bukapocalypse

Here's another load of typo- and howler-ridden provisional notes about bukes wot I've been reading. I still have a moderately full boxful of read bukes to catch up on in these notes, most of them nonfiction; goodness knows when I'll get to them.


Nowhere to Go (2011) by Iain Rowan

This collection of 11 short crime stories has just been published by the new imprint Infinity Plus Ebooks, which has also published (expanded) reissues of two titles of my own.

When my review copy arrived I opened it up just to have a dekko, mainly because my Kindle for PC software is still a new toy. I thought I'd quickly read the first story, then come back for the rest another day. Instead I found myself seized, and I read the book from front to back. Rowan offers an amazing fluidity of narrative; from the first paragraph it was a question of sitting back and allowing myself to be carried along by the flow.

Though all are very readable, not all of the stories are equally successful, and there are two instances where pairs of stories seem to be doing each much the same as the other: two stories of criminals getting their comeuppance because grossly underestimating their intended victims (both are good stories, though, with the second, "Easy Job", being pretty wonderful), and two stories of conmen playing upon their victims' greed (the first of these, "Two Nights' Work", is one of the jolliest stories herein -- I was reminded a little of the gusto of certain similar Roald Dahl tales). For me the two best stories are "Moths", which is the only dark fantasy in the book, and especially the collection's longest and most ambitious, "The Remains of My Estate". In the latter what impressed me was not so much the plot, although that's perfectly fine, but the unremitting depiction of the setting, a run-down urban hell where the cops barely dare intrude.

This collection was my introduction to Rowan's work. I'll be looking out for his name in future.


The Disappearance of Edwin Drood (1991) by Peter Rowland

There are several "completions" around of Charles Dickens' unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood, perhaps the best known being that by Leon Garfield, and then there have been various novels that have used the surviving text as springboard for something else, such as Dan Simmons's impressive Drood and, my favourite, The D. Case; or The Truth about The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini. Peter Rowland's novel uses a cunning and just allowable plot device to give Sherlock Holmes and John Watson MD the opportunity to solve the mystery -- which, of course, they do. I liked the style of this book quite a lot -- Rowland certainly caught Doyle's voice -- and I very much liked the tale . . . for the most part. My only irritations were towards the end, with the brief introduction of the supernatural (although, of course, this is perfectly in keeping with Doyle's own abject gullibility when confronted by the "psychic") and an explanation of Dick Datchery's role in the original that was clever and witty but out of place, being metafictional in what is otherwise a piece of straightforward telling. Overall, though, this was lots of fun -- and the ideal book to put by the bedside in the spare room!


My Name is Michael Sibley (1952) by John Bingham

I read the 2000 reissue of this novel, which has a foreword by John Le Carre. Here I discovered Bingham was the original of Le Carre's George Smiley, something I had not known before and which raised Bingham in my esteem. Many years ago I read several of Bingham's books, including this one (as well as his excellent account of the Scottish serial killer Peter Manuel); at the time I was expecting them to be cracking mysteries, as it were, and was too young and stupid to realize that Bingham was offering something very much better.

Mild-mannered, undistinguished journalist Michael Sibley is shocked when his old schooldays companion John Prosset is bumped off, because it was something Sibley has always fantasized about doing himself (although the world knows them as the best of friends, Sibley has always loathed his overweening, arrogant acquaintance) -- and in recent weeks, with Prosset seemingly moving in on Sibley's fiancee, the fantasies have been becoming ever more alluring.

Almost immediately Sibley realizes he's in many ways the ideal suspect for the police, and so he starts "improving" on events a bit -- telling little white lies here and there, encouraging fiancee Kate to do likewise, and so on. The net result is, of course, that every last falsehood and disingenuity comes back to bite him, and he looks guilty as sin. Is it possible that he is guilty as sin, but lying to the reader? Or is he, as he claims to be, an innocent man destined for the hangman's noose?

There's nothing flamboyant about the way Bingham tells this tale -- he was a very plain, restrained, quiet writer -- and yet Sibley's account of his misadventures succeeded in completely mesmerizing me. With luck some of his other novels are still in print . . .


