2006

Monica, is a successful, well regarded surgeon and physician who is ashamed of something in her past. She can't develop any meaningful relationships with anyone and pushes anyone who gets close quickly away.

 

Maj-Britt, hiding from the world behind an endless supply of food, requires help just to live, she is so obese. Locked in her apartment away from the world, Maj-Britt is deeply ashamed of something in her past.

 

Monica and Maj-Britt don't know each other, yet somehow, because of a conference, a car-accident and a care-worker, they briefly collide. The results of that collision, catastrophic for one in the short term, force both of them to confront the past and deal with their personal shame.

 

SHAME is not a novel for readers who like a murder right up there are the front of the book, with an investigation to resolve the crime. There really is no murder in SHAME, but there is death, sadness, despair, personal angst and profound tragedy and sorrow.

 

SHAME takes you carefully through the lives of Monica and Maj-Britt, revealing the events that lead to the shame that they each feel, and what has happened to each of them since. As those events are revealed, a connection between the two women slowly eventuates. The connection could save them, or it could destroy them both.

 

With elements of fear, oppressive religion, obsession, betrayal, sexuality, guilt, family dysfunction and emotional blackmail, SHAME is challenging and sometimes harrowing. It is also compelling, taut, intriguing and, ultimately, uplifting. 

Antonia Weston, former psychiatrist has to try to rebuild her life, shattered by murder and obsession. When she is released from prison after serving her own sentence for manslaughter, her former boss finds her a small cottage to rent in the quiet village of Amberwood.

 

The cottage is in the grounds of Quire House, now open to the public, in the past the family home of Thomasina Forrester. Over a century ago, Thomasina was a woman of money and influence, overseeing a trust that provided support for Latchkill Asylum. Latchkill is a malevolent place which has a profound affect on the local area and the people who live nearby. Maud is one of those people, her father runs the local mill Twygrist, and Maud, young, innocent and motherless is pulled into Thomasina's influence.

 

Antonia, in an effort to put aside the past events in her own life, forms a tentative friendship with one of the curators at Quire and finds herself increasingly drawn to finding out more about Quire House, Thomasina Forrester and Twygrist Mill. Although Latchkill has long been pulled down, Twygrist Mill still stands, derelict and menacing in the village and it still has a profound affect on people, not the least Antonia herself.

 

SPIDER LIGHT moves backwards and forwards between the past and the present, revealing more of Antonia's own experience and the story of Thomasina and Maud. Both threads have a central core of personal and sexual obsession which increasingly becomes more twisted and dangerous. Both stories have consequences that rapidly escalate and the results for Thomasina, Maud and Antonia are dire. All the way along, Twygrist Mill remains a focal point for so much anguish.

 

SPIDER LIGHT is Sarah Rayne's 4th book, a psychological thriller with a clever intertwining of the past and the present. SPIDER LIGHT is a reference to the half-light that comes at certain times of the day, the time when spider's sneak around, the light soft and eerie. It's an image that is used throughout the book to impart the sinister look and feel of Latchkill Asylum. It's also used to describe that half-world between madness and sanity, and it works. It imparts a creepy, half-light, enclosed, fuzzy world where nothing is clearly defined and nothing is quite right with that world.

 

SPIDER LIGHT is a great book, but don't make the mistake I did, reading it in the middle of a heavy, dull, spidery light, smoke-filled atmosphere from local bushfires. Try it in the bright sunlight, but definitely try it.

Lovers of Precious Ramotswe, Kurt Wallender, Rebus and Kay Scarpetta may wish to look away now. Toby Clements in his second book THE NO 2 GLOBAL DETECTIVE, rolls up his sleeves and gets stuck in.

 

When Junior Tutor at Cuff College Oxford, Tom Hurst, joins the faculty of the world's most famous crime fiction college he's startled, firstly by his fellow faculty and then a body, in the library, with a spear and the price tag of an IKEA duvet.

 

Hurst sets off to recruit four of the college's most famous graduates to kind the killer. He journeys to Botswana to see Mma Delicious Ontoaste, then to Sweden and Inspector Burt Colander, before heading for Scotland and Inspector Scott Rhombus, finishing up in America and (well you guessed it) Doctor Faye Carpaccia. Together they must stop arguing and get to IKEA before it shuts.

