Category Archives: thriller

Review: A Simple Act of Violence by R J Ellory

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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

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

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

Review: Thirteen Hours by Deon Meyer

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This is the last book I needed to read to complete the 2010 CWA International Dagger Award shortlist and is the third book I have read by Deon Meyer.

The story takes place across a single day. In the early Cape Town morning almost simultaneously a young girl’s body is found in a churchyard and a record producer is discovered dead in his home with his alcoholic wife sleeping nearby. Both cases are high profile and require urgent action, the first because it soon becomes clear that there is another young girl, an American tourist called Rachel Anderson, on the run from the people responsible for the dead girl and the second because if the man’s wife didn’t kill him then the most likely suspect is a celebrated gospel singer.  Two relatively new detectives, Vusumuzi Ndabeni (Vusi) and Fransman Dekker, are put in charge of one case each. Both are being mentored by Benny Griessel who is something of a dinosaur in ‘the new South Africa’ but who has lots of knowledge and experience to share if Vusi and Dekker choose to learn from him. Benny is under enormous pressure from himself and everyone around him. Can he still cut it when it matters?

A few weeks ago I described my perfect thriller. I said

If a thriller has

  • A twisty, turn-y plot that clips along at a decent pace and offers a pay-off for my investment of time (e.g. family reunited/world saved/justice done)
  • At least a couple of characters who, if not exactly three-dimensional, provide enough humanity that I care whether they live (or die), triumph over adversity (or fail) or right a wrong (or don’t).

it will probably get a rating of 3 (= decent/solid entertaining read) on my personal scale. There is a chance of extra points for humour, above-average excitement levels, deeper than usual exploration of a theme that interests me, a male character who doesn’t viewevery woman he meets as a potential bed mate or a female character who doesn’t look like a supermodel yet, miraculously, proves to have some value to the world anyway. Keeping the car chases short and detailed descriptions of weaponry to a minimum also scores bonus points.

Thirteen Hours gets a tick for each and every one of these points and a bonus for something I didn’t include above (but should have): an ending that didn’t make me roll my eyes and/or wish I’d stopped reading 30 pages beforehand. In essence it’s a perfect example of its genre and I absolutely loved it.

In thrillers plot is king and here the story is fast, unpredictable and has just the right level of complication. We switch back and forth between the two cases with often breathtaking speed and there are no convenient spots at which to pause for respite. This is the kind of book that the ‘page-turner’ cliché should be reserved for as I literally tore pages in my haste to find out what would happen next.

What excites me even more than a great story though is characters who involve and engage me and Thirteen Hours has bunches of them. Benny Griessel is intriguing: a recovering alcoholic struggling to re-connect with his family as well as find a place for himself in the newly restructured police force. But far from being dour or melancholic he’s funny and philosophical while still driven to do his job well for all the right reasons. His two mentees are equally interesting though vastly different people from Benny. Vusi is a quiet man reflecting on his mother’s simple view of the new world while finding his feet in a city new to him and Dekker is angry about prejudices he has been subject to as a coloured man in a black and white South Africa. There are plenty of other deft portrayals too and never knowing who would be a minor character and who would play a larger role made them all the more interesting.

Perhaps it didn’t hurt that the buzzing of the dreaded vuvuzela accompanied my reading of the last few chapters of the book (during the opening moments of the football world cup final) but another of the things that the book does beautifully is create a sense of its location. It is done more subtly than in Meyer’s previous books, such as when Rachel’s parents learn about South Africa’s crime rate from the internet and an when an elderly man who briefly helps Rachel discusses the country’s past and future, but it has no less of an impact for that. All the complications of a country in a state of great change where people of all backgrounds are both eager for and fearful of the new ways are played out in a myriad of small but fascinating details.

It’s not often that I feel like describing a book as perfect but I simply cannot think of a single thing I would change about Thirteen Hours. It has everything you’d want in a thriller and loads more besides, and is the hefty object I shall be hurling at the very next person who says in my hearing that crime fiction isn’t real literature.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 5/5

Translator K L Seegers Publisher Hodder & Stoughton [this edition 2010, original edition 2008]; ISBN 9780340953600; Length 412 pages

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Thirteen Hours has also been reviewed at Crime Scraps, Euro Crime, Material Witness, International Noir Fiction and Reviewing the Evidence

Deon Meyer’s Devil’s Peak was one of my top ten reads for 2008 and Dead at Daybreak was another excellent book of his that I read this year.

