JOHN CONNOLLY'S GAME OF GHOSTS

A couple of hundred pages into A Game Of Ghosts Charlie Parker feels, “not for the first time, as though he had wandered into a ghost story”. What, I wondered, could have brought that on? Could it be the Bretheren? Or the spirits of Peter Magus and the Capstead Martyrs? Maybe the Hollow Men? Or The Collector? Or the ghostly apparition of Philip, unacknowledged son of the Providence crime lord Caspar Webb (John Connolly names are always carefully crafted)? Or his Mother? Or Parker's dead daughter Jennifer? Or her very much alive half-sister Sam? This novel is filled with enough characters to require a supernatural scorecard!

But that is only part of what makes it so intriguing. The chess game Parker navigates is multi-dimensional, though the first three dimensions are bad enough. He is commanded by his friendly FBI man Ross to search for a missing private detective named Jaycob Eklund, though Ross won't say why. It doesn't take Parker long to discover Eklund was obsessively on the trail of the Bretheren, and there are other disappeared people along that trail.

Connolly's picture of the Bretheren's world is not only chilling, but totally convincing, a combination of suburban Borgias complete with incestuous couplings and Stepford families concealing their true purpose. It stands in contrast to Parker's own world, since Sam's mother Rachel, still frightened from Sam's kidnapping in the previous Parker novel, wants to limit his access to his daughter. Parker is always a character caught in the middle, sometimes the fulcrum, sometimes the object in the vice getting tightened. But he remains a most steady anchor to humanity.

One of the joys of entering Charlie Parker's world is that Connolly sees things so well and writes so well what he, or rather his characters, see. A Game Of Ghosts is layered with such craft that it is almost a disappointment when things resolve themselves with relative quickness, as if you really don't wish to bid some of these characters behind. Even the most dangerous of them. Of course, in Charlie Parker's world, you never can be sure.

A Game Of Ghosts by John Connolly

Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99 ISBN 9781473641860

NOTE: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

IRRESISTIBLE TARGETS BOOKS OF THE PAST YEAR

This is an odd Books of the Year list, because it basically includes only those books I wrote about on Irresistible Targets, or reviewed on The Crime Vault Live, and the books I read and wrote about were not necessarily written in 2016. And of course, some I haven't yet written about, which means a number of my favourite books of 2016 will, I hope, get mentioned here soon, including Paul Hendrickson's Hemingway's Boat, Reza Aslan's Zealot, Henning Mankell's Quicksand and David Talbot's The Devil's Chessboard. 

I admit I probably should have written about the books I reviewed on The Crime Vault, but once I'd done the podcast, reviewing them in some detail, I had pretty much said what I wanted to say. You can find links to all five of the the CVL podcasts here at IT, just use the search engine.  All the other books I mention you can similarly find in the past year.

My favourite 2016 crime novels were James Sallis' Willnot and Alex Marwood's Darkest Secret (CVL). Runners up were Michael Connelly's Wrong Side Of Goodbye, Robert Crais' The Promise (CVL), Graham Hurley's The Order Of Things, Stephen King's story collection Bazaar of Bad Dreams (CVL) and Johan Theorin's Made In Sweden (CVL).

I was also a judge for the CWA Short Story Dagger award, and John Connolly's Night Music, from which two stories made the judges' (and my) short list, was exceptional. The runner-up story came from another fine collection, Crimes, by Alberto Barrera Tyszka, from Venezuela.

But my favourite crime novel of the year was Sara Gran's Dope, which for some reason I came to late. Read my review; it really is as good as I say.

The other two non-crime books that stand out from the year's reading were Kevin Jackson's study of modernism and 1922, Constellation of Genius, and Joe Abercrombie's hugely entertaining story collection, Sharp Ends, which proves not only that the whole sword and sorcery genre is not dead, but that a good writer can do wonderful things with it.  Serious writing in a not always very serious genre. But then you probably watch Game Of Thrones, right?

