Review of Tony Parsons's The Hanging Club

The Hanging Club, by Tony Parsons (International Edition, Century, June 28, 2016.  To come from Minotaur on November 1, 2016))

As with the previous two books in this series, Parsons begins with a prologue describing a gut-churning scene of violence, setting off the police investigation that plays out over the pages. For those police procedural readers who are concerned about graphic descriptions of violence (and I’m one of them), I will say that these prologues are always short, don’t feel exploitative, and are more detailed and graphic than descriptions of violence in the rest of the book.


The Hanging Club is a group of four disguised killers who kidnap men and hang them, live-streaming the killings on the internet. These killings are not the neck-snapping hangings that professional hangmen used in the later years of the practice, though. These are slow, agonizing strangulations.

The Club members depict themselves as executioners in the style of Albert Pierrepoint, Britain’s last official hangman. Their execution targets are men who got off lightly after committing crimes against helpless victims. The internet broadcasts spark a media and online frenzy, with the majority supporting the Hanging Club, seeing them as doing the job that the police and courts are unable or unwilling to do.

Max Wolfe is a Detective Constable at West End Central station, and it’s his team that catches the Hanging Club cases. It’s West End Central’s usual good team of men and women, with a couple of new members joining this time around: a female sound expert whom Max finds himself attracted to, and a nebbishy historian.

As always, Parsons cranks up the tension with a gritty, straight-ahead police procedural story and then releases it by shifting to Max’s after-work life with his sweet 5-year-old daughter, Scout, and a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel named Stan. Max and his family are right on the edge of impossibly cute. But it’s a nice change of pace to have a police detective protagonist who isn’t an own-worst-enemy substance abuser and emotional cripple.

I loved the first book in this series (The Murder Man, published originally in the UK as The Murder Bag), but I found the second (The Slaughter Man) to be have several disappointing plotting problems. I was relieved that Parsons is back to form this time. The plotting is clean and propulsive, with just enough clues dropped along the way for a reader to solve the crime along with Max, and maybe even just ahead of him.

While I enjoyed this book very much, I can’t give Parsons full marks on it. He sets up a thought-provoking debate on vigilantism, but he gives short shrift to one side. He continues to have Max make stupid decisions that needlessly put him in danger––though at least as not as many as in The Slaughter Man. I was also disappointed that Parsons didn’t do as much with issues involving the media as he seemed to promise in the early stages of the book.

And now that I’ve read three books in the series, I can also see a character choice that Parsons makes with Max Wolfe that I’m not crazy about. When Max takes a physical or verbal beating, he is almost ostentatiously stalwart and uncomplaining. It’s clearly a play to gain sympathy for Max’s noble suffering character, but it's not an attractive trait.

I should also mention that I listened to the audiobook and recommend it. The narrator, Colin Mace, perfectly captures the Max Wolfe character.

Image sources: amazon.com, mirror.co.uk, dogsinpubs.com, buzzfeed.com.

Review of Susie Steiner's Missing, Presumed

Missing, Presumed, by Susie Steiner (Random House, June 28, 2016)

If you're a regular crime fiction reader, you know all about how the main genre breaks down into many sub-genres, one of which is the police procedural. I'm a big fan of the English PP, but I've enjoyed the more character-driven variations that we've been seeing recently in the sub-genre; for example, the quirky DC Fiona Griffiths in Harry Bingham's series.

Author Susie Steiner's variation on the traditional PP form is to broaden the focus of the character set. Instead of having a small team of detectives being the focus, with the victim, his/her circle and the suspects being seen only through the eyes of the investigative team, Steiner gives short first-person chapters to characters on both sides, the detectives and the victim's circle.

This way, the same events are seen through different eyes, bringing various shades and dimensions to the story. Better yet, this device allows Steiner to delve much more deeply into the effect of a crime and criminal investigation on the investigators, the investigated, and those associated with the victim.

The book tells the story of the investigation into the disappearance of the 20-something Edith, who is a Cambridge University student. Three characters dominate the first-person narratives: police investigator Manon Bradshaw and her detective partner, Davy, and Edith's mother, Miriam.

Manon Bradshaw is the most-featured character. Her chapters are about both the investigation and her messy personal life. Manon is single, in her late 30s, and wading through the muck of online dating to try to find a partner before her biological clock strikes midnight. Her search is complicated (to say the least) by her clumsy interpersonal skills and deep ambivalence about developing close relationships.

As seems to be common with protagonists in crime fiction these days, Manon has strong tendencies toward being her own worst enemy, both personally and professionally. That particular device often irritates me, but in this case, it only made me roll an eye occasionally. If Steiner develops this into a Manon series, we'll see, though.

Through Manon and her work partner, Davy, we also learn about the rest of the members of the investigative team. Davy's chapters also include the story of his relationship with his girlfriend, Chloe.

Miriam, Edith's mother, is second to Manon in the book's focus. Miriam and her husband, Sir Ian, are privileged Londoners, whose whole world is suddenly ripped apart. Sadly, we all have read news stories or seen television depictions of the effect on a couple and their family when a child goes missing. One of the strengths of the book is Steiner's depiction of Miriam's thoughts and emotions––which are not always what the news and TV dramas glibly feed us.

