Dennis Lehane: The Drop

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A Drop of "Boston Noir"
This is a drop of US "Noir" about the life of a Boston barkeeper, "reformed" criminal Bob Saginowski, an apparently simple and lonely man who likes to keep out of sight and out of trouble. Even at daily Mass he doesn't connect with any of the regulars, and refuses to take Communion.

One day Bob's simple personal life ends when he finds a battered puppy left for death in a dumpster and meets Nadia Dunn, another loner, who shows him how to care of the puppy. The relationship between these two damaged people and their love for the dog was probably the best part of the book for me. Things get difficult when Eric Deeds, a criminal psychopath, claims the dog is his and Bob takes a stand to keep the pup.

Bob works for in Cousin Marv's bar, now controlled by the Chechen mafia who are using the bar as a random money drop for their criminal gambling and prostitution activities. Things start to go bad when the bar is robbed of $5,000 after hours. The real problem is that the Chechen boss is going to want that money back.

I really couldn't connect to the characters and the settings, probably because I am an Aussie and it is outside my familarity/comfort zone. This story was first released as a short story "Animal Rescue," in an anthology "Boston Noir", which was adapted to become a screenplay for a movie - which I won't be rushing out to see.

Debbie Macomber: On a Clear Day

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Two enjoyable books I had missed
This is really two oldies by Debbie Macomber - STARLIGHT and PROMISE ME FOREVER - which have been reworked and published as a single book. Both are short and easy-reading romances in Macomber's inimitable style.

STARLIGHT is about Rand Prescott who has a chip on his shoulder because he is blind and doesn't want to enter into a relationship because he doesn't want to be a burden to anyone. Karen McAlister is suffering in a different way because her father constantly talks about her getting married. When Rand and Karen meet they are immediately attracted to on another but Rand doesn't want to share the burden of his blindness with her.

PROMISE ME FOREVER  is about Joy Nielsen, a physiotherapist who is looking after Sloan Whittaker confined to a wheelchair with a spinal injury after a serious accident. Sloane seems to have lost the will to try to walk again and has given up on his family, friends and business.  Joy is determined to get him walking but that means she has to help him to start caring about his life again.

In the past I have been suspicious of books that recycle an author's earlier books that are out of print. I really enjoyed both stories as they are certainly a couple of Macomber's early books that I am glad to have the opportunity to read now.

Karen M Davis: Deadly Obsession

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Lexie's Back
This is the second in a crime/police series about Dectective Lexie Rogers set in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney written by Karen M Davies. Karen's 20 year experience in the police force makes this series very authentic and believable.

During six years as a uniformed cop, Lexie Rogers has reached her career objective - to be a plain clothes detective. To get there she experienced a lot of terrible things, including being stabbed and left for dead by a member of a violent bikie gang and at the end of the first book in the series, SINISTER INTENT she was shot when facing up to a couple of renegade cops. She relives these incidents daily. On top of all of this she has been through a divorce and lost her brother, also a policeman, who was killed when he was on duty.

While Lexie is facing up to all of this the final blow came when her professional partner, Josh Harrison walks out on their close and loving personal relationship when his sister commits suicide. Josh should have been the tough one but he takes leave, goes to Bali and drowns his sorrows in a constant alcoholic binge.

Lexie is back with her first professional partner DS Brad Sommers when they are called to a bizarre possible suicide when a young woman is found near to Clovelly Beach holding a single red rose. When the body is turned Lexie sees a small very recognisable tatoo which she has seen recently on a woman in a bar. What stuns her is that the woman was with her ex-husband Zak who soon becomes one of the main suspects.

There are soon many suspects when they find out that the murdered woman, Melissa McDermott, a nurse from the UK was a very big party girl and extremely promiscuous. The case turns into a murder investigation when the pathologist finds a single needle wound in her neck.The case deepens when the Pathologist also comments that she had seen a another possible suicide recently with a similar puncture in her neck.

