Review of Koko Takes a Holiday by Kieran Shea (Titan Books, 2014)

Five hundred into the future, the planet is effectively run by large corporations who fight for assets and market share.  Ex-corporate mercenary Koko Martsellar runs a bar and brothel on The Sixty Islands, which specialises in satisfying appetites for sex and simulated violence.  Koko was offered the job by one of her old combat mentors, Portia Delacompte, who has risen slowly up the corporate ladder of an entertainment conglomerate.  In order to progress her career, Delacompte has selectively wiped some of her memory and joined a religious cult.  At some point in the past though she wrote a note to herself to eliminate Koko and to that end she sends a squad of security personnel to the bar.  Koko has not lost any of her instincts and skills, however, and after the shootout flees skyward.  In pursuit is an assassin.  If Koko is going to survive she needs her wits about her and to tackle her old boss.

Koko Takes a Holiday is a kind of cyberpunk tale set in the far (500 years hence) rather than near future.  Shea has imagined a world run by corporate conglomerates and puppet governments, where women are very much the equals of men.  Above the planet are ships that provide residences and specialise in different services. Koko is an ex-mercenary turned bar and brothel owner who can look after herself.  She’s a fun-kind of kiss-ass character, who’s lived through dozens of deadly scrapes and doesn’t take any crap.  Her ex-combat partner and current boss, however, wants her dead, though it’s not immediately clear to her why.  After surviving the initial hit, Koko flees on a self-built craft skyward pursued by an assassin.  There’s a good energy and vibe to the opening sequences, hooking the reader in.  After an initial chase, however, the pace slows and becomes more pedestrian as Koko settles in one place and Shea works in another couple of characters, including a security guard on his last day of duty who is about to take part in a mass suicide due to chronic depression.  The tale unfolds in an interesting enough way until near the end.  The reveal concerning why Koko is being pursued is based on a trillion-to-one chance encounter that was hard to believe and the final showdown is overly linear and over too quickly, in my view.  And the final scene felt too contrived.  All of that was a bit of let down after a cracking start, an interesting enough future world, and an engaging lead character.  If you like cyberpunk it might be worth a spin.

Review of Stalin’s Gold by Mark Ellis (Troubador, 2014)

1938 and during the transfer of gold bullion and treasures from Spanish republicans to Russia a couple of crates go missing.  Stalin orders Beria to track it down and recover the haul.  Two years later the Battle for Britain is raging and London is experiencing the full force of the blitz.  Along with their other duties, DCI Frank Merlin’s team has been instructed to get a grip on the looting of bomb sites.  In addition, Merlin has taken on the task of finding missing Polish RAF pilot Ziggy Kilinski, who seems to have some connection to the Polish government-in-exile.  That government has been funded in part by gold bullion transferred out of the country, bullion that a Russian émigré has a keen interest in.  With the bombs falling on a burning city, Merlin tries to get to the bottom of a case that involves common thievery and political intrigue.

Stalin’s Gold in the second book in the DCI Frank Merlin series set in London during the Second World War.  At one level there’s quite a bit going on in the tale which entangles Polish aristocratic exiles and RAF pilots, Russian gangsters and political agents, local criminal looters, and the police, centred around some missing gold bullion.  At another, the whole story is quite strongly telegraphed, meaning that there is not much mystery or surprise to the tale.  Moreover the tale is held together in a web of coincidences, such as Merlin finding some gold in a bomb site and the looter’s also being connected to the Russians, and there are a number of scenes that do not move the story forward.  To a degree these don’t really matter as it’s still an enjoyable read, Merlin continues to be a likeable character, the tale is interesting, and the context with respect to the war is nicely done, but I felt they took the edge off what could have been a more intriguing story with respect to how the mystery is revealed to the reader. 

Review of A House of Knives by William Shaw (Quercus, 2014)

London, 1968.  Detective Sergeant Cathal Breen of Marylebone CID is having a rough time.  He's haunted by the unsolved case of a dead man who is badly burnt, his father has just died, his colleague – Helen Tozer – who he has recently had a one night stand with has resigned and is serving her last few weeks on the force, and he is receiving anonymous death threats.  Added to his case load is another badly burnt body, one that has been stripped of his skin and drained of blood.  The victim is a popular womanizer who frequents London’s party scene and the son of a government minister and Breen is under pressure to solve the case without attracting any publicity.  Not long after he and Tozer start their investigation the assumed perpetrator of his death threats is murdered and Breen is suspended as a possible suspect.  Nonetheless, he continues to pursue his two active murder cases, while also trying to clear his name.  With the exception of Tozer, however, everyone else would prefer him to let the cases lie.

A House of Knives is the second book in the Breen and Tozer series set in late 1960s London.  Book two picks up shortly after the end of the first and I would recommend reading them in turn, starting with A Song From Dead Lips.  The real joy of both books are the likeable characters of Cathal ‘Paddy’ Breen and Helen Tozer and their interactions and on-going battles with their colleagues.  Both are outsiders – Breen, second generation Irish who mainly plays things by the book (unlike his colleagues) and Tozer, a headstrong, independent woman in a pretty much all male police force – and both are interesting company.  As for the story, it’s a fairly pacy police procedural set in the dying days on the Swinging Sixties in which Shaw intersects three main plot lines, each focusing on a murder – the deaths of an anonymous man, a government minister’s son, and the person suspected of sending Breen death threats.  There’s plenty going on, but the story never loses direction.  However, the denouement of one strand felt somewhat weak and unsatisfying.  Nonetheless, A House of Knives is an entertaining read and I’m looking forward to reading the third book in the series.

