Review of Whisky in Small Glasses by Denzil Meyrich (Polygon, 2012)

The body of a young woman is washed up on a Scottish beach in the West of Scotland. Detective Inspector Jim Daley is sent from Glasgow to the remote, close-knit town of Kinloch to investigate. There he discovers that the woman was infamous for performing sexual favours for drink and drugs and that her friend and a local club owner have disappeared. Daley and his team start a search while also hunting for other clues, though their task is not aided by the lukewarm reception of the local sub-divisional commander. Also acting as a distraction is the presence of Daley’s wife. She has followed him to the seaside town with her brother-in-law in tow hoping to try and patch things up despite her infidelity and Daley's hair-trigger temper. When the body count rises further pressure is applied by Daley’s ambitious boss. Soon there is much more at stake than Daley’s job and his rocky marriage.

Whisky in Small Glasses is the first in the DCI Daley series set in the West of Scotland. Daley is for the most part calm, collected and reasonable but he also has anger management issues that flair up when stressed. Given the state of his marriage, the pressure from his boss, and a difficult case, he’s never far from snapping. His sidekick is DS Brian Scott, a no-nonsense cop who’s reached his career ceiling. Together they make an interesting pair. Where the story suffers though is with respect to the plotting and telling. Meyrich uses a succession of plot devices to keep the story moving forward, some of which are seem barely credible, such as the backstory and unfolding drama involving the local chief cop, and Daley’s wife following him to the murder location. Moreover, the identity of the killer is strongly telegraphed from about halfway through in what is meant to be a whodunit. This is not helped by the lifeless, workmanlike prose. The result is a fairly weakly told police procedural anchored by a couple of intriguing lead characters.

Review of The Detour by Andromeda Romano-Lax (Soho Press, 2012)

1938. Ernst Vogler is employed on the Sonderprojekte, collecting great art from around Europe for display in the Third Reich.  After the incarceration in Dachau of his mentor, a well-known art historian, Vogler is sent to Rome to accompany the famous classical Roman marble statue, The Discus Thrower, to the border where it will be handed over to the Gestapo.  The statue is the personal target of the Fuhrer and there is widespread unhappiness that it has been sold and is leaving Italy.  Vogler’s task should be a simple, three-day excursion, but things start to go wrong as soon as he arrives in the Italian capital.  When he does set out to the border he is accompanied by twin brothers.  Almost immediately, the trio leave the agreed route, giving their police escort the slip.  Despite Vogler’s protestations, the brothers seem intent on setting their own schedule, which includes visiting a girlfriend.  At first, Vogler tries to resist the detour, realising that it is putting them all at risk, but soon he is so far implicated that he gives himself up to the adventure hoping that as long as he ultimately delivers the statue in one piece that he’ll survive the inevitable fallout. 

The Detour recounts the tale of Ernst Vogler, a budding art historian who worked on the Third Reich’s Sonderprojekte, collecting great art for the Fuhrer before the Second World War.  It is told as recollection as Vogler arrives back in Italy in 1948 to track down the woman he fell in love with on his last visit, a decade previously.  On that trip, Vogler was sent to Rome to accompany the famous statue, The Discus Thrower, back to Germany.  He is accompanied on his journey to the border by twin brothers, Enzo and Cosimo, who are police officers and speak rudimentary German.  Fearing that the statue is at risk, the brothers lose their escort and take a detour, with Enzo becoming obsessed with seeing his girlfriend.  As the journey progresses a series of mishaps and tragedies befall the trio.  Rather than telling the tale as a straightforward adventure, Romano-Lax nicely blends in a smattering of politics, art and philosophy, as well as thread of romance.  The historical context and Vogler’s backstory is well constructed and there’s a strong sense of place as the trio head north through the back-roads of central Italy.  The result is a bittersweet tale of a sensitive and insecure young man coming of age in difficult circumstances and returning years later to see if he can find lost love.

Review of Flight from Berlin by David John (Bourbon Street Books, 2012)

Eleanor Emerson is an Olympic athlete and socialite. On the ship from New York to Hamburg for the 1936 Olympics she refuses to tow-the-line of the team rules concerning on-board behaviour, straying up to first-class to party. The penalty is to be kicked-off the team. Instead of returning home she accepts a position of a celebrity columnist to report the games. Richard Denham is a British journalist who has been living in Germany for some time. He’s well aware that the games are being used for propaganda by the Nazi regime and he’s determined to expose the dark heart of the enterprise. Emerson and Denham meet at a garden party and form an uneasy alliance. Denham is being unwittingly drawn into a deadly game of espionage, with anti-Nazi resistors seeking to pass on a highly secret and potentially explosive dossier. Denham and Emerson are more interested in trying to uncover the story of the only 'non-Aryan' competitor in the German team, a fencer who is competing only because her family are being held hostage. As the games progress they come to realise that the Nazi machine is prepared to break its careful choreography to silence their activities. The question is whether they can flee Berlin intact and while exposing the Nazi lies and brutality.

