L.E. Truscott's Blog, page 3

Book Review: Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

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This book should have been called Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Boring. It took me a long time to get into it but I persisted, thinking there must be a whopping great twist coming at the end. There isn’t. I turned the last page, thinking there must be another chapter. There wasn’t. I can honestly say this is the first book I’ve ever read where I felt cheated out of a proper ending.

Eleanor Oliphant is weird. Everyone thinks so. Her office colleagues think so. The people on the bus think so. The man who sells her two litres of vodka every weekend thinks so. She thinks so, too. At least, she knows she isn’t like everyone else. When she sees Johnnie Lomond singing at a concert one night, she thinks he’s the perfect man and begins to crush hard. She imagines they will meet and her life will change in an instant. So she begins to stalk him. She tracks him down on social media and finds out where he lives.

At the same time this is happening, she happens to witness an elderly man take a fall in the street. She and her work colleague, Raymond, tend to the man as they wait for an ambulance (well, Raymond tends to him and Eleanor makes pointless conversation with his unconscious form) and from that point on, Raymond seeks her out for a series of platonic social engagements even though he mistakenly thinks she is falling in love with him and doesn’t feel the same. It seems implausible. They meet for lunch, they visit the old man in hospital, he introduces her to his mother, they go to the old man’s son’s birthday party.

And interspersed with all this are Eleanor’s weekly phone calls from her mother, who appears to be in prison or possibly a hospital for the criminally insane (but it isn’t specified). She tells Eleanor she’s a worthless, pointless, waste of a human being and Eleanor calls her “Mummy” and takes it because good girls love their mothers.

And that’s pretty much it. Eleanor has a boring and lonely life. She works, she does the crossword, she shops, she drinks, she stays home. But it’s hardly abnormal or worthy of a 400-page novel. Her reaction to realising the singer will never return her affection is over the top and comes out of nowhere. And then the pace with which she bounces back seems off the charts.

In the Q&A with Gail Honeyman included at the end of the book, she says she was inspired to write a novel on loneliness after reading an article about a woman working in a big city who often went the whole weekend without speaking to anyone. I get that. I get that she wanted to explore the epidemic of loneliness that infects the lives of many people these days. What I don’t get is why Eleanor had to be prickly, unsociable, unlikeable, lacking in empathy, with facial scars, a childhood history of abuse and abandonment, and a survivor of domestic violence and rape for her to do this. Because the subconscious message about loneliness becomes that it is the fault of the lonely that they are lonely. They are unpleasant misfits who bring their loneliness on themselves. Which is – to be frank – bullshit. There are plenty of people who are pleasant, friendly and empathetic with unblemished complexions, loving families still around and partners who don’t beat or rape them who are lonely regardless.

Eleanor is another in a long line of unreliable narrators but she’s not a well-executed one because she’s very specific and accurate (in an autistic kind of way) about everything except the one thing that isn’t true, which leads up to the “big” reveal. But the “big” reveal was not shocking at all. It just felt like the writer was trying to manipulate the reader into feeling something that all the words leading up to that moment in no way justified.

I’m absolutely stunned by reviews calling this book “original”, “unforgettable” and “devastating” because I found it uninspired, unremarkable and lacking.

2 stars

*First published on Goodreads 19 July 2020

Book Review: Mateship with Birds by Carrie Tiffany

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Mateship with Birds won the inaugural Stella Prize in 2013. Yet another beautifully written award-winning book with no plot and uninteresting characters – which seems to be the definition of literature in Australia in the 21st century. So I hereby swear I will never read another book that has won an Australian writing prize.

Okay, I probably won’t stick to that because I live in hope. And there were parts of the book I really liked, specifically the long-form poetry about the lives of the kookaburra family who live in a tree on Harry’s farm. But the rest of it was not enjoyable.

Betty lives on the outskirts of Cohuna, a small country town in Victoria, with her two children, teenager Michael and Little Hazel. She works at the local nursing home… and doesn’t do much else. Harry is a divorced dairy farmer and Betty’s nearest neighbour. He comes for Sunday dinner and helps her out when she needs maintenance on her house.

