Category Archives: 3.5 Stars

Review: THE HIDDEN CHILD by Camilla Lackberg

Posted on
12

THE HIDDEN CHILD is the fifth book centred around the summer tourist town of Fjallbacka on the west coast of Sweden featuring police detective Patrik Hedstrom and his true-crime writing wife Erica Falck. In this outing Patrik is starting paternity leave to look after the couple’s daughter Maja while Erica is looking forward to getting back to work and engaging in more adult intellectual pursuits after a year of looking after Maja herself. However when a dead body is discovered in town on the first day of Patrik’s leave he cannot resist the temptation to take a look at the crime scene, even though it means bringing one-year old Maja along. Erica is a bit miffed with Patrik for taking their daughter to a crime scene and for failing to grasp that looking after Maja does not mean leaving their daughter at home with Erica while Patrick goes shopping. But she too is soon interested in this crime as the dead man turns out to be the historian whom Erica visited when she discovered a Nazi war medal among her dead mother’s possessions. In fact the past has a particular pull on Erica as she also discovered some diaries her mother had kept as a teenager during the war years, and Erica keeps putting aside her own work to read the diaries in the hope they might provide some insight into her mother’s neglectful treatment of Erica and her sister Anna. When it becomes clear that Erica’s mother was friends with the historian who has now been killed Erica becomes involved in the investigation too.

From a criminal plotting perspective this is probably Läckberg’s best novel, incorporating two strong plots. The contemporary plot to determine the murderer of the historian is well thought out and doesn’t involve nearly as much police incompetence as the previous novels (though there is still a little). All the small police force play useful roles, including new recruit Paola who seems to fit in well, and the case explores some interesting issues including the rise of neo-Nazi groups in modern Sweden. But perhaps the book’s biggest strength is that this storyline links to a second one taking place in 1943-45, involving the recently killed historian, his brother who spent time as a prisoner of the Germans and several other Fjallbacka residents including Erica’s mother. Eventually the solution to the present-day crimes is located in the past though the nature of the connection is well hidden until the end of the book.

While the family lives of the characters in this series have always been a feature of the novels that I have enjoyed I do think this instalment went a little overboard with the minutiae of characters’ lives. Certainly not all the children are hidden in this novel. In fact the thing is teeming with pregnancies (five), births lengthily described (two), and assorted toddlers and teenagers not to mention yet another love interest for Patrik’s romantically unlucky boss Bertil, an encounter with Patrik’s ex-wife and assorted other minor dramas. It doesn’t feel like Läckberg has held much back for inclusion in the next instalment (aside from several more births I suppose). I do generally enjoy the lighter side of these novels though and it was nice to read a book in which pretty much everyone has a family life in the normal range (i.e. no dramas that can’t be sorted out with a good chat and no alcoholic/near suicidal loners lurking underneath the covers).

Overall then I enjoyed THE HIDDEN CHILD and thought the translation up to the usual good quality even though duties have switched from Steven T Murray to his wife Tiina Nunnally. I think it interesting that my two favourite mysteries to be solved by Läckberg’s fictional characters are the ones where Erica takes more of a central role in the investigation (my other favourite is the first book in the series, THE ICE PRINCESS in which Erica really takes centre stage) and wonder if she’ll continue taking more of a proactive role in future novels.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I’ve reviewed all of the earlier four books in this series THE ICE PRINCESS, THE PREACHER, THE STONECUTTER and THE GALLOWS BIRD (mini review)

THE HIDDEN CHILD has been reviewed at Euro Crime (Maxine) and Nordic Bookblog

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 3.5/5
Translator Tiina Nunnally
Narrator Eamonn Riley
Publisher Harper Collins [this translation 2011]
ASIN B0056GUO4U downloaded from audible.com
Length 17 hours 34 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series #5 in the Erica Falck/Patrik Hedström series
Source I bought it

Review: THE WINTER OF THE LIONS by Jan Costin Wagner

Posted on
7

THE WINTER OF THE LIONS is a peculiar book.

On one level it is a police procedural in which Finnish police seek to work out who killed a pathologist then a puppet maker then attempted to kill the television personality who had once interviewed both men on his highly rated chat show. But it’s hard to imagine any police force in the world operating as this one does, with little actual police work being done. Instead the lead investigator, one Kimmo Joentaa, makes a random, I might even suggest far-fetched, guess about the probable motive for the crime and proceeds to narrow down the pool of suspects his guess leads to in a fairly haphazard and not terribly successful manner (given that the culprit eventually shows up on their own virtually shouting “look at me over here, I’m the one”). So the book isn’t recommended for people who like their crime fiction to involve puzzles solved in a linear fashion with oodles of evidence.

