GoodReads meta-data is 320 pages, rated 3.90 by 1801 litizens.
Genre: krimi
Verdict: superb (again).
Aurelio Zen is on the job again, returning to his home town, Venice, to do a lucrative favour for an old friend. He conceals his true purpose in a several tissues of lies.
The favour is to investigate the disappearance of a wealthy American several months earlier. Zen’s cover is that he has been sent from distant Rome to investigate the Contessa’s complaints about intruders in her decaying mansion. He calls in some favours to assure himself that there is nothing to find about the American. He simply left. Now all he has to do is go through some motions and then collect his fee. Contessa is an honourary title for an elderly widow who complains of nocturnal visitations, which the local police put down to her dementia.
Knowing well the slipshod ways of the Questura, Zen has no trouble with his masquerade. His task is made easier by a national political crisis upsetting the usual ways of (not) doing things. In this context, other officers mind their own business, and leave him alone with the orders he forged for himself. As usual he trusts no one and uses the fax machine of a family friend rather the one at the Questura.
The atmosphere of Venice in February is cold and wet. The fog obscures reality while it penetrates stone and flesh. In this world, nothing is as it seems. And even when Zen peels aways the last layer the mystery remains. Nothing ever changes.
This title is fourth in the series and it is compelling. The more so since I read it while in Venice, though the weather was much better at the time. I recognised many of the streetscapes through which Zen walked, many of floating vaporetto stages (San Marco) on which he waited, some of the Venetian cuisine (nero pasta) he ate, and some of the museums (Accadamia) he passed. I first read this title and all the others in the series many years ago, after returning from a semester in Firenze.
Michael Dibdin
Each title in the series is set in a different region of Italy, and each offers something of a travelogue in the rich details of the setting which combine to explain some of what happens. However, the picture it presents of Italy is tainted to say the least. Incompetence, corruption, and indifference are the hallmarks. Senior police officers are mainly interested in tailoring. Politicians are uniformly corrupt. Citizens learned long ago to use the blind eye. The cynicism is pervasive. Yet Zen is a Sisyphus who does the best he can in this distorted world.
Although we liked the 2011 three-part television series, it makes Zen a much younger man, than he is on the page. Zen does not contact Inspector Brunetti when in Venice. Too bad.
GoodReads meta-data is 330 pages, rated 3.72 by 486 litizens.
Genre: Mystery.
Verdict: All trip and no arrival.
The opening invokes Chaucer’s Fourteenth Century world of the Canterbury Tales with the young prelate, Fairfax, riding through rain to a distant valley where the local priest has died. The job is to bury the priest in a Christian fashion, reassure the locales, and return within two days. Ah huh. The weather is miserable and gets worse. The rain leads to landslides and he has difficulty in finding the valley and getting into it. I felt wet just reading it.
The language and mōres are archaic. The Christian Church is almighty and Fairfax is one of its lowliest servants. But even so he is set apart from the primitive villagers, none of whom can read or write, and if cleanliness is next to godliness, they are a long way off. Work and prayer are their only pass times. A wheeled wagon is the most advanced technology they have and there are few of those.
In order to deliver a eulogy for the dead parson, Fairfax tries to learn about him by inquiring of the locals, and examining his belongings. It is in the latter that the plot thickened for he finds strange objects, and many forbidden books on the ancients. Among these relics are plastic items and a small sheet of metal with that most dreaded of symbols on it, an apple with a bit taken out of it! [Gasp!]
In further investigation Fairfax learns that the parson made no secret of his fascination with The Time Before and collected relics while rambling through the valley. Yet the mere possession of a plastic straw would lead to his excommunication or worse – he could be made to watch Pox News. Did he rely on the isolation of the valley to shield him from the long arm of the Church in ferreting out heretics.
Yes, an apple minus a bite. Get it yet? Ask Bill Gates. I had to read the first reference to plastic twice for the light to go on.
From this point on the text becomes more explicit about the cataclysm God visited on humanity because of too much or too little science centuries ago. The Church rejects all science and technology, teaching, nay, enforcing quietism and acquiescence in God’s mysterious ways – infant mortality, women dying in child birth, cuts leading the fatal infections, and the like. All very Fifteenth Century, post apocalypse.
While Fairfax recoils from the parson’s heretical pursuits, the suspicion grows that the parson was murdered. That seems farfetched until Fairfax finds the local Church registers have disappeared, four massive volumes recording the births, marriages, and deaths in the valley for a millennium. This mystery and the consequences of the weather lead him to stay in the valley longer than planned.
