Review: Blood Sunset by Jarad Henry

Title: Blood Sunset

Author: Jarad Henry

Publisher: Allen and Unwin [2008]

ISBN: 978-1-74175-420-9

Length: 327 pages

Setting: Victoria, Australia, present-day

Genre: Police Procedural

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating: 4/5

One-liner: Powerful imagery and a fascinating protagonist made this one hard to put down.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

It’s summer in Melbourne, Australia and with the city choking on the smoke from bushfires the body of a young runaway, Dallas Boyd, is discovered. At first Detective Rubens McCauley, newly back to work after recovering from a gunshot wound, registers the death as having no suspicious circumstances. However as he thinks about it more he becomes convinced the boy was murdered though it’s difficult for him to convince his superiors of this. He works alone on the case while suspended from duty but when a second teenager’s body is found his boss reluctantly allows him to return to work.

Ostensibly about the case of a murdered boy, Blood Sunset really seemed to me to be more about inner-city Melbourne. McCauley meets a series of people as he investigates the case and each one is used to show some aspect of life in the city. Sometimes these vignettes have little to do with the case, such as the scene which had me in tears where McCauley’s elderly neighbour describes the fear and helplessness he feels over one of his friends who was assaulted while withdrawing money from an ATM. At other times they’re more directly involved with the investigation such as when McCauley meets the social worker who has been assigned to the case of Dallas Boyd’s six-year-old sister who lives with the same step father who abused Boyd. Even McCauley’s personal life presents opportunities to display different sides of city life including his niece’s use of recreational drugs and his own search for the perfect pub gig. All of these threads are pulled deftly together to present a portrait of the gritty side of life in a modern city.

There is a very sound police procedural too, with McCauley doggedly tracking down leads and involving anyone he can find to help him uncover what happened to Dallas Boyd. At the very end of the book Henry did introduce one over-used crime fiction cliché, particularly unnecessary when the book is wonderfully suspense-filled without it, but overall it didn’t detract too much from the otherwise excellent story.

McCauley is a nicely complex character: sharing some of the foibles of other lone detectives in crime fiction but never becoming unbelievably dysfunctional. His struggle with some personal issues throughout the book is woven into the story well, providing interesting insight into his character without allowing the story to become angst-ridden. None of the other characters had much opportunity to be terribly well-developed and that, for me, was the only other slightly disappointing element to the book. Still, we did get some fascinating glimpses of both the city and McCauley’s personal history through meeting his estranged wife, his brother and some of his police colleagues.

I bought this book purely because it was buy an Australian author and hadn’t read a single thing about it before embarking on it. I sometimes wish I could approach all books with such a lack of expectations because it offers the potential for a reading surprise which, at least on this occasion, was  an entirely pleasant one.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Blood Sunset is the second book from Jarad Henry and follows on from his debut, Heat Shot (which was shortlisted for the 2006 Ned Kelly Awards in the best first novel category)

Blood Sunset has also been reviewed at Crime Down Under and Aust Crime Fiction

 

Review: A Beautiful Place to Die by Malla Nunn

Title: A Beautiful Place to Die

Author: Malla Nunn

Publisher: Pan MacMillan [2008]

ISBN: 978-1-405-03877-5

Length: 397 pages

Genre: Historical crime fiction / police procedural

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating: 5/5

One-liner: A stunningly confronting yet beautiful book.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

In the early 1950’s in the small South African town of Jacob’s Rest the police captain, Willem Pretorius, is found brutally murdered. When Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper is sent to investigate he struggles against the backdrop of the newly instituted racial segregation laws (apartheid) . Pretorius’ Afrikaner family want quick vengeance: they distrust Cooper who is English and assume it is the black community or coloureds who have killed their patriarch. At the same time the Security Police descend on the town and work on the theory that Pretorius was killed by a communist or other political activist and they soon sideline Cooper from their investigation.

Of the many striking things about this book the one that is likely to stay with me longest is the unflichingly honest picture it paints of the time and place in which it is set. So many engrossing details of both the political and physical setting are provided that I easily felt myself in the town of Jacob’s Rest with its roads for whites and its kaffir paths and its segregated Sunday church services with potluck dinners. I felt awkward and angry as the realities of the segregation laws were demonstrated through the story playing out but despite my discomfort I found myself unwilling to leave the place even for a moment and read the entire book in a single sitting.

