Maxine’s book reviews

I don't think I have ever read a book quite like this one before, and it slips down a treat - like an ice-cream with a vindaloo centre. Chick-lit noir has truly arrived in the shape of DEAD LOVELY, in which social worker Krissie conceives a child in the toilets of a night club in Ibiza with an apparently attractive stranger - who rapidly loses his appeal when Krissie comes down from her high and sees that the stars are really dust mites or worse.

Returning to her native Glasgow, Robbie (Krissie's baby) soon arrives and changes her comfortable, free-wheeling, single lifestyle by introducing responsibility, a concept as alien to Krissie as ballooning would be to a shark, despite her professional role as assessing parental suitability among the city's many dispossessed.

Helen Fitzgerald treads a clever balancing act between edgy, trendy noir and sympathy with her heroine's predicament. The first part of the story is told through Krissie's eyes, but when her mothering skills become truly appalling, we shift to seeing her from the perspective of other characters, and are hence reassured that she has a heart of gold.

The plot, such as it is, involves a hiking holiday with Krissie's two best friends, Sarah, a childhood schoolmate, and Kyle, a student flatmate who fancies her, and she him, but he is now married to Sarah. A further complication is Chas, the third student flatmate who has been in prison for ten years for apparently randomly attacking a man with a shopping trolley and refusing to provide any reason to the police.

Predictably, the holiday is a disaster, not only ending prematurely in the sense of the characters returning home early, but in the sense that is final for one of them - but which? The reader is kept guessing in some clever twists and turns. Krissie's panic at how to cope with the inevitable collapse of the creaking house of cards of her life, and her inability to cope with her baby, add to the tension of the holiday's hideous climax.

This book is very funny. It is hard to make a joke of parental neglect, but somehow Helen Fitzgerald manages it in this scurrilous but good-natured, easy-reading tale. Yes, the eventual ending is somewhat contrived and rather too "romance genre" for my taste, but I thoroughly enjoyed the hectic and chaotic ride, and recommend this refreshing voice for anyone who fancies something a bit different.

First published at Euro Crime, June 2009.

I've been eagerly anticipating Gene Kerrigan's third novel, having enjoyed LITTLE CRIMINALS and THE MIDNIGHT CHOIR so much, and I am not disappointed. Right from the first page, the reader is grabbed by the author's distinguishing mix of bleak noir, perfect attention to detail, atmosphere and lyricism - no hint of wordiness or sentimentality, but engaging one's emotions and attention right from the first page of poetic description, to the shattered illusions of the last.

The story concerns Danny Callaghan, who in an almost reflex action while at the bar of a Dublin pub, saves another drinker, Walter Bennett, from being shot by two young thugs who have roared up on a motorbike. After this incident, we learn more about Danny and his friendship with Novak, the publican. Danny has been a carpenter with his own business, married to the successful Hannah, but has been in prison for some years after killing Brendan Tucker, a local crooked businessman, by bashing him on the head with a golf club after witnessing him attacking some teenagers. The reader shares Danny's thoughts on his actions and his attempts to restart his life. Even before he went to prison, he lost interest in his business and although Hannah stood by him during his trial, his lack of ambition made them drift apart and they divorced soon after his conviction. Having served his time, Danny now lives in a mean apartment in a tower block, always looking out for Brendan's brother, the even more evil Frank Tucker, who has vowed to revenge himself on Danny, and making ends meet by acting as a chauffeur for Novak, who runs several businesses including a taxi service for visiting businessmen.

Lar Mackendrick is another corrupt gangster-businessman (he and his brother featured in THE MIDNIGHT CHOIR) who uses ancient Chinese philosophy to maintain his position against Tucker and other criminals eager to control the drugs that still flow freely despite the collapse of the Irish financial bubble and the gradual decay of many hopes and plans. (This is a highly topical book, bang up to date.) Gradually, we learn more about the abortive hit on Walter as well as Danny's attempts to appease Frank and find his footing in society again, as well as with Hannah - she has remarried but the two remain close.

The book is mesmerising and absorbing, as the gangsters circle each other for advantage and we, mainly through Danny's eyes, try to disentangle the many knots of past grudges, vested interests and relationships against the background of a beautifully conveyed and observed Dublin. The action that kick-starts the end-game, when it comes, is sudden and shocking. We realise the tentative nature of Danny's grasp on mainstream life, and his vulnerabilities. Events spiral out of control - to a bloody climax which is both slightly unbelievable and inconclusive. But this is a world where there are no neat ends, and where most people have nowhere to go but down.