Flight from Berlin is set around the 1936 Olympics and follows the escapade of American athlete and socialite, Eleanor Emerson, and British journalist, Richard Denham, as they tangle with the Nazi regime. Emerson is loosely based on Eleanor Holm, the US swimmer who was thrown off the US team for partying on the journey to the games. Another central character, Hannah Liebermann, is based on Helene Mayer, who was the only ‘non-Aryan’ to compete for Germany. Numerous other real-life characters populate the story, as do some real-world events, along with a couple of rumours surrounding Hitler’s medical notes from the First World War. John weaves a fictional narrative around these centring on a plot to discredit Hitler and the Nazi regime and to undermine the propaganda surrounding the games. The characters of Emerson and Denham are well-penned and for much of the story the plot is engaging and intriguing. In fact, I was thoroughly hooked up to the initial flight from Berlin. At that point, the story becomes increasingly ridiculous, progressing through an endless succession of clunky and unbelievable plot devices designed to create a series of dramatic moments leading to a climatic denouement. This was a real shame as it was all going so well before it spiralled into a series of staged chases. Overall, an interesting story with strong characters that became more-and-more implausible.

Review of Worst Enemies by Dana King (2012)

Borrowing an idea from Patricia Highsmith, Tom and Marty, two strangers who meet in a strip club, are planning to kill each other’s wives.  Under pressure from Marty, Tom goes first.  While he succeeds in killing the unfortunate wife, he makes a mess of the murder.  Local detective Ben ‘Doc’ Dougherty, a former MP and Penns River native, and Willie Grabek, a former Pittsburgh cop are assigned the case and soon have Tom in custody.  Shortly after a second body is discovered in an abandoned house and a connection is made to the first murder.  For a town that rarely sees one murder a year, two in the space of a few days causes consternation.  With Tom protesting that he’s been framed, tricked into committing murder, and Grabek doing the minimal amount before retiring, Dougherty tries to unravel the pair of murders, aware that whatever has transpired is not yet over.

Worst Enemies is the first Penns River novel.  I reviewed the second, the excellent Grind Joint, a while ago.  Worst Enemies cleverly reworks Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, twisting the plot through ninety degrees to create a compelling tale of scheming, double cross and manipulation.  King populates the story with a believable and engaging set of characters and his dialogue and social interactions are astutely and realistically penned, as are the police procedural elements.  What I particularly liked was that the story rooted in everyday realism concerning family interactions, personal relationships, social welfare situations, organized crime, internal police politics, and dealing with the legal system, and there is a strong sense of place focused on a small town in decline near to Pittsburgh.  The denouement was perhaps a little rushed, though it has a nice twist that jars against expectation.  Overall, a very nicely written and plotted tale and I’m looking forward to the next book in the series, Resurrection Mall. 

Review of Blessed are the Dead by Malla Nunn (Washington Square Press, 2012)

October 1953, Drakenberg Mountains, South Africa.  When the beautiful seventeen year old daughter of a Zulu chief, and maid to a rich white farming family, is discovered dead Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper and his Zulu partner Detective Constable Samuel Shabalala are sent to investigate.  Neither the Zulu chief, nor the white family, want the city detectives on the case.  As they search for the murderer they discover that Amahle was headstrong and ambitious with secrets that were potentially explosive in a strongly apartheid society.  The more they probe, the more they place themselves in danger, but neither is prepared to walk away from the case.

Blessed are the Dead is the third book in the Emmanuel Cooper series set in 1950s South Africa.  Nunn has really hit her stride in this instalment, both adding to the overall story arc of Cooper’s life and providing a thoroughly engaging mystery.  The characterisation is excellent, especially Cooper and his colleague Shabalala, but also the supporting cast, particularly Gabriel a white boy who is totally at home in the bush, and Nunn nicely portrays their interactions and social relations.  Indeed, she excels at detailing the complex social structure within and between communities – Black, Indian, Jewish, White Afrikaans, White English – and the politics of policing within such strictures.  There is a nice attention to historical detail and the sense of place is palpable with the reader being transported to rural South Africa and its dramatic landscape.  The plot is absorbing and nicely executed.  Overall, a very good police procedural that delivers on multiple levels.

