Category Archives: book review

Review: THE FALLEN by Jassy Mackenzie

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This is the first book I have read featuring Jade De Jong, a South African private detective, though it is the third in which she appears. As it opens Jade is in the resort area of St Lucia for a diving holiday with her boyfriend, a policeman. She booked the trip to overcome her fear of diving and to shore up the somewhat rocky relationship with David Patel. But even though she receives private lessons from the instructor she is unable to overcome her fear of drowning and fully embrace the sport and the holiday turns truly rotten when David drops a bombshell about their relationship. Before the two can discuss their future the diving instructor is found stabbed to death and David (with Jade in tow) steps in to help the locals with the investigation.

I found the plot of THE FALLEN uneven, slow to get going really as several threads of unequal interest were set up, including a somewhat confusing tale about Jade trying to find the grave of her mother who died when Jade was a baby. For me the pacing was thrown off by the terribly obvious and drawn out clue-hunting, and then at one point I thought the book had finished and was rather astonished to find there were still 6 and a half chapters (a couple of hours) of the audio book left . The thread that deals with what happens after the diving instructor’s body is found – and the truly horrible plan Jade uncovers – was for me the best part of the book; responsible for a genuine OMG moment when it became clear what was going on.

I should be fair and say that some of my problems with the book are probably not the author’s fault. The fact is I didn’t really take to Jade De Jong. This doesn’t mean she is a poorly drawn character (objectively I can see she is not and is indeed quite realistic) but I couldn’t summon up much interest in whether or not she got out of her various tight spots and near-death experiences. Just as you sometimes meet someone in real life and know you’re never going to be anything other than acquaintances without really knowing why, I just didn’t particularly like the character from the outset. As the book went on I found reasons not to like her, such as her somewhat hypocritical morality which seemed to boil down to the notion that it’s OK to do bad things (such as kill people) as long as the victims are not innocent (as deemed by whoever is doing the killing), but my not liking her preceded me discovering this about her.

I’m not entirely sure this book knew what it wanted to be. At times it read like an old-fashioned whodunnit, though with De Jong making a bit of a fist of the kind of denouement that Holmes or Poirot could perform with aplomb. I cannot possibly, for example, be the only reader to have been internally screaming “there are more than passengers on an airplane you dolt” as Jade very slowly worked this out as if for an audience of dim-witted, third graders. At other times the book read like a modern thriller with loads of action and heroine-in-peril scenarios. Personally I think this aspect of the book worked better, especially as it allowed the author to depict several aspects of modern South African life which was a real strength of the novel.

If I could separate my enjoyment of the book from my disinterest in its protagonist I would undoubtedly rate it higher as overall it did maintain my interest, especially with the excellent narration of the audio version from Justine Eyre. But in the end this has to be about my reaction to the book and frankly I can’t imagine myself picking up another book featuring this character (though I would give the author another go if she wrote something with a different character in it or at least taking the lead role).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

THE FALLEN has been reviewed (far more positively so don’t just take my word on the matter) at Jen’s Book Thoughts and Kittling: Books

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 2.5/5
Narrator Justine Eyre
Publisher AudioGO [2012]
ASIN B007OX6MTE
Length 10 hours 16 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series #3 in Jade De Jong series
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: THE BOY IN THE SUITCASE by Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis

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There’s absolutely no ambiguity about the title of this book: there is a boy and he is indeed in a suitcase, discovered there by Danish nurse Nina Borg after a frantic phone call from an old friend demanding that she pick the suitcase up from a  local railway station. For reasons that I still don’t fully comprehend when she discovers the perfectly healthy 3-year old boy in said suitcase Nina goes into hiding with him rather than contacting the police, her husband or anyone who might be any use at all in such circumstances. One thread of the book follows her as she tries to work out who the boy is (he doesn’t speak the same languages as Nina) and what she should do with him.

Three other threads follow three other characters: Jan, a wealthy Dane whose travel delays result in him missing out on a very important appointment; Sigita, a single mother in Lithuania who wakes up in hospital with a broken arm and everyone believing her a drunk and Jucas, a criminal type working on a sure fire way to earn the money he needs for his dream life in Poland with his wife. The stories do all connect though not in an entirely predictable way.

