Tag: crime fiction

Review 2432: The Hunter

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I always look forward to Tana French’s latest novel, and when it arrives, it jumps to the top of my pile. This one follows up on her last novel, The Searcher.

And really, it’s necessary to spoil the ending of The Searcher to explain this novel, although readers who haven’t read it may be able to get along without reading it. The main character of both novels is Cal Hooper, a retired detective from Chicago who moved to the countryside outside the Irish village of Ardnaskelty because he liked the look and feel of it. In the previous novel, Trey, a girl from a no-hope family, asked Cal to find out what happened to her older brother, Brendan, who disappeared. Cal did, and here’s the spoiler for that book—he had to make her promise not to take revenge against her brother’s murderers, who are all men of Ardnaskelty, although she doesn’t know which ones.

Now Trey is a teenager. Cal has been teaching her to do woodworking, and they have been buying furniture, fixing it up, and selling it and even occasionally making custom furniture. Trey’s family has been considered trash, but Trey herself is starting to earn some respect despite rough edges.

Then Trey’s father, Johnny Reddy, who abandoned his family years ago, returns. Cal dislikes and distrusts him on sight. Soon, the villagers find out that Johnny has a big plan for getting rich.

He has befriended a British man named Cillian Rushborough, a rich man whose people came from Ardnakelty. Rushborough is full of his grandmother’s story that gold used to be found on the mountain, and that it will have been swept down to the river. Johnny has convinced the villagers who own land along the river to go in together and salt the river with gold so that Rushborough will pay them to look for gold on their land. Cal isn’t invited to take part in this scheme, but he pushes his way in to keep an eye on Reddy. Once he meets Rushborough, he knows something else is going on.

Unfortunately, Trey sees her father’s scheme as a way to get back at the men who killed her brother. So, although she wants her father to leave, she starts helping him with it. Then, a body is found.

French usually pulls me right into her books, but for some reason, the setup of the scam kept losing my attention. Finally, though, things got moving and, as usual, French does not fail to fascinate.

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Review 2316: Undone

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Will Trent has taken his partner Faith Mitchell to the hospital because she passed out. While he is waiting, an ambulance brings in a woman who has been hit by a car. She is naked and has obviously been kept captive somewhere and been tortured. Even more horribly, her eleventh rib has been removed.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation has to be invited into a case, but Will drives to the crime scene, which is only being investigated near the road. The police try to send him away, but he enters the nearby woods to try to find where the woman was escaping from. He finds a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of plywood. Inside the man-made cave, he finds indications that two women were there. Eventually, he finds a second woman hanging upside down from a tree, dead. This woman has been blinded.

Back at the hospital, the doctor, Sara Linton (who apparently is the heroine of a different series by Slaughter), tells Faith she is diabetic. This condition is complicated because Faith is also pregnant.

For his part, Will has married his lover Angie, but she took off almost immediately afterwards. To his dismay, Will finds Sara, a widow, attractive.

As Will and Faith try to identify the victims, with the local police withholding evidence, another woman disappears. Because she physically resembles both victims, Will and Faith think she might be another victim of the same person.

This is another fast moving and interesting entrant to this series about a dyslexic detective and his partner.

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Review 2312: Bright Young Women

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Bright Young Women is a novel centering around the true story of a famous serial killer, whose last killings took place in a sorority at Florida State University in Tallahassee in 1978. Apparently, Knoll believes as I do that men commit such acts at least partially for the attention so she calls the killer The Defendant throughout the book instead of his name. So will I.

The novel is narrated by two different people in three different time frames. In 1978, Pamela is the president of a sorority and is about to become an important witness. In 2021, she is still trying to track down evidence that will lead to the body of one of his earlier victims.

That victim is Ruth, the second narrator, who in 1975 had the misfortune to meet The Defendant at the beach in Issaquah, Washington.