Review: Caught by Harlan Coben

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Although I have finished the 2010 audio book challenge I still enjoy walking and listening.

Caught opens with the life of Dan Mercer, social worker and all around good-guy, falling apart. Feeling what turns out to be a justified sense of unease Dan makes his way to an address at which one of the troubled children he counsels is waiting in apparent distress. When he gets there he is instead ambushed by a TV reporter who accuses him of being a paedophile who had gone to the house with the hope of having sex with an underage girl. Ugliness ensues. Concurrently in the same town the McWaid family are dealing with the disappearance of their teenage daughter Hayley. The seemingly happy young girl has been missing for three months and her family are barely coping with the uncertainty her disappearance has caused.

Much of this story is told from the perspective of Wendy Tynes, the news reporter who ambushed Dan Mercer. I found her sanctimonious, hypocritical and obtuse. Did I mention sanctimonious? It was this holier-than-thou aspect of her personality that increasingly grated on my nerves as the book progressed. I should however separate the fact I did not like Wendy from the fact she is a well drawn, complex character. After all it is realistic that I wanted to run over her driving an SUV as I fantasize about doing that to people (and television reporters) in the real world too.

Despite my homicidal feelings for Wendy the characters were the best thing about this book. There were several really credible and quite beautiful depictions of ordinary people in horrible situations. The parents and siblings of Hayley McWaid were all heart-wrenchingly believable. As were the Fathers’ Club: a group of middle-aged men including one of Dan Mercer’s old college roommates who Wendy tracks down with the aim of discovering more about Dan’s past. All of the men had become unemployed thanks to the economic downturn and their various ways of coping with being men unable to provide for their families in a world they believe only values them by their ability to do so was touchingly portrayed. I even managed to find Wendy’s teenage son and father-in-law quite endearing despite their association with the self-righteous Ms Tynes.

Parts of the story were solidly plotted and more akin to traditional crime fiction than a thriller as layers of people’s pasts were unpicked to provide understanding and motivation for various happenings. For me though these portions were overshadowed by some clumsiness. Firstly I began to wonder if Coben had been paid by the Temperance Society (or some shady government body) to wedge the ‘alcohol is bad’ theme in wherever he could (and sometimes where he couldn’t). This was monotonous and a pretty big give away to one of the two major plot threads which meant I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop despite the several apparent endings to that storyline. The other jarring note for me was the inclusion of the use of social media as a plot device. At times this was well integrated but at others it felt overly awkward. I can’t say more without giving away spoilers but, for example, I simply did not believe the actions taken by Wendy’s employers to information they discovered via the blogosphere.

I acknowledge this as a character defect of my own but when I love a particular character I can forgive minor flaws in a book and, conversely, when I develop a slow-burning hatred for someone my brain turns each tiny imperfection of the book into a major distraction. This is, I think, partly to blame for my reaction to Caught but I’ve never claimed to be entirely objective here. If you’d like another perspective on the novel do read the review at Petrona which is untainted by a reviewer’s rampant hatred for the encapsulation of everything that is wrong with the world in the form of Wendy Tynes (though being fair to myself I think I would have found the plot clumsy anyway). This is only the second Harlan Coben book I’ve read and as I really enjoyed the other one I’ll happily give the man another go and I’ll look for more books narrated by Christopher Evan Welch who was excellent.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 2.5/5

Narrator Christopher Evan Welch; Publisher Whole Story Audio Books [2010]; Length 11 hours 3 minutes

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Caught has also been reviewed at Book Journey (which reviews a different narrator’s version of the book), Me, My Book & the Couch (where Shon highly recommends the book) and Petrona (where the ever-reliable Maxine is impressed with the novel too so don’t take my word for it)

I read another of Coben’s standalones, Tell No One, earlier this year and enjoyed it more than this one.

Review: Inhuman Remains by Quintin Jardine

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Inhuman Remains is this month’s discussion book for my face to face book group.

Primavera Blackstone goes into hiding when she survives the plane crash that she believes was initiated by her ex-husband, Oz Blackstone. However when he dies a few months later she feels it’s safe to come out of hiding, retrieve her young son Tom and head off to Spain to live a life of luxury. Two years after this her Aunt Adrienne shows up and asks Prim to help locate her son Frank who, since he finished his prison sentence for fraud, has been working at a resort in Switzerland but has now disappeared. Prim, having previously helped her ex-husband who was apparently a private investigator as well as being a world-famous actor, agrees to become involved. Mayhem ensues.

