LIFETIME: LIZA MARKLUND trans NEIL SMITH

In a blistering action start to the novel Lifetime, cops Nina Hoffman and Andersson are called to a suspected shooting on Bondegatan. Nina realises the address is that of  a colleague Julia and her husband, Sweden’s most famous police officer, David Lindholm. They find David dead shot twice once in the head and once in the groin. Julia is in a distraught state covered in blood, telling Julia that the “other woman” has taken their young son Alexander. At the same time investigative journalist Annika Bengtzon’s house has been firebombed and she has escaped with only the clothes she stands up in, and more importantly her children, Kalle and Ellen. Annika’s husband Thomas has left her for a colleague, blonde Sophia Grenborg.

No two women could be less alike. Sophia was everything Annika despised, mainly because she could never be like her: educated,  feminine and well mannered. And Sophia enjoyed sex, unlike frigid Annika.

When Annika seeks help from her friend, Anne Snapphane she is rejected as Anne is more concerned in keeping a young lover in her bed. Annika has to readjust her dysfunctional life, care for her children, and work out the tangled business affairs that must be behind the murder of David Lindholm. But the Swedish legal system has decided that his wife Julia is the guilty party and that she has also murdered her son.

While all this is going on the editor-in-chief of the Evening Post Anders Schyman  faces the problem of getting rid of 60 employees, and Thomas is struggling with his parliamentary work on the use of lifetime sentences for criminals. This novel is a mine of information about Sweden’s criminal justice system, and it is quite nice to know that this socialist democracy seems to be almost as big a shambles as our own country.

‘I’ve been expelled,’ the head of news said. I forgot to pay my sub.’

‘That’s a bit mean of them,’ Schyman said. ‘

Sixteen years in a row,’ Spike said. ‘I have to say I don’t blame them.’ 

 

I always enjoy the Annika Bengtzon books, and this one was no exception, because the characters seem like real human beings with an array of  flaws. Annika is certainly a very jealous vindictive woman in Lifetime, and this is part of her charm and attraction. She is a real woman, who shows real emotions, and is neither a complete door mat nor a superwoman. Annika, like many women in real life, does seem to have slightly shaky judgement when it comes to her men, because Thomas is an obnoxious  self important bastard. I do hope they don’t get back together, Annika deserves better.

Practically every murderer these days claimed to suffer from some sort of psychological disorder.

If they didn’t hear voices, they were on anabolic steroids or blamed poor potty-training and broken toys when they were little.  

Lifetime is another great addition to this addictive series, and I can’t wait for the next Annika Bengtzon book, The Long Shadow to be published in September.  

Reviewing Black Bear at Euro Crime

You can now read my review of Aly Monroe’s Black Bear at Euro Crime.  

If you like intelligent books that will teach you something about the relationship between the USA, Britain and the Soviet Union in the immediate post war period, the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Crime Fiction award winning Peter Cotton series is well worth reading.

 

Blurbing Black Bear

Karen of Euro Crime kindly arranged for Aly Monroe’s latest book in her Peter Cotton series, Black Bear, to be sent to me by the publishers John Murray. I was very pleased to see on the inside pages blurbs from Euro Crime and Crime Scraps, we didn’t quite make the back cover.

I have now finished reading Black Bear, and my review will appear on Euro Crime in due course.

April 2013: a select few

I read only three crime fiction books during April because I was busy with other activities, and also I read some non-fiction. Those three books:

Pale Horses-Jassy Mackenzie

The Fifth Witness-Michael Connelly

The Weeping Girl-Hakan Nesser

were all enjoyable, but Hakan Nesser’s intriguing police procedural with Ewa Moreno as the main character was my pick of the month.

Hannah Vogel available on Kindle UK

The first three books in Rebecca Cantrell’s award winning Hannah Vogel series are available now on Kindle UK at exceptional value ranging from £2.99-£3.33. I can heartily recommend this intelligent series, which features a feisty female protagonist while at the same time educating the reader about major events in European history.

 Award winning author Rebecca Cantrell majored in German, Creative Writing and History at the Freie Universitaet of Berlin, and Carnegie Mellon University. She lives in Hawaii with her husband and son.

My review of A Trace of Smoke

My review of A Night of Long Knives with links to my four part interview with the author.

My review of A Game of Lies

Rebecca’s website

PALE HORSES: JASSY MACKENZIE

Pale Horses is the fourth in author Jassy Mackenzie’s series based in Johannesburg, South Africa and featuring private investigator Jade de Jong.