This novel doesn’t want to focus on The Defendant so much as on the girls he was after. The novel sticks with Pamela from the day before the crime through the days after she sees a strange man fleeing the sorority house, but it focuses on Pamela’s self-development afterwards. At the beginning, she is living an expected life as head of the sorority with the brightest girls on campus, engaged to Brian and planning to attend law school, only an inferior school even though she was accepted to Columbia because Brian couldn’t get in. Pamela is obviously in shock after the event because she doesn’t realize for hours that two of the girls are dead. But she clearly tells the sheriff that although she at first thought the man she saw was Roger, her best friend Denise’s boyfriend, she realized the man was a stranger. Nevertheless, the sheriff focuses on Roger, and this is only one instance of the incompetence of the law enforcement work on the case. Pamela is disregarded and patronized time and again in this novel.

One of Knoll’s themes is her idea that The Defendant, having performed poorly at college and not having been accepted into law school, was picking out successful, attractive women to kill. Then the media fed into his own view of himself by depicting him as smarter and more handsome than he was, despite his ridiculous performance when he eventually defended himself. Basically, they admired the killer while denigrating his victims.

Ruth’s self-evolution takes her from a lesbian woman dominated by an unloving mother who doesn’t want the neighbors to know her “shame” to a confident, lovely girl who has found a place for herself, largely because of the help of her friend Tina. It is Tina who later comes to Pamela and tells her she thinks The Defendant murdered Ruth as well as the sorority girls. Although Tina is right about everything, law enforcement disregards her and warns Pamela against her.

Knoll’s late 1970s certainly sound more like the 60s to me. In Michigan, I didn’t know any girls who were interested in sororities or still used hair spray or dressed as described in the novel anymore. Then again, it was Florida.

I found this a fascinating novel with a strong feminist message. I am looking forward to what Knoll does next.

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Review 2240: Deception

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Since I discovered recently that I had missed one of Denise Mina’s books, I looked again and found I had also missed Deception (also published as Sanctum), from 2002.

Lachlan Harriot is on his way to his wife Susie’s trial at the beginning of Deception. She is a psychiatrist accused of having had an affair with a convicted serial killer, Andrew Gow, and then murdering him and his wife after he was released from prison on appeal. Lachlan is sure she is innocent and will get off. He is certain she never had an affair with Gow.

But Susie is convicted after the prosecution spins a lurid story. Lachlan begins spending his insomnia-filled nights in Susie’s office—previously off-limits—looking for evidence that can be used for an appeal. Slowly, he begins turning up indications that nothing is what he thought it was, starting with proof that Susie has lied. Months before the murder, she was fired from her job at the prison after being accused of stealing Gow’s files. She always said she was fired because of sexism and did not take the files. But Lachlan finds them in the office.

This is a slow-building novel that takes a little patience. The facts Lachlan turns up aren’t as shocking as promised by the cover blurbs, but Mina is a superb plotter. The book doesn’t disappoint.

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Review 2229: The Field of Blood

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Ever since I read my first Denise Mina book, back in the Garnethill days, I thought I kept up with her. But it seems I might have missed The Field of Blood, which is the first Paddy Meehan book.

Two boys, 11 and 10 years old, take Brian Wilson, a three-year-old, out into a field and murder him. They are quickly found and thought to have committed the crime by themselves.

Paddy Meehan is an 18-year-old copy “boy” for the Scottish Daily News who wants to be an investigative reporter. When she reads about the story the police have put together of the crime, it doesn’t make sense to her. Why would the boys, who are from poor families, have taken a train out to a relatively posh area to kill Baby Brian when there are many desolate areas in their own neighborhood? She begins investigating and decides the boys were driven out to the scene.

Since she is not a reporter and is told to stop saying she is one, she uses the name of Heather Graham, the only woman reporter on staff. She is at outs with Heather, whom she previously considered a friend, because when the boys’ photo appeared in the paper, she recognized one as the cousin of her fiancé Sean and confided in Heather. Ambitious Heather suggested she break that story; however, she refused, saying her family would never forgive her. When Heather broke it instead, Paddy, who knew her family would think she did it, had a fight with Heather.

Heather is murdered, and Paddy doesn’t realize that because she was using Heather’s name, Paddy’s investigations have unwittingly caused her death.

