Sara Paretsky - Shell Game

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Classic Paretsky

I thought Shell Game was very good. I enjoyed Sara Paretsky’s early books but I haven’t read one for many years. I’m pleased to say that she’s still as good as ever.

Here, Vic is drawn into two apparently separate investigations involving friends and family as a young great-nephew of a close friend is suspected of murder while a niece (sort of – it’s complicated) comes to her because her sister has vanished. A complex plot develops involving stolen Middle Eastern artefacts, corporate malfeasance, Russian mobsters, Vic getting knocked about...well, it’s classic Paretsky. There is a monumental coincidence at its heart, but it hangs together well and makes an exciting and involving read.

Paretsky uses her very well-drawn characters to cast light on the present-day USA, with a convincing picture of the increasing, mindless conflation of “muslim” and even “immigrant” with “terroroist,” and some sharp stabs at the current political situation in general. Some are a little crude, but for the most part she gives an intelligent critique and creates a very convincing atmosphere.

Shell Game shows that Sara Paretsky deserves her place in the pantheon of great contemporary crime writers and that she is writing as well as ever. I enjoyed it very much and I can recommend it warmly.

(My thanks to Hodder & Stoughton for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Graham Norton - A Keeper

Rating: 3/5

Review:

Excellently written but slightly disappointing

Graham Norton has shown himself to be a very good, insightful and humane writer. All these qualities are plain in A Keeper, but as a novel I didn’t think it quite delivered.

The story is told in two time-frames; Elizabeth Keane returns to the small town in the west of Ireland where she grew up to deal with the estate of her recently dead mother. She discovers a cache of letters from the father she never knew and we get the intercut stories of her search for the truth of her origins and of the events of the past as they happened. It’s a sad, rather bizarre story whose lessons are mirrored in current events for Elizabeth.

Graham Norton writes beautifully. As in Holding (which I enjoyed very much) it is a delightful surprise that an apparently frivolous, rather waspish TV host can create such rounded, human and sympathetic characters and conjure atmosphere and sense of place so evocatively. Early on, for example, we get a poignant picture of the emotional bleakness of revisiting a now-unoccupied childhood home and excellently painted portraits of relatives whose desperation to pry and to get their hands on things from the house is dressed up as concern for Elizabeth.

A Keeper is a pleasure to read in this respect, but I didn’t find enough real content to keep me fully engaged. There is a tension, but its resolution is signalled early on, the Life Lessons applied to Elizabeth’s current situation felt a bit clunky, and the emotional insights didn’t seem that original, however beautifully portrayed the characters may be.

Overall, this didn’t deliver as much for me as Holding. However, this may be just a personal response; A Keeper is very well written and well worth a try to see if it suits you, even if I’m a little lukewarm about it.

(My thanks to Coronet for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Ian Rankin - In A House Of Lies

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Classic Rankin

Rebus may have been told that he is in a “managed decline,” but I’m delighted to say that Ian Rankin certainly isn’t. In A House Of Lies is excellent.

When long-dead body is discovered in an abandoned car Siobhan Clarke and Malcolm Fox are part of the MIT investigating. Rebus, now well retired from the force, was part of the original investigation and becomes involved in this, too – not always to the delight of the team. It’s classic Rankin: complex, well structured and nuanced, with his three central characters especially being extremely well drawn.

There’s a lot of good crime fiction being written at the moment, but for me, this shows why Ian Rankin still stands out from the rest and remains among among the very best writers in the genre. He generates an excellent and wholly unforced atmosphere, sense of place and feel of police work and his characters, plot and dialogue are all completely convincing to me. That long, shadowy, complex relationship between Rebus and Big Ger Cafferty is still a brilliant feature and Rankin is doing an excellent job of widening the central focus of the books to include Clarke and Fox. Most of all, In A House Of Lies is completely compelling; I was hooked and sorry to reach the end.

Probably all that really need be said is that this is a very fine Ian Rankin novel. The man is still at the peak of his form and I can recommend this very warmly indeed.

(My thanks to Orion for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Chris McCrudden - Battlestar Suburbia

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Enjoyably witty

I enjoyed Battlestar Suburbia; it is witty, imaginative and well written, but it did go on rather too long for me.

