77 posts tagged “"police procedural"”
Translated by David Hackston
Not having read this author's PRIEST OF EVIL (first published in 2003) as the subject matter does not appeal, I was pleased to discover that one of his earlier books, TO STEAL HER LOVE (first published in 1993), has just been translated into English, thanks to the Arts Council of England and English PEN, as well as the publisher, Arcadia, who is putting the book out in its Eurocrime imprint. Was DS Timo Harjunpaa worth the wait? On balance, yes.
On the plus side, it is great for me to read, finally, a police procedural set in Finland, as part of my criminal travels across mainland Europe. The haunting ICE MOON by Jan Costin Wagner, a German author who set his novel in Finland, is the closest I have yet come to it, but Wagner's book is more focused on the personal journey of the main character and is set in the countryside. TO STEAL HER LOVE is city-bound, complete with all the atmosphere and irritations of life that the detectives have to contend with in order to do their jobs - mainly at the level of having enough staff to reach an emergency on time without having to wait in a queue of reported fires, thefts and attacks. Another plus is the character and setting. Harjunpaa is a slightly remote man, but his domestic life is bought into focus by his attachment to his children's pets and a moving subplot about his senile father, from whom he's been estranged since boyhood but who is now dumped on him by the social services department. Initially the visit is just temporary, but Harjunpaa is soon frustrated by his attempts to contact social services to deal with the old man, being cycled round an eternal loop by answer machines, an experience with which we are all familiar but, as the irritated detective asks himself, how do the old people themselves cope with this Kafkaesque bureaucracy?
Other aspects of his family life are tantalisingly remote, however. I imagine that this is because the author's English-language readers have not been well-served by the lack of translated versions (as well as the almost inevitable wrong chronological order of those that are translated). I would guess that the earlier books provide more domestic context, particularly concerning Harjunpaa's wife, who barely features here but who is clearly a significant influence on her husband. The translation itself, by David Hackston, is excellent - a wonderful use of language that helps to bring this complex and subtle book to life, as well as adding many touches of humour throughout.
The main plot of TO STEAL HER LOVE concerns the creepy Tweety, a young man from a large family of criminals who is an expert lock-picker and synaestheisic - he experiences sensations as colours and images. Tweety, however, has a chilling hobby - he follows women to their homes and breaks into their houses while they are asleep, watching them and sometimes even getting into bed with them, albeit on the other side to their partners. He has a network of such boltholes across the city, which he visits at night and which are useful when he's on the run. Tweety gives everyone and every thing a name, whether it is a person ("Wheatlocks" is his favourite woman), his feet, or his lock-picks. He lives in a perpetual fantasy-schizoid state. Gradually we realise that his mother, whom he calls Mother Gold and idolises, is in fact a horribly manipulative old crone who has driven Tweety's father to death and constantly harangues her many (now adult) children, most of whom are devious, cunning criminals, all living together in a Dickensian rabbit-warren of shacks and decrepit buildings with secrets in the cellars.
The police have long known that somebody is stalking women and breaking in to their homes, but they can't catch the perpetrator. At the same time, they are bogged down by inter-departmental rivalries, budget cuts and corruption. Harjunpaa does his best to carry out his pure, self-imposed, mission as a detective but is constantly undermined by internal and external politics of one kind or another - even when he transcends that despite his chronic workload, there are never enough resources so he can't successfully follow through his cases, which regularly fail and so continue the cycle of his lack of good standing with his unsympathetic superiors.
Ultimately, although I'm glad I read this book, it fails to satisfy. The plotlines involving the repellent Tweety and his ghastly brothers are left hanging, and indeed it is one of the women he stalks rather than the police who is instrumental in the former's undoing. Harjunpaa lets Tweety slip through his fingers on several occasions, usually but not always by no fault of his own, and the other main plotline (a bank robbery) peters out after what seems to be an overlong build-up. My favourite parts of the story involved the police and how the lower ranks try to get the job done despite all the politics and rivalries from above and from other departments, and the broader observations of an overstretched societal system teetering on the brink and full of cynical opportunists, in the manner so ably conveyed by Sjowall and Wahloo in their Martin Beck series. I could have done with more of those aspects involving Harjunpaa and his colleagues on his team, particularly Onerva, and less of what it was like to see the world from Tweety's deranged perspective.
NO ESCAPE is the first of a series by N J Cooper, previously known as Natasha Cooper, author of the Trish McGuire books. Like the earlier books, NO ESCAPE has an appealing female protagonist - this time a forensic psychologist called Karen Taylor.
