Category Archives: crime fiction

Review: The Old School by P M Newton

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This debut novel by ex policewoman P M Newton made it to my shopping basket because I’m trying to read as much Aussie crime fiction as I can and because a crime fiction commentator I respect, Graeme Blundell, said the book “puts Newton in the company of Gabrielle Lord and Peter Temple“. After that I couldn’t resist.

It is 1992 and Nhu ‘Ned’ Kelly is a relatively newly qualified Detective Constable in Sydney’s west. When two sets of bones are discovered in the foundations of a building being demolished Ned is drawn into the investigation both for professional and personal reasons. Determining who the people were and what happened to them unfolds within a wider context of social issues affecting the city both in the mid 1970′s, when the bodies were placed in the concrete foundations, and sixteen years later when they are discovered. The Aboriginal land rights movement, the treatment of soldiers returning from the Vietnam war, the absorption of different cultures into the sprawling city and the misappropriation of power by some within the police force are all woven into a complex but highly believable story.

Having lived on the fringes of the giant sprawl that is Sydney during the late 80’s and early 90’s the aspect of the book that stood out most strongly for me was that Newton has captured perfectly the things I loved about living there and the things that drove me away. The multitudes of cultures that rub along together, the endless traffic snarls, the dodgy politics, the chasm between haves and have nots are all to be found in this novel. Anchoring the book to its time are major real life events including the Independent Commission Against Corruption’s inquiry into corruption in the NSW Police Force. I can honestly attest that, just as in this book, ICAC wasn’t an acronym in Sydney in 1992: it was a word that everyone knew the meaning of and everyone was talking about. Another significant event that is used to great impact in The Old School is the speech given by our then Prime Minister (and written by one of Australia’s unsung political heroes) to launch the International Year for the World’s Indigenous Peoples.

Born in Australia to a Vietnamese mother and an Irish-Australian father she carries not much more than her name to acknowledge the Vietnamese part of her heritage. And even there she prefers the Australian nickname that was inevitable with a surname like Kelly and an unpronounceable first name starting with N. There are reasons for Ned’s decisions and these are teased out beautifully in the story to provide depth to her character. She is surrounded by other intriguing people too. Her loving sister, her prejudiced Aunt, a range of colleagues with their own foibles and personal demons. All of these people are imperfect and often unlikable but they are all highly credible and the kind of people you want to read more about.

This book has all the ingredients of the top notch crime fiction. There are believable, interesting characters, a story that keeps readers guessing, a strong sense of its time and place and something to say about the human condition. Would police be so open to corruption if they were all paid enough to live comfortably in one of the most expensive cities to live in the world? Can we learn anything from our collective past or are we doomed to repeat the worst abuses of our fellow man over and over again? There is a slight over-reliance on coincidence and perhaps a thread or two too many woven into the plot but overall this is a highly readable and impressive debut and I look forward to reading the next installment of this series.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 4/5

Publisher Penguin [2010]; ISBN 9780670074518; Length 363 pages

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The Old School has been reviewed at Mysteries in Paradise

You can listen to Paul Keating’s 1992 speech here (though only if you have IE or Firefox).

Review: Death in the Andes by Mario Vargas Llosa

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My 14th stop on the Global Reading Challenge took me to Peru in South America.

Ostensibly this book is about the disappearances of three men in the mountains of Peru which two Civil Guards are sent to investigate. However this is not much more than a plot device for the author to explore broader themes such as poverty, violence and hopelessness. And he throws in a dash of romance (of the cruder variety) for levity.

If I’d read anything about this book before picking it up from my local library I wouldn’t have brought it home with me because it is exactly the kind of book my brain cannot process. Although it didn’t take me as long, reading it reminded me very much of the long four months it took me to plod through Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ Love in the Time of Cholera a few years ago because everyone said it was so wonderful. I once again thought I’d have made about as much sense of the book if I’d read it in its original (and to me incomprehensible) language. In short I don’t ‘do’ magical realism and this book is full of it.