While some of the locals try to urge him on his way, none too subtlety, others seem to want him to stay. For the latter is it because they want a priest, or is it because they want something from him. He cannot tell.
Thereafter it is all trip and no arrival. There is much rain and mud as Fairfax and company try to dig up the past, though quite why is lost on this reader. It is Ypres without the context.
E. M. Forester used this premise in a short story, ‘The Machine Stops’ as did Isaac Asimov in Foundation and Empire without the mud. In this case The Cloud failed and everything was lost. There is no substitute for saving to the local drive, and backing up on hard disks galore! Though that is easier said than done.
GoodReads meta-data is 320 pages, rated 3.17 from 190 litizens.
Genre: policier.
Verdict: It grew on me.
The first entry is the series Seymour of Special Branch set in 1906. Young Seymour has been recruited to Special Branch due to his several languages, because his anglicised name hides Italian and Russian ancestors, and his ambition. His remit is the docklands of London’s East End — long before it became the upmarket enclave it is today — where migrants speak those languages and more.
Then one fine day he is called to the FO (Foreign Office) from whence he travels to Trieste to find out what has become of the British consul, one Lomax by name, who has gone missing. Because Seymour is not a gentleman by birth some in the FO do not want to send him, but others suggest that his background and work with foreigners equip him for the job. Off he goes.
Ah, Trieste. He finds a different world there which he slowly absorbs and the absent Lomax dominates the story. Seymour poses as a low-level FO messenger charged with reporting on Lomax’s disappearance. He questions the office staff in the consulate, Lomax’s friends, and the police. In doing so he learns about the tensions in Trieste between the Austrian masters and the Italian population leavened with Serbs and Croats, along with the Big Enders and Little Enders. That a Great War might be sparked by a small event is presaged with a heavy hand.
Even better is the slow development of a picture of Lomax, who at first blush seemed to be an alcoholic idler, but as Seymour peels away the surface he finds depths in Lomax: ethical, technical, artistic, and political, belied by his al fresco life at a café.
In a minor register the tug of war between the city police, who are Italian, and the Austrian secret police is well handled. They cooperate reluctantly but are bitter rivals for status and budget. Linguistic nationalism is one of the master narratives.
The futurist artists with whom Lomax mixed are also brought to life that made me appreciate Italian Futurism’s effort to break with the past through art.
The parallel to the murder the Archduke at Sarajevo is evoked quite explicitly with unerring hindsight. Likewise Seymour’s dalliance with the only young woman in the novel is strictly routine. On the plus side, Seymour does grow up a little in the story, and thinks twice about some premature conclusions, particularly about Lomax.
Michael Pearce. He has at least two other series of krimis which I will sample and report.
I read it while we were in (the once Free Territory of) Trieste: having seen Miramar, Casa Revoltella, the grand canal, piazza central, and so on.
This sign was still there when we here in Trieste in September 2019.
GoodReads meta-data is 254 pages, rated 3.69 by 397 litizens.
Genre: krimi
Verdict: I wanted to like it but didn’t.
Setup: In November 1941 Edgar Rice Burroughs, yep père Tarzan himself, has taken a vacation in Waikiki to finish a book free from distractions of home and hearth. One of his sons has tagged along to carry the luggage. Burroughs is a man’s man and mixes with the uniforms that populate Hawaii, and distrusts 40% of the local population who are Japanese. In addition there is German in the next door cottage, who can only be up to no good.
A ’man’s man’ to be sure but at this time in his life Ed B was a teetotaller who did not smoke. Real men did both to prove their manhood. However Ed paid his manly dues by killing defenceless creatures for sport, and making sexist and racist remarks.
ERB was prone to bad dreams (caused by indigestion) and these he dutifully recorded in his adventure stories. Hmmm. We can be glad he did not have diarrhoea.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
There is nice hook at the start that describes the 3000 deaths in the attack on 7 December as murders, and then adds to that total the murder at the start of this story. Clever, but insubstantial. Too much hindsight after that as everyone assumes a war with Japan is coming. More likely many thought that little yellow Nips would not dare take on those manly men.
Enjoyed the description of our home-away-from-home Waikiki as it was in late 1941. While much has since changed some things have not, like Fort DeRussy.
Read it before but doing so again on the Kindle.
Does it really matter what colour trousers each character wears, tan or white, linen or cotton? Max seems to think so, padding out every scene with such useless detail.
GoodReads meta-data is 385 pages, rated 3.84 by 83 litizens.