On top of the setting the book has stunning characters. Cooper struggles with nightmares from his days in the trenches during the war and regularly argues with the voice of his former Sergeant Major. Although white he is distrusted by the powerful Afrikaners but also finds it hard to be accepted by the myriad second class citizens although, ultimately, it is a myriad collection of these people, including captain Pretorius’ Zulu ‘brother’ Constable Samuel Shabalala, who help him with his investigation. But it’s not only the sympathetic characters who are brilliantly depicted: Lieutenant Piet Lapping of the Special Branch is one of the most loathsome men you’ll find in crime fiction, all the more so because he’s entirely believable.

Of course none of this would be worth much if the book didn’t also tell a gripping story and there’s a real old-fashioned whodunnit here. In trying to uncover who killed Willem Pretorius Cooper uncovers a series of crimes that have been left unsolved because the victims weren’t white and also learns of Pretorius’ own moral lapses. He races to find what these events may have had to do with Pretorius’ death as he tries to salvage his own career from being ruined by the Special Branch.

This is yet another book that has everything I look for in my crime fiction and had me alternating between indignant mutterings under my breath, heart-in-my-mouth fear and more than a few tears.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

A Beautiful Place to Die has been reviewed at Aust Crime Fiction,  Reviewing the Evidence and Crime Down Under

Malla Nunn was born ins Swaziland but lives in Australia so we’re claiming her as ours. This interview with her on Radio National’s Book Show last December prompted me to go out and buy the book (and it only took me 11 months to rescue it from the TBR pile).

 

Review: The Trojan Dog by Dorothy Johnston

Title: The Trojan Dog

Author: Dorothy Johnston

Publisher: Wakefield Press [2000]

ISBN:1-86254-486-7

Length: 268 pages

Genre: Amateur sleuth

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating: 1/5

One-liner: A confusing, disjointed mess.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The book is set in 1996 in the lead up to the Australian Federal Election of that year. Amid fear that the government of the day would soon be ousted Sandra Mahoney is contracted to write a report on administrative out-workers for the department dealing with labour issues. Soon after she starts the woman who hired Sandra, Rae Evans, is accused of fraudulently obtaining $900,000. For reasons I still can’t explain Sandra decides that Evans is not guilty and sets out to ‘investigate’ the case (if you define investigate as blunder through a series of conversations and random acts of stupidity).

I struggled with this book thought can’t really explain why. Why I didn’t throw it against a wall that is. Probably something to do with the fact it was given to me as a gift.

It’s the most confusingly convoluted plot I have come across in a very long time. It felt as if someone had laid all the book’s paragraphs out end-to-end then rearranged them randomly before sticking them back together and calling it a book. Some of the several dozen story threads seemed to end almost mid-sentence while others went on interminably but in neither case there was not much advancement in the main story. The case hinged on computer fraud which required complex explanations of hacking and other techno-babble and the parts of the story dealing with these sounded as if they’d been translated from the Martian by a drunk babel fish. When we finally got to the resolution it was a complete non-event, I could barely remember having encountered the bloke who turned out to be the bad guy although I had long since given up caring ‘whodunit’ (in fact I kept forgetting what ‘it’ was).

Another problem with the book was what I took, by the end anyway, for pretentiousness but may have been poor copy editing. I’m way more interested in politics than the average person (I remember election years the way others do World Cups or Olympics) but for the typical reader (and anyone outside this country) I can only imagine that chunks of this book, especially the first third, would make no sense at all. It’s full of obscure references to the political landscape and is peppered with acronyms that I can’t believe anyone outside the Canberra scene would have understood then let alone 13 years later.

The characters were equally difficult to come to grips with. The book is told in the first-person voice from Sandra’s point of view which should have made it a personal story but didn’t. Sandra was vague and timid most of the time which made her occasional risking of life and limb quite unbelievable. Her reason for believing in Rae Evans was only ever hinted at and never explained why she went to such lengths to find out what really happened. Not that I need to like a character to enjoy a book but when everything else is going wrong too an unlikable protagonist is one burden too many so I found Sandra’s insipidity and shoddy treatment of many of the people around her very disagreeable and when at the end of the book she decides she is going to become a computer analyst I wanted to scream “oh really, so all I have to do to get a new job is call myself an air traffic controller eh?”

