e-challenge completed - new level set

e-book challenge hosted at The Lady Bug Reads

I was aiming for obsessed: 20 books - completed


My Kindle rivals made-from-paper books at present and so perhaps aiming for 20 books wasn't a real challenge for me.
Over on the site  at e-book challenge I have just discovered more levels and have decided to aim higher:
Monomaniacal – Read 100 e-books.
That should stretch me

1. 4.8, KEEPER OF LOST CAUSES, Jussi Adler-Olsen 
2. 4.5, VENGEANCE ROAD, Rick Mofina
3. 4.0, MURDER AT LOST DOG LAKE, Vicki Delany
4. 4.8, THE LEOPARD, Jo Nesbo 
5. 4.6, RELICS OF THE DEAD, Ariana Franklin
6. 4.6, THE JANUS STONE, Elly Griffiths 
7. 4.3, THE SERPENT AND THE SCORPION, Clare Langley-Hawthorne 
8. 4.2, DARK WATER, Georgia Blain
9. 4.2, THE POCKET ESSENTIAL AGATHA CHRISTIE, Mark Campbell
10. 4.3, MURDER IS EASY, Agatha Christie
11. 4.8, THE SWEETNESS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PIE, Alan Bradley
12. 4.7, DYING GASP, Leighton Gage
13. 4.1, THE ROAD TO HELL, Paul Levine
14. 4.3, FLASH FICTION FOR THE COCKTAIL HOUR, Cathryn Grant
15. 4.2, DARK BLOOMS, Melissa F. Miller
16. 4.5, OPERATION NAPOLEON, Arnaldur Indridason
17. 4.4, CANDIED CRIME, Dorte Jakobsen
18. 4.7, THE MAN WHO WENT UP IN SMOKE, Maj Sjowall & Per Wahloo
19. 4.9, BAD INTENTIONS, Karin Fossum 
20. 4.7, PRIME CUT, Alan Carter 

Review: THE KEEPER OF LOST CAUSES, Jussi Adler-Olsen

Translated by Tiina Nunnally
Published Penguin Group (USA Aug 2011)
My copy: an Advance Uncorrected Proof from NetGalley

Marketing copy provided by the publisher
Jussi Adler-Olsen is Denmark's premier crime writer. His books routinely top the bestseller lists in northern Europe, and he's won just about every Nordic crime-writing award, including the prestigious Glass Key Award-also won by Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson, and Jo Nesbo. Now, Dutton is thrilled to introduce him to America.

The Keeper of Lost Causes, the first installment of Adler-Olsen's Department Q series, features the deeply flawed chief detective Carl MØrck, who used to be a good homicide detective-one of Copenhagen's best. Then a bullet almost took his life. Two of his colleagues weren't so lucky, and Carl, who didn't draw his weapon, blames himself.

So a promotion is the last thing Carl expects.

But it all becomes clear when he sees his new office in the basement. Carl's been selected to run Department Q, a new special investigations division that turns out to be a department of one. With a stack of Copenhagen's coldest cases to keep him company, Carl's been put out to pasture. So he's as surprised as anyone when a case actually captures his interest. A missing politician vanished without a trace five years earlier. The world assumes she's dead. His colleagues snicker about the time he's wasting. But Carl may have the last laugh, and redeem himself in the process.

My take

By 2007 Carl Morck had been in the Danish police force for 25 years. He was once an experienced criminal investigator who lived and breathed for his work. He used to be an elegant man whom people noticed. But all that changed the day he and his team were sent to a murder investigation where hidden snipers killed one them, paralysed a second, and took away Morck's fire.

Six months on, Morck is back at work but a bit of an embarrassment that his superiors don't how to handle. The answer comes in the shape of a new section, Department Q, that Morck will head, that will deal only with unsolved crimes designated as cases "deserving special scrutiny."

The first case Morck decides to deal with is a high profile one of popular politician Merete Lynggaard who vanished from a ferry from Germany docking in Copenhagen Harbour in 2002. Successfully solving this case will be a big feather in the cap for Department Q.

