Book Reviews – Page 122

A Dark-Adapted Eye by Barbara Vine: Book Review

Published on July 10, 2010October 2, 2017 by Margaret6 Comments

A few months ago we went to the Science Centre in Glasgow where we spent time in the Planetarium, looking at the night sky as it appears without urban light pollution. To see the stars and planets you need a dark-adapted eye and the lights are slowly dimmed until they all come into focus.

In Barbara Vine’s A Dark-Adapted Eye, the narrator Faith has spent her life avoiding thinking, talking or reading about at the events that led up to her aunt’s hanging for murder. She only develops a “dark-adapted eye” very slowly when asked by a crime writer for her memories. This is psychological crime fiction, you know right from the beginning who the murderer is, but not why or how the murder was committed. It’s not even clear immediately who the victim is.

Slowly, very slowly, with lots of hints and questions about how things could have turned out differently the family relationships and events that led up to the tragedy are revealed. Because of this it’s not a quick read and I think it’s a book that could stand many re-readings, just to work out how everything ties in together and for different perspectives to become clearer. I borrowed this book from the library, but it’s one I’d like to own to delve into its secrets.

Faith and the other members of her family are all so well described and the settings too. This is a book where you can see events and people so clearly through their thoughts and emotions as much as through their actions, but their secrets are so well concealed. Vera, Faith’s aunt, prim, snobbish and obsessional is the murderer. Her brother is shocked and removes all photos of her, refusing to read the newspaper reports or go to her trial, as does Faith. Slowly, it appears that Vera has killed her half-sister, the beautiful, the perfect Eden, but how or why is not clear until near the end of the book, or at least it wasn’t clear to me. Francis, Vera’s elder son changed his name as soon as she was arrested and the younger son, Jamie is living in Italy as the book begins. Jamie has a major part in the story but he was only 6 when his mother was hanged and remembers nothing about the situation.

Eden and Vera have a love/hate relationship, which only gets worse as the years go by. I began by disliking both of them, then swinging from one to the other as Faith describes them and their relationship. In fact I was doing that all the way through this book, never quite sure what to believe. And by the end just when you think you understand it all, Vine throws everything into question yet again and the reader is left to decide just what did happen, just what was the truth. Fantastic.

A Question of Blood by Ian Rankin: Book Review

Published on July 6, 2010 by Margaret1 Comment

I’ve recently finished reading Ian Rankin’sÂ A Question of Blood, the 14th Inspector Rebus book, only three more left to read now!

Lee Herdman, is an ex-SAS loner who shoots andÂ kills two teenagers, injuring another at a private school in South QueensferryÂ near Edinburgh, before killing himself. Rebus, alsoÂ ex-Army andÂ a loner is the ideal man to investigate and he becomes obsessed with discovering what drove Herdman to do it.

But the book begins with Rebus in hospital having scalded his hands by tripping into his bath, or so he says. With his hands in bandages, DS Siobhan Clarke helps him out by being his driver. She is also becoming more and more like Rebus, a loner who has no life outside her job,Â and drinks alone. She has panic attacks as a result of beingÂ stalked by Marty Fairstone, a housebreaker with several convictions for assault. WhenÂ Fairstone is found burned to death in his house, after a late night drinking session with Rebus, RebusÂ isÂ the number one suspect for hisÂ murder.

Rebus is forced to think of his family, Â because one of the dead teenagers is a relation – Derek Renshaw, his cousin’s son. Family ties are highlighted in this book, not only through Rebus, but alsoÂ through the relationship between the surviving teenager, James Bell and his father, theÂ disreputable MSP Jack Bell, and also the Cotter family – the Goth teenager, Myss Teri, her parents and her brother who died in a car crash involving Derek Renshaw.

Rebus is his usual tormented self, but it is Siobhan who comes just as much into focus as Rebus and by the end of the book the relationship between them is strengthened:

He’d been thinking about families: not just his own, but all those connected to the case. Lee Herdman, walking away from his family; James and Jack Bell, seemingly with nothing to connect them but blood; Teri Cotter and her mother … And Rebus himself, replacing his own family with colleagues like Siobhan and Andy Callis, producing ties that oftentimes seemed stronger than blood. (pages 437-8)

I don’t think this is the best Rebus book Rankin has written, for me it dragged a bit in the middle and I think it could have been a bit less drawn out,Â but it’s still a good read, addressing more issues than just the crimes.

