Review: The Batman by Jo NesbØ

Book info:

Format: pdf e-book

Genre: detective novel

Target audience: adults

Once again I have a chance to review a book which, although not exactly new, somehow hasn’t been translated into English yet. I really wonder why. As far as I know (courtesy of Amazon.com of course) it is a beginning of a series featuring the same hero (Harry Hole). Other parts have been translated and published but the first and the second novel (The Cockroaches) – no. By the way  when The Batman was published in Norway in 1997 it became an instant hit, winning the Glass Key Award for best Nordic crime novel (an accolade shared with Peter Høeg, Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson) so it wasn’t a bad debut, quite the opposite in fact. It’s earmarked to be published this year (hey, I am anticipating a trend I suppose - go figure!) but somehow it was omitted previously.

Synopsis:

A thirtyish Norvegian policeman, Harry Hole,  is sent to Australia to help investigating a murder of a Norvegian woman and a tv starlet, Inger Holder, who used to work in a Sydney bar. Australia is not a country Harry imagined to be. He meets his very colourful local counterparts, especially one Andrew Kensington, and learns plenty about the myths and shameful history of Aborigines, the local inhabitants of that continent. Is it pertaining to the murder investigation? Somehow it is.

It seems the murder of Inger was a part of a whole series of similar crimes – strangling and raping of young, blond, single women, often foreigners. Why only a complete outsider saw and recognized that fact? How much murders will it take until the police manage to find the perpetrator?

What I liked:

It was a very interesting book – logical but also surprising. Not that it didn’t follow a well-known pattern of crime stories but the author managed to lead me astray several times with cleverly hidden clues and bright, big red herring swimming to and fro near the surface. I haven’t been entertained so much since my last Agatha Christie novel and this lady, say what you might, could complicate a multiple murder story and outwit her readers splendidly.

Of course reading The Batman (no, I am not saying why such a title, find out on your own) Dame Agatha would blush several times. It is a very contemporary book; well, relatively contemporary – the movies Harry speaks about are such that you can easily notice the relentless passage of time. Still it aged well – I bet plenty of young people, footloose and fancy-free, who are taking a year off in order to go abroad, live carefree and have fun in the sun would recognize friendly souls in their slightly older counterparts shown here, working in Australian bars, posing for a photo before the famous Melbourne Opera House and crowding Bondi beach in the evenings.

The main character is definitely a man who likes living dangerously. He has his own demons to defeat as he is an alcoholic; sometimes he wins sometimes he loses spectacularly, falling into an endless spiral of drinking and bearing the consequences. Overall a very interesting main lead, somebody very far away from prim and proper Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple. Still, he shares their brains and the passion of solving puzzles no matter how much it might cost.

Finally let me say that I liked very much the way the author constructed and presented the main baddie. I can’t say a lot in order not to spoil you but believe me, it won me over.

  

What I didn’t like:

Now I will have to continue that series. I got addicted instantly.

Final verdict:

Yes, I recommend this book and I hope the rest of the series will be as good as the first one. You can read it as a stand-alone btw but after finishing I am sure you will want another part even without one ugly cliffhanger urging you to do so. Consider yourself warned – Harry Hole is addictive.

Review: The Fixer: A Lawson Vampire novel by Jon F. Merz

Book info:

Form: e-book, Kindle format

Genre: fantasy, vampire detective story

Target audience: adults

I borrowed a digital version of this book from my friend - thank you very much, pchlaszachrajka! 

Synopsis:

When a bad, big, psychotic vampire called Cosgrove returns to Chicago, one thing is sure: there will be blood and murders galore. Cosgrove doesn’t disappoint his faithful allies and enemies - soon enough the Council, a body supervising all vampires living in that area, condemn him to death. Any death but the sooner the better. Lawson, one of vampire Fixers (so kind of law enforcers)  and his Control (so kind of boss) McKinley are given the order to find Cosgrove and drive something made of wood straight through his dark, scheming heart. The balance must be preserved and there is no balance with such psychos as Cosgrove.

Unfortunately killing him is easier said than done. Firstly, nobody knows what Cosgrove looks like now. Then our baddie has an interesting plan of his own and plenty of other vampires are cooperating with him secretly. When Lawson’s best friend is murdered in a club there’s no looking back, though, especially when a female assassin Lawson falls in love with, Talya, joins the hunt and is kidnapped as a result. Will vampires manage to clean their ranks? How many lives will it cost? Will humans finally find out the truth about vampires?

What I liked:

This novel was highly readable, I really was sucked inside the plot and the more I read the more I wanted to know about our sad vampire protagonist. Lawson was an interesting character mainly because he was so flawed -  an experienced law enforcer who is hardly fearless and has a very unpleasant fund of memories- anyway that’s what made this story work for me. The world Lawson lives in is dangerous but he didn’t choose his life, it chose him, and, while he would have chosen differently, he doesn’t waste a lot of time pining over it either. Well, being so very flawed and in love he whines a bit but not too much.

Talking about the love interest of the main lead I must mention Talya, a big asset of this book. She is an Asian girl – half Chinese, half Kazakh – which I found original. She used to work as a KGB secret agent and now she is a freelancer assassin, also something you hardly expect from a ‘damsel in distress’, usually met in such books. She has a brain of her own and she knows what she wants – another feature I appreciate in my heroines.

 Apart from that Merz did, in my opinion, a wonderful job of setting the fighting scenes. They seemed real and gory but not overly so. I also enjoyed several mentions of Musashi  Miyamoto, a Japanese swordsman and rōnin and bushido, the code of samurai. I like Japanese culture very much and it was like a ‘hello’ from a distant friend.

