Police

Barbara Fradkin is well known in Canada, and deservedly so. Her Inspector Green series, of which this novel is the first entry, are solid police procedurals with the charming Inspector Green using that favorite device of mystery readers everywhere: deductive reasoning. And as most mystery readers prefer to read a series in order, I’m reviewing the first in Fradkin’s series though she has now written ten novels in the series, the most recent being None So Blind.

I loved the set up of this first novel and I really loved the way the book and the characters who inhabit it hit the ground running. They obviously had a life going before we hit the scene, and it’s a sure sign of a writer able to create fully dimensional, realized characters. As I was reading I was sometimes curious about events in Inspector Green’s past but Fradkin presents him as he exists in his present reality. As it is with getting to know an actual human being, meeting Green is like getting to know someone you may become friends with later. read more

Some writers write with their smarts on their sleeves (Jeffrey Deaver and Thomas Perry come to mind) and some with their hearts on their sleeves. Louise Penny belongs firmly in this second category, and in none of her novels has her heart been more front and center than in this one, a deeply moving examination of the relinquishment of power, love, and attachment as well as an examination of the painful but necessary process of change and growth.

It almost seemed at times as though Penny couldn’t stop the words from rushing over the page, and as a reader, I couldn’t stop myself from rushing to inhale them as fast as she was throwing them down. Gamache has retired and settled in Three Pines with Reine Marie, with frequent visits from his new son in law, Jean Guy Beauvoir. read more

Karen Dionne joins us to launch what is not really an adaptation of the AMC show “The Killing,” but a prequel using the characters and setting familiar to any fan of the show. Reading the cover, it’s interesting to see the progression: “The Killing” began as a Danish show, “Forbrydelsen,” was developed by Veena Sud for U.S. television, and is now a novel by Karen Dionne.  At that point of removal I think the work becomes so far from the source that it’s now Dionne’s own.

For those of you not fans of the show, it’s a police show set in Seattle, featuring the uncompromising, workaholic, single mother Detective Sarah Linden; and the slightly less tightly wound Detective Steven Holder, back from working undercover.  Dionne goes backward in time from the show. read more

Mary Logue has long been one of my favorite authors and after waiting an increasingly long time between installments, I’m more than eager to pick up one of these tightly written, exciting and emotionally resonant novels.  Unfortunately I inhale them far too quickly and am forced to settle in for another long wait for the next book.  Logue’s main character is deputy Claire Watkins, who works in tiny Fort St. Antoine, Wisconsin.  She lives with her husband, the laconic pheasant farmer Rick, and her now almost adult daughter, Meg. read more

Louise Penny has always possessed a “voice”, a recognizable prose style and way of telling a story, but as her career has progressed you can feel the originality and power of her voice increasing.  She’s exploring deeply personal themes and rigorously examining her characters from the inside out,  giving them a little (or big) shake. While Gamache has some mystery left (and hence some of his own mythic power) there’s lots we’ve learned about him as readers since the publication of Still Life. read more

“What I warn you to remember is that I am a detective. Our relationship with the truth is fundamental but cracked…”

Tana French has obviously learned a few lessons from more established writers like Val McDermid and Denise Mina, and her first novel is a richly textured and complex character study as well as a precise explication of a particular crime. There are two main plot threads. One of them involves the disappearance of three 12 year olds twenty years in the past. Two of them were never found; the third is discovered with blood in his shoes clinging to the side of a tree. French infuses the memories of the boy—who is now a police detective—with fairy tale lore and language, giving the past an almost dreamy, otherwordly quality. In an early version of Cinderella, for example, the stepsister cuts off bits of her feet to fit into Cinderella’s slipper, so the slippers are filled with blood. Even the title, In the Woods, references the location of most fairy tales. French comes back again and again to the theme that children think differently—on the slim chance of seeing some kind of “marvel”, they’ll take a bigger risk, unheeded, because of their very youth. This gives her narrative a good deal of power and resonance. read more

The two signature books of the summer, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Tana French’s Broken Harbor, share a theme: the recession, joblessness, and the losses that come with those circumstances.  In Gone Girl, Flynn’s characters lose their jobs and investments and are forced to leave Manhattan for the wilds of Missouri, where they are fish out of water.

The former Dubliners in French’s novel, Pat and Jenny, find their dream home in a development that never “developed,” far out from the city and away from any of their friends or former lifestyle.  And their move was made for the most prosaic of reasons:  so their kids could grow up in a real house with a backyard.  Like Flynn’s characters, Pat has lost his job, and the development is a ghost town. read more

This may be the most traditional of Louise Penny’s now four novels, though she has been labeled from the beginning as a “traditional” mystery writer. And indeed, she does write in the same tradition as Margery Allingham, Josephine Tey and Agatha Christie (a tradition they helped create), but she has managed to make this old form her own. She has an exceptional gift with prose, and the character development she brings to her writing is very modern. In each book, Penny has managed to slightly change up her formula to make each story feel fresh, and this one is no exception. read more