I found this book uneven in quality: some of it was very good and some downright clunky. With the exception of Sigita the characters don’t seem properly fleshed out or, in the case of Nina, not quite credible. I could deal with her not being terribly sympathetic but did roll my eyes a bit at her sometimes ludicrous and thoroughly juvenile behaviour. At the end of the novel (in one of the clunkier passages of writing) this behaviour is explained if not justified but even so it still didn’t ring true (for example if she were truly on a mission to save the world then I don’t see how she could have let the young prostitute walk away as easily as she did at a certain point in the novel). So for me Nina’s ‘drive’ felt more like a plot device than a real character trait and I think there was probably a way to tell this story without stretching the credulity of readers to the extent that mine was. As a counter balance though Sigita is a terrifically authentic character, displaying a mixture of guilt, terror, indecision and tenacity that I found truly compelling and believable for her circumstances.

The story was more even and overall was good, though the very short chapters chopping from one perspective to another repeatedly did take some getting used to. However it maintained a good pace and did manage to keep a few surprises up its sleeve until near the end. I was going to write that the book didn’t have a particularly strong sense of place but then I realised that while it might not have screamed Denmark from every page it is a very European book in the way that it mixes people from several countries, all of them multilingual and crossing borders with ease. None of that would be possible on the giant island I live on.

In the end I liked but did not love this book though I think I am in the minority (again) as most reviews seem to have been much more positive. I suppose the thing that struck me most was that some of the themes it raises are dismissed quickly in favour of providing another plot twist whereas I’d have liked to see some of those themes and ideas explored in more depth and would have been happy to sacrifice a plot twist or two for the cause.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

THE BOY IN THE SUITCASE has been reviewed at Barbara Fister’s Place, DJ’s Krimiblog, Petrona, Reviewing the Evidence, The Crime Segments

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 3/5
Translator Lene Kaaberbol
Publisher Random House [2011]
ISBN 9781569479827
Length 313 pages
Format eBook (for Kindle)
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.

Review: FUN HOUSE by Chris Grabenstein

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Given that FUN HOUSE is the latest release in a series I have come to love and pokes pokes fun at a modern phenomenon I despise, reality TV, I was probably destined to like the book. However I have been let down by destiny once or twice before so it wasn’t a sure thing but happily the book met all my expectations. And then some.

It is the seventh book to feature former military policeman John Ceepak and his partner Danny Boyle who try to keep the fictional resort town of Sea Haven, New Jersey safe from the rather alarming number of criminals and murderers who frequent the place. It is summer again and the town has been been home to a new reality show which seems to be a hellish combination of all the reality shows ever to have aired, involving contestants who will do anything debasing for a few more minutes of ‘fame’, challenges designed to embarrass or titillate and voyeurism of the most puerile kind. On his night off Ceepak encounters several of the show’s contestants and is forced to arrest one of them. Footage of this event becomes an overnight You Tube sensation which results in Ceepak and Boyle being assigned to the show’s full time security detail, a ridiculous state of affairs that Ceepak only agrees to because it might lead to the apprehension of a drug dealer that has eluded the Sea Haven police for some time. As you might expect things don’t quite go according to plan and Ceepak and Danny are soon once again on the hunt for a killer.

One of the standout features of this book (and its predecessors) is the two lead characters and their evolving relationship. They are almost unique for crime fighting blokes in that they are both basically well adjusted human beings, though John Ceepak does carry some deep scars from his time in Iraq and Danny might end up with his own nightmares if his body count keeps increasing. The fact that they are engaging people despite not being alcoholics, loners, depressives, mavericks or any of the other things that the men of crime fiction often are does make a nice change (and not for the first time makes me wonder if the other kind of character hasn’t been a little over done). I enjoy seeing a ‘normal’ male relationship being depicted and realised with this novel that the quoting of Springsteen lyrics at critical plot points has become a favourite feature for me and not only because I’m a fan. It serves the same purpose as quoting poetry does in more literary novels and is, I think, a particularly good observation about the way men (in this instance) can struggle to communicate their feelings. When Danny and Ceepak don’t know what to say to each other about the scary or emotional situations they find themselves in they can at least offer comfort to each other via the words of their favourite songwriter. Surely it beats the oft-depicted alcoholic binges as a way to deal with life’s difficult moments.

Although it involves more than one gruesome death the plot of this novel is probably the lightest and funniest of the series though the deaths themselves are never treated too flippantly (at least not by Ceepak or Danny though some of the town’s political figures are a bit more cavalier). But the reality TV show setting offers Grabenstein many opportunities for poking fun at popular culture and he seems to relish the task. Even the normally taciturn Ceepak gets in on the act of ribbing the moronic behaviour of the contestants, the producers and the public who lap it all up. But while the book has lots of light moments Grabenstein does, as always, introduce some serious notes including the appalling fact that most policemen need to have second jobs in order to make ends meet financially (particularly poignant when juxtaposed with the ludicrous amounts of cash that ‘stars’ of reality TV might expect to make, especially if they are stupid, naked or a combination of the two). I like the way Grabenstein gently infuses his books with social commentary rather than ramming a point of view down reader’s throats.