The two investigators, Captain Lituma and his sidekick Tomás, treat the local villagers as little better than savages or simpletons, especially when they discover that the locals still practice ancient spiritual beliefs and attribute the disappearances of the three men to these mystical elements. I won’t even pretend I understood these beliefs which seemed to have a heavy supernatural element and the only thing I’ll remember is the ‘pishtacos’ which are some kind of fat-sucking spooky thing that I don’t think it would be pleasant to meet.

Aside from this element the book is extremely violent, not surprisingly I suppose as it looks in-depth at the brutal reign of the communist guerrillas known as Sendero Luminoso (or Shining Path) and their impact on local people and politics.  Lituma believes they’re responsible for the disappearances rather than any mystical being and he spends a lot of time talking about murders, rapes and torture he has witnessed or knows of. There wasn’t much room for sunshine and happiness in all of this. I imagine Lituma’s endless fascination with his off-sider’s romantic attachment to a prostitute he went on the run with when he shot her client while she was servicing him was meant to provide that lighter element to the book but honestly I just found it needlessly crude and bordering on repulsive.

The combination of a narrative told from a constantly changing point of view, a major fantasy element and  the endless violence and crude language did not appeal to me at all. Even the translation provided a bit of a struggle as many words were left in the original language with no explanation provided as to why. There were moments where I was engaged enough by a snippet of narrative to want to learn more about the plight of the people (or, heaven forbid, find out the outcome of the mystery) but these were few and surrounded by too much surrealism for me. In fact I wouldn’t have bothered finishing the book at all if it weren’t for the fact that South American books have proven elusive to track down for the Global Reading Challenge. However, there are plenty of very positive reviews of Death in the Andes at Amazon and elsewhere so don’t take my non-fantasy-loving brain’s word on it.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 2/5

Translator Edith Grossman; Publisher Faber and Faber [1996]; ISBN 0571175481; Length 275 pages

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Review: Gunshot Road by Adrian Hyland

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I try quite hard to have no expectations of the books I read. Even if I have enjoyed an author’s work before there is no guarantee I will do so the next time and sometimes I disagree with even my favourite reviewers. But I admit to tingling with anticipation when notified by the bookseller that my pre-order of Gunshot Road had left the warehouse and was on its way to me. I read it as the last book in my Aussie Author Challenge for this year.

Emily Tempest has become the world’s most unlikely cop, an Aboriginal Community Police Officer no less. On her first day on the job in Bluebush in the Northern Territory she is one of the officers called to the scene of a stabbing out at Green Swamp Well. On the surface it looks like an open and shut case: two old drunks got into a fight and one stabbed the other in the neck. But to Emily, who knows both the victim (Doc) and the suspect (Wireless), something doesn’t feel right and she can’t let the investigation slide.

Gunshot Road has it all. Literally. Everything I could possibly want from a work of fiction all in one gorgeous package.

First there are fantastic characters. Emily Tempest is brave and stubborn and smart and funny and, as was the case with the first book in which she features, I’m still not entirely sure how a bloke can create such a credible female character but I’m delighted he has. In this book she is more mature than in her first outing though she still struggles when she knows what she should do is not what she wants to do and usually her heart wins out over her head. For better or worse.

There are plenty of other beautifully depicted characters to look out for too. Like the teenage Aboriginal boy called Danny who is deeply troubled by something and unable to communicate his fears to Emily. And the town’s new top cop, taciturn and uncomprehending of all the things he doesn’t know, but trying to do the right thing in his way. And of course the setting, the harsh land in the country’s centre, is just as much a character as any person in the book.

The desert isolation, the unrelenting heat, the laconic humour, the often awkward relationships between blacks and whites all combine to form an unmistakably Australian story. It’s not always a pretty one though and no one could accuse Hyland of trying to make it so because he tackles touch subjects such as the rampant domestic abuse of women in Aboriginal communities, endemic poverty and racism. However he somehow manages to do it without once lecturing from a self-proclaimed moral high ground. That’s a much rarer trait than it ought to be in modern literature.

