One Hundred Reviews

My review of The Big O posted yesterday was meant to be my 100th book review since I started the blog last July. It seems that at least three of my reviews are not labelled as such because it turns out I've done 103 reviews.  It's quite a diverse list including books from 94 different authors.  The list is mainly crime fiction, with only 14 of the books being non-fiction.  The stories are set in 25 different countries.  The views are skewed slightly towards the higher ratings, but this shouldn't be a complete surprise as my reading has been shaped to a certain extent by positive reviews on other blogs.  In total 17 books were rated as 5*, 42 as 4*, 37 as 3* and 7 as 2*.  It's also skewed by the fact that there were a number of books I started but didn't get past the first 50 pages or so, and so never wrote a review.  In some cases I might give them another go, but it's unlikely.  Here's the list of reviews:


The Big O by Declan Burke ****
Hand in the Fire by Hugo Hamilton ***
Killer by Dave Zeltserman *****
The Day of the Jack Russell by Colin Bateman ****
A Deadly Trade by Michael Stanley ***
The Goodbye Kiss by Massimo Carlotto ****
Leather Maiden by Joe Lansdale ****
Roseanna by Maj Sjowall and Pers Wahloo ****
The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston *****
The People's Manifesto by Mark Thomas ****
The Devil's Garden by Ace Atkins ***
Chickenhawk by Robert Mason ****
Trail of Blood by S.J. Rozan ***
The American Envoy by Garbhan Downey ***
The Grave in Gaza by Matt Beynon Rees *****
Old Dogs by Donna Moore ****
Motor City Blue by Loren Estleman ***
Truth by Peter Temple ****
Paying For It by Tony Black ***
Criminal Summer by Luigi Guicciardi ***
A Firing Offense by George Pelecanos ****
Have Mercy on Us All by Fred Vargas ***
Expiration Date by Duane Swierczynski *****
The Silence of the Rain by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza ****
The Good Thief's Guide to Paris by Chris Ewan ****
Devil's Food by Anthony Bruno ****
Operation Mincemeat by Ben Macintyre ****
The Complaints by Ian Rankin ****
Pies and Prejudice by Stuart Maconie **
The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M Cain *****
The Song is You by Megan Abbott ****
Kamikazi by Raymond Lamont-Brown ***
Grift Sense by James Swain ****
Havana Fever by Leonardo Padura ***
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett *****
The Ones You Do by Daniel Woodrell *****
Old Flames by John Lawton ***
Dead Set by Kel Robertson ****
Up in Honey's Room by Elmore Leonard **
The Fugitive Pigeon by Donald Westlake ***
Via Delle Oche by Carlo Lucarelli ****
Shinjuku Shark by Arimasa Osawa **
Isle of Joy by Don Winslow ****
The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley ****
Diamond Dove by Adrian Hyland *****
Banksters by David Murphy and Martina Devlin ***
The Build Up by Philip Gwynne ***
The Wheelman by Duane Swierczynski *****
Calumet City by Charlie Newton ****
Ship of Fools by Fintan O'Toole ****
Stiff by Shane Maloney ***
The Herring Seller's Apprentice by L.C. Tyler **
Frost at Christmas by R.D. Wingfield ****
If the Dead Rise Not by Philip Kerr ****
Rubble by Jeff Byles **
Death of a Red Heroine by Qui Xiaolong ***
The Builders by Frank McDonald and Kathy Sheridan ***
Dirty Sweet by John McFetridge ****
Walking the Perfect Square by Reed Farrel Coleman *****
The Lime Pit by Jonathan Valin ****
Satan's Lambs by Lynn Hightower ***
The Killing of Strangers by Jerry Holt **
Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett ****
The Irish Sports Pages by Les Roberts ***
Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell *****
The Devil Met a Lady by Stuart Kaminsky ****
The Rabbit Factory by Marshall Karp ****
Mrs D'Silva Detective Instincts and the Shaitan of Calcutta by Glen Peters ***
The Small Back Room by Nigel Balchin ****
The Collaborator of Bethlehem by Matt Benyon Rees *****
Zoo Station by David Downing ***
The Reapers by John Connolly ***
Go to Helena Handbasket by Donna Moore *****
The Damned Season by Carlo Lucarelli ***
The Price of Darkness by Graham Hurley ****
A Trace of Smoke by Rebecca Cantrell ***
'Rommel?' 'Gunner Who?' by Spike Milligan ****
The Foreign Correspondence by Alan Furst *****
Queenpin by Megan Abbott ****
Disco for the Departed by Colin Cotterill ****
All the Colours of the Town by Liam McIlvanney ***
Black Delta Night by Jessica Speart ***
The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke **
Fifty Grand by Adrian McKinty *****
Last Rituals by Yrsa Sigurdardottir ***
Inspector Mallon by Donal McCracken ***
Winter Frost by R.D. Wingfield ****
Stop Me by Richard Jay Parker ***
Black Out by John Lawton ****
Bombs over Dublin by Sean McMahon ***
Harold Shipman: Prescription for Murder by Brian Whittle and Jean Ritchie *****
The Last Llanelli Train by Robert Lewis ***
Death in Breslau by Marek Krajewski ***
The Shape of Water by Andrea Camilleri ****
The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth by Malcolm Pryce ****
Before the Deluge by Otto Friedrich ****
Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada *****
Carte Blanche by Carlo Lucarelli ****
M*A*S*H by Richard Hooker ****
August Heat by Andrea Camilleri ***
The Devil's Star by Jo Nesbo ***
Dark Times in the City by Gene Kerrigan ***
The Twelve by Stuart Neville ****

