Review of The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths by Harry Bingham (Orion, 2015)

Fiona Griffiths did not join CID to investigate minor payroll frauds. She wants something more juicy, like a murder, or possibly a manslaughter. She’d like to pass the task on, but then she discovers the body of a woman starved to death. Shortly after, the man who set up the fraud is found murdered. But the fraud is still being committed and it’s more extensive and lucrative than initially thought. Fiona wants justice for the starved woman and she’s prepared to go undercover to gain vital evidence. After being trained in the basics of payroll accountancy and completing the toughest course in Britain’s police force, she starts work for an insurance company, taking the persona of a victim of domestic abuse seeking to get her life back on track. The criminal gang are looking for a vulnerable victim and Fiona is perfect. But as she’s drawn into their world she realises that they are more organized and ruthless than she’d anticipated. And moreover, the more she performs as her new persona, the more her identity fractures. It’s not just a case of whether she’ll survive but, if she does, which of her personas survives with her.

The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths is the third book in the series about a young police officer who suffers from Cotard’s Syndrome. While highly competent and driven, Fiona lives almost outside herself and has trouble identifying emotions or how people expect her to behaviour, constantly second-guessing what she should do or say in any situation. This gives her a vulnerability, yet at the same time she pushes boundaries and is not easily managed. She’s a wonderful literary creation, an engaging, complex, multidimensional, and often surprising character. In this outing, she trains to go undercover and then penetrates a sophisticated, careful and ruthless criminal gang who are perpetrating an enormous accounting fraud against several companies. The undercover work is challenging and places her fragile identity under pressure. The plotting is excellent, with Bingham spinning a multi-layered tale that also twists and turns and creates plenty of tension. The hook is a crime that is relatively unusual in crime fiction and is ingenious in its conception and implementation. The police procedural elements are very nicely done – rather than the formulaic boss and sidekick, Bingham provides the full panoply of units, forces, personalities, roles, procedures, and politics that operate during a major investigation. The undercover training and deployment instinctively feels realistic. Indeed, just about the whole book feels steeped in realism, though Fiona’s family life, with her father formerly being a major crime lord, has the feel of a plot device, and the denouement is also somewhat souped-up to be a dramatic finale. Nonetheless, this is a superb read and I’ve a keen sense of anticipation for reading the next instalment.

Review of The Sellout by Paul Beatty (Oneworld, 2015)

The Sellout is the story of how the unnamed narrator – called ‘The Sellout’ by one character, and ‘Bonbon’ by another – becomes infamous through his efforts to place Dickens, a town in South Central Los Angeles, back onto the map and to challenge ideas of race and racism within the black community. Bought up and home-schooled on a small two acre urban farm by his single father, a reasonably well-known psychology/sociology professor, The Sellout has a deep appreciation of the structural violence committed against and by the black community. Drawing on this knowledge his method is to use situationalist-like tactics to unsettle and disrupt deep-rooted thinking and social relations, including painting the old city boundary back onto the landscape, altering road signs, making a city block appear as if an exclusive white school is about to be built there, placing signs on buses to create white-only areas, and generally re-segregating the community, not only between white and black, but also the Mexicans, Asians, etc. Aiding him in the task is Hominy Jenkins, the last surviving Little Rascal, a group of black kids who starred in a dozens of short movies from the 1930s-50s playing racist stereotypes, who self-declares himself the narrator’s slave. While his work seems to be having a positive effect on those living in Dickens, through some strange reverse-psychology, his actions land him in hot water and a case that makes its way to the Supreme Court.

I loved The Sellout. It’s smart, sassy, outrageous, knowledgeable, and laugh-out loud funny. It is highly entertaining tale, with a great set of characters and an engaging storyline, yet also makes one reflect and think on a whole bunch of social issues and the history of race relations and places. It might well be the best recent book on race and racism in contemporary United States and I would love to see it taught on the school curriculum. At the same time I’m grateful I don’t belong to a book group as I suspect we’d need a few months to discuss everything going on in the narrative rather than a couple of hours. It’s easy to understand why it has won a number of major awards. Definitely worth reading, and I plan to read Paul Beatty’s other books.

Review of Silence by Anthony Quinn (Head of Zeus, 2015)

Spooked at a police checkpoint, Father Aloysius Walsh speeds away to his death. For the past few years he had been collecting evidence of collusion between serving police officers and loyalist paramilitaries, plotting a murder triangle in Armagh in the late 1970s. Inspector Celcius Daly arrives at the scene, along with Special Branch, and starts to investigate despite their warnings to steer clear. At a hotel a few miles away a former British agent who served at the heart of the IRA waits for Father Walsh, but is instead visited by a journalist. The agent, journalist and Daly all want the murders and the involvement of the police exposed, but for different reasons. For Daly the reason is personal – his mother’s name is written on Walsh’s murder map. His colleagues want Daly to drop his investigation and the agent silenced. Daly, however, needs to know the truth of his mother’s death even if that means revealing dirty police secrets of the past.

