Review: Tell No One by Harlan Coben

Title: Tell No One

Author: Harlan Coben

Publisher: Orion Books [originally 2000, this edition 2007]

ISBN: 978-1-4091-1702-5

Length: 346 pages

Genre: Thriller

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating: 3.5/5

One-liner: A frenetically paced, superbly plotted yarn.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Eight years ago David Beck and his wife Elizabeth took their annual trip to the remote place where they had shared their first kiss. That night Beck was beaten and his wife kidnapped. She was found dead several days later, apparently the victim of a serial killer. Beck has since put some semblance of a life back together but it quickly unravels when he starts to receive messages that appear to be from his supposedly dead wife at the same time as two bodies are found in the spot where Elizabeth was kidnapped from. As Beck tries to determine if his wife might be alive after all, the authorities become convinced it was Beck not the serial killer who was responsible for her death and some nefarious characters who seem to know what really happened eight years ago take whatever action is necessary to ensure no one else finds out the truth.

I know it’s an over-used phrase but this book was, for me, a genuine page turner. Sure there are coincidences and plot contrivances to be found but I still read the book as quickly as I physically could, sneaking a few pages whenever I had a spare moment. The original premise hooked me immediately and the story, although far-fetched, sustained its internal logic throughout. There were multiple switches in point of view from first person (Beck’s) to third (virtually everyone else’s at one point or another) which helped give the frantic sense that lots of action was taking place simultaneously.

While the yarn was enjoyable unfortunately the characters were a little too predictable and trite for me to really connect with. Beck is so full of wholesome goodness (he’s a white doctor in a ghetto neighbourhood who never judges anyone not even the pregnant 12-year olds and is still in love with his dead high school sweetheart and is even kind to puppy dogs….) that if I met him in real life I’d want to beat him myself. Almost all of the rest of the characters are stereotypes too: the drug dealer with a heart of gold who helps Beck to go on the run and the evil generic Asian who has seen too much and can kill a man with his bare hands and so on. About the only character who I was really interested in as a person rather than a plot device was Beck’s best friend Shauna the plus size model who “stalks into a room as though it offends her”.

However, in a thriller more than almost any other genre plot is king and I can’t go past the fact that the book kept me interested from the first page to the last.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

For some quite unfathomable reason I’ve never read any of Coben’s other books but based on the writing here I’m keen to try more so if you have a favourite Harlan Coben book or can tell me whether or not I need to start at the beginning of his Myron Bolitar series let me know in the comments below.

This book was supplied to me free by the First Reads program at goodreads.com (how a book that’s been available since 2000 qualifies as ‘first read’ has me baffled but I’m grateful for the book anyway).

Tell No One has been reviewed at Jen’s Book Thoughts and You’ve Gotta Read This,

 

Review: The Black Monastery by Stav Sherez

Title: The Black Monastery

Author: Stav Sherez

Publisher: Faber [2009]

ISBN: 978-0-571-24482-9

Length: 299 pages

After 33 years in Athens Nikos has returned to the fictional Greek island of Palassos to see out his remaining time in the police force as the island’s police chief. But rather than slide slowly into retirement Nikos has to deal with some grizzly murders that hark back to awful events which occurred when he was last on the island. Kitty Carson, a successful crime writer (and the only character to warrant both a first name and a surname if my memory serves me correctly) is holidaying on the island, as is Jason, an aspiring writer who has followed Kitty in a vaguely stalker-ish manner.

For me this was a book about the past and how time doesn’t really pass into nothing-ness but rather builds up in thin layers which, eventually, have to be burrowed through or they’ll bury you. All of the characters, including the island itself, have secrets or events in their histories that have some hold over the way their current lives are playing out and Sherez unravels these threads in a tantalising way. With a Dan Brown style thriller I tend to hastily turn the pages to find out what will happen next, whereas here it was a case of reading on to find out what had happened before. I was no less gripped than I am by more conventional thrillers but because the major events being described have, for the most part, already taken place I found myself more willing to take a little time with my reading and savour the delicious, metaphor-laden language for its own sake. Although Sherez demonstrates he is no slouch in the suspense department either with his genuinely page-turning conclusion.

The book is jam-packed with strong images: some beautiful, others gruesome. I’m consciously less fond of centipedes now than I was two days ago thanks to several descriptions of their particular creepiness. Then there’s the disturbing picture created by these simple lines, which describe the scene facing Nikos as he enters an annexe of the police station (formerly the island’s church) filled with broken statues

He stares at this strange gathering, the saints missing arms or legs like crash victims, their beatific expressions covered by a thick layer of dust. The Marys stare open-eyed into the blackness. Three of them, different sizes, all missing hands or feet.

There are, quite literally, dozens more passages which have created lasting pictures in my head, several of which may, I fear, inhabit my nastier dreams for some time.

I’m not surprised Sherez chose to set his story on a fictional island as I suspect the Greek Tourism Board might have banned him permanently from the country had he assigned all Palassos’ attributes to one of the real islands. Not only is there a mysterious religious cult and a history of gruesome murders but the depiction of the dance-clubbing, drug-popping somewhat desperate young tourists that throng to the island overshadow the glorious Mediterranean sunshine or anything else of a positive nature that might be on offer. At a different level he also shows the worst side of the island’s regular inhabitants, including authorities willing to use people’s prejudices to hide truths and perpetrate lies. It certainly isn’t a place I want to visit any time soon.

For me the characters are less successful than the other elements of the book. They’re not badly crafted or unbelievable, although of all the characters I found writer Kitty the least convincing as she switched a bit too suddenly from indecisive and troubled to investigator-in-control. More than that though I didn’t react very emotionally at all to any of the major characters which meant I missed out on that strong connection that only a much loved or fiercely hated character can bring to a reading experience. Perhaps this stems from the fact the book is a standalone so the author didn’t feel a need to create characters that would engender more of an emotional response from readers. Of course he might have tried very hard to create a sympathetic character or two and I just didn’t respond in that way. I was certainly curious to find out what would happen (or had happened) to all the players but I was never at risk of bursting into tears should one of them fall victim to the murderer.

I had never heard of Stav Sherez before selecting this book from those available for review for the month based solely on the fact it is set in Greece and I don’t recall ever having read any crime fiction set there before. I thoroughly enjoyed starting a book having no idea what to expect and was delighted with what I found. For me the writing itself is the star of the show. On multiple occasions I re-read phrases and sentences, often aloud, purely because I liked the way the words sounded together. Combined with the intriguing plot (including an ending I did not see coming) this made for a very satisfying reading experience.

My rating 4/5

Other Stuff

Reviewed at It’s a Crime (Or a Mystery)

Sherez has written one other standalone crime fiction novel called The Devil’s Playground.

I was provided with a free copy of The Black Monastery for review by the publisher via the Murder and Mayhem bookclub

 

Review: Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith

Title: Child 44

Author: Tom Rob Smith

Publisher: Whole Story Audio Books

ISBN: N/A (digital download via audible)

Length:14hrs 23mins

Narrator: Steven Pacey

It’s the early 1950’s in Russia and Leo Demidov is a war hero and high-ranking officer in the security services (specifically the MGB). He is asked to handle the delicate issue of a fellow MGB officer whose son has just died and who is claiming the boy was murdered rather than dying in accident as the official paperwork claims. Leo must convince the boy’s parents to stop making the claims of murder or risk their own arrest because, as everyone knows, senseless murders only happen in Corrupt western countries. At the same time Leo is investigating whether or not a Moscow vet, Anatoli Brodski, is a traitor as has been alleged. Both cases turn out to have unexpected impacts on Leo’s life when he’s thrown out of the MGB and he and his wife Raisa are punished for their transgressions.

