Category: Krimi

A novel that exudes the grim time and place of the divided and contested ruin of 1948 Berlin.

‘La Guerre est finie,’ as they say. Gregor Reinhardt is no longer a Wehrmacht investigator, but rather a police officer amid the divided rubble of Berlin, 1948. The police service is awash with returned German communist exiles inserted by the Soviets during the months immediately after Der Untergang before the Western Allies made it to Berlin. Like their Nazi predecessors, the Reds suppose crime is a product of the attributes of individuals. Whereas for Nazis it was race, for the Communists it is class. In neither case is investigation or evidence necessary. Nazi justice was to find the nearest üntermensch, beat them to death and the crime is solved. Communist justice is to find the nearest bourgeoisie and do likewise. Case closed.
In this Red Sea are some honest officers but they survive by keeping their heads down, and of course the opportunists who are always with us and they follow the Red wind as long as it blows.
Gregor is assigned to homicide which is housed in the American sector and that gives him a little leverage, thanks to a deftly inserted backstory. My usual irritation at backstories is because they do not develop either plot or character, but in this instance the backstory develops plot nicely.
When the murders occur, Gregor’s superiors obstruct the investigation as required by the krimi playbook. But, strangely the Soviets seem to want an investigation as Gregor learns through a back channel, but they do not wish to broadcast that. Strangely, the Americans are reluctant but have no wish to advertise this fact.
There are some well realised scenes when a Soviet officer talks to Gregor who also debates conditions with the American angel who got him out of a POW camp and into the Berlin police. Within each monolith are many fissures.
The victims killed in the same manner pile up and the link among them seems to have been service in a special command of the Luftwaffe. Thin ice ahead! Gregor has to tread lightly.
He does much back and forth through the rubble that is Berlin, and I followed some of it on an old online map. He meets disconsolate war widows, bitter Luftwaffe veterans, cynical street orphans, callous local police officers, an enthusiastic archivist from Paris, deals with the indomitable Frau Dommes in his office, marvels at the resilience of Frau Meissiner, his landlady, and many other characters, like the thug Fischer.
Berlin, 1947
That the trail was going to lead to some Nazi evil was a foregone conclusion. But that was moderated by the plot complication mentioned below, though it diluted the focus on the evil.
I particularly liked the time Gregor spent in the archives, using that mountain of paper to ruminate on the war and the place of individuals in it.
A couple of quibbles, first Nemesis is just too omniscient. He is a near übermensch. Moreover, Nemesis’s amalgamation of two groups of victims made no sense, but it was a means to complicate the plot.
Finally, could a unit of maximum Aryan Brandenburgeren really pass themselves off as Arabs? Really! I would have liked some coda with the unseen Lena. This is the second in the series I have read.
Luke McCallin

A police procedural set in London during the Little Blitz of early 1944 when V rockets rained down.
The murder of one and then two resident aliens, with a third suspected, is well out of the ordinary.  Our hero becomes obsessed by it to the neglect of other duties but his superior, though vexed, is indulgent, and even supportive.  

There is a large and intrusive US military establishment in London and it somehow seems involved In the mysterious deaths, so Plod noses around there, too.
There is much to’ing and fro’ing down mean nocturnal blacked out streets, many low lifes taking advantages of the circumstances, some patriots, and a lot of stoics hanging on.  
I never did understand what the villain was doing and there is no wrap up at the end.  What motivated him in targeting those three men remains unknown to this reader.  Still less could I tell if his motivation was  offical business, entrepreneurship, or just sadism.
Likewise I could not fathom his living doll who dutifully seduces Plod and then tries to kill him.  
The author has more success with some of the supporting players like the wooden top who deals with the first murder, and the US army sergeant, though she is shallow, at least she has some vitality but her backstory was superfluous and she would not have worn battle dress in an office.  I also like the brief role of an army guard who holds up Plod while Ike gets into a car.
That Plod is too dumb to realise the two women he has his way with are using him, is nicely done but in the end I am not sure that was intentional on the part of the author.
Plod’s own backstory which is parcelled out throughout the story is tedious and irrelevant, though it could have connected to that of the sergeant with some thought.  Missed opportunity there.
The coda in Berlin was just too long a stretch.  This reader was through long before that but kept reading hoping for enlightenment about the plot but none came.
John Lawton
I liked the setting and set up enough to read another.    

