Tag Archives: crime fiction

At the Dying of the Year by Chris Nickson

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At the Dying of the Year cover image

At the Dying of the Year by Chris Nickson, Severn House, ISBN 9781780290423, UK edition available now, US edition 1 June 2013.

I have to say I do like a good historical crime. Separately, those two things are not necessarily my favourite but together they just make sense.

They do have to be well-written though and fortunately At the Dying of the Year is well-written. It’s extremely well paced and enthralling.

The year is 1733, Richard Nottingham is the Constable of Leeds and three children have just been found. Dead, stabbed and battered. This is not a one off. Nottingham and his team are on the tail of a serial child-killer.

I describe this as crime rather than mystery because, really, there’s not a lot of mystery here. Nickson’s skill isn’t in weaving a whodunnit, it’s in telling a tale and letting us into the lives of the protagonists of his story. We go inside the minds of Nottingham and his deputies, and see how they view their times and lives.

Nickson really brings the personal to the fore in his characters, particularly focusing on their fears and uncertainties and he’s not afraid to deal to his readers emotions to push the story forward. He keeps the story moving at just the right pace, fast enough to keep interest but without sacrificing the cerebral slower moments.

There’s a lot of historical detail here and Nickson does go to lengths to bring to life the grit and sights, sounds and smells of 18th century England. He’s not always entirely successful, with some of it feeling a little forced and not quite on the button but this is a minor quibble.

If you like a good crime story I highly recommend making the effort to seek this one out.

Like BookieMonster on Facebook and win a copy of The Laughterhouse by Paul Cleave!

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It’s Christmas, a time for giving. So I’m doing the giving! And what a gift…

Just like BookieMonster on Facebook and enter the draw to win your very own copy of The Laughterhouse by Paul Cleave!

The Laughterhouse cover

From the author of the international best-selling thrillers The Cleaner, The Killing Hour, Cemetery Lake, Blood Men and Collecting Cooper.

A gripping new thriller from crime writing sensation Paul Cleave. 

Theodore Tate never forgot his first crime scene – ten-year-old Jessica found dead in the ‘Laughterhouse’, an old abandoned slaughterhouse with the ‘S’ spray-painted over. The killer was found and arrested. Justice was served. Or was it? 

Fifteen years later, there’s a new killer on the loose and he has a list of people who were involved in Jessica’s murder case, among them Doctor Stanton, a man with three young daughters.

If Tate is going to help them, he has to find the connection between the killer, the ‘Laughterhouse’ and a growing list of murder victims. And he needs to figure it out fast, because Stanton and his daughters have been kidnapped, and Stanton is being forced to make an impossible decision: which one of his daughters is to die first.

Prize courtesy of Penguin NZ.

Book Review: The Search for Anne Perry by Joanne Drayton

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The Search for Anne Perry cover imageThe Search for Anne Perry by Joanne Drayton, Harper Collins, ISBN 9781869508883, RRP$44.99, Available now.

It’s really not surprising that the Honorah Rieper/Parker murder story continues to fascinate so many people (myself included). For the few people who surely don’t know the story, Honorah was murdered in Christchurch in 1954 by two teenage girls – one, her own daughter Pauline Rieper/Parker, and the other Pauline’s best friend, Juliet Hulme. She had been beaten to death with half a brick wrapped in a stocking. At the trial it became clear that Juliet and Pauline had an obsessive relationship and an incredibly complex fantasy life. Lesbian goings-on were hinted at. Parker and Hulme seemed oddly detached from their actions.  The story totally captivated New Zealand and the time and has since been told and retold through books and movies (Heavenly Creatures, directed by Peter Jackson).

And what does this all have to do with Anne Perry, reasonably celebrated and certainly successful writer of mostly historical murder mysteries? Anne Perry, it turned out, was Juliet Hulme.

The Search for Anne Perry is, at heart, a fascinating story that ultimately fails to deliver. The blurb promises that Drayton “is able to peel back the layers of Anne’s carefully constructed life to show us the woman beneath” but reading the book turns into a disappointing experience, as the reader can’t help feeling that Anne’s life as told in The Search for Anne Perry remains “carefully constructed”.

