Auntiemwrites Crime-Mystery Author M K Graff

Tana French is a waif of an Irish actress. When she turned her hand to writing, her first two novels featured a  detective duo of the Dublin Murder Squad, and were both lauded as standouts for their unusual plot and interesting characters. In the Woods won the Barry, Edgar, Macavity and Anthony awards. French’s sequel The Likeness was equally well-received.

This time French has produced a glorious novel about a different member of the squad, featuring Dublin detective Frank Mackey and his host of dysfunctional relatives living on Faithful Place. They’re so dysfunctional, in fact, that Frank has severed relations with most of them at age nineteen, after the girl he was to elope with, Rosie, gets cold feet and never turns up. Becoming a successful detective, having a daughter he adores and an ex-wife he’s unsure about, take up most of his off time–until the day, twenty-two years later, when Rosie’s suitcase turns up behind a fireplace in a derelict house on Faithful Place, sending Frank back to his old neighborhood whether he likes it or not. Now everything Frank believed had happened has to be questioned, with disastrous consequences to those he hates and those he loves.

Faithful Place is a spell-binding thriller, with sharp dialogue and all-too-real characters. Written in first person from Frank’s point of view, we see his clear and unsympathetic views of life, sometimes with biting humor, often bathed in irony. One aspect I particularly want to note is French’s ability to create a Dublin brogue without resorting to a read-stopping stream of dialect. Instead she brilliantly uses key words here and there, as well sentence syntax, to convey the accent the reader hears distinctly. Dublin is a place French knows well, and the pockets of it she shows us are alive and throbbing.

This is a book that will capture you toward its conclusion, even as it envelops you with the many distinctive ways we show feel and show love.

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Ian Sansom has created a most unusual detective in Israel Armstrong: a depressed, Jewish-English vegetarian librarian who drives  an old mobile library van in the tiny Northern Ireland village of Tumdrum.

Ian Sansom’s Mobile Library Mystery series is hallmarked by  the author’s gift for wry humor, as he illustrates the very ordinariness of Tumdrum’s inhabitants and their daily lives. This fourth installment, The Bad Book Affair, finds Israel still adjusting to his breakup with long-time English girlfriend, Gloria. As he awaits his thirtieth birthday, Israel is overcome by a feeling of despair and takes to his bed for a few weeks, existing on spirits and spoonfuls of peanut butter, growing a beard and losing weight in the process. When he is rousted unceremoniously from his navel-gazing by Ted, his driver and friend, Israel returns to work. But within a matter of days, the disappearance of the troubled daughter of a local politician turns his already-slanted world on its head.

Israel suspects the girl’s disappearance may be related to his lending her American Pastoral from the library’s special “Unshelved” category. These are books the Library Committee has decided he must keep under his desk, not on open shelves, and are given out upon request. (They include such horrific and distasteful tomes as  Lady Chatterly’s Lover, A Clockwork Orange, Nineteen Eighty-four, and American Psycho) With Ted’s grudging help, Israel tries to find the girl before he can be run out of town–or celebrate his thirtieth birthday.

As usual, Sansom’s humor extends to the way he ends this book, with another enormous listing of Acknowledgments, people he readily admits he probably doesn’t know personally but have had some impact on his life, from the droll to the mundane. This list ranges from Amy Adams to Carla Bruni, from the Holywood Cricket Club to Marcel Mareau.

Sansom’s books have a lot to say about human nature; about friendship and where to find it; and about the universality of the questions we face in our lives, whether we are Jewish, Presbyterian, religious or non,  vegetarian or not.

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Stieg Larsson’s trilogy has spawned two sets of movies, one in Swedish with subtitles and a second in English ready to film here. I avoided seeing the first when it came out for now, wanting to read the books first. I read the first, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, last summer. After a false start at the long beginning, I started again and plowed through it, once I learned not to stop and try to pronounce all of those Swedish names. I was caught up in the twists and turns of the horrific story, but most of all, of the unique protagonist, Lisbeth Salander, and the journalist Mikael Blomkvist who befriends her.

