Translated by Charlotte Barslund.
Karin Fossum brings her usual cool empathy to this apparently simple tale of a married couple out for a Sunday afternoon walk in the forest, who discover the body of a young boy. The wife, Kristine, is deeply upset by the discovery, which brings into focus her own long-standing desire for a child, and the refusal of her husband, Reinhardt, to have a family. Reinhardt, on the other hand, is excited by the discovery, taking photos of the boy on his mobile phone (to the shock of Kristine) so he can show his friends, who he invites round for a grim dinner party to regale them with the find, and even, later on, attending the funeral of the dead boy and witnessing the mother's grief.
The first half of this novel is more of a dissection of a marriage than a mystery. Kristine sees a man walking away from her just before discovering the dead boy, and it seems likely that he's the perpetrator. Rather than condemning, the author remains non-judgemental and detached, showing the reader how life appears not only from the criminal's perspective but also through the eyes of detectives Sejer and Skarre, who seek to understand how someone could be a paedophile, rather than starting a witch-hunt. To this end, the police colleagues interview Philip Akeson, a sex offender who has done his time and been released back into society - and although like everyone, I find the whole subject of sex offences revolting (particularly where children are involved), I admire the author for going where few dare to tread, presenting the arguments fairly and even with sympathy and humour, not least because Akeson is shown as being rather likeable.
Half-way though the book, a second boy disappears. His name is Edwin and he's obese. He went to the same primary school as Jonas August, the dead boy, so detectives and village-folk alike suspect that the same person is responsible. By now, the reader knows quite a bit about Jonas August's killer, and we know it isn't the con-man boyfriend of Edwin's mother or the gay teacher at school who is very friendly to all the boys and invites them to his house to do jigsaws (to the consternation of his partner) - but never asks the girls. Who is implicated in Edwin's disappearance is an open question, however.
As usual, I am very impressed by Karin Fossum's talent and originality. In THE WATER'S EDGE she has taken an upsetting and controversial topic– the painful death of a child or children - and has made it palatable and interesting even to a sensitive reader who, frankly, cannot usually bear to think about the subject. The author uses the events in the book to look at people, their attitudes and relationships, in both small and large ways. Some of these are fleeting - how the villagers react to immigrant farm workers or the parents' association's suspicion of the gay teacher once Edwin disappears - and others are dissected in more detail, such as Kristine's gradual pulling away from her dominant marriage partner, or the study of Edwin's mother. All of this is done with insight, yet the mystery builds up almost under the surface of the book and, by the end of the novel, is sufficiently resolved for us to know what happened, without having all the loose ends artificially tied up.
Sejer and Skarre are relatively insubstantial characters, serving mainly to keep the plot going and to provide a neutral vehicle for the exploration of various human behaviours. Occasionally one of them might have a personal reflection, for example Sejer thinks of his daughter and his grandson - but on the whole their personal lives remain on the back-burner while the author looks at the reflections from all the faces of the prism of her characters and the situations that they have created for themselves. This is a wonderful book, short and haunting, and beautifully naturally translated. If you read it, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
GONE TOMORROW is a typical Jack Reacher thriller. If you like this series, you'll know exactly what to expect and you won't be disappointed (as you might have been in NOTHING TO LOSE, Reacher's previous outing). Reacher, as he likes to be known, is a capable, kind, tough-guy ex-army MP. He's also a drifter, wandering around America (usually) - in the earlier books he seemed to be looking for closure and resolution to some of his mysterious, covert past, but now that many of those plots seem to have run out, in recent books he travels around relatively aimlessly. Each novel tends to start with Reacher accidentally stumbling across trouble of some kind - he then follows a trail to sort out what is really going on, cuing lots of military, special-agent and police details as well as plenty of action. The story usually includes a brief relationship between Reacher and a woman, but by the end of each novel he has sorted out the main business and is setting off for a new, unknown destination.
In GONE TOMORROW, the plot follows the usual arc. At the beginning of the novel, Reacher is randomly taking a subway ride in New York in the early hours of the morning, as you do, when he notices a woman who fits almost every item on the Israeli government's secret list of "tell tale signs of a suicide bomber". Keeping a close eye on the few other occupants of the carriage, he eventually decides he has to intervene - with devastating consequences.
