Review of The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino (2012, Abacus; 2005, Japanese)

Yasuko Hanaoka is a divorced, single mother. A former nightclub hostess she now works in a local takeaway where her neighbour, a high school mathematics teacher, Ishigami buys his lunch each day. One day her former husband, Togashi, turns up looking for money and threatening continued harassment. The confrontation spirals out of control, ending with mother and daughter killing Togashi. Hearing the commotion, Ishigami offers to help get rid of the body and to plot the cover-up. All Yasuko and her daughter need to do is stick to the story Ishigami creates for them when questioned by the police. Detective Kusanagi can find no holes in Yasoko’s alibi, but there is something about the case that un-nerves him and he turns to his friend, Manabu Yukawa, a university physicist, for help. Yukawa was a friend of Ishigami at university and knows him as a mathematics genius. He’s somewhat surprised that Ishigami is a high school teacher, but knows that if he is involved in the case that it will be fiendishly difficult to solve.

Set in Tokyo, The Devotion of Suspect X is a police procedural with a difference. The reader is presented with the murder at the start of the novel. Yasuko Hanaoka and her daughter murder her abusive former husband. Their neighbour, Ishigami, who is smitten with Yusuko, hears the fight and offers to help them dispose of the body and create a cover-up. A body is subsequently found, quickly identified and the police turn up at Yashuko’s door. It appears though that she has a verifiable alibi for the time of the murder and she’s sticking to pleading ignorance. The unfolding story then revolves around the police probing the alibi and trying to trace Togashi’s last movements, with the mystery essentially being whether they’ll be able to get to the truth given Ishigami’s carefully plotted cover-up. There are two unaccounted element in Ishigami’s machinations. The first is Yashuko, who takes up with an old flame in the days following the murder. The second is Ishigami’s former university friend, Manabu Yukawa, a physicist who occasionally helps the police. Yukawa knows that Ishigami is a genius. What ensues is a battle of wits based around a mathematical philosophical question: what is harder – devising an unsolvable problem or solving that problem and knowing if it is correct? A cat and mouse game evolves, with Ishigami tweaking his plan in light of unfolding events. The police, however, remain baffled. The story and characters make for interesting reading, though the tale slows to a crawl at times with only the hook of wanting to know if they’ll be caught keeping the pages turning. The patient build-up is, however, worth it. Despite having sight of all sides in the game, the pay-off for the reader is the double-twist in the denouement, the first of which is somewhat unexpected and breath-taking, despite the fact that the book is marketed heavily on its existence. It’s relatively rare to come across a twist so clever that is not a blindsiding but makes perfect sense in relation to the rest of the plot. And the ending is just perfect. Overall, an absorbing, clever tale of clever scheming; a mostly four star read elevated by a philosophical spin and a very well executed denouement.

Review of Postmortem by Patricia Cornwell (1990, Scribner)

Richmond, Virginia. A serial killer is breaking into houses and strangling young women. Kay Scarpetta, the city’s medical examiner, is determined to try and help end the killer’s spree. Pete Marino, the lead cop on the investigation, prefers honest detective work rather than the theories of a pathologist. And the city’s commissioner and an aggressive investigative journalist seem to be waging their own campaign against her office. Scarpetta is used to making her way in a man’s world and she’s prepared to use all the forensic tricks her office has to try and make sure there’s no next victim. The killer, however, always seems to be one step ahead.

Postmortem is the first book in the Kay Scarpetta series following the investigative exploits of Richmond’s medical examiner. While Scarpetta has a soft underbelly, she is tough, uncompromising and dogged, used to having to fight battles with misogynists. In this outing, everybody seems to be out to besmirch her character and office as she tries to help catch a cunning serial killer who has been strangling a seemingly random set of women. Scarpetta is convinced that the secret to the case lies in forensic evidence. However, DNA is somewhat in its infancy and each scene seems to be compromised in some way. Moreover, her office and potentially herself are seemingly making mistakes. To add to her stresses her niece has come to visit for a couple of weeks. Cornwell spins the plot out, keeping the personal tensions and rivalries, along with the forensic details (which are occasionally overly-laboured), to the fore. The story is relatively linear, with few surprises and only a couple of twists and turns, and the denouement is somewhat inevitable. Nonetheless, it’s an engaging story held together by inter-personal rivalries, rather than the mystery of the killer’s identity.

