Category: Krimi

A krimi set in the world of British soccer. Our principal is Duffy, onetime fourth-string goal keeper and retired police officer. His retirement from the force was involuntary. Ahem. This is the second or third title in a long-running series.

There is quite a bit about the beautiful game, which passed over my head. I liked the ambiguous attitude and behaviour of the owner of the third division team at the centre of the mystery. If the team is relegated, well, he will sell the ground for a commercial development and, perhaps, break up the team. If the team has a few wins and hangs on, well, then he will stick with it long enough to sell it to another punter at a good price. Win-win for him. Not so for the fans whose team may disappear. Not so for the manger who will be blamed for relegation. Not so for most of the players whose fortunes are tied up with this team; there is not a lively market for fourth division players. A few of the better players will get other offers.

Some of the players are involved, along with the desperate coach for whom relegation of this team would be the end of his credibility and career in the Old Dart. He is so desperate he hires Duffy and pays him out of his own salary, which amuses both the owner and Duffy.
Duffy, per the back matter, is AC/Dc on sex. But here his battery is flat.
Someone has been nobbling the players. One has his leg broken in a choreographed mugging, while another is set up on a sexual assault charge. Duffy to the rescue. Well, sorta. In the end the leg will heal and the sex charge lapses when the complainant decamps, perhaps, because of Duffy’s pressure, or perhaps because the punter who paid her in the first place lost interest. Like life, it is unclear.
Duffy lives with Carol but that seems to be all. She has access to some police computers and that comes in handy when he can talk her into using that access for his purposes. Not often that.
Trouble is, I found the characters monotonous. They all blended. It seemed like a very long episode of ‘Minder.’ Neither much plot, tension, nor momentum, but some good one-liners.
Dan Kavanagh
I came across this title on the shelf in the Academic Bookstore across from Stockmann’s in Helsinki, and snapped the cover. Later I said hey presto and got it on the Kindle. I had no wish to carry the paperback around.

A light weight krimi set in Singapore. ‘Light weight’ is the kind of krimi I like. Not too serious, not too violent, not too graphic, and not too demanding on the little grey cells. I will admit of exceptions like Ross Macdonald and Georges Simenon, but they are few.
This is the first in a series focused on Aunty Lee’s home cooking restaurant in the island city-state of Singapore. Madame Lee is a woman of substance but she loves cooking and running her small restaurant for a crew of regulars since it is far off the beaten tracks in Singapore. She also has a long established and island-wide network of cronies and contacts, some of them from her late husband’s business empire. The final ingredient is her nose for news, i.e., gossip.