Mina’s early mysteries are gritty. This one, set in 1980s Glasgow, is no exception—gritty and thrilling. Paralleling Paddy’s story is a real one about another Paddy Meehan, a thief who was framed by the police for murder.

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Review 2209: We Shall Be Monsters

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If you are interested in reading this book, you will understand it much better—and there is a warning to that effect in the book—if you read the two books that came before it.

At the end of Blood Floe, retired Constable David Maratse’s friend and lover, Sergeant Petra Jensen, was kidnapped. Now the body of a teenager is found naked, his back embedded with fishing hooks with colored threads attached. Not far away, next to an ice-fishing hole, are Petra’s clothes and a suicide note.

Maratse knows that the use of her Greenlandic name in the signature is a message to him that she did not commit suicide. He arranges a funeral for her so that the authorities won’t realize that he plans to go off on his own to find her—and that’s what he does.

While Maratse is following leads and other police investigate the boy’s murder, there are glimpses of what is happening to Petra. Tensions rise when her captor tells her she will soon be set free, as the readers know that for him setting free means killing.

I was drawn to this series because of its glimpses into life in Greenland, but except for Maratse dressing in white and taking a sled dog team, there wasn’t anything particular to Greenland in this one. It’s a fairly standard thriller.

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Review 2162: Shrines of Gaiety

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It’s 1926. Ma Coker is being released from jail, and it’s like a circus in front of the prison. Nellie Coker is the head of a crime family in London, the owner of five clubs that Frobisher, the new broom at the police station, thinks are responsible for the disappearance of quite a few girls.

Miss Gwendolyn Kelling has unexpectedly inherited some money, so she quits her job in York as a librarian and decides to search for her friend’s sister, Florence Ingram, and Freda Murgatroyd, both 14, who have gone to London to make their fortunes, Freda being positive that she is going to be a star. When she goes to the police station, Frobisher asks her to visit one of the Coker clubs to report what she can observe.

Niven Coker, Nellie’s oldest son, by coincidence comes upon Miss Kelling on the street after she has been mugged. He gives her a ride to her ladies hotel, and afterwards she receives her purse.

Frobisher has been asking at the office for Maddox, one of the inspectors, but he has been on sick leave. Frobisher is sure Maddox is corrupt, but what he doesn’t know is that Maddox is putting the final pieces in place to take over Nellie Coker’s clubs. To start with, there is arson.

Maddox isn’t the only one after the Coker empire. There’s also Mr. Azzopardi, who begins by trying to exploit the weaknesses of Nellie’s youngest son, Ramsey.

There are some dark deeds in this novel, but it is written with a lightness that conveys more the fevered fun seeking of the time. For a crime family, the Cokers are curiously benign, and Nellie Coker seems to be three steps ahead of everyone else. The novel is more of an ensemble piece and doesn’t have a main character, although we admire Miss Kelling and also the plucky but naïve Freda. Although ostensibly a crime novel, I found it more a portrait of a particular period and enjoyed it very much. Atkinson has based some of it on the life of Kate Mayrick, the owner of clubs in Soho.

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Transcription

A God in Ruins

Review 2120: The Rising Tide

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Fifty years ago, a group of students attended a retreat at the urging of their teacher. They were so struck by it that they continued meeting every five years on Lindisfarne. This year, Rick Kelsall, a media star, finds himself in disgrace after one of his staff accused him of inappropriate behavior. He likes attention and the first night of the retreat, tells them all he’s writing a novel based on true events. During the night, he is murdered and left to look like a suicide.

Vera figures the most obvious suspects are the others there for the retreat—Philip, a wild boy turned Anglican vicar; Annie, a divorcee who works at a deli; Lou, who spends most of her time caring for her husband, Ken, stricken with Alzheimers; and Ken. In years past, there were three more participants: Charlotte, Rick’s ex-wife, who was bored by the retreat; Dan, Annie’s ex-husband; and Isobel, who was killed after she had a fight with Rick and drove off onto the causeway when the tide was coming in. Their teacher, Judith, was also at the first retreat.