Review of 7Days by Deon Meyer (Hodder, 2012)

Captain Benny Griessel is a recovering alcoholic, so is his friend, Alexa.  After much persuasion she is making a come-back, reviving her singing career.  Benny is to be her rock, helping her regain her confidence.  However, their plans are derailed when Benny is called away from her first public outing to deal with a shooting incident.  A policeman has been shot and an email sent to SAPS states that unless the killer of Hanneke Sloet is arrested a police officer will be targeted each day.  Sloet, a successful and sultry lawyer, had been slain in her apartment a month earlier but the case had quickly gone cold.  Griessel is put in charge of re-investigating the Sloet murder, whilst his colleague, Mbali Kaleni is assigned the task of finding the sniper.  Along with the political and media pressure, adding to Benny’s woes is trying to keep Alexa from sliding all the way off the wagon and to make sure he doesn’t join her.

Deon Meyer might well be the best writer of police procedural thrillers at present.  His stories have all the good hallmarks of a police procedural – an interesting lead cop and supporting cast, a strong sense of place, interesting puzzles, and attention to detail – but they also have the pace and tension of a thriller; the rollercoaster ride of a race against time.  And so it is with 7Days.  Captain Benny Griessel, a man who trails a litany of personal failures in his wake, is given the task of solving a murder while under immense pressure from a sniper shooting police officers and bosses, politicians and media demanding immediate results. Meyer expertly balances character development, plot and pace, producing a highly engaging and entertaining read that not only delivers an intriguing story but nicely advances the longer narrative of the Griessel books.  I was hooked from the first page and picked it up at every opportunity to find out how Benny was getting on at solving the two intertwined cases.

Review of Rough Riders by Charlie Stella (Stark House, 2012)

James Singleton, living as Washington Stewart, has spent ten years in the FBI witness protection program in North Dakota.  He’s still involved in crime, though now he has the Feds to protect his back.  Wanting a new life free of his shackles he’s finally found a payday big enough to skip the country – a haul of heroin smuggled into the country through a local air force base.  In exchange for murdering the cheating wife of a crooked colonel and selling the heroin he’ll get a free air ride and half the profits.  Before he departs, however, he wants to tie up a few lose ends, including arranging the death of Eddie Senta, the man responsible for his disfigured face.  The hit goes wrong and another of Singleton’s old enemies, former NYPD Detective Alex Pavlik, is soon on his trail.  The police are also becoming concerned at the spike in the local murder rate.  Singleton remains unphased, knowing that the Feds will keep protecting him and delighting in dishing out his own version of rough justice.

One of the back cover blurbs describes Stella’s writing as a mix of Elmore Leonard and George V Higgins.  It’s a high compliment, and though not unwarranted, I think does Stella a bit of a disservice for he has a style all of his own: multiple intersecting narratives, a couple of dozen lead characters, tightly written prose and crisp, punchy dialogue, plenty of action, and a plot that rattles along like a runaway train.  It’s fair to say that there is a heck of a lot going on in the 250 pages of Rough Riders.  It’s a testimony to Stella’s writing that despite the somewhat convoluted plot that the whole thing hangs together well and that I never got lost across the various narratives and characters.  Indeed, where the story excels is with respect to the characters and their interchanges.  Stella populates the story with a whole variety of low-level criminals, cops, and civilians, each one vividly portrayed.  My only critique really is that it was a little too condensed; kind of like a six part series crammed into a movie format.  And while I sometimes conclude reviews by saying the book would make a good film, this one would make a terrific TV serial.

Review of The Girl in Berlin by Elizabeth Wilson (2012, Serpent's Tail)

1951 and Burgess and Maclean have just fled England.  Having been acquitted of murder and fleeing to East Germany a few years previously, communist Colin Harris decides to travel back to London to check out the possibilities of return with a wife in tow.  Harris’ arrival raises flags and the enigmatic MI5 spymaster, Kingdom, asks Special Branch detective, Jack McGovern to keep tabs on him.  A couple of days later a former German scientist, who’d fled to Britain in the late 1930s, is discovered floating in a canal, having last been seen with Harris and a colleague.  While CID investigate, McGovern is sent to Berlin to keep tabs Harris who has returned to the city.  There he meets a raft of shady characters and Harris’ financee, who is desperate to find passage to England.  McGovern finds himself adrift in the divided city, unsure as to what he is looking for or why.  He senses he’s a pawn in a larger game, but he’s not sure of the purpose or rules.  And it seems he might be expendable.

