Category: Crime Fiction

My Best Crime Fiction Reads in 2009

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

Kerrie is asking for people’s top ten crime fiction reads of this year from which she will collate the books and come up with the best crime fiction reads of 2009.

The rules are

  1. it is about crime fiction you’ve read in 2009. Year of publication doesn’t matter.
  2. about 10 titles in the format of title, author (no need for description etc).
  3. any order will do. If you think one was so much better than the others, you might like to put it in your list twice.
  4. You have until Jan 7 to do it.

I’ve read a lot more crime fiction this year than in previous years (for example I read 16 in 2008 compared to 47 this year) so it’s really difficult to decide which to list as my top ten. Here they are in alphabetical order of title (tomorrow I could just as easily come up with another ten titles).

If you want to contribute your own list pop over to Kerrie’s blog.

Alphabet in Crime Fiction: J and K

Published on by Margaret3 Comments

Whilst I’ve been busy moving house Kerrie’s A-Z Crime Fiction meme has featured the letters J and K. Now that I have the computer up and working (well D actually did that for me) I’m having a little break from unpacking boxes to add to the series. I’ve written about the following books earlier in this blog and have adapted my reviews for this post.

the letter JJ is for A Judgment in Stone by Ruth Rendell.

This portrays Eunice, an illiterate woman and a psychopath who does anything to stop anyone from finding out that she can’t read or write.  Her ingenuity and resourcefulness is amazing. She blackmails people and killed her father. I found the whole premise of such a damaged person apparently functioning normally in society scary.

She is employed by the Coverdales as their housekeeper and in the interests of having their house kept clean and tidy they tried to make her comfortable. But part of the problem was that they looked on her as little more than a machine, not as a person. They meant well, wanting to make other people happy, but they were interferers and things went from bad to worse. Then Eunice met Joan, who was completely unstable, in fact she was insane. Joan is a religious fanatic, a sinner who delights in telling people of her past sins and wanting them to seek God’s forgiveness.  Their friendship ends in tragedy.

I felt helpless whilst reading this, desperately wanting the Coverdales to realise Eunice’s problems, but they were blind to the fact that Eunice was illiterate and although they tried to prevent her meeting Joan they were unaware of the danger they were in.  This inflamed Eunice and pushed her into taking the actions she did.

Although Eunice’s crime is known right from the start, that does not detract from the suspense. It actually makes it worse – you know that the murder is going to happen and as  the reasons why it happens become clear, the tension builds relentlessly.

letter Kis for King of the Streets by John Baker.

I read this over two years ago. It depicts violent murder in graphic detail, which I found hard to stomach and the subject matter of the abuse and murder of children is neither easy nor pleasant to contemplate, but it’s a quick read. This was the third book I’d read by Baker, all set in York and featuring the private detective, Sam Turner and his assistant Geordie (naive, but street-wise). Sam is investigating the murder of a blackmailer and the death of a teenage runaway, hampered by a gangster and his “minders”.

It’s well written, giving insight into the minds of both the detective and the criminal characters. I particularly liked the nickname ‘Gog’ for one of the ‘minders’, who trashes Sam’s office. Gog is, as the name suggests, a huge giant of a man, with little reasoning power, but plenty of brawn, looked after (not very successfully) by his brother, Ben. Baker also refers to Gulliver’s Travels in describing Gog as ‘Brobdingnagian’. At times I even felt sorry for Gog.

I enjoyed this book immensely, despite the violence it portrays.

Teaser Tuesdays

Published on by Margaret10 Comments

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading.

We’re still not in our new home, but still have access to the internet and I’m still reading! Next week it’ll be more difficult with all the unpacking and settling in, so I’ll probably be missing from the blogosphere then.

Currently I’m reading Mortal Causes by Ian Rankin.

About the book (from the back cover): It is August in Edinburgh and the Festival is in full swing… A brutally tortured body is discovered in one of the city’s ancient subterranean streets and marks on the corpse cause Rebus to suspect the involvement of sectarian activists. The prospect of a terrorist atrocity in a city heaving with tourists is almost unthinkable. When the victim turns out to be the son of a notorious gangster, Rebus realises he is sitting atop a volcano of mayhem – and it’s just about to erupt.

My teaser is from page 54:

Rebus shrugged. I’m just wondering how professional all of this really was. I mean on the surface, if you look at the style of execution, then yes, it was a pro job, no question. But then things start to niggle.

I always enjoy reading the Rebus books.  Although you can read each one as a stand alone book, reading them in order helps with understanding the background and the characters as they develop. I prefer reading to watching the TV series, but inevitably it is the faces of the actors I imagine as I’m reading.

