Just Finished Reading

Right so this is Book 9 in the Dublin Trilogy which is different from the McGarry Stateside books, both of which feature Bunny McGarry in timelines that may or may not make any sense whatsoever. (The author calls the Stateside books a follow-on - and to be fair, he probably knows what he's talking about). Doesn't matter a jot, it's a Bunny McGarry book, and it was an audio book read by Morgan C. Jones and I was happy. Although I've finished it now so I'm not so happy anymore because I'll have to wait for the next one. In whichever of the series which are sort of intertwined. The point is you'll finish this and have to wait if you've caught up on the various tentacles that form the McGarry universe. Although there is an upcoming TV series. Which had better be available immediately in Australia or I'll sulk. A lot.

So, back to the THE MAN COMES AROUND, and it's Halloween, and a long dead man returns from the grave to shoot his wife's new boyfriend. Which leads to a bunch of tricky problems - for the cops that happily declared Johnny Gildea dead, for his mother, wife and children who all thought he was dead, for the blokes that took over the gang he left behind, for his best friend Shakes, and for McGarry who now has to give up his holidays and find a dead man before he kills Bunny's working partner and best friend Pamela (Butch) Cassidy. Not so much for the bloke shot dead by a dead man - he personally might not have been happy about the whole being dead thing, but it's a sentiment not universally shared.

And somebody's pinched Deccy's bonfire. Just because bonfires and fireworks are illegal, it's a bloody liberty when some chinless wonder starts pinching kids bonfire piles. Which must be dealt with by Bunny at the same time that he's convincing Butch that he'll have to move to hers, or she'll have to move in with him (cue some very over optimistic neighbourhood responses at that one), and he's got to find a dead man before he kills somebody else.

Needless to say - mayhem. All jokes aside, it's a great plot this one, with plenty of new characters to deal with, and all the old favourites from Bunny's time in the Dublin Gardai. And Deccy - who manages to pump out a few versions of a few favoured catchphrases.

Blissfully funny listening with the standard warning about not when operating heavy machinery. Or sitting in a waiting room. You do get some odd looks when you're sitting in a doctor's waiting room with tears of laughter streaming down your face. People at the traffic lights tend to have a similar reaction.

Readers of SK Lynch's first novel, SOMETHING HE DID, might like to know a couple of things first up. She is working on a sequel, important as you're going to have questions, so many questions, at the end of this, and despite the reference to the wonderful BROKENWOOD MYSTERIES TV series in her bio, there are no old Holden cars, country music, and quirky characters here. Far from it to be honest. And for those worried - this is not an ending that comes with one of those cliffhanger, "and in the next book endings"... sort of.

Billed as "The novel with the best twist you'll read this year", there is so much more to SOMETHING HE DID than just a twist - a doozy which hindsight might make you feel you could have seen coming, but hindsight has been known to lie through it's teeth. It's absolutely a thriller with an opening half that seems a bit, well floaty, for want of a better description. That section shares the story between Amber - a young mother with a drug problem - fighting for access to her daughter, and struggling with constant setbacks - some of which are her own fault, a major one, a split-second of road rage, is anything but. That moment though, a car crash in the early morning traffic of Melbourne, sets Amber's life on a path that has a horrible sense of inevitability about it. What happens to the other party in the crash is less clear. Jake is an ex-rugby player, famous and lauded in his native New Zealand, a bit player in Australia, he travels backwards and forwards from his wife and two daughters at home in Queenstown; to his job, and his girlfriend and young son in Melbourne. The girlfriend knows all about his family at home. His wife and daughters nothing about his other life in Melbourne. 

The novel constantly plays with the reader's expectations whilst tearing through the main two characters lives like a wrecking ball. Mistakes come back to haunt, constantly dragging both Amber and Jake through the mire, escalating through both their lives until a couple of major incidents. It's when Jake's elder daughter, a girl already leading a hidden life, disappears in Melbourne that DS Claudia Russo's Missing Person's unit comes into the picture, tasked with looking for a rebellious teenager, pressured from above because Jake has a few contacts in high places and has been throwing his weight around.

What seems like it might be a straight forward thriller styled novel, with readers waiting for that final twist, has a lot more than that going on. From the car crash moment there's something not quite right about that description from the blurb "For one driver, the crash is a bizarre stroke of luck that sets their life on an upward trajectory they never thought possible. For the other, it is the first domino to fall in a terrifying downward spiral." Sure, initially, things might seem to be heading upward and onward for one of the driver's whilst the downward spiral for the other is marked and incredibly confronting to read. Until a daughter disappears, and a father's true nature is revealed, and it turns out the higher you climb, especially if you're using other people as the rungs on your ladder, the further and harder you fall.

Without spoilers though, that twist is really something. As is the aftermath, the conclusion that wraps up this story, and asks a hell of a lot of questions about right, wrong and complicity that will stay with readers until, one supposes, the next book is released. Which I'll certainly be queuing for now.

There is no doubt that Jack Heath is a prolific author, and CHOPPY WATER is his latest (currently) standalone novel. In a style that's similar to previous books - the "Kill Your ... " and the Timothy Blake series in particular, it has all the thrills, spills, action and irony that you'd expect, with a touch of dry, dark humour. What you end up with is a heart stopping, and frequently moving, thriller with a believable scenario at it's core: a wanted and haunted man, looking to disappear, who finds himself working (he has an ulterior motive) on a cruise ship, at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, when other people start really, and very quietly, disappearing at the same time as a dead body shows up in a very bizarre manner. Someone who was definitely not a victim of the virus.

That body, a young woman horribly disfigured, is discovered in the housekeeping trolley of one Cesar Cain - a man who is not who he says he is, somebody with a bunch of reasons for not getting involved in any murder investigations. He's on this cruise ship as part of a plan to disappear, because if the cops find him, he's going to jail, and if the bikie group the Hell's Hounds find him, he's going to die.

It turns out that the the first woman is surprisingly hard to identify, given the locked room / closed community of a cruise ship. And yes - that was "first" as bodies do seem to be piling up - leading to a bit of fretting from some about the message of a serial killer onboard getting out at the same time that everybody's already dealing with the thought of a deadly virus spreading. But the initial death is gruesome, and the details are not for the weak of stomach. Cain is comfortably sanguine with a fair mount of gore though, as he finds himself sucked into a murder investigation because the head of ship security is desperate to write it off as an "accident", and Cain's having none of that. His reasons for the reluctance, and ultimate involvement, are gradually revealed as the story progresses - from a very confrontational prologue, through the death of that young woman on board, some disappearances, and some very weird behaviour and dodgy goings on - all while the stories of the deadly virus, and problems in finding somewhere for the ship to dock because of it, start to send a lot of passengers batshit crazy. 

There is a lot going on in CHOPPY WATER and readers who pay attention to the small things will be rewarded with some "I thought so moments". You can also refuse to sweat the little things, and charge through this as a rip roaring thriller that belts along at a great pace, twists, turns and pivots left right and centre, and covers a lot of ground for something that is taking place in a very confined location. The subplot around the pandemic panic does add touches of gallows humour, but really, the goings on - in both Cain's life and on the ship - are the main focus and there's less that should be funny in either of those, if you don't count the vicious "funny business" that is eventually unearthed. Turns out there's a lot of that, as there has been in Cain's past - funny and decidedly not funny. 

Tinged with a bit of romantic longing, with a hefty "ships that passed in the night" metaphor going on, there's even a close encounter with a shark which very nearly had me cheering in the middle of the night. There are hints at the end of this novel that there could be more to come in Cesar Cain's story - would be interesting to see where he doesn't disappear to next.