The Man With No Face (1998) by Peter Turnbull

Ed McBain's 87th Precinct relocated to Glasgow? What could be more fun? I started this book -- about the boys and gurrrls of P Division tackling the murder of someone who's had his face shot off -- with enormously high expectations, and was immensely disappointed. The Ed McBain-homage element is assuredly there -- there's even a passage about the city being a woman -- but . . . Well, maybe the "but" is exemplified by the fact that Turnbull's passage about the city being a woman is actually funnier than the one in the McBain parody I put in Dave Langford's and my Earthdoom, and I'm absolutely certain Turnbull didn't mean it to be. McBain's wonderful skill was that often his books consisted more of his marvelous, endlessly entertaining digressions than they did plot; yes, of course we care about whodunnit, but the joy is in being with the boys and gals of the 87th as they chatter and badinage their way through events. Turnbull seems to have got the message that there should be lots of digressions and backflashes, but not that these should be witty and a delight in themselves. In a sense, then, his city-is-a-woman passage was a high point for me; elsewhere, though, every time the text moved into a particular selfconscious tone that heralded yet another boring-as-hell digression or backflash, I found myself gloomily leafing forward to check where this particular piece of dullery might come to an end.

Others may find exactly the opposite -- I believe Turnbull has many devotees -- but this is how it was for me.


Easy Streets (2004) by Bill James

The cover of this book calls it "A Harpur & Iles Mystery", which must be one of the most remarkable pieces of copywriting idiocy ever to appear. It is, for a start, not a mystery.

What is this book exactly? It's a crime novel, and it has cops in it called Harpur and Iles. But it's not in any real sense a mimetic novel. Instead, it's a sort of extraordinarily mannered semi-comedy of manners, semi-Jacobean tragedy. In an unnamed British city, the controllers of the drug trade are trying to adapt to the fact that the street price of their merchandise is plummeting dues to the easing of governmental attitudes toward dope. So they jostle for supremacy in an attempt to restructure the marketplace, killing each other in the process. And the cops seem complicit in all this. And, toward the end of the book, I didn't care in the slightest what happened so long as I got to page 191 and could read something else instead.

Bill James is a much-loved writer -- there are quotes all over the cover from hifalutin critics -- but not one for me. I have a feeling that, many years ago, I was deceived by the strapline into reading a different "Harpur & Iles Mystery" and spent much of the relevant time fighting a potent urge to throw it at the wall. A I imply, different readers may well have a completely different take on this book than I did.


Mister B. Gone (2007) by Clive Barker

Barker, as I recall, received a lot of flak when this book came out, and it's easy to see why: his publisher marketed it as his grand return to straightforward horror, whereas really it's a dark comedy -- nothing like thwarted expectations to annoy one's readers! The eponymous character and narrator is a demon who escapes a ghastly fate in Hell by coming to the surface and the 15th century, where, after teaming up with another demon in like circumstances, he eventually finds himself in Mainz. The fact that this is the time when Gutenberg is ushering in the spanking new technology of printing is no coincidence, since it provides a main driving force of the plot as well as, so the narrative conceit goes, an explanation for this book's existence. The demon himself, Jakabob Botch, is an interesting and almost likeable companion; despite his frequent cruelties, he has some smattering of a conscience and the finer sensibilities.

This isn't a blemishless novel -- the constant exhortations to the reader to burn the book rather than keep reading are too long and repetitive, while for me the climactic scenes likewise dawdled -- but overall I was entertained.


March Violets (2009) by Philip Kerr

This is the first of Kerr's series about ex-cop-turned-PI Bernie Gunther, here trying to solve a case (he's hired by a plutocrat to track down an expensive item of jewellery missing from the safe of the plutocrat's murdered daughter and son-in-law) while coping with the everyday horrors and bureaucratic complications of Nazism in pre-WWII Berlin.

