USA

Being a huge fan of Japanese crime fiction I admit to being particularly intrigued by THE LAST TRAIN. Set in Tokyo the viewpoint of this novel, written by an ex-pat American professor of American Literature at Meiji Gakuin University who has now lived in that city for twenty years, was a large part of this appeal. 

Whatever elements there are that feed into THE LAST TRAIN, they have combined to create a fascinating police procedural / serial killer with a reason novel interwoven with aspects of Japanese tradition and culture. Things get underway pretty quickly, when we're introduced to a victim being led away from a bar district, absolutely hammered drunk, only to have him fall in front of an underground train. Obviously the first part of the investigation is to decide if this American man was an extreme form of suicide or a murder. Enter our detective hero - Detective Hiroshi Shimizu, a man who remembers fondly his time studying in America. Filled with regret over the loss of his foreign girlfriend, he is pulled into a murder investigation in a most unexpected manner. Shimizu is a white collar crime investigator - much more at home in the world of financial shenanigans and spreadsheets, it's via his mentor, Takamatsu that he finds himself included in a murder investigation that rapidly becomes a serial killer hunt. When his Takamatsu goes missing Shimizu teams up with ex-sumo wrestler Sakaguchi to track down that most unusual of things - a female serial killer.

The outsider's viewpoint really works well in the way that Tokyo life is observed and described. There's lots of little gems of information imparted as the action proceeds - from the food / the night life / the way that the nightclub and hostess world works, and there's great humour. It was impossible not to laugh out loud at sumo-sized thugs setting off overweight alarms in lifts, and an elderly man prepared to use machinery lathes as a lethal weapon if necessary. 

Interestingly, even though it's an outsider viewpoint, it has an intrinsically Japanese feel to the novel - there's much to learn about the society, there's much to learn about the people, and there's much to admire in creating a female serial killer who is believable, and, more importantly sympathetic  understandable. 

Even with a little bit of heavy lifting towards the end dragging everything into line, THE LAST TRAIN is a really good novel for fans of crime fiction in general, and Asian crime in particular.

Another day another ‘Girl’ book. But don’t be fooled by the title which is linked to the current marketing zeitgeist but is actually is a subtle commentary on the plot. The Girl Who Was Taken, second novel by American author Charlie Donlea, is not the “domestic noir” the title might suggest but is actually a fairly straight down the line crime thriller with a resourceful investigator helped by a lucky victim, the girl famous for escaping.

The Girl Who Was Taken starts with a potential abduction and an escape. An unspecified time after she was kidnapped, Megan McDonald finds herself in a cabin in the woods and disorientated, staggers out through the rain and onto the highway where she is rescued. A year later and she has become famous for a ghostwritten book about her experiences which does not mention the second girl, Nicola Cutty, who disappeared on the same night she did and has never been found. While everyone expects Megan to be the “girl” she was before the kidnapping, Megan finds herself unable to return to a normal life as she works with a hypnotherapist to delve into the memories of the two weeks in which she was held captive.

But the protagonist of The Girl Who was Taken is Livia Cutty. A Kay Scarpetta in training, Livia is a junior medical examiner and spends her days doing autopsies or on ride-alongs to pick up bodies. Livia still lives with the guilt of nor answering a phone call from her sister on the night she disappeared. The story kicks into gear when Livia discovers a link between a body she has been asked to autopsy and her missing sister. Rather than bringing this to anyone’s attention she starts to investigate herself, finding out just after the reader does that her sister was into some pretty weird stuff including a group obsessed with abductions called the Capture Club.

Donlea does his best to up the tension by dropping in some kidnapper’s point of view chapters that allow for a few fairly forced red herrings. The story of the abduction itself comes out in flashback chapters which establish Nicola as a not particularly likeable teen looking for some attention, caught up in something she is unable to control. The fairly unsettling reveal when it comes is well handled and brings all of the clues together, but even so it comes a little out of the blue and is hard to reconcile with the criminal’s pov chapters.

The Girl Who Was Taken does not have any of the domestic noir genre trappings of the current crop of ‘Girl’ books with which it might be compared (on title alone). Rather, it is an effective, page turning crime thriller with a well handled mystery and an engaging and resourceful protagonist. While she keeps being told at every turn that as a medical examiner she should not be investigating things it would be no surprise if Livia Cutty returns. After all, being stuck doing autopsies never stopped Kay Scarpetta or Quincy.

Dennis Lehane takes a swerve away from his long running Kenzie and Genaro series (which includes Gone, Baby Gone) and his recent prohibition and gangsters trilogy to deliver a psychological thriller of sorts. Since We Fell is a book that is hard to categorise. In some ways it is an extended character study and in others it is an extremely long con not only of some of the characters but of the reader. For that reason it takes a long time for the novel to really come into focus with some readers possibly only hanging in to resolve the strong opening hook.

