Category Archives: 2011 Global Reading Challenge

I’ve completed this year’s global challenge

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After completing the extreme level of last year’s global challenge I only signed up for the medium level of this year’s challenge as I also had quite a few other challenges on the go this year. I needed to two novels from each of these continents in the course of 2011 – Africa, Asia, Australasia, Europe, North America, South America and a ‘Seventh Continent’ (which can be any seventh setting including Antarctica, the sea, space, the past, the future).

I didn’t really do much planning for this challenge but noticed when preparing this wrap-up post that 12 of the 14 authors were new to me but I didn’t do so well on achieving a gender balance, with only 4 of these being by women.

I think my favourite of these books is Domingo Villar’s Water-Blue Eyes set in Spain. It is delightfully short, has terrific characters, is full of humour and could be a promotional tool for the Galician tourist bureau. However there are lots of honourable mentions in the collection including Shamini Flint’s engaging tale of Malaysian law and order, Leighton Gage’s gripping novel of Brazilian corruption and Stan Jones’ thoughtful exploration of remote Alaska. All of these have an especially strong sense of their location which is what this challenge is all about, no?

Africa
1. Michael Stanley, The Second Death of Goodluck Tinubu (Botswana) (3.5 stars)
2. Nick Brownlee, Bait (Kenya) (2.5 stars)

Asia
1. Keigo Higashino, The Devotion of Suspect X (Japan) (2 stars)
2. Shamini Flint, Inspector Singh Investigates: A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder (Malaysia) (4 stars)

Australasia
1. Bev Robitai, Murder in the Second Row (New Zealand) (3.5 stars)
2. Kel Robertson, Rip Off (Australia) (4 stars)

Europe
1. Domingo Villar, Water-Blue Eyes (Spain) (5 stars)
2. Valerio Varesi, River of Shadows (Italy) (3 stars)

North America
1. Stan Jones – White Sky, Black Ice (Alaska, USA) (4.5 stars)
2. Barbara Fradkin – This Thing of Darkness (Canada) (2.5 stars)

South America
1. Leighton Gage, Blood of the Wicked (Brazil) (4.5 stars)
2. Ernesto Mallo, Needle in a Haystack (Argentina) (4 stars)

The Seventh Continent (international books with action in 3 or more countries)
1. John le Carre, Our Kind of Traitor (England, Antigua, France, Switzerland, Russia) (2 stars)
2. Adrian d’Hagé – The Maya Codex (Austria, America, Czech Republic, Guatemala) (3.5 stars)

Review: This Thing of Darkness by Barbara Fradkin

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Retired psychiatrist Samuel Rosenthal is beaten to death late one Saturday night in an Ottawa alleyway. Officially the case is being investigated by Sergeant Marie Claire Levesque, new to the Ottawa Police, and she becomes convinced the doctor was killed as part of a mugging gone wrong. A group of black youths was spotted on a surveillance camera and Levesque spends her energies on tracking them down. Her boss, Inspector Michael Green, is not sure the case is as clear cut and he also starts to investigate the case, enjoying the feel of being back out in the field. He tackles several lines of enquiry including the notion that Rosenthal was killed by one of his former patients or possibly even his own estranged son. Green and Levesque disagree on process and priorities for most of the novel which impacts the investigative process at several points in the story.

I found this a fairly confusing book to read, with an over-abundance of plot lines that all received fairly cursory attention. For my enjoyment the book would have been better served by focusing more in-depth on a couple of these only, though I’m sure this is a matter of personal preference. An aspect that really grated on my nerves was the inclusion of the possibility that the motivation for the crime was one young Muslim man’s extreme fundamentalism. There is absolutely no evidence of any such thing and the thread peters out into nothing at all, but that didn’t stop Inspector Green throwing out a few random “facts” about Muslim extremism.  The young man in question was born in Somalia and had experienced sustained violent abuse at the hands of a parent and the case does touch on the possibility that this upbringing had an unexpected impact on the boy but there was plenty of scope for this to be explored in more depth rather than yet another go-round of the ‘Muslim = terrorirst’ theme. I can’t even begin to imagine how truly awful it must be for the vast majority of Muslims who are perfectly normal, well-adjusted people to have their religion automatically linked with the notion of terrorism whenever it is mentioned.