Review of The Kill by Jane Casey (Ebury, 2014)

DC Maeve Kerrigan, DI Josh Derwent and the rest of Superintendent Godley’s team are called away from a wedding to investigate the shooting of an off-duty policeman in Richmond Park.  The officer has been shot with an illegal firearm.  There is no apparent motive and no substantive leads and the officers struggle to make headway in the investigation.  Then there’s a second attack on several officers patrolling a sink estate, leaving a handful dead.  It appears that someone is indiscriminately killing police officers.  As the pressure mounts, Godley’s team struggle to make progress, though Kerrigan senses she knows what is happening and why but feels trapped to act, despite the on-going attacks.    

The Kill is the fifth book in the Maeve Kerrigan series.  It’s a very readable police procedural, with a tense core case in which the Kerrigan, her abrasive boss, Joss Derwent, and the rest of their team investigate the murderous targeting of police officers.  While the book has its moments and is generally an entertaining tale I struggled at times with the story.  This was for a number of reasons, part of which is my taste in content/style.  A large chunk of the book focuses on the relationship and sexual chemistry between Kerrigan and Derwent.  A good proportion of the first hundred pages of The Kill were devoted to their interchanges and Kerrigan’s related internal dialogues.  Personally, I found this a little tedious as much of it did not move the story forward and its consequence was to create uneven pacing throughout.  I’m sure that it is this relationship, and the will they/won’t they element, that is the real appeal of the series for many readers, but for my taste it is too foregrounded.  As for the story itself, I had a hard time believing in the procedural elements of the plot, where reality seemed to get sacrificed for grit and tension and the longer series arc of character relationships.  Admittedly, this is common in the genre but I found I couldn’t quite fully suspend my disbelief and be swept along in the narrative as required.  There is however some nice contextualisation of public perception and reaction to policing in London.  

Review of Reykjavik Nights by Arnaldur Indridason (Harvill Secker, 2014)

A relatively new recruit to the Icelandic police force, Erlendur works nights as a traffic cop dealing with drunk drivers and accidents, domestic disputes and street fights, robberies and whatever else comes his way.  One evening he pulls a dead homeless person from a shallow pool.  The case is ruled suicide and soon forgotten by all but the stoic cop who isn’t convinced by the verdict and becomes obsessed with uncovering the man’s life and death.  Aware that a local woman disappeared on the same weekend, Erlendur becomes convinced that there might be a link between the two cases.  In his spare time he slowly pieces together the lives of the homeless man and missing woman.  However, rather than telling his bosses of his discoveries he keeps his investigation a secret, reluctant to lose control of his quest and to unnecessarily smear the memories of his two victims.

Reykjavik Nights is a prequel to the popular Inspector Erlendur stories, set not long after he starts to work for the police.  Already obsessed with missing persons or the lives of those that drop out of ordinary society, he is drawn to the cases of a homeless man found drown and a local woman who has vanished.  Despite having no mandate to investigate either case, Erlendur patiently seeks answers.  Given his lack of experience he is somewhat naïve and hesitant, feeling his way by instinct.  As with the other books in the series, Reykjavik Nights is as much about Erlendur and Icelandic society as it is the cases.  Indeed, the cases are quite mundane and straightforward but what makes them interesting is Erlendur’s attempt to tackle them.  Oddly, that in itself is quite mundane with few tension points, but Indridason somehow makes its engaging.  I think this is do with an evenly paced plot and the cadence of the prose – one is soon caught in a steady moving stream with pleasant scenery, with a few eddies but no rapids or waterfalls.  The result is an enjoyable police procedural with an inevitable but satisfying conclusion.

Review of Dragnet Nation by Julia Angwin (2014, St Martin’s Press)

The subtitle for Dragnet Nation is ‘A quest for privacy, security, and freedom in a world of relentless surveillance,’ which neatly sums up the book’s focus.  In short, Julia Angwin charts: (a) how web- and mobile-based communication has become an intersecting set of data dragnets in the United States (and elsewhere), with state agencies and companies using a variety of practices (such as using cookies, data trackers, wifi and MAC address sniffing, spyware) to track and trace the use of phones, apps, websites and online transactions and purchases; (b) her attempts to reclaim her privacy and to evade mass surveillance, and to improve her data security, using a range of different tactics, including cloaking, blocking, obfuscation, encryption, requests for copies of her data and deletion from databases, and changing which services she used.  Her analysis draws from of two main sources: her journalism with the Wall Street Journal and interviews with key witnesses, as well as desk-based research of literature; and her own attempts to install various bits of software and to change her online and communications behaviour. 