Next there is writing that made me simultaneously jealous at someone else’s ability to string words together in a way that I will never be able to and grateful that he didn’t keep his gift to himself.  This is from the opening chapter about an initiation

The town mob: fractured and deracinated they might have been, torn apart by idleness and violence, by Hollywood and booze. But moments like these, when people come together, when they try to recover the core, they gave you hope.

It was the songs that did it: the women didn’t so much sing them as pick them up like radio receivers. You could imagine those great song cycles rolling across country, taking their shape from what they encountered: scraps of language, minerals and dreams, a hawk’s flight, a feather’s fall, the flash of a meteorite.

The resonance of that music is everywhere, even here, on the outskirts of the whitefeller town, out among the rubbish dumps and truck yards. It sings along the wires, it rings off bitumen and steel.

I could go on but I’d end up quoting the whole book. In short, Hyland’s writing is a thing of beauty and the entire book is, in part, one long ode to its country.

Finally there is a great story and Gunshot Road is a more solid piece of crime fiction than its predecessor. For the first half of the novel there’s a fairly slow, humorous approach to the investigation as we’re introduced to all the players and people tease Emily about her new obsession. Then at a certain point the novel switches gears and speeds up as it becomes more serious and foreboding. Together these halves make up a perfectly paced story with a genuine nail-biting finish.

Heck the book even incorporates, glorifies actually, geology, my favourite science. What more could I possibly ask for? Gunshot Road is a funny, beautiful, sad and thoughtful book that everyone should read. Immediately.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 5/5

Publisher Quercus [2010]; ISBN 9781849162158; Length 369 pages

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I read, and loved, Adrian Hyland’s first novel featuring Emily Tempest, Diamond Dove (a.k.a Moonlight Downs in the US) last year.

Gunshot Road has also been reviewed at Aust Crime Fiction, International Noir Fiction, Kittling Books and Petrona

Review: A Not So Perfect Crime by Teresa Solana

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In something of a rarity for me I bought this book solely based on the blurb I read at the publisher’s website. It’s the the 13th of 21 books I need to read to complete my extreme global reading challenge and, set in Spain, is the last book on the European leg of this virtual trip.

Eduard and Borja are non-identical twin brothers, though they don’t tell anyone (for reasons that remain a bit murky). Having not seen each other for many years they now run a business together which is a kind of private detective agency (with the emphasis more on the privacy than the detection). Essentially they undertake confidential assignments for Barcelona’s wealthy and influential people. One day a politician with ambitions of his Party’s highest office, Lluis Font, asks them to discover who painted a portrait he found of his wife and to determine if she was having an affair with the painter. He is, he says, troubled by the prospect of a scandal that might damage his chances of further political success. Before long though the brothers find themselves investigating an all together nastier crime than possible infidelity.

It is a book of small details that paint a deliciously funny portrait of the brothers and the wider society in which they live. As the book’s narrator Eduard introduces himself and his brother and explains how it is that no one would know they are brothers unless they were told. Borja is stylish and sophisticated, Eduard prefers corduroy trousers and lace-up shoes; Borja has trotted the globe for twenty years while Eduard worked in a bank; and “Borja is right wing (for aesthetic reasons, he claims) and [Eudard] soldiers on as a non-voting disillusioned left-winger”. How could I not love such a character? Despite these differences the brothers really do get on rather well and as they fumble their way through an investigation which turns more serious than it first appeared their sibling relationship is shown to be quite strong and rather sweet.

I suspect I only scratched the surface of the satirical aspects of the novel as I’m just not that knowledgeable about Catalan politics or society though even I couldn’t miss some of the not-so-gentle gibes as the wealthy were pilloried and juxtaposed with Eduard’s middle class surrounds. These aspects do sometimes take precedence over the mystery, which at times seems like it might never be solved by ‘detectives’ who don’t even carry a camera and who are more concerned with finding a parking spot in crowded Barcelona than employing standard tailing techniques, but there is an old-fashioned whodunnit within this book too. The introduction of a series of possible suspects provides the perfect device for the author to show Catalan society in many of its guises.