First published at Euro Crime, June 2009. 

The description and dissection of a failing marriage that takes up the first chapters of BETRAYAL is one of the most realistic and gripping accounts I have read of how happy expectations gradually wither into the ashes of hard work, obligations, indifference and exhaustion. Eva and Henrik seem to have it all: he's a freelance writer, she a successful businesswoman. They have a four-year-old son, Axel (who still sleeps between them at night) and her parents, if not his, are supportive and always on-hand to babysit. What goes wrong? Henrik has gradually become resentful of his wife's decisiveness and leadership in all matters. Eva has become aware of what is missing in her grey life (as she sees it) - the weariness, the inadequacy, the rare commodity of time even in an era of more and more time-saving devices, the overwhelming influx of information that the human brain has not evolved to be able to handle.

Interspersed with the account of this stressed-out woman and her feelings of inadequacy is another story, that of Jonas, a young man whose partner Anna has suffered an accident and is in a coma. Jonas has been devotedly visiting Anna for two years (this being Sweden, he has been "off sick" from his job as a postman for all this time) and providing her with physical therapy and kind conversation. Jonas, however, is not what he seems. Soon we realise he has an obsessive-compulsive disorder and has suffered a particularly nasty childhood, chillingly portrayed. Yet Eva, who has had the opposite experience of an idyllic early life, is driven by her need to provide Axel with a "safe childhood home", a purely self-imposed drive that fuels her poisonous feelings towards Henrik. It is as if she is in competition with her own parents to be better than them, while at the same time being unable to admit to them that her marriage is in trouble - yet the older couple are the very people who understand, and hence support, her the most.

Eventually things come to a head for Eva when she realises that the main reason for Henrik's indifference is that he is having a secret affair. She soon unearths the most likely suspect, and in her bitterness and rage, takes an evil revenge. She also meets Jonas, an encounter that is going to have devastating consequences.

BETRAYAL is a compelling read, in which the tension is almost unbearable. The author's psychological insight is sharp: we identify with each character while we see the world through their eyes, but when the author pulls back and shows a more objective view, we realise things are definitely not as they had seemed. Each player in this grim story is locked into their own particular emotional straitjacket, all of which are cleverly, and with almost unbearable tension, built up into a perfect house of cards. It's all going to come tumbling down, but for who, and how? The final chapters are horrifically chilling - but in common with the very best of Scandinavian crime fiction, no car chases, fancy technology, thrills or spills are necessary for the gut-wrenching impact. This novel is psychological suspense at its finest.

First published at Euro Crime, June 2009. 

The new Roy Grace novel is an exciting, fast, satisfying read. The previous four books in the series featured a left-of-field, imaginative hook, ratcheting up the suspense (such as the stag night that went wrong when the groom was buried in a shallow grave as a prank, and then left and maybe forgotten). DEAD TOMORROW is a more conventional police-procedural novel, and none the worse for that. There are several interlocking plots, which make the most of the Brighton location. Various set pieces are fun, but small details such as noting named, minor celebrities' houses as two characters drive pass it, are sweet touches.

Lynn Beckett has had a challenging life: she's divorced, depressed, working in a debt-collection agency, and her daughter Caitlin has advanced liver disease. Lynn becomes desperate near the start of the novel when her doctor reveals that the girl's illness has reached crisis point and her only hope of survival beyond a few months rests on a liver transplant. Lynn's ex-husband Mal is a sailor, currently engaged in dredging the sea bed off Shoreham for gravel and other materials for the construction industry. The crew make a gruesome discovery when a body becomes stuck in the dredging pipe. It isn't long before macabre details come to light about the corpse, that of a teenage boy with a strange tattoo on his arm which might provide a clue to his identity.