A problem the novel has is that this latter aspect is often far more interesting, and far more effectively portrayed, than the noirish plot itself; I came away from the novel with a real sense that Nazism was soul-destroying in a far more wholesale manner than simply its policies of mass murder (barely getting into action by the time of this book), with not just the obvious victims of its viciousness being brutalized but also all the Germans who either obeyed mindlessly or -- the "March violets" of the title -- went along with the "disappearances" and other atrocities for reasons of terrified or mercenary self-interest.

A second difficulty is the writing style. Yes, it's refreshing that Kerr should put into Gunther's narration the kind of sardonic wisecracking similes that Raymond Chandler and other writers of the hardboiled era deployed to such spectacular effect, and sometimes it works. At other times, though, it becomes wearisome either because a particular simile stretches laboriously over two or three lines or simply because there have already been far too many similes over the past couple of pages.

Overall, then: moderately enjoyable, and in some places powerfully affecting. I read the novel bound up in an omnibus (Berlin Noir, 1993) with the next two in the series, and so was happy enough to keep reading. If I'd read it as a solo title, however, I'm not sure I'd have troubled to do so.


The Pale Criminal (1990) by Philip Kerr

Second in the series featuring PI Bernie Gunther; in this volume WWII is well under way. Berlin is being plagued by a series of ritual murders of young Aryan women; the murders have routinely been pinned on Jewish suspects, but this practice is becoming an obvious nonsense since, despite the luckless Jews having been killed or banished to concentration camps, the killings have continued. Heydrich, aware that most of the cops under his command are incompetent political appointees, dragoons Bernie into rejoining the Kripo as a sort of consultant in order to find out who the real murderer might be. Soon attention is focusing on Julius Streicher, loathsome even by Nazi standards, who may be engineering the killings in hopes of fomenting pogroms.

Simultaneously, Bernie is trying to aid a rich publisher who's being blackmailed over the homosexuality of her son -- something that, for obvious reasons, must be kept strictly a secret in Nazi Germany.

I liked this book a lot better than its predecessor, March Violets, mainly because the obsessive wisecrackery of the previous volume has here been toned down a little; perhaps Kerr had a stricter editor this time around or perhaps he was responding to the comments of reviewers of the first book -- who knows? As with the earlier book, though, I was still unconvinced by Bernie's sex life -- he seems merely to have to say "Fancy a quick one?" to any woman he meets and, next thing, he's in the midst of Position #294 complete with live marmoset and tub of cold spaghetti. Something like that, anyway. This aside, the plot worked admirably and, as before, the sheer oppressiveness of the Nazi regime, and of the ubiquitous terror it deliberately instilled in even its supporters, is excellently conveyed.


A German Requiem (1991) by Philip Kerr

The third of the series featuring Bernie Gunther. WWII has now been lost, and miraculously Bernie has survived -- miraculously because, having been co-opted into the SS, he was able to escape having to participate in that organization's crimes only by volunteering for combat. Now, a PI in Berlin once more, he's wondering if his wife is giving blowjobs to occupying Americans for money and gifts when he's hired by a Russian officer to try to produce the evidence that will save a convicted murderer in Vienna from the hangman's rope; the prisoner in question, the Russian's colleague in black market dealings, was also, years ago, one of Bernie's subordinates in the Kripo, so Bernie is perfectly aware of how murderous the man is. Off to Vienna Bernie goes, wondering if he'll have a marriage to come home to (this doesn't stop him from boffing any volunteers he encounters, of course), and soon he finds himself in the midst of a sea of grubby international politics as rival occupation forces jostle for ascendancy; part of the mix comprises those German war criminals who're trying to ensure they not just escape retribution but actually establish themselves in good positions in whatever new order will emerge from this chaotic melting pot.

I found this novel far more engaging than its three predecessors, with characters that were better drawn and a satisfactorily twisty plot -- this latter marred, perhaps, by a couple of marginally implausible coincidences. Even so, I may track down later titles in the series.


Exit Music (2007) by Ian Rankin

I bought this some little while ago and decided to keep it to read as my reward for finishing my nonfiction book Denying Science (coming your way this fall, plug plug); of course, Denying Science proved to be one of those rare books that took me far longer to polish off than anticipated, so, as you can imagine, by the time I allowed myself to reach Exit Music down from the shelf, I was trembling like a junkie in need of a fix. But it was worth the wait . . .