Sometimes it takes a while for me to ‘get into’ a book and on other occasions I know within the first few pages that it’s my kind of thing. Happily A Not So Perfect Crime fell into the later category. The book is superbly translated (from the Catalan) by Peter Bush who has retained a speedily flowing and delightfully funny tale. The fact that the story turned out to have a surprisingly thoughtful ending, musing on the subject of justice and whose job it is to hand it out, pushed the book to a four-star rating on my scale. Scrumptious.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 4/5

Translator Peter Bush Publisher Bitter Lemon Press [this translation 2008, original edition 2006]; ISBN 9781904738343; Length 286 pages

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A Not So Perfect Crime has also been reviewed at Euro Crime (minor spoiler alert though) and Reviewing the Evidence

Review: Badfellas by Tonino Benacquista

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Badfellas is the fourth of six novels shortlisted for the 2010 Crime Writers’ Association award for crime fiction translated into English that I aim to read before winners are announced next month.

Badfellas asks readers to imagine that the FBI’s witness protection programme has moved the Soprano family to Normandy. Having only ever watched three-quarters of an episode of the tv show that everyone but me loves I couldn’t quite manage that but I got the general idea. Giovanni Manzoni was a major Mafia boss who snitched on just about everyone in his organisation, ensuring many of them would be incarcerated for decades. What’s left of the Mafia are determined to kill him (and if honour isn’t reason enough there’s a $20million reward on offer) and the FBI is just as determined to keep him alive so that others will be tempted to become snitches. Manzoni and his family have been moved several times for their protection and as this book opens they are now known as the Blake family and are settling in the small town of Cholong-sur-Avre in France.

Given I generally avoid books and movies featuring mafia/organised crime as a central plot element I’m sure I missed loads of references to other works on this theme though even I picked up a few. But even without this intimate knowledge I could appreciate the satire and dark humour of Badfellas which is due to clever, quite sparse writing and an excellent translation by Emily Read. I especially liked the entire sections of the book which have little to do with things-Mafia, such as the parallels drawn between the present-day circumstances in the Region and Normandy’s WWII ‘invasion’ by Americans which are very amusingly done. There’s also a brilliant passage describing how the presence of the Blake/Manzoni family in France finally gets back to the head of the Cosa Nostra in his New York prison cell that’s almost worth the price of the book alone.

For me the most interesting aspect of the novel was the depiction of the impact of the exile on all the characters, including the repugnant Fred/Giovanni. In some ways he is the most affected, having lost his status and his raison d’être, but I couldn’t summon an ounce of sympathy for him and in fact his general attitude still makes me cranky enough that I shan’t talk about him any more. Maggie, whose real name is Livia, is his wife and she is also deeply affected by the exile. She misses her friends and family, but also feels such guilt over her circumstances and the part she played in her husband’s actions that she develops an almost unstoppable zeal for doing good to redeem herself. She cooks wonderful food for the poor FBI agents who assigned as their guardians because they too have to live away from their families for long periods of time and she becomes heavily involved in charitable pursuits in the town. Their two children Belle and Warren are also deeply affected by their father’s actions, though in Warren’s case it has a particularly surprising result as the 14-year old plots how he will recapture the place in the organisation that his father lost by his cowardly actions.

Overall I loved the writing and the way Badfellas is constructed and would recommend it based on these terrific attributes. But I am, like Norman at Crime Scraps, still a little conflicted about the content of the book. Because although Fred Blake/Giovanni Manzoni is revealed as a repellent human being with no redeeming qualities that I could discern he does, essentially, get away with murder. Repeatedly. And something about that irks me. I can deal with a book that has no morality to it at all, but I struggle just a bit harder to deal with a book which seems to suggest, however subtly, that crime pays. And that hideous, murderous crime pays a villa in the French countryside.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 3.5/5

Translator Emily Read; Publisher Bitter Lemon Press [original edition 2004, this translation 2010]; ISBN 9781904738435; Length 282 pages

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Badfellas has been reviewed at Crime Scraps, Euro Crime and Petrona and, as I mentioned, is one of six novels shortlisted for the 2010 CWA International Dagger award

Review: The Darkest Room by Johan Theorin

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Johan Theorin’s first book was one of my top ten reads of last year so I didn’t need much incentive to settle down with his second novel, though being able to count it towards my 2010 Scandinavian Reading Challenge obligation and knowing it’s one of the four books I have left to read on the CWA International Dagger shortlist didn’t hurt.