Finally let me tell you that I appreciated the idea that the vampires in this series aren't some weird type of supernatural creatures but just another species that evolved alongside of humans. That alone opens up many more doors which, I hope, will be explored in next parts.

  

What I didn’t like:

This novel was published for the first time in 2002. That’s exactly ten years ago. It makes itself felt. In other words if you look for a terribly original premise, keep looking because you are bound to be disappointed by this one.

My other complain is that this book could really do with some more extensive editing. I’m not a native English speaker and still I noticed some strange mistakes: e.g. a faulty sentence structure like "I knew your reaction would be worth coming out in this miserable rain for" or an occasional redundancy of word choice, like " Her hips ground in to my face as she rode my face..." (and it was supposed to be one hot scene, imagine that!) A rookie writer mistakes, more often found in low-quality fanfic nowadays than in officially published books (although there are exceptions to this rule).

Now my main complaint. I really couldn’t swallow that Lawson, a centenarian and a vampire with a several decades spent as a black Ops veteran, was from time to time so incredibly sloppy with his detective work. First he readily told his love interest, a human woman after all, that their mutual quarry is a vampire when the mere existence of vampires was supposed to be the biggest secret. He often took really poor operative decisions, allowing the main baddie to escape with ease and flourish. Ok, he was in love, but honestly, you should have expected a better control from such a professional. Also on several occasions Lawson describes himself as reacting "like a fourteen year old boy" to Talya. Well, doesn’t it sound silly? His background and training is given as lengthy, Marine/special forces tough, dangerous and pretty comprehensive but for all of his training Lawson doesn't seem to know what to do in a tight spot and allows situations to worsen through his own failure to deliver.

Final verdict:

 The world building was interesting but not especially original. The characters were complex but not very captivating. Still I want to give this series one more chance. Idealistic, I know...

Mini Review: The Quickie by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge

Book info:


Form: e-book, pdf format
Genre: Detective story, crime mystery
Target audience: adults

Synopsis:

Lauren Stillwell, a homicide detective from New York, is happily married to a handsome finance advisor, Paul. One day she decides to surprise her husband, visiting him at work during lunchtime. She sees Paul going out with an unknown, tall, slim blonde. They enter a posh St Regis hotel and Lauren is left rethinking her marriage and her life from quite a new perspective – that of a cheated, ageing wife. She comes to some fateful conclusions. One of them is that Paul has stopped caring about her some time ago and she, being very busy, hardly noticed. The second one is that she needs some mood-boosting entertainment. Like a quickie or rather a one-night stand.

The same evening Lauren pretends she has missed her plane and invites a handsome bike-riding colleague from other department, Scott Thayer, to have a late dinner with her. Scott, calling himself the most eligible bachelor on the whole NYPD, has been flirting with Lauren at work for some time now, apparently rather smitten by the older woman’s looks and not ashamed of showing his admiration. Although Lauren hesitates till the last possible moment, the evening ends up with them both going to bed at his friends’ flat. However, when Lauren’s husband appears outside, things get complicated. Lauren watches both men having a fight on the street and disappearing after a while in Paul’s Toyota.

Next day Scott’s battered body is found in a Bronx fountain. The whole NY homicide department is looking for the culprit and Lauren is made the main investigator. What cheer. For starters she finds out that ‘the most eligible bachelor’ was married and had three kids, one of them barely an infant. Then she finds his gun and his badge in her garden shed. Everything indicates that Paul knew about their flirt and killed Scott in a fit of righteous jealousy. Why doesn’t he want to admit it, lying to his wife through his teeth all the time?

Lauren feels very bad about her role and the whole situation, especially after visiting the young widow and witnessing her grief. She is so depressed that she thinks about telling the truth to her partner, exposing Paul and herself, ending her career in shame, perhaps even committing suicide. Then her investigation takes quite a turn - she finds a huge stash of banknotes hidden in Scott’s locker and a DVD glued underneath his desk at his house, labeled ‘insurance’ – it seems that Scott, the raising star of the Anti-Drug Task Force, had more than one secret to hide…Lauren takes another fateful decision – to stand by her husband and cover for him to the bitter end, no matter what. Will she succeed? Will she ever manage to talk to him about the whole event at all? Will the truth set her free in any sense?

What I liked:

Although at first glance this book might seem just another novel about cops and thugs I admit it was very well-executed. The pace of narration kept you waiting for more but the heroine and the readers were given some breathers from time to time. Overall it was very pleasant to read. Lauren was a great character – funny, stubborn and definitely kick-ass, although she didn’t wield any katana and never donned leather pants. She simply never lacked the backbone, even when she was utterly disgusted with herself.

I liked the most the fact that neither Lauren nor her hubby and coworkers were without flaws and the reality around them changed constantly, like in a kaleidoscope. It proves that you don’t need all the supernatural background to make a book riveting. The ending was  satisfying although bitter-sweet and the amount of things Lauren discovered during her investigation I found really mind boggling. Not bad.

What I didn’t like:

Well, after reading such a book you will really think twice before trusting any man. Not exactly a cheerful or sensible conclusion but in my present state of mind one that, I admit, might save you a lot of trouble and pain. Some twists did seem a bit outlandish but overall I have no major complaints.

I don't like the cover, though. It would be more appropriate for erotica stuff and I think is misleading a potential customer.

Final verdict:

It is not a classic whodunit and not a classic cop novel either. I enjoyed it very much and I recommend it to fans of both genres and also those who would like to try something different