This is the book that sees Rebus's exit -- his last case before retiring from the force. In a way it's a simple one -- a distinguished Russian emigree poet and notorious womanizer, now based in Edinburgh, is beaten to death in a little frequented street somewhere off the end of Princes Street. As Rebus investigates, he becomes convinced the murder must have something to do with the presence in Edinburgh of fleets of Russian industrialists who're being courted by Members of the Scottish Parliament in hopes they'll bring money and jobs to the Scottish economy. Is there some kind of coverup going on? Are those Russians really just businessmen or are they better characterized as mob bosses? And how come Ger Cafferty, Edinburgh's top gangster and Rebus's longtime nemesis, is somehow mixed up in all this?

This isn't the best Rebus novel I've read but it's not far off it, and certainly a distinguished ending to an astonishingly distinguished series; the book's climax is like something out of a Shakespeare play, at once darkly comic and a comment on the human condition. I'm lucky enough that I've never made a point of reading the Rebus books in order, so I still have several to go -- in fact, I already own two others that I've not yet read (plus a couple of Rankin's non-Rebus novels). There cannot be a crime-fiction writer in the world who does not regard Rankin's work as the benchmark against which all other writing in the field should be compared.


Farthing (2006) by Jo Walton

In an alternate world where Britain came to an "honourable" peace with Hitler in 1941, leaving the Reich in control of mainland Europe -- complete with extermination camps, whose existence is fully known by the Brits -- there's a murder during a weekend house party at Farthing, the ancestral seat of the Eversleys. Farthing has also given its name to the Farthing Set, a group of well placed, powerful, far-right politicians intent, although they insist their motives are the best, on bringing to Britain the same hell that Hitler has created in the rest of Europe. For much of the length of this book we seem to be being treated to a cozy country house mystery, told, in alternate chapters, in the two standard modes for a cozy: a third-person narrative following the investigation of Inspector Carmichael of the Yard, and a first-person account by Lucy, daughter of the current Lord and Lady Eversley, and enough of a rebel to have married a Jew -- a revolting decision in a land where antisemitism is just a hairsbreadth from being fully institutionalized, with official persecution seemingly just around the corner. In especial, Lucy's crime is sufficient in her mother's eyes to make both she and her husband expendable, sacrificial lambs to be thrown to the cops to keep the investigation from uncovering too many home truths. By the book's end all the horrors of Walton's dystopia are not just revealed: we are, thanks to the wonderful empathy she builds up in us for Lucy and husband David, and for Inspector Carmichael -- who as a homosexual has his own worries in the repressive nightmare that is Britain -- right in the middle of the terror.

The cover strapline makes comparisons with Robert Harris's Fatherland and Philip Roth's The Plot Against America; the latter I haven't read, though I own a copy and must dig it out soon. The comparison with the former seems invalid, though. Harris's cop hero has acclimatized to operating under Nazi occupation, and, even as he resents it, is largely in acceptance of it. Lucy/David and Carmichael, however, are drawn progressively closer to the abyss, and know they are being drawn; they are given the stark choice of fleeing from its edge or acquiescing to the long, slowly accelerating fall.

As an aside, I was amused by one thing: After reading for several chapters, I thought, Lucy is really more of a Bunny than a Lucy, to be in the spirit of country house cozies. About four pages later Lucy revealed that her father's pet name for her was . . . Bunny.

This is a top-notch book that -- at the same time as being as compulsive a page-turner as you're likely to come across all year -- forces ethical considerations onto the page, so that the reader, like the tale's heroes, doesn't have the option of simply avoiding them but must engage with them, one way or the other.