Chris McCrudden has taken an old SF trope and given it a fresh and amusing tweak. It is several millennia in the future; machines rule the world and permit humans only to perform menial cleaning functions and to live on orbiting “Dolestars”. However, McCrudden’s machines are the products of a type of evolution which gives them character traits reminiscent of their original ancestors – a homely, domestic breadmaker or a bossy, arrogant smartphone, for example. He uses the story of the accidental spawning of a human rebellion to sling satirical barbs at a good deal of current human activity, including use of the internet, sexism, scaremongering totalitarian politicians and much besides. It’s well done and often made me smile and even chuckle once or twice; the notion of a nuclear missile with the personality of a sulky teenager might give you the idea. (And, by the way, I liked that, without making a fuss about it, almost all the chief protagonists were women.)

It’s a good read which, crucially, never feels as though it’s congratulating itself on being so cleverly amusing. However, I found it became very fractured at times and even the willing suspension of disbelief didn’t quite make up for some of the more absurd developments and illogicalities in the machines’ make-up. I found that the central tenet didn’t quite support the book until the end and it could have done with a little tightening up.

I can recommend Battlestar Suburbia. It is the first of a series, though, and I’m not sure that I’ll rush to read the next book; I think that for me the idea may have run its course.

(My thanks to Farrago for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Neil MacGregor - Living With The Gods

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Another gem from MacGregor

This is another excellent book from Neil MacGregor. I have no expertise in this area, but as a lay reader I found it a thoughtful, erudite and immensely illuminating book.

MacGregor takes a similar approach to that in his previous outstanding books, A History Of The World in 100 Objects and Shakespeare’s Restless World, in that he uses artefacts fascinatingly to illustrate his subject, basing each brief chapter around a subject which has has religious significance like sacrifice, water and so on. Thus, this isn’t a conventional history of religion at all, but a very insightful look at the way in which worship in its many diverse forms has played a part in human life from the earliest objects we know of to the present day. As always, MacGregor makes shrewd, penetrating and very humane points, leaving us with much to think about. It’s a great book to read a chapter or two at a time, I think, and then to come back to.

The book is beautifully illustrated and MacGregor’s unfussy, readable style is a pleasure. I can recommend this very warmly.

Eric Ambler - The Levanter

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A very good period thriller

I enjoyed The Levanter. It is (to my shame)the forst Eric Ambler that I have read, and I’m impressed. It’s a good story, well told.

Set in Syria 1970 (and first published in 1972), this is the story of Michael Howell, a businessman whose factory is taken over by very radical terrorists who are manufacturing the means of a terror attack. Howell is compelled to go along with this and the story becomes very tense and gripping as the planned attack approaches.

I found the first 30 pages or so rather unengaging, but it got much better quite quickly, so do persist if you’re not immediately gripped. Ambler’s style is quiet, detailed and more about building tension than violent action, which he does extremely skilfully. It is largely narrated by Howell himself, with two other voices to help set the scene and who also imply that Howell himself may not be an entirely reliable narrator. It all adds up to an interesting, gripping story.

I can see why Ambler was so highly regarded in his day and on this evidence I’ll be happy to try some more of his books. Recommended.

(My thanks to Agora Books for an ARC via NetGalley.)

William Boyd - Love Is Blind

Rating: 3/5

Review:
A bit bored by Boyd

I enjoyed parts of Love Is Blind, but I found a good deal of it dull and I’m not sure that it added up to much in the end.

The book follows Brodie Moncur from his early working life in the late 19^th Century as a talented piano-tuner in Edinburgh as his work and his health needs take him to various places in France, Russia and beyond. He develops an obsessive love for a Russian singer and this is both the driver of the book’s events and the main subject of William Boyd’s interest.

For the first third or so of the book I was carried along by Boyd’s easy prose and the interest which, slightly surprisingly, I found in the details of Brodie technical work on pianos. The trouble is, I wasn’t very convinced by Brodie’s passion and found that I was more interested in his piano-tuning than the state of his heart. I got no real sense of obsession and I also found it completely un-erotic, despite some fairly graphic descriptions. This is not a good combination in a tale of overmastering passion and as the story moved from place to place I kept thinking, "OK, you're somewhere else now and you're still in love with her. And…?” I wasn’t drawn in by the period setting, either. The language isn’t always convincing and there are some rather clunky references to contemporary events and so on.

Things picked up a little in the later part of the book with some more dramatic developments and sense of threat, but it still wasn’t all that involving. It wasn’t helped by a somewhat melodramatic feel and in the end I was quite glad to finish the book, whose emotional climax didn’t affect me in the slightest, I’m afraid, because it felt contrived and overdone. Love Is Blind is by no means terrible, but it certainly isn’t one of Boyd’s best and I can only give it a very lukewarm recommendation.

