Review: China Lake by Meg Gardiner

Title: China Lake

Author: Meg Gardiner

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton (2002)

ISBN: 978-0-340-82247-0

A young American sci-fi author and part time lawyer, Evan Delaney, is looking after her six year old nephew while her brother is posted to sea as a Navy pilot. The boy’s mother, who disappeared some months before the book starts, reappears in all their lives as a member of an extreme religious cult known as The Remnant. The cult soon moves from picketing the funerals of AIDS sufferers to more deadly pursuits and Evan’s family and friends all get caught up in the mayhem.

I added this book to my bookmooch wishlist after someone posted the opening lines to the 4 Mystery Addicts reading group:

Peter Wyoming didn’t shake hands with people; he hit them with his presence like a rock fired from a slingshot. He was a human nail, lean and straight with brush-cut hair, and when I first saw him he was carrying a picket sign and enough rage to scorch the ground.

Those lines hinted, to me, that a ripper yarn might follow. Alas, it was not, quite, to be.

Although it had potential the book missed the marks that would have made it a great thriller for me. Along with the religious cult there’s action aplenty (although quite a bit of filler too), conspiracy theories and a rejected high school crush that turns to adulthood revenge-seeking on a large scale. There are even rabid animals and impossibly cute children in peril but none of it is particularly innovative. And I am heartily sick of thrillers that portray the police/authorities collectively as either utterly incompetent knuckle-dragging morons or awesomely invincible supermen. For the record this book chose the first option but as I find both equally unconvincing the other would have been just as annoying.

Once again, because this book lacked any compelling characters, I found myself being pernickety about things like obscure words used to show-off the author’s abilities with a dictionary and scenes that adding nothing but length. And these characters were just not interesting to me. The religious zealots were so over-the-top as to be laughable rather than scary. If you want terrifying religious nutters watch Louis Theroux’s 2007 documentary The Most Hated Family in America (about the people behind the military-funeral picketing Westboro Baptist “Church”) which sends chills down my spine precisely because the zealots are frighteningly normal rather than the caricatures that Gardiner has created. And the good guys aren’t a heck of a lot better here. Our heroine is frustratingly inconsistent (she believes the church members capable of starting a major biological war but not, apparently, of having enough skills to find out her boyfriend’s surname for example) and her brother is arrogant and seemingly incapable of having a coherent thought. Only Jesse, Evan’s boyfriend, seems well-rounded and believable in the context of the book but as he gets most of the daftest lines and plot devices I’m not even that fond of him.

In the end the plot had all the elements a thriller should have but they weren’t tied together well and without any great characters it was just a standard hero-saves-the-world-in-the-nick-of-time-and-despite-the-plodding-authorities book.

My rating 2.5/5

 

Review: Tough Cookie by Diane Mott Davidson

Title: Tough Cookie

Author: Diane Mott Davidson

Publisher: Bantam Books (2001)

ISBN: 978-0-553-57830-0

The 9th book in the Goldy Bear Culinary series finds Colorado caterer Goldy Schulz (nee Bear) performing for a TV cooking show and looking for work as a personal chef because her commercial kitchen has been closed by the health inspector. A man she used to date and is now trying to sell some antique skis to dies on the ski slopes and when Police decide he may have been murdered Goldy looks a likely suspect so she investigates to clear her name. At the same time she starts looking into the deaths of two people who died in separate incidents on the same ski slopes three years earlier.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve read so many of these (there are 15 in the series and I’ve read 10 though not in order) but it was all fairly predictable. There are the requisite number of mis-directed suspects, red-herrings and scenes of turmoil for the plucky protagonist but there wasn’t a single surprise in it for me. The description of food preparation is, as always, hunger inducing but not really enough to sustain a book. In fact if I hadn’t found such a perfectly comfortable reading spot I’d have been tempted not to bother finishing simply because I felt like I’d read it all before.

I am a little tired of the characters too. All the men in Goldy’s life are too one-dimensional to be believable: her ex-husband is evil incarnate and her current husband is so perfect that neither seems particularly realistic. Goldy’s friend Marla is the only character I actually like as she has a sense of humour and also seems more credible than the rest of the cardboard cutouts that populate the book.

I think perhaps I’ve reached my saturation point with this particular sleuthing caterer and it’s time to look elsewhere for my cosy reading.

