22 posts tagged “thriller”

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.

First published at Euro Crime, July 2009.

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.

First posted on Petrona, June 2009.

 

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.

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.

First published at Euro Crime, May 2009.

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.

First published at Euro Crime, May 2009.

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.

First published at Euro Crime, May 2009.

Skin and Bones by Tom Bale (Preface, £12.99)  starts grippingly and chillingly with the story of how Julia, visiting the village in Sussex where her parents recently died, runs down to the post office for a few supplies, to find herself in the middle of a massacre. A gunman is rampaging through the tiny hamlet, indiscriminately shooting people. Julia narrowly escapes – or so she thinks. She realises that the murderer is playing with her, chasing her in a macabre game. Just as he catches her and is about to shoot her, a badly wounded, older resident distracts the murderer for long enough for Julia to make a temporary escape, by climbing a tree on the village green. What she witnesses from there is even more shocking than the preceding events. Then she is shot.
After racing through these early chapters, I wondered if the rest of the book could possibly live up to this amazingly tense and dramatic start. The answer is a qualified yes. The plot is given momentum by the fact of one character knowing something that nobody else, the police included, believes – and this knowledge is exactly what is putting that person in peril. Or is it?
In a separate thread, Craig Walker, a former investigative journalist who has lost his nerve, becomes involved. He has personal connections with the village, and so helps an ex-colleague Abby, now a freelancer, to follow the story of the terrible killing and the possible reasons for it. Abby digs around and finds various shady connections with drug dealers, crime lords and property developers – not an edifying trio of professions, and one that rapidly leads her and Craig into danger themselves.
These parts of the books are the most successful, as the two main characters separately cope with the various threats to their lives, and decide to fight back. Less successful, in my opinion, are the portrayals of the villains, which do not quite gel.
Nevertheless, Skin and Bones is an extremely fast-paced thriller whose pages any reader will be desperate to turn to find out what twist and turn is coming next. There are some very good characterisations, particularly Vanessa, the wife of the local lord of the manor. But there are also some quite weak ones, for example her indolent nephew Toby, and quite a few predictable cliches. But overall, the book works. Many of the plotlines are cleverly tied together as events reach their conclusion – everything and everyone turns out to be more connected than they had realised, and there are several satisfying aspects to the resolution. Skin and Bones is definitely a book that will keep you occupied while the world carries on around you.

First posted at Petrona, January 2009.

"Missing girls, a brutal killer, a city in terror" are the words on the cover of THE TROPHY TAKER and I suppose they are a fair description, although the city (Hong Kong) does not seem too terrified. The prose is rushed as chapters flash by: detective Johnny Mann and his two colleagues investigate the disappearance of a series of women dating back more than 20 years. Bodies are found in various states of decomposition, having been horribly mutilated in various ways. Johnny is convinced that the criminals are involved in the thriving "hostess" scene, so hangs around various bars and clubs in the hope of catching those responsible.

In the process he meets Georgina, a young woman who has recently arrived from Devon, England. Georgina's mother, a widow, has recently died and the girl has decided to find her only family, two cousins who live in Hong Kong. Lucy, the elder of the two, is severely in debt to the triads, owning to an unconvincingly described night spent gambling. Ka Lei, the younger girl, rapidly becomes Georgina's soul mate. Soon, however, Lucy is put under intolerable pressure to betray not only her naive cousin but also her sweet younger sister, in order to repay her crippling debt.

THE TROPHY TAKER is an easy read, though it weighs in at 500 pages. The author is billed as "a female James Patterson", which is a fair warning of what to expect from the book's contents. The action is fast but fairly superficial, for example all the characters are in some way involved in the nasty trafficking events that Johnny, an idealised character with total integrity and unfailingly chivalrous, gradually uncovers. What suspense there is largely hangs on his ability to work out who is behind the disappearances (obvious) and then whether he will track down the victims in time.

Although the descriptions of life in Hong Kong ring true, and the reader cannot help but sympathise with the desperate situation of many of the women described, the book is too formulaic. Nobody seems to be surprised when women regularly go missing, it generally being assumed that they have had enough and have gone on the "backpacker trail" – though of course the reader is left in no doubt of what has really happened to these poor souls. It seems to be assumed that any female living in Hong Kong is an isolated, potential victim, too passive or thoughtless to take any precautions to protect themselves.

The book is something of a pastiche of various true-life crimes and similar books, told with broad brush strokes and lack of subtlety. For me, the repeated scenarios of tortured and abused women, even though they stop short at gory descriptions, cumulatively leave too nasty an impression, although the author seems to genuinely sympathise with her characters' plights.

First posted on Euro Crime, January 2009.