Random Jottings

Brit tec - home grown crime

I am getting really tired of January and the cold weather. Winter seems to have gone on for a long time this year.  I have been in Cambridge this week for a couple of days and the driving there was hampered by road works and the return journey not much fun as ice on the roads. So I have been hunkering down and reading a lot of crime, as per.

The Brutal Tide - Kate Rhodes.   This is the latest in the Ben Kitto series set on the Scilly Isles.  I really enjoy Kate's writing and loved her Alice Quintin books (if you have not read them may I recommend you do) and I keep pestering her for more despite the fact she is now writing a new series. Hope springs eternal.

A gangland mobster Craig Travis is dying in hospital and he is determined that he will get even with those who helped put him away. His daughter, who he adores and who sees no wrong in him, sets out to seek revenge on his behalf and a killing spree begins. Ben Kitto is on her list but she has to seek out a way to get to him.

At the same time Ben has discovered a skeleton which is unearthed during construction works and it links back to events some twenty years earlier.

The two stores run parrallel to each other and while one was predictible, (I won't say anything) the danger Ben is in keeps us on our toes and is very exciting. Really enjoyed it.

Showstopper - Peter Lovesey. The latest Peter Diamond detective story and I really love this series. I felt this was a slow burner and not as immediate as some of his other titles, and at the start when retirement was mentioned, I panicked. No this series cannot end but by the last page I felt reassured....

There appears to be be a jinx on a popular television series and while these are dismissed as just bad luck with the tabloids building it up, the mysterious disappearance of a member of fthe crew some years earlier has never been solved.

If you have not read any of the Diamond series then, once again, I can recomment that you do. Immensely readable and fun, with a dash of tragedy thrown in, I loved them all. 

Tana Collins - the Inspector Jim Carruthers series.   I received an offer from Amazon to read these, five of them in total, for the astounding sum of 99p on Kindle. Mad. But I bought them thinking if I did not like them then I was hardly out of pocket.

Well, I DID like them and spent a happy week reading all of them, Robbing the Dead, Care to Die, Mark of the Devil, Dark is the Day and Deep Water.   Inspector Carruthers is divorced from his wife (is there any other kind of DI in crime fiction) who is living in Scotland as he moved up there in an attempt to save his marriage. It did not work but Jim finds he loves living in a coastal town in Scotland.  He crosses swords with his boss (again this seems the norm in most crime stories. Peter Diamond has the same problem).   I am sure somewhere in the UK there is a DC Super who does not worry about budgets all the time. At least I hope so.

If I say to you that the writing is nice and tidy and clean you might get the impression that I am damning with faint praise, but I am not.  Flowery and over decorated prose is not for me. I like my stories and narrative lean and mean and Tana Collins fulfills this in spades as far as I am concerned.   Another recommendation and I do hope there are more.

I have also discovered another series, again courtesy of a 99p offer from Amazon. This is a cunning ploy because they lure you in and hope you will then go and buy the rest. I fall for it every time. This series features a female DI, Zoe Finch and the author is Rachel McLean. Just embarking on the second one and, yes, have bought more and will keep me going for a bit. Will let you know how I get on.

Two other things to mention.  A year or so ago, Dean Street Press, reprinted a series of detective stories by Moray Dalton of whom I had never heard. But as this publishing house seems to produce an endless list of books all of which I want, I got hold of them, read them and loved them.  Please do check them out and I am delighted to hear that in March this year more are arriving.

British Library Crime Classics continue to come up with the goods as well. Not all of them are to my taste but most of them are. After reading one of their reprints by Freeman Wills Croft I then went on to hunt down all his titles. It turned out to be quite expensive....

So two arrived this week, Death of Mr Dodsley by John Ferguson which is classified as a London Bibliomystery, A murder in a bookshop. Perfect.

Death of an Author - E C R Lorac. This title has been out of print since 1935 so kudos to the BritLib for giving us the chance of reading and enjoying. E C R Lorac is about my favourite of all the newly rediscovered authors they have published and I am going to save this up for a bit and just enjoy the anticipation.

