Category Archives: amateur sleuth

Review: Prime Time by Liza Marklund

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I’m having a Marklund-fest at the moment, this being my second book of hers in 2 months and I have another to read before the end of March in preparation for incorporating Marklund’s protagonist, journalist Annika Bengtzon, in an upcoming theme week focusing on amateur sleuths at Jen’s Book Thoughts. I am also counting this book towards my Nordic Reading Challenge.

In something of a nod to old-fashioned whodunnits the mystery at the heart of Prime Time concerns the murder of a popular Swedish television presenter, Michelle Carlsson, while she and a dozen other people are staying at remote Yxtaholm Castle for a week of filming. Newspaper journalist Annika Bengtzon is getting ready for a holiday weekend away with her partner Thomas and their two young children when she is called to attend the castle instead. This puts a strain on her relationship with Thomas (who is pathetically distraught at the prospect of having to look after his children on his own) but Annika is not in a position to knock back the assignment. Given that one of her best friends, Anne, is one of the 12 witness/suspects who was at the castle at the time of the murder Annika has a bit of a head start on the story and her resourcefulness as a a journalist does the rest, easily keeping her in-step if not ahead of the police investigation.

Prime Time is not the most taut piece of crime fiction you’ll find. At several points along the way the crime takes a back seat to other activities including political machinations at the pointy end of the news room in which Annika works and an almost microscopic look at the world of media which, if the book is even vaguely accurate, is not one I’d work in if it was the last occupation on earth. Even the resolution to the mystery is almost a non-event, though as is discussed at this excellent review, that can be a blessing when compared to the ‘that beggars belief’ kind of ending we see a lot of. However I thoroughly enjoyed the non-crime-y threads of the novel as it really did give me a sense of a world I don’t know much about. The various players with a role in Carlsson’s life, agent, boss, friend, competitor, were all with her at the Castle and it’s not long before they’re fighting with each other at first to prove how close they were to her and, when that doesn’t work, to dish the dirt as fast as they could. It’s a grim picture that makes my workplace look like a children’s tea party in comparison.

Annika is a complex character who I don’t always like but who is invariably credible. Her personal life is at something of a cross-roads here as her relationship with Thomas (whining SOB that he is) is put to the test and she struggles to overcome her innate tendency to blame herself whenever things go wrong. In Studio 69, which is set several years prior to this novel, Annika is experiencing an abusive relationship and some of the same characteristics are carried over into her current one. Part of the time I felt like wringing her neck for being so insipid but her behaviour is entirely consistent with people who have long experience of such relationships and it’s to Marklund’s credit that she doesn’t ‘fix’ Annika in one fell swoop. And even though she is at times falling apart personally Annika does manage to get her job done despite working in a male-dominated environment where many people view her as having not much more value than pond scum. Her immediate boss is a welcome exception to the rule, though he is undergoing his own crisis involving the ethics, or lack thereof, of his paper’s Publisher.

Prime Time isn’t always the easiest read and not only because it could have done with a little editing but because it tackles some difficult subjects that don’t always have a neat resolution by the end of the novel. Overall though it’s a highly credible and insightful novel about life as a woman who wants a career and family as well as the sort of things that’ll get you killed if you work in television (I’m seriously surprised anyone survives to age fifty).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Prime Time has been reviewed at Euro Crime and Reading Matters

I reviewed Studio 69 earlier this year.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 3.5/5
Author website http://www.lizamarklund.com/
Translator Ingrid Eng-Rundlow
Publisher Pocket Books [this translation 2006, original edition 2002]
ISBN 0743469089
Length 422
Format mass market paperback
Book Series #3 or #4 (depending on how you look at things) in the Annika Bengtzon series
Source borrowed from the library

Review: Burn by Nevada Barr

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National Parks Ranger Anna Pigeon is on administrative leave as she is recovering from recent traumatic events and decides to head to New Orleans where she can stay with a friend, Geneva. One of Geneva’s tenants, a creepy bloke named Jordan, appears to curse Anna using voodoo for no real reason which makes Anna very suspicious. Upon following him into the very seediest parts of post-Katrina New Orleans she becomes involved in a very grim situation involving child sex slavery.

