Lotsa Bones

Yesterday we had body parts. Today I've scoured my recent database entries for skeletons.
There are some treats among these books, and some of my favourite authors.

ENTOMBED by Linda Fairstein
Workers demolishing a nineteenth-century brownstone where Edgar Allan Poe once lived discover a human skeleton entombed -- standing -- behind a brick wall. When sex crimes prosecutor Alexandra Cooper hears about the case, it strikes her as a classic Poe scene...except that forensic evidence shows that this young woman died within the last twenty-five years. Meanwhile, Alex's old nemesis the Silk Stocking Rapist is once again terrorizing Manhattan's Upper East Side. The attacks soon escalate to murder, and the search leads Alex and detectives Mercer Wallace and Mike Chapman to the city's stunning Bronx Botanical Gardens. There, an enigmatic librarian presides over the Raven Society, a group devoted to the work of Poe.
This was an engrossing read. There's a lot of detail about Poe (and who knows if it is correct) but certainly we have all read some Poe at some time. I can believe too the claim made in the book that Poe was the originator of the detective novel. . There were parts of the novel which were very Poe-ish in their macabre-ness and suspense. At the same time it moves at a smart pace and there are lots of little weblike links binding it all together.
I didn't find this as dark as some of the earlier Fairstein's that I have read. There's some interesting comments too on how modern technology that can help track a culprit down - DNA of course, but Metro transport tickets??
My rating: 5.0

THE FUNERAL BOAT by Kate Ellis
The Tradmouth area of Devonshire is the location this Kate Ellis’ police procedural in which Wesley Peterson, a young black detective plays a prominent role. Wesley and his superior, Inspector Gerry Heffernan, had both chosen a rural setting in which to pursue their law enforcement careers, thinking criminal activity would be considerably less than in London. However, of late, things are anything but peaceful on their turf. A rash of burglaries targeting isolated farms in the district, the disappearance of a young Danish tourist, and the discovery of a skeleton who had met his death apparently violently are keeping Heffernan and his staff busy round the clock.
My rating: 4.5

BREAK NO BONES by Kathy Reichs
Dr Temperance Brennan is filling a vacancy as a supervisor of an archaeology dig for students from the University of North Carolina. The dig site on Dewees Island on contains sixteen prehistoric graves, a pre-Colombian burial ground. Dewees Island is largely a conservation easement, but the rest is ripe for development. On the penultimate day of the dig, just when they are well on the way to wrapping everything up on schedule, Tempe has a couple of visitors: local freelance journalist Homer Winborne, and Dickie Dupree, land developer and entrepreneur. As if on cue, an intrusive articulated skeleton is discovered in one of the graves. Tempe quickly realises that this body is not prehistoric.
My rating: 4.3

SPIDER TRAP by Barry Maitland
Spider Roach, his very name a combination of the insect pests that we all hate, is the perfect illustration of the adage that evil breeds evil. Back in the 1980s he controlled the hotbed of gangster land around Cockpit Lane. Now an old man, 20 years on he still controls it - his 3 sons are evil and always have been, and they seem to have married and begotten evil too. Brock had dealings with Roach back in the 1980s and he emerges from retirement in SPIDER TRAP to warn Brock off from his current investigation into the spider's web of evil he has built up over the decades. Two young girls have been found shot dead in Cockpit Lane, a boy is electrocuted as he tries to cross the electrified rail line to get to the nearby waste land where "brown bread" is rumoured to be hidden, and then the police begin to dig up 20 year old skeletons buried in the waste ground. #10 in the Brock and Kolla series
My rating: 4.7

MURDER IN THE MUSEUM - A Fethering Mystery by Simon Brett
Bracketts, once the home of poet Esmund Chadleigh, is an Elizabethan house, now a museum devoted to the remembrance of Chadleigh. Carole Seddon, retired public servant, becomes a trustee on the board of Bracketts, but board meetings are complicated by the discovery of a skeleton in the kitchen garden. Carole and her neighbour Jude become involved when there is a shooting in the house car park. Obviously Bracketts has secrets some one is keen to keep hidden. I am an addict of Simon Brett's writing.
My rating: 4.5