Karen is staying rent-free in her grandmother's ramshackle holiday home on the Isle of Wight while she works on her research project to identify and characterise "dangerous severe personality disorder" (DSPD). Her task is to interview Spike Falconer, incarcerated in Parkhurst prison for shooting a family of four to death some years previously. Karen and her autocratic boss Max Pitton think that based on his history he may have DSPD, which if so would be additional evidence that the condition exists.
As Karen gets to know Spike via her prison interviews, she becomes unsure whether he really did commit the murders for which he has been convicted. At the same time, a policeman on the island, DCI Charlie Trench, tells her of some unsolved crimes from years back. Charlie would like to nail Spike for these murders too, but Karen does not think they fit with what she is learning about Spike.
Part of this pacy novel is a straight "whodunit" - if Spike did not commit the crimes, who did? A crisis occurs when Spike escapes from prison accompanied by Jim, a guard he's befriended, and takes a young girl hostage, an event both resolved by Karen and one which makes her even more sure that nothing adds up about the strange young man she's investigating.
The book is also a story about Karen's journey to self-confidence. She's experienced a traumatic event in her own past, which we come to learn about, and as a result is reluctant to trust anyone - either a partner or a colleague. How she learns to overcome her own fears and demons in the light of police hostility to her views, bossiness from Max Pitton, her encounters with Spike's family and her wavering over her attraction both to Charlie Trench and her current lover, heart surgeon Will Hawkins, all take place against the increasingly tense backdrop of threatened violence and instability. As well as being a satisfying mystery novel, I liked way in which Karen develops from being rather weedy at the start of the book, to capable self-assurance as she's increasingly threatened by unknown forces.
The Darkest Hour by Katherine Howell is her second novel, telling two connected, interweaving stories with a cracking pace and confidence. I enjoyed it tremendously, despite not being sure about it at first.
The book opens with Lauren Yates, a Sydney paramedic, almost running over an injured young man running across the road late at night. Jumping out of her ambulance to help, the young man and his friend hastily drive away. Lauren investigates the alley where the men had run from, and encounters a horrific crime in progress. What’s more, she knows the perpetrator, who is able to threaten her sufficiently to make her stay silent about what she’s seen.
Six months later, Lauren and her partner Joe are called to the scene of another crime, this time a street where a man, James Kennedy, has been stabbed. While the ambulance is racing to the hospital, Kennedy is able to say the name of the man who attacked him: the same man who previously threatened Lauren. Lauren therefore has a dilemma – she has previously lied in court at the inquest of the man murdered in the alley in denying that she saw the attack, yet she can’t withhold the name of Kennedy’s assailant from the police because Joe, her colleague, also heard it.
Lauren is one of the two main protagonists in this novel; the other is Ella Marconi, a police detective who is being investigated after events in the previous book by this author (Frantic). Ella is determined to prove herself so that she gets to stay in homicide, hence when she pulls the James Kennedy investigation she is determined to solve it. She’s stymied, however, when Lauren withdraws her evidence about the perpetrator.
I was in two minds about this book up to this point. I wasn’t impressed by the coincidence of Lauren being involved in two cases involving the same perpetrator, or with her dilemma of silence. Lauren is a competent and committed paramedic who has evidently shown plenty of resilience at earlier stages of her life. I didn’t find her vacillation very interesting to read about.
But luckily it doesn’t last long, as Lauren realises that she and her family can’t live with a threat hanging over them. After she comes clean with Ella and the police force, the book shifts a gear into overdrive, and continues at a breathtaking pace until the end. Katherine Howell has a great way of keeping up the action and tension, while also providing plenty of authentic details about the police investigation and the paramedics’ life of constant call-outs, tension and bravery as they repeatedly help the victims of accidents, attacks, and self-destruction.
The police investigation is compelling, with several different divisions coordinating various lines of enquiry as it becomes clearer that certain events must be connected. The question is, how? I really enjoyed the way in which witnesses were interviewed, phone records checked, and evidence gradually put together to build up a complete picture. The author is particularly good at interspersing chapters from the point of view of some of the less savoury characters without giving away to the reader how everything is related. And she presents really authentic characters in Lauren and Ella by showing the reader glimpses of their home lives, their families and how they deal with everyday and not-so-everyday domestic tensions.
