Category: Krimi

Against the advice of his dear friend and mentor Sherlock Holmes, Dr John Watson volunteers for the British Army in 1915. Though he is over fifty, the Royal Medical Corps needs every qualified physician it can get, and he is soon in uniform and posted to Belgium.

That is the premiss.
Watson is assigned the task of teaching field surgeons a new technique of blood transfusion, and this mission takes him here and there near the front lines because it is there that blood transfusion can do the most good.
Amid the squalor, death, and destruction of trench warfare at Ypres, he notices a death that seems odd. At first the suspicion is that the new method of transfusion is to blame, but that conclusion is soon dispelled. Then there is another murder.

The army medics are so swamped and exhausted by the maimed, wounded, and dying that they have no time, energy, or wit left over for anything else. Moreover, they are assigned to one place. By contrast, Watson has some freedom of movement and some repose to think about what he has seen.
He starts to make inquiries and …. He forms a shaky alliance with an outspoken suffragette nurse’s aid, and bluffs his way here and there with his rank of major, with his fame at Holmes’s chronicler, and with his assured manner. His suffragette ally also plays some cards of her own and from their investigations a pattern begins to emerge.
Among the thousands and thousands of deaths that go through Clearing Station Five in the sector, five or six have not been the result of warfare. accident, or disease. They have been murdered. There is a murderer at work within the ranks!
Whatever for amid such a charnel house, Watson asks? Why bother when every man at the front will probably die soon enough? Yet the murderer pursues his victims even in extremis. What is the pattern and who might be next!
The set-up is a fresh take on the Holmes canon, and Holmes himself figures in the story with an apprentice. This Watson is persistent, insistent, and nobody’s fool but neither is he Holmes, as he realises.
But the Military Policemen are solely preoccupied with deserters and infiltrators and place no faith in the story he tells. He is after all a teller of stories, is he not? An over-active imagination set off by the shock of the front, they conclude. He is shown the door.
He will have to do it all himself.
There is an array of characters and a volume of detail about trench warfare. A counterpoint is offered in the role of German sniper who proves…. Winston Churchill is there in the trenches and gives Watson a hand.
Churchill at Ypres
Altogether a compelling story well told, though the gruesome reality of the Ypres salient was taxing to read. There is even some gallows humour.
Robert Ryan
This is part of series and I intend to read other titles in it.

Honolulu in 1934 is the setting. The British Museum lends a rare Hawaiian painting to the Bishop Museum and a curator accompanies it, himself part Samoan. There he meets a feisty woman reporter and they team-up.

Why?
Because the painting is stolen from the Bishop Museum during the gala reception on New Year’s Eve. But wait! There is more. The very unpleasant and unpopular director of the museum has been murdered.
Are the two crime connected? Apparently not, yet the coincidence is unlikely.
And later a third, historic crime comes to light which is related to the stolen portrait.
There is some to’ing and fro’ing in pre-war Honolulu and Waikiki along Ala Moana, the Pink Palace, and Lei’Ahi (Diamond Head to Haoles).
In the small world of 1934 Honolulu nearly all of the persons of interest are taking part in an amateur play and the curator and his gal-pal are, too. Just by chance the curator, in his spare time, is the playwright.
The time is right but there is no Charlie Chan in sight. Nor is there any mention of the sizeable military population at Pearl Ridge, Pearl Town, and Pearl Harbor. For the cognoscenti, Doris Duke began to build Shangri-la in 1936.
The dialog distinguishes the characters and the comments on the tropical flora and fauna are measured, enough to evoke but not so much as to labor. However, the pace is slow and the family’s relations are hard for this reader to grasp. But there is much description for its own sake, neither deepening the context nor integrated with the plot, i.e., clothes, room furnishings, store fronts, and food. As a result the pace is s l o w.
There is a satisfying array of suspects and much back-and-forth. Every scene is wordy. The author is a playwright and there is much, too much, dialogue from ordering coffee to the weather. I was hoping for more of the Bishop Museum, but despite its importance in the plot there was little compared to all the other description. Too bad, Bishop is one of our favourite places while on Oahu.
While philately provides a material incentive for a villain there is little about why the stamps in question are so valuable, compared to the many descriptions of decor. Note, a philatelist does not cut stamps off envelopes. Too crude.
Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl
First in a series but not sure I want to press on.
I have been stockpiling Hawaiian krimis since our last visit in 2010. There are many set in Hawaii and my collection is modest.

