Review of Blood Curse by Maurizio de Giovanni (Europa Editions, 2013)

Naples, 1931, the city is teeming with life, most people living in poverty and trying to scrape by. In the working class district of Sanita an elderly woman has been beaten and kicked to death. Commissario Ricciardi and Brigadier Maione are called to the scene, knowing that the locals view them with suspicion and will provide minimal help in finding her killer. Searching her apartment and placing pressure on the building porter they discover that the old lady made a living as a fortune teller and money lender. Dozens of people, both poor and rich, have visited the apartment to receive prophecies or to take or pay back loans, leaving the detectives with many potential suspects, some of them with political connections. As well as trying to identify the murderer, Maione also tries to solve the mystery as to who has slashed a beautiful widow’s face.

Blood Curse is the second book in the Commissario Ricciardi series set in Naples in 1931. Ricciardi is very much a lone detective, shunned by his fellow cops due to his reserved manner and uncanny ability to solve difficult cases, with the exception of Brigadier Maione, who appreciates his boss’ talents and acts as a loyal partner. Ricciardi can see and hear the final seconds in the lives of victims of violent deaths. It helps provide initial clues, but is also a curse, providing emotional attachment to the case and isolating him from others. His affliction and relationship with Maione makes for an interesting and empathetic lead character. In this outing, Ricciardi and Maione investigate the death of an elderly fortune teller and money lender. Due to the woman’s activities there are lots of potential suspects, many of whom de Giovanni introduces to the reader through multiple individual threads. In addition, there is a second case, involving a knife attack on a beautiful woman. These multiple threads makes the narrative quite fragmented and somewhat confusing, especially near the beginning of the book. As the book progresses these various threads are interwoven and the narrative takes shape, the tale becoming increasingly compelling and entertaining, with a good sense of place and portrayal of social relations. The denouement, however, felt somewhat hollow and overly contrived. Nonetheless, an engaging story.

Review of Present Darkness by Malla Nunn (Emily Bestler Books, 2013)

1953, Johannesburg, South Africa. As with other cops, Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper is hoping that no-one is murdered in the days leading up to Christmas. While his colleagues are looking forward to a holiday away from the city, Cooper is hoping to spend time with his coloured partner and child, a strictly illegal relationship in the apartheid country. Their hopes looked dashed after a white couple are assaulted, the man dying in the hours afterwards, but the positive identification of a black boy and his friend as the assailants by their daughter appears to lead to a quick result. For Cooper it creates a major headache as the boy is the son of Cooper’s friend, Zulu detective, Samuel Shabalala. Cooper is certain the boy is innocent, however the daughter is sticking to her story, the lead detective Lieutenant Mason is determined to wrap things up quickly – planting evidence as required – and the boy refuses to provide an alibi for himself. To make things more difficult, the hard-headed Mason has made it clear he will not tolerate anyone disrupting the case and he’s prepared to shatter Cooper’s home life if necessary. Cooper, however, is made of stern stuff, as are his friends Shabalala, and Dr Daniel Zweigman, a survivor of German concentration camps, and he knows the terrain, having been raised in the Sophiatown ghetto.

Present Darkness is the fourth book in the Detective Emmanuel Cooper series set in South Africa in the 1950s. In this outing, Cooper has returned to Johannesburg, the city in which he was raised, and is living in secret with Davina, his coloured partner, and their child. The plot concerns the assault and murder of a white couple and the framing of a teenage black boy for the crime. The sting in the tail is the boy is the son of Cooper’s friend, Zulu detective Samuel Shabalala.  Cooper wants justice, his boss Lieutenant Mason wants to see the boy hang and is quite prepared to not only ignore evidence but to fabricate it. Mason is a bully and full of dirty tricks, though it’s not clear why he’s so keen to close the case so quickly and to push Cooper to one side. Nunn once again does a nice job of detailing the lived realities of apartheid South Africa, with its marked prejudices and oppression, corrupt policing, its dangerous ghettos, and illicit relations and friendships across the race divide. And it has a strong sense of place – both in the city and the countryside – and historical contextualisation. The three friends at the heart of this, and the other books – Cooper, Shabalala, and Dr Zweigman – again shine, forming an interesting and engaging trio. While the other books take a slightly more expansive view, this tale focuses very much on personal danger – the framing of an innocent boy and the fraught attempt to see justice served, and the threat to Cooper’s new family. Nunn nicely builds the tale up to a dramatic denouement, though the resolution seemed a little contrived and held together with plot devices. Overall, another entertaining addition to an excellent series.