Resurrection Men by Ian Rankin: Book Review

Published on June 26, 2010March 12, 2024 by Margaret5 Comments

I’m on a roll now with Ian Rankin’s Rebus books. Resurrection Men is excellent, so good that I couldn’t wait to get back to it each time I had to stop reading. And when I finished it I immediately got out the next book in the series A Question of Blood, which promises to be just as good.

Resurrection Men isn’t about body-snatchers (as I wondered it might be), but about the cops who need re-training, including Rebus. They’re at Tullialian, the Scottish Police College and they are a tough bunch indeed, ‘the lowest of the low‘ as one of them, DI Gray tells a witness he is interrogating:

We’re here because we don’t care. We don’t care about you, we don’t care about them. We could kick your teeth down your throat, and when they come to tell us off, we’d be laughing and slapping our thighs. Time was, buggars like you could end up inside one of the support pillars for the Kingston Bridge. See what I’m saying? (page 326)

To help them become team players – fat chance of that I thought – they’ve been given on old, unsolved case to work on. But Rebus was involved in the case at the time and begins to get paranoid about why is on the course. It’s a tough, gritty story and as with other Rebus books, there’s more than one investigation on the go, several, in fact, needing concentration to keep tabs on each one. Siobhan Clarke is now a DS and with Rebus away she is in charge of the case of the murdered art dealer. Siobhan is getting more and more like Rebus and has a much bigger part in this book than in previous books.

Rankin is great on characterisation – they’re all credible, I feel I know the main characters. His dialogue rings true to life and I felt like a fly on the wall throughout, a bit uncomfortable at times as Rebus gets into tricky situations and tries to work out who he can trust. Both he and I were unsure right to the end.

Bad Science by Ben Goldacre:Book Review

Published on June 22, 2010 by Margaret2 Comments

Bad Science is mainly about health issues, and how they are reported in the press which surprised me as I expected it to be more wide-ranging. It shouldn’t have been such a surprise as Ben Goldacre is a qualified doctor, working for the NHS. He also exposes the ‘tricks of the £30 billion food supplements industry and the evils of the £300 billion pharmaceuticals industry’.

It’s a splendid rant against the lack of education and knowledge about health with the inevitable result that we are unable to understand and judge for ourselves the effectiveness of the various treatments on offer. He describes how placebos work, just what homeopathy is, the misunderstandings about food and nutrition, and above all how to decide what works and what is quackery, scaremongering or downright dangerous. He is scathing about homeopathy, about Gillian McKeith’s lack of scientific knowledge and misleading claims, and dismisses Patrick Holford for the way he cherry-picks the data to suit his case, and makes extraordinary claims without evidence to back them up.

I very rarely read anything scientific but found this easy to understand, apart from the statistics, which cause my eyes to glaze over at the mere sight of a graph, tables or columns of figures. Fortunately there’s not a lot of that in this book.

There are disturbing chapters on such topics as the way some drugs trials are carried out – the distortion of evidence and the way harmful/negative effects are ignored or hidden. His chapters on health scares about MRSA and MMR are particularly interesting. Other topics were not so surprising, as I’ve always been sceptical about the value of taking food supplements and vitamins (even though I’ve taken vitamin C tablets for years).

Overall, even though I thought there was too much repetition and over explanation, I did learn quite a lot and it does provide food for thought.

Set in Darkness by Ian Rankin:Book Review

Published on June 17, 2010August 13, 2018 by Margaret7 Comments

Set in darkness

Set in Darkness was the first Inspector Rebus book I read, nearly three years ago. I’m currently reading all of them in sequence – this is the 11th in the series. I was pleased that I remembered so much about it and it didn’t spoil the tension at all, but then I hadn’t remembered all the details. I think I enjoyed it more the second time round as I knew the main characters and had seen them develop in the previous 10 books.

