The Trespasser, by Tana French

I finished reading Tana French's 'The Trespasser' first thing this morning. I actually set it aside late last night, because I was getting so stressed out about it I knew I'd have trouble sleeping. Here's a review that tracks pretty well with my impressions of this outstanding crime drama.

Review by Alison Flood, The Guardian

There’s more than a little of the noir about Tana French’s latest, The Trespasser. Set, like her previous thrillers, among the detectives of Dublin’s murder squad, perhaps it (hard-)boils down to the fact that her protagonist this time, detective Antoinette Conway, manages to fizz with contempt for the world around her, bristle with toughness and sink regularly into poetic gloom all at the same time.

“The case comes in, or anyway it comes in to us, on a frozen dawn in the kind of closed-down January that makes you think the sun’s never going to drag itself back above the horizon,” says Conway, the only female detective on the Dublin squad, dealing with the cruel practical jokes of colleagues who want to see the back of her, and lumbered with straightforward domestic violence cases when she wants to be on the trail of psychotic serial killers.

This particular case looks like a lovers’ tiff, “just like the uniforms figured... some gobshite who got his knickers in a twist and threw a tantrum at his girlfriend”. Aislinn Murray is lying dead in her immaculate home, blond and beautiful. Everyone is convinced the boyfriend did it, but Conway and her partner Stephen Moran – both appeared in French’s previous novel, The Secret Place – believe there’s more to it. Or perhaps, tired of being given the easy solves, they just want this to be more than another “slam-dunk” case. Keeping it quiet from the rest of the team, they pursue a series of dark possibilities, in the process discovering there was more to the glossy Murray than met the eye (“everything about her seems dense enough with sadness to drop you like a sandbag”).

Conway is an enjoyably complex companion, both bruisingly misanthropic – “If he’s not our guy, he’s such a godawful damp weenie, the kind who needs regular slaps across the back of the head just to keep him from vanishing up his own hole” – and so in love with her job it almost makes you want to give it a try. “That pulse is hammering right through me, practically lifting me off the bench. Forget coffee; this job, when it’s right, this job is the hit that speed freaks throw their lives away hunting ... It’s a smell of blood raging at the back of your nose, it’s your arm muscle throbbing to let go the bowstring, it’s drums speeding in your ears and a victory roar building at the bottom of your gut.

French also pulls it out of the bag here with some of the best back and forth interrogation scenes out there. “No ifs and maybes twitching in the corners, gumming up the air, itching inside my clothes... Just me and the guy across from me, and what we both know he did. It lies on the table between us, a solid thing with the taut, dark shine of a meteorite, for the winner to claim.”

As she and Moran edge closer and closer to a dangerous truth, obstacles continue to fall or be planted in their paths, until they’re not sure they even want to get to the bottom of what they’re looking for.

While The Trespasser isn’t quite up to the intense brilliance of The Secret Place, it is still a gnarly, absorbing read, and a finely tuned slice of wintry gloom from one of the best thriller writers we have.

Read more about Tana French here.

The Second Life of Nick Mason, by Steve Hamilton

This crime drama by Steve Hamilton received a lot of very good reviews, so I got it out of my local library and started reading it. I needed a break from the more serious reading of Kevin Gutzman's, James Madison and the Making of America. I'm half way through Nick Mason's second life. I have the distinct impression I've read this before. Not this particular book, but other stories like it. The anti-hero, hero. Troubled past, troubled guy, in over his head. Trying to be a better person. Fates conspire. You know what I mean.

I'll let you know what I think when I'm finished.

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I'm finished. Thank goodness. My take?

Laughably implausible plot.

Clichéd characters up and down the cast ladder, but especially the main character, "Nick." I can't tell you too much without revealing the plot line and outcome, but let me say this, "Jack Reacher" does it better, without all the whining, and with a more satisfying, if similar outcome.

I've read and enjoyed Steve Hamilton before -- A Cold Day in Paradise, The Lock Artist (which I particularly liked) -- his writing is straight forward, crisp, and he has an outstanding ability to put the reader in the action's locale.

I'll try another book by Hamilton. I know he can do better.

Publish, Anyone?

Amazon is reinventing publishing, and brick and mortar publishing houses are scared, and I say, be afraid, be very afraid.

A Review of Three Women in Luxor

"Without fanfare, Richard Badalamente drops the reader into the lives of three women visiting Egypt, the events of the past infusing the stories with poignancy, awareness, and irony. Each story opens into a subtly awakening awareness: the clamor of Luxor as backdrop, the rising tension of unnamed events, and the shifting energies as the stories unfold to reveal characters from two very different cultures. Badalamente brings the stories along with a deft hand, dialogue and narrative alternating with a spareness that allows the reader to fully experience the nuance of humor and detail."

S. Moon, on Amazon.com

The Burren

The ruined castle rose from the barren land, a towering rock outcropping, looking as if slabs of limestone had been lifted from the Burren by some gigantic hand and placed like cratered dominoes to form a rough imitation architecture. Mullioned windows, hollowed and cracked, gave the building a foreboding, institutional look, something between a prison and an asylum.

County Clare was our last stop before returning to Dublin for our return flight to the States. Madeleine and I had been in Ireland almost two weeks and I was ready for the vacation to be over. Two weeks of overcast, damp, chilly weather was enough for me, to say nothing of navigating the goat paths the Irish called roads. I had not been enthusiastic about vacationing in Ireland in the first place, but Mattie had been going through a bit of a rough spell emotionally, and when she expressed a desire to visit her ancestral home, I acquiesced.

We had just come from the Burren, a geological anomaly in the northwest corner of County Clare. It was 300 square kilometers of karstic limestone slabs denuded of soil by ice age glaciations -- a bleak place dotted by the remains of megalithic habitations and burial sites, Celtic crosses, and a ruined Cistercian Abbey from the 12th century, and more recent remains of villages abandoned during the famine. The area was popular with archaeologists, as well as occasional tourists, like us. It was also popular with spelunkers, who had discovered that the crevices between the stone slabs often led down to extensive tunnels and caves.

Artifacts discovered in the Burren had been traced to a Mesolithic people that first came to Ireland about seven thousand years before Christ. Some artifacts recently discovered in caves under the Burren were puzzling to archaeologists, because they seemed to predate the earliest archaeologically accepted human habitations of Ireland, and because some of the items discovered appeared to be associated with witchcraft.

Had I known then what I later discovered about the castle we were about to explore, and the former inhabitants of the caves beneath the Burren, I would never have brought Mattie to the accursed place.

Christine Falls

I am reading Christine Falls, by Benjamin Black, a pseudonym of John Banville, the Irish novelist and journalist. I read The Sea, by Banville, a year or so ago, and enjoyed Banville’s prose and found the story, a very personal introspective, intriguing. I don’t remember how I happened upon Christine Falls; I had written the title down on the back of an envelope, and I was surprised to find that Banville wrote under a pseudonym.

Whereas The Sea is literary fiction, and Christine Falls is crime fiction, the latter is equally literary and I found myself rereading excerpts of the book for the shear enjoyment of Black’s/Banville’s prose. Here is Black describing the entry of a nun, Sister Anselm, into the room where a couple is waiting, hoping to adopt a child from the convent’s orphanage. A short, square-shaped nun was approaching. There was something wrong with her right side, and she walked with a wrenching movement, dragging her hip after her like a mother dragging a stubborn child.