back to the north: Spring Tide, by Cilla & Rolf Börjlind

9781843915157
Hesperus/Nova, 2014
originally published as Springfloden, 2012
473 pp

paperback, copy for review - thank you, Shannon!

I have to offer kudos to the authors for their opening chapter -- I think they designed the first few pages totally for shock value and it worked.  There is one of the most god-awful crimes going on in that chapter, and seriously, I couldn't help but to be drawn in just to see who could have committed such a terrible deed. Eventually all is made clear, but in the meantime, a number of other things are going on that the reader must work through before getting to the big reveal.  On the whole, it's not a bad book -- there are a number of twists and turns throughout the story that keep things interesting and then there's that need to figure out who could have committed such an atrocious opening crime and why that kept me reading -- but on the flip side, there are definitely issues that keep it from being a much better book.

The story begins in 1987 on the west coast of Sweden, on a night of a spring tide.  While the tide is out, three people bury a woman in the exposed sand, leaving only her head exposed, knowing that within fifteen minutes, the waves would be rolling back in with the high tide that would raise the water level about 50 centimeters. They do the deed, not knowing that there is someone else on the beach watching them. As the tide starts to come back in, we are told that not only is this poor woman pregnant, but that her water has broken.  Nearly a quarter of a century later, in 2011, young Olivia Rönning, a police-college student, is just about to start her summer holidays.  One of her instructors has a file of cold cases in his hand, and offers them a "voluntary" summer project: they are to choose one case, make an analysis of the investigation, and see if they can find anything that have been done differently - "a little exercise in how cold cases can be tackled." Olivia chooses one that her father, now deceased, had worked on as a DCI in the national crime squad.  As it just so happens, it's the murder of the pregnant woman that occurred in 1987 in Hasslevikarna, on the island of Nordkoster. Olivia really gets into this murder study, mainly because the woman's identity had never been established  - and comes up with all kinds of ideas.  The first thing she does is to look for the original investigating officer, Tom Stilton, only to find out that no one seems to know where he is. Later she will discover his whereabouts and they will team up, but first, she decides to go to Hasslevikarna herself and find out what she can there.

While Olivia is off playing girl detective, the streets of Stockholm are in a bit of turmoil. Some very nasty people are attacking the homeless on the streets, beating them up,  filming the violence on their cell phones and then sending the video to a website called Trashkick.  The police haven't seemed very interested in getting to the bottom of things, but when a woman is killed, one roughsleeping man in particular decides he needs to find out who did this, only to find out that the problem is even worse than he'd imagined.  Then there's a storyline regarding a minerals magnate who maintains his interests through some pretty unsavory methods, but who will do anything to save himself and his fortune when someone from the past pops up, threatening to reveal a shared secret.  The book encompasses all of these plotlines, along with running social commentary,  mainly on the lack of a safety net for the not-so-fortunate in Stockholm.

from hem.bredband.net

So - while I enjoyed the basic whodunit solving of the story as well as  some surprising twists that kept cropping up that appealed to my need to play armchair detective,  I think the authors were a little overambitious here.  If the story had been reined in a little more, more tightly controlled with a lot of extraneous stuff edited out,  it would have made for much better reading.  Second, I just couldn't help noticing the number of  coincidences that play a huge role throughout the book, some of them just too fluky to be credible. Then there's main character Olivia -- while she becomes embroiled in this particular cold case for her own reasons, sometimes she comes across as a less-serious heroine than one would expect. It's almost as if the authors felt they needed a young-adult component to reach a wider reading audience.  Teaming her up with the inwardly-tormented Stilton was a great idea, but even there, he's definitely the one in control. And finally, while I think crime fiction is an excellent venue for exploring social issues, it has to be done in moderation and in the context of the story to come off in a very good way -- here, it's just a little overdone for my personal taste.

So far, from what I can tell, reader reviews have been positive, with a number of people eager for Spring Tide to branch out into a series.   If that happens, I would likely give a second book a read -- while the Börjlinds may be seasoned television scriptwriters, this is their first attempt at novel writing, and they wouldn't be the only newbie novelists who were a little overambitious initially but who came back stronger in their next attempt.

for TLC book tours: Laura Lippman's After I'm Gone

9780062083418
William Morrow, 2014
331 pp

paperback, sent by the publisher  -- thanks!