SILENCE OF THE GRAVE by Arnaldur Indridason
Building work on the outskirts of Reykajavik (Iceland) uncovers a body possibly buried alive during World War Two. Erlendur and his team are called in to investigate and try to uncover the truth while a team of archaeologists slowly and painstaking exhume the skeleton. Those who still live in the area tell of a young pregnant woman who disappeared in the war, but is it her? An elderly dying man talks of the green woman who was crooked. At the same time Erlendur is re-living his past - his daughter Eva Lind lies in a coma in the local hospital after a miscarriage and an old woman asks him why he is carrying a young boy around with him. The construction of this novel is intricate and it is almost impossible to solve the mysteries until the very end. Indridason draws into it a fascinating local legend about an orgy at the local gasworks on the night Halley's comet nearly struck the earth in 1910. Translated into English from Icelandic in 2005.
My rating: 5

THE DRAINING LAKE by Arnaldur Indridason
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 persons 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.
My rating: 4.7

THE BONE GARDEN by Tess Gerritsen
Maura Isles, Boston medical examiner, tells Julia Hamill that the skeleton she has dug up in her back garden is old, much older than the house that she has recently purchased. The skeleton is that of a female under 35 years, buried perhaps more than 150 ago, and murdered. Julia is recently divorced and had been labouring to convert the barren back yard into a garden when her shovel struck a skull. Now her backyard is an excavation site for the medical examiner’s office.
For most of the book, which jumps, sometimes a little jarringly, backwards and forwards between the 1830s and the present day, we are following an ancestor of the last owner of the house, the person's whose estate Julia bought the house from. We do this both through reading about events as they happen, and through papers and letters hoarded by the previous occupant Hilda Chamblet
My rating: 4.6

Body parts strewn around

The finding of body parts, hand, arm, foot, leg would be a gruesome enough discovery. In crime fiction it is often the beginning of a murder mystery.

This was true with Giles Blunt's THE DELICATE STORM, where the finding of a disconnected arm in the forest begins a search for other parts of the body.

Then it occurred to me that recently I have read other books where there is a similar plot. Here are a couple:

NOT IN THE FLESH by Ruth Rendell
Honey the dog is a wonderful hunter for truffles. But this time she unearths something even less savoury - a human hand. Another case for the inveterate duo Reg Wexford and Mike Burden. The body is male, and has been there for over 10 years, wrapped in a purple bed sheet. In this story Reg Wexford seems to be a little less clearly drawn and we learn more about the dynamics of the team he works with. The plot is a spider web of threads. It is all about degrees of separation, those threads that draw us together. And running through all the murder mysteries, missing persons and threads of deception, something else Rendell has on her mind - female circumcision, ritual genital mutilation of young immigrant children, providing a rich undercurrent, showing Rendell as aware of the issues of her times as ever.
My rating 4.8

BLIND SPOT by Terri Persons
FBI Agent Bernadette Saint Clare has many distinguishing features. At first sight she is a small person with a superficial resemblance to Mia Farrow. Then, if she discards her sunglasses, you notice she has devil’s eyes, each eye a different colour. Bernadette’s success as an FBI Agent however owes much to her “hidden” gift: an ability to see through the eyes of a criminal while holding an object the person has held.
A dog returning from an exploring trip to a nearby river brings his young master a rather gruesome trophy - a human hand. And so Bernadette Saint Clair begins her new posting with a new boss. Tony Garcia is a little different to her previous bosses – he wants to see where Bernadette’s “gift” will take them. When a male body is found in the locality without a hand, it is Bernadette who alerts them to the fact that the hand that the dog found is female.
My rating 4.1