Detective Superintendent Roy Grace has lots of cases on his plate, and is working extremely long hours to attempt to keep up - to the slight consternation of his girlfriend, glamorous mortician Cleo. The corpse on the sea bed takes over Grace's life as a major case, soon acquiring a connection in Romania, where the reader learns of the awful circumstances in which many young, abandoned children are forced to live, scrounging a living on the streets, addicted to drugs, glue or paint-sniffing, living among the central heating pipes under the ground. Criminals masquerading as friends and supporters prey on these waifs and strays, trafficking them for nefarious purposes. Back in England, the story forges on: there are several narratives, each of which has a short chapter devoted to it before the reader is whisked onto the next development. The technique is that of James Patterson, but far more effectively used here to build up suspense in the race to discover what is happening to the Romanian orphans, whether Caitlin will find a liver on the transplant register, or whether the various shady Eurotrash characters will be uncovered by Grace before they dispatch more victims. At the same time, the author does not neglect the personal lives of his characters, as Grace and his friend and colleague Glenn Branson, currently living in Grace's house because his wife has thrown him out, try to keep their domestic lives together as well as, in Grace's case, provide the necessary reassurances to his bosses that he's running a good investigation.

Interest is sustained not only because the plot (in itself not that original) is very well conveyed, but because there are so many vignettes and small observations that add up to make an exciting whole. The team of police who are investigating the case(s) appear in each book and are now gelling as individual characters. There are plenty of small, neat touches - I smiled when one character could not remember what he wrote in an article in Nature - and several in-jokes, such as when the relative merits of two actors who play Ian Rankin's detective Rebus are briefly mentioned, or when Lynn is reading a Val McDermid novel that contains an apposite scene, or when a minor character has the name Jeffrey Deaver. There are also plenty of hints about Grace's caseload as well as the continual mystery of what happened to his wife Sandy, who disappeared more than 10 years ago (we learn a little more about that here), to keep him going for many more books.

Since the "retirement" of Rebus and John Harvey's Resnick's almost-retirement, Peter James's Roy Grace is a main contender for the title of crown of UK police detectives. Perhaps Grace will have to fight it out with Peter Robinson's Alan Banks for the top spot, but I think Peter James's series is going from strength to strength. Full marks for readability, plot, character, sense of place and, perhaps above all, an attractive sympathy displayed by the author for his many characters, major and minor.

First published at Euro Crime, June 2009.

ICE COLD (translator: Anthea Bell) is the second novel by the acclaimed author of THE MURDER FARM; both novels have won the German Crime Prize in consecutive years. ICE COLD tells the story of a serial killer in the Germany of the Weimar Republic. The book opens with the execution of Josef Kaletis, and the rest of the book tells the story of events leading up to that point, from the perspectives of several different people either directly involved in the story or as witnesses to various parts of it. As in the earlier novel, the various voices are signified by different typefaces.

This grim tale is told amid lives of extreme poverty and ignorance, with the political propaganda applied to the population by the government always in the background. The atmosphere of working class Munich is well-conveyed, reminding me of L'Assommoir and Nana in Emile Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, which explored poverty and squalor in Paris 50 years before the events of ICE COLD.

Andrea Maria Schenkel conveys vividly the hopes of the young Kathie, a farm girl who escapes her boring village and strict parents to start a new life in the bright city. On arrival, Kathie's aspirations are immediately dashed, as both families to whom she at first turns are struggling themselves, each having to let out their meagre spare room to lodgers to make ends meet. Cast off on her own, and seemingly with little education, intelligence or common-sense, Kathie soon falls in with some men who spend their time drinking and who have wives at home.

This novel is vivid, bleak and short. It is also very graphic: in unsensational terms it describes in considerable detail horrific violence in passages I wish I had not read. The novel certainly has power, and the story of the murderer (ignorant, violent and yet passive when confronted by authority) and his victims, as well as the other characters, is starkly memorable, not least because of the ability of the author to convey experiences from her characters' perspectives and with their emotions.

First published at Euro Crime, May 2009.

 