On one level The Girl in Berlin works quite well.  It is quite nicely written with some nice attention to detail concerning London and Berlin in 1951, including fashion, politics, and sense of place.  Many of scenes are well framed and engaging.  On another level, however, the book seems quite disjointed and the plotting somewhat ponderous.  While Detective McGovern plays the central character, rather than follow him exclusively, Wilson weaves together a number of intersecting threads centred on a set of characters.  Some of these are much more crucial to the mystery aspects of the book than others, with some interchanges have little bearing on the case.  The result is a storyline that seems more literary than crime/spy orientated and a plot that seems to make little sense at times.  Consequently, while the story had its moments, overall it lacked coherence and didn’t ring true.

Review of Natural Causes by James Oswald (Penguin, 2012)

Newly promoted Detective Inspector Tony McLean has been living his life in limbo.  His finacee died a couple of years ago and his grandmother, who raised him since he was four after the death of his parents, has been in a coma for 18 months.  Travelling home one evening he spots flashing blue lights outside a house and stops to offer assistance.  A prominent city resident has been murdered, but the investigation is in hand and he’s sent on his way.  The following day he’s called to a building site where the body of a young girl has been discovered, apparently murdered in a strange ritual some sixty years previously.  McLean is oddly affected by the case and makes it his priority, despite being drawn back into the first case as pressure within his station mounts.  Then there’s a breakthrough with the killer seemingly found having taken his own life, only for a very similar murder to happen shortly afterwards.  Against his rationality, McLean suspects some link between the long dead girl, the deaths, and the supernatural, and with the death toll mounting he and his colleagues are under pressure to solve the case.

Natural Causes in the first book in the Detective McLean series set in Edinburgh.  The tale is a police procedural thriller with a supernatural bent.  Oswald has an engaging voice and he keeps the pace and action high, with plenty of twists and turns and a fair dose of emotional heart-tugging with respect to McLean’s personal life.  McLean is the typical wounded cop and Oswald quickly has you on his side, and there is a decent amount of character development as the story unfolds.  His colleagues are also nicely penned and there’s a good sense of place with Edinburgh forming the backdrop.  The plot is an entertaining yarn as long as one can suspend disbelief, with the procedural elements as much a fantasy as the supernatural heart of the tale.  Nonetheless, the story rattles along, with the body count rising as it makes its way to its denouement.  I’ll certainly be checking out the next book in the series, The Book of Souls.

Review of The Exterminators by Bill Fitzhugh (Poison Pen Press, 2012)

Having escaped New York and then claimed the assassination fee for their own deaths, Bob and Klaus are hiding out in Oregon, still working on their all-natural pest control.  Whilst they had been working on cross-breeding preying insects, they are now exploring the use of genetic engineering, inserting the genes from one species into another.  It’s an expensive business and they need investment capital.  In steps Blue Sky Investment Partners, a front for DARPA, the funding agency for the US military.  They think that Bob and Klaus’ hybrid insects could play a role in fighting terrorism, and conveniently falls outside of the rules relating to biological weapons.  Despite assurances that they will stay below the radar, their resurfacing in the DAPRA facilities in LA gets flagged up in the CIA, where a disillusioned agent spots a way to make a fortune by revealing their re-appearance to the Bolivian drug lord who paid for their original assassination, then doing the job himself.  What results is a convergence of hired killers and killer insects in LA, along with thousands of religious evangelicals as rumours of the second coming of Christ abound.

I thought Pest Control was great fun and was clever with it.  The Exterminators, which is set six years later, has the same style and wit, but the plotting was not quite so spot on, with a couple of loose threads (such as French assassin whose plotline kind of goes nowhere), a couple of nonsensical bits (at least to me, such as the CIA agent’s actions), and a less fluid flow.  That said, it is still very clever and well executed in parts -- the threads and explanation around genetic engineering, DARPA, and the fundamental religious right and how it sees the world and tries to manipulate the media were excellent.  And Fitzhugh mixes together a nicely drawn set of characters, though Klaus’ assassination skills are somewhat underplayed, as are the roles of Mary and Katy, Bob’s wife and daughter.  Overall then, a fun and entertaining read, but definitely not for those with a bug phobia.

