I thank Karen of Euro Crime, and the publisher (Corvus), for my copy of this novel.
Review of this novel at It's a Crime! blog.
25 posts tagged “thriller”
“A page-turner”, “unputdownable” and a blurb from Lee Child (“solid gold A-list must-read”) are all somewhat clichés of crime fiction, but in the case of Three Weeks to Say Goodbye by C. J. Cox (Corvus), more than justified. From the first paragraph of the novel, when Denver travel-development specialist and narrator Jack McGuane gets a horrible phone message at work from the agency from which he and his wife Melissa adopted their 9-month-old baby Angelina, I felt compelled to find out what was going on. It isn’t pleasant: owing to an administrative confusion, the baby’s natural father never actually signed the relevant legal documents, and now wants the baby back.
The initial chapters lurch from Jack’s initial belief that this can be easily sorted out, to his awful realisation that not only is he in a mess with no legal leg to stand on, but he can’t afford a lawyer and can’t rely on the support of colleagues or contacts because the baby’s natural grandfather is an ambitious federal judge with a large network of allies and people who owe him favours within the local public and political services. The book succeeds very well in these opening chapters because it focuses on the emotions of Jack and Melissa, truly devoted parents to Angelina, and the havoc caused by the actions of the creepy Garrett Moreland and his powerful father John.
Jack and Melissa try to counter the Morelands’ claim over their baby but fail. Judge Moreland gives the couple three weeks to say goodbye to Angelina and to organise her life so she is ready for the transfer, a Solomon-like dilemma. Jack and Melissa vow to spend this time in fighting the Morelands with everything they have – which isn’t much. The sum total of their weaponry consists of two of Jack’s old schoolfriends: Cody, now a police detective; and Brian, a well-connected player in the Denver local political scene. Brian offers to dig into Judge Moreland’s background to try to find some way to stop him. Cody, however, turns out to be more of a liability than an asset, as Jack discovers when he sees Cody torn to pieces in the judge’s courtroom, for tampering with evidence. Cody is then suspended from the force so is effectively ruined as a useful ally.
Although the pace of the novel is maintained all the way through, and the portrayal of Jack (mainly) and Melissa (less detailed) is empathetic and involving, I felt that the detection aspects were not as strong as they might have been. Brian, and subsequently Cody, spend much time absent, undertaking unknown activities, occasionally phoning Jack with cryptic updates. Most of what the reader experiences is Jack flailing around as disaster piles on disaster, particularly a trip to Berlin which Jack is forced by his boss to undertake, during the somewhat artificial "three weeks" framework. There is a good interlude when the little band of friends travel with Angelina to Montana to see Cody’s dangerous uncle Jed and stop in on Jack’s parents; and a truly surreal, eventually horror-comic episode when Jed turns up in Denver.
Ultimately, however, the climax of the novel depends more on violence than it does cleverness or dissection of motives and methods, which for me was a slight disappointment. Only slight, though – the plot is a good one and Jack is certainly a very refreshing change from most protagonists. He’s got all the usual human shortcomings; he's the opposite of macho; his devotion to his wife and daughter is touching; and the way he feels and acts in the workplace is very convincing. I very much enjoyed this novel and, though I might not go back and read this author’s previous series, I am extremely well-disposed to any future politico-legal thrillers he might care to write.
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.
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.
The Scarecrow opens as Jack McEvoy, a solid reporter for the LA Times, is given two weeks’ notice – he’s a victim of the death-by-internet of the US newspaper industry and of the decline of the global economy. Rather than go quietly, he decides the best way to show his corporate bosses that they were wrong to dismiss him is to write a fantastic story. And, as luck would have it, the one he has just finished—an apparently routine case in which a black teenager has confessed to killing a white, drug-addicted stripper and leaving her body abandoned in the trunk of a car — has a little sting in its tail. The boy’s grandmother calls Jack, telling him that the police have fixed up the conviction, and that the boy never confessed to the killing.
Jack decides to investigate, and soon becomes convinced that the woman is right. At the same time, his glamorous young partner and to-be-replacement, the multitasking and over-ambitious Angela, does some Internet searching and comes up not only with a previous case with an identical modus operandi, but also makes some dark online discoveries of her own.