Once again Karen Davis shows us her considerable inside knowledge of the dynamics of the force and the different types of officers - the young, the aggressive, the old and weary, the predators etc. - who  have to work together on a difficult case.  They again have their range of unusual nicknames - Cakes, Batman and even Amazing Grace. She also gives us an insight into undercover work, especially for those who choose to work undercover for years and have to take on the persona of the people they are investigating.

All in all another it was a good authentic police/crime thriller but it didn't have the same impact on me as the first book in the series, probably because I guessed the killer early in the book and felt the reactions of Josh to his sister's death was over done and Lexie's reactions on his return were a somewhat unbelievable.

I started reading this book first and quickly realised that, although it can be read as a standalone, there were some personal dynamics from the first book that I would miss. So I put it aside and read SINISTER INTENT first and I'm glad I did. This book was an enjoyable and page-turning read and I look forward to other books in the series.

Barbara Hannay: Moonlight Plains

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Good Australian Outback Romance
There are a crop of recent outback/homestead romances around and this is one of the better ones. Barbara Hannay has continued her bestselling Fairburn family romances by stepping slightly sideways to bring in the story of Kitty Martin in wartime Townsville and the Charters Towers area of outback North Queensland during WWII.

In February 1942 Kitty was alone in her Grandfather's homestead "Moonlight Plains" (he was away on a muster) when she heard two planes overhead and one of them crashes. Despite thinking that they may be Japanese, she goes out in the paddock to find out what is happening and meets Captain Ed Langley who had landed to try and save his buddy Bobby who has been seriously injured in the crash of the second plane. She helps Ed rescue Bobby but unfortunately his wounds from the crash are fatal. Later on back in Townsville she meets Ed again but their reunion is a family secret that will be kept for more than 70 years.

Moving on to the present day Kitty is a very old lady in a retirement home and gets to know Sally Piper, a young and beautiful photo-journalist, who frequently visits her grandmother at the same home. Sally travels to Moonlight Plains on a journalistic assignment to see Kitty's grandson, Josh Fairburn, a cattleman turned builder who is restoring this grand old Queensland homestead where Kitty first met Ed. While they are immediately attracted to one another their attraction is hampered because Sally is still recovering from the death of her husband three years ago.

The setting in wartime Townsville, with the "invasion" of American troops on their way to the war in the Pacific gave the book a new dimension for me. I didn't realise that so many American troops passed through Townville and I also didn't know that the Townsville was bombed on several occasions in July 1942 by Japanese planes based in Raboul.

I found this a very easy book to read, and the characters well formed and realistic. I look forward to reading other books in the series.

Kathy Reichs: Swamp Bones

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"Pythonous" bones
Many popular authors write short e-book novellas as promos for their next book, and in most cases they are really not worth reading. SWAMP BONES by Kathy Reichs is an exception - a great self-contained novella which covers new "bone" territory for Tempe Brennan and involves her investigating and solving multiple murders in a book that only takes a couple of hours to read.

Forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan is taking a well earned vacation visiting a good friend Lisa Robbin in Florida. Lisa is a dedicated ornithologist who is checking out the stomach contents of introduced Burmese pythons who are eating their way through indigenous animal and bird species in the Everglades. Within minutes of meeting her friend in her laboratory, Tempe makes a chilling discovery that the stomach contents that Lisa is examining clearly contain human foot bones. Tempe's vacation is immediately put on hold.

In a relatively few pages Reichs takes us through murder investigations in the Florida Everglades where the victims have been carved up by a chain saw and left as meals for vultures, pythons and alligators. The action takes place in the darkest depths of the swamp at the same time as many hunters are in the Everglades competing in "The Python Challenge" with prizes for the most killed, longest etc from State Fish and Wildlife.

I give top marks to Kathy Reichs for a very different, chilling and well written novella. Given her current writing form I am looking forward to the next full length Tempe Brennan novel BONES NEVER LIE  to be released on 23 September 2014.