At the same time as these events unfold, another story is also being laid out in intervening chapters. In Seattle, after a late night run to the chemist, Clare Sullivan comes home to find that her husband, her two young daughters and their nanny are all missing from the house. After searching all over she runs next door to see if the neighbours know anything but the house explodes into flames and when they die down firefighters walk out of the wreckage with three bodies, assumed to be her husband and their children. Clare is thought to have murdered them all but goes on the run before she can be arrested.

As you might imagine the two stories end up intertwining, though in a rather unexpected way (though it wouldn’t be so unexpected if you read most of the blurbs and other reviews which give away a fairly major plot point that I was glad I did not know when I started the book).

Although I missed Anna being in the beautiful natural environment of one of the national parks I still enjoyed Barr’s skill at creating a sense of location, this time the city of New Orleans, which is depicted here with beauty and ugliness both and as much more than the tourist destination or news-headline the name conjures up for most. The last part of the story, which takes place inside a club catering to the most perverse sexual tastes is equally well described, if not nearly as enjoyable to immerse oneself in.

Having two main characters whose stories are told in alternating chapters was another difference for this book from any of the others I have read. I liked the structure; particularly in the second half of the book it really added successfully to the build up of tension. I was less taken with the character of Clare, though I can appreciate that Barr was trying something new to keep a series fresh. I can’t give details about what didn’t work for me without giving away plot spoilers so I’ll just say that I didn’t find the focus on Clare’s ‘unique psychology’ particularly engaging. I also thought that it was a bit too easy for Clare to have been a theatre company actor which allowed her to have a diverse range of skills, knowledge and insight that the average suburban mother just would not have.

Overall though the book was compelling, even when the subject matter got very tough to handle. On that score I give Barr credit for not incorporating excessive or gratuitous descriptions of horrid things happening to children, though one’s own imagination does fill in the gaps grimly enough. This is not a book for the faint-hearted but is a well-written, intelligently plotted mystery. It’s worth reading for the character of Anna alone who continues to evolve, grow, make mistakes and generally be a very credible human being. I’m looking forward to number 17.

What about the audio book?

I was a bit wary of this edition because it’s a different narrator than has read the previous two Anna Pigeon books to me but Joyce Bean did an excellent job and I quickly forgot that Anna used to speak with a different voice. The wide range of accents and complex dialogue must have been a stretch for any narrator but Bean sounded like a natural.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The only review I could find of Burn which did not have any nasty big plot spoilers was at Kittling Books (because Cathy just wouldn’t do that sort of thing)

I have reviewed two of the Anna Pigeon books Hunting Season and Borderline

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 3.5/5
Author website
Narrator Joyce Bean
Publisher Brilliance Audio [2010]
ISBN N/A (downloaded from audible.com)
Length 12 hours
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series #16 in the Anna Pigeon series
Source I bought it

Review: Buffalo West Wing by Julie Hyzy

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The fourth book in the White House chef series sees Executive Chef Olivia (Ollie) Paras and the rest of the White House kitchen staff welcoming a new President on Inauguration Day. But when Ollie finds a box of famous brand barbeque chicken wings have been delivered especially for the new President’s young children she makes the unpopular decision of refusing to give the wings to the children because she doesn’t know who delivered the box and the rules about what food can be given to the First Family are very clear. The decision plays a role in the President’s wife bringing in a new personal chef to the White House and even though her job is on the line Ollie is not allowed to tell the First Lady that the chicken turned out to be poisoned or that the children are still under threat.

I like this series because of the out-of-the-ordinary setting so it didn’t really bother me that in this one there was less mysterious drama for Ollie to be involved with than in some of the previous books. In some ways it made for a more believable story because it really isn’t feasible that chefs face a life threatening situation every day, and the inner workings of the kitchen politics that underpinned this one kept me entertained and empathetic. Poor Ollie has her job in jeopardy for doing exactly what she was supposed to do with respect to her workplace rules and has to cover for the shortcomings of the person brought in to potentially replace her. Anyone know a workplace where that kind of thing doesn’t happen regularly? If you do can you leave me a comment and an application form?