Angwin’s argument is that ‘the modern era of dragnets marks a new type of surveillance: suspicionless, computerized, impersonal and vast in scope.’  She reports that in 2013 Krux Digital had identified 328 separate companies tracking visitors to the top fifty content websites.  She herself identified 212 data brokers operating in the US that consolidated and traded data about people, only 92 of which allowed opt-outs (65 of which required handing over additional data to secure the opt-out), and 58 companies that were in the mobile location tracking business, only 11 of which offered opt-outs.  She contends that through a lack of privacy people are being routinely hacked in a number of ways, including: always being locatable; finding it difficult to keep something secret; being impersonated; having devices hacked and used to spy on activity using the microphone, camera, and screenshots; being categorized, socially sorted and financially manipulated; and always being considered a suspect by state agencies and open to suspicionless searches.

While one of the back cover endorsements claims the book is an ‘antidote to Big Brother’s big chill’, I experienced the opposite.  It is an engaging and informative read, but an also somewhat depressing, revealing the US state to be entirely paranoid about its own citizens, routinely spying on them as if they are all criminal suspects (often in secret and without legal recourse; as the Snowden and Wikileaks revelations have also highlighted), and corporations have little respect for their customers treating them as simply another commodity to be monetized and sold, with just about all of their online behaviour, however mundane, being harvested, traded, and consolidated to create new derived data products, and used to nudge them towards purchases (with such actions authorized in the small print of complex legal documents that detail terms and conditions, or not at all as in the case of many apps).  In both cases, privacy has disappeared almost entirely, despite claims to the data being anonymized (it is incredibly easy to de-identify the data given the overlapping metadata). And Angwin’s analysis only concerned the internet and mobile phones; once one considers the plethora of smart home and smart city technologies, from mass digital CCTV, automated systems, to the internet of things, then the loss of privacy multiplies.

As Angwin’s own concerted attempts to reclaim privacy highlight, at present it is very difficult to regain any meaningful level of protection (and even if one does, the very fact that a person is seeking privacy flags them up as a potential risk and further potential surveillance).  Indeed, Angwin often struggled to make sense of different technical approaches, install various bits of software, and change her behaviour, despite being technically savvy and having access to leading experts in the field.  Certainly many of the approaches she tried would be beyond the average internet or smartphone user.  This leads her to conclude that the solution to the data dragnet cannot be purely technical, but rather requires a combination of better laws, oversight and financial penalties, a more transparent and ethical state (just as there is surveillance focused on citizens, there should be on the state itself to create mutual accountability; and it should use more ethical approaches such as programs like ThinThread that tries to respect and protect privacy, relying on encryption and court sanctioned search warrants), and a new market of platforms that see consumer privacy as a competitive advantage.  Here, I was somewhat surprised not to see privacy-by-design in the mix, or even discussed, nor data minimization or fair information principles. 

Ultimately, Angwin concludes that there is a need to find a middle way between ‘those who ask us to hand over all our data and “get over it,” and those who suggest that we throw our body on the tracks in from the speeding train that is our data economy ... We didn’t shut down the industrial economy to stop pollution.  We simply asked the polluters to be more accountable for their actions’ (p. 223-224).  Finding and implementing that middle way, however, given the vested interested involved will not be easy or straightforward.  Overall, an interesting read that highlights the extent of the present dragnet and the difficulty of avoiding it, but a little thin on how the data captured is being used and alternative privacy visions (which might have been gained by examining privacy, technology and legal debates).  Certainly worth a read if you want to increase your paranoia about how data about you is generated and traded.

Review of Secret Warriors: Key Scientists, Code-Breakers and Propagandists of the Great War by Taylor Downing (Little Brown, 2014)

The British Army and Navy were deeply conservative institutions going into the First World War.  Much of their technology and strategies were firmly rooted in the nineteenth century.  The political realm and universities were not much different, with science and engineering held in relative disdain.  Over the course of the war the thinking and tactics of the establishment were altered by a range of scientists, medics, journalists and writers who sought to aid Britain in its pursuit of victory. 

In Secret Warriors, Taylor Downing provides an expansive overview of how technologies and attitudes were reshaped, focusing on five main areas - aviation, code-breaking, engineering and chemistry, medicine, and propaganda - and their key actors.  While covering so much ground provides a broad overview, it inevitably sacrifices depth for breadth.  As such, while the book is often fascinating it is also quite sketchy at times.  And it is very much focused on Britain, largely ignoring developments elsewhere, except for cursory nods every now and then.  Further, the book could have done with a bit more wider contextualisation as to the institutional and cultural changes taking place in British society, and a conclusion that sought to more fully make sense of how the ‘secret warriors’ made a difference and their legacy.  Instead, the conclusion is quite piecemeal, focusing mostly on the careers of three scientists, and makes a tentative argument about how the changes wrought fed into the Second World War.  Overall, a useful book if you’re interested in a broad brush overview of scientific breakthroughs in the First World War.

Review of Werewolf by Matthew Pritchard (Salt, 2014)

August 1945 in the British occupation zone in Germany. Detective Inspector Silas Payne, a fluent German speaker, has been seconded from Scotland Yard to help train a new local police force, although his recruits are still interned.  When two bodies are found in the cellar of house requisitioned by the army Payne starts to investigate, quickly encountering resistance from the local British personnel who do not want him interfering in their affairs.  When a British soldier is killed, the commander and his deputy become convinced the murders are the work of still active Nazi resisters, so-called werewolves, seeking to undermine British authority.  Payne, however, believes it is the work of a single killer with a history of murder.  Whilst the army are chasing shadows, Payne employs his policing skills to try and track down the depraved killer who has used the war to hone his skills.