There are several lesser-featured characters, including Edith's boyfriend, father and her best friend. Although we learn about them mostly through the eyes of the three key characters, these secondary characters are vividly drawn and add richness to the story.

This is a rewarding read, both as a police procedural and a study of the flawed and very human people who orbit a crime. I will keep Susie Steiner on my radar screen.

Note: I requested and received a free advance reading copy of the book from the publisher, through NetGalley.

Image sources: susiesteiner.co.uk, dailymail.co.uk, theguardian.com, quotesgram.com, legacy.com

There's no rapture for these crime fiction characters

I'm home from work with the flu. My coughing and sneezing are too much for my dogs, who have disappeared under the bed, leaving me alone to binge watch The Leftovers, whose characters live in a world after a Rapture-like event caused many people to vanish. I can't tell if I'm running a fever or if this TV series, based on Tom Perrotta's novel of the same name, is just downright weird. I'll see if I can collect my thoughts enough to tell you about a couple of books whose characters have their hands full sans a mass disappearance.

A man who's falling from his fifth-floor window windmills his way to the ground in the opening of Maurizio de Giovanni's The Bottom of Your Heart: Inferno for Commissario Ricciardi (translated from the Italian by Antony Shugaar; Europa Editions, November 2015). It's a beautiful piece of descriptive writing in a book replete with lively descriptions of life in the sweltering summer of 1939 Italy under Mussolini. The point of view leaps among various short first-person narrations, but it focuses primarily on a third-person omniscient narrator's account of the investigation of Commissario Luigi Ricciardi and Brigadier Raffaele Maione into the death of Professor Tullio Iovine del Castello, chair of gynecology at a university hospital in Naples. There is no shortage of suspects if Dr. Iovine was pushed or thrown; the victim repeatedly flunked an old professional rival's son in his medical school classes, was having an extramarital affair with a woman young enough to be his daughter, and had enraged a ferocious gangster who swore revenge.

The Botom of Your Heart is the seventh book in this series, and characters from previous books reappear. Ricciardi, who fears for his sanity and keeps himself aloof since "the Deed" that allows him to hear the final thoughts and to see the ghostly shades of people who have died by violence (see Maltese Condor's review here), is still single in his 30s and is living with his beloved tata, now in deteriorating health, and her niece, Nelide. The lonely Commissario also has the affections of Enrica, the shy teacher who lives with her family across the street; Livia Vezzi, a beautiful social butterfly and widow of Italy's most famous tenor; Dr. Modo, the irascible medical examiner; and, of course, his loyal and tireless Brigadier, whose own secrets make him particularly impatient with his informant, Bambinella, a transvestite prostitute. This entertaining series is for people who enjoy crime fiction with a literary bent, keeping track of an ensemble cast of characters, and an Italian setting that's brought to life by its characters' concerns and the author's vivid writing. A reader can begin anywhere in this series, but for the full backstory, start with the first book, I Will Have Vengeance: The Winter of Commissario Ricciardi.

The Italians in de Giovanni's series are natural philosophers. Even sassy private eye Kinsey Millhone is becoming more reflective in Sue Grafton's X (Marian Wood Books/Putnam, August 2015), the 24th book in the alphabet series set in the fictional town of Santa Teresa, California. Unlike other titles in the series (see my review of W Is for Wasted here), this "X" doesn't specifically stand for anything; however, one can find all sorts of Xs (symbolic and real), in the book: Teddy Xanakis, kisses, ex-husbands and wives, mistakes, the missing, a place locator, and unknowns.

In reading X, one gets the sense that things are beginning to wind up for Kinsey. The woman who trims her own hair with a fingernail scissors and has one dress hanging in her closet is financially secure, at least for a while; she can pick and choose her cases. Kinsey agrees to find an ex-con just released from prison only when Hallie Bettancourt says she was referred by one of Kinsey's friends, and Kinsey becomes involved in Pete Wolinsky's old case only when his widow, Ruthie, asks for help in locating financial records for an IRS audit. This isn't one of Grafton's strongest books; the plot feels somewhat contrived, and I was at times annoyed by Grafton's excessive attention to detail (Kinsey doesn't just make coffee, she turns on the machine, adds the coffee, watches the water heat...). Still, it's worthwhile to revisit Santa Teresa to see how one of mysterydom's most likable female sleuths is doing, and we won't have many more chances. Grafton does a great job of conveying what it's like to live on California's Central Coast; here, in 1989. Kinsey still goes to the library to look for old records and composes her case summaries on a Smith & Corona typewriter. She and her 89-year-old landlord and neighbor, Henry, are dealing with some new neighbors and the drought. (Was this timely reading!) In this 24th book, Kinsey seems less inclined to get into trouble, but when the searches for the ex-con and the financial records open cans of worms, she can't help but start digging. By the end, she's learned a thing or two and made her peace with the fact that justice isn't always cut-and-dried.