Even though I read it alone and there wasn’t a campfire in sight reading The Darkest Room was a similar experience to having sat at the feet of an old-fashioned storyteller and become engrossed in his latest tale. Different threads and themes are woven together in a way that would be a disaster in a lesser craftsman’s hands but in Theorin’s, who is clearly a master of his craft, the sensitively translated product is deliciously atmospheric.

The novel centres on a house which was originally built from timber washed ashore after a shipwreck in 1846. The house, at Eel Point on the remote Swedish island of Öland, has seen many inhabitants in the subsequent decades and the book reveals what happened to some of them in between recounting the story of the house’s current owners Katrine and Joakim Westin. Just as they and their children are settling into their new home after moving from Stockholm tragedy strikes the family, as it has befallen many of the house’s previous occupants, and Theorin teases us by slowly revealing that things are not as they might first have seemed. Are there ghosts at Eel Point or does the danger that lurks take a more earthly form?

In addition to the Westins we meet Tilda Davidsson, a recently graduated police officer who is the sole officer operating full-time out of a newly re-opened station in one of the island’s towns. Her job is primarily a community liaison though she does have at least one more serious investigation to worry about as the island experiences a string of burglaries. As well as being an interesting character in her own right Tilda’s familial relationships offer a way for Theorin to include Gerlof Davidsson here, who was my favourite figure in the first book, Echoes from the Dead. There just aren’t enough clever octogenarians featured in fiction these days and even though Gerlof’s role is a more minor one I appreciated his insights as Tilda records his thoughts and stories in an informal oral history.

I know that saying that a book’s setting is a character is frowned upon in some reviewing circles but I can’t think of any other way to describe the presence in this story of the house in particular and the island in general. The action takes place in the Northern winter when the island is at its coldest, harshest and least inviting. Snow, ice and storms feature heavily and I can’t be the only reader to have reached for a warming cup of tea and another blanket as I lost myself in the tale. Aside from the natural environment the book also explores a theme that Theorin is clearly engaged by, namely the social changes the island has seen as Sweden has moved from being an agricultural based society to a more urbanised one.

There are plenty of other aspects of this absorbing book I could talk about but I’m wary of giving spoilers and frankly further discussion on my part is just taking you away from your next task which is to track down a copy of the book. Now. It is part historical fiction, part ghost story, part whodunit, and part sailor’s yarn. It is wholly enjoyable and recommended to all.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 5/5

Translator Marlaine Delargy; Publisher Black Swan [this edition 2010, original edition 2009]; ISBN 9780552774611; Length 474 pages

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Among the many places The Darkest Room has been reviewed are Crime Scraps*, Crimetime, EuroCrime, DJ’s Krimiblog, It’s A Crime (or a Mystery)* and Mysteries in Paradise (The reviews with an asterisk next to them are both quite lovely but they do give away a little more of the plot than I would like to have known before embarking on this particular book)

Review: The Uncomfortable Dead by Paco Ignacio Taibo II

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When I decided to tackle the extremist level of the 2010 Global Reading Challenge I had to put my own detective skills to the test to find a title that would count for North America that wasn’t set in Canada or the US. Eventually I stumbled upon this mysteries in foreign lands website and learned about some Mexican mystery writers, of whom Paco Ignacio Taibo II is the most prolific and influential.

Firstly I should point out that this book actually has dual authors as half the chapters are written by Subcommandante Marcos who is the leader of the Zapatista National Liberation Army in Mexico (the Zapatistas have, since the mid 1990′s, fought in primarily non-violent ways for the rights of indigenous people and against the economic globalisation policies of the Mexican government).