In Werewolf Matthew Pritchard joins together a story about the British occupation of the Western Germany and acts of profiteering, revenge, poor management, trying to place order onto a chaotic society and chase down war criminals, with a serial killer tale.  At one level, it’s pretty well executed, except towards the end where it becomes a little ragged and a few loose ends are left hanging, on another level the serial killer angle felt like a different kind of story interwoven into an end of war tale; a kind of sensational twist to an already murderous war.  There was, to my mind, plenty of interesting avenues to explore concerning the British occupation, Nazi war crimes and ratlines on their own.  Nonetheless, the story rattles along at fair clip and its engaging fare, there is some nice contextualisation with respect to the period, and Silas Payne is a strong lead character.  Overall, a quick-paced, tightly written piece of post-war crime fiction. 

Review of Stone Cold by C.J. Box (2014, Head of Zeus)

After an undercover agent is killed in Medicine Wheel County in a remote corner of Wyoming, the governor asks game warden Joe Pickett to investigate rumours about a local millionaire who might have a sideline in high profile disappearances.  The local game warden is none too happy to see Pickett, especially when he starts to ask a few too many questions and to rub some of the locals up the wrong way.  Whatever the situation is with the millionaire, it’s apparent that law enforcement in the county has slid-off the rails.  As the weather closes, there’s no way for Pickett to leave or reinforcements to arrive, which means surviving on his own or going the same way as his predecessor.  Meanwhile, at the other end of the state, his daughter might be sharing a university residence with a very disturbed young man. 

Stone Cold is an example of a law enforcement thriller; a kind of game warden ‘mission impossible.’  The format works by taking an ordinary family guy, putting him into an extraordinary situation, then letting the game of cat and mouse begin.  If you are prepared to suspend your disbelief a few times it works pretty well.  Pickett is an interesting enough character who rarely opts for the sensible course of action, or backs down, but instead goads the opposition and then battles through.  In this, the fourteenth book in the series, the opposition is a millionaire who is running a high-class hitman-for-hire operation from his back woods ranch, who is a local philanthropist but also controls the local law enforcement though not some of his employees.  There are a number of weak plot devices throughout, including the appearance of characters from previous books, and the thread involving Pickett’s daughter is an unnecessary distraction.  That said, there’s a colourful set of characters, there’s plenty of action and tension, and the story rattles along at a fair clip.  Overall, a tale that’s difficult to take too seriously, but is still entertaining fare. 

Review of The Few by Nadia Dalbuono (Scribe, 2014)

Detective Leone Scamarcio is the black sheep of his mafia family having joined the Rome police force and become a detective.  Not long after another argument, his boss confronts Scamarcio not to repair bridges but to ask him to secretly investigate on behalf of the prime minister the death of a rent boy who was photographed frolicking with a senior politician.  So far the scandal has been kept out of the media, but it’s only a matter time before the story breaks.  At first the case is baffling, with two other young men perishing and a fellow cop left fighting for his life, but then Scamarcio is pointed towards the island of Elba, where a young American girl has been abducted from a beach, traumatising her parents.  The local cops are not happy at having Scarmarcio interfering with their investigation, especially since he quickly identifies flaws in their approach, but he gradually makes progress.  The problem is that all the leads point to an even greater political and criminal scandal.

Set in the city of Rome and the island of Elba, Nadia Dalbuono’s debut novel mixes police procedural with political thriller. The central character is Leone Scamarcio, a loner who is an outsider within the police force given his family’s mafia connections, who also has a mild anger management problem being unafraid to let his boss know exactly what he thinks of a poor decision or action.  The plot involves Scamarcio covertly investigating a sexual scandal involving a senior politician that has become a murder case.  The start of the story felt a little clunky, both in terms of its plotting and telling, but becomes more assured as it progresses, especially when the tale moves to Elba.  Here, there is more of a sense of place and better framing and contextualisation.  However, on return to Rome it becomes a little fanciful again and the twist in the resolution felt weak and unlikely.  Nevertheless, Scamarcio is an appealing character and the story rattles along, hooking the reader in, and there is plenty of intrigue and tension.  Overall, an entertaining read that shows promise as the start of a new series.   

Review of The Dead Ground by Claire McGowan (Headline, 2014)

Forensic psychologist Paula Maguire thought that she’d left Northern Ireland for good.  But after helping solve a case in her native Ballyterrin she finds herself still attached to a specialist missing persons unit, living at home with her father, pregnant but unsure who the father is, and still wondering what happened to her mother who disappeared in 1993.  She has limited time to dwell on her own problems, however, as a new born baby has been snatched from the maternity ward of the local hospital and the doctor running a local women’s centre that provides advice to those considering travel to Britain for an abortion has disappeared.  As the team search for the pair, and battle with a local police station for control of the investigation, another baby goes missing, followed by a pregnant woman.  With the pressure mounting to solve the cases Paula becomes emotionally invested in the investigation and inevitably ends up doing more than producing a profile of the abductor.