The fire is lit when the plastic wrapped dead body of a young woman washes up on one of Sentosa’s beaches. ‘Sentosa’ means peace and tranquility and tidal corpses do not fit the tourist board image. Sentosa also generates enormous income from the twenty million visitors a year who go to this Asian values Disney-like land.
Aunty Lee gets along well with her stepson Mark, who is unable to emulate his father’s business success, but not with his insufferable wife, Selina. She was so insufferable in the early pages I thought, applying years of viewing episodes of ‘Midsomer Murders,’ that she would be the first victim. Alas, no. Though she does largely pass out of the story, or my reflexes have improved and I managed to flip the pages upon which she appeared so quickly I did not notice. I did enjoy a smile when she reappeared toward the end, and the villain slipped her knockout drop so that we readers did have to endure more of her endless verbal and sub-verbal tirades. What’s her problem? She is rich, but not rich enough. And never will be.
Madame Lee’s crime-busting irregulars include Nina, her Filipino maid, and Sergeant Salim, a Malay Muslim, in a city of Chinese Christians and a few others as she pursues the Sentosa murderer. When the victim is identified it is someone she knew. Then there is a second…. Also known to Aunty Lee. This is too much! It’s personal!
I learned quite a bit about the legal status of guest worker maids in Singapore. Sergeant Salim’s outsider status has advantages and disadvantages, as he well knows, and he is learning to capitalise on the former, and gets a few tips from Aunty Lee about managing the latter. That maid, Nina, has her own network to bring to the table.
There is some to’ing and fro’ing in the miasma that is Singapore. A major plot concerns gay couples, and coupling, in Singapore, where it is ILLEGAL! That seemed an odd foundation for the series, though it is well handled, and by the smoke and mirrors of authorship Sergeant Salim is never directly confronted with this crime.
The villain was not hard to spot for us hardened krimi readers but how he came into contact with the two women and dispatched them was neither convincing nor interesting. It also seems to me that early on we had far too much of the egregious Selina for no other purpose than the relief at her subsequent absence. She played no part in the plot. Yes, I now about the false text message but the egregious Selina was not essential to that.
Ovidia Yu
These quibbles aside, I shall certainly read the second in the series.
In my many business trips to Singapore I never made it to Sentosa. I did walk through the Raffles lobby once and shopped for underwear at the Marks and Spencer, and have since stuck to the M&S house brand via email order. I rode around on the red bus once. Loved the Aladdin’s Cave of the Mustafa Centre, especially before it got all cleaned up. Battle Box in Channing Hill was a grim reminder of the War, as was the replica Changi Chapel. [Moment of silence.]
I had a memorable Thai meal in Singapore in which I made a fool of myself. Long story. Short version: having traveled in Thailand I thought I knew Thai food. Wrong. On all my visits in Thailand the hosts always knew I was coming and all the places I stayed catered, I later realised, for the western palate. The meals in university restaurants and hotels are not the real thing. But place we went in Singapore was! I was hors de combat quick smart.

Siri Paiboun is a retired medical doctor in the Laos of 1970s when it had plunged deep in the red water of communism. During the long struggle to reach that water, Dr Siri was with the patriots in the red alliance, saving many lives in battles with the French, the Americans, the Thais, and the Vietnamese. Many survivors of those wars are grateful to him.

In the red dawn, elderly and banged up from his years of hardship in the jungles, Siri became the national coroner. There are many bodies buried throughout Laos and Dr Siri unearths more than one, not all of whom were killed in the line of duty much to the chagrin of great and (not so) good of Vientiane.
This latter career is the spine of this series, now in its eighth title.
The time machine of these pages offers a travelogue to Laos of the 1970s, an impoverished, depopulated, ideologically-driven polity surviving with broken-down Soviet equipment, dealing with American sexual diseases, living off smuggling across the river to Thailand, and coping with the ancient spirits of the land.
The books have the form of a murder mystery which is salted with more and more elements of fantasy as the series has continued.
Dr Siri is a medium for the spirits of Laotian myth and the undead of those killed in the many wars of the land. Not only does he see ghosts now and again, he also negotiates with them.
Ghosts are not part of the Five-Year Plan, the Comrade Doctor is repeatedly told. But what choice does he have, when the ghosts appear. He has to answer before the spirits makes things worse.
There are many caustic comments on the corruption and stupidity of the stultified regime, consisting many of the dregs of the society jumped up to the top without either ability or experience but a manual of communist clichés that fit no occasions. This is no accident because the fraternal very big brother, Vietnam, prefers a crippled and compliant regime on its border.

During the course of the previous novels, Siri has gathered around him a group of associates. First and foremost is Madam Daeng, an entrepreneur of noodles, Phosy a frustrated police officer, nurse Dtui whose talents exceed the imagination of her formal superiors, and Mr. Geung, the Mongoloid janitor who simplicity cuts through subtrefuge more than once.
That is the inner party. They are also joined from time to time by others like the mad Indian, Ravi, who stands in the river for days at a time, and others who idle around the noodle bar in the hope of alms. Since Siri married Daeng and moved in with her, he has turned his house into a homeless shelter with all manner of residents.
One resident was a Buddhist monk who then disappears after leaving Siri a cyptic message about a new Buddha. Why did he leave and where did he go? To find out, read the book.
Colin Cotterill
The early titles in this series had zest and clever plots along with all those colourful characters and travelogue. The eighth entry at hand has neither zest nor wit. The energy level is so-so and the plot … what plot? Whenever a plot thread dissipates, a ghostly spirit steps in and re-sets. Each such episode serves only to allow the author to take some very cheap, Bill Bryson-like shots at any one and every one, from Thai army officers, to monastery abbots, bus drivers, Laotian officials, rice farmers… This adolescent humour at the expense of defenceless others does not long sustain this reader’s interest. It reads like it was grind to write; it is to read.

