Thomas Perry - The Bomb Maker

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Not for me

The Bomb Maker has some of the makings of a good thriller, but didn't think that the writing and characterisation were good enough to carry it off, I'm afraid.

Set in Los Angeles, the main thrust of The Bomb Maker is in a battle of wits between a highly ingenious designer and maker of bombs and the LA Bomb Squad whom he wants to kill.  We get long, intricate descriptions of both the designing and building processes of the bomber and of the painstaking work of the Bomb Squad to make them safe.  Much of this is actually very interesting and quite gripping, although it does get a bit much when expressed in such plodding prose and with rather cardboard characters. 

Outside the technical detail, the rest of the story is pretty poorly done.  The main protagonist is Dick Stahl – heroic, sexy, modest and unflappable.  Of course.  We originally meet him as he attempts to rescue a businessman kidnapped in Mexico, where he brilliantly and heroically…well, I expect you can guess.  He is then called back to head up the Bomb Squad he used to lead in order to tackle the threat from the eponymous bomb maker.  It's hopelessly implausible both in characterisation and plot, and the prose is horribly clunky at times.  This, for example, as his squad are about to tackle a very dangerous bomb: "Elliot and Hines stared at Stahl, who seemed deep in thought.  After a moment he looked up at them and noticed that they looked worried, apprehensive, scared.  "Don't worry.  We can do this."  It's not exactly thrilling, electrifying, exciting, is it?  I'm afraid I found this throughout and it became very wearing after a while.  There is an extremely awkwardly drawn romantic liaison with dialogue which verges on the embarrassingly bad at times and which has a faintly ludicrous Pretty Woman feel to it as well.  And so on.

So, I'm afraid this one wasn't for me.  It's painstakingly researched and has its moments, but I really can't recommend it.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

Simon Brett - The Liar In The Library

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A very good read

I enjoyed The Liar In The Library very much.  Like so much of Simon Brett's work, it is entertaining and witty, but also has some excellent characterisation and some acute observations on modern life.

The plot?  It's not really the important thing, but after a talk in the library at to Fethering, a small, affluent village on the English South Coast, a successful author is found dead in his car.  Jude becomes a suspect and she and Carole investigate in their usual way.  It's a decent if slightly silly story with a lot of nods to Golden Age crime, which it acknowledges fully in the story.  What makes it so enjoyable is Brett's writing.

His style is easy to read and has a quiet excellence about it.  Jude and Carole's slightly spiky friendship works very well and there are some witty sallies at pretension in modern literary life – for example, "...the fact that his novel was just an old-fashioned romance with a happy ending had been disguised by enough tricks of postmodernism and magical realism for the literati not to feel they were demeaning themselves by reading it."  There are also some enjoyable, skewering portraits of a pompous author, a ridiculously arrogant academic and so on.  Brett also makes some quiet but important points about subjects like library closures, homelessness, xenophobia and so on which give the book rather more weight than you might expect.

In short, this isn’t Great Literature but it's witty, thoughtful in places and a very good read.  Recommended.

Alan Parks - Bloody January

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Very noir indeed

I thought Bloody January was a good crime novel and a promising start to a series.

Set in Glasgow in January 1973, Harry McCoy is a Detective Inspector who gets a cryptic tip-off from a gangster in prison that a murder is about to take place.  McCoy and his new partner then investigate an increasingly complex case involving Glasgow's seamiest criminal side of drugs, prostitution and violence in which some very rich and powerful people seem to be involved.  It's a good story, well told.  Alan Parks writes well and generates a very good, convincing atmosphere of both the period and the milieu.  It is pretty unremittingly dark, with plenty of drink, drugs, miserable weather and some sickening violence.  (There is language to match, which is completely appropriate to the characters, but some readers may like to be warned of liberal use of both the c- and f-words.)

I did think that the book was treading some quite well-worn paths at times.  I mean, does a maverick Scottish Police Inspector with a desolate emotional life who drinks far too much, has a morally ambiguous relationship with a powerful criminal and is barely tolerated by his superiors sound at all familiar?  Or a plot with aristocrats behaving badly and using their highly-placed contacts to protect themselves? 

Nonetheless, I still found this an involving read and I will look out for the next book.  Harry McCoy has the potential to be a very interesting character and I think Alan Parks may develop this into a very good series. Recommended if you like your crime dark and seedy.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

Devorah Baum - The Jewish Joke

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Hilarious and brilliant

This is just brilliant.  It is packed with genuinely very funny jokes and also has some very shrewd things to say about what they signify and how they are used.

The first thing to say is that The Jewish Joke is very, very funny.  I spent a lot of time laughing out loud and at times truly had to wait until I'd recovered and wiped my eyes before reading on.  Perhaps not one for reading in public, then, but it's just a joy and the book is worth buying for the jokes alone. 

Devorah Baum also adds some analysis of the significance of jokes to Jews and to other people, and she does it excellently.  She takes her subject seriously but never too solemnly and plainly loves the jokes as jokes, so her analysis is brief, witty and insightful.  I found that it really added to my enjoyment, when clumsy, over-earnest analysis would have killed any enjoyment stone dead.  Her analysis is very shrewd, too.  She is excellent on the slippery problem of what is acceptable and what is unacceptable, and on the enduring importance of humour to survival, among other things. There are lots of nuggets in this book, but here are just four little passages I marked:

"While it’s important to be mindful of sensitivities, it’s just as important to remain wary of the humour police, those punchline vigilantes who so often wind up silencing the very people they’re claiming to defend."

