Split Second by Cath Staincliffe

Staincliffe, Cath - ‘Split Second’ 
Hardback: 320 pages (Apr. 2012) Publisher: Constable ISBN: 1849013454

SPLIT SECOND is a very moving account of an apparently impulsive crime and its aftermath, told from the point of view of three characters. Emma is a shy young woman who witnesses some teenagers yelling abuse at a boy sitting opposite her on the bus as she returns home from work. Frozen in fear, she does nothing. A young man comes down from the top deck and tries to stop the attack – the bus stops, all the participants run off, and tragedy occurs.

Andrew is the father of one of the boys involved; Louise is the mother of another. The book tells the story of the ensuing events from both their points of view, as well as from that of Emma. By use of this device, the reader is drawn into the criminal justice system and how well or badly it deals with apprehending criminals, supporting witnesses, and helping relatives of victims.

The novel is more than just an account of these events. The reader experiences the unbearable emotional responses of two separate parents who are coping with the aftermath, as well as Emma’s internal conflict. As each of the three characters reflects on the situation and decides what to do, one gets to know more about them as people, as well as about their families and their lives at work. Hence, all three of them are fully rounded portraits, and by the trial at the end of the novel, we really care about the outcome on much more than an intellectual level.

Cath Staincliffe has used a similar narrative device in her previous novel, WITNESS. In her hands, it is extremely effective in both cases. SPLIT SECOND is a truly insightful, thoughtful book – it is short and unpretentious, and very well worth reading, both as crime fiction and as a poignant insight into the apparently mundane but, under the surface, deeply individual lives of people confronted with an issue they never thought they’d have to face.

Review first posted at Euro Crime, May 2012

Nights of Awe by Harri Nykanen

Nykanen, Harri - ‘Nights of Awe’ (translated by Kristian London)
Paperback: 278 pages (Feb. 2012) Publisher: Bitter Lemon Press ISBN: 1904738923

The ten days starting with Rosh Hashanah and ending with Yom Kippur are termed the Days of Awe, or the Days of Repentance. This is a time for individuals to consider the sins of the previous year and repent. Hence the English-language title of this book, the events of which take place during this period – but not always at night. (The book was called ARIEL when it was first published in Finnish in 2004.)

Ariel Kafka is an inspector in the violent crimes unit of the Helsinki police, so is called in when two men are attacked and killed at a busy train junction. With little to go on, Ari (as everyone calls him) is stymied until another two bodies are discovered at a repair garage. “Four bodies in one day was a lot”, thinks Ari with typical laconic understatement. Because the victims are all Arabic, the unpopular SUPO (security police) muscle in with theories of terrorism to explain the crimes. In a nod to the author’s other series, Helsinki Homicide, Ari consults Lt Tamanaki for some advice on how to proceed: Tamanaki refers him to the Islamic society, which provides useful background and context.

The pace of the narrative never lets up. Even more bodies are found. Ari rushes about pursuing a constellation of leads while SUPO continue to muddy the waters by not providing useful information to Ari but being suspiciously well-informed about the police investigation, always turning up one step behind Ari at each crime scene. Ari uncovers a possible Israeli connection: he is warned off by several of his well-connected extended family who are on the committee of the synagogue. Ari’s brother, who owns a law firm, puzzlingly wants to know more about the case than is released to the public, and Ari’s ex-girlfriend’s father, a failed furrier, is somehow involved with one of the later victims. SUPO piles on the pressure by suggesting that Mossad agents are trying to prevent an act of terrorism planned for the upcoming visit of Israel’s foreign minister. Ari, surely the best-connected detective in fiction (partly due to the smallness of Helsinki’s Jewish community), happens to have been the boyhood friend of someone who may be able to help him work out what is happening in this convoluted series of crimes and plethora of interested parties.

After a great first half, NIGHTS OF AWE suffers from being overcomplicated by too many conspiracy elements, and in having quite so many murdered corpses turning up – all crammed in to a short book. Ari is an intelligent, dynamic and determined investigator, whose relationship with his Jewish roots and extended family (secondary to his loyalty to the police and his country) provide interesting tensions. I hope to read more about him, but I also hope that his future cases are more local than this one.

Review first posted at Euro Crime, May 2012.