The usual plot synopsis with which I start my reviews is almost impossible to provide in this instance. The chapters alternate between Marcos’ story and Taibo’s. Marco’s chapters are narrated by a variety of characters including Elias Contreras, a detective in the Zapatista movement and who investigates missing persons cases (among other things) and a gay Filipino mechanic with a skinhead haircut. Taibo’s chapters feature his most well-known character: independent (private) detective Héctor Belascoarán Shayne who is asked by a ‘progressive official’ to look into some messages being left on his answering machine by a man he once knew but whom he believes died in 1969. Eventually the two stories collide when a person known only as Morales is sought by both investigators. That is about as much detail I can provide without getting terribly surreal.

Because the book is utterly absurd. It isn’t any of the things you might look for in a mystery novel. Much of it is narrated by a man we know to be dead, some stretches talk about the book itself being written (in the same way that some TV characters break the ‘fourth wall’ and talk to the camera), there really isn’t a linear progression or a single story and much of the action seems completely irrelevant to anything else. Despite all this, or maybe because of it, I did enjoy the book. Or at least the first half of it.

Not that I’ve ever given it a moment’s thought before now but if I had done I doubt I would have presumed that a leader of a revolutionary army would be a closet comedian but Marcos has missed his calling. Most of his part of the story is told from Elias’ point of view who is somewhat plodding investigator who recounts the events he is involved in with an almost childlike naivety. It’s a bit gimmicky but genuinely funny too and his innocence provides a good device for explaining things that most readers won’t, presumably, know much about such as the mechanics of running a revolutionary group.

However at a point about half-way through the book Marcos’ chapters switch into political diatribe mode which is where my interest dipped severely. There are pages (and pages) of mini-essays about the search for bad and evil which, you’ll not be surprised to learn, is generally discovered to be the fault of George W Bush or the American DEA or the CIA or a handful of the other entities that the left traditionally blames for the world’s ailments. As always I find it tiresome to be lectured at in my fiction regardless of how much I might concur with the sentiments expressed but I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised given one of the authors is a left wing revolutionary and there’s a very prominent pull-quote from Naomi Klein on the copy I read.

That glaring annoyance aside there was still plenty to enjoy here. Taibo’s character, the one-eyed, limping, coke-drinking Héctor Belascoarán Shayne is superb. Who can’t love a man who says of a poem

Now that was a real poem, one of those that grabs you by the nuts and squeezes softly until the pain becomes an idea?

I’ll definitely be seeking out a book featuring him written by Taibo alone. And although I won’t claim to have understood all the local or political references (I’d have been lost without google) I did get the sense that the book accurately depicts a version of Mexico that is very real for many people.

I’m not sure I can recommend this book to everyone as I know some would find it unfathomable or frustrating and can even imagine that if I had read this book at a different time in my own life I might have dismissed it as drivel. But if you are the type of reader who can suspend a need for order and sensibleness, or are looking for a book that provides an almost tangible sense of its geographical and political setting then I would suggest tracking down a copy (my local library had one which I found pleasantly astonishing). The closest comparison I can think of is that it’s a bit like a David Lynch movie, only with humour.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 3/5

Translator Carlos Lopez; Publisher Akashic Books [this translation 2006, original edition 2005]; ISBN 9781852429072; Length 288 pages

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The Uncomfortable Dead has been reviewed at Mostly Fiction Book Reviews

Review: A Thousand Cuts by Simon Lelic

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I read this book because Maxine told me to (and even sent me her copy because she is so lovely). I have learned (the hard way) to listen to her and only to her :)

As the book opens we learn there has been a shooting at a London school and that three students, a teacher and the gunman are dead. Lucia May is the police Detective assigned the case but everyone, including her boss and the school’s headmaster, assumes she will wrap it up neatly and quickly. However as she interviews those connected to the shooting she unravels the thousands of moments of bullying and torment that led to the shooting and realises it’s not an open and shut case.

Most of the short chapters in the book are a succession of the interviewee’s sides of Lucia’s discussions with those connected to the shooting including students, parents and teachers. Although we jump quickly from one voice to another I never once had difficulty in working out who was talking or following the action. The different perspectives are depicted cleverly, without gimmickry of any kind and are stunningly realistic. Some of them hit me like a punch to the stomach while others made me weep with sadness. But despite being knocked around by the conflicting emotions I simply could not stop reading.

