34 posts tagged “book review”
Laos is an impoverished, landlocked socialist republic in southeast Asia, bordering with the more dominant nations of China, Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. THE CORONER'S LUNCH is set in 1976, a year after the end of a long civil war that resulted in the Soviet-backed communist Pathet Lao coming to power. The protagonist of this wonderful book is Siri Paiboun, a doctor and a widower who, rather than being able to enjoy a peaceful retirement at the age of 72, is made the country's only coroner. One of the many delights of this book about ordinary people's experiences of living under the communist regime are the small everyday acts of subversion and rebellion that avoid the notice of the unimaginative authorities but cause a liberating sense of personal triumph that sustains people through each day.
Siri has been a communist ever since his student days in France, but only because of the woman he loved and subsequently married. Although perceived by the authorities as a safe pair of hands, Siri in fact is a detached observer of the soulless regime. One of the many pleasures of this delightful novel is the life Siri has made in his hospital lab with his two co-workers: Drui, a spinster who reads out-of-date fashion magazines and looks after her ill mother; and Mr Geung, a man considered "simple" (he has Down's syndrome). The collaboration and relationship between these three in their working and, occasionally, personal lives is a subtle yet sharp portrait of how the human spirit can prevail against the most deadening official dictates and the most extreme poverty of resources.
Siri himself lives in a room in a building with many others, including the predatory Miss Vong, whose curtain is always flickering and who bullies Siri into digging trenches for the Party on his Sunday off. Siri has other neighbours, however, whom only he can see - the spirits of the dead, who come to him at night and reveal to him the stories of how they met their ends.
Turning to the actual plot, Siri is faced with two baffling and dangerous cases. One concerns Mrs Nitnoy, the wife of a senior government official, who has died mysteriously while at a Women's Union meeting. Another concerns the bodies of three men who have been discovered at the bottom of the sea, tied to rusty bombshells. Siri's professional attitude leads him to dig into these obscure deaths against the desires of officialdom to the extent of endangering himself. He also feels driven to continue because of his spiritual visitors and the final rest that will be brought to them by the knowledge of how they met their ends.
The investigation and the story of Siri's life continue almost in parallel. We meet a range of sharply observed characters, some sympathetic and others less so, but all convincing. The strength of the book lies in the beautiful touches of detail, the irony and the coded conversations - for example between Siri and his lunchtime friend Civiali, whom he meets every day on a nearby log; Siri with his baguette always specially made by Auntie Lah of the bread trolley. There is excitement too, as the energetic Inspector Phosy and a policeman from Vietnam, Nguyen Hong, become involved in the cases under investigation, and Siri is sent into the jungle to find out why the past three military commanders of a unit helping to rebuild the local communities after the war, have mysteriously died.
Siri remains unbowed by the many petty bureaucratic indignities of the regime, and by the backward and poverty-stricken existence he is forced to lead. He maintains his dignity and sense of self throughout. The book loses its unerring tone only once, in an unconvincing scene where Siri turns the tables on his young and patronising boss, Judge Haeng, after Siri cannot stand another "burden-sharing tutorial" from this incompetent yet high-handed youngster.
THE CORONER'S LUNCH has been likened to the Botswanan series of books by Alexander McCall Smith, but I would say it is, on the evidence of this first instalment, vastly better: first because it has no element of the slightly patronising tone that sometimes mars the (otherwise charming) books by McCall Smith; but mainly because THE CORONER'S LUNCH has much more substance. The deaths provide many enlightening insights into all aspects of this mysterious country and its societies, and all the many disparate threads are bought together in a truly admirable and masterly way at the end.
I was lost in admiration at this wonderful book: for the convincing and sympathetic portrait of a man and his little circle of friends and their lives; and for the exciting and clever dramas that, in the end, come to a completely satisfying conclusion, even solving a mystery very personal to Siri himself as well as making neat, barbed little points about how the regime is undermining any semblance of the values its constant propaganda asserts.
Colin Cotterill is an extremely talented author who, by his lightness of touch and his simple, direct writing style, draws the reader in totally to a complex, many-layered world. The book is so full of beautiful little touches and nuances that you cannot fail to be won over. I'm very glad indeed I read this superb book, and I urge you to do so as well.