If not terribly real-world credible the core of the mystery here is logical and believable within the context of the novel and not nearly as far-fetched as some cosies tend to be. It involves people from a hostile country (Hyzy sensibly made up a country rather than ascribe evil intent to anyone real) wanting something from the US Government that they are unlikely to want to give so dastardly means are resorted to and Ollie is, once again, in the right place to attempt to save the day.

This is a light, quick read that is full of well-researched details about White House goings-on. The characters are fun to love (or hate) and there is enough suspense in the story to while away some pleasant reading hours.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I have reviewed the three previous books in this series State of the Onion, Hail to the Chief and Eggsecutive Orders
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 3/5
Author website http://www.juliehyzy.com/
Publisher Berkley Prime Crime [2011]
ISBN 9780425239230
Length 275 pages (plus recipes at the end)
Format mass market paperback
Book Series #4 in the White House Chef mysteries
Source I bought it

Review: Studio 69 by Liza Marklund

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I am normally a fan of reading series in order wherever possible but I have given up trying to work out the correct order for this series. The books do not follow each other chronologically and also seem to have been translated out of the order they were written. This one has also been published under several titles including Studio Sex and more recently Exposed, but whatever it’s called I’m counting it towards my Nordic book challenge.

When young journalist Annika Bengtzon answers her newspaper’s tip line and hears that a woman’s body has been found behind a gravestone at a nearby cemetery she fights for the opportunity to be able to report the story which will, hopefully, lead to a permanent job with the paper. Over what sounds more like the average Australian summer than a Swedish one in terms of temperature, Annika follows leads, becomes personally involved in some aspects of the case and uncovers a link to high-level political corruption in an effort to solve the murder of Josefin.

I doubt I’d have read this book based on its blurb which says Annika is a combination of Peter Hoeg’s Miss Smilla and Thomas Harris’ Clarice Starling. What the…? Fortunately I didn’t read any of that nonsense until I’d finished this remarkably good book. The plot manages to be complex but not hard to follow as we are introduced to various potential suspects including a sleazy boyfriend, a client at the seedy club where she worked and a Minister of the government. What I liked most was that even though Annika’s actions were driving most of the plot advancements there wasn’t a single point at which I thought “someone who isn’t with the police wouldn’t be able to do that or have access to that information” which can be a real problem with the ‘amateur’ sleuth in crime fiction. When we moved into the political arena I was absolutely enthralled with the tidbits I gleaned about the recent history of Swedish politics.

Annika is a fascinating character. Her inexperience hampers her at times but she does good work too as is evidenced in the way she gains people’s confidence and trust during interviews and it is obvious that she really cares about the plight of Josefin, and perhaps even identifies with her a little too much. She faces various struggles in her workplace being both young and female so automatically not to be taken seriously by many. Actually the workplace issues were really credibly depicted with both the good and bad aspects of any office on display. There were petty squabbles and nasty back-stabbing but also genuine friendships and mentoring of our young protagonist to even things out. Annika’s personal life is not smooth-sailing either as she has a fairly poor relationship with her mother and a controlling boyfriend. However her grandmother loves her to bits and the feeling is mutual so all is not gloom and doom on that score.

Marklund has created a terrifically believable story here full of well drawn characters, many of whom are not as sympathetic as I found Annika to be but are still highly credible. The picture of Sweden on show is remarkably normal, and not any more dour or grim than any other part of the world which flies in the fact of accepted wisdom about Scandinavian crime fiction. Clearly Marklund had issues she wanted to explore such as the shenanigans of the Social Democrats, domestic violence and even the relatively recent phenomenon of the mass hysteria that wallowing in these kinds of events can sometimes generate, but all of this is done as part of the story not with lecturing or preaching for which I am profoundly grateful. I found the book so compelling I already have moved another in the series to my ‘read soon’ pile.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Studio 69 has been reviewed at DJ’s Krimiblog, Nordic Bookblog and if you are at all interested in this author you should check out this excellent post about the books and the character of Annika

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 4.5/5
Author website http://www.lizamarklund.com/
Translator Kajsa von Hofsten
Publisher Pocket Books [This translation 2002, original edition 1999]
ISBN N/A (downloaded from audible.com)
Length 431 pages
Format mass market paperback
Book Series Number 1 or 4 in the Annika Bengtzon series
Source I bought it second hand

