Facebook and Irish crime fiction

At the weekend I finally signed up with Facebook so that I could access the Irish Crime Fiction group. And very informative it's been so far. A great resource for anyone interested in Irish crime fiction.

People keep telling me I need a Facebook presence. Now I have one, I think I need to spend a bit of time working out how it works, what I might do with it in terms of the wall and other functions, how the whole friends things works, and issues around privacy and sharing, etc. I'll try and feel my way into it. Anyway, if you're on Facebook and you want to find me on there and connect or whatever, I think this link should work.

Review of Devil's Peak by Deon Meyer (Hodder, 2007)

Christine van Rooyen is a high class escort with a young daughter that she dotes on and a rich client who wants her to play the role of a wife. Thobela Mpayipheli served as a elite soldier overseas before returning to work as a bodyguard for a criminal in Cape Town and eventually settling down on a farm with a wife and young son. The wife has died and the son becomes everything, but then at a service station two armed robbers shoot the boy as they make their getaway. Whilst on trial the two men escape and the police seem resigned to leaving them on the run. Thobela though isn't and he has the skills and the patience to track them down, and whilst he stalks them he can do the work that the justice system fails to. Inspector Benny Griessel is an alcoholic cop on the verge of losing his wife, kids and his job. He's been given one last chance to get himself off the drink and to solve the case of a vigilante killing paedophiles and child murderers that the justice system has failed to deal with. Christine, Thobela and Benny start to dance around each other, slowly circling until their inevitable convergence.

The real strengths of Devil's Peak are the characterisation, plotting and sense of place. Meyer provides an intricate story based on three in-depth character studies embedded in the turmoil of South African society, its criminal underbelly, and overstretched and corrupt police force. Over the course of the novel their back stories are revealed and teased apart as their lives start to intersect. The story moves at a steady pace, at times a little too slow for my tastes, slowed by detailed description, as Meyer carefully moves the inter-connecting pieces into place, but it builds to a page-turning finale. At its heart, the story is about the strengths and failings of people, families and institutional systems, and it raises questions about human nature, justice and the balance between self-destruction, love and survival. Benny Griessel and Meyer's storytelling reminded me of early Harry Bosch stories by Michael Connelly. Meyer writes with the same intensity, layering, and level of detailed knowledge that Connelly does, raising the story above the average police procedural fare. The overall result is a very fine read and I'll certainly be keeping an eye out Meyer's other novels.

Lazy Sunday Service

The distributor failed to deliver a batch of books to my local bookstore on Friday, which meant my attempt to buy Adrian McKinty's The Cold, Cold Ground was thwarted yesterday. Hopefully, it'll be in stock sometime next week. Unable to get stuck into the first Detective Sean Duffy outing, I instead starting reading Dorothy B. Hughes, In a Lonely Place. I'm about halfway in now and the pages are ticking over nicely. A really excellent filler whilst I wait for the book distributor to get its act together.

My posts this week
Best reads 2011
Around the world in 365 days
New to me authors read in 2011
Top read book reviews of 2011
Wee Rockets launches
Review of White Nights by Ann Cleeves
100 up
Reviews of books published in 2011
Swimming with loan sharks

Swimming with loan sharks

'Where's my fuckin' money, Michael?'

'I ... I don't have it, Mr Doyle. I'm sorry ... things haven't worked out as I hoped.'

'I don't give a shite how things have worked out, Michael. I want my one thousand euro back.'

'But I only lent five hundred!'

'At twenty percent interest per week. It's been four weeks.'

'But one thousand euro! That's, that's ...'

'That's capitalism. I provided you with a service, Michael. You needed a loan, I gave you one. You knew the terms.'

'I need more time.'

'Two weeks. Same rate of interest. And next time ... '


A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words.