Before he knows it, Jack is facing what starts out as a puzzling inconvenience, rapidly escalating into danger. He calls an old friend, FBI agent Rachel Walling, in the hope that he can convince her to help. Soon, Rachel is caught up in events, cast off by the FBI and struggling to discern what’s behind Jack’s sudden plunge of fortune. Then, the two of them make a chilling discovery.
I won’t reveal any more of the plot here: the book just goes on and on at a confident and inventive pace, never slackening off into predictability, never stepping over the mark into unnecessary contrivance; always bang-up-to-the-minute and laden with constant tension as Jack and Rachel try to stay one step ahead by out-thinking their unknown enemy. At the same time, the book is full of details of journalistic procedures, inter-colleague dynamics, internet technology, FBI protocols – never slowing the pace but cumulatively creating an atmosphere of complete believability. The ending is less interesting than the rest of the book, but that didn't bother me too much, although I smiled at the fact that Jack's professionalism comes through for him. What I also like is the way the author has set things up so that any of his four main characters (Jack and Rachel, together with Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller, who are both alluded to in The Scarecrow although not (if memory serves) by name) could participate in a future novel in one of several ways. Intriguing!
If you haven’t read a Michael Connelly novel before, you could start with this one, or you could start with The Poet, the only previous book in which Jack is the main character (Rachel has appeared in several other novels, though). But perhaps the best thing to do is to begin with the first, The Black Echo, and make your way through the whole catalogue. I don't think you would regret it.
If you are a keen Connelly fan, you might like to keep a note of the websites mentioned in The Scarecrow. I haven’t tried this myself, but the author told us at the recent CrimeFest meeting that he has registered these domain names and has included some content on these sites relevant to the novel. There is also a three-part video, Conflict of Interest, on the author’s website which apparently tells the story of what Rachel is doing up to the point where she makes her first appearance in the novel - in response to a phone call from Jack. (Apparently the video story ends with this same phone call.) There are also video clips of scenes in and surrounding some of the author's other novels at the same web page.
Review first posted at Petrona, May 2009.
Harlan Coben’s latest novel returns to his original character, Myron Bolitar the sports agent, and his associates Win, Esperanza (a.k.a. Little Pochahontas) and Big Cyndi. However, in Long Lost any association with sports, a standard feature of the earlier novels, is dropped, and instead the story is a trendy thriller covering international, post-9/11 terrorism, stem cells, lost loves and water-boarding torture, with a quick tour of Paris and London from a decidedly American perspective.
The reviews to date of Long Lost have not been kind, and I can understand why. One has to admit it is a bit of a lazy book. However, Harlan Coben is nothing if not a great story-teller, and anyone who wants an undemanding but exciting aeroplane or beach read will not be disappointed by spending an afternoon reading this novel. The author is bang up to the minute with his BlackBerries, Google maps and blogs, even if his knowledge of science is a bit sketchy - John Wyndham could certainly give him a run for his money in that regard.
The plot of Long Lost is a bit of a see-saw. In a classic Coben hook, Myron is contacted at the start of the book by his ex-lover Terese Collins, whom he has not seen for some years since running away with her to a tropical island and then splitting, begging him to come to Paris to meet her. Myron has found happiness in a previous novel with “9/11 widow” (as she is called) Ali, but that relationship is now on the rocks so Myron obligingly takes a flight to France and meets Terese. Before she can tell him much more than the bare fact that her ex-husband Rick, an investigative journalist, has been murdered, Myron is on the run from an assortment of French police, Mossad agents and Arab terrorists.
I won’t summarise more of the plot here. Suffice to say that it’s a full inventory of contemporary themes and anxieties, but even if one is being generous, an illogical mish-mash. (The scene in a London (Camberwell) pub is particularly risible.) This is one of those books where the reader just has to decide whether to go along for the ride, or whether to close the covers in disgust and move on to something more believable. I opted to read the whole thing, and enjoyed it, particularly the ending – which I found quite surprising, as in most Harlan Coben novels the ending is weaker than the lead-up.
If you’ve read all the Coben novels up to now, you’ll know what to expect and you’ll probably enjoy this one, though it certainly isn’t one of his best. If you haven’t read him, I suggest either reading one of his classic standalones (Tell No One, for example, which has been made into an excellent French film) or the first Myron Bolitar book, in which the author takes a bit more care with his characters and works a bit harder to keep the reader on board.