Genre: krimi
Verdict: Too much shoot ‘em up, not enough think ‘em up.
Time: 1970s. Place: South Korea.
The US Eighth Army had about 60,000 personnel in South Korea at the time. So many people, so many of them bored, all of them with access to American goods at wholesale prices while across the street from each camp was a thriving blackmarket. Result, a lot of low level crime. Buy the whiskey, cigarettes, radios, washing machines cheap on the base; cross the street and sell them for a profit. Illegal but profitable.
Then again put 60,000 people together in small spaces leading regimented lives, and friction results. Crimes against persons follow. Then add the money in blackmarket transactions and the felony fires flicker.
By the terms of the alliance with South Korea, the Eighth Army polices itself with a Criminal Investigation Division, of which Sergeants George Sueño and Ernie Bascom are two investigators. They are both lifers and have been doing it a long time.* (This is the thirteen title in the series.) Their names and ways are known.
Both North Korea and South Korea are armed and dangerous. The piracy of the USS Pueblo in 1968 with the subsequent murder of one crewman in captivity, the crippling of two others, and the beating the rest into putty, is fresh in everyone’s mind. Ergo there are a lot of angry GIs who want revenge or at least who will make sure they are not next for the cement mixer.
The air along the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) sizzles with tension. Talk about a misnomer, there was then no place on earth so militarised with a million armed men on each side of the line, many of them straining at the bit. It got worse when new North Korea artillery brought Seoul within range.
Bad as all that is, it is worse still in the Joint Security Area, that bubble inside the DMZ where those Blue Huts are with a Military Demarcation Line (MDL) dividing them in half.
The curb between the two is the DML.
JSA is an assignment no grunt wants because it is THE tripwire that (and all who dwell there) would be the first to go. Poof! In principle both sides have free movement within this small area, in practice everyone moves slowly and every move is watched with angry eyes.
Late one night Sueño and Bascom are roused from their cots in Seoul and ordered north to the JSA where they find the Lieutenant-Colonel in charge of the night shift standing guard over a dead body, that of a ROK soldier assigned to the JSA. Ten feet away stand a squad of NKs with AK-47s in ready. The corpse is sprawled over the MDL within the DMZ at JSA in the ROK. OK? The Chicken Colonel orders Sueño and Bascom to pull the body back to his side, while the NKs get twitchy. Sueño and Bascom do as ordered and begin their investigation into the murder of No-Go, as his friends called him, a ROK grunt who did warehouse duty in JSA.
What was No-Go doing in the middle of the night at the MDL? He should have been abed many yards away. Moreover, who split his skull with an entrenching tool?
The easy answer to the last question is the NKs. But why? They’ll do anything! Wait! If the NKs wanted him dead, they would have shot him. Period. No that answer is too pat, though some in the Eighth see it as another Pueblo incident. Meanwhile, life goes on, that is, crime goes on, and Sueñp and Bascom have other investigations to pursue.
They get mixed signals about continuing to investigate No-Go’s murder, but as always Sueño never knows when to quit, and Bascom goes along for the ride. Then the Eighth settles on No-Go’s buddy PFC Fusterman as the guilty party and begins to railroad him to clear the air. Convicting Fusterman will defuse tensions is the thinking of some. Others suppose the opposite, giving in the NKs a pass on this one will encourage other incidents. Back and forth goes the seesaw that Sueño and Bascom ride. It is pure McKinsey management pushing responsibility down to the lowest level, so when things go wrong the blame falls on those who have no choice in the matter.
It gets more complicated (too complicated for this reader) when a criminal gang horns into the plot. Sueño and Bascom drink a little less alcohol and bed fewer passers-by in this outing than in the earlier titles, but they still get beat up and shot at enough to get re-accredited as cartoon heroes. All that leaves this reader cold. As does Sueño’s repeated hormone attacks. Really Sueño zip it up for a while.
What is fascinating is the ways and means of investigating within the interstices of the Eighth Army. There is always a paper trail if one knows where to look and whom to ask, even when the perpetrator has tried to erase it, there are all those copies in triplicate times triplicate, and these two lifers can follow these snail trails. They know a lot of other lifer sergeants with whom to trade information. The sergeants’ network holds many an army together.
Further, Sueño has learned to speak Korean and his interactions with the locals are very well realised. He may be a ‘big nose’ but he knows and respects the ways of Koreans. No-Go had a family and Bascom and Sueño find out a lot through them. Fusterman had a family, too, and its members send a lawyer to defend him in the Court Martial. While feisty, she is an underdeveloped character in this telling, too easily misled while loudly proclaiming her savvy and contributing nothing to the story. Don’t blame her, she is written that way.
