Review of All Fun and Games Until Someone Loses an Eye by Christopher Brookmyre (Abacus, 2005)

Jane and Alexis both had events in their teenage years that irrevocably changed their lives.  Whilst enjoying being a punk in Glasgow, Jane became pregnant, married and settled down to a boring married life.  In Canada, Alexis hacked into a classified site and ended up on the run in the South of France working for a shadowy high-tech, private security contractor who does lethal work for hire.  Now forty six and a grandmother, Jane still dreams of being a secret agent, going on dangerous adventures and playing in the casinos of Monte Carlo.  Alexis wants to give up fighting and killing baddies and to go to College.  Both are trapped in their respective lives.  But then Jane’s son Ross, a specialist in non-lethal weapons, disappears.  Alexis’ firm is hired to locate him and they soon form a partnership with Jane, who’s steely determination to track him down means she soon living her James Bond dreams.

Brookmyre’s tales are always good fun, invariably a thriller tale wrapped up in dark humour and spun out as an edgy comic caper.  So it is with All Fun and Games Until Someone Loses an Eye, which has a very nice hook about a dour Scottish housewife making a transformation into Lara Croft as a secret agent.  The set-up is very nicely done, as is the unfolding of the plot and the denouement, with the action sequences particularly well conveyed.  As usual, Brookmyre develops a colourful cast of characters, placing them a number of them slightly or fully out of place, and riffing on their interplay.  The result is humour is ever present, though rarely spills over into belly laughs.  The only downside is there is far too much explication and back story, with rambling long passages that added little but padding.  Some judicious editing would have added a little pace and verve.  Overall, an entertaining, well conceived, tongue-in-cheek thriller.

Review of The Secret in Their Eyes by Eduardo Sacheri (Other Press, 2011; Spanish 2005)

On retiring from forty years working as a court clerk, Benjamin Chaparro asks to borrow an old typewriter, hoping to write a novel with his new found time.  After a few false starts he decides to write the story of Liliana Morales, a recently married young woman who was raped and murdered in her apartment in 1968.  Liliana’s death had a profound effect on her husband, a reserved bank teller, and cast a long shadow over Chaparro’s career after he takes more interest in the case than usual, in the process making an enemy of a colleague who later gains power and influence during Argentina’s dark years of the 1970s when thousands of people disappeared at the hands of state agents.  As he writes, Chaparro reflects on his own life, his friendships and failed marriages, and his loneliness and unrequited love for Irene Hornos, who started as an intern in his team and is now a judge.

The Secret in Their Eyes charts forty years in the life of Benjamin Chaparro, a court clerk in Buenos Aires, whose life is over-shadowed by the investigation into the death of Liliana Morales and his love for a married woman.  Sacheri tells the story through two entwined narratives.  The first follows Chaparro retiring from the court service, starting to write a novel, and coming to terms with his new life and his loneliness and longing for Irene.  The second is the text from the novel charting the death of Liliana, the investigation over a number of years, the quest for justice, and the material and emotional effects on her husband and Chaparro.  The two strands are very nicely interwoven, the observations and reflections are keenly detailed, and the pace is judged beautifully.  Both stories are fascinating, especially the investigation and how it became entangled in the dirty war in Argentina during the 1970s.  The characterisation is very well done, particularly the melancholic Chaparro, and plotting is excellent, though the story tails off a little towards the end, with both storylines feeling like they weren’t quite fully worked through (ironically, a recurrent element in the book is that Chaparro is never quite happy with what he believes to be the end of his novel, going on to extend the story).  Nonetheless, The Secret in Their Eyes is a very well written piece of literary crime fiction.  The book was made into a film of the same name that won the 2010 foreign language Oscar (which, if I remember it correctly was quite faithful to the book, though it had more tension and the ending was more definitive).

Review of Darkhouse by Alex Barclay (Harper Collins, 2005)

Nearing his fortieth birthday, NYPD Detective Joe Lucchesi has taken a year’s leave of absence after a kidnapping case goes wrong, leaving the kidnapper and a mother and child dead.  Joe’s wife, Anna, is an interior designer and the family move to a small village in South East Ireland for her latest project: to restore an old lighthouse.  Their sixteen year old son, Shaun, attends the local school where he meets and falls in love with Katie.  It seems like an idyllic life until the partner of the kidnapper catches up with them and Katie disappears after a night out with Shaun.  Duke Rawlins and Donnie Riggs grew up in rural North Texas where they formed a twisted and dark bond.  Now that Donnie is dead, Duke is compelled to seek revenge against the officer who shot him. 

Darkhouse was a book I edged my way through given the underlying tension and sense of foreboding, which left me uncertain as to whether I really wanted to find out how the story is resolved.  Much of that tension is created through the intersecting storylines and juxtaposition of everyday family and village life in Ireland in the early 2000s, with the dark world of Duke Rawlins and Donnie Riggs in North Texas in the late 1980s.  Barclay’s writing is vivid and well paced and balanced.  The characters are nicely developed throughout the story and the interactions between them well portrayed, especially the suspicions and strains amongst the Lucchesi household, the police and the village population.  There is also a great sense of place, time and social worlds in both Ireland and Texas.  The key strength of the story though is the plotting, with a nice mix of carefully ordered tension, feints, and reveals that produces an edge of the seat read without descending into a gore fest.  Overall, a very good crime thriller.

