Monthly Archives: July 2012

International Dagger 2013 – Reading Progress and Speculation – #1

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As my virtual friends at Petrona and The Game’s Afoot have already started discussing titles eligible for next year’s International Dagger award for crime fiction translated into English (and published in the UK) I thought I’d better catch up (at least in terms of number of posts on the topic if not number of books read). It’s early days yet but already Euro Crime lists a potential 56 titles (though only per author is eligible and the publication of some titles will inevitably be delayed so the list is a work in progress). So far I have read a rather paltry 5:

  • DISGRACE, Jussi Adler-Olsson, tr Kyle Semmel (Danish)
  • LAST WILL, Liza Marklund, tr Neil Smith (Swedish)
  • MISTERIOSO (a.k.a. THE BLINDED MAN), Arne Dahl, tr Tiina Nunnally (Swedish)
  • THE BLACK PATH, Asa Larsson, tr Marlaine Delargy (Swedish)
  • THE THIEF, Fuminor Nakamura, tr Stephen Coates; Satoko Izumo (Japanese)

These are all good novels but the standout so far is Liza Marklund’s LAST WILL. And I have to say Nakamura’s THE THIEF has stayed with me for months after reading it.

In some format or another I have these additional 5 titles lined up ready to read:

  • IN THE DARKNESS, Karin Fossum, tr James Anderson (Norwegian)
  • PIERCED, Thomas Enger, tr Charlotte Barslund (Norwegian)
  • THE AGE OF DOUBT, Andrea Camilleri, tr Stephen Sartelli (Italian)
  • THE BLIND GODDESS, Ann Holt, tr Tom Geddes (Norwegian)
  • THE CRUEL STARS OF THE NIGHT, Kjell Eriksson, tr Ebba Segerberg (Swedish)

And I have rather a long wishlist from which to choose. My goal is to read at least 25 of the eligible titles before the shortlist is announced (around May next year).

Review: Death of a Carpet Dealer by Karin Wahlberg

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Almost as this book opens Swedish carpet dealer Carl-Iver Olsson is fatally stabbed while on a buying trip in Istanbul. Over the subsequent 400 pages Olsson’s life and the lives of his extended family and colleagues are picked apart to reveal the motivation and, ultimately, the culprit of the nasty crime. Along the way we learn a little about a lot of people including Olsson’s wife, his niece, her husband and the Olsson’s children as well as the policeman investigating the case, Claes Claesson, and his wife who, not surprisingly given the relatively small town they live in, is a colleague of Olsson’s wife at the local hospital.

I was prompted to read this book after seeing this review and realising at least some of the story takes place in Turkey which is one of my favourite places to have visited. I even have fond memories of buying a lovely carpet there and so was keen to re-visit that world, if only virtually. The book has a great sense of location – quickly taking me back to the vibrant and exotic city of Istanbul but also depicting the small coastal community of Oskarshamn in Sweden (which I have not visited) (yet) with equal vividness.

The mystery at the heart of the novel proves to be quite a simple one but this is one of those books where the journey from beginning to end provides the bulk of the book’s enjoyment as the author does not appear to be in any great hurry to reveal her secrets. Instead she introduces us to a cast of characters who are all connected to Olsson in some way, however tangentially that might be. Some lives, such as that of the tea-seller who discovers Olsson’s body, are only peeked into while others, such as that of Claes Classon and his wife Veronika, a doctor who is heavily pregnant as the book opens, are viewed in more depth. I suppose this meandering, somewhat domestic air to the book would not appeal to all readers but I found it engaging. The disparate lives are intertwined skilfully, with good use of different points of view and enough little nuggets of intrigue to keep me reading along. The author has also managed to gently insert her knowledge of hospital procedures (she is a doctor herself) and the world of fine rugs into the novel in a way that informs without seeming like a lecture.

The characters are nicely drawn though there is not a huge range of personality types on show. Most people are…pleasant…with perhaps a minor character flaw or two but nothing truly ghastly (even the murderer is, ultimately, a bit bland) and most of the characters experience a bit of everything life has to offer…romance, angst, guilt, longing…but there are no grand passions on display.