In its first few chapters, SUN AND SHADOW provides an evocative description of life in downtown Gothenburg: not the Sweden of Christmas cards, but the seedier side of drunks and petty crime. Patrik and Maria, two bored teens who hang out on the streets, rebellious and vulnerable, represent the problems of their generation, intersecting the police-procedural plot as the book develops, as a kind of benchmark for the values of the society they live in.
The author has the ability convey with sympathy a range of characters and their problems: not only Patrik and Maria but the beat police, who have to deal with the casual violence of traffic accidents and after-effects of drug and alcohol abuse. World-weary detectives do their duty and live their tough lives against backgrounds of domestic stress: money troubles, relationship questions, commuter hell, bad weather and health worries.
Erik Winter is a young, successful detective inspector, about to marry his long-term pregnant girlfriend Angela, a doctor. While they are in the process of moving in together, Erik hears that his father, who has retired to Spain, has had a heart attack, so flies to the Costa del Sol to be with him and his mother. Erik's few days there, in the sun of the climate but the shadow of his father's life, take on an existential air, as he lives in and observes an alien, almost opposite world to his icy norm.
The haunting quality continues after Erik returns to Gothenburg. A couple living in one of the flats near Erik's is murdered, possibly to some hideous taped music which is playing in the apartment when the bodies are discovered. Erik and his colleagues struggle to find a motive for the gruesome crime; nothing was stolen and the couple seems to have had not only no enemies, but no close friends either.
Although this book was published in English translation in 2005, it was written in 1999. Part of the atmosphere and tension cleverly created by the author is provided by the advent of Christmas and the looming millennium: the city is gearing up for a huge party on New Year's Eve, and there is a degree of nervousness among the police about the crowds, whether computer systems will break down, and a general unease about the mystic significance of the date change. This lends the book a curiously but sweetly old-fashioned air: although the fears were real enough to many at the time, they now seem quaint only a few short years later.
In this MP3-less era, Erik sets off into the world of indie music to discover where the cassette tape came from, who recorded it and what the words mean. Unhinged biblical prophecies seem to be at the root of it, but are they relevant to the crime?
Characters and plots are interlocked: Angela discovers an unfortunate letter from Spain in Erik's briefcase while looking for some notes about her pregnancy. Patrik is the first to discover the bodies because he has a newspaper round in the apartment block: did he see the murderer leaving the scene? Has he heard this type of music before? Why is he injured? Maria’s mother is the police chaplain who tries to help Erik decipher the strange lyrics on the tape, and who may know more than anyone realises about the secret lives of some of the policemen who seek out her counsel.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The characters are deftly drawn and the writing is unforced and natural - the translator is the excellent Laurie Thompson, who also translates Henning Mankell's novels. I liked the policemen with their various foibles, and admired the way the author increases the suspense while the investigation reaches a climax.
The end, as is so often the case, is a bit of a let-down. Erik seems a bit too dense at realising what the murdered couple were up to, and fails to follow some obvious leads. The identity of the murderer makes logical sense, but could have been any of several characters. Not only that, but the motivation does not hang true - there is no sense of "ah, yes, that explains it", and the murderer suddenly turns out to have abilities that we weren't told about previously. Most of the subplots end in mid-air, which is a pity as many of the characters had come to grow on me. I'll definitely continue to read this series, though, because the characters are so involving, and I have the feeling the author will be building on his initial talent in future books.
Looking good dead
Peter James
Peter James follows up his racily readable first outing for Detective Superintendent Roy Grace with a second, Looking Good Dead, which is just as good, if not better. The new book opens with a scene familiar to commuters – packed train, irritating man yelling down mobile phone – and quickly lurches into nightmare as passenger Tom Bryce innocently picks up an abandoned CD, takes it home, downloads it, and sees a murder.
Just as he did so successfully with the stag-night prank gone wrong in his first Roy Grace novel, Dead Simple, James ratchets up the tension in Looking Good Dead. Tom's business and family life spirals out of control as the owners of the CD close in on him and exact terrifying revenge on Tom for his fateful curiosity. Chapters splice between victims and predators, police and criminals, the pace building up almost unbearably as paranoia turns into reality.
