Penguin

There's a Renault Twingo referred to as having "committed suicide" when Gallo, the station's driver, he of the "Indianapolis Complex", slams into it in a spectacular example of mad driving that had me crying with laughter on page 4 of VOICE OF THE VIOLIN. Which is not a bad writing feat at all, in 4 pages you know that Montalbano's in a mood after a fabulous meal was interrupted by his nemesis Catarella. That his car's in the shop and he has to get to a funeral. That Gallo's a madman, and there's now a green Renault Twingo parked on the side of the road that's now got a smashed rear end. And you're laughing.

There's nothing particularly funny about the subsequent discoveries when Montalbano returns more than a bit intrigued as to why nobody has rung the station breathing fire over the damage to their car. And it's not all plain sailing in this case as Montalbano battles mutual dislike between him and his new boss, has the investigation taken off him with dreadful consequences, and stares down a bit of discontent in his team all whilst he battles to come to grips with a major upset in his personal life.

As is expected in this series, tight, descriptive, brilliant storytelling with a wonderfully engaging central character who has raised grumpiness to a glorious art form.
 

Please don't ask me what the correct order of this series is, as I've got absolutely no idea. I've never found the need to worry about it as each book works on its own, and each book is one of those little pieces of joy that just make you feel good.

Part of it has got to be Inspector Montalbano who is just so gloriously grumpy and idiosyncratic that he leaps alive from each and every page. Part of it is the setting which is woven into the action so seamlessly that you're just there, in that location, beside that ocean, in those restaurants, with those people. But definitely it's that food, which, frankly, I'm starting to think there should be a law against. You simply cannot read one of these books without constant mental references to the decided lack of wonderful meals lurking in your own refrigerator. (Note to self, first sniff of a Lotto win and we're hiring one of those housekeepers that cook like he has!).

Of course, none of the pluses thus far touch on the nature of the plots in these books, which are also extremely good. Almost masterclasses on tight, taut, clever plots in succinct but fully formed stories, decorated brilliantly by all the other aspects.

I dip into this series these days when I want a bit of comfort reading. And when I'm not on a diet.
 

Following on from the excellent THE DIGGER'S REST HOTEL, BLACKWATTLE CREEK sees Charlie Berlin and now wife Rebecca, 10 years on. Married with two kids, they are struggling to make ends meet on a policeman's wage, living in the glaringly new suburbs of Melbourne. With a solid but unremarkable career in the police behind him, Berlin's refuge from the demons that continue to haunt him after WWII, is his happy little family unit, despite his sometimes fractious relationship with his son Peter, despite their difficult financial circumstances, despite the sideline that Rebecca asks him to get involved in when on leave.

When a recently widowed friend tells Berlin a very odd tale of her husband's body being tampered with in a Melbourne funeral parlour, Berlin accidentally sets off down a path which proves dangerous to him, and to his family. It's the threat to his family, and his home and their pet dog that most riles Berlin, and a riled Charlie Berlin might still be a taciturn, quiet man, but he also becomes a very determined, taciturn, quiet man.

Coming straight to BLACKWATTLE CREEK without having read the first book, I think, is likely to be a big problem for some readers. Berlin is a very haunted, troubled, damaged man, and the difficulties he has with coping with the memories of what happened in WWII are particularly dwelt upon in this book. Without an understanding of how he came to have Rebecca and his family, how he struggled to get his life onto some sort of even keel in the opening to the series, possibly makes the level of angst appear all-consuming in the second book. Personally, I find Berlin a profoundly likeable man (and not just because the family own an Aussie Terrier!). He's flawed, but not unaware; questioning but not mired in self-pity; realistic and often startling honest.

He also doesn't play a solo-lone-wolf role. Wife Rebecca is refreshingly realistic - a mean hand in the kitchen, an enthusiastic lover and supporter of her husband, she's also an ex-journalist with a growing career as a photographer. She's combined with amongst others, Lazlo Horvay, an erratic and somewhat elusive Hungarian immigrant hearse driver, fleshing out a supporting cast of characters, including a colleague that pays a dreadful price for helping Berlin.