Review of Philippe Georget's Autumn, All the Cats Return

Autumn, All the Cats Return, by Philippe Georget (Europa Editions, 2014)

My favorite mysteries are the ones that expose me to a different world. That's something I get with the Gilles Sebag series, which began with Summertime, All the Cats Are Bored (see review here), and is followed up by Autumn, All the Cats Return. Sebag is a homicide inspector in Perpignan, in France's Mediterranean south, just across the Pyrenées from Spain. Perpignan is a center of the Catalan region and the reader has the pleasure of being exposed to both French and Catalan language, food and culture.

In this new book, the reader's cultural and historical horizons are broadened even further by the book's main plot, which is the murderous targeting of Perpignan residents who, back in the 1960s, were Pieds-Noirs, French residents of Algeria, during the bloody fight for independence.

French President Charles de Gaulle reached a cease-fire agreement with the Algerian independence forces, which outraged a rogue group of French army officers, who formed a guerrilla force called the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète, or OAS. The OAS brutally attacked their opponents, hoping to terrorize them into acquiescence with continued French rule. Despite the appalling numbers they killed, they were unsuccessful and most Algerian residents with French ties fled to France.

Corpses in the streets were commonplace
during the Algerian war for independence

Now, when an old man is discovered executed in his Perpignan apartment, with "OAS" painted on his door, Gilles Sebag and the rest of the squad soon figure out that despite the decades that have passed since Algeria gained its independence, someone is targeting old OAS fighters. After all this time, they have tough challenges to identify potential new victims and to figure out who the murderer could be.

At the same time, Sebag is anxious to help his grieving teenage daughter by conducting an unofficial investigation of the death of her school friend, who was on his scooter when he was struck by a delivery van. The cop assigned to the investigation isn't known for his work ethic, and Gilles wants to make sure his daughter and the dead boy's family know exactly what happened.

Perpignan

If you haven't read the first Gilles Sebag, that's OK. There is not much that happens in the first book you need to know to enjoy the second. There is a running theme from the first book that continues in this book about Sebag's fear that his beloved wife had an affair, but you don't really miss anything on that plot element if you haven't read the first book.

To appreciate this series, I think you need to have a strong interest in reading books set in unfamiliar locales. You must also enjoy a long book with a deliberate pace and an often melancholy tone. The book includes the Victor Hugo quotation "Melancholy is the happiness of feeling sad," and that's an apt comment on the book's own style.

Breaking Out of a Slump

I've had a terrible time finding good mysteries lately, to the point where I feel happy if I find a book I think is even just OK. But I finally read a couple in the past month that I felt a lot more than OK about.

William Shaw's The Kings of London (Mulholland Books, January 27, 2015) is the second in his police procedural series set in 1960s London. But this is only a little bit the Swinging London of the Beatles, Stones, long hair, granny glasses and Mary Quant minidresses. Mostly, it's the just-barely-out-of-postwar rationing, lousy food, racist and sexist London.

Cathal Breen is a Detective Sergeant with the Metropolitan Police, and the son of an Irish workingman. Breen looks and speaks like any other Londoner but, inevitably, the rest of the members of the force call him Paddy, and he will never be fully accepted as one of them. Another misfit is his sometime partner, WPC Helen Tozer. Tozer, one of the few women on the force who does anything other than traffic patrol and serving as a family liaison, has it even worse than Breen when it comes to taking guff from the other police officers––and firefighters and anybody on the street.

As The Kings of London begins, Breen's in a bit of a funk. His father, who had dementia for a long time and whom Breen had taken care of, has now died and this casts a pall over the upcoming Christmas season. He's even more glum knowing that Tozer is soon to leave the force to go back to run her family's farm after her father has become too ill to manage. As if this isn't enough, Breen is getting death threats at work and he has a new neighbor from hell up above his basement flat.

It's almost a welcome relief to Breen when he catches the gruesome case of a man's body found in a burned building with his skin and hands removed and the carcass drained of blood. Though this looks like a case of torture, Breen soon figures out what really happened. Now it's just a question of why and whodunnit. Those are tougher questions than usual, given the resistance Breen and Tozer receive from the victim's family and higher-ups in the Met.

If you've been looking for a good police procedural, check this one out, especially if the idea of a novel set in London in the 1960s appeals to you. I'll be looking forward to the third book in the Breen and Tozer series, A Book of Scars, which came out in the UK in June.

When I first started reading mysteries back in the 1970s, one of the first series I read was Peter Lovesey's Cribb and Thackeray books, about two police detectives in Victorian London. I've never been much of a fan for the Victorian period, but Lovesey knows how to write a cracking good story with plenty of wit and puzzle-solving interest.

Here it is, 45 years since his first crime novel, and Lovesey is still getting the job done. Since 1991, most of his books have been about Peter Diamond, a homicide Detective Inspector with the Bath, England police force. Usually, Diamond does his sleuthing with the able assistance of his team, the stalwart Keith Halliwell, plodding John Leaman and cheeky former crime journalist Ingeborg Smith––and the occasionally bedeviling by his boss, Georgina Dallymore. Dallymore couldn't detect her way out of a corner shop, but that doesn't prevent her from interfering. When she does, at least Diamond gets to go home to the comforts of his cat and his lady friend, Paloma.