I’m not sure I would read all of the 6 other books about Claes Classon and his wife (this is the seventh book in a series but only the first to be translated into English) but I’d happily read a couple more. DEATH OF A CARPET DEALER is engaging novel at the lighter end of the spectrum and while it won’t set the literary world on fire it will bring pleasure and an intelligent read to those who give it a go.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

DEATH OF A CARPET DEALER has been reviewed at Nordic Book Blog,  Petrona and Rhapsody in Books

I suppose I have come to expect ridiculous typographical errors when it comes to eBooks but I grow weary of them. In this book one of the minor characters repeatedly appears as Karao?lu throughout the text of my copy (an ePub version of the eBook). Other non-standard characters (e.g.Ö and ç and é) appear quite normally so this repeated stuff-up really grated on me. eBook publishers have got to sort this crap out and soon if I am really expected to take them seriously.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 3/5
Translator Neil Bettteridge
Publisher Stockholm Text [2012]
ISBN 9789187173141
Length 399 pages
Format eBook (ePub)
Book Series #7 in Claes Classon 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: BLOOD OF THE PRODIGAL by P.L. Gaus

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In Ohio’s Amish country 10 year-old Jeremiah Miller goes missing from his grandfather’s farm one morning.The boy’s grandfather, Bishop of one of the stricter groups of Amish in the area, reluctantly turns to two ‘Englishers’ for help finding him, though with strict instructions about how involved they can be and who they can tell. Pastor Caleb Troyer and his friend Professor Michael Branden agree to help with all the conditions specified by Bishop Miller, including his demand that the police not be informed. The Bishop believes the boy has been taken by his father, the Bishop’s son Jonah, who was banned from the community ten years earlier.

I am a sucker for the stories of outsiders, especially those who choose to remain separate from mainstream society, and you can’t get much more ‘separate’ than the Amish. However I’ve read a couple of fairly ordinary, superficial books featuring this community and have become wary of writers who have jumped on a bandwagon but was drawn to try P.L. Gaus’ series after reading some rave reviews at Kittling:Books. And that blog’s excellent host was right, Paul Gaus does seem to know his subject, being what I have gleaned from his bio an amateur expert after living in the area for 30+ years. This book, the first of what is currently a series of seven, provides loads of interesting details about the Amish way of life and beliefs and offers neither condemnation nor sycophantic praise of the community’s choices which is a very rare thing indeed. Very occasionally the exposition is a little clunky but for the most part it is seamlessly incorporated into the story.

The story itself is a fairly simple one, though compelling in its focus on the missing boy and the idea that Bishop Miller knows more than he has let on to those outside his community who he trusts, but only to a point. The two friends undertake a creditable private investigation which is made difficult due to the many Amish people unwilling to talk to them. When they are forced to join forces with local police due to someone being murdered before Jeremiah is found, the transition to a more formal investigation which allows the amateurs to be involved is believable. I must admit though I’m still not entirely clear how it is that a pastor and a professor became the ‘go-to guys’ for the Amish (or anyone else for that matter) and overall I thought the introduction to this element of the series was not handled as well as it might have been. At several points I was sure I’d made a mistake and chosen something other than the series opener to read, as prior experiences of the main characters were written in such a way as to make me think they’d been discussed more fully in an earlier book I’d missed (but I have triple checked and this is indeed the first book of the series).

That aside though the characters are nicely drawn. The most intriguing for me was Bishop Miller who in some ways is a minor character but his influence is felt by almost everyone in the story and it is his decisions that have the biggest impact. He banishes his own son from his community, he invites the outside help, he decides what to tell the outsiders and when. His personal struggles with those decisions are delicately but credibly teased out. Towards the end of the book there’s a particularly touching scene where he shares his thoughts at a funeral service and my worry that it might be get too mushy or preachy was unwarranted.

BLOOD OF THE PRODIGAL is not a perfect book but as a debut novel it shows a lot of promise, having introduced interesting characters and dealt with its subject matter sensitively and intelligently. I’m not sure there is endless scope for engagingly credible stories to come out of such a closed community but I’d be very happy to read the next one in the series. Happily for me the next few have all been narrated by George Newburn so I’ll be heading back to Ohio’s Amish community at some point.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 3/5
Narrator George Newburn
Publisher Random House Audio [this audio book 2011, original edition 1999]
ASIN B006JCTCM0
Length 6 hours 55 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series #1 in the Ohio Amish 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: LAST WILL by Liza Marklund

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In her sixth adventure to be translated into English journalist-cum-sleuth Annika Bengtzon is, on behalf of her newspaper the Evening Standard, attending a lavish banquet for the year’s Nobel Prize winners. She is dancing with a reporter from a rival publication when shots are fired and a woman dies in front of her. Although moved by what she has witnessed Annika’s thoughts turn to making a report for the paper but before she can contact her newsroom she is whisked away for questioning and immediately placed under a Disclosure Ban which prevents her from revealing anything she has seen.