THE TORSO by Helene Tursten
Translated from Swedish in 2006. The story begins with the gruesome discovery of part of a human torso in a black plastic bag on a shoreline near Goteborg. Detective Inspector Irene Huss, whose superintendent suspects is a magnet for killings, is one of the team called in to investigate. When they learn of a similar torso turning up 2 years earlier in Copenhagen, Irene is sent to liaise with the Copenhagen police. Her investigations reveal strong connections between communities in Sweden and Denmark. As people she visits seem to die shortly afterwards, it certainly appears her superintendent's joke has at least a grain of truth. Irene herself is targetted by someone who does not want the connections fully revealed. Some detailed descriptions will not suit the squeamish. Irene Huss is strong, level-headed, intuitive, highly principled, but sometimes fallible.
My rating 4.6

Skeletons tomorrow...

THE REAPER, Peter Lovesey

If the title in the context of crime fiction makes you think "grim reaper" then you are on the right track.
This is a macabre cosy if there is such a thing. A rompingly entertaining read, but not one of Lovesey's best.

Otis Joy, the rector of St. Bartholomew's in the Wiltshire village of Foxford, a young man in his late 20s, is a dynamic relative newcomer to the village. He seems everything a vicar needs to be, even if he is unmarried. Underneath though he is a very nasty bit of work indeed. Nobody believes lugubrious old Owen Cumberbatch when he says that the Rev. Joy's last parish is without its Sexton/bellringer because he crossed Otis Joy. Snooping old Skidmore simply disappeared.

But we do know from almost the first page of the story that Otis Joy is responsible for the death of the bishop, Marcus Glastonbury, who had found out that he had been embezzling funds at his previous parish (where the Sexton disappeared).

We learn also that he has come to an "arrangement" with his current Parish treasurer, Stanley Burrows, ex-headmaster, to have a private contingency fund which appears nowhere in the church's accounts. And then Stanley says he would like to hand the job over to a younger person, that he is getting too old, and the responsibility of the parish books is too great...

I think Peter Lovesey, one of my favourite authors, had great fun in writing this book. It is almost as if he decided to write a spoof on the village cosy. There are some really sardonic descriptions, almost cruel, of village personalities. One that comes to mind readily is Cynthia Haydenhall, Chair of the Women's Institute - my mental vision of her is of a dark haired strident Penelope Keith - who sees herself as the social hub of the village. And there are others..

This isn't going to exercise your little grey cells too much. But if you enjoy the occasional cosy, then hunt it down. In style it reminds me a bit of M.C. Beaton's Agatha Raisin series.

My rating was 4.1

I've been a Peter Lovesey fan since he published his first novel WOBBLE TO DEATH. You may be familiar with his Peter Diamond series. Fantastic Fiction lists his novels.

e-book readers - do you, would you, will you?

Over on Petrona, Maxine has raised a story she's heard about Amazon's Kindle self-combusting. Seems it might be a marketing ploy.

In case you haven't caught up with it, Kindle is a wireless reading device marketed through Amazon, which sold out prior to actually being release, and is not available outside the US anyway. In case you think you could get around that, the documentation on the Amazon site clearly states
"Kindles cannot currently be sold or shipped to customers living outside of the U.S."
If you go to the website there's a 6 minute video about Kindle so you can see what it does.

Now e-book readers are not new. When I was lucky enough to visit Microsoft in 2000, they had an e-book reader they were promoting. It was a bit clunkier and heavier than the Kindle appears to be. What seems to have happened is that the Microsoft e-book reader became a bit of software rather than a bit of hardware.
The library of the newly opened Steel Canyon High School that we visited was going to have minimal real books and students would be able to download text books to an e-book reader.

So presumably what has happened is that e-book readers have been loaded onto pocket PCs, tablets etc. rather than a dedicated e-book reader. But I could be wrong.

So do you read e-books? How? Where?
As I said over on Maxine's blog, there are things I find attractive about an e-book reader, but I'd like mine also to have the option of being a "voice-book" so if my eyes were tired I could listen rather than read. So why don't I just listen on a CD player or mp3 player?
A couple reasons
* believe it or not, when you listed you are listening to someone else's interpretation of text
* for me , listening is usually slower than reading the text for myself.