I hate to say that because Drayton has clearly worked hard and gained the trust of her subject as few others have. The cost of that trust, though, is unfortunately this is more of a “Perry-approved” version of the story. At times the tone veers towards gratingly gushy. Drayton is clearly a fan of Perry’s and so the big questions feel unanswered. How? Why?

Throughout I felt like I was trying to read between the lines, to find out something authentic and genuine. Perhaps this is the only authenticity left. If you kill someone, you become a “murderer”; to stop being that every day you must wake up and recreate every part of yourself that isn’t the “murderer”. Maybe then, that’s all you have left.

This really is the at the heart of our fascination with the Parker-Hulme story. They are the ordinary people capable of killing, as all we ordinary people must then surely be. I think about the questions I would like to ask, chief being “When you write about a murder and a murder victim’s body, do you think about that murder? Do you see that body?”

It just may be that those questions are too personal. Too many layers deep.

My final word is I think The Search for Anne Perry is a necessary addition to the Parker-Hulme story, even if it ultimately doesn’t reveal as much as it wants to. It’s certainly readable and will definitely have an audience.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo coverI don’t really have to introduce this do I? I mean, I think we all know the book I’m talking about. Heck, you might have even seen the movie. Or even the second movie. All I’m saying is, this book is NOT a secret.

As per my contrary nature (I was a terrible child) I hadn’t yet read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (or sequels). The bigger deal people make of a thing, the less I feel like joining the group (I was totally insufferable as a teenager). But the noise has died down slightly, so when Whitcoulls kindly furnished me with a copy to celebrate their new Top 100 it seemed like time to give in and find out what I’ve been missing.

Unfortunately what I seem to mostly have been missing is a really bad translation job. At least I hope it’s a bad translation, otherwise I have no clue how this book got published, as is. Most of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo reads like a 10 year old’s creative writing attempt. I mean, hey, you’re not going to knock the little guy back but you wish he’d find a new way to start (and conjoin) sentences. (“And then I met Ritchie McCaw and then I got to see the World Cup and then a giant unicorn appeared and gave me the power to fly. And then I flew home.”) This makes the writing so incredibly tedious that I spent the first 50 pages in disbelief.

Then on page 55 I hit the jackpot:

He was relaxed, and the anxious knot in his stomach had eased. She had that effect on him. She always had had. And he know that he had the same effect on her.

The effect “She always had had.” had on me however, was probably not what the author intended.

And then it was a struggle not to spend the next 100 pages laughing hysterically.

Finally he opened his shoulder bag and put his iBook on the desk in the office. Then he stopped and looked about him with a sheepish expression. The benefits of living in the countryside, forsooth.

Forsooth, FORSOOTH I SAY COUNTRYSIDE BENEFITS! Forsooth, and possibly fie!

And then I got really really depressed because I’ve clearly wasted my life, and I’m poor and I didn’t write these books, and really, how hard can this be:

Mikael got out of bed and went to stand naked at the kitchen window, gazing at the church on the other side of the bridge. He lit a cigarette.

Nakedly, presumably.

And then (damn you Larsson) Mr Writer Man got me with plot instead. Because despite the fact that I utterly hated the writing, by the middle I was hooked, and I remained hooked right up until the plot denouement (and then I ended on a really angry note because the actual end couldn’t be more predictable). You have no idea how angry it makes me that I had to waste hours wading through acclaimed dross TO FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENED.

I didn’t find even a single thing to like about the characters either. Blomkvist is Uber Amazing Man, a friend and instant lover-man to all the ladies. Just forget he’s got a young teenage daughter who he remembers about once a year. Lisbeth Salander is Intelligent Revenge Outcast Girl, according to the other characters she either has super duper photographic memory and skills or she’s “mentally retarded” (not my words). She behaves and reasons like a 12 year old girl, and Blomkvist at one point mentions Aspergers, but hey, when she wants the sexy times, what’s a Blomkvist to do? She so crazy. The rest of the characters just really revolve around, only doing anything that furthers the plot.