Review of The Big O by Declan Burke (Harcourt, 2007)

Karen meets Ray when he accidentally intervenes in an armed robbery she’s committing. Her plan is to use the money she liberates to help buy a cottage in the mountains with three acres for her rescue pet, a barely tame Siberian wolf. Ray is no angel, painting bedroom murals between kidnapping rich folk for ransom, but he wants to leave the underworld and start a new life. Something clicks and they start dating. But the course to true love is not going to be easy. Karen used to date Rossi, a slightly psychotic, serial offender, who is getting out of prison after a five year stretch. Rossi wants his Ducati, his .44 and the sixty grand he had hidden in his lock-up. Karen’s day job is working as a receptionist for Frank, a plastic surgery consultant who can’t perform surgery any longer do to a malpractice suit. Frank is divorced from Madge, with whom he has twin daughters, who are bleeding him dry of cash. Frank wants Madge, who is also Karen’s best friend, kidnapped so he can collect the insurance money and start a new life in Haiti. Ray is the guy hired to snatch Madge. Doyle is a detective who wants as many scalps as she can get. All Karen and Ray have to do is trust each other enough to pull off the kidnap job, and avoid Rossi, Frank, Doyle or Ray’s new bosses from thwarting their plans.

The Big O is a comic crime caper – think of Carl Hiasson strained though a noir filter. The story is broken into a succession of short scenes each written from the perspective of one of the six principle characters. The structure works to provide a nice, quick pace and enables Burke to flesh out the characterisation, where each person is slightly larger than life with certain foibles. The plot is driven by multiple coincidences, each binding the actors into ever-more overlapping and mutually dependent or conflicting relationships. The prose is well honed and expressive, and there are plenty of comic asides and some astute observation. The only thing that grated after a while was the use of coincidence, which was clearly deliberate but edged towards excessive. I also couldn’t figure out Doyle, the detective, and her relationship with Ray, which seemed tenuous, or her motives. And there was one scene near the end that made little sense to me. But that probably says more about me than the novel. I’ve been saving The Big O for a little while so that it marks my 100th review since starting the blog last July. Was it worth the wait? Absolutely. The Big O is a very enjoyable read and a comic crime caper that is genuinely comic. I now need to track down the sequel, Crime Always Pays. It’s available for download for Kindle, but I don’t possess a Kindle. A publisher needs to do the right thing and step in put it out in paperback!  For those looking for an excellent crime fiction blog, Burke's Crime Always Pays blog is excellent and always worth a read.