T. JEFFERSON PARKER'S THE FAMOUS AND THE DEAD

Jeff Parker's Charlie Hood books can be frustrating: they posit the existence of devils and angels, engaged in a competition over us humans; more than once reading this novel I thought about John Stewart's song  'Strange Alliance', also known by the last line of its chorus, 'like heavyweight champs, after the fight, does Christ hang out with the Devil at night?' Reviewing earlier books in the series I didn't give away the gimmick, but now it is so much out in the forefront it has to be revealed, essentially because within the terms of something you might find supernatural, Parker makes this work as a hard-driving border noir that deals primarily in ambiguities, and in the power of love to overcome what we would have to call evil.

The local devil in these books is Mike Finnegan (no relation, I hope, to the great singer-organist of the Serfs, and then any number of records, not least Jimi Hendrix' and including his one fine solo album I know about) and he has his clutches deep into Bradley Jones, the son of Suzanne Jones, aka Alison Murietta, Hood's antagonist and love from LA Outlaws (see my review here). I mentioned Jones in my review of Border Lords, which you will find immediately after LA Outlaws from 2012 on this blog--where I mentioned it was criminal Parker wasn't in print--Sandstone Press deserves kudos for getting him back in print in this country. I now need to catch up with the previous Hood novel, The Jaguar, which is referenced in this one, but doesn't need to be read first (though it would likely help).

Reviewing Border Lords I mentioned, again without explaining, how the gimmick of devils created a problem, but as I implied above, Parker has sorted it out pretty deftly. The Famous And The Dead addresses it directly, making it the major obstacle Hood, in the end, has to overcome. It's complicated: Jones and Finnegan have tied Hood up in a corruption package which seems likely to end his career; Jones' wife Erin is expecting a baby but living with Hood and his girlfriend Beth, but Beth is starting to have doubts about what Hood is willing to do to win his fight with the devil. Meanwhile Finnegan wants Brad and Erin's child, but would prefer he be raised by Jones and his own squeeze, a woman named Owens. Throw in an assassination committed with a gun from a shipment Hood should have stopped, a gang of Missouri rednecks dealing stinger missiles, and Mary Beth, the girlfriend of one of them, who's come to LA to be an actress, as well as an angel trapped down a deep cave, and it's a complicated story that continually twists and turns. 

And the way it does resolve itself is interesting, not as you'd expect, though there is a more logical fate awaiting Finnegan, which will still be available in the next book in the series.  The deck reshuffles, and Hood winds up with a partner I would not have expected, and maybe not the most interesting of the possibilities. Call me sentimental. Also call me convinced Parker can pull off this mix of crime and deviltry: it's somewhere between light-hearted and chilling (Thorne Smith and John Connolly perhaps), but remember too, there are probably more Americans who believe in angels than in evolution.

The Famous And The Dead by T. Jefferson Parker
Sandstone Press £8.99 ISBN 9781908737366

ASA LARSSON'S UNTIL THY WRATH BE PAST

The thaw is a crucial part of life above the Arctic Circle, and it is a dangerous life, so when the body of a young woman surfaces in a river, it is going to be written off as an accident or suicide until prosecutor Rebecka Martinsson has a vision in a dream, and realises she is dealing with a case of murder.

Asa Larsson's first two novels both won awards in Sweden, so it is interesting to see the chances she takes and different directions she pursues in her third. Martinsson is a compelling lead character, drawn to life in Kiruna (full disclosure here: my grandfather came from a nearby town, and I have never really felt the urge to settle there) despite the prospect of success in Stockholm, That Wilma Persson (a nice choice of name), the dead girl, participates in the story as a ghost, isn't new; it's a device that's won awards for mainstream writers in the English-speaking world, and ghosts have factored in Johan Theorin's work (set in Oland, oddly enough, because it's the other end of Sweden and it's where my grandmother was born). As a devide it frees Larsson from having to worry about making her book into a 'whodunit', but what makes it really effecticve here is the idea that a character as rational and driven as Martinsson, trying to come to grips with the irrational love she has for the area where she was born, it becomes particularly effective as part of the draw of the north.