The overweight, crotchety, curry gobbling, beer swilling, stained necktie wearing, disheveled, immaculate tennis shoe wearing Sikh inspector of police is on the job again. Hooray! This is the seventh title in the series.

Singh is a Singaporean, though many there deny it, most of all his superiors in the police force, who repeatedly send him on foreign assignments, like the one in this story, to get him our of mind and sight. He is indeed an ambulatory eyesore, a fact that he is quite comfortable with.
Singh goes to London on an exchange program where he is assigned to review community policing! Those who know Singh, know what he thinks of that. Sitting at a desk reviewing case files is not what he does.
The sojourn is made all the more difficult because Mrs. Singh, she of the curries, has come along, too, over his prostrate body for he tripped over her suitcases. Her unnumbered family has many colonies in London which she plans to visit bearing gifts.
While he finds plenty of good curry in London, and that is crucial, he also finds….. While the formal assignment is a report no one will read, he soon becomes aware of a hidden agenda. Someone wants an investigation of one cold case, and preferably done by someone who is not as rule-bound as the Bobbies have to be for fear of offending anyone in a community. For that kind of job Singh is just the man!
In between enormous curry meals that leave him nearly comatose, Singh barges around asking the questions the ever so polite Bobbies dare not ask, least they give offence to some member of the community. It is quickly apparent that many lies have been told and that further piques his interest.
Shamini Flint
The mix of the serious and the comic in these krimis is disconcerting to this reader. Much of this krimi is pretty grim. Not to my taste. But much is jocular and light.

A police procedural set in contemporary Helsinki, where we spent a week in 2016.

The violin proves to be a dangerous instrument when three young women carrying violins are murdered one after another, the first found at the Sibelius monument.  Been there.

The police investigation seems to involve only three officers, and they issue no public warning about those nasty violins.

There are many red herrings, some very satisfying.

There is also quite a lot about music, particularly Jean Sibelius’s music. While it is rather technical, it is informative.

The author tries hard to relate the music to the plot but it does not work for me.
While much of the policing is interesting and engaging, I did find the principal officer, Miranda, very immature. Her hormones are more decisive than her grey matter.

However the profile of the culprit, that part was intellectually interesting.
The victims and their murderers are described in more detail than suits me.
The denouement left me cold. The villain was obvious for a long time to the reader, if not to Miranda. The complication of the religious zealot made little sense to this reader.

The author has other musical titles.

The genre is thriller but not the breathless, cross-cut, cryptic kind that conceals its lack of substance with smoke and mirrors.  