That said, I enjoyed it a lot.

Part of that enjoyment invariably stems from the fact it didn’t tread the familiar path of a million police procedurals before it. I really do like authors who take interesting risks with the genre’s tropes, even if they’re not always successful. And there’s no doubt I was hooked by Kimmo’s approach to the case and was never not desperate to know who the culprit was and whether or not they would be found before more deaths occurred (something that never felt like a sure thing).

The characters are very strong too, though they do generally conform to the melancholic  stereotype associated with Scandinavian crime fiction. In fact Kimmo Joentaa could have been the prototype of the lonesome, introspective detective on which all others are based. His wife died some years ago and he is clearly still coming to grips with that, a fact borne out I think by his becoming somewhat bizarrely and immediately attached to a woman whose name he doesn’t even know. But perhaps my thinking this relationship an odd one says more about me than it does about Kimmo. Either way it added intrigue to the book.

We also meet the murderer fairly on in the book; though we don’t know who it is we know it is someone who has been involved in a tragedy and lost someone close to them. I’m normally not much of a fan of ‘seen through the eyes of the killer’ scenarios but here it was not sensational and offered some insight into how people cope (or don’t) with the traumas they experience. In fact the entire book could be looked at as a treatise on this subject, with Kimmo still suffering from his wife’s death and then losing his friend the pathologist who was killed at the outset of this book. And the television star who is the subject of the attempted murder is also a study in the kind of mental impact such a thing might have on a person.

Perhaps I was just in the right mood for peculiar (and cold, I did enjoy all that snow as I read the book during our sweltering summer) but I enjoyed THE WINTER OF THE LIONS more than I thought I might based on some of the reviews I read. Things surreal are not normally my cup of team but this one was just ‘normal’ enough to have me lapping it up and planning to go back and read the earlier books in the series (now that I have committed the cardinal sin of reading out of order).

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

THE WINTER OF THE LIONS has been reviewed at Crime Pieces, Euro Crime, International Noir Fiction and Mrs Peabody Investigates

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 3.5/5
Translator Anthea Bell (from German)
Publisher Harvill Secker [2011]
ISBN/ASIN 9781846553462
Length 268
Format paperback
Book Series #3 in Kimmo Joentaa series
Source Borrowed from library
Creative Commons Licence
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Review: A Room Full of Bones by Elly Griffiths

Posted on
15

In the fourth book to feature forensic archaeologist Ruth Galloway the mystery starts early on. Ruth has been asked to attend a local museum for the opening of a coffin which was found at a construction site and is thought to contain the remains of a medieval Bishop. She arrives to find the museum’s curator lying on the floor. Not being certain if the man is alive or not she phones an ambulance and the police. The man is pronounced dead on his arrival at hospital and the police investigation steps up a notch which introduces DI Harry Nelson to the action.

Of course anyone who has read the previous novels in this serious would have been waiting for this meeting as Ruth and Harry have a personal history which was left at a rather dramatic point at the end of The House at Sea’s End. I’m trying not to give spoilers to this or previous books so I won’t say much more, other than to reflect that I thought Griffiths did a good job of capturing the awkwardness realistically. She’s also done a good job of encapsulating the essence of the personal lives of Ruth, Harry and their friends and colleagues so this would be a decent place to start the series if you are interested in trying it out but don’t feel you have the time or energy to read the three earlier books.

The mystery element in this novel is stronger than has been the case in the previous novels which, while entertaining, were all fairly easy to stay ahead of, especially for seasoned crime readers. Here there are several threads that need to be sorted out including the very basic question of whether or not the museum curator was murdered or not. There do prove to be two potential motives including a possible connection to claims being made for the repatriation of Australian Aboriginal bones and skulls in the museum’s custody. Ruth’s old friend Cathbad is a member of a group which has requested the items be returned to Australia for a proper burial, as is her new next door neighbour who is an academic visiting from Australia. He is also a member of the same tribal group to which the bones belong so he has a personal stake in the repatriation of the items. The issue of such repatriation is becoming increasingly vitriolic in the real world but Griffiths handled its complexity and sensitivity well. In particular Ruth’s needing time to weigh up the pros and cons on a personal and professional level rang very true. I’m always a little wary of ‘foreign’ books which throw in Australian characters or tackle other subjects I am familiar with but Elly Griffiths has done well on both counts here.