Grabenstein really has carved out a sub genre all of his own with this series or at least I can’t come up with anything to compare the books to. They’re generally light but not cosy (too much ‘on stage’ blood and violence and a lack of predictability), comedic but not really capers and blend the procedural with the satirical in unique way. As always I listened to this instalment narrated wonderfully by Jeff Woodman and my only disappointment is that I greedily gobbled the whole thing up in one day and now have a two-year wait for the next instalment of this series.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Thanks as always to Belle for introducing me to this series (not only for this introduction but for the reminder that I don’t always know what I like because I never would have chosen the first book for myself).

I have reviewed all but one of the earlier books in this series TILT A WHIRL, MAD MOUSE, WHACK A MOLE, HELL HOLE and ROLLING THUNDER (I have also read the fifth book MIND SCRAMBLER but somehow missed reviewing it – perhaps I’ll do a re-read when I’m jonesing for a Ceepak and Boyle fix while I wait for the next book).

Oh and if you’re a fan of Ceepak and Boyle see if you can track down a copy of the short story RING TOSS which appeared in the June 2010 issue of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and was at least in November last year available from Amazon as a kindle single (I couldn’t find it today though).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 4/5
Narrator Jeff Woodman
Publisher Audible Inc [2012]
ASIN B007SP2OD6
Length 7 hours 44 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series #7 in the Ceepak and Boyle series
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: DEFENDING JACOB by William Landay

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DEFENDING JACOB is narrated by Andy Barber, a 51 year old assistant District Attorney in Newton, Connecticut. When a teenage boy and classmate of Barber’s son Jacob is murdered on his way to school one morning Barber leaps into the investigation. After a slow start, largely due to a lack of cooperation from the high school students who were friends and classmates of the victim, seems to point in the direction of a local man who has been accused of indecent assault. But while Barber pursues that line of investigation other players in the Newton law enforcement community are chasing a different suspect: Barber’s own son. When they believe they have enough evidence they confront Barber and issue an arrest warrant for Jacob. What follows is an accounting of Jacob’s trial and the impact it and the surrounding media and social scrutiny all have on the Barber family.

From a storytelling point of view I found the book uneven. The title tells us that Jacob is going to need defending so I was waiting for that point from the very first sentence and it seemed to take a heck of a long time to get there. Once we got to what I thought of as the starting point the book did pick up pace and drew readers into the familiar but nevertheless compelling consideration of whether or not Jacob was innocent but would be locked up or was guilty but would be set free. The depiction of the teenage social scene was a particularly successful aspect of the book. However I could have done without the major plot line revolving around the notion of an inherited propensity towards violence. It is a theme that has been explored many times over and while that in itself is not a reason to avoid it forever more I didn’t think it added anything to this story which dealt with the issue in a fairly superficial and uninteresting way. It felt like it had been added for shock value as no one, least of all the characters who were meant to, seemed to have any real convictions about ‘the murder gene’ notion one way or the other.

As far as individual characters go the book is a miss for me. It’s not so much that none of the three family members is particularly likeable or sympathetic (though they’re not) but that I didn’t find them to be very strongly drawn on any scale which made them insipid. Worse though is that they did not seem very credible, especially the mother. Her husband describes Laurie as a warm, outgoing person with many friends and a strong connection to her community and her own family. Yet she totally withdraws from her parents immediately and every single one of her so-called friends abandons her (again with immediate effect). Even I, anti-social introvert that I am, could drum up one or two good friends who would stand by me in a crisis so I found it a stretch to swallow that she would not have had one person who stood by her in the horrific circumstances. Nor did I believe she would withdraw so immediately from her own family. The depiction of Andy’s development of highly disparaging views on the legal system he had worked his whole life in also failed my ‘ring of truth’ test. For me both of these things would have felt more realistic if they’d been depicted as happening more gradually than both parties having woken up the day after Jacob’s arrest with an entirely new set of beliefs and behaviours from what they’d had the day before. As a collective character though the Barber family and its implosion is the best aspect of the book for me.