 

NO 2 GLOBAL DETECTIVE is really a loosely connected set of parodies of each of the 4 popular crime fiction characters, wrapped up in an overall investigation around the college which has the distinct feel of a Michael Innes or like-minded cloistered academic setting.

 

According to the bio provided, Toby Clements reviews crime novels for a national newspaper and keeps a who's who in crime fiction on his desk. He obviously knows the nuances of the big name writers he's having a go at incredibly well. Each of the sections is written with a very similar feeling / tone to the original authors, although he's possibly the most successful with Mma Delicious Ontoaste where the lampooning seems to be at its largest and the behaviour of the central character at its most outrageous and unexpected.

 

Whether or not you like the idea of vicious parody will probably dictate whether or not you like this book. Whilst there are some moments of inspired hilarity - there were some periods where you just wish the author would stop trying to be too clever and get on with it.

 

Silly, tongue in cheek, having a go at some of the well known names in Crime Fiction, THE NO 2 GLOBAL DETECTIVE has that feel of a book that somebody will buy for a friend they think takes their crime fiction too seriously.

THE CUTTING ROOM is Louise Welsh's debut novel, published for the first time by Text Publishing in Australia in 2006.

 

Rilke's not exactly the archetypal hero accidental investigator. He's in his 40's; his personal hygiene is a bit offhand; he's an auctioneer for one of Glasgow's less than salubrious auction houses and he's gay with a taste for anonymous sexual encounters anywhere, anytime.

 

When summoned by Miss McKindless to her recently deceased brother's home, stuffed full with antiques, the likes of which Rilke's firm have never been able to get hold of. Despite her demand that the entire house be cleared in a week, Rilke readily agrees to the windfall. When she insists that Rilke personally clear her brother's private room in the attic he goes along with that as well, although she's very particular that everything in it must be destroyed. Naturally Rilke can't resist a very good look around and in amongst the very impressive collection of exclusive erotica, he finds a cache of photographs. The photographs include some of the dead man along with many that have a snuff porn theme. Rilke is immediately drawn to finding out where these photos came from and who the girl depicted could be.

 

Despite the fact that the search for the origins of the photos and the girl herself is a very fruitless task - the photos are obviously old, there is no indication of where they came from or where taken or anything that could possibly provide any sort of lead, Rilke can't leave well enough alone. He says himself "Let's just say I can't leave her there" when pressed to chuck it all in. And herein lies one of the great dichotomy's of the book. Rilke is in many ways a very confrontational character. His pursuit of sexual pleasure is, well, not to put too fine a point on it, a bit mucky. His (and those of his boss Rose's) ethics are a tad on the questionable side, and yet he continues the quest to find out something about these photos in a way that is extremely human and decent. At the same time, he's not depicted as a lone wolf, hard man who cares - typical of many crime fiction books. He is extremely cynical, he's a realist.

 

Along with Rilke there's a supporting cast of wonderful characters - Rose, his slightly overblown, vaguely past it, sexual predator boss, whose best friend is ultimately Rilke - the one man who just isn't vaguely interested in her sexually no matter what she does. There's Les the drug-dealing transvestite. There's a bunch of reprobate second hand dealers in everything from books to porn, furniture to junk. There's the old schoolfriend, now policeman, who does Rilke more than one favour by dragging him out of some difficult 'legal' situations. All of the supporting characters are drawn as vividly as the Rilke and again, there are some things to like and some things to loathe about many of them.

 

Ultimately THE CUTTING ROOM is a fascinating book - part morality tale, part crime fiction, part character study, vaguely Gothic, grotty and steeped in a sense of place and people. If you are interested in the non-black and white, if you can let the obvious flaws in somebody's character roll and look beneath to find a true nature, you should enjoy this book.

Caitlin Ross is a typical Southern California teenager, obsessed with clothes, boys and how she looks. Her younger brother Luke is out of control, getting into trouble shooting paint guns at people and obsessed with his violent DVD's and video games. Kathryn, Caitlin and Luke's mother, is too busy popping pills to have any hope of controlling them. Their father, now living a long way away, is too busy with his own new life.