This is the seventh book of the Inspector Green series and I did feel a bit like I was attending a party uninvited as there were a fair few oblique references to past events. That aside though the focus on the personal lives of the various members of the team was a stronger element of the novel, though I must admit to finding Green both unlikeable and not entirely convincing. At one point for example he his indirectly responsible for the death of an innocent young girl and is at least partially to blame for the heart attack of a colleague. He seems to shrug off both of these events with only the most cursory of nods to any emotional impact on himself and neither incident changes the man’s behaviour at all. I found this a little hard to swallow.

In the end I suppose this was a perfectly serviceable police procedural but I didn’t find anything in it that stood out our would make me want to read more of the series. I do appreciate this is probably at least partly a result of coming to the series so late but I do think a series should be able to be joined at any point in its progress.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

This Thing of Darkness has been reviewed at Reviewing the Evidence

Apart from a liberal use of the words loonie and toonie I didn’t notice anything particularly Canadian about the novel, but I’m counting this as book 2 of the North American leg of my Global Reading Challenge for the year

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My rating 2.5/5
Publisher Napoleon and Co (this digital edition 2009)
ISBN  9781926607146
Length 344 pages
Format eBook (ePub)
Book Series #7 in the Inspector Green series
Source I bought it

This post is published at http://reactionstoreading.com if you are seeing it at another site then it has been stolen and/or used entirely without permission.

Review: A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder by Shamini Flint

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Inspector Singh of the Singapore police is close to retirement age but having done something to annoy his superiors he’s the officer chosen to go to Malaysia to look after the interests of a Singaporean citizen in trouble. Former model Chelsea Liew has been arrested for the murder of her Malaysian ex-husband Alan Lee and Singh is meant to observe Malaysian police and ensure that she receives a fair deal. The problem for Singh is that everyone believes her guilty (and who would blame her given Lee’s years of abuse and the bitter custody battle they were in regarding their children) and if she is convicted she will receive the death penalty.

As seems to be happening more and more with my crime fiction reading of late the mystery element takes a back seat to other aspects of this novel. In this instance it’s not a bad thing at all as there is so much else of interest going on, reminding me once again how suitable the conventions of crime fiction are for writers to explore a range of issues and ideas. Here Flint has included everything from relatively innocuous (though fascinating) observations about the differences between Singaporean and Malaysian cultures to tougher subjects such as the problems that can arise in Malaysia which operates under common law for most things but has formally adopted Sharia law to deal with family law matters for Muslims. By using an example of a remotely possible case in this world of dual laws Flint has offered real food for thought and by resolving this thread in a somewhat unorthodox manner she offers no easy solution to the complexities that must inevitably arise in this type of scenario. Very realistic! It’s a powerful storyline and, for me, made more so because it plays out simply, without any proselytizing.

Although tradition might demand the reader has some sympathy for the victim of a murder it is somewhat difficult here. Alan Lee appears not to have many redeeming qualities, being an abusive husband, horrible father, callous businessman and all around despicable human being. This does give Inspector Singh something to work with when he becomes convinced of Liew’s innocence and tries to convince the local authorities of it. As a character Singh is something of a stereotype being portly, smarter than average and a bit of a loner. He can be quite funny too, especially when dealing with his sister (who lives in Malaysia and provides her hospitality with opinionated homespun wisdom). Although we do meet two local investigators we don’t get to know them in much depth as, unlike most series of this type the Inspector will be off to another country in the next book so there’s not the impetus to develop ‘the investigative team’. Instead we spend time learning about the suspects, especially Alan Lee’s family. I really enjoyed this approach to storytelling.