The Scarecrow opens as Jack McEvoy, a solid reporter for the LA Times, is given two weeks’ notice – he’s a victim of the death-by-internet of the US newspaper industry and of the decline of the global economy. Rather than go quietly, he decides the best way to show his corporate bosses that they were wrong to dismiss him is to write a fantastic story. And, as luck would have it, the one he has just finished—an apparently routine case in which a black teenager has confessed to killing a white, drug-addicted stripper and leaving her body abandoned in the trunk of a car — has a little sting in its tail. The boy’s grandmother calls Jack, telling him that the police have fixed up the conviction, and that the boy never confessed to the killing.
Jack decides to investigate, and soon becomes convinced that the woman is right. At the same time, his glamorous young partner and to-be-replacement, the multitasking and over-ambitious Angela, does some Internet searching and comes up not only with a previous case with an identical modus operandi, but also makes some dark online discoveries of her own.
Before he knows it, Jack is facing what starts out as a puzzling inconvenience, rapidly escalating into danger. He calls an old friend, FBI agent Rachel Walling, in the hope that he can convince her to help. Soon, Rachel is caught up in events, cast off by the FBI and struggling to discern what’s behind Jack’s sudden plunge of fortune. Then, the two of them make a chilling discovery.
I won’t reveal any more of the plot here: the book just goes on and on at a confident and inventive pace, never slackening off into predictability, never stepping over the mark into unnecessary contrivance; always bang-up-to-the-minute and laden with constant tension as Jack and Rachel try to stay one step ahead by out-thinking their unknown enemy. At the same time, the book is full of details of journalistic procedures, inter-colleague dynamics, internet technology, FBI protocols – never slowing the pace but cumulatively creating an atmosphere of complete believability. The ending is less interesting than the rest of the book, but that didn't bother me too much, although I smiled at the fact that Jack's professionalism comes through for him. What I also like is the way the author has set things up so that any of his four main characters (Jack and Rachel, together with Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller, who are both alluded to in The Scarecrow although not (if memory serves) by name) could participate in a future novel in one of several ways. Intriguing!
If you haven’t read a Michael Connelly novel before, you could start with this one, or you could start with The Poet, the only previous book in which Jack is the main character (Rachel has appeared in several other novels, though). But perhaps the best thing to do is to begin with the first, The Black Echo, and make your way through the whole catalogue. I don't think you would regret it.
If you are a keen Connelly fan, you might like to keep a note of the websites mentioned in The Scarecrow. I haven’t tried this myself, but the author told us at the recent CrimeFest meeting that he has registered these domain names and has included some content on these sites relevant to the novel. There is also a three-part video, Conflict of Interest, on the author’s website which apparently tells the story of what Rachel is doing up to the point where she makes her first appearance in the novel - in response to a phone call from Jack. (Apparently the video story ends with this same phone call.) There are also video clips of scenes in and surrounding some of the author's other novels at the same web page.
Review first posted at Petrona, May 2009.

I've spent about a month away from Scandinavian crime fiction, reading a wide range of alternatives, but THE MIND'S EYE reminds me from page one of all the reasons why I love the best exponents of the genre from this geographical region. The plot is simple yet powerful; elemental themes are involved; there is lots of droll humour and neat touches; the solution is satisfying; and one is left hoping for more.

THE MIND'S EYE was written before the other two Hakan Nesser books I've read, BORKMANN'S POINT and THE RETURN, and I wish I had read it first, as it reveals not much but sufficient about Van Veerten's domestic life to provide context for the subsequent books in the series.

As the three-act tragi-comedy that is THE MIND'S EYE opens, Janek Mitter awakens from a drunken stupor and can't immediately remember who he is. When he sorts it out in his mind, he discovers his wife dead in the bath. He's rapidly arrested and tried for her murder, in a drolly superb court case that had me laughing out loud on several occasions.

All does not end well for Mitter, however, who is convicted of the crime and incarcerated in a secure mental hospital. Van Veerten, the head of the local police, is uneasy about the resolution of the case, but before he can put a definite name to his doubts, another tragedy happens. Eventually, the detective realises that the only way he can solve the crime is by digging back into the victim's past. On the way, he and his colleagues encounter a number of citizens of varying degrees of respectability and culpability, each vignette being telling, humorous or sadly pathetic in its own right.

Scandinavian crime fiction as a genre seems to excel at the good, simple story, well-told and with classical underpinnings, echoing ancient tragedies and sagas. THE MIND'S EYE is no exception. I was absorbed from start to finish, and cannot recommend this book highly enough. If you are lucky, it will be the first book by this author that you have encountered, in which case you can read the rest of his output, or at least some of it, in the order in which it was written.

First published at Euro Crime, May 2009.

The third in Ann Cleeves' "Shetland quartet" (earlier volumes are the prizewinning RAVEN BLACK and the equally impressive WHITE NIGHTS) is a very satisfying read. This series is growing in maturity; RED BONES seems to me to have an added depth in portrayal of the characters (familiar from previous books as well as new to this volume) and their environment, as well as a more confident plot. Perhaps this is in part due to the fact that the author focuses here on only two regulars, the police detective Jimmy Perez and his slightly slow subordinate, Sandy Wilson. Jimmy's partner, Fran, and her daughter Cassie, are in London for most of RED BONES, and other detectives, including Roy Taylor from Inverness, do not make an appearance.