And then I remember that this was the book that a majority of people said is the BEST BOOK EVER and perfectly nice people like Phillip Pullman said very nice things about it, and then I thought Well, what’s wrong with me? And frankly, that’s the worst thing. A book should not make you wonder what’s wrong with you. Sigh.

My final summation? All TGWTDT has is plot. And even then it gets more distracted than an ADD guinea pig on V.

Larsson was not a great writer. He came up with a good story, then he drowned it in HIS MESSAGE. Women are SO OPPRESSED. Men are SO ANGRY. Swedes are SO UP FOR SEXY TIMES. And here is an historical exposition paragraph that sounds like it was lifted word for word from Encyclopedia Britannica. Because I am SERIOUS AUTHOR.

Taking away a person’s control of her own life – meaning her bank account – is one of the greatest infringements a democracy can impose, especially when it applies to young people. It is an infringement even if the intent may be perceived as benign and socially valid. Questions of guardianship are therefore potentially sensitive political issues, and are protected by rigorous regulations and controlled by the Guardianship Agency. This agency comes under the county administrative board and is controlled, in turn, by the Parliamentary Ombudsman.

Thank god a relatively interesting point about Swedish society and politics got lost amongst the bits that made me fall asleep.

In the end, the truth is that because I ams who I ams I wouldn’t have hated this so much if other people didn’t like it so much. If I hadn’t been told how good it was, I would just accept it has a cracking plot and not really cared about the very obvious, very many flaws.

Which, it seems, is really what the writer was going for.

Berger thought that the book was the best thing Blomkvist had ever written. It was uneven stylistically, and in places the writing was actually rather poor…

Book Review: Mercy by Jussi Adler-Olsen

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Mercy

Mercy by Jussi Adler-Olsen, Penguin, RRP $40, ISBN9780718156886, Available now.

Ah, Scandinavia. Suddenly it’s the deep dark heart of crime, the seedy underbelly of …um, Northern Europe? I have to confess the whole Scandinavian crime she-bang has passed me by (unless you count Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow which it seems people don’t – shame as it’s brilliant) – I haven’t read any Stieg Larsson because, quite frankly, I am contrary and if everyone else reads it that’s a good reason for me not to (though now I’m reviewing seriously my contrariness has to take second place).

Mercy follows Carl Mørck, one of crime’s great archetypes – the world-weary homicide detective transferred to a new department where he can’t rub too many people up the wrong way. He’s investigating unsolved crimes, including the disappearance of Merete Lynggaard – a Danish politician who’s been missing for five years. Mørck’s investigation takes him into political circles and, eventually, a fairly ingenious evil-mastermindy type crime.

So, Mercy has a great big “Guaranteed Great Read” printed so not-sticker slap bang on the front cover. Oh dear. Mercy isn’t a great read. It’s an okay read but it’s not great. It takes far too long to get going, it has a questionable portrayal of a secondary character and some odd side plot points that seem to only be there for character exposition but have all the subtlety of a sledge-hammer (like my metaphors, clearly).

It highlights an integral problem with reading books in translation – I have no idea if these issues are exacerbated by a bad translation.¹ The good news is, however, that I did eventually get drawn in by the story and I did feel like the characterisations seem to improve significantly as the book went on.

But I had a real issue with the initial characterisation of Mørck’s assistant Assad – a Muslim immigrant to Denmark. Sure, it could be argued that Adler-Olsen is using Mørck’s initial disdain of Assad as a comment on many European’s attitudes towards immigrants – an increasingly large problem in many parts of Europe, including Scandinavia. But initially it just all feels too crude to be effective.

In many ways then Mercy is almost a book of two halves. The first half is problematic and verging on not-worth-continuing, the second half is intriguing and has characters that have impact. Overall that just doesn’t make for greatness.

¹Am I the only reader to have vague problems with reading books in translation? It’s a bit like watching movies in translation – I only speak English fluently and from what I’ve been told by people who do speak other languages, the translations are generally missing a significant amount. It’s not that I don’t think publishers do their best to get the best translation, it’s just I wonder if any idea of true or complete translation is by it’s very nature inherently imposssible.