Jade is hired by wealthy futures trader and base jumper Vincent Theron to investigate the fatal fall of his parachuting partner Sonet Meintjies from the 68 storey Sandton Views skyscraper. Sonet had worked for a charity helping indigenous people to establish farming projects. As Jade investigates she discovers  Sonet’s obnoxious ex-husband Van Schalkwyk had lost his farm in a land claim to the Siyabonga tribe, and has leaflets scattered in his house from the “Boere Krisis Kommando”.  But the Siyabonga tribe seem to have disappeared and their farming commune is barren and deserted. When Jade starts to return to Johannesburg, her tyres are slashed and as she begins to search for Sonet’s siblings she is involved in shootings, car chases, and a brutal murder.

Meanwhile Ntombi Khumalo, whose husband has died of cancer, is being forced by her employer to act as chauffeur to a vicious killer, because he has threatened her son little Khumalo.

Pales Horses covers all of the essentials of good crime thrillers; it is exciting, has good characters, an intriguing plot, a good deal of social commentary, and a fine sense of place. The atmosphere of modern post apartheid South Africa is evoked on many levels, but especially with the contrasts between the wealthy shopping and business district of Sandton, Johannesburg, and the harsh bleak poverty of rural South Africa.

In less than three hundred pages Jassy Mackenzie introduces the reader to some of the Rainbow Nation’s many problems, corruption, racism, land reform, the vast gulf between rich and poor, and the seemingly ever present violence. Amusingly Jade’s ex-lover Police Superintendent David Patel has difficulty sleeping on the Cape Province coast because it is too quiet. He is so used to  the noise of sirens and gunfire in Johannesburg, a city whose prosperous suburbs feature security gates, high walls, razor wire and guns.

 Jade de Jong is a feisty female protagonist, well suited to her environment, much more VI Warshawski than Miss Marple; and her relationship with David Patel, who has his own personal problems, is one of the interesting sub-plots. Ntombi Khumalo in her perilous situation dreams of being a professional chef, and distracts herself, and interests the reader, by thinking about her menus while driving around with a brutal killer. The reader is given two female protagonists in a genre that usually features men, because this is an out and out thriller, and one which stands up well to a comparison with the better known books of Deon Meyer. But most importantly Jassy’s characters are people you want to follow into the future, and see how their lives develop. Pale Horses is an excellent addition to the ever expanding sub genre of South African crime fiction, and I shall look out for number five in the series.

I received my advanced uncopyedited  from the publishers Soho Press. Jassy Mackenzie was born in what was then Rhodesia, and moved to South Africa when she was eight years old. The three previous Jade de Jong novels are, Random Violence, Stolen Lives and The Fallen.  

A Tale of Two Back Covers

They were the best of covers and the worst of covers……OK I am biased but comparing the US and UK back covers of Liza Marklund’s new thriller Lifetime I not surprisingly came to the conclusion that the US version is far superior. A nice photo of Liza and blurbs from experts.

The UK version has a blurb from the Daily Express comparing Annika Bengtzon with Peter Hoeg’s Smilla’s Feeling for Snow 1992, and Clarice Starling in the Thomas Harris novel The Silence of the Lambs 1988. It has been a very long time since I read those books,  they are over twenty years old, and I agree they do have determined female protagonists, but otherwise the Annika Bengtzon books are very different. 

ANZAC DAY 2013

I have posted about my wife’s grandfather Petty Officer Percy Kempster DSM previously, but make no apologies for providing this link to his story on ANZAC Day. 

 

http://dalyhistory.wordpress.com/2011/12/20/petty-officer-percy-kempster-dsm/

THE WEEPING GIRL: HAKAN NESSER trans LAURIE THOMPSON

Detective Inspector Ewa Moreno is looking forward to her summer vacation, part of which she will spend with her newish boyfriend, Mikel Bau at his holiday home at Port Hagen. She just has to interrogate a lowlife, Franz Lampe-Leermann, held in prison at Lejnice near Port Hagen; a useful snitch in the past he will only talk to her.  

On the train she sees a young girl weeping. The girl Mikaela Lijhart explains that she is on the way to visit her father, who she does not know. Sixteen years previously something happened and he has been in an institution ever since. Once she was eighteen her mother was obliged to tell her about him. The two women go their separate ways.

At the end of her interview Moreno understands why Lampe-Leerman only wanted to speak to a woman, as he reveals he knows a journalist with proof that one of her colleagues at Maardam is a paedophile.