In this case a historian comes across some undiscovered archival material.  From this premise a mystery and a quest unfold.  It is a reasonable premise since in its many convulsions Russian records have often been boxed up and sent off to the warehouses in the countryside and forgotten, because those who sent them died without time to leave records of the distribution.  In the Kremlin treasury we were told many Tsarist gold bars were found buried in barn a few years ago in unopened boxes, stashed at least since the Civil War, each bearing the double eagle.
The exposition of the revolution, the communist coup d’état, and the Civil War was of especial interest to me as I read it while in Moscow, traversing museums and galleries rich in the detail of that period, having just done the same in St Petersburg.  The factions, divisions, and differences among the White Russians goes a long way to explaining why they lost the Civil War. While they outnumbered and outgunned the Bolsheviks, they could never agree among themselves nor could they compromise with each other. As a result the Bolsheviks picked them off one-by-one.
The abdication of Nicholas II, accession of his younger brother Michael for one day and his replacement by Prince Lvov, then the liberal Alexander Kerensky, the ill fated Duma election that favoured the liberals and not the communists, the effort to continue the war which failed, and the coup at 2:10 a.m. in the White Dining room, which we visited where the clock stopped at that time.  
My snap of the White Dining Room.
The clock stopped at the time the door burst open.
The Romanov dynasty came full circle starting and ending with a Tsar Michael.
But the story is crowded and chops back-and-forth in time and place from those who stashed the gold, the Nazi effort to retrieve it, and our hero’s effort to track it down plus far too much of his back story, boring as usual.  
Brian Garfield
We do get rather too much of our hero’s many other publications, offered no doubt to credential him.  While his description of the Israeli femme fatale is nicely done, it does go on and on. It was clear to this reader from the beginning that she was a honey trap but the protagonist was much slower to realise that it was not his lengthy cv or other charms alone that kept her coming back for more. Oh hum. There is one born every minute, per the sage.

Another intricate krimi from this master, Ross Macdonald, he of California sunshine noir.
This is Macdonald’s take on the generation gap of the 1960s. Young Davy and even younger Sandy seem bound for mutually assured self-destruction while taking a few others with them.

Sebastian, Sandy’s father calls in Lew Archer to find them and return Sandy home. While Sebastian offers a good front, it does not take Archer long to realise there is no back to this front. Sebastian failed to make the transition from a promising young businessman to a successful one. Behind the trophy wife, model home, and new car Archer finds a loveless marriage, a silent house, and many unpaid bills, while Sebastian dances attendance on his wealthy boss, Stephen Hackett, in the hope of….something.
Then Hackett is kidnapped at gunpoint by none other than the two teenagers, Davy and Sandy. Unbelievable but true. Why?
It is a tangled skein and by the end I needed a genealogical chart because this one spans three generations. It is a cocktail of Macdonald’s themes, an unloved child, a misused child, illicit drugs, denied kinship, a surly subordinate, a very nice woman who knows too much, a venal older woman with a toy boy husband, and assorted police officers including a bent one.
The body count reaches Midsomer proportions while Archer develops, applies, tests, and rejects alternative hypotheses until at last one fits.
While the principle cast seems to consist of disparate people with nothing in common, in fact, on that family tree, they are entwined by marriage and murder, the latter seeming to be the stronger bond.
In addition to the rebels with a cause in the teenagers, Macdonald also adds some Cain and Abel. And as frequently the case in his novels, there is a black widow who has consumed two husbands.
Against the array of vipers and the lost teenagers, Archer meets some very solid citizens. Alma in the nursing home, a school guidance counsellor who goes beyond the call of duty, a security guard who keeps his word come what may, many others who lend a land, like truck driver who finds Archer on the highway, Al at the sandwich bar, and gas pump jockey with a calliper on his leg, each of whom reminds the reader of all the decent people out there.
The imagery at times transcends the story as when Archer admits to himself that he likes the work, late at night, driving from one place to another like an antigen connecting cells in the great body of Southern California.

This title reads like short stories woven together, one of which concerns the Trans-Siberian Express. Only half-way through the book does our protagonist get on the train.  The details of the train and Siberia read like excerpts from Wikipedia.  