Review of The Last Winter of Dani Lancing by P.D. Viner (Ebury Press, 2013)

1989. University student Dani Lancing was kidnapped, raped and murdered.  The event shattered lives of Jim and Patty, her parents, and Tom, her best friend who wanted to be more.  2010. Jim and Patty have separated.  Jim still lives in the family home with the ghost of Dani.  Patty has given up her career as an investigative journalist to work for a charity, Lost Souls, who help families who have lost loved ones.  Tom is now a Detective Superintendent, running a specialist unit that hunts for the killers of women.  The legacy of Dani’s death still drives their daily lives.  When Dani’s case is placed on the secondary list for a cold case unit, Patty regains hope of discovering her daughter’s murderer.  Forensic science means that it might be possible to get a DNA match.  Employing a private detective she finds out who the prime suspect was in the case and a way to get the police sample.  All she needs now is a sample of blood.  Her obsession to administer her own form of rough justice initiates a dangerous set of events that neither Jim or Tom are able to halt.

The Last Winter of Dani Lancing tells the story of parents shattered by the loss of their daughter, how they cope in the aftermath, and their pursuit of justice.  Dani disappeared from her University lodgings to be found dead three weeks later.  Nobody was arrested for the murder.  Twenty years later her mother, a former investigative journalist, is driven by a need for answers and revenge – she not only wants to find the killer, but to exact an eye-for-an-eye punishment.  Her husband has retreated into being a recluse, living with the ghost of his daughter, who he interacts with continuously.  Her former best friend, Tom, is a senior police officer known as the ‘Sad Man’ due to his empathy with the dead and their families.  Viner tells the story of each in a sympathetic voice that reveals their hurt and loss, and there is a strong, intense emotional register throughout the tale.  This is heightened by the use of a temporally broken narrative, the storyline jumping back-and-forth from the early 1980s to the present day.  This produces a strong sense of character development and provides glimpses into key moments in each of their lives.  The plot is interesting and engaging, but as it progresses a series of unlikely coincidences and reveals start to appear, with the links and backstory of one character in particular being a series of convenient plot devices.  The result is a tale that spins into a thriller for the denouement, but one that has elements that seem out of kilter with the rest of the tale.  Nonetheless, a good read, especially with respect to the emotional register and character development.

Review of The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan (2013, Vintage)

Dorrigo Evans has risen from rural poverty in Tasmania to become a doctor.  He joins the Australian Army and is preparing to ship out and join the fight in the Second World War when he meets Amy, the young wife of his uncle.  Despite being engaged to Elle, Dorrigo starts a passionate affair with Amy, but then the war intervenes.  First he lands in Syria, fighting the Vichy French, then transfers to Java where he is captured by the Japanese.  With a thousand men under his command he’s put to work building ‘The Line’ – a railway through Thailand to Burma.  In the forced labour camp he assumes the persona of The Big Fella – the compassionate but hard-nosed commander who strives to keep his men alive, forcing officers to share the work of ordinary ranks, negotiating with the Japanese, begging and stealing where necessary, and looking after the sick and dying.  Thoughts about Amy sustain him, but then in a rare letter from home he learns of a tragedy from home.  When he returns to Australia after the war he quickly finds himself married to Elle and resumes his career as a surgeon.  But he’s haunted by the war and Amy and continues to play The Big Fella, though with an ever-growing list of indiscretions, including a string of affairs. 

The Narrow Road to the Deep North charts the life of Dorrigo Evans, a flawed war hero who is haunted by his love for a woman with whom he had a brief affair and the horror of a Japanese prisoner of war camp.  It’s essentially an exploration of the human condition and its different forms and qualities – love, regret, cruelty, honour, jealousy, friendship, savagery, doubt, hope, commitment, infidelity – and of culture and social relations, while also detailing the history, context and horrors of the construction of ‘The Line’ – the railway built by the Japanese using forced prisoner of war and local forced labour.  Rather than use a linear narrative, Flanagan switches between different points in Evans life in a seemingly random order that actually pivot around a single day in 1943 when he receives a letter from home, Darky Gardiner is thrashed to death, and Jack Rainbow dies on a makeshift operating table.  He also switches the focus to other characters, notably the Japanese camp commander who survives the war and rebuilds his own life, but also Amy, the woman Dorrigo loved, his wife, Darky Gardiner, a Korean prison guard, and a number of the Australian prisoners.  What emerges is a series of contrasts and juxtapositions – love/indifference, freedom/confinement, compassion/cruelty, carefree/haunted – with threads of connection such as the camaraderie of prisoners, family ties, and in the case of Dorrigo and his Japanese commander a fascination with the beauty and meaning of poetry and literature.  The result is a vivid, haunting, moving and thought-provoking tale of love and loss told through some wonderful prose.  A story that I sense I will continue to mull over for some time.