The main part of the book is set on the island of Whalsay, where Sandy and his family come from. Two young students are conducting an archaeological dig on a small croft owned by Mima Wilson, Sandy's widowed grandmother. The old lady is unconventional and gets on well with the young women, until the students discover a skull and some bones buried on the property. Hattie, one of the students, is tremendously excited by the find as she believes it will vindicate her theory that there was a well-established old trading route, confirming the island a powerful commercial force in its time.

However, the discovery of the bones sparks not one, but two, tragedies, which Jimmy and Sandy increasingly come to feel were not accidental. As their investigation continues, we learn more about the Wilson family as well as their neighbours the Coulsens: their role in the "Shetland bus" in the Second World War in which the islanders helped members of the Norwegian resistance to escape from the Nazis; and the tensions between the men who became rich by working on the fishing boats compared with those and their families who have to scrabble around for a living on the unforgiving land.

Much of the appeal of this book lies in the wonderfully conveyed sense of place, the convincingly sympathetic portrayal of a way of life, and astute characterisation. But as well as these elements, there is a good solid mystery plot: I worked out parts of it before any revelations, but found the whole satisfyingly tied together in ways that I had not anticipated. It was sad to me that, in an echo of the first in this series, RAVEN BLACK, the two most interesting and likeable characters in the book (excepting the sweet Sandy and the rather dreamily lovely Jimmy) were the victims: the second of these is particularly upsetting. But of course, the extent of the tragedy also makes the reader more involved in desiring the police to discover the perpetrator(s) of the crime. RED BONES is an excellent, absorbing, slow-burn of a book.

First published at Euro Crime, May 2009.

Johnny Mann, the bereaved Hong Kong police detective at the centre of THE TROPHY TAKER case, is sent to England to investigate the case of Amy Tang, a 12-year-old girl who has been kidnapped from her boarding school. Amy turns out to be the illegitimate daughter of Johnny's old enemy "CK", who controls the Hong Kong triads. Johnny is keen to undertake the case because he's had enough of his period of leave and wants to continue his work to break the corrupt sex trade between the Far East and the UK. He's convinced there is a connection with the Philippines, where he has been recuperating, and believes Amy's disappearance to be related to others. In the UK, Johnny acquires a partner, police detective Becky Sharp, who is both attractive and intelligent. Becky has a possessive husband, who loses no time in accompanying the couple to Hong Kong when the investigation leads them back there.

THE TRAFFICKED is fast-paced and readable. However, any book on the topic of the exploitation and brutalization of girls and young women is treading a difficult line between expose and entertainment. Although Lee Weeks writes with assurance about various grim and ghastly situations, and never fails to be sympathetic to the many victims in the pages of her books, the explicit, businesslike descriptions of violence and sexual abuse are hard to take. The core assumption is that the sex trade through Hong Kong and the Philippines to the UK is free to continue unabated as government and police forces are either corrupt or complicit - the Philippines are portrayed as truly awful: full of poverty and horrendous squalor, with government-backed death squads roaming the streets, killing boys and kidnapping girls (into prostitution) so that the place looks nice for the tourists, who are said to be blissfully unaware or uncaring in their quest for personal satisfaction in an environment less restrictive than at home. There seems to be an unending source of customers in the UK for these poor "trafficked" victims - can there really be so many men who would do these things to babies and girls? The fate of these children is dreadful - repeated scenes of torture and depravations are described, with the men involved enjoying and/or hardened to it. Cumulatively, the lack of official action and various nasty events lead up to a justification for Johnny and his team to take personal vengeance on the horrible villains - with one or two loose ends left over, doubtless for the next book. There is a mystery aspect to the plot - someone is betraying Johnny and co - but the resolution of that is not much of a surprise.

It is hard to sum up THE TRAFFICKED. It is a good thriller, racy and pacey, but for my taste the subject matter is too awful for entertainment. It would make a good movie, but not one I would watch. It is definitely not a comfortable read and will make you question why you are reading it at all; why you go on holidays to places in the world where poverty is rife and the local population is exploited; and why (if you believe the author) nobody other than the under-resourced Catholic missions is doing anything to halt these dreadful, entrenched practices.

First published at Euro Crime, May 2009.