London

When your favourite authors start dying even the most reasonable reader should be forgiven for becoming a nervous, obsessed, idiot hoarder of books that can, after all, be re-read should the unthinkable eventuate.  Despite an overwhelming desire to continue this hoarding behaviour, eventually the yearning for books like CALIBRE becomes too strong and, as a result, I'm no longer hoarding CALIBRE.  (DISCLAIMER:  I have no information whatsoever with regard to Mr Bruen's state of health... it's just that he's a favourite author and there's always the chance that any one of my favourite authors could beat me out the door....)

I'm not 100% sure what called me to this book over the last few days, but I found myself inexplicably incapable of looking past it when scanning the shelves for a little something to fill in a hot weekend.  Which plan failed dismally as I read it in a single setting.  Not because the book is 192 pages long, because it was so extremely, gloriously readable.

Of course we're talking Bruen here, so it's rapid-fire dialogue, recited by unconventional characters, with a healthy disdain for the rules or much in the way of propriety.  There's also the most marvellous dark, dry humour - personally I thought Sergeant Brant's method for becoming the British equivalent of author Ed McBain had a weird sort of merit, although I doubt his colleague, who was being set up for a systematic fleecing of his ability, would agree....

CALIBRE, as with all of Bruen's novels, is not for everyone.  We're not talking straight-forward police procedurals here, nor are we necessarily talking much in the way of complicated plots.  What we are talking is a sense of noir, of the dark side, of black humour and somehow, disconcertingly so in some places, realism.  Favourite author or not favourite author I'm going to have to snap out of hoard mode and get back into reading (and re-reading) all of Bruen's books.

1945 - World War 2 is over, and TRUTH DARE KILL is another book set in a post-war period that I've read recently.  Set in London, this is the story of Danny McRae, an ex-policeman who has returned from the war after being captured by the Germans, incurring a severe head injury in the process.  As a result he suffers amnesia and blackouts, which has to make working as a private investigator a lot more complicated than it needs to be.

Approached by a woman who wants the possible death of her married lover investigated, McRae takes the job.  Partially because he needs the money, and partially because the missing man turns out to be McRae's commanding officer in France, and one of the few people in the world that can help him discover the missing parts of his life.  The complication is that not only do the blackouts and amnesia make his job difficult, there are also a series of brutal murders of prostitutes in nearby Soho and McRae has some very valid reasons to wonder if he could be involved.

TRUTH DARE KILL felt very like a book aiming to create a lone wolf, stripped down, struggling character.  Danny McRae is taciturn and introverted, he's probably not meant to be an easy man to find any connection with.  I'm not sure whether that was a particular ploy on the part of the author (the character is, after all, having trouble coming to grips with himself after his war-time experience), whether it's an artefact of the book's "styling", or maybe because it's the first book in a series.  Alternatively it could be a combination of the whole lot.  Either way, I suspect some readers will struggle with McRae.  I found him quite realistic, and everything about him consistent, right down to the problems of finding something about him to connect to.  He felt at sea, awash with the complication of life, the difficulties of randomly losing control of your life, making it seem feasible that he'd be disconnected from everyone and everybody (including a distant observer like me - the reader).

There's a very noir feeling to the setting as well.  There was something subdued, dark, shell-shocked about 1945 London that felt authentic, albeit deliberately washed out, tired, gritty, bleak.  

Despite the overwhelming feeling of bleakness left behind by TRUTH DARE KILL, I did find it to be quite an interesting book, set in another post-war period that isn't like the world that I live in.  I certainly engaged enough with the book to add the next in the series to my buy list.

There's something about the blurb to this book that seems to suggest that it's tending towards a romance.  If that's what you're looking for, you might want to consider your options.  Whilst we're talking relationship here, we're also talking manipulation, need, dependencies and some really really nasty behaviour.

It's not just the possibility of overt romance that could put a reader off - there's Margot herself.  At the beginning of the book she's starting out after a relationship that obviously controlled her, set her life's path.  She comes across as one of those slightly wet women - shy, self-conscious, little bit overweight, somebody who is finally starting to take some control of her own life until she meets yet another man.  Leon is obviously a shady character, and there's a strange sensation that there can only be one reason why a man like him would be intested in a woman like her.  There's a dreadful feeling of the inevitable about the whole thing.

But something happens as you press on into this book, at some stage you start to get a sneaking suspicion that something's not quite as it originally seems.  Your perceptions of everybody and everything are slowly twisted, gently rolled sideways.  

CLOSE-UP sort of snuck up on me a bit, in the early stages I was fully expecting to dislike it, the premise, Leon, Margot and just about everybody else in the thing.  Somewhere along the line something changed and, to be brutally honest, I've still got absolutely no idea how this author did that.  It's not the fastest paced thriller in the world, it is almost laconic in a way - perhaps that's part of the way that things sort of sneak up on you, but add to that an ending that I simply did not see coming and CLOSE-UP was quite a surprise package.