nocto

I couldn't find the second in this series as it seems to be out of print in the UK so I skipped straight on to the third. I'm torn between enjoying this book quite a lot and finding the structure of the series too constricting to be liked.

This series is about Wesley Peterson and the other detectives of Tradmouth in Devon, where Tradmouth is a thinly disguised version of Dartmouth. I like the characters and find the majority of them believeable, especially the female members of the cast such as Wesley's wife Pam and his colleague Rachel Tracey. The plots themselves are believeable up to a point and the intersection of police work and archaeology is interesting. I'm finding this series to be difficult to get my head round though because there are just too many coincidences between the police work and the archaeology.

The structure of these books seems to be: Police start to investigate murder; Wesley bumps into his archaeologist mate Neil who is doing a dig somewhere near the murder; Dig turns out to involve a body who was murdered or a murderer; Murder involved in the dig turns out to be exactly the same story as the present day murder. And by exactly the same story I mean that the murders involve the same family members, the same places, the same motives, the same methods. In this one there is a element of copycatness involved between the two crimes but it still stretchs credulity a little bit far. I also think that it might make the later books in the series a bit predictable. In this one I was still willing to believe that the crimes wouldn't be as tightly related as they were.

It's almost that having dreamt up a series which combines police detection with archaelogical detection Ellis has done too well. The neatness of her plots is detracting from the other parts of the story. In a less well written book it would be easier to suspend disbelief and go along with the parallel crimes but the true to life characters make this a difficult task here. I'll certainly try another book in this series and see how I enjoy it.

Purchased on 11th July 2002.

[these comments are taken from a mailing list discussion, they're out of context and contain spoilers]

I had trouble finding any sympathetic characters in this book, I think Savannah was probably the only person who felt real to me, but that's probably another question. I didn't like Joe much but I felt that this was all Will's fault. Will was moulding Joe to be a better version of himself and it didn't seem to me that that was what Joe had needed, it seemed rather an abuse of Joe's character to me.

Hmmm, I think I found little favour in anyone because I didn't feel most of them were very real. Something about this book just didn't work for me. Joe didn't seem like a real character to me and as a consequence nearly everyone I saw through his eyes didn't seem real.

Joe was polite to the point of stiltedness even with Mary Ann and that seemed off to me, I couldn't see him having stayed so polite with the person acting as his mother all the way from the age of 5 to 24, and that reflected badly on Mary Ann to me. I wasn't convinced that June was after him in himself. I'd have felt better about her if she'd let the ruby bracelet sink and told Joe it was him she was interested in and not material things whether they were rubies or scars. Lorna and Chrissa did seem like more sympathetic characters because they had smaller roles and so Joe's viewpoint didn't intrude so much on my view of them.

I think Savannah came over as more of a sympathetic character to me because she was more on Joe's wavelength, she had the same kind of mannered surface that comes of being a mature child who doesn't fit into an adult world, which is sort of what Joe is too. So she seemed more real in Joe's world than the adults around her and therefore I was more favourably inclined towards her.

I thought the real relationship was obvious from the point that Thor said he wasn't really Joe's father though I thought that maybe the clues to that conclusion were too obvious and spent some time wondering which of the other older men in the book could be his father. Between the acid and Will and Jack Blazak this was very much a book about fathers so I would have been disappointed if Will hadn't turned out to be Joe's father. I was surprised that this came as news to Mary Ann though, I thought that she would have put two and two and two together and made six long before Joe found out.

I thought Will's skills at manipulation made him a bad husband and father, it didn't gel for me that both Joe and Mary Ann would still think he was wonderful. I didn't really get what Will's dreams were. He has a rich wife and plenty of money, he's blackmailing people and though I think he thinks that he's trying to make the world a better place and doesn't realise that he's just as corrupt as the rest of them. All a bit twisted but that was the point I guess.

I'm trying to put my finger on quite why Joe doesn't work for me when Mallory in Carol O'Connell's books works for me perfectly. They are both characters who have had bad childhood experiences and who show little emotion to others. Somehow the third person narration of Mallory works better for me than the first person narration of Joe even though on the face of it I'd think that the first person narration might work better for the reader because we know we're only seeing what the character doing the talking wants us to see.