Review of Eleven Days by Stav Sherez (Faber and Faber, 2013)

Eleven days before Christmas a fire guts a small convent in a residential area of West London.  Ten nuns are found dead in an upstairs room having seemingly made little effort to escape the inferno and an eleventh body is found in a confessional in the chapel.  DI Jack Carrigan is handpicked by Assistant Chief Constable Quinn, head of the Catholic Police Association, to investigate the case with instructions to wrap it up quickly.  However, it soon becomes clear that this is no ordinary case, the victims were no ordinary nuns, and the identity of the eleventh victim may provide the answer to solving the crime. While Carrigan pursues a line of inquiry concerning the nuns’ on-going battle with Albanian criminals operating near to the convent, DS Geneva Miller concentrates on the work of the nuns in Peru in the 1970s and their links to liberation theology.  Their progress is slowed by both internal politics and the church hierarchy, but Carrigan and Miller are determined coppers willing to confront difficult challenges.

Eleven Days is the second book in the Carrigan and Miller series.  Like the first book, Sherez uses the format of a police procedural and London’s diverse population to shine a light on fairly weighty political and social issues.  In this case, the political turmoil and violence in Peru during the 1970s and the role of liberation theology and the contemporary movement of Albanian criminals into London’s underworld and sex trafficking.  Both provide a menacing backdrop to Carrigan and Miller’s investigation into the death of ten nuns and an unknown young woman.  Hindering their investigation is the intransigence of the Catholic Church to share information about the nuns or their work and internal police politics.  The result is an engaging and compelling tale full of gritty realism in which the politics is a crucial element of the story but never overly dominates it at its expense.   Moreover, Carrigan and Miller make for an interesting pairing as they battle their own personal demons.  I wasn’t entirely convinced by the denouement, which I felt had one twist too many, but nonetheless a superior, thought-provoking, edge-of-seat police procedural that had me staying up late to keep the pages turning.

Review of A Song from Dead Lips by William Shaw (Quercus, 2013)

London, 1968, and a young woman is found dead, hidden under rubbish in an alleyway near to the studio used by the Beatles.  The locals are quick to finger a new arrival in the area, a black surgeon involved in Biafra nationalism.  Detective Sergeant Cathal Breen is assigned to the case and has little time for racist prejudices.  Breen is under a cloud having abandoned a colleague at a robbery who was subsequently stabbed.  While most of his colleagues are reluctant to invest much effort into the investigation, new recruit to WPC Helen Tozer is keen to make her mark.  As the first woman to join the CID team she’s fighting an uphill battle to gain acceptance.  Working together Breen and Tozer slowly make headway, establishing that the girl was a keen Beatles fan.  When two more people end up dead, the case steps up a gear, with Breen and Tozer racing to catch the killer before anyone else dies.

Set in London at the tail-end of the swinging sixties, A Song from Dead Lips captures not only the changes taking place at the time, but also the rump of old conservatism and everyday racism and sexism, the influence of class, and the pervasiveness of corruption within institutions.  Along with context, the key ingredients of the book are its two lead characters and their somewhat awkward relationship.  Detective Sergeant Breen is a principled outsider, the son of an Irish immigrant builder, who is marginalised within CID.  WPC Helen Tozer is an ambitious but rather naïve detective determined to break the glass ceiling.  Shaw surrounds them with a number of other well penned coppers and suspects.  The plot is a relatively straightforward police procedural, with Breen and Tozer fighting their colleagues as they struggle to solve the mystery.  The result is an engaging tale full of social and political commentary.

Review of Dunbar Case by Peter Corris (Allen & Unwin, 2013)

Cliff Hardy, a Sydney based P.I. and tough guy, is hired by a university professor to look into the possibility that more than one person survived the Dunbar shipwreck in the mid-nineteenth century, taking ashore a fortune in diamonds.  The trail leads to a prisoner who knows the whereabouts of another treasure.  All Hardy is after is old family history, what he gets is more complex, involving the notorious Tanner crime family, an undercover cop, and an ambitious journalist.  Then someone he talks to is found dead and the case takes a more sinister turn.

The Dunbar Case is the thirty eighth book in the Cliff Hardy series set in Australia.  It’s a fairly standard independent, headstrong, tough guy PI tale, where the lead character takes a bit of punishment, has a romantic fling, and somehow manages to survive the shenanigans in which he finds himself involved.  The tale is more than a paint-by-numbers case, with Corris blending a historical and contemporary plotlines to good effect, but it did feel a little paint-by-numbers in style, lacking a certain edginess to the writing and relying on a few plot devices to tie things together.  Overall, a competently told, entertaining PI tale from down under.

Review of The Circle by Dave Eggers (Hamish Hamilton, 2013)

Up to her ears in college debt and in a dead-end job she loathes, Mae Holland swallows her pride and asks her best friend from college, Annie, to help get her a job in The Circle, an giant internet company that specialises in providing authentication and transparency in online transactions.  The company has a reputation as a great employer, with wonderful facilities, endless parties, free food and accommodation, excellent health packages, and opportunities to pursue the development of novel ideas aimed at making society safer and people more accountable.  Mae’s initial job is in customer experience, dealing with online queries, but she is soon simultaneously fielding hundreds of survey questions.  Her friendship with Annie, one of the executives, provides her with access denied to most newbies and she is soon encountering some of The Circle's top execs and scientists.  It’s an exciting time in the company given its continuing meteoric rise and an endless procession of new product launches.  Mae feels incredibly privileged to be a part of what seems as much a social movement as a company, but nonetheless is unsettled by the disjuncture between her old and new life and the increasing pressure to live her life in ways visible to the company and the rest of the world.

