Category Archives: thriller

Review: AGENT 6 by Tom Rob Smith

Posted on
10

AGENT 6 is the somewhat epic conclusion to Tom Rob Smith’s trilogy featuring MGB agent turned human being Leo Demidov. It takes readers from 1950 to 1980 and from Russia to America to Afghanistan in something that feels less like a thriller than it does a haphazard tour through the lowlights of Soviet-era history. As the book opens we’re in 1950 which is earlier than the action in the first two books and we see Leo at the height of his powers as a security agent who very much believes in the value of his role to the country he loves. He has been assigned a new agent to mentor and there are chilling scenes in which Leo teaches his protegé what to look for in a person’s diary in order to discern how much harm that person could potentially be to the State (the premise being that no one with a diary could be entirely harmless). Leo is also asked to assist with arrangements for the visit to Russia of American singer Jesse Austin (loosely modelled on Paul Robeson), one of the few western artists permitted to visit the country and only because of his professed belief in and support for communism. The visit provides an opportunity for Leo to properly meet Raisa, a woman he spoke to briefly on the train one day and the person who will become his wife.

This action ends rather abruptly and we jump forward 15 years to the period following Leo’s downfall and departure from government service (all of which is covered in the other two books in the set, CHILD 44 and THE SECRET SPEECH). Leo is disillusioned but seems happy enough; his loss of faith in the communist state is made up for by having his family around him. However that family, his wife Raisa and adopted daughters Elena and Zoya, are soon off on a state-sponsored trip to New York where the girls are to be part of a joint choir with American children at the United Nations. Many of the reviews and synopses I’ve seen describe subsequent events to this but I think that spoils things so shall stop here, except to say that members of the Russian delegation get in touch with their supporter Jesse Austin and the trip does not end as expected.

I almost didn’t bother reading this book after the disappointment which was its predecessor but I had an urge to complete the trilogy and did wonder if Smith had managed to recreate any of the magic of his first book, CHILD 44, which I can still remember passages from three years after reading it. In the end I am glad I read AGENT 6 because it washed away the distaste left behind by the ludicrous second novel, even if it didn’t manage to achieve the particular magic of that first novel.

The biggest difference between CHILD 44 and the subsequent books is that CHILD 44 essentially told a single, coherent story and almost as a by-product of that demonstrated broader points about the awfulness of a totalitarian regime, the lengths people will go to when they are pushed too far and the misery that can accompany seriously having to question one’s long-held beliefs. The story itself is quite intimate and allows the reader to be drawn into Leo’s world and develop a sense of the changes he is experiencing. The remaining books in the trilogy largely lacked this layer of narrative and so, for me, the power of exploring the broader issues was dissipated as we jumped hither and thither through Soviet history without any real focus. In AGENT 6 though there is an echo of the first book’s intimacy in the thread that depicts the life of Jesse Austin and his fall from grace, orchestrated by an unforgiving government. Austin’s dignity and his wife’s steadfast support of her husband and refusal to be bitter about all they lose were heart-achingly sad, especially when juxtaposed with the mean-spirited and cynical people attempting to use the Austin’s on both sides of the America versus communism fight.

For me the rest of the book is less successful, being too disjointed and broad to be fully engaging. The large chunk that takes place in Afghanistan, where Leo is forced once again to work for the State, though this time with his eyes open, was too long-winded. It felt to me like the author was trying way too hard to highlight the parallels between the Soviet attempt to conquer the country and the current war being fought there by America and its allies. This section of the book did introduce someone who should have been a compelling and sympathetic character but she didn’t quite work for me and in the end I don’t think she or the entire section added much to this book or the trilogy overall.

Like most readers I’m sure I spent most of the book wondering when the eponymous agent 6 would appear and then being quite disappointed when it finally happened but at least the ending of this book had less of a Hollywood feel than its predecessors. I do think Smith is a talented writer and even though I don’t think the ambition of this trilogy was evenly successful I’m glad to have read it and met some of the beautifully drawn characters. If you have read the other two books in the series I would definitely recommend you complete the picture with this one but if you’ve yet to start I’d just read CHILD 44 and leave it there.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I have reviewed CHILD 44 and THE SECRET SPEECH

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 3/5
Narrator Gareth Armstrong
Publisher Simon & Schuster UK [2011]
ASIN B005KTRZHC (downloaded from audible.com)
Length 13 hours 33 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series #3 of Leo Demidov trilogy
Source I bought it
Creative Commons Licence
This work by http://reactionstoreading.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Review: Trackers by Deon Meyer

Posted on
10

It’s hard to know how to talk about TRACKERS without giving away too many of the book’s surprises which come from both story and structure so I shall err on the side of caution. I don’t think it’s letting too much out of the bag to say that there are three distinct books here, and though the reader assumes the stories will eventually intertwine most connections are not made until almost the very end so you are really reading three independent stories. While this maintains suspense it does require more than the usual amount of small-detail retention on the part of the reader, something that proved quite challenging with the audio version of the book.