Annika’s bosses at the paper treat her as if the ban is somehow her fault and use it as an excuse to send her on extended leave, ostensibly so other staff can report on the events without having to worry that they will inadvertently break the ban. But Annika’s interest in finding out the reason for the shootings doesn’t diminish, and she is able to keep up with the official investigation due to her long-standing connection to the Hawaiian shirt-wearing senior policeman known only as ‘Q’ who feeds her snippets of information she cannot report. She finds other leads too in the scientific community which surrounds the Nobel selection process which indicate the shootings have something to do with the Prize and its history. This is at odds with official version of events which blame an Islamic terrorist group for the shootings, though Annika learns from her newspaper colleague that this is surrounded by very disturbing practices on behalf of the government.

As I have come to expect from Marklund, LAST WILL is an above average combination of criminal investigation, exploration of intriguing political themes and salient observation on modern domestic life and its hard to know what to highlight first. Though I think because it is done so deftly I ought to discuss the way Marklund weaves small-p politics into her writing without making me feel like I’m attending a lecture. Here she tackles some genuinely weighty issues including the influence of America on its allies in a post-September 11 world, the seeming ease with which alarming legislation designed to restrict individual freedoms can be shoved through a supposedly democratic Parliament and the astonishing competitiveness of scientific endeavours in general and the medical field in particular. Apart from being engaging from a storytelling perspective (who knew medical research was quite that cut-throat?) what impressed me most was that although it’s not difficult to sense where Marklund’s own beliefs on these issues lie she does manage to present a reasonably rounded argument in most instances. I was struck more than once by how different this was to a book which I stopped reading earlier this year because it failed to even try to depict more than one side to any argument and was demanding readers to think a certain way. I much prefer my crime fiction like this because it makes me think and and draw my own conclusions about the world around me.

Another strong element of LAST WILL is its characters especially the frustrating but entirely believable Annika. She’s a fully-rounded person with an equal amount of admirable traits and foibles and she seems to lurch through life from crisis to crisis in a way that it is much more fun to read about than be part of I’m sure. Here she has become more financially secure but her relationship with her husband is strained to say the least. This is mostly because Thomas is an insufferable, philandering bore though it’s not quite that simple of course. Annika’s self confidence is low enough that she allows herself to be poorly treated by him and her supposed best friend who is just the worst kind of leech. But while I occasionally want to grab her by the shoulders and shake some sense into her I can’t help but admire the way she works her way through things. And sometimes she does fight back though the most memorable cases were against an elderly neighbour and two very nasty children. I can’t say that I like Annika but I like reading about her and find her a hundred percent credible. We humans don’t always make smart choices, even when someone else is writing our lines.

Although not a major element of this book Marklund has continued to depict the ever-changing world of journalism which, given her own background as a journalist, is both authentic and extremely sad. The book provides real insight into the chaotic race to the bottom that mainstream media seem to have become engaged in over the past few years and, as I do with each new book in this series, I wonder how low things will go.

My only very minor criticism of this book is its depiction of the perpetrator of the shootings who we meet sporadically throughout the book (we know who has committed the crime but not who has hired them). The super-human assassin with no ties and homes in all the best exotic locations are a little bit clichéd for my taste but this really is a minor gripe about an otherwise excellent book. Aided ably by a very readable translation from Neil Smith,Marklund has delivered a ripping yarn with loads of food for thought, a dash of humour and some delicate imagery. Highly recommended.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

LAST WILL has been reviewed at Petrona

I have reviewed three of Marklund’s earlier books, Studio 69, Prime Time and Red Wolf

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 4.5/5
Translator Neil Smith
Publisher Emily Bestler Books [2012, original edition 2006]
ISBN 9781451606928
Length 404 pages
Format hardback
Book Series #6 in the Annika Bengtzon series
Source Borrowed from the library

Review: DISGRACE by Jussi Adler-Olsen

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In Adler-Olsen’s second novel to be translated into English we meet a very unsavoury group of criminals who, since they were teenagers together at boarding school, have loved nothing better than fuelling themselves up on illicit drugs then violently attacking someone, sometimes to the point of death. They also hunt and kill animals and indulge in the odd rape for good measure.