It’s fair to say that most fans of this series are at least as interested in the personal stories of Ruth, Harry and friends as they are in the whodunnit aspects of the books and those fans will not be disappointed with this instalment. Ruth’s daughter has her first birthday in this book but Ruth still frets about her mothering skills and seems a little preoccupied at times so she is not quite the dominant character in this book as she has been in the past and Harry’s dry humour is also quiet for a while when he undergoes a particularly nasty trauma. While I did miss the presence of my favourite two people a little, there were many developments in the lives of the lesser characters to keep me interested. I have quite a soft spot for Cathbad who is a lab technician at Ruth’s university but is also a Druid and seems willing to participate in any vaguely spiritual ritual he thinks suitable for a given situation which often has unforseen circumstances.

I look forward with much anticipation to the arrival on my doorstep of the annual instalment of this series and, once again, the reading experience lived up to my expectations, providing a very enjoyable and satisfying read with just a hint of what might happen in the next book.. I read A ROOM FULL OF BONES in a single day (again the housework was neglected) and had a very contented smile on my face upon completion, you can’t ask for better than that.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

A Room Full of Bones has been reviewed at Euro Crime

I have reviewed the first three books in the series: The Crossing Places, The Janus Stone and The House at Sea’s End

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 3.5/5
Publisher Quercus [2012]
ISBN 9781849163699
Length 344 pages
Format trade paperback
Book Series #4 in the Ruth Galloway series
Source I bought it
Creative Commons Licence
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Review: V is for Vengeance by Sue Grafton

Posted on
10

The 22nd outing for Kinsey Millhone, private detective in the fictional California town of Santa Teresa starts with a brief prologue in which a young man is thrown to his death from the top floor of a Las Vegas parking garage after failing to pay his gambling debts to a loan shark, Lorenzo Dante.The story proper then starts two years later when Kinsey spots two shoplifters in a local department store and after alerting the store’s security to follow one of the woman Kinsey trails after the other. The first woman is Audrey Vance and she is arrested, but shortly after being bailed out of jail by her boyfriend her body is found, apparently having committed suicide from a local bridge. Kinsey is then approached by Audrey’s boyfriend who doesn’t believe she was shoplifting and wants her good name cleared. However Kinsey soon becomes convinced that Audrey was a professional shoplifter, part of a large operation. While all this is going on we’re introduced to a woman called Nora who is married to a wealthy Hollywood agent but soon experiences an upheaval in that relationship. She meets Lorenzo Dante who is tiring of his life of organised crime and becomes smitten with Nora which has unforeseen circumstances. Of course the two stories eventually connect, in several ways by the end of the novel.

This book is a return to a more traditional storytelling format after the departure into part historical fiction of 2010’s U is for Undertow. From a plotting perspective it is complicated but in Grafton’s assured hands the different elements are juggled well, always keeping the reader’s interest There are plenty of twists and turns along the way as Kinsey unravels the shoplifting racket and Nora and Lorenzo do their separate dances with fate. There is a one unlikely coincidences at the very end which I could have done without but I forgave it. I did think it a nice change for a crime novel to spend most of its investigative energy on the crime of organised shoplifting which I had no idea could be so lucrative and…well…organised! Who’d work in retail?

It’s fair to say that Kinsey has never been the most deeply drawn character in crime fiction but here she does seem to be even more solitary and one-dimensional than usual. In the past couple of books she has made tentative connections to the extended family she has discovered, after being orphaned as a young child, but there is no mention of her relatives here. Even Henry, her octogenarian landlord, plays only a minor role as he is out of state for most of the book. So for character development we turn to others including Nora and Lorenzo whose backgrounds are vastly different but whose current dissatisfaction with the direction their lives have taken is interesting to watch unfold.

I have written before about my fondness for this series and have even admitted a certain lack of objectivity which might result in me being a bit more generous about these books than others I read so you’ll have to excuse me a little. Though even I can admit that V is for Vengeance is not the best of the series.It’s a bit long for example. The first books in the series were never 450+ pages long and this one didn’t need to be either. For instance fans of the series already know about Rosie the bar owner’s dodgy Hungarian cooking and I’m sure even readers new to the series would have gotten the gag with less than a dozen or so references to it. There seemed to be a bit of unnecessary filler content like this that in earlier books was either never there to begin with or was edited out.