One of the pleasures of this book is the personality of Grace, a policeman who has been around for many years, a true professional and on top of his game. His uneasy relationship with his female boss, the local media and his role in today's politically correct police force are conveyed with confident conviction. The author's friendship with Chief Superintendent Dave Gaylor of Sussex Police, and his journalistic investigation and "shadowing" of police operations, coroners and others as research for this book, really pay off in terms of a convincing milieu.
Grace is an intuitive policeman, sympathetic to the paranormal since suffering a catastrophic personal loss – his wife disappeared some years ago and he has never found out why or what happened to her, although one senses he will in a future book. Here, we find out more about the impact of this event on Grace's character, and more about his nascent attempt at a relationship with Cleo Morey, the improbably beautiful and expert mortician (yes, really, mortician!).
Although the plot and pacing are terrific, there are also implausibilities in the book; once the basic situation is set up, experienced noir readers might guess quite a bit of what is going on without trying too hard. But if you take this book on its own terms, you are in for the epitome of a rattling good read. You probably won't be able to put it down once you start it, so be warned.
Maxine Clarke
Review originally published on Eurocrime website in December 2006.
Thanks to Norm alias Uriah Robinson of Crime Scraps, I have just finished Roseanna, the first of the Martin Beck series of books by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, written in 1965. The book is readable and compelling. A murdered girl's body is dredged up from a canal at the start of the book. Over the ensuing year or more, policeman Martin Beck and his colleagues tenaciously investigate until the girl's identity, and then that of her killer, are found. The book is spare and focused, and utterly compelling in an unglamorous, uncompromising way.
I've read a great deal of crime fiction in my time, and although the "mystery" element is almost absent in this book, I found it completely absorbing. Beck is unromantic but realistic, both in his personal/family life and in his work. It is also educational to be reminded what it was like for us before straightforward international phone calls, faxing, emailing and the internet.
Highly recommended --- and as Norm predicted, I'll now have to read the next nine books in the series (one of which, The Locked Room, is reviewed at Crime Scraps). Norm has also written a succinct analysis of all ten books here.
Henning Mankell, Karin Fossum and Lisa Marklund are all superb present-day Swedish crime-fiction authors who write in the tradition established by Sjowall and Wahloo -- plot-driven books that convey plenty of sociopolitical comment along the way. For me, the combination of police procedural with "placeism" -- the details of everyday life that create an authentic and true voice -- is what makes reading all these authors such a rewarding experience.
The edition of Roseanna I read is published by Harper Perennial. This edition has an excellent introduction by Henning Mankell (author of the Wallender series) about his love of the Sjowall/Wahloo books; and at the end are interviews with the authors and another analysis of the books, as well as a list of all the books in the series, all for £6.99. I was very impressed and wish that one found these additional items in books more often, to provide context for interested readers.
Ruth Rendell's Chief Inspector Wexford series is now about 20 books long. I first started reading these books as a teenager and enjoy them as much now as I did then. Over the series, we have followed the development of Wexford and Burden's own family lives: their marriages, their children and (in the case of Wexford), grandchildren. Sometimes these have involved drama, but most often, and most successfully, they simply involve the daily interactions between people, with all their small frustrations and pleasures. Wexford and Burden themselves, longstanding partners professionally, have become almost like an old married couple themselves, understanding each other well enough to know when to exercise tolerance or patience.
As well as the family developments, Rendell covers the change in police procedures over the years (the series begain in 1964): technological, political, social. New, young staff are hired who have the attitudes of their own generation, bringing challenges for Wexford and the old hands.
Finally, Rendell is interested in addressing changes in society's values. In this well-established series, and particularly through Wexford, who is both old (experienced) and open-minded (this is what makes him a good, intuitive policeman), attitudes to race, gender, religion, the developing world, consumerism, religion, morals and so on are bought into focus. Rendell has a strong liberal social conscience: Wexford, being both aware of his increasing age and the possibility of becoming more "out of touch", as well as having a sensitive and emotional personality, seems to represent the authorial persona.
