Monthly Archives: May 2012

Discussing dark crime

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This week Jennifer Byrne, host of Australia’s monthly TV book club, hosted a half-hour discussion about the state of modern crime fiction. Joining her were Jo Nesbo, Malla Nunn, Leigh Redhead and Michael Robotham and they touched on a wide range of topics including what makes a good detective character, the ‘Scandi’ trend, the crossover between TV and novel writing and how much darkness is too dark.

I didn’t agree with everything said but the discussion is a good one as it prompted some possible future blog posts to start bubbling away in my brain and I would recommend it to fans of the genre.

For Aussies the show is available for 2 weeks via iVIew but I believe people the world over can watch from the First Tuesday Book Club’s website (the official name of the show is Jennifer Byrne Presents Dark Places). As far as I can tell the episode should be available from there forever (or until the ABC pulls the website down).

International Dagger 2012 – Reading Progress and Speculation #2

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I first wrote about my progress towards reading eligible titles for this year’s International Dagger Award for crime fiction translated into English a few weeks ago and had planned for this follow up post to to cover the mass of extra books I had read before the announcement of the official shortlist on Friday night (UK time).

Alas I only managed a further 3 books, bringing my total to a rather paltry 18 of the eligible 76 books (as listed at Euro Crime)

I’ve indicated which six of these would make my personal shortlist and there have been no changes since my first post. My personal favourite of those is Karin Fossum’s THE CALLER but any of them would be a worthy winner.

Now I wait to see if any of these make the official shortlist and get my credit card ready so I can order the shortlisted books I haven’t read in time for the winner’s announcement in a few weeks. Hopefully I have at least made something of a start and one or two of my selections make it to the judges’ shortlist.

Other people are speculating about their choices over at Euro Crime.

Keep movin’, movin’, movin’*

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I had not intended to bore you all with Reactions to Reading’s behind the scenes carry-on but a couple of you have noticed the paucity of posts lately and have written to enquire about my health and wellbeing. Apart from making me feel all warm and fuzzy that complete strangers have noticed my absence let alone cared about it, their enquiries did make me realise how unsettling unexplained absences can be.

Rest assured I am hunky dory but have bought a new house and will be moving shortly (in fact 4 weeks today I will lay my weary head in my new abode for the first time). In between working full time and family commitments I’m doing all that stuff that goes along with moving…giving away things that won’t fit into the new place, packing, organising renovations at my new house, arranging all the services to be disconnected and, of course, wondering just how I managed to acquire quite so many books. At the moment there’s not much spare time for reading let alone blogging about reading. But I hope to be back to full-posting strength by mid-late June and in the interim do hope to post the occasional review or book-related thought.

Today I’ve got a link for the crime fiction fans amongst you. The First Tuesday Book Club is a monthly TV book club in Australia and each week the panel discusses a new book and a classic. This month they chose Thomas Harris’ SILENCE OF THE LAMBS as the ‘classic’ and the discussion is a really robust one. Aside from Shane Maloney (an Australian crime writer) the panel are not aficionados of the genre but all seemed to enjoy it. The discussion reminded me how good the book was and how utterly awful most of the thousands of copycat books that have come since really are.

*a line from the Rawhide TV Show theme song

Review: THE FALLEN by Jassy Mackenzie

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This is the first book I have read featuring Jade De Jong, a South African private detective, though it is the third in which she appears. As it opens Jade is in the resort area of St Lucia for a diving holiday with her boyfriend, a policeman. She booked the trip to overcome her fear of diving and to shore up the somewhat rocky relationship with David Patel. But even though she receives private lessons from the instructor she is unable to overcome her fear of drowning and fully embrace the sport and the holiday turns truly rotten when David drops a bombshell about their relationship. Before the two can discuss their future the diving instructor is found stabbed to death and David (with Jade in tow) steps in to help the locals with the investigation.