Moreno confides in Munster, but before she can really begin to enjoy her time away from work, Sigrid Lijphart comes to Lejnice and reports her daughter as a missing person. Mikaela had visited her father, Arnold Maager, at the institution and then made a trip into town before going missing. Moreno learns that Arnold Maager, a teacher,  had murdered a 16 year old girl pupil Winnie Maas, and believes Mikaela’s disappearance is connected to this old crime and begins her own unofficial investigation. Moreno devoting her holiday to amateur detective work causes her relationship with her bloke to suffer, and nothing in this case is at it seems at first glance.

I’ve just told my boyfriend to go to hell because of this business…..I don’t know if that can be classified as occupational injury-what do you think?

This is another brilliant addition to a series of ten books that rivals the Martin Beck books of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo for consistent excellence. 

The Weeping Girl was originally published in Sweden as Ewa Moreno’s Fall [Ewa Moreno's Case] and the Chief Inspector makes only the very briefest appearance in this story. But Moreno has the personality to carry the book without much assistance, and the other characters are well drawn varying from the helpful local police constable Vogesack to the obnoxious Lejnice Police Chief Vrommel.

The true story of the chief of police in Lejnice.

He had already written over fifty pages, and the title he was currently thinking of giving it was: The Skunk in Uniform.

Although he had not entirely eliminated the possibility of The Long Arm of the Bore, or A Nero of Our Time.

The plot of investigating an old crime  has been attempted many times in recent years [remember this is a book that has taken 13 years to reach us in English] but never quite like this. Hakan Nesser is never predictable, his stories are full of surprises, when a body turns up it is not the one you are expecting. The clever plot combined with the author’s trademark wit and dark humour keep the reader intrigued, a little off-guard and puzzled to the end.

Baasteuwel’s jaw dropped for a moment. ‘I’ve got to hand it to you, you know what you are doing. Do you spend all your holidays like this? ‘You should see me when I’m on duty, said Moreno.

Hakan Nesser has won the European Crime Fiction Star Award [Ripper Award] 2010/2011, the Swedish Crime Writer’s Academy Prize three times, and the Nordic Glass key Award.

The photo shows Hakan Nesser with Maxine Clarke at Crime Fest 2009. 

My reviews of the rest of this superb crime fiction series:

 The Mind’s Eye

Borkmann’s Point

My review of The Return and here and here

Woman with Birthmark

The Inspector and Silence

The Unlucky Lottery

The Hour of the Wolf    

THE FIFTH WITNESS: MICHAEL CONNELLY

My reading in April so far has been a bit restricted as some of  life’s little pleasures intervened; arranging a relocation for a relative, VAT returns, having  windows replaced, and clocking up yet another birthday. Those birthdays do seem to come round rather quickly now. 

The Fifth Witness by Michael Connelly was disappointing, and I can understand why readers of the ABA Journal favoured Robert Dugoni’s Murder One as their choice for the 2012 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction. 

Over 500 pages of first person Mickey Haller was a bit difficult to digest, turgid and in places frankly boring, perhaps you had to be a lawyer to fully appreciate it. At times it did read more like a textbook for aspiring defence lawyers than a novel, and I was not entranced because I thought  the “brilliant double twist” [Evening Standard] was telegraphed for all to see.

Some passages did interest me though, Haller enjoys himself at the expense of his junior associate Jennifer by constantly calling her ‘Bullocks’ after the art deco department store in LA that was purchased by the Southwestern Law School to be part of the campus. This reminded me of the reverse situation when the Royal Dental Hospital in Leicester Square, London was bizarrely situated over a Tennessee Pancake House. The property was worth a fortune, and although dentists from all over London referred patients there, it was sold off in 1987, and reincarnated as a five star hotel.  A similar fate awaited Exeter’s Eye Hospital a few years later, as the sight of a Victorian/Edwardian hospital building produces £ signs to in the heads of NHS administrators.

I think I might have enjoyed The Fifth Witness more if Haller had been defending a more pleasant and deserving character than Lisa Trammel. Lisa is one of Haller’s clients in his new business of preventing bank foreclosures in the property debacle following the banking collapse. Lisa is then charged with murdering the bank’s CEO Mitchell Bondurant, when he is found with his head bashed in and a witness sees her near the scene of the crime. The reader is taken through the minutiae of the case. We learn about foreclosure mills, Hollywood deals, Haller’s relationships with his two ex-wives and teenage daughter, and all this is interesting but doesn’t make up for the fact that Mickey Haller is not Harry Bosch.

It is difficult to criticise an author whose books you have enjoyed so much in the past, but I think because of the weak plot twist and the unsympathetic characters this was not one of  Michael Connelly’s better books, even though it did win the Harper Lee.