Review of Lehrter Station by David Downing (2012, Old Street)

November, 1945.  John Russell and Effi Koenen are living in London with their adopted daughter, Rosa, John’s son Paul, and Effi’s sister, Zarah.  Russell is struggling as a freelance journalist and then an old ‘friend’ Yevgeny Shchepkin of the NKVD makes contact.  He threatens to reveal how Russell helped the Russians obtain German atomic research material unless he travels to Berlin to help assess the loyalty of German Communist Party members to Moscow and to offer his services to the American intelligence.  Shchepkin has his own plan to help both him and Russell escape Moscow’s grip, which involves revealing his plan to be a double agent to the Americans.  The upshot is Russell and Effi travel back to the ruins of Berlin, intent on fulfilling their mission and trying to track down surviving friends and family.  While they try to satisfy both Soviet and American spymasters, their search for Rosa’s father brings them into contact with a black marketeer with a secret to hide and the trails set-up to take surviving Jews to Palestine. 

This fifth book in David Downing’s ‘Berlin stations’ series and it is very much a series book being mainly focused on revealing the fate of the characters from the previous four books and the city of Berlin post World War Two.  It was certainly interesting to discover who had survived and perished and to get a sense of everyday life in the ruins and the large-scale migrations occurring.  And Russell and Effi are as engaging as ever.  That said, the tale lacked impetus, pace and tension, being a rather meandering affair with a handful of intersecting threads and lacking a clear resolution, and the hold of the Soviets over Russell felt a little weak.  Overall, then, a book that felt like a bridging episode, but nonetheless a nice read.

Review of Target London: Under Attack From V-Weapons During WWII by Christy Campbell (Abacus, 2012)

Between mid-1944 and the end of the war, Christy Campbell documents that 10,492 V1 flying bombs were launched, of which 2,419 reached London killing 6,184 and injuring 17,981, and 1,402 V2 rockets reached the UK killing 2,754 and injuring 6,500.  107,000 houses were destroyed in the city and 1.5 million damaged.  While the flying bombs could be intercepted and shot down and gave a brief indication of its arrival via its noisy jet engine, the V2 arrived unexpectedly at six times the speed of sound.  Hitler’s terror weapons were indeed terrifying, but they were nowhere near as effective as the German leader hoped and stood little chance of turning the tide of the war. 

Target London tells the story of the V1 and V2, focusing for the main part on how the British came to learn of their development and set about trying to gather intelligence, formulate a response in advance of them being used, and cope with them while in operation.  As such, while the book does cover their development and rollout in Germany and their deployment in France and the Netherlands, in the main the narrative concentrates on machinations in Whitehall and the Armed Services, and the various scheming and in-fighting between departments, politicians, officers, intelligence operatives, scientists and allies.  Far from being a united and coordinated effort various factions manoeuvred  to claim authority over the intelligence and response to V-weapons. 

Campbell tells this story by weaving together the biographies of key individuals and documenting the work of various committees and the policies and actions they produced.  It gets off to a somewhat rocky start, with a timeline that jumps around, moving from Germany 1943, then 1929, then Britain in 1958, followed by 1939 and 1942.  Then it settles into a set timeline moving from 1943 to 1945, with each chapter covering one or two months.  It would have been better to have had a linear timeline throughout and the 1958 chapter could have been a postscript or dropped altogether.  Once it becomes linear, the story is more coherent and there’s a wealth of detail, though it’s a little confusing to follow the various spats and threads at times.  Nonetheless it makes for fascinating reading.  Overall, an interesting book that could have done with an edit to strengthen its narrative flow and clarity. 

Review of The Woman Who Died a Lot by Jasper Fforde (Penguin, 2012)

With SpecOps reduced to just six divisions and having barely surviving a failed assassination attempt Thursday Next is four months into semi-retirement, living on the edge of Swindon with Landen, her husband, Tuesday, her genius teenage daughter, Friday, her disgruntled, edgy son, Jenny, her fictitious daughter, a couple of fictional characters and a dodo.  Swindon is due to be smited by an angry God in a few days time and the Anti-Smote shield, designed by Tuesday, is not yet working.  On the same day, Friday is destined to murder a sixteen year old boy.  And it seems that Jenny is a mind worm planted by Aornis Hades, one of Thursday's mortal enemies.  As well as dealing with these issues, Thursday has just been appointed Chief Librarian for the town and is immediately facing a one hundred percent budget cut as well a succession of Thursday impersonators and the continued unwanted attention of the Goliath Corporation.  With the whole family under threat, Thursday tries to unpick the deadly plot at play.