Inspector Kill and Officer Oh from the Korean National Police put in a welcome appearance. Kill is a dedicated man but he takes orders, and Oh remains enigmatic but a good friend to have in a tight corner. These two like nothing better than slamming up villains of any kind and sometimes it suits them to work through Sueño and Bascom.
Then there is the climatic firefight in the JSA which seemed gratuitous in the context of softly-softly, though it was noteworthy that one of the weapon wielders on the Sergeants’ side was a woman MP whose quick wit prevented a further disaster. The madness of Colonel Peel, another officer in the mix, is, well, madness. Though there is an implied complexity in the NK officer Kwon that might have been better brought to the surface when to save his family he refused to defect.
By the way, the fiction then as now is that the JSA is administered by the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission, consisting of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Sweden, and Switzerland. Neutral? As if. These representatives are seldom seen and never heard.
Grant Limón license, because many strange things have happened in the unique place that is the JSA.
Martin Límon, himself a lifer.
There is a superb Korean film, much more low key than this book, called ‘Joint Security Area’ (2000).
Lobby poster.
We saw it after we visited the JSA in 2004, and even in 2004 when things were not as tense as in the 1970s, the JSA crackled. At the time I was visiting professor at Korea University.
*Lifer means someone in for the maximum enlistment of twenty years. Not quite literally life but it most feel like is sometime.
Goodreads meta-data is 119 pages, rated 4.51 by 101 litizens
Genre: krimi, period piece
Verdict: Ruso and Tilla are at it again.
By some mischance Ruso and Tilla have taken up residence in Gaul on his brother’s farm, while the latter is away. What Ruso knows about farming is zero. So he tries to look thoughtful when the foreman seeks his decisions. Meanwhile, he tries to make peace among his many quarrelling siblings, in-laws, relatives, and visitors. He means well but seldom succeeds. Tilla tries to be a good Roman wife and shut up, but she is not good at that either.
Then Ruso’s younger sister has an illicit boyfriend who seems to have murdered his employer. After much avuncular tsk, tsk, tsking, he hopes to let the law take its course. Not so his sister who throws herself into the defence of her beau and Ruso must extricate her, and the best way to do that is to find the real killer. He means well but seldom succeeds at this either.
Enter Tilla who is much better at getting people to talk to her, partly because she is such a foreign specimen no one takes her seriously – big mistake.
This title is an entry in Downie’s Medicus series. Much I sympathise with Ruso and love Tilla, I fear that the author is running out of steam.
Goodreads meta-data is 256 pages, rated 3.71 by 276 litizens.
Genre: krimi
Verdict: Fun but flabby
When CBS executives pressured Orson Welles to reduce the verisimilitude of the script for the Halloween broadcast in 1938, his standard defence was that no one would be stupid enough to think it real. Ah, he should have paid more attention to P. T. Barnum. There is always someone that stupid with many friends, just look at the White House today.
In 1938 Welles was an infant terrible of twenty-three years already with a string of theatrical triumphs behind him. While he was a creative genius, as well he knew, he needed help and founded the Mercury Theatre with John Houseman to produce his genius. Yes, that John Houseman.
Welles never did one thing at a time; while he continued to stage dramas for the Mercury Theatre on Broadway, he also branched out with the Mercury Theatre of the Air, while simultaneously writing scripts for movies. If he had fewer than three separate and independent projects to work on in a day, he became bored.
Welles own career in radio started with that voice as the caped avenger in ‘The Shadow,’ who knew what evil lurked in the hearts of men, rivalling Santa Claus in contravening of the NSW Privacy Laws. To return to this yarn Welles is hatching a new project and he brings into the tent the writer of ‘The Shadow’ stories from earlier years, Walter Gibson, who is the narrator thereafter.
Gibson is no ingénue but even he is swept up in the profligate and prodigious energy that Welles exudes, and — since all expenses are paid — he goes along for the ride. He enters just as the Mercury Theatre of the Air is rehearsing for The War of the Worlds. It is fascinating to read of the organised chaos that produced live-to-air radio in 1938. While on air and in role before the microphone Welles scribbles new lines for the other players to whom he hands them.
Genius he may be, but that most levelheaded of men, Houseman, knows Welles is riding for fall, and he tries to reign Welles in, again and again. Ditto the CBS executive who delivers the budget, but who also wants to curb the enthusiasms of the Wunderkind least the corporate goodwill evaporate taking the money with it. Gibson observes all of this with wry detachment.