Aside from this excellent review at Crime Scraps most reviews I have seen of this book (and the series which now totals four) talk about it being light, fun and cosy and I think this is a little misleading. The crime at its heart does happen ‘off-stage’ so to speak and there are not extended passages of violent description so in that way the book is, I suppose, ‘cosy’ but I found the subjects it explored anything but light and frothy. In addition to the issues mentioned above it also deftly tackles the environmental impact of deforestation in the region and the treatment of local indigenous communities, neither of which are subjects I would consider light.

Although now a proud stay-at-home mum in Singapore Shamini Flint has worked as a lawyer in both Singapore and Malaysia which provides an authentic feel to this book. Although it’s not first and foremost a legal thriller there are many scenes in which the law and its application is discussed and dissected in a thought provoking way. Amongst all of this we are treated to a solidly entertaining whodunnit as well, which kept this reader guessing to the end. Although I will happily read the next installment of this series in paper form I am really hoping that it will be released in audio format too as the narration of this book by Jonathan Keeble was (as always) excellent.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Inspector Singh Investigates: A Most Peculiar Malaysian Murder has been reviewed at Crime Scraps.

I’m counting this as book 2 of the Asian leg of my Global Reading Challenge for the year

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My rating 4/5
Author website http://www.shaminiflint.com/index.html
Narrator Jonathan Keeble
Publisher Hachette Digital [this audio book 2011, original edition 2008]
ISBN N/A (downloaded from audible.com)
Length 8 hours 34 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series #1 in the Inspector Singh Investigates series
Source I bought it

This post is published at http://reactionstoreading.com if you are seeing it at another site then it has been stolen and/or used entirely without permission.

Review: White Sky, Black Ice by Stan Jones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: Water-Blue Eyes by Domingo Villar

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As this book opens we meet Leo Caldas, a Police Inspector in the Spanish town of Vigo, as he is participating in the weekly radio broadcast Patrol on the Air, during which people can ring in with questions or complaints for the police to investigate. Caldas is a grudging participant in the PR exercise and entertains himself by keeping a running tally of how many enquiries he will need to follow up on and how many he can hand over to the City police. When he’s finished the show he barely has time to sit in his office chair before he and his subordinate, Rafael Estévez, are rushing to attend a luxury apartment building where a man has been killed. The man, local jazz musician Luis Reigosa, has been tied to his bed and suffered horrific burn-like injuries to his stomach and groin but forensic specialists need time to identify the exact cause of death, which doesn’t give Caldas and Estévez many leads with which to begin their investigation.

Several elements of this excellent novel compete for status as the standout feature but in the end they all come together to form the perfect novel. Perhaps the thing I loved most were the characters who are richly drawn and highly believable. Although this is the first novel in which he appears Caldas is a fully formed man whose past we see in glimpses as the current narrative unfolds. His personal life is complicated by an uneasy relationship with his father and a split from the woman in his life due to their differences over the idea of having children. His working life is also complicated, mainly by having to deal with the consequences of Rafael Estévez’ aggression which is generated when he encounters the difficulties of his new home. Poor Estévez is not a native of Galica (the region of northern Spain in which Vigo is situated) and he has struggled to adjust to his new environment. He finds the unpredictable weather and steep streets equally frustrating but worst of all

To Rafael Estévez’ stern Aragonese mind, things were this way or that, got done or didn’t, so it was only with considerable effort that he managed to decipher the ambiguous expressions of his new fellow citizens.

This issue generates much of the warm humour of the book, though I felt a little guilty for laughing at Estévez as I too have a tendency towards literalness and find ambiguity annoying to deal with.

If the local tourist bureau in Galicia hasn’t paid Villar something for his work then they should because my overwhelming desire upon finishing the book was to investigate how much it would cost me to fly there and stay a while. The environment is described beautifully and the relaxed pace of life depicted appeals to me greatly. Even a serious police investigation must stop for deliciously described meals and the occasional paddle in the ocean and I couldn’t help but wish that all of life was prioritised in this way. Of course Caldas manages to have a fascinating conversation about philosophy with other patrons during one memorable lunch and this ends up leading him to an important discovery in his investigation which proves there’s nothing wrong with this way of working at all.