Review: The Strange Files of Fremont Jones by Dianne Day

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When her father marries a woman who she dislikes Caroline Jones brings forward her plans to live an unconventional life. Determined not to marry because of the way it diminishes the role of the woman, she moves from Boston to San Francisco, changes her name to a gender-neutral Fremont and sets up a business as a typist. And it is that business, plus a fascination with Sherlock Holmes, that introduces Fremont to the role of amateur deduction as she becomes involved in investigating several mysteries that her clients seem to be caught up in. One customer leaves a series of gothic horror stories which he claims to be true for her to type and then disappears, while another is killed shortly after Fremont types a curious document for him.

I enjoyed the depiction of San Francisco in the early 1900′s as a place for adventurers and dreamers and the overall inclusion of period details was well done too. The picture painted of a town at a time of change and flux included things like the adoption of new technologies such as the telephone and electricity and it was very engaging.

For me the rest of the book was not as successful. The blurb on my copy suggested it would be suitable for fans of Elizabeth Peters whose character, Amelia Peabody, does share some traits with Fremont Jones. However I found the writing here more stiff and lacking the underlying sense of humour that Peters conveys with her similarly strident and forward-thinking protagonist. There was also too much focus on a fairly implausible romance between Fremont and her first client for my tastes. The use of the first person narrative and Day’s penchant for exclamation points at the end of innocuous sentences contributed to the impression the entire tale was being told by a breathless teenager seeing intrigue where none exists. In all then the book was a bit more of a melodramatic suspense than I enjoy reading but there are plenty of readers who would disagree, including those who awarded the novel a Macavity award for best first novel in 1996.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 2.5/5
Author website http://www.avadianneday.com/
Publisher Bantam [this edition 1996, original edition 1995]
ISBN 055356921X
Length 244 pages
Format mass market paperback
Book Series #1 in the Fremont Jones series
Source I bought it

Review: Pelagia & the White Bulldog by Boris Akunin

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After an abandoned attempt to read Death in Breslau I borrowed a second book from the local library to kick off this year’s Eastern Europe Challenge.

Pelagia & the White Bulldog is the first novel of a series set in late 19th century Russia and introduces Sister Pelagia: “a fidgety, curious woman, undignified in her movements and not cut out to be a nun.” She is tasked by the Bishop of Zavolzhie to investigate a situation which is vexing his Aunt who claims that someone has tried to poison the last remaining examples of the the white bulldogs with brown ears that her husband had especially bred before his death. That is really all I can tell you about the plot without delving into action that does not take place until the half-way point of the novel. Although I suppose it is not spoiling things too much to add that there is a second (eventually intertwined) storyline relating to the appointment of Vladimir Lvovich Bubenstov as a representative of the Orthodox Church’s Holy Synod to investigate religious improprieties in the town.

I have to admit to struggling with this book and in some ways I shouldn’t have been surprised. One of the reasons I stopped a formal study of literature during my University days was that I couldn’t face reading what I came to think of as ‘another bloody Russian’ that the syllabus seemed to be full of. I don’t know if it is the original writing or the way the language is translated into English but the one thing the Russian fiction of my acquaintance has in common is an unwillingness to use 10 words when 200 (or 2000) are available. I found the flowery, long-winded prose of Tolstoy and Dostoyesvky dread-inducing all those years ago but I thought perhaps a less ‘worthy’, more recent title might be different. Alas I did not find it so. Amidst the interminably lengthy descriptions of nothing much at all there is a story, of sorts, here but not one that kept me particularly engaged (and not one that couldn’t have been told in one-third the word count). I teased out some interesting observations about the politics of the day but as a mystery the book left a lot to be desired in that the culprit for the crimes that were eventually described was obvious almost from the outset and the way in which Pelagia deduced the answer bordered on the inane.

I didn’t find the characters particularly enjoyable either. I thought I would like Pelagia’s quirkiness but she soon turned into a kind of reject from a Carry On movie what with knocking over fruit bowls and spilling tea in men’s crotches and whatnot. Slapstick has never been my humour of choice. The rest of the characters were all pretty formulaic for the intimate melodrama the book turned into, though the way Bubenstov hid is evilness was the most entertaining thing about the book for me.