A police procedural set in Lima, the one in Peru, in 1970. The protagonist smokes opium and snorts cocaine amid the rubble left by an earthquake.  Somewhere the Peruvian socccor team is winning and that alleviates a little of the pain of the destruction for some.

Detective Captain Simòn Weiss is Jewish and makes sure everyone knows it, accompanied by a half-Japanese Lieutenant Kato, like the Green Hornet’s off-sider.  
The narcotic haze lifts a little and there are two murders.  One isa Japanese crucified on a pool table.  The other is the faked suicide of a Jew.
Many shades of World War II haunt Lima. Jews fleeing Naziism found their way to Peru, and after 1945 so did some Nazis fleeing nemesis. Then there are some Japanese war criminals hiding among the local Japanese community, some of whom were deported to camps Stateside, it says in these pages, during WWII. Whew! This plot is thick.  
Weiss spends a lot of time worrying about his love life, his mother, his step-father, his mystical dreams about a scorpion, his long-term girlfriend, until he is swept off his feet by a pretty face who promptly dumps him. He is as smitten as the heroine in any bodice ripper at the sight of manly pecs.  
Meanwhile, he and Kato tote up a multicultural body count of villains, Japanese and German, and Peruvian or two for good measure. 
In part the story is high romance as Weiss meets the girl of his dreams. Remember the opium?
There is no policing to speak of.  Everyone knows everyone else and the coppers follow their noses to blast the villains.  The formulaic confrontation with kowtowing superiors are only half-hearted.  
After slaying the dragons and losing the damsel, Weiss rides off into the sunset leaving Kato to take the credit.  That would seem to mean that there will be no future adventures of gunslinger Weiss.  West from Peru is a wet ride.
That the hanged man somehow managed to slip a note into the ceiling beam to identify his murders might seem a little far fetched to some.  
That Weiss thinks mainly about himself might bore some readers.
That there is little about either Peru in general or Lima particular may disappoint some readers. Though some of the references like to the military school with its yellow walls reminded me of a Mario Vargas Llosa novel, ‘The Time of the Hero.’ Llosa is The Peruvian writer, despite his longtime residence in London, to me. I also read his ‘War at the End of the World’ and found the descriptions of Gaugin’s painting in ‘The Way to Paradise’ to be more compelling than any other of his work I read.
Isaac Goldemberg
The book has a forward in which a friend lauds the genius of the author and an afterward lauding the genius of the translator.  Never a good sign when someone else has to try to convince the reader to read the book.
I first encountered this book with its exotic locale in a bookstore in Helsinki Finland in September 2016 and it was only later that I read it on the Kindle.

The adventures of Chief Inspector Pel of the many names continue.  
Pel goes missing between home and office.  Madame Pel, used to his erratic hours, patiently waits, while at the office the ever loyal Darcy is so preoccupied with his love life, for this Lothario is madly in love with a woman who is out of reach geographically and perhaps socially, that he cannot think of anything else, so he does not notice Pel’s absence for several hours.