Down Among the Dead Men (Soho Crime, July 7, 2015) is the 15th in the series, and it's a change of pace. To Diamond's dismay, Dallymore insists that he go off with her to West Sussex to help with an internal investigation. What; no team, no home, no cat, no Paloma? Just lots and lots of Dallymore? Diamond is horrified, but he keeps his feelings to himself.

Dallymore is frustratingly close-mouthed about the details of the case and Diamond doesn't find until they reach West Sussex that this is a complaint about a senior detective who succeeded in getting a conviction of a car thief for the murder of a man found in the trunk of a car he'd stolen, but then failed to pursue later evidence that her niece's fingerprints were found in the trunk.

Diamond is gobsmacked to learn that the officer in question is an old acquaintance, Henrietta ("Hen") Mallin. Diamond knows Hen as a supremely competent detective who's rough around the edges and has a raucously humorous approach to life and work––kind of the female version of Diamond. Georgina and Hen promise to be oil and water, so Diamond gives Hen the high sign that they should pretend not to know each other.

A second strand of the story involves a posh girls' school and the disappearance of their unpopular art teacher. When the investigation of Hen's case leads Diamond to inquire into Hen's interest in a series of missing persons cases in West Sussex, the two strands begin to look as if they might be intertwined.

I missed Diamond's working with his team, but his interplay with Dallymore was surprisingly satisfying. At times, Lovesey's depiction of Dallymore tends to the caricature-ish, but there are flashes of a real (though flawed) person in there and I had to admire the way Diamond cleverly plays on Dallymore's vanities to steer the investigation the way he wants.

The solution of the mystery was a little abrupt and not quite satisfying, but it was still a very enjoyable read and definitely helped me feel my good-book drought wasn't dire just yet.

Books for the Ides of April

I know I'm not Thomas Paine, facing the American Revolution, but I can still say these are the times that try men's souls: the overwork and overworry of tax season. As she related on Saturday, Sister Mary Murderous has been taking refuge in a flood of good TV dramas. My zonked outedness at the end of the day and subsequent middle-of-the-night awakenings have cast me into reading one book after another. I mean, I must achieve a suspension of disbelief somehow, if not in sweet dreams, then in a work of fiction––and I'm not talking about our tax returns! The books below are all timely for the Ides of April.

Maybe one of these days we'll see a greedy Owen Laukkanen villain cheat on his taxes. So far, they've been too engrossed with kidnapping (The Professionals), armed robbery (Criminal Enterprise), and running a murder-for-hire operation (Kill Fee) to bother. In The Stolen Ones (G. P. Putnam's Sons, March 2015), we watch a criminal hierarchy involved in the despicable crime of trafficking women. The man at the top is called the Dragon. His financial demands and reputation for ruthlessness put tremendous pressure on Brighton Beach's Andrei Volovoi, whose truck drivers deliver the shipping containers of victims to their final US destinations. Like all of Laukkanen's villains, Andrei considers himself a regular American businessman. Andrei likes to think that any eastern European woman dumb enough to fall for the trap presented by the American dream deserves the box and whatever comes after.

Then one of Andrei's drivers kills a curious sheriff's deputy and Irina Milosovici, who speaks only a smidgeon of English, escapes from the truck's container. Her beloved younger sister, Catalina, remains trapped with others in the box as the truck drives away. [Note to self: Never be reincarnated as a Laukkanen criminal caught in the middle between cops and worse criminals, although Andrei rises––or perhaps the better word is "sinks"––to the occasion.] What ensues is one of the writer's patented three-ring circus thrillers that also examines a serious social issue. Point of view and setting get juggled between the scrambling bad guys, the separated but feisty Milosovici sisters, and an engagingly mismatched duo of good guys: Kirk Stevens, a veteran in the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and Carla Windermere, a hotshot FBI special agent. Tension in The Stolen Ones is already the high-wire sort, but Owen Laukkanen, crafty as usual, yanks and twists the wire. Put this guy on your thriller writers must-read list. I feel like I've popped a Xanax when I hear he's working on another.

After a difficult session with the calculator, take a break with the soothingly cynical company of an Italian crime solver. Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen, Donna Leon's Guido Brunetti, and Andrea Camilleri's Salvo Montalbano come to mind. Add to these Timothy Williams's Commissario Piero Trotti of the Polizia di Stato in northern Italy. The fourth series book is Black August (originally published in 1995 by Trafalgar Square Publishing; re-released by Soho Crime, January 2015). Trotti is a bit like Ian Rankin's Edinburgh cop, John Rebus, whose life revolves around his work, although Trotti's vice of choice is hard candy rather than the bottle. Like Rebus, Trotti is honest and efficient, but his methods are out of the Dark Ages. He alienates people and can't work on a team.

When the questore, who's read Machiavelli's The Prince, warns him to get out of town on vacation rather than join the Rosanna Belloni murder case, Trotti interprets this to mean the questore really wants him to investigate. This is convenient thinking. Rosanna, a retired headmistress whose corpse is found, battered beyond recognition in her bedroom, is an old friend whom Trotti met 20 years earlier when her student, Anna Ermagni, was kidnapped. With this book, you look at the nature of friendship, professional loyalty, and the mental health system, much more pleasant than checking your Form-1040 figures.