I was undoubtedly pre-disposed to liking this book because of its length. At 167 pages it is tiny in comparison to many of the lengthy tomes published these days but is an absolutely captivating read without any of the dead weight of its competitors. It’s fast, witty, oozing a sense of its location, has terrifically memorable characters and a taut, compelling plot. It is also beautifully readable in its second language, a testament no doubt to the skill of translator Martin Schifino, who has managed to capture the poetic essence of the Spanish very well. This is a true gem of a novel that would be enjoyed by all readers, crime fans or otherwise.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

This book has been reviewed at Crime Scraps, Petrona, Reviewing the Evidence and The Game’s Afoot (where Jose Ignacio read the book in its original Spanish).

I’m using this as the first book for my European leg of this year’s global challenge

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My rating 5/5
Translator Martin Schifino
Publisher Arcadia books/Euro Crime [this translation 2009, original edition 2006]
ISBN 9781906413255
Length 167 pages
Format paperback
Book Series The first in a series to feature Leo Caldas
Source I bought it

Review: Needle in a Haystack by Ernesto Mallo

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In 1976 Argentina’s Dirty War had begun and its environment of state-sponsored illegal arrests, torture, killing and forced disappearances provides a brutal backdrop for what would otherwise be a simple tale of a policeman investigating a murder. Superintendent Lascano is asked to follow up on a report of two bodies being found but when he arrives at the site there are three bodies. Two are of young people who were clearly killed by the Junta’s death squads and their deaths will not be investigated further but the third body is an older man’s which appears to have nothing to do with the others. It is this death that Lascano decides to investigate and he learns it is the body of an Auschwitz survivor who is now an almost universally loathed money-lender.

I have ranted at length about the enormous (seemingly unedited) tomes that are produced in such numbers these days so it is worth noting that I did a little happy dance when I opened this book on my eReader and found it to be 192 pages short. If anyone needs evidence that an engaging, thoughtful story can be told in less than a house brick sized lump they need look no further than the rather haunting Needle in a Haystack. Told from the perspective of several different characters and not in chronological order, the story comes together as a kind of literary jigsaw puzzle with some pieces being found early and having to lie on the table for a while, awaiting their connecting pieces to appear before the full picture could become clear. The book’s snappy length enabled this to be a very successful storytelling mechanism.

There are very memorable characters here, both good and evil. Lascano is a widower who has struggled to come to terms with his wife’s death and the scenes describing his home, from which nothing of hers has been removed, are sad but very credible.  His determination to his job, in the face of widespread corruption and overt threats is also credibly portrayed. Some of the most memorable characters have only fleeting appearances, like the General’s wife who thinks the baby she has adopted hates her, but they are all beautifully drawn.

I must admit I found the long blocks of italicised text which eschewed quotation marks and other punctuation a little off-putting as they slowed down my reading pace and I’m still not sure what the format was meant to add to the story. Also the sex scene which spoke of Lascano’s ‘sex being reborn and wanting to fly’ just made me laugh and the schmaltzy tone of the whole scene seemed out of place with the rest of the book. Overall though these are minor quibbles about an excellent book which is both a sound mystery and an unsentimental depiction of what must have been a horrifying time to live through.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

This book has been reviewed at Crime Scraps, Euro Crime and Petrona and is one of 7 shortlisted titles for the 2011 CWA International Dagger Award

I’m using this as the second book for the South American leg of this year’s global challenge

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My rating 4/5
Translator Jethro Soutar
Publisher Bitter Lemon Press [this translation 2010, original edition 2005]
ISBN 9781904738565
Length 192 pages
Format ePub
Book Series The first in a trilogy (I believe the second has been translated into English and will be released soon)
Source I bought it

Review: Bait by Nick Brownlee

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This is the second book of the African leg of this year’s global challenge. Set in Kenya, it’s written by a British journalist and I was prompted to listen to it after hearing a rave about Ben Onwukwe, the narrator of the audio version