The Dead Ground is the second book in the Paula Maguire series set in the small, fictional border town of Ballyterrin, which in my head at least is Newry.  The storytelling is much more assured than the previous outing and less melodramatic, though it has plenty of drama.  Along with a compelling main plotline, McGowan interweaves a handful of interesting subplots that add to, rather than detract from, the story.  I was hooked from the start, the book quickly becoming a page turner, given the succession of abductions and the rising tension.  In this sense the plot worked well, although as the story progressed the mystery element receded as the identity of the perpetrator and the inevitable ending became obvious though no less tense.  Paula Maguire is a strong, complex, conflicted and engaging lead character, and McGowan surrounds her with an interesting mix of characters with different backgrounds and viewpoints.  The result is a swirl of alliances and rivalries depicted through some nice interpersonal exchanges.  Indeed, I imagine most readers will want to read the next book in the series as much to keep up with Paula’s soap opera personal life as to see how she solves the next crime.  There’s also a strong sense of place and history, with the Troubles still casting a shadow over the Irish borderlands.  Overall, an engaging, page turner, with an interesting lead character and subplots.

Best reads of 2014

I read and reviewed 109 books in 2014 - in line with previous years but way more than the 80 I hoped to read.  Here are my ten favourite fiction books read in 2014 (not all of which were published during the year).  For full reviews of each book click on the links and to see all 109 reviews click here.

In The Morning I'll Be Gone by Adrian McKinty

Hits all the bases - strong voice and prose; very good sense of place and history that interweaves real events and people; nice characterisation and interplay between characters; and a well worked plot that entwines two compelling stories to great effect.  At one level the tale is a straightforward police procedural thriller; the twist is that McKinty inserts a cold case locked room mystery into the heart of the novel.  Both cases are very well told and enfolded, leading to a clever and interesting climax. 

Visitation Street by Ivy Pochoda

A layered tale that has a great sense of place and social depth, dropping the reader into the world of Red Hook and its inhabitants, with keen observations regarding race, class, family, and urban life.  The characters are very nicely portrayed and their interactions and dialogue realistic.  The plot has a nice cadence, the prose is evocative, and the telling has a strong emotional register, especially a sense of foreboding, without ever slipping into melodrama or psychological suspense. 

Pest Control by Bill Fitzhugh

A screwball noir caper set in New York that plays off a confusion of two forms of extermination -- the killing of insect infestations and contract killing by hitman -- with the hapless hero of the story working as the former but being confused with the latter.  What I liked so much about the story is its warm, upbeat slant despite all the mayhem and madness taking place.  Fitzhugh also peppers the text with entomological detail about the various bugs that appear.  The plot is nicely constructed and well paced, with a succession of confusions, setups, twists and turns that keep the pages turning. 

Villain by Shuichi Yoshida
 
A thoughtful and thought-provoking read that could have easily been titled ‘Victim’, since the two roles are thoroughly entwined in Yoshida’s absorbing tale of the murder of a young insurance sales agent.  The great strength of the story is its telling, characterisation, contextualisation, atmosphere and plotting.  Yoshida’s narrative has an understated style, avoiding any melodrama, and yet captures the subtleties of emotion and human relations.  He does a particularly nice job of detailing the relationships between friends and family members and their petty jealousies, awkward moments, lonely reflections, secret fantasies and encounters.  

Long Way Home by Eva Dolan

The antithesis of the classic English cozy.  Rather than the amateur detective solving a dastardly crime in some middle/upper-class idyll, Dolan presents the rotten underbelly of modern Britain -- everyday racism, anti-social behaviour, poverty, and exploitation -- investigated by a police force under resource constraints and media pressure, who are mistrusted and little respected.  The real strength of the book is the plot, which is a cleverly worked police procedural with a couple of nice twists and turns, and the contextualisation and gritty social realism. 

Grind Joint by Dana King

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.  King sticks firmly to social realism rather than veering off into a thriller with a capital T, with an undertow of compassion running throughout the narrative. 

The Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler

The fourth book in the Philip Marlowe series.  The strength of the book is the plot and Chandler’s storytelling.  The story starts as a missing wife case, quickly becoming a two missing wives case, then a murder investigation.  It takes all of Marlowe's guile and abrasiveness to solve the puzzle, and the denouement is very satisfying as Chandler reveals a perfectly logical, but well camouflaged, twist.  Overall, a superior PI tale from one of the genre’s masters.

The Stranger You Know by Jane Casey

The fourth book in the DC Maeve Kerrigan series set in London sees 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 tale has plenty of intrigue, tension, twists and turns, feisty interchanges, and engaging subplots.  

Cross of Iron by Willi Heinrich

Considered one of the classic combat novels about the Eastern Front in World War Two, rather than glorifying the campaign, Heinrich instead delivers gritty social realism -- the daily grind of staying alive, everyday encounters with wounds and death, petty and class politics and personal rivalries, the formation of bonds between men who would never otherwise associate with one another, and the brutality of close quarter fighting.  The result is a compelling, sometimes harrowing, read, with a strong storyline and characterisation.

Keep Away From Those Ferraris by Pat Fitzpatrick

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.  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.

