Category Archives: Caro Ramsay

Review: Singing to the Dead by Caro Ramsay

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I read and really enjoyed Caro Ramsay’s first book Absolution in my pre-blog days and was very keen to read her second book, featuring some of the same characters. SPOILER ALERT: In this review I am by necessity going to talk about an event that took place at the end of the first book so if you haven’t read that one and want to without knowing what happens at the end please avert your eyes.

As Singing to the Dead opens readers are introduced rapidly to several story arcs. In the first of the two main threads two small boys have gone missing in Glasgow but it’s hard to know if they might have been kidnapped or are runaways due to their fairly grim home lives. There’s also an elderly man who has been killed in a house fire but Police soon learn that there might be something more sinister at play as it seems he may have been poisoned. The Police at Partickhill station are still recovering from the loss of their old DCI,  Alan McAlpine, and are having to deal with a new boss who they find it hard to like.

Ramsay’s strength lies in her ability to create very credible characters, in particular because she doesn’t shy away from depicting unlikable people who still manage to do good things. This is rarer than it ought to be in fiction. Not that all the characters are unlikable of course though, as in life, some of them are but, again as in life, pure evil is rare. These kind of complex characters are far more interesting than easily identifiable heroes and villains. Between a whole police squad and all the players needed to keep several story arcs running there are quite a lot of characters but I never found myself overwhelmed. In fact I enjoyed the literary version of an ensemble cast in which no one character really played a lead role. On top of maintaining interest it made it harder to predict what would happen and who would turn out to be the bad guy(s).

Ramsay also juggles her many threads well and it would be a fussy reader indeed who couldn’t find enough content to keep one’s mind whirring with all that’s going on in this book. That said, I found the middle of the book a bit ‘woolly’ and think it could have done with tighter editing. There was some duplication and labouring of points, particularly in the thread concerning Eve and her sister Lynne, which slowed down the action and made the book longer than it needed to be (another 500+ page tome). However, the stories are wrapped up masterfully and even if you predict the outcome of one thread I suspect you’ll struggle to work them all out.

This is quite a different book to Absolution. It doesn’t have the emotional punch of its predecessor but on the flip side it’s far more complex and suspenseful. Overall I found it an excellent follow-up book, not least because it didn’t stick to exactly the same formula as the first which shows the author isn’t afraid to take some risks and I have to applaud that.

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My rating 4/5

Publisher: Penguin; ISBN: 978-0-014-102925-2; Length: 510 pages; Setting: Glasgow, Scotland, present day

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Singing to the Dead has been reviewed by Donna’s dad at Big Beat from the Badsville, Karen at Aust Crime Fiction and Pat at Euro Crime

However good her writing is this author still gets my award for ‘author who least understand the point of the internet in 2010′. My unsolicited advice to Ramsay or anyone trying to present a ‘public face’ online is that if you can’t update your website in more than 3 years (it still shows Absolution as her only published novel although it does have a link to what was presumably an early title for Singing to the Dead) and you’re not going to post to your blog then don’t have them. Better still, learn.

And while I’m in rant mode may I please have permission pour paint on the next person who writes that Ramsay is a ‘female Ian Rankin’? Not only is it a completely nonsensical thing to say [we get it, he's Scottish, she's Scottish but that's just about where the similarity ends] but nonsense does not become intelligent just because it is repeated endlessly.

Crime Fiction Alphabet: A is for Absolution

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In a new weekly meme Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise asks us to write a blog post about the letter of the week. I thought I’d use the meme to highlight books I enjoyed before I started keeping this blog. I’ve kept ratings for years and kept reading notes in odd places including Good Reads for a while before I started this blog so I should be able to keep participating in this meme.

This week’s letter is A and I’ve decided to talk about Scottish author Caro Ramsay’s first novel, Absolution, which was published in 2007.

The story opens when PC Alan McAlpine returns to work after a family tragedy and is rostered to hospital duty to wait for the awakening of a young woman who lies near death after being the victim of a horrific acid attack. McAlpine is soon obsessed by the woman and even after discovering what led to her predicament he continues to fantasize about her. The novel then leaps forward 20 years and McAlpine is a Detective Inspector who investigating a series of brutal killings

The opening passages of this book are some of the most moving I have read, in any kind of genre, and perfectly sparked my interest in both the story to come and getting to know McAlpine. Ramsay’s writing is wonderfully descriptive and evocative of the time and place. She builds the suspense well and the ending fits logically with the events that went before it which is not always the case with crime fiction these days. There is a thread that I found awkward and unnecessary from a plot development point of view (the car crash) but I can easily forgive this in a book with so much else to recommend it.

One of the more interesting aspects of this particular reading experience is that I enjoyed the book despite the fact I grew to despise the protagonist Alan McAlpine. I suspect readers are supposed to feel sympathetic towards him but I found him totally self-absorbed and hated the way he treats his wife and friends with utter contempt much of the time. In fact I found it a bit of a stretch that everyone around such a person would universally put up with his poor treatment of them, cover for his drunken mistakes and generally ignore the fact he’s a selfish ingrate but I guess it does happen. Happily for the good citizens of Glasgow the dogged and devoted Colin Anderson and smart, courageous Winifred Costello are available to do some actual police work. Likeable or not though, all the characters are well constructed and nicely multi-dimensional.

Ramsay has a new book out this year called Singing to the Dead. It features Colin Anderson who I very much enjoyed in Absolution so I’ve added this one to my wishlist.

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I normally direct readers to an author’s website but Ramsay’s is seriously out of date and virtually devoid of useful content. I discussed back in February the fact that large chunks of the publishing industry seem to ignore the internet as a legitimate marketing tool or, worse, treat it with contempt (what else would you call a ‘blog’ with one post written in 2007?).