Surely Primavera Blackstone is the kind of woman who only exists in the fantasy lives of men? There is no substance to her at all as she flits from being the world’s cleverest woman to the world’s most perfect mother to the world’s best lover while maintaining a nice line in pithy one-liners. Everyone she knows loves her, everyone she knows will risk their own death to save or protect her and everyone she knows is awestruck by her. I, on the other hand, found her tiresome and entirely unbelievable. None of the other characters is memorable enough a day and a half after finishing the book for me to make any kind of comment about them at all.

The plot started at implausible and got sillier from there. There is so much double crossing and triple crossing and parish priests saving the world kind of nonsense that I’d really lost interest well before the last ludicrous and unsatisfying twist. No one seemed to be telling the truth at any point in the story so there really wasn’t any suspense because I had nothing invested in the characters or the story.

I’m quite sure the book is not meant to be taken terribly seriously and I’m quite content with that concept but in such cases I have to find something to like and here I couldn’t. I can’t even sensibly explain why Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia Peabody (an equally implausible heroine of adventure tales) makes me smile while Primavera Blackstone just made me cranky but that’s the way it is. Once again though I am out of step with the mainstream because Jardine has published 30 novels including nine previous books featuring Oz Blackstone and they seem to be very popular but I’m afraid I didn’t see much here that would have me hunting down any of his other titles.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 2/5

Publisher Headline [2009]; ISBN 9780755340224; Length 310 pages

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Inhuman Remains has been reviewed at Mysteries in Paradise

Review: The Third Rail by Michael Harvey

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The third novel by Michael Harvey to feature Chicago private investigator Michael Kelly was provided to me by the publisher in the hope that I would review it.

In Chicago a sniper kills a woman as she waits for her train then another woman is killed while on a different train. While authorities in the city scramble to bring things under control, private investigator Michael Kelly is contacted by the killer who starts hinting at what may lie behind the killings. Kelly, an ex-cop, is allowed a tangential role in the hastily established task force and, of course, he becomes pivotal to the events.

For me thrillers are all about fast-paced plots with impossible situations which a hero will somehow get himself and/or the village/city/world out of just in the nick of time. The Third Rail provided an interesting take on this formula and was certainly a quick read with plenty of tension. I did think the plot was unnecessarily convoluted though and this detracted a little from my enjoyment. I don’t think the book was helped by basing separate threads on completely unrelated real world events, one of which seemed to have no point whatsoever other than to, perhaps, lay the seeds for a future book. Surely a story about a rush to stop a series of terrifying spree killings and uncover the reason behind them should have been enough to sustain a great thriller.

I did like Michael Kelly and although I haven’t read the earlier books I didn’t feel that I was missing out on anything vital by not knowing his back story. Enough hints are dropped that I managed to create one for him in my imagination. In some ways he’s a typical thriller hero, being impossibly bullet-resistant and all of that, but I am a sucker for a guy who loves his puppy and is cynical about almost everything else. His relationship with his girlfriend, who struggles with the risks associated with his work, was one of the more realistic elements of the book for me and quite a highlight. Another highlight was the depiction of Chicago both physically and politically which helped add a credible element to the novel (though perhaps I am being unfair in thinking that corruption in the city’s political circles adds to the realism).

The alternating points of view between Kelly, the killer’s and others suited the style of the novel though jumping from first person to third person narrative was a bit awkward with such short chapters. Overall though this is a fast and easy read which you will not want to put down once you’ve started.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 3/5

Publisher Bloomsbury [2010]; ISBN 9781408805855 Length 281 pages

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Review: Slay Ride by Chris Grabenstein

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Thanks to Ms Bookish last year I discovered the joy that is Chris Grabenstein’s John Ceepak series as read by Jeff Woodman and the series has become my ‘go to’ recommendation for people new to audio books. In an effort to space out my listening pleasure (there are only 5 books in the series so far though a 6th is on its way) I thought I’d try a book from Grabenstein’s other series for adults (he also writes YA fiction).

One of celebrated FBI Agent Christopher Miller’s neighbours has lost her grandson to a killer terrorising the cab drivers of New York and Miller feels obliged to undertake his own investigation into the case though it is officially the responsibility of the NYPD. Meanwhile, advertising executive Scott Wilkinson gets a ride to Newark airport with the limousine driver from hell. Nearly 12 months later the two men’s lives intersect when Miller is suffering the consequences of carrying out an unauthorised investigation and Wilkinson has cause to regret the complaint he made to the limousine company at the conclusion of his limo ride. Payback’s a bitch.

