novels – La Creme De La Crime

Our Little Secrets; Peter Ritchie

At a dark place in Edinburgh’s heart, secrets refuse to lie dormant.

At Police Scotland HQ, Grace Macallan has pitched up in Counter Corruption. But the demons of her past are never far behind.

Meanwhile, Edinburgh’s gangland is in turmoil. As a new breed of upstarts challenges the old criminal order, their battle for territory causes serious havoc.

Into the war steps DI Janet Hadden. Ambitious, hardbitten and addicted to risk-taking, she knows how to throw opponents off balance. But when she’s thwarted, Hadden seeks help from a notorious underworld fixer, a man who keeps secrets but always extracts a price.

Beset by violence and double-crossing, Grace is soon embroiled in a savage game of cat and mouse with colleagues and criminals alike. With all sides driven by dark desires, theirs is an endgame that will take Grace down unless she holds her nerve. Credit to the back of the book and Amazon Buy it here……

My words….

It doesn’t seem like five minutes since I finished Where No Shadows Fall, the fourth in the Grace Macallan series of crime thrillers.

I’d made the effort to read no 1 Cause of Death, as my pre-requisite minimum to find out the genesis of the characters. After WNSF I went to on read the 2nd Evidence of Death and 3rd Shores of Death and thoroughly enjoyed them both as they’re both excellent novels in their own right.

There is a continuing development of Grace’s character and life after Cause of Death the connections she makes in and out side of Police Scotland; her relationships with colleagues and journalists alike. Whilst we lose some people along the way we gain new ones who become part of the fabric of these novels. She doesn’t feature as much in this one as the others but as you’ll know she has changed her life and her role in Police Scotland

That doesn’t detract as the big-hitter for me is the way Peter Ritchie builds up the gangland characters; in their most fiendish and ultimately misguided genius – as we see time and time again in these novels their naivety; and we’re all saying to ourselves as we read – how can they possibly get away with this? Who would know this paradigm unless they’d been around the block chasing down these guys.

This isn’t a whodunnit; it’s how and when will the world fall in around them? Big Arthur Hamilton, his son-in-law Dominic Grainger and low-level criminals like Tonto – Davy McGill and plenty more I won’t mention.

Then there is the central protagonist DI Janet Hadden – I quote from the book…

A call from the head teacher and a tense meeting made Hadden’s parents realise their daughter was never going to be someone who loved easily or would be loved by others. …..their friends and acquaintances, whose common agreement was that Janet Hadden was a ‘strange yin’

She threw herself into sports and martial arts.

So we jump forward to the present – she’s hit a ceiling in her career – what’s that down to? She’s cold and calculating so to get ahead she decides to cross the thin blue line to see if she can play both ends against the middle. She introduces herself to a successful criminal. This is where the book basically starts to develops.

I think she misses one vital thing – the criminals are doing what they do because they are fundamentally dishonest and can’t be trusted as far as even, she, a martial arts expert can throw them.

This isn’t a procedural either; we know what’s going on from 360 degrees throughout it’s just a question of when will their respective house-of-cards fall down.

This one gets my five-gold-star award because there’s a bloody good old fashioned yarn on these pages full of intrigue, murder, double-deceit, threat, violence and cunning at play from all angles in this page-turner which I read in double-quick time.

Fast-paced and gripping from start to finish I never wanted to put the book down and that despite my wife catching up on a very popular fantasy TV series whilst I read – Peter Ritchie won for me, he’s my king beyond the wall (Hadrian’s of course).

my thanks to Peter Ritchie and Black & White for the preview copy; it’s always a pleasure and also an accolade to be actually quoted on the inside cover of OLS from my blog of WNSF. Keep them coming Mr Ritchie I am waiting ….. we are all waiting!

follow the blog tour …..

“Blood and Honey” DI Joe No.6 by Graham Hurley

Another exciting page in the continuing Portsmouth Procedurals with Faraday and Winter and more Jimmy Suttle.

I read this one, not a mean feat at 500+ pages, in a few days. Whilst this time last year I was struggling to find time and brain space to read I am now still travelling and working away but this now gives me the time to consume books at an increasing rate. In fact I am on no. 24 of 25 of my annual Goodreads challenge. I thought I’d set the bar quite high after only managing 20 at a push in 2015. I think I am reading faster into the bargain.