Although this is the second novel by Katherine Howell, you don’t have to have read the first to enjoy it (I haven’t). It seems that the character of Lauren is new to The Darkest Hour, and one learns enough of Ella’s back-story not to feel one is missing out by not knowing all the events described in Frantic.
Above all, The Darkest Hour is written with confident and authoritative prose. The author is clearly very talented and I’m eagerly awaiting her next novel, Cold Justice.
I thank Crimefiction reader of It's a Crime! blog, and the publisher PanMacmillan, for my copy of this book.
Read a review of Frantic at It's a Crime!
Read another review of The Darkest Hour at The Guardian (review by Joanna Hines, but it is brief.)
The author interviewed at It's a Crime! after winning the Davitt award.
I very much enjoyed this book. I shouldn’t have done if I am logical, as it is not only about a serial killer, but it concerns the murders of young women and girls in very gruesome, slow ways – topics on which I have more than once gone on record as saying “enough, already!”. So why did I like the novel?
Kate Burkholder is chief of police in the small town of Painters Mill, Ohio. She’s ex-Amish, under the bann from her teenage days, when she left her family and the local community (which makes up roughly half the town) for the ‘English’ (the other half). Kate is a professional, competent police officer in her 30s who has built a good strong team and “back office”. As the book opens, she’s called out one freezing night because of some cows that have broken through a fence onto the road. Kate’s irritation quickly turns to shock when she discovers the mutilated body of….yes, you guessed it, a young woman.
What follows are the details of Kate’s investigation of the murder: a very readable and engaging account of the procedures and events that follow a crime, showing the effects on the individuals concerned and on this small community as a whole. Plot-wise, reader interest is maintained by the unusual twist that everyone on the team jumps to the conclusion that, because of a particular “signature” on the victims that was never made public, the murder was committed by a serial killer who struck several times around 16 years ago, but has never been heard of since. Why has he (presumed ‘he’) been silent for so long?
Kate, however, knows that the killer cannot be that person – and she has a certain, secret reason for this knowledge. Hence, she does not call in outside help to follow up that lead, but instead focuses her small team on other avenues of investigation. This is all very well until (inevitably) the killer strikes again – and then again, this time in the Amish community, and Kate is blamed for running an inadequate show. She becomes the victim of inter-jurisdictional and small-town politics as she struggles to keep her investigation on track, while having to follow up in secret her own dark past and that of her estranged family. The only good thing that seems to happen to her is the arrival of a profiler from Cincinnati (the Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation) – but even he soon seems suspicious of Kate after the council receives an anonymous note via an Amish churchman.
This book is a great read, written in an assured style and with a fast pace, striking that difficult balance between providing enough details of the investigation and people involved in it, as well as a sense of place, without over-doing things. The story is a very good one, with several interesting angles to do with family, belief, loyalty, morality and so on. The suspense is high, especially when Kate is sidelined so tries to carry on her own investigation even after a (wrongly accused, in her view) suspect has been identified. Although the reader never doubts Kate’s integrity, there is enough of a question over what she did all those years ago to provide more impetus to the story and uncertainty about her current motives.
On the down side, the detailed descriptions of the murders are pointless. The novel would have been just as tense and exciting without the gory information about how these women and girls were tortured and killed. I feel it is simply unnecessary to provide these details – they aren’t necessary to make the villain seem even more bad. I hope they weren’t included for commercial purposes. Whatever the reason, I hope that the next book by Linda Castillo will cut down on these ghastly, explicit aspects. (There are other murders in the book which are just as or even more horrific than those in the main investigation, yet these are sketched rather than dwelled upon – and have just as much emotional impact.)
The closing part of the novel is slightly weak. There aren’t that many potential suspects and the identity of the killer is clear once one of the two obvious suspects suffers a tragedy and is therefore out of the running. And the traditional “woman in peril” climax went on for too long, though at least its initial circumstances were believable.
My main take on this novel is that it’s jolly good, and I’d recommend it to anyone. I don’t mean to moan on too much about the torture but to me this book is a perfect example of one in which some judicious cutting of a few paragraphs here and there would have made it really stunning and of much more broad appeal.
I thank Karen of Euro Crime for my copy of this book, a proof from the publisher, Macmillan.
Other (overwhelmingly positive) reviews of this book can be read at:
Random Jottings (with a review of The Ice Princess by Camilla Lackberg).
Wicked Prey is nineteenth in the Lucas Davenport series (there is a twentieth, Storm Prey, due out early next year). I haven’t read all of the previous books, but have read enough of them (about six) not to be lost at this late stage.