‘The Nine-Tailed Fox’ (2017) and ‘Pong Pong Heart’ (2015) by Martin Limón
Entries in this reliable series following the (mis)adventures of George Sueño and Ernie Bascom, Criminal Investigators, 8th Army Headquarters, Seoul, South Korea circa 1972. In earlier reviews descriptions of the two protagonists and their world have been outlined elsewhere on this blog. Go there for background.
Suffice to say here, that these entries maintains the standard of the earlier titles.


There are many things to like about these books. First is that there is always a mystery that requires detective work. Sounds simple but so many books in the genre lack both mystery and detection. The common substitutes are sex and violence.
In addition, here as in several others, Korean lore and myth are integral to the plot. That is, it is rooted in the time and place culturally, as well as materially.
Moreover, Limón treats the Koreans, be they business girls, file clerk Miss Kim, innkeepers, or the redoubtable Mr Kil of the National Police, with respect, even deference. It is, after all, their country.
There is much about how an elaborate organisation like the Eighth Army operates and a recurring cast of characters around headquarters, e.g,, Sergeant Riley who knows everyone and if asked very nicely can secure even top secret documents when official channels are closed, Lifer Harvey, called Strange for good reason, who knows where many bodies are buried, the blustering provost who has been counting off the days until retirement for a decade, the motor pool chief who sees a lot more than he tells, and so on.
There are also martinets, bullies, thugs, many of them field grade officers. There is a rich black market in PX goods and conflict among the army wives, too.
In short, there are many crossfires in which to get caught, and these two often do get caught. Conflicting orders are after all common in any organisation but never mentioned in KPIs.
George is moody and introspective, planning to stay in Korea when he hits twenty years and maximises the army pension. He is learning the language and tries to immerse himself in the culture in food, drink, music, arts, and so on. The ever resourceful Ernie always has his lock-pick with him, namely a size twelve boot with which he kicks in doors that for some reason will not open. Ernie plans to drink himself to death by retirement age.
Sometimes the bow is long but the arrow continues to fly true.
Anne Hillerman, ‘The Lion’s Song’ (2017)
Inheriting the mantle from père Tony must have been difficult in every way. Yet I have read to the end each of her three novels and found things in them to like. I do not bother to finish books that do not engage my interest. Best to stop beating one’s head as soon as possible.

Chee, Bernie, and Leaphorn each play a part in this one. But always the dominant character is the place, in this instance the Grand Canyon. To see it is to know why it is called that.
A proposal for a tourist development near the south rim of the Grand Canyon is on the table. There is a great deal of money at stake, and some of it is already wafting around. There are so many overlapping, competing, and conflicting jurisdictions that no one is quite sure who has the last word. In addition there is the St Bartholomew parade of activists, interest groups, holier than thou greenies, each and all of whom want a say, not just a say, but THE say. Then there are the native Indians, who are divided among themselves, first by tribes, but also by generation, and by more venal interests, too.
The stew is rich and to sort through it a mediator is employed, a very seasoned lawyer from Phoenix, who has done this kind of thing before. He works methodically and with superhuman patience.
Is it just coincidence that his car was blown up? Why do the lights in the town hall where the host is gathered keep going out? Why does the mediator seem to disappear at times?
In a game of hot potato Chee is assigned as the mediator’s bodyguard and he comes to learn a great deal about his backstory and that might explain current events.
The variety of characters is good and they are given individuality. The complexities of the mediation are well realised. The elderly grandmother is arresting. The fog in the Grand Canyon during which the title is explained is marvellous.
Yet the balancing act with three foci — Bernie, Jim, and Joe — is just too much. Also there are far too many pointless descriptions of the pockets from which keys are extracted, the winding down of car windows, the aroma of tea, and so on and on and on. Some readers, perhaps this very reader, were shouting at the book to move on. This a lot of this padding.
Cowboy Dashee appears in this one and I thought he met his end a long time ago in another book. I mean him no ill will but I was surprised to read of him. I think it was ‘Dark Wind’ (2010) and I will check on that for my own satisfaction.
John D MacDonald. ‘The Deep Blue Good-bye’ (1964)
Graeme Blundell recently recommended JD. Long ago I tried to read one, this one I think, and put it aside. I have done so again.
This is the first in a very long running and successful series — twenty-one titles according to Wikipedia — and perhaps some things changed with confidence and success, and perhaps they change for the better but I will never know. This is the one Blundell, whom I find a reliable cicerone, recommended so I tried it.