Department Q consists of Carl Morck and his assistant, a political refugee from Syria, a civilian called Hafez el-Assad. Assad is primarily meant to do clerical and cleaning duties but as Morck increasingly involves him in the investigation, it becomes obvious that Assad has experience and talents no-one knows about. They make an unlikely but strangely complementary detective duo.

Their investigation into Merete Lynggaard's disappearance reveals elementary pathways that the original team missed and sloppy methodology. As they begin to make progress, the investigation into the shooting of Morck's team six months before ramps up, and Morck himself has panic attacks over what it will reveal.

Book website

This was a great read. My rating 4.8

I certainly hope to read a sequel.

I am counting THE KEEPER OF LOST CAUSES in e-book challenge, Nordic Challenge 2011, translated, and new-to-me authors.

Forgotten Book: GUARDIAN ANGEL, Sara Paretsky

This week's Friday's Forgotten book for the meme hosted by Patti Abbott on Pattinase's Friday's Forgotten Books appears in my records for 1993.

GUARDIAN ANGEL, published in 1992, is  the seventh in Sara Paretsky’s  V I Warshawski series (now 14 books). I had already read a number of the earlier books and was already hooked.

Publisher's blurb (from author's website)

Racine Avenue is going upscale—bad news for hand-to-mouth residents like V I Warshawski. As tax bills skyrocket, newcomers pressure old inhabitants into fixing up their homes or moving out. To the yuppies on the block the worst eyesore belongs to old Hattie Frizell, whose yard is “returning to native prairie, complete with hubcaps.” Their block club wants her and her five dogs gone.

V I and Hattie have a relationship of sorts: one of those five dogs gave V I’s dog Peppy an unwelcome litter. When Hattie slips in her bath and is rushed unconscious to the hospital, V I feels compelled to get involved. But neighboring lawyer Todd Pichea and his wife, Chrissie, act swiftly to get the courts to make them Hattie’s legal guardians. V I returns from a business trip to find they’ve put the old woman’s dogs to sleep. Furious, V I starts poking around in the Picheas’ affairs, hoping to turn up something scandalous enough to make them lose their guardianship.

Hattie isn’t the detective’s only worry. When her downstairs neighbor’s oldest friend disappears, Mr. Contreras persuades V I to investigate. As she probes both problems, V I uncovers a scandal linking one of Chicago’s oldest industrial families to union fraud and a politically connected bank. Her investigation takes her into the depths of the steamy Sanitary Canal and brings her eyeball-to-eyeball with her ex-husband, Dick Yarborough. When her dear friend Lotty Herschel and her own lawyer turn against her, V I is left alone to struggle with the most serious case of her career.

Grand Master:  On 28 April 2011 the Mystery Writers of America named Sara Paretsky its Grand Master at the Edgar's Banquet.

Travelling again

Posts on this blog may be a little erratic for the next 6 weeks!

We leave for Abu Dhabi today.

Review: VENGEANCE ROAD, Rick Mofina

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 316 KB
• Print Length: 496 pages
• Publisher: Mira (September 1, 2009)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services
• Language: English
• ASIN: B002HJ1XLW
• Source: I bought it.

Blurb from author's website:
The International Thriller Writers (ITW) named Vengeance Road a finalist for a 2010 THRILLER AWARD in the category of Best Paperback Original and The Private Eye Writers of America named it a finalist for a 2010 SHAMUS Award for Best Paperback Original.
The murder of a broken-hearted woman and and the chilling disappearance of her friend raise questions about their ties to a respected detective and lead to one journalist’s obsession to find the truth!
The body of Bernice Hogan, a troubled young ex-nursing student with a tragic past, is found in a shallow grave near a forest creek.
Jolene Peller, a single mom struggling to build a new life with her little boy, vanishes the night she tried to find Bernice. Hero cop, Karl Styebeck is beloved by his community but privately police are uneasy with the answers he gives to protect the life — and the lie — he’s lived.
The case haunts Jack Gannon a gritty, blue-collar reporter whose sister run away from their family years ago. Gannon risks more than his job to pursue the story behind Styebeck's dark secret, his link to the women, and the mysterious big rig roaming America's loneliest highways on its descent into eternal darkness.

