Cry Baby - Mark Billingham

 

The seventeenth Thorne novel is a prequel to the first, Sleepyhead.  It is 1996, the year football was supposed to be coming home, with the European Championships in London.  A seven year old disappears from a London park.  Thorne is a newly separated DS.  On a hunch he suspects one of the mother's neighbours.  The suspect's name is leaked to the press and he ends up killing himself, shortly before his alibi was proved.  Thorne suspects his DI, Gordon Boyle, of being behind the leak.  Certainly he blames Boyle for easing up on all other suspects.  At the same time Thorne knows full well that he made the same assumptions about the suspect - because he looked like a paedophile.  Thorne, however, does not ease up.

Billingham really is a master of his craft.  He leads us towards the real culprit and then misleads.  There is a terrific red herring involving the boy and his best friend, and a twist at the very end that I never dreamt was coming.  The climax itself is terrifically exciting.  I shall have to take it to pieces to find out how Billingham did it.  I mean, I read a lot of crime fiction and I am getting frankly cheesed off with the current crop of Jamie Bulger plotlines - yet my heart was genuinely thumping and I couldn't turn the pages fast enough.

Much fun is also had with Thorne's first meeting with the punk pathologist, Phil Hendricks.

A great start for my reading new year.

The Disappeared - C J Box

The blurb claims Box is "The #1 American Crime Writer". Well, he's not that. Better claims can be made for various others. I suspect most would have Ellroy on their list and of those, I would suggest that Don Winslow rides pretty high in their estimation. That said, Box is a prolific and very successful author who pursues a very American line of crime fiction - rural backwoods, nothing too violent, investigated by a local with a deep family background and impeccable morals.


In this case the backwoods are Wyoming, the investigator Joe Pickett, a game warden who has previously worked as the agent of the state governor. Now there is a new, very different governor but he still wants Joe to probe the disappearance of a British woman entrepreneur from a holiday ranch where it just so happens Joe's eldest daughter works. It also happens that the local game warden has vanished, which gives Joe a reason to provide temporary cover.


The Disappeared is my first Box novel and I liked it. I normally prefer my crime fiction several shades darker and bloodier, but Box is a highly skilled writer who does deep research. His flair for the locale sucks you in and it doesn't matter one jot if you haven't read any of the other 17 Pickett novels; Box provides just enough exposition without you even noticing. I especially liked Joe's friend Nate Romanowski, a loose cannon professional falconer. I like any character who can weaponise a trout. The plot is clever, the subplots subtly interwoven. I will definitely be reading more Box.

The Distant Echo - Val McDernid

The Distant Echo has, with hindsight, become the first in the Karen Pirie 'cold case' series. I make what might seem an odd point because whilst it is a cold case and Karen Pirie is in charge of the file, she doesn't appear until about 360 pages in and contributes nothing to solving the case.

What in fact we have is a dense, two-part crime story. In 1978 a bunch of mates, studying together at St Andrews University, stumble upon a body in the snow. Rosie Duff was nineteen, a barmaid at one of the student pubs. She has been raped and stabbed and dumped in the old Pictish graveyard. The boys are initially treated as suspects. They were drunk, they had access to a suitable vehicle, all bar one are of the right blood group. But there is no real evidence. They are bailed, their names leaked to the Press. It is assumed by all they are guilty. They are so overwhelmed by the pressure that one tries to commit suicide. In trying to save him, the lead investigating officer, DI Maclennan, loses his life. In effect, whoever killed Rosie is now responsible for the deaths of two people.

That story makes up about half of a 560-page book. The detail is immense, the characterisation forensically detailed. Flash forward twenty-five years. It is now 2003 and forensic science has moved on considerably, albeit nowhere near so much as it has today. Police all over the world are re-opening old cases in light of the latest advances in DNA profiling. The Chief Constable of Fife has decided to get with the programme and has set up a small cold case unit. Karen Pirie has the Rosie Duff profile, which is very much a priority, given that the other cold case officer is the younger brother of the late Maclennan and James Lawson, the first police officer on the scene, is now ACC Crime with special responsibility for the unit.

The four original suspects are now spread across both sides of the Atlantic. Alex and Ziggy are still close, even though Ziggy is a paediatrician in Seattle while Alex is a Glasgow manufacturer of greeting cards. Tom aka Weird became an evangelical Christian under the pressure of the original investigation and now conducts a TV ministry in America. Davey is a lecturer in French and has no real contact with the others, despite living barely an hour's drive from Alex and despite the fact that has sister Lynn has long been married to Alex.

No sooner has the case been reopened than Ziggy dies in a fire. Then a second member of the quartet is murdered. Another is attacked in the street and left for dead. The list of suspects is long and the police have no new leads. The evidence from the original investigation into Rosie's murder has gone missing.

The Distant Echo (not a great title) is a fabulous, serious, psychological and procedural crime novel. It demonstrates why McDermid is the grande dame of Tartan Noir. It is essential reading for students of the genre. I got it because I had seen a review for the latest Karen Pirie. I'm now seeking out the rest of the series.

In the Cold Dark Ground - Stuart MacBride

I think I must have missed a couple of instalments in the Logan McRae saga. I knew that Logan had given up the big city (Aberdeen) in favour of a rural posting (Banff) back in uniform. I knew he had taken up with the Goth beauty Samantha and that he had been the surrogate father for at least one of DCI Steel's children. But I didn't know that Samantha was in a vegetative coma following an attempt on Logan's life or that the urbane gangland fixer John Urquart had bought his old flat for a ridiculously overblown price - that is to say criminally, comproimisingly inflated.