I'll tell you right off the bat, screenwriter Daniel Pyne's novel, Fifty Mice (Blue Rider Press, December 2014), isn't for everybody. For one thing, it's noir of the paranoid variety and deals with themes of reality, memory, identity, and fate. For another, it opens with the kaleidoscopic images and confusion of Jay Johnson's abduction off a Los Angeles Metro train, and what's going on in Jay's subsequent Kafkaesque situation only becomes clear to him and the reader over the course of the novel.

When Fifty Mice begins, Jay is 30-ish something and engaged to be married. He currently works in telephone sales, although he previously worked with data obtained from experiments run on laboratory mice, and he still hangs out at his friend Vaughn's lab. This brings us to yet another reason this book isn't for everyone. Laboratory mice have never been as sympathetic as they are in the tidbits Pyne throws our way. They are in about as much control of their tiny, tragic lives as is Jay, because the outraged Jay finds himself trapped in a Witness Protection program on Catalina Island, off the coast of California, an unwilling possessor of a new identity for God-only-knows-what reason. Jay is clueless, but the feds don't believe that for a moment. It will be to Jay's advantage to figure out, uh, something. After reading these reasons for not recommending this book to every reader, those who will enjoy this memorably original noir know who you are.

I still have some experimenting to do with my income taxes. I wish you the best with your own.

The Wolfe of West End Central: Review of The Murder Man by Tony Parsons

The Murder Man by Tony Parsons (Minotaur, October 7, 2014. International Edition published by Century, August 2014, under the title The Murder Bag)

The Murder Man is the first crime novel by well-known British journalist and author Tony Parsons. If you're familiar with his work, you'll see that some patterns are repeated, among them that the protagonist is the single father of a young child.

Detective Constable Max Wolfe lives across from London's Smithfield Market with his five-year-old daughter, Scout, and their new Cavalier King Charles Spaniel puppy, Stan. (Conventional wisdom is that the ideal dog name is two syllables, with a vowel ending, but I love the idea of a cute little sad-eyed, long-eared spaniel named Stan.) Father and daughter are close, Stan is learning about his new home, and all is well, except for the absence and sadness that can sometimes be heard softly echoing around their loft apartment's large spaces.

On the job, Max is a bit of a maverick. But not maverick as in the alcoholic, self-destructive, villain-whispering genius we see so often in today's crime fiction. Max is just a very good cop who sometimes lets his humanity and his inborn sense of duty make him a little bit deaf to orders and the rule book. Just enough of a maverick to have made it seem like a good idea to him to transfer out of anti-terrorism to homicide, to London's West End Central station on the famed Savile Row.

It looks like Max has landed in a good place, with congenial colleagues and a good mentor-type guv'nor, Detective Chief Inspector Malory. His first day on the new job is a shocker, as the team is called to the scene of a homicide in the high-rise office of a posh banking executive, where they find him dead from a brutal, but expertly-applied throat cutting.

Once similar killings reach the magic number of three, we have a serial killer, which not only changes the priority of the investigation, but sends the news outlets and the social media into an orgy of 24-hour coverage. The victims are sons of privilege, which is a wonderful hook for the news stories, websites and tweets, who characterize this as kill-the-rich class warfare and whip the public into an almost celebratory frenzy over the killer the cynical media are calling Bob the Butcher.

Because author Parsons begins the book with a short prologue from 1988––a scene of appalling sexual violence––we know the "whydunnit" of this mystery before the detectives do. This is a daring choice by Parsons, because it could make the reader feel the sleuths are slow on the uptake. But that doesn't happen here. Max and his team are smart and capable, quick on the scent.

Both Tony Parsons and Max Wolfe
like to relax with a spot of sparring

Also, Parsons is writing much more than a whodunnit here. This is very much a character-driven and issues-driven story. Max is human; tough, but also vulnerable, likable and funny, and even a reader like me, who dislikes reading too much about a detective's domestic situation, found Max's family life a plus to the story. Parsons interweaves the plot with issues of privilege, power, inequality and media manipulation. The story is also imbued with a powerful sense of place. Locations include Scotland Yard's Black Museum, its private museum of murder history, complete with weapons and relics going back to Jack the Ripper; the boxing gym Max frequents; Smithfield Market; a posh boys' school in the country.

Tony Parsons, back in his rock-and-roll journalism days.
Yes, that's The Boss, Bruce Springsteen, on the right.

I don't know if anyone else will agree with this, but this book reminded me a little bit of J. K. Rowling's Cormoran Strike series. The connection first came to mind because these are two novelists who are new to crime fiction, but it's more than that.

Both writers have developed very human protagonists who are out of the usual run of hard-drinking own-worst-enemy types. Both authors' crime fiction is character-driven, with a great sense of place, and incorporate commentary about modern society. I think most people who enjoyed Rowling's The Cuckoo's Calling and The Silkworm will be likely to enjoy the grittier The Murder Bag––assuming they can get through that prologue.