Then Madame Pel telephones Darcy and the alarm bells rings. Pel has a long list of enemies, krims he has banged up, and the worst is feared. Meanwhile all leave is cancelled, Sergeant Misset whinges on cue, and no stone is left unturned.  Until….
In a strange phone call Pel tells Madame Pel to instruct Darcy to stop the search.  
Odder still.
Two days later Pel reappears none the worse for wear with a strange story to tell.  The gist of it is that an old nemesis wants Pel to find his missing granddaughter and in return the nemesis will go quietly.
It takes Pel far too long to find the girl whom he keeps tripping over without recognition but there are compensations in the old, garlic eating baron who is much quicker on the uptake than his dithering manner suggests, in de Troq’s capacity nearly to read Pel’s mind in a crisis, and in the balanced portrayal of the gung-ho special team brought from Paris. Nice for once to find a fictional police officer who is a person not a stereotype.
While the situations in these books are stereotypical, the handling of them is not.  The baron has ability that belies his appearance.  The head of the SWAT from Paris listens to reason and has no desire to go in shooting if it can possibly be avoided.  In a TV cop show these two would be reduced to cardboard.
Much to Pel’s surprise it all works out, for he the eternal pessimist expected the worst, and his nemesis even keeps his word, which Pel did not expect.  But not quite in the way he was supposed to do.  Yes, he surrendered but he did not give up.
Cannot figure it out?  Read the book.
Juliet Hebden
This was my reading on QF3 Sydney to Honolulu in March 2017.  

I was intrigued by the cover that referred to the escape of Mussolini. Francis Deakin in ‘The Brutal Friendship,’ a study of the relationship of Mussolini and Hitler, made him seem, in part, an Italian patriot. What would Eco make of him, I wondered. The blurb emphasised the thriller of Mussolini’s escape.

But….it takes forever to get to Mussolini, a quarter to the book or more, and then that part disappears.
This is the conceit. A nameless millionaire wants to start a newspaper.   He hires a team of surplus journalists to do a proof of concept.  They are to prepare dummy, uncirculated editions for a year.  These specimens will be used to solicit other investors.  Who knows, maybe that is the usual practice.  None of the team, all writers and editors, know anything about the business side of publishing.  
But some of the team are cynical enough to suppose that the dirt they put into the dummy editions might be used for blackmail.  
There follows page after page about the media, its evils and manipulation. This lecture is relieved only by a travelogue through the streets of Milan.  Oh hum.  Not what it says on the back cover. Not why I bought it.
Then one of the journalists comes up with the story of a body double for Mussolini who was substituted for the real man. This is a discovery that is unrelated to the foregoing.  It just pops out.  
For this reader the book I bought starts there. Knowing nothing about these final days of the Fascist Regime, I found it a plausible speculation.  The nub is this.  While Mussolini’s face was known to millions through ubiquitous photographs, films, statues, postage stamps, coins, and more, few ever saw him up close in the flesh for more than a second or two apart from the inner circle.  
Now add that he had a body double to foil assassinations and to do the boring duty of watching parades.  This man might have a considerable resemblance and been at it so long that he came to think of himself as a Mussolini.  He would be known to the inner circle.  

Add the wear and tear of the last months and years, weight loss, ulcers, narrow escapes, worry, stress and Mussolini’s physical appearance and mental balance would have been altered as well as that of his doppelgänger.
Finally much confusion as the last Fascists flee from the Italian partisans, hoping either to surrender to the Allies, but then they did not go south where the Allies were, or to make it north either to Switzerland or Germany. 
Why escape?  One, to save his life and perhaps to fight again another day.  If Mussolini survived perhaps he could help others in the inner circle and their families.  Perhaps a living Mussolini could negotiate for Italy.  Perhaps a living Mussolini could be used against the prospect of a communist insurrection in Italy.  Once the speculation starts, it has no end.  All of this is interesting but there is very little of it, and it is only just that, speculation. None of it is fleshed out.
Much more interesting than another media diatribe or a streetscape of a corner of Milan. Though there are more lectures on the corruption of the media sprinkled throughout.  Oh hum. 

The Mussolini part disappears from the last third of the book in favour of more recitation of media evils and Italian corruption.  Old news not particularly well told.  Along the way are some obligatory sex scenes which the author is very poor at rendering.  Must have been included to please an editor.
The Número Zero of the title has nothing to do with Mussolini, but is the first edition of the mock newspaper.
In sum: a major disappointment. 
I once drove Signor Eco across the Harbour Bridge when he visited Sydney.