Lazy Sunday Service

It's been a listless but productive week.  I managed to convert my blogging post of last week into a full paper and have just about got our housing report complete - we're fiddling with graphics and data permissions.  And The White Gallows was officially published yesterday.  On the flip side, I went to a symposium on the state of the Irish economy and strategies to improve it on Thursday, which whilst very informative was depressing as it's clear to me that the deflationary cycle we're in is making things worse not better.  Plus there's nothing positive in our housing report - we've used 20+ different datasets, and whichever way you look at it the property bubble and crash is spectacular and housing, banking and planning policy in Ireland has been poorly formulated and badly implemented.  It's going to be a long, slow road to recovery both for the wider economy and the housing market. 

My posts this week:

Review of The Day of the Jack Russell by Colin Bateman
Redlining apartments
Review of Killer by Dave Zeltersman
New town for Cork
Not sure if this bodes well
Opening first lines
Review of Hand in the Fire by Hugo Hamilton
Off out into the world

Off out into the world

Today is the official publication date for The White Gallows. It would have passed me by except for two reviews appearing this morning. So far I've discovered four reviews, which can be found at:

Reactions to Reading
Kittling Books
International Noir
Mack Captures Crime

Thankfully, they all say positive things, which is a relief!

There is a YouTube video/promo thingy, which can be found here.

The back cover blurb is:
In post-Celtic Tiger Ireland the murder rate is soaring and the gardai are struggling to cope with gangland wars, domestic disputes, and drunken brawls that spiral into fatal violence. To add to Detective Superintendent Colm McEvoy’s workload are the deaths of two immigrants – an anonymous Lithuanian youth and an elderly German billionaire. While one remains an enigma, the murky history of the other is slowly revealed. But where there is money there is power and, as McEvoy soon learns, if you swim amongst sharks, you’d better act like a shark.

I doubt the book can be found in many bookshops given the limited marketing resources of the press and their emphasis on online sales through Amazon, Book Depository and others. Bookshops can order it through the book distributors - Gardners (UK/Ireland) and Argosy (Ireland). For those outside of UK/Ireland, then Book Depository (UK or US) do free shipping to anywhere in the world. Publication details: published by Indepenpress. ISBN 978-1-907499-37-1 £8.99, €10.99

Anyway, the book is now officially published, and hopefully anyone interested can get hold of a copy either online or through their local bookshop. Thanks to all the support I've received through the blog as The White Gallows has meandered its way into the world. It has been very much appreciated.

Review of Hand in the Fire by Hugo Hamilton (Fourth Estate, 2010)

Vid Cosic has moved to Ireland from Serbia to make a new life, first working as a night security guard and then on building sites. A few months after arriving he finds a mobile phone on the street and contacts the owner, Kevin Concannon, a lawyer of low morals, to let him know he’s found it. So starts an intense and dysfunctional friendship. Not long after meeting for the first time, Cosic is confronted by a drunken work colleague and Concannon violently attacks him leaving him for dead. Only it is Cosic who is arrested and prosecuted, feeling obliged to stay silent to protect Concannon. Awaiting trial, Cosic starts to undertake repair work on the house of Concannon’s mother, getting to know his wider family and its troubled stories. Two, in particular, fascinate him – the death of a young, pregnant women washed up on the Aran Islands and the disappearance of Kevin’s father. Bound together through acts of violence, betrayal and family secrets, their tenuous friendship is placed under more and more pressure. The opening lines can be found here.

The title of the book refers to Concannon’s definition of a friend – someone who will put their hand in the fire to protect someone regardless of the consequences. And this is the sentiment at the heart of the book, which explores the nature of friendship, family and the immigrant experience. It’s a well written story, with some nice observations and insights. I’m not sure to what extent it was an Irish story though, which the opening lines strongly suggest it will be. Ireland is there, but more as a backdrop rather than as contextual arena. The plot is relatively straightforward and clearly telegraphed, though one suspects it was never meant to have a twist, being an in-depth study of relationship than a mystery, despite the hauntings of the violent attack and the drowned woman that surfaces throughout. The characterisation of Cosic is well developed, though he seemed overly naïve, pliant and childlike at times, to the point of lacking credibility, but Concannon remains something of an enigma. The reader is repeatedly told he is charming, but there is precious little evidence that that’s the case, and one is left wondering why his long suffering girlfriend or Cosic tolerate his selfish and confrontational behaviour. It’s not that he’s not a believable character, but rather that the character that the reader engages with is not the same one that the other characters seemingly interact with, producing a strange dischord. Overall, I found it an interesting read, with some nice writing and observations, but the central relationship never seemed fully credible and the plot failed to really excite.