Davenport is a tough but dandyish ex-cop who has previously had to leave the force because of killing someone (I surmise), and is now an agent of some kind for the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension in Minnesota. He’s married to a surgeon called Weather, who barely features in Wicked Prey as she’s always at work, but she’s been significant in earlier books. The couple have a little boy called Sam, and have recently fostered a 14-year-old girl called Letty, who has had plenty of violently traumatic experiences in her past (doubtless told in a previous book).
Don’t let this preamble put you off – the author is very skilful at slipping in sufficient back story to orient the new or forgetful reader without affecting the pace of his plot. And it is some plot! A small gang plan a series of robberies at the Republican convention in St Paul, which is to endorse John McCain as official candidate for the US presidency. Davenport is called in to investigate, partly because all the cops are busy defending against a possible terrorist threat, but also because discretion is needed about the tarnished set-up in the political machine.
At the same time, Letty is working as an intern for a local TV station (for a woman who, it turns out, is the mother of another of Davenport’s children, but this relationship does not feature in this particular book). Letty becomes aware that she’s being watched by a strange trio – a man in a wheelchair, a teenage girl who appears to be a hooker, and a dope-addled hanger-on. It turns out that the disabled man, Randy Whitcomb, blames Davenport for his condition, and is plotting revenge in some way that involves Letty.
Both these plots are handled with wit, flair and pace. When I first realised I was going to be reading a book about a heist and a teenage girl being stalked and kidnapped, my heart sank. But it soon turned out that I was totally unfair to prejudge this double-whammy – the book is clever, fast, subtle and very witty indeed. It’s particularly strong on the interplay between Davenport and colleagues; and between the putative robbers.
I was engrossed in the strategy taken by the strong-willed Letty, and in the war of minds between the four members of the thieves’ gang and the various local and national law-enforcement agencies. An additional plus is that Davenport and co use plenty of traditional detective skills to work out who they are chasing and, more difficult, what the villains are planning to do and when. The scenes at the Republican hospitality centre are particularly good.
I found the resolution of both main plot themes a bit of a let-down, rather hastily treated. Letty is a cold piece of work, and will no doubt have this side of her character dissected in future instalments. The ending of the heist story was disappointing after all the situational and character build-up, so I’d rate this novel a high beta rather than an alpha. Very well worth reading, though – and one can forgive a lot when a book is so full of laconic humour and cynically mature observations of modern mores.
Wicked Prey by John Sandford. Simon and Schuster, 2009. £12.99.
Author website, including bibliography.
I thank Karen of Euro Crime for my copy of this book.
Translated by Mike Martin.
Thumbprint is the first novel in a series written in the 1930s by Friedrich Glauser; a series so influential that Germany’s main crime-fiction award is the Glauser prize. The novel is a highly readable affair, opening with the imprisonment of Erwin Schlumph, a young man arrested for shooting Wendelin Witschi, a travelling salesman and father of Schlumph’s sweetheart, Sonja, in the woods late at night. Schlumph is visited in prison by the man who arrested him, Sergeant Studer, who discovers that the young man has attempted suicide. After rescuing him, Studer decides to look into the case in more detail, as he’s fairly convinced that Schlumph didn’t commit the crime.
First, Studer has to convince the investigating magistrate to authorize him to take this course, which Studer realises isn’t going to be easy as the man is a stickler for procedure and wants the case tidied away with no fuss.
“Sergeant Studer, I would like to ask you, in all politeness, what you think you are doing? Could you explain how you cam to involve yourself without authorization – I repeat, without authorization -- in a case which…”
The examining magistrate broke off, though he couldn’t have said why himself. The man on the chair before him was a detective, a simple policeman. He was middle-aged and there was nothing special about him: a shirt with a soft collar, a grey suit that had gone slightly baggy in places because the body inside it was fat. He had a thin, pale face with a moustache covering his mouth so that you didn’t know whether he was smiling or not. And this simple policeman was sitting there in the chair, legs apart, forearms resting on his thighs, hands clasped…
The Magistrate himself couldn’t have said why he suddenly adopted a slightly warmer tone.