The first and most prominent of the three stories centres around a woman called Milla Strachan who, when we meet her, is just coming to the decision to leave her violent, philandering husband and their boorish, spoiled son. Although she trained to be a journalist she has not worked for many years and struggles to find a job until she spies a small newspaper advertisement. That leads to a report-writing job with a government agency. In the second book we meet a young freelance bodyguard called Lemmer who is hired for the seemingly innocuous job of escorting two endangered rhinos being smuggled into the country from Zimbabwe on behalf of a wealthy and slightly dodgy farmer. In the final book of TRACKERS we follow the trail of former policeman Mat Joubert as he starts his new job as a private investigator and takes on the case of a missing husband whose wife is unsatisfied with what she perceives to have been a fairly cursory investigation by police.

All three stories are compelling in their own right though I have to admit to finding the first one a little tough-going in parts. Although the audio narration was excellent I found the very complicated plot a little hard to follow in this format and did have to rewind quite a bit which is something I very rarely need to do. I had no such problems with the other two books within this book and perhaps for that reason I enjoyed those two stories slightly more than the first.

There are several elements which link the books, the most obvious being that each depicts some version of tracking; be it people, animals, objects or something less tangible.  This could have been clumsy in a less talented author’s hands but Meyer is a terrific storyteller and manages to use this device almost without the reader noticing it’s being done. Another theme common to the stories is that the main character in each one is at something of a crossroads in his or her life and the events cause, or force, them to learn something not entirely comfortable about their own makeup. Milla Strachan’s case is probably the most dramatic of the three but these threads are all fascinating and provide part of the depth of this book.

The remainder of that depth comes from the other thing which links the books which is the  ever-present commentary on life in modern South Africa. It is almost as if Meyer has written a non-fiction book underneath the fictional one in which he is depicting a year in the life of his country. Setting the main part of the story in the time leading up to the country’s hosting of the football (soccer) world cup offers scope to show how the country and its residents want to be seen on the all-important international stage, while the disparate stories within TRACKERS allow a broad cross-section of ‘routine’ lives to be depicted which helps readers build up a real picture of the country today. Again it is something you almost don’t notice until the book is finished when you suddenly realise you have such a detailed picture of the place that you feel like you could walk into the pages and feel at home.

I think I’ve only scratched the surface of all that is good about TRACKERS so can only recommend you read the book for yourselves, though I’d only recommend the audio format to seasoned listeners. It is an intelligent, compelling thriller with a fantastic range of characters and an absorbing sense of place. At a time when many successful writers seem content to write the same book over and over again Meyer is to be applauded for continuing to stretch himself and his readers.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Trackers has been reviewed at International Noir Fiction, Mysteries in Paradise, Petrona, The Game’s Afoot and was chosen as one of 2011′s best thrillers by Kirkus Reviews

I’ve reviewed three of Deon Meyer’s other books Devil’s Peak, Dead at Daybreak and Thirteen hours.  There hasn’t been a dud in the bunch.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 4.5/5
Author website http://www.deonmeyer.com/
Translator K.L. Seegers (from Afrikaans)
Narrator Saul Reichlin, Rupert Degas, Sandra Duncan
Publisher Hodder & Stoughton [2011]
ASIN B005OSUOAE (downloaded from audible.com)
Length 17 hours and 55 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series standalone
Source I bought it
Creative Commons Licence
This work by http://reactionstoreading.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The one where I rant (almost politely) about The Fear Index by Robert Harris

Posted on
17

Who knew my mother would turn out to be right most of the time? Certainly not my teenage self. But, as she may have mentioned a time or three, it does indeed do me good to sleep on things before committing some of my more…enthusiastic shall we say?…thoughts to print. If I’d written this review the day I finished the book it would have been a complete rant…full of swearing and vitriol and at least nine libellous statements. Now I’ve calmed down a little I can put things into perspective. The book is still a long way short of my favourites list for the year but I am now prepared to concede it probably isn’t the confirmation we’ve all been looking for that civilisation as we know it is done for. Rather it’s just another in the growing line of barely adequate books from brand name authors who apparently can’t be edited.