I admit to having got totally lost in the characters, I couldn't keep the cops or the politicians straight in my head. I started off looking back each time somebody appeared who I thought I may have seen before but I quickly tired of that and just stayed confused. I could have done with one of those little cast lists in the front with a one line summary of who each person was. I was ok on keeping track of the main characters who were basically Tronas or Blazaks I think but beyond that I got lost.

It makes sense to me that some of the characters were based on real people because it explains why they didn't seem very real to me which sounds backwards. I found parts of both the plot and the characters confusing and suspect this was because Parker was trying to parallel real life too closely.

I think it would have been a much different story if Joe hadn't been disfigured and it would have been harder for the author to build a character like Joe without the visible scarring to build his reactions to the world around. I don't think it was essential to the plot but it was integral to the character.

For me in this book the many sides of Joe made him less believable though I don't doubt I've said the opposite of other characters in other books before now. Joe just didn't ring true for me and the more I saw Parker trying to build him up into a real character with these different aspects the less real he seemed to become. I thought the baptism thing was a bit odd. I could believe that Joe found it cleansing but I was bemused that church's didn't notice an extra guy in the mix especially one who has been made out to be so visibly noticeable.

To me the main theme was about fathers and children Joe/Thor/Will and Jack/Alex/Savannah and I enjoyed those parts of the story and all the bits that paralleled each other in the subplots. I found all the political stuff too much to comprehend and got utterly lost in those parts of the plot. Since this was, as the question says, the main plot, this really rather wrecked the book for me.

Joe went on about shooting so much that he was going to have to do some of it before the book was out. The bits of the resolution I understood were satisfactory enough but the bits I didn't obviously weren't.

Hmmmmm. Since it didn't work for me I don't see the book as an award winner. Although I've gone on about not finding the characters and plot entralling it was really the writing in this book that didn't work for me.

Early on in the book I found it really hard to read. Around about where Will gets murdered Parker is using one sentence per paragraph and though I suspect this is supposed to make the reader feel that the action is happening thick and fast I just found it choppy and stacatto and painfully slow to read. It improved some and flowed better later in the book but by then I think I'd missed enough details that I rather lost the plot.

So I wouldn't have given this book an award as I didn't like the individual elements or the book as a whole very much. I expected to be the odd one out in this discussion and that everyone else would love it and I'm surprised by how many others have been dissatisfied with it too.

I've read two of the other Edgar nominees. I enjoyed Harlan Coben's _Tell No One_ more than _Silent Joe_ but I don't think that it was an award winning book either mainly because of a weird ending and the whole thing felt like it was written just to sell the movie rights. I loved _Reflecting the Sky_ by SJ Rozan but I think that's possibly more a reflection (excuse me...) on the series as a whole rather than on the book alone, there's always more to a series book than what's between the covers of any individual volume in it. I haven't read the others; I've grown bored of McBain and I've never heard of the other author.

Purchased on 16th May 2002.

I was worried about being disappointed by this book since I was going back to the beginning of a series that I'd already read the latest entries in it. From the way that Sam looks back in the later books to things that happened in this one I did know a bit more than I was supposed to do about the goings on but for the most part it worked out ok. Henderson foreshadows what is going to happen in this book on the first page and so the book wasn't spoilt by any means. If anything I think it was probably nice to read this book with a nice glow of nostalgia about it.

On the whole I was very pleased with the book, it didn't have any rickety first novel creaks about it and stands up well to the standard in the later books. It looks like Henderson knew what she was up to from the off.

I'm definitely looking forward to reading Too Many Blondes now and then my series will be complete and I'll have to wait for more books. Hopefully the reissue of these first books in the series is a promotion to garner interest in the series before a new release. That's what I'm choosing to believe anyway!

(Oh and what was the cover artist on? there's a woman in a convertible on the cover and Sam has a Ford Escort van which is about as far from a convertible as you can get!)

Purchased on 11th July 2002.