The Girl Who Played with Fire (2006; trans 2009 from the Swedish by Reg Keelend) by Stieg Larsson

I like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo a lot, but was very disappointed by this, the second in the series of three . . . and probably won't trouble to read the third. Blomkvist's political magazine Millennium is gearing up to publish an exposé by two freelance journos of a sex-trafficking ring that involves people in high places; but then, with the report in its final stages of preparation, the two are brutally murdered . . . and Lisbeth Salander's fingerprints are all over the murder weapon. Of course, Blomkvist knows she must have been set up; but how can he help her when he hasn't a clue where she is or what she's doing? The ensuing tale involves far too many artificial coincidences for this reader, and also makes what is, for me, a cardinal sin in a thriller novel: introducing a real-life celebrity as a supporting character. By the end, my reaction to it all was: I do not believe one bleeding word of this any longer -- and a thriller that invokes this reaction is seriously malfunctioning.

There are some good sections, and the text is helped by a good translation, but overall? Nope.


The Shape of Snakes (2001) by Minette Walters

A knockout psychological thriller. In November 1978 a spinster black woman with Tourette's syndrome, Mad Annie, was murdered in the shabby West London terrace where she lived and where she was habitually persecuted by the neighbourhood kids and adults alike. Only Margaret Ranelagh, the young local wife who discovered her, seemed interested in doing anything more about the crime than sweeping it under the carpet as swiftly as possible . . . and for her persistence she has paid with social, mental and marital upheavals, having had to spend the past couple of decades abroad. But now she's back, and she wants to extract justice for Mad Annie by, despite the fierce hostility of others involved, raking over the near-dead coals of the case and bringing uncomfortable truths to light. The title refers to that fact that, deliciously, all through the telling of this longish and complex tale, the shape of this history's plot (i.e., what we think was the real story behind Mad Annie's death) is, like that of a snake, constantly changing as we discover more and more about the characters involved, being put in the position of frequently having to reevaluate them as we uncover further details of their nature and past behaviour. This is a beautifully told story, with strong characterization, impeccable pacing, and a powerful narrative drive.


Down Cemetery Road (2003) by Mick Herron

Oxford housewife Sarah is in the terminal stages of the dinner party from hell, forced upon her by her would-be financial whizkid Mark, when the house down the road explodes, killing the two adults therein; their small daughter, however, escapes unscathed . . . only shortly thereafter to disappear off the face of the earth as if she'd never existed. Sarah, diagnosed by one of her husband's obnoxious dinner guests that evening as suffering from Bored Housewife Syndrome, takes it upon herself to try to track down the child, little realize that she's taking on one of the UK's nastiest covert divisions, a group largely manned by sociopaths that's charged with clearing up the messes made by the security services by "disappearing" people and the truth alike. Doggedly persistent, Sarah dodges death through a combination of naivety, luck and simple goodheartedness even as the bodies pile up around her. In so doing she gradually unravels the horrific crimes the UK government is committing supposedly in the name of that country's citizens.

This was a book slow to start, and the tedium was barely helped by the author's frequent habit of using cheap narrative tricks to pull the wool over the reader's eyes -- as example, we're made to believe at first it was Sarah's house that exploded and then, gasp, a few pages later it's revealed with a sort of arch cackle that, no, the text was ambiguous and really it was the nearby house that went bang. That's cheating, in my opinion. (I've committed this crime myself on occasion, but I educated myself out of it years ago.) This sort of smartassery continues all through the book; late on, there's an example of it that's supposed to offer a fiendishly cunning twist whose stupidity is revealed when you ask yourself: How would you film this? You couldn't, of course, because the twist wouldn't work if you could actually see what was going on. Even so, after its sluggish start the narrative really does pick up a compelling head of steam; the pages started turning at a blurring speed. I'm still not certain if this adequately compensated for the irritation I felt over the artificiality of those "cheats".


Death by Sheer Torture (1981) by Robert Barnard

One of the review quotes on my edition of this book is from a wisely unnamed reviewer for the Chicago Tribune: "Robert Barnard has never produced anything but four-star suspense." The other quotes make it plain Barnard's real fortes are wit and ingenuity; if he ever tried to write a suspenseful novel, I've yet to come across it. He triumphs in the same sort of mystery subgenre as Colin Watson; his books are less outright comedies than Watson's, but they have if anything a more lingering cleverness.