I didn’t hate this book but nor did I love it and on balance there were more niggly bits than there ought to have been. Even the editing seemed to have missed some continuity issues such as the fact that Barber tells us the man who prosecuted Jacob’s case went into private practice following the trial yet he appears to be questioning Andy in a subsequent grand jury investigation (transcripts of which pepper the entire book). Personally I wouldn’t recommend this book but having looked around at reviews it’s clear I am in the minority so, as always, you should make up your own minds. If you are an audiobook devotee you could do far worse than listening to Eric Meyers narrate it as I thought he did an excellent job.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

DEFENDING JACOB has been reviewed (generally in far more positive terms than I have done) at Bookgeeks, I’m Booking It and Raging Bibliomania

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 2.5/5
Narrator Eric Meyers
Publisher Whole Story Audiobooks [2012]
ASIN B007RYX9KU
Length 14 hours 44 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.

Review: NIGHTS OF AWE by Harri Nykänen

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In Helsinki the bodies of two Arab men are found, one presumably tortured before being shot and the other having fallen or been pushed from a bridge onto railway tracks. Detective Ariel Kafka of the Violent Crimes Unit, and one of only two Jewish policemen in Finland, is the lead investigator. The bodies are quickly identified and at first police wonder if the crimes are race related but, as more bodies start piling up and the security forces start poking their noses in where Kafka doesn’t want them, consideration turns to a possible terrorist attack being planned for Helsinki. Then again it could be a drug thing!

I thoroughly enjoyed meeting Ariel Kafka who is around 40, single and, mostly, unobservant of his religion’s traditions and rules. Refreshingly he is not a maverick, a loner or an alcoholic and yet he still manages to be interesting. He does have a family tragedy in his past but it does not cripple him and he rubs along well enough with his older brother while having a quite lovely relationship with his uncle. His working relationships are not beset by conflict either. He manages to get on with most of his superiors, even acknowledging the political fallout they try to save him from, and his colleagues are generally energetic and competent, though one is more interested in his hobby than his work but even he manages to help track down a vital piece of evidence when it really matters. Kafka can be a bit acerbic but his dry humour is a nice counter balance and overall he is the sort of character I can imagine as a real-world policeman which is not something I often think about fictional detectives.

The plot was a less successful element of the book for me, feeling a bit more like a Hollywood thriller script than a considered work of crime fiction. The speed with which conspiracy theories were dreamt up, bought into and abandoned in favour of a new one wasn’t really convincing. And when combined with the alarming body count (eight I think by the end of the book) I did start to roll my eyes a bit. For me the fact of Kafka’s Jewishness and the setting of the book during the ten-day period between two of the most important Jewish holidays, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, was enough to give the book the unique flavour I suspect the author was aiming for. Adding a thread about Mossad agents working in-country was a little over the top (most Jewish people I know seem to manage to get through entire days, weeks even, without encountering a single reference to the famed Agency so it kind of bugs me when every fictional Jew runs across at least one agent before breakfast).

However there is enough promise in this series opener for me to be keen to read the next instalment should there be one. The protagonist offers scope for genuinely interesting character development and there is evidence that Nykänen has the capacity to explore social themes in an intelligent way, even if in this book such exploration got a bit lost at times amidst the overly convoluted plot. For example Nykänen tackles the difficult issue of the way Israel and the broader Israeli/Palestinian conflict is perceived in Finland and Europe generally and he does so thoughtfully. NIGHTS OF AWE, a title with a clever double meaning, is a smoothly translated, smart, fast-paced read with enough depth that I could largely forgive the unnecessary ‘Hollywoodisation’ of the plot.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

NIGHTS OF AWE has been reviewed at Crime Scraps, Mrs Wordopolis Reads and The Crime Segments

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 3.5/5
Translator Kristian London
Publisher Bitter Lemon Press [2012]
ISBN 9781904738923
Length 252 pages
Format paperback
Book Series #1 in Ariel Kafka series
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: THE THIEF by Fuminori Nakamura

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I don’t think I’d have noticed let alone read this book if it hadn’t appeared on the list of titles eligible for this year’s International Dagger Award for translated crime fiction published in the UK and that would have been my loss. It’s a great reminder of why I follow this particular award more closely than any other; I am prompted to read more widely in terms of geography and style than I otherwise would do.*

THE THIEF is an odd book, not really fitting neatly into any of the crime genre’s boxes though it is, I suppose, closest to noir even though there is a bit too much overt metaphysical symbolism for it to fully conform to the necessary tropes . It recounts a short period in the life of a Japanese pickpocket who describes his daily ‘work’ (identifying victims and the various ruses used to steal their stuff) and how he gets caught up with a gang who coerce him into crimes he would not have chosen to commit. He also, somewhat reluctantly, befriends a young boy who he one day notices shoplifting with his mother and prevents the pair from being caught by a store detective.