 

Suddenly Caitlin's mother announces that because they are so out of control, the three of them are spending the summer on the isolated North Carolina island of Outer Banks. Caitlin and Luke have no choice but to go along; their father doesn't want to get involved and Kathryn controls the purse strings. Once they all arrive on the island, the resort hotel they were heading for turns out to be a desperately rundown and understaffed old hotel, owned by an old school boyfriend of Kathryn's. They immediately start to rekindle the old romance and Bill continues to feed Kathryn's addiction to pills and alcohol, but there's something even more creepy about Bill.

 

I confess I had some serious problems with this book, and it's very possible I was not the right person to review it. For a start all of the characters were way too stereotypical and bland. There were also some very hard to believe goings on. Caitlin and Luke flee the hotel and go to stay in the trailer of a young girl Caitlin has met on the island. Kathryn makes no attempt to contact them / find out what is happening with the children that she cared enough about to take away to see if they would straighten out, and only in the final chapter there's an attempt to explain that away. There is a murder, finally, but the story climax occurs in a massive hurricane which overtakes the island - with lots of people rushing around outside in the middle of the storm and some very big attempted twists in the plot. Caitlin and friend are ultimately rescued and then the Coast Guard shows up to take them to medical help because they "were out looking for a small airplane"... in a hurricane! The other unsatisfactory element was the final chapter, wrapping up of all the loose ends and explaining the up until then, unexplained. I'm not a fan of those types of resolutions.

 

As the blurb describes the book as "Laguna Beach meets Cape Fear" this could be a book that would appeal to fans of rapidly moving, big picture thrillers.

John Cardinal is a detective in the small police force, in Algonquin Bay, Ontario a small rural town in Canada. The local mayor keeps reporting his wife missing, when everybody else in town knows exactly what she's up to. Rather than just try to convince the poor delusional husband what's really going on, Cardinal is sitting in a car, with the mayor, outside the local motel, when there's a call over the radio about a body.

 

As Cardinal pulls up outside the location, a part of him is wondering about the car that looks just like his wife's and a part of him is wondering why somebody would die outside a mostly uninhabited, new building in Algonquin Bay.

 

Cardinal's wife, Catherine, is a photographer who has had problems most of her life with manic depression . She's been in and out of hospital, but she's been regularly taking her medication and when she was heading out earlier in the night with cameras, there'd been nothing in her manner that caused her husband any concern.

 

But it's her at the foot of that building, and there's a suicide note.

 

The opening few chapters of THE FIELDS OF GRIEF are heartbreaking. Cardinal struggles to understand why his wife has killed herself, and he just can't bring himself to believe that she has. That she'd stood in front of him only a few hours earlier and he hadn't picked up anything in her manner or her behaviour that indicated what she was about to do. The coroner thinks it was suicide, Cardinal's companions think it was suicide, John Cardinal can't agree.

 

A young man heads into a local laundromat, shotgun in hand and despite new CID member, Larry Burke's best efforts to talk him out of it, puts the shotgun to his head and kills himself. It's Fall in Algonquin Bay, the place is at its most beautiful. Suicide's sometimes happen there, but if they do, they happen in the dead of Winter, not in Autumn.

 

Detective Lise Delorme has her own confrontational problem. Graphic photos of a young girl being sexually abused have been discovered and the backgrounds of the photos show that some of the abuse occurred in Algonquin Bay. She's trying to track down the victim and the perpetrator.

 

Slowly a connection between the victims appears and somebody who should be trying to help vulnerable, sad and damaged people, is even more damaged. The problem is Cardinal knows that there's something a lot more to his wife's supposed suicide, but what is it? When he knows what it is, is there really anything he can do about it?

 

THE FIELDS OF GRIEF is a raw study in grief: Cardinal's reactions to his wife's suicide, his daughter's feelings about her mother. The mother and sister of the young man in the Laundromat, the reactions of Larry and Lise are all so different. It's also a shocking portrayal of what happens when the helper needs help. Deeply affecting and very compelling: highly recommended.