Silence is the third book in the Inspector Celcius Daly series set in the borderlands of Northern Ireland. Daly is an introverted and stubborn loner cop who lives in a run-down cottage near to Lough Neagh. In this outing he’s investigating the death of a Catholic priest who had been investigating the death of Daly’s mother, along with others, in 1979. Daly had been told his mother was caught in the crossfire of a skirmish between the police force and Republican terrorists. Father Walsh’s research shows she was killed in cold blood by Loyalist paramilitaries colluding with serving police officers. The police force wants to keep the collusion under wraps to protect its reputation and the officers involved. Daly is only interested in the truth. With his usual single-mindedness he starts to gather evidence to supplement that collated by Father Walsh. Unlike much crime fiction that is driven primarily by the plot and the interactions between a fairly large cast of characters, Silence is an in-depth character study of a man struggling with himself and his past, and the landscape and history of the Irish borderlands. Quinn dwells on Daly’s inner turmoil, the atmosphere and sense of place, and the secrets of a dirty war. The result is a highly reflexive, literary crime tale that juxtaposes the present fragile peace with the need for truth and reconciliation.  The prose is often delicious, there’s some nice intertextuality with Stuart Neville’s work, and a clever knowing nod to the storytelling with a passage in which a journalist details how she’s going to tell the story of the 1979 murders through a fiction piece starring Daly (Quinn is a journalist).  Where the story suffers a little bit is the ending which seemed a little truncated and the denouement lacked conviction and resolution. In addition, there was one element that did not ring true for me and bumped me out of the story. Nonetheless, an interesting piece of introspective crime fiction.

Review of Devastation Road by Jason Hewitt (Scribner, 2015)

A man wakes in a field. He is unsure who he is, where he is, or how he got there. Gradually he gathers himself and starts to explore. In a nearby river bodies are floating past. At a farmhouse a young man appears to be burying two people. He starts a journey, heading to where he thinks home might be.  He is joined by the young man, Janek, who reveals they are in Czechoslovakia. The war is on-going, but the Russians are not far away and the roads are full of refugees. Using a fragment of map, Owen, heads into Silesia with a sense he is searching for something, though he’s not sure what. Janek is hunting for his brother, Petr. Unable to retain memories for long Owen jots down notes to refresh his knowledge. Gradually he starts to remember fragments of his life in England, his brother, a woman, and joining the RAF. On their journey Owen and Janek meet Irena, a troubled young Polish woman who is trying to give away her unnamed baby. Together the three of them plus the baby head towards Leipzig en route to England, the past of each gradually catching up with them. And the more they progress into the heart of Germany the more devastating the journey becomes.

Set in the last days of the Second World War, Devastation Road charts Owen’s journey from a field in Czechoslovakia back to England. As told by Hewitt it’s both a physical and metaphorical journey – a slog across Germany and one of self-discovery. With amnesia and disorientated, Owen sets off on foot accompanied by a young man, Janek who is seeking his brother. Initially avoiding roads, they soon join the endless stream of refugees and are joined by Irena and her baby, who is seeking the man who raped her to pass on the child. Together they journey to an abandoned prisoner of war camp, then onto the rubble of Leipzig, ending up in concentration camp shortly after liberation. Along the journey Owen starts to remember fragments of his life and how he ended up on the continent. Janek and Irena have their own secrets that are also gradually revealed. The strength of the story is the hook of the journey and the evolving dynamic between Owen, Janek and Irena and the gradual piecing together of each of their lives. The tale seemed to sag and lose direction a little in the middle section, and I never quite connected with the lead characters, but Hewitt brings the story to a poignant denouement. The result is a thoughtful tale that deals with themes of memory, belonging, regret, and redemption.

Review of Even Dogs in the Wild by Ian Rankin (2015, Orion)

A senior lawyer has been murdered.  It’s appears to be a robbery gone wrong until a threatening note is found.  Then a shot is taken at Big Ger Cafferty, an Edinburgh crime boss who has received an identical note.  DI Siobhan Clarke is investigating both cases, but Cafferty will only deal with Rebus and the old cop is bought out of retirement as a ‘consultant’.  It doesn’t take Rebus long to pick up the scent of an old crime being revenged.  Cafferty has other worries as well.  A notorious Glasgow criminal and his gang are making waves in the city and Daryl Christie, his one-time lieutenant, is playing games.  DI Malcolm Fox has been assigned local liaison to a surveillance team from Glasgow, but he’s an unwanted team member and his fondness for procedure soon causes friction.  With tensions rising, Rebus, Clarke and Fox work to stop dog eating dog.