There are several reasons why I should not have liked THE THIEF but in an almost ornery way my brain decided to be transfixed by it. Despite me. I am sure the fact that it is a teeny tiny book amongst a landslide of doorstop-sized tomes didn’t hurt.

I know I sound like an uncaring, middle class, cow but I’m not really fond of books told from the career criminal’s point of view. In most cases I’m not sympathetic to them, regardless of the real or imagined traumas that led them to their lives of crime, and I’m rarely swayed or intrigued by their angst or their revelling in the misery they inflict. So a story told by a pickpocket should not, on past experience, have engaged me at all but it did. It may have something to do with the fact that the eponymous thief (named only once as Nishimura) doesn’t delve deeply into the morality of his actions (aside from a claim to only steal from rich people) and certainly doesn’t spend time justifying himself. He is what he is and rather dispassionately tells his story which I somehow found more acceptable than the books which give lengthy reasons for a person becoming a life-long criminal. They always seem to boil down to “it’s not my fault I turned out this way” at which point I usually mumble “cry me a river” under my breath (I warned you I’d sound like a cow).

There is also, at least on the surface, is not a lot going on here in that rather than a major story arc the book concerns itself with an almost random slice of Nishimura’s life which is another reason I ought not to have been engrossed in the book as that kind of thing often irks me. But with THE THIEF almost immediately I did want to know what troubles would befall the narrator (there was never even a glimmer that his life would bring something other than troubles). Somehow his detachment and reserve made me hang on for the few tiny morsels that would provide insight into the man, his personal history and his ultimate fate.

Some of THE THIEF borders on the surreal, the female characters are prostitutes or dead (downtrodden women are a feature of all the Japanese crime fiction I have read) and the ending is as ambiguous as it gets which are all more reasons why I would normally not enjoy a book. And yet I listened to the whole thing in a single sitting almost without noticing the time passing. There are some things that don’t really work (I don’t care how downtrodden she is I didn’t for a moment ‘buy’ the character of the boy’s mother who at a point I won’t detail for fear of spoiling utters the line “what good are kids anyway” which did cause my eyes to roll) but overall I am glad to have read the book and would recommend to those prepared for something a little different.

*I see now that a delay in this book’s UK publication date has ruled it out of contention for this year’s award but I’m still glad to have read it (and can now I say I’ve started reading titles eligible for next year’s award).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

THE THIEF has been reviewed at International Noir Fiction, Mrs Wordopolis Reads and The Crime Segments

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 3.5/5
Translators Satoko Izumo and Stephen Coates
Narrator Charlie Thurston
Publisher AudioGO [This edition 2012, original work 2009]
ASIN B007EJIBOC
Length 4 hours 1 minute
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.

Review: The Drowning by Camilla Lackberg

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THE DROWNING is the sixth book depicting life and death in Fjällbacka, Sweden’s answer to Cabot Cove or the villages of Midsomer. Its prologue features a description of a man’s death and the story proper then opens with police detective Patrik Hedström and his colleagues searching for Magnus Kjellner who has been missing for some months and whose wife visits the police station weekly to ask for updates. But no one, least of all Läckberg, seems terribly concerned about the man’s disappearance. There are, after all, pregnancies, nappies, parenting leave, pregnancies and other domesticity to discuss. At length.

We are also introduced to Christian Thydell, a local resident and debut author who has been receiving anonymous and threatening letters for some time. He has kept these a secret even from his wife but makes the mistake of mentioning them to his mentor and fellow author Erica Falck. She tells her husband, the aforementioned police detective, and their shared publisher with the result that every man and his dog is soon aware of Christian’s problems. Eventually links are made between Christian’s story and the missing man’s but it seems to take the Fjällbacka police a lot longer than it will take the average reader to work this all out.

These stories are intertwined with flashbacks to the life of a troubled young boy who was orphaned, fostered, bullied and almost responsible for the death of his sibling. Again, the connections seemed fairly obvious but this part of the book was in some ways the most successful for me as the characters in it at least felt like their creator was interested in what was happening to them. With the contemporary story I didn’t get much sense at all that the author really cared about the characters. At least that’s my interpretation of their collective insipidness.