It's Midsummer and Annika Bengtzon, newspaper reporter and mother, is preparing for family celebrations at her partner's parents Island Holiday home. When she gets a call to say that Michelle Carlsson, a big name TV presenter has been murdered, and Annika has been assigned to follow the story, Thomas is furious at her for leaving him to get the children to his parents alone. Annika's just returned to work after maternity leave and her relationship with Thomas is increasingly fraught with tension and anger.

 

Annika is instantly torn between the fascination of a major murder investigation and the call of her family. On the one hand - a murder in a remote, isolated location during the filming of a prime-time TV series; a limited number of suspects, one of whom is her own best friend; and the victim Michelle - a controversial person, and long-time target of Annika's own paper. On the other hand, her own very young children; an increasingly difficult relationship with the disgruntled and demanding Thomas; and her parents-in-law who just do not approve of Annika and maintain an ongoing close friendship with Thomas' first wife.

 

The central mystery in PRIME TIME is a twist on the classic closed room scenario. There are only twelve suspects and there are all sorts of complicated personal and professional factors affecting all of the suspects and their relationships with the victim. There is a police investigation, and a police investigator, Q, who plays a very small role in the book. The investigation of the crime in this book is done by Annika as she sets out to find the story and ensure her best friend is not incriminated. There is also all of the machinations and manoeuvring of media organisations; even Annika's own paper seems to be embroiled in scandals and management power struggles.

 

PRIME TIME is the 4th book in a series which concentrates on Annika's own life, her career and her personal relationships. There's absolutely nothing easy about Annika. In the earlier books she's a very angry, prickly and difficult woman, always complaining, always rubbing up against everyone around her. In PRIME TIME the chip on Annika's shoulder has decreased in size a little, but there are definitely times when you'd like to take both Annika and Thomas by the hand and bang their heads together. Towards the end of PRIME TIME they are both starting to see what the real problems are and they start sorting out their personal relationship and their own careers.

 

As Annika searches out the story behind Michelle and ultimately her murder, there are some of the 12 suspects who become very real, whilst others remain very shadowy and under-drawn. Despite the quick dissipation of the closed room scenario, as the suspects leave the scene of the murder and return to their own environments, there is a final "drawing room" denouncement.

 

There's some real skill in the writing here, Annika's not a character that's easy to warm to, but you really feel inclined to stay with her to the end.

When the body of a young woman is found on the banks of the River Thames, the injuries turn out to have an unsettling similarity to the unsolved, 1930's Los Angeles case of Elizabeth Short - known as The Black Dahlia.

 

Detective Inspector Anna Travis is on the team investigating this horrible crime when Detective Chief Inspector James Langton is called in to take over from the original team leader. They have a prior working and private history and Travis is very hesitant and discomforted by the close presence of the volatile and erratic Langton. As the killer starts to taunt the murder team in a manner that follows the Black Dahlia case, right down to inciting local media to dub the victim The Red Dahlia, the team becomes increasingly aware that this a violent and vicious killer who thinks that taunting them is part of the game. It doesn't help that the victim herself is a bit of a mystery, and there are very few clues in her life to a possible perpetrator. Another copycat killing and Langton and Travis realise they have just a few days before the 3rd victim and absolutely no concrete leads. An anonymous tip off finally leads the team to a suspect, and from there on the novel becomes a race to the finish to try to prove the seemingly unprovable.

 

There is absolutely no doubt that La Plante can write big rip-roaring books with good characterisations and THE RED DAHLIA delivers on that promise. Whilst La Plante does write good, strong, human female characters they are not at the expense of the male characters. Langton starts off an uptight, inaccessible workaholic, becoming more human and vulnerable, even troubled. You can see why Travis would find him so attractive. The killer, who is known from the time of the anonymous tip off is pure evil, but not a caricature. There are some awful elements to the violence of the killings and to the events surrounding the suspect and his behaviour but these are handled carefully, with no attempt to shock or sicken the reader.

 

This is the second Travis and Langton book, the first being ABOVE SUSPICION but you do not need to have read the first to get the second. THE RED DAHLIA really was a great read - involving; fast paced; nicely balanced in terms of revelations of the violence and horror and sprinkled with just enough personal life to make you engage with all the characters.

