nocto

Garnethill was so good, just about the best book I read last year, that I've put off reading this for fear of being disappointed by it. The first book, which featured Glaswegian Maureen O'Donnell defending herself against accusations of being a murderer, would have been wonderful as a standalone but I couldn't see it as the start of a series. That would have defeated the realism that was an intrinsic part of its attraction. I've learned since that Mina is keeping this series as a trilogy and that understanding gave me more faith that the followup books would be as good as the first, and in this case at least, I was right.

I expected to see more continuity between the investigation in Garnethill and the investigation in Exile than there was. I suppose the third volume, because of it's title: Resolution, will deal more with wrapping up the Garnethill case. Threads from the first book run through this book but don't really get tied up, they are just in the background linking (I presume) books one and three.

This was another fantastic book though with a great bleak story and some fine dark humour. Once again everything is going wrong for these characters but the darkness is lifted by the sense of hope. Some things have definitely got better since Garnethill, things are running smoother in some ways for Maureen and her family but nothing is easy and it all feels real.

In short, it's as good a followup novel as I've read and I'm really glad it is. I'm very much looking forward to Resolution.

Purchased on 31st August 2001.

This is the 2nd Willow King mystery. It's several years since I read the 1st in the series and I found this book hard to get into. Some of the dialogue is very stilted and some of the characters are really winding me up with how dreadfully posh they are but I'll reserve judgement until I've seen how the plot turns out.

Willow lives a double life: mid-week she works as Willow King doing something in pensions and at the weekend she lives a life of luxury as a romantic novelist called Cressida Woodruffe. In the first book I found this quite an interesting basis for a detective story but it's just irritating me in this book.

In the end the plot was the most credible part of the book with the characters at the centre of the story having reasonable motives for their actions. The way that Willow unmasked the killer involved a really big risk that I didn't find credible though. The conclusion also relied on an entire hospital ward dutifully shuffling off to see the new 5.30 episode of Neighbours, when even I know that the anyone in hospital would watch the lunchtime edition first and not it's afternoon repeat. It's odd how the details can sometimes really annoy you when a book isn't working for you.

I want to like Natasha Cooper and I have one of her later Trish Maguire books to read soon but I don't think I'm going to try any more of the Willow King books.

Purchased on 3rd May 2000.

Kathy Kolla's Puzzle Corner

I haven't got past the opening page of this book yet. In the first paragraph Kathy Kolla is pondering a word puzzle. Make at least 130 words from the letters in "claim to dream". I got to 130 but had to resort to "I, Rearrangement Servant" (aka Internet Anagram Server) to suss out the 12 letter word "melodramatic".

[My comments are taken from a mailing list discussion and as such contain spoilers!]

[on the characters]

I'm not picking up any huge inconsistencies between the characters from book to book, Kolla and Brock both seem much as they have been before. I think there are inconsistencies in the narration though - Brock barely featured in this one (even less than he did in book one). I hope that there is more of Brock again in book four since I think that since we have two lead characters I'd like to see them both used.

I thought Aunt Mary(anne) was a good addition to the cast as she's been mentioned in the previous books. I didn't buy that Kathy took her in so easily though without trying to find out what was going on. It was good to learn more about Kathy's background though.

The only other character that I think we've met before is Bren, but I barely remembered him. And like Mike I'm still waiting to find out what the blonde with the red sports car is to Brock.

Since our pair of detectives are now officially colleagues I expect we are going to see more recurring characters from now on in the series. I thought Desai was an interesting character that I'd like to know more about.

[on the plot]

I thought the first parts of the book were more plausible than the last part, though mainly I was glad that neither detective ran off and did something silly at the end of the book again and neither of them got injured in the process.

I liked the procedural aspects of the book with the team trying to find connections to other cases and with them getting babysat by others when the investigation seemed to be going nowhere. I thought it was a bit unlikely that they'd happen to pick up only the related murders when they picked other cases though. I liked the parts when Kathy started to uncover the theatrical connection when she was given the missing Zoe case which looked like a dead end and I thought it was realistic that the others weren't interested in her findings because the forensic people had come up with a stronger tie to another case.