Interspersed along the way are more traditional narrative chapters told from Lucia’s perspective though these have no less emotional impact. As the sole woman in a squad of men all but one of whom continuously tease her about things like being raped, participate in gross practical ‘jokes’ at her expense and physically torment her, Lucia’s working life is unbearable. The cloying sense of dread that she feels whenever she has to interact with her colleagues is, again, incredibly realistic. She is demonstrably affected by her situation physically and psychologically but, perhaps because there are parallels between her circumstances and the events that led to the shooting, she perseveres with her investigation.

In one sense this book is an easy read being relatively short and not, to me anyway, appearing to have a single unnecessary word. It flows beautifully and is truly compelling. In terms of content however it’s hard going. The violence of the shooting is not described in graphic detail but the violence, fear and torment prevalent in this community is portrayed in the written equivalent of full colour so that you can’t just read and forget. These people and this story will stay with me for a long time.

One of the (many) things that saddens me about the state of modern media is that coverage of real-world events like the one that is the subject of A Thousand Cuts is so superficial. For a couple of days there is outraged coverage about guns/bad parenting/heavy metal music/government regulations or whatever other nonsense is decreed as the evil of the day. After that, after the blame has been laid at the feet of some object or person far removed from ‘normal’ society all is forgotten. What Lelic has done is show how implausible it is that any such event could ever be so clearly linked to a simple identifiable cause and that it’s far more likely that we’re all responsible because of the things we do or say, and the things we don’t do or say, every day.

A Thousand Cuts is beautiful, intimate and sad. Read it.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 5/5

Publisher Viking [2010]; ISBN 9780670021505; Length 294 pages

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

A Thousand Cuts has the title Rupture in the UK, with one or other title the book has been reviewed at Euro Crime (by the aforementioned Maxine), Reading Matters,  Reviewing the Evidence, It’s A Crime (Or A Mystery)


Review: B-Very Flat by Margot Kinberg

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I have a number of challenges on the go and several books to read for each one piled up but when Margot Kinberg’s second Joel Williams novel arrived on my doorstep on Friday I decided it had to skip to the top of the TBR list even though I can’t count it for any of my challenges.

Just as with the first installment in the series, Publish or Perish, this book opens with a series of deliciously intimate portraits of people at Tilton University whose lives are interconnected in interesting ways. Among the deft depictions we meet student Serena Brinkman, a violin major whose campus fame is on the rise and who is in the running to win a major music competition. Michelle Park, also a gifted violinist and Serena’s rival, is under immense pressure from her parents for whom the only acceptable outcome at the competition is a win. Troy Brinkman is Serena’s cousin and friend but he’s having money troubles causing him a lot of stress. Marcie Bratton is a dormitory advisor to Serena and her roommate Tessa who dreams of a career in the military but worries about a secret she has that might prevent her from fulfilling that dream. One of the Music Department’s staff covets Serena’s antique Amati violin and seems to think such a beautiful object is wasted on Serena and one of the campus newspaper’s photographers does not take kindly to Serena’s rejection of his romantic advances. Of course things do go horribly wrong, this is crime fiction after all, and although at first the death which occurs appears to be an accident the Police and one of the university’s professors, ex-policeman Joel Williams, do accept that it was murder and start investigating.

Once again Margot Kinberg has created a delightful whodunnit with a plethora of clues, red herrings and potential suspects. The book drew me in immediately as it revealed snippets of information about all the players with nice pacing and a really strong sense of credibility. Both the university setting and the day-to-day lives of the cast of mostly young characters all felt very realistic to me. When a writer of Kinberg’s calibre creates this kind of picture it starts to seem perfectly reasonable that multiple people would see murder as the solution to their particular problem and, for me, that’s what makes a thoroughly enjoyable whodunnit.  Though I did chuckle at the beginning when several sets of parents select Tilton University believing the small town setting would be safer for their children than a big city. If only they were crime fiction fans they’d have known not to trust those idyllic looking small towns!