I was going to try to be polite about the book because, on one level, it’s a perfectly competent cosy mystery. There’s oodles of domesticity, a straightforward whodunnit and the inevitable cliffhanger ending that gives the book something of a soap-opera feel. My problem is, I suppose, that the books are marketed as psychological thrillers or suspense novels and this one at least is nothing of the kind. Partly this is because the day-to-day lives of the series’ continuing characters occupy more time than the actual mystery despite the fact that nothing terribly new is happening to any of them. All the ones who are pregnant have been pregnant before and, honestly, there is a limit to how many discussions about how to fit parenting leave into their lives I am interested in (for the record that limit was probably reached about half-way through the previous book in this series). The endless consumption of buns with or without coffee, the repetition of jibes about Erica eating for two (she is pregnant with twins which I don’t count as a spoiler as it is revealed very early on) and being unable to stand up on her own whenever she sits down grew tiresome.

Perhaps if the mystery story had been stronger I’d have felt differently about this book but I thought the plot fairly obvious and it didn’t seem to tackle anything new either. In most of her previous books the mysteries have delved into an interesting area, such as THE HIDDEN CHILD‘s exploration of nazism in Sweden in both historical and contemporary times. Here a cast of insipid characters strolled through a story that expressed mild rebuke at poor parenting – a topic Lackberg has address in earlier novels (with better results). The psychological twist in the resolution was both predictable and unconvincing.

To me THE DROWNING feels like a book churned out to formula and it verged on treating its readers like idiots. At one point early on for example Patrik, who has been described as turning Magnus Kjellner’s life inside out in the period before the book opens, has a conversation with the man’s wife asking who his friends were. Surely this would have come up somwhere in the three months of exhaustive searching for the man? Especially as he only had three?

In its favour the book did pick up towards the end with the last third having a decent pacing and I did, as always, enjoy the narration of the audio version by Eamon Riley (in fact I’m not sure I’d have bothered finishing the book if I’d been reading it in print). Having enjoyed this author’s previous books I will give the next one a go on the grounds this could be an aberration. But the quality will have to be substantially improved if I’m not to consign this series to the “once good, now formulaic” list that so many other long-running authors have been added to.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I have reviewed the earlier novels in this series The Ice Princess, The Preacher, The Stonecutter, The Gallows Bird and The Hidden Child

In the interests of fairness there are far more glowing reviews of this book at Bookish Magpie, TheBronteSister,

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 2.5/5
Translator Tiina Nunnally
Narrator Eamonn Riley
Publisher Harper Collins Audio [2012]
ASIN B007HN3ZQO
Length 15 hours 28 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series #6 in the Erica Falck/Patrik Hedström series
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: A DARKER DOMAIN by Val McDermid

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14

If the world could be ordered to my specific tastes all books would be available in audio format and all of those would be read by people with Scottish accents, even the ones set in outback Australia. I blame my mother’s crush on Sean Connery (and the fact a portion of my developmental years was spent in darkened theatres watching his movies instead of going to kindergarten) for the fact I find it the very best way to hear English spoken. I was pre-disposed then to liking A DARKER DOMAIN, one of Val McDermid’s standalone novels, given it is narrated by Scottish actress Eilidh Fraser. Happily the story is a damned fine one too which made my listening experience complete.

Being something of a latecomer to the Val McDermid appreciation society I was, once again, impressed with the superior storytelling skill on display in this big novel that a lesser author probably couldn’t pull off. It opens in the contemporary setting of the Fife Constabulary cold case unit. DI Karen Pirie is asked to track down Mick Prentiss who has been missing for more than twenty years, since the brutal miner’s strikes of the 1980′s when he was thought to have gone to work as a scab in Nottingham. But now that his daughter is desperate for a bone marrow donor for her very ill son she cannot find a trace of her father and turns to the police for help.

At the same time Pirie is given a much higher profile missing persons case to re-open. The local laird is Broderick Grant and twenty years earlier his only daughter and her baby son were kidnapped and held for ransom. However the exchange went horribly wrong which resulted in the daughter’s death and the grandson’s permanent disappearance. Now  a journalist has found some evidence that provides a concrete link to the old case and Grant wonders if he can find out what happened to his grandson once and for all.

These historical stories unfold concurrently throughout the novel, often hinting at how they will connect but I’m sure (at least I hope) I’m not the only reader who made several errors of guesswork before stumbling across the actual connections. McDermid really is a master of this kind of twist-filled plot because it is, at least until just before the end, continually surprising while maintaining a credibility that is often lacking from this kind of book.