I'm not going to reveal any more of the plot here as that would destroy the fun of this somewhat formulaic (but enjoyable) novel. Suffice to say that soon enough, Reacher becomes involved with the NYPD and a capable detective there called Theresa Lee; the brother of the potential suicide bomber, who is a New Jersey cop; the FBI; a congressman who aspires to be a senator, another ex-military guy who has certain attitudes in common with Reacher; various indeterminate mobsters; and some rich Ukrainian refugees. As the seasoned Lee Child reader has come to expect, quite a few of this cast of characters are not what they seem (not least the suicide bomber and the Ukrainians), and Reacher spends much of the middle part of the story working out what he thinks is going on, travelling between the groups to confront them, finding out he was wrong, re-thinking, etc. As is usual in this series, Reacher is fairly slow off the mark, working things out wrong and having to rethink his options - but this is always OK because friends and foes alike are all considerably more stupid than him. The whole is all highly and undemandingly readable as we feel that we are getting an insight into a life we don't know, for example US military strategy during the Afghan-Russian wars of the 1980s, the inner workings of the New York subway system, the provenance of various kinds of guns, or how sports jocks in LA live - but pushing the plot forward fast is not part of the package. To like these books you have to like all these slow details - of how to get a room in a NY hotel for less than $100 a night or what it is like to while away hours in bookshops, on trains, in coffee shops or on park benches (Reacher's usual lifestyle).
By the end of the book, Reacher - backed up by the few people he has come to trust after numerous attacks, kidnappings, ambushes, etc - has finally worked out what is really going on, which is rather exciting and quite satisfying. I hope it isn't giving too much away to reveal that he walks off into the sunset with his ATM card, toothbrush and out-of-date passport (his only possessions) - still the same old Reacher, and doubtless off to find some similar adventure in some other US city or county this time next year.
It is all too rare that we in the UK can read some of the great Australian crime fiction currently being published. I write “great” because of all the wonderful reviews I read on the Australian (mainly) blogs devoted to the subject. I've loved Peter Temple (Jack Irish and more) and Adrian Hyland (Diamond Dove), for example, and have enjoyed the first two by Michael Robotham – who although Australian sets his books in the UK. Although some more authors are being published over here and/or are available on Amazon, there are many that aren’t – see the Crime Down Under Australian crime fiction database and this reading group for plenty of examples.
One author who is regularly recommended by crime-fiction bloggers and other reviewers is P. D. Martin, so I was very pleased to see a copy of her debut, Body Count (publisher, Mira), in my last visit to Murder One, and snapped it up.
Review:
Sophie Anderson is an Australian, working for the FBI as a profiler in their famous Quantico offices. As the book opens, she takes part in a joint operation with the Washington, DC, police to capture a serial killer, an exciting few chapters that provide a (seemingly) authentic view of an FBI operation in detail, and allow us to become acquainted with the engaging Sophie and her colleagues.
We also learn, however, that when she was a young child, Sophie’s brother John was abducted. Not only did the infant Sophie have a premonition of this horrifying event, but in a nightmare she experiences the kidnapping and subsequent events from the perpetrator’s perspective, feeling his sense of enjoyment. Determined to dedicate her life to helping victims of criminals, twenty-five years later she is an admired and respected profiler. Of course, she and the reader know that the reason for Sophie’s ability to accurately profile offenders is because of this psychic ability.
Unfortunately, clichés of the genre being what they are, the plot of the book is apparent very early on. Sophie has a best friend among her colleagues, Samantha (aka Sam). The team is overworked because resources have been diverted to combating terrorism in the wake of 9/11, so the case of the “Washington slasher” is passed to Sam and Sophie to profile. Inevitably, via Sophie’s nightmares, the reader has to share her re-enactment of the horrible ways in which this person tortures and kills. Equally inevitably, Sam and Sophie (both attractive, fit young women, of course) become targets of the killer as they are similar in several ways to the earlier victims. For me, this aspect of the book is deeply unpleasant, as the basis for the suspense is not only the fact that women are being tortured and raped, but that it is probable that one of the two friends is going to suffer this fate, and that we are going to have to experience these events through the mind of the other one. I really do not find this entertaining in any sense: to the contrary.
This having been said, the book does not fall into the category of “torture porn” that has made me fail to complete, or not even start, other books on these topics. The tale is told briskly and without dwelling too much on the gory details – but they are horrible.
It is obvious very quickly, and well before anyone in the FBI taskforce cottons on, that the villain is going to be someone working on their team. In another weakness, I knew the identity of the villain on the first appearance of this character – I am not sure why I clicked straight away, but I did - so for me there was no suspense in the eventual revelation of which character this was and how they had evaded suspicion.