I know there are readers who don’t share my admiration for brevity and conciseness and more who simply enjoy the kind of writing that Akunin has produced here. I am probably the poorer for not being able to appreciate this particular style but it can’t be helped. For me the hints of wry humour and mildly interesting plot were lost in the flowery, tangent-riddled prose that made me want to poke my own eyes out with one of the knitting needles that Pelagia carried everywhere.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I couldn’t find much in the way of online reviewing of this book but did come across a 2006 review in the UK paper The Independent that describes a similar reaction to mine. However in the interests of fairness you might want to check Amazon for some more positive reviews.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 2/5 (yes it probably is a little low, but it’s my opinion after all, as all the reviews here are, I’m not making any claims to objectivity)
Author website http://www.boris-akunin.com/
Translator Andrew Bromfield
Publisher Weidenfield & Nicolson [this translation 2006, original edition 2000]
ISBN 0297852507
Length 295 pages
Format paperback
Book Series #1 in the Sister Pelagia series
Source borrowed from the library

Review: The Body on the Beach by Simon Brett

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As part of the Good Reads Aussie Readers Summer Reading challenge I needed to read a book with a word related to summer in the title. As I’m using my TBR pile for the whole challenge my only option was this book with the word beach in the title as I had nothing else summer-y to read (I’m not a fan of the season so this is not surprising).

Carole Seddon is not someone I’d like to meet in real life. In her 50′s and retired from a job in the Home Office she has established a very orderly life for herself in the village of Fethering. She has a long list of rules about what constitutes acceptable and unacceptable behaviours and seems to judge people on the most insignificant of factors. As this book opens she is walking her dog Gulliver on the beach when they discover a body. After making her way home and washing the dog Carole notifies the Police but when they look in the spot Carole has described there is no body. Being a little shocked at finding a body and at having been treated like a silly old lady by the Police, Carole takes the unusual step of talking to her new neighbour about the events.

Jude (just Jude, no surname) is the woman who has moved in next door to Carole and is her complete opposite in terms of personality. She has no set rules for acceptable behaviour as can be evidenced by her ordering large glasses of wine (sometimes at lunch time) and beating her rugs in the front garden! But though Jude isn’t ‘a Fethering sort of person at all’ she listens to Carole and doesn’t think she’s crazy so the two women embark on a friendship of sorts and decide to investigate what happened to the body they are both convinced that Carole saw. Through a series of orchestrated meetings with key players in the village they start to build up a picture of what might have gone on.

As the setting is described in a fair amount of detail the story here is slow to get going but once it does there’s a nice build up of suspense, though the plot is not terribly difficult to work out for people who’ve read a lot of crime fiction. However if English village mysteries are your thing then I think you’d really enjoy this book as Brett has done a great job of depicting the place and its various characters so that not all is as idyllic as it might first appear. Somewhat unusually for this kind of story the motive for murder and associated covering up activities is really very credible when finally revealed.

There are a further 11 books (so far) in this series and because there are hints that Carole’s very prim and proper personality might be weakening towards the end of this book I could be tempted to read another if for no other reason than to find out if she does join the human race after all. The Body on the Beach certainly has decent plotting, an intricately drawn setting and credible, if not likable, characters to recommend it as a promising start to a series.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 3/5
Author website http://www.simonbrett.com/
Publisher Macmillan [2000]
ISBN 0330376969
Length 327 pages
Format mass market paperback
Book Series #1 in the Fethering series
Source I mooched it

Review: The House at Sea’s End by Elly Griffiths

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Ostensibly The House at Sea’s End is about the discovery of the bones of six people in an isolated cove on the Norfolk coast, just beneath the house of the local MP whose house is, literally, crumbling into the sea. The bones are old but not ancient, less than one one hundred years old on first inspection, and it transpires they are likely of German origin given the chemicals found within them. These facts fit in with the war-time history of the area. It soon becomes clear that someone doesn’t want the secret of the bones revealed when a journalist who is investigating the find is found dead so official investigators have two mysteries to solve.

