Category: Krimi

GoodReads meta-data is 287 pages rated by 3.81 by 332 litizens. 

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: Vroom!  

Serendipity Dahlquist, aged almost thirteen, uses her roller blades to good effect, to rescue ageing PI Leo from an unhappy client. Precocious does not begin to describe Serendipity.  She reads a lot, and thinks more, and as curious, fearless, and street smart as only a tweenager can be. 

The client was not even Leo’s but his office mate’s.  The two are not partners but split the rent on the office, as Leo tries to explain to everyone but no one cares about this fine point.  Their names are on the door of the Bradley Building office and that makes them partners. Period! Then Leo’s oily office mate/partner is murdered, and, well, a PI has to do what a PI has to do in the screenplay.  

What follows is a pastiche of The Maltese Falcon (1940) as this odd couple — the precocious Serendipity with the battered Leo — look for a lost dog while by-passing Serendipity’s long errant mother.  Her grandmother is in loco parentis but largely preoccupied with her career as a regular in a daytime television soap opera until a wall falls on her.  How could that happen?  Good question.     

The plot concerns, ahem, illegal dog fighting and is just as unpleasant as it sounds.  Leo and Serendipity meet a lot of deplorable enthusiasts for this bloodsport, and one sheriff who has made his mission in office to eradicate this disgusting exhibition on his turf.  There are some vivid characterisations, like the hapless Botolo brothers, though their sister seems to have interchangeable names, Constanzia and Consuela.  The body count is high, and not just dogs.  

The plot is perfectly tied up in the best Ross Macdonald fashion, and the text even includes a nod to one of his titles for the cognoscenti.  But what the plot does not reconcile is Groucho the dog, why he was taken in the first place with that reference to money.

First in an all too short series.  Arf! 

GoodReads meta-data is 320 pages rated 4.28 by 125 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: A good start.    

On New Year’s Eve 1949 at a midnight party in the palatial home of a British ex-patriate the host himself is murdered, though no one seemed to notice at the time. By some chance the investigating officer was the first and only woman in Indian policing. Sure.  Everywhere she goes no one takes her seriously.  No doubt this is true but to read it is repetitive and boring.  

On top of that we get an endless mish-mash of backstories at the expense of any momentum in the front story. I did persevere, but only just.  

There is plenty of India but diluted by the didacticism.  If Khan continues the series I hope he brings more focus to the front stories.  

GoodReads meta-data is 427 pages, rated 4.12 by 58 litizens.  

Verdict: so so. 

Caught up in the regime change from many gods to one with Pharaoh Akhenaten, diplomat Hani unravels the murder of an Egyptian vassal in the troubled borderlands with the Hittites who are not good neighbours.  The plot is convoluted and characters are no sooner introduced than killed off.  Much about the theology that has little resonance with a contemporary reader is reviewed.  Ditto the geography which the author does not help the reader with and I seem to misplaced my map of ancient Egypt.    

Does the vast conspiracy reach all the way to the top?  If so, is it a conspiracy?  

First in a series.  Perhaps the latter titles are less overwrought. 

GoodReads meta-data is 223 pages, rated 4.22 by 120 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: Diverting. 

It’s 1898 and Watson has been kidnapped by a criminal mastermind (no, not him) in a plot to start a European war. His rescue is facilitated by his niece, Lucy, and Sherlock.  Oh, and the latter’s smarter brother.  There is rich period description of the Orient Express. The plot is as complicated as one could want.  One distinction is the evident corruption, not mere incompetence, of the London police.  

This is number seven in the series heretofore unknown to me.     

GoodReads meta-data is 256 pages, rated 3.48 by 54 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: charming.

Humble, long-suffering Inspector Ganesh Ghote is sent to a cool mountain hill station in southern India, far from the mean albeit colourful streets of Bombay (as it was then).  There he finds a ghost of the Raj, the private Ooty Club whose members, British and Indian (who are more British than the British in their tweeds and wingtips).  

Into this self-contained and closed community murder has intruded.  The drunken and conniving servant Pichu has been stabbed to death on the…billiard table in the night. Ghote’s investigation is dogged by Surinder Mehta, retired ambassador and friend to prime ministers past and present, who is an avid reader of Agatha Christie novels and sets about helping Ghote with a running commentary from the Great Dame’s novels.  (For a time Ghote wonders what a dog has to do with anything.)   

This is the seventeenth title in the Ghote series and it is light, diverting, and interesting as the best of them.  How did Keating do it?   

GoodReads meta data is pages 292 rated by 3.93 by 4110 litizens.

Genre: thriller 

Verdict: No thank you.

Set-up: Dresden December 1944. Max is a police officer with a gimpy leg from a World War I wound at Ypres.  The privations of the war increase every day, but Max soldiers on, as does his wife Karen (a hausfrau without a personality).  Their two sons are in the Wehrmacht and a constant source of worry, but there is no communication.  