Underneath the characters and in particular, Berlin's struggle with life in general, there's an interesting Cold War style plot going on, with a disconcerting line in nasty characters doing unmentionable horrors all in the name of "research", all seemingly condoned by politics of the very worst kind.  

Whilst the plot is strong, and Berlin and his family fascinating characters, one of the supplementary attractions of this series has to be the sense of place and time that they invoke. Even for a country kid, the milk bars, the bags of lollies, and fish and chips wrapped up in newspaper bought back memories, to say nothing of jumping jacks, tombola marbles, and great big lumbering Studebaker cars. Heaven help me if McGeachin leaves another 10 year gap in Berlin's life before the next book - then we're dangerously close to complete recall. Perhaps that's one of the great strengths of this series - as we're working through the book, feeling a decided sense of nostalgia for a society that's not that far away in terms of time and experience, you suddenly realise that the nostalgia is being chipped away by a realisation that there could have been some very nasty things going on, right under our rose-coloured glass view.

Whilst it's not particularly unusual to have a flawed central protagonist, unapologetic ones are less common. Add being female, and that makes IN HER BLOOD's Catherine Berlin a rather rare beast, and a very welcome one.

Set in London after the Global Financial meltdown, Berlin is a government investigator who receives a tip-off about a local loan shark, then finds her informant floating in the Limehouse Basin, brutally killed. The first complication is that her female informant has been anonymous, and even the police seem to have trouble identifying her. The second complication is at the same time a notorious doctor is murdered and the pharmaceutical heroin he provided on prescription to registered addicts stolen. Leaving Berlin with the third complication of only finding a very limited temporary source, and the final, really big complication of sorting out a permanent alternative supply.

Berlin is a registered heroin addict, completely opposed to more mainstream treatment options, including methadone, she's an addict who had some measure of control over her addiction... as long as her doctor was alive.

Hence the flawed, unapologetic protagonist. Berlin (she doesn't use Catherine) is completely aware of her addiction and firmly of the opinion that she has it under control. Which makes the sudden inaccessibility of the ongoing medical supply a rather interesting problem for her. Hauxwell has pulled off a balancing act - on one hand you can see that it's not going to take much of a push for Berlin's life to spiral out of control, and at the same time you can see she's not going to let that push happen without one hell of a fight.

Illustrating the limited supply of heroin, the story is divided into "The First Day", "The Second Day" and so on covering the 5 days of supply that Berlin has. Before it runs out, she has to do something about her own life, and whilst she's aware of that, and thinking of her options, her desire to know who her informant was and solve the murders is also pressing - not least because some of her investigative choices are very compromised by the overriding addiction. These suspect choices provide a very interesting insight into the all-consuming nature of addiction, no matter how much somebody thinks they have it under control. There is quite a bit of that teetering on the edge going on for all the characters - Berlin, her bosses and workmates, the cops, the crooks. Really just about the entire cast have choices to make be they conscious or unconscious.

Early on there was some confusion about the involvement of an independent investigator right in the heart of a series of murder enquiries, but the writing was so sharp, and the way that the plot wove the world of drug addiction and rehabilitation, cops and crooks, high-finance and loan-sharking together was clever and very realistic. But really, the best aspects of IN HER BLOOD was Catherine Berlin who is a surprisingly sympathetic, unapologetic, flawed protagonist.

The problem I had with an earlier book of Honey Brown's was that whilst the thriller aspects of the book really worked, I was less convinced by the post-apocalyptic scenario and the happy ever after ending. AFTER THE DARKNESS solved those personal prejudices, and presented me with a thriller that worked on just about every level.  

I just love thrillers that make the hair on the back of my neck stand up, that present a scenario that's unexpected, quietly disconcerting and extremely worrying. Particularly where the tension ramps up, the outcome's not immediately apparent, and the resolution ambiguous. AFTER THE DARKNESS takes a pretty normal married couple, successful in their business, happy in their family life and their love and relationship together, and in one seemingly innocent outing, rips that into little tiny itty bitty shreds. It then takes these two traumatised individuals, Bruce and Trudy Harrison, and makes everything a whole lot worse.