Reviews of books published in 2011

Out of the 103 books I read last year, 34 were published in 2011, 31 of which were fiction. All of these books were bought, bar three. I'm not sure how much they cost, but buying books in the year they were published is a fairly expensive business. I'm not sure a third of my reading this year will be books published in 2012. Here are the books listed by my rating. The balance of ratings were reflective of those across all books read.

Absolute Zero Cool by Declan Burke *****

Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan *****

Sweet Money by Ernesto Mallo *****

The Rage by Gene Kerrigan *****

Devil Red by Joe Lansdale ****.5

Mercy by Jussi Adler-Olsen ****.5

Ashes by Sergios Gakas ****.5

Crimes in Southern Indiana by Frank Bill ****.5

Outrage by Arnaldur Indridson ****

The Day Aberystwyth Stood Still by Malcolm Pryce ****

Fun and Games by Duane Swierczynski ****

Dirty Old Town by Nigel Bird ****

Bloodland by Alan Glynn ****

Plugged by Eoin Colfer ****

The Somme Stations by Andrew Martin ***.5

The Bloody Meadow by William Ryan ***.5

The Quarry by Johan Theorin ***.5

White Death by Tobias Jones ***.5

The Fatal Touch by Conor Fitzgerald ***.5

One of Our Thursday's is Missing by Jasper Fforde ***.5

Falling Glass by Adrian McKinty ***.5

Death Toll by Jim Kelly ***.5

Taken by Niamh O'Connor ***

Every Shallow Cut by Tom Piccirilli ***

The Whispers of Nemesis by Anne Zouroudi ***

The Killer is Dying by James Sallis ***

The Cleansing Flames by R.N. Morris ***

The Red Coffin by Sam Eastland **.5

Frozen Out by Quentin Bates **.5

City of Bohane by Kevin Barry **.5

Agent X by Noah Boyd **

100 up

I was having to update something this morning and realised that at some point last year I passed the 100th mark for volumes edited/authored. The vast bulk of these are issues of academic journals. The tally is: 20 academic books, 2 novels, 12 volumes of an encyclopedia, 68 issues of the journals Social and Cultural Geography, Progress in Human Geography and Dialogues in Human Geography, and 5 special issues of journals. I've no idea how much that totals in words, but my guess is somewhere between 11-12 million (the vast majority of which I didn't write, but edited). If nothing else, it amounts to a fair amount of dead trees and a lot of zeros and ones.

Review of White Nights by Ann Cleeves (2008, Pan)

On the Shetland Isles the white nights of mid-summer when the sun barely sets over the horizon has everyone a little crazy. One evening a practical joker gate-crashes the opening of an art exhibition in the remote village of Biddesta. The next morning he is found hanging in a boat shed. Inspector Jimmy Perez was at the launch, hoping to start a new relationship with artist Fran Hunter. He's called to the scene and the local doctor rules the death murder rather than suicide. Whilst Perez waits for Chief Inspector Roy Taylor to arrive from Aberdeen, delayed by fog, he gets to work investigating the crime. The village of Biddesta is small, but tight knit, with a long shared history and secrets. The hanged man not yet identified, another murder is committed; this time a famous local musician is found at the bottom of a cliff. Taylor is wound like a cog, always wanting to force the pace of the investigation, whereas Perez is more reflective and circumspect. As a shetlander, Perez knows the people and place, but the puzzle of the deaths and the reason behind it are elusively out of reach and take a while to fall into place.

White Nights is the second book in the Shetland Quartet. My review of the first, Raven Black, is here. The strength of White Nights is its sense of place and characterisation. Cleeves immerses the reader in the small community, ways of life, and landscape of the Shetland Isles. The characters are well penned and the relationships between them credible and compelling. The telling was a little too descriptive at times for my tastes, especially near the start, but Cleeves has a nice easy going style of storytelling that is pleasant to the eye. I thought the middle of the book, once the investigation is well underway and Taylor is adding spice to tale, was excellent. My main problem was the resolution, which didn't quite gel for me. Regardless, this was a good, solid enjoyable read and I look forward to the third book in the series.