Review: White Nights by Ann Cleeves

Title: White Nights [Unabridged Audiobook]

Author: Ann Cleeves

Narrator: Gordon Griffin

Publisher: ISIS Audio Books [2008]

ISBN: N/A [downloaded from audible.com]

Length: 11hrs 35mins

Setting: Shetland Islands, Scotland, Present day

Genre: Police Procedural

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating: 3.5/5

One-liner: A story where setting takes center stage, ably supported by compelling characters.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

It’s summer in Shetland and well-known artist Bella Sinclair is hosting an exhibition of her work alongside that of new artist Fran Hunter. Although there are not as many guests at the opening as Bella expected, one unknown Englishman does make an impression when he breaks down in tears at the sight of one of the paintings. Local Detective Jimmy Perez, attending the exhibition on a date with Fran Hunter, takes the man aside and discovers he has amnesia. When the man disappears from the gallery Jimmy doesn’t make much effort to find him but wishes he had done when the man is discovered dead the next morning. This presumed suicide and subsequent events all seem to be affected by the endless daylight of the far northern summer and the isolation of the islands.

I’m a sucker for books set in remote locations. They are as different from my inner-city life as it gets (and not somewhere I’d willingly spend more than about 5 days) but I love reading about them. Cleeves does a superb job of immersing readers in the isolated world populated by familiar faces  who, although they share much, all seem to work incredibly hard at keeping a little piece of themselves private. I quickly developed an image of Biddista, the village of half a dozen houses where most of the action takes place, and its inhabitants thanks to Cleeves’ imagery and her depictions of how the locals interact with the various ‘incomers’ in the story.

Cleeves takes time too to develop a range of characters. Jimmy Perez is engaging as he pursues both personal and professional interests despite the fact he is unsure of himself in both spheres. I thought his mixture of introspection and decisiveness quite realistic although I was a bit bored by his somewhat laboured relationship with Fran. Several of the island ‘old-timers’ were utterly absorbing including Kenny who has the misfortune to discover more than one body and who seemed to represent the Islands’ struggle to have its traditions coexist with modern ways. The Inverness Inspector in charge of the case, Roy Taylor, was a different type of character all together but equally well depicted and a good source of conflict for the novel.

For me the book fell down a bit in its story. The establishment portion was quite good but after that I found the plot fairly predictable and I actually thought the ending a bit too melodramatic (and not terribly credible) which was out of keeping with the earlier events. As all the suspects were highlighted then rejected during the final scenes I got the sense that the culprit had been chosen for shock value more than continuity.

I haven’t read the first book in this quartet but I didn’t feel that I was at any disadvantage. There were mentions of earlier events but I wasn’t troubled by not knowing the details which scores bonus points from me as books which can be read independently seem to be a rare commodity in crime fiction these days. Although the story wasn’t the most gripping I’ve read there is much else to recommend this book, especially when narrated by the delightful Gordon Griffin who managed to portray an entire range of people without really changing his voice at all.

Other Stuff

I reviewed another book set in Shetland last year, SJ Bolton’s Sacrifice, and this is the second book in Ann Cleeves’ Shetland Quartet: for islands with a population of around 23,000 people they seem to be inspiring a disproportionate number of murders!

White Nights is also reviewed at It’s Criminal, Mysteries in Paradise, Euro Crime, Euro Crime again and, for a review with a difference, try WhereDunnit

 

Crime Fiction Alphabet: A is for Absolution

In a new weekly meme Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise asks us to write a blog post about the letter of the week. I thought I’d use the meme to highlight books I enjoyed before I started keeping this blog. I’ve kept ratings for years and kept reading notes in odd places including Good Reads for a while before I started this blog so I should be able to keep participating in this meme.

This week’s letter is A and I’ve decided to talk about Scottish author Caro Ramsay’s first novel, Absolution, which was published in 2007.

The story opens when PC Alan McAlpine returns to work after a family tragedy and is rostered to hospital duty to wait for the awakening of a young woman who lies near death after being the victim of a horrific acid attack. McAlpine is soon obsessed by the woman and even after discovering what led to her predicament he continues to fantasize about her. The novel then leaps forward 20 years and McAlpine is a Detective Inspector who investigating a series of brutal killings

The opening passages of this book are some of the most moving I have read, in any kind of genre, and perfectly sparked my interest in both the story to come and getting to know McAlpine. Ramsay’s writing is wonderfully descriptive and evocative of the time and place. She builds the suspense well and the ending fits logically with the events that went before it which is not always the case with crime fiction these days. There is a thread that I found awkward and unnecessary from a plot development point of view (the car crash) but I can easily forgive this in a book with so much else to recommend it.

