Month: September 2010

The Serpent Pool by Martin Edwards: Book Review

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

I’d been eagerly looking forward to reading Martin Edwards’s latest Lake District Mystery, The Serpent Pool and it didn’t disappoint. It’s a  terrific book. It has everything, a great sense of location, believable, complex characters, a crime to solve, full of tension and well paced to keep you wanting to know more, and so atmospheric. I loved all the literary connections, the secondhand bookshop, the book collectors and historian, Daniel Kind’s research into the 19th century writer, Thomas de Quincey and his history of murder.

The earlier books in the series are The Coffin Trail, The Cipher Garden, and The Arsenic Labyrinth, featuring DCI Hannah Scarlet, in charge of the Cumbria’s Cold Case Team, her partner Marc Amos, a rare book dealer and Daniel Kind, a historian and the son of Hannah’s former boss, Ben Kind. See Martin’s website for more information.

The Serpent Pool begins with the death of George Saffell, one of Marc’s customers, stabbed and then burnt to death amidst his collection of rare and valuable books.The motive for his killing, the subsequent death of another of Marc’s customers, Stuart Wagg, and the connection with the cold case Hannah is investigating gradually become clear.

Hannah is investigating the apparent suicide of Bethany Friend who had drowned 6 years earlier in the Serpent Pool, a lonely, isolated place below the Serpent Tower, a folly high on a ridge. Her mother refused to accept she had killed herself, she had no suicidal tendencies and no known history of depression. She had drowned in just eighteen inches of water and was found with her hands loosely tied behind her back and her ankles tied together. Hannah and Greg Wharf, her new detective sergeant set about re-interviewing all the witnesses.

When Hannah discovers that Marc knew Bethany she wonders what he is hiding and why he had never mentioned it to her. Their relationship is not going well and to make matters worse she is still attracted to Daniel. Marc, in turn, seems dangerously attracted to Cassie Weston, a new employee.

The complex plot kept me guessing to the end of this gripping murder mystery.

Agatha Christie Blog Tour

Published on by Margaret

On 15 September 2010 Agatha Christie would have been 120 years old.

Over at the ACRC Blog Carnival we are taking part in world wide celebrations with a blog carnival tour from 1-30 September 2010.

My contribution will be on 22 September. The schedule for the blog tour is at the Agatha Christie Reading Challenge site, where you can check out what the other participants write each day.

RIP Challenge

Published on by Margaret7 Comments

It’s time for Carl’s R.I.P. (Readers Imbibing Peril) Challenge. This challenge runs from 1 September to 31 October. As he describes it, it’s that time of the year

where two short months are dedicated to reveling in all things creepy, eerie, mysterious, gothic, horrifying, suspenseful and strange.

It is time to celebrate things that go bump in the night; that favorite detective that always gets his man, or woman, in the end; that delicious chill of a creak on the stairs, of the rogue waiting in the dark, of the full moon and the flit of bats wings.

The categories of books to choose from are:

Mystery.
Suspense.
Thriller.
Dark Fantasy.
Gothic.
Horror.
Supernatural.

There are a number of Perils, but I’m going for the easy one – Peril the Third, which involves reading one book that fits within the R.I.P. definition.

I have a few books to choose from as I don’t like to commit myself too soon. These are from my TBR list. If I read more than one that it is all the better:

(The links go to Amazon.co.uk)

Thirteen Hours by Deon Meyer: Book Review

Published on by Margaret10 Comments

Thirteen Hours by Deon Meyer (translated from Afrikaans by K L Seegers) is a great book. I was engrossed in it right from the start. It’s tense, taut and utterly enthralling. Moving at a fast pace the book follows the events during the thirteen hours from 05:36 when Rachel, a young American girl is running for her life up the steep slope of Lion’s Head in Capetown.  The body of another American girl is found outside the Lutheran church in Long Street. Her throat slit had been slit. An hour or so later Alexandra Barnard, a former singing star and an alcoholic, wakes from a drunken stupor to find the dead body of her husband, a record producer, lying on the floor opposite her and his pistol lying next to her.