The Fear Index takes place in Switzerland where ex-pat American über-genius Alex Hoffman has left his prestigious job at the Large Hadron Collider to set up a hedge fund. Using his mad mathematician skills he has created the world’s best algorithm for determining what the world’s financial markets will do before anyone else and has made himself, his business partner and their investors giant piles of cash. The sorts of cash piles you can’t get to the bottom of even when you buy $60 million houses. As the book opens Hoffman experiences a series of strange events – receiving a very expensive rare book through the mail, having a bizarre intruder at his house and closing down his wife’s art exhibition opening in a peculiar way – which point portentously to something being rotten in the state of money-making.

Harris did a lot of research in preparation for this book. I know he did a lot of research because it’s all in the book. Lengthy passages of jargon-rich exposition appear throughout, most often as the clunkiest dialogue two (or more) fictional human beings ever uttered. Real people, even nerdy ones, do not in my experience stop what they are doing every few minutes to explain the basic facts of their own work to each other. The other way the research has been included is that random bits of unrelated knowledge have been shoe-horned into the plot in a series of inexplicable scenes. For example somewhere among his reading the author learned of that German case where someone agreed to be eaten by someone else so in it went, regardless of how well (or not) it fit with the rest of the story.

Another thing that made this book a giant yawn for me is that it would appear the author never met a stereotype he didn’t like. There is not a single character in the book who even approaches credibility or uniqueness and they are all depicted very superficially. So the nerds are all vaguely autistic, the policeman is a bumbling fool of the Inspector Clouseau variety, the rich men are all greedy and uncaring and the knife-wielding psychopath has a ponytail. Even the computer program which turns out to have a personality all of its own is an imitation (though a poor one) of HAL 9000.

There can be little doubt that the shifts in the world’s financial markets and collapsing of whole economies in recent years could provide fascinating fodder for a thriller. There are a plethora of bad guys, innocent victims a-plenty, technology that only a handful of the smartest people on the planet understand and your choice of conspiracy theories about who is to blame for it all (depending on your political leanings and/or your personal threshold for what constitutes greed). Robert Harris took all of this promise and turned it into the most crushingly boring book I have read in a decade. To me it was a collection of tediously displayed research joined together by a series of ‘twists’ telegraphed so far in advance of their actual occurrence that I thought the author was repeating himself by the time I actually got to them.

If you want to read some dramatic, even thrilling, writing about last year’s ‘flash crash’ or the general morass that global finances have become try the newspaper columns or books of good financial journalists like Scott Patterson and Michael Lewis and for proper ‘machine becomes sentient being’ tales head for Arthur C Clarke or Robert A Heinlein and leave this dud to languish in the bottom of the bargain bin.

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: Headhunters by Jo Nesbo

Posted on
14

After a hiccup (I had discarded the book once but you convinced me to give it another go) I thoroughly enjoyed Jo Nesbø’s The Redbreast and bought the rest of the series before I’d even finished the first book. I haven’t actually gotten around to reading any of them yet because every time I reach for the second book in the series I see its 600+ pages and decide to read something else. Something shorter. But a standalone novel is a whole different box of bananas and shorter than most of the Harry Hole novels so I was keen to read this one. Sadly for me it turned out not to be my cup of tea.

It is the story of Norwegian executive recruitment specialist Roger Brown (I never did discover how he ended up with such a thoroughly English name though concede this is probably my fault…my mind did wander on occasion) whose life spirals out of control in an increasingly gruesome way. Roger has a great job and a beautiful wife who he professes to adore but he feels he needs more money to fund his lifestyle so he has second job as an art thief. In a way, though not the way you might expect, it is this second job that gets him into trouble and sets up the main plot thread of the novel in which Roger matches wits with Clas Greve, a candidate for a top CEO job who ultimately becomes Roger’s arch enemy. The two play a game of cat and mouse across the Norwegian countryside and leave the landscape littered with bodies.

This book didn’t really tick any of the boxes on the list of things I look for in a good thriller and it had quite a few of the things that make me turn off (including scenes featuring poo). I found the characters flat and uninteresting which is probably the biggest problem I can have with a thriller. If characters are to be unlikeable I want them to be really unlikeable; the kind of people whose painful demise I guiltily yet eagerly anticipate. Here I just thought the two main characters were dull and I didn’t much care which of them lived, died or got the girl. The main woman was a non event; being defined only by her relationship to the men in the story and having a laughingly unbelievable relationship to her husband.

