether he survived the ever-looming threat of dismissal but I can’t say he was a badly drawn character, merely one that did not appeal very much to me. I found the female characters who included Blanco’s fiancée Carmen, the journalist and Cámara’s girlfriend a little flat and forgettable though I can’t really put my finger on a reason for this.

As a mystery the novel mostly worked although the ending was a bit too contrived for my liking but that is a fairly common experience for me. I think writing believable but engaging endings must be very very hard. However the investigation itself was suspenseful and kept me guessing in just the right way.

OR THE BULL KILLS YOU provided a real sense of being transported to the streets of Valencia, something I suspect was the result of the mixture of Webster’s writing and an excellent narration of the audio book by Mark Meadows whose Spanish pronunciation sounded wonderful in my ears. I think most people would like the book and some will love it, perhaps especially those who have not read quite as much crime fiction as I seem to have done (the people who all recommended it to me are occasional readers of the genre rather than die hard fans).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

OR THE BULL KILLS YOU has been reviewed at, Euro Crime, It’s A Crime and The View From the Blue House

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 3/5
Narrator Mark Meadows
Publisher AudioGo [2011]
ASIN B005IHIACK
Length 11 hours 34 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series #1 in a new series?
Source I bought it
Creative Commons Licence
This work by http://reactionstoreading.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Review: A DARK REDEMPTION by Stav Sherez

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As my shelves (and digital devices) are quite literally groaning under the weight of police procedural novels set in England I’m not really in the market for another series to follow. But given I still have strong images in my head from the last book I read by Sherez (set in Greece) I couldn’t resist this first instalment of a promised new series even though it’s in a crowded space. It turns out to have been a good decision..

A DARK REDEMPTION opens with three young men taking a trip to Uganda following their university graduation and before they have to knuckle down to jobs and real life. On their travels they make a seemingly random choice which leads them into the clutches of a rebel army and a grim stretch in custody though at this point we don’t learn a lot of the details of what went on. The main part of the story then starts, taking place a dozen or so years later. Jack Carrigan, one of the three men who had travelled to Africa, is a Detective Inspector in London and he is put in charge of the investigation into the brutal murder of a young African student named Grace Okello. But Jack has made enemies on the force and his boss forces Geneva Miller, a woman who has had her own brushes with bureaucracy, to be the DS on the investigation. She is to assist Jack and report back to his superiors about his behaviour and methods. At the start of the investigation the two are wary of each other and also have different ideas about the motivations for the murder – with Jack thinking her violent boyfriend responsible and Geneva wondering if it is somehow linked to Grace’s research into the armed conflict in her native country. But as the case unfolds the two detectives develop a respect for each other and of course narrow down the focus of their investigation.

I was a little wary of the themes this book looked set to tackle given that I started it as the Kony 2012 social media frenzy was in full swing. Happily my fears were unfounded as Sherez deals with the African elements of the story (including the aforementioned Kony) sensitively and intelligently; managing to portray nuances of the situation in both Uganda and amongst the displaced African community living in England that you won’t find in most mainstream media. Some of the segments of the book are violent but it never feels at all gratuitous and the story would not feel authentic if there were not some level of violence given what we know about the recent real-world history that provides the story’s backdrop. Sherez uses several methods for imparting the relevant information about Ugandan history and politics and in combination these are quite the lesson in how authors of this type of novel can do such things without making the reader feel as if they are in a lecture theatre.

I agree with Sarah at Crimepieces who wrote that Carrigan’s maverick status was depicted in an understated way as that is exactly how I felt. Too many crime books these days appear to be working from a list of quirks and anti-authority behaviours to give their protagonists and there is a tendency to go overboard or have no real reason for the traits displayed. Jack is not at the extreme end of the scale and any foibles he does have make sense within the context that Sherez provides. There are also quite a few hints of secrets still to be explored in both his and Miller’s lives in what I hope will be some future instalments of the series as I enjoyed both characters and would happily read more of their exploits.

On one level I suppose this book is ‘just’ police procedural novel but it is a superior example of the genre. Both thoughtful and thought-provoking A DARK REDEMPTION manages to explore a complex issue without either sensationalising them or treating readers like morons and for that alone I applaud it. The fact that it also provides a suspense-filled mystery and a decent resolution is icing on this excellent cake. To undoubtedly stretch the dessert metaphor a little too far the narration by English actor David Thorpe is the delicious chocolate sprinkles on the icing :)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Sidenote: I know that authors normally have little influence over their book covers so it’s unfair to include this in the review proper (and I have not taken the matter into account) but this cover couldn’t be less relevant to the book if it tried. The near ubiquitous shadowy silhouettes that are much beloved of crime fiction marketing/publishing types these days tell us nothing to make us pick up the book or to mark it out as unique and, now that I’ve read it, don’t even hint at anything going on within the story. If a cover is going to be this irrelevant why bother?

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

A DARKER REDEMPTION has been reviewed at Crimepieces and It’s A Crime.

I reviewed an earlier, unrelated book by Sherez set in Greece called THE BLACK MONASTERY in the early days of this blog.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 4/5
Narrator David Thorpe
Publisher Audible Ltd [2012]
ASIN B007D56PK4 (downloaded from audible.com)
Length 11 hours 11 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series #1 in the Carrigan and Miller series
Source I bought it
Creative Commons Licence
This work by http://reactionstoreading.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

International Dagger 2012 – Reading Progress and Speculation #1

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As I am rarely in step with the thinking of awards judging panels I’m really not that interested in the myriad of awards handed out in the crime fiction field these days. One exception is the UK Crime Writers Association’s International Dagger Award for books translated into English which I follow because it prompts me to read beyond the American and English stuff that can overwhelm the market. In the past I’ve normally only managed to read the shortlisted novels but this year I’ve kept track of eligible titles via Karen from the excellent Euro Crime tagging eligible books on Good Reads and have at least managed to make a head start (thanks Karen).

So far I’ve finished 15 books (with a 16th forever being on the DNF pile):

I’ve indicated which of these I would put on my shortlist. As I haven’t read even a quarter of the books that are eligible I am likely way off the mark but If I were handing out the award today it would go to Karin Fossum’s THE CALLER but I think all of the books I have selected are excellent

I own these books and plan to read them all before the shortlist is announced. I wonder if any will replace the ones I have picked above.

  • Gazan, Sissel-Jo; The Dinosaur Feather
  • Kaaberbol, Lene; Friis, Agnete, The Boy In The Suitcase
  • Kallentoft, Mons; Midwinter Sacrifice
  • Läckberg, Camilla; The Drowning
  • Mallo, Ernesto; Sweet Money
  • Nakamura, Fuminori; The Thief
  • Nykänen, Harri, Nights of Awe
  • Ohlsson, Kristina; Unwanted
  • Sacheri, Eduardo, The Secret In Their Eyes (well I’m on the library queue for this one but not sure I will get it in time)
  • Sigurdardottir, Yrsa; The Day Is Dark

However there are 53 more titles eligible for nomination. Are there any others you think I MUST read in the time remaining (the shortlist is due to be announced in the last week of May)? Have you got your own prediction for what will make the shortlist?