When Michael’s friend Dora stays for Sunday dinner one week, Harry decides it’s time to start teaching the boy about the opposite sex. He begins writing him letters full of stereotypes and downright disinformation about women and sex, then leaving them in the outhouse behind Betty’s house for Michael to find. In between, he milks his cows and watches the lives of a family of kookaburras nesting on his property.

There’s also another neighbour, Mues, who is clearly the local sexual pervert. He entices Little Hazel into his shed so he can expose himself to her and is later caught raping a sheep he has tied up to prevent the ewe from getting away.

And that’s pretty much it. My copy of this book seems to have previously been in the possession of an unimpressed high school or university English Literature student. It is full of notes decrying the constant references to bodily functions and fluids and at one point states, “This is offensive!” and then on the next page, “This is appalling!” I wasn’t quite as enraged as that but I understood. The reason for this book is still completely unclear to me.

As an aside, the cover image of my copy of this book uses the painting Boy in Hand Me Downs, which inexplicably has a magpie in it. It’s almost like the person designing the cover didn’t read the book and just took a stab in the dark based on the title. Why use a picture of a magpie when the focus throughout the book is the kookaburras?

The blurb calls Mateship with Birds a “hymn to the rhythm of country life”. I call it a reminder why most people prefer cities and suburbs.

In a word: unnecessary.

2 stars

*First published on Goodreads 20 May 2020

Book Review: 13 Reasons Why by Jay Asher

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A longer title for this book could have been “13 Reasons Why My Life Sucks and It’s Completely Your Fault and Not My Fault At All Even Though I Do Nothing to Help Myself”. I don’t doubt that the reasons for suicide are intensely personal and rarely understood by anyone other than the person committing the act but when you’re writing a book about it, the reason needs to be better than a literary equivalent of “wah, wah, wah”.

Yes, I clearly did not enjoy this book but I understand why it made great source material for a TV show and I also understand that the TV show fixed a lot of the problems. Thank God.

Two weeks after Hannah Baker’s death by suicide, Clay Jensen receives a box full of audio tapes. The package doesn’t say where it came from and when he pops the first tape into a tape deck in his father’s garage (because that’s the only tape player in the house – who has a tape player these days?), he’s shocked to hear Hannah’s voice telling him she’s going to outline the reasons why she killed herself and that he’s one of them.

Clay is shocked. He is sure he always treated Hannah with respect. What was it that he did that meant he ended up on these tapes on a list with twelve other people? So he listens to find out. He finds out that he isn’t the first person to listen to these tapes. Each person on the tapes has received them and then passed them on to the next person. If they don’t, someone has a second set and will release them to the public. If they do, only the thirteen people will know what’s on them.

Clay listens to Hannah discuss her first kiss, her betrayal by her partner in her first kiss as he spreads rumours about getting past first base, being included on a degrading list awarding her “Best Ass”, a scrag fight with someone she thought was her friend, a peeping tom, multiple sexual assaults, a fatal car accident and a guidance counsellor trying to offer her advice even though she refuses to tell him what she needs advice about.

The whole book takes place in less than 24 hours because Clay wanders around town and binge listens to the tapes on a Walkman he steals from a friend, afraid that his parents would overhear if he kept listening on the tape deck at home. He visits places where many of the incidents Hannah describes take place and cries and stops for a milkshake and moves on and cries and doesn’t go home until he’s finished listening.

As I got closer to the end, I was sure there must be some big twisty ending coming because the book was all build up. But there wasn’t. Yes, Hannah’s life sucked (like a lot of teenagers’ lives suck) but she asks exactly no one for help. When others need help from her, she turns her back on them. And just before she kills herself, she seems to allow an attack to take place to justify that she’s doing the right thing in choosing suicide. By the time we get to see the complete picture of why she thinks killing herself is the only option left, it seems entirely realistic but not much of a gut punch – and it really needed to a gut punch to end on since we’ve known from the very first moment that the story ends with Hannah’s death.

The characters are all very two-dimensional. Clay is described as perfect. He doesn’t go to parties because he studies all weekend to prepare for tests that always seem to happen on Mondays. He is subject to rumours, just like Hannah is, but all of them are about how perfect and good he is. The other girls are catty and jealous. The other boys are either sex obsessed, sex pests or outright rapists. And Hannah, who has the most scope to be a beautifully layered and intricate character, manages to miss the mark and come off primarily as whiny.