But for me the book is less about all this than it is about people. Funny, fearful, loving, sad, conflicted, imperfect ordinary, lovable people. Our heroine Ruth Galloway is a forensic archaeologist with the fictional North Norfolk University and is involved at the outset with the dating of and investigation into the discovery of the bones. This is her first big task, other than routine lecturing duties, since she came back to work from maternity leave and she is struggling with the demands of work and learning how to look after her new baby. Being Ruth she deals with it, at least in part, via an ever-present witty, self-deprecating internal monologue. Above this Ruth’s charm is her credibility: her conflicting hopes for her future and the haphazard way she deals with the strangeness her life throws up make her instinctively likable and someone who ‘the average person’ can identify with.

The hero of the novel, who is taking on an increasingly larger role as the series progresses, is DCI Harry Nelson, the main policeman who Ruth has worked with in all the investigations with which she has been involved. Harry is married to a glamorous hairdresser and in some ways has nothing in common with the overweight, unglamorous Ruth. However they share intellectual interests and they work together in a very complementary way. Harry is perhaps less likable for some, he is very sarcastic (which I happen to love) and his personal choices are not always to be admired but once again I think he’s a very realistic character and I enjoy him almost as much as Ruth.

Some of the minor characters in the series are taking shape nicely too, my favourite of these is the lab worker and practicing Pagan, Cathbad who seems to have appointed himself some kind of personal guardian for the Galloway family. He brings a hint of spirituality to the novel but he’s also quite practical at times and it’s rather delightful watching the relationship between him and Harry develop into something approaching friendship, regardless of how unlikely this might seem to both of them.

If you’re looking for complicated, extremely suspenseful crime fiction you’ll need to look elsewhere. The war-time mystery was pretty straight-forward, though unraveled well, and even the present-day intrigue was be fairly easily solved, though there was misdirection and we had a few tense moments worrying about key characters. The plot itself and the motivations are credible though, even if not terribly taxing for die-hard crime fiction fans. Griffiths has continued giving the books a sense of crime fiction history too, this time by incorporating a simple code to be broken in the form of a list of popular mystery novels (on a note of the “I think publishing might be in trouble” kind I can’t help but make a comment about the proofreading done here though, Omar Yuseff is the protagonist of The Fourth Assassin which was written by Matt Rees).

I read The House at Sea’s End in a single day, cobbling time from chores and family obligations, because I couldn’t not do so. I wanted to savour it slowly and eek out the experience of being surrounded by enjoyable, interesting people but in the end I could not stop until I got to the very end. I am a little sad that I’ll probably have to wait a whole year for another installment but I’m very happy that the book lived up to its predecessors and my own anticipation.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The House at Sea’s End has been reviewed at Euro Crime

If you are going to read this series I strongly recommend you start at the beginning with The Crossing Places then The Janus Stone (which was one of my top ten reads of last year) (not bad in a year when I finished 162 books).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 4/5
Author website http://www.ellygriffiths.co.uk/
Publisher Quercus [2011]
ISBN 9781849163682
Length 356 pages
Format trade paperback
Book Series Number 3 in the Ruth Galloway series
Source I bought it

Review: Waterloo Sunset by Martin Edwards

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“In Memory. Harry Devlin. Died Suddenly, Liverpool. Midsummer’s Eve”

Six days before Midsummer’s Eve an announcement containing these words is hand delivered to the office of very much alive lawyer Harry Devlin. Harry’s partner in the legal practice thinks it’s a bit of a joke but Harry is not so sure and tries to work out who might have sent the announcement and what their intent might be. As Harry deals with a series of subsequent unsettling reminders of his possible upcoming death, he also becomes perturbed by a case in which first one body of a young woman then another is found mutilated. Don’t let that put you off though because this is not a book about graphic mutilations and psychopathic serial killers. It’s about ordinary, everyday people and their reactions to the sometimes extraordinary things that happen around them.