Lazy Sunday Service

Picked up a new order from the local bookshop on Friday, which I've added to the TBR. Expect reviews of the following in the next couple of months or so (unless they get lost on the pile!): Corpus by Rory Clements, The Defense by Steve Cavanagh, Bloody January by Alan Parks, City Without Stars by Tim Baker, Smoke and Ashes by Abir Mukherjee, Last Orders by Caimh McDonnell, Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark and Snap by Belinda Bauer. I need a phase of reading more than I'm buying!

My posts this week
Review of Dead To Me by Cath Staincliffe
Review of The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Meeting an angel

Meeting an angel

Danny was running out of steam. His focus was solely the next three yards of tarmac.

One hundred metres more, then walk from there.

The impact blindsided him. He skidded up the bonnet, hit the windscreen, then catapulted forward, landing in a heap.

A car door slammed.

‘Moron! Don’t move! You could have broken something.’

‘You broke it for me,’ he muttered.

‘You ran in front of me, idiot. You okay?’

‘Do I look okay?’

‘You look an idiot who’s going to buy me a new headlight.’

‘And you look like the angel who’s going to take me to hospital.’



A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words.

Review of Dead To Me by Cath Staincliffe (2012, Corgi)

Mancunian teenager Lisa Finn has had a rocky start to life – placed in care by her mother, in trouble with the law, and addicted to drugs. She dies with a single stab wound to the chest. The case is picked up by a Major Incident Team headed up by DCI Gill Murray. Lisa’s mother insists the feckless boyfriend is to blame, but Murray wants everything done by the book, every lead run down and closed off. New recruit DC Rachel Bailey is a cop in a hurry and she’s little time for the book. She has her own ideas as to who the killer is and she want to prove her worth. It’s DC Janet Scott’s job to keep Bailey on the straight-and-narrow and see if she can deliver on the promise that Murray sees in her. The problem is that Scott and Bailey do not see eye-to-eye and that has the potential to cause all kinds of issues for the investigation.

Dead To Me is a prequel to the TV series ‘Scott and Bailey’ and was published mid-way through the run of the second series. Staincliffe was not a writer for the TV series, so I’m not quite sure how the novel came about; I’ve also not watched the TV series so I’ve no point of comparison between them. What I can say though is that I thoroughly enjoyed the read. The premise is relatively straightforward – a fairly conventional police procedural investigating the murder of a young woman found stabbed in her home. The woman had recently left a care home and was found by her junkie boyfriend. What sets the book apart is the trio of lead female characters: the experienced and successful DCI Gill Murray; the stoic Janet Scott, a career DC who wants to stay on the frontline and has no ambition for promotion; and the impetuous and reckless DC Bailey who is hungry for success and recognition. Staincliffe provides all three with a decent personal backstory and unfolding personal issues and interlinks those with their professional lives, and the story hinges around their interactions. In other words, this is really a Scott, Bailey and Murray story, with each given even weight, though Bailey acts as a kind of fulcrum in the story. While the mystery element holds no great surprises, the procedural components and the actions and interactions of the three lead characters make for a compelling and entertaining read.

Review of The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (2005, Random House)

Liesel is nine years old when her mother journeys south to near Munich to leave her with her new foster parents. On the way her brother dies, which is the first time Death sees her. At the funeral she steals The Gravedigger’s Handbook from one of the attendees, despite the fact that she cannot read. Her new papa is a kindly accordion player and her new mother a bit of a battle-axe. She quickly makes friends with the other children on Himmel Street, especially Rudy, though her time at school is a bit more fraught. Each night she has nightmares and when she wakes her new papa helps her learn how to read. She steals a book from a pile being burned by the local Nazis and from the library of the mayor’s wife. As the Second World War progresses her new family hides a Jew, Max, in the basement and he creates a new book for her. Sworn to secrecy, Liesel helps to keep Max alive. She steals food from local farms, shelters from bombs in a neighbours shelter, and watches Jews be marched to the local concentration camp. She hopes the war will end soon, but Death will see Liesel two more times.