I read on Graham’s web page that his wife keeps ‘the charts’. I can only imagine these are extensive because the plot in each book always refers backwards to previous episodes.

The book of the blog.

In this one we get a glimpse of how Winter is coping with his life changing event from a previous book but he will never really change his ways. Eadie, Joe’s most recent squeeze is out of the picture in this book, and J.J. doesn’t figure much either, but Joe does almost get involved with another woman with a thread from Angels Passing coming across his bows.

This one isn’t about Bazza Mackenzie, either, for a change. After the previous attempt to bring down his empire, we’ve moved on to a headless body at a bird watching site on the Isle of Wight, where in fact most of the action takes place with Joe as SIO and Willard putting on the pressure.

Meanwhile, working for Cathy Lamb on the crime squad, Paul and Jimmy are after a local business man called Wishart, after nicking a well known defence solicitor for possession and another guy for living on immoral earnings. Paul gets more than he bargained for out of the deal in the book and ends up with a nasty headache but a great new piece of skirt on his hands; she can be a headache too!

Joe is after a former squaddie for the headless dead body but they dont know who it is which makes pinning it down even harder. Helping Joe with this one is Tracey Barber, down on placement from London, she has a background in Special Branch which ties in nicely with the main plot. There are big references in this book to Bosnia which is where the main target has his allegiances and it appears also got a young and vulnerable ‘wife’.

What makes the story spin is the target runs lodgings and a care home on the island where a missing man had an argument with the owner. The missing man, not seen for months, seems to tie in with the body that is bloated and apparently chewed by sea creatures so not easily identifiable especially without a head. He had been visiting his ‘nan’ in the home but she’s unreliable because she has dementia.

My thoughts.

It’s a big book as I said but very enjoyable, very easy to read and I am on to the next one already called One Under.

As you know if you read my blogs I dont like to give anything away about the outcomes of books. I love all the local references which make these books very special to me.

I give it 5 stars because it flows, keeps you gripped whilst it leads you all over the place. The climax is good and whilst again a study of some political history with the backstory of UN peacekeeper forces in Bosnia.

Sins of the Father – Jimmy Suttle #3 by Graham Hurley – 5 stars

I’d recently read, and written a few words about, 1. Western Approaches and 2. Touching Distance the first two Jimmy Suttle books, as an alternative to reading the DI Joe novels by Graham Hurley. It seemed natural after I read DI Joe #5 to swap back and find out what was happening with Jimmy and Lizzie; after two books I have really started to care about them and towards the end of this one I had tears in my eyes.

I stress I don’t counsel this approach to these books although you can read them as stand-alone novels because the back-story is explained enough I would always read in order.

I might have also mentioned that my erstwhile colleague, crime fiction expert, a narrator, and Q&A lead at various book launches and Nordicana events, where I met him, Barry Forshaw had touched only lightly on the work of Graham Hurley in his Brit Noir encyclopedia. I was quite disappointed that he’d only included a reference to two of the Suttle series and no DI Joe, but I guess it’s difficult to get in everything about every author. I was also alarmed by this entry when I read an apparent spoiler about book 3 Sins of the Father that I would rather not have known, but in the event now reading this one I understand it not to be a spoiler as the devastation that Jimmy and his wife Lizzie have experienced isn’t one of the actual whodunnit threads in this great novel that actually happens in between books 2 and 3 and we know the outcome early in the book.

As I think I mentioned in my previous blog on Graham’s first four books about DI Joe, I got spoilers in Western Approaches about the fate of DI Joe and Paul Winter that I’d rather not have known but I am still enjoying that series of books set in Portsmouth. There are in fact other spoilers in this one but I won’t elaborate.

Touching Distance deals with the killing of several apparently unconnected people by what can only have been done by a sniper. (see my Graham Hurley catch-up blog for more on these two books.

Before I move on to the actual review of this book, I would hasten to add that there is a stark and sometimes cruel side to the story lines in these books. The good guys don’t get off easily in life and I do believe that the author has an almost cruel mindset when he plunges our heroes and heroines into horrible and sometimes, in contrast, some pleasurable situations in their private lives that add to the sense of tension and it serves to enhance the thrilling nature of these books.