I found the plot of THE FALLEN uneven, slow to get going really as several threads of unequal interest were set up, including a somewhat confusing tale about Jade trying to find the grave of her mother who died when Jade was a baby. For me the pacing was thrown off by the terribly obvious and drawn out clue-hunting, and then at one point I thought the book had finished and was rather astonished to find there were still 6 and a half chapters (a couple of hours) of the audio book left . The thread that deals with what happens after the diving instructor’s body is found – and the truly horrible plan Jade uncovers – was for me the best part of the book; responsible for a genuine OMG moment when it became clear what was going on.

I should be fair and say that some of my problems with the book are probably not the author’s fault. The fact is I didn’t really take to Jade De Jong. This doesn’t mean she is a poorly drawn character (objectively I can see she is not and is indeed quite realistic) but I couldn’t summon up much interest in whether or not she got out of her various tight spots and near-death experiences. Just as you sometimes meet someone in real life and know you’re never going to be anything other than acquaintances without really knowing why, I just didn’t particularly like the character from the outset. As the book went on I found reasons not to like her, such as her somewhat hypocritical morality which seemed to boil down to the notion that it’s OK to do bad things (such as kill people) as long as the victims are not innocent (as deemed by whoever is doing the killing), but my not liking her preceded me discovering this about her.

I’m not entirely sure this book knew what it wanted to be. At times it read like an old-fashioned whodunnit, though with De Jong making a bit of a fist of the kind of denouement that Holmes or Poirot could perform with aplomb. I cannot possibly, for example, be the only reader to have been internally screaming “there are more than passengers on an airplane you dolt” as Jade very slowly worked this out as if for an audience of dim-witted, third graders. At other times the book read like a modern thriller with loads of action and heroine-in-peril scenarios. Personally I think this aspect of the book worked better, especially as it allowed the author to depict several aspects of modern South African life which was a real strength of the novel.

If I could separate my enjoyment of the book from my disinterest in its protagonist I would undoubtedly rate it higher as overall it did maintain my interest, especially with the excellent narration of the audio version from Justine Eyre. But in the end this has to be about my reaction to the book and frankly I can’t imagine myself picking up another book featuring this character (though I would give the author another go if she wrote something with a different character in it or at least taking the lead role).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

THE FALLEN has been reviewed (far more positively so don’t just take my word on the matter) at Jen’s Book Thoughts and Kittling: Books

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 2.5/5
Narrator Justine Eyre
Publisher AudioGO [2012]
ASIN B007OX6MTE
Length 10 hours 16 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series #3 in Jade De Jong 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: THE BOY IN THE SUITCASE by Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis

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There’s absolutely no ambiguity about the title of this book: there is a boy and he is indeed in a suitcase, discovered there by Danish nurse Nina Borg after a frantic phone call from an old friend demanding that she pick the suitcase up from a  local railway station. For reasons that I still don’t fully comprehend when she discovers the perfectly healthy 3-year old boy in said suitcase Nina goes into hiding with him rather than contacting the police, her husband or anyone who might be any use at all in such circumstances. One thread of the book follows her as she tries to work out who the boy is (he doesn’t speak the same languages as Nina) and what she should do with him.

Three other threads follow three other characters: Jan, a wealthy Dane whose travel delays result in him missing out on a very important appointment; Sigita, a single mother in Lithuania who wakes up in hospital with a broken arm and everyone believing her a drunk and Jucas, a criminal type working on a sure fire way to earn the money he needs for his dream life in Poland with his wife. The stories do all connect though not in an entirely predictable way.

I found this book uneven in quality: some of it was very good and some downright clunky. With the exception of Sigita the characters don’t seem properly fleshed out or, in the case of Nina, not quite credible. I could deal with her not being terribly sympathetic but did roll my eyes a bit at her sometimes ludicrous and thoroughly juvenile behaviour. At the end of the novel (in one of the clunkier passages of writing) this behaviour is explained if not justified but even so it still didn’t ring true (for example if she were truly on a mission to save the world then I don’t see how she could have let the young prostitute walk away as easily as she did at a certain point in the novel). So for me Nina’s ‘drive’ felt more like a plot device than a real character trait and I think there was probably a way to tell this story without stretching the credulity of readers to the extent that mine was. As a counter balance though Sigita is a terrifically authentic character, displaying a mixture of guilt, terror, indecision and tenacity that I found truly compelling and believable for her circumstances.

