Hostile Witness by Rebecca Forster

Hostile Witness by Rebecca Forster

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I'm not entirely sure how to categorize this one. It's hardly a "courtroom procedural", as it's far from typical court procedure. It's a bit of a "whodunnit", but your options are limited from the beginning. But mostly it's a lot of unlikeable characters bulldogging through a trial to come to the truth.

None of the characters are very likable. Josie, the protagonist, is a whiner. She does her job, gets a client (who she believes is innocent) off a murder charge, and then throws her career away when the woman turns out really to be a murderer. Josie's love interest, Archer, handles confrontation by retreating (perhaps understandably, but it doesn't make him any more likeable); her supposed partner, Faye, doesn't want her practising the kind of law she knows Josie is good at; the girl accused of murder doesn't want to be liked; the victim was a creep; his son is a victim of child abuse who turns into a creep; and the accused's mother—and wife of the son—is the biggest creep of the lot.

I Am Not A Lawyer™, but many of the courtroom scenes don't ring true to me—and at least one reviewer who is a lawyer agreed.

There are really only three possibilities for the killer, and Forster commits the cardinal sin in a mystery writer of telling us that somebody else did it. Misleading the reader is good; lying to the reader—not so much.

Red Planet Blues by Robert J. Sawyer

Red Planet Blues by Robert J. Sawyer

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I'm usually a big fan of Sawyer, but I just couldn't get into this one—a sort of Raymond Chandler goes to Mars. The science was almost non-existent—and I love Sawyer mostly for his science—and the characters were two-dimensional at best.

The Burning Room by Michael Connelly

The Burning Room by Michael Connelly

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Still interesting, but it seems Connolly might be trying to write Harry Bosch out of existence, as the ending leaves him very much in the air.

Deadline by John Sandford

Deadline by John Sandford

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Better than the previous outing in the Virgil Flowers series. Funnier and more believable.

Virgil is trying to get an assistant DA onside, and the DA says: "If we go to court, we like to have things pretty well wrapped up." Virgil replies "Dave, I've been doing this for quite a while. You don't want them wrapped up, you want a gold-plated guarantee, because otherwise you're afraid you'll screw up your conviction stats."

Plus ça change... In Canada, it's completely different, but the results are the same... US DAs might prosecute a losing case because it's politically necessary, but here the Crown attorney has no need to bolster conviction stats because they're not elected, but they still refuse to prosecute if they think they won't win.

Sandfor has a way with a simile. ‘The woman with a minimal flesh wound “screamed, "I'm dying, I'm dying, where's the goddamn ambulance." She sounded like a blackboard being run through a table saw.”’

Mandarin Gate by Eliot Pattison

Mandarin Gate by Eliot Pattison

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Another solid entry in Pattison's Inspector Chan series.

In this case, I read more for the fascinating descriptions of Tibet than for the mysteries, but the mysteries hold their own.

I read this immediately following Bone Rattler, which Pattison sets in his own country's history, and I find I prefer his take on Tibet than the history with which he is probably more familiar.

Bone Rattler: A Mystery of Colonial America by Eliot Pattison

Bone Rattler: A Mystery of Colonial America by Eliot Pattison

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I had a lot of trouble with this, and nearly gave up on it.

In short, there's a lot of racism, and I'm not entirely convinced it's all the racism of the characters.  The protagonist, Duncan McCallum, is a convict transported from Britain to the New York colony in 1759, and he has the prejudices one might expect of someone completely unfamiliar with the American natives. But, as his vision is expanded and he learns how little he originally knew, there's too much of the "noble savage" in the natives he later meets (and for that matter in the only black character) for me to be comfortable.

Also, Pattison seems to know a lot about Tibetan culture and as much as one might expect of an American about American history and culture, but I have a really hard time believing his English characters...

The Republic of Thieves by Scott Lynch

The Republic of Thieves by Scott Lynch

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is not your usual crime caper. Locke Lamora and his partner Jean are the last remnants of an organized crime ring—in a fantasy world with a medieval setting. But, hey, I love crime novels and fantasy, so why not...

I've been waiting through two books for this, and it was worth the wait. We know from the very beginning of The Lies of Locke Lamora that his lost love, Sabetha, is central to ... well, everything. So finally, we meet her, and she is everything we expected.

