Little Brown

When SAY YOU'RE SORRY was announced I promised myself that this time - straight to the top of the pile. After all, what's not to look forward to - a solid police procedural with a psychological aspect, written by an Australian, set in the United Kingdom. One of the tricks of this series is that Robotham is switching the main viewpoint around between a couple of central protagonists - ex-cop Vincent Ruiz and clinical psychologist, Joe O'Loughlin. Now at a pinch I'd have to say that Ruiz is my favourite of these two characters, but that's not to say that O'Loughlin isn't also a strong central character.

Robotham has carefully constructed a story in SAY YOU'RE SORRY which includes one of the more difficult viewpoints - that of the living, captured victim of a kidnapper, sex attacker and vicious man. Teenager Piper's voice is extremely authentic, frequently quite chilling, yet Robotham carefully controls the amount of exposure that the reader must endure, whilst simultaneously dolling out the details of the fate of both girls, their families, the village and the investigating team.

Followers of this series will know about Joe O'Loughlin's own past - the Parkinson's disease that originally, I believe, came to Robotham as an dilemma for a man whose understanding of the human mind can do nothing about the disease that is slowly taking away control of his own body. They will also know that he is now separated from his wife, although they are still in close touch if for no other reason than the support and care of their daughters. Their oldest daughter Charlie makes a classic teenager's appearance in this book, and it's a nice touch that when Charlie in trouble O'Loughlin's call for help goes straight to Vincent Ruiz. Ruiz is there in SAY YOU'RE SORRY, working with O'Loughlin as is the way with these books now, yet this story is more about getting into the head of a killer, of understanding the sort of madman who would kidnap two young girls, and seemingly keep them alive for 3 more years.

There are quite a few red herrings as is traditional, and there is a decent surrounding story of the two kidnapped girls, their families, events that led up to their disappearance, and the lives of at least two of the early suspects in the case. All this extraneous information builds and fleshes out the book and creates a world in which the victim, for whom there is still some hope, Piper, isn't forgotten and the reason for the chase not lost in the detail. To be honest the guilty party came as quite a surprise. What doesn't surprise at all is how good these books are, and SAY YOU'RE SORRY is no exception.

I can't tell you how pleased I was to finally get to read THE WRECKAGE. I've been a fan of this series since it's inception, with only one minor disappointment in the last book which headed off into shock tactics a little too overtly for my liking. THE WRECKAGE, however, is a terrific thriller, with a complex and masterfully executed plot and a sense of pace and tension that is nicely balanced with a bit of romance and some family secrets.

It probably doesn't hurt that the action centres around Vincent Ruiz in this book, one of my favourite of Robotham's shifting cast of central characters (in itself a particularly clever idea). The book is made up of a number of different threads, some of which are reportedly based on true events. Using a series of short, sharp chapters, Robotham switches the focus amongst these seemingly unconnected threads. Handled well this idea of chopping and changing the viewpoints and the story threads really provides a strong sense of pace and tension, cutting and weaving the story, moving rapidly through the various events, never giving the reader time to relax. Here it's handled very well.

The other aspect well handled in this type of scenario is whether or not these disparate elements - robberies in Iraq, a missing British banker, and a young female scammer in danger from a shadowy, and very efficient assassin connect. It's less of a surprise these days when they all do, but how they do is extremely important. Here it's done with considerable assurance and believability. The reader is drawn towards the conclusion, rather than fed the details up front, there's enough to guess about, wonder about to really keep you turning pages.

I'm not much of a fan of star ratings, or arbitrary numbers when it comes to books (even though many sites insist that you use them). My private rating system is all to do with whether or not I got much sleep whilst reading this book. Needless to say THE WRECKAGE rated very very highly - it's a book that kept me awake most of the night as it was next-to-impossible to put down.

DEATH IN THE LATIN QUARTER is the first novel by Raphael Cardetti, translated from the original French, released in English in 2010.  Categorised on the cover as a "treasure-hunt tale", this is a book set in the halls of academia and the world of art collection, restoration and museums.

The story, as outlined in the blurb, revolves around Valentine Savi, a talented young restorer, taking in private commissions to clean and restore artwork on behalf of the great general public.  She has fallen from grace, fired from a prestigious job after a mistake, which is slowly revealed as the book goes on.  After being approached by an enigmatic elderly man with a unique commission, she quickly finds herself involved in nefarious plots to possess an ancient manuscript and the secrets it allegedly holds.