But underneath the rollicking plot there is a real depth, particularly as McDermid describes life for the striking workers and their families. This is a subject I’m not terribly familiar with (in my defence I was 16 at the time and lived half a world away) but the details of day-to-day life included here had a very authentic feel to me. The real poverty being experienced by the striking workers, their disappointment in the strike’s leaders, the good and bad sides to the power of the local community are all deftly depicted and really made me feel like I have some small sense of this turbulent period. I’d recommend the book for this if nothing else.

The characters in the book are also enjoyable to meet, even the unpleasant ones like Broderick Grant who uses his money and influence in the way that such people often do. There are two strong female characters though in Karen Pirie and the journalist involved in the Grant case, Bel Richmond. Pirie is particularly engaging as she is constantly skating on thin ice with her superiors but because she has a history of good results she gets away with most of her unorthodox behaviour. And she does have a good offsider in DS Phil Parhatka who is, sometimes, able to reign in her wilder ideas.

McDermid somehow manages to avoid the sickly sentimentality that could easily overwhelm a book that tackles the kind of emotional storylines and themes as this one does. The undercurrent of dark humour probably helps, as does its almost entire lack of judgement about the people involved in the story and the actions they take. The more I read the more I realise just how rare a thing this is and the more I am grateful for those books which achieve it.

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A DARKER DOMAIN has been reviewed at Aust Crime Fiction, Petrona, Reviewing the Evidence

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My rating 4/5
Narrator Eilidh Fraser
Publisher Whole Story Audio Books [2009]
ASIN B0036KXP94
Length 11 hours 54 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.

Review: OR THE BULL KILLS YOU by Jason Webster

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8

In Valencia, Spain it is the beginning of the Spring Fiesta and Chief Inspector Max Cámara is unhappy. At the last minute he has been forced to stand in for his boss as the honorary master of ceremonies for the day’s bullfight. Cámara despises bullfighting. But he performs the duty with competence if not enjoyment and is relaxing in a nearby bar afterwards when word reaches him that Jorge Blanco, the matador who had so masterfully beaten the bull in the day’s fight, has been found dead. In charge of the investigation Cámara struggles with his own personal demons, office and city politics and a plethora of potential suspects in his quest to solve the case.

Blanco was famous and much-loved, almost single-handedly responsible for reviving the city’s interest in bullfighting. Is that why he was killed? There are local elections due in which one party has made the banning of bullfighting its top priority which could have prompted someone to want Blanco out of the way. But the fighter’s personal life is also ripe ground for suspects as there are rumours about his sexuality which seem at odds with his engagement to a much-loved entertainer.

Surprisingly, to me, the thing I enjoyed most about this book was its richly depicted setting which included more information about bullfighting than I could ever have anticipated being intrigued by. Which is why it is sometimes good to read things you think you might not like. Webster, who is not a native Spaniard but has lived there for twenty years and has published several highly acclaimed travel books about the country, really does bring the city alive for the reader with quite lyrical descriptions of the city, the festival, the food and the bullfighting. Early on Cámara meets a female journalist who is so much an acknowledged expert about the sport that she was the only reporter who had ever interviewed Jorge Blanco. She and Cámara debate the merits, or lack thereof, of the sport and she fills him in on any history and symbolism that might be relevant to his investigation and it is these exchanges that allow readers to absorb information about a subject most of them probably know little about. I really liked the way this was done, especially they way it enabled Webster to present both sides of the debate without being judgemental.

The rest of the book was not quite as successful for me. I was not as taken by the character of Max Cámara as other reviewers seem to have been which of course is a highly personal thing. Perhaps I have had my fill of alcoholic detectives who argue with their superiors and are, in the end, fairly self-absorbed (in this instance Cámara’s inner life revolves around his worries over his fertility which I literally could not have cared less about). Ultimately I didn’t find him quite engaging enough to care that much whether he survived the ever-looming threat of dismissal but I can’t say he was a badly drawn character, merely one that did not appeal very much to me. I found the female characters who included Blanco’s fiancée Carmen, the journalist and Cámara’s girlfriend a little flat and forgettable though I can’t really put my finger on a reason for this.

As a mystery the novel mostly worked although the ending was a bit too contrived for my liking but that is a fairly common experience for me. I think writing believable but engaging endings must be very very hard. However the investigation itself was suspenseful and kept me guessing in just the right way.

OR THE BULL KILLS YOU provided a real sense of being transported to the streets of Valencia, something I suspect was the result of the mixture of Webster’s writing and an excellent narration of the audio book by Mark Meadows whose Spanish pronunciation sounded wonderful in my ears. I think most people would like the book and some will love it, perhaps especially those who have not read quite as much crime fiction as I seem to have done (the people who all recommended it to me are occasional readers of the genre rather than die hard fans).