Naturally, when they do finally meet, they're maneuvered into being on opposite sides...

The story takes place in three disjoint periods. We see the earliest days of Locke Lamora's memory, when he first meets (and loses) Sabetha.  Then there's the framing plot, in which Locke and the Gentleman Bastards (including the found-again Sabetha) are performing the play which give the novel its name, The Republic of Thieves, during which Locke and Sabetha become lovers. Finally, we have the latest installment of Locke's, and his sidekick Jean's, lives in which they're coerced into an odd political contest where they have to rig an election. Even though it would cost him his life, Locke might still have refused until told that Sabetha is working to rig the election the other way.

So far, the series isn't losing any steam.

The Son by Jo Nesbø

The Son: A novel by Jo Nesbø

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My wife has a fascination with Scandinavian mysteries that is completely beyond my comprehension. I mostly find them too bleak to tolerate, but so far I've enjoyed Jo Nesbø's "Harry Hole" series, and I read them as fast as they get translated into English (which is for some odd reason not in the order they were published in Norway...).

This isn't a Hole novel. And that's a good thing, because it's much better. In my opinion, this is Nesbø's masterpiece. A tightly written police procedural, where you get all the clues you need to solve the crime, but probably won't see the light until nearly the end of the story. I loved every moment of this one.

Personal by Lee Child

Personal by Lee Child
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Surprisingly, still as good as ever. Reacher's funny, cool, and always a little bit smarter and faster than his opponents.

The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters

The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This tale takes a rather different tack to apocalyptic events than most such stories.

The protagonist is a (dedicated) policeman, in a world with a known expiry date: an asteroid is on a collision course with the Earth, and while it may not wipe out all life, it's certainly going to put an end to human civilization. So, many people are happy to let civilization go early, including policemen, and the load falls on the few who stay on their jobs.

When you know the world is going to end, can you—should you—hold it together as long as possible?

Angelica's Smile by Andrea Camilleri

Angelica's Smile by Andrea Camilleri
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another fine, hilarious, romp from the master of Sicilian crime novels, and his equally masterful translator Stephen Sartirelli.

In this outing, Montalbano needs to solve a series of burglaries. Along the way, he meets the beautiful Angelica, who reminds the inspector of his own teenaged fantasies of the Angelica of Orlando Furioso. Consequently, Camirelli peppers the story with quotes from Orlando Furioso, leaving poor Sartirelli to say "in certain cases I had to retranslate the excerpt because the Reynolds translation no longer contained the textual ambiguities that enabled Camilleri to apply the passage to his own story."  I really don't pity the translator's job, but Sartirelli is always up to the challenge.

Treasure Hunt by Andrea Camilleri

Treasure Hunt by Andrea Camilleri

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Yet another brilliantly written whodunnit about Chief Inspector Montalbano from Andrea Camilleri. You get all the clues, and any careful reader should be able to figure out the culprit before it's over. But Camilleri never springs any surprises and there's never an annoying Deus Ex Machina to solve the puzzle. On top of Camilleri's excellent mystery writing, we have his descriptions of the food and geography of Sicily that read like a travelogue. And finally Stephen Sartarelli's amazing translations!

In this entry, the initial crime is almost inconsequential, but it leads Montalbano to accept the challenge to go on a "treasure hunt".  As always, I find myself sidetracked by Sartarelli's translation magic. One of the clues in the treasure hunt is a simple substitution cipher, and I initially wondered at the ability to translate it wholesale into English, before it occurred to me that he actually just translated the plaintext, and then used the rules deduced by the inspector to recreate the enciphered text, but it doesn't detract from Sartarelli's brilliance.

You get no medals for being able to figure out who's leading Montalbano on this treasure hunt, and the conclusion is fairly predictable, but you'll enjoy yourself almost every step of the way (there is one particularly gruesome murder that I hope you don't enjoy...)

The Dance of the Seagull by Andrea Camilleri

The Dance of the Seagull by Andrea Camilleri

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There's not much to be said about Andrea Camilleri's Montalbano mysteries that I haven't said before. They're mostly tightly written whodunnit's. You get all the clues and any careful reader should be able to figure out the culprit before it's over. But Camilleri never springs any surprises and there's never an annoying Deus Ex Machina to solve the puzzle. On top of Camilleri's excellent mystery writing, we have his descriptions of the food and geography of Sicily that read like a travelogue. And finally Stephen Sartarelli's amazing translations!