Having been reading about Portugal, I tried this title.

It opens with a nice walk through 1903 Lisbon.  I followed some of it on Google maps.

However this book is SO contrived.  Our protagonist walks through the city backward, yes like a defensive safety or like Ginger Rodgers!  He is sad and in mourning and expresses it in this way and has been doing this for a year or more. Oh hum. Thus making others responsible for not colliding with him. How egotistical. Out of my way! Coming through, backward!  Yes I know walking backward can be a form of contrition but there is none of the spiritual depth of that implied in these pages, where it reads like what it is, a gimmick.
The backward walker reaches his rich uncle’s house and uncle is a lively character who wants to move with the times, in particular with the automobile.  Many pages are consumed as the uncle tries to explain to the protagonist how to drive. He makes no effort to learn but some how does manage to do it. Backward, indeed.
He then drives off to the high mountains on a quest.  To find an altar piece carved in Angola and which is in a little out-of-the-way church there. He read about the altar piece in a priest’s diary from the 16th century, which no one else has read, it having been buried in an uncatalogued box in the national archives, and then traced it through shipping, archival, and ecclesiastical records.  That part was interesting but sped through.  
Nothing compelling here.  He manages to drive the car through villages to the amazement of locals and the boredom of this reader.  It is a short book so I will flip more, but…
I did keep flipping.  It is three stories connected only by the author’s assertion that they connect.  After the motorist who does find the altar piece, which portrays Jesus on the cross as an ape.  Better if it were an African slave after the harrowing descriptions of that.  
Then a doctor and his wife in 1938 without any reference to the Salazar regime or the wider world that I noted in my FF, Fast Flipping.
Then in the 1980s a Canadian senator who retires there.  Odd that. The author does seem to know anything about the Canadian Senate which is largely ceremonial.  While the senator’s ancestors were Portuguese he hasn’t the language but moves there anyway in retirement with his recently acquired pet ape. Yep! The first scene of recognition with Odo, the ape, is very good, but then it is repeated with dogs, with birds, Odo can relate to anything.
Once again it seems to me that all this creativity is to impress other writers, awards panel members, and jaded reviewers and not to entertain, educate, or stimulate readers.  Moreover, most of it seems to have been researched in manuals and reads like it, the car, the mountains, the apes; it reads like digests from Wikipedia interspersed with some dialogue and a few quite good scenes.  
Even more depressing than reading the book is reading the high praise heaped on it by professional reviewers.

Pascha the unwanted ghost is still about, annoying the only human that he can contact, Dr Martin; the Goose, as Pascha calls him.  Martin has taken extreme measures to control, if not rid himself, of this apparition by installing all manner of electronic gear in his home, offering feeble explanations to his long suffering girl friend about why he has an electronic net over the bed.  Martin goes to endless lengths to conceal the fact that he is haunted by Pascha, though his one and only friend Gregor knows.  Gregor is a man who can keep a secret.

Gregor is Herr Detective Inspector Kreidler whom Pascha rather grudgingly admires.  Gregor is an action man and that appeals to Pascha, the one time car thief.
But then then two police officers appear with a warrant and arrest Gregor, who lapses into an uncharacteristic passivity.  Pascha is outraged and is determined to spring him.

He needs Martin for that but Martin is completely preoccupied with his girlfriend who is pregnant.  Martin spends hours supervising her, arranging her diet, instructing her in exercises, telling her when and how to sleep, to rest by sitting such-and-such a posture.  Martin is a health fanatic and this he imposes on her, well, he tries to do so but Brigit has a mind of own and the appetite of more than two. She may eat as he asserts when he is there but when he is not let the chocolate cookies, fruit bars, potato chips, anything and everything roll.
The only way Pascha can mobilize Martin is by claiming to be in contact with the soon to be born child.  A lie but Pascha is a much-practised liar. 
For her part Brigit is bored by Martin’s Regime and she wants to help Gregor, not sit quietly inn a dark room listening to soporific music eating lettuce leaves for six more months. (By the way, this sounds pretty much Martin’s idea of heaven.)