In the Cold Dark Grave is Logan's tenth outing. His search for a missing person leads to a naked male body in the woods. His head is covered with plastic and his body has been bleached to remove any forensic traces.These are the signature stylings of Malcolm McLennan, "Malk the Knife", gangland supremo of Edinburgh. The dead man turns out to be a partner in a shipping business with apparent links to McLennan. The other partner is missing - but turns up safe and sound back home. Meanwhile the police inquiry, now headed up by Steel's MIT unit, discover the dead man's collection of graphic homemade porn. Turns out his partner was a partner in every sense...

Logan has to cram in a lot of funerals over the coming weekend. First he has to pull the plug on Samantha as the palliative care team at her nursing home have given up hope. At the same time he is called to the deathbed of the Aberdeen kingpin Wee Hamish Mowatt, who has always been oddly fond of Logan and who now wants him to take over his empire. The other contender, the ultra-thug Reuben Kennedy, begs to differ. To top it all off another angry female officer, Superintendent Niamh Harper, takes charge. She seems to have taken against Logan for no reason. But there is a reason - and it's a good one.

MacBride is on top form. Some of the wisecracks are laugh out loud funny, the action dark and bloody, and the plot, despite its complexity, remains somehow credible throughout. The crime is always just an inciting incident in the McRae novels, but here it remains logical and brilliantly deployed. I didn't guess who did it or who the mole on the police team was, but the clues were all there. I say it again, Brilliant.

Strange Shores - Arnuldur Indridason

It is 2010 and Inspector Erlunder in on leave, revisiting - as he often does - his childhood home in rural East Iceland. Being Icelandic and a loner, Erlunder camps out in a long-abandoned, ruined cottage - despite sub-zero nighttime temperatures.

He is drawn back to his roots because this is where, forty years ago, everything changed for him.  He was ten, his brother Bergur ('Beggi') was eight, yet they accompanied their father out into a snowstorm to rescue sheep.  The boys became detached from their father. Erlunder made it home, Biggi didn't.

What can Erlunder hope to find after four decades?  Beggi's body was never found.  Erlunder speaks to the locals (who do not share his big-city sociability). The suggestion is made that foxes might have scavenged the remains and taken bits back to their earths.  Hunters often discover bits and bobs.  One of them, the especially curmudgeonly Ezra, found a toy car - the little red car that Biggi had in his mitten that fateful night and which Erlunder was jealous of.

Ezra can't remember, after all these years, where he found the car.  But he remembers another disappearance in a snowstorm that dates back even further - Matthildur, the wife of Ezra's fishing partner Jakob, disappeared during an especially vicious snowstorm in 1942.  Other people have mentioned Matthildur's disappearance to Erlunder. So little happens in this remote district that it is still a talking point seventy years later.  The intriguing thing is that the body was never found, even though an entire British Army squadron caught in the same storm all turned up eventually, dead or alive.

The missing body hooks Elender and he sets out to solve the mystery.  Why did she decide to set out to cross the mountain in January?  Was it something to do with her nasty-sounding husband?  Did her disappearance link in some way to Jakob's death, in a shipwreck seven years later? Why do some many people still care?  For exactly the same reason that he, Erlunder, cannot rest - cannot escape his memories and his dreams - until he has found his long-lost brother.

All he knew was that somewhere on his journey through life time had come to a standstill, and he had never managed to wind the mechanism up again. [p. 275]

I was wary when I realised that this was an out-of-series novel but Indridason has a masterful way of switching between past and present.  You always know where and when you are, even when you are sharing Erlunder's hectic dreams.  Indridason uses short punchy chapters but keeps the pace slow, drawing you deeper and deeper into the story.  The revelation, when it comes, is really dark.  The resolution of Erlunder's framing story is really touching.

For me, the best Indridason I have read so far.

The Rising - Brian McGilloway

I started The Rising with high hopes.  Post-Troubles Ireland is a fascinating setting for crime fiction and McGilloway seemed to have taken the trouble to polish his prose in order to bring some quality to a genre that is always at risk of slipping into cliche.  Sadly he apparently only took the trouble in the early chapters and, frankly, the unique setting quickly became irrelevant.  By the middle of the book I was losing track of which side of the border Devlin was on at any given time; there seemed to be no difference, though I'm pretty sure British citizens living in Ulster might not always be so forthcoming to Garda officers like Devlin.

The Rising itself is an extreme community group cracking down on drug dealers.  Again, early on, they seem to be verging on paramilitary tactics, but it soon wears off and they're not really the drivers of the story.  The story is about drug dealers, and it's good that McGilloway ups the ante by involving the son of Devlin's former colleague and lover, but the key twist was ludicrously obvious and when I saw that coming the tension failed.

The Rising is the fourth and latest in the Devlin series.  The problem generally with police series is that the protagonist tends to develop a barrowload of personal problems, most of which have now become cliched.  Devlin doesn't have those problems.  Unfortunately that makes him boring and characterless.  The particular issue that McGilloway has handicapped himself with is that he chosen to write in the first person.  We therefore see this world solely through Devlin's eyes.  We therefore know that he is going to see out the story, so that's the effective tension gone.  Secondly, Devlin is a bit bland, largely conservative-with-a-small-c in his outlook, and thus an uncontroversial-bordering-on-uninteresting guide to his world.  The one whose inner voice we really want to hear in this story is Caroline Williams, mother of the dead boy and ex-wife of the appalling Simon - there's the character who would have given this storyline zing.

Maybe I would be happier with the author's other series, the DC Lucy Black thrillers...