The narrative structure is difficult to keep track of at times. Hannah’s tape-recorded dialogue is in italics and Clay’s prose isn’t but it’s all first person and they swap from paragraph to paragraph so a lot of the time I had to stop and ask myself, “Wait, was that Clay or was it Hannah?” As a result, there’s no flow. Instead, it’s staccato and jumpy and not in a way that contributes to the story.

At the end of the book, there’s a question and answer session with the author and he admits that the book all started with the idea of someone listening to a story on tape, before he even knew what the story was. You can tell. He was so obsessed with delivering the story in this format that he overlooked the fact that it means the entire story is told instead of being shown. “Show, don’t tell!” It’s the most basic tenet of fiction writing and he fails completely. Asher might have gotten away with it if the prose had been better but it’s terribly melodramatic and lacking in complexity.

In a few words: not worth the hype.

2 stars

*First published on Goodreads 18 April 2020

Book Review: And Fire Came Down by Emma Viskic

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I started reading And Fire Came Down as soon as I finished the first Caleb Zelic book, Resurrection Bay. Not because I enjoyed Resurrection Bay that much, just because I already had it and thought I might as well. This is the book that Resurrection Bay should have been. And Fire Came Down isn’t perfect but it’s one of those rare cases where the sequel is better than the original.

And Fire Came Down takes place about six months after the events of Resurrection Bay. Haunted by the events of the first book (oldest friend murdered, betrayed by business partner, estranged wife viciously attacked with a knife right in front of him), Caleb Zelic is trying to hold things together. He’s managed to salvage some of his private investigation business but things are slow. One night when he is taking his daily run, a woman approaches him and asks for help. He doesn’t know her but she has his name and address written on the back of a receipt. She signs the word “family” – at least Caleb thinks she does but she’s clearly not fluent in sign language. Before he can get any clarification, a hulking blond man attacks her and tries to drag her away. Caleb intervenes and she flees but she doesn’t get very far. The blond man continues his pursuit and rather than let herself be caught, she steps into traffic and is fatally struck by a vehicle.

Caleb cradles her on the road as she dies; it’s another thing to add to his list of haunting events. And when he checks the receipt with his name and address written on the back, he finds it’s for a train ticket – station of origin: Resurrection Bay. Someone he knows must have sent her to him for help.

He heads back to his home town, which is simmering with more than the usual amount of tension. It’s a stinking hot summer with the threat of bushfires hanging overhead and as well as the ongoing racial divide between the white community and the local Aboriginal people, a rash of vandalism, arson and riots is going on. Caleb starts asking around but everybody denies sending the woman to him.

The police aren’t looking into the woman’s death because they think it’s a clear-cut suicide. Caleb feels like he owes her something. But the more he investigates, the more the people of Resurrection Bay turn against him. It’s almost like everybody knows what’s going on but nobody wants to get involved.

I’m still not convinced that Caleb Zelic, the main character, has a long-haul series in him but I was a lot more impressed by this effort than the last one. The town of Resurrection Bay was beautifully drawn. It’s not the kind of place I imagine anyone wanting to live in if they didn’t have to – rampant racism, a massive drug problem, rising crime levels and disillusioned law enforcement – but it’s the perfect setting for a crime novel. It also feels very Australian and not in the cringeworthy way that a lot of Australian novels do.

Caleb still refuses to admit his deafness makes things more difficult but without his business partner, he struggles even more interviewing people than in the previous book. There’s a hilarious and yet dangerous moment in a pub where he asks a bushily bearded bikie some questions and can’t see his lips through his facial hair to make out even a single word. And whenever he goes for a run, he leaves his hearing aids at home so can’t hear anything. Of course, this always seems to be when he really needs them – women asking for help, bad guys holding him down and demanding answers to questions he can’t hear, and so on.

The plot struggles a little because Caleb makes some huge leaps in logic, not necessarily obvious ones, in order to link all the clues together, meaning the reader can only take his word for it rather than attempt to figure it out for themselves. And the ending is absolutely terrible because it turns out that literally everyone is a bad guy (okay, not quite, but almost everyone).