In this entry, it's not so much a whodunnit, as a what-was-it-that-was-dun. Montalbano's senior investigator, Fazio, disappears, apparently while involved in an investigation, and when found he's suffering from temporary amnesia from a couple of blows to the head. Montalbano has to figure out both who tried to kill Fazio, and why.  Following the trail leads to a one-time ballet dancer who may have tried to blackmail someone. The only really sour note in the story comes when Montalbano finds a letter to the dancer, and completely misinterprets it. I'd venture to say that any Canadian reader, and most American or British readers, would have the identical reaction that I did, that Montalbano was extremely obtuse to not understand who the author was. But I don't think any amount of superlative editing could change the fact that this is probably a cultural difference between Sicily and practically anywhere else in the Western world.

Anyway, Camilleri is brilliant!

Let It Ride by John McFetridge

Let It Ride by John McFetridge
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It's not a mystery and it's not really a thriller (though it's labelled as both), but somehow this story managed to keep my attention pretty thoroughly.

It's a thinly disguised tale of what's actually going on in Canadian organized crime. One of the review quotes on the back cover praised McFetridge's imagination, and wondered where he could come up with this stuff. I figure the reviewer must have been American, because no Canadian could have missed many of these details: The Saints of Hell (read "Hell's Angels"); the Lone Gunmen (read "Bandidos" — the massacre of the Lone Gunmen happened pretty much as-written, to the Bandidos, just a few kilometers from my home); the ex-leader of the Saints, "Mon Oncle"  Bouchard and the ex-leader of the Hells Angels in Canada, "Mom" Boucher; even the arrest and trial of many of the narcotics officers who were supposed to be taking down these criminals. 

But the fact that the author used real events in the biker wars to back his story doesn't detract in any way from a pretty good read. 

I can't say I agree with McFetridge's apparent belief that we Canadians all really want to be Americans, but maybe I'm just putting his characters opinions in his own head. I do love the details about how the Canadian bikers, even though affiliated with the American gangs had their own constitutions that were more egalitatarian: they permitted blacks and ex-cops! McFetridge also pretty much nails Canadian racism: we all like to think we're less racist than America, and by and large we probably are, but there are still very real barriers to equality. Sunitha's father's story of immigrating to Canada from India, only to find that he'd never be allowed to be a Canadian in anything but name, is  too often heard.

The Gods of Guilt by Michael Connelly

The Gods of Guilt (Lincoln Lawyer) by Michael Connelly
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm not sure whether I like Michael Connolly's “Lincoln Lawyer”, Mickey Haller, or Hieronymus (Harry) Bosch better. I think it probably depends which one I've read most recently!

Whatever the case, I love Mickey Haller. Mickey is conflicted. He knows that the job he does as a criminal defense lawyer is important, and he knows that he's very, very, good at it. But he also knows that sometimes he helps guilty men walk. And that makes him feel guilty too. While that guilt makes him human, and occasionally drives him to drink, he's not the kind of self-indulgent sot that I so hate in mysteries.

I won't spoil the revelation to explain who the Gods of Guilt of the title are, but of course it also refers to all the people who Mickey feels are judging him for the choices he's made through his career (not all of whom are even alive).

There's no “whodunnit” here. We know almost immediately that Mickey's client is innocent, and it doesn't take much longer to be pretty sure who is guilty. What is here in this story is a solid courtroom procedural, with plenty of soul-searching about how one does the right thing, and even what that right thing is.

The Fatal Touch by Conor Fitzgerald

The Fatal Touch (Commissario Alec Blume) by Conor Fitzgerald
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Not as good as Fitzgerald's first outing, but still enjoyable.

I had some difficulty with credibility, but the reader has to remember we're talking about Italy. Or at least the Italy of crime fiction. The corrupt Carabiniere seems over-the-top, and certainly would be if set in North America, but is probably not worse than I have seen in other crime fiction set in Italy. I don't know enough, personally, about Italy to know how corrupt the police are, but one suspects that the novels might not be telling the whole story.

On the positive side, the police work is solid, and clues don't have to appear by wild coincidence to advance the plot.