Martinsson's romantic relationship with her former boss forms one of the one of the sub-plots here, and Larsson contrasts his handsome charm and city slickness with the more homey virtues of one of the male characters. The other big contrast is between Martinsson and Anna-Maria Mella, the police inspector, who has her own problems with men, including her police partner, which were detailed in the previous novel. It's no coincidence that Scandinavian work examines the pressure of work on the domestic lives of women (think about the Danish TV drama The Killing as a recent example, though it factored in the Martin Beck series 50 years ago) because they have long been established as equal in the workplace, yet the inbuilt prejudices are brought out most strongly in this extreme rural setting. Which leads to Until Thy Wrath Be Past's other real strength: its setting.

By setting I don't mean, in this case, the landscape or weather of the north, although Larsson's descriptions are often telling. Rather, it is the rural background; this novel could be transposed into the American south say, fitting somewhere into the territory of Erskine Caldwell or James Dickey's Deliverance, or perhaps more closely into the Maine of Stephen King, John Connolly or Michael Kimball. It is the people, and in the Krekula brothers Larsson creates two frighteningly vivid villains who are recognisable to anyone who has spent time in those rural areas with their undercurrent of repressed violence. Although Hjalmar, the oversized adolescent, a violent savant, seems familiar from other stories, but he is drawn with depth and sympathy, while the viciousness of Tore, the brother in control, is palpable, and made more so when it is unleashed in a very modest way, on Anna-Maria.

It's also fascinating, because the brothers are trying to protect a secret which has remained hidden for many decades, and which relates back to a time of what in Sweden was divisive (I'm thinking of how America's Southern gothics refer back to the Civil War). In the far north of Sweden, during World War II, the plight of the 'plucky Finns' was very close at hand, as were the Nazi trains moving men and materiel between Finland and Norway. The changing allies in the years between 1939 and 41 made choosing sides difficult all over the world, but the quiet role many Swedes (and indeed some Norwegians)and their businesses enjoyed while supporting the Germans has been a feature of many books, not least Asa Larsson's namesake Steig. That it should remain a somewhat contentious issue seven decades later speaks to its power.

Until Thy Wrath is a many-layered novel, deftly written and as best I can tell, well-translated by Laurie Thompson. And if the ghost story is indeed resolved, and the past revealed, it leaves enough of Martinsson's life unsettled to make readers look forward to the next one.

Until Thy Wrath Be Past by Asa Larsson
Maclehose Press, £12.99, ISBN 9780857050724
NOTE: This review will also appear at Crime Time
www.crimetime.co.uk

JOHAN THEORIN'S DARKEST ROOM

Like his exceptional debut novel, Echoes From The Dead, Johan Theorin's story is deeply woven into the landscape of the Baltic island of Oland (in Swedish literally, Island Land), one which is considered unique by the island's residents (which included my grandmother), and by Swedes in general. It's not just a sense of setting, as it is in Mari Jungstedt's novels set on Gotland, the next island to the east. It's more a sense that the land itself is a force, if not a character, in the story. In his first novel, it was the bleak Alvar, and now it is the equally bleak eastern coast, and the dangerous blizzards, which in the flatness of the island, can take away one's sense of location, sense of being, with fatal consequences.

In fact, as with the first book, the English title is not a translation of the Swedish. The Darkest Room was called Nattfak, literally Night Blizzard. I can see why the switch was made, though Blizzard Night might have worked better. Oddly enough, Echoes From The Dead might have been a better title for this novel than for Theorin's first, because the story does indeed involve the dead, as well as the living.

It is an incredible mix of ghost story, thriller, and very subtle whodunit. John Connolly proved it possible to integrate ghosts with modern crime stories, but Theorin's approach is totally his own, because you get a very telling sense that not only are the dead alive on Oland, but that some of the living are half-way, or already dead.

Joakim Westin has joined his wife and two children in an old manor house, built for the twin lighthouses on nearby Eel Point. They intend to redo the house, and are obviously getting away from tragedy in Stockholm. But while Joakim is back in the capital closing the sale of their house, tragedy strikes on Oland. And new policewoman Tilda Davidsson, investigating bulgaries of summer houses, becomes convinced that the tragic death was not an accident.

The burglaries are being carried out by an unlikely group of Swedish bad guys, and the manor at Eel Point is a tempting target. Davidsson is a recent graduate of the police college, and is having an affair with one of her instructors; her coming to Oland was a way of forcing the married man into a decision. And most interesting of all, Tilda's great uncle Gerlof is telling her stories about the old days on the island; readers of the first novel will recognise Gerlof as the amateur sleuth working out of an old-age home.

