Random Jottings

Triple Tecs

I don't know about you but in the summer I don't cook much, nor do I read What I Call serious reading. Too hot to cook, well sometimes, and also difficult to concentrate when the sun is shining. I like something light to eat and steak and kidney pie loses its savour. Ditto books.  Not saying that when the nights are cold I am suddenly going to work my way through the Booker list or start reading Gogol but I do tend to hunker down with books that need concentration.

And looking at my reading over the last few weeks I have been reading loads of detective stories. Re-reading the Zouroudi books set in Greece which I love and then in the last week have had three of my favourite detective series come up with the latest.

Linda Castillo-The Dead will Tell. The latest in the series featuring Kate Burkholder, chief of police in Painters Mill in Amish country.   Love these books.  They are well written with great story lines and there has not been a dud one amongst them. If I have one criticism it is to say that for a peace loving people, the Amish do seem to have a lot of murder and mayhem going on. It stretches credulity a tad but then I think of Midsomer Murders and the body count in that series and realise that nothing reaches the level of death and destruction there.

OK so everyone in Painters Mill knows the abandoned Hochstetler farm is haunted. A terrible murder and fire took place there over thirty years ago and when Kate Burkholder is called to the scene of an apparent suicide of an old man found hanging from the rafters in his dilapidated barn she realises that his death is a murder and a murder done particularly cruelly with the maximum amount of suffering. When a second man is found dead, also seemingly by his own hand, Kate discovers that, in common with the first murder, there is a link to the old case.  And there seem to be more on the killer's list....

If you have yet to discover this series then I really recommend them. But do read them in order as there is a narrative thread dealing with Kate's personal life that runs through them all.

Want you Dead - Peter James. The latest in the Roy Grace series set in Brighton.

Single girl, 29, smouldering redhead, love life that's crashed and burned. Seeks new flame to rekindle her fire. Fun, friendship and – who knows – maybe more?

An ad placed on a dating website leads Red Westwood to meet charming and rich Bryce Laurent. He is handsome and madly in love with her, showering her with gifts and presents. When his past and his lies are revealed to her she breaks up with him and evicts him from her flat.  But he is obsessed with her and he intends to destroy her, her life and her family. There seems to be no escape.

Roy Grace finds that Bryce Laurent is cunning and ruthless with a string of aliases and difficult to find. While he is dealing with this case he is also arranging his marriage to Cleo and having nightmares that his missing wife Sandy will turn up at his wedding and ruin his future.   

There have been a few adverse reviews regarding this latest Grace book so I was not sure what to expect when I started it but found I became totally immersed and engaged, reading it straight through in one sitting.   If I do have a criticism it is that a car accident removed an unpleasant character in the last book and the same happens in this one.   Very helpful but it certainly opens up a new story line which will no doubt be explored in the next one in the series.  I look forward to it.

Abbatoir Blues - Peter Robinson. The latest DCI Banks book and the first thing you have to remember when reading these is that the TV series has gone off on a totally different tack, the characterisation of Banks is also different and you have to put this out your mind, else you will get very muddled as to who does what and what is happening.

I found the last Banks book, The Children of the Revolution, very tedious and rather boring and pleased that this one is back to form. Initially investigating the theft of an extremely expensive tractor, the latest in a long line of rural crimes, it soon escalates when human blood is discovered in an abandoned hangar and it is clear a murder has taken place. Then a possible witness vanishes and goes on the run and it all starts to get very complicated.

There is one common factor in these books that really irritates after a while. The constant harping on about what music Banks is listening to, or any other character, given in detail. If someone is driving along and about to meet his death I am really not interested in knowing whether he is into rap or garage music, I really am not.  And when Banks gets home and finds a CD in the post I don't really need to know it is a recording of lieder by Janet Baker.   Peter Robinson does go on at length about this and I do wish somebody at his publishers would tell him to tone it down a bit.

But, apart from that, a return to form.

So three good tecs this week and I have a few more on the pile waiting to go....

Before the Poison - Peter Robinson

Peter Robinson is the author of the bestselling DCI Banks crime novels and last year I came across one in a charity shop and thought I would give it a go.  One of the later ones so found I was a bit at sea with the background and history of the characters, but enjoyed it and made a mental note to save this series up for further reading when I have exhausted all my current crime crazes.  There are an awful lot of them which is a bonus.

However, Before the Poison is not a DCI Banks story but a stand alone fiction so had no idea if I would enjoy it or not - the answer is I certainly did.   Chris Lowndes returns to his native Yorkshire after the death of his wife. He is a composer, writing music scores for movies in America and, now he is on his own, he needs time to recover from his loss and to write his piano sonatas which he has wanted to do, but never had the opportunity after years of soul destroying, albeit lucrative, work in Hollywood.

He buys a house in Richmond in Yorkshire - it is bought long distance and he knows very little about it. 'I walked up the path between the trees and the overgrown lawn, a broad symmetrical oblong of limestone with a hint of darker millstone grit here and there.....there was an arched stone porch at the front, with wooden benches on either side which reminded me of the entrance to an old village school.... I had a curious sensation that the shy, half-hidden house was waiting for me, that it had been waiting for some time"....

What Chris does not know is that a murder took place in this house in 1953. Grace Fox was found guilty of murdering her husband, the local GP, and met her end on the gallows.  As Chris learns about the troubled history of Kilnsgate, he becomes fascinated by her story and the more he discovers about her, the more certain he becomes that she did not murder her husband.

