Canada

I must admit that thrillers with a religious scenario are not the sorts of books that I seek out, so DEAD BISHOPS DON'T LIE by André K. Baby would not be a book that I'd normally give a second glance. When offered by the author for review purposes, I did stop and think about it, and there was something about the blurb of the book that appealed. Probably the "caustic investigator" idea - being a declared fan of the less than perfect central protagonist.

Set in the European environments of Switzerland, Italy and Russia, with a touch of the exotic in the Caribbean, the gruesome murders of two archbishops seem to be related by the hidden meaning in the way that the killings were done, as well as the messages left by the murderers. Investigator Thierry Dulac, dry, acerbic, controlled and measured, is put in charge of the international investigation, and in turn he looks to an expert in mythology and symbolism for help in decoding the killer's cryptic messages.

Of course in this sort of thriller, you expect a big conspiracy, and in religious thrillers I doubt there's any more obvious source of that threat than the Vatican, the Code of Silence, and lurking Cardinal's influence. Toss in a bit of Russian past and present menace, a British Marchioness with some out there sexual habits and something that she seems to be hiding, and you're well into the realms of the money, the influence and the power.

Rule number 1 with these sorts of thrillers is that there must be a good sense of pace and action. It's a bonus if you can get some good, believable, realistic characters built into that. It's a bigger bonus if there's a good sense of place and the occasional bit of exotic as well. In the main, Baby's settings and characters are really good, the reader really gets a feel for each of the locations in this book, and a chance to connect with all of the major characters. The baddies were nicely lurking and threatening, without stepping that narrow line into cartoonish. There are a few problems with some the pacing at points in the book, and a couple of extraneous scenes that perhaps could have been dumped to get the action and pace of the book moving forward quickly, but really, once the scene is set, the story is very engaging.

If, like me, you're a bit wary of this sort of thriller, it would be worth swallowing the reticence and giving DEAD BISHOPS DON'T LIE a go.

THROUGH BLACK SPRUCE isn't the first book it's taken me quite a long time to read, it's not even the one that took the longest to read, but it did take many attempts before I was able to get any traction.  This attempt I read the blurb first-up and did a little Google hunting - something I normally try not to do.  But this time I really needed it to find out what on earth was going on.  Then it dawned on me why I was having so much trouble getting into the book.

THROUGH BLACK SPRUCE is a family story, told from two main points of view.  Annie is the sister of the missing Suzanne, as per the blurb.  She's the one who did come home, after a whirlwind time in the big cities which started off with her looking for Suzanne and ended up with her almost living Suzanne's life.  The other main narrator is their Uncle Will, a man haunted by loss, old, looking back at his life and the disastrous outcomes surrounding the disappearance of Suzanne.  The book launches into these individual voices very quickly, and there's no real hint at the start as to what the story is about, and where the reader is being taken.  It's a controlled, contained, almost placid book to start off with, beautifully evocative of life in a harsh and difficult environment and the joys and tensions of living in a small community.  It draws a series of wonderful, thoughtful, sometimes eccentric, often quite poignant characterisations.  At no stage does THROUGH THE BLACK SPRUCE give anything unnecessary away.  

And that is why the book may have been so difficult to get any traction on.  There is no indication at the start where this is going, even for a while who is narrating; what has happened; how anybody got to the position they are in, or even what exact position that is; where the story is leading. This is immersion reading, and in a way extreme faith reading.  The reader has to simply give in to the author, allow this world and these people to slowly, very very slowly emerge, draw their pictures, cohere into a tale of violence and extremes, kindness, love and compassion.  Once you do give in, allow this book to work it's way into it's own story and draw you into the world, it's often rather beautiful.  Uncle Will is a marvellous old character, wise and stupid, kind, stubborn and game as.  Annie is very much a survivor, whether that's in the modelling studios and parties of New York and Toronto or deep in the frozen forest in the hunting camps, setting traps and coaxing the old snowmobile into one more trip, she's strong and very very like her Uncle.