Opening lines

This post was prompted by a piece yesterday by Jose over at The Game's Afoot about opening first lines. I thought I'd post some opening lines by one of my favourite authors, Joe Lansdale, who always has strong openings to his novels.

It was July and hot and I was putting out sticks and not thinking one whit about murder.
Mucho Mojo (1994)

When I got over to Leonard's Christmas Eve night, he had the Kentucky Headhunters turned way up over at his place, and they were singing "The Ballad of Davy Crockett," and Leonard, in a kind of Christmas celebration, was once again setting fire to the house next door.
The Two-Bear Mambo (1995)

When you grow up in a place, especially if your childhood is a good one, you fail to notice a lot of the nasty things that creep beneath the surface and wriggle about like hungry worms in rotten flesh.
Leather Maiden (2008)

On the afternoon it rained frogs, sun perch, and minnows, Sunset discovered she could take a beating good as Three-Fingered Jack.
Sunset and Sawdust (2004)

It was mid-April when I got home from the offshore rig and discovered my good friend Leonard Pine had lost his job bouncing drunks at the Hot Cat Club because, in a moment of anger, when he had a bad ass on the ground out back of the place, he'd flopped his tool and pissed on the rowdy's head.
Bad Chilli (1997)

Bill Roberts decided to rob the firecracker stand on account he didn't have a job and not a nickel's worth of money and his mother was dead and kind of freeze-dried in her bedroom.
Freezer Burn (1999)

Not sure if this bodes well ...

The White Gallows is set in west Meath, in and around the towns of Athboy and Trim. There isn't a huge amount of action in the town of Athboy itself, but I give a plug to a couple of businesses, including McElhinney Fashions, a department store that runs down one side of the main street. Opening in 1937, it became something on an institution, with people travelling from all over Ireland to buy outfits for special occasions such as marriages, communions and confirmations. Yesterday it announced that it is closing with the loss of 56 full and part-time jobs, one of hundreds of businesses that have closed in Ireland during this recession. McElhinneys for Men will continue to trade as it is not part of the same company (and comes recommended - I bought a couple of good shirts there), but even so, it doesn't seem to bode to well when one of the places mentioned in the book shuts before the book is even officially published!

Review of Killer by Dave Zeltserman (Serpent’s Tail, 2010)

Leonard March knows he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life in prison, so he does a deal with the DA to turn state witness against mafia boss Salvatore Lombard in return for immunity for undisclosed crimes. The DA agrees to a fourteen year sentence and immunity for the chance to bring down a godfather. Once the paperwork is signed, March admits to the murder of twenty eight people; murders he’ll never serve time for. Fourteen year’s later and he’s released from prison to public and media fury. Unable to leave the state due to a pending civil action for damages, all March wants to do is keep a low profile, do his time working as a night janitor in an office block, try and catch up with his adult kids, and avoid a revenge attack by Lombard’s men. It’s hard to live anonymously though when your face is plastered across every newspaper, you’re the topic of conversation on late night radio shows, and ghost writers are lining up to capture your life story and sell on the book and movie rights. But when the mysterious and beautiful Sophie enters his life and he acts the good Samaritan, stopping a liquor store robbery, things start to look up.

Killer is a relatively short book at 214 pages, but there isn’t a single wasted word. Told in a straightforward, matter of fact way, the story is utterly captivating, hooking the reader in from the first line and not letting go. I was totally mesmerised, but it’s difficult to explain why. There’s nothing particular special about the prose and the plot is pretty uncomplicated, though there’s a sting in the tail. But there’s something about the story and the way that it’s told that’s compelling. I think it’s because it genuinely does feel like it is Leonard March’s story; that you are listening to his voice. And it’s a voice that tugs at the reader’s emotions in subtle, contradictory ways, which makes it seem convincing and credible. In addition, the structure of the book, with chapters alternating between the present and past events, enables the reader to get a rounded grasp of March’s persona and his history of violence. Overall, a great read and I’m now on the hunt for his earlier books, Pariah and Small Crimes.