Sandra’s love interest is Ivan something-Russian and he isn’t her husband (a fact which should have added far more interest to the narrative than it did) and he is a caricature of all things geek. Most of the others who features in the book are so randomly discussed or involved with the story that I didn’t form any other lasting opinions.

I could actually go on some more but I’d probably start getting really rude and/or personal and I really try to avoid that on Reactions to Reading. I’m only cross because I feel I wasted a lot of time on this book and that isn’t the author’s fault because I could have stopped at any point.

Other Stuff

I was relieved when I read this review in the Australian Crime Fiction Database and realised I was not alone in my thoughts about this book because I was beginning to think I was completely mad. Well respected Aussie crime fiction reviewer Graeme Blundell says that Johnston’s series has improved considerably since this outing but I can’t imagine spending another moment in Sandra Mahoney’s company.

 

Forgotten Book: Ligny’s Lake by S H Courtier

This post is a contribution to Pattinase’s Friday’s Forgotten Books

Title: Ligney’s Lake

Author: S H Courtier

Publisher: Wakefield Crime Classics [original edition 1971, this edition 1992]

ISBN: 1-86254-286-4,

Length: 176 pages

Setting: Australia, 1969 (contemporary)

Genre: Amateur sleuth / bibliomystery

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Synopsis

Lewis Ligney is a vaguely mysterious high-ranking official with the Australian Government. He’s physically imposing via his size and the fact his face has been badly disfigured from an incident during WW2. Sandy Carmichael is a freelance engineer who befriends Ligney, his sister’s next door neighbour, and finds him an intelligent. congenial companion. One evening Carmichael sees Ligney at a boxing match in Melbourne but when he tries to make contact Ligney claims he doesn’t know Carmichael and disappears from the venue. Carmichael then reads in the newspaper that Ligney is missing, presumed drowned at Bateman’s Bay. Carmichael knows he saw Ligney after the supposed drowning and sets out to find, and hopefully help, his friend but discovers that Ligney had many enemies.

Things to look for

This book drips its Australian-ness from every page starting with the central premise. In what surely must be a unique event among nations Australia’s serving Prime Minister, Harold Hold, disappeared and was presumed drowned while swimming in the ocean in 1967 so having an important Canberra identity disappear in this fashion is clearly borrowed from the news headlines   There’s also the novel’s language and its protagonist’s journey up and down much of the East Coast of the country. In all the book is as Aussie as they come. Which makes the fact it was never published in Australia during the author’s life something of a mystery itself.

Although I’ve no evidence to back up my theory I wonder if Courtier was the victim of what A A Phillips termed our cultural cringe: a phenomenon which saw, until quite recently, virtually every artistic endeavour in Australia viewed as inferior to that produced elsewhere (especially the UK). It’s certainly interesting to ponder that Courtier’s very Australian books found publishers in the UK and US right up until the 1970’s while  these days many Australian crime fiction authors (such as Michael Robotham, P D Martin and Barry Maitland) set their crime fiction in the UK or the US to increase their chances of being published in those countries.

The plot is well constructed and, aside from the fact I never quite understood why Sandy went to such efforts on behalf of Ligney, fairly credible. Although set long after the end of WW2 the war plays a pivotal role in the story but I think it’s quite realistic that people would have had vivid memories of the dramatic events that took place 20-25 years earlier. The resolution is quite a page-turner and quite unpredictable too.

I’d not heard the term bibliomystery before seeing the publishers mention it in the afterword here but I’ve certainly read my fair share of novels in which books or things associated with them are central to the plot. In Ligney’s Lake it is Henry David Thoreau’s Walden that plays a key role. Courtier did a reasonable job of explaining the significance of the book to Ligney (and therefore this story) but I have to admit that my total ignorance of Walden made for some confusing moments.

Where the book falls down a bit for me is in its characterisations which are quite one-dimensional and a bit ‘blokey’ but quite representative of the time it was written. If, for example, Sandy had been more fleshed out it probably would have been clear why he went to such lengths for someone who appeared to be little more than an acquaintance.

A miscellaneous fact or three

Only two of Sidney Hobson Courtier’s 26 novels were ever published in Australia during his lifetime, with the remainder being published by English and American publishing houses. He also had five novels translated into German.