Mira Jacob: The Sleepwalkers Guide to Dancing

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Memorable and emotional story
I was fascinated by the title of THE SLEEPWALKERS GUIDE TO DANCING and then I was also fascinated by this excellent debut multi-generational and multicultural family story by talented author Mira Jacob.

Brain surgeon Thomas Eapen, his wife Kamala and son Akhil moved from India to New Mexico in the late 1960's, and daughter, Amina is born in the US. In 1979 Jacob takes the family back to India to revisit their his family, dominated by the matriarch of the family Ammachy who is plotting to get Thomas to move back to India. The visit tells us a lot about the stresses in his family background and the bonds that Thomas and his family have to deal with in their new life in America. The bonds are there but the tolerance isn't and Thomas cuts the visit short, much to the dismay of Ammachy and their Indian relatives.

Jacob tells most of the story through the eyes of Amina, in her early teens and then in her early 30's as she copes with the strains on her family and especially her bonds to her father. Jacob moves us seamlessly from India to America and between the years. At the start of the book Amina, then living and working as a wedding photographer in Seattle, gets a message from Kamala that her father, Thomas, is acting very strangely, staying up most of the night, apparently talking to dead relatives and burying things in the garden. Although she knows that Kamala often exaggerates, she is persuaded to go back to find out what is happening.

Amina soon realises that to help her father and to understand his actions she needs to revisit her family's painful past and the tensions that still haunt her family. She explores the bonds of love, the grief of loss and the need to make peace with the past. She also needs to explore and face up to her personal future, and her career as a photographer with artistic ambitions.

Mira Jacob has an uncanny ability to describe the dynamics of an Indian family living in a western society. Her description of how Kamala still keeps her Indian heritage in a new country is palpable. Kamala still mostly wears a sari (incongruously with tennis shoes), and drives and dominates here family by cooking traditional Indian dishes in abundance and getting upset if they don't eat what she gives them.

This is very different family literary fiction of the highest order, bringing us close to many memorable characters and following the fortunes of a multicultural family. Jacob's prose is easy to read and gives us great observations of a family struggling to cope with itself and their environment. I would recommend this to anyone who wants to read a family saga that is very different and enlightening.

Karen M Davis: Sinister Intent

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Great début crime novel
This is a great début crime/police novel by former detective Karen M Davis which kept my attention from beginning to end. The story is set in Sydney where bikie  (motor-cycle) gangs are at the centre of organised crime.

After six years as a uniformed cop, Lexie Rogers has reached her career objective - to be a detective. Getting there has not been easy and she has been exposed to the worst things that can happen while policing the dregs of society. A few months ago she was stabbed and left for dead by a member of a bikie gang  in the red-light Kings Cross area of Sydney. While she has recovered physically she still relives the horror of the attack, especially at night. On top of all of this she has been through a divorce and lost her brother, also a policeman, who was killed when he was on duty.

Her new long-time detective partner accidentally broke his leg and her temporary partner is DS Josh Harrington, handsome, single and unattached. Josh takes the lead role in a big murder hunt for a drive-by killer of a 'Bluey' a member of the Devil's Guardians motor cycle gang. The investigations focuses on the animosity between the Guardians and the Assassins bikie gangs recently elevated by a pub brawl over a girl-friend. Both tough guy leaders of the gangs, Rex Donaldson and Max Croft, and their leading members are checked out and interviewed by the police, a difficult task given the intense distrust of the police by both gangs. Their is also a long-term intense personal hatred between Donaldson and Croft.

Davis uses her actual experience of policing of bikie gangs to give us a realistic insight into the organisation of the gangs, the kind of people who are members and the range of outlandish nicknames - Bluey, Rowdy, Keg and Maggot. What is especially fascinating is that while most of them are from the dregs of society, Davis is never judgmental about the gangs or  their members, and much of the story focuses on the personal feelings, psychologicial outlook and relationships between the members.

Davis also uses her actual experience of working for many years with the police force to describe the dynamic of the force and the different types of officers - the young, the aggressive, the old and weary, the predators etc. - who  have to work together on a difficult case. They also have their range of unusual nicknames - Batman, Lurch Grumpy and Sleazeman. It is a behind-the-scenes look at the force that only someone who worked there could write.