Martin, of course, does too but not at the expense of leaving Brigit’s side. He ends up towed along in her wake. 
Loved the deal Brigit makes with the sleazy night club owner. How will she explain it later to Martin?

This title is fifth in the series. What a hoot they are. Keep it up Jutta!

This is the ninth title in the tales of Commissar Adamsberg, the vague, unkempt, inquisitive detective, played in a film adaptation superbly by Juan Garcia.

Juan Garcia as Adamsberg.
There are also television episodes that have all-star guests like Charlotte Rampling. In the following picture from the television production we have Adamsberg, Danglard, and Retancourt.

The characters are varied and amusing; the dialogue is human and humane; the situations stretch from the mundane to …. Iceland and back.

How does she do it, Fred Vargas, one time professor, now full time writer? Well, I hope she is at it full time because it is a big world and more of it needs Adamsberg, Danglard, and company to resolve its mysteries.

The setup in this title? An elderly woman is found dead in her bath with slashed wrists. She had terminal cancer and the gendarmes call it suicide, and following procedure they photograph the scene and present it to the station chief to sign off and close the file. Bored, he reads the file and looks at the pictures.

Odd that symbol drawn in lipstick on the side of basin.

He calls Danglard, Adamsberg’s number two, famed in the small world of plod for his vast knowledge, retentive memory, and capacity to solve puzzles. Danglard has to see it for himself in situ, and being bored, Adamsberg rides along with Danglard for an outing. The symbol baffles even Danglard and once baffled he cannot quit. Adamsberg is indifferent as they return to their desks.

Then, by chance, a woman comes to the front counter of the nick to make report, but she finds the cop shop all rather distressing and turns to leave, her mission unspoken, but Danglard passes through the lobby and he, of unfailing courtesy, addresses her with great civility. She responds to his politesse, and in short order she reports…. It ties in with the ostensible suicide.

Now Adamsberg reads the file and the plot thickens. Terminally ill or not, why would such a formidable woman lay down fully clothed, hair done, perfumed, nails polished in the tub full of water and cut her wrists? Why would a woman described as determined and self-sufficient, give way? Why is there no suicide note? Why did she struggle in her Zimmer Frame to mail a letter that afternoon?

It all does not add up to zero. There is something more to do it and it meets the eye in the symbol that even Danglard cannot decode.

As ever there are tensions among the officers, numbering about twenty, in this unit. Adamsberg’s loyal number two is Danglard, and there are others who also suspend disbelief in order to be loyal to him, too. It takes suspension because he does go off on tangents, and some do not work, but others do. The tangents come from his intuition which he seldom can explain. Adamsberg is not articulate or learned.

Against this are the positivists in the squad who want facts, finger prints, DNA samples, eye-witnesses before making a move. The metaphysical cloud shovelers who follow Adamsberg are tested in this title, and even Danglard wavers. That phrase ‘cloud shovelers’ was hung on Adamsberg and his deputy in Quebec in an earlier title, but it sticks.

Characterisations are one of Vargas’s strong points. She differentiates her characters and gives them each space, in the way Frank Capra gave character actors camera time, believing it enriches the story, rather than detracting from the protagonist. It sure does. (There days most of the diminishing breed of character actors could be, and sometimes are, replaced by CGI. [Computer Generated Images, Mortimer!])

In this tale there is a thuggish stable man with a police record, who dotes on his horses while imposing discipline on them with whistles and words of kindness that abash both Danglard and Adamsberg. There is a retired nurse who dithers, but is incisive when it counts. There is a spoiled and petulant young man of twenty who has depths none anticipated. Then there are the history re-enactors, some of whom are even odder than Adamsberg.
Most of all there are the regulars, starting with Adamsberg wearing clothes that looked slept-in and probably were, again. Danglard who will never be promoted because he is an alcoholic, a single parent with a brood that takes up a lot of time and energy, and a walking encyclopaedia as far as colleagues can tell. There are many others on the team, like the Amazon Retancourt, who are all watched over the in the office from atop the photocopier by Snowball who figured decisively in one of the earlier tales.