There are three cases Rebus and his colleagues are investigating. The first is the discovery of a corpse in one of the old fireplaces at Queensberry House, Edinburgh during the works to build the new Scottish Parliament building. The body, nicknamed Skelly by the police, had been bricked up around 1979, twenty years earlier. The second case is the murder of Roddy Grieve, a candidate for the Scottish Parliament, found in a summer house in the grounds of Queensberry House, and the third is the suicide of a tramp who had jumped off North Bridge over the deep gully that housed Waverley Station. The press nicknamed him Supertramp after a building society pass book was found in his belongings that revealed he owned £400,000. At the same time the police are investigating a rapist who is targeting singles clubs.

Rankin’s skill is in interweaving the cases. At no time does this seem contrived or forced, the links seem to unfold naturally as the investigation progresses. Rebus is out of favour with his boss, Farmer Watson, which is why he’d been seconded to the Policing of Parliament Liaison Committee to advise on security for the Scottish Parliament, but also why he was on the spot when Skelly was discovered. DS Siobhan Clarke is working on the rape case and on her way home from the singles club she witnesses Supertramp’s suicide, and is then assigned to his case. Siobhan is becoming more like Rebus, dedicated and obsessed cops, who like working on their own. The cop instinct defines them – always on the lookout, their lives not their own, but made up of other people’s lives (page 223 paraphrased).

This is a dark book; there is darkness within Rebus himself, as well as in the crimes he investigates. He doesn’t sleep at night, aand as one of the other characters says to him

‘We all come from the darkness, you have to remember that, and we sleep during the night to escape the fact. I’ll bet you have trouble sleeping at night, don’t you?’ He didn’t say anything. Her face grew less animated. ‘We’ll all return to darkness one day, when the sun burns out.’ (page 157)

He is a troubled soul, with ghosts in his life – past family and past friends who come to him as he sit sin darkness on long nights when he’s alone. He can see his career crumbling around him and ends up beaten and bloodied. He only survives with help from Big Ger Caffety, released from prison and still Edinburgh’s crime boss.

I loved this book.

The Right Attitude to Rain by Alexander McCall Smith

Published on June 16, 2010 by Margaret3 Comments

The Right Attitude to Rain is the third in the series of Isabel Dalhousie novels, set in Edinburgh and the Scottish Borders. It’s a pleasure to read but difficult to write about. Not a lot happens and reading it is like being inside Isabel’s head. She takes a great interest in the affairs of others and likes watching people. Some people might call this nosiness.

Some things do happen – Isabel is buying a flat for her housekeeper, Grace. Cat, her niece has a new boyfriend, Patrick, but Isabel doubts his possessive mother is happy about that. Meanwhile she is wondering if her love for Jamie, 14 years her junior and Cat’s ex-boyfriend, could ever be reciprocated:

There is no point in my loving this young man, she told herself, because it can never go anywhere. And yet did it matter if love was not reciprocated? Was it not possible to love somebody hopelessly, from a distance even, and for that love to be satisfying, even if never reciprocated, even if the object of one’s affections never even knew? (page 33)

A large part of the book is taken up with their developing relationship and the tensions it arouses. Then there is the American couple Isabel watches in the Scottish Gallery who turn out to be friends of her cousin Mimi, who is staying with her for a few weeks. This gives Isabel the opportunity to meet the couple and become involved in their lives. Mimi also has a revelation concerning Isabel’s ‘sainted American mother’, which causes Isabel some distress.

It’s a study of relationships, communication and misunderstandings as Isabel mulls over philosophical and moral dilemmas, and conducts internal debates instead of simply making a decision and acting upon it. Grace sums her up admirably:

Isabel’s life was a good one; she was a kind woman, and she felt for people, which was more than one could say about a lot of people in her position, Grace thought. But there were certainly areas of Isabel’s life where what was required was a little less thought and a bit more action. (page 125)

What about the rain? Well, it all depends on your attitude – any hint of warm weather and you’re optimistic about being outside: