The Treatment

Aug25

The Treatment is the second in Mo Hayder’s Jack Caffrey series. Caffrey is still obsessed with the paedophile next door and the mystery of what happened to his brother all those years ago.

Caffrey gets a case that seems a little too close for comfort. A family is held prisoner in their own home for a weekend. No one notices because they were supposed to be going on holiday. Instead, the mother is restrained and locked in a cupboard, the father is restrained on the landing while the son is abused. Then the perpetrator takes the child out of the house and is seen by a passerby. The police sweep the area but can’t find anything.

Whilst investigating this case, Caffrey is also trying to work out what happened to his brother. The cases are linked and Caffrey gets information that takes him out to a remote farm in Suffolk. Some of his actions are ill-advised and Caffrey is risking his job to pursue his obsession.

An extra complication is that Caffrey is dating one of the women that was a victim in the last book, Birdman, and she’s dealing with her experiences in a very public way. His secrecy and obsession with his brother isn’t making things between them better.

The plot twists and turns and the killer is hidden in plain sight. There are a few plausible candidates and Hayder shows how easy it can be to miss what is really going on. I wasn’t keen on the heavy-handed use of dialect for the character of Caffrey’s boss but that was the only thing that spoilt my enjoyment of the book. The resolution of all the plot lines was brutal and I found it very affecting.

Birdman

Aug19

Birdman is Mo Hayder’s debut novel and the first to feature Jack Caffrey, a handsome yet troubled detective. I enjoy a thriller and Mo Hayder is easy to read. Which should not be confused with easy to write.

Someone is murdering women and sewing live birds into their chests. Disturbingly, Hayder is able to present several plausible suspects. There’s a lot going on in the book aside from the investigation; there’s Caffrey’s struggle with the unresolved disappearance of his brother, and his overlapping romantic relationships. The plot is handled well and the real murderer is introduced early and hidden in plain sight.

Caffrey’s resolution of the crimes opens up some questions for the reader. Caffrey takes a personal path that might feel very satisfying of a need for retribution, for terrible crimes to receive terrible punishment. Birdman is a blend of horror and thriller and it is the horror ending we’re presented with; the evil that has risen is wiped out of existence. Only then can we sleep safe in our beds. But Caffrey is an officer of the law; he’s meant to serve it, not take it in his own hands. It’s an uncomfortable presentation of what a person might do when their sense of right and wrong is complicated. On reflection, this is a more thoughtful book that it appears, and I enjoyed it a lot.

Body Double

May18

Body Double by Tess Gerritsen is a Rizzoli and Isles mystery. A woman is killed in a car and she looks just like Maura Isles. Naturally, she’s shaken by this and responds by investigating the case. Isles is adopted and so it’s entirely possible the victim is related to her.

In the course of finding out who the murdered woman is, Isles meets a policeman who had been the victim’s lover and who develops a (slightly creepy) attachment to Isles. She and Rizzoli also discover some truly horrible crimes going back decades.

I don’t want to give the plot away. It’s nicely twisted and the connections are surprising. Gerritsen is a solid writer who creates believable characters. I enjoyed this, as I’ve enjoyed all of her books, and if you like thrillers, then you’ll like this.

The Shining Girls

Mar5

I’m terribly aware how heavily skewed my reading is in favour of white men. It must have an impact on my writing, and my language, and my worldview, and I’d like to have more diversity in my reading. I read widely in terms of genre, but not so much in terms of author. There are blog challenges similar to the ‘100 books in a year’ challenge which I could do, except that it’s a tough year and I don’t want to take on anything I know I will turn into a chore. That doesn’t mean I can’t pay more attention though.

Whenever I look for contemporary female SFF writers Lauren Beukes is always at the top of the list. The Shining Girls is a story about a time-travelling serial killer. Harper stumbles across a house in the 1930s and to stay in the house he has to match girls with the trophies in the house. Kirby was attacked by Harper but got away. She becomes obsessed with finding out more about her assailant. What she discovers can’t possibly be true. Until he comes for her again. She got away and Harper has to correct his mistake.

The time-travelling element is an interesting twist on the serial killer horror story and the construction of the novel means that you don’t get all of the pieces until the end. It’s cleverly done. The characters are interesting. Harper is complex. Beukes conveys him in a way that shows how he is compelled by house. You could almost think he doesn’t have any choice. But she also shows how his personality makes him so compatible with the house, as if it drew its own to it.