Whilst the ramp up is nicely paced, what really works in AFTER THE DARKNESS is the realness of the whole thing. Of course a holidaying couple would take a short bypass to an art gallery on the road back home. Of course they would fail to recognise the menace until it was too late (not everyone goes around expecting the worst after all!). Of course they would do whatever it took to save each other. Of course they would struggle to talk about the shocking situation they found themselves in afterwards. Of course they would react when the threat continues, and of course they would do what ever it takes when the threat gets too close to home.

All of which adds up to one of those much touted, and often not achieved, "unputdownable book". But AFTER THE DARKNESS truly was very difficult to put down. The writing is taut and subtle, the tension is built within the reader's head, as it builds in the characters lives. There are clever differences in the plot which give Brown options to explore the couple's individual and combined reactions and relationships giving the book a refreshingly different outlook. The characterisations aren't stereotypical - Bruce and Trudy may be a married couple, but their roles and reactions aren't limited by their gender and standard expectation. There's cross-over and ambiguity in their reactions, actions, and responsibilities. It's that realness thing again - they seem like very real people, in a very real scenario that's spiralling rapidly.

It's actually not that often that I find myself immersed in a book that I truly can't put down. Not only was AFTER THE DARKNESS one of the best thrillers of it's kind I've read in a long time, it gave me a chance to work long and hard on some good "can't sorry... reading" excuses.

Whilst nobody deserves to die for sexual activities between consenting adults that could be regarded as unsavoury, THE DOUBLE LIFE OF HERMAN ROCKEFELLER says a lot about the causes of this man's death, and all of the participants in the whole sorry, mucky mess.

Herman Rockefeller was killed in January 2010, after a rendezvous at the home of Bernadette Denny, where he had gone, a second time, for sex.  He died, it seems, because he lied about his circumstances and therefore his motives, and because the two people found guilty of his manslaughter - Denny and her boyfriend Mario Schembri - were angry at his duplicity.  

Mr Rockefeller had a history of trawling for sex with strangers that went back at least a decade.  He frequently advertised in a range of speciality magazines, using a number of different names, and where he was targeting swingers, with photographs of him engaged in sex with an unknown woman, believed to be a prostitute.  Denny and Schembri encountered Rockefeller through these advertisements, making their own attempts to join the swinger scene.  The frustration that lead to Rockefeller's death arose from his failure to produce a female partner, instead using Denny for his own sexual gratification only.  The police also discovered that this supposedly upright, loving family-man, church goer and pillar of his local community had also kept a mistress, the woman who eventually helped police look in the right direction - along with a hidden stash of mobile telephones, multiple post office boxes, and the many many advertisements he had placed in sex magazines, as well as a particular technical feature of his abandoned car.

THE DOUBLE LIFE OF HERMAN ROCKEFELLER does a particularly good job at sensitively and carefully outlining the effects that this murder, and the particularly gruesome way that this remains were disposed of, had on his family and community.  It looks carefully at the backgrounds of Denny and Schembri, and it also looks at what is known about Rockefeller.  At the end, the book extrapolates on a theory of why a man, worth somewhere in the vicinity of $14.6 million at his death, took such an extreme path to achieve sexual gratification when it would seem that there were plenty of other options open to him.  

The sobering aspect of the book for this reader is that it was possible to feel great sympathy for Rockefeller's family, it was even possible to feel some sympathy for Denny and Schembri.  Rockefeller, on the other hand, was less approachable, more shadowy, complicit in his own demise.  This is possibly because his behaviour was so extreme, and frankly, predatory, but it was also obviously because he has no opportunity to explain the sordid and inexplicable.  

THE DOUBLE LIFE OF HERMAN ROCKEFELLER is a discomforting book, about a disconcerting case, but it doesn't feel exploitative or sensational.  It's very measured in tone, tells as much as it can about all the main participants and does something that really good true crime writing should.  It allows the reader to understand what happened, and where known, why.  What everyone involved was thinking... well that's considerably less clear.