Rob Kitchin's Blog, page 211

Review of Buried Strangers by Leighton Gage (Soho Crime, 2009)

In a remnant of rain forest on the outskirts of Sao Paulo a clandestine cemetery is discovered.  Despite his boss being more interested in the investigation of a political rival, Chief Inspector Mario Silva of the Federal Police travels from Brasilia to investigate further.  The bodies have not been long buried and are interred in family groups. Silva enlists the help of local cop, Delegado Yoshiro Tanaka.  Tanaka soon discovers the recent disappearance of a local family.  Following their trail leads to Tanaka straight to the source of the bodies and his own death.  Silva and his team struggle to pick up the trail once again, but when they do it uncovers a dark secret and other cemeteries.

Buried Strangers is an engaging read.  Gage writes in an assured, economical style heavy on dialogue and action.  The political, social and economic relations of modern Brazil are laid bare without overly dominating the text; there’s plenty of context without it being a geography/history lesson.  The characterization is good, with Gage able to quickly sketch a portrait that appears in the reader’s mind’s eye.  The storyline for Buried Strangers is contemporary and interesting, if more than a little unsettling.  The pages just fly past.  That said, the book suffers from too many awkward plot devices.  For example, moving a pair of witnesses hundreds of miles away to where they were uncontactable, a mother living next door to her son, Silva’s cleaner’s son using an underground emigration network in a city hundreds of miles away.  There’s coincidence and then there’s plot device coincidence.  There’s 200 million people in Brazil and it’s a massive country, the chances of Silva’s cleaner’s son having anything to do with the case must be astronomical.  I don’t mind having to suspend disbelief every now and then, but I like it to be near-credible disbelief.  Moreover, the ending unfolded in a very quick, straightforward fashion, with no twists or turns, though there was some tension.  Overall, an enjoyable read, which could have been great if it hadn’t been reliant on obvious plot devices.  The next book in the series is Dying Gasp and it's on my to read list.

Hitting the wall

If you're a regular on this blog, you've probably noticed the posts getting shorter and shorter in the last few weeks.  Basically I've hit the wall of over-commitment.  Running two research institutes and also doing another person's job in the university, plus a load of other project and institutional commitments, has me running around endlessly.  I'm hoping it might ease off by mid-June.  Until then, expect snippet blog posts with occassional reviews. 

Frontline TV appearance

I took part in the Frontline debate on Monday evening on RTE1.  The programme was on planning and building failures and some of the pressing issues with respect to property in Ireland.  If you're interested, then the programme can be found here.  I can't find a way to embed here.  My slot is 17.45 in.  Interesting to take part.  The programme mainly focused on the problems rather than solutions.  My contribution focused on this piece I wrote a week or so ago.

Review of Killed at the Whim of a Hat by Colin Cotterill (Quercus, 2011)

Jimm Juree was a crime journalist in Chiang Mai until her mother sold up their profitable shop to developers and moved the family to the rural coastal village of Pak Nam as the new owners of the Gulf Bay Lovely Resort and Restaurant. Nine months later and she’s sick of running a failing resort and craving the thrill of crime journalism.  Then two crimes come along together - two bodies unearthed after many years and the vicious killing of a local abbot.  Suddenly Jimm has two cases to investigate, one of which is trying to be hushed up by Bangkok detectives.  She sets about the task with the help of her reluctant bodybuilder brother, her sister that used to be a brother, her resentful grandfather that used to be a policeman, and a local gay, camp cop looking to make his mark, at the same time trying to keep her eccentric mother, who seems to be suffering the first stages of dementia, in check.

I’m a fan of Cotterill’s Dr Siri series set in Laos in the 1970s.  Although the characters are all a bit eccentric, they are all believable, warm and sit together comfortably, and there is a lovely sense of place and time.  Killed at the Whim of a Hat had none of those things.  The characters are a ragbag of caricature and are largely one-dimensional.  They seemed forced and false.  Moreover, told in the first person, the voice of Jimm Juree just didn’t click for me.  The real let down of the book, however, is the plot.  Neither of the two plotlines are well resolved, though the two unearthed bodies was more plausible than the death of the abbot, which really made little sense and relied on coincidence and Juree having a sister with way more resources and skills than the police could ever dream of.  Just about the whole storyline was nonsense and didn’t stand up to a casual read, let alone scrutiny.  Cotterill is a skilled writer and he can write with great warmth and wit, this whole story, however, felt forced and flat.  I’ll persist with the Dr Siri novels and will maybe return to this if reviews of future books suggests a return to form.

Lazy Sunday Service

I've spent part of the weekend making copyedit changes to a novel manuscript.  It's taken an age, partially because I had to decipher my own handwriting!  I think the book is now in pretty good shape.  At least, I hope it is.  I also took one last read of my short story collection, Killer Reels.  I'm hoping it might go to press sometime this week.  That's the plan in any case.  It won't be tomorrow though.  A busy day at work, followed by an hour long TV debate in the evening on Frontline.  Will need to get my thoughts ordered for that - usual stuff on planning failures and what needs to change.  Making slow progress uploading my Blue House reviews onto Goodreads and Amazon - I've now 138 done.  It's going to take a while to get them all up.