Bait is a story of violence. It opens with a young boy gutting a white man on the bow of a fishing boat off the coast of Kenya. The boat is then blown up with the body of the white man and the live young boy on board. Subsequently there are more violent deaths (several shootings, a harpooning, an attempted murder by crocodile and probably a couple more I’ve forgotten), several near-deaths and other violent outbursts. Amongst all of that is the story of Jake Moore, an ex-cop from Britain, and his partner Harry who run an ailing business offering big game fishing trips to rich tourists. They get caught up in the violence via several threads, not least of which is Jake’s encounter with Mombassa’s only honest cop, Detective Inspector Daniel Jouma. Initially investigating a disappearance Jouma (with help from Jake) eventually ends up on the trail of the nastiest kind of crime you can imagine.

The setting is the most distinctive thing about the book for me. Brownlee has depicted Kenya following the post-election riots of 2007; tourism has significantly reduced and crime and corruption has flourished. The wealth and luxury enjoyed by the owner and visitors to the Marlin Bay Hotel where much of the action in the novel is set is juxtaposed well with the extreme poverty endured by those outside the five-star compound.

Ultimately though this felt like a film script more than a book to me. It’s full of action and imagery (most of it bloody) but not a great deal of substance and the characters were a bit too stereotypical and shallow to really engage me (the rich man is evil, the South African is a racist etc). To be fair I think perhaps if I was an occasional reader of the genre I would have liked it more, but as it stands the book fell into my ‘meh’ category which I broadly describe as a ‘book that’s OK to read but barely distinguishable from a hundred similar tomes and will be quickly forgotten’.

Given that I really did enjoy the narration from Ben Onwukwe the book probably would have scored 3 stars despite its flaws but for the very end. There’s a wrap-up where one of the characters explains the message of the book, in essence explaining in words of one syllable why it’s called Bait, that I found particularly patronising. When you add that to the colossal amount of violence and other elements I’ve described it’s just not a book I would recommend ahead of other African crime fiction such as Deon Meyer’s excellent South African books.

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Bait has been reviewed at Mysteries in Paradise (where Kerrie enjoyed it more than I did) and The Game is Afoot (where I think Jose Ignacio had similar feelings to me though he is more polite).

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My rating 2.5/5
Author website http://www.nickbrownlee.com/
Narrator Ben Onwukwe
Publisher Whole Story Audio Books [2009]
ISBN N/A (downloaded from audible.com)
Length 8 hours 6 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series #1 in the Jouma and Jake series
Source I bought it

Review: The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino

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I’m counting this as my first book on the Asian leg of the 2011 Global Reading Challenge.

Yasuko Hanaoka is a single mother whose ex-husband, Togashi, still bothers her for money and engages in other nasty harassment. One evening he comes to her apartment, gets threatening and ends up strangled at the hands of his ex and her teenage daughter, Misato. Ishigami is a maths teacher/genius and Yasuko’s neighbour. He visits the lunch-box shop at which she works every day just so he can buy lunch from his pretty neighbour. When he hears noises in her apartment he deduces what has gone on there and offers to help dispose of the body and cover up the crime. The rest of the book is then billed as a battle of wits between Ishigami and the police who are aided by their very own genius, physicist Dr. Manabu Yukawa nicknamed Professor Galileo, who happens to be an old college mate of both the lead detective on the case, Kusanagi, and our genius maths teacher Ishigami (though the latter two have never met prior to this case).

This book has won Japan’s Naoki Prize for Best Novel and is highly rated at both Amazon and Good Reads. I can’t for the life of me see why any of those things is true but there’s nothing new there, I am often out of step on such matters. As always, I’ll tell you why I didn’t think much of the book and you can make up your own minds.