The seventh instalment of the Thursday Next series, The Woman Who Died A Lot has a somewhat different setting to the other stories, being set entirely in and around Swindon with no excursions into the BookWorld, and is very much a family affair involving the whole of the Next clan.  Nonetheless, like the other books in the series Fforde has produced a clever, inventive tale with a tangle of intersecting plotlines that all eventually resolve themselves after a number of scrapes.  There’s certainly a lot going on and it takes a bit of concentration to follow the various threads and logic, but Fforde does a good job of keeping everything on track.  Moreover, the characterisation is nicely done, especially Thursday’s children, Tuesday and Friday, and old enemies such as Jack Schitt and Aornis Hades also make appearances.  There is nice humour throughout, though it was of the smirking rather than laughing out loud variety, and a lot of the literary in-jokes and satire on modern living of the earlier books was largely absent.  Where the tale comes a little unstuck, however, is the ending, which felt a little flat and underwhelming given the extended lead-in.  It made sense, and set up the next instalment, but didn’t pack the wallop I was expecting.  Overall, a good, fun, cerebral read, but hopefully the next instalment will re-enter the BookWorld once more.

Review of A Dark Redemption by Stav Sherez (Faber, 2012)

DI Jack Carrigan has a troubled personal past and is considered something of a maverick within the London Met, singly obsessed with solving cases in his own way.  His new investigation concerns the horrific death of Grace Okello, a Ugandan student studying at the School of African and Oriental Studies, who was undertaking her thesis on rebel leaders and child armies in Africa.  Carrigan’s boss places the equally marginalised DS Geneva Miller into Carrigan’s team to monitor his actions.  Carrigan and Miller don’t see to eye to eye, with Miller pursuing a different line of enquiry to her boss.  As the murder breaks in the media the team is placed under increasing pressure to solve the murder and it soon becomes clear that others are interfering with the investigation and Carrigan has other personal baggage.

A Dark Redemption is a police procedural with a strong political inflection concerning rebel child armies in Northern Uganda.  The strength of the story is its nice prose and cadence, the contextualisation and the handling of the subject matter, and a nice sense of place with respect to the seedier parts of London.  Carrigan and Miller are both troubled cops who are struggling in their personal lives and at work.  In A Dark Redemption, Sherez focuses in particular on the back story of Carrigan and his approach to the death of a Ugandan student, though Miller has more substance than a one-dimensional side kick.  Similarly other characters are nicely penned, such as a London-based political activist.  The plot was interesting and compelling, though some elements didn’t quite ring true, and there is a reliance of plot devices at times.  There is though a nice twist towards the end that I didn’t see coming.  Overall, an engaging police procedural that tackles a weighty political issue head on.

Review of The Yard by Alex Grecian (Penguin, 2012)

1889, a year after the Jack the Ripper murders, and Scotland Yard has established a dedicated murder squad.  One of its members, Inspector Little, has been found murdered, bound-up in a trunk at Euston Station.  The newest member of the squad, Inspector Day, is given the task of solving the case.  Recently promoted and just having just arrived from Devon, Day is keen to prove himself.  He’s aided in the investigation by Dr Kingsley, who has taken it upon himself to establish a forensically-led morgue, Inspector Blacker, and Constable Hammersmith.  Between them they start to gather clues, but then another murder is committed, a bearded man who has been shaved before having his throat cut, and a second policeman killed.  As they come under increasing pressure to bring the perpetrator to justice, the killer starts to interfere in the investigation, seeking to persuade Day to give up his pursuit.

The Yard is a curious kind of crime novel.  From near the start the identity of the killer is made clear, as is the reason for the crime, as is the process of investigation.  The story is then not a whodunit, whydunit or howdunit.  Indeed, there is really no mystery to the tale at all, much of the historical detail is dubious or inaccurate, and the villain is no Jack the Ripper or Moriarty, making the work for the police relatively easy.  Instead the narrative is propelled along by a mix of breezy writing, colourful scenes, and some interesting characters and their interplay, the pages turning mainly to see if it is resolved as it inevitably should be.  Inspectors Day and Blacker, Constable Hammersmith and Dr Kingsley are all engaging characters, each with a certain vulnerability but determined to solve the case, though the villain and lesser characters, such as the two whores who appear throughout, are more caricature in nature.  Given its various flaws, The Yard, is a book I would ordinarily find somewhat annoying, but in this case actually enjoyed - kind of like the low-brow movie you know you should dislike, but watch and like regardless.  Overall, then, a flawed but enjoyable tale of murder in Victorian London.

Review of The Boy in the Snow by MJ McGrath (Pan, 2012)

Edie Kiglatuk, a native of Ellesmere Island in the High Arctic, is visiting Alaska to help support her ex-husband, Sammy, who is taking part in Alaska’s world-famous Iditarod dog-sled race.  Not long after the race starts, Edie discovers the frozen body of an infant, laid to rest in a spirit house on land belonging to the Old Believers, an exiled Russian Orthodox sect.  The Mayor of Anchorage, and candidate for governor of Alaska, wants the case dealt with quickly and the police soon arrest a member of the sect for murder.  Edie, however, is unconvinced of his guilt and starts her own investigation along with Derek Palliser, an Ellesmere Island police sergeant who is the other member of Sammy’s team, that leads into a sordid and sinister web of sex trafficking, property development, political corruption, and religious persecution.  Her snooping soon raises hackles placing her in danger, but also threatens Sammy’s chances of finishing the race alive.  Edie, however, is stubborn, resilient, and determined to achieve justice for the dead infant.