Courtier was born in rural Victoria in 1904 and died in 1974 and so was a contemporary (though older) of the more well known (and far more prolific) Arthur Upfield and Carter Brown (both of whom also had much of their work published outside Australia instead of or before it was published in this country).

Courtier was a school teacher who wrote 10 standalone crime fiction novels of which this is one, more than a dozen books that formed two series featuring different police inspectors and approximately 200 short stories. All of Courtier’s crime fiction novels are listed here.

When he died Courtier left an unfinished science fiction novel which he apparently hadn’t settled on a title for.

In a 2008 exhibition called Murderous Melbourne: A Celebration of Australian Crime Fiction and Place two of S H Courtier’s books inspired props to be designed by Melbourne University’s architecture students. This is one of the images of the exhibition but you can find out a bit more about crime fiction’s relationship to place by watching this video (the section on the exhibition starts at about 2:44).

A final word

I don’t think I’m alone in being woefully ignorant of my own country’s crime fiction heritage so I am quite chuffed to have found such a decent example by this neglected author who seems to have loved his country even if it didn’t return the favour. I’m not sure I found all the literary allusions the publishers of my edition saw but I did enjoy a ripping Aussie yarn.

 

Review: The Build Up by Phillip Gwynne

Title: The Build Up

Author: Phillip Gwynne

Publisher: Pan MacMillan [2008]

ISBN: 978-1-4050-3849-2

Length: 339 pages

Setting: Australia (Northern Territory), present day

Genre: Police Procedural (well kinda)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating: 5/5

One-liner: Funny, sad, perfectly Australian story about weather and sheer bloody-mindedness.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Dusty Buchanan is a Detective with the Northern Territory Police in Darwin. As the book opens a phone conversation with her over-bearing mother causes her to miss being there when a body is found in the long-running McVeigh case and so she is removed from the case. Instead she focuses on a tip-off she received from one of the blokes at the local camp for Vietnam veterans. He says his fishing line got caught on the body of a woman in the billabong. When Dusty is further isolated from her colleagues she’s forced to look to some unlikely people for help.

Reading The Build Up reminded me how much fun it is to read a book with language, cultural references and the odd ‘in’ joke that only locals will understand. It’s a bit like watching one of those kids’ movies that has a few strategically placed lines especially for adults and, in me anyway, provoked the same kind of knowing smile. I love a story that provides a sense of its location and this one stamps Australia in general and Darwin in particular lovingly on every page. I share a fellow blogger’s curiousity about whether or not the book will generate interest (or understanding) outside Australia (what would they make of Up There Cazaly for example) but I am delighted that Gwynne doesn’t seem to have written with one eye (and his bank balance) on the international publishing scene. In real life and in this book crude language and political incorrectness exist alongside spectacular places and down-to-earth people you can rely on in a crisis. You have to take the good with the bad or you get neither.

The build up of the title refers to the in-between period between Darwin’s two seasons: the dry and the wet. It’s a period known for provoking odd behaviour in people: suicides rates go up, other crime rates go down. Everyone is affected in some way. There’s also a build up in the way the book says what it has to say about its characters and the world they inhabit. The solving of either case, while being what drives Dusty, is almost incidental to the creation of a quite detailed picture of the place and the people who live in it. It’s an almost linear narrative but not always and the sequence in which what happens is revealed makes for deceptively powerful story telling. Just like the weather, the book teased me into thinking it was a fairly laid-back sort of a tale which left me completely unprepared for the-sucker punch of an ending.

Gwynne has created some truly memorable characters here. Dusty is the only human who is fully fleshed out (the other character that receives the full treatment is the Northern Territory itself) and she is terrific. She’s imperfect but not cripplingly so and is smart, funny and the sort of copper I hope there are plenty of. The rest of the people are generally quite brilliantly depicted via fairly brief but very descriptive scenes. No amount of extra words could have created a better image of a bloke called Trigger than a scene in which he can’t perform with a prostitute unless she’s wearing the football jumper of the player he believed responsible for his sidelining from the game he adored.