Sure enough, Studer is allowed to investigate the case, and so travels to Gerzenstein, a microcosm of Swiss village life, where everyone listens to the radio all day and sounds like the announcer, and where every other building is a shop or small business. Studer is somewhat stifled by the atmosphere:
God, people were the same everywhere. People in Switzerland tended to keep their little indiscretions very much to themselves, but as long as they didn’t impinge upon other people’s lives, nothing was said…….Unless something unexpected happened. Such as a murder. And a murder needed a murderer, like bread needed butter. Otherwise people would complain. And if the presumed guilty party tries to hang himself, and a detective comes along who is stubborn as a mule, then it can happen that al the little irregularities there are in everyone’s life suddenly become important. You work with them, like a bricklayer with bricks, to erect a building. A building? Let’s say a wall just for the moment.
And later:
“Perhaps you remember the case of that dental technician in Austria? Put his leg on a chopping block and hacked away at it until it was left hanging by a scrap of flesh, just to pocket a huge sum from the insurance. There was a big trial.”
“Well yes,” the examining magistrate said, “in Austria. But we’re in Switzerland here.”
“People are the same everywhere”, Studer sighed.
For the rest of the novel, Studer, helped by the local police chief, works on the shooting, with a mixture of forensics, witness interviews, psychological insight and dogged persistence. Dreams and hallucinations begin to come into play – Studer’s wife and Sonja both have a tendency to stay up all night reading novels – which renders them into a dream-like state by day. Studer himself drinks too much and later becomes ill with an infection, causing him to vividly imagine various scenarios that may have led to the murder, and providing some flashes of inspiration.
At its heart, though, the book is a classic story of a murder, some suspects, some social observations, and a neat solution. What makes it special, and fresh more than 70 years later, is its straightforward truthfulness, lack of pretension and yet, despite these pragmatic aspects, its hints of other worlds through which Studer’s perceptions are filtered.
What had people done with their own voices? Had they been infected by the radio? Had the wireless sets in Gerzenstein triggered off a new epidemic: voice-swapping?
My final words of the review part of this post are in praise of the translator, Mike Martin, through whose interpretation the novel reads as if it were written yesterday. I also put in a note of thanks to the publisher, Bitter Lemon Press, which since 2004 have published all five of Glauser’s Studer novels in English translations (all, I believe, by Mike Martin).
Friedrich Glauser was born in Vienna in 1896, and died aged 42, a few days before he was due to be married. He was a schizophrenic, addicted to morphine and opium, and spent much of his life in psychiatric wards, insane asylums and in prison for forging prescriptions. He spent two years in the Foreign Legion in North Africa, and worked as a coal miner, gardener, labourer and hospital orderly.
Der Bund: Glauser has elevated his material to an exquisite artistic level, a master of psychological analysis, a warm, sensitive and wonderfully observant writer.
Nationalzeitung Basel: Perfect characterization, brilliant portrayal of humour and irony against the dark, brooding background of small-town life.
Bayerische Rundfunk: Friedrich Glauser is a remarkable discovery. An ability to translate an erratic, obsessive life into language that seduces by its intimacy. A reflection of his suffering and compassion.
Glauser at the Bitter Lemon website.
Glauser's books reviewed at Euro Crimeand Reviewing the Evidence.
Translated by Victoria Cribb.
HYPOTHERMIA is among the very best of the books I've read this year. It's the sixth of the author's Erlendur series to be translated into English; it is truly a mature, masterful and utterly fantastic book.
It's a story stripped bare to the bone. A young woman, Maria, commits suicide at her holiday cottage on the shores of Lake Thingvellier. About 30 years ago, Maria's father Magnus fell from his boat and drowned in the same lake. Ever since then, Maria has been extremely close to her mother, Leonora, still living with her even after graduating from university and her marriage to a doctor named Baldvin, who moved in with the two women after his wedding to Maria. Leonora died of cancer two years before the book opens, during which time Maria gave up her job to nurse her mother, constantly at her side. Everyone assumes that part of the reason for Maria's suicide was her inconsolable loss.
Erlendur is only involved in this case tangentially, in that he is told of Maria's death because Maria's main house is in his jurisdiction, so it falls to him to inform Baldvin of her death. Baldvin is devastated. A few days later, however, Maria's friend Karen, who discovered the body, comes to see Erlendur, convinced that Maria cannot have killed herself. Not only was Maria in a positive frame of mind, but Karen has a tape of a recent session between Maria and a medium, in which Maria talked of her comfort in being in touch with her mother from beyond the mother's grave - the two women had talked about this in the mother's final days, and agreed on a method of communication if there is "life after death".