The first Edie Kiglatuk story, White Heat, was one of my reads of 2012 so I was looking forward to reading The Boy in the Snow.  However, the tale did not live up to expectation.  While the premise is an interesting one, focusing on political ambition and corruption, sex trafficking, and property development, the plot was too full of holes and there was a constant stream of plot devices (unlikely coincidences and connections, police incompetence, stupid actions, blind luck) to be convincing.  What saves the book is the character of Edie Kiglatuk, who I think is a marvellous creation, the sense of place and lifestyle, general atmosphere, and the pace and suspense.  The latter meant the narrative rattles along at a fair clip with a series of tension points and intrigue that kind of steam-rolls over the poor plotting.  This produced a tale that was engaging and frustrating in equal measure.  Where the book really took a nose spin, however, was the denouement, which was weak and unconvincing.  Overall, an interesting read as long as one overlooks the weaknesses in the plotting.  Nonetheless I plan on reading the next Edie Kiglatuk tale as I like the character and the settings.

Review of A Willing Victim by Laura Wilson (Quercus, 2012)

November 1956 and DI Ted Stratton is called to a murder scene in Soho.  Jeremy Lloyd was a quiet young man of no apparent means who was stabbed to death with a pair of scissors, surrounded by hundreds of religious and spiritual texts.  Lloyd had recently left a cultist sect based in Suffolk run by an enigmatic post-war refugee from the continent, disillusioned by his displacement by a young boy, Michael, as the anointed future spiritual leader.  Aware that he was possibly in danger, Lloyd had left a photograph with a neighbour of a beautiful woman.  Following the trail to Suffolk and the Foundation for Spiritual Understanding, Stratton discovers the woman is Mary Milburn, the charismatic mother of Michael, supposedly conceived through immaculate conception.  She has recently disappeared.  As Stratton presses for answers the Foundation closes ranks.  Nonetheless he starts to uncover Mary Milburn’s secret past, one that raises many more questions.  Then the body of a woman is discovered in the woods near to the Foundation and Stratton is dealing with two murders and a secretive sect.

A Willing Victim is the fourth book in Laura Wilson’s historical police procedural series set in and around London the 1940s and 50s.  In this outing, Stratton is investigating the death of a strange young man in a Soho bedsit who is obsessed with spirituality, the trail leading him to a Suffolk village and a secretive, cultist sect.  It’s an engaging story that is nicely contextualised with respect to the religious foundation (drawing on Wilson’s own experiences of being raised in such an environment) and the period, has a strong sense of place, and has well drawn characters, especially DI Stratton, the charismatic Mary Milburn, and author Ambrose Tynan.  The plot is well constructed, with plenty of intrigue, blinds and feints and has a credible and gripping denouement that doesn’t slip into melodrama.  The narrative is a little over-elaborated in places, especially in the sub-plots, but overall it proved an thoroughly enjoyable and entertaining read. 

Review of The Late Greats by Nick Quantrill (Caffeine Nights Publishing, 2012)

Joe Geraghty has been hired by Kane Major, manager of New Holland, the most successful band to come out of Hull in the 1990s who are reforming for a new tour, to keep an eye on them and police their interactions with journalists.  Don, the owner of the detective agency Geraghty works for, is not happy with the arrangement, given it is more of a security job than detection.  However, that soon changes as Greg Tasker, the troubled lead singer, disappears.  Geraghty joins forces with a tabloid journalist to try and locate Tasker and what seemed like an easy task takes a sinister turn.  Despite Don’s warnings to drop the job, and DI Robinson’s threats to stay away from a case the police are now investigating, Geraghty keeps his hand in, increasingly finding himself in hotter and hotter water.