The Circle is an allegorical tale about the perils of creating a large, seemingly for the public good, data aggregator company that controls access to vital social, economic and governmental goods and services.  The Circle is a large internet company that has quickly grown to become a massive, global critical player through it TruYou authentication system that provides a unified identification system for online transactions and interactions (whether that be using social media, playing games, conducting banking, or accessing government services).  It’s effect has been to be to just about eliminate anonymous internet activity, hugely reducing anti-social behaviour and criminality.  It’s ambition is to create open, transparent and accountable society and governance through the elimination of privacy on and offline (for example, by distributing hundreds of thousands of networked miniature cameras throughout landscapes and implanting tracker devices in kids).  The sunlight of constant exposure will prevent crime and corruption, they prophetize.  The tale follows Mae Holland, a young college graduate and her introduction to the company, her indoctrination into its ethos, and her rise through its ranks as she resolves personal reservations and conflicts.  The power of the tale is in exposing the cult and power of information and how it is increasingly being exposed, collated and centralized in the internet age.  Eggers does a good job at shining a critical light onto the California ideology underpinning many such companies.  The main issue with the tale is that Mae is a little too one-dimensional and compliant and there’s too little examination of resistance to The Circle’s ambitions or alternatives, both within and outside the company.  And while the story does raise questions about what an open society created through private vendors means for privacy, democracy and governance, it’s treatment of such issues is rather shallow.  Overall, a thought-provoking read about the supposed utopian promise that information will set us free.

Review of Red Joan by Jennie Rooney (Vintage, 2013)

1937, aged 18, Joan heads to Cambridge University to study science.  There she meets the confident and exotic Sonya Galich, a refugee from Russia, and her dashing cousin, Leo.  Enchanted by Sonya and swept off her feet by Leo, Joan is pulled into their orbit and their communist agitating for worker rights and Spanish republicans.  Nearly seventy years later one her acquaintances from that time, Sir William Mitchell, is being investigated for espionage, committing suicide before being exposed.  Having carefully protected her past, a knock at her door threatens to expose Joan’s secret past.

Red Joan is loosely based on the story of Melita Norwood, the Soviet’s longest serving British spy who was exposed in 1999.  Unlike Norwood, Joan is not a committed communist, but rather went to Cambridge University in the late 1930s as an idealist, raised by a socialist father.  There she meets cousins, Sonya and Leo, falling in love with the latter and joining their political circle.  Together they groom Joan and once the Second World War has started and she has finished her degree they arrange a job for her as a secretary at an atomic research centre.  Red Joan tells her story through two interwoven strands, one set in the past, the other detailing Joan’s interrogation by MI5 whilst simultaneously trying to deal with her barrister son who has taken on the role of her legal brief.  It’s a narrative structure that works very well, aided expressive prose, nicely crafted characterisation, and a carefully constructed plot.  A particular strength of the story is how Rooney unsettles any straightforward black and white reading of being a traitor, providing a layered, nuanced and poignant account that gradually exposes a long held secret and its consequences, and explores themes of motive, ideology, conscience, guilt, regret, and protection.  An engaging and thought provoking traitor’s tale.

Review of The Informant by Andrew Rosenheim (Arrow, 2013)

September 1941.  Special Agent James Nessheim has been sent to Hollywood where he somewhat reluctantly works in a movie studio screening scripts.  Supposedly working out of the Los Angeles FBI office, he actually reports directly to Assistant Director Harry Guttman.  One of Nessheim’s informers, Billy Osaka, a Japanese-American journalist and translator with a gambling problem, has gone missing after asking to see him urgently.  Nessheim sets out find Osaka, but soon discovers that others are also searching for him.  His boss has also been dragged into murky waters when a State Department employee with youthful communist sympathies approaches him to reveal that Russians have been seeking to activate him as a spy.  The next day the man is found dead in the park in which they met.  As Nessheim tracks Osaka’s trail, Guttman discovers that a sizeable amount of Russian-owned money has been transferred from New York to a Japanese bank in Los Angeles and asks his agent to find its destination.  Neither Nessheim or Guttman realise the significance of their respective cases, but both are acting beyond their remit and have hunches that they should keep digging away despite the warnings to the contrary.