As often happens when I read the best ‘crime’ fiction I again thought about how genre labels ruin reading. They set silly expectations and make people worry about unimportant things when what really, really matters is for a book to capture a reader’s heart and imagination. If a book spirits you away for a while or makes you think about things in a different way, if only for a moment, then does it matter how many of the genre tick-boxes it gets right?  This book should be required reading for Aussies and while I’m not sure it’ll make complete sense to the rest of you I’d recommend you try (and I’ll happily provide translations and explanations if required).

Other stuff

The weather phenomenon known as the build up is common to tropical climates and, in Australia, usually starts around October and runs until December. It is recognisable by its unrelenting humidity and the way it teases you into thinking the relief of rain is just around the corner. I have lived through one (not in Darwin but in Far North Queensland) and I never, ever wish to do so again. You can find out more about Aussie weather here.

The book has been reviewed at Crime Down Under, Mysteries in Paradise, Books and Musings from Down Under, Aust Crime Fiction

 

Review: The Consequences of Sin by Clare Langley-Hawthorne

Title: The Consequences of Sin

Author: Clare Langley-Hawthorne

Publisher: Penguin [2007]

ISBN: 978-0-14-311293-8

Length: 262 pages

Setting: England and Venezuela, 1910-11

Genre: historical crime fiction

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating: 4/5

One-liner: Historically accurate, delightfully complex yarn full of wonderful imagery.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

In Edwardian England Ursula Marlow is the only daughter of a widowed self-made man. She is woken one morning by a frantic phone call from one of her suffragette friends, Winifred “Freddie” Stanford-Jones, who has discovered her lover dead covered in blood in the bed beside her. Although she doesn’t want to be beholden to him, Ursula calls upon her father’s legal adviser Lord Wrotham to smooth the waters with the Police. Despite this Freddie is soon arrested and as Ursula tries to clear her friend’s name she discovers that the murder of Freddie’s lover may relate to a troubled expedition to Venezuela’s famed Orinoco Delta that her father financed 20 years previously.

I love it when a book surprises me. I was expecting a frothy historical romp and although this book does have its frothy moments there’s also a more melancholic, even sombre, thread that I, perhaps perversely, enjoyed. Also, Ursula is also more complex and credible heroine than I anticipated. She’s not the over-the-top force of nature that Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia Peabody is but nor is she an Austen-esque woman constantly being overcome by the vapours. At times she’s a take-charge gal forging ahead regardless of danger but at other points she’s indecisive and clearly scared by unfolding events. This dichotomy is far more realistic than the extremes you often find in fiction and it made Ursula more interesting and the book less predictable than others in this crowded space.

I’m no expert on the period but the historical setting seems to have been captured rather beautifully. There were many details of Edwardian life depicted that demonstrated that the past is indeed a foreign country: one fun to visit but nice to return home from. While exploring in South America a hundred years ago or sailing first-class on the Lusitania (5 years before it sank) might have been great experiences I wouldn’t trade them for being able to vote and look after my own finances.

While I revelled in the details of the explorers of the past and Edwardian life in general there was a solid mystery playing out at decent pace although there weren’t many red herrings or alternative suspects whose guilt I could ponder. The remaining characters other than the two leads played fairly minor roles and but perhaps other characters will participate more fully in future books. The only one here that I struggled with was the policeman (in fact I’m still not sure if he was supposed to be incredibly dumb or vaguely corrupt). However the book was crammed with enough other delights to keep me occupied and I’ll even admit (as long as you promise not to tell anyone else) that I was quite engaged by the romantic element to the story (which was almost entirely lacking in soppiness thank heavens).

Other stuff

This book has been reviewd at Books and Musings from Down Under and Bookgirl’s Nightstand

 

Review: Fan Mail by P D Martin

Title: Fan Mail

Author: P D Martin

Publisher: Pan Australia [2008]

ISBN: 978-0-330-42402-8

Length: 497 pages

In the third thriller to feature FBI profiler Sophie Anderson we’re taken to Los Angeles where best-selling crime writer Loretta Black is killed in a manner reflecting her newest book. Sophie, having just moved from the FBI’s Behavioural Science Unit to the LA field office, teams up with LA Police Detective Dave Sorrell to track down the killer. Realising that Black has received some rather nasty fan mail they concentrate on that angle quite early on. At the same time as this is playing out one of Sophie’s earlier cases is proceeding to its court phase in another state and there are some dramatic developments that take her attention from the present case at times.