I hope I haven't made this book sound heavy-going. It isn't. All this context is interwound into a readable, digestible plot. Rendell likes to explore one particular situation in each of these novels; in this case, "End in Tears" focuses on young children, parenthood, surrogacy, and the powerful feelings thus engendered -- using new and established characters to explore different angles. (This book, published in 2005, is certainly topical, bearing in mind the current media-induced hysteria over Madonna's adoption of a Somalian baby earlier this year, 2006.)
Of course, the book is a detective novel, and works well as such. The plotting is tight and many balls are kept in the air without one falling down that I noticed, even though the presence of twins is usually a bad sign in crime fiction. But in the end, the denouement is almost irrelevant (just as well, as I thought it stretched believability a bit too much). But as a whole, the book simply works -- the author is comfortable with the world she has created, the characters live outside the page, reading is effortless.
I will send a free, unread copy of this book to the first person who asks for it in the comments -- owing to advancing senility I inadvertently bought two copies. If you haven't read a Wexford novel before, I'd recommend starting the series from the beginning (they are all in print). If you have read a Wexford before and like them, you will enjoy this one too.
Here is a bibliography for Ruth Rendell, which includes the Wexford series in reading order.
"There's a song...."
" 'Losing my religion'. "
She screwed up her eyes, then said yes. "You know what that means: losing my religion?"
"I know what it means literally. Is there another meaning?"
"It's an idiomatic expression. It means something like: I can't take it any more".
---------------
That's me in the corner
That's me in the spotlight
Losing my religion
Trying to keep up with you
And I don't know if I can do it
Oh no, I've said too much
And I haven't said enough.
-------------
Gianrico Carofiglio's second novel, A Walk in the Dark, is even better than his excellent debut, Involuntary Witness. Although translated with more assurance than Witness (this time by Howard Curtis), the author has matured, adding depth to the characters who appeared in the previous novel and introducing new ones who are instantly real. The confident dovetailing of back-story and character development as the plot unfolds is unfaltering.
Against the background of a legal case -- this time Guido Guerrieri is prosecuting a well-connected man for abusing his girlfriend -- the book is a perfect jewel. The themes are addiction -- to alcohol, cigarettes, fear or to a behaviour pattern -- and coping with the premature loss of a relationship -- by illness, death or cruelty. The context is corruption. I have some personal knowledge of the baroque and sinister lunacies of the Italian legal system, obviously not by any means as extensive as Carofiglio's (he used to be a judge), but enough to know that his accounts of the machinations are realistic.
The result is a powerful, insightful and compelling account of a tragedy -- or two or three. If you only read one book for the rest of this year, make it this one
Denise Hamilton is the female author who most nearly made it onto David Montgomery's "top ten" detective novels list. I have enjoyed her previous books since reading her first, The Jasmine Trade, upon its initial UK publication as part of an Orion "new authors" promotion. Eve Diamond, an investigative journalist with the LA Times, struggles to make and keep a career in a city hypersensitive to ethnic and ethical tensions, and is as determined as hell to get to the bottom of things. The plot and outcome of The Jasmine Trade was original and moving-- all in all a great debut.
Although I have certainly enjoyed the subsequent Eve Diamond novels, which have built further on these themes, none of them has surpassed the first, and I am wondering if they are beginning to tail off a bit into formula. Savage Garden is once again set against the background of Eve's relationship with Latino boyfriend Silvio,a subplot that has got stuck, and hence irritating. Silvio is a cipher as in previous books: I think this is to keep the reader on edge wondering if he's going to turn out to be involved in the crime, but in fact it just makes him a non-character.
In Savage Garden, Eve is now more established at the paper; she is lumbered with an intern, hired on an "equal opportunities" programme. Eve's hypocritical superiors are pleased to have found an apparently ideal candidate but want Eve to keep a close eye on her to protect them from the possibility of a "Jayson Blair"-style plagiarism scandal. As ever, the author handles the politics of the newspaper, and more generally of Eve's struggle to stay on, let alone climb, the greasy pole, excellently.
However, the plot isn't that great, depending too much on people not telling Eve things until the second or third time she asks them. Silvio's silence/ambivalence is particularly unbelievable. The denouement relies on the old WIP (woman in peril) device about three times over, and when it is all sorted, stretches it a bit.