After I'm Gone is the first book I've read by Laura Lippman, an author with eighteen published novels,  a collection of short stories, and one book scheduled to be published in February of 2015.  After I'm Gone is a standalone novel,  not part of her ongoing series, although  PI Tess Monaghan does make a very brief appearance in this book, albeit unconnected to the story at hand.  It is less a crime novel than a family saga, and when all is said and done, the novel reveals how a single moment of decision can have effects that continue to reverberate through time.

Felix Brewer has done pretty well for himself -- he's a successful bookie who has a few other shady side businesses as well as a legitimate enterprise, a small coffee shop.  He is  married to Bambi, with whom he has three daughters, but Felix also has a few women on the side. One of these women is Julie Saxony, a stripper who goes by the moniker Juliet Romeo who is in love with Felix and hopes that someday he'll leave Bambi for her, even though Felix has always been up front about no divorce. In 1976, after Felix is convicted for his criminal activities, rather than face prison, he just takes off, without a word to his family. Ten years to the day after he leaves, Julie Saxony disappears, and it's assumed that she's gone off to be with Felix. However, some years later, her body is discovered in a park. While the publicity surrounding Julie's death dredges up the whole Felix story again, the killer is never found and the case just sort of goes nowhere.   Now, in the present, a cold-case consultant and retired detective named Roberto "Sandy" Sanchez picks up the cold trail, determined to solve the case. 

If this were the long and short of the story, I'd classify it solely as crime fiction, but as I noted, it's more of a long-term family drama. After I'm Gone actually examines the effects of Felix's disappearance from the points of view of the women in his life -- his wife, his daughters, and Julie Saxony, his mistress.  Character, rather than plot, drives this novel that spans several decades, and Sandy, through his investigation,  is there to tie things all together. The Brewer women limp by over the years,  with Bambi, who has literally gone from riches to rags, shored up emotionally and financially by the daughters and supported by close family friends. In the meantime,  Julie Saxony, who is strangely concerned with keeping tabs on Felix's family,  is determined to make something of herself, up until the day that someone kills her.

Considering that the word "thriller" is used in the back-cover blurb,  I  expected much more crimewise. While I'll admit that it was difficult not to become interested in their lives, I found that  there are a number of chapters where I had to question the relevance to what is going on overall in the bigger picture of the crime. And then there's Sandy, who's trying to solve the case but  really only gets only bit parts in this book as compared  to everyone else. Even when we're in a Sandy chapter, there's more about his self-perceived failures in life than his police work. This gets old really fast.  I liked Sandy and wanted to see more of him professionally, but that just wasn't the case.   I also figured out the who way before the police did, which is kind of sad, considering the possible number of suspects in this book.  

When all is said and done, I was drawn into the story, even though it's not nearly as edgy as the crime I normally read.  I liked the multiple points of view approach and the long span of time that really lets the reader get to know the characters.   I'd recommend it to people who enjoy crime writing  on the lighter side, and to people who are happiest reading character-,  rather than plot-driven novels. 

My thanks to TLC book tours for offering me a look into this novel.  This is a tour, so many bloggers have offered their take on this book, and you can find them all here. 

and she's back ... with Thomas H. Cook's A Dancer in the Dust

9780802122728
The Mysterious Press/Grove Atlantic, 2014
308 pp

hardcover - sent to me by the publisher (thank you!)

"The trouble is that we always define 'forward' as moving in our direction...But not everyone can, and not everyone should." 

I've been reading Thomas H.Cook's novels for some time now, but it seems to me that his previous two books The Crime of Julian Wells and Sandrine's Case marked a serious departure from his earlier works.  Now he's back again, taking his writing in yet another direction with A Dancer in the Dust, which I seriously debated for a while as to whether or not it's truly crime fiction or something else entirely. In the long run, I decided to post here, since there is most definitely a crime that lies at the heart of this book, but in many ways it's much more of a timely novel set in a very risk-fraught part of the world that most of us will probably never experience.  It's a story of great loss and one man's chance at personal redemption, and it is very, very good.  