This is probably one of the most realistic books I’ve read in terms of the way in which this kind of investigation might unfold. Unlike one of those TV crime shows, where each fingerprint or speck of dust leads speedily and miraculously to one of only two people on the planet who could possibly have ‘done it’, there are many dead ends, false leads and old fashioned follow-up here. It’s a really fine example of a modern procedural investigation and shows just how much painstaking work from dozens of experts is required for success. I will admit though that people who’ve read a lot of crime fiction might find the explanations of all the evidence collection theories and techniques a little repetitive (there can’t be too many fans of this genre that don’t know what Locard’s principle is for example) but it must be tough for an author to know how much prior knowledge of specialist subjects to include. The bonus side effect of focusing on the myriad of investigative approaches is that it allows the inclusion of lots of credible red herrings and plot twists in the story so you never quite know how it’s going to end.

Martin also does a solid job with her characters. Sophie has some psychic ability (normally a turn off for me) but it doesn’t take over her character and it’s quite fascinating to see how she is learning to accept and use her unique talent. Aside from that she and Dave Sorrell develop a decent working relationship over the course of this story and, again, it has a very realistic feel to its growth as the two feel each other out. The minor characters, including early suspects and the various crime lab experts are also nicely depicted.

My slight criticism of this book is the continuing thread that began in The Murderer’s Club. Apart from relying quite heavily on information from that book for at least one thread of this one, if you haven’t read The Murderer’s Club before Fan Mail you won’t be able to go back and read it because lots of the plot twists and information about the culprits are given away here. And the hint at the end of this book that we’ll hear from a key person behind The Murderer’s Club in future made my heart a little heavy. I think the idea of criminal mastermind being obsessed with a single investigator has been done to death (It’s one of the main things that prompted me to give up both Patricia Cornwell’s  Kay Scarpetta series and James Patterson’s Alex Cross novels) and I’d be annoyed if this series takes that kind of turn. However I’ll cross my fingers and will definitely read the next one in this series some time soon (it’s already sitting in Mt TBR).

My rating 3.5/5

Other stuff

Fan Mail has also been reviewed at Mysteries in Paradise, Crime Down Under, It’s Criminal and Aust Crime Fiction

The other books in this series are, in order, Body Count, The Murderer’s Club and Killing Hands which is book 4 in the series and was released this year.

 

Review: Shatter, Michael Robotham

Title: Shatter

Author: Michael Robotham

Publisher: Sphere [2008]

ISBN: 978-0-7515-3731-4

Length: 470 pages

One afternoon Joe O’Loughlin, a clinical psychologist, is asked to help in a crisis situation: a naked woman is standing on a bridge preparing to jump to her death. Joe talks to her briefly but she jumps anyway. Several days later the woman’s teenage daughter, Darcy, appears on Joe’s doorstep and begs him to help her convince Police that her mother didn’t commit suicide. Joe begins to wonder if, somehow, the woman could have been coerced into jumping. He calls on his old friend, now-retired Detective Vincent Ruiz for some help and together they talk to the local police.

Joe O’Loughlin has appeared in 3 books now although they can all be read as standalones. Each time I meet him I find something else to love. Unlike many of the protagonists in crime fiction Joe is not a troubled loner nor does he have any super human abilities. Even his skills in reading people, which he is mostly very good at, let him down some times. He’s smart, funny and heart-wrenchingly self aware. I particularly like the way Joe deals with the personal issues in his life in a very realistic way. He’s not always sensible (who is?) but nor does he go to the extremes that you see in some fiction that make you wonder how the person could possibly have survived adolescence.

But the real joy of Joe is the way he interacts with the people around him: his family, his old friend Ruiz and, in this book, young Darcy and the DI in charge of the case, Veronica Cray. There’s always a dry, sarcastic wit to his relationships and it gives the book an undercurrent of humour which is a welcome relief among the dark subject matter. I think the natural-sounding dialogue that peppers the book is Robotham’s best writing and something that sets him apart from other authors.