So do you, would you, or will you?
Tell me about e-books and e-book readers

THE DELICATE STORM, Giles Blunt

Unusually warm weather in northern Canada just after New Year brings with it a dense fog that shrouds Algonquin Bay. The discovery of a human arm out in the forest sparks a search for other body parts, and eventually bits that appear to have been mauled by bears are discovered. John Cardinal and Lise Delorme become involved in investigating this and another case where a local holds up a bank, threatening the teller with a gun. The identity of the hold up man is easily solved, but the identification of the body bits leads Cardinal and Delorme into learning about separationist activities from the early 1970s when a hostage was killed, two separationists confessed to his murder, and one of the hostage takers vanished. Another strand is introduced when a young female doctor disappears.

THE DELICATE STORM received the 2004 Arthur Ellis Award from the Crime Writers of Canada, as well as being nominated for a swag of others including the Dashiell Hammett, the Macavity, and the Anthony.

So why didn't I enjoy it as much as I expected to?

For one thing, I think it moved from being murder mystery to crime thriller. A very large number of characters crowded its pages. There was a lot of background information, heavy use of acronyms where the meaning didn't readily stay with me, and some slow passages. These were mainly caused by descriptive bits that became pages of detail that the reader needed for some later event or piece of information to be significant. It meant that the book really was rather long, and there was always a danger you might miss something important. Sometimes you had to wonder whether crowding the reader's head with the detail was worth it for the one significant item.

However there were a number of issues raised which would have appealed particularly to Canadian readers: Canadian politics, separationist movements, male and female detectives working together, Canadian severe weather and its effect on daily life (including police investigations), dishonesty in police officers, tension between intelligence and investigation agencies both in Canada, and between Canada and the USA. But for me, the ending was unsatisfactory, but I won't tell you about that, because you will want to read it for yourself.

THE DELICATE STORM (and what is the significance of that title?) is the second in Blunt's Cardinal series. The first was FORTY WORDS FOR SORROW, and after THE DELICATE STORM comes BLACK FLY SEASON and THE FIELDS OF GRIEF (aka BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS)

My rating 4.3

Will you recognise someone 30 to 40 years on?

Have you ever had the experience of meeting someone you haven't seen for decades? Their first words "you haven't changed a bit". My mental reaction: "I hope I didn't look like this 30 years ago!"

So how does that work?
In Giles Blunt's THE DELICATE STORM, a forensic artist is a guru on "age progression". She says "the truth is, the proportions of your face don't change. That's why - say you haven't seen someone for say thirty, forty years - the moment you get up close and they begin to speak, you're looking in their eyes, you know it's them."

She went on to touch up an old photo and the result looked uncannily like someone Cardinal and Delorme had put on their suspects list.

What do you think of that?

Does nationality help?

What role is played by your "national interests" in reading/appreciating a book?
What role is played by your understanding of the country's history, knowledge of current affairs etc?
Does the book's setting make a difference?

These ideas occurred to me while I was trying to fathom why I didn't like THE DELICATE STORM as much as those who gave it the 2004 Arthur Ellis Award (from the Crime Writers of Canada) - but then is that award only for Canadian writers?
I've almost decided that the answer lies in the fact that the murder mystery was so deeply entangled with Canadian political history and other facts such as the relationship between law enforcement agencies in Canada itself, and between the USA and Canada.

You might think my questions have rather obvious answers, but I think they also have something to do with writing style, reading traditions and so on.
For example, my reading of choice is almost without doubt (how's that for hedging your bets?) British crime fiction. I think that has a lot to do with the fact that I was brought up on British literature, and that the crime fiction most readily available in Australia was British. I remember very clearly when the paperback became readily available in Australia and I began devouring Agatha Christie in particular. Mind you I also devoured Simenon, so perhaps my argument doesn't hold much water.