In his debut novel Smith has painted a bleak picture of Stalin’s Russia where blind faith in the State, or pretence of it, is the norm. Across the disparate parts of this story people’s actions and decisions are fuelled by paranoia, desperation and vengeance. Many people abuse whatever power they have and many others live in constant fear of that abuse. The few acts motivated by love, friendship or hope are memorable for their rarity. In some ways this is a familiar picture of Russia during this era but I thought Smith did a better job than many writers in demonstrating the subtle differences in people’s behaviour and exploring the reasons behind that behaviour rather than portraying everyone in as stereotypical good and evil as is often the case.

Few of the characters are likable however understandable their actions may be. But likable characters aren’t necessary for me to find a book engaging: far more important is their believability and I found these people very credible in the context of the world Smith has depicted. I did though, in the end, grow quite fond of Leo even though many of his actions were abhorrent and I’m not entirely convinced that the kind of redemption explored in the novel is possible in the real world.

The writing is breathtaking in the way it depicts scenes so vividly that you’re transported to the places where action takes place and can feel the emotions of those involved. The opening passage for example, in which two young brothers catch a cat so they can eat a proper meal during a time when their entire village is literally starving to death, is stunning. By the end of it I swear my own amply full stomach was growling in sympathetic hunger pangs. Smith uses rich descriptions and exquisite details to provide a vivid picture of a time and place I’m very happy to have only visited in fiction.

For the most part the structure of the book is good too. Rather than the story unfolding in a linear fashion readers are shown events in various people’s lives which, at first, seem to have nothing to do with each other but later turn out to be related in unexpected ways. This piecing together gives the book an epic feel which is unusual for a book that takes place over the period of only a few months. My main criticism of an otherwise terrific book is that in the last third the plot moved from credible to silly with the number of ‘in-the-nick-of-time’ escapes and coincidences used to get to the ending. The sudden shift from nicely paced narrative to edge-of-your-seat thriller was jarring and unnecessary: these people’s stories were gripping enough without the addition of the ‘Hollywood’ elements and a resolution in keeping with the rest of the novel would have made much more sense.

There was a lot of hype about Child 44 when it was published (it was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize) which made me wait a while before reading it but it turned out to be a pleasant surprise. It’s an evocative portrayal of a time and place that’s been demonised many times in literature and movies but rarely explored in such a thoughtful and thought-provoking way.

Audio book Specific Comments: A couple of times the narration crossed the line from reading into performance although it was only with the voices of a couple of minor characters so it wasn’t too jarring. Listening to this book provided an unexpected advantage too. When reading books set in non English speaking places I, being woefully monolingual, usually have to come up with some anglicised version of people and place names to keep everything clear this can interrupt the flow of my reading. Having the many names pronounced perfectly for me removed this frustrating element and I found it much easier to keep track of all the places and people than I normally do with foreign names.

My rating 4.5/5

Other Stuff

 Reviewed at It’s A Crime (Or A Mystery)

Reviewed at Euro Crime

 

Review: The Writing Class by Jincy Willet

Title: The Writing Class

Author: Jincy Willett

Publisher: Scribe [2008]

ISBN:  978-1-921372-11-7

No. of pages: 326

Amy Gallup is a writer-turned-teacher who runs an evening fiction-writing course. Her current class is turning out to be surprisingly enjoyable for Amy as the students are clever and seem willing to enter into the spirit of critiquing each other’s work. However an undercurrent of hostility creeps in when someone who Amy christens The Sniper starts playing nasty pranks on both the teacher and fellow students.

I nearly didn’t read this book because when I got it home from the library I discovered that one of the prominently placed pull quotes on the cover was something gushing by David Sedaris. I am, apparently, the only person on the planet who doesn’t find Sedaris’ own writing amusing and assumed that if he liked it I would not. As I had dragged it all the way home I set out, albeit with low expectations, and happily, enjoyed it spite of myself (and Sedaris) and vowed, once again, to wage a campaign to rid the world of publicity blurbs on books because they do more harm than good.

