Tim Dorsey - No Sunscreen For The Dead

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Fantastically entertaining

I loved No Sunscreen For The Dead. It is bonkers, extremely funny and actually rather an exciting story.

This is the 22nd Serge Storms book. If you don’t know Serge, he’s not easy to explain. He lives in Florida and is a manic collector of trivia who has crazes, during which he discovers scumbags behaving despicably and dispatches them in ways which have an ingenious poetic justice and which are wholly deplorable and extremely entertaining. This time, Serge is manically pursuing an oral history project among residents of a retirement village. He and his hilariously drugged-up sidekick Coleman discover that unscrupulous salesmen are preying on the residents...with extremely amusing and satisfying results for the reader (who really ought to disapprove, but hell – they deserve it) but not for the scumbags. Alongside this is a rather intriguing espionage story which began in 1970 and which eventually impacts on the present day joyous mayhem of Serge’s activities.

It’s just a joy. I laughed out loud regularly, Tim Dorsey writes superbly, with especially brilliant dialogue, he constructs and paces his story extremely well and there’s a lot a lot of genuinely interesting and amusing detail about all sorts of aspects of Florida. I read the whole thing with complete delight and can recommend it very warmly.

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

Jane Harper - The Lost Man

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Excellent

I loved The Lost Man. It’s thoughtful, engrossing and rather powerful.

The synopsis isn’t that alluring: in the Australian Outback in the punishing heat of a Queensland midsummer a man is found dead by his two brothers near the boundary of the two properties in which they have lived all their lives. There is a mystery about why he broke the cardinal rules of Outback survival and as questions are asked, some dark family history and secrets emerge. It sounds very familiar ground, but Jane Harper creates something quite special out of it.

The whole thing is beautifully done. Harper’s writing is unflashy and readable, but has a quiet excellence about it. She generates a very powerful sense of place and the effect of the harsh conditions on its inhabitants. The story unrolls slowly but for me very grippingly as she develops her characters with delicacy, insight and subtlety. Dialogue in particular is excellent as believable characters emerge gently but powerfully and a sense of tension and menace slowly builds. We also get a fine, insightful picture of the effects of loneliness and isolation and of the long, bitter memories which can persist in a small community.

If you expect mutilated corpses, several Big Twists, car chases and the like, this won’t be for you. The pace is slow and measured, but the atmosphere and mystery are beautifully done, I found it utterly gripping and there is genuine human insight here, too. It’s one of the best books I’ve read for a while and I recommend it very warmly.

(My thanks to Little, Brown for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Monty Python Speaks! - Edited by David Morgan

Rating: 4/5

Review:
...he's a very naughty boy!

I enjoyed Monty Python Speaks. It gives a chronological account of Python from its birth through interview extracts with all six male Pythons, Carol Cleveland and others involved in the production. It’s not especially funny, but it’s interesting and entertaining.

I should probably say that I was about 15 when Python began on TV and was soon a devotee, so I have more interest in this than some other people may. I enjoyed reading about the group dynamics, the details of the writing process and the films – especially Life Of Brian. I could perhaps have done without such detailed chronicling of the exact nature of the funding and release of different programmes and films in the USA, but I suppose it’s good to have these things on record – and one can always resort to skimming.

I’m not sure I learned much that was really new, but I’m glad to have a fuller picture of the characters involved and the key events – the frank discussion of Graham Chapman’s alcoholism and his contribution to the group was especially interesting to me, for instance.

This is a good book to dip into, and I often found myself reading more at a sitting than I expected to, which is a good sign. Recommended.

(My thanks to Fourth Estate for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Sarah Hilary - Someone Else's Skin

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Very good crime writing

I enjoyed Someone Else’s Skin. I have read a couple of the later ones in this series and was glad of the chance to read the first.

This is a police procedural featuring DI Marnie Rome and DS Noah Jake which deals with some pretty dark issues of domestic abuse. It does it with realism and generally unsensationally, although there is a longish episode of effectively torture which teetered on the border, I thought. It was redeemed by avoiding many of the clichés and stereotypes of the genre, though, and the story is by and large convincing – and the psychology is a lot more plausible than it often is in crime novels.