The machinations that get this story rolling bordered on being too contrived but they were out of the way early on and I enjoyed the rest of the tale. It whips along at a fast pace and involves a very acceptable number of twists, turns and scary moments. Though the ultimate ending is never in much doubt, the good guys are going to prevail, there’s a tension-packed story involving international jewel thieves, stolen matryoshka dolls, a gruesome scene that’ll make you think twice about sliced meat and a Christmas concert full of 6-year olds to get through before the satisfying pay-off.

Grabenstein’s characters are always thoughtfully drawn and rarely as simple as they might appear at first glance. Both Miller and Wilkinson are quite well developed and interesting but in Slay Ride the author seems to have enjoyed exploring the darker elements of personality by creating particularly nasty bad guys. Nicolai Kyznetsoff, the crazy limo driver, is disturbing at its best and Jeff Woodman’s excellent voicing of him added a deliciously creepy element to my listening experience.

Sometimes I like to escape from the real world and visit a place where the bad guys are really bad and the good guys are extra good and it’s blindingly obvious who is in which category. This book fits that bill to a tee and is a fast, funny and entertaining listen to boot.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 4/5 (It’s probably a 3.5 for the book with an extra half a point purely for Woodman’s narration).

Narrator: Jeff Woodman; Publisher: Audible Inc [2006], Length 8hrs 6mins

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I have read (and loved) the first three of Grabenstein’s John Ceepak mysteries too.

Review: Last Light by Alex Scarrow

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Following yet another recommendation from my personal librarian/reading mentor I picked up Alex Scarrow’s Last Light a few weeks ago and when my reading mood ring hit ‘thriller’ this week I read it. I can’t resist books with an environmental theme.

The Sutherland family is scattered. Andy is in Iraq doing private consulting work as an engineer, Jenny is in Manchester on a job interview, their teenage daughter Leona is at University in Norwich and their seven year-old son Jacob is at boarding school in London. When the world experiences a series of incidents which shut down global oil supplies and, in turn, cause chaos and rioting on an unprecedented scale the Sutherlands have a battle to find each other amid the rapidly collapsing society.

I have spent more than one evening sitting around with my Greenie friends speculating about what the world will look like if when oil becomes a rare commodity in the not too distant future so I was well and truly primed for a book which took this as its theme. Last Light did not disappoint, presenting a thoroughly credible series of possibilities and, I was pleased to see, not resorting to the clichéd British stiff upper lip seeing everyone through the crisis. The story unfolds at a suitably fast pace in a succession of short chapters and the depiction of society quickly crumbling was well done and quite believable given how reliant we all are these days on having life’s necessities such as food, water and energy delivered to our doorstep, often from half a world away.

My single gripe is that Scarrow saw the need to incorporate a ‘shadowy figure’ element to the story by attributing the instigating events to a sinister global cabal bent on… well… the sorts of things that sinister cabals of shadowy figures are always bent on. For me this aspect detracted a little from the otherwise authentic feel to the story. Also, I could have done with a few less pages devoted to gunfights in Iraq but I’m prepared to admit this is a personal bias against descriptions of gun play which I always find to be incomprehensible and on par with watching dust settle in the entertainment stakes.

Through each of the family members’ struggle to make it to the family home to reconnect Scarrow was able to show different aspects of how society might quickly fall apart in such circumstances and how ‘nice ordinary people’ such as the Sutherlands will struggle to accept that the societal norms they’ve been used to might no longer apply. The description of what happens when Leona and her brother make it to their suburban home and then, along with the few neighbours similarly trapped,  experience being terrorised by gangs each night is truly frightening. This along with other key scenes generated quite a few ‘what would I do faced with that scenario?’ moments for me.

The characters are about standard for a thriller in that they’re not superbly well-rounded but neither are they one-dimensional  automatons.  Interestingly for a male writer I found the female characters to be better developed and more credible than the men. Both Jenny and Leona coped with the barrage of frightening experiences and the way went from confused to afraid to resolved and back again felt very realistic . The only character to develop even a smidgen of the super human skills that heroes in thrillers tend to do was Andy, the father, and even that was of a very minor nature when compared with the sort of thing you normally see in thrillers.