This is a story that looks into the hearts, minds and politics of the bikie gangs and the police who try to keep them under control. There are twists and turns in the plot, a love story, intense personal feelings between the major bikie gang characters and great and sometimes emotional twists towards the end. We meet a number of unforgettable characters who I am sure will feature in future books in this series.

This is crime fiction at its best written by someone who has had a close personal relationship with the police force. In her author postscript Karen Davis tells us about her 20 year career with the force ending with PTSD after years of witnessing distressing events and dealing with the seedier side of life. To her surprise she found that writing about it was psychologically beneficial as it helped to release some suppressed emotions. With this excellent début novel she has established herself as a talented novelist and I hope that she continues to share her real-life experiences in further novels.

I started reading and enjoying the next book in the series, DEADLY OBSESSION first and quickly realised that, although it can be read as a standalone, there were some personal dynamics from the first book that I would miss. So I put it aside and read this book first. I'm glad I did and I really look forward to going back to reading DEADLY OBSESSION very soon.

Daniel Silva: The Messenger

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Gabriel Allon vs Jihad Incorporated
Daniel Silva has written some excellent espionage/covert ops books in the Gabriel Allon series and this is one of the best. Gabriel Allon is one of the most fascinating characters in modern espionage fiction. He operates in two quite distinct worlds, that of a world renowned art restorer and that of a senior operative of Israel's Security Intelligence Service - "the Office". He is a skilled artist in both worlds, one very gentle and the other, while still very skilled, at times can be very violent.

Allon is once again pulled out of retirement with news that jihad bombers may be targeting the Vatican. This sets Gabriel and his team from the Office on a chase to find the mastermind for the bombers, thought to be Ahmed bin Shafiq, a former chief of a clandestine Saudi intelligence unit, who has set up his own "Jihad Incorporated" organisation,. They believe that bin Shafiq has been bankrolled by Saudi billionaire Abdul Aziz al-Bakari, better known just as Zizi, who is known for his expensive tastes especially for his valuable collection of Impressionist paintings.

Gabriel plans to infiltrate Zizi's entourage by using a missing Impressionist painting as bait, and hopefully identify bin Shafiq who has not been seen for years. To do this he needs to find someone to deliver the bait and goes to Adrian Carter, a top CIA operative. for help. Carter is a very old school spook and generates my favourite quote of the book "According to office wits (at the CIA) Carter left chalk marks on the bedpost when he wanted to make love to his wife". Carter finds beautiful and very brave art expert Sarah Bancroft to set the bait.

The action moves from Jerusalem to Rome, Venice, Washington, London, Paris, the Bahamas and back to Rome. In the course of the action Gabriel gets close up and personal to the Pope and the US President.. Silva provides us with explosive endings but in the process creates a future threat to world peace to make sure that Gabriel will not go into permanent retirement.

I revisited this book because it was discounted recently as an e-book daily deal for pocket-change. I am glad I did as it is still one of the best of the series and although it is 8 years since it was first published the content hasn't dated.

Peter Robinson: Children of the Revolution: An Inspector Banks Novel #22

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Another very good UK police procedural
There is a certain comfort in reading another good UK police procedural, and Peter Robinson is definitely one of the masters of the genre. This is a mixture of first-class team police investigations mixed in with a maverick investigation by Inspector Banks.

After 22 books in the series the lead character, Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks, is getting older and nearing the normal retirement age of 60. His area commander, Catherine Gervaise, suggests that he has the choice of early retirement or, if he toes the line and controls his maverick tendencies, he might get the nod to become Detective Superintendent and can stay on till 65.

In CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks is faced with finding the possible killer of a retired disgraced reclusive academic, Gavin Miller, who is found dead having fallen from a footbridge over a disused railway. There are signs of a struggle pre-mortem, the bridge rails were too high to fall over and Miller has £5,000 in used notes in his pocket. As Miller has been a virtual recluse since his retirement, Banks' team have few initial clues, other than the background to the forced retirement, a small personal drug stash, and his last phone calls to help them with their investigations.