Though it is presented as a police procedural with the three teams of detectives working separate cases, pace Ed McBain’s 87th precinct, the ominous villain on the train and the plot that leads to the train is more of the thriller.   Credulity replaces credibility.
The three stories are told back to front in alternative chunks of prose, which this reader finds confusing and distracting.  
Though Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov is the central, continuing character in this series, endowed with an artificial leg to give him some distinction, I found him to be hallow.  Tap, tap there is nothing inside.  He is very polite, very patient, very clever….  he has a family….  our hero is motivated by justice but the boss is ambitious for political power and is more interested in accumulating files on those he can manipulate than banging up crims. So far, so carbon copy.
The three cases.
1. The subway stabber who is a nutter of no interest. This one is a procedural.  Much plod and a trap that almost backfires.  
2. The mysterious object on the train which turns out to be very little as far as I could tell. The thriller.
3. The kidnapping of the heavy metal musician whose kidnapping was arranged by his father to teach the prick a lesson. I identified with the father on this one.
The Trans-Siberian railroad in October 2016 when we crossed it.
This is one of dozens of titles by this author, and to this reader it has the same narrative structure of the one other one of his I tried to read.  All done by the numbers.  Yet the cover proclaims it to be a best seller and it was published by a reputable firm. Go figure.
Stuart Kaminsky
There are some soppy comments on the blanket of white snow in Moscow. Anyone who have lived in a big city will realise snow is usually grey like the sky until it turns brown from the pollution and churned up by cars and pedistrians into brown sludge.   There is nothing nice about it after thirty-six hours.

An exotic setting for this krimi in the heart of Africa. It opens in a tourist camp at the Okavango Delta, at the confluence of the Chobe and Linyanti Rivers where Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Botswana meet with Angola not far away.
The red dots are tourist camps on higher and drier ground.
The nearest town, for those consulting a map, is Kasane near Victoria Falls. The waters are replete with crocodiles, water snakes, and hippopotami.
‘Don’t fed the crocs. Keep your hands and feet in the boat!’
There are many descriptions of sunsets and sunrises in workman-like prose. Our hero is Detective David Bengu, known as Kubu because of his resemblance of his manly figure to a hippopotamus.
It is a small tourist camp; one that is decidedly downmarket: Basic, no luxuries to attract high-paying guests. It represents the inheritance of the owner, and it is run by Dupie who has spent his life in the bush. The area is a swamp more than anything else and boats are essential and even more essential is someone who knows how to handle them in the rivers, the current with those crocodiles and hippos have to be avoided.
The dozen or so guests are a combination of Europeans and Africans, white and black, local and foreign. That is the norm in these camps, we are given to understand.
The abnormal is that one of the guests, an African black name Goodluck Tinubu, according to his driver’s license, is found dead in his tent one morning. He was very clearly murdered, his throat cut. The local plod from Kasane arrives and deploys the usual conventions of the police procedural.
No sooner do the police investigate the camp staff and the remaining guests than another of them is found dead, with his head smashed by our old friend, blunt instrument. Two murderers in quick succession within a few meters of each other is too much for the local plod and a call goes to distant Gaborone for help. The Number One Detective Agency is not available so our protagonist takes the case.
It gets worse when fingerprint identification shows that the the titular first victim died thirty years earlier during the Rhodesian War! This is his second death.
The conventions then go into overdrive. We learn Kubu’s backstory, his likes and dislikes, his capacity for beer, his vexed relationship with his boss, his family life… His constant preoccupation with food and drink to the exclusion of much else. In a word, boring. The only part of this backstory that I found amusing was the report of the schoolboy experiences with the game of cricket, and even that was a distracting digression.
Much more interesting are the legalities, political niceties, and social morēs of that part of the world. Though it is far away, South Africa looms large. While the Rhodesians War ended thirty years before, its baleful influence remains palpable. Many of the people we meet in the story were displaced first by the war or then later by the malignant regime that now rules, one set of chains having replaced another. Underlying all that recent history, the ancient tribal differences remain the bedrock of relations among the locals.
The camp is not owned but rather is a concession, one about to expire. The owner of the concession is not at sure she wants to retain it, and even if she did, she is not sure she has the means to do so.
Each of the guests is limned, revealing that each has a story related to this part of the world. The wars for independence and civil wars there left scars, physical and psychic on both the participants and their progeny. And no krimi is complete today without a reference to the drug trade with vast amounts of money that entrails.
The detail of the camp, the tourist trade, the relationship among the actors are all very well done. There is also some insights into the plight of Zimbabwe that remain with the reader. I would prefer much more of that and much less of Kubu’s diet.
The authors are a pair, who seem to work together seamlessly. Well done!
Michael Sears and Stanley Trollop
This is the second title in the series. In the way that publishers have of confusing the international market, this book has another title in the United States, ‘A Deadly Trade.’ A reference, no doubt, to alert readers to the drug trade. Strikes the sledge hammer of subtlety again.
I see there is a third and I will get to it one day. I find the exotic setting very interesting but Kubu himself is a bore. He is always far more interested in himself than anything else.