There follows the first of a series anatomical murders of a young woman.  Others follow.  The police chief is a Nazi zealot and does not care about the murders of these slatterns.  He is pure cardboard, sent to stymie and annoy both Max and the Reader.  

A police procedural follows as Max slowly traverses the highways and byways of Dresden after clues, thwarted by his Cardboard superior. There is a lot of Dresden, and even more on the human tide from the east as the Red Army surges ahead. Suppressed panic is the atmosphere.  

More anatomical murders follow.  Max stays at it as the world around him disintegrates.  Karen spends all day scrounging food and fuel for the apartment.  

Then it gets worse. The fire bombing occurs and there are gruelling descriptions with more anatomical details. These are well done but not to my taste.  One injured and distraught woman Max encountered wandering through the rubble after raid of 13-15 February 1945 cries out, ‘Why are these devils doing this to us.’ Why indeed? Meanwhile, the few remaining Jews are eliminated along with anyone else whose Hitler salute is not crisp enough.  

I had hoped for more on the cognitive dissonance of the last days, but there isn’t much aside from references to wonder weapons and innate superiority of Germans. Then it was over.

Then the war ends and Russians take over. The murders continue.  The Russians are amused that Germans have been reduced to killing each other.  When some Russian soldiers are living up to the stereotype and Max pleads with his Russian liaison officer to stop them, the Rusky has a good retort that silences Max. Partly it is mismatched buddy-story as Max and Rusky work together.  

I never did fathom the complications of the plot. Cardboard superior, zealot though he was, hid his one or was it two moronic (think drooling Republican congressmen and you have it) sons and….   Then there is kindly doctor upon whom no suspicion falls.  Well, you know who dun it.  Many others have things to hide and it all gets tangled.  Why did Doctor and Zealot stay?  No idea.  Explanations are given but they don’t compute.  

Both Max’s sons survive to give us a happy ending. Although the sons do not communicate with their parents each knows where the other is: One in a Russian POW camp and the other in a French prison. Telepathy?  

It is rich in descriptions of wartime Dresden and daily life as the world ends.  There is a continuous narrative and not the chopped and changed discontinuous narrative that thrillers have all too often instead of a plot. But it is over-plotted and almost incomprehensible because of that.

There is no mention of the countless French POWs worked to death in war factories in Dresden, nor any reference to the manufacture of poison gas in Dresden for use in the death camps.  It was a key transportation hub east to west. There were also USA POWs there, too, namely Kurt Vonnegut and company. And one scene in these pages takes place in a slaughterhouse. Of David Irving’s exaggerations, fabrications, distortions, and more nothing will be said here.  

Good Reads meta-data is 202 pages 4.0 by 24 litizens

Genre: krimi

Verdict: arthritic. 

Very Englishman Ludovic Travers is on his twenty-first outing in this title. Our hero gets embroiled in the art scene in Paris. Because he is so handsome, so charming, so rich, so smart, speaks such perfect French he makes friends easily.  Meanwhile his personality-zero wife shops.

The book is padded with lengthy courtesies, accounts of taxi rides, and the praise heaped on Ludo by one and all.  It an inflated short story. The prose is laborious and leaden. There nothing for everyone: no action, no characters, no description of time or place, no police procedural, just people praising Ludo for being handsome, charming, rich, smart, Francophone, and more.

It does have a plot twist.  SPOILER.  The renown artist is presenting as his own work that of drunk whom he keeps on the sauce.  Or something like that.  

Here’s another SPOLER for Sy fy readers: there is no donkey and no donkey flies.  

The back story is slightly more interesting than the novel.  Bush wrote and published the first title in this series in 1926 and quit his job as a civil service clerk to write, thereafter cranking out sixty-two (62!) novels in which Ludo is praised by one and all. The last appeared in 1968!  One is enough for this reader. 

GoodReads meta-date is 276 pages, rated 3.93 by 193 litizens.  

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: Po-Mo

I chose it for the Hamburg setting.  We had been planning to spend a few days there in September 2020.  

Reading some of Goodreads reviews, I was impressed that so many who commented were able to summarise the book.  I couldn’t.  I could not figure out who our hero was, what her work was, or why I should care, or much else. Still less could I fathom why I should be interested in any of it. Instead I waded through repeated laborious descriptions of hangovers, bitterness, and ponderous witticisms. To the deus ex machina finish.

I found it to be cryptic, convoluted, and disjointed, eschewing a linear narrative. It leaves the effort of integrating the parts into a whole to the reader.  This reader declined the task.  

Po(st)-Mo(dern) is it then. Whenever I see that phrase Po-Mo I always fear the worst, and so far Po-Mo has never let me down.  