The Informant is a historical political thriller set immediately prior to America entering the Second World War.  It’s the second book in the James Nessheim series, but can be read as a standalone.  The strength of the story is the plot and contextualisation.  The tale is told through a set of alternating perspectives of James Nessheim in Los Angeles, and is his boss, Harry Guttman in Washington and New York, and centres on finding a missing Japanese-American informant, uncovering the work of Soviet agents, and establishing if there is a link between the two and its significance.  Whilst, the timeline is linear, the plot weaves together a number of strands and subplots to create a complex, if somewhat fanciful, stew.  Nevertheless, Rosenheim makes sure the reader stays orientated and that the story keeps moving forward.  Moreover, he evokes the tense atmosphere, politics and political landscape of the time and nicely places the story in its locales, with a strong sense of place with respect to the film studio, Little Tokyo in LA, and the hills above Santa Barbara, and context with respect to the marginalised position of the Japanese in America and political sympathies with communism and the plight of the Soviet Union as German troops advance on Moscow.  The result is a thoughtful, engaging and well told tale.

Review of The Stranger You Know by Jane Casey (Ebury, 2013)

Three women have been murdered in their homes.  DC Maeve Kerrigan is pulled off another case headed up by her abrasive boss, DCI Josh Derwent, to help with the investigation and is forbidden from talking to him.  Twenty years earlier, when Derwent was a teenager, his fifteen year old girlfriend was brutally murdered.  Despite having an alibi, Derwent was the prime suspect and the taint of suspicion has never left him.  Now someone fitting his description is pursuing and charming vulnerable women then recreating the old murder scene.  Kerrigan doesn’t want to believe the evidence but it all points to Derwent’s guilt and the fact that another woman is undoubtedly at risk.

The Stranger You Know is the fourth book in the DC Maeve Kerrigan series set in London.  In this outing much of Kerrigan’s attention is focused close to home, trained on her immediate boss, the intimidating bully, Josh Derwent, and the connection between the murder of his girlfriend twenty year’s previously and a series of more recent slayings.  Derwent is desperate to be part of the case, but some of his colleagues are unconvinced of his innocence.  Kerrigan is prepared to give him the benefit of doubt, but as usual he doesn’t make it easy for her.  Casey hits all the nails on the head: a well developed set of characters, a nicely constructed plot, a good sense of time and place, well depicted police procedural elements, engaging prose and narrative, and a good pace.  Kerrigan is a complex character, wracked with vulnerabilities, insecurities, and has low self-esteem, but at the same time knows she has talent, is headstrong and risk-taker, charting her own path often in direct contravention of orders.  The other characters are similarly multidimensional.  The tale has plenty of intrigue, tension, twists and turns, feisty interchanges, and engaging subplots.  For me there was one twist too many, and a couple of characters drop out of the story towards the end, but Casey nonetheless keeps the reader guessing to the last few pages as to the culprit.  Overall, a superior and entertaining police procedural.

Review of Raising Steam by Terry Pratchett (Doubleday, 2013)

Dick Simnel’s has inherited his father’s fascination for steam and the possibilities of harnessing its power.  Unlike his father, he relies on a slide rule and mathematics to tame and harness it, meaning he doesn’t vaporize himself as he tinkers.  The result is Iron Girder, a train that runs on rails.  Simnel takes his invention to the great city of Ankh-Morpork, seeking the help of self-made man, Harry King, to build a railway network.  The city’s patrician, Lord Vetinari, can see the inherent potential in quick, efficient and comfortable travel, but is also aware that luddites will try to limit progress.  He thus dispatches Moist von Lipwig, master of the Post Office, the Mint, and Royal Bank, to help smooth the way and negotiate routes.  In the meantime, a different kind of revolution is brewing in the Dwarf world, as conservative extremists plot to overthrow the more liberal king and destroy the corrupting influence of new technologies and multiculturalism.

Raising Steam is the 40th Discworld book in Terry Pratchett’s hugely successful fantasy/satire series.  I’ve read all of them bar two.  All of the books are consistently inventive, warmly humorous and satirical, and full of interesting characters and plots.  Raising Steam focuses attention on two main themes and their juxtaposition -- the creation of new technologies and how they can transform societies and produce new issues, and the rise of extremist religious groups that hold highly traditional and conservative views and want to mould society in their vision.  It’s an interesting tension, but in this case the story nonetheless feels like two quite different narratives being jammed together without ever fully blending.  Moreover, while the book is in the fantasy genre, there were inconsistencies or convenient plot devices that felt clunky, some characters felt surplus to requirements, and there are sub-plots that go nowhere.  For example, despite growing up relatively poor, Simnel’s mother just happens to have a fortune in the attic to fund the initial development of an engine.  And when Simnel travels to Ankh-Morpork to demonstrate the engine he has to set up a track to do so; somehow the big, heavy engine made the journey without rails, but now needs them to run.  We’re told of a wedding massacre and a young dwarf visiting his family being attacked, but these then sink without trace.  The result, for me, was one of the weakest books in the series.  Full of nicely penned characters (and there are an awful lot them, many from previous books snuck in for small cameo appearances), and packed with snippets of railway lore, but the plot not quite running on track.