The thing missing from Emma Viskic’s books is memorable villains. It’s great to have a well-developed hero but without a memorable villain, it feels like the hero isn’t really being challenged all that much. What would Will Graham and Clarice Starling have been without Hannibal Lecter? What would Sherlock Holmes have been without Moriarty?

Who is Caleb Zelic? We still don’t really know. He’s still stumbling around trying to figure it out. So we’re still stumbling around with him. But he’s definitely lacking some of the mental strength that we traditionally associate with heroes and has to be saved by others a lot more than he saves himself.

In a word: better.

3.5 stars

*First published on Goodreads 10 April 2020

Book Review: Resurrection Bay by Emma Viskic

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Caleb Zelic is a private investigator and he’s been profoundly deaf since he was a child as a result of illness so he remembers what it was like to be able to hear. He wears hearing aids but they don’t give him perfect hearing and he relies more on lip reading. It’s an imperfect science so he misses a lot. He’s fluent in sign language but hardly anyone else in his life is. It sounds like it would be a problem for a private investigator. It is. He misses a lot. But as his ex-wife points out to him, he seems determined to “pass” for someone who isn’t deaf.

The story opens with Caleb in shock and cradling the body of his dead childhood friend, Gary, who was also a police officer. He’s called the emergency services and requested an ambulance – at least, he thinks he has because he couldn’t tell if anyone was actually on the other end of the line. The paramedics come and confirm Gary is long dead from a cut throat. The police want to know why Caleb was the one who found him. Because he received a text message from Gary saying, “Scott after me. Come my house. Urgent. Don’t talk anyone.” And so begins the mystery we spend the entire book trying to solve: who is Scott and why did he want Gary dead?

The main characters are pursued almost immediately by an assortment of unknown bad guys creatively referred to as Boxer and Grey-face. Caleb is attacked in his flat and stabbed but manages to escape. Frankie, his business partner and a former cop, is attacked in her house and disappears. There’s a lot of running away and refusing medical treatment. It’s hardly surprising when Caleb slips into septic shock. He spends a few days recuperating at his ex-mother-in-law’s house in Resurrection Bay, his childhood home town, because she’s a doctor. But the bad guys find him there as well. It’s almost like they have inside knowledge.

So who is betraying him? Is it his unreliable brother, Anton, a former junkie? Is it Frankie, an alcoholic who’s recently fallen off the wagon? Is it his ex-wife, Kat, who left him after a heartbreaking miscarriage? Is it Tedesco, the lead detective assigned to investigate Gary’s murder? Or was Gary a bent cop who had it coming and got Caleb caught up in it?

Resurrection Bay is very similar to The Dry by Jane Harper. Australian man linked to law enforcement with disability/physical difference that made him an outsider in his formative years is drawn back to his home town after a childhood friend is murdered. When I realised how similar it felt to The Dry, I went back to read my review of that book and in it I’d talked about how it felt similar to The Dressmaker by Rosalie Ham. It sort of points to a problem with Australian fiction, in that a lot of it feels the same. I’ve given all three of these books three stars because while they’re well written, there’s just nothing much original about them. Caleb’s ex-wife, Kat, is Aboriginal and that’s another thing Australian writers are doing a lot of these days, throwing in the token first nations secondary characters.

Resurrection Bay was Emma Viskic’s debut novel and won her three Davitt Awards (for Best Novel, Best Debut and Reader’s Choice) in 2015 as well as the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction in 2016. It was also declared iBooks Australia’s Crime Novel of 2015. There must not have been a lot of competition. Because while Caleb is an interesting concept character and the sense of his mostly soundless world is visceral, the plot is middling, the crime is uninspired, the middle men are stereotypically lightweight and the villains are grotesquely violent without any real reason to be (at least that we know of because their motivations remain unexplored).

Maybe if I’d gone into reading this book with lower expectations… no, I would still have rated it three stars. But maybe I would have been less disappointed than I am.