Here the victim of an aristocratic country house murder is, unfortunately for our narrator, Inspector Perry Trethowan, his father; even more unfortunately, Dad died suspended from the strappado he'd commissioned as a masochistic masturbatory aid. It's going to be difficult to live this one down at the Yard. Much of the mirth of this novel derives from Perry's ghastly elderly relatives: the Trethowans have long been famous for using aggressive publicity to make the most of their generally somewhat secondary artistic talents. (The only genuinely talented one among them, the now-dead painter Elizabeth, is generally disparaged by the rest.) As for Perry's Dad, a very minor composer, Perry is at pains to point out to us that his father's greatest compositional triumph was probably the occasional musical fart.

The solution to the murder mystery is satisfying. The solution to Perry's other problem -- making sure he doesn't inherit the ancestral seat -- had me grinning. What more could I ask? This is hardly a major work, but it's a very jolly piece of entertainment.


The Man who Turned into Himself (1993) by David Ambrose

The cover quotes for my edition of this book are from mainstream reviewers amazed, as is the blurb writer, that any novelist could be so fiendishly ingenious as to co-opt the many-worlds aspect of quantum theory to his theme. Nuff said about the abysmal mental horizons of those reviewers. Ambrose himself must, I guess, have squirmed.

Rick Hamilton is in a business meeting when he suddenly realizes his wife Anne is about to die in a horrific car accident. Fleeing to the spot, he is just not quite in time to save her, although their young son Charlie survives; Rick's grief is sufficient that he casts himself into an alternate timeline, where he piggybacks onto (and into) the mind of his counterpart Richard, who is married to a very similar but importantly different Anne. He could love her, but . . . And he has to cope with his grief over the fact that, in this world, son Charlie was never born. Out of this straightforwardly sciencefictional situation Ambrose conjures a fast-paced and gripping tale, even if the only truly three-dimensional character is Rick himself.

An additional recommendation is that Ambrose succeeds in telling us his completely satisfying story, which has its depths, in under 200 pages.


A Novel Bookstore (2009; trans from the French 2010 by Alison Anderson) by Laurence Cossé

Broke genius literateur Ivan and exquisitely beautiful and rick heiress Francesca decide to open a bookshop in Paris that will go completely against the grain of a French literary scene dominated by the Gallic corporate equivalents of Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Called Au Bon Roman (the original and much better French title of this book; approx. "The Good Novel"), this store has a stock that eschews all the fifteen-minutes-in-the-limelight bestsellers du jour, focusing instead entirely on novels -- and occasional other books -- that are of lasting literary value, whether classic or recent. The books are chosen by an anonymous committee of discriminating readers whose identities are kept strictly confidential. Only now someone, perhaps enraged by the astonishing success the corporation-thwarting Au Bon Roman is having, has clearly hacked that confidential list, because its member are beginning, one by one, to suffer . . . unfortunate accidents.

This is a moderately dark comedy aimed smack at bibliophile readers like me. The mystery-story aspect doesn't work too well, which is unimportant; the translation limps, sometimes dreadfully, and this matters quite a lot more; but the gentle, quasi-satirical humour and the love of books both come shining through, and for me, as I eagerly devoured this book, that was all that really mattered.


Mr Mee (2000) by Andrew Crumey

Mr Mee is an improbably naive octogenarian antiquary, living in Glasgow and writing occasional twee essays for journals like The Scots Magazine. His current obsession concerns two minor players in the life of Jean Jacques Rousseau called Ferrand and Minard. His battleaxe housekeeper suggests he get himself a computer rather than continue trying to research such subjects through his dirty, dusty old books. It's not long before his surfing of the interwebs leads him to the joys of online porn: there's this live webcam, you see, showing a naked woman (in whom Mr Mee has no more than mild interest) boredly reading a book about . . . Ferrand and Minard! Next thing he knows, he's having a torrid affair with a youthful masseuse, Catriona. In another of the three narrative strands making up this book, a middle-aged university lecturer is wishing he could have a torrid, adulterous affair with a youthful student, and believes himself to be playing her as skilfully as any trout angler. The third strand involves the two 18th-century copyists Ferrand and Minard who, through their incompetence, succeed in losing from history all trace of a revolutionary encyclopedia of human knowledge full of speculations and theorems that would have seemed insane to the editors of L'Encyclopédie; various of the lost essays -- as for example the one concerning a philosopher's discovery that the laws of nature can be represented by arrangements of furniture and domestic implements, meaning that arrangements of furniture and domestic implements can be used to generate new laws of nature -- pepper the text, often to very entertaining effect. Such modern concepts as quantum theory, special relativity, social networking, Mendel's Theory of Heredity and the world wide web are prefigured by the various 18th-century French authors. But are these essays really all that they might seem?