But I don't mean to sound grudging. Savage Garden is a perfectly competent, above-average, crime-fiction novel. I would not recommend reading it if you haven't read the earlier books in the series -- read The Jasmine Trade first. But if you have read and liked the earlier books, you'll probably like this one too. I hope that Denise Hamilton gets out of the Eve/Silvio rut for the next, though.
Originally posted at Petrona on 21 October 2006.
I am fairly sure by Crimescraps out of Eurocrime, or vice versa, I recently came across a book so highly recommended that I could do nothing but read it. Involuntary Witness is by an Italian author, Gianrico Carofiglio, who according to the blurb is "an anti-mafia judge in the southern Italian city of Bari". First published in 2002, the book has been translated into English by Patrick Creagh, and was published in the UK in 2005.
Guido Guerrieri's marriage is on the rocks and he's a corrupt lawyer, representing people whom he despises for the money. From the Sartre-like pit of existential despair when it all goes wrong, Guerrieri's life begins to turn around when he is finessed into taking on the defence of a Sengalese man, a beach-peddler accused of murdering a small boy. The "Mockingbird" court case plays out in parallel with Guerrieri's spiritual rehabilitation and redemption.
I loved this fast-paced and compelling story. Not only for all the above reasons, but because of its sense of place. I've written before about placeism, and in that context of how John Grisham, although usually weak on plot, excels at conveying it. Carofiglio's Bari is in the same mould --- the details of life in this small Italian town illuminate the eternal dramatic themes. And it is good on plot, too.
This is a perfect miniature of a book --much shorter than Grisham, and all the better for it.
See here for the book's entry on the Italian Mysteries website.
Eurocrime reviews this book here (Karen Chisolm) and here (Karen Meek, who is Eurocrime herself).
Amazon UK listing is here, and Amazon US here. Go on, buy it!
How's about this for a crazy premise: man pays organisation to kill him painlessly if he should have progressive fatal disease or accident rendering him comatose. Changes his mind, but the organisation won't let him. Organisation is ruthlessly efficient at killing assorted passers-by but hopelessly inefficient at killing the man. Man meets previously unknown son. Son gets fatal disease and goes into hiding. Man tries to find him, while at the same time avoiding the paid assassins.
Well it does sound crazy, and it is. The shark is definitely jumped more than once in this book, Kill Me by Stephen White. Yet it doesn't matter. The book does its job at drawing in the reader -- it almost lost me after the unappealing first chapter, but because I've enjoyed all White's previous books, I persevered. And although the plot did indeed become more ludicrous as the book progressed, I was carried along by the persuasiveness and immediacy.
This book is a departure for White in that he writes from the point of view of one of Alan Gregory's clients, so we don't see the action through Gregory's sometimes rather prim, even smug, perspective. For my part, I would have enjoyed the book without the "thriller" element, or if the thriller element were inevitable, would have preferred there to be a twist or two (I can think of a couple) rather than for the plot to be quite so predictable. But in the end I didn't mind, because White can write (and, to touch on a contemporary theme, and as he says himself in the end notes, his editor can edit).
I can't write anything distinctive or profound here about why people (eg me) like crime fiction so much, as many academics have gone before me and can write with far more insight than I. After all, a book like Kill Me is well insulated from the believable world. But for my small part, I would suggest that a book centred on the therapists' encounter with the client (think early Jonathan Kellerman for the epitome), including the challenge of how to deal with a known fatal condition (as here), enables the reader to travel to places that aren't too comfortable in this hard old unforgiving world of reality. The fact that it is unbelievable that this character would take out such a "death insurance" policy, or that an organisation would exist to fulfil it, doesn't matter. The fact that the character sets the policy to kick in at a very preliminary stage of illness is also neither here nor there. The strange rules that the organisation has, for example not killing any clients in their homes in case it looks suspicious, but being quite happy to kill via sniper on a scaffolding in a blocked under-mountain tunnel with a car set on fire as a smoke cover -- totally bonkers. Yet none of this matters, because these plot devices allow the reader to explore some uncomfortable questions. Under what circumstances is choosing death better than living a life? Put a family in the mix, how does that change things? What factors would make such decisions change? These are the underlying issues addressed in "Kill Me", and I guess they are the reason why the book "works" despite its plot.