Since We Fell opens with a bang, literally. Rachel shoots her husband on the deck of a boat and he flops over the side. Why she has taken the shot and what happens next will have to wait as Lehane takes us back to Rachel’s childhood and her difficult relationship with her mother. Following her mother’s death, Rachel goes on a years long search for the father that she never knew and who her mother refused to tell her about. Through this search she meets Brian, a private detective who, after much trauma on her part comes spectacularly back into her life.

The first two thirds of Since We Fell is essentially a character study of Rachel – the foundation of her deep anxieties and agoraphobia, her desire for safety and security, her extreme response when things don’t turn out the way she expects. Only some of which is really relevant for the final third of the book when the pieces fall into place and the action kicks in. At which point Since We Fell starts to feel like a different book altogether – full of violent goons, sleights of hand and plenty of gun play.

It feels like Lehane is trying to do too much in Since We Fell. The naturalistic exploration of Rachel’s mental state is undermined by the extreme suspension of disbelief needed to follow the plot. And again, in the final third of the book Rachel manages to throw off the burden of mental illness that she has been carrying in order to both forward that plot and be an effective actor in its resolution. The idea being, I think, that all she really needed was something bigger to focus on outside of her own worries.

The lengthy and detailed start of the book becomes irrelevant by about half way through, used only as a way to manoeuvre various characters into place. The original hook is almost forgotten by the time it rolls around again, with only some well-timed hints to keep the reader’s appetite whetted. And its resolution requires such a breathtaking suspension of disbelief that it skews the rest of the plot. The last third, while nominally exciting and well written does not feel it resolves any of the real issues that were raised earlier on and just leaves the reader constantly asking “but why…?”. So that in the end Since We Fell doesn’t work. There is definitely some psychology here but possibly not the psychological thriller that fans of Lehane’s work and of good thrillers more broadly would have been hoping for.

The world seems to be full of highly trained, disaffected, black ops, renegade loners who are trying to do good deeds while being hunted down by their government. Last year, Orphan X, also known as Evan Smoak, joined the ranks of the likes of Jason Bourne and Jack Reacher as the latest highly skilled loner on the block. But there is no need to have read Orphan X to get right into this novel as Gregg Hurwitz covers all of the necessary detail in one paragraph:

“…the Orphan Program, a deep-black project buried inside the Department of Defense. It had identified the right kind of boys [and as it turns out, girls] lost in the system of foster homes, covertly culled them one by one, and trained them to do what the US government could not officially do in places where it could not officially be. A fully deniable, antiseptic program run off a shadow budget.”

When the book opens Smoak has turned his back on the Program and has taken his budget and skills to the street. He is “The Nowhere Man” and will help people in trouble, asking in return only that they pass on his phone number when they know of someone else who needs his help. In this case he comes to the aid of a girl blackmailed and at risk of being trafficked. This job brings him to the attention of some other bad dudes who are after his very healthy Swiss bank account and before long Smoak has been captured himself.

Smoak finds himself up against Renee Cassaroy, a villain who has stepped straight out of the pages of a James Bond book, complete with monologues, a bunch of expendable ex-Sinaloa cartel goons (including one mute goon called Dex who is bigger and badder than the rest), a taste for fine everything and a creepy doctor doing illegal things to keep him looking young. Smoak has come to Renee’s attention due to his bank account and he initially has no idea what Smoak is capable of. But even when he works it out, Renee sees their contest as a game rather than the life and death situation that it is. At the same time, Smoak’s old Orphan crew, still out to kill him themselves, is closing in.

The Nowhere Man sits well within genre tropes but is an enjoyable action thriller. As Smoak’s situation gets worse, his self belief and ability to improvise increase. This leads to some fantastic, hold your breath action scenes. This is cartoon stuff but Smoak is a sympathetic character Hurwitz handles the action with great panache. And it is not real spoiler in this genre to suggest that there will be plenty more Smoak to come.

YOU is one of those books that I've been hearing murmurings about for ages, so when it was talked up by a local publicist who knows her crime fiction well it became required reading. Having said that, I'm well aware that it has also garnered mixed reactions so all in all, quite an intriguing read.

It doesn't take long to identify some of the likely causes of the mixed reactions. YOU is a creepy, sobering and realistic story about stranger obsession which is enough to make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. It's discomfortingly, worrying and more than a bit weird to spend time with somebody talking intimately (in their own heads) to the source of their obsession. 

The you of the title is a young college student / writer living in New York. She's a typical millennial girl, who lives her life in a public stream of Twitter, Facebook and email, willingly surrendering privacy to the point where she's even given up closing curtains in her apartment, regardless of what she's doing / when she's completely nude. It does feels like a very realistic portrayal, made even more disconcerting by something narcissistic, almost wanton about her as well.