In this title the plot is, as always, complicated, convoluted, and obscure. Yet when it is nailed, it all hangs together. Of course, it is far fetched and some of the touches of the bizarre are, well, bizarre, and probably unnecessary but they have become the decoration on Vargas stories. The bizarre touches, the boar, the mysterious island, are well judged, if distractions.
Fred Vargas
Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau (1957-), archaeologist by day and krimiest by night. At the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and then the Institut Pasteur she specialises in epidemiology, particularly the Black Death in Europe. Her authoritative study is ‘Les chemins de la peste’ (2003). Some dinner table conversation there I expect.

A new locale, a new investigator, a new approach for this jaded reader of police procedurals.
The protagonist, Owen Irvine, was once in policing and then spent a decade investigating social benefits fraud for the local council in Cumbria.

His past in policing is murky, and no doubt more of his backstory will emerge. Ho, hum. Backstories do not a front story make.

Tracing penny-ante fraudsters is not much fun for Owen but there are challenges. Mostly though his prey are single mothers trying to squeeze a few more quid from the system for their kiddies, or so they say despite the new car in front, the satellite dish on the roof, and the ashtray full of St Tropez cigarette stubs on the table.
Owen is numb, having heard all the lamebrain excuses before, each told as if unique.
Not only does the council squeeze the pounds it pays to claimants, it also squeezes those it pays to the investigators, and the chopping block has Owen’s name on it. While his record is the best, it is too good, because he has banged up more than one relative of a councillor. In this and several other ways, the plot is leaden.
Then he meets one fraudulent claimant who is different. It is another woman, but one without excuses to offer, who seems educated, and smart, and who admits her crime, and yet …. she was desperate enough to pull a stupid stroke for a few hundred quid.
Owen breaks his own rule and asks why? He has never had to ask before. Always before he is told an avalanche of reasons he does not want to hear, because he is only serving the injunction, not making the decision. This one, Clare, tells him reluctantly a story about a man who deceived her, took advantage of her, and drained her bank account.
He passes the story onto a comrade in arms at his old nick, and, by the legerdemain of crime fiction another similar case arises, and the chase is on. Well sort of.
There a reality check in this book. Time is budgeted and for a crime without violence, for a crime where there is no evidence of a crime apart from the drained bank accounts, the time allocated is half a day. Imagine what a Star Trek film would be like if there were a Star Fleet budget. No more warp engines, Captain, we are out of dilithium crystals and do not have the gold-pressed latinum to pay for more until the end of the space-year.
Ah but the recently sacked Owen, who is more or less financially independent (because he owns his home, has a vegetable patch, a trout stream, an eternal Land Rover, and few needs), has plenty of experience in finding people who do not want to be found and time on his hands.
That is the set up. A pretty good one, if only it had been told with some élan or wit.
This reader felt the boxes being ticked. Perhaps that is inevitable in the first title of the series. Owen’s backstory is forced into the foreground. To do so makes it very wordy and slow. Though Owen is supposed to be laconic and reserved, but he talks about himself incessantly to get that backstory out. To enhance Owen he is made a victim in the dismissal by the council and by implication in his earlier dismissal from the plod. A poor put-upon hero, yet again, martyr to his virtue. All of this background interferes with any interest in the foreground. The time and place are described but they take a distant second place, and that is a shame, because the regional setting is what I found attractive at the outset.
Among the compensations are some lively scenes. The puzzling interview with Clare is one. Another is with a fraudster who seems to have done it just for fun and enjoys discussing it with Owen. Then there is the police officer who is uninterested in the information Owen passes on. They have a pissing contest, as they say on Channel 7Mate. Predictable but well done.
Regrettably, but perhaps inevitably in this kind of context, all the characters sound alike, use the same speech mannerisms, idioms, and vocabulary. All the police officers sound alike, even the educated Asian woman. Indeed, Clare is only distinctive voice in the early going, and that is a plot device, to be sure, and a good one, but it emphasises how monotonic the rest are, including Owen.
J. J. Salkeld, a very industrious writer to judge from the array of titles on Amazon. Strength to his arm.
It is the first in a lengthy series and perhaps things come together. Time will tell, if I get back to it. I found it easy to put aside.