I'm thrilled to hear that Parsons plans two more books featuring Max Wolfe. I can guarantee they'll be on my pre-order list.

Notes: I listened to the audiobook of The Murder Bag, read by Colin Mace, who raised the level of the book even higher. After the short prologue, the book is told in first person by Max, and Colin Mace embodied that character perfectly.

Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, Goodreads, BookLikes and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.

Review of Broadchurch by Erin Kelly

Broadchurch by Erin Kelly, based on the story by series creator Chris Chibnall

Back a couple of years ago, I read about a psychology study claiming that people who had been "spoiled"––meaning that they'd learned major plot points in advance––actually enjoyed a book or movie more than those who hadn't. I think that knowing a story in advance can add another layer to the experience; if you know what's going to happen, you may have a more nuanced experience when you see a movie or read a book.

That's why I was interested in reading Broadchurch (Minotaur Books, September 2, 2014), even though I'd watched the Broadchurch series already, on BBC America. (I wrote about the series at length here.) I had David Tennant, Olivia Coleman and Jodie Whittaker in my head whenever Alec Hardy, Ellie Miller and Beth Latimer appeared in the book, and that brought them even more vividly to life. And the novelization allows the reader to know the characters' thoughts (to some extent) and provides a closer look at why some characters do what they do.

West Bay beach, Dorset, filming scene for the Broadchurch series

Author Erin Kelly has written five novels, psychological thrillers, including the recent The Burning Air (see review here) and The Ties that Bind. She has a lean writing style, but with a richness and skill at conveying emotions that works very well in adapting the story written for the screen by Chris Chibnall. The murder of 11-year-old Danny Latimer in the small Dorset beach town of Broadchurch makes friends and neighbors begin suspecting each other and questioning whether they could have prevented Danny's death. This is an excellent setup for the kind of psychological drama that is Kelly's specialty.

Chloe, Mark and Beth Latimer, grandmother Liz

Danny's murder is devastating to his young parents, Beth and Mark, who married when they were teenagers; his older sister, Chloe; and his grandmother. They don't know what to do with the rage that boils inside them, the grief that follows them from room to room and crowds them when they sit on the sofa. Beth, an avid runner, particularly feels the claustrophobia of feeling penned inside the house, but when she rushes to the grocery story to escape, the reactions of the other shoppers make her want to run them down with her cart.

Mark has a secret about where he was when Danny was killed, and the way life works in a small town, he hangs onto it even when it means he falls under suspicion, not just from the police, but even Beth.

DI Alec Hardy (David Tennant), DS Ellie Miller (Olivia Coleman)

And there is more drama with the investigators and journalists. Detective Sergeant Ellie Miller is not only longtime friends with the Latimers, with her son having been best friends with Danny, but Ellie is forced to partner with new-to-town Detective Inspector Alec Hardy, who has been slotted into the job that she'd been assured was going to be given to her. Alec Hardy is terse, seems to think everybody in Broadchurch is an idiot, and is battling personal demons. Hardy and Miller begin as nothing but rough edges to each other, but the friction begins to rub away the edges as they desperately work to keep the investigation on track, despite an increasingly fractious local population and the jackals of the press.

Maggie, Olly and Karen

Olly Stevens, Ellie's young nephew, is a fledgling journalist with the local paper, run by the tough-but-tender veteran, Maggie. Olly hopes to break into the big time, like Karen White, a brash reporter for a big national daily paper, who finds it difficult to reconcile the demands of her editor for tabloid-style stories with the sympathies she increasingly has for the Broadchurch locals. Karen knows Hardy from an earlier case in another town, and they are bitterly at odds.

Along with being an excellent psychological thriller and whodunnit, the story is a rich portrait of small-town life in this beach community on the Dorset coast. You don't often come across crime fiction that takes so seriously the effect of murder on a community. The story races along, with plenty of action, tension and emotion. If you prefer fairly short books, don't be put off by the book's 433 pages. It's a fast read, both because of its pace and the fairly large type.

Anna Gunn will play Ellie Miller in Gracepoint

You might have heard that Fox will be broadcasting a 10-part remake of Broadchurch, called Gracepoint, starting October 2. Despite what I said earlier about having no problem watching/reading after being spoiled, I'm not so sure about Gracepoint. I just watched all the videos on Fox's site and it looks like a pale imitation of Broadchurch. So many scenes have almost exactly the same direction and dialog, but the actors (except for David Tennant, who reprises his role––I guess he's that anxious to become better known in the US) have that buffed and homogenized look that American producers think we want, rather than the very real-looking actors that the British readily cast. From the videos, it appears that looks have been elevated over acting skills, compared to the British cast, at least in some cases. (I'm not talking about Anna Gunn's acting, but just look at some of the other actors' videos.)

I would strongly recommend watching Broadchurch (available on Amazon Instant Video and Netflix)––and reading this book––and then deciding whether you want to see Gracepoint. And look for the second season of Broadchurch, which is being filmed now in the UK and will air on BBC America sometime early in 2015.

Note: Thanks to the publisher for providing a copy of the book for review. Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, Goodreads, BookLikes and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.