That said I still enjoyed catching up with Kinsey again and am philosophical about the slight waxing and waning of quality that happens with any long running series. I think i’m still objective enough to be able to say that this series is not on a downward spiral like several I’ve stopped reading all together (e.g. Patrica Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta series). Essentially this book is well in keeping with its predecessors and the main characters didn’t do anything ridiculous. I will look forward to the remaining 4 installments of the series. If you’re new to the alphabet books and are curious I would recommend you read the previous novel, U is for Undertow, which I think works much better than this one as a standalone novel or as an introduction to the series. But long time fans will be happy enough with this outing, though most will probably wish for a bit more Henry as I did.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 3.5/5
Publisher Mantle [2011]
ISBN 9780230756212
Length 437 pages
Format trade paperbak
Book Series #22 in the alphabet series.
Source I bought it
Creative Commons Licence
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Review: A Short Cut to Paradise by Teresa Solana

Posted on
9

The private consultants who aren’t quite detectives who made their debut in A Not So Perfect Crime are back for another adventure among the upper echelons of Barcelona society. This time they are tasked with proving that Amadeu Cabestany was not responsible for the murder of famous novelist Marina Dolç The police have arrested him on the grounds that he was heard to threaten Marina and on the night she was killed she had won a prestigious literary award that he was sure he was about to win. But his agent and some-time lover does not believe in his guilt and she turns to Eduard and Borja for assistance. They discover that Amadeu’s alibi is very shaky as there are no witnesses to his leaving the hotel before Dolç’s death and being mugged at a local disco and no one else seems to have much of a motive. They do however start to learn some interesting things about the famous author’s life.

There’s something about a holiday week that calls for lighter than normal reading and I was quite chuffed to find this book unread on my shelves as I had such fond memories of the first book in the series. Happily this one too is clever and funny and thoroughly engaging; perfect for reading on a warm summer day with a glass (or two) of sangria. It’s probably not the book to reach for if you like your mystery solving to be at the forefront for the length of the novel but if you don’t mind the odd (in some cases very odd) tangent or three you could do a lot worse.

Eduard is a former lefty radical who spent 20 years as a middle-class banker before setting up in business with his twin brother Borja (formerly known as Pep). We see most of the tale through his eyes as he recounts the brothers’ attempts to uncover evidence and a suspect or two. Though not as strongly as he was in the first book, he is still vaguely put out by Borja’s social climbing, especially when it requires Eduard to wear classy suits rather than his preferred jeans and otherwise operate out of his comfort zone (heaven forbid he must spend a night in a five-star hotel). But at heart the relationship between the two brothers is sweet and a definite highlight of the novel, being the source of much humour.

The rest of the humour comes from the observations about local society. Although I know nothing about Catalan literary circles the depictions of the social events with public displays of bonhomie hiding private hatreds and petty jealousies was pitch-perfect. I just inserted the names of local authors in the roles of literary versus popular fiction authors to make the humour complete.Solana seems to take great relish in satirising literary circles and I suspect she particularly enjoyed writing the scene in which most of the players are accidentally drugged so that their true natures are on full display.

More poignant moments in the novel come from the short chapters told from perspectives other than Eduard’s. Among the ‘character vignettes’ we meet a man driven to undertake an armed robbery even though he has no criminal record, get a surreal glimpse of prison life for Amadeu who the other prisoners stay clear of due to his resemblance to a movie murderer and his seeming ability to cause grown men to die at his feet and even briefly meet a long-suffering policewoman who has to wrangle a rookie cop with a big mouth. All of these are delightful interludes as well as providing little nuggets of information which help make sense of the overall story.

The crime’s resolution offered a slightly unsatisfactory note in that it didn’t quite make sense but overall I thoroughly enjoyed this slightly surreal and very witty tale of literary madness which gave me one more reason to be glad I’m a reader not a writer.  I am pleased to learn (via excellent Spanish-reading blogger Jose Ignacio at The Game’s Afoot) that a third book has been released. Translation now please.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

A Short Cut to Paradise has been reviewed at Euro Crime, International Noir Fiction (though noir this definitely isn’t) and Lizzie’s Literary Life