And I have to mention yet again, Jane Casey and her wonderful detective stories featuring Maeve and Josh.  I have just reread them all and now that I know the characters well found that going right back to the beginning was a real treat.   They are simply brilliant.

Jane has also written stand alone title, The Killing Kind which is equally gripping and, I gather it is going to be made into a tv series.  Cannot wait.

OK well loads of recommends for you. Do let me know if you read or have read any of them, and let me know what you think.

 

2021 Reading - Part one

A bleak dreary day today and I am sitting here with a rug over my knees and a hotwater bottle at my back as I ache all over. I always do after a busy time. Christmas was stressful in that right up to the last few minutes of Christmas Eve I did not know whether I was going to see the family or not as they had had Covid and we were taking tests like mad. Finally all negative on the Day so slung everything in the car and off I went.

So now all quiet and a bit of music in the background and musing on my reading year. Not a vintage one as, along with many of you I suspect, life had got in the way and my resding has been of the light variety. Of course you may belong to those who have finally ready Proust, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in lockdown and if you have please don't tell me as it will make me feel inferior...

Glancing at my list it is no surprise that detective stories form the main bulk of my reading. I re-read all of the Bill Slider books by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles and can really recommend them. The mysteries are excellent, the writing witty and funny and the characters are warm, clever and lovable. Best to read in order as there is a story line relating to Slider's private life which develops throughout the series.   I love them and looking forward to the next one in 2022.

Kate Rhodes - her Alice Quentin series are my favourites but she also has a new character, Ben Kitto, and these stories are set in the Scilly Isles.  Still hoping we will get another Alice novel but these are also immennsely readable and so well written.

 

I re-read all the Peter Diamond books by Peter Lovesey set in Bath and love them. The main character is lovable though difficult and grumpy and knowing Bath fairly well helps place them. There are over 20 of them so if you want a nice new series then try them. Again, best read in order.

Jane Casey - I have read and loved all her Maeve Kerrigan books and am madly in love with her male protagonist, Josh Derwent, who is all man and simply gorgeous with it and if the author does not get them together soon I shall burst.   A new book by this author this year and though not a Kerrigan book "sob" was excellent and exciting. The Killing Kind, a stand alone but oh so looking forward to the next Maeve. If you have not read this series you have a treat instore but do read them in order.

E C R Lorac - a Golden Age crime writer and a new discovery by the excellent British Library Classic Crime series all of which I manage to get my mitts on as the BritLib send them to me. A huge selection of authors, not all of whom I get on with, but most of them are well worth reading. Along with Lorac, who also writes as Carol Carnac, I am working my way through Freeman Wills Croft who I love for his detail and minutaie.

Loads of re-reads this year and one of the best was the series of books about the Carey family by Ronald Welch and published by Slightly Foxed. I have written about them before and simply love them.

I discoverd the Malmo mysteries by Torquil McLeod. Scandi-noir and enjoyable.

I have also been reading a huge amount of chick-lit though I really dislike that description. Romantic fiction would be better. A huge amount of snobbery surrounds this genre and I can never understand why. Yes some of them are a bit meh, but that is not confined to romance alone.  Milly Johnson, whose I wish it could be Christmas Every Day I reviewed recently, is lovely and yes sentimental at times, but also funny and witty. Jenny Colgan is my current binge read with a heap of them sitting on my To be Read shelf.  I tend to avoid titles such as The Little Beach Tree Bakery and the Christmas Bookshop but one of my regular visitors recommended her and so I tried one and have since been thoroughly enjoying them.

Not a huge amount of non fiction this year but will be writing about those I have enjoyed in the next post.

Crime catch up

The title of this post sounds as if I have been on the lam with a black mask on my face and a bag marked Swag on my back, but it is not as exciting as that, it is merely a round up of my reading.

I mentioned earlier this year that I am beginning to wonder if I should rename this blog Random Crime as I have read such a lot in this genre over the summer. I had decided not to go abroad this year, my last trip to Australia with the delays and the nightmare that was Dubai airport was so awful it nearly finished me off, and I laboured under the misapprehension that staying in the UK would mean I would have a relaxed time. Au contraire. I have been so busy my feet hardly seem to have touched the ground. A lot of this is connected with the family move to Ealing, helping out with same, looking after grandchildren in the summer holidays etc etc, this week catering for a friend's birthday lunch, helping at the Felixstowe Book Festival and generally doing my impression, well honed, of a blue arsed fly.

Next year I may take myself off to Siberia. Sure it will be quieter there.

So crime it has been as I love them, I gobble them up and they relax me. Yes even serial killers have their charms when you are tired and you are sitting with your feet up and cuppa at hand.   Here goes:

Bitter Remedy - Conor Fitzgerald. Oddly enough I have started this round up with one of the crime series that are not an easy read. I do not mean that in any critical way, it is just that these require a bit of concentration and usage of the grey cells as they are more cerebral than others. I do not know why this is so, or even if I am the only one who feels this way, but these require more concentration from me.

They are set in Rome and feature Alec Blume, a resident American in the police force having lived their all his life. As per his private life is the usual mess, he is a maverick yadder yadder yadder but he has an interesting personality and I find him intriguing. Not sure I like him much mark you. He is on leave after a minor breakdown, his live in lover has left him as she does not want him to be involved in the upbringing of their child, and he signs himself up for a natural remedy course at a crumbling villa outside Rome. He is willing to try anything but when he gets there finds the course has been cancelled. Taken on a tour of the gardens by the hostess, Silvana and her gardner father, he is given a herb to try which fells him and is rushed off to hospital. There he meets Silvana's fiance who is involved in drug and girl trafficking and is a thoroughly shady piece of work. Instead of being on holiday he finds himself involved in trying to find a missing girl and bodies start piling up. Well written and worth your attention though it might be best to start at the first one in this series if you feel you want to give them a go.

Dark Horizon - Simon Hall. I have been lucky enough to have been sent all the books in this series by the author and enjoy them greatly. A TV reporter and a detective form a partnership in which they help each other with solving murders and providing Dan, the reporter, with the inside edge on the latest crime which keeps his ratings made boss happy.    In this latest a long siege of protesters is outside a huge monolothic shopping and office centre which nobody wants.  I have to say the one weakness in this book is that I am not quite sure why this should be so.   It is called Resurgam and one night during a protest a lorry is driven headlong through the gates by one of the more radical of the group, Esther, and a security guard is killed. Esther flees the scene and off goes the story.   

The story of Dan's personal life runs alongside the narrative and, yes you have guessed it, he cannot commit, his private life is a mess etc etc. At least in this book he sorts himself out.

The Frozen Shroud - Martin Edwards. This is the latest in this series which is set in the Lake District and features a historian turned occasional detective, Daniel Kind. I have read all of these and, once again, can recommend that you try them and read them in order to bring you up to date with the personal life of Daniel which, again, is......no need to go on.

Three bodies have been found - a maidservant at the local hall found bludgeoned to death, her face disfigured and a blanked put over her face which froze in the icy winter, hence the Frozen Shroud. It was assumed that she was murdered by the mistress of the house who had discovered her husband was having an affair with her. She promptly committed suicide and no further investigation took place.   Back to modern day and a sexy attractive Australian woman cutting a swathe through the local men, is also murdered in exactly the same way. Her violent ex lover fleeing the scene was killed in a car crash and once again the assumption was made the killer had been identified and no further investigation takes place. Five years later, yet another body and another fall guy set up to take the blame.

As always, loved it and the relationship between DCI Hannah Scarlett and Daniel is coming along nicely. Already looking forward to  the next one.

The WInter Foundling - Kate Rhodes.   I read the debut novel of this author a couple of years ago and my review is here. Thought it was excellent. Featuring psychologist Alice Quentin who is called upon to help Scotland Yard in certain cases, it was gripping with really good writing and, the word the Guardian hates, a page turner par excellence. Since then she has written two more, both well up to scratch and this latest is well up to scratch too with Alice taking a sabbatical to investigate the treatment of psychopaths in a high security mental prison (well somebody has to do it I suppose) where she meets one of the worst serial killers of the last thirty years. A series of deaths has all his hallmarks all over it and it gradually becomes clear that he has a follower, somebody who must work at the prison. But who?    Great stuff.

I have recently raved about Martin O'Brien and his Jacquot novels and am now re-reading them all over again. I find when I discover a series I enjoy I motor through them at the rate of knots and when I go back to them enjoy them even more and this is what I am now doing.

Right I think I have actually caught up withg my backlog. Praise be.

Random Reading Round up

I have been spending most of my days watching Wimbledon in the last week or so, which you have probably gathered by now, hence the lack of posting.  I have managed to read quite a lot in between hurling shrieks and abuse at the TV screen and am doing a round up of these else I shall rapidly fall behind.

The Heist - Janet Evanovich and Lee Goldberg.   Not sure how much of this is Janet and how much is Lee as the style and narrative and characters are more or less slight variations on the Stephanie Plum books. Don't know how she manages to churn out so many, perhaps she needed a bit of help, hence Lee Goldberg. Whatever. So this is a new series featuring Kate O'Hara, an FBI Special Agent who is obsessed with taking down an international crook Nicolas Fox. He is dashing, daredevil and, naturally, devestatingly handsome. Well she gets her man. Or does she?   Double dealing with the FBI and deals made ensure that Nicolas Fox is now on undercover with the FBI and Kate, again naturally, is the agent assigned to work with him. Lots of fun, lots of daft adventures and lots of heavy breathing between the two of them which will obviously not end up with them in bed until at least book seven in the series, ensure that these are going to be as fun and as successful as the Plum books.

The Memory Key - Connor Fitzgerald.   This is the latest in the series featuring Alec Blume, an American born detective who lives in Rome. These books are not your normal go get 'em detective thrillers. They are more cerebral than that and you need to sit and read and concentrate on them. They are elegantly written with great style and ensure that the reader uses those little grey cells (pace Poirot).    Sofia Fontana is a witness to a killing. The victim is an ex-terrorist, Stefania Manfellotto, who has been involved in atrocities in the past.  She does not die but the bullet has killed the memory lobes in her brain and she has no recollection of the past, and her memory span is minimal.   It is assumed that she was the victim but when the witness Sofia is then killed herself Alec believes she was the original target all along though he has problems ensuring that the police feel the same way. 

One of the suspects involved is Sofia's professor, a man obsessed with the Memory Key and how one remembers information and data.   It is ironic that Stefanie met him regularly and they discussed her politics while she passed on information about her old colleagues and she then loses her memory.

As I said, beautifully written and, as always, a thread concerning Alec's personal life running through the book and we can chart the progress or lack of it, of his relationship with one of the detectives he works with, Caterina. Like most police officers in a series such as this, he is pretty poor in his dealings with those he loves.  Due to be published on 1 August but you can pre-order.

A Killing of Angels - Kate Rhodes.   I read this author's debut novel, Crossbones Yard, last year and really enjoyed it (see my review here).  The heroine of this promising series is Alice Quentin a psychologist who has so many problems of her own I am surprised she is allowed to practice. After her first foray in assisting the police she decides she will not help them again, but of course she does and, in this case, she is asked to build up a profile of a killer who is targeting bankers in the City.   You might think the only good banker is a dead banker and this murderer obviously feels that way as his calling card left by each body is a picture of an avenging angel.

Pacy, engaging and most enjoyable I sat and read this through in one sitting. And, once again, I did not see the end coming or the identity of the killer.   Next time I read one of Kate Rhodes I shall look for the most unlikely, nicest, and seemingly innocent person and target them as the baddie. That way I might have a chance of guessing who did it.

OK that is it for today - more crime thrillers to review next week but for the rest of this Sunday I shall be watching the Men's Final at Wimbledon.   Or I may not. It depends whether my nerves will take it or not. I have strawberries and cream to hand.   And Valium.....

London and Los Angeles - two debut thrillers

Two debut thrillers have arrived at Schloss Random in the last week and I have enjoyed both of them very much, one set in London, the other in Los Angeles.

First one is Cross Bones Yard by Kate Rhodes. Our heroine is Alice Quentin, a psychologist who has problems of her own after suffering an abusive childhood when she and her brother suffered at the hands of their father and had to watch their mother being regularly beaten.   Hiding in a cupboard in a desperate bid to avoid him she is now a troubled adult who suffers from claustrophobia and is incapable of forming long lasting relationships.  So we have a troubled protagonist which seems to be a given for crime and detective thrillers and the writing and story has to be good to overcome a feeling of deja vu.

And it is.   Sharp narrative and good plotting.    Alice is a loner and one night out on her regular run she discovers a body on waste ground at Crossbones Yard, an area where prostitutes used to be buried.   The wounds are similar to those inflicted on the victims of Ray and Marie Benson (shades of the Wests here) who killed thirteen women before they were caught.   Alice is asked to interview Marie Benson to see if they can found out who is the copy cat killer.   The bodies begin to mount up and Alice has to go into hiding as threatening letters are sent to her, somebody tries to break into her apartment and it is clear her life is in danger.

In charge of the investigation is D I Alvarez, a widower, dark and brooding and grieving for his wife. "The bad tempered detective who had given me a lift home appeared in the doorway. ...he looked different by daylight. His black hair and pale skin made him look exotic, Middle Eastern maybe, starved of sunshine for much too long. There was still no indication that he knew how to smile".   He and Alice are attracted to each other and a relationship develops though both of them try to fight it and Alice is fresh out of breaking up with her previous boyfriend, Sean, a surgeon who is now exhibiting worrying signs of anger and resentment.

A tense, exciting ending when Alice finds herself abducted and a final twist I did not foresee at all.  I hope this is to be a series featuring this character as I found this an exciting pacy thriller by Kate Rhodes and look forward to the second.

Guilt by Association - Marcia Clark.  I gather that the author is a former LA Deputy District Attorney, as is her heroine Rachel Knight, and was the lead prosecutor in the OJ Simpson murder case so she certainly knows her onions and has produced a snappy, pacy thriller which zapped along, complete with witty one liners and sassy dialogue.

Rachel is another survivor with baggage to carry. In this case, it is the disappearance of her younger sister many years ago for which she blames herself.   As with Alice, she has difficulty in maintaining a long term relationship and to compensate buries herself in her work.

Her trusted and idealistic colleague, Jake, is found dead beside the body of a murdered teenage male prostitute and it appears as a murder/suicide.   Rachel does not believe this can possibly be the truth and sets about trying to prove the FBI wrong.   She is also dealing with a rape case of the daughter of a wealthy doctor who is applying pressure on Rachel's boss for a quick solution and whose re-election he is supporting.

Rachel has two good friends, Toni who works with her in her office and Bailey, a police detective and this trio provide the book with warmth and humour as the three support each other along the way. Bailey works for the Crime Unit in the LAPD and my first thought was that he must know Harry Bosch and then, no Elaine, wrong books...

Lots of twists and turns again and dealings with the seamy side of LA and, as with Alice in the previous book, Rachel finds herself in danger and being shot at and then kidnapped.  Also, as with Alice, there is a rather dashing and glamorous hero eager to get to know her better, in this case Lieutenant Graden Hales "six feet tall, on the lean side but tastefully muscled under his blue unfiorm, his dark blon hair just long enough to comb.  HIs eyes were a gold flecked hazel and he had wide, pronounced cheekbones, a strong nose and a generous mouth".  Mmmmm, nice.

As the story progresses it gradually becomes clear that the two cases are linked but how to prove it?

Thoroughly enjoyed this one as well.  Two good debut thrillers whose authors will go on my list of Those to Look Out For.