Now comes the heretical part of this review: I didn’t find Shatter particularly suspenseful. It was never much of a whodunnit (the culprit was revealed quite early on) nor, really, a why or a even a how dunnit (again all of those were revealed without fanfare and long before the end of the book). In the end it was what happens next story which, especially towards the end, was disappointingly predictable. Most of the story is told from Joe’s perspective but there are also short chapters told from the killer’s point of view and in them he talks about his capacity to break a person’s mind. Although the killer’s methods, described at some length which somehow made them less scary, led to extreme consequences I was never as gobsmackingly shocked as I was supposed to be by the notion that one person could manipulate another into doing something truly awful. I’ve read history, I watch the news and I’ve seen teenage girls in action. So, I never stepped over that line that separates me from knowing I’m in a fictional world to wondering if, maybe, that noise I heard outside the window isn’t evil that somehow leapt from the page.

Perhaps I have suffered a little too much from the hype that has surrounded this book but it wasn’t the ‘wow’ read for me that others have described. The characters and dialogue are excellent, and well worth reading the book for, but, for me, the story wasn’t as engaging as Robotham’s two earlier books featuring Joe O’Loughlin (Suspect and Lost). I think it relied a little too heavily on one big, hairy, audacious plot point and because that didn’t quite work for me the rest was a little flat.

My rating 3.5/5

Other stuff

Shatter is a popular book among crime fiction bloggers so here are just a few of the links I found to reviews from people who all, I think, got a little more from this book than I did:

• Books and Musings from Down Under
• Crime Down Under
• It’s a crime (or a mystery)
• It’s criminal
• Mysteries in Paradise

 

Review: Black Ice by Leah Giarratano

Title: Black Ice (the 3rd Jill Jackson novel)

Author: Leah Giarratano

Publisher: Random House [2009]

ISBN: 978-1-74166-809-4

Length: 323 pages

Jill Jackson is working undercover as Krystal Peters in Sydney’s Fairfield. In a long term operation she’s gathering intelligence on the area’s drug dealers and their suppliers in an effort to help clean up they city’s drug scene. At the same time Serendipity (Seren) Templeton is due to be released from prison after spending more than 12 months in jail for a drug related crime she did not commit. All she wants is to be reunited with her young son. And to extract revenge from the man responsible for her imprisonment. There are other forces at play too: Jill’s sister Cassie, a top class fashion model, has a new boyfriend and is living the high life in the harbour city and a young Chemistry student is learning that you can’t always stop what you start.

I’m sure part of the meaning of the title of this book relates to the drug at the heart of the tale. But as I started reading I was reminded of the winter I spent in the North-East of the US (i.e. a real winter as opposed to its rather laughable cousin we have here in Adelaide). As someone new to walking and driving in the conditions I was warned often of the black ice which was virtually transparent and so invisible until you were right on top of it (which in my case generally resulted in falling over or sliding off the road). There are elements of this story that are hidden in the same way: Jill’s undercover alter-ego whose personality is very different from Jill’s, Seren’s second persona which she uses to embark on the revenge she’s been plotting for months. Even air-headed Cassie, towards the end of the book, shows hidden depths. The unpredictable way all three of these strong female characters are revealed over the course of the story is utterly captivating.

It’s always the characters I love most about Giarratano’s books and this time I think it’s Serendipity who will stay with me after the rest of the book starts to fade. Her life of abuse, teenage pregnancy without any support, and betrayal when the one good thing that’s ever happened to her turns sour is painfully but beautifully depicted. In what might be a new record I was crying by page 38 when her two cellmates turned on her. Then each other. From that point on all I wanted to know was how would life treat Seren and how, or if, she would cope.

Jill is more mature in this book and at times takes a back seat to the other characters although she’s still quite a presence and it is interesting to watch her behaviour change and normalise over time. Aside from her and Seren there are Giarratano’s usual assortment of odd but memorable bit players who manage to leave lasting impressions even if they only appear for a few lines or a few pages. I won’t forget poor Damien who should have known better than to experiment or the nastily bureaucratic parole officer any time soon. And in this book the city itself plays a strong role. Two of its sides, rich and privileged versus limited by poverty, are shown inhabiting the same physical space yet practically operating as if on separate planets and it has quite a realistic feel for this former Sydney-sider.

Rather than answering the question ‘who committed that crime’ this book seems instead to be pondering the reasons why crimes happen and so is far less of a police procedural than its predecessors. Although some of the scenarios were completely foreign to my middle class existence with my happy childhood memories I found myself often wondering what I would have done in the scenarios being described. Although ‘turning to a jelly-like wreck’ is the most likely answer for most instances in this book I always enjoy reading that offers me any kind of vicarious living. And although parts of the book are bleak it’s not uniformly so. Call me an old softie if you like but I enjoyed it more because of that: there are limits to how much bleakness I want in my life.