Taken by Robert Crais

Robert Crais is one of the best (and best-selling) exponents of the detective novel/thriller blend. He achieves this goal by use of two characters: LA private investigator Elvis Cole, and his friend Joe Pike. Cole is a wisecracking, warm-hearted and intelligent man, whose inner sadness is masked by his Hawaiian shirts, Pinocchio clock on the wall of his office, and his self-mocking appellation of “The World’s Greatest Detective”. Pike, on the other hand, is a strong, silent type, ex-special forces and just the kind of guy you need on hand to get you out of trouble. After several novels in which Cole was the main character, solving cases in Chandler-esque style with Joe as his loyal sidekick, Pike has branched out to become the main character in a couple of novels of his own.

In Taken, Crais has mixed his formula again, both stylistically and in terms of plot. Stylistically, the book is told not only from several perspectives, but in chronologically haphazard segments that add to the tension. Jim and Krista, who tell part of the story, are two young lovers who stumble into a horrific nightmare while out in the desert one night, and seemingly disappear. Cole, another narrator, is hired by Krista’s desperate mother to find her daughter. Pike, and his even more extreme companion Jon Stone, narrate other sections. Because of the chapter headings, the reader knows pretty early on that Cole is going to be “taken”, so suspense is built up by the reader’s ignorance about who, why and how.

The plot concerns people-trafficking, which nowadays is a crime-fiction staple. Here, however, the author puts a novel yet nasty riff on the theme: foreign nationals pay LA contacts (often via relatives) to be smuggled into the USA, whether from Mexico, Korea, or various Arab countries. Yet the rival gangs of LA prey on each other, re-kidnapping these refugees at their desert rendezvous points and demanding ransom from their families in relatively small but regular amounts. When the families run out of money and the ransom can no longer be paid, the refugee “disappears”.

Cole does not take long to find out what has happened to Krista and Jim: these initial sections of the novel sparkle as Cole builds up the picture using tried and tested methods of detective fiction (perhaps leaning a little too much on friendly police officers to run database searches for him). Krista, in particular, is no slouch, managing to stay alive by fooling her captors. Half-way through, the gear shifts, and the book becomes a thriller as Pike and Stone, having been neatly outwitted, engage in a desperate search to find the kidnapped victims before it is too late.

Taken is an addictive read: not a book to put down once opened, but not one that will take long to finish. It is probably best enjoyed if you’ve read some of the previous 12 novels about Cole and Pike, not least because of the in-jokes and some of the recurring characters who make brief appearances here.

Review first posted at Bookgeeks, May 2012.

Stay Close by Harlan Coben

Did you know that you can hire paparazzi to follow you around, yelling personal questions and photographing you while you have your Bar Mitzvah or take someone out for a date? I didn’t, but this nadir is where Ray Levine finds himself at the start of Stay Close, Harlan Coben’s latest novel. Ray, previously an award-winning war photojournalist, has to do this demeaning job because the woman he loved, a stripper called Cassie, left him 17 years ago and he’s never recovered from the blow.

I hesitate before revealing any more of the plot of this book because it is all like this – a constant melodrama. Cassie, for example, is now called Megan and lives in suburban New Jersey, ferrying her two children to soccer practice or to parties, and sitting cosily on the sofa with her husband while he watches sports on TV. Despite her 17 years of domestic placidity, Megan still hankers after her old life. So when she receives a phone call out of the blue from one of her old associates – a call that, naturally, contains shocking news – she drops everything and heads off to her old haunts in Atlantic City.

Several other characters are introduced: a good cop, a bad cop, a lawyer, a grieving wife, a grieving father, two unusual assassins-for-hire, and so on . The novel is written in bite-size chunks of prose from their assorted points of view, each piling on the complications and keeping up the tempo. From this staccato presentation, it emerges that men have been disappearing at the rate of one a year for (as you’ve probably guessed) the past 17 years, without anyone in law enforcement noticing until now. The main area of suspicion is the Pine Barrens, a forested area outside the city made world-famous by a Sopranos episode, and no less sinister here.

Harlan Coben has written some addictive, gripping thrillers in his time: a series about Myron Bolitar, ex-basketball player turned sports agent; and exciting, standalone novels mostly set in New Jersey, such as Tell No-One and Just One Look. Recently, however, his output has seemed rather mechanical. The plot of Stay Close is very fast-moving in its constant twists and turns; had the author taken as much care over the characterisation, the end-result could have been a superior thriller. Instead, it’s hard to care about the participants or to become involved in their dilemmas. Stay Close is a book to pass the time rather than one to cancel any appointments for.