Even Dogs in the Wild is the twentieth book in the Rebus series.  One problem with long-running series is maintaining the freshness of the plots and interest in the characters.  Rankin suffers neither problem.  In this outing the plot consists of two separate investigations – an incursion into Edinburgh by a Glasgow-based gang and the deaths of a lawyer, a lottery winner and a potshot at crime boss, Big Ger Cafferty.  What joins the two plot lines are the involvement of principle characters of DI Clarke, DI Fox, recently retired Rebus, and Cafferty, and good old fashioned detective work.  Rankin keeps the parallel stories both ticking along at a clip and nicely balances the investigations with the evolving relationships between the characters.  The result is an entertaining and enjoyable police procedural that taps into current events and the exposure of past ones.  The only bit that felt a little underdeveloped was the end, which seemed to tail off and left untold the aftermath and fallout of the cases.  Nonetheless, another strong addition to the series.

Review of Pleasantville by Attica Locke (2015, Serpent’s Tail)

1996, Houston.  Former police of chief Axel Hathorne is running to become the first black mayor of the city.  Pleasantville, a planned neighbourhood built in the 1950s, is a key battleground district.  It’s Hathorne territory, with Axel’s father being a founder and key community leader.  When a young woman disappears while campaign volunteering it sets the community on edge, especially as two other women were sexually assaulted and murdered in previous years.  Then Axel’s son is first accused of being complicit in her disappearance, then when her body is found, murder.  Given the thin complicit evidence and Axel’s main rival is the attorney general, whose office is prosecuting the case, it appears that some very dirty politics is at play.  Pleasantville native, activist and environmental lawyer, Jay Porter, is hired to represent Axel’s son, despite having little criminal trial experience. Porter has his own problems given the death of his wife a year ago, a break-in at his office, and someone trying to steal his clients.  But he’s tenacious and he detests injustice.  However, there are powerful forces at work that have a larger agenda and are prepared to play hardball.

Pleasantville is a political and legal thriller set in Houston in 1996.  As well as telling a complex tale of murder and political and community skulduggery, Locke also provides insightful social commentary on communities in transition, election campaigning, environmental racism and long-term legal battles.  The wider context is the Clinton years and the Republican long-term strategy for a run on the White House in 2000. The story has many interlocking moving parts that all swirl around the Hathorne family and Jay Porter.  The Hathorne’s helped found Pleasantville, a planned black community, and Axel is running to be the city’s first black mayor.  Porter is a single father, activist and environmental lawyer who has been seeking damages for local residents from contamination.  While there are a number of subplots, the hook of the story is the disappearance and murder of a young female campaign volunteer and how her death is used politically and personally.  Given the various threads, the number of characters and the social and political commentary it’s an ambitious tale.  Overall, it mostly delivers on this ambition.  At the start there is a lot of moving pieces into place and introducing characters and threads that dulls the pace and demands concentration, but as the story progresses the intrigue, tension and pace increases, and Locke makes some interesting observations about racial and environmental issues and local/national US politics.

Review of The Defenceless by Kati Hiekkapelto (Orenda Books, 2015)

Sammy, a Christian Pakistani refugee and drug addict, has been denied asylum in Finland.  Rather than be deported he goes on the run, sleeping rough and searching for his next fix.  Unwittingly, he is visiting a drug dealer when an elderly neighbour complaining about loud music is accidentally killed.  To cover their tracks the pair dump the body on an icy road where a distracted Hungarian au pair runs over the corpse.  Anna Fekete, herself a refugee from the former Yugoslavia and now a police officer, is part of the team investigating the old man’s death, which is initially assumed to be a case of dangerous driving.  Fekete already feels somewhat out of place in her adopted country, but the case heightens those sentiments.  Meanwhile a patch of blood-stained snow has been found in some woods and two drug gangs, one consisting of disaffected immigrants, are fighting for control of supplying the city.  Both Fekete and her racist, anti-immigrant colleague, Esko, have their hands full dealing with cases strongly linked to immigration.

The Defenseless, the second book in the Anna Fekete series, is set in a northern Finnish city at the tail end of winter.  The tale is very much a part of the Scandinavian tradition of social realist crime fiction, focusing on the themes of immigration, identity, dislocation and family, and on drug gangs and rivalries, and their interrelationship.  The story follows three intertwined trajectories: Sammy, a Pakistani Christian and drug addict who fled his home country in fear and does not want to be sent back to certain death; Fekete, an immigrant from Yugoslavia with Hungarian roots who is now a police officer but is somewhat listless and homesick; and Esko, a racist police officer who is struggling with his health.  The plot centres on the death of an elderly man and his missing neighbour, and a battle between rival drug gangs that Sammy has stumbled into and Fekete and Esko are investigating.  Hiekkapelto nicely explores the core themes and the lives of immigrants in Finland.  The plot is engaging and there is an interesting twist in its tail, though the ending seemed to fizzle out somewhat, with weak resolutions to a couple of strands.  Nonetheless, a nicely told socially realist police procedural.