Review of Geek Sublime: Writing Fiction, Coding Software by Vikram Chandra (Faber, 2013)

Vikram Chandra has made a living as a programmer and also written award winning literary fiction.  In Geek Sublime he reflects on the writing of fiction and code, their points of connection and departure, drawing on his own experiences and the observations of others.  In particular, he makes reference to literary theory, especially that relating to Indian texts, languages, philosophy, mythology and poetry, using it to reflect on ideas of the structure, aesthetics, logic, and the work of text as fiction and code.  In the main it’s an interesting read, engaging with ideas little used in the consideration of code, but it is a little to uneven in its analysis, and also lopsided in its treatment of fiction and code, with too much attention paid to the former.  Indeed, while there is some engagement with literary theory, there is no attention paid to its equivalent of software studies or critical code studies, though there are some references to computer science views of programming.  Nor is there any reference to code poetry, the most obvious example of where code and fiction directly interface, or in thinking about code in relation to storytelling, for example in framing and generating the narrative of games or CGI movies.  Overall then, an interesting read that introduces a number of new ideas, but is somewhat uneven and limited in its comparison of writing fiction and code. 

Review of Grind Joint by Dana King (Stark House, 2013)

A small mill town to the north of Pittsburgh, Penns River is on a slow slide towards permanent recession and urban decay.  Daniel Hecker, an ambitious businessman, has convinced the city council that a grind joint casino will create new jobs and attract visitors that will help revive the local economy.  One week from opening and the body of a local drug dealer is found dumped at the new casino’s doors.  The killing has the hallmarks of a professional hit by local mob boss, Mike ‘The Hook’ Mannarino, but there is no firm evidence to link him to the crime.  Hecker and his head of security, Daniel Rollison, a former spook, want the case closed as soon as possible and they don’t mind greasing the wheels to get the result desired.  However, Detectives Ben ‘Doc’ Dougherty and Willie Grabek are smarter than many small-town cops, serving in Penns River for personal rather than career reasons.  Under pressure from an acting chief of police who wants the job fulltime, they work their own angles, sensing that there is much more at stake than solving the murder of a low-level drug pusher.

Grind Joint is a tale of a town in decline, local politics, personal rivalries, turf battles, inter-agency rivalry, family relations, and a cop determined to try and uphold law and order in the face of greed, betrayal, and rising crime and poverty.  King packs an awful lot into an excellent story, with multiple, intersecting plotlines, and he hits all the right buttons -- excellent characterisation, strong sense of place, good contextualisation, engaging plot, and tight, expressive prose.  There are a fair few characters in Grind Joint, but King has a way of quickly presenting their essence and is particularly good at capturing their interactions and the nuances of their relationships.  They are not black and white one-dimensional figures, but have depth and resonance.  In particular, Detective Ben ‘Doc’ Dougherty is an engaging, thoughtful presence.  Moreover, King firmly places the reader in Penns River, a former industrial town that has a declining economy and is struggling to find a new path.  The plot is cleverly worked, placing in tension the aspirations of a powerful businessman, the machinations of local government and policing, the ambitions of organised crime, and the thin blue line of an honest cop, a couple of his colleagues and his family.  King works that tension to great effect, but sticks firmly to social realism rather than veering off into a thriller with a capital T.  And despite the themes of corruption and violence, there’s compassion running throughout the narrative, embodied in Dougherty and his family.  If I were a movie producer I’d be looking to buy the rights.  A very fine tale that is told very well.  Highly recommended.

Review of Summertime, All the Cats are Bored by Philippe Georget (Europa Editions, 2013, French 2009)

It’s the height of summer in the French Mediterranean town of Perpignan.  A young Dutch woman is found bludgeoned to death on a beach and shortly afterwards another disappears in the city, along with a local taxi driver.  Inspectors Sebag and Molino are tasked with trying to locate their whereabouts.  Neither cop has much appetite for the case - they are hot, bored, distracted by family matters, and prone to extended breaks.  But Sebag used to be a good detective and he senses that there is more to the case than meets the eye.  When an attempt is made to snatch a third Dutch woman on her way home late at night the investigation shifts up a gear, with a hotshot from Paris seconded to the case.  In response, Sebag regains some of his old sparkle, determined to find the missing Dutch woman, but at the same time he’s worried about the fidelity of his wife and drifting apart from his kids.  He sacrificed his career to spend time with his family and just as he rediscovers his verve for the job they seem to be slipping away.  The life of a young woman though lies in the balance and that has to take precedent.