The Book Thief tells the story of Liesel, a child growing up in Nazi Germany and her experiences throughout the war, as narrated by Death who has taken the book she wrote during the period and is fascinated by it. Her communist parents have been sent to a concentration camp and she taken in by foster parents. She’s illiterate but decides she wants to learn to read and is helped by her kindly new father, sourcing new books by stealing them. As the war progresses she helps to shelter a Jew and resists the regime in quiet and sometimes open ways along with her friend, Rudy. Zuzak tells the story almost as a fairy tale, with Liesel traversing ups and downs, adventure and danger, punctuated by facts and observations by Death. However, while the punctuations add a bit of liveliness to story, the telling otherwise felt a little flat and even. And while the story is interesting enough, there is no sense of mystery and the edges are shorn from the danger moments as the narrator consistently telegraphs to the reader how the story will unfold. The result is a story that, for me at least, didn’t quite achieve the emotional resonance it might have, but is nonetheless a thoughtful read.

Lazy Sunday Service

I picked up two book one's in long running series this week. Patricia Cornwell's Postmortem (no. 1 in the so-far 25 book Kay Scarpetta series) and Ruth Rendell's From Doon With Death (no. 1 in the 24 book Inspector Wexford series). I've read a couple of the Rendell series years ago, but this will be my first Cornwell. Looking forward to it.


My posts this week

Review of Let The Dead Speak by Jane Casey
Review of Cemetery Lake by Paul Cleave
Buried

Buried

The world swam back into existence.

Carrie cursed, then coughed. The air was thick with dust.

She opened her eyes to blackness.

Not a speck of light.

Spluttering she tried to move, sitting up. Then spread her arms and rotated.

The ceiling seemed to be just above her head.

A panic started to rise. ‘Hello?’

She started to explore, stumbling over debris.

The room had shrunk to a couple of metres squared. The door had disappeared.

She wondered how much air she had. Would yelling or digging use it up more quickly?

Was anyone hunting for her?

She cursed again.



A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words.

Review of Let The Dead Speak by Jane Casey (HarperCollins, 2017)

Chloe Emery flees her father’s home earlier than expected and returns to her mother’s house in West London. She finds the house deserted but covered in blood. Newly promoted DS Maeve Kerrigan and her team start to investigate. All the signs are that Kate Emery was brutally murdered, then disposed of. Kerrigan’s investigation quickly uncovers that Emery was manipulative and deceitful, but there are no obvious suspects. Her attention is focused on three households: Emery’s neighbours, the Norrises who have taken Chloe in and are acting suspiciously; the Turner’s whose son was investigated for stabbing a schoolmate; and Emery’s former husband and his two teenage boys. All seem to have something to hide and are partial with the truth, but with little forensic evidence she and her team have little else to work with. And Kerrigan has the sense that the bloodbath in the Kate’s house might not be the closing act.

Let The Dead Speak is the seventh book in the Maeve Kerrigan series. In this outing Kerrigan has been promoted to detective sergeant, gaining responsibility for running investigations. Her first case is a murder without a body after a house is discovered covered in too much blood for the victim to have survived. As usual she is aided by the abrasive DI Josh Derwent, but also has to contend with a new recruit, an ambitious fast-track detective constable that wants to skip routine work and be at the heart of the case. Without a body and conclusive forensic evidence the Kerrigan struggles to make headway and none of the victim’s neighbours or family are being very helpful. This outing is a straight-up police procedural focusing on the intricacies of the case and the relations within the investigative team, with Kerrigan’s personal life moved into the background. Casey does a very nice job of spinning the tale out, especially related to the difficulties of dealing with awkward witnesses and suspects. While the case is very tightly focused, there’s plenty of intrigue and forward movement as Kerrigan tries to sift the truth out from amongst all the lies. And as the story reaches its denouement there’s plenty of twists, turns and feints, shifting the reader from one suspect to another. Overall, an engaging and nicely told addition to the series.

Review of Cemetery Lake by Paul Cleave (2008, Arrow)

Theodore Tate used to be a police detective, but after the death of his daughter and injuring of his wife at the hands of drunk driver, he left the force. At the same time, the perpetrator of his family tragedy disappeared. Two years later he is working as a private investigator. His latest case has him visiting a cemetery for the exhumation of a suspected murder victim. As the coffin is unearthed, three bodies rise in the bordering lake. In the coffin is a young woman rather than a middle-aged bank manager. Rather than simply let his former colleagues investigate, Tate decides to steal evidence and run his own inquiry. His hunch is that there are other women occupying other peoples' final resting places and others might be destined to join them. Defying just about everybody connected to the case, and making a series of poor choices, Tate carries on regardless convinced that he can catch the killer before anyone else can.