Unlike many of the great tomes being published these days, the book comes in at a very satisfactory 202 pages which just goes to prove that a good writer can tell a good story without requiring the deforestation of a small country to provide the paper and I’m also impressed by the fact that you could easily read and enjoy this book without having read the first book in the series (though you should read that one too, you just don’t need to in order to understand what happens in this one).

I can wholeheartedly recommend this book, especially to those of you who like a good puzzle to solve and enjoy matching wits with the professionals as they unravel the clues. Perhaps you’ll have more luck than I did at predicting the culprit in this fine novel.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 4/5

Publisher: Publish America [2010];  ISBN: 9781448971213; Length 202 pages; Setting: America, present-day

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My review of Margot Kinberg’s first Joel Williams novel Publish or Perish.

B-Very Flat has also been enthusiastically received at DJ’s Krimiblog and Petrona.

Margot Kinberg shares thoughtful and intriguing ideas about what makes crime fiction tick at her excellent blog Confessions of a Mystery Novelist.

Review: Hypothermia by Arnaldur Indriðason

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Prior to this book I’d only read one of Arnaldur Indriðason’s Erlendur series, Jar City which I liked but didn’t love. However, when Hypothermia became available at my local library I thought I’d use it as my first book to count towards the 2010 Scandinavian Challenge being hosted by Amy at The Black Sheep Dances.

A woman is found hanged in her weekend cottage but all indicators point to suicide. Erlendur of the Reykjavik Police must talk to the woman’s husband but it seems to be a matter of routine. At around the same time Erlendur is reminded of one of his earliest cases: the disappearance some 30 years previously of a young man named David whose father is now dying and Erlendur feels obligated to look into the case one last. Although there is no identifiable action to take on either case Erlendur finds them occupying his thoughts and he becomes somewhat obsessed by uncovering the facts relating to each incident.

I’ve been trying for a couple of days but I can’t seem to explain why I found a book in which there’s not a great deal of action as quite as compelling and moving as I did.

As I read the book almost in a single sitting, I fell asleep at about 2:00am with a handful of pages to go and quickly devoured them the next morning, the word that kept popping into my head was yearning. Maria, the woman whose body was found hanged, is yearning so much for her mother who recently died and her father who died many years earlier that she is driven to seek out psychics and mediums. Erlendur too is yearning for a resolution to his own childhood tragedy which saw his only brother disappear forever in a wild storm one night. Erlendur adult daughter forces her estranged parents to talk with each other so that she might know the kind of family life she never had. And what dying father of a long-disappeared young man wouldn’t yearn to know what had happened to a much-loved son?

The way this is all teased out is via a rather simple but effective plot which involves Erlendur talking to the friends, relatives and acquaintances of both Maria and David and slowly piecing together each jigsaw puzzle. He does it without any official warrant so has virtually no assistance from his colleagues but the book is still a procedural of sorts I suppose.

Frozen Lake Þingvellir

Of course it’s impossible for a monolingual person like me to know for certain but I feel, by virtue of its invisibility if nothing else, that the translation is sensitive to the author’s original intent. It is certainly a very readable book in its English form. The sense of place in the book too is strong. Physically this is primarily due to the setting of several key scenes in and around Iceland’s lakes, in particular Lake Thingvellir (when Erlendur and his daughter spend a day driving around to see several lakes I couldn’t help but hit google for some images). Intellectually we see the interconnectedness between people and events that must be a part of life in a country of only 300,000 people and there is an undercurrent of the country’s folklore sitting, however uncomfortably, side by side with things modern.

Hypothermia is without the kind of explosive drama that a lot of crime fiction thrives on but, for me anyway, the subtle drama of these exquisitely depicted, intertwining stories was equally as intriguing. It is sad, though not depressing, thoughtful and ultimately quite beautiful.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 5/5

Translator: Victoria Cribb; Publisher: Harvill Secker [200]; ISBN: 9781846552625; Length 314 pages; Setting: Iceland, present day

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Hypothermia is reviewed beautifully, as always, by Maxine at Euro Crime,