3 stars

*First published on Goodreads 5 April 2020

Book Review: This House of Grief by Helen Garner

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Most Victorians – likely most Australians – would remember this case from the news. A car containing a father and his three boys veered off a highway and ended up in a dam on Fathers’ Day. Only the father escaped; the three boys drowned. Did he do it on purpose or was it a tragic accident as a result of a medical episode?

Robert Farquharson was an ordinary Aussie bloke. He wasn’t good-looking, he wasn’t smart, he wasn’t successful, he wasn’t anything special. He lived in a country town where the main pastimes were football and drinking. And if you could tie down a woman, then you pretty much had all you could expect to have in life.

Cindy Gambino went into the relationship on the rebound after her boyfriend had been killed in a car accident. She and Robert met in 1990, married in 2000 and had three children by 2002. In 2004, they separated. Cindy loved him but she wasn’t in love with him. Just months later, she entered into another relationship with a man she would later marry and have more children with. And less than a year after that, her three boys were dead.

Within hours of the incident, police and witnesses were doubting Farquharson’s account of what had happened. It appeared he had barely even attempted to save his children from the dam and had prevented others from diving into the water to search for them. His main concern was what would happen to him because he’d “never been in trouble before”. The physical evidence wasn’t clear cut but the police felt strongly that this was an act of revenge. And so he was charged with three counts of murder.

I’ve read quite a few of Helen Garner’s books and this was definitely my least favourite. The reasons might sound a little strange. The first is that she doesn’t insert herself into the story nearly as much as she has in some of her other books. In her previous creative non-fiction and sometimes fiction books, she cast herself as one of the main characters and it was very effective. In this book, she is reduced to a simple observer and narrator and while that may be appreciated from other authors, it’s not her usual style and the book suffers for it. The second is that because the story was so well-publicised as it was happening, the book revealed nothing new. There were no stunning revelations, no jaw-dropping moments, just a straight narrative that was a little boring at times. She describes members of the jury staring into space as the technical evidence is presented and falls asleep herself in court at one point.

Part of the problem with this book is that Garner started writing it at the beginning of the trial, not knowing what would happen, not knowing whether it would turn out to be a fantastically interesting trial or not. There ended up being two trials, an appeal and two appeal denials. And none of it was worthy of a Helen Garner book. After so much effort from the author, it would have been hard to give it all up, to admit defeat, to abandon the book. It’s what should have happened. I bet there was a publisher in the background who just simply refused to let it.

And for someone who so prominently calls herself a feminist, Garner’s immediate instinct in so many of her books that pit a woman against a man (particularly this one and The First Stone) is to side with the man and it feels bizarre. As she sits in the court room and watches the trial, she experiences an almost maternal concern for the defendant, a man charged with murdering his children. It’s certainly not what I felt for him as I read the book.

Garner’s writing is as readable as ever – I think I once said she could write about paint drying and it would be fascinating – but the story just isn’t as interesting as some others she has chosen to write about in her other books. I think it captures quite well how boring and long-winded and tedious the legal system can be and unfortunately this infects the story being told.

If you want to read about this terrible crime and the resulting court proceedings, I would recommend finding a different book. I feel that maybe a true crime author would have been able to do justice to it more than Garner did.

3 stars

*First published on Goodreads 29 March 2020

Book Review: The One Who Got Away by Caroline Overington

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Oh, Caroline, no! I read this purely on the basis of all the terrific Caroline Overington books I’ve read in the past but it feels like an attempt to cash in on the popularity of Liane Moriarty’s suburban style of drama and it just fails completely.

Molly Franklin gets a call from her stepfather asking her to come to his house urgently. When she gets there, the police tell her that her older stepsister, Loren, is missing – presumably lost overboard – from the cruise ship she and her husband, David, were having their second honeymoon on. Immediately, both Molly and her father think that David is responsible and insist he be investigated for murder. But there’s some jurisdiction issues because the Netherlands-registered vessel was in international waters and docked in Mexico as soon as the crew realised Loren was missing. And there’s little physical evidence to suggest David did kill her.