THROUGH BLACK SPRUCE is not however, a perfect book.  It's strengths are most definitely in Will's world, as he narrates his life, as he moves through the Canadian wilderness, as he goes backwards and forwards through his past and his present.  Less convincing are the times that Annie spends away from forest, in the cities and the modelling life.  This is more sketchy, flat and bland, hard to follow, less immersing.  Because of that there's frequently a lack of balance in the narration.  Will became a real focus, allowing the reader to understand and accept his connection to his home, the land and the creatures around him.  There was less of that connection with Annie - maybe because of the Indian spiritualism which worked well for Will but didn't seem to have such authenticity in her city based world.  Once she's back in the forest, at her Uncle's side, and once the events surrounding the disappearance of Suzanne start to clarify, Annie starts to make more sense.  But it was hard to shake a slight suspicion of contrivance.  

But that's a minor quibble.  Ultimately I really liked this book, once I'd figured out how to read it.  It's probably not a book for a more traditional crime fiction fan - it's definitely about the journey and not the destination, but once into it, once I'd figured out who was who and that I wasn't supposed to have the slightest idea what was going on for most of the book, I just went with it.  And along the way there were some glorious moments.

The ABC tv series has prompted the re-release of the paperback but has little resemblance to the events of 2009 that Sawyer created.

The best science fiction novels will always have you firmly believing in the writer's vision of our future world.  It is a given that there will be some hellishly dire warning as to where humanity will head if it trips merrily along its current path of debauchery and selfishness.  Science fiction offers up all the cool stuff like great technology and at best, grounds this reality from whatever stage of advancement the world is at as the novel is written (which would be 1999 for FLASHFORWARD).

It is interesting to compare how we are now, to how Sawyer thought we might be a decade into the future.  A layman's knowledge of quarks, the shelf life of a Supernova and the behaviours of neutrinos etc and suchlike might have been of valuable assistance to understanding what it is that causes the Flashforward, and it may be this aspect of the read that will appeal to the little space geek hidden inside of you anyway.  (CERN's real life website will be helpful here ).

As the novel is multi perspective (necessary for a novel where catastrophes occur on a global scale) we are privy to the immediate after reactions of the scientists who work together at CERN, and how their lives spiral outwards from that couple of minutes when the whole conscious world goes bye-bye.

It's an incredible premise that is not fully explored and the complexities of space and technology swamp the human interactions in this novel.  This does not necessarily detract from the read, however it strips away opportunities for possible morality explorations and "survivor" personal angst on a grand scale.  FLASHFORWARD will make its readers question themselves - it is quite impossible not to project yourself right into this story.    Is it best not to know your own future, so as to not consciously steer your life towards what may or not be a fixed path - one that was always going to be determined by your own actions?

FLASHFORWARD has enormous potential throughout the book but with such upward momentum, anything less than an apocalyptic conclusion might only serve as a let down.  It is easy to see why this novel is so awarded and highly regarded in science fiction circles.  Having every person on earth facing the same dilemma is an ambitious premise for a novel.  The ideas are put out there with a lot of theorizing  left to the reader - and perhaps that was always the intention.

It's probably heresy to admit this - but there were a few things about this book that made it sound less attractive than it could have.  Not least of all the plot of a teenage girl going missing in circumstances sounding suspiciously like a run-away.  Teenage angst is a subject normally avoided in my reading choices.  How wrong can you possibly get?

FEAR THE WORST is the third book from Canadian author Linwood Barclay, the earlier two being NO TIME FOR GOODBYE and TOO CLOSE TO  HOME.  FEAR THE WORST is really the story of Tim Blake and how his life goes completely pear-shaped when his teenage daughter doesn't come home after a normal start at her summer day job.  Nothing has gone from her room.  She's not answering her telephone.  No friends admit to having seen her.  She simply vanished.  Stranger still - the hotel where she's supposedly been working say that Sydney Blake has never worked there.  Tim is a pretty normal divorced man.  He works as a car salesman, he's trying to maintain a relationship with his daughter, he's not particularly jealous of his ex-wife's new boyfriend.  He has got himself into a very messy relationship with a woman who is definitely not quite right, but he's trying to do the right thing about her as well.  He's even trying to be a good role model for his daughter's teenage friends - especially Patty.  An unlikely best friend, Patty comes from a very dysfunctional background and she's very very different from Tim's Syd.