The book of the blog

As I write am I’ve literally finished the book but it explains that their 4-year-old daughter Grace is no longer alive, having disappeared at the Southsea kite festival the previous August. The book, in parallel, also deals with the savage murder of a local rich old man with a military history in Africa.

The dead-man is rolling in money but confined to his home after a stroke. Two of his adult children, Neil and Hilary, live with him and they are the obvious first suspects, but their alibis for the evening of the murder are apparently very strong. So Jimmy and Luke Golding his partner on the case along with Det. Supt. Nandy as SIO and DI Houghton are engaging lots of CID resources in tracking down a mysterious African who was visiting the dead-man but was gone after the murder was committed.

Lizzie meanwhile has failed to write the novel about the events and her close experiences in the last book, primarily as a result of the loss of her daughter. Whilst we saw that she and Jimmy were patching things up at the end of Touching Distance, the loss of Grace has damaged them and their relationship. Chantry Cottage is now history, Jimmy has moved into a flat in his area and Lizzie is back in Portsmouth with her mother. There are more flashbacks to the DI Joe series in this book, because of what Lizzie is doing with her new project, where she encounters one of Bazza’s acquaintances and business associates.

My thoughts..

The way Graham Hurley writes is great for me. The narrative flows, the exchange from one thread to another doesn’t always wait for a new chapter to start. Each new chapter is marked by a date and sometimes the hour giving the passage of time. I don’t want to put these books down and regularly I’ve been reading the same paragraph over and over and realize I should stop and go to sleep.

As I said earlier, in this one we do get a lot of, sometimes, previously unwritten back-story about Jimmy and Lizzie when they’re examining or explaining to someone else the situation and aftermath surrounding the loss of Grace. Even Jimmy’s learned passion for opera gained in an earlier story causes someone from his past to haunt him momentarily. I just love the continuity of these stories, the individual baggage the characters have and if you are reading them in order I would strongly recommend you do, in fact, I think you should read all the DI Joe ones first!

This is another wonderful novel from Mr. Hurley. 5 stars once again.

I have to wait for no 4. to be published so watch this space. I need to know what happens to Jimmy and Lizzie, Luke Golding and all the other characters big and small!

It isn’t about the crimes, is it? It’s about the people. I was the same with the Wallander (Mankell) and Harry Hole (Jo Nesbo) novels – for me, they become part of my life for the time I am reading.

The Order of Things is now available for pre-order and due for release in November. I can’t wait. I have my email confirmation from Amazon.

In the meantime, I will be starting Blood and Honey by, guess who, Graham Hurley in the next installment of the Faraday and Winter series, when I lift my fingers off the keyboard. I am sure I will get more on the Jimmy back-story too! Until next time…….. happy reading!

As a complete aside as I finish this blog I’ve just learned that Blackout by Ragnar Jonasson should arrive next week.

Cut to Black …. DI Joe #5 Graham Hurley

In my last blog I was in catch-up on Graham Hurley’s Portsmouth Police Procedurals featuring DI Joe Faraday and also dipping into the continuation of these in the Jimmy Suttle series set in the West Country. I have now read no. 5 called “Cut to Black”I raved in my blog about the procedural narrative, the lives of the coppers and their personal battles, and the use of the back-drop of Portsmouth as an added bonus for me living in the area where most of the crimes are perpetrated, the police and perpetrators live.

The nastiness of the crimes in some of these cases has me now looking over my shoulder for Bazza’s mates, wondering if the lad with the hoodie loitering by the bike-rack at the station is up to no-good! The site of an unmarked Ford Fiesta parked at the side of the road with two dodgy looking blokes sitting there could be a couple of Kingston Crescent DCs watching an address or someone in particular. The sound of a siren, usually a head-turner anyway, now has my imagination fired-up even more.

The book of the blog

Cut to Black follows the continuing exploits of Faraday and Winter.

Faraday is still in Major Crimes and gets appointed to take over a covert operation to bring down the aforementioned crime-boss in Pompey “Bazza” who has almost completely separated himself from being ‘a mush from Copnor’ ; from his away football fan roots in the notorious and violent ‘6:57;’ his evolution into drug-dealing, the foundation of his fortune, and then his move to appear legitimate by setting-up businesses and buying property to help him wash his dirty money. Joe’s appointment is a result of one his colleagues being seriously injured in a hit and run accident. J.J., Joe’s son is now making serious documentary video’s with Joe’s now girlfriend Eadie Sykes and this leads to some trouble for both father and son and a conflict of interest!