My rating 2/5

 

Review: Devil’s Peak by Deon Meyer

Title: Devil’s Peak

Author: Deon Meyer

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton (2007)

ISBN: 978-0-340-89705-8

In present-day South Africa three stories unfold in parallel. Christine explains to a patient Minister what led to her becoming a prostitute while Benny, an alcoholic police officer, has one last-ditch attempt to salvage his marriage and career. At the same time Thobela, a former freedom-fighter, is devastated when his adopted son is killed as an innocent bystander to a robbery and he turns to a life of vengeance.

This book reminded me of Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore. Although they’re set on different continents both books stretch the boundaries of traditional crime fiction and use the genre to demonstrate wider social issues in an understated way. And, like Temple, Meyer paints the most spectacular pictures with often only a handful of words, as with the sentence

“Beyond George the houses of the wealthy sat like fat ticks against the dunes, silently competing for a better sea view”.

The book is littered with such startlingly clear images that make it easy to visualise the people never met and the places never visited.

At the beginning of the book I almost groaned audibly at the thought of yet another drunken copper (I’ve lost count of how many I’ve met over the years) but Meyer’s depiction of the alcoholic’s constant struggle with his demons is the most eloquently heart-wrenching character development I’ve read in a long time and I was soon internally cheering Benny’s day-by-day efforts along. In fact Meyer takes his time, and ours, establishing all three characters and their separate, but ultimately linked stories. In a lesser writer’s hands this would be annoying but here provides a solid foundation for what otherwise could be an unbelievable or far-fetched climax. Instead the stories are tantalisingly built to their inevitable but gripping combination and resolution.

While I won’t pretend that one book can give a definitive view of such a mammoth thing as post-apartheid South Africa  I think a good book can provide a valid snapshot of a time and place that helps define the bigger picture. All three characters struggle with details of ‘the new South Africa’ in very real ways that made me think more deeply than I’ve done before about what the removal of the apartheid system might have been like to live through from a variety of perspectives.

I learned since reading this book that while not strictly part of a series there are other books featuring some of these characters however I didn’t once have the sense I was missing something by not having read anything else by this author. The book works entirely as a suspense-filled standalone novel which is haunting, unpredictable and utterly absorbing.

My rating 4.5/5

Other reviews:

Euro Crime reviewed the audio version of the book in June 2008

 

Review: Michael Tolliver Lives by Armistead Maupin

Title: Michael Tolliver Lives

Author: Armistead Maupin

Publisher: Black Swan (2008)

ISBN: 978-0-552-77293-8

This book fills readers in on what’s happened to the Barbary Lane crew from Maupin’s Tales of the City series since last we heard from them in 1990’s Sure of You. As the title suggests Michael (or Mouse as he was known in the early books) didn’t die as a result of AIDS as we might have assumed would happen given where the last book left off. Instead as the book opens Michael’s been married for a few years to Ben, Anna Madrigal is still the centre of an odd but loving family and there have been an assortment of hatches, matches and dispatches. As the book goes forward Michael deals with the things that happen when you’re in your late 50’s.

I thoroughly enjoyed the early books in this series but this one didn’t engage me in the same way. Perhaps it’s partly because in the intervening 18 years I’ve changed and am not so taken with the soap opera-ish style of the book but that’s only part of the story. This book simply isn’t as good as its predecessors. It lacks the wonderful sense of the absurd that the early books incorporated and is far too full of worthy messages to be entertaining. I don’t know if he was trying to push some kind of envelope or achieve something else but all the endless details of Michael’s sex life did for me was induce boredom. They certainly didn’t do a heck of a lot to advance what plot there was. If you take out the sex scenes and the passages that repeat events from the previous books there’s not a heck of a lot of story left and the characters are all very under-developed.

When news of this book first surfaced Maupin insisted it wasn’t the 7th book in his famous series even though it featured a key character, referenced many events from the series and caught us up with all the original characters. Eventually he was forced to concede the book is part of the series but his reluctance to do so sums up what’s wrong with this book. It’s trying to be too many things at once and doesn’t successfully achieve any of them. He either needed to jump right in and update the series in the same style as the original books or write something completely separate (which he’s perfectly capable of doing as The Night Listener indicates). The sequel you have when you’re not having a sequel didn’t work for me.