For a start the plot does not really take us anywhere new or interesting. My one sentence summary of the premise for the book is “ugly man does stupid thing because he is in lust with unattainable beautiful woman” (and yes that is slightly more bitter and twisted than what the book presents but only a smidgen). The only suspenseful element of the entire thing was the question of whether or not the police would uncover the truth, except it wasn’t really that suspenseful because the ‘investigation’ wasn’t remotely credible to me. Readers are lulled into accepting the immediate and singular focus on Yasuko Hanaoka as a suspect because we know she is guilty, but the police had no idea that was true and their decision to only ever investigate the woman Togashi divorced five years ago would have been laughable if it had been depicted in a more traditional procedural. In a nod to this notion one of the detectives makes a comment along the lines of ‘he had no friends’ which, I suppose, is supposed to reassure the reader that all other avenues of inquiry were exhausted. Even the investigation into Yasuko was highly improbable, consisting of repeated re-interviewing and endless following people connected to Yasuko for no reason at all and acting upon a lot of baseless assumptions.

The cover-up devised by Ishigami could have been intriguing but it dragged on too long. For me it started to get vaguely tense in chapter 16. Of 19 chapters. Irrespective of the pace I never quite bought into the supposedly brilliant machinations being put into play by Ishigami because I never really felt the author was playing fair with me as a reader so I was actively looking for things he might have hidden. In the end I’d argue that Higashino broke one of the cardinal rules of mystery writing by ensuring that the resolution relied on a piece of information that we, as readers, were never given.

The characters in the book were even less interesting than the plot, though probably more credible. I simply found them stereotypical, flat and unlikable. The portrayal of Ishigami’s life as barren due to him being an ugly, misunderstood genius whose daily battle with bored teenagers and dreams of missed opportunities which could all have been made palatable by the affections of a beautiful woman was tiresomely derivative. Yasuko’s insipid acceptance of life as something that happens to you was cringe-inducing and dull. Other people decided everything for her, from when to give up working as a club hostess to whether or not to conceal the murder she has just committed. She didn’t even really make a conscious decision to kill Togashi and even her final act was prompted by someone else’s actions rather than her own beliefs or strength of character. So this all leads me back to the plot. One of the reasons I didn’t find the ‘will they get away with it’ scenario terribly suspenseful was that I simply didn’t care.

Both the translation (by Alexander O Smith) and narration (by David Pittu) were more positive aspects of the book for me. The dialogue in the book does sometimes have an awkward feel which other reviewers have attributed to poor translation, but I thought that when conversations were stilted or tentative it was natural for those people in that setting and reflected the slightly formal feel of Japanese culture. The narration was superb and really the only thing that stopped me from consigning this book to the DNF pile.

Ultimately I found this book more of a gothic melodrama than anything else and I guess I’m just not romantic enough to have been sucked into its orbit. I’ll acknowledge that it did create an atmosphere of sorts but for me there was no real substance to it and I grew quickly tired of the contrivances of the plot. My personal recommendation for a thoughtful and intriguing work of Japanese crime fiction would be Shuichi Yoshida’s Villain.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The Devotion of Suspect X has been reviewed far more favourably at lots of other places including The Black Sheep Dances and Yet Another Crime Fiction Blog.

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My rating 2/5
Translator Alexander O Smith
Narrator David Pittu
Publisher Macmillan Audio [this edition 2011, original edition 2005]
ISBN N/A (downloaded from audible.com)
Length 9 hours 2 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series possibly the first in a series but so far the only one translated into English
Source I bought it

The Seventh Continent

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For this year’s Global Reading Challenge the requirement from last year’s challenge to read books set in Antarctica has, thankfully, been changed. It’s not that I object in theory to books set there but they do all appear to be of a certain type and two of them will last me a while. So this year, in addition to books from each of the six more lived-in continents participants must read 1-3 books set in a “Seventh Continent” of the reader’s choice “you can either choose Antarctica or your own ´seventh´ setting, eg the sea, the space, a supernatural/paranormal world, history, the future – you name it”.

For my seventh continent I’m using International which I have chosen to define as books which have action in 3 or more countries. The first book I read was John le Carré’s Our Kind of Traitor which had action in England, Antigua, France, Switzerland and, via flashback, Russia. Now I’ve finished my second book in this category, Australian author Adrian d’Hagé’s latest thriller, The Maya Codex, which travels to Austria, Guatemala, America and the Czech Republic.