A charming krimi from Mumbai in India, full of colour and movement like the city itself. Inspector Ashwin Chopra has been forced to retire at fifty because of a heart attack.  The upright Chopra has long tried single-handedly to rid India of crime and corruption. He is a man with a mission who has been side-lined! But for how long?  

Coincidentally, Copra’s much loved uncle, a father figure, leaves him….a very young elephant!  Huh?  Chopra lives in a gated community on the fifteenth floor of a modern condominium.  While there is plenty of storage in the basement, there is no room for an elephant, large or small, young or old.  Still Copra must accept the elephant, Ganesha, named for the god, out of respect for his departed uncle.  
Poppy, Chopra’s wife, is taken aback, nonplused, and…., but before she can lay down the law, the egregious Mrs Supramanium, a neighbour, barges in and demands removal of ‘that creature!’  
That’s it!  Under no circumstances will Poppy concur or agree with ‘that woman!’ The elephant stays!  He is tethered in the courtyard, minded by the doorman as a temporary measure.
However, the elephant is depressed, head down, wobbly on his feet, saggy tail, trunk deflated, and — worst of all — will not eat. Chopra does not know what do, so he buys books and consults a zoo keeper and later a one-time circus trainer. Strangely, he does not turn to Dr Google. 
Of course, the book-writing scholars disagree with each other since that is how careers are made, leaving him little wiser. These books by scientists are desiccated and abrupt without any practical information for the urban elephant owner. But he also finds a memoir by an Anglo-Indian woman who reared an elephant, more or less as a pet, and it does inform him on some practical points. That is a start. More importantly, it heartens him to make the effort.
Then there is the uncle’s letter entrusting the elephant to Chopra, which in part said ‘This is no ordinary elephant.’  Uncle was not one for exaggeration or superfluous remarks.  Thus Chopra proceeds with care.
Into the mix comes a crime that Chopra, retired or not, cannot ignore.  An innocent young boy has been murdered and no one cares, least of all the police at his old nick now with a new supervisor. In addition, a one-time nemesis reappears.  The thread unwinds with some of the usual twist and turns, but then there is the elephant in the room. Literally in one instance.
While walking Ganesha to a veterinarian for yet another consultation, Chopra sees a lowlife who used to consort with the nemesis and the old impulses take over; off he goes on the trail with Ganesha in tow!  Into the colossal glass-and-steel Mall of India he goes, brushing past security guards who suppose no elephants are allowed.  Too little, too late are their efforts to impede entry. Then there is the escalator ride!  What a tribute to German engineering. What a show for the shoppers!
A Cadbury chocolate bar gives Ganesha a powerful incentive to lumber along.  When obstructed, Chopra declares Ganesha a police elephant.  Police dog. Police elephant.  Out of the way!
Ganesha lives up to the appellation more than once. In turn when the monsoon hits, Chopra rescues the tethered Ganesha from a torrent.  They have bonded.
Along the way there is much elephant lore.  Meanwhile, Poppy thwarts Mrs Supramanium, while coping with her crotchety mother who is not keen on either the elephant or the husband.
Vaseem Khan
Quite a trip and also a fine arrival, leading to the next title in the series. Loved it.
At least some researchers into African elephants, much larger than Indian ones, have declared them free of Machiavellianism. All will be explained upon request.