Review of The Day of the Jack Russell by Bateman (Headline, 2009)

The owner of the No Alibis bookshop in Belfast uses his vast knowledge of crime fiction to run a sideline private investigation service, as long as it doesn’t involve any danger or straying to far from the city. He’s hired by Billy Randall, the owner of a no-frills airline, to track down two vandals who have videoed themselves painting an enormous cock onto his forehead on a giant billboard, and then posted it up on YouTube. Accompanied by Jeff, his student worker, and Alison, his occasional girlfriend, and somewhat encumbered by his battleaxe mother, the nameless shopkeeper soon discovers who the culprits are, but shortly afterwards they are murdered. In order to prove his innocence he sets out to discover who the real murderer is, but the only clue is the disappearance of a stuffed Jack Russell dog which had a very important owner. It seems though that he is not the only person with an interest in the dog, with the police, MI5 and a Belfast gangster also in the hunt. What’s so important about this dog? And why were the two vandals killed?

It’s quite some time since I read a Bateman novel. In fact, the last time was when he hadn’t dropped Colin from his name. I think I read the first seven or eight of his books, stopping around Mohammad Maguire and Shooting Sean, which seemed a bit thin and tired compared with his earlier work. Divorcing Jack is, however, still in my top ten reads, a brilliant debut novel. So, it was a good to tuck into The Day of the Jack Russell to resample his work. As with his other novels, TDJR is a comic crime caper, laced throughout with humour, gags, and oddball characters, and I found myself laughing out loud on a fair few occasions. Bateman’s writing is witty and engaging and the pages fly by. He has a natural gift for crafting dialogue, which crackles off the page. The only thing that riled was the main character, who to put it bluntly is a bit of a wanker – a condescending, anally-retentive, know-it-all megalomaniac and hypochondriac. Heaven knows what Alison, his supposed girlfriend, sees in him. I know that’s how he’s meant to be, but as a narrator I found him all but impossible to warm to. The plot just about holds together given the madcap action and an investigation style that specialises in leaps of faith based on the plot devices of various classic crime novels. Overall, an entertaining read, and worth checking out if you like comic crime capers.

The Lazy Sunday Service

This bank holiday has take up a predictable pattern - read, throw ball for dogs, rebuild wall, check internet, repeat. Bliss. This is to be the week of trying to catch up on reviews. I've five books finished that need their review written. I hope to get three of them done today and the other two tomorrow, by which time I should have finished another book. I'm a reading roll!

My posts this week:
Some Like It Hot
Eurovision hangover
Review of A Goodbye Kiss by Massimo Carlotta
Ireland's housing market undervalued
May reviews
Review of A Deadly Trade by Michael Stanley
Retrospective commercial rent reductions
Academic blogging: issues and challenges
Saturday snippet: Hand in the Fire by Hugo Hamilton

Saturday Snippet: Hand in the Fire by Hugo Hamilton

Hand in the Fire tells the story of Vid Cosic, a Serbian immigrant to Ireland, and his relationship with the dysfunctional Concannon family who befriend him. Binding them together in a strange and strained embrace are four violent incidents - the death of Cosic's parents in a car crash in Serbia, the drowning of a pregnant, unmarried young woman off the Conemara coast, a drunken brawl that leaves a man with a broken jaw and hip, and fists thrown in the break-up of a troubled marriage. I bought it as in impulse buy in The Reading Room in Carrick-on-Shannon based on the strength of the opening few lines. And here they are:

You have a funny way of doing things here.

Like friendship, for example.

Nobody does friendship like you do in this country. It comes out of nowhere. Full on. All or nothing. I've been to places where friendship is cultivated with great care over a longer period of time, like a balcony garden. Here it seems to grow wild.

You could say that I did him a small favour. I found his mobile phone lying in the street and contacted his girlfriend. Her name was Helen and there was a picture of her on the phone, laughing into the camera. I could have read through all her messages, but I didn't want to be intrusive. I contacted her and arranged for him to pick it up that same evening. It was nothing more than that. Anyone else would have done the same. I waited outside a late-night shop and saw him walking towards me with a big smile as though we already knew each other. He thanked me and stood there, refusing to let me go. Before I knew it, he was returning the favour, shaking hands and leading me away to a bar for a drink.