Review of Dresden by Frederick Taylor (Bloomsbury, 2005)

The flattening and firestorm of Dresden on the night of the 13th February and morning of the 14th of February 1945 continues to generate controversy.  For many it has become a symbol of the extent to which the Western Allies overstepped the mark from a morally righteous war campaign to wanton destruction and mass murder.  For others, Dresden was a legitimate target; a key transport node and a centre for armaments production and administration, and the next city that the Russians would face as their front moved forward.  The controversy focuses on Dresden and not other German cities who suffered the same fate in large part because of its cultural cache -- known as ‘The Florence on the Elbe’ -- the fact that it was unprotected (its flak guns moved elsewhere), the lateness of the attack in the war wherein it was clear that the Allies were going to win, that the city was full of refugees fleeing East, that the centre of the city and its key heritage buildings were the target rather than factories, and Russian anti-Western propaganda after the war as the iron curtain closed and the cold war started.  Frederick Taylor’s book seeks to chart what happened on the 13th and 14th of February 1945, when between 25,000 and 40,000 people died, and thousands more were made homeless as thirteen square miles of the city’s historic centre was destroyed, and to contextualise it within the long history of Dresden and of modern aerial warfare and the end game of the war, and to consider the moral philosophy of the bombing.  He does so by drawing extensively on archival sources, interviews with Allied air crew and survivors of the firestorm, and by considering other accounts of the raid and their arguments.  The result is a book that does more than detail a particular harrowing destruction of a city, but tries to make sense of it.  Some of the history of the city was probably not needed and the moral philosophy could have been deepened and extended, but otherwise Taylor succeeds in his aim, providing a very readable, informative and largely non-partisan account and arguments. 

Review of Little Criminals by Gene Kerrigan (Vintage, 2005)

Frankie Crowe is a career criminal who dreams of moving up from the junior ranks to a high flyer.  All he needs is a lucky break and a hefty pile of cash to set himself up as a player.  Justin and Angela Kennedy appear to be his meal ticket, two Celtic Tiger cubs who have become wealthy through finance and property.  Jo-Jo Mackendrick is a gangland boss, determined to protect his position and what dirty jobs do and do not happen in the city.  Crowe feels he doesn’t need Jo-Jo’s blessing, he’s earned his right to step up to the big time.  His plan is to assemble a small group of four, kidnap one of the Kennedy’s and demand a million euro ransom.  And nothing is going to get in his way: Mackendrick, the Kennedy’s or the police.  If that means the taking of lives, then so be it.

Little Criminals is a cracking read and a lesson in how write all tell and no show, using tight, sparse, expressive prose.  There isn’t a single sentence that doesn’t propel the story forward.  Rather than following one person, Kerrigan shifts the point of view, telling different elements of the story from the perspective of a handful of characters, principally the main criminal Frankie Crowe, his reluctant sidekick, Martin Paxton, kidnap victim Angela Kennedy, and copper John Grace.  The characterisation is excellent, with each character's back story, neatly and efficiently set out, with a series of wonderful scenes and realistic dialogue.  The plot is tight and gripping.  There is no real mystery element to the story, nor unlikely coincidences or melodrama, instead it simply charts how the Crowe’s attempt at making the big time unfolds, which in and of itself is highly compelling.  The whole book is wonderfully evocative of Dublin before the crash, colliding together the worlds of criminal gangs and the corporate elite.  Overall, an excellent tale, very well told.  Highly recommended.

Review of Die a Little by Megan Abbott (Pocket Books, 2005)

In 1950s Los Angeles, school teacher, Lora King, is living with her brother, Bill, an investigator for the DA’s office when Alice Steele, a studio seamstress, breezes into his life.  A short time later, Bill and Alice are married after a whirlwind romance.  Alice quickly settles into her new life as a housewife, endlessly baking and organizing social parties.  Lora, however, senses that there is more to Alice’s past than meets the eye and finds herself becoming suspicious of her stories.  Gradually she starts to investigate elements of her sister-in-law’s history, slowly becoming acquainted with Hollywood’s underbelly.  But the more she digs, the more she risks her own safety and Bill’s job and happiness.

Die a Little is a thoroughly noir tale about the tension between two femme fatales - a sister and wife - battling over the same man.  The main strengths of the novel are the atmosphere, tight plotting, strong characterisation, and crafted prose.  Abbott captures both the hopes of post-war US and its seedy underbelly of vice, drugs, and exploitation, filtered through a darkly tinted lens.  The plot is layered and nicely paced as Lora transitions across the arc of the story as her relationship with her sister-in-law comes under increasing strain.  All three main characters are well penned, being complex and deep, the support cast are more than simply ciphers for the story, and the interactions between the players is nicely portrayed.  The story is told through lyrical, literary prose that adds to the atmosphere.  Overall, an enjoyable noir tale that adds a distinctive voice to the genre.