My take:
This is actually #1 in Rick Mofina's Jack Gannon series. I have already reviewed #2 THE PANIC ZONE.
Jack Gannon, a reporter on the Buffalo Sentinel feels he has reached a sort of impasse in his life, and is living in a rut that he must break free from.

Wheeling out, with Springsteen in his head, Gannon questioned where he was going with his life. He was thirty-four, single and had spent the last ten years at the Buffalo Sentinel. He looked out at the city, his city. And there was no escaping it. Ever since he was a kid, all he wanted to be was a reporter, a reporter in New York City. And it almost happened a while back after he broke a huge story behind a jetliner’s crash into Lake Erie. It earned him a Pulitzer nomination and job offers in Manhattan. But he didn’t win the prize and the offers evaporated.

There's something about Rick Mofina's style that draws the reader in. It is deceptively simple, and gives Mofina the ability to build tension. By the last 20% of the book (in Kindle terms) you are positively racing to get to the end.

I found my stance on the "guilty or not?" status of the decorated detective who is the focus of Gannon's investigation constantly shifting, as Gannon revealed more. As in THE PANIC ZONE there is the feeling of a race against time, that is, if Gannon doesn't get a move on, more lives will be lost. When Gannon refuses to reveal his sources for his initial disclosure for the Buffalo Sentinel he loses his job at the paper, and continues as an independent whom everybody treats as a pariah. But he doggedly continues his investigation, just ahead of the pack, and in the long run, putting his own life on the line.

At the very end the author comments in crafting this story, I have taken great fictional liberties with geography, police jurisdiction, procedure and other aspects. Earlier he talks about how parts of the story are loosely based on an old story that occurred nearly half a century before.

VENGEANCE ROAD is certainly worth a read, and I'm looking forward to reading #3, In Desperation, sometime. I have a review copy on my Kindle.

My rating: 4.5

Rick Mofina's website where you can read excerpts and find out more about the author.

I am counting VENGEANCE ROAD in the e-book challenge and the Canadian Book Challenge

Crime Fiction Alphabet: P is for PRIME CUT, Alan Carter

I'd like to take the opportunity of this week's Crime Fiction Alphabet which is the letter P to remind you of an Australian novel published earlier this year, particularly since it has now been listed on this year's Ned Kelly Awards nominations for Best First Fiction.

Publisher: Fremantle Press, 2011

Awards:  Shortlisted, Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger Award, 2010 (as Chinese Whispers)

ISBN13: 9781921696503

HB/PB: Paperback

Pages: 320

Source: e-copy of the (Proof Read version) on my Kindle, supplied by the publisher for review purposes.

Sample Chapter: PRIME CUT extract.pdf

Book Club Notes:  View Book Club Notes

 

Publication date: February 2011

Publisher's blurb

Meet Cato Kwong — disgraced cop and ex-poster boy for the police force. Banished to the stock squad after the fallout from a police frame-up, Cato is brought in from the cold to solve the case of a torso washed up on the wild shores of the Great Southern Ocean. But Cato faces powerful opposition when his investigation lifts the lid on the exploitation of migrant workers and disturbs an even darker criminal mind.

My take:

This really is a remarkable novel. Two main stories are told in tandem. The first begins in the Prologue with the murder of a woman and her son in Sunderland, England in 1973, the day of the FA Cup. What Detective Sergeant Stuart Miller sees at the scene of the crime will stay with him for the rest of his working life and in fact contributes to him emigrating to Busselton in Western Australia. 35 years later he still has nightmares.

The second story begins in Western Australia in October 2008. Detective Senior Constable Cato Kwong and Detective Sergeant Jim Buckley are part of Western Australia's Stock Squad and are also at a crime scene. In Cato's view they are "washed-up has-beens recycled as detectives.... The Laughing Stock Squad." And then they are called to a murder scene, at HopeToun: a headless torso in the shallows on the beach. The local policewoman is Senior Sergeant Tess Maguire, recovering from sick leave after being beaten up. HopeToun is a laid-back holiday or retirement spot for wheatbelt farmers, not a place where you expect murders to happen. In recent times though HopeToun has become a mining town.