Joe Geraghty’s PI beat is the dour streets of Hull on the East coast of England.  Despite attempts to gentrify parts of the inner city, it remains an earthy, struggling port town, with its fair share of poverty and crime.  Quantrill captures the sense of place and the ambivalent attitude of its residents to their city.  He populates the story with everyday kinds of figures, with even those who have managed to escape to supposedly better things -- managing/being in a rock band, becoming a national journalist -- still grounded by the town.  To add a little spice to the humdrum mix he has Geraghty babysit the reformation of New Holland, the biggest band to come out of the town in the 1990s, whose lead singer has disappeared, but even that quickly has the feel of being part of the everyday, relatively mundane tasks of a private investigator in a rough and ready town, with Geraghty plugging away at it like any other case.  And that’s a big part of why I liked the book, it was a thriller with a small ‘t’, set in the everyday, with Geraghty a fairly ordinary guy, with no special detection skills but blessed with bloody-minded tenacity and occasional irrational decision-making.  The plot moves a decent pace, and keeps the reader guessing until the denouement, though there were a couple of elements that were a bit lost on me.  Overall, an interesting and entertaining PI tale.

Review of Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World by Christopher Steiner (Portfolio-Penguin, 2012)

In Automate This, journalist Christopher Steiner, discusses the ways in which algorithms are increasingly mediating and augmenting everyday life through their deployment in a variety of industries.  He makes a persuasive case, using a series of well told stories that focus on the activities of particular pioneers of creating and using algorithms.  The result is an engaging and informative read that largely celebrates the development and use of algorithms and their creators, and congratulates them for finding ways to make themselves incredibly rich whilst improving the lot of mankind through better health care, financial trading, music production, a multitude of apps, etc. 

That said, the book suffers from a couple of troubling flaws.  First, the narrative almost exclusively focuses on the development and use of algorithms in the United States, as if it’s the font of all global computing and algorithmic innovation.  And second, and more problematic, is the almost total absence of any critical analysis of algorithms, the logic and rational instrumentality underpinning their use, and their wider effects on social and economic systems.  Sure, the use of algorithms has its benefits, but there are also all kinds of risks and social, political and economic consequences to their use, including wide-scale economic restructuring and job losses.  Occasionally Steiner acknowledges some of these risks and effects, usually in a throwaway sentence, before quickly moving on, with the suggestion that the benefits out-weigh the risks and better algorithms will address most present shortcomings.  No serious attention is paid to forms of algorithmic governance or their uses in surveillance, social sorting, filtering and profiling, nor the inherent contradictions in rendering labour redundant and therefore unable to buy the goods and services algorithms create.  The result is an interesting and largely optimistic book that lacks analytic depth and critical reflection.  Nonetheless I have recommended it to several folk, with the warning to keep that caveat in mind.

  

Review of The Istanbul Puzzle by Laurence O’Bryan (Avon, 2012)

Sean Ryan is the co-founder of a private cultural heritage research institute.  One of his projects is to examine the mosaics in Hagia Sophia, the ancient mosque in the centre of Istanbul, with the fieldwork being conducted by his assistant, Alex.  The project comes to a sudden halt, however, when Alex’s beheaded body is found.  Ryan heads to Istanbul determined to discover what happened to his friend, but on arrival it’s clear that the Turkish police do not want him there, the British consulate is lukewarm about his presence, and a couple of thugs seem to want him dead.  Ryan is saved from the latter by Isabel, a member of the consulate staff.  They form an uneasy alliance, which Ryan continually tests by determinedly pushing for answers and action.  He most certainly gets action and intrigue through a series of chases, violent encounters, and puzzles concerning cultural and religious artefacts and a wider political conspiracy.  Having failed to get answers over the loss of his wife to a roadside bomb in Afghanistan, one way or another Ryan is going to get justice for his friend.

The Istanbul Puzzle is a political/religious conspiracy thriller set mostly in the Turkish capital but with excursions into Iraq and London.  I usually shy away from such thrillers because I have difficulty buying into the plausibility of the plots and gaining a belief in the characters.  However, since I was travelling to Turkey I thought I’d give it go.  O’Bryan writes in short, workmanlike sentences, keeping the story moving at quick clip.  The story is told in the first person perspective of Sean Ryan, a half-British/half-American scientist who works for a research institute.  He’s still grieving over the death of his wife and his career is somewhat on the skids and he approaches his investigation into the death of his research assistant with a cavalier, devil-may-care attitude.  It took me quite a while to get into the story, for two reasons: I didn’t connect with the first person perspective of Ryan (my sense was that a third person perspective might have suited the story better), nor the staccato style; and I didn’t buy into the plot which has a conspiracy whose logic is not fully elaborated.  As the story progressed, the style improves and I managed to suspend my sense of belief as I got a little more hooked into the story.  As it nears its end the story builds to a climax, however, there are a few too many dangling ends with respect to the fate of a number of secondary characters and the conspiracy.  Overall, a thriller that will appeal to Dan Brown readers.