Cemetery Lake is a serial killer/private investigator tale set in Christchurch in New Zealand. As is the common trope for PIs, Tate is down on his luck, a former policeman whose wife was left in a vegetative state and daughter killed by a drunk driver. He stumbles onto the work of a serial killer at an exhumation when the wrong body is in the coffin and people formerly buried are found in a lake. His need for justice sets him off in pursuit even though his former police colleagues want him to stand down. Cleave's tale charts his dogged, destructive track. Told in the first person, the narrative is engaging and compelling, even while the tale itself is somewhat of a stretch to believe. Cleave keeps the pace high, with plenty of action, intrigue, and twists and turns. It barrels along to a climatic denouement, but ends somewhat on a cliff-edge rather than rounding things out. Overall, a break-neck serial killer tale full of the usual tropes and sliding towards outlandish at times, held together by being a page-turner with an interesting enough lead character

Lazy Sunday Service

I finished the first draft of a new non-fiction book on Friday. Now have to read through it and tidy-up and send it back to my co-author. Then try to work out what to do with it. It's the first time I've written a non-fiction book without having a contract in hand. It's aimed at a general audience rather than an academic one and I think we'll probably need to find an agent to get it placed. Fun times ahead.

My posts this week
Review of All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Review of Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly
New to me authors in 2018
There’s no what if, if he gets hold of her

There’s no what if, if he gets hold of her

‘Where is she?’ Farrell asked wearily.

‘Why can’t you leave her alone?’

‘She doesn’t have her medication, Mrs Kelly. We need to find her.’

‘She doesn’t want to be found. She’s scared of him.’

‘She doesn’t have to go back. But we do need to find her. For her own safety.’

‘I’m her mother; I’ll judge what’s best for her.’

‘You know where she is.’

‘No. And I don’t want to know. I just want her safe.’

‘She’s no medication.’

‘She knows I’ll help if needed.’

‘But what if …’

‘There’s no what if, if he gets hold of her.’



A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words

Review of All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (2014, 4th Estate)

Marie-Laure became blind at a young age. As war breaks out she flees Paris with her father, the locksmith at the Museum of Natural History. Their flight takes them to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo in Brittany where they take refuge with a great-uncle and his housekeeper. In a mining town in Germany, Werner Pfennig lives with his younger sister in an orphanage. He is intrigued by radios and science and becomes an expert at building and repairing them. At the start of the war his endeavours secure him a place at an elite Nazi school, where he helps invent a radio direction finding device. As Marie-Laure gets drawn into aiding the resistance and her uncle broadcasts messages, Walter is drafted into the army tracking down enemy transmitters. Their paths seem destined to cross as the war draws to a close.

Set mostly in the lead up to and during the Second World War, All The Light We Cannot See tracks the lives of two children, Marie-Laure Leblanc a blind French girl, and Walter Pfenning a German orphan obsessed with radio. As the war starts, Marie-Laure flees Paris to Saint-Malo, while Walter is escapes work in the local mine to enrol in a military school. As Marie-Laure becomes a courier for the resistance, Walter joins a radio-direction unit tracking down resistance members in Russia, Austria, then France. Doerr tells their two stories through parallel threads, along with a third thread related to a Nazi treasure hunter trying to trace the location of a precious diamond removed from the museum Marie-Laure’s father worked at. The story is not told chronologically but rather jumps back and forth, with the Allied siege of Saint-Malo acting as a fulcrum point. The story is essentially about two good people trying to get by during a war. It is beautifully told, with some evocative prose and enchanting scenes. The first half was a wonderful read. Then the sections became progressively shorter and the timeline more choppy and it loses some of its charm. The denouement is nicely done, avoiding a saccharine conclusion, but rather than finish at the war’s end, it’s natural end point in my view, it stutters to a halt by jumping forward over time. The result was the second half of the story lost some of its compelling nature.