"What humourlessness always fails to recognise is just how useful a sense of humour can be for confronting what one finds offensive, including offensive jokes."

"Jokes…remain the most bearable form available for transmitting a traumatic history."

"There are few utterances more flush with unchecked privilege, after all, than the sneering sound of someone insisting, in the face of another’s hurt, that they really ought to be able to ‘take a joke’."

The Jewish Joke is hilariously funny and readably thoughtful, too.  It is one of the best things I've read this year and very, very warmly recommended.

Joanna Cannon - The Trouble With Goats And Sheep

Rating: 5/5

Review:

An excellent read 

I agree with the many hundreds of people who have enjoyed this book: it is thoughtful, engaging and exceptionally well written.

I won't go over the plot in detail again; briefly, this is set in the hot summer drought of 1976 in an unnamed small town near Nottingham, where one of the residents of a "respectable" avenue goes missing.  The fallout from her disappearance exposes some terrible secrets which slowly emerge, partly because two ten-year-old girls investigate in their naïve way.

It is a gripping story, but what makes it special is both Joanna Cannon's exceptionally good writing and her fine insight into her characters.  She captures beautifully the way in which secrets, often hidden by shame, lurk beneath a veneer of "niceness" and how this can manifest itself in hatred, bullying and bigotry.  Cannon is especially good on the workings of a herd mentality, how people will ignore evidence as long as what they believe fits in with the crowd and how this can lead to manipulation and sometimes appalling consequences.  Although this is very convincingly set 40 years ago, the messages remain very apposite.

In short, I thought this was excellent.  It is readable and intelligent, and I can recommend it very warmly.  (I can also warmly recommend Cannon's second novel, Three Things About Elsie.)

Joanna Cannon - Three Things About Elsie

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Enjoyable, humane and insightful

I thought Three Things About Elsie was excellent.  It is involving, humane and extremely well written.

This is the story of Florence Claybourne who is in her eighties, living in sheltered accommodation and her memory and other mental faculties are now pretty unreliable.  A man who supposedly drowned sixty years before arrives, creating a mystery and sense of menace which drives the plot of the book.

We get the story from three intercut points of view; Florence's unreliable first-person narrative and two third-person narratives from the points of view of two members of staff - Miss Ambrose, a supervisor and the handyman, Handy Simon.  It is extremely well done and has plenty to say about age, memory, attitudes to older people and so on, but it is Florence's voice which really stands out.  At times there are some strong echoes of Alan Bennett's A Cream Cracker Under The Settee, but for the most part Florence is an original and very engaging character with her own slightly eccentric but often profound take on things.  I marked lots of sentences and passages which I liked; these two brief extracts may give you a flavour:

"Elsie's father left for the war and came back as a telegram on the mantelpiece," and "I looked across the lounge and into the past.  It was more useful than the present.  There were times when the present felt so unimportant, so unnecessary.  Just somewhere I had to dip into from time to time, out of politeness."

I became involved in the mysterious plot, but it is the beautifully drawn characters, the book's humanity and insight, and Joanna Cannon's excellent writing which really counted for me.  I thought it all added up to an excellent book, which I can recommend very warmly.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

Christine Poulson - Cold Cold Heart

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Not for me

Oh dear.  Almost everyone else seems to have loved Cold Cold Heart, but I'm afraid I couldn't get on with it at all.

The plot is in effect a classic Country House Murder mystery, moved to an Antarctic research station in winter: ten characters completely cut off from the outside world, one of whom is a killer.  Katie Flanagan, a young medical research scientist is flown in to replace someone after an accident just as winter cuts the station off for months.  Claustrophobic and sinister things begin to happen, and we are left to try to spot the killer. 

My problem with the book is that it all just seems so clunky and even crudely done sometimes so I just didn’t believe in the characters or the plot and couldn’t get involved at all.  We get bits of the story from far too many points of view (even that of a cat, believe it or not, which is wholly unnecessary and horribly twee) and everything is spelled out in plodding chunks of unconvincing exposition.  There is a lot of forced and sometimes patronisingly unnecessarily spelling out of obvious details, like  "Anything she didn't have now she'd have to do without, because where she was going, there were no shops, no mail, no Amazon."  Gosh, thanks - I'd never have known if you hadn't said! 

Elsewhere, characters give each other great swathes of information which they already know.  For example, early on Katie is talking to her best friend with whom, we are told, she has "talked it over so many times," but we still get:

"What'll you be doing there?" Rachel asked.

"I'll be taking over this guy's research project – I'm well qualified for it.  It's about the way human beings adapt to darkness and isolation.  Lack of light suppresses the action of the pineal gland with the result…" etc. etc etc.

Two close friends having a farewell chat about something they have "talked over so many times"?  Really?  The whole book reads like this and it all felt false to me; I felt I was just being clumsily set up for a puzzle (with "twists", of course) but wasn't the slightest bit convinced by the characters or the setting – which meant I wasn't very interested in the puzzle.

I'm afraid I got very fed up with the book and ended up skimming quite large chunks without feeling I'd missed much.  I'm plainly out of step with the huge majority of reviewers so don't let me put you off before reading other reviews, but I'm afraid I really didn't like Cold Cold Heart.

(I received an ARC vis NetGalley.)