back with Black: Even the Dead

 9781627790666
Henry Holt, 2015
287 pp

paperback (my ARC copy from LTER and the publishers -- thank you!)

Even the Dead is number seven in Black's (aka John Banville) Quirke series which begins with Christine Falls, one of my favorites in the entire series.  My guess is that Even the Dead just might be the last Quirke novel --  there is just something I gleaned from the story that makes me feel that way. If not, we'll say I'm wrong and call it a day, but to me it just has that last-of-series feeling.  This one is a bit more subdued than the other Quirke novels -- not nearly as dark in tone but still quite good.  And it is a must read for anyone who's been following this series.  

Set in  "mean and mendacious"  Dublin of the 1950s, a city where the small group behind the powers that be maintain control through a mix of religion, politics, and money, Even the Dead opens with a dead man on the pathologist's slab, being worked on by Dr. David Sinclair, Quirke's assistant and the guy Quirke's daughter Phoebe's been seeing for a while now.  Chief pathologist Quirke is not even at the hospital but rather convalescing from events that started in an earlier story.  The police are certain that the body belongs to a suicide, but Sinclair thinks otherwise and to be sure, he reluctantly calls his boss in for a consultation.  It is actually just what Quirke needs -- being back at work -- and he puts his recovery time aside and goes back to work.  The dead man, Leon Corless,  is the son of a very well-known Communist agitator (this is the 1950s, remember), and Quirke confirms Sinclair's findings that this was no mere accident and definitely not suicide.  While Quirke is getting back into his post-convalescent swing, Phoebe has an adventure of her own when she is contacted by a former classmate who confides to Phoebe that she is both pregnant and in very serious danger.  Phoebe barely remembers her, but sensing that the girl is completely in earnest, she hides her away at a family home.  When she returns later to check on her, the girl is gone, lock stock and barrel, leaving Phoebe feeling despondent:  after all, 

"A person had been given into her care, troubled and terrified, whom she had tried to help, and, somehow, she had failed."

 Phoebe turns to her father, who turns to his friend Inspector Hackett for help both on the Corless case and on the girl's disappearance -- and it isn't long until they discover that the two cases are quite possibly related.

As always in this series of novels, Black's writing is tip-top -- he has a way of not only creating a clever plot but also characters that manage to stay under my skin and make me impatient for the next installment, especially in the main character Quirke, who was driven by "an absence of a past," and who 

"... was aware of no great thirst in himself for justice and the righting of wrongs"

with

"...no illusions  that the world could be set to rights, at least not by him, who could not even set right his own life." 

However, as the story continues and Quirke's present crosses his past, things begin to change, leading to an extremely powerful ending I never saw coming.  

Even though (in my opinion)  Even the Dead is not as dark as its predecessors, there is still a deep,  underlying noirish current that runs throughout the story, which certainly kept me turning pages to see where Black was going to take things. I love this entire series and this newest book did not disappoint.  I would truly hate to see this series end, but as I said earlier, it's written so that it feels like it might just be the last -- here's hoping it's not.  

Who's going to like this book? Certainly readers who've followed the series in order up to now, and readers who enjoy the darker side of crime and characters without going to the darker extreme of true noir.   Cozy fans stay away -- there is nothing, I repeat, nothing even remotely cutesy or nice in this entire book.    Also, since much of this book strays into Quirke's past, it would be doing oneself a disservice to start the series with this novel -- each and every book should really be read in publication order.  

As long as Banville continues to write as Benjamin Black, I'll continue reading what has turned out to be one of my very favorite series of crime novels ever.   I hope I'm in for much, much more. 

The Devotion of Suspect X, by Keigo Higashino

0312375069
St. Martin's, Minotaur
Publication date: 02/2011
original Japanese title: Yogisha X No Kenshin (容疑者 Ｘ の献身)
(Buneishunju Ltd., 2005)
Translated by Alexander O. Smith
 with Elye J. Alexander

First things first: my thanks to Librarything and its Early Reviewers program (and to Minotaur books) for the advanced reader's copy of this novel.  File this one under pre-order, because it's not scheduled to be released until February, 2011. 

To keep myself current in Japanese (and Chinese too), I often watch foreign movies with no subtitles, and I had recently added the movie Yogisha X no kenshin (English title: Suspect X) to my Netflix queue.  So when LT offered this on its list of ER books, I jumped on adding my name to the please, please list so I could read it before watching the film. This book was the recipient of Japan's Naoki Prize for best novel in 2006, and there is also a Japanese TV series called "Detective Galileo" based on Higashino's books. Higashino is also the author of another book on my shelf -- Naoko -- which I haven't yet read but it's probably going to move closer to the top of the TBR pile once I get home.

