Grounded

Gone to Ground by John Harvey

(Actually read this some time ago) Not a Resnick one but very good nevertheless.

Will’s first thought when he saw the man’s face: it was like a glove that had been pulled inside out…Stephen Bryan, a gay academic, is found brutally murdered in his bathroom. Will Grayson and Helen Walker, police detectives investigating the case, at first assume that his death is the result of an ill-judged sexual encounter: rough trade gone wrong. But doubts are soon raised. Bryan’s laptop has gone missing – could the murder be connected to a biography he was writing on the life and mysterious death of fifties screen legend, Stella Leonard? Convinced there’s a link, Bryan’s sister Lesley sets out to prove that Bryan had uncovered a dangerous truth, and that – desperate to keep it hidden – Stella Leonard’s rich and influential family have silenced him. But soon both Lesley and Helen Walker find themselves victims of the violence that swirls around them, as gradually the investigation uncovers the secrets of a family corrupted by lust, wealth and power…

One of the more recent ones and I think this was in fact the first Harvey I picked up. Mainly set in Cambridge rather than Nottingham but some of the characters do cross over from Resnick series. Really is rather good – well-paced, well-plotted and just an entertaining read.

Headway

The Maintenance of Headway by Magnus Mills

‘It’s a matter of procedure,’ I explained. ‘Strictly for the record. You don’t get sacked from this job unless you did what Thompson did.’ ‘What did he do then?’ ‘We never mention it.’ In Magnus Mills’ brilliant short novel he transports us into the bizarre world of the bus drivers who take us to work, to the supermarket, to the match and home again. It is a strange but all too real universe in which ‘the timetable’ and ‘maintenance of headway’ are sacred, but where the routes can change with the click of an inspector’s fingers and the helpless passengers are secondary. The journey from the southern outpost to the arch, the circus and the cross will seem as familiar as your regular route, but then Magnus Mills shows you the almost religious fervour which lies behind it, and how it is fine to be a little bit late but utterly unforgivable to be a moment early.

Very reminiscent of The Scheme for Full Employment but none the worse for that. Mills writes in a cool, deadpan style and delivers a surreal tale of the strange life on the buses which is compellingly realised and never dull.

Last writes

Last Rites by John Harvey

Getting towards the end of the Resnick series and they do just get better and better:

Lorraine Preston’s brother, Michael, was sent down for life for the murder of their father – and now he’s being allowed out for their mother’s funeral. A hardened criminal, Michael Preston is the last person Resnick wants back on his patch, even is it’s only for a matter of hours. Heartsore and world-weary, Resnick is struggling to contain an explosive situation on the streets, where the spread of guns has led to a frightening escalation in drug-related crime. The local force, meanwhile, is riven by internal rivalries and rumours of corruption. With his previously stable relationship with Hannah Campbell wavering, Resnick is forced back on his self-belief, his understanding of people. Why – himself included – they do the things they do.

Really don’t want them to end.

Who let the dogs out?

The Dogs of Riga by Henning Mankell

Second in the Wallander series – and some exceptional challenges for Kurt:

Sweden, winter, 1991. Inspector Kurt Wallander and his team receive an anonymous tip-off. A few days later a life raft is washed up on a beach. In it are two men, dressed in expensive suits, shot dead. The dead men were criminals, victims of what seems to have been a gangland hit. But what appears to be an open-and-shut case soon takes on a far more sinister aspect. Wallander travels across the Baltic Sea, to Riga in Latvia, where he is plunged into a frozen, alien world of police surveillance, scarcely veiled threats, and lies. Doomed always to be one step behind the shadowy figures he pursues, only Wallander’s obstinate desire to see that justice is done brings the truth to light.

It is rollercoaster stuff and the Lativan escapade is particularly exciting. Also serves as a reminder of what already seems like a different age.

Mazy business

The Maze by Panos Karnezis

A really well written (and translated) novel following the mazy journey of a lost Greek brigade towards the coast and salvation:

Set in Anatolia in 1922, a Greek expedition, lost in the desert, bickers among itself and blunders forwards toward the coast. Brigadier Nestor is as addicted to morphia as he is to Greek myths; Father Simeon is as disappointed in himself as he is passionately sincere in his religion; and the Bolshevik Major Porfirio, who has failed in his attempt to win any men to his cause, save for his colonel, are each wonderful creations.

Lying in the recent memory of all these men is a massacre of Turkish civilians carried out by the brigade, which weighs on them heavily. Coming across a town the brigade settles in for a few days. Here Nestor can investigate fully the recent thefts that have plagued him and try to work out who is behind the communist propaganda circulating the camp. As readers we are given the opportunity to meet, among others, Mr Othon, the schoolmaster, the foolish Mayor and his fiancé, the town’s beautiful and exotic prostitute Madame Violetta, her maid Annina and her lover Yusuf the gardener.