What makes this novel remarkable is the way the author forwards these plot strands in tandem. It took a bit of getting used to at first. There is little to tell the reader that you've changed from one plot to another, just a change of characters. Often, but not always, the plots are basically at the same point, like the interviewing of a suspect.

But there's much more than that to keep the reader involved. There are prior links between some of the characters which are gradually teased out for us. There are genuine murder mysteries with lots of attendant red herrings. There's a good feel for the climate in Western Australia, both physical and economic. And there is some excellent characterisation.

My rating: 4.7

I'm already looking forward to Alan Carter's second novel - I hope there is one!

PRIME CUT will be available from Fremantle Press

About the author:
Alan Carter was born in Sunderland, UK, in 1959. He holds a degree in Communications Studies from Sunderland Polytechnic and immigrated to Australia in 1991. Alan lives in Fremantle with his wife Kath and son Liam. He works as a television documentary director. In his spare time he follows a black line up and down the Fremantle pool. Prime Cut is Alan Carter’s first novel. He wrote it while he was living in Hopetoun as a kept man.

Review - EYE OF THE RED TSAR, Sam Eastland - audio

• UNABRIDGED
• Narrated by Steven Pacey
• Length:9 hrs and 47 mins
• Release Date:12-06-10
• Audible.com
• Source: I bought it
• Published 2010

Publisher's blurb (author's site)

It is the time of the Great Terror.

Inspector Pekkala - known as the Emerald Eye - was once the most famous detective in all Russia, the favourite of the Tsar. Now he is the prisoner of the men he once hunted.
Like millions of others, he has been sent to the gulags in Siberia and, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, he is as good as dead. But a reprieve comes when he is summoned by Stalin himself to investigate a crime. His mission - to uncover the men who really killed the Tsar and his family, and to locate the Tsar's treasure. The reward for success will be his freedom and the chance to re-unite with the woman he would have married if the Revolution had not torn them apart. The price of failure - death.
In a land of uneasy alliances and deadly treachery, pursuing clues that have eluded everyone, Pekkala is thrust into the past where he once reigned. There he will meet the man who betrayed him and the woman he loved and lost in the fires of rebellion—and uncover a secret so shocking that it will shake to its core the land he loves.
Set against the backdrop of the paranoid and brutal country that Russia became under the rule of Stalin, Eye of the Red Tsar introduces a compelling new figure to readers of crime fiction

My take:
One of the problems with historically based fiction is always how reliable the depiction of characters and events is. And how does the ordinary reader know? Can you judge authenticity in subjective ways like how the supposed "facts" feel?

I guess I have an advantage over most readers in that I have done specialised studies in the Russian Revolution at tertiary level, and taught the Russian Revolution for a number of years to senior high school students.

The fate of the Romanovs has always been a topic of great debate. There were of course "sightings" of members of the family well after their deaths had been affirmed, and even women who claimed to be Anastasia. Sam Eastland (a pseudonym of Paul Watkins) has taken much of that into account in the supplementary information at the end of the novel, where he gives a timeline of events and claims.

The action in the novel flutters from pre-1917, into 1917 itself, and then backwards and forwards into 1929. It does build up a strong picture of the time, and really brings Inspector "Emerald Eye" Pekkala's search for the truth to life. Pekkala is torn between his loyalty to the Tsar and his family, particularly to the boy Alexei,  and the real reason why Stalin has released him, the search for the treasure the Romanovs were supposed to be carrying with them. There are those who will not like this picture of the Tsar as a benevolent father and kindly gent, but unfortunately it is often only fictionalisations, not the dry notes notes of historical tomes, that reconstruct personalities.

The next title in the series THE RED COFFIN was published earlier this year.

My rating: 4.4


Check Sam Eastland's impressive website: Inspector Pekkala.

Another review to check

I am counting EYE OF THE RED TSAR in the Historical Fiction Challenge