The point of view then switches to Loren’s as Molly finds and reads an account that Loren has written of her life up until getting on the cruise ship, focusing mainly on how she met and married David. Even though they are both from the same California town (Loren from the poor side and David from the wealthy side), they meet for the first time while both working in New York. After six months of sex and fun, David breaks up with Loren unexpectedly and leaves New York. Four years later when they bump into each other, Loren realises she’s never gotten over him and makes it her mission to win him back. It works. They get married, settle in their home town and have twin daughters. It’s not a perfect relationship as they struggle to adjust to life with two young children. And David comes across a bit too smooth. He has an answer for everything.

We switch point of view again to journalist Liz Moss. She’s interviewing David and it’s a few months after Loren went missing. David basically admits to everything he’s done wrong – and he’s done a lot wrong – but he emphatically denies responsibility for Loren going missing. Molly gets another turn as she enlists a former friend of Loren’s – now a famous actress – to bring attention to her sister’s plight, then the judge at David’s trial takes over before Molly is given the final few chapters for the last word.

There are too many points of view. It should have just been Loren and Molly. The journalist and the judge add nothing, especially since we’re not emotionally attached to them.

Loren’s section is a lot of telling, because she’s writing an account of her life. And Liz’s section is a lot of telling as well, because she’s interviewing David. He talks and talks and talks and talks. A lot. It’s not much fun.

When Loren’s fate is finally revealed on the last page of the book, it’s completely unsatisfying. I closed the back cover and just said, “Oh, no, no, no!” The reveal of the villain was unexpected but mostly because it felt wrong. It felt like it should have been pretty much anyone other than who it turned out to be.

In my review of Matilda Is Missing, I wrote, “It seems like Overington’s worst books are still better than the best books of many other writers.” The One Who Got Away is the book that proves this is no longer the case.

Overington’s best books are the ones that revolve around abused children. They’re horrifying and they deliver gut punches but they are pretty close to perfect narratives. If you’re new to Caroline Overington, start with I Came to Say Goodbye, follow it up with Sisters of Mercy and Matilda Is Missing, then round it out with Ghost Child (these are all the books I’ve read so I can’t comment on any others). But you can give The One Who Got Away a miss.

In a word: unworthy.

2 stars

*First published on Goodreads 21 March 2020

Book Review: Conned by Matthew Klein

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In 2013, I was perusing a book store and came across No Way Back by Matthew Klein. I didn’t even read the blurb because I was hooked simply by reading the front cover. “They know everything. They control everyone. Even you.” I couldn’t resist. And even better, I read the book and loved it. Ever since, I’ve had the rest of his books on my Goodreads “Want to Read” list. So when I came across Conned (also known as Con Ed in some places) in a second-hand book store, I snapped it up.

Conned was Klein’s second book, published in 2007, so it’s nearly 15 years old now. The implausibly named Kip Largo (likely just so Klein can set up Key Largo jokes) has been out of prison for a year after serving a five-year sentence for what was essentially a pyramid scheme. He lives in a dump, works at a dry cleaner and hasn’t seen his now adult son Toby for a while. When Toby shows up and says he’s in trouble, Kip takes him at his word – the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree – but he doesn’t have any money and there’s nothing Kip can do about it. He’s trying to put his con days behind him and go straight.

After Toby has his leg broken by the Russian mafia he owes money to, Kip feels guilty and makes them an offer: one last con. It will set him up for life and pay off Toby’s debt a hundred times over. They agree on the condition that if they don’t have the money within two months, they will kill both Kip and Toby. Kip has failed Toby over and over again and he feels he owes his son.

Conveniently, while drinking in a bar, Kip has recently been recognised and offered a job to con a billionaire husband out of a few million by a wife with an unbreakable prenup. He initially said no but it’s perfect for what he’s planning. The con? To convince the husband to invest in technology he doesn’t understand but will seeingly make him a lot of money. Seems simple enough, right?

Actually, it starts to get convoluted from this point. Klein starts out by trying to explain some basic cons and moves onto larger cons and even a historical one to educate the reader who likely doesn’t have that much experience with the industry (and trust me, it’s an industry). Then Kip goes about setting up his con but he never explains too much ahead of time, neither to the readers or any of the other people he brings in to play minor roles (including fake FBI agents, fake programmers, fake marketers, etc). Toby convinces Kip to let him play a role as well, but he keeps Toby just as much in the dark as everyone else.