Theorin not only juggles these stories, but also genres, switching gears wonderfully as the suspense builds up. The real coup is that he resolves them all so deftly; leaving the who-dun-it until you've almost forgotten it, and then bringing all the elements together for the solution. Part of the reason it all works is that the elements overlap; the ghosts act upon the people in this world, the victims act on their killers, and the island acts on all of them. It's a bravura performance.

The translation, by Marlaine Delargy, does an exceptional job of keeping to the simple flow of Swedish prose, while altering the mood and pace as the story switches from haunting to hunting and back. I have a small quibble with the practice of translating simple things to English (metres to feet, Mama to Mummy) when their originals are perfectly comprehensible, but in the face of such smooth switching of suspense gears, Theorin has been incredibly well served. Though they share some qualities, The Darkest Room is a very different book from Echoes From The Dead, but in its own way every bit as successful. Theorin (pictured above receiving the Crime Writers' Association's 'new blood' dagger from the British author Martine McCutcheon) is the new Nordic novelist to watch.

The Darkest Room
by Johan Theorin
translated by Marlaine Delargy
Black Swan £7.99 ISBN 9780552774611

MARK MILLS' WHALEBOAT HOUSE: A Forgotten Friday Entry

I'm not sure if, strictly speaking, The Whaleboat House qualifies as a forgotten book--after all it won the CWA Silver Dagger for best debut, and his second novel, The Savage Garden, was a Richard & Judy finalist, but as he had managed to slip under my crime-reviewing radar, I thought I'd revisit it, to see if it deserved its award. And I'm pleased I to say, it probably did, though it's also fair to ask how many award winning books have since been retitled by their publishers? Maybe they assumed a British audience wouldn't figure out it was a place name, and certainly wouldn't know how to pronounce Amagansett (it would come out Uh-MAG-an-set). But the original title was Amagansett (see below left) when it was published in 2004 (and it's a place name, pronounced AM-a-gan-set, just like it looks) but perhaps that name looked too serious for a Dagger winner. Even under its new title (which I confess actually works better) it's had two different paperback editions, the first pitching it more as a crime story, as befits a Dagger winner, the second positing it as a sort of historical piece of serious fiction, dirty realism set in the immediate post war, with a romantic twinge, as befits a Richard & Judy nominee (see below right). The problem with the latter approach is that although Mills writes well, and his period setting is drawn well and intriguingly, the story is, at heart, a mystery, and a tale of revenge.

It's notable too for its setting, the immediate postwar fishing community of Amagansett, before the huge boom in the Hamptons, when fishermen still plied their trade in New York's waters (see Joseph Mitchell's exquisite collection, The Bottom Of The Harbor, for a brilliantly realised picture of that industry from the same era). Conrad Labarde is the descendant of Basque fishermen, and works the waters from his shack on the ocean side of Long Island, along with his friend Rollo, the somewhat dimwitted scion of the area's oldest fishing family. It's Rollo who's brought the whalehouse to Conrad's property: and the second title is a far better one for this book; along Amagansett is the setting, it is the whalehouse that sees the story.

Conrad and Rollo bring up the body of Lillian Wallace, one of the wealthy population who visit the area on summer weekends. But Conrad has his own history with Lillian, and knowing the presumed suicide is a murder, he investigates alongside Tom Hollis, a disgraced former New York cop now deputy chief in the small town. The investigation, of course, visits the areas where cultures clash, while Hollis, whose own investigation is directed, as it were, by a few dropped words from Conrad, also discovers ways around his own problems. As well as Lillian's death, Conrad is also haunted by his experiences in the war, where he was an assassin, and somehow blessed with luck while those around him died.