In Department Q, the Copenhagen Police’s group responsible for clearing up cold crimes, grumpy and work-shy detective Carl Moerk finds the case of a years-old murder of a brother and sister on his desk. Unsure who has referred the case Moerk and his sidekick, the cleaner turned assistant Assad tentatively start looking into the matter, even though someone confessed to the murder and is serving a prison sentence for it. But Department Q soon learn that there were likely more people involved in the murder, that those people are from the country’s elite families and that they’ve committed far more than one crime.

As with the first book in this series the police characters are very enjoyable to read about. Although naturally lazy Carl is an intelligent policeman and he doesn’t like being dissuaded from a case for political reasons. Assad, an Iranian immigrant, is also clever and happy to do Carl’s grunt work while providing a nice line in homespun philosophy. In this book the men of Department Q are joined by a female colleague in the form of Rose who is meant to be some kind of administrative assistant but is soon just about running the place. She has some of the best, bitingly sarcastic lines in the novel.

The story itself and the focus on the criminal characters did not make for outstanding reading. Introducing the criminals early on is a reasonably common plot device these days and it can work well when the author goes on to delve into why the characters turned into the criminals we meet. Adler-Olsen doesn’t really do that here though, seemingly content with describing (at some length) the almost ludicrous number of violent episodes the gang engage in. There is one person – known as Kimmie – who has broken away from the gang and lives on the streets – who (I imagine) readers are meant to develop a connection with but I’m afraid I really didn’t. I could see that she’d had something of a rough start in life but I could also see that much of the horrid stuff that happened to her was a direct result of her own appalling behaviour and I couldn’t really summon up much energy in caring whether she outwitted her former friends or not. The rest of the gang are evil to the point of caricature, as is the depiction of the lives of ‘the elite’ versus lives of ‘normal people’ so that aspect of the novel didn’t really grab me either.

This book has a little too much ‘what’ (endless details of the various attacks by the gang either from their own points of view or that of their victims) and not enough ‘why’ for me.  I thought the story weak and not nearly suspense-filled enough for its 14+ hours as an audio book (though narrator Stephen Pacey is a delight to listen to as always). In the end there is a solid enough work of crime fiction thanks to the dogged, and amusing performance of the folk of Department Q but, for me, this book is not in the same class as the author’s previous novel.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Other reviews of DISGRACE are at Petrona, Shade Point and Wicked Wonderful Words

I’ve also reviewed the first book in this series, MERCY 

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 3/5
Translator Kyle Semmel
Narrator Stephen Pacey
Publisher Penguin Books [2012]
ASIN B0089Z6JXU
Length 14 hours 12 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series #2 in the Department Q 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.

Best new-to-me authors Q2 2012

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My reading overall has slowed down considerably over the last few months but I still managed to read 13 books by new-to-me authors from April to June. One of those is Australian author Virginia Duigan’s THE PRECIPICE which I read in April and haven’t stopped thinking about since. I adored its septuagenarian protagonist and its depiction of my country’s beauty, growing old and rubbing along in modern society.

Other books by new to me authors that I’d recommend are

All of these are authors I will happily read more books from.

Of course reading new authors isn’t always a success and some of the authors I tried out won’t be leaping back on to my TBR but I’m philosophical about these experiences. Finding a book like THE PRECIPICE, which I simply love to bits, makes all the not-so-good reads well worth the experimentation.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My best new-to-me authors Q1 2012

Mysteries in Paradise is hosting a meme to highlight books new to us. Head over to participate or check out other people’s lists.

I’m beginning to think I’m fickle

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A post at the excellent Kittling: Books the other day got me thinking. Cathy listed all the authors whose books she buys automatically as soon as she knows they’ve a new book out and many of the writers on her list had very long-running series that Cathy has stuck with all the way through. What got my little grey cells humming was that If I were to come up with such a list it would be brief to the point of embarrassment.