I’m slightly cheating in using this as the last book for my What’s In a Name challenge in the category of book with a size in the title. I suppose short isn’t officially a size but it will have to do as the book I was half way through reading (At Close Quarters) fell into the washing up sink and didn’t really recover as well as I might have hoped.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 3.5/5
Translator Peter Bush
Publisher Bitter Lemon Press [2011]
ISBN 9781904738558
Length 284 pages
Format paperback
Book Series #2 in the Eduard and Borja series
Source I bought it
Creative Commons Licence
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Review: The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston

Posted on
9

Webster Fillmore Goodhue, Web for short, has been doing nothing much at all for the past year or so. Sleeping 15 hours a day and tacking the piss out of customers at his friend Chev’s tattoo parlour have pretty much filled his days since the trauma he was a part of took place. Chev is getting fed up and asks another friend of theirs, Po Sin to help. The help comes in the form of a job offer in which Web will work for Po Sin’s company, Clean Team, which cleans up after nasty, messy deaths. Web unexpectedly takes to the job but his salvation also leads him down a path to near ruin as he becomes caught up with the daughter of a suicide victim whom he cleans up for.

The male characters are here are a treat, somehow managing to surprise right through to the end at the same time as fitting the conventions of the noir end of the crime genre. On the surface Web is the standard no hoper so beloved of the genre but he has his reasons for being like he is and as readers learn about them and watch Web try to deal with the hand life has dealt him it’s hard not to grow to like him. Then again I’m a sucker for the sarcastic, well-aimed wisecrack. His friends are the good kind, even if they do choose tough love as their method for helping him out of the various messes he gets himself into. The point is they do help. The role of ‘the girl’ in this particular tale is taken by Soledad, probably the most conventional of the characters and the least well developed but she fulfils the necessary functions of ensnaring Web and performing the odd bit of treachery.

I really liked the writing too, especially the dialogue, which is smart, funny and fast: absolutely perfect for the setting and the people. I didn’t notice it was quite so full of crude language until I went trawling to find a section to quote here and realised there was hardly a line to be found without several ‘f’ words. But I think the situations being depicted here – whether that’s yanking the chain of yet another moron wanting a ring of barbed wire tattooed around his arm, having one’s delicate body parts pierced by a sarcastic sadist, cleaning up brains ‘n’ stuff from all manner of crevices or being threatened by certified gangsters on the prowl for almonds – probably all qualify for more than the average amount of swearing.

The internet tells me this is Huston’s most mainstream novel and, if true, I suspect it’ll be the only one of his I read. I have a fairly low tolerance for gruesomely described violence and even this book took me beyond my personal limit a time or two. I was happy enough in this instance to read to the end because I was enjoying the main story and the character development but I did find some of the intricately described violence a bit repetitive. For my tastes less of this would have made a better book but I do understand I am in the minority on this; fans of Huston in particular or noir in general probably don’t think there was enough of all that.

I only read noir occasionally and generally stick to the comic stuff of which I’d say this is a good example though perhaps not as great as I was expecting based on the many (many) superlative-laden reviews I’ve read. Without a huge number of comparisons to make though I’m probably not the best judge of such things, I just know I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as Plugged, though it was still a very good read and recommended for those who can cope with the violence and swearing.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 3.5/5
Publisher Ballantine Books [2009]
ISBN 9780345501110
Length 319 pages
Format paperback
Book Series standalone
Source I bought it
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Review: Almost Blue by Carlo Lucarelli

Posted on
6

I nearly didn’t read this book because it concerns itself with a serial killer: a subject I think I have just about reached my lifetime limit on. However I had read several good reviews though I think the bigger factor for me just now was that it is blessedly, mercifully, wonderfully short. I am a bit fed up with massive, bloated tomes.

It is a story in three voices. In Bologna in Italy we meet Simone a young, blind man who rarely leaves the attic of his family’s apartment where he spends most of his time listening to a peculiar combination of jazz music, police scanners and other people’s mobile phone conversations. Ispettore Grazia Negro works for a special police unit which deals with serial crimes. She and the Unit’s head have linked several murders of young students together and have finally convinced judicial prosecutors that there is a single case to be investigated. The third voice is that of the killer who needs to quiet the noises in his head.