Meanwhile Winter is now part of a crime-squad aimed at proactive policing – their task is to try run out of town some drug dealing ‘scousers’ who are treading on Bazza’s toes. Paul is partnered with Jimmy Suttle in this story and he learns some valuable lessons from Winter with hindsight.

This novel also has a lot of political ooomph as it’s set in March 2003 during the invasion by the US and UK of Iraq and the toppling of Sadam Hussein. I found this weird timing – I started reading this book just after the Chilcott report was published. The novel for me wasn’t so much about crime but about the people involved in it and how far their web can be spun. It’s about drug culture and the potential the money coming from that has for changing the economic fortune of an area.

Another highly recommended novel from Hurley’s library! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

PS Blood and Honey, no 6 is already dispatched from Amazon

Connor Montrose in The London Cage

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As quite often happens a publisher – in this case Fledgling Press drops me a line and asks me to read and review a book before it’s release. In this case it is The London Cage by Mark Leggatt. As with all the books I receive my first move is to check if there is one before. I was correct and in this case The Names of the Dead was published previously so being cheeky I asked the publisher for a copy of that book and it duly arrived in the post.

So who is Connor Montrose? Described in some reviews as Bond meets Bourne meets Indiana Jones – there is some truth in this in comparison as the pace of the plots is similar. The real Connor Montrose is a CIA IT Technician who has gone rogue because he was digging where he shouldn’t and found out about aircraft flights that no one should know about when he is trying to find out what has happened to his sister. The irony of this is to keep him out of trouble he is posted to Interpol in Europe, where he gets into more trouble.

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Names of the Dead

The CIA want Connor dead! “Shoot on sight with extreme prejudice” are words expressed to ensure he cant speak. He gets tangled up in a plot to extract gold and millions of dollars hidden since the second world war. This involves him being permanently on the run.

The London Cage

Connor survives, as one would expect, but only by being one step ahead of the CIA with the help of a new ’employer’ and a side-kick called Kirsty.

We find him in a bar in London with an ear-piece watching proceedings between some Russian guys and some one selling photographs. The ear-piece is allowing him to communicate with Kirsty who is a hacker of the Lisbeth Salander standard.

Kirsty is an interesting character in her own right as you’ll find out she knows the rat-runs and back ways in London. She knows how to spot a Victorian lamppost that isn’t a lamppost at all but carries a bank of CCTV.

Connor and Kirsty are in the middle of a cat and mouse game; the CIA and MI5 are after them and narrowly escaping capture or being shot as in this story MI5 and the metropolitan police are US poodles doing what and when they told.

They are helped by a mysterious character called Pilgrim the brother of a character introduced and who dies in the prologue set 30 years in the past. The circumstances of his demise slowly unravel as the plot unveils a threat of nuclear war and Armageddon in the middle east unfolds with the Russians and Kirsty with her back-office genius Zac in the background competing to decipher codes taken from a photograph of the dead man when his body is recovered at the bottom of an glacier.

The plot comes to the explosive ending when the clues lead them to Whitechapel and the arches, a house with a supposed and disgraced double agent just before he gets killed. They do solve the problem, but Kirsty and Connor have to be chameleons in the watched-world that is 21st century London, with containment zones closing around them they change appearance, clothes and use devious means of transport to get where they need to go.

The London Cage is an excellent follow-up to Names of the Dead from Mark Leggatt and I can highly recommend it if you like a page-turning thriller non-stop tension, jumping from one close-call to another only escaping from each one in sometimes the most unlikely and fluky situations. in the Connor Montrose you never know who is on your side or who you can trust and how much they have to hide.

The Names of the Dead is on Amazon in ebook format.

The London Cage is publish on June 29th, 2016 on Amazon in paperback.

thanks to:

Mark Leggatt

Linda MacFadyen at Fledgling Press for my review copies.

Willow Walk by SJI Holliday

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The Book of the Blog

Following on from ‘Black Wood’ – ‘Willow Walk’ sees us back in the fictional Banktoun following Davie Gray investigating drug-related deaths amongst teenagers in the region for his colleague in CID – Malkie. Does Davie want to join CID at his age?