Review of My Kind of Justice by Col Bury (Caffeine Nights, 2015)

Though he grew up in a rough part of Manchester and has a shady past as a gang member, Jack Striker has managed to work his way up the police ranks to Detective Inspector.  Recently appointed to Greater Manchester’s Major Incident Team his first case seems like a gangland slaying.  Despite his doubts, DCI Maria Cunningham wants to forge ahead on a particular line of inquiry.  A few hours later another youth is killed.  While Cunningham tries to keep the cases separate, and enlists the help of another DI and her boss to try and marginalise Striker, he can see clear links and starts to investigate the cases as if they are related.  Soon it is apparent that Striker is right and there is a vigilante killer at work, murdering gang members who preyed on the local community.  One of the victims is Striker’s nephew and when Cunningham succeeds in pushing him from the investigation, Striker runs his own unofficial op along with a couple of trustworthy colleagues.  However, the ‘Hoodie Hunter’, as the press have dubbed him, is a dangerous foe and it seems that Striker has met his match.

My Kind of Justice is a gritty police procedural set in South Manchester.  The strengths of the story are the sense of place, characterisation and plot.  Col Bury clearly knows the area well and he paints a vivid social picture of a place blighted by poverty, drugs, and criminal gangs.  His central character, DI Jack Striker has managed to climb his way out these ills through a career in the police, though the cost has been his marriage and his relationship to his two kids.  He still has family and old friends living locally, however, and they hold secrets he’d like kept hidden as he plays out his version of a redemption man.  While he has close colleagues at work, he also has enemies, and Bury does a nice job of portraying work-based rivalries and office banter.  The plot centres on the investigation into a spate of murders of local gang members by a vigilante who is steadily picking them off.  The vigilante serial killer angle gives the story tension and an inherent pace.  It is fair to say, however, that once the tale moves out of the purely procedural format as Striker is removed from the official investigation it drifts towards a thriller and starts to become a little bit telegraphed and reliant on plot devices.  Moreover, the telling was a little stilted and overly descriptive at times, though this only marginally detracted from the enjoyment of the story. Overall, a decent start to what I suspect is the first in a series.

Review of A Killing Winter by Tom Callaghan (Quercus, 2015)

In the depths of a freezing winter in Kyrgyzstan a young woman is found lying in the snow, sliced open to reveal a foetus.  Inspector Akyl Borubaev of Bishkek Murder Squad is appalled at the crime, which takes a political turn when the woman is identified as the daughter of the Minister for State Security, a powerful and lethal man.  Borubaev is tasked with finding the woman’s killer quickly and discretely and canons into the Kyrgyz underground seeking answers.  Using threats and violence it’s hardly subtle policing, but he picks up a trail and discovers that the woman is not the only victim and that others are also searching for the killer.  Talking to Borubaev, however, is a costly business, his witnesses also becoming victims. Even if he succeeds in finding the killer, he might not have a case, and there’s a good chance he won’t survive either.

It would not surprise me in the slightest if A Killing Winter has been banned by the Kyrgyzstan tourist board as it paints a dismal picture of the country – high-levels of state corruption, strong criminal gangs and a crime-ridden society, crippling poverty, wide scale drug and alcohol abuse, and terrible, freezing weather.  From a crime fiction perspective, it’s certainly an interesting setting, however, especially with a protagonist who believes in law, order and justice, and utilising intimidation and violence to achieve those ends.  Inspector Akyl Borubaev of Bishkek Murder Squad is a complex character with a moral compass pointing in roughly the right direction, though he turns a blind eye to the worst excesses of his colleagues and to the criminal elements of his family.  Recently widowed, his sense of self-preservation is also a little skewed.  It needs to be to solve a series of brutal murders – this is not a book for the squeamish or faint-hearted – and take on the killer.  Right from the start Callaghan employs vivid violence and then counterpoints it with pathos in a series of quickly moving switchbacks to create an engaging police procedural thriller.  The plotting is nicely done, with the investigation constantly shifting gears and direction as Borubaev chases shadows and motive, leading to a nice denouement.  Beyond some sentences designed to shock rather than simply tell the story, my main issue was I couldn’t work out why Borubaev was alive at the end of the book; it made no real sense when witnesses and others were being killed not to also dispose of him.  Otherwise this was an evocative, pacey tale and the start of what I think should be an interesting series featuring Borubaev.