The Welles that emerges in these pages conforms to the general impression. Genius, yes, without a doubt, charming and charismatic to get his way. But also he can be crude, rude, and arrogant by turns. And ever theatrical in appearance, tone, and movement. He could turn the taps on for love or hate with equal ease and switch between them in a breath, because he did not mean any of it. Not so much that he was insincere, as like an Olympian god, he was indifferent to the matters of mere mortals. (What a comeuppance then to spend all those later years pitching for Findus frozen peas and Paul Masson wine in television advertisements. These make painful viewing on You Tube. How low the Olympian fell before the long arc of justice.)
Every time Houseman forced a compromise on him after much resistance and rancour, Welles would give in with lavish good grace, and promptly undermine the agreement. To give an example, if CBS insisted that no real names be used. He made up names that in the script did not look like real names but when said with certain inflections — which he coached the actors to do — sounded like real names of people or places. When CBS said the script cannot have a simulated President Roosevelt speaking, after hours of angry resistance, Welles conceded by substituting a Secretary of the Interior. He then cast as the Secretary an actor famous for his perfect impersonation of FDR. And so on.
So Houseman decided to teach Welles a lesson he would not forget – SPOILER ALERT — by framing him for murder! As an accomplished producer Houseman knows everything about staging and with the help of a woman scorned he fakes a murder scene with Welles’s name written all over it – literally, for Welles to find a few hours before the ‘The War of the Worlds Broadcast.’ That’ll tame him was Houseman’s hope. A subdued Welles could then be guided to moderate the realism of the upcoming broadcast, thought Houseman.
Yes the frame-up did stun Welles, but the show must go on and, if anything, the spectre of the murder fired him to make even greater effort in the broadcast. Houseman had underestimated his man.
I said ‘flabby’ above because I found the pages padded with endless and pointless descriptions of clothes, decor, food, and the appearance of players who walk across the page. Buried in this verbiage is short story that is a corker, notwithstanding the fact there is almost no investigation, no psychological depth, just an elaborate prank within an even more elaborate prank. But the evocation of radio drama was fascinating and I intend to listen to a few from Audible, starting with ‘The Shadow!’ On a similar note I read years ago, and have dredged up the reference thanks to the app Book Collector, John Dunning, Two O’Clock Eastern Wartime (2001). It too evokes the magic of radio in 1942.
A number of other items related to Welles’s ‘The War of the Worlds’ broadcast have been discussed on the blog, including Ed Murrow’s documentary on it and Hadley Cantril’s study The Invasion from Mars (1940). Seek and ye may find.
It turns out there were plenty of people dumb enough to believe that invasion story, despite the station breaks, the newspaper advertisements, the fabricated place names, the incorrect terminology, the elapsed time, and any number of radio-addicted children who recognised the voices of the actors. These people vote, drive cars, and have opinions. Think of that. Look around, they are your neighbours today.
Collins is a writing industry from his Iowa home with a number of series. This one is in a set of so-called Disaster novels, that centre on a real, or in this case imagined, disaster, e.g., the Hindenburg crash, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the London Blitz, or the assassination of Huey Long. In them he mixes real people of the time and place with some fictional ones to stir the pot. He does a great deal of research for the context, but anachronisms still appear, as he admitted in the afterword to this novel. These always jar.
The meta-data is 352 pages from Amazon, rated 4.5 by five litizens. It is not on GoodReads yet.
Genre: krimi
Verdict: Whoosh!
The denizen of Slough House are joined by a new Regent Park cast-off named Lech Wicinski, who had child pornography on his MI5 laptop. How dumb was that! So dumb that only a robot would suppose it true, and once supposed off Lech goes to the endless exile of Slough House, while his girlfriend (tipped off by an anonymous caller) goes ballistic and walks out. Just when it seems things cannot get worse he meets Jackson Lamb. Worse now has a name.
Of course Lamb does not believe anyone is that dumb but he does not care about injustice, as long as it leaves him alone. In another dumb move this injustice bumps into Lamb and he goes to work, as only he can. Though the beautiful Emma Flyte, briefly head dog at the Park, refuses reassignment to Slough House after falling afoul of the very malevolent Diana Taverner on the First Desk, she pitches in when Slough House denizen Louisa Guy (even more unstable than usual) sets off for Wales in deep winter, while Catherine Standish, sober for now, tries to corral Jackson Lamb with no success. Situation normal.