Review of Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly (William Morrow, 2016)

During the Second World War, the NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) expanded its research operations at its Langley base in Virginia. The flight engineering advances being made required a huge amount of calculations, all of which were undertaken by human computers. As part of its recruitment drive the NACA started to hire black women as computers, most of whom had college degrees in mathematics and often worked as school teachers. Segregated into the West Computing pool, the women worked diligently for the engineers. While the site had separate seating in the cafeteria and segregated toilets, the women started to break down the race barrier and advance into management and engineering roles, particularly in the late 1950s and 60s as the wider civil rights campaigns were underway and the NACA got subsumed into NASA, though they continued to be hampered by a race and gender glass ceiling. Nonetheless, they all made a valuable contribution to the work at Langley, with a number making significant contributions to aerospace research and the space race.

Hidden Figures tells the story of the black women at NACA and later NASA from the mid-1940s through to the early 1970s. While Shetterly provides the broad scope of the women’s lives and work at the Langley site, and discusses a number of women, she focuses in particular on the four lives to tell her history: Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Christine Darden. To provide wider context, she frames the these biographies in relation to both their non-work lives, the development of the local community around Langley, and the wider treatment of black people and the civil rights movement. The result is an interesting uncovering of the important work of the women, not only in NACA/NASA, but also the local community and in encouraging other black women to pursue careers in science. Shetterly does a nice job of constructing the social history and of balancing the various strands to create an informative narrative. She tells a story of resilience, willpower, dignity, pride, intellect, and a fierce commitment to family, community and science. However, in her desire to promote and celebrate the work of the women the book lacks a critical edge, is full of platitudes, and becomes a little too repetitive.  Overall, an engaging and important social history.

New to me authors in 2018

Of the 101 books I read this year 65 were by authors new to me. It's always a balance between returning to old favourites and discovering new writers. I might shift the balance back slightly towards catching up with writers I've read before in the coming year and I hope to read books by some of the authors below.

The Girls of Atomic City by Denise Kiernan 
The Death Season by Kate Ellis
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
The Treacherous Strand by Andrea Carter 
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut 
Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway
City of the Dead by Sara Gran
Red Plenty by Francis Spufford
African Sky by Tony Park
Taroko Gorge by Jacob Ritari
Ghost Month by Ed Lin
The Last Days of Jack Sparks by Jason Arnopp
Sirens by Joseph Knox
Rain Falls on Everyone by Clár Ni Chonghaile
The Age of Treachery by Gavin Scott
The Falcon and the Snowman by Robert Lindsey
Jar of Hearts by Jennifer Hillier
Under the Frangipani by Mia Couto
The Innocent by Ian McEwan
Wife of the Gods by Kwei Quartey
Code Girls by Liza Mundy
She Rides Shotgun by Jordan Harper
The Cypher Bureau by Eilidh McGinness
Basin and Range by John McPhee
The One Man by Andrew Gross
The Atrocity Archive by Charles Stross
Who Killed Palomino Molero? by Mario Vargas Llosa
The Alibi Man by Tami Hoag
Fletch by Gregory McDonald
The Last Days of Night by Graham Moore
Easy Motion Tourist by Leye Adenle  
The Real-Town Murders by Adam Roberts
Kolymsky Heights by Lionel Davidson
The Big Kiss-Off of 1944 by Andrew Bergman
Lamentation by Joe Clifford
Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell
The Confession by Jo Spain
Straight Man by Richard Russo
Between Giants: The Battle for the Baltics in World War II by Prit Buttar
Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz
The Rúin by Dervla McTiernan
Bone Island Mambo by Tom Corcoran
Traitors by Josh Ireland
Night Life by David C Taylor
The Kept Woman by Karin Slaughter
Paris Trout by Pete Dexter
The Bombers and The Bombed by Richard Overy
The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra by Vaseem Khan
A Negro and an Ofay by Danny Gardner
Dark Town by Thomas Mullen
The Twilight Warriors by Robert Gandt
The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942-1944 by Ian W. Toll
Jade Dragon Mountain by Elsa Hart
The Way Back to Florence by Glenn Haybittle
The Unquiet Dead by Ausma Zehanat Khan
Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal by James D. Hornfischer
The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson
The Sentinel by Mark Oldfield
The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson
Thumbprint by Friedrich Glauser
Burial Rites by Hannah Kent
The Bird Tribunal by Agnes Ravatn
Death on Demand by Paul Thomas
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
The Sugar House by Laura Lippman