Bang-Up Hot-Weather Books

"Talking about a biohazard, you should have a warning posted on the door," my husband said, looking into our bedroom. There I was, sorting and rearranging books. I am at the stage where you have an even bigger mess than the one you started with days before. Books are stacked all over the floor, piled on the bed and falling off the dresser. His remarks were a mistake. He'd been reading about the discovery of 50-year-old vials of smallpox and other deadly viruses forgotten in a US governmental lab's cold storage. Since he put the apocalypse on my mind, as soon as he left the room I abandoned cleaning for digging for books like Nevil Shute's 1957 On the Beach, in which a sailor jumps ship to return home in the aftermath of a nuclear war; Stephen King's The Stand, about a battle between good and evil and a deadly virus called Captain Trips; and Jeff VanderMeer's quiet and creepy Authority (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, May 2014), the second in his Southern Reach mystery/horror/sci fi trilogy. (Authority shouldn't be read until you've read Annihilation (see my review here).)

I'll tell you more about the postapocalypse when I find all my the-future-is-the-pits books. In the meantime, I'd like to mention some books I've come across in my searching, the ones perfect for reading this summer.

A few days ago, I happened upon Reginald Hill's The Price of Butcher's Meat, also published under the better title of A Cure for All Diseases, and couldn't resist a re-read. It's the second to last in the Andy Dalziel and Peter Pascoe series and dedicated to fans of Jane Austen (you'll see why when you read it). Dalziel is at the Avalon clinic in the seaside resort of Sandytown, recovering from injuries suffered in an explosion. While fresh psychology grad Charlotte Heywood's emails to her sister sometimes feel excessive, I love this book for its look at Dalziel as an invalid (!) and Daphne "Big Bum" Denham, a rich woman who likes to make people around her dance. The ocean setting and the murder (a sure nominee for best summer crime scene) make it perfect hot-weather reading. It can be read as a standalone, but it's best appreciated if you already know Hill's characters––and believe me, they're well worth knowing. I'm now reading Death Comes for the Fat Man to remind myself how Dalziel was blown into his coma in the first place (of course, PC Adolphus Hector was involved) and how Peter and Wieldy investigate in the Fat Man's absence.

Scotsman Donald Pace goes missing in northern Africa during World War II in Gerard Woodward's poignant and offbeat comedy Letters from an Unknown Woman (also published as Nourishment). Donald's wife, Tory, works toward the war effort at Farraway’s Gelatine Factory. She has evacuated their children to the Cotswolds and is living southeast of London with her widowed mother, Mrs. Head, as the book begins. Like Death Comes for the Fat Man, Woodward's book begins with a big bang. This one, courtesy of a German bomb, levels Dando's butcher shop next door and provides an almost perfect leg of what Mrs. Head and Tory hope is pork for their dinner. Soon a letter from Donald arrives. He's prisoner at a German stalag and he begs Tory to send him dirty letters. Tory's efforts to satisfy him awaken a new woman. It's much more than a sexual awakening. It's Tory taking charge of her own life. By the time Donald, a very bad sort, returns home, no one is the same.

In I Shall Be Near to You by Erin Lindsay McCabe (Crown, January 2014), onetime tomboy Rosetta Edwards refuses to stay home when her new husband, Jeremiah Wakefield, joins the Union Army to earn money to buy a farm in Nebraska. When he goes off to fight the Civil War, she cuts her hair, becomes "Ross Stone" and passes a cursory physical to fight at his side with other volunteers from rural New York. This beautifully written book, narrated by the memorable Rosetta/Ross, is a love story set against the loud and dirty backdrop of war. It's based on letters written home by hundreds of northern and southern women who actually fought in the Civil War.

And now back to the trenches of book sorting and shelving in our bedroom.

Camp Out with These Books

Conveniently for my daughter, she's rarely home when I want to throttle her. I'm getting ready for a camping trip with friends, so I pulled out our five-person tent. Except it's not our five-person tent. I've never seen this tent before in my life. The last time I saw our tent is when I handed it to my daughter, who took it to a weekend music festival, the kind where there are thousands of tents being taken down on the last day, and your daughter brings back a tent that's not nearly as large or as nice as the one she and her friends originally set off with in her car.

That particular tent may be jinxed. On the way home after purchasing it, I asked my two then-small kids not to tell their dad how expensive it was. It was erected in the living room, and the three of us were looking at it proudly when Hubby/Daddy got home. "Wow, that's a really nice tent. I bet it was pricey, like a hundred bucks," he said. "Yeah, something like that," I smiled. "No, Mommy, it was $xxx.xx," advised our daughter, the overly truthful, little Miss Know-It-All. "Hey, Mommy told us not to tell Daddy how much it cost," scolded her big brother, who liked nothing more than correcting her. Luckily, Hubby/Daddy has a sense of humor, and he just laughed.

Thinking about our jinxed tent today, I hope the people now camping with it are not plagued by blizzards or high winds, since the tent's bad-weather cover remains in our garage. The instructions are there, too. Let me know if you're the (un)lucky person in possession of the tent that formerly belonged to us, and I'll tell you how to set it up. For everyone else, I'll stick to suggesting books you'd be lucky to have for reading in your tent.