The meta-data does not lie. There are 352 pages but they flew by.
The office politics that Lady Di gets up to are straight out of McKinsey, and the absolute depravity of her political masters would make Pox News executives envious, the contract thugs loose in Wales are there to murder a child who saw something (though I was never quite sure what) and it is all in a day’s work for them. Bien sûr, Taverner was not so stupid as to believe Lech had pornography on his lap top but she exiled him faire encourager les autres. While whoever planted the material on his laptop may be a security threat, she is more interested in using the incident to terrorise subordinates into even more slavish obedience than fixing the leak. To fix it would mean revealing that the leak occurred on her watch. Lady Di does not admit to errors! With priorities like that is it any wonder she has risen to the top in the world where managers manage per McKinsey?
As usual there are thrills and spills with the Slow Horses from Slough House. Emma gets her pretty face shot off, Lech was not cut out to be a field agent and gets cut to pieces, Cartwright survives to keep feeling sorry for himself, Louisa likewise is surprised to be alive along with the intended victim, Catherine is even more tedious sober than when drunk, and Jackson Lamb could not care less as long as the world leaves him alone.
Meanwhile, back at Regent’s Park, Lady Di plans her next move up the greasy pole, enumerating the heads she will step on to get there. She is always sure the enemies are inside the tent, not outside. Meanwhile, the German plant in the Park who engineered the distracting pornography remains in place undetected. That plant may be a threat to national security but it is no threat to Lady Di – so all is good at the First Desk.
Goodreads meta-data is 336 pages, rated 3.78 by 2817 litizens.
Genre: krimi
Verdict: meticiulous
Inspector Irene Huss is on the job after a nurse is murdered in a private hospital. This is the second instalment in the series following ‘Detective Inspector’ Huss (2004). As the police go to work the staff of the hospital, its owners, the medical consultants, patients and their visitors are questioned, and the interstices of the nineteenth century building are examined. Tursten knows this world well from her earlier career as a nurse.
What follow is a police procedural rich in the locale both the city of Göteborg and of the hospital. Its principal owner is the surgeon in chief, who has a trophy wife and the debts to prove it. It is February and the freezing rain becomes a pivotal character in the plot. When the temperature rises to freezing, it is cause for smiles, but when it rains and then freezes again, there are no more smiles but plenty of black ice.
There is a split among the nurses, some have been working at this hospital since it was owned by the surgeon’s father, and others are twenty year old contractors who come and go. The old guard nurses are loyal to the past, including its ghost, and the contractors just want to get paid. Ghosts or not, there are some haunted characters in this hospital of Otranto.
Even as Huss and the team investigate more murderers occur that may be related or may not. Along the way we see street people who have long since become non-persons to the social services, some faked qualifications that no one has the time or interest to check, and Huss herself is so preoccupied with things at home (two teenage children, a dog, and a husband in that order of priority) that she makes mistakes.
While her immediate superior tries hard, his roots are in the old school when women made the coffee and they show through, but Huss grits her teeth and bears it. Both that such sexism is present and that Huss ignores it, riles some GoodReads reviewers who qualify for the Snow Flake Award. Curiously one such writer condemns the books as easily forgotten and then dwells on this sexism in detail. It seems the writer both forgot the book and remembered it. Take that Aristotle, a thing can be itself and not at the same time. So much for the law of the excluded middle.
I have also read ‘Fire Dance’ (2014) and liked it.
Goodreads meta-data is 173 pages, rated 3.85 by 2859 litizens.
Genre: Krimi
Verdict: Predicable.
A Swedish widow in Götenborg, the eighty-eight year old Maud, lives in an enormous, inherited flat that is the envy of many. She appears harmless and helpless, yet she is in fact irascible and deft at turning the perceptions and prejudices about elderly ladies against others in five loosely linked stories (or is it incidents) in the collection. The covetous neighbour is bamboozled and strung up by her own mobile, the aggressive tourist got stuck in the wrong place by a knitting needle, an antique dealer trying to con her out of her belongings finds himself no longer growing old – and so on. Maud leaves a string of bodies behind her.
When Inspector Irene Huss (there is an in-joke here) notices that Maud’s name keeps coming up on reports about these deaths, she smiles and moves on. What could a harmless and helpless old woman do anyway. Why nothing at all.
Except…!
While the stories were repetitive, Tursten’s afterword about the stimulating challenge to write about a perpetrator rather than a plod was charming, but not quite in proportion to the reading it took to get there.