Tim's problems start when the police seem to be more interested in proving he killed his daughter, than actually looking for her, but things really start to get complicated when he's lured to Seattle on a false report and returns to find his house trashed and drugs planted there.  The police find Syd's car only to discover there's blood on it - but not just Syd's; and there's something going on with Patty and Syd's ex-boyfriend Jeff.  As Tim searches for Syd more and more weird things (and people) start falling out of the cracks of what Tim thought he knew about his daughter.

FEAR THE WORST ticks all the "page turning" boxes.  The action is fast and frenzied, and whilst our hero does take a bit of a battering, he's not made out to be super-human. He's believable.  The supporting cast of characters - Patty, Tim's ex-wife, her new boyfriend Bob, all have some shape and depth to them.  The grudging co-operation which slowly builds between Bob and Tim is good, again believable.  The plot is complex but not complicated to follow, the twists and turns built into Syd's life realistically, adding some blips in Tim's along the way just to show sometimes life can come back and bite you when you least expect it.

Every now and then along comes a book that I can really say was a page turner.  FEAR THE WORST is definitely one of them.

After spending a fair amount of time in Tasmania in the 1970's, Canadian Gordon Aalborg did what all red blooded Canadian-Australian men do, he turned to writing romance novels.  20 or more of those novels later, he's now turned to crime fiction as well, and DINING WITH DEVILS is the second of those.

Set in Tasmania, DINING WITH DEVILS combines crime and caving - not a combination that you'd immediately think of (unless you're inclined towards the belief that activities in the dark are best when that dark is rocky, hard, damp, and far underground!)

Sergeant Charlie Banes from the Tasmanian police isn't the only one who instantly thinks that the blind man shooting blanks at a dead pigeon has killed the gun dog judge.  Visiting Canadian author Teague Kendall came to the same conclusion.  At the same time caving enthusiast and almost girlfriend of Kendall, Kirsten Knelsen, is kidnapped.  Nothing connects these two events until Kendall also goes missing.  Odd?  Well add a psychotic anti-American ex-Vietnam War sniper; a vengeful ex-wife; a killer who was supposed to have died in a Canadian cave a year ago; an irascible old bushman; an even more irascible Jack Russell; and a Bunch of Tassie Devils doing what Tassie Devils do best and Charlie's up to his elbows in the mad, the bad, and the simply flat out peculiar.

One of the hardest things about writing a book based somewhere you don't live on a daily basis would seem to be getting the language right - the slang, the intonation and, in particular with Australia, the dry, sarcastic wit.  Aalborg's done a terrific job at getting a very realistic feel, tone and timing to the dialogue in DINING WITH DEVILS.  There are a few minor slipups that local readers will need to forgive - cellphone isn't a term we use at all, and despite SUV making minor inroads into our daily language courtesy of some appallingly lazy advertising, it's still not ubiquitous.  Luckily the pace of the book is going to pull a local reader through these minor blips, and the main part of the dialogue - particularly the humour, works pretty well.  

The other thing that works really well in DINING WITH DEVILS is the descriptions and use of the Tasmanian bush.  The characters live within their setting with ease, the locations within the book, whilst most likely fictional, seem right for the place.  

The action in this book is tight, and taut, and whilst the plot is complicated, it's not messy.  It's also not without some laugh out loud funny moments, as well as the occasional peak through the fingers scary bits.  It's not a book that gives up on characterisation for the sake of action, although not all the characters are meant to be people that you want to sit down and have a beer with.  Suspense, action, humour, cannibalism, caving, bushcraft, Tassie Devils, and a cranky Jack Russell terrier - DINING WITH DEVILS has the lot.