My rating 2/5

 

Review: An Affinity for Murder by Anne White

Title: An Affinity for Murder

Author: Anne White

Publisher: Oak Tree Press (2001)

ISBN: 1-892343-16-9

When Freelance writer Ellen Davies goes to interview an expert in Georgia O’Keeffe’s art for an article she’s writing she finds, instead, a smouldering pile of old clothes piled up in the middle of the floor. As if that wasn’t bad enough underneath the clothes is the charred body of a man. The house at which all of this takes place belongs to Ellen’s friend Diane, who later asks Ellen to look after an ugly painting so that her ex-husband doesn’t get hold of it. Are there missing works of one of America’s greatest artists to be found in Lake George, New York or is there a sinister art fraud racket going on?

It’s a fairly standard amateur sleuth plot although Ellen is less intent on discovering whodunnit than writing her article about O’Keeffe. It’s the teenage daughter of a friend that really wants to play detective and Ellen goes along for the ride for a good part of the book. Perhaps I wasn’t paying as much attention as I normally would due to seasonal silliness but on multiple occasions I thought the author made reference to things that hadn’t happened in the book but readers were supposed to know about. It’s the first book in a series but the many vague references to past events were disconcerting and made it seem like the second or third book in a string. Even Ellen’s love interest treats her the same way the hapless partners of more seasoned amateur sleuths do; making multiple comments about how she should stop getting involved in these kinds of events. Why would he do that if it’s the first time Ellen has done something like this? However the plot was resolved satisfactorily even if there were loose ends that didn’t make a lot of sense.

Where the book fell down for me was that the characters who were all a bit too stereotypical and not terribly engaging. Ellen as a protagonist is a bit dull and I felt the author was trying too hard to make her seem feisty and independent and the rest of the cast were not people I’d want to spend much time with. Kevin, Ellen’s boyfriend, was downright annoying and Diane, the friend who got Ellen muddled up with the mystery in the first place wasn’t much better with her continual whining about her ex-husband and never-explained clandestine affair with a bar tender. Aside from small glimmers of personality from the teenage Josie there wasn’t a hint of a sense of humour in the entire book which is something I look for in my cosy reading.

I picked the book because I’m a fan of O’Keeffe’s paintings and thought a mystery about her work would be a nice way to pass some lazy summer reading time but didn’t really get what I was looking for. However the book’s won several awards and there are now four books in this series so clearly these characters appeal to others.

My rating 2.5/5

 

Review: Relentless by Simon Kernick

TITLE: Relentless

AUTHOR: Simon Kernick

ISBN: 978-0-552-15312-6

PUBLISHER: Corgi Books (2006)

The hum-drum suburban life of software salesman Tom Meron is thrown into chaos one afternoon when an old friend rings him moments before dying horribly at the hands of unknown assailants. Within the next couple of hours Tom is accused of murder, his wife seems to be missing, he goes on the run from Police and has an alarming altercation with some very (very) bad guys. And then things get really dangerous.

It’s a fairly standard ‘average guy’s life goes to hell in a hand-basket’ kind of thriller. The pace is speedy, swapping often between points of view to help create the impression there are lots of things happening at once and cramming lots of action into a short time span. Personally I find fight scenes and car chases a bit tedious in the written word and there quite a few of these but I skimmed over them without seeming to lose the gist of the story.  The plot was pretty well constructed and logical although it did have some threads that seemed to be thrown in for shock value rather than adding much to the overall story.

For me to get truly swept along for the ride that thrillers want to take you on there has to be an interesting character or two. I don’t mind if it’s good guys or villains but I have to want to find out what happens to someone no matter how ludicrous it turns out to be. Without this element I tend to pick fault with what would otherwise be forgivable plot discrepancies and the incredible happenings that are de rigeur for the genre.  The largely under developed characters in Relentlessdid not offer me anyone to care about. All of them, heroes and bad guys alike, said and did things I didn’t find natural within the circumstances of the story and the narrative often seemed at odds with their actions. Tom and Kathy were said more than once to be devoted parents but both of them managed to curl of for a good night’s kip without once mentioning their children or, more realistically, trying to check up on them. People had just tried to torture, stab, shoot and blow he and his wife up but Tom assumes that the same bad guys wouldn’t be able to unearth his children in a matter of moments. The villains in the story were more stereotype than individual character to me and now, only a few hours after finishing the book, I can’t remember the main bad guy’s name.