I read the story in several sittings over one day and I'll post my review sometime this week.

Academic blogging: Issues and Challenges

Yesterday I attended a symposium on academic blogging in Trinity College Dublin organised by the collective who produce Pue's Occurrences. My own contribution concerned the Ireland After NAMA blog (other blogs represented are listed below). It was fascinating to listen to the experiences of other academic bloggers and the kinds of issues and challenges that they face through blogging. I thought it might be useful to share those challenges with a non-academic audience (I've put up a very similar post on Ireland After NAMA given the completely different constituencies of the two blogs), so below is a basic summary. I'm sure many of these issues will resonate with non-academic bloggers as well.

Sustainability

• feeding the monster - need to post regularly to build and maintain a reader base
• voluntarism – relies on voluntary labour and enthusiasm of posters
• in collective blogs, getting people to contribute - people are busy; but also a lack of confidence in the credibility of the media

Academic credibility

• some contributors worried about wasting work by publishing it through a media that presently lacks sufficient academic and institutional credibility and legitimacy

Building a readership/community

• how to implement successful strategies to develop a readership base
• building trust and relationship with readers; building a community

Relationship between individual creative/academic freedom and institutional control and oversight

• to what extent does a blog represent institution? What level of control do they/should they have over it?
• To what extent are blogs experimental thought spaces for ideas and analysis as opposed to formal spaces of reporting/commentary (does it have to have the same levels of rigour and validity as that written in a journal?)

Different way of working

• a blog can drive a research agenda and not the other way
• blogging is often a process of doing and publishing research in a just in time fashion

Different way of writing/communicating

• shorter pieces in a much more journalistic style; lacks usual academic conventions
• making ideas and writing open and accessible

Editorial policy

• for collective blogs - is there a need for an editorial policy or control? Or a writer’s/reader’s charter? What happens if people post material that is inappropriate or badly written? Who takes editorial control? On what basis?

Funding

• for design, maintenance and content, for subscriptions or servers, for events, etc

Media interest

• what happens if a post goes viral and the media get interested? It can be a lot of pressure and can take up a lot of time

Dealing with negative feedback/abuse

• vested interests do not necessarily like what you have to say and can react, sometimes not through public debate by private means; how to deal with this?

Dealing with the public

• dealing with comments in a timely and informative manner; being prepared to engage beyond the initial posting.
• how to deal with people who ask you to do work on their pet projects
• discussion of work on other social media such as bulletin boards – do you engage? What happens when the material gets misinterpreted?

Dealing with conflicts of interest

• how to deal with posts on topics or expressing views that conflict with or undermine funders of the blogger's research (or someone else's in the collective)

Dealing with data issues

• publishing material that is copyrighted or used under data license; intellectual property issues in general
• maintaining links to other sites

Archiving and longevity

• what happens to the data and material being created? Long term archiving of material? Long term maintenance of material produced?

The blogs taking part were:
Pue's Occurrences
Ireland After NAMA
UCD Academic Blogging
Irish Left Archive
Come Here To Me!
Some Blind Alleys
History Compass
The Model Blog

Review of A Deadly Trade by Michael Stanley (Headline, 2009)

Jackalberry camp, a tourist retreat on a peninsula jutting out into the Linyanti River that separates Botswana and Namibia, is finding it difficult to make ends meet. Turning a poor financial situation into something worse are the murders of two guests, one of whom has been mutilated in the style of a revenge killing. Assistant Superintendent ‘Kubu’ Bengu of the Botswana CID is sent to investigate. It turns out that mutilated corpse has died before, having been recorded as slain in the Rhodesian war thirty years previously. The other dead man was an undercover police officer from South Africa. A third man is missing, having left the camp before the bodies were discovered. All of the guests and most of the staff seem to have something to hide and Kubu and his colleagues initially make slow progress. But then the remaining guests start to be murdered and somebody threatens Kubu, seeking to retrieve an impounded item. Something sinister from the past seems to be a play in the present, and if Kubu is to stop and solve the crimes he needs to unravel a deadly set of relations.