Kirby is a brilliant heroine. She’s likeable, dogged and smart. Her previous traumatic experience makes part of her want to hide away and part of her want to fight back which I found very realistic. I thought it was a sensitive depiction of the complicated and contradictory feelings people have after being made a victim. And Kirby has more trouble in her life than that. It doesn’t define her and she still has to cope with all the other shitty things life hands her.

It was really good. I enjoyed it, would recommend it, and will be reading more work by Lauren Beukes.

Scream for Me

Aug16

I picked up Scream for Me by Karen Rose from the book drop at work. I was in the mood for something lightweight and thrilling.

Following the death of his brother, Detective Vartanian finds a collection of photographs that indicate that, when much younger, his brother participated in the gang-rape of several young women. When he goes to Dutton to investigate the murder of a woman, he realises that this death is somehow connected to those events.

Alex Fallon’s sister has gone missing and she comes to Dutton to care for her small niece and to look for her sister. The police think she’s an addict and aren’t interested in looking for her. Fallon had a twin who was murdered when they were teenagers and the MO for the current crimes is very similar. It becomes clear that the murderer is trying to reveal the rapists from Fallon and Vartanian’s childhoods, and that several important people are implicated.

This has been a strangely hard review to write. Partly because it’s a while since I read the book and it hasn’t stuck very well in my mind, and partly because I didn’t have very strong feelings about it. I enjoyed it while I was reading it, even though I thought the plot was a bit predictable. There were elements in it that should have had a high emotional impact but somehow fell flat. I guess I never believed that any of the main characters were in danger of dying. The ones that died were the minor characters that hadn’t had enough page-time to get the reader invested in them. It’s ok for a palate cleanser, but didn’t engage me enough that I’d seek out more.

61 Hours

Jun18

Oh hai Jack Reacher. 61 Hours by Lee Child sees Reacher stuck in South Dakota during a snow blizzard of the kind that lasts for days and shuts whole towns down. Coincidentally, it’s a town with a problem that needs the kind of solution Reacher can provide.

There’s an elderly woman who is a key witness in a trial against a particularly vicious Mexican criminal. Previous witnesses have been scared off or killed and the local police are giving her round-the-clock protection because they know an assassin is on the way. Obviously, at first they think it’s Reacher.

He’s on a bus full of tourists and it slides of the road in the blizzard so Reacher gets stuck in Bolton for a few days. He can’t help sticking his nose in and finds out about the witness. And about the new prison in the town that has a call-out policy that demands every police officer in town responds when there’s an escape.

Reacher uses a secret army telephone number and meets the woman currently doing his old job, to whom he forms a connection even though they only speak on the phone. He establishes that the killer must already be in town because no one is getting in or out. The Sheriff thinks it’s someone from the biker gang who live on an abandoned air force base outside the town. They are known to make and sell amphetamines but the police are finding it difficult to prove it.

Can Reacher keep the witness alive? Can he identify the killer? In the meantime, the Mexican drug lord is coming out to clear the airbase of his secret stash.

The big reveal is a surprise and it’s a good one. I hadn’t worked out who the killer was, but as soon as I knew I saw that all the clues had been there. As usual, Lee Child delivers a competently written, pacy thriller that is fun and easy to read. There’s a little bit of social commentary as the characters talk about the effect of the new prison on the town, and when they discover what’s at the airbase, which is handled very effectively. For me, it made the book the best of his that I’ve read.

As an aside, I heard that Tom Cruise is going to play Jack Reacher. While I’m not someone who thinks that an actor must look exactly like the character in the book, this seems an odd choice. This might be a mental adjustment too far.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest

Apr5

Finally, the last part of the Millenium trilogy! In Steig Larsson’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, Lisbeth Salander is arrested for the attempted murder of her father and her friends work hard to save her.

Lisbeth has a bullet lodged in her brain and is taken to hospital where her life is saved but she finds herself under arrest. Blomkvist, Armansky and Bublanski’s team are working to find Niedermann and prove Salander innocent. Meanwhile the secret section within the Swedish security police realise that Zalachenko has created a huge problem and act to fix it.

I’ve found the previous two books patchy – there’s a lot of good points and one or two bad points. Given that, this book is surprisingly good. There’s less of the repetitive summing up that slows the story down and a lot of action. The two sides are trying block each other and Larsson weaves these threads together in a way that keeps the tension going throughout.

I particularly enjoyed the courtroom scenes. Larsson’s dialogue often sounds like the characters are reading reports to each other. I don’t know if that’s due to the translation or if the dialogue is just clunky. However, the dialogue in the courtroom scenes (which are mostly dialogue) really works. They are tense, emotional and gripping.