Thrillers should be gripping yarns full of larger-than-life characters regardless of the subject matter (heck Michael Crichton managed to make the building of aeroplanes and edge-of-your-seat ride in Airframe) but this one missed the mark for me. The characters and setting were all a bit too generic for me to get caught up in it at all.

My rating 2/5

Other reviews of this book

Eurocrime reviewed it in June 2007

 

Review: Still Waters by Nigel McCrery

Title: Still Waters

Author: Nigel McCrery

Publisher:  Quercus (2007)

ISBN: 978-184724-075-0

In what is one of the most alarming openings to a book I’ve ever read, a children’s war-time tea party goes horribly wrong and readers spend the rest of the book trying to work out the connection to a modern-day crime. In the present day an old lady’s body is discovered on the fringe of some woodlands at the site of an unrelated car accident and Police have to unravel the story of how she came to be there. In parallel we meet another elderly lady called Violet (or is she?) who makes a habit out of befriending lonely, isolated women. Then killing them.

Called in from what is euphemistically known as ‘gardening leave’ to investigate is DCI Mark Lapslie who suffers from a neurological condition in which most sounds he hears trigger overwhelming taste sensations in his mouth. For example his mobile phone ring triggers the taste of chocolate (which sounds like yummy-ness without the calories) while the sound of a busy office triggers the taste of blood (less appealing all around I imagine). The book does a great job of demonstrating how such a condition impacts Lapslie’s life and the lives of those around him and seems quite realistic in its portrayal of how such a thing might drive and shape a person. In the end there isn’t a great deal of plot-driving point behind Lapslie’s condition but it would be a different story without this element because the condition does shape the Lapslie character.

The other major character in the story is Violet/Daisy who’s own character is equally well developed. Very early on we know she’s a killer but knowing that doesn’t detract at all from the building up of tension in the story. I found myself wanting quite desperately to know how she came to be the person she was and wondering what kind of connection she had (for there must have been one) to the awful event that opened the book.

There were quite a few story threads and potential plot devices that went nowhere or were left unresolved but I rather liked that. In many of the best-selling thrillers these days it seems as if everything that happens has to tie up neatly at the end which is so unlike real life. Here there were things that just happened and turned out to have no deeper meaning which made the whole thing more credible (and helped keep me guessing right to the end). This all added to the book’s unpredictability. There were several times when events happened and I thought I knew exactly how that particular thread would be resolved (having read a police procedural or three in my time) but in each case the predictable, forumulaic thing didn’t happen. The main story was resolved to my satisfaction so the loose ends that remained actually added to my enjoyment of the book rather than detracted from it.

The underlying reason for the events in the book were also, sadly, credible. Rather than larger than life serial killers making suits out of human skin (Thomas Harris) or similarly fantastical yarns this was a story that one can imagine happening in the real world. It’s about people who live on the fringes of society and to whom grizzly things can be done without much consequence. In fact a variation of this kind of thing did happen in my very own city not so long ago (google The Snowtown Murders if you’re interested).

I borrowed this book from a friend several months ago but, due to the ever growing TBR pile of my own books, was planning on giving it back un-read until I noticed it was scheduled for a Buddy Read at the Murder and Mayhem bookclub and I do enjoy discussing a book with others. I’m grateful to the person who scheduled it because I found the book to be a totally engrossing read with beautifully created imagry. On top of that it managed to do something quite different with a very familiar genre.

My Rating: 4.5/5

Other reviews of this book

Euro Crime reviewed it in August 2007

Aust Crime Fiction reviewed it in February 2008

 

Review: The Embroidered Corpse by Brian Kavanagh

TITLE: The Embroidered Corpse

AUTHOR: Brian Kavanagh

ISBN: 1-905202-36-9

PUBLISHER: BeWrite Books (2006)

 In the second Belinda Lawrence mystery our heroine and her friend Hazel visit Kidbrooke House, a Tudor mansion full of glorious antiques and a mysterious piece of tapestry. Soon after their visit the House’s owner is killed in a grizzly manner and when Hazel buys some furniture from the estate sale she discovers the tapestry in a drawer. She gives the tapestry to Belinda who in her quest to find out more about its origins becomes embroiled in a thousand-year-old conspiracy and a modern-day religious cult.