Although Erlendur is sceptical, he is irresistibly drawn to situations involving the missing and the disappeared. He's already looking into three old cases of young people who have suddenly and inexplicably vanished, reflecting on the impact these events have had on the families of the departed. Family members tend to get in touch a on birthdays or anniversaries of the disappearances to find out if there is any news, and Erlendur sees how time takes its toll as the parents of these vanished teenagers become more infirm and eventually die. Erlendur largely lives in his own past, as his own life was shaped by a traumatic event when he was 10 years old. He and his younger brother (aged 8) were out on the hillside in a blizzard, and both boys became lost in the storm. Only Erlendur was found, nearly frozen to death.
Reflecting on these events, Erlendur visits the friends and relations of Maria, the dead young historian. He becomes more interested in the accident in which her father drowned, and digs out the details of the old police investigation, which seemed to have been carried out in a rather perfunctory fashion. At the same time, in a familiar theme in these books, he pursues new leads in the cold cases with characteristic focus.
The events of HYPOTHERMIA occur in a bubble removed from any official criminal investigation - although Erlendur interacts occasionally with his colleagues, the story focuses on his "private" investigation of Maria's death and the old disappearances. Although Erlendur does not believe in the afterlife, he's driven by his own inner need to speak for the lost and the missing, and perhaps above all to seek to thaw out some of the hypothermia of the souls of those who are left behind - including himself.
Erlendur's family life is also a fairly significant part of this book, as his own two children gradually switch roles with Erlendur and his long-ago divorced wife. Eva Lind (mainly) and Sindri want their parents to meet and to reconcile themselves to the break-up of their relationship, but it is quite clear that they are incapable of even the slightest understanding of each other's point of view. Perhaps because of Eva Lind's determination that her parents achieve some closure, or perhaps because of the investigations he's involved in, Erlendur reads to Eva Lind from a book describing the events in which he and his brother were lost, and he reflects on the impact the events, and the book's publication, had on his mother and on his own decisions at the time of his mother's death - directly relevant to Eva herself.
It is hard to convey the sadness and depth of HYPOTHERMIA. The book's plot is completely solid, being an apparently simple tale of a man going round talking to various people, but underneath there are so many layers of the past, of emotion and mood, of different ways of looking at death, disappearance and the lost, descriptions of the ways of life on this bleak island, and how past ways are changing.
There are no dramatics in this story, no exciting set-pieces or thrilling climaxes. The book is simply a rich, thoughtful, mature and compelling work, sympathetically translated. These Icelandic books have much in common with Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch series, in particular the lonely perspectives of the protagonists Harry and Erlendur in speaking for the dead and disappeared of however many years ago - but each is a unique creation. I loved HYPOTHERMIA, with its ageless, deeply sad stories lying beneath its pages.
FEVER OF THE BONE is the sixth in the author's series about DCI Carol Jordan and criminal psychologist Tony Hill, but you don't need to have read the previous novels to appreciate this one. It is written with multi award-winning Val McDermid's usual professionalism, dependability, style and apparent effortlessness. Although some parts stray into formula and are even slightly tired, the book is replete with tiny, fascinating character sketches and barbs of insightful observations of modern mores that lift it way above the average. It's a perfect holiday or weekend piece of light reading (despite the dark central theme) that leaves plenty of issues to ponder after the last page is turned.
The main plot concerns the deaths of some young teenagers in and around the fictional town of Bradfield in northern England. Carol and her team find themselves looking for a person or people who stalked the youngsters by first befriending them on a social networking website called RigMarole, then luring them into a direct meeting, and then killing them. Very few details of the abductions and deaths are provided, thankfully, but it is harrowing to read about the impact of the disappearances on the children's parents, who seem to have done all they can to protect their offspring. While paying due respect to the emotions involved, the book shies away from covering much of these aspects and focuses mainly on the investigation: how Carol's "cold case" team discover clues via old-fashioned police work as well as by following the internet trail. One part of their multi-specialist approach is missing, however. Carol's new and unsympathetic boss, James Burke, will not let her call in Tony Hill to work on profiling the criminal, ostensibly for cost reasons but Carol senses egos are involved. Instead, Burke tells Carol to make do with one of the police force's own profilers, ironically a man trained by Tony. Of course the man is useless, leaving Carol and her colleagues pretty stuck as to how to proceed when the tangible leads run out.