(My thanks to Penguin for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Stella Rimington - The Moscow Sleepers

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Not for me

I didn’t get on well with The Moscow Sleepers. It felt rather formulaic and wasn’t well enough written to convince me of the characters or the plot.

The book is about possible Russian agents (“sleepers”) in the west and MI5 and related agencies’ attempts to uncover them and their activities, with her principal character, Liz Carlyle of MI5 at the centre of things. Stella Rimington obviously knows this world intimately, but portraying it convincingly in a novel is another matter. She has a slightly forced prose style, as though she hasn’t quite moved from official documents to a relaxed, flowing style of her own in fiction. Some stale usages and clichés crop up fairly regularly, like the character who, before going away, “had to get her ducks in a row first” for example, which I found off-putting.

There are an awful lot of characters, almost invariably introduced as they are travelling somewhere or waiting for something and thinking about...followed by a lengthy, sometimes very over-lengthy, potted history. All these rather clunky introductions made each one seem less like a rounded, real person and more like yet another slightly unconvincing character to keep track of. I began to mutter “Oh, for heavens’ sake” to myself when, even well into the novel, yet more new characters were introduced in exactly the same way, complete with physical description and biographical background. It gets very wearing.

Rimington does like to tell us things rather than show us, often at tediously painstaking length; there is none of the subtlety and tension of le Carré or the wit of Mick Herron, for example, nor even the slow, meticulous plot and character development of Gerald Seymour. Take this little extract, for example: “Liz window-shopped apparently aimlessly, though a close observer would have noted how she lingered at the fronts with large curved windows, and a professional observer might have concluded that she was using the windows to keep an eye on what was going on behind her. She seemed to conclude that nothing was amiss, for she turned with no hesitation into Stresemannstrasse.” Quite apart from the infelicity of the use of “conclude” twice so close together, it’s a terribly laboured description of something so easy and basic. It all got too much for me, I’m afraid.

All this made the book rather a slog for me. I found it pretty unconvincing throughout, it didn’t engage me and I can’t really recommend it.

(My thanks to Bloomsbury for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Patrick deWitt - French Exit

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Dull, self-regarding and mannered

I’m afraid I didn’t get on with French Exit at all. It seems to me to be a novel which thinks a great deal of itself but adds up to very little.

Frances, a wealthy, viciously bitchy, snobbish New York widow (Really? Again?) completely dominates her overweight, ineffectual son Malcolm, and destroys any other relationship he may develop (Really? Again?). Her financial profligacy means that she is reduced to the abject penury of her last few hundred thousand dollars, and her only (improbable) friend offers her use of a vacant apartment in Paris. This takes the best part of a hundred pages and although the book improves a bit in Paris, I simply couldn’t raise any interest in the story or its uninteresting and clichéd characters. We are told that Patrick deWitt is taking satirical jabs at his subjects, but to me it just felt like another uninteresting novel of New York’s rich – in whose lives the rest of the world ought to be hugely interested, apparently. Malcolm has a fiancé (well, any woman would fall in love with an obese, gauche, inarticulate man with some bizarre habits who is utterly dominated by his vile mother, wouldn’t she?) who at one point thinks, “The mother of the man she had accidentally fallen in love with did not approve of their union: this was so. But it was a common problem, wasn’t it? It was a trope.” Well, yes, it is, as is much of the rest of the book. The trouble is that none of it is much more than that.

Oh, it’s “beautifully written” of course – but in that self-conscious “beautiful writing” way that makes it often seem tediously arch to me and sometimes downright mannered; the use of “this was so” in the little extract above, or “Malcolm was yet in his hotel room,” (“yet”?) for example. It just jars on me, seeming out of place in context and thoroughly self-regarding.

French Exit has had some favourable reviews, but I found it to be dull, mannered and much of it was a struggle to get through. There have been some very fine novels involving New York’s rich; The Bonfire Of The Vanities, A Little Life and some others spring to mind, but this doesn’t have anywhere near their quality of satire or insight. I didn’t utterly hate it, but it was hard work and I really didn’t get much from it. I doubt whether I’ll bother with any more of Mr deWitt’s work.

(My thanks to Bloomsbury for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Victor Cornwall & St John Trevelyan - Scoundrels

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Amusing stuff

I found Scoundrels amusing but not quite as hilarious as some other reviewers did.