The characters are terrific. Amy is a loner afraid of being alone, a writer with the misfortune of having had her first book published and has a dozen more quirks. Often I find fictional people with loads of oddities to be unbelievable but I didn’t experience that with Amy. Her foibles and peculiar behaviours were all explained naturally and I not only found her credible but I liked her. A lot. She’s witty, self-deprecating but not depressingly so and clever. Her students fulfil more stereotypical roles but as that is partially their purpose it doesn’t detract from the story and they do manage to surprise on occasion. I was thoroughly enthralled by the depiction of the shifting group dynamics and the development of the characters, much of which is done via their writing and the critique of it. Of course as Amy delivers her mini lectures about what makes good (and bad) writing I was applying that information to what I was reading and, for the most part, found Willett had taken her own character’s advice.

Structurally the book tries several different things and most of them work. The backbone consists of chapters for each class and these include snippets of each student’s writing which are discussed and dissected. In between there are chapters told from Amy’s point of view, extracts from Amy’s blog and diary entries from The Sniper. This could have been confusing but Willett has done a good job of pulling all these elements together to form a narrative. There is one part, a mystery play that one of the students has written that is acted out by the other students, that I failed to see the point of and found incongruous with the rest of the story but it wasn’t jarring enough to detract too much.

In pure mystery terms the plot is less successful than the character development and structure. The police show no interest in any of the nastier events that take place which is not terribly credible and the traditional whodunit with an ever decreasing pool of suspects isn’t done all that well. There’s never more than a vague suspicious shadow cast over any one person and when the villain was finally revealed there wasn’t a huge amount tying them back to an intricately woven trail of evidence. However I really didn’t care about this too much as I was enjoying the non-mystery elements of the story and all the rest the book had to offer. 

So I’m not sure this book is really crime fiction although as I seem to be saying that rather a lot lately maybe I just don’t understand the term anymore. Still, I can imagine recommending this to people I know who don’t like reading traditional crime fiction and wouldn’t suggest it for hard core mystery lovers at all. There were aspects of a decent ‘chic-lit’ (I hate that term) title such as Jane Green’s The Beach House but it also reminded me of Ben Elton’s Dead Famous in the way it cleverly deals with archetypes and applies a liberal does of satire to events. Whatever genre it might be I found it a thoroughly entertaining and witty book.

My rating 4/5

Other stuff

Reviewed by Helen at It’s Criminal

 

Review: Diamond Dove by Adrian Hyland

Title: Diamond Dove (alternative title Moonlight Downs)

Author:Adrian Hyland

Publisher: Text Publishing [originally published 2006, this edition 2007]

ISBN: 978-1-921145-92-6

No. of Pages: 322

In her mid-20’s and after travelling around the world Emily Tempest goes back to the place she left as a teenager: Moonlight Downs. A run down property in Australia’s Northern Territory, nine hours drive from Alice Springs. It’s where Emily spent her childhood after her mother died and where her dad sent her to the city from when she got into too much trouble. With the Moonlight mob having only recently returned to the property after securing ownership in a Land Rights claim the place is not what it was when Emily left but she still feels drawn to it. Sadly, not long after she arrives one of the mob’s leaders is killed and Emily seems to be the only one interested in finding out who killed him.

I’m not convinced this is crime fiction, at least not in its purest sense. There is a crime, and an investigation of sorts, but, for me anyway, that element of the plot wasn’t particularly important, although in the end it had its share of suspense. At the risk of making this sound like some kind of schmalzy personal-journey tale (schmaltzy this definitely isn’t) solving the mystery played second fiddle to the book’s other themes. Half-Aboriginal, half-white Emily Tempest’s search for somewhere to belong and someone to belong to is engrossing because it isn’t schmaltzy. Indeed all the characters’ search for ‘home’ and ‘family’ ,whatever those terms might mean to them, makes compelling reading. And the exploration of outback Australia after land rights claims started being awarded to Aboriginal groups feels very realistic. I used to be an archivist for a state government here and I did a swag of research for claimant groups and members of the stolen generations so have some small sense of those issues and Hyland’s portrayal of them felt very realistic to me. 