Review of The Game Must Go On by John Klima (Thomas Dunne Books, 2015)

1941 and baseball’s biggest star, Hank Greenberg, is drafted into the army.  The hope is he would serve a short term then return to the game while being retained on the reserve list.  Instead Pearl Harbour happens and the future of the game during wartime is put in doubt as many players are eligible for service and sign-up to fight.  Unsure whether the 1942 season will even be allowed to proceed, the baseball commissioner writes to President Roosevelt who decides the game must go on for the sake of morale.  The difficulty for the baseball clubs is that talented players are being stripped out of the game at all levels and travel between games is restricted.  What’s left are players deemed too young or old or unfit for service or have family duties.  The teams cobble together new starting line-ups and re-jig the timetable to include more night games and double-headers.  One of the players to get his chance includes Pete Gray, who lost an arm as a child, who made his living in the minor leagues constantly pushing against prejudice. 

John Klima tells the story of baseball in the war years, focusing in particular on the stories of Hank Greenberg, Pete Gray, Billy Southworth Sn and Jnr, and Bob Feller, with a wide supporting cast of those that went to war and those that stayed in or joined the game.  As well as detail the story of the game at home, he also details the experiences of the players serving in the army and navy both in the states and on the battlefield.  The result is an engaging tale of personal trials and an enterprise under pressure.  Klima tells the wider story by weaving together a set of intersecting narratives concerning individuals, teams and the business of baseball as they unfold between 1941-1945. The result is a wealth of information and an interesting tapestry of stories.  However, the text suffers from a fair amount of jumping between different themes and individual/institutional tales, as well as too much repetition, and would have benefitted from a serious edit.  Nonetheless, The Game Must Go On is a fascinating and accessible read about a turbulent period in baseball history that reshaped the post-war game.

Review of A Little More Free by John McFetridge (ECW Press, 2015)

Montreal, Labour weekend, 1972.  The Canadians and Soviets face each other in the ice hockey summit series.  A nightclub is set on fire killing thirty seven people.  The Museum of Fine Arts is robbed.  And a US Army deserter, David Murray, is found dead.  Constable Eddie Dougherty, a beat cop who dreams of becoming a homicide detective, finds himself the first responder on each case.  While the nightclub murders are easily solved, and the museum robbery seems to have mafia connections, the death of Murray is more of a mystery.  Eager to impress Detective Carpentier of Homicide, when he’s not working his shift Dougherty freelances on the case trying to identify the killer.  However, since Murray was an illegal immigrant and he was active in anti-establishment networks few of his associates are willing to cooperate with the police.  Nonetheless, Dougherty keeps plugging away hopeful of solving the case.

A Little More Free is the second outing for Constable Eddie Dougherty, an anglophone cop working in the largely francophone city of Montreal.  The story has two real strengths.  The first is Dougherty who is a fairly ordinary cop from a working class background who’s likeable and dogged.  The second is the historical contextualisation and sense of place – McFetridge places the reader in the city during the famous Canadian-Soviet ice hockey series and the tail end of the Vietnam war.  While the tale has three central cases - the mass murder of thirty seven people, a major heist, and the murder of an army deserter – the telling is somewhat low-key, focusing on the mundane, everyday grinding out of an investigation.  The result is an engaging story that spits and sizzles rather than boils and explodes.  It’s an interesting tactic, but one that works well, imbuing the tale with a sense of realism and drawing the reader into Dougherty’s world.  I’ll certainly be reading the next in the series, One or the Other.

Review of Canary by Duane Swierczynski (Mulholland, 2015)

Sarie Holland is a straight A’s honors student who barely drinks and never does drugs.  At a party she agrees to drive a fellow student across Philadelphia.  Only the run is for drugs and the location of the deal is under surveillance by Officer Wildey.  Sensing an opening to bust a difficult case once Sarie’s friend collects the drugs Wildey pulls her over, her friend doing a runner.  Sarie is given a choice – name her friend, become a police informer, or go to prison for five years or more.  She chooses informer.  Wildey and her boss think that by leaning on her hard, Sarie will give up the name of her friend.  Instead, Sarie tries to buy her freedom by tracking down other dealers.  She’s out of her depth, but proves quite adept of finding suitable felons.  Only Wildey has a particular dealer in mind. To complicate matters a gang is bumping off informers and it’s only a matter of time until Sarie is in their sights.

The hook in Canary is an appealing one.  The first time that a goody-too-shoes student does something stupid she is made to pay a heavy price, forced to choose between friendship, informing or prison.  However, a weakness in the book’s plot is that she barely knows the person she is taking the rap for and it’s hard to believe that she’d sacrifice her own future for him.  Added to that, the tale is propelled along by a number of fairly crude plot devices, barely believable twists, and a storyline that was somewhat telegraphed.  Nonetheless, Canary is an entertaining read, held together by the likeability of the two main characters, Sarie, the resourceful student, and Wildey, an honest, caring cop, and their interactions, and a strong sense of place with respect to Philadelphia.  The double narrative works well, swapping between their points-of-view, and also that of Sarie’s brother and father.  And once the seemingly inevitable telegraphed ending is revealed as a false summit the tale gets interesting and gripping.  The result is an enjoyable tale that requires a fair bit of suspension of disbelief.