Although overall I liked the book I thought that only one of these voices, that of Simone, worked consistently well as both a mechanism for developing a strong character and for advancing the story. Lucarelli has really done an outstanding job of depicting what it is like to be this blind individual…not the stereotyped generic blind person common to much fiction but this particular man. He can’t understand descriptive words that others use and so has invented his own descriptive language which assigns colours to voices and so on and his description of falling in love with the voice singing a particular song he heard on his school bus radio is quite exquisite. The voice of Grazia is less engaging for me, partly because she spends half of the short book being impacted by her period pain (this is how you know it’s a book written by a bloke) and partly because I thought she flip-flopped too much between accepting the rampant misogyny around her and being angry about it. The voice of the killer was the least original of the three and could have been left out of the book entirely in my humble opinion.

As a story I found the book more consistent as we were led down a path of first linking the murders together then inserting our three characters into the narrative and having them .meet up with each other in intriguing ways. This could have been a cliché-fest but Lucarelli avoided all the pitfalls to produce a really gripping, if somewhat violent story. However at no point was anything gratuitous and in a book so short it would have been almost impossible to linger too long on any blood-soaked scene so I think even those who shy away from darker books could cope with this.

Even with its flaws this book did draw me in quickly and deeply to its setting and the overlapping, claustrophobic worlds of its three protagonists. The sparse writing style and bare kind of translation, which kept as many native Italian words as could be gotten away with, combined to make it a quick yet immersive reading experience. I gobbled up the whole thing in one day and then felt compelled to hunt down some of the music mentioned within the story to make myself an Almost Blue playlist which is not something I do very often at all. I am looking forward to other books by this author.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Almost Blue has been reviewed at Fleur Fisher in her world, Petrona, Reading, fuelled by tea (where Yvann didn’t finish it for some reasons I agree with though I thought the translation was better than Yvann did), Reviewing the Evidence and The View from the Blue House (where I agree with Rob, the book was almost too short)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 3.5/5
Translator Oonagh Stransky
Publisher Vintage Books [this edition 2004, original edition 1997]
ISBN 9780099459439
Length 169 pages
Format paperback
Book Series #1 in the Inspector Negro series
Source I bought it
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Review: Scales of Retribution by Cora Harrison

Posted on
7

The setting is the Kingdom of Burren on the west coast of Ireland in 1510. It is only early in his reign but King Henry VIII in England wants his empire to expand further into Ireland than the four small counties loyal to him. As the book opens King Turlough Donn O’Brien has gone off to fight the Earl of Kildare who is loyal to the English, leaving his eight-month pregnant wife Mara, who is also the kingdom’s investigating judge (the Brehon), at home. On one day Mara goes into an early and difficult labour and the kingdom’s physician Malachy dies a gruesome death. Although only barely recovered from the difficult childbirth Mara must take steps to investigate the death if an injustice is to be avoided. There is no shortage of suspects at least, with many locals having good reason to despise the greedy and incompetent man.

Good historical crime fiction has to provide a decent mystery and an engaging and at least vaguely credible historical setting. Scales of Retribution scores well on both tasks, although perhaps the historical aspects of the novel do slightly outshine the classic whodunnit. Each chapter of the novel begins by outlining some aspect of Gaelic law which is then explored in action and I found this fascinating, especially as comparisons were made to English common law (which Ireland did not adopt in full for a couple of centuries). Perhaps Harrison has selected only those elements of the older legal system that are more benign but it did seem to offer a more sensible approach to many aspects of civil life.

Mara is helped in solving the mystery by the students of the small law school that she operates in the grounds of the castle. There are a half-dozen young men in various stages of study and they use the case (and previous ones if hints dropped in this book are any guide) as a way of supplementing their theoretical learning with practical experience. Suspects include a man whose much loved dog was killed by poison scattered by the physician, several members of the man’s own family and patients who he had ill-treated. A favourite custom of his was to provide incorrect ointment for some patients so that their wounds would not heal and they would need to continue paying him. This had disastrous consequences on more than one occasion and these victims (or their relatives) are also suspects. The boys carry out interviews and other aspects of the investigation and bring all the information back to Mara and the classroom for discussion and dissection, though it is Mara who provides the ultimate solution.

Mara fits in to the sub category of strong female protagonists inserted into historical fiction written by women that I discussed earlier this year. She is the only female Brehon in the country, has a lot of latitude in her professional and personal life and is a very strong character overall but she has a very human side too. For example she is unable to provide milk for her newborn baby and must use the services of a wet nurse (at first her own adult daughter and then a villager) and her jealousy that other women can do this simple thing that she cannot is well portrayed. There are plenty of other nicely drawn characters including several of the students who all have different skills and strengths. I did think there were rather a lot of people to keep track of though and think it would have been nicer for a few less characters which would have enabled the remaining ones to be portrayed in more depth.