In New York City, risk-assessment consultant Ray Campbell picks up a phone call one day, and on the other end is someone from his past. The topic of the conversation is the murder of  someone Ray once knew "from the old days," when he was an idealistic younger man with no interest in politics hoping to make a difference in the world -- more specifically,  in the African country of Lubanda.  Campbell arranges to see the caller, Bill Hammond, who Ray also knew "from the old days," to talk about the murder of Seso Alaya. Alaya, it seems, had phoned Hammond earlier in the week, to tell him he had something to show him, but never told Hammond exactly what it was.  Before Hammond and he could get together, Seso was murdered.  When a certain clue is revealed to Campbell, he realizes that Seso, who had probably scraped together every penny he made at his job in Lubanda to come to New York, was there about another person Bill and Ray had known in Africa, Martine Aubert, a white woman who was also a native Lubandan and who stood firm against changes being forced upon her.   Hammond is now the head of the Mansfield Trust, an organization that is a "kind of a holding company for a large number of charitable institutions and NGOs," that makes recommendations on whether "billions in aid might or might not pour into any particularly country" (and whose decisions are closely followed by highly-placed politicians, and other important sources of funding).  The Trust is "poised to offer a great deal of aid to Lubanda," and, as Hammond notes, if they give the green light, then lots of other organizations will follow suit. He needs to know what Seso wanted him to see, so he tasks Ray with getting to the bottom of things.  Ray agrees, and in the process of helping Hammond, memories of Lubanda come flying back, especially those of his  "Dancer in the Dust," Martine.  His search will also bring him back there physically, not only on Hammond's behalf, but also to  face down his own demons about what happened there a long time ago. 

However, there is so much more to this book than a simple who/whydunit. In and around this New York murder, the author examines some tricky issues, especially in questioning the benefits of humanitarian and other forms of aid to what we consider underdeveloped nations. Even the very best of intentions may result in unforeseen consequences, as Martine, for example, points out when Ray wants to build a well.  In a scene that was a bit of an eye-opener for me, Ray has drawn an x on the map where he wants to build it, and asks Martine her opinion, but her response is not what Ray had expected. She draws a circle around the x and explains

" 'The nomads will come to this well...and because of the water, they will have bigger herds. But to and from the well, these larger herds will eat more of the grassland, and so the nomads will have to move farther and farther from the well to feed their animals.' She drew a second, wider circle around the x. 'The grasses will be eaten clean first here.' She drew a third, still larger circle. 'Then here.' Now a much larger circle. 'Then here.' She looked at Bill. 'All their cows will die within the first circle.' She handed Bill back the pencil, her gaze now fixed on him intently. 'When that happens the nomads will have nothing to trade for the grains and materials they need. No meat or milk. Nothing to sustain them...but your water...You are friends of Lubanda, but even so, it is important to know the consequences of what you do.' "

Aid also ends up in goods that are stockpiled and sold on the black market or in other venues, and when a country's leader gets rich off of that, there's always someone who's envious of the generated wealth and wants it for himself. And the cycle continues, often starting wars, or bringing to power tyrannical leaders who care nothing for the people of the country, but for how much profit there is to be made in receiving outside assistance.  While the author acknowledges that there are genuinely good people with honest intentions of making a difference, there is always a cost of some sort to be paid by those they are trying to help. Martine hopes to show Ray that everything is "more connected to other things."  Another big theme in this novel is the way in which foreigners with money push for change in these countries, "to buy what they sell and to make what they, these 'others,' want to buy," and that outside money that promotes change often leads to a form of slavery, begging, or at the very least, upsets the traditional order of things. As Martine notes in this book,  "Lubandans should be Lubandans;" if there are tribal rivalries, let them be just that.  Another theme that the author hits on in this book is the issue of racial justification; there are other powerful elements that come into play as well,  but sadly, space and time limitations do not fully allow me to do this book justice. 

Letting A Dancer in the Dust stand on its own without trying to draw comparisons to Mr. Cook's other books is probably a very good idea since it is so very different.   The story itself is told across different time periods, through flashbacks that are Ray's memories of the past, ultimately revealing the reason behind his need for personal redemption.  Ray starts out as a naive idealist, but years after all he's been through, he comes to realize a fundamental truth about how people become lost "in a wilderness of error." And, as he notes, 

"...there is none deeper, nor more fraught with peril, than to believe that your world, your values, your sense of comfort and achievement, should be someone else's too."