GoodReads meta-data is 256 pages, rated 3.71 by 190 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: deliberate but obscure. 

When an unidentified, crippled homeless man is shot dead in what looks like a professional murder, putting Inspector Espinosa back on the mean streets of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) in the rain. Why would anyone go to the bother of killing with such efficiency a helpless and hopeless man?  Why did the victim hobble up the steep cobblestoned hill in a thunderstorm to the place of his death?  

Then there are the guests at a nearby dinner party who parked cars on the street where the murder occurred.  Did the dinners see or hear anything in the deluge?  No, but one of them seems evasive, or is he just vague?  Espinosa has many questions and sets about getting answers.  

A police procedural follows. There is much back-and-forth in Ipanema and Copacabana as Espinosa and his team question, trace, and question again. And that part I liked as they pieced together the puzzle.

But the momentum is interrupted by unnecessary backstories of nearly everyone and anyone along the way.  Nor did I like the denouement which seemed to me to undermine most of what went before.  I had the same reactions to the two earlier titles in this series: the locale is fine, and Espinosa plods away but the plot is – well, really it is not a plot at all.  There is no way a reader can follow it.  

Spoilers alert, take warning!

1. The efficient killing was not efficient.
2. Nearly all the testimony so painstakingly pieced together is irrelevant.
3. The narrator is untrustworthy.
4. Did the wife know about the gun or not?  Sometimes yes, and sometimes no. 
5. The last character introduced is the one. (A rule violation of the procedural.) 
6. The catalyst was a psycho like a storm and not integral.  

The list could go on.

GoodReads meta-data is 240 pages, rated 4.17 by 247 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: tasty.

Vish Puri, chief of Most Private Investigations, is fully occupied with a money laundering problem when his mother brings him a new client.  

The money that needs laundering is his own, stuffed in bags under the bed off the tax radar.  However, in its wisdom the Government has abruptly decided to phase our high denomination currency in its losing war against corruption, and everyone, Puri included, has only a few days to redeem such notes, and in so doing invite the attention of the aforementioned tax authorities.  Son of an upright police officer, Puri will not break the law, but a little bending is in order, and he shifts and sways to find a way, which brings him into contact with some types he would have preferred to avoid. 

While he is bobbing and weaving, his mother, whose repeated interference in his investigations makes him appreciate his stay-at-home and mind-her-own-business wife all the more, brings in a new client, who of course cannot pay.  What’s more she claims to be the reincarnation of a dead murder victim.  Ah ha! Here is line Puri can draw.  No dead clients.

That is, until he realised that the ostensible victim’s death was one his deceased father investigated to no avail because it was caught up in the terrible 1984 Sikh riots following the murder of Indira Gandhi.  His father was sure the victim was murdered and not yet another victim of the riots, but in the chaos of the time he could turn up no evidence. Reluctantly then, Puri opens a file to honour his revered father and placate his mother who seldom takes no for an answer.

Meanwhile, an unhappy former client wants him to cure his new son-in-law’s snoring or give back the handsome fee Puri was paid to assess the young man as a suitable husband for this client’s daughter.  Whew!  Clients do ask for a lot for their money.  Puri offers a refund but that is refused with a threat of bad publicity or even court action. With no choice he adds snoring to his list of tasks.  

To deal with the trifecta Puri mobilises his operatives: Hand Brake, Facecream, Tubelight, Flush, and Ms Elizabeth Rami who is the office manager, and no one dares to take liberties with her name. Then there is the spy gecko, a drone of sorts. Much of the telling is light-hearted, and Puri offers again a guide to Indian cuisine as he munches his way around Delhi trying to find ways to deal with the money, the murder, and the snorer.  In the course of so doing, his Hindustan Ambassador automobile is wrecked, and his operatives torture a hitman with a cat, and his youngest daughter wants to get married with or without his permission!  Meanwhile, a tax man cometh.   

This is the fifth in the series, and as always recent Indian history provides the backdrop, in this case the riots that saw countless Sikhs murdered for being Sikhs following the killing of Prime Minister Gandhi (by the Sikh bodyguards). Madness and badness are not confined to the USA.   

I tried the web site on Safari, Firefox, and Chrome without success, and then quit while I was behind. Try if you must:  http://www.vishpuri.com/#http://

The change of currency reminded me of the phasing out of the 500 Euro note. It was done to make black market transaction in the drug business more difficult, because the €500 was the favourite of drug cartels.  Evidence? Well, one news account said that at one large European bank 5000 of the €500 notes were tested and all of them but four (4) tested positive for traces of cocaine!  I found that pretty convincing, leaving aside the larger question of whether drug use should be illegal.  Regrettably, I did not bookmark that article for the reader’s reference.