Review of The Zig Zag Girl by Elly Griffiths (Quercus, 2014)

When two thirds of a body are discovered in left luggage at Brighton station in the summer of 1950, DI Edgar Stephens is assigned to the case.  It appears that the woman was the victim of the Zig Zag Girl trick, whereby a magicians appears to slice a woman in three.  Shortly after the mid-section is sent directly to Edgar.  During the Second World War he had been a member of the Magic Men, a group of magicians tasked with inventing ways to deceive the enemy through illusions, until they were disbanded after a tragic accident.  Edgar turns to his friend, Max Mephisto, who was also a member of the group and is still on the variety circuit.  Max is reluctant to get involved until it is discovered that the dead girl is his former assistant.  Then another former member of the Magic Men is found dead, also staged to look like a magic trick gone wrong.  Aware that they and their former colleagues are under threat Edgar and Max try to unravel the identity of the killer before it’s too late.

I loved the title, cover and premise for The Zig Zag Girl, but was disappointed by the story itself.  I’ve liked Elly Griffiths ‘Ruth Galloway’ series and given my taste for fiction set in the 1930s-1950s, interest in police procedurals and tales relating to the Second World War, I had high hopes for the book.  However, the police procedural elements were unrealistic and the war-time aspects full of inaccuracies and fanciful ideas.  For example, the case concerns a high profile set of murders, yet the only people actively investigating them are a bumbling cop and his magician friend rather than a sizable investigative team.  Moreover, the police response to the threats is minimal, there are no meetings with media, and there is little senior management involvement.  A junior WAAF officer who pushes aircraft round a board in a control room is somehow promoted to head up a whole secret service section.  In Inverness the Magic Men build an aircraft carrier (called a battleship): somehow they can work on it to build it, but it is also so flimsy that a man can’t stand on it to send up a flare so they have to put a woman on it do that job (and she’s lowered on from an aircraft at a time when helicopters were extremely rare).  She shoots the flare, it lands on the very long ship (a few hundred feet) and it catches fire and somehow she can’t get off before it burns out as she’s obviously incapable of jumping into the sea.  The timeline of the war is foreshortened: a few months after the Norway campaign (1940) Edgar’s recruited into the secret service and sent to Inverness (p. 126); after two years there the company is disbanded and he works at a desk job for a couple of months waiting for the war to end (p. 271) -- somehow 3 years have disappeared.  I could go on.  Indeed, the plot in general relied on awkward plot devices and unlikely coincidences and the denouement was very weak.  Further, the narrative had minor continuity errors (e.g., on page 44 Edgar watches Charis die, on page 152 he is told two days later she is dead because he wasn’t there).  I don’t mind some fanciful details or logical inconsistencies in a story, but in this case there were just too many and the result was that I simply did not buy into the tale.  Overall, whilst the premise is interesting, the execution and attention to detail is not and my feeling is the book lacked research and it really needed the attention of a critical editor with domain knowledge of policing and the Second World War to remove/amend the most fanciful bits. 

Review of The Formula: How Algorithms Solve all our Problems ... and Create More by Luke Dormehl (WH Allen, 2014)

The Formula provides an overarching account of how algorithms are increasingly being used to mediate, augment and regulate everyday life.  There’s much to like about the book -- it’s an engaging read, full of interesting examples, there’s an attempt to go beyond the hyperbole of many popular books about technology and society, and it draws on the ideas of a range of critical theorists (including Baudrillard, Deleuze, Marx, Virilio, Foucault, Descartes, Sennett, Turkle, etc).  It’s clear that the discussion is based on a number of interviews with algorithm developers and academics.  However, there are also some notable gaps in the analysis and the analysis itself generally lacks depth.  There is no detailed discussion about the nature of algorithms or its formulation into pseudo-code or code, or even a brief potted history of the development of algorithms.  There is a very short discussion concerning the negative side of algorithms and how they are used to socially sort, underpin anticipatory governance, regulate and control, which really needed to be expanded.  The analysis points to various issues and suggests some interesting lines of enquiry but then skims over them, with one or two points from the varied selection of theorists being used to illustrate an idea but often in quite a superficial way.  Given the book is designed to be a popular science text aimed at a lay readership getting the balance between accessibility, depth and critical reflection is tricky.  Dormehl does a better job of balancing the two than some others I’ve read recently, but I would have still have preferred deeper analysis, especially on the nature of algorithms and the effects and consequences of algorithmic governance and automation.

Review of by Unravelling Oliver by Liz Nugent (Penguin, 2014)

Oliver Ryan has snapped.  Married for over thirty years he hits his wife for the first time.  A couple of hours later he batters her into a coma.  Oliver has always had a cold, enigmatic side to him, but he also has charm and charisma.  Combined they have enabled him to become a very successful author whose books have been turned into plays and movies, and to carry-on a series of affairs.  Since early childhood he has also had dark secrets that he has carefully protected, sometimes with deadly consequences.  Now, as Alice lies in a hospital bed, Oliver’s world is unravelling as some of his various secrets are revealed.