Larsson followed this with the wonderful The Girl Who Played with Fire, which I read quickly and with great energy.  His plotting amazed me. His ability to take an unsympathetic character and make me care for her was startling. Then I took a few months off, holding off on the third because I knew Larsson had died and only left 200 pages of a fourth book. I resisted finishing the trilogy, the way a nun I once heard of resisted reading one of Dickens books. He was her favorite author, and she was a teacher and authority on him. She explained she wouldn’t read this last book because then there would be no more left to look forward to.

Then Doc, thinking he was doing me a favor, came home with the third book one day. It sat on my bedside table for exactly a week, and then I caved.

My reading that week was confined to bed-time. I stayed up far too late several nights in a row to reading, and once again, Larsson’s writing had me in its thrall. His books are like watching Batman–CRASH! SMACK! POW!!! The pace builds and builds. As the book opens, Lisbeth lies in critical condition, the result of injuries she’s barely survived at the hands of her father and half-brother. Her father is in the same hospital, just doors away, recovering from Lisbeth’s attack with an axe. That he’s buried her alive after shooting her doesn’t faze the maniacal Zalachenko, who has accused HER of trying to murder him. Under arrest for three murders she didn’t commit, Blomkvist hires his sister to represent Lisbeth and mounts his own investigation to clear her. From her hospital bed, Lisbeth manages to assist him. How they work in concert is a large part of the plot of this third volume.

Despite my reticence to finish, I kept on reading, until on the third evening it was 2 AM and my eyes were closing. I had only 30 pages or so to go, and the book was tying up loose ends, almost in an epilogue of sorts. So I put it aside and slept. The next afternoon I carved out a few minutes to finish what I expected to be more closure. And we’re off! In those last pages Larsson managed to eke out yet ONE more plot twist,  more action-filled scenes, until only the last two pages where a sort of true epilogue.

This is writing at its finest. Lisbeth is an anti-heroine, and yet as more and more of her story is revealed, Larsson was able to provoke empathy for her. The social mores of Sweden and well as the political ones are carefully documented, too. His imagination knew no bounds. The trilogy is highly recommended.

I know exactly how that nun felt.

God, I’ll miss Larsson’s writing.

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Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks series is one I’ve followed from with great delight and this 19th novel is no exception. One year at the mystery convention Bouchercon, I saw Robinson in the crowd and thought how much he resembled my mental image of his Detective Chief Inspector.

Recovering from a lousy love affair (those readers who follow the series might have seen that one coming), DCI Banks is away on holiday when a distraught former neighbor arrives at the police station asking to see him. His partner (and early love) Annie Cabbot is covering for him. The woman has found a loaded handgun in her daughter’s room. Under current English law, this is a punishable offense of up to five years for the girl, Erin. The neighbor has left her tearful and uncommunicative daughter at home with her husband.

The situation unfortunately quickly gets out of control at the house. It is immediately complicated when it comes to light that one of Erin’s roommates is Banks’ daughter Tracy, who was last seen going to warn off the gun’s owner, Erin’s boyfriend, Jaff.

Jaff is good-looking, sexy, and involved in dubious business; he has too much money and is too smart for his own good. Banks is summoned home early from his vacation due to Tracy’s disappearace, only to find out that Jaff’s boss is his former nemesis, George Fanthorpe.

Banks must race against Fanthorpe’s formidable backing to track down Tracy before Jaff can do her permanent harm. Did I mention there’s an almost-fatal shooting of one of his team? And that his new superior is still deciding how to handle Banks?

This is a series that never disappoints, as Robinson continues to grow his main characters and let them operate within the bounds of today’s criminal reality.

One aside, that I noted with great dismay. I’ve read Robinson’s prior novels, published variously through by the years by companies such as Macmillan and Hodder & Stoughton. All have been on quality paper, with readable print in size of 6.5 X 9.5. This last book is out of William Morrow, in a 5.75 X 8.5 size. The quality of the paper was thin, with a lesser lb. weight; the print smaller and more difficult to read. But the most distressing part for me was the number of typo’s and errors that were allowed to stand, an almost disdain for this fine author’s work. On the top of page 5, there is an extra space between two lines of a sentence! This lack of care speaks volumes to me about today’s traditional publishers and the reason so many writers are turning to indie and self-publishing. If I were Peter Robinson, I would be calling my agent immediately to find me a new publisher.

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