The great thing about the book is that Sarah Hilary can really write. Her prose is readable and unflashy, but is very evocative. This gives a flavour: “Her features clustered sulkily at the centre of her face, corralled by pallid, marbled flesh.” The book is full of these little gems of description and it’s a pleasure to read.

I do think that Hilary overdoes her characters’ personal lives. The book opens with the murder of Marnie Rome’s parents, for example, something which rather dominates the books and which intrudes a bit more than I’d like. I also thought that two tense climaxes was rather implausibly excessive. However, overall it’s a very good, gripping read which deals well with tough issues.

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

Alexander McCall Smith - The Department of Sensitive Crimes

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Not McCall Smith's best

Like so many people, I enjoy The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series very much. However, I have never really got on with Alexander McCall Smith’s other work and this remains largely true of this start of a new series.

The Department of Sensitive Crimes is set in an odd little department of the police in Malmo, Sweden. The location is significant: it is the setting for both Wallander and The Bridge and McCall Smith is trying to create a contrast to these classics of Scandi-Noir. Ulf Varg (translation: Wolf Wolf) and his colleagues are a gentle investigative team who look into not-terribly-serious crimes and resolve them by talking to people, noticing details, reflecting on human nature (or a version of human nature, at least) and generally being honest and kind. Remind you of anything?

Yes, The Department of Sensitive Crimes has pretty much the structure of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, but set in Sweden. The trouble is that while Mma Ramotswe, Mma Makutsi, Mr J.L.B Matekoni and others have real originality, charm and a genuine spark about them, Ulf and his colleagues don’t really. For me they weren’t terribly interesting people and their digressive musings just became rather dull rather than charming.

It does have its moments; a statement in court by a convicted man is genuinely touching, for example, and wry sentences like “But the procedure for procedures had to be gone through, in accordance with further procedural guidelines,” kept me going. It’s readable and I did finish it (with a little skimming of yet another digression every so often) but I won’t be rushing to read the next in the series.

(My thanks to Little Brown for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Steve Cavanagh - Twisted

Rating: 3/5

Review:
So-so

I was rather underwhelmed by Twisted. I had heard that Thirteen was very good, so I thought I’d try this one, but it seemed pretty run-of-the-mill stuff to me. The plot is based around a reclusive, mysterious author, JT LeBeau, whose books make millions but whose life seems to be involved with a number of murders. To say more would be a significant spoiler.

The thing is, the book is constructed entirely so that there can be “Twists”. (And just in case we don’t admire them sufficiently we’re even told by a character how very difficult this is.) I am prepared to suspend disbelief, sometimes from a considerable height for a really good book, but I found a lot of Twisted rather silly and a bit dull. The opening hundred pages or so are padded with masses of tedious and largely irrelevant detail about unconvincing characters’ lives, thoughts and so on, to the extent that I kept suspecting that the author was paid by the word, thinking “get on with it!” and skimming judiciously. I didn’t miss anything important. When things did begin to happen, nothing was much of a surprise and there are some ridiculous coincidences and some utter implausibilities: for example, a character who is obsessed with concealing his true background isn’t really sure where he left a vital document which may or may not have been stolen. Really? Later, another similarly obsessed character leaves his laptop alone with someone else and available to be read, to the extent that it doesn’t even require a password to bring it out of sleep mode. Huh? Even mine does that. And so on.

It’s well enough written to be readable, but the knowledge that we’re always being set up for the next Twist made it unengaging for me, and that knowledge meant that I saw several of the Twists coming. The ending is absurdly silly and I wasn’t all that sorry to finish it. This might be OK for a brain-off beach read or the like, but nothing more.

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

Andrea Levy - The Long Song

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Not for me

I almost feel I should apologise for not getting on with The Long Song. I can see that it’s well written with an original voice, that it’s a well-constructed narrative and that, obviously it deals with extremely important issues. It’s just that for some reason I didn’t engage with it at all.

I can’t really explain this; it’s just something that happens occasionally with books and no matter how well done it is, it just doesn’t do it for me. This is plainly just a very personal response so don’t let me put anyone off because many others think it’s brilliant. Personally, though, it’s not a book I liked.

(My thanks to Tinder Press for an ARC via NetGalley.)