Among the many fine qualities displayed in Waterloo Sunset my favourite is the underlying sense of humour. Harry is a witty, satirical character whose reaction to such things as the pronouncements by management consultants about how he should maximise his business potential and the efforts by authorities to turn Liverpool into the City of Culture are priceless. But Harry’s partner describes him as “setting a gold standard in attracting trouble” so the humour is matched by action in the novel as Harry’s personal and professional lives become increasingly complicated. For openers an old lover (who is the ex-wife of one of the city’s most prominent gangsters) resurfaces while he attempts to connect with a new love interest, a client accuses him of conspiring to cover up the killing of his mother and at one point he is suspected of involvement in a murder.

Another thing that struck me about this book was the authentic feel of the character’s behaviour throughout the novel. Whether it was the man flinging accusations about the cover up of his mother’s murder at a nursing home, Harry’s partner’s response to Harry receiving the death notice or their building security man’s reaction to Harry discovering him in a compromising position they were all very believable characters behaving in ways that suited the picture Edwards had drawn of them. You generally expect the main characters to be handled properly in a novel like this but it’s pleasing to see the minor ones being deftly drawn too.

This book has a complicated plot which in a lesser writer’s hands might have devolved into chaos but Edwards keeps track of all the threads, red herrings and side-tracks with aplomb. Towards the end as one of the main threads is resolved I had all but forgotten about the Midsummer’s Eve announcement but fortunately Edwards had not and treated us to a humdinger of a climax. I had not read any of the previous seven novels in this series but did not feel at any disadvantage in terms of understanding the story and was easily drawn into Harry’s world and the city of Liverpool.

What about the audio book?

There’s no doubt that part of the attraction for me of Martin Edwards’ books in audio format (I have another one lined up already on my iPod) is that they’re narrated by Gordon Griffin who is an outstanding actor and storyteller (he has also narrated the two Ann Cleeves novels I’ve listened to).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Waterloo Sunset has also been reviewed at Crimetime UK, DJ’s Krimiblog, Euro Crime and Mysterious Reviews

I have read and reviewed two of Edwards’ Lake District series: The Coffin Trail and The Arsinic Labyrinth as well as his brilliant fictionalised account of Hawley Crippen’s murder of his wife in Dancing for the Hangman.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 3.5/5
Author website http://www.martinedwardsbooks.com/
Narrator Gordon Griffin
Publisher ISIS Audio Books [2008]
ISBN N/A (downloaded from audible.com)
Length 10 hours 46 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series Number 8 in the Harry Devlin series
Source I bought it

Review: A Killer Plot by Ellery Adams

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I picked this one up from the ‘new’ shelves at my local library but was going to take it back unread due to my new focus on only reading the books I already own/planned to read but Cathy prompted me to read it before taking it back.

Olivia Limoges has moved back to the town where she was born, Oyster Bay in North Carolina. Having experienced some personal tragedies in her life she is something of a loner, preferring the company of Captain Haviland, her highly trained standard poodle, than other people. Almost against her will though she is drawn into friendship with a group of local writers who meet regularly to discuss and critique each other’s work. When one of the group is killed and a haiku left next to the body Olivia and the other members of the writer’s group all feel a particular interest in investigating the murder.

I really enjoyed this introduction to a new series with its great location and interesting characters. Olivia is working on a novel set in ancient Egypt in between her business interests which include owning the town’s only 5-star restaurant and being a member of the town’s Planning Committee. She is aloof and a bit prickly but she has a practical approach to helping people when they’re in need and I liked her. It probably helped that she treated her dog with the deference and adoration that all dogs deserve. There are loads of great minor characters too who I will enjoy getting to know in future installments of this series.

I thought the resolution to the mystery was a little bit awkward and unnecessarily complicated but overall the plot development was solid and importantly did not involve depicting the official investigators as moronic simpletons. There’s lots going on in the novel though as the body count piles up and the alibis are scrutinized and the tension builds nicely. Overall it’s a fun, light mystery with a load of engaging characters and if you are a dog lover I think it’s one you will particularly enjoy.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

A Killer Plot has been reviewed at Kittling Books

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 3/5
Author website http://www.elleryadamsmysteries.com/
Publisher Berkley Prime Crime [2010]
ISBN 9780425235225
Length 311 pages
Format mass market paperback
Book Series Number #1 in the Books by the Bay series
Source borrowed from the library