There's no mystery in this story really -- if you read the blurb on the back, the story is given to you: a single mother (Yasuko Hanaoka) of a teenage girl gets a visit from her ne'er do well ex-husband (Shinji Togashi).  She's been trying to avoid Togashi since the divorce, but he eventually catches up to her at her apartment. Trouble ensues, and Yasuko strangles him.  After some hand-wringing moments of wondering what she's going to do now and how her daughter will fare if she goes to prison, Yasuko's problem is solved when her next-door neighbor Ishigami comes to the rescue. Having heard the commotion through the shared thin walls of the apartment, Ishigami (who has admired Yasuko from afar, stopping in daily at the bentei shop where she works), comes up with a plan -- he will help her get rid of the body, and to protect the object of his affection, he comes up with the perfect alibi for her.  Every possible avenue of police questioning is planned out -- but what Ishigami hasn't counted on is his old university friend Yukawa (nicknamed Detective Galileo by his cop friend), physicist, fellow genius and more importantly, a sometimes-consultant for his detective friend currently working on the case. What follows is a rather challenging and often suspenseful game of cat and mouse that lasts right up until the end -- with a couple of nifty plot twists thrown into the mix to keep the reader guessing.

The characters in this novel are interesting, to say the least, especially Ishigami.  He is somewhat of a loner; a gifted mathematician who is wasted in the classroom teaching teenagers who don't care and who don't understand why they should learn math.  He is a genius who would rather spend his time solving complex mathematical problems or working out extensive mathematical proofs, unconcerned with gaining recognition for his efforts.  One of the most interesting parts of this story revolves around his rather odd devotion to Yasuko, whom he met by chance at a point where he felt that there was "no particular meaning to his life."  I spent the entire novel wondering just what it was that made this man do what he did -- waiting up until the very end for the answer to this question. It's Ishigami who is the cornerstone of this situation -- not the detectives on the case, not his friend Yukawa, not even Yasuko -- and understanding Ishigami is the key to how this entire drama plays out.

I had no translation issues at all with this novel,  and overall it was an interesting journey from start to finish -- especially the nifty twisties in the story. Personally, I found it more of a psychological drama than a mystery or crime fiction novel, but there's enough detective work to keep a crime fiction reader interested. Unlike many other novels of Japanese crime fiction or mystery, this one is rather light -- not as dark as say, something by Akimitsu Takagi or on the level of weirdness of Ryu Murakami's In the Miso Soup, but it's still a good read. I'd recommend it to readers of Japanese crime fiction for sure and to those who enjoy Japanese novels in translation.

Bad Boy, by Peter Robinson

9780061362958
William Morrow
2010
341 pp.

First, my thanks to LibraryThing's early reviewer program and to Morrow for my copy of this book.

Don't do what I did and start this late at night -- you won't want to put it down.  It's that good. Although this book isn't really a whodunit, the tension begins to build very close to the beginning and doesn't let up.

 The 19th installment in Robinson's Alan Banks series, Bad Boy begins with the discovery of a gun.  Julia Doyle contacts the police to report that she's found a gun in her daughter Erin's room, and that she was hoping to speak to Inspector Banks (a long-time friend of the Doyle family), but he's away on vacation in the US.   His partner Annie Cabbot takes the case (gun laws are very strict in the UK)  but things quickly spiral out of control and lead to a major disaster.  Erin had just recently moved back home -- she had been living with Banks' daughter Tracy (who's now going by  "Francesca") until things started heating up between Tracy and Jaff, Erin's boyfriend. Tracy, who's going through a rough patch in her relationship with her dad and in her life in general, decides to let Jaff know that the police are trying to find out where Erin got the gun. She finds herself even more attracted to Jaff,  and offers to help him out by letting him stay in her Dad's cabin -- which turns out to be a really bad decision as the two become fugitives, first from Jaff's criminal connections and then the police.  When Banks returns home, there is no time to waste -- he must find Jaff and Tracy in a hurry to prevent the worst from happening.

I have to own up to only having read the first Inspector Banks novel, so I'm at kind of a disadvantage here as far as the development of the characters and of the series stories in general.  So the big question for me is whether or not I think Bad Boy could work as a standalone novel, and I'd have to say yes. Personally, I prefer series books in the order they're written, but I think in this one, there's enough of a buzz-through kind of history offered by Robinson that overcomes the need for having read the previous 18.  My only complaint:  I figured some of the ending earlier so I wasn't too surprised, but hey, if that's the worst of it all, I can easily overlook it. 

Overall, I thought Bad Boy was quite good -- a bit on the suspenseful side, with enough twists and turns along the way to keep the pages turning -- and I look forward to books 2-18 in the series.