The story was a bit better than the characters but its cartoonish quality resulted in me not really being able to care about its many, increasingly implausible twists and I found myself picking apart relatively minor things like dodgy physics and technology. In a book I am enjoying I let that kind of thing was over me but here I wasn’t really engaged by the story and so the things stood out more (I can’t go into more detail without spoiling). Another thing which leapt out rather disconcertingly was the clunky product placements for brands of fridge, beer, furniture, clothing and so on. I go to some lengths to avoid being advertised at constantly so it really annoys me when it happens as part of a narrative. For me the ending to the book lost it half a star on my personal rating scale, seeming to lose the guts to be a tale of true noir right at the crucial moment and having a very clunky denouement.

I have something of a soft spot for high class thieves (blame my mother’s yen for Cary Grant which resulted in me watching To Catch a Thief dozens of times as a kid) so I was probably predisposed to liking this novel but it was not to be. To me it felt like a loosely connected series of vignettes in which bad stuff happened to not very nice people (and one poor dog) and not a lot in the way of thrills. As always alternative opinions are available and you shouldn’t just take my word for it.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Headhunters has received more positive reviews at A Common Reader, Nordic Bookblog Petrona

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 2/5
Narrator Sean Barrett
Publisher Random House Audiobooks [2010]
ISBN N/A (downloaded from audible.com)
Length 7 hours 50 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series standalone
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: Our Kind of Traitor by John le Carré

Posted on
12

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 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

Review: The Secret Speech by Tom Rob Smith

Posted on
6

It is 1956 in Russia. Former MGB Officer Leo Demidov and his wife Raisa are trying to make a life for their odd little family. Raisa has only recently fallen in love with the man she was married to for many years before that but she could not love him while he carried out the brutal instructions of his superiors in the Stalinist regime but Leo had an epiphany three years earlier (depicted in the first book in this planned trilogy, Child 44) and stopped his violent activities. Now they are adoptive parents to Elena and Zoya whose parents were killed in an incident in which Leo participated and while 7 year old Elena is happy enough to join the new family 14 year old Zoya cannot forgive Leo for his role in her parents’ death. When Stalin’s successor Nikita Kkrushchev, gives a speech denouncing and apologising for the brutalities committed by the state under Stalin, one woman from Leo’s past who now calls herself Fraera begins a program of violent revenge which involves taking from Leo everything he holds dear.

In an author interview included in my edition of this book Smith declared he wanted to write something with the excitement of the TV show 24 and I think he has succeeded (although I’ve only ever seen a handful of episodes of that show). It is a thriller in the Robert Ludlum style with action and plot twists a-plenty. We move at breakneck speed from Moscow to a prison ship to a Gulag to occupied Hungary and we watch people turn on each other again and again until this reader could barely keep track of who was on which side.

I couldn’t help but compare this book to its predecessor which was one of my top ten reads of last year and the comparison is fairly unflattering. Where Child 44 provided subtle and intimate portraits of a range of people and depicted a quite breathtaking range of emotional stories The Secret Speech has a singular bludgeoning, violent tone and is full of people motivated primarily by self-interest, vengeance or both. There is really only one character whose motives are different and sadly she is not terribly well developed. For me the least impressive part of Child 44 was the final quarter of the tale which moved from careful psychological suspense to Hollywood style thriller and The Secret Speech has continued that later aspect without incorporating the pervading sense of oppression and fear that made the  first book so compelling. Reading this book I never once forgot that I was reading a fictional tale whereas the first book was so absorbing that you could believe those decisions had been made and emotions had been felt by real people.

The story here is overly complex and relies too heavily on a string of coincidences and unlikely escapes and the book is driven mostly by narrative instead of its characters. Leo is a far less complicated character in this novel, although there are glimpses of his insightful introspection when he considers the problem of his interactions with his adopted daughter. But whereas in the first book I could sense his angst about having done bad things for what he thought at the time were good reasons here he seems to have no compunction about doing bad things, presumably because the good reasons are different ones than before?