The best thing of all is that all of these issues are treated with a total absence of the brand of political correctness so prevalent these days that involves some group being offended on behalf of some other group. The book shows the good and the bad of everyone involved without once unduly condemning anyone or praising anyone. Things are what they are and the reader gets to draw their own conclusions. For that alone I would love the book.

However there’s more to love. There’s wonderfully dry, very Australian Emily. Although I have little in common with Emily I feel a far greater feminine kinship with her than with any of the fictional women I am supposed to ‘relate to’ (e.g. any character in Sex and the City or the insufferable Bridget Jones). Not bad for a woman created by a bloke. And the other characters are equally memorable: her childhood friend and soul mate Hazel, the neighbouring station owner Earl Marsh, the cops, the hunters are all vividly depicted.

Then there’s a depiction of a country which, for this city girl, is as foreign as northern Europe or southern Africa. But it’s spectacularly drawn and could tempt even me from my creature comforts. At least for another visit (I have ventured to the Territory a couple of times).

There’s also the funny, very irreverent, very evocative writing that made me smile a lot, cry a little and read whole chunks out to anyone who would listen. With a few words Hyland can create lasting imagines in your head.

I should have read this book ages ago but the copy I bought was filched by a friend before I got to read it and it’s done the rounds since then. Being a cheapskate I couldn’t bring myself to buy another copy so I waited patiently for my copy to return. The good thing about having done it this way is that everyone I know has read it so I won’t have to loan it out again. Which is just as well ‘cos this one’s a keeper.

My rating 5/5

Other Stuff

Reviewed by Maxine at Petrona

Reviewed by Sally at Books and Musings from Down Under

An interview with Adrian Hyland at Barbara Fister’s Place

 

Review: What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman

Title: What the Dead Know

Author: Laura Lippman

Publisher: Harper [first published 2007, this edition 2008]

ISBN: 987-0-06-112886-8

No. of Pages: 366

In 1975 two teenage sisters, Sunny and Heather Bethany, disappeared from a Baltimore shopping mall one Saturday afternoon. Despite a lengthy police investigation no trace of the girls was ever found. Their parents, Miriam and Dave, cope as best they can but the event changes the course of both their lives. Fast forward to the present day and, in the aftermath of a car accident, a woman claims that she is the missing Heather Bethany. Due to some inconsistencies in her story and their inability to confirm any of the facts that she gives them, police aren’t convinced she is who she claims to be.

Reading this book was a frustrating experience. As happened when I saw the movie The Sixth SenseI worked out very early on the twist that would come at the end spent the rest of the time wondering why the heck no one else could see it. Most of the time having worked out the end doesn’t impact my enjoyment of a book as there are many other things to occupy my mind: other plot threads, character development and so on. Here though it hindered my reading as I found it quite unbelievable that no one involved in the story ever voiced the possibility that was so blindingly obvious to me. Plots like this rely on keeping the reader guessing and I wasn’t (guessing that is). Every new revelation just cemented what I had already worked out and so I was bored by the chapters focusing on the present day investigation into the woman claiming to be Heather.

On other levels the book worked. I enjoyed the structure of it for example. The criss-crossing between a range of time frames was well done and although it didn’t follow any recognisable pattern it wasn’t confusing. We learned a lot about Heather and Sunny’s childhoods, the lives of their parents following the girls’ disappearance and a little about the woman who may, or may not, be the adult Heather. We also saw glimpses of the people who investigated the case, both at the time of the disappearance and in the present day, although this was by no means a police procedural.

Some of the characters were stunningly developed: in particular Miriam and Dave the parents of the two girls and, for me, the revelation of the various facets of their personalities and lives both before and after the disappearance of their children was the highlight of the book. Lippman portrays two very different ways that people involved in the same horror might deal with it and both are equally credible. When Miriam wonders which event in her life prior to the day of the disappearance she might go back to and change for the entire thing to have been avoided I could feel the genuine agony that thought would cause as it played a never-ending loop in a parent’s mind. The rest of the characters though weren’t nearly as interesting.