Nevertheless, I don’t want to be unduly negative about the book. Its strongest aspects are in the details of the investigation – how the FBI team teases out hard clues from a profile and follows them all up in order to narrow down the options to identify a chief suspect. The story is told at a fast pace in an easy style, and the protagonist is an attractive character, although her mystic intuition is far stronger than her ability to add two and two together in the here-and-now, and she’s a bit too susceptible to a handsome guy. Although at the end of the day the subject-matter was not to my taste, I would not hesitate to recommend this book to anyone looking for an exciting thriller to take on holiday or to pass away a couple of hours, if you don’t mind the subject matter described here. The novel easily stands up there with Karin Slaughter and earlier (i.e. good) books by Patricia Cornwell and Jonathan Kellerman. And it’s better than many others in this rather crowded subgenre.
Translated by Sian Reynolds.
So I come to the last book I have to read that is on the shortlist for the 2009 International Dagger award. It’s French, and the first in the Adamsberg series that has already won Fred Vargas this award for two years in succession (2006 and 2007).
Jean-Baptiste Adamsberg has been, until the start of this novel, a provincial police inspector of great unconventionality but with an unusually high success rate in solving cases. Therefore, as the novel opens, he’s recently promoted to commissioner in the Parisian force, and we see his eccentricities through the eyes of his close colleague, Inspector Danglard – himself a single parent of two sets of twins and additionally looking after a fifth child belonging to but abandoned by his ex-wife and her lover. Adamsberg has an instinctive, bordering on supernatural, style, as is shown by an initial vignette in which he correctly identifies the criminal in a case long before any evidence is found to force a confession from the suspect.
Despite the internal and external strangenesses of the sensual Adamsberg and the lugubrious Danglard, the story told in The Chalk Circle Man is at its heart a straightforward police procedural. Someone is drawing chalk circles on the Parisian streets at night, leaving strange objects in their centres. Adamsberg’s forebodings about the person behind this activity are soon borne out when a murdered body is found inside one of the circles. Despite intensive police activity, other murders follow, at different parts of the city.
An eccentric range of suspects is assembled even before the first body is found. An academic whose research speciality is deep-sea fish, Mathilde, has a hobby of following people round the city. One of these characters, a beautiful blind man called Paul Reyer, has disappeared and Mathilde, professing to be worried, reports him as missing to the police. She is ignored by all but Adamsberg, who rapidly finds the “missing” man (not missing at all). Soon, Reyer and another wanderer on the streets, an elderly woman called Clemence, are lodging with Mathilde in her fish-obsessed house. Clemence is addicted to answering lonely-hearts adverts, but is perpetually disappointed because each time she arranges to meet someone, he immediately abandons the old woman on sight.
How these three oddballs are going to become involved in the chalk circle story is not clear – but involved they are, not only with the mystery but also, in Mathilde’s case, with Adamsberg in a much more personal sense. As events reach their climax, the author plays fair with her readers and provides a satisfying, if sad, solution to the bizarre conundrum. At the same time, the author has piqued the reader's interest in the affectionate relationship (mainly unspoken) between Adamserg and Danglard, two men of very different outlook, to be explored further in future novels.
Much has been written about Vargas's alternative universe. I see her characters as acting like children in adult’s bodies. This novel is a fable, in which people live out their impulses, creative or destructive, without thought of consequence. Nobody plans for the future, living in the existential present. Yet the motivation of the murderer is cold and logically carried out – and would pass muster in a novel firmly rooted in pedestrian reality.
The book is peppered with acute social observations; cynical yet funny barbs at the media and modern society (the excerpts from the newspaper reports of the chalk circles are hilarious); and myriad tiny delights – Mathilde’s plan to spend a day following a man who is interested in the mythical rotation of sunflower stems, Clemence’s pointed teeth for which Mathilde likes to provide zoological comparisons, or little exchanges between Adamsberg and Danglard about Byzantium and the emperor Justinian (actually highly relevant to the mystery). If the reader is prepared to take this world as it is, then the book is very satisfying. Its eccentricities are charming (though the author is ruthless within her creation, which is no fairy tale) – they are bound up in the pace and focus of the novel, rather than distracting the reader from these essentials.
Thanks to Karen Meek of Euro Crime for my proof copy of the book.
Translated by Don Bartlett.
In the cold of winter in Oslo, Harry Hole is investigating the case of a young drug addict who has apparently committed suicide among the containers in a shipyard. He's undecided about his future with the police force: although he has achieved closure concerning the death of his colleague (described in three previous novels: The Redbreast, Nemesis and The Devil's Star), the reverberations have left him even more outside the mainstream than before. His lover Rakel has rejected him in favour of a careerist doctor. What's more, his sympathetic boss, Bjarne Moller, has retired and been replaced by a stickler for discipline, Gunnar Hagan. It isn't long before Harry and his new boss are rubbing each other up the wrong way, as Hagan reacts against Harry's intuitive and freewheeling approach (no doubt he would be shocked at Harry's failure ever to have had business cards printed).