Summertime, All the Cats are Bored is a police procedural set over a few hot weeks of early summer in Southern France and the local police’s attempts to save a young woman who has been kidnapped and two murders.  The strength of the story is the sense of place and characterisation.  Georget firmly places the reader in the Perpignan region during tourist season and captures the team dynamics and interactions of the investigative team.  The narrative mostly focuses on Inspector Gilles Sebag, a cop who’s slipping into a midlife crisis as the case starts - he’s prioritised his family over his career, but now his teenage kids are making their own way in life and his wife is spending increasingly more time with friends and holidaying on her own and he suspects she’s having an affair, and his boss wants him to apply for promotion.  His basis of his sense of self seems to be on shifting ground and now he’s trying to deal with a case where the life of a young woman is under threat.  The intertwined scenarios of Sebag’s crisis and the perplexing investigation provide a nice hook and plot.  However, the telling unfolds at a too leisurely pace, with a little too much unnecessary explication.  The cats might be bored, but the reader veers towards that state a little too often until the final third of the book.  Overall, an interesting character study and investigative case that too often lacks pace and edge.

Review of Keep Away From Those Ferraris by Pat Fitzpatrick (Createspace, 2013)

As a teenager Noel Byrne was one of the crowd until he was plucked out for no discernible reason to be Johnny Ferrari’s best friend.  Johnny was the charismatic son of a Dublin fish and chip millionaire and the life and soul of any party.  After school, Byrne headed to university, but continued to hang out with Ferrari, who was making a name for himself by organising raves and parties across the city.  Over time they drifted apart, with Byrne using some of the confidence he gained from being in Ferrari’s shadow to become a television reporter with the national broadcaster covering business affairs.  With the impending collapse of Celtic Tiger economy, the two boyhood friends meet-up again.  Only this time Johnny seems to have gone off the rails having kidnapped a former boy-band star.  Soon, Noel finds himself entangled in a conspiracy to manipulate the share price of Hiberbank, which is either on the verge of collapse or about to bought by investors.  At the same time, Johnny’s sister Maria has also re-entered Byrne’s life, he’s being forced to take part in a TV reality show, and his parents are about to make a financial decision that will ruin them.  Caught between doing serious time for a crime he hasn’t committed or shafting the entire nation, and unsure who he can turn to for help, Byrne is left dazed and floundering.  Whichever he looks at it, he appears to be screwed.

Keep Away From Those Ferraris is a satire set at the tail end of the Celtic Tiger.  Whilst the plot is quite outlandish it works extremely well because the boom then bust in Ireland was so outlandish.  Pat Fitzpatrick captures the sense of disbelief, disillusionment, denial, panic, greed, dirty dealing, and the way in which the collapse was portrayed by a breathless media unsure as to what was happening.  He’s especially good at illustrating how the wealthy elite sought to protect their status through dodgy deals concerning failed banks.  There’s all kinds of thinly veiled reference points for anyone familiar with Irish culture and the crash, including the golden circle, Anglo, and RTE.  In my view there’s very little to fault - the plot is very nicely worked with some good twists and observational asides, the characterisation is spot on with even the ‘hero’ being somewhat of a cad, the contextualisation with respect to the Irish crash and associated shenanigans is excellent, the black humour and wit is genuinely funny, and the writing is engaging.  The only thing I didn't think worked was the title and cover, neither of which is really reflective of the book's style or themes and wouldn't ordinarily have compelled me to try it - so if you have similar feelings set them aside and cut to the content.  I thought it was a thoroughly enjoyable read.

Review of Another Case in Cowtown by Mel Healy (2013)

Moss Reid is an unassuming private investigator who works out of small office in Stonybatter in the north inner city of Dublin.  His usual fare is snooping on cheating spouses, tracing missing people or recovering property where payments have been skipped.  During a scorching summer week, Reid finds himself snowed under with cases -- tracing the mother of man given away at birth, spying on partners suspected of having affairs, and working undercover as a chef in a Dublin restaurant plagued by thefts.  Reid is something of gourmet and the restaurant assignment lets him practise his culinary skills, but he soon detects that there is more going on than meets the eye, with one of the workers seemingly having no past.  As the week unfolds, Reid tries to nudge all of his cases to a conclusion, but when his office is broken into twice it’s clear that someone does not want one of them solved.

Private investigator Moss Reid is a fairly unassuming guy who scrapes by solving relatively mundane and routine enquiries.  He’s rarely in a rush, does not play the hard man, is generally quite convivial, and has the right amount of patience to hang around for hours waiting for clues and to deal with antsy clients.  He’s not quite as organised as he could be, but things generally fall into place.  He’s an appealing character and, along with the sense of place and the pacing and asides, he’s the key ingredient to Another Case in Cowtown.  Healy captures the atmosphere and habits of Dublin, with some nice observations, and the story drifts along, with the occasional tangent that often involves food.  The plot has Reid investigating a number of cases, all of which has some interest, but falters a little in the last quarter through some over-complication and gaps.  Nevertheless, the story is a pleasant and entertaining read. 