I knew absolutely nothing about this book before starting to read it which is always the best way to approach a new author I think. I am delighted to have found this series and will definitely be adding it to my ever growing watch list. Scales of Retribution handles both aspects of its charter, historical detail and mysterious intrigue, well and is gently humorous to round things out nicely.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

A hat tip to regular commenter Kathy D for recommending this series when I was looking for recommendations for female Irish crime writers. On short notice to finish the Ireland reading challenge this year I could only find this latest book in the series but I will keep an eye out for the earlier ones as I really enjoyed both the mystery and historical aspects of this one.

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My rating 3.5/5
Publisher Severn House [2011]
ISBN 9781780101026
Length 207 pages
Format eBook (ePub)
Book Series #6 in the Burren mysteries series
Source I bought it
Creative Commons Licence
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Review: The End of Everything by Megan Abbott

Posted on
9

This is a book I would like to have read for a book club as there are several aspects of it that I can’t quite make up my mind about and I’d enjoy discussing some of these nuances with others.. They are the sorts of things I can’t really go into in any depth in the review because it would constitute unacceptable (to me) spoiling so this is less of a review and more of a series of questions I cannot really answer.

Lizzie and Evie are 13-year old best friends. One day as they leave school Lizzie is picked up by her mother, leaving Evie to walk home alone but she disappears. In the frenzy of police interviews and schoolyard gossip which follows Lizzie is left to piece together what happened and yearn for her friend’s return. A few days after the disappearance Lizzie remembers something that directs the investigation towards a local man who has also disappeared but it is not clear early on whether the two events are connected.

The book is told in the present tense from Lizzie’s point of view, neither of which are my favourite forms of narrative and in combination they could have sounded the death knell early on. However Abbott has used both the point of view and the tense to perfection, using the first to beautifully depict the self-absorbed narcissism of being 13 and the second to envelop the reader cloyingly in Lizzie’s world. I was definitely seeing things from this particular 13 year-old’s perspective rather than utilising any of my own experiences of being that age though. As the book progressed the language and thoughts Lizzie started to express seemed far too adult and atypical for girls of that age. I suppose one could argue that the circumstances Lizzie found herself in prompted a faster than normal maturation but I did not get the feeling that this is what the author was trying to convey. Then again, Lizzie is the ultimate unreliable narrator – there are dreams, memories and longings that become quite mixed up so readers are not sure what is real and what imagined – so maybe it is in keeping that her narrative voice is not entirely authentic? Or maybe there is an even bigger gulf than I imagined between life in the US and life here in Australia?

Part of the reason I grew less accepting of Lizzie’s voice was that all the young girls in the book (i.e. Evie and and her older sister Dusty in addition to Lizzie) are depicted with the kinds of thoughts about sex and sexuality that I don’t think are typical. One would have been believable but, for me, three was far less so, especially as they all arrived at their beliefs independently. In the same way I found it difficult to swallow that all the dad-age men in the novel were somewhere on the spectrum of sexual predator. I guess Abbott was exploring the ‘you never know what’s lurking in suburbia’ theme but I certainly found the book less successful as it went on when just about everyone turned out to be at least slightly debauched. To me, one or two such characters are more believable than an entire cast but perhaps I am missing a larger point?

Both the time and place of the book are left very vague and I assume this is a deliberate strategy to focus our attention more keenly on the people at the heart of the story and their very narrow world of neighbouring houses. I imagine Abbott thinks we don’t need to concern ourselves with anything larger than that in terms of place and this aspect of the novel worked well. An interview I read with Abbott suggests the book is set ‘in the 1980′s’ (I think later in the decade but am not really basing this on much other than use of the phrase ‘school lockdown’)  which fits with the novel’s general sense of a more innocent time than today. I thought the adults, including police, were perhaps a bit too naive but then in the suburbs of my youth (I turned 13 in 1980) we lived in the shadow of the unsolved and high profile disappearances of 5 children in two separate incidents some years earlier, so perhaps in this one respect my own experience was not quite the norm.

I really would not classify this as crime fiction but I don’t mean that as a criticism in any way, I simply think it has wider appeal and really follows none of the conventions or tropes of the genre. If it were a book written by someone who wasn’t already identified as a crime writer I think this would more easily have slipped neatly into a general or literary fiction category.