His private life overlaps this story in a big way when a woman is found badly wounded and Malkie thinks it’s someone Davie knows! When he goes to the hospital it turns out not to be the girl – Marie – that he’s been dating on and off, but they have a lot of similarities but one key identifier isn’t on the injured victim.

In parallel with this Marie is receiving letters from someone called Graeme. As the story unfolds we find out who the mystery letter writer is and when he turns up in Banktoun things get messy for Marie and for the rest of community especially in the location of the book’s title.

Davie is hot on the trail and has discovered a link between Marie and a missing mental hospital patient as well as being hot on the trail of the ‘drug’ pushers.

Overlapping all this is Laura from the first story – one of Davie’s karate students and her escapades with a boy – a rite of passage for her, leading to her playing a part in the conclusion of the mystery letter-writer – when it all goes to mayhem.

I wont say anymore about the plot as I will spoil it.

My Thoughts

I was, I must admit, initially, a little dissapointed that not all of the main characters from Black Wood were featured but as Davie is the copper in the mix he is central to Willow Walk even more than he was in Black Wood. This makes Willow Walk a standalone if you haven’t read Black Wood, but my followers will know I like to read in order.

This is another excellently written page-turner from Susi. A true nail-biter.

I’d read the first in a matter of days despite having a day job and read this one in a similar time frame, consuming hundreds of pages sometimes in one sitting. That speaks volumes for me about the fluid way in which the narrative flows, alternating between Davie and Marie and ‘the letters’ she receives. The letters that keep appearing in the novel add to the ultimate creepiness of this story.

I highly recommend this chilling novel – it has suspense, thrills and it gave me the creeps. A thoroughly good read. 5 Stars for Willow Walk

Credits

SJI Holliday

Black & White

Laura at B&W for my review copy of Willow Walk which started me on the Banktoun trail and introduced me to Susie’s work

Willow Walk – as I said in a recent post on social media “if it’s half as good as Black Wood we’re in for a treat”.

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watch out for the Blog Tour in June for the paperback release. In the meantime this is now out on ebook at the following page (if you’re not already there of course.)

Willow Walk eBook

Black Wood is also on eBook, Print and Audio Download too!

Black Wood by SJI Holliday

Moving to the north, in fact, Scotland and Banktoun a small, close-knit community where everyone appears to know everyone else and this is fueled by the town gossip monger Bridie.

I read this having received a review copy of Willow Walk (my thanks to Laura at B&W) which I am now reading in earnest to follow the lives of the characters from Black Wood.

I have to add this isn’t my normal reading as I tend to do police procedurals so approached it with some reticence but it had me gripped and my first session got me well past page 100 as I just couldn’t put it down and ended up on the settee into the early hours.

The Plot

There are a lot of mysteries in this excellent thriller that kept me gripped and reading – I completed it in less than a week which is a challenge sometimes with my other commitments.

Why is Claire in a wheelchair?

Why is Jo on medication?

Who is Jake? Why is he so devoted to Claire?

Why does Scott split up with Jo which forces her to move out and into her friend Craig’s flat ?

Why does she then run off to her late grandmother’s cottage – Black Wood?

Who is the stranger that comes into the bookshop where Jo works?

Why do the locals think a witch lived in Black Wood cottage?

Then there’s Pete who see’s things from his house but his father doesn’t want him to talk to Davie Gray.

Davie Gray – the local police sergeant influenced by ‘mod’ culture who rides a motor scooter when he’s not in a panda car. He’s troubled by the threat of closure of his police station now that Police Scotland has been formed and there are rationalization plans all over. In addition to this someone is frightening girls down at ‘The Track’ a place where the teenagers go for illicit drinking, smoking weed and dalliances.

Jo thinks she knows the stranger and is determined to find out who he is and what he is up to?

We also see the story from Davie’s perspective too as he struggles to deal with the many facets of this excellent read.

My thoughts

Susie’s (SJI) great novel is the first of the Banktoun trilogy and I think deals with people’s interpersonal relationships and feelings and fears in a sympathetic way.