Review of Blood from a Stone by Donna Leon (William Heinemann, 2005)

A few days before Christmas an African street vendor is shot dead whilst selling bags in a square in Venice.  Commissario Brunetti is assigned to the case, but makes little initial headway given that the man’s fellow illegal immigrants have seemingly melted away into the Venetian underworld.  When both the ministries of internal and foreign affairs show an interest in the case, Brunetti is order to hand over the investigative material and warned to drop his investigation.  Intrigued and holding back evidence, he continues to probe, though he seemingly makes little progress.

Blood from a Stone is a curious kind of police procedural, as much about feints and duplicity as detection.  It is told in an understated way and drifts along without any urgency.  The plot is relatively thin -- Brunetti starts to investigate a murder but is then warned off, regardless he keeps surreptitiously picking away at it despite seemingly going nowhere -- but that hardly seems the point.  The tale is more about Venice, Italian food, Brunetti’s family life, the petty office politics of the police, and a social commentary on how immigrants are imagined and treated and the West interferes in African politics.  Leon does a nice job of creating a sense of place, time and social context, and letting the reader float along with the narrative as if on a gondola.  An entertaining, mild-mannered story.

Review of Last Rights by Barbara Nadel (Headline, 2005)

1940 in London at the height of the blitz, undertaker and First World War veteran Francis Hancock’s nerves are in shreds.  Unable to descend into the shelters for fear of being buried alive, he wanders the streets in a dazed madness as the bombs fall all around him.  One night he comes across a man who claims to have been stabbed before staggering off.  Two days later, the man turns up in Hancock’s funeral parlour.  The police think he died from shock caused by a bomb blast, but Hancock discovers a small pinprick on his chest which he believes was created by a hat-pin.  Initially, the police are not interested, but after a post-mortem examination they arrest his wife, disbelieving her alibi and aware that she has a chequered history and possible 'bad blood', her mother having murdered her step-father with a hat-pin through the heart.  Hancock is not convinced of the woman’s guilt and having taken in her teenage daughter sets about trying to contact her estranged sisters and to discover who did kill the man.

Last Rights is a kind of a hard-edged cozy: undertaker, Francis Hancock, turns amateur detective, investigating a murder when the police do not at first seem interested, continuing when he feels that they have arrested the wrong person.  The edge is provided by the blitz, working class conditions, prostitution and the black market, and some unsavoury characters.  The story unfolds at a reasonable clip and Nadel’s style is quite engaging.  There is some nice contextualisation with respect to the blitz and the Jewish community in London, the sense of place is quite strong, and the characterisation and familial relations are well realised.  Where the book suffers is with respect to the plot.  The premise is interesting but the execution is weak and contrived at times and the killer is somewhat obvious from a long way out.  There were a number of elements of the story that I just simply did not believe, not least the actions of the police, which made little sense.  Overall, the makings of a good series, but this opening story was undermined by an improbable plot.

3 stars

Review of Six Bad Things by Charlie Huston (Ballantine Books, 2005)

After being in the wrong place at the wrong time and barely surviving murder and mayhem in New York, Hank Thompson has been hiding out in Mexico in a beach hut, keeping his head low and living a life that doesn’t suggest he has four and half million dollars buried in the sand.  The Russian mafia though has long memories and tentacles and when a nosy backpacker turns up, Hank knows it’s time to move out.  He also knows he needs to try and protect his parents who, now the mafia know he’s alive, have become a potential leverage point.  Getting out of Mexico and into the US, however, is not straightforward when you’ve corrupt policemen on your trail and you’re on the ten most wanted fugitives list for crimes you mostly didn’t commit.  After four years of relative calm, a vicious tornado has been released and its tracking Hank from Mexico to California to Las Vegas, attracting head cases and spitting out dead bodies.  Hank is not about to roll over though and accept defeat, even if it just leads him further into trouble.

Six Bad Things is the second in the Hank Thompson trilogy, though it can be read as a standalone (though I’d recommend reading the excellent Caught Stealing first).  It starts relatively sedately with a wonderful scene about how Hank has become addicted to cigarettes, gains a little pace and then opens out full throttle.  Huston excels at writing fast paced action sequences and riffing dialogue (the conversations between Hank and Sally are exceptionally good), and he strings these together into an endless succession of scrapes, highs and lows, and twists and turns.  Hank is an engaging lead character, teetering on an anti-hero tightrope between goody and baddy, and the other characters are well penned, providing interesting foils.  Whilst the story is an enjoyable romp, it’s not quite as engaging as Caught Stealing, a couple of bits seemed a little over-contrived, and the end was a wee bit flat, working more to set up the third instalment rather than closing this one off.  Nevertheless, it is superior stuff, and anyone who enjoys fast-action noir with wise-cracking dialogue, will gallop through it wearing a wry smile.  Bring on A Dangerous Man, the final instalment in the series.