Outer Florida in the 1970s was a frontier where a loner could go to escape and that is what Travis McGee does on his cruiser in the Keys. MacDonald does the regional accents and the class syntax well, but it just goes on, and on and on and on. The characters are differentiated. The locale is brought to life. All that is true.
But it proceeds by endless exposition, like a textbook. There are pages and pages of exposition. Page and page. It is exhausting without forward progress, like listening to a non-stop motor-mouth. One does nothing but grows tired.
I gave up at the twenty percent mark according to the Kindle. If I have not suspended disbelief by that time with a book and entered into its world, I do not press on. There is no honour in the hollow achievement of finishing something I would rather not have started.
A screenwriter would be needed to pull it apart and give it some life. Even the scenes where Travis is questioning witnesses read like depositions rather than dialogue.
John D MacDonald has an interesting backstory himself, but knowing it does not make the book any more engaging. He was a Harvard MBA who gave up a corporate career for the typewriter when he had a young family and worked hard at being writer. I admire that, but, well, see above.

Chuck Restic is a human relations manager in a large firm in La La Land. HIs career peaked years ago and while his star descends that of his wife, a property lawyer, ascends and they part company without acrimony.

Now Chuck has time on his hands and the hum-dum of the office offers little distraction. In response to a complaint from a employee he talks to Ed about his cologne. Yes, about his cologne. An explanation is below. Chuck finds Ed a nice fellow.
A few weeks later quite by accident Chuck learns that Ed disappeared shortly after that interview. Time passes and Ed does not return. After four weeks AWOL the corporate policy is to clear Ed’s cubicle, box the contents, and mail it collect to the listed address. He is sent down the Corporate Memory Hole.
Chuck decides to pass some time by taking the box to the address by hand. In so doing he is gradually drawn into a real estate swindle in which Ed himself was somehow involved. But when Ed’s body is found, it gets worse.
There are some very tough guys around who fancy themselves to be the Armenian Mafia, Lincoln Heights Branch. They may be tough but the smart money is played by a zillionaire who is pulling all the strings.
Along the way, Chuck finds solace with a police officer who throws herself at him, a fact he accepts as his lot. Too bad he had not seen ‘Funeral in Berlin’ (1966) where Harry Palmer realises immediately that Eva Renzi is up to no good when she throws herself at him. Poor Chuck.
Chuck is bored at work and idle at home so he starts nosing around and gets in deeper and deeper. Then one of his buddies is murdered and the plot gets thicker quicker. While I remembered Harry Palmer’s self-deprecating cynicism and saw the punch coming, it is played out very well.
There are technical details about Lost Angeles real estate that provide much of the mystery, and while the Armenians are much in evidence, they know there are bigger fish in this sea. Chuck doesn’t and keeps stumbling around.
But after a thirty year career of insufferable Power Point presentations, unending off-site retreats, excruciating 360 degree reviews, maniacal KPIs, and nightmarish McKinsey-speak, being beaten up by Armenians comes as something of a relief to Chuck. Still all those years in HR gives him access to a lot of personal information about personnel past and present and even applicants that he puts to use. Futhermore, it has taught him how to read between the lines in files to find out more. He also has contacts among freelance journalists who in the past have dug out information for him; in short, there is a solid base for his investigations.
As to the cologne, this is the story. An employee lodged a formal complaint against Ed for wearing so much cologne that she became ill. Mind, Ed did not work near her cell, er cubicle, but only walked by it once or twice a day. Still she filed the paperwork, and once filed it fell to Chuck to deal with it. It all seemed so realistic.
The complaint was vexatious. The complainer had been with the firm less than two years, during which time seven formal complaints about comparable matters had been filed, while the complained did little productive work. But the complainer, once hired, was untouchable, being a forty plus, pregnant, black woman who ticked all the demographic boxes for a huge personal injury suit from giant uncaring oppressive corporation that had made mistaken of hiring her. She had to be placated at all costs. Ed, on the other hand, had been with the firm for more than a decade, was extremely productive, corporate loyal, but as a white, middle-aged man he would never win a lawsuit. Such is the corporate logic in these pages.
Adam Phillips
While the plot is straight out of Raymond Chandler with updates and located in the world of real estate, the corporate backdrop strikes a cord with this reader. The author produces an interesting variety of characters and gives each a distinctive voice. There is much travelogue of the Lost Angeles where people live and work well away from the Tinsel Town stereotypes. The corporate world and the real estate context are refreshing. This is the first of a series and I look forward to reading another.

The Salamander is an arsonist in Occupied Lyons in 1943. A fire in a cinema immolated nearly two hundred patrons on a freezing winter’s night.