It’s not just the story that makes this book such a gripping read, but the characters are so well-drawn too. DI Benny Griessel is mentoring two inexperienced detectives who are investigating these crimes. I grew very fond of Benny, who is also an alcoholic and struggling to keep his marriage together. He deals with mentoring his charges very well, with patience and expertise, but also gets emotionally involved when Rachel’s father entreats him to save his daughter. There are many other memorable characters, such as Inspector Mbali Kaleni, a Zulu woman with a powerful personality who commands people’s attention, and the elderly Piet van der Lingen, who helped Rachel, looking like an ‘aged monk with his thinning grey hair around the bald spot that shone in the flourescent light.’

The two cases move along parallel to each other, keeping me desperate to know what happened next in both. The book also reflects the racial tension in the ‘new South Africa’ with its mix of white, coloured and black South Africans. There is a strong sense of location, not just from the cultural aspect but also geographical because although I know nothing about Capetown I had no difficulty in visualising the scenes from Meyer’s descriptions.

Without doubt this has to be one of the best books I’ve read this year, one that had me eager to get back to it each time I had to stop reading.

Seeking Whom He May Devour by Fred Vargas

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

It took me some time to ‘get into’ Seeking Whom He May Devour, mainly because of the somewhat stilted style, which may be a result of the translation from French, but as this is the first book by Fred Vargas I’ve nothing to compare it with. Looking at the reviews on Amazon, it seems as though it is the translation. Anyway, it’s a rather quirky crime fiction novel with touches of humour that appealed to me.

On the back cover it describes the book as ‘frightening and surprising’, but I didn’t find it at all frightening – surprising, yes, particularly the ending which I hadn’t expected at all. It’s set in the French mountains. Johnstone, a Canadian is living there whilst he films a documentary about wolves. The problems start when more and more sheep are found with their throats torn out. The vet says it is the work of a very large wolf and after Suzanne Rosselin told Johnstone she believed it was a werewolf, the hunt is on, despite Johnstone’s wish to leave the wolves in peace. Then Suzanne is also found dead, killed in the same way, When Massart, who worked at the slaughterhouse and lived on his own high up on Mont Vence, disappears suspicion falls on him as the werewolf.

Soliman, Suzanne’s adopted son and Watchee her shepherd persuade Camille,  a plumber/musician, who is Johnstone’s girlfriend to go with them as they try to track down Massart. They are an odd combination of characters – Soliman, a young black man who loves telling African folk stories and giving definitions of words he ‘s learnt from a dictionary, Watchee, an old man more comfortable with his sheep than people and Camille, who is writing a music soap opera and reads the A to Z of Tools for Trade and Craft for relaxation.

Soliman and Watchee enlist Camille’s help in tracking down Massart, because she can drive and they can’t. Johnstone, a man who’s not good with words, doesn’t like the idea and every now and then pops up as they travel through the French countryside on narrow hairpin tracks in a smelly old sheep wagon. I felt this section of the book was over-long but I did like their philosophising and story-telling. I also liked the little touches of humour, such as the episode where Watchee phones a friend who puts his mobile in Watchee’s leading ewe’s ear so he can talk to her, to keep her spirits up whilst he is away.

With the help of Commissaire Jean- Baptiste Adamsberg the killer is finally tracked down. Adamsberg is another eccentric character, a policeman who is being stalked by a girl who is obsessed with the idea of killing him. He has his own way of working things out:

Adamsberg put one thing in another, or turned them upside down, or scattered what had been brought together and threw it up in the air to see where it would fall. And despite his amazingly slow pace, he would in the end, extract truth from that chaos. (page 109)

By the end of this book I was really enjoying it. It isn’t a scary book, but neither is it a ‘cozy’ mystery. It’s different from any other crime fiction that I’ve read and I want to read more by Fred Vargas. This is the second in her Chief Inspector Adamsberg series but it reads fine as a stand-alone book.