Eventually, Kip starts to feel like an unreliable narrator. He doesn’t trust anyone and no one trusts him, not even the reader. Is he running a con against a billionaire husband and for the Russian mafia, or against the Russian mafia, or against everybody? Or is he the one being conned?

It should probably be obvious by now that I didn’t enjoy this book as much I liked No Way Back. Part of the problem is that it’s difficult to feel much sympathy for people who are so greedy for a quick buck (or a thousand) that they do really stupid things, like withdrawing huge sums of money from their bank accounts and handing it over to complete strangers on the promise of getting it back with interest. A lot of these scams are also very low tech and in the decade or so since it was published, a bunch of Nigerian princes have taken over the scene and made it a lot more high tech, arm’s length, romantic and devastating.

The character of Kip is, however, very convincing as a conman and Klein says in his endnotes that he did a lot of research. There’s also an author biography that tells us Klein ran an internet company a lot like the one Kip sets up as part of the con, which later went bankrupt before he became a successful writer. Talk about art imitating life.

Ultimately, the ending lacks the poetic justice a story about a con deserves. But Klein’s writing is easy to read and the book is diverting enough as long as you don’t expect too much from it.

In a word: inoffensive.

3 stars

*First published on Goodreads 12 March 2020

Book Review: Hangman by Jack Heath

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About 15 years ago, I saw Jack Heath at a writers’ festival when he was primarily known as a children’s and young adult writer. He was young himself, a bit of a prodigy. I can’t remember the context but he was talking about reading a book while on an airplane and it contained a description of a woman grinding her heel into a man’s crotch. The scene was so vivid – in his head at least – that he passed out at 30,000 feet. Boy, he must have come a long way since then because as the main character in Hangman, Timothy Blake is the new Dexter Morgan (only worse).

The most important thing to note about Hangman is that while Jack Heath has written umpteen books for children, THIS IS NOT ONE OF THEM. If books were given ratings, this one would be 18+.

It’s not for the faint-hearted either. Blake is a monster and kills then mutilates numerous people throughout the story without any reluctance. When he’s not murdering people, he’s a civilian consultant for the FBI field office in Texas, offering advice on time-sensitive cases, usually missing persons. The deal? For every innocent life he saves, he gets to take a not-so-innocent one. It’s an unofficial deal with the field office director but it’s working out for both of them. The Texas FBI field office has an enviable solve rate for its cases and Blake stays out of jail.

When Cameron Hall, a fourteen-year-old student, is abducted and a ransom demanded, Blake is called in. He managed to get his old FBI supervisor shot (in the bulletproof vest he was wearing but he’s still injured) so he’s assigned a new one, Reese Thistle. Blake’s uneasy about it – he stays away from women for their sakes and his own – but he doesn’t really have a choice.

They go all over Houston chasing up leads but something feels amiss. And when Blake is kidnapped from home and dumped at the warehouse where Cameron Hall is being held captive, it starts to feel just a little too convenient. But then another boy goes missing, almost identical to Cameron Hall, and Blake thinks he’s stumbled onto a serial kidnapper with a predilection for blond teenagers.

Blake is supposed to be a bit of a savant – and he is – but obvious leads aren’t followed up and connections are dismissed as coincidence, so it diminishes him a little. When Thistle is revealed as someone from his very traumatic past, it starts to feel a lot like writers’ tricks instead of ingenious plot. And his traumatic past is contrived – when it is revealed how he survived as a baby after his parents were shot, you’ll roll your eyes at least a little because it is just ridiculous.

The reason the book is called Hangman is also a bit unfathomable. Blake literally says that he chose Hangman as the name for his online business solving Rubik’s cubes and other puzzles because the name he wanted – Problemsolver – was already taken. I suspect there was another reason in a previous version of the book, a plotline that later got written out, but Heath – or maybe his editor – was so attached to the name that he couldn’t bear to let it go.

The book’s best feature is that it is really well written, extremely readable – in fact, I read it all in one day. It keeps you reading because all the way through it feels like something big is right around the corner.