Screening was ‘La Bête Humaine’ (1938) from the novel by Émile Zola and realised by Jean Renoir. Many of the victims of the fire were railway workers and their families.

The central characters in the celluloid story were railway workers led by the peerless Jean Gabin before his face was scarred by German shrapnel in 1943 in North Africa. Many rail lines converge on Lyons, giving it a large resident population of the chemin de fer.
The freezing weather, absence of materials and expertise, and infighting among the responsibles in the civic administration combine to preclude any forensic investigation. There is a very great deal of duck and cover. Then by chance a German fire chief just happens to show up and throws his weight around, seemingly determined in all but word to misdirect and confuse. Yet he must be there for a reason.
The Nazi commandant is one Klaus Barbie, young, educated, debonair, sophisticated, handsome, bilingual, and blood thirsty, a soft-spoken vampire.
Called the Butcher of Lyons for good reason.
Was the fire an act of the Résistance that somehow went wrong, or internecine conflict among factions of the Résistance? Either is possible. Was it Klaus Barbie’s way of attacking the Résistance? This is certainly within the bounds of possibility. And if he did, he might prefer not to publicise it, just to trade on the doubt. Or is a murderous arsonist at large threatening one and all?
A large gathering of hundreds of nasty Nazis is scheduled for Lyons very soon, and to allow for the histrionics of their conclave it will be convened in a huge, old opera house full of dry timber, a catacomb of rooms, with a maze of gantries and catwalks that have never been mapped, side entrances, underground loading docks, concealed exits for divas to elude adoring fans, and other mysteries. In short, an arsonist’s delight and a nightmare to police.
Barbie will not delay the meeting of the coven. To do so would damage his prestige and be an admission that he cannot control Lyons. Uh huh. Is that because the first fire was his and he feels safe, or is it just arrogance? Not even his superiors in Paris are sure and so they send St Cyr and Kohler in case there is a firebug at work. Of course, if a Nazi barbecue occurred the retaliation is unthinkable and that knowledge motivates St Cyr and Kohler to superhuman efforts, and writer Janes spares them nothing.
Kohler is a good German but not a good Nazi. St Cyr is a good cop and patriot, but crime is crime.
There are the usual plot twists. In this outing St Cyr seems unstable, accusing nearly everyone he mets of the crimes. Kohler, for once, has cut back on benzedrine and is calm by comparison, though he is caught with pants down and survives.
There is a great deal of description that goes beyond setting the scene. This is an early entry in the series and the writing is uneven. But the portrayal of Barbie is ambitious and measured. Mad and bad, yes, but controlled and calculating, too, and well aware of the fact that his own superiors could cut his throat at anytime for reasons of their own. As always the stifling and exhausting atmosphere of the Occupation is the principal character.
But the greatest fault is the presentation on the Kindle. The text is continuous even when it cuts back and for the between Kohler and St Cyr. Kohler is in one part of the city creeping through cellars looking for phosphorous and St Cyr is at a hotel checking on guests and luggage. When the scene changes from one paragraph to another there is no signpost of any kind, no blank line, no asterisk, no signal in the text. Ergo I was taxed to re-read many paragraphs when I realised it had switched from one to another. The publisher bears responsibility for this needless levy on my time and patience. Tsk, tsk, and tsk.
When reading Marc Bloch’s memoir ‘Strange Defeat’ (1940) for the first time years ago, I had a conversation with a very intelligent philosopher who found my curiosity about Occupied France odd. His line was that the defeat in 1940 was the cleansing failure of a corrupt capitalist regime. And after all, as Bloch notes, life went on the day after pretty much as always, hence Bloch’s title. I did protest to this intellect that changes came, but these, I was told, I had got our of proportion. Ah but I continued to protest, Bloch himself joined the Résistance and was captured, tortured, and killed by the Nazis. This fact was a mere bagatelle to my interlocutor. Bloch brought it on himself that was his line. Really nothing had changed from one day to the next with the change of the flag. That philosopher ascended to the professorship confident in his judgement. All very like those academic apologists for Pol Pot, Mao, and all the other mass murders.
St Cyr and Kohler know what this great intellect did not, does not, know, reality comes through the skin.

It is Occupied Paris 1943, and a series of robberies demand the attention of the luckless duo of Louis St Cyr and Hermann Kohler. The robberies are bold, vast, and deft. But this is no mere thief because fatal booby traps have been left behind to discourage police investigation. Stealing millions of francs from a metro safe is of little consequence, but the theft of industrial diamonds bound for the Reich’s war machine is a red alarm, and our exhausted heroes are called in. Much has been said about them in earlier posts and will not be repeated here.