Even putting aside the fact I wasn’t terribly engaged by the plot I’m not entirely sure why this book has generated so much awards fuss (check out Kerrie’s list for more details). For me it was pretty much a middle of the pack read with occasional sparks of real interest.

My rating 3/5

Other stuff

Reviewed by Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise

 

Review: The Low Road by Chris Womersley

Title: The Low Road

Author: Chris Womersley

Publisher: Scribe [2007]

ISBN: 978-1-921215-47-6

Technically this isn’t really a review because I didn’t finish the book. In the portion that I read a disgraced junkie doctor (Wild) and a crook with an untreated bullet wound (Lee) are thrown together by circumstances at a seedy motel on the outskirts of town. They head off on the kind of road trip you’d take if you were unlucky enough to live in Hell, ostensibly to find a surgeon who can deal with Lee’s injury. Another crook (Josef) is angry with the Lee and he follows them. Things go downhill from there. 

After I’d read the first 20-odd pages I put the book down and found dozens of ways to avoid picking it up again. I did that same thing three or four more times over the next couple of weeks. But, as I had voted for this book to be the subject of discussion at an online book club and because it’s by an Australian author, I felt obliged to give it another go. I got as far as page 74 before deciding I couldn’t spend my time in the company of these people anymore.

One of the things I love most about reading is that it often provokes strong reactions. I laugh, I cry, I join social justice campaigns, I pull bedclothes over my head in fear. Or, on occasions like this, I feel every crevice of my being becoming full of overwhelming despair. I vowed after finishing Luke Davies’ Candy: A Novel of Love and Addiction that I wouldn’t read a book of unending bleakness again, so feeling that despair fill me up like wet cement fills a foundation ditch, I assigned The Low Road to the DNF pile.

I can appreciate the writing. Womersley has a capacity for creating striking and long-lasting images with deceptively simple phrases that I am deeply envious of. It’s the subject matter sucked out my soul. I’ll demonstrate if I may. Josef has broken into Lee’s apartment and before leaving he pisses all over Luke’s bed (don’t ask). Womersley writes

He was unsure to do what to do when he had finally finished. He zipped himself up and waited while the rust -coloured puddle melted into the sheets and mattress. It didn’t give him nearly as much satisfaction as he had hoped, but perhaps he had expected too much.

 That is exceptional imagery. But it makes me want to curl into the foetal position and weep. 

Before I finish I’m going to have a whinge about the book’s eschewing of quotation marks to indicate dialogue. Is there a point? Is it supposed to be edgy? Modern? Was there a memo I missed? The book has commas, apostrophes and all the other punctuation you’d expect to see in English prose so I fail to see what purpose removing the humble quotation mark served but I found the failure to distinguish dialogue from everything else bloody annoying. 

My rating 0/5 (DNF)

Other stuff 

My view on this book is a minority one. Most people, including those who judge the Ned Kelly Awards, think it’s a great book. Which shows what I know. Here are links to a few of the many reviews that speak far more glowingly of the book than I do.

Reviewed by Damien at Crime Down Under

Reviewed by Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise

Reviewed by Sunnie on Aust Crime Fiction

 

Review: What is Mine by Anne Holt

Title: What is Mine (a.k.a Punishment)

Author: Anne Holt

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing [originally published 2001, this translation 2006]

ISBN: 978-0-446-57802-8

In present day Norway a nine-year-old girl has disappeared, presumed kidnapped, then a younger boy disappears and his body is found soon afterwards. There’s a sinister note found with the body but no one is sure if the boy’s disappearance is related to the girl’s. The police inspector in charge of the case, Adam Stubo, seeks help in solving the cases from Joahnne Vik: a lawyer and psychologist. Johanne is reluctant to get involved for a variety of reasons, not least of which is the fact she is, at the same time, becoming intrigued by an older case. Many years ago a man called Aksel Seier was sent to prison for raping and killing a young girl but was released a few years later under odd circumstances and Johanne is looking into the case on behalf of an ageing lawyer who never believed Seier was guilty.

