Translator: Stephen Sartarelli. If there is one thing that AUGUST HEAT, the tenth in the Inspector Montalbano series, does without a doubt, it is to make the reader feel the titular heat. The sweat and power of the sun is a constant presence, dominating the investigation and forming an oppressive, ubiquitous miasma: "Sitting on the veranda at Marinella, he thought he felt a hint of cool, but it was mostly a hypothesis of cool since neither the sea nor the air was moving."
Montalbano's girlfriend, Livia, is coming to stay for the summer season, but because of her extensive experience of being ignored by her paramour while he is called away on urgent police business, she commands him to find a holiday let for her friend Laura, together with Laura's husband Guido and their young, hyperactive son Bruno, so she will have things to do instead of being bored and alone. Montalbano attends to his task with his customary vigour, eventually lighting on an isolated but suitable villa by the sea, long abandoned by the German couple who own it as a result of various tragedies in their family. One senses that these tragedies were not entirely coincidental and are a harbinger of future complications, but more oblivious than the reader, Montalbano goes ahead and rents the villa on behalf of Livia's friends, who duly move in. Disaster constantly strikes, manifested by invasions of cockroaches, mice and then spiders - however, these are nothing compared with the terrifying disappearance of young Bruno and the family cat, together with a sinister discovery made by Montalbano while he searches for the lost boy.
Realising that the visitors' presence will needlessly complicate his investigations, Montalbano manipulates events so that they, including Livia, leave for home, clearing the way for him to interrogate a series of shady Sicilian builders, property speculators, and estate agents, uncovering all manner of dodgy practices. Despite the blistering heat, Montalbano and his regular band of assistants pursue their course with their usual zeal. Although I followed the plot with my usual enjoyment of Camilleri's novels, the typically offhand style is occasionally just too perfunctory. The central event took place some years ago, and most of the action once Livia and co have left consists of various shady suspects being summoned to the police station and investigated in an attempt to trip them up.
Montalbano is ever susceptible to female charms but, in loyalty to Livia (who has proved a useful excuse for escape on previous occasions) has never succumbed. However, in this story, he meets his match, which perhaps sets things up for some movement in his rather static relationship with Livia in future books.
Eventually, "The light breeze on the veranda had matured from infancy to adolescence and was making itself felt. He decided to seize this favourable moment when his thoughts weren't log-jammed by the heat, and consider rationally the investigation he had on his hands." The metaphor continues, and Montalbano, mainly by pursuing a few avenues that he'd omitted earlier, closes in on his man. Nevertheless, the denouement is engineered by someone else, rendering him a mere spectator, and a frustrated one to boot.
AUGUST HEAT is not the strongest of this charming series of books, though the superb translation and sheer good humour raises many a smile, not least in the passage of homage to Maj Sjowell and Per Wahloo, the Swedish writers of the ten-book Martin Beck series. If you have read the previous books by Camilleri, you'll enjoy this one regardless, but if you haven't, the story may seem somewhat flat and the finer points will be lost. As usual, the translation is utterly sympathetic and a work of art in its own right. The final footnote by the translator is well worth reading, in describing Camilleri's efforts to support the victims of Mafia violence.
Although long, FROZEN TRACKS is a satisfying read, both in terms of plot and characterisation. Edwardson introduced his series characters DCI Erik Winter and colleagues in his two previous books, SUN AND SHADOW and NEVER END, and in this third outing the characters have matured into a familiar team with distinct identities. (Thankfully yet unusually, Edwardson's novels so far have been published as translations in series order, though starting with the third in the series rather than the first.)
In the run-up to Christmas in Gothenburg, two sets of crimes are occurring. The more dramatic sequence involves a series of young men who are brutally attacked at night, possibly with a branding iron. More subtly, various young children tell their parents that a strange "mister" has taken them for a ride in his car. This second, disturbing set of crimes goes undiscovered for some time, partly because they occur in the suburbs so are reported to different police stations who do not communicate efficiently, and partly because there is some doubt in both the parents' and police minds as to whether the children are making up their stories.
Part of the novel is a straight police-procedural investigation, describing how the detectives seek out clues and gradually piece together evidence. Although there is no indication that the two sets of crimes are connected, the reader suspects that they might be, and indeed this proves to be the case. However, because there are two apparently distinct investigations, the chapters told from the point of view of the criminal have an uneasy feel to them, as the reader is never sure which crimes the perpetrator is responsible for.
I like the characters of Winter, his team and the descriptions of their domestic lives. As with everything else in this book, these are understated, but effective – Winter's new family and the gradual steps that the bereaved Halvers is taking towards a new family life are absorbing.
There is also plenty of dry humour in the book, but where it really comes into its own are the descriptions of the young children and their accounts of their experiences. Edwardson also writes books for children, and Winter's (and other police staff's) questioning of their young witnesses is portrayed with great believability and sensitivity. I was not quite as compelled by the scenes of rural life, but this is a minor point in a book that overall is a good, old-fashioned (in the best sense) read. Laurie Thompson turns in his usual superb translation, conveying vernacular and jokes with apparent ease.
On one level this novel is an entertaining, light-hearted and fast-moving romp, relating how Krissie Donald, protagonist of DEAD LOVELY, becomes a probation officer, encounters a client, Jeremy, who is accused of killing his mother-in-law, feels sorry for him and tries to prove him innocent. This process not only involves finding evidence and arguments to help the defence lawyer (not exactly part of her job description) but also stimulates Krissie to try to find out who did the dirty deed if not Jeremy. There's plenty of fizz and pace to this plot, as the author wittily skewers all kinds of modern targets among the absentee-management and politically correct, training-course culture of today, where nobody understands responsibility but they know how to check boxes recording performance targets.
My enjoyment of this well-written novel, however, was marred by two aspects that made me uncomfortable. One is Krissie's domestic life. The reader is clearly meant to identify and sympathise with Krissie, who is presented as a naïve, warm-hearted, ditzy woman, who can't be blamed for all the things that go wrong in her life. I just could not go along with that, particularly where her young son Robbie is concerned. For example, as the book opens, Krissie and her patient boyfriend Chas have spent a couple of years recovering from the events of DEAD LOVELY living with and being looked after by Krissie's parents. They all decide it would be good for the young family to be independent, so Chas, Krissie and Robbie move back into Krissie's flat and she starts a new job as the community protection (aka probation) officer. A lot is made of how much Krissie hates leaving Robbie on her first day at work (Chas is looking after him while she's there). Similarly, she does not particularly like her workmates. However, she readily accepts an invitation to go to the pub with them in the evening, leaving Chas to cope with all the parenting and returning home very late without a care. This is definitely not endearing behaviour, and I found myself constantly wrong-footed in finding Krissie's actions increasingly less likeable as the book wore on (yes, she gets much worse than this), yet the author relentlessly presents her as a romantic, endearingly cute heroine who deserves our sympathy at the expense of her little son and the rest of her family.
The other main aspect I found difficult about the book was the depiction of the families of Jeremy (the accused murderer) and Amanda (his manicurist wife). Are these portrayals intended to be satires of modern life and relationships? The relationship between Amanda and her birth mother immediately after their reunion is the most extreme example of the author's ability to push way beyond anything remotely funny into something utterly ghastly, but not acknowledged as such with even so much as a blink or change of pace.
Although I enjoyed this book and found many parts of it funny, its ambiguities defeated me in the sense that I could not work out how much is intentional on the part of the author. As a mystery novel, there are some gaping inconsistencies in the plot (when the truth of the murder is eventually revealed) that really should have been addressed in a final revision.
Even with these flaws, and despite my queasy distaste for several of the relationships and set-pieces, I admire the author for creating situations that are so over-the-top awful yet told in a teen-novel, "Princess Diaries" style that allows her to go even further than is bearable without making the reader put down the book in disgust. I still don't know if I like or loathe Krissie for her blithe refusal to take responsibility for anything in her personal life or for her own feelings - a couple of hints indicate that the childhood trauma described in DEAD LOVELY is at the root of it, so this may be addressed in future novels - or it may be just how Krissie is. If nothing else, Helen Fitzgerald is certainly different, and does not shrink from depicting a warts-and-all world and characters, all with good humour and a light, readable touch.
DI Will Wagstaffe, who is universally known as Staffe, is a policeman with problems. His parents were killed by a Basque bomb while on holiday while Staffe was a teenager; ever since he has been working with the Spanish police to track down the killers. He's just off to continue this quest, in the guise of a holiday, when he hears of a murder on the run-down Limekiln estate in his patch, "Leadengate" (a fictional area of London). Foregoing his trip to investigate the crime, we rapidly learn of Staffe's failed relationship with Sylvie; his hankering for his junior colleague Julie; his sense of responsibility for his drug-addicted sister Marie, a single parent whose boyfriend beats her up; guilt over Jessop, his ex-partner and mentor who has been forced into early retirement; and to cap it all, Staffe has just compromised himself in court in order to bang up a member of the "eGang". On the bright side, he is very well off, having used the compensation money from his parents' deaths to begin a second career as a property speculator. He now owns several houses in London, very useful for his rather complex life, and for helping out Marie (who has long-since blown her share of the compensation).
This busy background is worked into the plot that is kick-started by the Limekiln estate murder. The victim has in the past been accused, but not convicted, of a sex crime against a child. He's been killed in a particularly sadistic way, and the killer has left no trace of his (or her) crime. Soon, a second assault takes place - this one an even more sadistic and nasty ritual, which is unfortunately explained in some detail. The victim, Guy Montefiore, is a paedophile who is not allowed near his own daughter, and who has been stalking another teenage girl. Staffe manages to rescue Montefiore before he dies because someone, presumably the attacker, phones to alert him. Pennington, Staffe's unsympathetic boss, is suspicious of Staffe's own role in the attack, and wants to hand the case over to the Met. Staffe is convinced that the cases are related, so begs to keep control of the investigation - but his unorthodox methods enrage Pennington further.
Somewhere in SUFFER THE CHILDREN is a good story trying to get out. But because the book is stuffed with so many disparate themes, it has insufficient drive and pace. Staffe himself is the strongest element in the novel - some of his personal dilemmas are a bit cliched, but he's an interesting character with room for development. The plot, however, is far too bitty - gruesome serial killer, possible police conspiracy, a vigilante group that might or might not exist, whether the injured Montefiore will regain consciousness or if he'll be killed in his hospital bed, a mysterious video-embedded website, and what seems like endless witness and suspect interviews that are hard to keep distinct.
Unfortunately, by the time I reached the three-quarter point of SUFFER THE CHILDREN, I had ceased to become involved, and although I did finish it, I was not all that interested in the outcome. I was not quite convinced, once the identity of the killer(s) was revealed after a few red herrings, that it all stacked up. Fewer characters, themes and plot-lines would have made this a stronger book, so I hope that in future the author will decide that "less is more".