As usual no one will tell the the truth. As usual there are threats. As usual there are misleading clues. What is unusual is the audacity of the crimes, even high ranking Nazis in occupied Paris are been relieved of valuables they had just stolen from Jews! Audacious also in that three crimes were perpetrated in one night alone! Worse the booby traps have claimed victims, a chamber maid come to clean a room, a flic who opened a door, and a bomb disposal squad whose members should have known better. The villain also tries to eliminate St Cyr and Kohler; this a joker who plays for keeps.  

The perpetrator, it emerges, is called The Gypsy, because part of his childhood was spent with some Romani people. Though he himself is tall, Aryan in appearance with the blond hair, and piercing blue eyes of a film star combined with multilingual charm and confidence. The irony is that his appearance and the Nazi uniform he wears, supplied by his would-be control, put him above suspension. His gypsy heritage ostensibly explains his preternatural skills as a thief.
Spoiler alert.  
If I have grasped the plot, the Gypsy was in the slammer when the Nazis occupied Oslo. Then some bright Nazi spark had the idea of using him to infiltrate a Resistance network in France by inserting him as though he were an English agent. The connection would be made through a one-time girlfriend. What can go wrong? In return for exposing the Resistance network the Gypsy would be allowed to keep any loot he collected and sent on to Spain. (As if.) The members of the Resistance group he reveals would of course be tortured and murdered. The assumption was that the loot would come from the French, not Nazis themselves. So much for assumptions.
Once released, equipped, briefed, financed, and in France, however, the Gypsy pursues his own agenda. He slips his watchers, he manipulates the girlfriend into the frame and disappears. Then the robberies occur in rapid succession.
Now I may have gotten muddled because Janes’s elliptic style shows no mercy to slow wits. There is never a summation at the end in the Agatha Christie manner. But it seems the Gypsy had an earlier career of theft in Berlin where he stole from Nazis with great success until the Norwegians nabbed him. So far so good.
Meanwhile, the bright Nazi spark who loosened the Gypsy now tries to blame the crime wave onto (1) the Resistance and/or (2) St Cyr and Kohler. To that end this Nazi takes hostages, beats witnesses, and generally shrieks at one and all. If he cannot shift the blame, the axe will fall on him, no metaphor intended. Again I follow.
But what I do not follow is this. The Resistance network targeted was inactive, inert, and consisted of three well-meaning women who had done nothing and were never likely to do so. Nor did they have contact with others in the Resistance. They hardly seem a high profile target for such a far fetched and elaborate effort. That part I do not get.
Nor does the denouement make much sense to this reader. That these three women contrive and execute such a plan once the Gypsy shows himself is beyond my suspension of disbelief. That they nearly spontaneously concocted and implemented the plan is just not credible. They managed to out manoeuvre the Gypsy, the Nazis and the allied goons, and our heroes. If they were able to do that, well, why did they not do more for the Resistance?
Nor did I ever fathom what the Gypsy’s agenda was, apart form thieving for its own sake. He is simply a plot device in this outing and denied personality apart from one brief scene in the Metro.
On the other hand, the siege of the hideout is marvellously told as is the evocation of Paris in 1943 when a Nazi victory seemed on the horizon.
As usual our heroes are full of angst! But as usual the reader knows they will somehow square the circle. These two will survive to the next volume in this long running series.

The German has long since retired from the Ministry of the Interior where he was am off-budget fixer. That is, he was a trouble-shooter who dealt mainly with criminal matters. If a baffling case was raising media hysteria, the German would be despatched to see what he could do to put a blanket on the fire.