Thinking about it now this was quite a complex story but it never felt like it while reading it as all the components were drawn together well. Even though there were two quite separate threads for a majority of the book I never found either difficult to follow. I found it quite fascinating to read about horrid events unfolding in a place where such things are rare as there was a noticeable difference in the language used and the reactions ascribed to the various players than would be the case if the book had been set in the US. The ending to the story was a bit disappointing though because it relied too much on a string of coincidences and left a couple of things completely unresolved. These elements (which I can’t be more specific abouot without giving away spoilers) appear to have been forgotten about rather than deliberately left to the reader’s imagination but I could be wrong about that. Either way it was a little annoying to be left in the dark.

The characterisations were generally good although I did tire a bit of the relationship between Johanne and Adam which was a ‘should we sleep together or not’ kind of thing. I just wanted them to either get on with it or shut up about it and found it difficult to imagine two grown adults with no ties would behave as immaturely as they did (surely one of them could have been a grown-up). However there were many other elements to both of their characters which were much more satisfying to watch develop and there were a string of minor characters who were also thoughtfully and artfully depicted. Emilie, the first child to be kidnapped in the story, made me weep.

This book had a high degree of what I like to call unputdownability (i.e. it made me late for work) and, overall, the annoyances were forgivable. I can’t help thinking I’ll be remembering some of these characters for a long while yet which is always the sign of a good read. 

My rating 3.5/5

Other stuff

Reviewed on Euro Crime (September 2006)

And again on Euro Crime (October 2006)

For the record I think the American title, What is Mine, gets to the heart of what the book is about slightly better than the UK title which is Punishment.

 

Review: No Time for Goodbye by Linwood Barclay

Title: No Time for Goodbye

Author: Linwood Barclay

Publisher: Orion [originally published 2007, this edition 2008]

ISBN: 978-0-7528-9404-1

14-year old Cynthia Bigge woke up one morning alone in the house. At first she thought her parents and brother had all left the house normally without waking her but it soon became clear they had disappeared. She never saw them again. Twenty-five years later Cynthia is married, has an eight-year old daughter and agrees to make a television show about the disappearance to see if it stirs up any information. Eventually it does, although not perhaps what Cynthia and her family were expecting.

The plot here is intricate but well executed. The linking between past and present is well done and the various elements of Cynthia’s story are teased out at a beautiful pace. Although it’s her story, the novel is narrated by her husband Terry which makes for an interesting perspective as there are things he knows that the reader doesn’t but there are many things he learns along with the reader which makes it easier to follow than many thrillers. I have to say though that I found the last portion of the story, the big reveal if you like, a bit predictable. I might have been having a lucky guess day but I think the short chapters that were interspersed with the main story that offered transcripts of telephone conversations gave the game away a bit early. As usual though on the rare-ish occasions when I manage to work out the ending I happily read on to see if I was right.

The far more interesting component of the book for me was the character development, in particular Cynthia and Terry’s relationship and the way they individualy dealt with what was obviously a series of traumatic events. So often in thrillers this element is ignored and it was nice to see someone take the time to explore this. The characters’ reactions to the various events in the book were very natural although, paradoxically, far less predictable than the plot. I was quite taken with the couple and their daughter Grace and stayed up late more to find out if anything truly terrbile would happen to them than to discover what happened to Cynthia’s family.

This book is far more than the run-of-the-mill ‘action sequences plus pseudo-science’ thriller. It’s an engaging, credible story with troubled but likable people who could easily be your neighbours and I’m not at all surprised to see Richard and Judy chose it as a great summer read last year.

My rating 3.5/5

Other stuff

reviewed in January Magazine [November 2007]

reviewed by Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise [May 2008]

Linwood Barclay has a series of mystery novels which feature a science fiction writer

 

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

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