Really excellent characterisation here, particularly the Brigadier, his chief of staff and the Padre, but having set the scene extremely well in the first two thirds of the book the later sections feel somewhat underdeveloped and rushed. Bit of a missed opportunity perhaps but nevertheless a good read.

Times is Hard

Hard Times by Charles Dickens

Seems a bit churlish to be at all critical of such a classic but there is something ever so slightly unsatisfactory about the ending and the moralistic dimension of the novel. Having said that, there is much to be enjoyed, including a number of the central characters, especially Gradgrind, Bounderby and Sissy.

Slightly ashamed to recall writing an essay on Hard Times at university without ever having read the book (until now). Got a good mark for it too.

Thrilling stuff

The girl with the dragon tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Forty years ago, Harriet Vanger disappeared from a family gathering on the island owned and inhabited by the powerful Vanger clan. Her body was never found, yet her uncle is convinced it was murder – and that the killer is a member of his own tightly knit but dysfunctional family.

He employs disgraced financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist and the tattooed, truculent computer hacker Lisbeth Salander to investigate. When the pair link Harriet’s disappearance to a number of grotesque murders from forty years ago, they begin to unravel a dark and appalling family history. But the Vangers are a secretive clan, and Blomkvist and Salander are about to find out just how far they are prepared to go to protect themselves.

This really is an excellent yarn, an exciting and compelling thriller. Seems also to have sold squillions of copies worldwide and is one of those books always recommended on Amazon, no matter which other books you are interested in. Was genuinely surprised how much I enjoyed it. The back story about the author is also intriguing:

Stieg Larsson was the Editor-in-Chief of the magazine Expo. He was a leading expert on anti-democratic, right-wing extremist organisations. He died in 2004, soon after delivering the text of the novels that make up the Millennium Trilogy.

Looking forward to reading the next one. And no doubt the movie is already in production…

Museum piece

Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson

From the back cover:

Ruby Lennox was conceived grudgingly by Bunty and born while her father, George, was in the Dog and Hare in Doncaster telling a woman in an emerald dress and a D-cup that he wasn’t married. Bunty had never wanted to marry George, but here she was, stuck in a flat above the pet shop in an ancient street beneath York Minster, with sensible and sardonic Patrica aged five, greedy cross-patch Gillian who refused to be ignored, and Ruby…Ruby tells the story of The Family, from the day at the end of the nineteenth century when a travelling French photographer catches frail beautiful Alice and her children, like flowers in amber, to the startling, witty, and memorable events of Ruby’s own life.

Rapturously received first novel this and one that I did enjoy but perhaps not quite as much as I had hoped. Whilst there are many entertaining and compelling characters in the family cast the episodic and slightly uneven and disjointed nature of the tales as they jump across the generations made matters (and the family tree) rather difficult to follow at times. Still, very well written and a pleasure to read although subsequent novels are stronger I think.

The Scheme

The Scheme for Full Employment by Magnus Mills

‘Life on The Scheme is like being in a great big feather bed. You’ve got your full uniform provided, winter and summer, subsidized cups of tea and sandwiches, the opportunity for a quiet doze in a lay-by while you wait to clock off, and a generous weekly wage. And all you’ve got to do is turn up for work every day! But it could all so easily come to an end. Already, workers are beginning to divide into opposing camps, and a new superintendent has arrived, intent on sending The Scheme the way of ‘all those other failed social experiments, like public transport, school dinners and municipal orchestras’.

A short, odd and really rather entertaining novel.

Nether Nether Land

Netherland by Joseph O’Neill

Mixed reviews on this but I really rather enjoyed it. Plot-wise not a lot actually happens:

In early 2006, Chuck Ramkissoon is found dead at the bottom of a New York canal. In London, a Dutch banker named Hans van den Broek hears the news, and remembers his unlikely friendship with Chuck and the off-kilter New York in which it flourished: the New York of 9/11, the powercut and the Iraq war. Those years were difficult for Hans — his English wife Rachel left with their son after the attack, as if that event revealed the cracks and silences in their marriage, and he spent two strange years in New York’s Chelsea Hotel, passing stranger evenings with the eccentric residents. Lost in a country he’d regarded as his new home, Hans sought comfort in a most alien place — the thriving but almost invisible world of New York cricket, in which immigrants from Asia and the West Indies play a beautiful, mystifying game on the city’s most marginal parks.

And the cricket element is, rather disappointingly, underplayed. But nevertheless found this a quiet, serious and surprisingly moving novel.