The story was more even and overall was good, though the very short chapters chopping from one perspective to another repeatedly did take some getting used to. However it maintained a good pace and did manage to keep a few surprises up its sleeve until near the end. I was going to write that the book didn’t have a particularly strong sense of place but then I realised that while it might not have screamed Denmark from every page it is a very European book in the way that it mixes people from several countries, all of them multilingual and crossing borders with ease. None of that would be possible on the giant island I live on.

In the end I liked but did not love this book though I think I am in the minority (again) as most reviews seem to have been much more positive. I suppose the thing that struck me most was that some of the themes it raises are dismissed quickly in favour of providing another plot twist whereas I’d have liked to see some of those themes and ideas explored in more depth and would have been happy to sacrifice a plot twist or two for the cause.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

THE BOY IN THE SUITCASE has been reviewed at Barbara Fister’s Place, DJ’s Krimiblog, Petrona, Reviewing the Evidence, The Crime Segments

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 3/5
Translator Lene Kaaberbol
Publisher Random House [2011]
ISBN 9781569479827
Length 313 pages
Format eBook (for Kindle)
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: FUN HOUSE by Chris Grabenstein

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Given that FUN HOUSE is the latest release in a series I have come to love and pokes pokes fun at a modern phenomenon I despise, reality TV, I was probably destined to like the book. However I have been let down by destiny once or twice before so it wasn’t a sure thing but happily the book met all my expectations. And then some.

It is the seventh book to feature former military policeman John Ceepak and his partner Danny Boyle who try to keep the fictional resort town of Sea Haven, New Jersey safe from the rather alarming number of criminals and murderers who frequent the place. It is summer again and the town has been been home to a new reality show which seems to be a hellish combination of all the reality shows ever to have aired, involving contestants who will do anything debasing for a few more minutes of ‘fame’, challenges designed to embarrass or titillate and voyeurism of the most puerile kind. On his night off Ceepak encounters several of the show’s contestants and is forced to arrest one of them. Footage of this event becomes an overnight You Tube sensation which results in Ceepak and Boyle being assigned to the show’s full time security detail, a ridiculous state of affairs that Ceepak only agrees to because it might lead to the apprehension of a drug dealer that has eluded the Sea Haven police for some time. As you might expect things don’t quite go according to plan and Ceepak and Danny are soon once again on the hunt for a killer.

One of the standout features of this book (and its predecessors) is the two lead characters and their evolving relationship. They are almost unique for crime fighting blokes in that they are both basically well adjusted human beings, though John Ceepak does carry some deep scars from his time in Iraq and Danny might end up with his own nightmares if his body count keeps increasing. The fact that they are engaging people despite not being alcoholics, loners, depressives, mavericks or any of the other things that the men of crime fiction often are does make a nice change (and not for the first time makes me wonder if the other kind of character hasn’t been a little over done). I enjoy seeing a ‘normal’ male relationship being depicted and realised with this novel that the quoting of Springsteen lyrics at critical plot points has become a favourite feature for me and not only because I’m a fan. It serves the same purpose as quoting poetry does in more literary novels and is, I think, a particularly good observation about the way men (in this instance) can struggle to communicate their feelings. When Danny and Ceepak don’t know what to say to each other about the scary or emotional situations they find themselves in they can at least offer comfort to each other via the words of their favourite songwriter. Surely it beats the oft-depicted alcoholic binges as a way to deal with life’s difficult moments.

