The Missing Mystery

I must admit I've gotten lazy. I didn't realize how lazy until I saw the date of my last post (yikes!). It's not that I've stopped reading as much as fallen prey to the allure of the small screen.  I still read Anne Cleeves but I love Brenda Blythyn's Vera Stanhope. While I'm not too sure about the actor who plays Jimmy Perez in the Shetland series, it doesn't stop me from watching it. And while I've never read a single Morse book, try and keep me away from Inspector Lewis or Endeavour. My mission (at least while my series are on summer hiatus) is to catch up on both my reading and my writing, in spite of the attention craving, book-chewing hound of the Baranvilles. Consider this the beginning.
And where better to start than with a couple of my favourite Scandinavians. Yrsa Sigurdadottir's The Silence of the Sea opens with a yacht crashing into a harbour wall. The crew and passengers, a family with two young daughters, have completely disappeared and lawyer Thora Gudmundsdottir is hired to sort through the legal mess. There's only one problem and that's because instead of letting the story unravel, the author spoonfeeds the reader what actually happens in alternating chapters. So, little mystery here...
Jo Nesbo's The Son has been out long enough that it's now out in paperback, the perfect format for hauling to a beach. Unfortunately, it's hardly beachtime reading. There are far too many characters (maybe you can remember them if you write them all down. And maybe not...). The lawyer, Einar Harnes. The cop, Simon Kefas. His wife. Her sister. The crime boss. Assorted inmates and henchmen. The priest. The prison governor. The assistant prison governor.  The girlfriend. And finally, the criminal, Sonny Lofthus. Though I really wanted to like the title character, he was just too cringeworthingly violent. 
But maybe it's not just that. Maybe it's that The Son misses a central protagonist-- maybe it misses Harry Hole. 

What more could you want than a dog, a book and a blog?

Lacklustre Lackberg

I hate to appear to be slagging on some of my favourite authors but the Scandinavians do appear to be slipping. I have to admit I lost interest in Jo Nesbo after the initial Harry Hole triology but what really finished me off was him writing a children's book.
Camille Lackberg's latest, The Lost Boy, and Yrsa Sigurdardottir's I Remember You have almost identical covers: that of a boy in a hoodie standing in front of the water. Perhaps it's appropriate as both stories revolve around a pair of 'lost' boys--one in the past, the other in the present.
Sigurdardottir's story involves a group of friends who are dropped off at a remote island to renovate an old house. Gardar and Katrin are a couple who are already on the outs with each other and their high maintenance friend, Lif. (This is the main problem right here: not one of the characters is sympathetic.) They are haunted by a bullied boy who got stranded on the island to die. It's obvious from the start they're going to be picked off one by one. And the thing is, the reader doesn't care. The only one we care about is Putti the dog.
Lackberg's Lost Boy picks up where the last book left off, with Erica and her sister Anna trying to recuperate from their car crash. A friend, Nathalie, has fled an abusive marriage to take refuge on a remote island with her son. (This thread seems all too familiar as Erica's sister also suffered through an abusive relationship which lasted the course of several installments.) Naturally there are ghosts on the island, among them that of a woman and her son who has also suffered through an abusive relationship. Throw in several other storylines--including yet another woman fleeing an abusive relationship, a drug ring and a couple of conmen and it all becomes a bit too much.
But what really killed the books for me was the element of the supernatural, which even the excellent Asa Larsson failed to pull off in Until Thy Wrath be Past. A mystery already has that element of the unknown; to add a vengeful ghost only makes it cheesy. A reader wants Agatha Christie, not Friday the 13th. But maybe that's me.

Dead Scared

It's been awhile since I announced this blog and I don't really know what's stopped me from posting. It's not that I haven't been reading. And it's not that I haven't been writing--reviews have been piling up in my drafts folder. For awhile I even considered switching over to Wordpress, but  after too much consideration which left me in a stall, I decided to stay where I am. Curled up and comfortable.
I've been reading S.J.Bolton since her first book, Sacrifice and while I've mostly liked what I've read, I've been getting a little impatient. While each book was well written, there was no continuity between any of them. I liked her characters well enough to want to know what happened after.( Few of them seemed finished within their individual stories.) With DC Lacey Flint, she's finally settled on a main character. This is the DC introduced in Bolton's last book, Now You See Me. Flint is not an easy character to like, or even understand, but she is intriguing enough to want to follow along.
In Dead Scared, Flint goes undercover to discover why students are killing themselves in record numbers and unusually cruel ways. No one is sure there is a murder, much less a conspiracy.
 Of course there's a strong unfulfilled attraction between Lacey and her nemesis, DI Mark Joesbury, which can make the dialogue a bit too Castle-like. But the action and character development prevent this from falling into the trap of becoming a sitcom.
Bolton also brings back psychiatrist Evi Oliver, first introduced two books back in Blood Harvest. Dead Scared made me go back for a reread, which was hugely satisfying, to tie up that book's loose ends. Now I can't wait for more. Can a Masterpiece Mystery be far behind?