Review of Tell No Tales by Eva Dolan (Vintage, 2015)

As they wait at a bus stop in Peterborough three immigrants are mowed down by a passing car.  Two are killed outright, but the third survives.  The case is given to the Hate Crimes Unit headed by up DI Dushan Zigic and DS Mel Ferreira.  They are already struggling to identify the killer of two men kicked to death in previous weeks.  Both were murdered in full view of CCTV cameras by a man who has carefully concealed his face but raises a Nazi salute before disappearing.  The bus stop deaths attract the national newspapers and soon the full glare of the media are focused on both cases.  Racial tension in the town had already been high with far-right factions both fuelling and capitalising on it, but now it is spilling over into more violence and Zigic, Ferreira and their colleagues are under huge pressure to get an early result.  

Like the first book in the Zigic and Ferreira series, Tell No Tales focuses on racial tensions in the town of Peterborough given the recent wave of East European immigration.  The tale has all the elements of a compelling police procedural – engaging and well-contextualised cases, gritty realism in the interactions between the police, public and media, a strong cast of characters with the lead pair having interesting personal back stories, internal conflict within the police force and nice subplots, and a good sense of place.  In particular, the story has its finger firmly on the pulse of contemporary Britain, its turn towards English nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment, the exploitation of new arrivals, and underlying racial tensions.  While the two cases are interesting and nicely told, especially as to how they gradually become entwined, the plotting did feel a little forced at times.  Nonetheless, Tell No Tales is a gripping and thought-provoking page turner and I’m looking forward to reading the next book in the series.

Review of Snapshots by Michael O’Higgins (New Island, 2015)

Dublin, 1981, at the height of the hunger strikes.  Christy Clarke is a ruthless criminal specialising in armed robberies.  Wayne Clarke, his son, is a gifted musician and footballer, who wishes his parents would stop their constant fighting.  Father Brendan is the local curate, actively involved in the abortion referendum campaign and battling his conscious with regards to his own sexuality.  Detective Sergeant Dick Roche is obsessed with tackling serious crime in Dublin and has his sights set on nabbing Christy.  A brutal attack on a prison officer puts these four on a collision course where each has something significant to lose: their freedom, their innocence, their reputation, their career.  An uncompromising battle of wits ensues, with no player wishing to cede ground.

Snapshots is the debut novel of criminal lawyer, Michael O’Higgins.  The real strength of the novel is its characterisation and character development as the four principal actors seek to outwit each other to come out top in their various interlinked battles.  O’Higgins carefully frames and sets out the worldviews of a ruthless criminal, his twelve year old son, the local curate, and a committed copper, and slowly entangles their interactions, charting how each is transformed by their encounters and the passage of time.  While the plot and telling is somewhat slow and ponderous to begin with, the tale soon picks up pace and intrigue and really hits its stride when O’Higgins gets onto his familiar territory of the courts.  Rather than adopting the register of a thriller, the narrative benefits from a grounding in realism and authenticity, with working class Dublin in 1981-82, the Troubles and hunger strikes in the North, domestic violence, clerical sexual abuse and the abortion referendum providing wider contextualisation.  While there is no great sense of mystery, O’Higgins does keep the reader wondering as to who will come out on top and the denouement is wonderfully classic noir.  Overall, a thoughtful, literary, criminal tale.

Review of The Killing of Polly Carter by Robert Thorogood (MIRA, 2015)

When supermodel Polly Carter plummets from the cliffs beside her home on the island of Saint Marie, DI Richard Poole is called in to investigate.  Initially the prognosis is murder, but Poole soon establishes it was murder.  The problem is that the four visitors to the house and her two staff all seemingly have alibis.  Poole and his team set about investigating the death, searching for clues that will reveal the murderer.  Providing a distraction is Poole’s mother who has abandoned her husband in England to join her son in the Caribbean.

The Killing of Polly Carter is the second novel in the Death in Paradise series, a spin-off from the television series of the same name and written by its creator.  It’s very much a modern day take on the classic country house mystery in which a quirky but brilliant detective solves a murder that’s taken place amongst a small group staying in a mansion that’s seen better days.  While the plot has most of the ingredients, it also seems a little uncooked at times.  Part of the issue, I think, is that I never really got vested in the solution or the characters.  While Richard Poole is interesting enough, there’s little backstory provided - for example, we are not told why he’s based on Saint Marie, or why he is living in a beach shack, we just know he's a blow-in from the UK.  Moreover, there’s little character development, with all but Poole being somewhat thin and insubstantial.  It’s almost as if the book is written as an instalment in the series; it’s an episode rather than a movie, with an assumption that the reader is somewhat familiar with the television series and the back plot and characters.  What we’re left with then is the plot, which is a kind of open air version of a locked room mystery in the Agatha Christie mould, with a subplot concerning Poole’s parents.  That was, for the most part, nicely done with all the characters kept in the frame up to the last few pages, though I didn’t really buy the denouement.  Overall, an enjoyable enough police procedural.