A Deadly Trade is a convoluted puzzle of a police procedural, at the heart of which is the affable and engaging character of Kubu. The writing team of Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip are particular good at creating a cast of complex and rounded characters, and the relations between them, and of evoking a strong sense of place as the investigation criss-crosses Botswana. They also do a fine job of portraying the police procedural elements without them detracting from the story. The plot for me is where the book has some niggles. There are effectively three main plots running through the story, along with a host of subplots, and at least one of the main plots could have been dropped, along with a couple of subplots. Red herrings are all well and good, but in terms of credibility for me there can’t be too many of them. Having finished the book a few days ago and now reflecting back on the story, I also find myself left with a handful of loose ends and questions, where things didn’t quite seem to add up. And in general terms the whole thing could do with a bit of tightening up. All relatively minor stuff, but I think created because there were too many threads being interwoven and some scenes were dwelt on rather than limiting the narrative to what was needed. Sometimes less is more. That said, A Deadly Trade is an enjoyable read and Kubu is a delightful character whose company I intend to share in the future. I have my eye out for the first book in the series A Carrion Death.

May Reviews

Relatively straightforward to pick a book of the month from May's reading, Charlie Huston's The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death was a blast - original, witty and smart.

Leather Maiden by Joe Lansdale ****
Roseanna by Maj Sjowall and Pers Wahloo ****
The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston *****
The People's Manifesto by Mark Thomas ****
The Devil's Garden by Ace Atkins ***
Chickenhawk by Robert Mason ****
Trail of Blood by S.J. Rozan ***
The American Envoy by Garbhan Downey ***

Review of The Goodbye Kiss by Massimo Carlotta (Europa Editions, 2006 [2000]; translated by Lawrence Venuti)

As a youth, Georgio Pellegrini was full of ideological fervour and commitment that ended with the unintended death of a night watchmen by a bomb planted outside the Industrialist’s Association. Ratted out by an ex-girlfriend, Pellegrini is forced to skip across the French border. A year later, a wanted man in Italy, he finds himself in Central America lending a hand to left wing militants involved in a civil war. When he is ordered to kill a fellow compatriot, he knows its time to leave, slipping across to Costa Rica where he spends a couple of years tending a bar and womanising, growing ever more homesick. Eventually he returns to Paris, determined to find a way to clear his name and return to Italy. His old political group finds someone already imprisoned to take the rap for the watchman’s death. He’s picked up at the border and charged with belonging to an armed group and told that they know about his deception; they’ll throw the book at him if he doesn’t name the entire network. Unwilling to serve a life sentence he cuts a deal with the police and after a couple of years he’s out of prison and looking to create a new life. But there are few opportunities for an ex-militant, ex-con with no scruples except a life of crime. Pellegrini is soon helping to run a strip joint, working various scams to supplement his living, always looking for new opportunities to make money and take advantage of weak women, in often cruel and sadistic ways. And he doesn’t care who he hurts or kills as long as he survives, but then he sees a way to reinvent himself as an honourable citizen – one last job is all that is required to set him up for life.

The Goodbye Kiss is, as one review says, ‘lean, mean and violent’; Italian noir at its darkest, placing the reader in the mind of criminal who’s prepared to do anything to get by. Pellegrini is a well formed character who is frighteningly believable, his thoughts and actions seemingly rationale and logical. He uses intimidation, manipulation and violence in a pre-meditated, calculated way to exert his will, yet he also understands his place in the wider criminal system and how to respect and work that system. Some of his actions are stomach churning and it is difficult to warm to the main character, but that is clearly the point. Criminals like Pellegrini are repulsive and, for many people, unfathomable, and Carlotto provides a window into their world. The book is written in a lucid, engaging, economic prose that keeps the pages turning, and the story is well structured and plotted, with just the right amount of backstory to give credibility. The book is short at 144 pages; and for me slightly too short. I was somewhat surprised when I turned a page to find it was the final one, with an ending I wasn’t expecting and found unsettling (I’d discuss this more, but it’s impossible without giving spoilers). Overall, well written and paced novel, that's a rewarding and disturbing read.