Vera’s team turns up lots of intriguing information about the retreat participants and their connections. Charlotte, who had been a celebrity, now runs a failing spa. Dan, from a lower social class than the others, is now a wealthy resort owner. Vera is shocked to find out that his partner is Katherine Willmore, the Police and Crime Commissioner. Further, it was her daughter who made the allegation against Rick, which she has not revealed to Vera.

On the team, Holly and Joe are still feeling competitive, but they have started getting along better. And Joe has shown some independence from Vera.

Vera has a notion that the crime has some connection to Isobel’s death years ago. Then another person connected with the group is killed.

As usual, Cleeves has written another tightly plotted, clever mystery. However, for this one, I found the ending incredibly touching.

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Review 2090: A Pin To See a Peepshow

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A Pin to See a Peepshow is a fictionalized retelling of a famous British true crime. Jesse, who was a contributor to the Notable British Trials series, chose to make the life of her main character and the details of the crime slightly different from the actual events.

Julia Almond is an unusual girl who projects the assurance that her life is going to be different from that of the others around her. She has a sense of style and after finishing schooling, is able to find work at a small dressmakers.

Julia has lived mostly in a daze of romantic daydreams except for her work at the shop, where she thrives and is promoted. But she finds her real life boring and seems to care only for her dog, Bobbie. She is waiting for a great love.

What she gets is Mr. Starling, a friend of her father’s. During the First World War, her father dies. Her mother can’t afford the house even with Julia’s small salary, so her uncle, aunt, and cousin move in and begin to order things as they want. Julia’s bedroom, which has been her sanctuary, is invaded by her cousin Elsa. Julia is told that Bobbie can’t sleep in her room. She kicks up enough of a fuss to get that changed but finds Elsa trying to lure Bobbie away from her. When Julia finds living at home unbearable, she decides at twenty to marry Mr. Starling, whose wife has died and who looks a lot more handsome in his uniform. This, of course, does not work out well, but she gets along for years until she meets Leonard Carr, a sailor seven years younger, who begins pursing her.

Jesse’s message is that Julia would not have ended up as she does if she had not been lower class and financially insecure. Any poorer and she would have just left with her lover. Richer and divorce would have been commonplace, but to her it was a scandal. Further, although she was innocent of murder, she was convicted because of her adultery and the difference in age between her and her lover.

Jesse paints an open-eyed but sympathetic picture of Julia. Although I could have done without some of the sections at the end where others reflect on the execution, it is a powerful and affecting piece of writing.

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Review 2059: The Fortune Men

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I didn’t read what The Fortune Men was about ahead of time, because I was reading it for my Booker prize project. That meant that at first I wasn’t sure why the novel switched between the stories of two characters, Mahmood Mattan, a Somali stoker who is a gambler and a petty thief, and Violet Volacki, a middle-aged Jewish storekeeper. However, when I turned to the back of the book, I learned that Mattan was the last man in Cardiff to be sentenced to death for the murder of Violet Volacki in 1952 and that years later he was found to have been wrongfully convicted.

Mahmood is not a perfect man. He has quit going to sea to be near his Welsh wife and children, but work is hard to find for a black man, and he has too much time on his hands. He spends it gambling and womanizing and occasionally stealing. He has a big mouth and he lies a lot. But he is not a murderer.

When the police come to see him because a woman was robbed and her throat cut, he doesn’t tell the exact truth about where he was, because he was dangling after a Russian woman and he doesn’t want his wife to know. A black man, possibly a Somali, was seen outside the store, but even after the victim’s sister and niece say it was not Mahmood, it’s pretty clear that the police decide it was him and look for people to place him there. After a reward is announced, plenty of them pop up.

This novel is well-written and should have been haunting, but first I kept having problems staying with it, and later, even after I got more interested, I felt distanced from the characters and the story. Mohamed went on side trips through the memory of Mahmood’s life that should have made readers feel closer to him, but I did not, and I noticed Goodreads reviewers complaining about the same thing.

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