Review of Concrete Angel by Patricia Abbott (Polis Books, 2015)

Eve Moran has a pathological need to take things without paying for them, then to hoard her collection.  Her target is usually cheap trinkets, knick-knacks and clothes – things that people will either not miss or won’t care about if they disappear.  From an early age, she relies on her own charisma, lies, and the efforts of others to evade serious punishment.  Nevertheless, she spends time in an institution to cure her of her compulsions and serves a little jail time.  Her daughter, Christine, learns that the way to her mother’s affection is to help her in her schemes, scams and swindles.  However, as she grows older she comes to resent her mother’s manipulative nature and eventually starts to resist when it’s clear that Eve is using her young son in one of her crimes.

Concrete Angel is marketed as ‘domestic suspense’ and that seems an apt label.  The story follows the life of Eve Moran, a compulsive petty thief and hoarder, from her adolescence in the 1950s to middle age, and her various trials and tribulations in and around Philadelphia.  In particular, it focuses on her strained relationship with her family, her husband and various lovers, and her daughter, Christine.  The latter slowly transforms from willing pawn and accomplice to resentful teenager, the change starting after she takes the rap for a murder her mother committed.  When Eve starts to use her young son in her crimes, Christine decides it’s time to try and end her mother’s behaviour.  The novel then is a relatively unusual for a crime novel given its extended timeline and its detailed character study.  Over the course of the story one really gets to know Eve and her family and their unfolding relationships.  The tale has plenty of drama, with an endless stream of crimes and scams, from shoplifting to murder.  Abbott, however, rather centring the plot on them, makes these a part of the everyday theatre of Eve and Christine’s lives.  The only bit that didn’t ring quite true to me was the ending, which felt a little underplayed.  Overall, an interesting tale told in an engaging voice.

Review of The Last Four Days of Paddy Buckley by Jeremy Massey (2015, Riverhead Books)

Paddy Buckley has followed in his father’s footsteps and works in the funeral trade in Dublin.  Still mourning the death two year’s previously of his pregnant wife he’s been moving through life in somewhat of a daze.  Then on a single day his world is turned on its head once more.  First, he ends up in bed with an attractive grieving widow, who then promptly drops dead.  Then he meets her beautiful daughter and once again loses his heart.  Then he ploughs into and kills the brother of Vincent Cullen, head of one of Dublin’s most ruthless criminal gangs.  Realising who the victim is, he speeds off into the night.  The next morning he’s assigned the job of organizing Donal Cullen’s funeral.  It’s bad enough that he’s having to look after the funeral of a woman who died in his arms, but now he’s surrounded by thugs who are actively searching for him.  With a bit of luck he’ll manage to pull through, but with his present run of luck that seems doubtful.

In this debut novel, Jeremy Massey tells a farce about an undertaker who has the task of arranging two funerals for people whom he has accidentally killed.  Beyond what the law might think, the catch with one is that he is falling in love with the victim’s daughter, the catch with the other is that the victim is the brother of the head of a major Dublin criminal gang.  Just as Paddy Buckley is given the hope of a new relationship after mourning the death of this pregnant wife, the ground is pulled from under him and it looks like it might be a struggle to survive the week.  The tale is quite nicely told, with Massey carefully arranging the setup, and then spinning out the aftermath as Buckley tries to manage the fallout.  However, while it’s entertaining enough, the plotting felt a little over-contrived, the telling felt a little flat, lacking both tension and humour, and I didn’t really connect with the Buckley as a character.  That’s not to say that I didn’t like the book, just that I wasn’t bowled over by it.  Overall, a story with a really great hook that didn’t quite live up to its promise, but nonetheless was an interesting read.

Review of Stasi Child by David Young (twenty7, 2015)

East Berlin, 1974.  Oberleutnant Karin Müller is a detective in the murder squad of the GDR national police. Her marriage is disintegrating and she’s haunted by memories of being raped and the subsequent botched abortion.  When she’s ordered to investigate the death of a teenage girl found near to the Berlin Wall, she knows she’s heading into trouble.  The girl has been recently sexually assaulted, appears to have been escaping from the West to the East, and a high ranking Stasi detective is calling the shots.  He wants her to discover the girl’s identity, but not her killer.  In practice, investigating one means also trying to identify the other.  As she tries to determine who the girl might be it becomes obvious that others would prefer her to make little progress.  In a country where it’s not clear who’s a state agent and a wrong move can make you an enemy of the state, Müller tries to steer a course through murky waters, determined to solve the case and stay alive.