Born Ludwig in Alsace, his few friends know him as Louis but his mother always called him Ludwig and he thinks of himself that way. In retirement he retains his network of contacts socially but they, too, are retiring. A man without family, a man without friends, a man without anything but a vocation – investigation – coupled with persistence and ingenuity, that is the German. Retirement offers him little reason to get up in the morning. He passes the time as a translator, currently working on a biography of the Iron Chancellor, which regrettably does not play into the story, as I had hoped.
Then an old friend, Marthe, brings him a problem. Her simple-minded ward seems to be embroiled in two murders. There is backstory of how he became her ward and then they later drifted apart. The ward was hired over the telephone to deliver pot plants to two women, each of whom was soon thereafter murdered with his finger prints on the door, on some furniture, on the pot plant….
While Ludwig is not convinced the dolt is innocent he owes Marthe a lot, which is not specified, and he is obliged to act on the assumption of dolt innocence. Hmmm. He trades on his past as an agent of the Ministry and first digs into the simple-minded youth’s past. There are ambiguities and gaps but by and large the lad seems within his mental limits an honest toiler, first as a gardener, but one who needs a lot of supervision, and as a busker with an accordion. That latter vocation supplies the title but again it does not play into the story.
The ward was set up to take the fall, as per the krimi manual. Yes, but why him? Is it all being done to get at this young man, or is it by chance that he was selected to serve as a scape goat, along with the murder victims. What could one so simple have done to earn such multiple, mortal enmity?
Following a parallel train of thought Ludwig ponders the two victims, who seem to have no mutual connection as far as he can determine from his police contacts.
He has the assistance of The Three Evangelists who recur in Vargas’s krimis, Mark, Luke, and Mathew. These three perennial graduate students share a house with the uncle of one, himself a retired plod. The three students are men and are students of history, one prehistorian, one a medievalist, the other who speaks only in the language of World War I trench warfare with which he is obsessed.
As the pages turn, each of them adds interpretations, facts, and insights into the mystery. Van Doosler, the uncle upstairs, does the cooking when he feels up to it but is otherwise aloof. Tant pis. I had rather hoped he would figure in the story as more than window dressing.
Fred Vargas, whose books have been purged from ideologically pure women’s libraries because of the name Fred. Amusing, n’est pas?
The title in translation places the focus on the simpleton, but the French is ‘Quand sort la recluse’ which refers to Ludwig stirring, I assume. He certainly is the core of the story. While I gulped it down, as always with a Vargas krimi, I felt it was underdone.

It had to happen sooner or later. Lord Peter Wimsey has become the Duke of Denver, upon the death of his older brother Gerald. That dukes are higher than lords is news to me.
With the title Duke comes ducal responsibilities, most of which were new to Peter Wimsey. There are vexatious relatives, disputatious tenants, ravenous charities, clogged drains in the strangest places, a crumbling pile that is crumble still, elderly retainers to retain, so that when he is called to Oxford, off he goes! What a relief!
When he was but a lord, to him the relatives were polite, the tenants deferential, the charities distant, the drains unknown, the ancestral pile was for holidays, and the retainers retained. As duke, it all changed.

Called to Oxford? One of the Duke of Denver’s entailments is to be The Visitor to a not very distinguished college at Oxford. While every other Oxford college Visitor is a royal of one magnitude of another, this college has the Duke of Denver. Investigation in the muniments room of the aforementioned crumbling pile reveals that generations ago a Duke of Denver handed over some dosh to replace a roof or two at the college and in return for that largesse the title The Visitor was bestowed upon him for his lifetime, but in a subsequent change of the college constitution the limitations ‘his lifetime’ was omitted, perhaps by error.
Well, no matter, an escape to Oxford is most welcome for the poetry quoting, incunabula collecting, Saxon speaking Wimsey. It is a return to lost youth for this old soldier.
Peter is now married to Harriet (née Vane) and it seems to be after World War II and in the early 1950s. The stately home is crumbling in part because of a fire caused by an errant German bomb and taxation is vexing.
Together they descend on the college to find themselves in the middle of an acrimonious and bitter conflict among the twenty of so fellows of the college over the status of a tenth century book in its library. The conflict is so vitriolic that no one speaks of it! Immediately I found this scenario easy to believe.
These scholars seem to do little else but plot one against another, while seldom is heard a discouraging word from their lips. Backstabbing, undermining, poisonous rumours, slanderous gossip, attribution of venal motives, all communicated by innuendo and sotto voce, these are the weapons of choice. Meanwhile, at high table meals the weather is much discussed. This is brutal realism at its best.
Even the engineers and economists among the brethren have taken sides over this book. On the one hand, the goal is to sell the book to raise money for yet another roof and on the other hand is the over-our-dead-bodies group! Yep, prophecy there.
Each fellow votes in a time honoured, and otherwise incomprehensible, arcane ritual and each poll results in a tie. After three such votes, some of the parties invoke the right to summon The Visitor to adjudicate. Enter the Duke!
While the vote remained tied in those three rounds, the constituency shrank. The senior most fellow, the Warden, went missing and another died falling down stairs. Two others had unlikely accidents, which while damaging, were not fatal, but which precluded participation in the voting ritual. In the best tradition of krimis the ritual does not admit of absentee or proxy voting. Is someone mowing down the voters? Are there two mowers, one on each side of the question, the keepers and the sellers? Are there only two sides to the issue?
Before any Solomonic adjudication can occur there must be sleuthing to find out what is going on.
Harriet takes no convincing to join in, and engages her own distaff Oxford network, and the ever reliable Bunter mines the college servants with his usual dexterity.
Nothing is what it seems to be.
As in C.P. Snow’s Cambridge novels, all of which I have read [Groan!], the scholars do little scholarship but make an enormous fuss over the rituals and prerogatives that fall to them, like passing the port. It is all too credible.
Dorothy Sayers created Wimsey in the 1920s.