One of the more interesting aspects of this particular reading experience is that I enjoyed the book despite the fact I grew to despise the protagonist Alan McAlpine. I suspect readers are supposed to feel sympathetic towards him but I found him totally self-absorbed and hated the way he treats his wife and friends with utter contempt much of the time. In fact I found it a bit of a stretch that everyone around such a person would universally put up with his poor treatment of them, cover for his drunken mistakes and generally ignore the fact he’s a selfish ingrate but I guess it does happen. Happily for the good citizens of Glasgow the dogged and devoted Colin Anderson and smart, courageous Winifred Costello are available to do some actual police work. Likeable or not though, all the characters are well constructed and nicely multi-dimensional.

Ramsay has a new book out this year called Singing to the Dead. It features Colin Anderson who I very much enjoyed in Absolution so I’ve added this one to my wishlist.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I normally direct readers to an author’s website but Ramsay’s is seriously out of date and virtually devoid of useful content. I discussed back in February the fact that large chunks of the publishing industry seem to ignore the internet as a legitimate marketing tool or, worse, treat it with contempt (what else would you call a ‘blog’ with one post written in 2007?).

 

Review: Garnethill by Denise Mina

Title: Garnethill

Author: Denise Mina

Publisher: Bantam Books [1999]

ISBN: 0-553-50694-3

Length: 445 pages

There’s a quote from the book below. It has some curse words in it. I didn’t choose it because of them or to be deliberately controversial but the passage represents best part of what I liked most about the book. If you don’t like curse words don’t read the review (or the book).

Maureen O’Donnell comes home drunk one night and falls into bed. The next morning she discovers the mutilated body of her lover Douglas in the lounge room of her flat. She’s viewed with suspicion by just about everyone including the Police, Douglas’ mother (a member of the European Parliament) and his wife. Even her own mother questions whether she did it or not. As the victim of incest by her own father and having recently spent a stint in a psychiatric hospital Maureen has already experienced some of the worst life can throw at a person. But when she realises that no one else might be looking for the real murderer and suspects that the murderer has it in for some already abused people she takes action.

If I were supreme overlord of the universe (don’t think I haven’t dreamt of it) this is the kind of book that people would think of when they heard the term chick lit. Maureen is funnier than Bridget Jones, has better friends than Carrie Bradshaw and is the kind of practical, non shoe-obsessed woman that fiction needs more of. She is ‘pathologically independent’ (Mina has a way of describing things perfectly yet succinctly), a loyal friend, a helpful though perhaps misguided patient (she makes up stories that she thinks will make her therapist happy) and doesn’t define herself only terms of the bad things that have happened to her. In a nutshell she’s fantastic.

Fortunately Maureen has some helpful if unlikely allies. There’s her drug dealer brother Liam, her best-friend Leslie who volunteers at a women’s shelter and even one of the policemen working her case who all help her out and take risks for her. Just like any chick lit heroine’s mates would. Of course it wouldn’t be a great book if Maureen didn’t also have some crosses to bear including an alcoholic mother and several sisters who think she has a false memory of her father’s abuse of her. All of them though, the goodies and the not, the victims and the heroes are exquisitely depicted in a few of Mina’s evocative lines so that they all became quite clear images in my head while I was reading.

I know that not everyone likes humour in their fiction and also that humour is an elusive quality not easily shared. The humour here is of the dry, sarcastic ‘never let the bastards get you down’ kind that might not be for everyone but allowed me to relate to the characters far more than I would have if they’d been consistently earnest and worthy (as others in their predicaments might have had a yen to be). Plus it made me laugh out loud on more than one occasion.

But the book is not all laughs by any stretch of the imagination. It depicts the systematic abuse of a city’s dispossessed and tackles hefty issues like domestic violence against women far more realistically than is often the case. During a passage in which Leslie and Maureen discuss how to deal with perpetrators of violent crimes against women Leslie gets to the heart of things:

“God Al-fucking-mighty Maureen, have you thought about this at all? It’s all right for you and me to worry about our moral standing – neither of us are getting our faces kicked in every night in the week. These women are treated as if they were born on the end of a boot and we set up committees and worry about our moral standing…We’re not fucking helpless, we’re fucking cowards.”

Having spent more than my fair share of time (which would be none if I scored that job as supreme overloard) in politically correct meetings that do nothing to address the problems they have ostensibly been set up to solve I felt much empathy for Leslie’s position and for the action Maureen takes subsequently. It sure beats talking.

The whodunnit aspect of Garnethill is solved almost as an afterthought, although it is a very satisfactory and quite unexpected resolution, because it’s the characters and their respective journeys through the crap life throws at them that make this book a page turner and a treasure.

My rating 5/5

Other stuff

Garnethill has been reviewed at Curled Up and Helen Edith’s Blog

The good part about discovering an author after they’ve been writing for a while is the certainty of there being more books. There are two more books featuring Maureen O’Donnell (Exile and Resolution) and I shall scatter them both through my reading in the next couple of years and enjoy the anticipation all the while.

This is the third book I have read in a row to receive a 5-star rating which has not happened to me since I started keeping a record of what I was reading about six years ago. I’m not sure what I have done to deserve the reading gods smiling upon me in such a way but I am very, very grateful for the hatrick.