Thanks to the ever-generous Karen of Euro Crime for my copy of Long Lost, which whiled away a very happy couple of hours on a sunny Saturday afternoon. It certainly beats doing the ironing and weeding the garden.
Johnny Mann, the bereaved Hong Kong police detective at the centre of THE TROPHY TAKER case, is sent to England to investigate the case of Amy Tang, a 12-year-old girl who has been kidnapped from her boarding school. Amy turns out to be the illegitimate daughter of Johnny's old enemy "CK", who controls the Hong Kong triads. Johnny is keen to undertake the case because he's had enough of his period of leave and wants to continue his work to break the corrupt sex trade between the Far East and the UK. He's convinced there is a connection with the Philippines, where he has been recuperating, and believes Amy's disappearance to be related to others. In the UK, Johnny acquires a partner, police detective Becky Sharp, who is both attractive and intelligent. Becky has a possessive husband, who loses no time in accompanying the couple to Hong Kong when the investigation leads them back there.
THE TRAFFICKED is fast-paced and readable. However, any book on the topic of the exploitation and brutalization of girls and young women is treading a difficult line between expose and entertainment. Although Lee Weeks writes with assurance about various grim and ghastly situations, and never fails to be sympathetic to the many victims in the pages of her books, the explicit, businesslike descriptions of violence and sexual abuse are hard to take. The core assumption is that the sex trade through Hong Kong and the Philippines to the UK is free to continue unabated as government and police forces are either corrupt or complicit - the Philippines are portrayed as truly awful: full of poverty and horrendous squalor, with government-backed death squads roaming the streets, killing boys and kidnapping girls (into prostitution) so that the place looks nice for the tourists, who are said to be blissfully unaware or uncaring in their quest for personal satisfaction in an environment less restrictive than at home. There seems to be an unending source of customers in the UK for these poor "trafficked" victims - can there really be so many men who would do these things to babies and girls? The fate of these children is dreadful - repeated scenes of torture and depravations are described, with the men involved enjoying and/or hardened to it. Cumulatively, the lack of official action and various nasty events lead up to a justification for Johnny and his team to take personal vengeance on the horrible villains - with one or two loose ends left over, doubtless for the next book. There is a mystery aspect to the plot - someone is betraying Johnny and co - but the resolution of that is not much of a surprise.
It is hard to sum up THE TRAFFICKED. It is a good thriller, racy and pacey, but for my taste the subject matter is too awful for entertainment. It would make a good movie, but not one I would watch. It is definitely not a comfortable read and will make you question why you are reading it at all; why you go on holidays to places in the world where poverty is rife and the local population is exploited; and why (if you believe the author) nobody other than the under-resourced Catholic missions is doing anything to halt these dreadful, entrenched practices.
LULLABY is about the worst nightmare-situation imaginable: the loss of a child. A young woman, Jess, and her older husband Mickey are out for the day with their baby Louis. They become separated, and Jess, from whose point of view the book is told, cannot find her husband or baby - and her bag, containing her mobile phone, is on the back of the missing buggy. The first chapters of this neat thriller build up the tension, as Jess becomes increasingly desperate when Mickey fails to come home and cannot be contacted. Her insecurities become magnified into paranoia as a result of the presumed abduction of her son.The police are not very sympathetic and don't take the case seriously for a while, particularly when they discover Jess's earlier post-natal depression.
LULLABY is a page-turner, yet I felt an increasing level of irritation with the wet main character as it progressed. It turns out that Jess barely knows Mickey and let him sweep her off her feet into an instant marriage when she fell pregnant. Nobody at his office knows his movements or anything about his working lifestyle. Facts and characters pop up out of nowhere as the book progresses. Jess is a passive character, allowing herself to be dominated by her au pair and her sister, as well as putting up with the patronising behaviour and inappropriate terms of endearment from DI Silver, the policeman in charge of the case.