It purports to be the memoirs of a couple of upper crust chaps, now long retired, who have had all sorts of outrageous adventures and who, in between chapters of reminiscence, snipe at each other very amusingly. It’s well written and quite outrageous; they are self-seeking, brutal and uncaring with a casual, blind arrogance which far outstrips any abilities they may have. The scrapes they get into are absurd and often entertainingly disgusting (Cornwall’s recovery from fugu poisoning is quite appalling, for example).

How funny you find this will depend on your sense of humour, but it’s well done (in a field which has some terrible turkeys in it). I find it quite entertaining; I read it in smallish chunks, but I do keep going back for more and I will certainly read any subsequent volumes.

(My thanks to Farrago for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Lawrence Osborne - Only To Sleep

Rating: 3/5

Review:

Rather dull 

I’m afraid I found Only To Sleep pretty dull and rather aptly titled for me. As a lover of Chandler’s originals I approached it with some scepticism, especially after John Banville’s The Black-Eyed Blonde, which I thought was a pretty dreadful pastiche of Chandler’s style. This was stylistically better, but really didn’t add up to much.

It’s a good idea in many ways to set the book in 1988, when Marlowe is 74 years old; his narrative voice is calmer, less snappy and the wisecracks and brilliant similes almost absent. It’s reasonably plausible from an older Marlowe and avoids having to try to imitate the inimitable originals. The trouble is, it’s not very interesting. The plot, such as it is, revolves around a dodgy death in Mexico, to where Marlowe has now retired. He is persuaded to look into the matter by an insurance company who aren’t happy about the claim and then...not very much happens. I remember an old Private Eye parody of one of the le Carré TV adaptations along the lines of:

Lengthy shot of Smiley walking slowly up a lane to the door of a house.

Smiley knocks.

Long pause.

Window opens upstairs and a woman’s face appears.

Smiley: “My name is Smiley. George Smiley.”

Pause.

Woman: “Go away!”

Window slams. Long close-up of Smileys thoughtful face. Eventually he turns away.

Lengthy shot of Smiley’s back as he walks slowly away from the house.

Repeat for four following scenes.

Well, I got rather that feeling with Only To Sleep. Marlowe talks to a lot of people whom we don’t know in unfamiliar places so it’s all rather hard to keep track of. A very slow picture of the dead man emerges. Slowly. And so on. Without Chandler’s matchless prose, human insight and wit to underpin it, the whole thing became dull to me and I began to skip, without feeling I was missing much.

This isn’t the mess that The Black-Eyed Blonde was, but it’s not a significant addition to the Marlowe canon either. I can’t really recommend it.

(My thanks to Vintage Digital for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Belinda Bauer - Snap

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Nothing special

I have quite enjoyed some of Belinda Bauer’s previous books and in the end I found Snap a readable, if pretty implausible, thriller, but it’s nothing that special.

The first 100 pages are, frankly, rather dull and often plain poor. Early on, there is an event which would make anyone – absolutely anyone – dial 999 immediately, but it is important for the plot that the person involved tells no-one...so she doesn’t, and the endless mental absurdities given to justify this just made me bored and rather cross. Bauer’s portraits of her main characters are rather crudely painted and the two male police officers especially are absurd caricatures of different aspects of male smugness and self-regard – with, of course, a far more human, intelligent and grounded female junior officer whom they despise, just to make sure we grasp the point. I found the psychology of some of her other characters pretty iffy, too, and the repeated dream sequences were unconvincing and very irritating.

Bauer’s writing is quite often rather overblown in the clichéd manner of so many “Gripping Psychological Thrillers” so we get a lot of this kind of stuff:

“Catherine turned toward the oven and gaped.

The oven was open, and the cake tin lay upside down on the tiled floor.

Oozing batter.”

This kind of repeated, unsubtle hammering at the reader with one-sentence (or one-clause) paragraphs did get me down in the end and I almost gave up. However, there is a development around page 130 which was quite interesting and by page 200 it does become quite an intriguing story. It’s an easy read which I did want to finish, but there is so much gaping implausibility, coupled with some highly unlikely and sentimental character shifts that it didn’t add up to much more than that for me.

I’m very pleased to see a crime novel on the Booker Long List. There have been some very fine crime-driven novels in recent years with real psychological and social depth, which would have been very worthy Booker contenders: several of Susan Hill’s Serrailler series, G.D. Abson’s Motherland, Joe Ide’s IQ spring to mind, among others. However, Snap isn’t in that league; it’s a readable but not very remarkable thriller which I can recommend as an undemanding read once you’ve waded through the first 120 pages or so, but it’s no more than that.