Okay, up front, I really really struggled to finish this book.  Originally I thought it might be a slight personal wariness that I feel about these great artwork / secrets from the past / enigmatic old millionaires / playing fast and loose with everyone around them type scenarios.  There were a number of things that worried me about this book:  why we couldn't just confirm what had happened to make Savi lose her job so that we could all move on (it wasn't hard to take an educated guess after all).  Why the Dean even had time to develop such a hump with some poor hapless student (and quite what all that was supposed to be about anyway).  Why so many millionaire art-collectors have to be "enigmatic"; and most of all why their assistants have to be gorgeous, wound up like a top, perfectly coiffed blonde women (for that matter why are their bodyguards always "disguised" as the chauffeur and built like the proverbial without a brain cell to spare).  And I haven't even mentioned the compound, the state of the art security system that wasn't, and the security consultant who would have been better paying more attention to the aforementioned state of the art security system, and a lot less to lusting after the main female characters.  Whilst these sorts of books are very much about the manipulation of the reader experience, there must be something in the storytelling that makes the reader willing to go along with the obvious tension building, and I couldn't, no matter how hard I tried, swallow a lot of it.  

At one point I thought I'd nailed the problem, assuming I'd missed a subtle sense of humour.  Maybe the story was teasing me, it was supposed to be slightly tongue in cheek, and I'd misread the tone completely...  Toiling on through the book, I looked for these signs, but I simply couldn't find them.  Instead I found an increasing pile of overt red herrings, a bit of romantic tension, much rushing around and a hefty dose of telegraphed character-jep that would have made a movie fan pitch Jaffa's at the screen.  As the pace tried to pick up in the book, my ability to stick with it was getting less and less.  The villains were too much, the bad guy too obvious, the characterisations too clichéd and the plot too transparent for my taste.

It didn't really come as much of a surprise that somebody has taken up the "girl in the cellar" storyline, although in SHE'S NEVER COMING BACK the victim is an adult woman, kidnapped on her way home from work, held in the cellar of the house opposite her own home.

Talking about this book is going to be a balancing act, as without giving away too much, there was just so much about it that simply did not work, that actually worried me.  Worried me to the point where I got my partner to sit down and read it as well, so that we were then able to discuss the concerns that, in the end, we both shared.

I don't think it's giving too much away to suggest there's something profoundly "film script" about this book.  From the initial kidnapping, the perfect family and picturesque location that Ylva lives in, through to the use of a camera to allow her to see snippets of her family life, the book is clearly telegraphing the look, and the feel of a film.  Whilst that's not necessarily always a bad thing, in this case there were a number of elements of the plot that just seemed too strongly geared towards the "film", with so many things left unexplained when there was plenty of space for explanation.

The characterisation of the victim was, not to put too fine a point on it, decidedly dodgy.  An adult woman, known to have been unfaithful to her husband in the past, there was some subtle undercurrent throughout the book that seemed to be drawing the reader's attention constantly to her sexual past, veering dangerously close to victim blaming.  Having said that, there were a lot of extremely disconcerting female characterisations going on.  The women in this book all seemed to be either morally ambiguous, sainted angels or barking mad.  Not that many of the male characters fared a lot better - they were sooks, ineffectual, complicit (and in one very notable case, complicit in the face of professional expertise that should have had him running for the straight-jackets, the hills or both).  

Nothing in the motivation for the kidnapping, or in the manipulation and cruelty once Ylva was captive made much sense.  The motivation was unconvincing, the supposed execution of the plan for her fate flew in the face of the "blueprint" being followed, and there were simply too many daft or missed opportunities, over the top or flat out unbelievable actions and way too many convenient lapses to allow even a smidgen of willing suspension of disbelief.  Instead, there were so many glaring holes in the plot and inconsistencies in the characterisations that these readers became increasingly incredulous and profoundly frustrated and annoyed.  Annoyed to the point where the evening after finishing the book we found ourselves carefully working through the "blueprint" and how you would go about addressing the requirements properly.  Thankfully we don't have any neighbours to freak out and there's no chance we'd ever be able to dig a cellar through the quartz layer around these parts, as I doubt it would have been an easy conversation or stack of notes to explain to the local constabulary.

Perhaps it's more a book for somebody looking for a film-styled thriller, with some carefully choreographed graphic cruelty and sexual violence, a blatantly manipulative happy ever after ending, built around a very current day scenario.  It was a undoubtedly a very quick read.  But for this reader (actually these readers) there were so many aspects of the plot and characterisations that were simply too far a stretch to be believable, plausible, justifiable or palatable.