I was mentally encouraging Jess as she gradually came out of her self-imposed ignorance and took more control of her life. Yet to keep the plot going, she avoids telling the police about leads: for example she deliberately puts herself in danger more than once at the hands of her drug-addicted brother and an unconvincingly portrayed crime boss, and she allows her au pair to keep a key to the house and to entertain her boyfriend there, even though she has good reason to be suspicious of them both. More by luck than judgement, Jess gradually uncovers more about her husband's life, and through that route works through a selection of minor characters and red herrings until she eventually discovers what happened to Louis - although the solution is a slight cheat as it relies on a degree of disinformation and omission. Inevitably, Jess's discovery about Louis's abduction puts her in a perilous position, but she hangs on for the sake of her son, and in a coda (also somewhat cliched) she seems on the brink of growing up.
The publishers of LULLABY liken it to the style perfected by Nicci French, but although the themes of domestic life turned to nightmare are similar, and the descriptions of post-natal depression are particularly well done, I feel that the comparison is not yet justified. LULLABY also contains elements of Martina Cole's books: for example the gangland characters, the family troubles, and the wealthy lifestyle that Jess has accepted unquestioningly since her marriage.
Once you have started LULLABY you will have to finish it, if only to find out what happens to the lost baby. One difficulty for me is that I found none of the characters particularly likeable; indeed, many of them did not seem very believable either. The book is a good, lightweight pastiche of contemporary themes, but does not cohere into a convincing whole.
Jamie Worth is the Glasgow policeman in the triangle at the centre of THE TWILIGHT TIME, Karen Campbell's impressive, police-procedural first novel. In the second book in the series, AFTER THE FIRE, Jamie trains as a firearms officer and (this is not giving anything away) shoots and kills a girl as she is running from her tenement home, allegedly after erratically shooting a gun at innocent passers-by in the street below.
The novel explores in-depth the events leading up to the night of the shooting, Jamie's trial and his subsequent imprisonment. (Again, this is not giving anything away as these events are revealed at the start of the book, the first part of which is told in flashback.) We learn in minute detail about Jamie's experiences of being let down by the police force, the legal system and his presumed friends and colleagues; and experience his wife Cath's perspective as the mother of their two young children. At times, the first half of this book is slow, even tedious - partly for me because I found it difficult to identify or sympathise with Jamie or Cath. The author is also deliberately ambiguous about who is at "fault" - it is clear that Jamie has shot the girl, so the outcome of the court case is only one aspect of the story - his emotional and ethical responses are also central to the mix.
The author was herself a policewoman for many years, and this experience provides a framework that seems deeply authentic - not just in the scenes involving the criminal justice system, but in the descriptions of the media's behaviour and the poignant excerpts throughout the book that movingly describe the short, tragic life of the young victim. The author goes where few would wish to travel, in following Jamie right through his prison sentence and all the associated petty deprivations and cruel meanness. Society forgets about an individual after he or she has been convicted for a crime, but the author is on a crusade not only to show up the injustices and corruption inherent in the prison system, but also to demonstrate that far from providing a punishment followed by rehabilitation, it destroys those who are in it by breaking them mentally and/or physically.
Anna Cameron is an apparently successful, graduate-entrant policewoman whose career nearly came unstuck in THE TWILIGHT TIME. At the start of AFTER THE FIRE, she is attending a UN conference in New York, where she meets prosecutor David Millar; due to his keenness on her and his charming good nature, she forms an uneasy relationship with him. Anna returns to Scotland on discovering what has happened to Jamie, who is her former lover, convinced of his innocence and determined to prove it. Despite her offers of help being violently rejected by a jealous Cath, she is determined to vindicate Jamie.
Gradually, Cath and Jamie separately transcend their challenging situation: in his case, the violence and other abuses of prison, and in hers, of coping with young children, a mortgage, being broke and friendless. They both discover what is really important, and shrug off many of their earlier (frankly boring!) attitudes and values. But it seems a distant hope as to whether Anna can (or will go the full distance to) uncover any evidence to help Jamie, or even if so, can turn it to his advantage. Assuming you have already read THE TWILIGHT TIME, AFTER THE FIRE is a rewarding book. The author does not try to make her characters likeable or pander to the reader; she has a serious, campaigning point to make. This is a refreshing combination, and by the end, one feels that some of the characters have really been put through everything that modern life can throw at them, and have emerged the stronger for it. I'm very much looking forward to reading more by this talented, thoughtful author.