Although it involves more than one gruesome death the plot of this novel is probably the lightest and funniest of the series though the deaths themselves are never treated too flippantly (at least not by Ceepak or Danny though some of the town’s political figures are a bit more cavalier). But the reality TV show setting offers Grabenstein many opportunities for poking fun at popular culture and he seems to relish the task. Even the normally taciturn Ceepak gets in on the act of ribbing the moronic behaviour of the contestants, the producers and the public who lap it all up. But while the book has lots of light moments Grabenstein does, as always, introduce some serious notes including the appalling fact that most policemen need to have second jobs in order to make ends meet financially (particularly poignant when juxtaposed with the ludicrous amounts of cash that ‘stars’ of reality TV might expect to make, especially if they are stupid, naked or a combination of the two). I like the way Grabenstein gently infuses his books with social commentary rather than ramming a point of view down reader’s throats.

Grabenstein really has carved out a sub genre all of his own with this series or at least I can’t come up with anything to compare the books to. They’re generally light but not cosy (too much ‘on stage’ blood and violence and a lack of predictability), comedic but not really capers and blend the procedural with the satirical in unique way. As always I listened to this instalment narrated wonderfully by Jeff Woodman and my only disappointment is that I greedily gobbled the whole thing up in one day and now have a two-year wait for the next instalment of this series.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Thanks as always to Belle for introducing me to this series (not only for this introduction but for the reminder that I don’t always know what I like because I never would have chosen the first book for myself).

I have reviewed all but one of the earlier books in this series TILT A WHIRL, MAD MOUSE, WHACK A MOLE, HELL HOLE and ROLLING THUNDER (I have also read the fifth book MIND SCRAMBLER but somehow missed reviewing it – perhaps I’ll do a re-read when I’m jonesing for a Ceepak and Boyle fix while I wait for the next book).

Oh and if you’re a fan of Ceepak and Boyle see if you can track down a copy of the short story RING TOSS which appeared in the June 2010 issue of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and was at least in November last year available from Amazon as a kindle single (I couldn’t find it today though).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 4/5
Narrator Jeff Woodman
Publisher Audible Inc [2012]
ASIN B007SP2OD6
Length 7 hours 44 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series #7 in the Ceepak and Boyle 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: DEFENDING JACOB by William Landay

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DEFENDING JACOB is narrated by Andy Barber, a 51 year old assistant District Attorney in Newton, Connecticut. When a teenage boy and classmate of Barber’s son Jacob is murdered on his way to school one morning Barber leaps into the investigation. After a slow start, largely due to a lack of cooperation from the high school students who were friends and classmates of the victim, seems to point in the direction of a local man who has been accused of indecent assault. But while Barber pursues that line of investigation other players in the Newton law enforcement community are chasing a different suspect: Barber’s own son. When they believe they have enough evidence they confront Barber and issue an arrest warrant for Jacob. What follows is an accounting of Jacob’s trial and the impact it and the surrounding media and social scrutiny all have on the Barber family.

From a storytelling point of view I found the book uneven. The title tells us that Jacob is going to need defending so I was waiting for that point from the very first sentence and it seemed to take a heck of a long time to get there. Once we got to what I thought of as the starting point the book did pick up pace and drew readers into the familiar but nevertheless compelling consideration of whether or not Jacob was innocent but would be locked up or was guilty but would be set free. The depiction of the teenage social scene was a particularly successful aspect of the book. However I could have done without the major plot line revolving around the notion of an inherited propensity towards violence. It is a theme that has been explored many times over and while that in itself is not a reason to avoid it forever more I didn’t think it added anything to this story which dealt with the issue in a fairly superficial and uninteresting way. It felt like it had been added for shock value as no one, least of all the characters who were meant to, seemed to have any real convictions about ‘the murder gene’ notion one way or the other.