I probably shouldn’t have liked this book. At least in part it’s about the drug scene (almost my least favourite plot theme ever for reasons I won’t bore anyone with) and, more importantly, it’s quite a departure from its much-loved predecessors. I was anticipating more of the same from Black Ice as I had enjoyed about the two earlier Jill Jackson novels: the creepiest of villains and a put-upon but valiant heroine. I didn’t have to hide undeer a blanket once here and the heroine wasn’t really who I expected her to be. However, despite that departure, or perhaps because of it, I found the book an emotional and satisfying read. It has retained the essence of what made the first two books great: wonderfully drawn characters and an exquisite build-up of tension towards the climax. But it’s also taken me somewhere unexpected, given me new ideas to think about. A thoroughly great read that I’d recommend to both fans of the previous books and people new to the series.

My rating 5/5

Other stuff

Having raved about Leah Giarratano’s first two books (Vodka Doesn’t Freeze and Voodoo Doll) I was contacted by Leah a couple of weeks ago to ask if I would like a copy of her new book (absolutely no strings attached). While supremely chuffed at the contact and excited to get my hands on a pre-release copy I was also a little worried: what would I say if I didn’t like it? Anyone who has known me more than about 3 days knows I am not good at hiding my feelings. Would I be able to say nothing at all? I can tell you I breathed quite a sigh of relief as I closed the book and realised I wouldn’t have to deal with that particular social awkwardness .

At the time of posting this I haven’t been able to locate any other pre-release reviews of the book but feel free to leave a link in the comments section if you have one.

 

Review: The Darkest Hour by Katherine Howell

Title: The Darkest Hour

Author: Katherine Howell

Publisher: Pan Macmillan [2008]

ISBN: 978-0-330-42467-7

Length: 491 pages

Paramedic Lauren Yates is working alone one night when a man bolts from an alley in the heart of Sydney and she stops to see what’s going on. She stumbles upon the body of a convicted paedophile then the man’s killer, Thomas Werner, who is Lauren’s sister’s ex boyfriend and the father of her niece. He warns her to say nothing if she wants her family to be OK. Some months later, after Lauren has lied about the events she say in the alley that night, Lauren and her partner Joe are transporting a stabbed man to the hospital in their ambulance and he makes a dying declaration that the man who killed him was Thomas Werner. Detective Ella Marconi is assigned to the investigative team and realises that Lauren has something to hide when she tries to change her statement about the patient’s dying declaration.

This is the second of Howell’s books to be published and, like the first book Frantic, for me it was more about the psychology of the situations people find themselves in than a standard police procedural. Howell is a former paramedic she really captures the tension and emotion that must be a constant for people in that line of work. Some of the most compelling reading in the book is when the paramedics respond to callouts where they have little knowledge of what they’ll find. But she also, hopefully without the same first-hand knowledge, does a top job of depicting the crumbling of the fragile relationships between the various criminals that feature in the book. Her main characters, Lauren and Ella, are both shown to be fully rounded people with all the foibles and shades of grey that we humans have and seeing what made them tick and how they would handle the increasingly nasty stuff being thrown at them made me want to keep reading.

I did struggle with the plot a bit. Partly this is my fault as I read the book over a week or so rather than my usual couple of days. But even accounting for that I felt the need for a whiteboard and coloured markers so I could keep track of the various telephone calls that connected the many players together. The introduction of the daily investigating team meetings at which the day’s discoveries were summarised was, I suppose, an acknowledgement of the plot’s complexity and while it helped me a bit I think the whole thing could have been resovled more simply.  The beginning and the end were perfectly understandable but I lost my way a couple of times in the middle.

Ultimately though this is a good read, particularly if you like to read about how various types of people will react to life’s nastiness.

My rating 3.5/5

Other Stuff

Reviewed at Crime Down Under,  Aust Crime Fiction (Sally) and Aust Crime Fiction (Karen) , Mysteries in Paradise

Katherine Howell’s previous book, featuring a different paramedic but the same police detective, is Franticand I rated it a 4/5 (pre blog days)