Actually, this is a concept I believe in wholeheartedly, so the book was quite powerful, resonating with me on a very personal level.

All in all, A Dancer in the Dust is a very serious, sad, and tragic story, with no warm fuzzies of any sort.  It should provide its readers with a great deal of food for thought based on the issues the author presents here. While there is a good mystery to be had here, the novel definitely does not fall within the typical mystery category,  and frankly,  that's okay by me. I love when authors use their writing  to take on big issues.

 I have only a very small niggle here. Ray's job as a risk-assessment consultant leads him to make certain platitudes throughout the novel about the lessons of risk. For a while, these little rules were okay, fit in well into what the author was trying to illustrate, and I really understand why the author allowed him to do this, but after a while, the continuing referrals to risk assessment started getting old. This, I realize, is a really nit-picky kind of thing that may not bother anyone else, but it did me. Otherwise, every time I had to put this book aside, I couldn't wait to get back to it.  It's like I knew something terrible was going to happen but couldn't stop reading until I discovered exactly what it was. And why.

So far, reader reviews of this novel have been generally positive, and I will add my vote to the accolades.  If you are at all interested in the topic, you should not miss this one. I promise it will keep you turning pages.

two reads on the existential plane: Savage Night, by Jim Thompson and The Panda Theory, by Pascal Garnier

I'm sort of inundated with family for the rest of the month so I don't have time for my usual chatty reviews, but I've finished a couple of good ones I'd like to pass along.  Actually, I don't really have time right now to even post a review, so here are the titles:

First up there's Savage Night, by Jim Thompson, one of the darker books I've read this year and really geared toward fans of said darkness and noir;

and then something a little less dark than Savage Night but still not light, The Panda Theory, by Pascal Garnier:

The cover blurb that says "A little jewel of black humour..." is not wrong, but I'd call it more on the bleak side. The Panda Theory is from Gallic Press, an imprint I've just discovered, and I liked it so much I now have four of their novels by Garnier.   Another one recommended for fans of literary darkness.

I have family here through the 30th so there's no time to read, much less update my reading journal, but I really want to talk about both of these novels so I'll table the discussions until later.

now here's something refreshingly different: The Devil's Road to Kathmandu, by Tom Vater

kindle copy
2012
Crime Wave Press
(also in paperback)

I'll be on this indie writer/indie press kick for a while since I have so many small-press books in my library, and some on my kindle (although I really don't prefer ebooks over real ones). First up is a book by author Tom Vater, who is not only a crime writer, but who also co-founded Crime Wave Press. As the little blurb at Crime Wave's website notes,

"Founded in 2012 by publisher Hans Kemp of Visionary World and writer Tom Vater, Crime Wave Press publishes a range of crime fiction - from whodunits to Noir and Hardboiled, from historical mysteries to espionage thrillers, from literary crime to pulp fiction, from highly commercial page turners to marginal texts exploring our planet's dark underbelly." 

Can we say right up my alley? So having heard about this small press, I decided to give The Devil's Road to Kathmandu a read, and now I'm planning on reading my way through this publishing company. Not all at once for sure, but their books will be worked into my regular crime fiction reads.

The Devil's Road to Kathmandu is divided into two different time periods, but moves easily back and forth across both; not an easy task for some writers, but here the author does it most assuredly.  In 1976, three British hippie friends Fred, Tim and Dan, make a plan to drive across Asia  to India  to buy drugs and then sell them again once they reach Nepal.  They buy a Bedford bus specifically for the trip; as Dan says to his friends, "We've got the opportunity to do something different with our lives."  They are pretty much stoned all of the time, pot, acid, opium, you name it they did it, but it's a great adventure.  In Ishafan, Iran,  the trio adds another traveler to the mix, Thierry, from France, whom they met at a nightclub called the Blue Parrot. It seems that Thierry owes some money to the wrong people and needs to make an escape.  He  joins the adventure as they make their way into Pakistan, which  turns out to be a nightmare, but the group makes it into India and finally into Nepal, where they decide to bank the drug money they've made.  Dan and Tim fly on home, Thierry decides to stay and wait for the woman he loves, and Fred just  disappears. Flash forward to 2000, and now Dan's son Robbie has gone on his own journey in the same area.  He meets up with his dad, who has returned to Kathmandu after all this time, drawn there by an email from the long-lost Fred who reminds him that the money's still there and he & Tim should come and get it. Unfortunately for all, it seems that their pasts have come back to haunt them.

