IT'S A CRIME! (OR A MYSTERY...)

Books for Christmas

There will now be a short break in these posts, until the end of the week.  Back with Anne Brooke, Debi Alper and possibly one or two more.

Books for Christmas - Matt Rees

 I see a Mexican wave coming up for the pick from Matt Rees, author of the engrossing The Bethlehem Murders as I know some of you have a fondness for this author:

  "The Patience of the Spider: An Inspector Montalbano Mystery By Andrea Camilleri

The maestro of the Italian detective novel is Andrea Camilleri. This eighth in his series about Sicilian sleuth Salvo Montalbano is without a doubt the best to have been translated into English by Stephen Sartarelli so far. It's by far the most compelling, intelligent mystery I've read this year. Montalbano's a fabulous creation and a true cult hero to Italians. When he isn't obsessing about the crime at hand, he's nearing tears at the quality of the delicious food in his favourite trattoria and enjoying a tempestuous romance with his long-distance girlfriend. Camilleri is, however, not the cheery tour guide type (which proliferates even in murder mysteries set in Europe's most beautiful country). The Patience of the Spider is the darkest in a series which is becoming increasingly bitter about law, order and politics in Italy. The nicely constructed plot revolves around the kidnapping of a girl from a family which used to be rich. But the heart of the book is the struggle by the aging Montalbano--after a lifetime waging war against the lawlessness and neglect of Sicily--to reassert his own faith in the goodness of other human beings. A beautiful novel, full of humour and cultural insight."

--Matt Rees is the author of the Omar Yussef Mysteries, a series about a Palestinian detective. The first book The Bethlehem Murders was published in May by Atlantic Books, which also will publish The Saladin Murders in February. Born in Newport, Wales, he worked as a journalist in the Middle East for more than a decade and now lives in Jerusalem. The French magazine L'Express dubbed him "the Dashiell Hammett of Palestine" and Colin Dexter called Omar Yussef "a splendid creation".

Many thanks ...

I thank everyone who has/have left messages of sympathy here, including those who have been quietly in contact by email.  I appreciate every word expressed.

My mother's death was a shock;  no doubt about that.  I now need time to come to terms with it and I hope you will allow me that.

I'll return when I feel I can.  My best wishes to you all,

R.

Books for Christmas - Andrew Taylor

Andrew Taylor, author of the wonderful Lydmouth series, The American Boy, the Roth Trilogy and many more sees the need for a wide and deep stocking this Christmas:

"I believe in having a large Christmas stocking and hence there will be room for not one but three crime novels, perhaps bound together in a single omnibus volume of varied criminal delights. Here are three very different books I have enjoyed this year - and to some extent the choice is arbitrary, because I could have chosen many more. But this particular selection certainly illustrates the extraordinary versatility of the genre.
I'll begin with the grimmest of the three. On one level, Tokyo Year Zero (Faber, £16.99) by David Peace is a murder mystery: on another it is a grimly effective exploration of Tokyo a year after the end of World War II. Peace creates – or recreates? – a nightmarish vision of a society in disintegration, both physically and morally. Not for the squeamish, but this is a book that travels deep into its very own heart of darkness.
Next comes a book that isn't exactly cheerful but does have a sophisticated sense of humour. A different sort of darkness from David Peace's is investigated in Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter in the Dark (Orion, £9.99), whose central character is a Miami crime scene investigator and part-time psychopathic killer. With ingredients like that, the novel should be both nauseating and derivative, but it’s neither. It is dark, original, and often very funny – like the Dexter series as a whole.

Finally, in Losing You (Michael Joseph, £12.99), Nicci French gives a brilliant demonstration of how simple a very good thriller can be: a teenage girl goes missing on the Essex coast; in a single day, her mother tries with increasing desperation to track her down, and in the process finds out more about her daughter than she ever suspected. It's a textbook example of how to generate tension - Hitchcock would have loved it. A book to chill the heart of every parent."

Books for Christmas - John Lawton

And now it's the Christmas pick of John Lawton, author of the excellent (because I think so) Frederick Troy novels:

* * * * *

Helpless by Barbara Gowdy.

"Go on, name me half a dozen Canadian writers ... Peggy Atwood (of course) ... Mordecai Richler (that's going back a bit), Stephen Leacock (that's going back even further), Michael Ondaatje (OK ... he lives there, but actually he's from ....) that bloke who wrote a whopper about Newfoundland but nobody remembers his name ... Wayne? .... and Barbara Gowdy.

You might say 'who?' I doubt she's much noticed in the UK, although all but a couple of her books are in print here. Gowdy never does the same thing twice. In that sense, she's Canada's TC Boyle. She's also TC in the sense that while crime is often a vital part of her work, you'd never call her a crime writer. Helpless (2007) deals with a crime that has tabloid currency – child abduction. She deals with it from the point of view of the mother, the girl and ... the kidnappers. It would have been so easy to get this wrong .... to have been campaigning, and reduce the novel to a medium for the campaign, to have been sentimental ... or just grotesque. Gowdy does none of these things. It's a compelling, hugely intelligent read. And when you've read that seek out her "We So Seldom Look On Love" from about twenty years ago."