Tony is not sitting around moping while all this is going on. At the end of the last book, he discovered that his estranged father had died, leaving him a considerable amount of money. Tony has no wish to learn anything about the life of the man who abandoned him as a baby, but he can't avoid sorting out his father's estate, having to sell his house and narrow boat in Worcester. By coincidence, Tony is contacted by the Worcester police who are at their wits' end over the killing of a young teenager and so hire Tony to create a criminal profile for them. Curious about his father's life despite himself, Tony agrees to take on the job and travels to Worcester, in the process ending up spending the night in his father's old house and beginning to discover unexpected things about his own past. (Helped without his knowledge and against his will by Carol, who confronts Vanessa, Tony's evil mother, to try to find some answers about the past lives of father and son.)
Carol and Tony are intensely involved with each other on an astral plane but can't admit their feelings openly (a longstanding theme). The action is stalled for a while because Carol is too principled to discuss details of her cases with Tony even though they live in the same house, because Tony is not officially involved. Eventually, they put their heads together and realise that the case Tony has profiled in Worcester is likely to be an earlier crime committed by the same person who killed the two teenagers in Bradfield. Tony is allowed back on the team and by joining forces with the attractively portrayed Alvin Ambrose of the Worcester police, Carol and her colleagues begin to narrow down their list of suspects. Val McDermid is bang up to the minute (or, rather, nanosecond) with her social media and technological know-how, providing a whistle-stop tour of security breaches and data-protection issues as the hunt becomes more targeted.
The criminal is eventually tracked down by a combination of traditional police detection and some (glossed-over) online gee-whizzery, with a dash of inspiration from Carol and Tony combined. Although the resolution is a logical and rational outcome of all the earlier clues, to me it did not seem credible in psychological terms, and nor did it seem likely that the criminal would have managed to obtain the specific information needed about which children to attack, despite the book's casual assumption that there is no security or code that cannot be hacked. For me, a stronger part of the book was the story of Tony's gradual discovery of his father, which is rather moving - and, one hopes, will enable him to move on a bit in his rather static relationship with Carol.
After reading this book, I learnt that Val McDermid and her publishers have created a social networking site called RigMarole, just as described in the book. In a spirit of curiosity I joined it, and have to admit it is an eerie experience to look around it and to see (and if you wish, interact with) the characters in the novel (some of whom meet sticky ends, and some of whom are distinctly unpleasant). I found this experience more unsettling than actually reading the book. If you want to look for yourself, the URL is http://rigmarole.ning.com/.
Weighing in at 550 pages, I was slightly daunted at the prospect of reading this book, but I need not have worried. It’s very absorbing – a slow burn of a book (published by Pan Macmillan), full of atmosphere and suspense, as well as with a well-drawn cast of characters and a satisfying plot.
The first part of the novel concerns three women who are staying in a remote cottage in a village in the north of England. Rachael, Anne and Grace are conducting an ecological review, the results of which will determine whether the area can be developed into a quarry. As the novel opens, Rachael arrives at the cottage to begin the project and discovers her friend Bella, owner of the neighbouring farmhouse, hanging from a noose, having apparently committed suicide. This being a crime novel, we know that this conclusion may not be justified, but for the first part of the novel, the author is content to let everyone believe that Bella took her own life, while we get to know the living characters and the dynamics between them. Each section of the book is told from the point of view of one of the three women researchers, having the double benefit that the characters and their concerns can come to life, and that certain events can be with justification kept from the reader.
Tensions build between the women and with the people in the nearby village who have conflicting interests in the project. Peter, the women’s employer, is a greasy-pole-climber who among other nefarious activities has plagiarised Rachael’s research and discarded her after an affair without telling her he’s begun to see another woman (whom he eventually marries). Rachael is the most successfully portrayed of the three central women, as she fights to overcome her insecurities and relationship with her confident, overwhelming mother. Anne is married to the local squire, but their relationship is semi-detached to say the least; Grace also has a local connection – she is the most mysterious of the three women and one senses she must have some connection to Bella’s death.
A crisis occurs in the shape of another death, which leads to the introduction of DI Vera Stanhope, a middle-aged, unmarried and distinctly unconventional woman who has bags of external confidence but her own share of internal insecurities relating to her own past, and in particular her father’s “secret obsession”. Vera brings a welcome dynamism to the book, both in terms of plot and her working environment with her subordinates.
The author cleverly switches between points of view; these, together with her paced revelations of past events gradually show the full extent of the network which Vera must unravel to get to the bottom of the mystery (or mysteries). I shall certainly be reading the next books in the Vera Stanhope series (though I believe that THE CROW TRAP was originally written as a standalone novel), not least because I find her an attractive and unusual character, and want to know more about her.