The characters in this series are developing nicely. Belinda seems much more assertive than she was in her first outing (Capable of Murder) and is more of an instigator of events in the story than in the first book where she seemed to react only to the things that happened around her. I also found her boyfriend Mark more agreeable this time around and my only quibble with the characters is that I’d like to see more of the bloke-mad, gin-drinking Hazel Whitby as she adds a nice humorous element to the stories.

The plot is complex although not difficult to follow although I did struggle in a couple of spots because so much of the story relates to the intricate details of the piece of tapestry which we readers never see. There is a partial picture on the front cover of the edition of the book I read but it doesn’t contain the all-important borders and I couldn’t always visualise what the characters were talking about.

I’m not terribly familiar with this period of history but my inner conspiracy theorist was thoroughly engaged by the well-researched details and intriguing speculations about the Bayeux Tapestry, the historical events it portrays and the royal lineage of England. The resolution to the story was very much in keeping with the events that preceded it (not always a given in crime fiction these days) although far more gruesome than the average ‘cosy’ reader might like. 

All in all this is a thoroughly entertaining read and especially recommended to those who enjoy stories with a historical twist. 

My rating 3.5/5

 

Review: The Makeover Murders by Jennifer Rowe

Title: The Makeover Murders

Author: Jennifer Rowe

Publisher: Bantam Books (1993)

ISBN: 0-553-29740-6

In yet another take on the country house mystery ABC TV researcher and all around curmudgeon Verity Birdwood is sent to an up market beauty spa for a fortnight and must somehow fit in with the odd assortment of women who are paying a fortune for the ultimate makeover. As the spa, in Sydney’s hinterland, is inundated by flooding rains relationships between guests and staff at the spa reach breaking point and murder becomes a viable option for someone.

I think I read all the Verity Birdwood books when they were first published but I had forgotten until this year, when I started re-reading them,  just how good the plots are. About the only thing you can rely on is that they won’t work out as you predict because Rowe is very good at red herrings.  The fact that this one is set in an area I lived in for several years made it that much more enjoyable as I too have survived several Hawkesbury River floods and, although my captivity was nver as action-packed as in this house, I could well believe the sense of isolation and growing desperation that mother nature can generate.

And I love Verity Birdwood (or Birdy as she likes to be called). She’s smart and cranky and generally believable because she doesn’t always get it right first time. But there are always loads of other great characters in Rowe’s books too and this is no exception. The employees and paying guests of Deepende Spa are a curious mix of people that you want to read about to find out what makes them all tick and which one of them has resorted to murder to solve their problems. As is often the case with cosy mysteries Birdy has a close relationship with a police detective and in this book that relationship is a bit strained as Dan Toby struggles to deal with the made-over Birdy. It adds a nice complexity to the story.

All in all this was a satisfying read and a great example of how a familar structure such as the country house mystery can still be given new and interesting life by a good author.

My rating 4/5

 

Review: Decaffeinated Corpse by Cleo Coyle

 Title: Decaffeinated Corpse

Author:Cleo Coyle

Publisher: Berkley Prime Crime (2007)

ISBN: 978-0-425-21638-5

This is the 5th book in the coffeehouse mystery series and fits squarely in the cosy category. In this outing Clare Cosi and the crew at the Village Blend coffee shop are doing the unthinkable: becoming major players in the decaf coffee business. An old friend has developed the world’s first botanically decaffeinated bean and, if they can all stay alive and out of prison, it should set the coffee-drinking world on fire.

I have all sorts of motivations for choosing particular books and my reasons for reading this series include the fact I love New York and I’m also a bit of a coffee addict and I enjoy all the ‘inside-baseball’ coffee facts the series offers. This book did have the usual amount of coffee trivia and featured a couple of ‘only in New York’ moments but, even so, it wasn’t as enjoyable as the others in the series. It seemed to have a long and fairly pointless build up (the first murder doesn’t occur until half way through the book) and then a very rushed, barely comprehensible resolution. To me it felt like this book fell victim to the ‘writing by formula’ disease that, unfortunately, some series fall into. The great characters, like Clare’s ex mother-in-law Madame Dubois, weren’t given room to shine and the plot was just pedestrian.

I admit that with work being frantic and seasonal madness I’m not at my reading best right now but that’s the time I usually love to escape with a good cosy and this one just didn’t grab me.

My rating 2.5/5