If you had asked me at somewhere just after the half-way point of this novel what my rating would be I’d have anticipated a 4 or even a 4.5 for what was a very compelling story quite beautifully written (Abbott really does have a way with words). But then the book started to lose its punch for me by having virtually everyone turn out to be the same kind of creepy character and every relationship containing some element of abuse. And just to be contrary with myself I found the ending disappointing because it was all a bit too neat and not as dark as I thought the story deserved. Overall though I’m glad I read the book and it is one I can imagine discussing with gusto with other readers of it and possibly even having my opinions of it changed over time.

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The End of Everything has been reviewed all over the place but I’ve linked to ones that provide some range of views: Book Smugglers (warning there are a few spoilers here but it’s a good review which raises some interesting discussion points), Just a Normal Girl in London, Mostly Fiction, Readings Bookshop blog

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My rating 3.5? 3? I’m really not sure
Publisher Pan Macmillan [2011]
ISBN 9780330533829
Length 244 pages
Format trade paperback
Book Series standalone
Source I borrowed it from the library

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: The Track of Sand by Andrea Camilleri

Posted on
7

The previous two installments of the Inspector Montalbano books that I’ve read have been enjoyable despite seeming a little surreal, particularly when it comes to the local politics they depict. But as I read The Track of Sand while the Italian political system crumbled (again) in a heap on my TV screen I couldn’t help but be reminded of the old adage that truth is almost always stranger than fiction. In fact a book featuring a disappearing horse carcass, pathologically uncommunicative neighbouring police jurisdictions and a protagonist haunted by vaguely erotic dreams is positively tame in comparison the farce that is Silvio Berlusconi.

Montalbano wakes one morning to see a horse lying on the beach outside his front window. When he investigates he discovers the horse is dead, “its whole body bearing the signs of a long, ferocious beating” which makes Montalbano furious to the point of imagining he could do the same to the horse’s killers. He calls for his offsiders to come and help him collect evidence and review the crime scene so that they might track down the animal’s killers. Unfortunately the carcass disappears before the team has a chance to do everything they need to do and the investigation becomes somewhat haphazard. They do eventually learn that the horse is likely one (of two) kidnapped from the stables of a wealthy man and this introduces the beautiful Rachele Esterman, horse rider and seducer of men, to the picture.

I don’t imagine anyone reads this series purely for the plots. There always seems to be some woolly meanderings and illogical moments; here, for example, almost the entire mystery would have been avoided if only one of three supposedly intelligent and experienced policemen had taken a single photograph of the dead horse. There’s a rather clumsy link to another case too that seems to assume more knowledge than the reader of this book could have. But there is so much else to enjoy about the novels that it’s easy enough to let slide these relatively minor problems.

Montalbano’s fury on behalf of the poor horse and determination to locate the culprits, his obsession with finding good food (and his reaction when served stuff of lesser quality), his fear of getting older and his sporadically autocratic behaviour make him a well-rounded, if not always likeable character. His almost prudish reaction to his unorthodox seduction by the gorgeous Rachele is probably all too credible (because apparently the word no is not in his vocabulary). Though this was one of the things which prompted me to reflect on the disheartening depiction of women in this book and the series overall. On my limited exposure to one quarter of the series I can only remember women being seen as victims, his sexual partners or his cleaner. If he hasn’t slept with Ingrid then she’s the exception but there’s so much unresolved sexual tension between the two I’m not sure she can count as a fully formed character in her own right.

However, as always, the book is filled to the brim with rich humour, stemming mostly from the dialect-laden dialogue and Montalbano’s internal monologue. It reminds me how dolts like me who can only read in one language are indebted to translators with the skill of Stephen Sartarelli. The surreal exchange between Montalbano and the linguistically challenged Catarella when Rachele Esterman first appears in the story is, alone, worth reading the book for. This is a very readable and (in an age when bloated 500+ page books appear to becoming ‘the norm’) delightfully short novel offering many moments of pure joy for the reader.

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The Track of Sand has been reviewed at Crime Scraps, Euro Crime, Milo’s Rambles

I have also reviewed August Heat and The Wings of the Sphinx

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My rating 3.5/5
Translator Stephen Sartarelli
Publisher Mantle [this translation 2010, original edition 2007]
ISBN 9780330507660
Length 279 pages
Format hard cover
Book Series #12 in the Inspector Montalbano series.
Source borrowed from the library

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.