My posts this week
Review of Snapshots by Paul Brazill
Drop in price for The Rule Book and The White Gallows
Potential time bombs for home buyers/sellers
Goodreads
Review of Lumen by Ben Pastor
$1 billion gost town to be built in US as locus for economic development
The drink talking

The drink talking

‘You’re a dead man!  A dead man!  You fuckin’ hear me?’

‘Fuck off away with yourself.  You’re full of shite.’ 

The two bouncers kept their distance, not wanting to get involved.

‘I’m going to fuck you up big time, you lying, cheating, fucking gombeen fucker!’

‘Go home, Christy.  You’re not right in the head.’

‘I’ll give you right in the head!’  Christy pulled a knife from his jacket and lurched forward.

The older man dropped to the pavement, clutching his stomach.

Christy pointed the bloodied knife at the bouncers, then starting running, full of panic and regret, though not remorse.


A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words

Review of Lumen by Ben Pastor (1999/2011, Bitter Lemon Press)

October 1939 and Captain Martin Bora of Wehrmacht Intelligence has taken up lodgings in Cracow, sharing with the boorish womaniser, Major Retz.  He’s charged with gathering information and suppressing Polish resistance.  Within a couple of days of arriving, Mother Kazimierza, the abbess of the city convent, is shot dead.  The abbess has a devoted following given her apparent ability to see future events and her death has the potential to provide a locus for insurection.  Bora is given the task of investigating her death and to prove it wasn’t the Germans who killed her.  Father Malecki, a Chicago Pollak, is already investigating the abbess’ powers for the Vatican.  With her death, he’s instructed to stay and assist the investigation into her killing.  Bora and Malecki form an uneasy alliance, pushing against the regimes of the Church and occupying state for answers.  Retz meanwhile has taken up with an old flame and other women, regularly instructing Bora to stay away from his lodgings until the early hours.  As the weeks unfold, Bora’s becomes increasingly disillusioned with the Nazi regimes actions in Poland and with his own life.  Then Retz is found dead having seemingly committing suicide, providing Bora with a fresh mystery. 

Lumen is a competently written police procedural, well contextualised within the opening few months of the Second World War.  It is effectively a coming of age tale.  Bora is from a wealthy, well-positioned Prussian family.  Whilst he has little sympathy for the Polish, prepared to harass them and kill their livestock, he has a sense of morality that stops well short of open murder.  As time moves on, he comes to see the Nazi regime for what it is and struggles to challenge the actions of his comrades, whilst being mindful of his own position and career.  He also comes to understand his own domestic situation.  In both cases, his sense of loyalty and conviction is severely eroded, but held in place by his sense of honour and pride.  The prose and plot are very measured, with the story unfolding at an even pace that downplays melodrama.  This makes the story seem slow at the start, but works effectively across the novel to expose the everyday torments that Bora, Malecki and the Polish population face.  The characterisation is understated, but nicely done, revealed through actions not description.  In general, the plot is well structured and engaging, with the three main strands (the abbess death; Retz and his domestic life; Nazi actions in Poland) nicely intersecting, but the mystery elements were a bit more ponderous.  I knew the identity of the killer from very early on, even though I was wrong about the reason, and its resolution seemed a little clunky.  The second case was all circumstantial evidence and supposition, which appeared realistic, but only to internally resolve the death, not to act on.  These were not major issues, to be honest, and Lumen is an enjoyable, thought-provoking read.  

Goodreads

I've set up an author profile on Goodreads.  It took a little while to sort through things and get all 23 books listed under my profile and mess about with other stuff.  I'm not really sure what to do with it now!  You can check it out here.  I've also been busy uploading reviews into the reader part of my Goodreads account.  I've managed 99 so far (which takes me back as far as June of last year).  It's going to take me a while to get all my Blue House reviews loaded in.  I know you can link to other Goodread users, join groups, fan authors and all that malarkey; I'll take a look at that in due course.

Drop in price for The Rule Book and The White Gallows

The publishers of The Rule Book and The White Gallows have lowered their Kindle price.  Now both available for £1.90 or $2.99.  The paperback version is £8.99 or $10.99

Visit Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com to download The Rule Book.
Visit Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com to download The White Gallows.


And if you do download, I hope you enjoy them.

For reviews of both, click on the tabs above.

Review of Snapshots by Paul Brazill (Pulp Metal, 2012)

Paul Brazill burst on the flash fiction crime scene in late 2008 and he quickly developed a reputation for dark, inventive, clever and witty stories.  Snapshots is a collection of 21 of his short stories published on various online magazines between 2008-11.  The tales mostly focus on the everyday, gritty underbelly of society - lowlife criminals, chancers, losers, affairs, prostitution, robbery, murder, seedy pubs, drink, drugs and rock n’ roll - and whilst they are dark, there is also an undercurrent of humaneness, wit and warmth.  There is a strong element of his adopted Poland throughout, but the stories are undoubtedly British in character and feel.  Like the vast majority of collections there is a little unevenness across the pieces, with a handful of stories a little underdeveloped,  There is undoubtedly, however, some very fine pieces of writing here.  Brazill writes in colourful prose, has some lovely turns of phrase, and is handy with an effective simile (though some are used a little too often).  What I would really like to see is what he could do with a longer format - even a novella the same kind of length as Gerard Brennan’s excellent, The Point.  My money’s on it being a knockout.  Whilst we wait for that, Snapshots is a visceral, enjoyable introduction to one of the most productive and entertaining practitioners of crime flash fiction.