Stasi Child captures well the paranoia, fear and complex power games of the GDR, conveying the sense that even those working in the police and security services, who were most able to abuse their positions, were fearful of how the system could eat its own.  Young illustrates this by entwining two parallel storylines: the first told in the third tense and is set in the present follows Oberleutnant Karin Müller, a young detective who despite her own woes still believes in the ideals of the GDR, who is ordered by the Stasi to identify a teenager whose murder has been staged to look like she was killed trying to flee from the West; the second, told in the first person and set some months earlier charts the harsh regime suffered by Irma Behrendt in a youth detention centre.  Both characters and storylines are compelling, though I initially struggled with the first person tense of the latter.  The tale is atmospheric and plot intriguing.  However, its realism started to waiver as it built towards its denouement, which felt overplayed; both in terms of the wrap-up, but also in the personal ties between the threads -- and the carefully layered police procedural gave way to a thriller.  The final scenes, however, pack a powerful punch.

Review of The Pale House by Luke McCallin (No Exit Press, 2015)

Late March 1945 and the Germans are on the retreat on all fronts.  After a harrowing time in the hands of the Gestapo after the failed attempt on Hitler’s life in 1944, Captain Gregor Reinhardt finds himself back in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, where he’d served two years previously.  This time he is a member of the Feldjaegerkorps -- the military police -- who have far reaching powers to conduct investigations across all units.  Having served as a detective in Berlin before the war, Reinhardt has a nose for tracking down criminals and in a city under siege and sheltering the worst elements of Ustaše - the Croatian fascists - and a German penal battalion he has plenty to choose from.  What draws his attention is two separate executions of seemingly anonymous soldiers.  And the more he probes, the stronger the pressure to divert his attention.  Only Reinhardt is a man of principles -- he might be working for a corrupt state, but he still believes in justice regardless of consequence.   

The Pale House is the second book in the Captain Gregor Reinhardt series.  Reinhardt joined the police after the First World War, rising to become a detective inspector in the Berlin Kripo before joining the Abwehr and the fringes of the German resistance.  In the closing stages of the Second World War he finds himself in Sarajevo as the partisans close in, working for the military police.  The city is in turmoil as the Germans prepare to retreat and the Croatian Ustaše lash out at the civilian population, knowing they are about to be overrun.  Despite sense of impending doom and savagery, McCallin has Reinhardt conduct a murder investigation, weaving a clever, compelling and somewhat complex plot.  He very nicely captures the fear at work in the city, the tension within the German ranks and between them and their Croatian collaborators.  Reinhardt is a somewhat sombre character, but his principles and role as a flawed but ‘good German’ in a corrupt regime makes him an interesting anti-hero.  The other characters are well penned, though given the case and situation, they’re all a pretty rum lot.  I particularly liked the very strong sense of place and it’s clear that McCallin has done his historical research, yet it doesn't dominate the story but rather provides good context.  Overall, an excellent historical crime tale and a strong addition to what’s shaping up to be a very good series.

Review of The Peripheral by William Gibson (2015, Penguin)

Flynne and her brother, Burton, live in rural America in the not too distant future, where the drugs business, the Hefty corporation, and Homes (Dept Homeland Security) control just about everything.  Their life consists of raising the money for their mother’s meds and playing games for others for cash on what passes for the internet.  When Burton is called away, Flynne steps in to play security in what seems like a staid beta game.  All she is supposed to do is work a perimeter around a huge tower block, keeping away buzzing objects.  Then she witnesses what appears to be a murder.  After that things start to get a little crazy, with a contract taken out on Burton’s life and a corporate entity from Columbia, Coldiron, seeking to protect them.  Whatever Flynne has witnessed, one group wants her dead and the other wants her to identify the killer.  And both seem to have the resources to make staying alive one hell of a ride.

It’s easy to understand how some readers might get frustrated with William Gibson’s writing style.  In The Peripheral he uses a raft of made-up slang and neologisms, new cultural norms and invented technologies without ever explaining them.  He just plunges the reader into the narrative as if the world he is describing is entirely familiar.  One simply has to either try and work it out, or guess, or keep reading until what is being described eventually makes sense.  It took me about 80 or 90 pages to feel confident that I knew what was going on, but by then I was entirely immersed in his worlds.  And from there on in it was a really great read as Gibson conjoins two parallel histories, separated by seventy years, with the witness to a murder in one residing in the other, and ideas and minds shuttling between the two.  Flynne is an engaging humanist lead and Gibson populates the books with a coterie of other interesting characters, especially the cynical, jaded PR man, Wilf Netherton, and a clever, mysterious cop, Lowbeer.  The plot is ingenious and nicely constructed, and after a somewhat ponderous opening gains direction and pace.  The temporal separation of the two eras enables Gibson to explore the unfolding arc of history, and the interplay of politics and technology and to speculate on the fate of humanity.  Moreover, there is a good sense of place, both of rural America and urban London.  My advice is, if you find yourself struggling in the open chapters to understand what is happening, simply keep going and you’ll be rewarded for doing so.  I thought it was a great read.