Blog Action Day 2010 - Water

Blog Action Day is an annual event held every October 15 that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day with the aim of sparking a global discussion and driving collective action.

This year's topic is Water.
Right now, almost a billion people on the planet don’t have access to clean, safe drinking water. That’s one in eight of us who are subject to preventable disease and even death because of something that many of us take for granted.

Access to clean water is not just a human rights issue. It’s an environmental issue. An animal welfare issue. A sustainability issue. Water is a global issue, and it affects all of us.

After all, clean water is essential for our survival, but dangerously scarce. Nearly one billion people in the world today don't have access to clean water and 42,000 people die each week from water-borne diseases. And the issue doesn't stop there — water availability impacts a wide variety of issues from the environment to women's rights and from technology to fashion.

I've decided to do my appreciation of water a little differently to what you'll find on most blogs. It may be a bit different to what the organisers were expecting, but I hope you'll still be able to appreciate the seriousnes sof the issue, and perhaps even sign the UN petition. (see the block in the right margin)

I'm listing some crime fiction books somehow connected with water.
I've chosen 12 books from my records. The 9 below have already been reviewed on this blog.

• 4.7, THE WATER'S EDGE, Karin Fossum
• 4.5, DEEP WATER, Peter Corris 
• 4.8, WATER LIKE A STONE, Deborah Crombie 
• 4.8, THE SERPENT POOL, Martin Edwards 
• 4.6, THE CROSSING PLACES, Elly Griffiths 
• 4.5, WILLOWS FOR WEEPING, Felicity Pulman 
• 4.2, DEADLY WATERS, Pauline Rowson 
• 3.8, THE DEAD POOL, Sue Walker 
• 3.5, AGATHA RAISIN and the WELLSPRING of DEATH, M.C. Beaton

And these 3 are mini reviews

WATER CLOCK by Jim Kelly, my rating 4.5
Memorable for its unusual setting. Philip Dryden is a reporter for The Crow, a local newspaper in Ely in the Fens. Philip carries a lot of baggage with him – a wife in a coma in a local hospital, and a father who disappeared in the last great Fen floods. Winter is approaching, there is a lot of snow, gales, canals freezing over. A car is discovered in a canal, a frozen block of ice in its boot, encasing a butchered body. Very very readable first novel.   

THE WATER'S LOVELY by Ruth Rendell, my rating 4.7
Ruth Rendell never disappoints me. Sisters Ismay and Heather Sealand live in the bottom half of a house in suburban London and their mother and aunt live in the upper floor. Nine years before their stepfather Guy was drowned in the bath upstairs and Ismay and her mother have always thought Heather was responsible, although they hid their suspicions from the police, and gave Heather, 11 at the time, an alibi. After the verdict of accidental drowning, the matter was never discussed again but Ismay has always thought of Heather as a murderer. She thinks Heather drowned Guy in order to protect her. Ismay wonders whether she should warn Heather's new friend Edmund about Heather's possessiveness.

THE DRAINING LAKE by Arnaldur Indridason, my rating 4.7
After an earth tremor, the water level in an Icelandic lake begins to drop as water drains out through fissures in the lakes bed. Eventually it drops low enough to reveal the skeleton of a murder victim, probably there for a number of years and anchored to a piece of Russian radio equipment. The search for the identity of this person is a fairly lengthy and tedious process but murders and missing perrsons are pretty rare in Iceland where everybody knows everybody. Woven into the murder investigation is the story of idealistic young Icelandic socialists, party members chosen to be educated at university in Leipzig in East Germany, and then also more about Erlendur's own family and his children who flit in and out of his life. Originally published in Icelandic in 2004, the 4th of Indridason's books to be translated into English.