Most of the thrillers I come across these days seem to either be concerned with some aspect of the (to me) nonsensical ‘war on terror’ or a variation on hidden codes in religious texts and I’ve tired of both of these so enjoyed the opportunity to explore a different theme. Also, having ranted previously about books which incorporated their messages badly by telling me what to think rather than showing me what the characters were thinking I was pleased to see that someone still knows how to incorporate a political point of view while delivering all the action and heart-in-the-mouth moments of terror that a thriller is supposed to have. I would heartily recommend it to anyone who likes the idea of an intelligent romp of a thriller.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 4/5

Publisher: Orion Books [this edition 208, original edition 2007]  ISBN: 9788752893273; Length 483 pages.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Last Light has also been reviewed by Maxine at Petrona (thanks once again for the recommendation) and at Material Witness

Crime Fiction Alphabet: Z is for Z4CK

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I was not exactly spoiled for choice for my final contribution to the crime fiction alphabet but it seems fitting to end off on a book that’s a little bit crime, a little bit sci-fi and a little bit thriller given that several of my contributions have bled into one or other of these sub-genres over the past few months.

Z4CK by Kevin Milne appealed to my inner geek. The book starts out in the near future in Edinburgh, Scotland and we see a future with some things I would dearly love to see (such as the flights to Australia from Scotland that take less than 3 hours) and other parts that I’m not so keen on (such as everyone carrying a single device that contains all of their personal information and a single company called Sec-Net having a monopoly on the security of that information). We then learn, in flashback, the story of Duncan Steele who created a program, called Z4CK which is an abbreviation for something I can’t remember, that allows him to bypass any network’s security and was nearly killed for it. Framed for a murder he did not commit Duncan has to use all his computer hacking skills to keep himself alive and out of jail.

The book is a great romp of an adventure and, apparently, very technically accurate which is not surprising given that Milne is a security expert and open source software pioneer. He says he wrote the entire novel on a wireless hand-held device during his morning commute on Scottish trains which, in the early 00′s must have gotten him a lot more raised eyebrows than would be the case now. This probably also explains the numerous typos in the book (nearly forgivable in the free PDF version but not quite so acceptable in the printed version that came out in 2004). There’s not a heck of a lot of character development but the plot is solid, if a little far-fetched, and thoroughly entertaining.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Thanks to Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise for hosting this fun meme and ensuring that even if I’ve posted nothing else during the week I’ve managed to pull something together each Monday for the last few months.

Review: The Last Pope by Luis Miguel Rocha

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Pope John Paul I reigned over the Catholic Church for 33 days in 1978. The premise of this book is that he was murdered. By a shadowy group called the P1 who are, for the record, more dastardly and secretive than the dastardly and secretive P2. Thirty years later a journalist receives a list of names. An Italian man tries to kill her. So does the CIA. Someone whose name isn’t Jack Payne tries to stop them. Oh, and the Americans can’t kill Castro.

Though odd, the above paragraph makes more sense than the book (and it’s a heck of a lot shorter so you should thank me for saving you).

The Last Pope has

  • the Vatican
  • a pretty young woman
  • a rascally, acerbic offsider for the aforementioned young woman
  • a secret code
  • photographs with images that can only be seen under ultra-violet light
  • a list of shadowy figures
  • Masons
  • a seduction scene

If all it took to make a great thriller was the sum of such parts then The Last Pope would have been readable. But a thriller needs more than the right ingredients. So it wasn’t. Readable that is. Reasons include:

  • The writing is pedestrian (for example within three short paragraphs the same man is described as having perspiration streaming down his face, hands slippery with sweat, perspiration clouding his eyes and being in a cold sweat) (even if the original Portuguese has four different words for sweat I doubt there was a need to use them all in one page)
  • The construction is bamboozling with its short chapters jumping in time from 1978 to earlier to the present and, for all I know, several periods in between. Some of these jumps are identified by chapter headings but many are not (to the point that I began to think that someone dropped the manuscript on the way to the printer and all the chapters got put back together out of order)
  • Many of the characters have no names (The Italian Man, The Master, The Subject etc) but this is balanced out by the fact that those who do have names have several each. So it’s usually about as clear as mud who is talking or being referred to.
  • Perhaps worst of all is that the thing doesn’t know if it wants to be a novel (i.e. fiction) or an expose (i.e. fact). In a bizarre author interview that appears at the end of the book Mr Rocha claims that it’s all true and that the character of JC (who is the assassin) (trust me that isn’t a plot spoiler) is based on the real assassin who he (Mr Rocha) has spoken with. I might be more inclined to swallow all this if the author hadn’t in the same interview also said
    • Assumptions will be replaced by confirmed facts in a future edition
    • He has never received a bad review (he has, I’ve read them and claiming they don’t exist is on par with me claiming the chocolate cookies I ate this morning didn’t exist because I closed my eyes )
    • The reason the Catholic Church hasn’t made a fuss about this book is they know it’s true (which is absurd because the book suggests that anyone who tells the truth about all this will get a bullet to the head so I think Mr Rocha’s claims to street cred in the conspiracy community would have been improved if he said he’d been shot at and then gone into hiding)

Honestly I’d have stopped reading this book at about page 60 but it was a pick of my book club and I DNF’d the last one so felt a little obliged to finish it. Plus I have to admit to a perverse pleasure in seeing how bad it would get.

If you want a thriller set in and around the Vatican that doesn’t treat its audience like morons read God’s Spy by Juan Gomez-Jurado. Or any other book you can find.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 0.5/5

Translator: Dolores M Koch; Publisher: Penguin [This translation 2008]; ISBN: 9780141042695; Length 473 pages; Setting: All over the place, random dates between about 1971 and whenever the thing was first published.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise has read the book (for the same book group). She has a different take on it and, as always, is far more polite than I am.

Review: Dead at Daybreak by Deon Meyer

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In South Africa Zatopek (Zet to his friends) van Heerden is an ex cop now working, reluctantly, as a private detective. Lawyer Hope Beneke hires him to find the will of an antiques dealer called Johannes Jacobus Smit who was killed in his home nearly a year earlier. If the will is not found within seven days Hope’s client, Wilna van As who was Smit’s live-in partner, will not receive any of Smit’s estate. One thread of this book takes off then as a fairly standard, if action-packed, procedural that counts back from Day 7 through van Heerden’s investigation into what happened to Smit and where the will might have ended up. The other thread of the book, revealed in alternating chapters, is a recounting of Zet’s life from his childhood onwards to his present circumstance of being self-proclaimed trash with evil in his heart.

The flawed protagonist is certainly not a new invention but I did find myself completely engaged by Zet van Heerden whose route to personal destruction is far from run-of-the-mill. The son of a miner and an artist, Zet’s journey to becoming a policeman and profiler is revealed in such a way that it feels perfectly natural and entirely believable even though it described many events which are completely foreign to me. One of the things that I like most about the characterisation of Zet is that although he’s depicted as quite sad, even depressed at times, he’s not always so and he does maintain some healthy relationships. For example he’s very close to his mother, the only woman he cooks for, and manages to make great friends with some unlikely people along the way even if he struggles to find the kind of love his father and mother shared.

The plot is quite complicated, with both threads getting sidetracked at times, but I found it remarkably easy to follow which is a credit to both Meyer’s writing and the excellent translation from Afrikaans by Madeleine Van Biljon which has retained all the bantering and colloquialisms that are sometimes lost in translated novels. As often happens with thrillers I did find the ending a teeny bit disappointing in terms of the alarming number of testosterone fueled shoot-outs that took place, but overall it was interestingly paced,  full of suspense and quite unpredictable. Along the way there are some absolutely beautiful vignettes, such as when Zet and Hope discuss their personal feelings about the country’s referendum on apartheid in 1992 or when Tiny Mpayipheli, a man Zet engages to protect his mother when the search for the will gets dangerous, describes a rugby match he played in the Soviet Union.

Dead at Daybreak is a little more noir than what I tend to think of as ‘my’ kind of crime fiction but I found it captivating. Alongside the male-dominated narrative and the shootouts at the end there’s plenty of heart and intelligence in this book which made it a very satisfying reading experience for me. Saul Reichlin added to my enjoyment with his wonderful narration which included excellent South African accents that helped make me feel like I was half a world away and he might just have the sexiest voice I’ve heard on an audio book. Ever.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 4/5

Translator: Madeleine Van Biljon; Narrator: Saul Reichlin; Publisher: Whole Story Audiobooks [this edition 2007, originally 2000]; ISBN: N/A (downloaded from audible.com); Length 13hrs 3mins; Setting: South Africa

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The only other book of Deon Meyer’s that I’ve read (so far) is Devil’s Peak which I thought was so good it made it into my top ten reads for 2008.