I very much enjoyed this read and the way that the plot and mystery are maintained is refreshing!The events of the book are played out in a very clever way swapping backward to times when Jo and Claire were themselves teenagers and the strong narrative introduces a ‘boy’ in the past as we see the story from his perspective and also from Claire’s and Jo’s at different stages in the story. The main character, however, is Jo and we see most of the current day events from her angle. It’s a very complex plot that weaves between different people and the past and present. It’ll keep you on your toes throughout.

I can’t recommend Black Wood enough as it sets the scene for the trilogy but it’s also an excellent stand-alone thriller.

Credits

SJI Holliday

Black & White

Laura at B&W for my review copy of Willow Walk which started me on the Banktoun trail and introduced me to Susie’s work

watch out for the follow-up but in the meantime, there’s a Davie Gray short story available free from the following link Wrack Line

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Willow Walk – as I said in a recent post on social media “if it’s half as good as Black Wood we’re in for a treat”.

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watch out for the Blog Tour!

Gunnhildur’s Travails – Thin Ice

I am continually honoured in the presence of genius in the group of Nordic noir lovers of which I am part. This genius sources in Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Norway even Derbyshire, and, in this case, Hampshire.

The latest tale from this stable is the excellent Thin Ice from Quentin Bates. A local, homegrown talent who continues to excel with his police procedurals about Gunnhildur an officer in the Reykjavik CID.

However, this isn’t a traditional Whodunit as we start with the bad guys and follow their escape when they car-jack a mother and daughter when their getaway driver fails to be at the rendezvous. In parallel with this Gunnhildur battles with the trials of her private life. Her son has now settled with one of his girlfriends and rekindles his relationship with his now-dying father much to her dismay. Along with this, she is troubled by her two grandchildren sired by her son. The getaway driver is then found dead in a fire. Is this accidental?

The pace switches between the criminals, as a long-standing, habitual, criminal and a monster of a man and his side-kick, who doesn’t have a sheet, whilst the main bad-guy has a sheet as long as his and his sidekick’s arm. The former continually waves a gun at his captives and is unafraid to use it. The alternate thread is following Gunnhildur and her colleagues trying to track down the missing women.

The atmosphere and emotion are diverted by one of the captives, as the daughter of the pair becomes involved with the not so bad sidekick – in this context you could call it ‘Rekjavik Syndrome.’ This adds to the suspense in the story as it leads to an unexpected outcome as a surprise as she – the daughter turns out to be as conniving and deceitful as the criminals themselves.

I’d made a concerted effort to read all the prior novels before starting Thin Ice, as I love reading in sequence, having read Frozen Out when this blog tour was announced and was invited to contribute. As a result, of this, I had missed out on some story line and even questioned the writer about continuity who pointed me to the two novella, WinderLude and Summerchill which I read in parallel – these filled in some blanks on Gunnhildur’s family story.

I really enjoyed reading all of these novels and I do wonder with excitement what is next for Gunnhildur. Will she get that promotion? Will her family life settle down?

Watch out for the next in the saga, but in the meantime Thin Ice stands alone as a great crime story, filled with the atmosphere and coldness that is Iceland-Noir.

I highly recommend it and please follow the rest of the blog tour both backward and forwards.

Credits and references – Quentin Bates – Author Page

Thin Ice Thin Ice (Gunnhildur Mystery)

Cold Comfort Cold Comfort (Gunnhildur Mystery Book 2)

Chilled to the Bone Chilled to the Bone (Gunnhildur Mystery Book 3)

Cold Steal Cold Steal (Gunnhildur Mystery Book 4)

Winterlude Winterlude (Gunnhildur Mystery)

Summerchill Summerchill (Gunnhildur Mystery)

Missing in Malmo by Torquil MacLeod

Another great novel in the Anita Sundstrom series. I love this book – couldn’t stop reading it other than when my eyes gave up. I can’t wait for the next one which is due through my letter box just after Easter.

Following on from her successes in the previous two novels set in Malmo, Anita investigates the disappearance of an heir-hunter from the UK.

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The man she loves (but won’t admit to him) is still in prison for the murder in the first book but she still visits him on the pretext of getting to the bottom of the murder he committed in England but she is reluctant to do anything about it as he would be sent back to the UK; her ex-husband turns up looking for his young student girlfriend who he unofficially reports to Anita as missing so she has two missing people – one official and one unofficial and as we know Anita can be maverick sometimes. Her son is back with her in Malmo but he’s not in the best of spirits.