Harry is nothing if not a good detective, though, and rapidly unearths the facts behind the young man's death which his younger, slicker colleagues have overlooked. His method of solving the case proves critical to the climax of the next investigation, which takes up the bulk of the book.
An assassin from Vukovar is in Oslo, whose target is a member of the Salvation Army. We are told the life story of the assassin, known as the Little Redeemer for his actions in the terrible wars during the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. We also learn a great amount about the workings of the Norwegian branch of the Salvation Army, the raging jealousies and relationship traumas of its younger members, and the shady business dealings concerning the lucrative properties that the Army owns in Oslo. I admired the fact that the author managed to keep me interested in the story of the Little Redeemer, because the 'disaffected assassin' theme is one that crops up quite often in thrillers and tends to create a sense of deja vu.(For an example of an excellent book in this subgenre, I highly recommend The Serbian Dane by Leif Davidson.)
I was less interested in the Salvation Army characters, finding most of them (the men, certainly) either unsympathetic or not well-drawn, or both. I would prefer to have read more about Harry, his personal life and his colleagues. As the plot thickens - and it is a very fast-moving, exciting plot - there are a couple of rather gruesome set-pieces, as well as another tragedy that strikes the Oslo police team. Harry himself presses on with the investigation, finding himself drawn to one of the Army members, which of course distracts him from his pursuit of the Redeemer. As I've found previously with this author, the final disentangling of who hired the assassin and why does really stretch credulity - however, the story of the Redeemer and his circumstances are, perhaps because more simple, rather moving, and I was pleased by Harry's choices in the end-game.
Although you don't need to have read the earlier books in the series to enjoy The Redeemer, I think you'll enjoy it a lot more if you have done. There are nuances running throughout the text, for example Harry's relationship with watches and with his retired ex-boss, that won't make much sense in isolation of the previous novels. I think the Harry Hole books comprise one of the top police-procedural series being written today. Although the books have flaws, they are flaws of ambition - the plots are very clever, and if perhaps they are sometimes a bit too clever, that's better than the opposite. These novels are thoughtful, intelligent, exciting and above all, have a great central character.
'You're moving into a difficult area for theologians, Hole. Are you a Christian?'
'No. I'm a detective. I believe in proof.'
I recommend reading all the books - in the right order. (English readers won't have been able to read the first two chronological novels in the series, which have not yet been translated, but the next one, The Snowman, will be out in English fairly soon, and follows directly on from The Redeemer.)
Translated by Don Bartlett.
I have been having a bit of a Jo Nesbo fest recently, as part of a possibly doomed attempt to read all the shortlisted novels for the Crime Writers' Association international dagger award before the winner is announced in about a week's time. I had read four of the six books when the shortlist was announced, which admittedly helps a lot.
Although I had not read Jo Nesbo's The Redeemer, I won it at Crime Fest, so had a copy to hand. Life is not that simple, though. Nesbo's Harry Hole series is one of many to be translated into English out of chronological order - and in this particular case, it's an egregious crime because the impact of the "trilogy within the series" (The Redbreast, Nemesis and The Devil's Star) is ruined if you do what I did and read the third one first, followed by the first one. The Redeemer follows on from this "trilogy".
Nothing for it, then, but to buy Nemesis and read that first. And a gripping read it is, too. The character of the police detective, Harry Hole, previously rather patchy and chaotic, began to gel in my mind. I'm sure he looks exactly like Don Bartlett, the excellent translator of the series (though Don has more hair than Harry). Nemesis turns out to be a very exciting book. Harry is mourning the death of a colleague and has his suspicions (actually, convictions) of who is the perpetrator. However, after six months he has failed to find any evidence so has agreed with his boss to go back to his usual duties. His girlfriend Rakel and her son Oleg are in Russia, where Rakel is petitioning the courts for custody of Oleg. While she's away, Harry bumps into Anna, a woman with whom he had a brief fling some years previously. Anna is now an artist of sorts, and has created a strange triptych of paintings surrounding a lighted statue - Nemesis. Harry is soon investigating two crimes, in an intensely plotted and detailed narrative (you need to read every paragraph carefully to spot all the clues). There are some real implausibilities in the plot when the ending is finally revealed - not least the perpetrator of both the crime and the way in which Harry is manipulated in his attempts to solve it - but I didn't mind because by then I was won over to Harry: he's a flawed, angst-ridden, funny alcoholic - inevitably a maverick but one who in the main uses his brain and wit rather than his fists to demonstrate his independence.
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.
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.