Since first drafting this review it has been confirmed that Vera Stanhope is to become a TV detective. I’m very much looking forward to watching her exploits, and well-deserved congratulations to Ann Cleeves for this news.
The Crow Trap reviewed at Reviewing the Evidence
Wheredunnit on Northumberland, Ann Cleeves and the Vera Stanhope books.
Brief review at Mysteries in Paradise, as part of a "female detectives" post.
Ann Cleeves guest post on "crime for all" at DJ's krimblog.
Posts about Ann Cleeves at DJ's krimblog: includes reviews of all the Vera Stanhope series.
Translator: Marlaine Delargy. THE DARKEST ROOM is a wonderful book, framed as the story of a wooden house, Eel Point, on the coast of the small island of Oland, Sweden - an island where the population is small and the old traditions continue. The house has a long, tragic history associated with the building of the two lighthouses on the nearby rocks, shipwrecks and various residents. The brief stories of these old tragedies are told in short sections interleaving the book's chapters, showing how Eel Point has become regarded today as haunted. The reader is never sure whether the ghosts are real, or to what extent the house's sad, cruel past is influencing current events.
A family moves to Eel Point, ostensibly to start a new life away from the city and the pressures of work and commuting, but as we gradually realise, there is another reason for the move. Katrine and Joakim have been married for seven years and are a typically smug, professional modern couple - good jobs, two lovely young children, well-off, and spending their spare time renovating their homes, which has enabled them to gradually move up the property ladder to the extent that they can now afford to buy the enormous yet run-down manor at Eel Point. At first it is hard to like either adult in this self-satisfied couple, but we gradually see the cracks in their personalities as, little by little, their story is revealed, and they become more sympathetic. Some of the revelations are from Katrine's estranged mother, Mirja Rambe, an artist of some renown and a determined Bohemian, for whom truth is an elastic concept. Mirja and her mother, an even more renowned artist, lived at Eel Point for a time during Mirja's childhood, and their secret history is central to the mysteries of the present.
Another plotline involves a series of robberies on the island. Three bored young men regularly get high on drugs before stealing from and vandalising holiday houses whose owners are absent in their regular jobs on the mainland. The police are completely unsuccessful in solving the case until Tilda Davidson, a new recruit arrives. Tilda is the connection between THE DARKEST ROOM and the first novel in this loose series, ECHOES FROM THE DEAD, as she is the granddaughter of old Gerlof Davidson's brother Ragnar. Tilda is both determined to make her mark as a policewoman subject to patronising sexism from her male colleagues (and smarting from an unfortunate affair), and also is interested in her own family history, of which she knows only fragments. Her grandfather Ragnar is dead, so she visits Gerlof in his old people's home to tape-record his reminiscences of his brother and their lives on the island. These sections of the book are among my favourites, both in Gerlof's reactions to the tape recording project and the way in which he infiltrates himself into Tilda's investigations. He immediately provides her with some good leads to the burglary case, as he knows old people who live near the properties concerned, people to whom a car passing down the road is a major life-event. Sure enough, Tilda and her colleagues soon begin to track down the perpetrators based on this evidence, and a case is gradually built up.
There are so many wonderful aspects to this book that it is impossible to note them all in a brief review. Above all, the author himself is a wonderful storyteller; one becomes totally immersed in his Oland world and in the lives and personalities of the superbly well-observed characters, major and minor. He is also a great plotter - the main stories as well as the minor ones weave in and out of each other: apparently small details in one story turn out to be highly relevant in another. He also has fun with the ghost-story concept, keeping the reader guessing as to whether he'll pull a supernatural solution out of the hat or whether he can possibly create a down-to-earth explanation for all the disparate events.
There is so much that could be said about this excellent novel, packed full of subtleties and stories, but my main advice is to read it and experience it for yourself. I wonder if, like me, you will be left thinking that there is more to the "solution" that the main protagonist, Joakim, realises? Does the author intend us to conclude that Joakim and Katrine have paid a price for a misdeed they themselves have done? I think so - for I believe that the couple has committed a terrible crime but are in total denial about it, and I believe that Johan Theorin wants us to see the novel as a story of acknowledgement and retribution.
A final note: I appreciated the translation by Marlaine Delargy: the collaboration between her and the author makes the book read as if it were written in the language in which I read it. THE DARKEST ROOM was a number one bestseller in Sweden and won the 2008 Glass Key award for the best Nordic crime novel of the year. If there is any justice in the world, the book will be winning many more awards now that it has been translated into English and so eligible for a greater number of them.