Review of Night Moves by Randy Wayne White (Berkeley, 2013)

Doc Ford works as a marine biologist on Sanibel Island, off the west coast of Florida, when he’s not doing secret wet work for the US government.  When his friend Dan Futch, a local pilot, asks him to help investigate a possible last resting place of the infamous Flight 19, when five planes disappeared on a training run in 1945, Doc and his hippie pal, Tomlinson, tag along.  The plane, however, has been sabotaged and is forced to make a crash landing in the Everglades.  Futch fixes the plane and flies out, but Doc and Tomlinson walk, picking up a stray dog on the way.  Back at Dinkin’s Bay it’s clear that all is not well.  Two new expensive boats with mystery owners are in dock, a married woman is seeking a divorce by pursuing Doc and Tomlinson, her crazy documentary-making brother-in-law wants to capture the finding of Flight 19, and Tomlinson’s rival recreational drug supplier is seeking to corner the market.  Plus Doc has inherited a dog that leaves chaos in its wake.  What should have been some covert archaeological work is become something a little more dangerous.

The hook of Night Moves is the possible discovery of Flight 19, the infamous training run in 1945 in which five torpedo planes disappeared on a routine flight out of Fort Lauderdale.  Whilst generally thought to be lost at sea, for the purposes of the story White postulates that they crashed into the Everglades.  Finding the flight would be a major discovery, so any attempt demands a level of secrecy to stop the site being swarmed by news crews and crazies.  But such is the draw, that any hint of discovery can attract unwanted and deadly attention.  Entwined through this central thread, White weaves a number of subplots, including a manipulative diva, a tentative romance, a drug rivalry, an international hitman, a lost dog, and general carry-on in Dinkin’s Bay.  To his credit, this unlikely cocktail for the most part works, in the main because the story is engaging and the characterisation and place is nicely drawn.  The reader kind of floats along in the narrative.  Where the story starts to become unstuck however is towards the end, where the credibility of the plot is stretched to breaking point.  Ultimately, it seemed as if White made the decision that the Flight 19 was not a sufficient hook, so populated the book with a series of weaker subplots to try and create mystery and action.   In my view, that was a shame as the Flight 19 mystery should have provided more than enough intrigue to hang a decent story on.  Overall, an enjoyable read that loses its way a little in the last quarter.

Gold Medal award

This afternoon I’m heading into Dublin to receive the Royal Irish Academy’s Gold Medal for the Social Sciences, presented by An Taoiseach (prime minister), Enda Kenny TD.  The medals are considered the highest award an academic can receive in Ireland, and are presented once every two years.  I’m obviously delighted and honoured to be the 2013 recipient.  I’m also a little bemused as they usually seem to be presented to folk who are nearer to the end of their career than the start.  I’m also acutely aware that the award is a reflection of a lot of collaboration.  Since starting my PhD just over twenty years ago I’ve worked with a lot of great people on various projects and publications, receiving some wonderful support and camaraderie, and if you’re one of those people I owe you a debt of thanks.  After the ceremony I have to go for a meal with the Editor of the Irish Times, the Head of RTE (the national broadcaster), and the Director of the Higher Education Authority, so I guess I’ll need to be on my best behaviour and to try and keep my foot out of my mouth.  These kinds of ceremony gigs are not my scene, but I’ll try my best to enjoy it.  You never know, I might even do so.

Review of The Holiday Murders by Robert Gott (Scribe 2013)

Melbourne, Christmas Eve, 1943, and Inspector Titus Lambert of the Homicide division is called to a large house in which a father and son have been brutally murdered.  He’s accompanied by Sergeant Joe Sable, a young Jewish cop with a heart murmur, who’s been promoted to detective because others have been called up for active service.  Initially they have few leads, but when two military intelligence officers declare an interest in the case it’s suggested that this might be the work of Nazi sympathisers.  Lambert is not convinced that the murders are politically motivated, but it's soon obvious that there is a small group of active national socialists that have not yet been interned who are intent on creating a fascist Australia.  For Sable, the investigation reawakens an interest in his Jewish heritage, and for Constable Helen Ford presents an opportunity to make her mark in a patriarchal police force.  As the violence escalates over the Christmas period, Lambert and his team seek to solve the murders before they induce public panic.

The Holiday Murders is a very competently told police procedural.  The real strengths of the book are the plotting and historical contextualisation.  The story has a nice pace and cadence, and carefully works all the various clues and participants into place, with some nice feints and blinds.  Set in Melbourne in 1943, the story is well framed with respect to the small pockets of anti-Semitism and Nazi sympathisers and agitators who felt the real enemies of Australia were the Jews and communists rather than fascism.  Despite this, the sense of place is a little underdeveloped, giving little flavour of the locale.  The characterisation is nicely done and there is a good dynamic between the various actors, especially Inspector Titus, Sergeant Joe Sable, and Constable Helen Lord.  Overall, an interesting and entertaining read that is hopefully the first in a series.