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OR THE BULL KILLS YOU has been reviewed at, Euro Crime, It’s A Crime and The View From the Blue House

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My rating 3/5
Narrator Mark Meadows
Publisher AudioGo [2011]
ASIN B005IHIACK
Length 11 hours 34 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series #1 in a new series?
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: A DARK REDEMPTION by Stav Sherez

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As my shelves (and digital devices) are quite literally groaning under the weight of police procedural novels set in England I’m not really in the market for another series to follow. But given I still have strong images in my head from the last book I read by Sherez (set in Greece) I couldn’t resist this first instalment of a promised new series even though it’s in a crowded space. It turns out to have been a good decision..

A DARK REDEMPTION opens with three young men taking a trip to Uganda following their university graduation and before they have to knuckle down to jobs and real life. On their travels they make a seemingly random choice which leads them into the clutches of a rebel army and a grim stretch in custody though at this point we don’t learn a lot of the details of what went on. The main part of the story then starts, taking place a dozen or so years later. Jack Carrigan, one of the three men who had travelled to Africa, is a Detective Inspector in London and he is put in charge of the investigation into the brutal murder of a young African student named Grace Okello. But Jack has made enemies on the force and his boss forces Geneva Miller, a woman who has had her own brushes with bureaucracy, to be the DS on the investigation. She is to assist Jack and report back to his superiors about his behaviour and methods. At the start of the investigation the two are wary of each other and also have different ideas about the motivations for the murder – with Jack thinking her violent boyfriend responsible and Geneva wondering if it is somehow linked to Grace’s research into the armed conflict in her native country. But as the case unfolds the two detectives develop a respect for each other and of course narrow down the focus of their investigation.

I was a little wary of the themes this book looked set to tackle given that I started it as the Kony 2012 social media frenzy was in full swing. Happily my fears were unfounded as Sherez deals with the African elements of the story (including the aforementioned Kony) sensitively and intelligently; managing to portray nuances of the situation in both Uganda and amongst the displaced African community living in England that you won’t find in most mainstream media. Some of the segments of the book are violent but it never feels at all gratuitous and the story would not feel authentic if there were not some level of violence given what we know about the recent real-world history that provides the story’s backdrop. Sherez uses several methods for imparting the relevant information about Ugandan history and politics and in combination these are quite the lesson in how authors of this type of novel can do such things without making the reader feel as if they are in a lecture theatre.

I agree with Sarah at Crimepieces who wrote that Carrigan’s maverick status was depicted in an understated way as that is exactly how I felt. Too many crime books these days appear to be working from a list of quirks and anti-authority behaviours to give their protagonists and there is a tendency to go overboard or have no real reason for the traits displayed. Jack is not at the extreme end of the scale and any foibles he does have make sense within the context that Sherez provides. There are also quite a few hints of secrets still to be explored in both his and Miller’s lives in what I hope will be some future instalments of the series as I enjoyed both characters and would happily read more of their exploits.

On one level I suppose this book is ‘just’ police procedural novel but it is a superior example of the genre. Both thoughtful and thought-provoking A DARK REDEMPTION manages to explore a complex issue without either sensationalising them or treating readers like morons and for that alone I applaud it. The fact that it also provides a suspense-filled mystery and a decent resolution is icing on this excellent cake. To undoubtedly stretch the dessert metaphor a little too far the narration by English actor David Thorpe is the delicious chocolate sprinkles on the icing :)

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Sidenote: I know that authors normally have little influence over their book covers so it’s unfair to include this in the review proper (and I have not taken the matter into account) but this cover couldn’t be less relevant to the book if it tried. The near ubiquitous shadowy silhouettes that are much beloved of crime fiction marketing/publishing types these days tell us nothing to make us pick up the book or to mark it out as unique and, now that I’ve read it, don’t even hint at anything going on within the story. If a cover is going to be this irrelevant why bother?

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A DARKER REDEMPTION has been reviewed at Crimepieces and It’s A Crime.

I reviewed an earlier, unrelated book by Sherez set in Greece called THE BLACK MONASTERY in the early days of this blog.

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My rating 4/5
Narrator David Thorpe
Publisher Audible Ltd [2012]
ASIN B007D56PK4 (downloaded from audible.com)
Length 11 hours 11 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series #1 in the Carrigan and Miller series
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.