Of course, the whole way through I was having to stop myself identifying Mr Mee with Arthur Mee, the editor/author of The Children's Encyclopedia, a compilation that haunted my childhood.

I spent the first 50 or 100 pages enchanted by the conceits of this book, and laughing a lot. After that, though, the sexual elements of the text, which had earlier been just ribald fun (Mr Mee's discovery, looking at the naked woman on his screen, thinking: So that's why Ruskin was so upset!), began to seem instead a bit voyeuristic, or masturbatory, or both; in other words, even while I continued to be entertained by the book's various nat phil fancies, I had the horrid sensation of my skin crawling. Had the novel been porn, I'd have been unruffled; had it been Laurell K. Hamilton, I'd have been either giggling or throwing the book at the wall; as it was, I was just . . . somehow uneasy.

So:

Don't take my word for it. Your reaction to the text might be quite different. You may find yourself slapping your thighs with mirth all through the passages I thought were a bit seedy. But, for me, this book left a faintly nasty taste.


American Skin (2009) by Ken Bruen

I enjoyed the previous Bruen book that I read, The Guards, so was expecting a lot from this one. In the event I was somewhat disappointed: American Skin enthralled me a lot less than I'd anticipated, not (I concluded) because of the storytelling, which is trademark Bruen, but because there were -- and I know this sounds odd -- too many psychopaths in the tale. Stephen Blake and his best pal Tommy pull off a bank heist in Ireland with an Ulster IRA psychopath called Stapleton, who climaxes the heist by killing Tommy. Blake flees for the US, leaving financial-whizkid girlfriend Siobhan to launder the money preparatory to joining him, with it, in the US. By Stapleton has other ideas. In the US, Blake, who himself is not without psychopathic tendencies, guiltily boffs the psychopathic nympho wife, Sherry, of the psychopathic petty gang boss who used to be Tommy's friend, then offs the friend and flees again, now for Tucson. Sherry pursues, hooking up with another psychopath, sadistic serial killer Dade . . . Are you beginning to realize why my disbelief failed to stay fully suspended?


The Distant Echo (2003) by Val McDermid

My first encounter with a McDermid novel; after reading this one, I rushed out and bought three others (including A Place of Execution, the TV miniseries of which I much enjoyed a few years ago). In 1978 four male St Andrews University students, best pals, the self-styled "Laddies fi Kirkcaldy", take a short cut on their drunken way home through the snow from a Christmas party and stumble across the still just alive body of a local barmaid; despite their best efforts, by the time help arrives the raped woman is dead. In succeeding months the four lads suffer persecution, sometime brutally violent, from the police and the locals, including the victim's thuggish brothers and their equally brainless friends. After all, since the students were the only ones known to have been on the scene as she died, they must be the killers, no?

Now (2003) the inquiry is being reopened as part of a cold cases drive headed -- coincidentally -- by the officer who, as a young cop back in 1978, was the first to be informed by the students of the crime, and who played a part in that initial, fatally unsuccessful investigation; the fact that he knows the case and the four students (all now successfully established in their different careers) seems helpful. But the reopening of the case has clearly triggered the original killer, keen the case should remain unsolved, or perhaps some vigilante seeking to avenge that long-ago death.

I was absolutely spellbound throughout this longish book -- spellbound by the sheer storytelling and character depiction as well as by the convolutions of the plot. It's going to be difficult making myself pace the other McDermid novels I now own rather than read them all in a single gluttonous splurge.