The narrator is a seemingly charming, normal, well-read, good looking young bookshop manager. Yet readers may quickly come to believe that he's sociopath. He's certainly obsessive, manipulative and chillingly entitled. 

So not a necessarily likeable pair of characters, but extremely believable and identifiable. Which ends up setting up a very interesting scenario for a reader, who will be confronted with a disconcerting plot of obsession and manipulation, in a manner that's very current day, and feels particularly insidious and particularly scary as much of it revolves around our technological lives. 

Everything in YOU therefore wrong-foots the reader, creating a challenging reading experience of very intimate personal time with rather unpleasant people, wrapped up in obsession, fuelled by the manipulation of technology to control.

Martin Cruz Smith takes a break from his long running Arkady Renko Russian crime series which started with Gorky Park to explore a different corner of history. The Girl from Venice takes readers to Italy in the dying days of the Second World War. Italy is being bombed by the allies and is riven by division as Mussolini and the fascists cling on to power. At the same time the country is playing host to the German Western Front command and an increasingly desperate German army, many of whom can see the writing on the wall.

But the focus of the novel is Innocenzo, or Cenzo, a fisherman of Pallesteria, a small town across the lagoon from Venice. When Cenzo picks up what he thinks to be a dead girl floating in the lagoon he steps into a world of trouble. The girl, Gulia, very much alive, has escaped from a German attack that killed her Jewish family and the two end up in the middle of a number of power plays as various people try to manoeuvre as the war ends. Chief among these is Cenzo’s brother, a famous actor and propagandist for the Mussolini regime.

Cenzo, while having a very different background turns out to be a similar character to Renko. This is not apparent in the first half of the novel where he spends his time as a fisherman hiding Gulia. But when she disappears and he goes with his brother to Salo to find her, Cenzo turns out to be anything but a simple fisherman. Salo is the seat of the German high command and a hotbed of partisan activity. The narrative takes on some of the elements of noir crime fiction as Cenzo navigates this world with amazing aplomb and a healthy disrespect for authority, in a manner reminiscent of Cruz Smith’s Russian detective,

In The Girl From Venice, Cruz Smith effectively captures a point in time. In particular the chaos that accompanied the slow withdrawal of the Germans from Italy. The scenes in Salo as the American army advances, the German army crumbles and the Italians try to work out which side to bet on are particularly fascinating. All this sits in the background to the plot itself, part family drama, part mystery and part romance that keeps the whole ticking along. So that while he falls back on familiar character tropes, Cruz Smith delivers an engaging and fascinating historical drama.

Bill Beverly has taken out 2016 Golden Dagger Awards for both best crime fiction and best debut for Dodgers. This is the type of crime novel that is steeped in the criminal world. There are no murders to be solved, no stunning late novel twists, no confession in the library or carefully staged plea bargains. This is a story about criminals, about crime and redemption, that shines a light on modern America.

East is a yard boy for a Los Angeles drug operation. His job is to manage the group pf teenage boys who stand guard around the houses where people come to buy and take drugs. At fifteen he is already lost to the system, living out of a cardboard box, having to find his own way and working for that gang to support his young single mother. When the drug operation is blown, East is given a new assignment by his boss Fin, a man to whom he is also related – to go with three other boys, including his trigger-happy younger brother Ty, to Wisconsin to kill a potential witness in an upcoming trial.

East and his three companions, young black teens, are all out of their comfort zone and out of their depth as they are asked to drive a van from LA , the only place most of them have ever known, across the middle of America. The four represent different archetypes – Michael the brash older boy who has been to college, Walter the young intellectual used to helping the gang with the books, Ty a thirteen year old killer with a thing for guns and East, the conscience of the group somewhere in the middle, trying to do the right thing.

For a while Dodgers is a bizarre roadtrip in which, as could probably be expected, nothing goes to plan. The more the boys have to improvise the more their desperation and characters emerge. About two thirds of the way through, as the original plan continues to disintegrate in the light of the real world, the book changes pace but not intent, continuing to focus on the situation and plight of the American rust belt through the eyes of outsider East.

Dodgers is a stunning debut. A tough novel full of tough characters often doing questionable things, it nevertheless has a strong sense of humanity. East is an original and sometimes heartbreaking literary creation. A fifteen year old wise before his years but with plenty of growing up still to do. Other characters too, both the boys themselves and people they meet, leap off the page.

If you are looking for a crime novel that provides some modicum of comfort in crimes solved then perhaps Dodgers is not the book for you. But if you want a crime novel that delivers a page turning story but also in a timely way explores American culture and society then Dodgers should be on your list.