 

Review: When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson

Title: When Will There Be Good News?

Author: Kate Atkinson

Publisher: Doubleday [2008]

ISBN: 978-0-385-61451-1

In one of the most shocking openings you’ll read to a book a young child witnesses a horrible crime against her family. Thirty years later that young child is Joanna Hunter: a GP a new mother and the employer of 16 year-old orphan Reggie Chase as her ‘mother’s help’. When Dr Hunter disappears unexpectedly Reggie finds it difficult to believe her husband’s explanation. DCI Louise Monroe is obsessed with a different crime against a different family but eventually she too is drawn into the mystery of Joanna Hunter’s disappearance and Jackson Brodie, former policeman and former PI, also becomes involved in the case when he finds he owes Reggie a big favour.

I am smitten by the characters in this book. They lept off the page and into my heart where I suspect some of them will take up long term residence. Reggie Chase, with her sharp wit, belief in her own standing as a harbinger of death and dogged determination in the fact of events which would bury lesser mortals, is an utter delight. Newly married Louise Monroe’s obsessive, self-deprecating monologue is equally memorable and thought-provoking. Even minor characters, such as Reggie’s criminal brother Billy or the woman hiding in a safe house in fear of her ex-husband who has already killed her own mother, sister and niece are all vividly depicted. The quick chapters told from each character’s point are view are beautifully crafted.

Atkinson’s clearly evident writing skill makes the thing that let this book down, for me, even more annoying than it might otherwise have been. It is quite literally drowning in coincidences. And while I tried to implement the advice of some reviewers to just accept them I couldn’t get past the fact that their constant presence denuded the book of any shred of suspense. By about half-way through the story, after the second or third audible groan, I knew that Atkinson was not afraid to link very unlikely events together at the drop of a hat. From that moment on there was not another single point where I wondering what might happen or pondered how the story would resolve because I knew that whatever pickles the characters might get themselves into they would be quickly removed from it via a trite and unbelievable coincidence. Which did suck the fun out of reading just a little and, perhaps more importantly, detracted from the things Atkinson was observing about people, the way the develop and change their identities and their survival in the face of horrendous adversity.

There are things I really love about this book but I do wish the plot hadn’t been quite so predictable nor quite so referential to previous works which made it a little difficult to read as a standalone novel.

My rating 3.5/5

Other stuff

Reviewed by Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise

Reviewed on Euro Crime

 

Review: Sacrifice by S J Bolton

Title: Sacrifice

Author: S J Bolton

Publisher: Bantam Press [2008]

ISBN: 978-0-593-05912-8

Tora Hamilton is an obstetric surgeon who moves to the Shetland Isles with her husband Duncan, a native of the Isles who hasn’t been home for twenty years. As she’s digging a hole to bury her horse on her farm she finds the body of a young woman buried in the peat. It wouldn’t be a mystery novel if this were a straightforward discovery of course and a series of increasingly sinister events follows as Tora and a local police woman try to find out who the woman is and how she cam to be buried there. 

I’m a city girl. In my 20’s I spent three years living in a semi-rural location but, although there were aspects of the lifestyle I appreciated, I never felt at home there like I do with the hum, pace and capacity for anonymity of urban life. Despite my preference, or possibly because of it, I am a sucker for the unfamiliarity of stories set in isolated places which is why I grabbed a copy of Sacrifice based on nothing but the setting. And the book delivers: depicting a sense of the isolation, darkness and hard-to-penetrate community that I have always imagined exists in such places. It’s one of the most evocative books I’ve read in a long time. 

It’s also a pretty good yarn: full of twists and suspense and that page-turning ‘pull’ of a good story. The complex plot is a little too convoluted in a couple of spots but overall it hangs together well and is credible within the context of the environment that Bolton has created. The traditional folklore elements of the story are well researched and integrated nicely with the modern thriller which is a rare thing and quite remarkable for a debut novel. 

As far as characters go Tora is quite typical of the genre in that she’s an ordinary woman who keeps going despite the many nasty things that are done to and around her. However she’s more credible than many in these fictional situations. She doesn’t develop sudden abilities to fight like a ninja as happens so often and her decisions are within the boundaries of what the average human might choose to do in the circumstances. Her changing reflections on whether or not she could trust the people around her were a good device for advancing the plot and there are some real insights about Tora’s relationships with other women that really rang true for me. Dana Tulloch, the Detective Sergeant who investigates the case, is the other character who holds the novel together and she too grows as the story unfolds and is someone I found myself wondering about when I wasn’t reading the book. The male characters are not as well developed which is partly due to their lesser roles but even with that proviso there was room for them to be a little more than the two dimensional good guys or bad guys they were portrayed as.

I thoroughly enjoyed being transported off to the windswept and mysterious Shetland Isles and will be actively looking for Bolton’s next book.

My rating 4/5

Other stuff

Reviewed at reviewing the evidence