Hakim is having trouble at home too – his sister is having arguments with their parents – this leads to some additional domestic intrigue when Hakim stays over at Anita’s whilst she is away working with a UK detective to try to track down the reasons why the heir hunter has been murdered – his body, missing a part of a limb, is washed-up in the Sound.

To add insult to injury the body of the ex-husband’s missing girlfriend also gets washed-up in the Sound – she has been raped and her apartment is pristine almost professionally cleaned and only the ex-husband’s prints are found in some places where others there is nothing for forensics to discover. Nordlund and Westermark are working on the murdered girl whilst, as I said Anita is over in England, working with local CID and meeting the heir hunter’s widow and trying to piece things together from what was left over – strangely, however, she is the victim of a burglary around the time of the discovery of his body.

This is a complex plot, the local detective has some baggage with a deputy chief constable whom they interview about the past crime – there was a diamond robbery some time ago which tracks back to the past and action in Australia where one of the culprits was killed by the main detective – the DCC, in fact, the closure of the case made his career. Whilst only one of the diamond heist gang is still alive in England, the other two have died but there is another twist – the hit-and-run of a local English guy.

Anita’s ex-husband is then arrested and charged with the girl’s murder but Nordland is not happy with something and starts digging again but it leads to an unhappy conclusion.

There is some personal and professional tragedy for Anita in this gripping novel but it does bring closure on both local and English fronts and an excellent climax. The culprits are found and in a gripping ending with Hakim finding the heir hunter’s murderers and Anita puts together what Nordland had found out and confront’s the real murderer.

You’ll need to read it – I highly recommend this book to any fan of good police procedurals and or course nordic crime.

Credits and references

Missing in Malmö: The third Inspector Anita Sundström mystery (Inspector Anita Sundström Mysteries Book 3)

Torquil MacLeod

An Event in Autumn by Henning Mankell RIP

I write this blog post with an overwhelming sense of loss! I have read every word written about Kurt Wallander and there is nothing more of him nor Henning Mankell although for those of you who follow the Nordic Noir genre they will live long in our collective psyches.

A classic Wallander story; conflict in himself; with Linda and the world. He wants to desperately live out his days in a more relaxed environment with his love of classical music away from the stress of policing and the city. He takes the opportunity presented by Martinsson, to check out an idyllic place and in doing so he stumbles across a crime scene, in his attempt to find the place to live away from the city. This opens up the under-resourced cold-case investigation that his boss can’t support.

He is lonely and has lost his father, he needs some love. I know how that feels – how the agonising relationship between a father and son can be until one day they are no longer there. His relationship with his ex-wife – there is no longer any contact although he has now rekindled the relationship with his daughter, now a budding police officer herself, after a period of separation. She is a good thing for him if he only realises it in time.

I have felt a kindred spirit with Kurt for some time; I read ‘A Troubled Man’ recognising the signs of type II diabetes in the narrative! Time caught up with him too! One day I will find my children, again or them me, hopefully before it’s too late.

This novella – a simple plot – wasn’t a difficult read, not that any of Henning’s Kurt books are; in fact for me returning to the pages of a Wallander thriller only at the weekend it felt like I was meeting a schoolboy friend with whom I’d not spent any time for years and yet it didn’t feel like we’d been apart for days at all.

It’s Monday night in late November as I write this and ‘An Event in Autumn’ is set in the coldness of late autumn leading into winter in Ystad; snow one minute; then rain and slush! I hate this time of year – going to work in the dark and coming home in the dark!

Kurt unravels things as he usually does, as most great detectives do, by noticing things in people and in places that aren’t quite right! He does the unspeakable and walks into the jaws of a trap without calling for back-up! It all works out in the end.

You know I don’t do spoilers, but I expect most of you will have read this anyway but something in me needed to write this as most bloggers know! The melancholy of a Wallander and most critically for me is the afterword by HK himself a beautiful essay on the life he and Kurt shared! I admit to shedding a tear or maybe two.

On a lighter note I have seen Lassgard; Branagh and Krister Henriksson play Kurt and was fortunate to meet Krister in 2014 at Nordicana. He will always be my Wallander! A wonderfully humble and gracious man overwhelmed by the excitement I showed in meeting him!

May you rest in peace Henning! Thank you for the gift and legacy you gave us.