Those two books are enough to enable me to complete the medium level of the challenge (a total of 14 books) but if I am to press on for the expert level (a total of 21 books) I’ll need a final book for my particular seventh continent.

So, have you read a great book set in lots of countries? It has to be at least 3 but I’d like some more for my final book…perhaps I can find a book set in 6 countries? More? Over to you.

Review: Our Kind of Traitor by John le Carré

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I chose to read John le Carre’s 24th novel because it is due for discussion on a local TV-based book club next week and I was curious to see how le Carré’s work is travelling these days, having enjoyed some of his classics like Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy. I’m also using “international” as my seventh continent for the Global reading challenge which I’m describing as a book which has action in three or more countries (here we visit England, Antigua, France, Switzerland and, via flashback, Russia)

Perry Makepiece and his girlfriend Gail are upper-middle class nearly-thirty-somethings who spend a small inheritance on a once in a lifetime tennis holiday in Antigua. There, in (very) lengthy detail, they meet Dima, a Russian criminal with an extended family who challenges Perry to a tennis match as a cover for inveigling the pair in his plan to defect rather than be assassinated as he soon expects to be. Upon their return to England Perry, trying to shield Gail and her legal career from as much involvement as possible, informs the relevant spooks. So enter Tom, Dick and Harry (the code names the three spies use for a portion of the novel, I’m struggling to remember their real names or why they felt the need for this absurd subterfuge) after which everyone spends some time in a basement and then there’s some more tennis.

That synopsis, interspersed with snippets of Dima’s personal history as a member of the Russian criminal brotherhood, takes about 50% of the audio book to unfold which might give you an idea of the pace of this so-called thriller that slumbers along in second gear for its entirety. If I included the bizarre and disconnected sub plot about Dima’s daughter’s pregnancy to a climbing instructor but left out all the tedious tennis, spy-craft exposition and wallowing in indecision by the spooks, the remainder of the plot could easily be summarised in a single paragraph and then you could all save yourselves the bother of reading it at all. Even the extraordinarily abrupt ending is dull, as if the author was as tired with the whole thing as I was by then.

Le Carré assures us that the money laundering and its links to the UK financial crisis at the heart of this novel is very real and I have no reason to doubt him But it doesn’t matter how real the basis for the novel is if the author can’t make me believe it and I didn’t believe the premise for this novel for a single second. Nothing about the character of Dima, his choice of defection route or the use by the British secret services of a couple of randomly chosen amateurs for work like that felt remotely credible. Even if such things go on every day in the real world, le Carré didn’t manage to make me believe it in his made up one. The ‘instruction’ of Perry and Gail seemed much closer to the spy games I played when I was eight (I got a spy kit for my birthday that year which included invisible ink and machines which my best friend and I used to send and receive coded messages that our respective brothers couldn’t read) than to any real life espionage. I would have been unsurprised to see the cone of silence?

The characters are the final let down of this 11 hour and 23 minute disappointment. In the past le Carré has been a master at creating intriguing people who leap of the page and demand to be investigated, absorbed and understood. Here the characters are all flat and kept at arm’s length with emotions that seemed the same whether they were facing imminent death, the break-up of a marriage or the fact their cup of tea had grown cold. Tom, the oldest of the MI6 agents, is a poor imitation of le Carré’s best-known, bureaucracy mastering creation George Smiley and Dima is a caricature of the evil Russian stereotypes of B grade movies. The rest of the characters have already faded from my mind.

Listening to this book was like one, long yawn. Aside from an excellent narration and the fact that le Carré can still put words together in a way that is pleasing to a lover of the English language there is really nothing to recommend the thing at all. However, elsewhere on the ‘net reviews of the novel are split fairly evenly. If you do decided to read it I hope for your sake you’re in the half of the population that has an entirely different reading experience to the one I had. But just in case I suggest you take a pillow.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 2/5
Author website http://www.johnlecarre.com/
Narrator Michael Jayston
Publisher BBC WW [2010]
ISBN N/A (downloaded from audible.com)
Length 11 hours 23 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series standalone
Source I bought it