Banks and his team then follow two lines of inquiry, Miller's questionable dismissal 4 years ago from a local academic institution for sexual molestation, and a recent phone call to wealthy and successful author Lady Veronica Chalmers, who says that the call was alumni fundraising and denies any personal knowledge of Miller. There are lies on all sides and Banks soon finds that Lady Veronica's family have very powerful connections and he has to put his career at risk and use his maverick abilities to find out the truth.

As always the story is set in the Yorkshire Dales, a lovely but frequently very wild part of England. Robinson's description of the countryside is especially evocative of the moors, and becks and streams criss-crossing the dales. He gives a marvelous description of a moorland pub with roaring open fire that served “Hot pie in t’oven” which turned out to be “Game Pie" with a warning “Watch out for t’shot” (before a piece of buckshot broke one of his teeth).

This is a very good but not outstanding book by Peter Robinson, a Canadian who was born in Yorkshire. His key character Alan Banks is a real Yorkshire copper who “thrives on circumstance, contradiction, and coincidence” which are the warning signs that he always keeps a lookout for. I will also be on the lookout for the next book in the series because there is still a lot of life left in Inspector Banks.

Bernard Cornwell: Sharpe's Trafalgar

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A Sharpe adventure on the high seas
I am becoming addicted to Bernard Cornwell's superb action-packed historically detailed fictional series about Richard Sharpe, an English  foot-soldier in India and the Napoleonic wars at the end of the 18th and start of the 19th Century. This time Sharpe takes to the high seas and at the end of a long voyage home from India gets involved in the Battle of Trafalgar, the largest and bloodiest sea battle of the days of sail.

Richard Sharpe was born and raised in poverty and joined the British army and was sent to serve in India. He quickly made his mark as a Sergeant but was promoted from the ranks to become a commissioned officer for an “act of outstanding bravery” when he saved the life of General Arthur Wellesley (later the Duke of Wellington). At that time most officers purchased their commissions and looked down at Sharpe as an interloper with no class, and his men don’t think he is a proper officer.

Sharpe is on his way back to England from India on “Calliope” an East India Company ship. Fellow passengers are Lord William and beautiful but very aloof Lady Grace Hale. Initially there is little contact between Lady Grace and Sharpe but her fascination with Sharpe’s character and persistence (he is a rugged ladies man), Lord William’s addiction to laudanum (an opiate) as a sleeping draft and the tedium a long voyage bring them much closer together.

Part way through the voyage the Calliope is hijacked by a French warship, the "Revanant", off Mauritius and the ship is left under the control of a small prize crew. When English man-of-war, the "Pucelle", finds them Sharpe takes control of the ship by cutting the steering ropes. He is reunited with Captain Joel Chase who became a friend in Bombay when Sharpe saved Chase from a very violent encounter with Indian businessmen who swindled both of them.

In a very clever literary move Cornwell sets the Pucelle  in pursuit of the Revanant ending the chase in Spanish waters at a time when huge opposing fleets from England, and France and Spain, are about to meet in  the Battle of Trafalgar. This is where Cornwell excels - authentically researched historical contexts and adrenaline-pumping action-packed description of battles.  The reader is right in the centre of the naval battle, with the noise and recoil from broadsides of cannon; the destruction of sails, spars and masts; much bloodshed; sword fights and much bravery. Of course Sharpe is in the centre of it all.

While the book is nearly 400 pages it seemed much shorter because of the page-turning action. I have read that Cornwell has been called "The greatest writer of historical adventures today."  I agree and I am already addicted to the Richard Sharpe series and plan to read all 22 of Sharpe’s adventures in order whenever I get a spare moment. As I started with #4 in the series I need to go back first and read Sharpe's adventures in India (Sharpe's Tiger, Triumph, and Fortress).