In fact it would consist of one author: Sue Grafton. I’ve read her alphabet series from the beginning and have bought each instalment, though, I must admit, not always immediately it was released (book pricing in Australia has always been obscene and I have not always had enough disposable income to shell out for new release prices). All the other authors whose books I used to buy automatically and who are still writing including

  • Patricia Cornwell
  • Linda Fairstein
  • Elizabeth George
  • P.D. James
  • the Kellermans (husband and wife only not the offspring)
  • Stephen King
  • Karin Slaughter

are no longer anywhere near my radar. With most of them I simply became bored: feeling like I was reading the same book repeatedly or believing the authors to be such big names that no one is prepared to edit them properly anymore so their stuff is bloated (you really don’t want to get me started on all the things wrong with Elizabeth George’s later books). I even crossed Sara Paretsky off my favourite authors list after this year’s BREAKDOWN landed on my DNF pile due to its overt claims to a moral superiority it did not earn.

The next-closest I have to an author whose books are ‘auto-buys’ for me is journalist turned fiction writer Geraldine Brooks whose non-fiction and historical fiction I have generally loved. But even then I baulked at MARCH (a story from the point of view of the absent father from LITTLE WOMEN). I’ve pretty much read everything Ian McEwan ever wrote too, though I’ll admit that I never finished SOLAR and feel a bit wary about whatever he might release next.

There are some recently new-to-me writers whose books I eagerly anticipate. These include

  • Sulari Gentill
  • Chris Grabenstein
  • Kerry Greenwood
  • Elly Griffiths
  • Katherine Howell
  • Adrian Hyland
  • Arnuldur Indridason
  • Asa Larsson
  • Liza Marklund
  • Johan Theorin

But I haven’t been reading any of these authors for more than 3-4 years so I’m hardly a long term fan. Perhaps I’ll tire of these too?

What about you? Have you been reading the same authors for a long time? Is it fickle to have completely changed my reading tastes or a by-product of maturing?

International Dagger 2012 – Reading Progress and Speculation #3

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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 back in April and updated my progress just prior to the announcement of the shortlist. My final post on the subject should have been my thoughts on the entire shortlist prior to the announcement of the winner (which will be in the very early hours of Saturday morning in my local time) but I didn’t quite manage to finish reading all of the shortlisted books, which are

I’ll blame my failure to complete this simple task mostly on the fact that I misplaced my eReader during my recent move and it contained both of the books I haven’t read. Though in reality it would have been quite easy to pick up a copy of PHANTOM from the library but quite honestly I was bored to tears by all things Jo Nesbo after his recent tour of Australia during which he seemed to be in/on every media outlet I encountered and I couldn’t help  wondering why some of those shows/newspapers couldn’t perhaps interview some of the many excellent Australian crime writers once in a while instead of fawning all over the cute chap from Scandinavia who repeated the same half-dozen anecdotes ad nauseum (and I do acknowledge this wasn’t his fault – he was asked the same daft, simplistic questions over and over again).

According to the readers and voters at Euro Crime that’s the book likely to win the award (apparently Australian media are not the only ones Nesbo-obsessed) but if I were handing out the trophy it would go to Deon Meyer for TRACKERS (sorry Mr Meyer given my track record for being on the losing side that’s surely lost you any chance of winning) (and sorry too Ms Larsson as I really loved UNTIL THY WRATH BE PAST also but picking two winners seems like a bit of a cheat). Regardless of who wins though I feel privileged to have been able to read so many wonderful books thanks to the work of all the excellent translators and I look forward to getting stuck into next year’s reading.

Review: I WILL HAVE VENGEANCE by Maurizio De Giovanni

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We meet Luigi Alfredo Ricciardi in Naples in 1931. He is as old as the century, unmarried, almost friendless, a policeman. Though he is independently wealthy enough not to have to work for the money he has a different motivation: he sees, and hears, dead people. The ghosts of those who have died sorrowfully haunt him and his only relief seems to be the brief period following a successful investigation, when the voices leave Ricciardi alone for a time.

After an odd introduction containing more supernatural elements than I’m normally interested in, the book settles down into a fairly standard procedural in which Ricciardi and his faithful subordinate, an older man who grew to respect then love Ricciardi when he investigated the death of his son, investigate the murder of Arnaldo Vezzi, one of Italy’s greatest opera singers, who has been stabbed in his dressing room on the opening night of a new season. The case soon throws up a plethora of suspects as virtually everyone hated the cruel arrogant singer and Ricciardi must piece together the evidence through careful listening and observation of everyone involved. Ultimately the case is resolved intelligently and happily, for this reader anyway, without much impact from the ghostly contingent in the book.