The character of Fraera is used to advance much of the plot but I found her motivations confused and overall she was not convincing. She demands her gang members behave in exactly the same way as the State demanded of its workers like Leo (i.e. blind obedience regardless of the instructions up to and including murder) and I’m not convinced that having one of the characters point this out excuses the fact that it is a fairly blunt plot device (and really just increases the body count).

If you’re after an adrenalin-filled thriller with loads of fighting and in-the-nick-of-time escapes then you will enjoy The Secret Speech and probably won’t need to have read the first book as Smith has done a good job of incorporating information from the previous book without making it too boring for those who have read it. It does weave real and fictional events together well too and if you’re anything like me it will send you off to ‘research’ (i.e. google) which of the events that were depicted were real. If you’re looking for something extra, like the intimate character portraits of Child 44 then I think you might be disappointed, though perhaps I was being unreasonable in expecting a second exceptional book.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The Secret Speech has been reviewed at Euro Crime

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My rating 3/5
Publisher Pocket Books [this edition 2010, original edition 2009]
ISBN 9781847391605
Length 449 pages
Format paperback
Source I bought it

Review: Three Weeks to Say Goodbye by C J Box

Posted on
5

I have not read any of C J Box’s long-running Joe Pickett series (primarily because I just don’t have the energy to launch into yet another series where I might be compelled to start at the beginning) but I am fast becoming a fan of his standalone thrillers. This one has a very good hook and kept me gripped right to the end. Jack and Melissa McGuane receive the worst news possible: their adopted daughter’s biological father, Garrett Moreland, never officially relinquished his parental rights and he, or at least his father, wants nine-month old Angelina.  Garrett’s father is a well-respected Judge in Denver and has the law, money and considerable influence on his side. On their side the McGuanes have two old friends, Cody who is a detective with the Denver police and Brian a wealthy property developer, along with a fierce love for the daughter they have raised. Judge Moreland, claiming a desire to ensure his tearaway son accepts his responsibilities, offers the McGuanes a final three weeks to spend with Angelina before taking the baby into his own family. The mystery component to the story surrounds the McGuane’s growing belief that there is a more sinister reason for Judge Moreland’s demand to have Angelina.

The story is told in the first person from Jack’s point of view. This is a good voice for such an emotional story as it allows the raw frustration and impotence that Jack feels at not being able to save his family to really shine through. I’m sure the temptation would have been to tell this kind of story from the mother’s point of view but I think it was probably stronger for being told from the father’s perspective. The downside of using a first person narrative is, as always, that there are times when action is taking place that Jack can know nothing about and as a reader you do feel that at a couple of points that Jack is mulling over his situation again while the real plot is advancing elsewhere.

While the bad guys in this novel were pretty much rotten to the core the good guys offered more depth. The character of Cody for example was used to good effect to depict an ever-present tension between following the letter of the law and achieving justice which, as most of us probably believe, are not always the same thing. The slow disintegration of both Melissa and Jack in terms of their willingness to consider increasingly risky and illegal behaviour is also interesting if not always entirely believable in Jack’s case.

I did find the ending of the story a bit over the top and the very last chapter lost the book half a point on my personal rating scale for being just too cute and ‘preachy’ but overall I was entertained by the novel and was definitely rooting for the McGuanes. I am a bit weary of the crime and thriller genres being so dominated by series books so am pleased to have found another author who, at least every other year, is prepared to offer a story that can be read within the confines of a single book.

What about the audio book?

This is the first book I have listened to by John Bedford Lloyd but it won’t be my last as he is a terrific reader which is not surprising given his long career as a character actor in the US. I’ve already added several more of his narrations to my audible wishlist (there are dozens more unavailable to people in my geographic location but I shan’t turn this review into another gripe on that issue). At the end of the book there is a short interview with the author CJ Box which is not particularly hard-hitting but does offer a few snippets of information about the process he uses to create his novels and his inspiration for this particular story.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Three Weeks to say Goodbye has been reviewed at Material Witness and Petrona.

CJ Box’s other standalone thriller, Blue Heaven, was among my top ten reads for 2008.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 3/5
Narrator John Bedford Lloyd
Publisher Macmillan Audio [2009]
ISBN N/A (downloaded from audible.com)
Length 9 hours 43 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Source I bought it

Review: Operation Napoleon by Arnaldur Indriðason

Posted on
11

First published in Iceland in 1999 Operation Napoleon was published for in English just this month. I couldn’t pass it up when I noticed it available as a new release for my eReader.