A noir krimi with quantum physics!
I selected it for the Kindle because I smiled at the title on the cover. Wait! There is more. It is a krimi based on quantum physics. Yep! (It also represented light relief from reading Nietzsche.)

Huh?
That is how our protagonist reacts. ‘Huh?’ He is Paul, one very depressed loser in San Francisco whose path crosses that of Tali, who saves his life but she runs away when he tries to thank her.
A chartered loser, he is used to people avoiding him, but not quite like this. He pursues her, and, without breaking stride, she promises to explain all, but first he has to grasp some quantum physics.
Huh? Well, all right.
But before she can explain much, she first has to do a few things, and, well, seeing is believing, and Paul sees enough to … believe, a little. She arranges to met him for a further explanation but she is a no-show.
Huh? (Paul has a small vocabulary.)
What is a fellow to do but Google it; he reads up on quantum physics, advising readers in direct address to skip that part of the book. I should have, but I didn’t. Had I, that would have been in total about three-quarters of the book. Of course the cat comes up.

During this ersatz research he comes across the name of a Stanford scientist, the summaries of whose work on websites sound like Tali’s interrupted exposition. While the scientist seemed to have had a fine career strewn with publications and accolades until a few years ago when he, too, seems to have disappeared. Huh. (See!)
But even a loser can use the telephone book and Paul finds a street address that might be that of the professor. Hey, presto!
Well, that’s a lead. What would Philip Marlow do? Doh! He would go see the professor.
It is a mile-a-minute, except for the asides on matters quantum physics, and is it droll. dry as dust. Regrettably the asides on QP increase, and go on and on. The mile-a-minute stretch like a Salvador Dali watch.
Oh, and the cat. Did I mention the cat? Well, there is neither a cat nor a gat. Which word I always assumed was derived from Gattling gun, the rapid fire weapon developed in the Nineteenth Century, precursor to the machine gun. Another weapon so deadly that its inventor thought it would end war.
The set-up sounds better than it reads. It takes a quarter of the book to get the characters lined up around all the lectures on QP. There is so much preliminary fussing that it reminded of those dreadful Sunday lunches where the fussing over nothing is continuous so that the food does not appear until 4 pm by which everyone has had too much alcohol and a headache either from the drink or lack of food.
Then Paul inadvertently, if you can believe it, drops a homemade bomb into the fountain at a shopping mall and it kills a great many people. The cops arrest him and in his cell he reads Kant on metaphysics and shares it with the reader. Which is harder to swallow the bomb at the mall or Kant in the clangour? What is worse is reading it.
By this stage three-quarters of book has elapsed without any further sighting of Tali, and no explanation of events that this reader can follow. Where is that damn gat? Where is Schrödinger? Or even the cat?

Eventually this mass murderer is sprung on bail. What! Fire that DA and get one keeps capital criminals in the slammer.
There is a final confrontation of sorts but mostly it is like one of those post-modern conference presentations where the words flow but the meaning does not. The characters talk each other to death, or something. Hard to tell through my glazed eyes. Since this is San Francisco there is an ever handy earthquake to settle matters.
There is a long afterword with more QP. Enough, already!
Robert Kroese, who has many other titles on Amazon.
Following the afterword is a biography in which we read that the author wrote his first novel in second grade. Is this it?
I did make it to the end, but only with quick thumb work flipping the pages with very little reading and less pleasure.