While Ian Carmichael brought him to life on the small screen in the 1970s.
Ian Carmichael as Peter Wimsey
Bunter was an older man, and he and Wimsey had been through trench warfare in Flanders together and had survived, thereafter bonded for life, and with a considerable amount of unspoken communication.
Despite the dreadful experience of Flanders, Wimsey (and for that matter, Bunter, too) remains Edwardian in manner and morēs. Wimsey is an enthusiastic and effete dilettante, who quotes obscure poems in dead languages and playwrights unknown all the day long while playing the piano and sporting a monocle. His private collection of incunabula is the envy of museums. His flow of witty banter is without end and without purpose. Noel Coward could not have bettered him as a caricature.
Bunter unfailingly addresses him by his title and always stands in his presence. Always and always. Bunter out butlers even that fellow James Stevens in ‘Remains of the Day’ (1989).
Harriet, mindful of her own modest origins, tries after a fashion to loosen them both up, with little success. Nor does she seem aware of the changing times of the 1950s.
The unalloyed Edwardians Wimsey and Bunter are an odd couple in world of a Labour government and many new social attitudes. Still that is part of the fun.
Like Sherlock Holmes and more recently Hercule Poirot, Wimsey has his re-animators. This is the fourth title by Paton and I have liked it enough to read another. Though I did find it wordy, but Peter is like that. There is much talk, often about nothing much, and too little detection. It must be struggle to be arch and witty when talking about staircases and fence posts, but Wimsey is made to do it. Poor fellow.
Jill Paton Walsh
He even indulges in the future subjunctive interrogative at times, such is his mastery of all things Fowler. (Mortimer, skip it. It would take too long to explain.)
Even in the sleepy village I know well, the absence of the senior scholar for three months would be noticed and some effort made to figure how what happened to the missing savant lest the key performance indicators be spoiled.

Our hero, Eddie Grant, he of the chiseled jaw, martial arts belts, multi-lingual talents, and accomplished lady killer …. [Is there nothing beyond him?]

The set up is this. Ed (I refuse to call a grown man with such a cv as above Eddie) is the son of World War II veteran whose assignment in 1944-1946 was tracking down art looted by Nazis. His father died earlier, in suspicious circumstances that Ed mentions but apparently was not motivated to do anything about at the time. Then the father’s assistant from the wartime assignment dies, again in suspicious circumstances. This assistant left a letter to Ed’s father, not knowing he had predeceased him, and asked that his executor deliver it by hand.
Since the dad is dead the messenger, a daughter, delivers it to Ed. She is of course a beautiful woman who falls under Ed’s spell, taking her place in the queue.
It just so happens that Ed has many contacts in the worlds of policing and art, and these he now mobilises. Why he did not mobilise them when his father died is unknown. Even more mysterious is why he did not mobilise them when his wife and child were murdered after his father’s mysterious death. All of this death is supposed to awaken sympathy I suppose but it just makes Ed seem a jinx and jerk. Four dead before he goes into action.
Then the big black Mercedes limousine appears bearing — as it must — Germans.
So much for subtlety. The plot is by the numbers and the characterisation are connect the dots.
I quit at about 25% on the Kindle. I was reading topic sentences only and flipping on; it was time to move on.
At the start there is much too much backstory forced into the opening pages so that we may appreciate Ed, followed later by extensive and pointless descriptions of hairstyles. clothing, drinks, furnishings, cars, and so on and on. This later I guess is the Paris part. If this superfluous detail were cut to the standard say of Georges Simenon the text would reduce by more than two-thirds. Good grief. Amid all the bland descriptions there is very little story. With John Stuart Mill, I suppose that we know a person by deeds not by the recitation of a backstory. What do I care about the backstory until there is a front story?
Nor is it possible to warm to Ed for whom everything seems to come easily though he moans and groans about it.
This is described as ‘a novel of Paris’ and I wanted to test that proposition. There is much Paris in the early going and I consulted by Michelin map, but then we head off to Orlando in Florida and…. I supposed it gets back to Paris but without me. The Florida trip seems mostly to be an occasion for more pointless description.
After re-reading all of Iain Pears krimis with Jonathan Argyll and Flavia di Stefano chasing lost paintings the reference to a lost Raphael was intriguing, but this treatment is not arresting for this reader.
I had a look at the comments on Good Reads to see what I was missing. I looked at the effusive ones, further confirmation that this source is not credible.
John Pearce
Speaking of sources without credibility, one of the local rags has a weekend feature called something like ‘Books that made me’ in which minor celebrities, well I guess they are but they are unknown to me, list and comment, briefly, on five books that had a formative impact of their being. Nice idea, but the execution is kindergarten.
These celebrities seem not to do much reading and certainly not of, say, a novel of consequence or a historical study of insight. Instead we have excited drivel over self-help manuals, diet plans, children’s books – see I said kindergarten – and Mills and Boon stories, Alice’s adventures. In some cases it is pretty clear it was a stretch for the subject to think of five books. When one of these pieces refers to ‘Death in Venice,’ ‘Swann’s Way,’ ‘Absalom, Absalom,’ ‘The Iliad,’ ‘Crime and Punishment,’ ‘Hotel Baltimore’ and their kind, let me know.