The reveal, when it comes, is underwhelming. I think it’s supposed to be a commentary on how nobody’s perfect, because in this book nobody is. But considering how long Blake is outsmarted, the criminal should have been outed a lot earlier. And the reasons for the crimes are a bit ho hum. The story relies too much on the shock of discovering exactly what Blake does in his spare time and these days we’re all a bit jaded.

I’m curious enough to want to read the next book in the series. Not straight away. But sometime in the next few years. If I come across the sequel on sale. Or in a second-hand bookstore.

In a word: okay.

3 stars

*First published on Goodreads 12 March 2020

Book Review: Blackbirch – The Beginning by KM Allan

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I follow this author’s blog and I love the confidence she conveys on her website. Blackbirch, her debut novel, doesn’t have quite the same poise but you can see where she was trying to go and hopefully she will get there as the series continues.

I was given an ARC (Advance Reader Copy) in exchange for an honest review of this book. I read the ARC. It was okay. I wrote a review saying that. I offered the author the option of not posting it. She didn’t accept, which I thought was very gracious, but asked me to hold off on posting it until after the official release of the book. And then I watched as she posted tweet after tweet about all the changes she was making in the lead up to the release date. If it was changing that much, I didn’t think it was fair to post the review I’d written. So when the book came out, I bought a copy and read it again. I’m glad I did. It’s not an entirely different book and it’s not perfect, but it was enough of an improvement to make me want to rewrite my original unposted review.

Josh Taylor has been sent to live in Blackbirch with his mother’s best friend, Grace, and Grace’s daughter, Sarah, after the death of his own parents in a car accident. He wasn’t in the car at the time of the accident – at least, that’s what he’s been told – but he doesn’t really remember because he’s suffering from some kind of psychologically-induced partial amnesia. He knows who he is but a lot of other things are very hazy.

Blackbirch is a regional town that relies on tourists and what brings the tourists in is its reputation as a location for witchcraft and magick (note the “k” on the end – magic is what magicians do but magick is real and powerful). Grace runs a store selling candles and herbs and spellbooks and other magick ingredients. Sarah helps out after school but she isn’t a believer. Eve, Sarah’s former friend, works there as well and she believes big time. Josh has never given much thought to any of it.

But weird things are happening. A girl named Kallie is coming to Josh in his dreams, warning of a dark presence and possible danger. Just touching a sacred crystal or a spellbook for a moment sends a power coursing through his body that he can’t control and doesn’t know how to explain. Phantom pains in his shoulder plague him. And something is drawing him to a house deep in the woods that everybody else says doesn’t exist.

Josh needs answers – the truth about his parents’ car accident, about who he can trust, about what exactly is going on – but how far will he have to go to get them? And who will get hurt in the process?

The premise is captivating and the world building that has gone into the town of Blackbirch is terrific. The setting is enticing, somewhere we’d probably all be intrigued by. There’s something a little Blair Witch about the place but without the serial killer vibe, a little Salem but without the finger pointing, hysteria and witchcraft trials.

The characters are a little underdeveloped, I think because they’re all competing for limited space. Because of this underdevelopment, Josh doesn’t really seem interested in the missing parts of his identity. Sarah trails him around like a puppy dog, bounding at his heels in an effort to cheer him up, like he’s having a bad day instead of a bad year. Max, Sarah’s next door neighbour who is obviously in love with her, is pretty much superfluous. He misses out on all the important moments of the story and could easily be removed. Kallie… well, since she only comes to Josh in his dreams, we’re not even sure if she’s a real person.

Eve is the most successful character – and the best interactions are between Josh and Eve – but her motivations aren’t properly explored. She hovers between understandably guarded and inexplicably power hungry. Arden Flynn, the high school guidance counsellor, is the most well-rounded and best written character but he’s an adult and we’re really here for the teenagers. It is a young adult book, after all.

The plot is a little haphazard, the writing is a bit melodramatic, the structure could be tightened and there are a few handfuls of typos (although not too many to forgive) but it gets there in the end. There’s an in-your-face cliffhanger that means you have to buy the next book to get any sort of closure but if you like urban fantasy, witches and magick, then you probably won’t mind (and it’s reported to be coming out in 2020 so you won’t have to wait too long).

In a few words: a promising start from which to continue.

3 stars

*First published on Goodreads 24 February 2020