Although a bit wary at first (I am seriously turned off by the supernatural) I did enjoy this story and its intense, sorrow-filled protagonist. Ricciardi falls into the ‘nearly perfect in every way and a hundred times smarter than everyone around him’ category of detective but there’s not a drop of arrogance in him so he’s rather likeable. And even though I don’t believe in things ghostly I certainly believed that Ricciardi was haunted by them and couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. In effect he is constantly surrounded by the sorrow of others and he feels a compulsive obligation to do something about it which clearly does not make for a restful life. His one glimmer of hope is his nightly observations of a young woman who lives in an apartment he can see from his own home and this element of the book is surprisingly touching.

Like all the Italian crime fiction I’ve read the female characters leave a bit to be desired, being either mother-figures or temptresses of some sort, but the minor male characters are all nicely drawn. There’s a priest who is tangentially involved in the case and he grows to care for Ricciardi and their relationship has the potential to prove quite interesting if it is developed in further books.

The setting here is a highlight both in terms of the small but authentic details of the city, its opera theatre and its various neighbourhoods and the historical backdrop. Italy in the 30′s was a time of some political turmoil (though really when wasn’t Italy in a period of some political turmoil) and this is captured in an understated way with familial arguments and the harsher political realities of Ricciardi’s workplace. I’m fairly sure this element of the book in particular is due as much to the skills of its translator as its author, and this seems to be borne out by an informative afterword from the translator herself.

I’m not entirely convinced this character has the makings of a long-running series, as I suspect the very things that would allow the Ricciardi to develop as a human being are the things which would make him more like the rest of us and therefore less interesting to read about. But I would certainly be curious enough to read another book in the series.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I WILL HAVE VENGEANCE is reviewed at Crime Scraps, Euro Crime & The Game’s Afoot

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 3.5/5
Translator Anne Milano Appel
Publisher Hersilla Press [2012]
ASIN B00793NHSI
Length 2855 locations!
Format eBook (kindle)
Book Series #1(?) in the Commissario Ricciardi 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.

Books of the Month – June 2012

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2012 continues to be a slow reading year for me as June saw me occupied with moving house and renovating. My books are still all packed away in boxes as the room they are to live in awaits painting and new shelving though happily last weekend I did unearth my TBR boxes and discovered my eReader. The misplacement of that pesky device has caused me to fail in my bid to read all the novels shortlisted for the CWA International Dagger Award for translated crime fiction which is to be announced on Friday (2 of the books are on that device which I couldn’t find for several weeks). Oh well.

I imagine though that my pick of the month, Antonio Hill’s THE SUMMER OF DEAD TOYS – set against the backdrop of a wilting Barcelona summer – would have been my choice even if I’d managed to read a lot more books. I haven’t posted a review yet (one is half-written) but it’s a jolly fine book about a troubled policeman asked to investigate the death of a young man who was originally thought to have committed suicide. It’s highly recommended reading.

Reviews of the rest of my month’s reading are also in short supply, though if you like the idea of a light but entertaining old-fashioned whodunnit you might like to check out the murderous shenanigans at a suburban bowls club as depicted by Australian author Ellen Mary Wilton in HYSTERIA AT THE WISTERIA. A proper review of Anna Jansson’s KILLER’S ISLAND, set on Sweden’s summer holiday destination island Gotland, has been submitted to Euro Crime but I haven’t gotten around to writing full reviews of anything else I managed to read for the month and, if we’re being realistic, I’m unlikely to. I did scribble some brief thoughts on all the audio books I listened to while packing though.

Books vs Adaptations

I recently started writing posts in which I compare a book to its adaptation. I’ve always loved watching adaptations of books I’ve read – good and bad and enjoy pondering what it is that makes a really good one. This month I posted twice for the series. Once over at Celebrating Reginald Hill (a marvellous, month-long celebration of a brilliant writer) where I discussed the first book in Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe series A CLUBBABLE WOMAN and once here on my own blog where I took a look at Val McDermid’s A PLACE OF EXECUTION. If you can think of a book with an interesting adaptation that I should check out do leave me a comment as I am enjoying the process of tracking down and watching movies I’ve not seen.

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