BORKMANN'S POINT is the second book in the Inspector Van Veeteren series, but the only one currently available in English. Nesser lives in Sweden and has set his book in a fictitious small Scandinavian town.

 

An ex-con is murdered by a blow from a very unusual, extremely sharp instrument. Soon a real-estate mogul is killed in the same way seemingly with the same weapon. Van Veeteren, who was holidaying on the coast nearby, is stopped from returning home and sent to help the local under-experienced police team. Van Veeteren finds an immediate friendship Bausen, the head of the local police, due to retire any day now. Bausen is very anxious to get this serial killer, dubbed unsurprisingly, The Axeman caught and stopped so that he doesn't have to retire with this case outstanding.

 

The local team is made up of two investigators: Beate Moerk who is trying very hard, but she's very inexperienced and Kropke who is very full of himself, but very obsessed with technology and extremely naive. There are also two Constables - Bangs and Mooser - again a bit bumbling and out of their depth. Van Veeteren brings Munster, one of his own team down to the small town to assist, and the whole group tries desperately to find some sort of link between the victims to try to explain why. When a third victim is found, this time with the weapon itself, there's still no obvious links and the weapon, no matter how unusual is old and doesn't help much either.

 

Slowly an idea of a connection between the victims starts to reveal itself to Van Veeteren, as the murderer's thinking is slowly revealed to the reader.

 

There's nothing much in the solution that the reader can't see coming in this book. BORKMANN'S POINT is actually a reference to a theory on solving crimes that a senior officer tells Van Veeteren years before and in this case, it's actually quite true. There is a point in the book, quite a bit before the finish where it's possible to see the solution quite clearly.

 

There's a good sense of humour at play throughout the book which certainly helps and Van Veeteren is one of those rumpled detective types that does appeal to me in particular, but there was something about the arch tone of some of the conversation which just didn't quite sit right. Add to that the fact that it wasn't the most original or involving mystery, it wasn't the WOW read that other recent books have been.

 

Having said that, it was definitely readable, with a good sense of place, a nice sense of humour and a cast of characters with some potential.

Mel Stenning has been a victim most of her life. Adopted by very conventional parents, she rebelled (but hated herself for doing it), getting into all sorts of situations and ultimately ending up in Australia, pregnant with no chance of having anything to do with her daughter Poppy's father. Returning to England she's a single mother, working for a living, finding it hard to cope, when she meets Simon. Never really convinced that Simon loves her, and constantly obsessed that he's remained involved with his last girlfriend Rosa, Mel is pregnant again. When Simon proposes, they marry and move to an old, derelict warehouse in Kent that Simon is sure they can renovate. Poppy finds it hard to adjust to the new area; the renovations lurch along out of control and mostly going nowhere; Mel obsesses over Simon's commitment to her; and Jo, when he arrives, is a difficult baby, colicky and fractious. Simon is increasingly absent from home working in London on jobs for desperately needed money.

 

In the meantime London police are investigating the violent stabbing death of prostitute found in her own flat, and then Rosa goes missing. The police are very interested in talking to Simon about Rosa, even more so when his credit cards are found in her house. Mel's even more convinced that Simon has been lying to her about Rosa, but when the police interest in him increases and Poppy suddenly goes missing, seemingly taken by Simon, Mel's life and faith in Simon spirals totally out of control.

 

Mel is the focus of HIDDEN. The story is told from her perspective, starting immediately with the circumstances around Poppy going missing and then back through events that got them to that place. Interspersed with Mel's life are chapters from the viewpoint of policeman Dave Gosforth, in charge of the murder investigation and then Rosa and Poppy's disappearances. The use of the first person perspective means that Mel's obsessions are stark and concentrated. This perspective gives the book a very claustrophobic, self-involved feeling, almost voyeuristic and definitely slightly creepy. Mel is quite exasperating - her victim mentality and her inability to make a positive change become really frustrating, but the pace of the book does pull you through the story. The final resolution is not hard to see coming, but the increasing tension by that stage means that you stay with Mel just to see if she'll actually develop some backbone and get herself out of this.

 

Despite, or possibly because, Mel is such a complicated character this was a unexpectedly involving book.