Just before the end of World War 2 a plane of mysterious origins crashes on the the Vatnajökull glacier in Iceland during a fierce blizzard. Although it is thought to be a German plane the search that is mounted some days later is carried out by the American army which has a base in the country. However only a single wheel is discovered and the search is called off. More than 50 years later satellite images of the glacier seem to indicate the plane’s location and a new search is mounted by the US Army which still has a presence in the country. Several local civilians become unwittingly caught up in the search to find the plane and hide its secrets once and for all, the most notable of whom is a young lawyer called Kirstin whose love of her brother forces her to stand up to some truly nasty individuals.

This stanadlone novel from the author of the Erlendur police procedurals is at heart a fairly standard thriller. There is a big secret that some people will go to any lengths to hide, a few innocent people stumble across the secret’s existence and are unable to extricate themselves from events and then a race to see which side will overcome the myriad of obstacles to achieving their goal which in this case was permanent cover up for one side or survival and exposé for the other. The story certainly stretches the bounds of credibility at some points, especially with respect to Kirstin’s ability to get out a succession of near-death scrapes while around her the body count mounts, but it is by no means as far-fetched as some I have read and its internal logic is pretty sound. It is also well-paced and, particularly in its second half, is brimming with genuine tension and intrigue. The secret, when revealed, is just this side of plausible and is one of those that makes you wonder ‘what if’.

As with Indriðason’s other fiction however there is more to the book than a simple plot as it explores several themes in some depth. The most obvious of these is the complicated relationship between Iceland and the US Army. The reluctance of the Icelandic people to accept the foreign army in their country informs Kirstin’s behaviour towards a former beau, Steve an American, who she turns to for help when she is caught up in the events taking place on Vatnajökull. At a government level there are economic and popularity considerations which compete to be taken into account before action can be taken. Although it’s fairly clear where Indriðason’s heart lies on this issue it is pleasing that he provides a strong character in the form of Steve to display an alternate view to the ‘Americans are evil’ theme.

A theme that doesn’t crop up terribly often in fiction but one Indriðason does seem to be particularly interested in is the relationships between siblings. Here Kirstin only becomes involved in the story and goes well beyond her comfort zone of physical endurance because she fears for the life of her younger brother and as the book progresses we learn more about why she feels so duty-bound to look out for Elias. In addition, one of the Americans who was involved in the very first search for the lost plane turns out to have had a similar reason for maintaining his interest in the search until the present search. There are glimpses too of other ideas that interest Indriðason such as the military hierarchy’s willingness to accept that torture is a legitimate means to an end as long as they can claim deniability (quite insightful given this novel was written long before newspaper headlines about gruesome torture being sanctioned at Gunatanamo Bay) and a hastily explored crack at privacy.

I knew absolutely nothing about this book when I bought it and found myself a bit skeptical when learning it was a thriller involving war-time secrets. However I found it a thoroughly entertaining yarn with the added bonus of more depth than you usually find in a thriller and far fewer explosions (which for me is a good thing).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Operation Naploeon has been reviewed at Reviewing the Evidence and The View from the Blue House

Earlier this year I reviewed Arnaldur Indriðason’s Hypothermia which remains in hot contention for my favourite book of the year. It’s a very different kind of book to this one!

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 4/5
Translator Victoria Cribb
Publisher Harvill Secker [this translation 2010, original edition 1999]
ISBN 9781846552854
Length 274 pages
Format eBook (ePub)
Source I bought it

Review: Never Look Away by Linwood Barclay

Posted on
9

David Harwood is a journalist for a small paper in upper New York State and is working hard on a story about corrupt local government officials taking bribes to approve the establishment of a privately run prison in the area. On top of this pressure, for several weeks his wife Jan has been exhibiting signs of depression, to the point even of reporting suicidal thoughts to her husband and he is very concerned. In an attempt to lighten the family’s mood the couple take their four year old son Ethan to a local amusement park for the day which is when their lives fall apart.

Never Look Away incorporates a compelling mix of nail-biting tension and normal people behaving credibly despite extraordinary situations. David Harwood is a great character for a thriller, being the sort of person with whom we can all identify. I really liked the fact he didn’t suddenly develop any inexplicable superhuman skills (which tends to happen in thrillers) but stumbled his way through a series of pretty astonishing events in a very believable way. His reaction as he learned that people around him might have lied was particularly credible in the way it showed his willingness to entertain the most bizarre theories rather than the notion he had been deceived. His parents are also wonderfully normal characters and even his wife Jan, though a less orthodox character, has a credibility about her.