There are plenty of unique, crazy and offbeat characters that fill this novel, and the author has a keen eye for detail.  The part of this story that took place in the Blue Parrot is one of my favorites, and is an excellent example of how the author sets a scene that sucks the reader right into the action. Using impressive descriptions, dialogue that's totally believable and creating such a realistic atmosphere that you feel like you're actually there along with the boys from the bus drinking it all in, he's created a world out of this nightclub that I hated to leave. And that's only one instance ... he does the same where ever the action is -- in Pakistan, India, and most especially in Kathmandu.  This is definitely not your average crime novel, which is a very good thing. Definitely and most highly recommended.

betrayal abounds in The Accident, by Chris Pavone

9780385348454
Crown Publishing, 2014
385 pp

hardcover from publisher, thanks!

The main focus of this novel is a  manuscript titled The Accident, which  if published threatens to take down the wide-ranging, worldwide empire of media mogul Charlie Wolfe. The anonymous author  has written a tell-all book that exposes a lot of egregious secrets about the rich and powerful, and the manuscript also churns up an incident in Wolfe's past that the author now decides to reveal.  Isabel Reed, who receives the manuscript with only an e-mail address as a contact, has to make a pretty hefty decision herself: should she make sure that this book gets published?  Should she pretend that she'd never read it or even received it? Or should she go the authorities, the news media itself, or even call the White House? Figuring that she can't be killed "in front of the whole world," if she goes public, she decides to hand the book off to an acquiring editor she knows would be the right person to see it through.  Unknown to Isabel, along with Wolfe, there's a CIA agent in Copenhagen who also doesn't want the book to be published; in fact, he doesn't want the manuscript to exist at all.  But as it turns out, the manuscript is already making its way into hands other than those belonging to  Isabel and her editor friend, as others see it as a perfect medium for saving or making their careers.  

At the heart of this novel it's all about betrayal, and trust me, there is a lot of duplicity and double-dealing going on all through this book.  Well beyond the anonymous author's exposé of Wolfe, there are people who see the manuscript as a way to elevate or launch their respective careers, there is one who sees its potential as not only a blockbuster but also a way to save a failing business, and there are other, more personal types of betrayals going on among some of the characters as well. This theme was well expressed, and the look behind the scenes at the publishing industry is quite interesting, especially the fact that it sometimes takes only a look at the first page to decide whether a book is worthy of continuing on to the second or not.  The author's bio page at his website reveals that he knows what he's talking about, since he spent nearly two decades working at a number of different publishing houses. And I do have to say that  I particularly enjoyed the piece-by-piece unraveling of one particular secret that isn't made known until the very end.   But let's face it: the trope of the anonymous manuscript that if made known will cause empires to crumble and secrets of the rich and powerful to be released is just not that original any more. Not only that, but the big secret that the anonymous author refers to in the title of his manuscript would be along the same lines as if someone had revealed that Steve Jobs had done something heinous  in his college years -- yeah, it's shocking, but that act alone wouldn't have brought down either Apple or Jobs, especially nowadays. In my head, I'm thinking that all of the other stuff that Wolfe was up to would have been far worse and better to focus on as the meat of the anonymous manuscript.  Bottom line here: while there is some suspense that kept me reading this novel, I've read better.  

I'm looking at reader criticism on another screen right now, and most people are saying that The Accident is not nearly as good as Pavone's The Expats, so I'll probably try to rotate that one into my reading schedule to see what I may have missed.  All in all, this one was just okay. 

reorganizing the eurocrime room

My husband thought this was very funny -- it's me cleaning out the room where the Eurocrime lives. He posted the photo on his facebook page, and the caption reads "would you call this a book problem?" I guess he doesn't understand that I have to make a mess to get things organized.