Review first posted at Bookgeeks, April 2012.

Containment by Vanda Symon

Containment
by Vanda Symon
Penguin (New Zealand), 2009.
Sam Shephard #3

Reviewed at Petrona, May 2012.

In the Bleak Midwinter by Julia Spencer-Fleming

In the Bleak Midwinter
by Julia Spencer-Fleming
St Martin’s 2002
Clare Fergusson #1

Reviewed at Petrona, May 2012.

The Loyal Servant by Eva Hudson

The Loyal Servant
by Eva Hudson
copyright Eva Hudson
Kindle edn, 2011

Reviewed at Petrona, April 2012.

Killer Instinct by Zoe Sharp

Killer Instinct
by Zoë Sharp
Murderati, Inc (Kindle edn, 2011)
First published by Piatkus, 2002
Charlie Fox #1

Reviewed at Petrona, April 2012.

The Other Child by Charlotte Link

Link, Charlotte – ‘The Other Child’ (translated by Stefan Tobler)
Hardback: 416 pages (Mar. 2012) Publisher: Orion ISBN: 1409123375

It is unusual to read a book set in England but written by a German author and translated into English. I was therefore intrigued by THE OTHER CHILD, a book that has apparently sold 15 million copies in Germany since its publication there in 2009.

THE OTHER CHILD is the story of a group of people who live in Scarborough: Chad and his daughter Gwen live on a decrepit farm; Fiona, a widow, lives in a flat in the town, regularly visited by her granddaughter Leslie, a recently divorced doctor. Fiona and Chad have been very close since the Second World War, when the 11-year-old Fiona was evacuated from London to the farm. The two never married. Nowadays, Fiona spends much of her time on the farm, telling Chad and Gwen how to run their lives in no uncertain terms, and looking after the reclusive old man.

Gwen, a plain, old-fashioned woman, is in her mid-thirties and very shy: she enrols in an evening class to improve her confidence, and there meets Dave Tanner, a handsome but impoverished wastrel-type, who makes a meagre income teaching housewives French and Italian. Dave offers Gwen a lift home one rainy night, and before too long the two are engaged to be married. They invite Leslie and Fiona to a party to celebrate this event, along with Jennifer and Colin, a childless couple with two Great Danes who spend two or three holidays each year at the farm. The party is a disaster, mainly because the shrewish Fiona accuses Dave of only being interested in Gwen so that he can take over the farm. The group breaks up; by the next morning, one of them is dead.

The police officers who investigate this crime are DI Valerie Almond and DS Reek. They wonder if the death could be related to that of the unsolved murder of a young student in the town some months previously, but evidence is frustratingly hard to come by.

The bulk of the book consists of the relationships between and behaviour of this group of characters and one or two others. Several of them have come into possession of Fiona’s emails to Chad, which tell the story of the couple’s friendship since the war to the present. Leslie, in particular, is deeply affected by the outcome of this story and its implications.

THE OTHER CHILD is very readable, but it has more in common with a book by, say, Maeve Binchy than a crime novel. The police investigation is only briefly sketched – Almond and Reek seem to have no base or team; their role is basically to interview various characters. The crime element comes to the fore at the end, but unfortunately I found the identity of the criminal obvious and the climactic finale overdone. One of the plotlines simply peters out. The story of the “other child” is a moving one, but because most of it is left to the final section of the novel, it almost seems like a side-issue, rather than the focus of the book as one might expect from the title.

The author evokes some of the atmosphere of Yorkshire and of London during the Blitz, and has a few sharp digs at landladies and town gossips. Apart from the odd misplaced word (for example, someone who takes a bus to town is said to have “driven” over), it is impossible to tell that the novel was not written by a native Englishwoman. Some of the dialogue is fairly clunky, but overall the book is an easy, undemanding read, which I enjoyed despite the weakness of the crime plot.

Review first published at Euro Crime, April 2012.

A Dark Redemption by Stav Sherez

A Dark Redemption
By Stav Sherez
Faber&Faber, 2012
Carrigan and Miller #1

Reviewed at Petrona, April 2012.