I read this book because Maxine at Petrona told me to it and while it didn’t make me miss my bus stop as she suggested that’s only because I walk to work. On two successive mornings I walked an extra long way around to get to my office just to hear a little more. Funnily enough the big plot twists were telegraphed but I didn’t find that detracted from the story terribly much as I was more interested in how the various players would cope with unfolding events than the play-by-play, though the strait narrative was very sold too.

I like thrillers that have an air of normality about them and don’t go too over the top with explosions and other silliness and Never Look Away fits that bill well. At its heart it’s a story of a family where all is not what it seems and plays on the sorts of fears that all of us might face at some time. Top thrills indeed.

What about the audio book?

To be perfectly honest it took me a little while to ‘get into’ Jeffrey Cummings’ narration as he used a wide variety of voices and some of the ones for minor characters were a little odd-sounding. However after the first 20-30 minutes I was totally absorbed and Cummings had made the book whatever the audio equivalent is of a page turner.

Never Look Away has also been reviewed at Crime Watch and Petrona

I’ve also read Linwood Barclay’s No Time for Goodbye (which was terrific) and Too Close to Home (which I didn’t enjoy quite as much)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 4/5
Narrator Jeffrey Cummings
Publisher Orion Publishing [2010]
ISBN N/A (downloaded from audible.com)
Length 12 hours 42 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Source I bought it

Review: A Simple Act of Violence by R J Ellory

Posted on
19

A Simple Act of Violence is a book of two parallel stories, with the link between the two clear from the outset. In Washington DC a woman called Catherine Sheridan is killed. Police, in the form of Detective Robert Miller and his partner Al Roth, believe she is the fourth victim of a serial killer known as ‘The Ribbon Killer’. The second story thread is told from the perspective of the person we are to assume is the killer, a man named John Robey. In a series of (long-winded) chapters he talks about being recruited to the CIA and his his work for them in Nicaragua and other hot spots. One of his fellow CIA agents was Catherine Sheridan.

This book recently won the Theakston’s Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year for being among other things ‘fascinating and surprising’. Do you ever wonder if you’ve read a different book from the one others are talking about? That’s how I feel about A Simple Act of Violence because I found it about as fascinating and surprising as breakfast.

In audio format the book is nearly 19 hours long (500+ pages in its printed versions) but there is a startling lack of action for such a long tome. As far as the serial killer thread goes most of the victims are already dead by the time the book starts and we spend a chunk of time following Miller and his precinct buddies as they wander aimlessly down one dead-end after another. The few plot developments that do occur are telegraphed so far in advance that by the time they finally happen you think you’ve already read that portion of the book.

The traditional narrative chapters are interspersed with chapters where John Robey tells us everything wrong with American foreign policy from the 1980′s onwards. I’ve read text books that were more compelling than these parts of the book. Not only is the content old news, effectively a re-hashing of the Iran-Contra affair and events surrounding American’s involvement in Nicaragua, but the story-telling method is dull and unbelievable. In my experience people do not lecture each other in day-to-day life but in John Robey’s experience everyone he met pontificated or lectured about something. Including people he was about to kill. Real people do not have the kinds of conversations that happened repeatedly during this book. It reminded me of those TV police dramas where two professionals who would both know exactly why a test is being conducted and what it will or won’t prove nevertheless explain the whole procedure to each other in words of two syllables or less because the writers can’t work out any other way to let viewers know what is going on.

To top it off there wasn’t a single interesting character in the book. Miller is an unmarried cop who’s had a nasty experience where his credibility was questioned. Ho hum. He wasn’t an alcoholic but most other cliché’s were covered. His sleepless nights, friendless days and obsession with a single case have all been done before and there was no new angle or character depth here to make me care whether he got some sleep, made a friend or found the killer. Nobody else, including the pontificating Robey, was any more engaging or believable to me.

In the end it felt to me as if this book didn’t know what it wanted to be. It didn’t have enough pace or twists to be an old-fashioned thriller, nor did it have enough heart to be a political exposé pitting one man against his government. I wish I’d read a “fast-paced thriller, each page…[bringing] about a new twist…” but I read a slow and largely predictable novel about people I will not be able to remember this time next week.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 2/5

Narrator Alan Nebelthau; Publisher Whole Story Audio Books [2009]; Length 18hours 40 minutes

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Clearly I’m in the minority with regards to my views on this book so do check out other reviews including the one at Material Witness