After you've doused yourself with mosquito repellent, pitched camp away from the poison oak, and secured your food out of the bears' reach, take refuge in the mean streets of Los Angeles with black homicide detective Elouise ("Lou") Norton in Rachel Howzell Hall's Land of Shadows (Forge, June 2014). Lou's current case involves the death of 17-year-old Monique Darson in a gentrifying development, but Lou sees similarities to her own older sister Tori's unsolved disappearance 25 years earlier. As her investigation proceeds and grows more dangerous, Lou becomes convinced that solving Monique's murder will also close Tori's cold case. Her superiors aren't so sure.

Rachel Howzell Hall
(Getty Images)

Most of the book is narrated by Lou. It's a pleasure to follow Lou as she recalls days leading up to Tori's vanishing and its aftermath, and she deals with her new partner from Colorado, Colin Taggert, who dresses like he's "going to a bar mitzvah at the Ponderosa" and does a bites-his-lip-and-smiles thing when he surveys the attractive Lou. Lou rolls her eyes, although her marriage to Greg, in Japan on business, is wilting. How many "Sorry, Baby" Porsche Cayenne SUVs does a woman want from her cheating husband? Lou is sassy, smart, and tough; writer Hall knows Los Angeles inside out, and she has keen insight into human nature and complex family relationships. This is a great start to a new series. Don't worry about the looming "Z" for Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone: meet the LAPD's Lou Norton.

Okay, I love Lou, and I look forward to seeing more of her in the future, but one should spend only so much time with law enforcement while camping. After all, isn't the point of spending a few nights hanging out with wild animals in the forest to escape civilization? Let's plot a murder (ineptly, it's the funnest way) with Buddy Sandifer, a used-car dealer in the Midwest and father of a teenage son heavily into sex manuals, who wants his wife dead so he can marry his buxom blonde mistress, Laverne, in Sneaky People. This terrific black comic noir, set in the '30s, is written by Thomas Berger, who also wrote the picaresque novel, Little Big Man, which starred Dustin Hoffman when it was adapted for the screen.

When you've had your fill of gazing at the stars and eating s'mores around the fire, light the tent lantern and crawl into your sleeping bag with a book. Now, the book must be absolutely riveting to keep your mind off how incredibly claustrophobic it all is. Think about it: you are lying not only inside a small tent, you are encased in a narrow bag. But don't think about it too much. If the enclosed space is getting to you, and you're in danger of bursting into shrieks and running amok through the camp, you might find it helpful to stuff cotton between each of your toes so they don't touch each other while you're in your sleeping bag. (I have no idea if this actually works because it just occurred to me; however, doesn't the theory behind this suggestion seem sound to you?)

My specific book recommendation depends on the phase of the moon. If there's a full moon, don't just howl at it––read Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Please don't tell me you don't like science fiction. There are certain books even non-sci fi lovers should enjoy, and this is one of them. In it, indentured lunar colony members produce wheat for consumption on Earth. It's 2075 when some of them, aided by a computer named Mike, decide to stage a revolution.

The word "revolution" reminds me of the French (Happy Bastille Day!), which reminds me of Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo. (Trust me, I am working my way toward a point.) If there's not a full moon, but an inky sky glittering with constellations, I suggest you read Alfred Bester's darkly comic oddball tale, The Stars My Destination. You'll see the parallels to Dumas' 1844 adventure masterpiece as Gulliver ("Gully") Foyle, Mechanic's Mate 3rd Class and only man alive on the wrecked and marooned spaceship Nomad, vows revenge against the owners and crew of the Vorga, a passing space vessel that ignores his distress signals. It's a furious, obsessional murderous pursuit through time and space that should distract you from the confinement of your tent and sleeping bag.

I would be grossly irresponsible if I didn't close with a post-apocalyptic horror thriller for your nighttime read. M. R. Carey's The Girl with All the Gifts (Orbit/Hachette, June 2014) is that––and an on-the-road (à la Cormac McCarthy's The Road) and coming-of-age novel, too. Its heroine is a 10-year-old named Melanie, whom Dr. Caldwell calls "our little genius." Melanie lives alone in her cell in a cellblock full of other children. There are no windows, and the children have no memories of any other existence. Five days a week, Sgt. Parks trains a gun on them while they seat themselves in wheelchairs, are strapped in, and are wheeled into a classroom for lessons. Melanie loves her teacher, Miss Justineau, and hopes when she grows up, she can move to Beacon, the closest city in that part of England. Soon thereafter, events take a turn that puts Melanie, Miss Justineau, Sgt. Parks, Pvt. Gallagher, and Dr. Caldwell on the road to Beacon. That's all I want to divulge about the plot and characters.

M. R. Carey

Despite its flaws (clichéd characters and plot elements and an over-long 403 pages), I enjoyed this book for its creepy atmosphere, intricate plotting, examination of our world and a dystopian future, the relationships between the characters, and the chance to see Melanie come into her own. Pandora, who opened a box and gave her gifts to the world, would have enjoyed it, too. When the owls start hooting, pull out Carey's novel, and dig in.

Happy camping and reading, everybody.