The Whistler is an issues novel that uses the framework of a legal procedural. In his recent Grey Mountain, Grisham took on the coal industry, in The Whistler it is the Indian-run casinos and the range of social and political issues that they raise. But in focussing too much on the issues he raises and their potential resolution, he loses sight of the need to for a legal thriller to thrill.

An informant (the whistleblower or ‘whistler’ of the title) brings a potential corruption case to the attention of the Florida Board of Judicial Conduct. The allegation is that a Florida judge has been working with an organised crime gang and has been instrumental over the years in helping establish and then keep in business a casino on Tappacola  land. This not only included favourably ruling on land deals but also possibly having an innocent man sentenced to death in return for a cut of the casino profits. For BJC Investigator Lacy Stolz and her partner Hugo Hatch, this investigation promises to be the most far reaching of their careers. But as they start to investigate they soon find themselves well out of their depth and a target of criminal forces.

Despite some of the trappings of a thriller, The Whistler is rarely anything but a legal procedural. A combination of Board of Judicial Conduct investigation into a potentially corrupt judge and the FBI investigation into the organised crime group that she is working for. Grisham takes readers through the investigation – the lucky breaks, the building of a case, the presentation to the grand jury, the turning of key witnesses – step by step, occasionally providing the criminal’s point of view to solidify or explain some aspect of the plot. While there are undoubtedly some tragic and tense moments as the case builds, Grisham never loses sight of the legal processes that need to grind away to achieve a result.

This tale is made readable by Grisham’s experience in delivering an accessible description of those procedures, the way they operate and the complex web of corruption they are uncovering. His main characters, including Lacy, a strong middle age single woman are well drawn but have limited roles outside of furthering the investigation. And it is left to the minor characters including Lacy’s obnoxious but well resourced brother Gunther and her mysterious informant Greg Myers to add colour to the narrative.

The Whistler is John Grisham’s twenty-ninth legal thriller and once again shows that the formula which he practically invented in his early books – a combination of social commentary, legal shenanigans and fairly low key action that occasionally generates real thrills – is still working. But in The Whistler that formula doesn’t quite fire as it used to. Because after setting up for the bang of a thriller, The Whistler’s end game becomes a lengthy legal procedural whimper.

NOTHING SHORT OF DYING is the debut release from author Erik Storey, which arrived with considerable fanfare. It's flagged as something that will have Lee Child's Reacher watching over his shoulder which clearly flags this is action packed, with a lone hero up against it from all sides central character.

Clyde Barr is a mountain man, hunter and a mercenary. After many years fighting conflicts in Africa amongst other places, and a torrid stint in a Mexican jail he's heading back to his native Colorado, out into the mountains, going bush as we'd say in Australia, looking for a low key sort of life. Which all goes to hell in a hand-basket when he gets a frantic call from one of his sisters, and heads out to save the day. At this point you start to find out that Barr's personal life is anything but uncomplicated, his family is fractured, his younger sister has been a bit of a trial and just about everybody is flat out nasty or at the very least disinterested. Unless you count Allie the barmaid with a sort of heart of gold and taste for adventure, who joins him on quest, serving as companion, love interest and recently arrived conscience or reason to get his act together.

NOTHING SHORT OF DYING is really quite the roller-coaster ride, and in that I'm not just referring to the action packed, race to find and free the sister. There are many highs and lows in dealing with Barr to navigate as well. The action here is bloody and violent, there's a feeling of the wild west about the pace, and the free-wheeling bash, crash and killing spree. Whilst it's obvious that those who have taken Jen are definitely the black hat wearers, Barr's not so easy to pigeon-hole. There are times when he feels like part of the problem - with a tendency to wipe out anybody who even looks like they are going to get in his way, and times he's haunted by memories of things that have gone wrong in the past, people who he's failed to save, bodies he's left in his wake. And of course, there's a budding romance with Allie - who is carting around more than a few issues of her own.

There were points where I absolutely loved NOTHING SHORT OF DYING, and points where I'd cheerfully have flung it across a room. Whilst there are aspects of Barr's characterisation that rang true, that has to balanced up against the constant concept of anything can be solved if you shoot it, hit it hard enough, or drive around it fast enough. All of which has been done - to death - before, although undoubtedly that doesn't sound particularly fair as the same could be said of lots of thrillers. It's all going to come down to a question of connection with Barr and even with Allie. If, as a reader he's somebody you instantly feel you can barrack for, or even just understand a bit, then the quibbles will disappear. If he's somebody you're struggling with, then the lack of subtlety, and the constant bang bang, shoot 'em up, loner out to save the day, getting it wrong, getting it right and the extreme violence is going to be less successful. 

NOTHING SHORT OF DYING is definitely one for readers to make their own minds up about.