This is a lot to pack into a relatively small package, but Mills does it well. You might say it's too much, that the Hollis and Labrade backstories are slightly too melodramatic, but I think that what is also going on here is a bit of homage from a British novelist to the great novels of the early twentieth century: not just Joseph Conrad, which is signaled pretty obviously, or Fitzgerald's Gatsby, which of course is the classic novel of a Hamptons hit and run leading to more serious crimes. There are echoes of Hemingway, and Steinbeck too, and maybe even a little John O'Hara. It's as if Mills is simply touching those familiar soft spots, and it wouldn't work if he hadn't made his own characters so real, real enough to carry the story through. Its denouement is, like the backstories, somewhat melodramatic, and certainly we see it coming because we've seen it before, but it is handled well, and resolved honestly. As I said, Mills writes very well, and writes his American scenes and characters as well as any Anglo-Irish writer since John Connolly. The fact that he can make his period story resonate with echoes of great novels while still keeping the suspense compelling suggests the Daggers, and maybe even Richard & Judy, were right.

The Whaleboat House by Mark Mills
Harper Perennial 2005 £6.99 ISBN 0007161921

THOMAS H COOK'S THE FATE OF KATHERINE CARR

Thomas Cook's characters are often haunted, but usually they are forced to face, and sometimes resolve, the past without recourse to the supernatural. However, when supernatural elements begin to intrude in his latest novel, The Fate Of Katherine Carr, it seems as normal as anything else in the day-to-day life of George Gates.

Gates (and yes, the name carries connotations) was a travel writer, an adventurer who sought out the unusual places on his journeys. Unusual, and, in a sense haunted; early in his story he tells about the cliffs of Saipan, off which Japanese threw their children and leapt to their deaths rather than face the atrocities they expected from the invading Americans. Gage is haunted too, by the memory of his son, kidnapped as he waited for his father to pick him up on a rainy afternoon, and murdered by his kidnapper, who'd never been found. Haunted by the knowledge he had forgotten promising Teddy a ride if it rained, forgotten because he was wrapped in trying to find the right words to finish a line in his book.

Now Gates writes for the local paper in Winthrop, which appears to be in upstate New York, or maybe western Connecticut, up past the end of route 34, and his traveling is limited to his now empty (haunted?) house, the newspaper, and O'Shea's Tavern. There, one night, he meets Arlo McBride, retired state police missing persons investigator, and becomes interested in Katharine Carr, amateur poet, novice writer, who became a recluse after a vicious attack on her doorstep, and who later disappeared without a trace. That was twenty years ago. Soon Gates is reading Carr's poems, and a story she wrote about a woman who disappears, taken away by a strange person named Maldrow (and yes the name suggests connotations), and his Chief, whose purposes might be evil, or might not.

It's been noted that Cook's stories unfold gradually, and the process has been compared to peeling the layers of an onion. His characters are often writers, people looking for the write word, the right way to express their feelings. In this novel, the layers of the onion are obvious, but so skillfully drawn that they become forgotten: Gates is telling the entire story to a Mr. Mayawati; apparently while traveling again in exotic places. Within the story, Gates has started writing an article about a young girl, Alice, dying of a disease which is aging her prematurely. Gates winds up reading Katherine's story to Alice (and yes, the name suggests connotations), stories within stories within stories, and those tales start to melt together, until the boundaries between what has happened and what hasn't, between this world and the next, seem to disappear.

What makes it work, makes it compelling, is Cook's prose. Although there are moments when he seems to be echoing Poe's 'Cask Of Amontillado', and where the rhythms take on the a slightly more ornate, Lovecraftian feel, the reality is that the style is measured but straightforward, much of it, despite the rhythms of the gothic tale, told in simple language that suggests this form of travel is no stranger than any other. You might compare it to John Connolly, who early on borrowed the tropes of horror writing to remake his detective novels, but Cook is doing something different, merely extending slightly the reach of his usual concerns. The supernatural is a world of memory, of the dead and the past, and that has always been the territory Cook's novels have explored. Katherine Carr is not a ghost story, but it is. Maldrow and the Chief are not real, but they are. In these ambiguities, Cook has created another small gem of a novel. He deserves a wider audience, but perhaps his work his too idiosyncratic, his books, while recognizably Cook's, too different from each other. Or perhaps the audience isn't as comfortable with being totally captured by ambiguity as they ought to be.

The Fate Of Katherine Carr, by Thomas H Cook
Quercus, £17.99, ISBN 978184728404

this review also appears at www.crimetime.co.uk