Crime Fiction Alphabet: I

Published on by Margaret2 Comments

Continuing with the Crime Fiction Alphabet,  I is for Ian Rankin and Inspector Rebus.

Earlier this year I decided to read Rankin’s Inspector Rebus books in order, starting with the first, Knots and Crosses, published in 1987. Recently I finished the fifth – The Black Book, published in 1993. In all there are 17 in the series, so I’ve a few to go yet. I have read a couple out of sequence – Set in Darkness (2000) and The Falls (2001).

My copy of The Black Book is packed away with our belongings in storage, so this is going to be a bit brief. This is the first book in which both Big Ger Cafferty the ruthless gangster boss, organiser of crime in Edinburgh and DC Siobhan Clarke appear as main characters. DS Brian Holmes has been mugged and is in a coma in hospital, so Rebus with the help of Siobhan, is investigating his attack in the carpark of the Heartbreak Cafe.  (I liked the references to Elvis in this book, with dishes such as ‘Love Me Tenderloin”.) When Rebus finds Brian’s little black book, with his coded notes on various criminals and old cases he is drawn back to investigate the fire that five years earlier had destroyed an Edinburgh hotel leaving an unidentified dead body. His team are also running Operation Moneybags, aimed at busting Big Ger’s moneylending  business.

Rebus has plenty of personal problems in this book. His girlfriend, fed up with his unreliable hours has locked him out of her flat and his brother and ex-con Michael has turned up in Edinburgh, sleeping in the box room in Rebus’s flat. So Rebus, who has let his flat to students has to sleep on the sofa in the living room. As usual with the Rebus books there are a number of twists and turns, with different sub-plots running at the same time as the main plot.

You don’t have to read the books in order as they each stand alone, but I think it helps to see Rebus’s character as it develops. The next book in the series is Mortal Causes, and as I have kept this handy (not in storage) I’ll be reading this next.

Sunday Salon – Today’s Book

Published on by Margaret6 Comments

tssbadge1We’re not moving into our new house for a while yet and I’m writing this in a rented barn conversion, which is just beautiful. I’ll take a few photos later. For now, I’m just writing a short post about what I’m  reading today, which is not what is shown on the sidebar under “Currently Reading”.

I brought some books with me but as there are some here I had a look at them and started to read The Light of Day by Graham Swift.

I shouldn’t like this book – it’s written in the first person present tense, a style I don’t like much, it begins very enigmatically referring to characters and events when I have no idea who or what  they are and there are quite a lot of short sentences without verbs – my English teacher wouldn’t have let me get away with that. And yet it works, it builds up suspense and tension. The cover is different from the one I’ve shown here, but I can’t find the same one on line, so this will have to do.

So far I’ve gathered that there has been a murder, and I know who did it. Now it’s a matter of discovering the why and the how.

Teaser Tuesday:Excursion to Tindari by Andrea Camilleri

Published on by Margaret5 Comments

teaser-tuesdayI’m just going to write a short note about Excursion to Tindari by Andrea Camilleri because it’s a library book and I’m going to return it this afternoon in one of my last trips to my local library.

This is the fifth Inspector Montalbano mystery but the first one I’ve read. My impression of the book as a whole is that it is well constructed, with plenty of colourful characters, and the mystery kept me guessing to the end. Montalbano investigates the death of a young man, Nene Sanfilippo and the disappearance of an elderly couple, the Griffos. They had lived in the same apartment building, but at first this seems to be merely a coincidence. Montalbano is soon plunged into the dangerous world of Sciliy’s “New Mafia”. (This much is revealed on the back cover).

I particularly liked the way Montalbano’s thoughts are revealed and his relationship with his bosses. He’s another detective who works well on his own and with his own team independently of his superiors. He loves food and there are various desciptions of the meals he savours with great relish. He is also a bit of a philosopher – sitting in an old olive tree whilst musing on life and his work:

Straddling one of the lower branches, he would light a cigarette and begin to reflect on problems in need of resolution.

He had discovered that, in some mysterious way, the entanglement, contortion, overlapping, in short, the labyrinth of branches, almost mimetically mirrored what was happening inside his head, the intertwining hypotheses and accumulating arguments. And if some conjecture happened to seem at first too reckless or rash, the sight of a branch tracing an even more far-fetched path than his thought would reassure him and allow him to proceed.

Ensconced among the silvery-green leaves, he could stay there for hours without moving. (pages 99 – 100)

At times this book reads like a comedy, with some of the police talking in dialect before plunging back into the dark criminal world. I couldn’t work out what was behind the crimes at all, which for me was immensely satisfying. When you can see the end coming chapters away and have worked out who “did it” I sometimes feel let down – not so with this book.