OK so the scene is set nicely for an atmospheric and slightly scary investigation - Chris feels there is a presence in the house and that this presence is Grace.  There are several threads to the narrative and one of my favourite devices is used, the time line flitting backwards and forwards - we have Chris's searching and questioning alongside the report of the trial at the time from which it is clear that the jury and judge are prejudiced against Grace as she was a free spirit and had taken a young lover, and Grace's journals written in wartime when she was a nurse.  These journals are set in Singapore, North Africa and Germany and, for me, were the most fascinating and interesting part of the story.  Reading these I found a deeper understanding of her personality and character and came to the conclusion that she was a brave and principled woman who did not have it in her to commit murder.

Chris has his own issues to deal with and feels the need to bring closure to his doubts, not only about Grace, but where his life is now going to lead.  He finds that his sonata is inspired by the conundrum that is Grace and he also finds a slow growing relationship with Hester, the estate agent who sold him the house and was the first one to tell him its history.

An ending I was not expecting, not clear cut by any means, but in a way satisfying.    On checking I see that Peter Robinson has written two other stand alone books which I may read before I embark on the DCI Banks series. Good to know I have all these to come.

I thought this was a simply terrific book - I have been lucky in the last few weeks with my reading. No sooner have I put one great read down than I pick up another. I read this after my perusal of The Good Wife's Castle by Roland Vernon which was quite marvellous and I thought it would be rather difficult to follow that, but Peter Robinson gave me another day of total concentration while I read this straight through.

Flowing narrative, seemingly written with ease so that the reading experience is the same.   Highly recommended by Random.

Triple Crime

Have read three very good crime/thrillers over the last week or so and have decided to do a round up of these in one post.

The Fatal Touch - Conor Fitzgerald.  This is the second in a new series set in Rome and featuring Commissioner Alec Blume, an American born Italian citizen who remained in Italy after his parents died and who joined the police and has risen through the ranks.  Not quite the usual maverick we come to expect in detective stories, but with a will of his own and an integrity and way of doing things that is not always popular.  A body is discovered in the Piazza de Renzi early one morning - he is the local drunk and as he has not been robbed, it would appear a tragic but unsurprising accident.   Needless to say it proves to be anything but and when it is discovered that the dead man is a painter and a master forger of old masters, then more investigation is needed.   Blume discovers notebooks in the dead man's studio in which secrets which have been hidden for years are about to be revealed, including the fact that the forger and his business partner once cheated the Mafia by selling them a forged painting. 

Twists and turns and devious characters including one Colonel Farinelli of the art fraud department of the Questore who is more involved than he cares to admit, and is very keen indeed to track down and destroy the notebooks.

A lot of detailed description of how a forger works, the tricks he uses to recreate the aged paper and the pigments of the paint and all fascinating, as are the extracts from the hidden notebooks.  Took me a while to get into The Fatal Touch but once I did I really enjoyed it.   The first Alec Blume novel, The Dogs of Rome was reviewed by me last year and this series looks as if it will run.  I do hope so.

Bad Boy - Peter Robinson.  My sister was reading one of this author's books when she was staying with me a few weeks ago and she said how good they were.  I made a mental note of the name and then, coincidentally, a copy of his latest dropped through my letter box courtesy of Hodder (thank you Hodder) and picked it up and sat down and read stragith through.   D C Banks is the detective in this series and, true to form, is divorced, likes a drink and is estragned from his daughter. Same old, same old really but, once again, good writing can imbue these stock characters with interest and flesh them out and I was soon engrossed.

As this is the latest paperback and I know nothing of what went on before, I understand that Alan Banks is on holiday recovering from the trauma of a previous case and while he is away an old neighbour calls into the police station.   Her daughter has been mied up with a boyfriend she is not happy about and, when tidying up her daughter's room, she found a gun hidden in the wardrobe.  She wants Alan to come and help and to sort this out, but instead finds that she has unleashed a full police procedure which will result in a tragic death.   By the time DCI Banks returns from his holiday it is to learn that his daughter Tracy, has disappeared with the owner of the gun and he does not know if she has gone of her own free will or has been taken hostage.

Rattled along, lots of action, great stuff and I thoroughly enjoyed it.  Best of all, I have checked inside the book and delighted to see that there are another eighteen DCI Banks stories all waiting for me.  Calloo Callay o Frabjous Day.  Lots of reading enjoyment ahead of me Hodder, dear kind people...........

And my third, Fragile Minds - Claire Seeber.  Sent to me by Avon Publishing this  is published on 21 April as a paperback original.  A bomb has exploded outside the Royal Academy of Ballet in the heart of London and the police suspect a terrorist group.  But this is misleading and investigation by the DCI Joe Silver (gosh there is a familiar name for a detective) soon turns up links to the Daughters of Light, a group which seems to draw members from he Ballet School and, particularly, to one teacher who turns out to be not who she has pretended to be.

Mixed up in all this is the physiotherapist of the school, Claudie, who is suffering from a terrible tragedy of her own.  She has blackouts and, as she was in the square when the bomb exploded, is frightened that she might have had something to do with it.  If only she could remember...

Well plotted and interesting book and I enjoyed it with one or two caveats.  Claudie seems to plunge into unconcsicousness, or crash to the floor in a faint a bit too often for plausibility and, while I find Joe Silver an interesting character, I feel I would like him more if the author could rid him of the habit of calling everyone 'Kiddo'. 

So three very different but equally gripping thrillers and three titles of all lovers of this genre to watch out for.