Unravelling Oliver recently won the Irish Crime Novel of the year award.  It could have easily won the literary novel award given its prose and style.  Unlike most crime novels, where the central driver is usually a linear plot told from a single perspective and enhanced by strong characters, Unravelling Oliver is an in-depth character study told from multiple perspectives with a non-linear narrative.  The unravelling of the title refers to both Oliver’s snapping and his fall from grace and to revealing the long run up to it that stretches back over his entire life.  In this sense it is very much a form of psychological drama (rather than thriller, though it is full of gripping moments).  The narrative is carefully constructed, each chapter told in the first person by Oliver or by those closest to him, layering in new elements to the story.  And whilst it is clear what is coming next in some instances, their reveal is nonetheless shocking.  I thought the tale was interesting whilst I was reading it, and though I enjoyed the prose and narrative I was not fully captivated, however in the subsequent couple of days it’s been rattling around in my head, kind of maturing after the fact.  Overall, a thoughtful, literary piece of crime fiction, and definitely worth a read for those tiring of the genre’s usual conventions.

Review of Southsiders by Nigel Bird (Blasted Heath, 2014)

Jesse Spalding dreads going home from school.  He knows he’s walking in a battle zone as his parents fight.  After a particularly aggressive clash Jesse heads home late to find the family apartment in Edinburgh’s Southside empty.  His father has decided to call it quits and has headed to Belfast via hospital to nurse his wounds.  His alcoholic and violent mother has also fled promising to never return.  Already known to social services, Jesse is determined not to end up in care and contrive a pretence until one or both parents return.  Other than fooling the authorities, he knows the main issue is sourcing money.  The rent is due soon and the only solution seems to be to pawn part of his father’s rare record collection -- something Jesse is loathe to do given he’s as much a fan of 1950s and 60s R&B as his dad.  But he needs the money now and he’ll worry about getting them back later.

There’s much to like about Nigel Bird’s Southsiders.  It has a great set-up -- a kid hooked on 50s R&B abandoned by both parents and trying to survive on his own; a nicely drawn set of characters; and engaging prose that manages to be tough and warm-hearted.  I was thoroughly engaged with and entertained by the story and then it just stopped.  If Southsiders is part of a series then I can see the logic of drawing the first instalment to a close.  The issue for me was the point of closure was too early, with only one element closed, admittedly a key one, but all the others left open.  In other words, I didn’t feel we’d got to the end of Act One and moreover I really wanted Act Two there and then as I needed to know how the elements of the first act got resolved - basically Southsiders is a novella that, in my view, would have been more satisfying as a full novel.  Overall, then, a well told but truncated tale.

Review of The Hot Country by Robert Olen Butler (No Exit Press, 2014)

The son of a famous stage actress, Christopher Marlowe Cobb, or ‘Kit’ to his friends, is a war correspondent for the Chicago Post-Express.  After stints reporting from the Balkans and other hot spots he finds himself in Mexico in the spring of 1914.  A civil war is unfolding and the arrest of a handful of American sailors by the Mexican authorities has led to the US seizing the port of Vera Cruz.  The US marines arrive at the same time as a shipment of armaments on a German ship.  The occupation is not entirely peaceful, with a few skirmishes with local forces and a sniper winging collaborators and a marine.  With the help of a young pickpocket Cobb seeks to identify the sniper and the identity and intentions of a man sneaked into the port from the German ship.  He has a nose for a good story and senses he could be onto a major scoop, though the adventure to claim it might cost him his life. 

Robert Olen Butler is a Pulitzer winning literary writer who in The Hot Country turns his talents to historical crime fiction.  The result, for me at least, is a story that has the prose, pace and reflective aspects of literary fiction, but lacks the tightness, edge and intrigue of crime fiction.  The book is billed as a thriller, but the pace is for the most part languid and the tale drawn out with few tension points, especially in the first half where there are some incidents but they lack edge and verve.  Added to this, the historical context is underdeveloped.  I know very little about Mexican history or its relations with the US and having read the story I still know little beyond the two month, narrowly presented slice of the story.  Somewhat ironically given that the lead character is a journalist, the reader is provided with next to no wider context.  The story did not need to be an in-depth history lesson, but it did need to provide a reasonable amount of historical orientation.  Taken together, the pace, lack of context and tension, left me adrift rather than being captivated.  Once the tale left Vera Cruz it picked up pace a little and became more adventurous, with Cobb shifting from reporting history to actively intervening and creating it by adopting the swashbuckling role of an undercover, frontline war correspondent.  It was a shame then that the qualities of the second half of the story did not run throughout.  On the plus side, Cobb is an engaging lead character, I really enjoyed the subplot of his correspondence with his wayward mother, and there is enough potential to suggest an interesting series.  Indeed, despite being a little lukewarm to this outing, I would be interested in reading about Cobb’s next adventure.

Review of Bite Harder by Anonymous-9 (Blasted Heath, 2014)

Dean Drayhart is an unlikely candidate for death row.  A paraplegic after a hit and run incident that killed his daughter, Dean turned vigilante, tracking down hit and run drivers and administered lethal justice via the vicious teeth of his helper monkey, Sid.  One of those he dispensed with before being taken into police custody was the son of a Mexican Mafia boss.  Orella Malalinda wants Dean sprung from jail, and Sid and his call-girl girlfriend, Cinda, ensnared.  Then she wants revenge.  And what Orella wants, she is used to getting.