As far as individual characters go the book is a miss for me. It’s not so much that none of the three family members is particularly likeable or sympathetic (though they’re not) but that I didn’t find them to be very strongly drawn on any scale which made them insipid. Worse though is that they did not seem very credible, especially the mother. Her husband describes Laurie as a warm, outgoing person with many friends and a strong connection to her community and her own family. Yet she totally withdraws from her parents immediately and every single one of her so-called friends abandons her (again with immediate effect). Even I, anti-social introvert that I am, could drum up one or two good friends who would stand by me in a crisis so I found it a stretch to swallow that she would not have had one person who stood by her in the horrific circumstances. Nor did I believe she would withdraw so immediately from her own family. The depiction of Andy’s development of highly disparaging views on the legal system he had worked his whole life in also failed my ‘ring of truth’ test. For me both of these things would have felt more realistic if they’d been depicted as happening more gradually than both parties having woken up the day after Jacob’s arrest with an entirely new set of beliefs and behaviours from what they’d had the day before. As a collective character though the Barber family and its implosion is the best aspect of the book for me.

I didn’t hate this book but nor did I love it and on balance there were more niggly bits than there ought to have been. Even the editing seemed to have missed some continuity issues such as the fact that Barber tells us the man who prosecuted Jacob’s case went into private practice following the trial yet he appears to be questioning Andy in a subsequent grand jury investigation (transcripts of which pepper the entire book). Personally I wouldn’t recommend this book but having looked around at reviews it’s clear I am in the minority so, as always, you should make up your own minds. If you are an audiobook devotee you could do far worse than listening to Eric Meyers narrate it as I thought he did an excellent job.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

DEFENDING JACOB has been reviewed (generally in far more positive terms than I have done) at Bookgeeks, I’m Booking It and Raging Bibliomania

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 2.5/5
Narrator Eric Meyers
Publisher Whole Story Audiobooks [2012]
ASIN B007RYX9KU
Length 14 hours 44 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.

Books of the Month – April 2012

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After a couple of months of fairly ordinary reading I seemed to hit my stride again in April, in quality at least if not quantity. As I gushed about on the weekend my book of the month is Australian author Virginia Duigan’s THE PRECIPICE. It’s a fantastic tale about an elderly woman who is almost as unlike the proverbial little old lady as it is possible for anyone to be. I fell in love with her in the same gushing way that my 14-year old self fell for Fitzwilliam Darcy (I was a 14 year old girl, it’s in the rule book). This is my second 5-star read for the year and I am recommending it to all.

II finished another 10 books for the month including all of these that I would recommend

The Australian Women Writers Challenge 2012

I’m now up to 7 terrific books by Australian women and I listed them all in a recent post. I’m so impressed with the quality and variety of books I’ve read for this challenge, and am amazed at the variety all the participants have been reading (677 at the time of posting). Australian women writers rock!

Other, non-review related posts this month

I posted about this year’s International Dagger Award for crime fiction translated into English. The shortlist will be announced at the end of May but I have speculated already about its makeup.

I also discussed the iPad and web apps that enhance my reading life. On reflection I suspect this makes me look just a wee bit obsessed. Oh well.

I introduced a new feature here at the blog called book versus adaptation (hopefully the title is self explanatory). I’m aiming to write one of these a month (though I’m not going to kill myself over it) as a justification for having gone a little bit mad buying DVDs and downloaded movies lately. I started out with FIELD OF BLOOD, a book written by Scottish author Denise Mina who was also credited as helping with the TV movie made of the book last year.

Next month?

I’m still trying to read a few more titles eligible for the above-mentioned International Dagger award and I have to read William Landay’s DEFENDING JACOB for book club. Plus I have new books by 3 great Aussie women writers that I want to get to. And tonight I have downloaded an audio book I’ve been looking forward to for months – FUN HOUSE is the new John Ceepak novel written by Chris Grabenstein and narrated by Jeff Woodman. That friends is my definition of happiness.

What about you…was April a good reading month? Did you have a favourite book? Or did you acquire anything you’re itching to read? Any issue you need to get off your chest?

If you want to see other people’s crime fiction picks of the month head over to Mysteries in Paradise for the Pick of the Month meme