The story is resolved in a satisfying way. The baddies get their come-uppance but the good guys have to work really hard for it. And there is one point towards the end where Larsson pulls off a convincing threat to a main character.

I think I’ve enjoyed this book most of the three Millenium books and it lifts the trilogy as a whole.

100 Books in 2011: Worth Dying For

Dec26

Ah, Jack Reacher, I just can’t stay away from you. And in Worth Dying For, Lee Child’s taciturn alpha male itinerant troubleshooter/maker is on good form.

Reacher is hitching across the US, as is his wont, and is dropped off in the middle of the desolate plains of Nebraska. He finds a motel and walks into a village terrorised by the Duncans, a family of thugs who deal in human trafficking.

The battered wife of the youngest Duncan calls the drunken doctor drinking at the motel bar and Reacher, having a chivalric moment, drags the unwilling doctor to assist, then tracks down the husband and breaks his nose. As things start unravelling, Reacher discovers that the Duncan’s are implicated in a thirty-year old case of a missing girl.

Meanwhile, the Duncan’s are waiting for a shipment that is late. The buyers have sent a couple of guys to find out where it is. There are further buyers in the chain, who also send thugs to expedite the process.

After much chasing around windy, flat farms and the grisly, violent deaths of many a criminal, Reacher solves the case and the bad guys get their just desserts.

I think Lee Child is getting better as a writer, Reacher seems a more complex character than when I first picked up one of these books, and as he gets more complex he gets more likeable, which was definitely missing at the start.

I also appreciate the short time span the novel is set in. All the action happens over a few days, maybe a week. With Reacher able to have many adventures in a short space of time, he doesn’t age at the same rate as the reader. Which can be a problem with your action hero. Worth Dying For has all the strengths and weakness I’ve come to expect from Lee Child. What’s good is the plotting, the pace, and the creation of a insulated little world wrapped up in its own problems. Not so good is the dialogue and Reacher’s god-like powers. Still, all in all, it was fun and if you’re looking for an easy, relaxing read, you could do worse.

100 Books in 2011: The Girl who Played with Fire

Oct28

I’ve become fed up of reading short books in order to hit my 100 books for the year target and was feeling the need to get into something more substantial. The Girl who Played with Fire by Steig Larsson is the second in the Millenium trilogy and is a 650 page brick.

Lisbeth Salander is hiding out in the Carribean, having had some cosmetic surgery and done a bit of travelling. She’s wondering what she will do with herself now she doesn’t have to work for a living.

Blomkvist is working on an expose of the sex trade in Sweden. Salander comes back and starts to pick up the pieces of her life, including checking in on her guardian and making sure that she is on track to be declared competent. But her guardian has hired a hitman to kill her. Then the journalists Blomkvist is working with get killed and it looks like Salander is the murderer.

The police investigation focusses on finding Salander but Blomkvist doesn’t believe she did it and does his own investigation. Salander takes matters into her own hands. All three investigations come together in a tense climax with some interesting revelations, which hopefully will be expanded on in the last book.

This book was actually a little better than the first one. It still suffered from a lack of editing, especially visible in the frequent summing up passages. It probably could have been a hundred pages shorter without losing anything.

The dialogue is stiff and stilted but the pacing of the action sequences is good. The plot and story line are really exciting and the characters are becoming more rounded and engaging. I wouldn’t make this top of your reading list, but it is worth reading.

100 Books in 2011 challenge: Voodoo River

Aug9

I’m way behind on the 100 books in 2011 challenge, so I’m picking short, easy reads to try to catch up. Robert Crais is an easy read, and Voodoo River comes in at less than 300 pages.

Elvis Cole is hired to find out about the birth parents of an adopted woman, who is a TV star born in Louisiana. He finds out that her father was black and that her mother’s father killed him, facts known to a local private detective and a local crime lord. The mother and her husband know about the murder and that it was covered up. They’re being blackmailed and the husband, the sheriff, turns a blind eye to the crime lord’s human trafficking business.

It’s a pretty complicated plot to be wrapped up in a short book. It never feels like anything is being revealed too quickly, whilst at the same time, everything is there to make it all add up. It is well done and this is probably the best of Crais’ that I’ve read.

Characterisation is handled well and most characters are reasonably fleshed out. The dialogue got on my nerves a little. Cajun dialect was indicated by dropped letters and phonetic spellings rather than by cadence and word choice. It often felt heavy-handed. Other than that I enjoyed it.

Boudica Marginalia

Reading, writing, and other things

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