Bite Harder starts pretty much where Hard Bite ended and I think it’s fair to say that the books should be read in sequence.  If you need to catch-up, this is no bad thing as Hard Bite is excellent - original, witty, smart, dark, and hard with a soft-centre (see my review).  Bite Harder has the same traits, though the balance of the plot is more action orientated, with a little less reflection, and told from multiple perspectives as the various characters seek or flee each other, eventually converging on an epic finale.  The pace is high throughout, there’s plenty of twists and turns in the plot, and the narrative is laced with black comedy.  I would have liked the cop thread to be filled out a little, spent a bit more time with the folks in the old people’s home, and also got a little more back story with regards to a couple of characters, but these are minor quibbles.  Bite Harder is a lot of hard hitting fun and hopefully Dean, Sid and Cinda will reunite for a new adventure shortly.

Review of Dataclysm: Who We Are (when we think no one’s looking) by Christian Rudder (Fourth Estate, 2014)

The stated aim of Dataclysm is to introduce lay readers to the era of big data, the possibilities of such data, and the types of analysis used to make sense of them.  The problems with the book start with the title and subtitle, neither of which, I think, make much sense.  Dataclysm, Rudder explains, is a play on cataclysm: the wiping away of one era to be replaced by a new one.  However, big data is set to complement small data, not wipe them away as small data are generated to answer specific questions rather than being a by-product that is then repurposed, and most big data are held by private corporations or government and are not readily open to researchers.  All of the data that Rudder analyzes is from social media; they are data produced precisely because we think someone is looking (for a date, for conversation, for information, to provoke a reaction, etc).  Uploading information to the internet is largely a process of the presentation of the self, as Goffman’s famous theory would frame the activity.  Even if other people cannot see the answers to direct questions, as when filling in questions on a dating site, the answers shape the user profile and the process of matching -- something that users are aware of, consider and present to.

The book then proceeds by discussing social media data and what they might reveal about human behaviour and society.  Crucially, however, there is no systematic discussion of big data per se, its forms and characteristics, no discussion of data analytics, and only a cursory discussion of the many ethical, social and political implications of such data.  There is no discussion of statistics, or statistical tests performed on the data presented, nor data mining, data analytics, machine learning, pattern recognition, profiling, prediction, etc.  The irony here is that Rudder’s company – OkCupid – employs these techniques to be able to process and match potential partners, yet he never explains how this is achieved. 

Instead, the entire analysis is rooted in the empiricist form of data science, rather than data-driven science, and never proceeds beyond description.  As such, the analysis of gender and race he presents are based on a ‘letting the data speak for themself’ approach and constitutes armchair interpretation.  He barely engages with the vast academic literature on quantitative analysis of race and gender that has taken place for several decades using large data sets such as the census or public administration data.  Rudder has access to an enormous set of very interesting data that could be used to conduct some fascinating sociological and psychological analysis.  Instead what we get are a series of descriptive statistics and banal revelations, most of which are already well established. 

The result is a book that hints at the potential of big data and data science but undersells it substantially, and it under-estimates in my view the readership level of its potential audience by never progressing beyond mathematics and data visualisations used in junior school.  In contrast, books such as The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver provide a much wider and deeper discussion.  This is a shame as Rudder is an engaging writer and he has privileged access to an extremely rich social data that could be used to conduct some wonderful and sophisticated social science research.  Such rich research and its policy implications are barely hinted at.

Review of The Spring of Kasper Meier by Ben Fergusson (Little, Brown, 2014)

Kasper Meier has survived the war and now shares a small apartment with his elderly father in the ruined city of Berlin.  The economy is shattered, people struggling to get by on meagre rations, supplemented with scraps traded for on the black market with other locals and the occupying forces.  Meier spends his days horse-trading, swapping household goods and information for food and tobacco, working his various networks.  One day a young woman, Eva Hirsch, shows up at his apartment wanting Meier to find the whereabouts of a British pilot.  When Meier refuses, she resorts to blackmail.  Meier has his own way of dealing with blackmailers but as he tries to short-circuit Eva’s scheme he comes to realise that he’s caught up in something more sinister, as is Eva -- allied soldiers are being murdered on a regular basis.  Feeling sympathy for Eva and wanting to extract himself from the threats and obligations being placed on him by Frau Beckmann, Eva’s landlady and rubble clearing leader, and her feral twin children, Meier tries to work out how to save himself, Eva and his father.

The strength of The Spring of Kasper Meier is the post-war desolate atmosphere of Berlin, the sense of place, and the details concerning how ordinary people seek to survive amongst the rubble on meagre rations.  Kasper Meier is interesting character, complex, brusque, tough, yet compassionate, who has long lived a secret life, managing to survive in Nazi Germany.  Eva is more open and friendly, a little naive, but with an edge hardened survivor mentality.  Their somewhat awkward relationship is nicely portrayed.  The plot, centring round find a British pilot and supposed revenge killings is an interesting idea, but its telling is not always convincing and often a little drawn out.  The plot hinges on a threat of blackmail that, for me at least, didn’t seem strong enough and the fear exerted by two omnipresent twelve year old twins that did not feel credible, regardless of how feral they’re portrayed.  And for someone who has managed to survive, specialises in sourcing information and trading on the black market, and possesses a gun and physical strength, Meier doesn’t always act in line with personality and circumstance.  The result was the story felt a little uneven and contrived at times.  Overall then, an engaging and atmospheric, but sometimes patchy, story of survival and struggle in the ruins of Berlin.