A krimi set in wartime Reykjavik Iceland in 1944. The island is awash with soldiers and sailors of the Allied forces: Brits, Canadians, French, and mostly Americans. Harbours are dredged, piers built, fuel tanks dug into hillsides, pipelines laid, barracks built everywhere, landing fields levelled, hangers erected, roads paved, concrete bunkers made, ammunition dumps created, and on and on, from 1940. There has been more money spent on the island in those five years than in the previous five hundred years.

With so much money comes loose morals, it would seem, despite the language barriers. While Icelandic men are not off at the war, they are off on construction jobs all over the island, leaving wives, sisters, cousins, and daughters to their own (de)vices.
The setting and the set-up are good. On the plus side is some detail about the impact of this intrusion on Iceland, and not just the sex, but also on nationalism, though that is merely mentioned and not in any way developed. The weather is there, too, but it does not figure in the story, as it did in ‘Trapped.’ There is also a little more about Iceland legends, the hidden people, but again it is a sidebar that is not cemented into the plot.

The execution is not equal to the set-up. First, the story is split between then in 1944 and now in 2000, say. This is a technique I cannot abide because it makes the reader responsible for integration. Second much of both stories, the then and the now, is padding, e.g,
‘I walked up the the three plank steps to the door. I took off my left glove and knocked on the door, and waited, while I put the glove back on. I heard faint sounds insider but the door did not open.
I took my glove off again and knocked on the door again. I put the glove on and waited. And waited.
The door opened. I introduced myself and asked to come in for a word. She said, no. I asked gain very politely. she said no and turned away. I asked once more for a word inside. She said alright.’
Snappy, uh? He then asks her what she saw. She says she saw nothing. He asks her three times and three times she says she saw nothing. Bold, he asks a fourth time, again no result. He leaves, descending the plank steps.
That took about five pages for nothing. He then repeats most of this verbatim to his partner over the next two pages.
While this book is slow, it is not detailed, but rather superficial. Two examples suffice. (1) The Icelandic nationalism is mentioned more than once but never articulated. (2) While there are many soldiers around there is never anything about their role in the war effort or how Icelanders feel about being occupied. Is this war their war? They are, after all, eddas or not, Danes by blood and the German heel is on Denmark, yet that is never even referred to as an issue in the story.
The text, perhaps thanks to the translator, is replete with banalities. If there was a clichéd way to say something, that was the way it was said.
Arnaldur Indridason
This is one industrious writer who has three series, the one that includes this title is Reykjavik during World War II, including ‘Silence of the Grave’ (2007), which was adequate, and another series that follows the investigators of Inspector Erlendur, e.g., ‘Jar City’ (2007) which I liked a lot for its meticulous attention to detail, especially in thinking things through. Erlendur as I recall does a lot of thinking. In contrast is the author’s third series ‘Reykjavik Thrillers.’ On the strength of Erlendur I read his ‘Operation Napoleon’ (2012) and regretted it and did not bother to finish it. The list of his titles on Amazon translated into English is long,
While my recollection of Erlendur is strong enough for me to try another, from now on I will pass on the other two serieses.