The ending was certainly the weakest part of the book to me, everything got a bit too fantastic. Bettina didn't really work for me as a murderer, I could understand that she wanted to pay Stafford back for his imagined wrongs to her but something seemed slightly out of kilter. I thought Tom Gentle was creepy and I didn't think he'd have confessed so readily, I got rather confused over how much was him and how much was Bettina.

On the whole I thought it was a good plot with lots of interesting details but could have done with a better ending.

Purchased on 15th January 2002.

This has been my favourite book in the series so far (it's the third). In this book Kate is working on a crab fishing boat in the Bering Sea. There are two reasons that this worked for me. The first was that the setting was wonderful and I really got the feel of the icy seas and the isolated villages visited. The second is that because Kate was away from her home ground I didn't spend half the book wondering if I was supposed to remember the characters from the previous books which is what happened when I read the second book. The only other recurring character in this book, as far as I could tell anyway, was Jack Morgan who is Kate's lover and the police contact who gets her into these mysteries.

I think if you get too hung up on finding the mystery in this book you probably wouldn't enjoy it, Kate herself seems to forget that she is supposed to be investigating the deaths of a couple of fishermen most of the time. That didn't spoil it for me, I was enjoying finding out about the fishing as much as anything. I can't say I'd recommend this book to anyone except as a glimpse into Alaska and given that the investigatory side of the book doesn't seem particularly realistic I have to wonder whether any of the fishing detail and Aleut customs parts of the story were at all realistic too.

All in all it was a short and interesting read though and I'll keep reading about Kate's adventures.

Purchased on 22nd November 2001.

Reporter Molly Cates has spent eleven years following the case of serial killer Louie Bronk who is about to be executed by the state of Texas. She's just published a book all about him and is ready for the final chapter in the story.

Nothing is that simple in fiction though. The title of this excellent book refers to the phenomenom of death row prisoners having a "red scream" in their final days where they protest their innocence. I don't want to give away too much of the plot here because Louie's red scream doesn't really get any substance until about halfway through. This is an excellent piece of plotting though I didn't find the book as compelling as Under the Beetle's Cellar which comes after this one and also features Molly Cates.

The ending let the book down a bit with a rather generic heroine in peril type of scene but mainly I thought the plot was rock solid and everything fell into place just as I couldn't have foreseen it doing, which is the right thing to happen at the end of an interesting and thought provoking mystery novel. I put off reading this book quite a lot because I didn't really fancy reading a book about death row but it was well worth reading and the main characters aren't in favour of the death penalty any more than I am.

Purchased on 17th January 2001.

When I bought this secondhand I was actually after one of the Skip Langdon series as I'd met Skip in a short story and wanted to know more about the New Orleans cop. This however is a story about San Francisco lawyer Rebecca Schwartz. I think it's the fourth in the series.

This book is set around the Monterey Bay Aquarium where one of the staff is found floating dead in a tank. Rebecca is holidaying and visiting an acquaintance who works at the aquarium when that aquaintance is arrested for the murder and she has to jump back into lawyer mode to represent her.

I found most of the characters a bit thin, there were plenty of possible suspects but few of them were developed enough so that the reader could decide whether to suspect them or not. The best characters were the cast of children who play a big part in the plot.

The plot wasn't bad with a few interesting aspects that were mainly due to the presence of the children rather than the adults. Many of the adults on the edges of the plot seemed to act without apparent motive.

Whilst I enjoyed this I'm not sure I'll be rushing to track down more of Smith's books even though I suspect that this isn't her best work.

Purchased on 8th November 2000.

Three men in their seventies die on the same winter's evening. One is murdered in his bath, the second dies of exposure on a playing field, the third is run down on his bicycle. It's up to Pascoe to suss out what has happened to them, though only one of them is really his case. And Andy Dalziel is muddled up in one of the deaths and behaving decidedly furtively about it.

I thought this was a pretty good story though it took a while for me to get the three separate incidents being investigated straight in my head.

I like the way Hill weaves in parts of his detectives lives with the themes in his tales. This book has a lot to say about the care of the elderly and this is reflected in Ellie Pascoe's parents problems as her father begins to show signs of senile dementia.

The story telling is, as ever, excellent, but I think Hill is beginning to really pick up at about this point in the series and I think the later books are just going to get better until I get back to where I started at the first Hill book I read, On Beulah Height.

[This is book 8 in the Dalziel & Pascoe series]

Purchased on 15th January 2002.