clair081

Two previous novels by Maurizio de Giovanni have been published in English translation, both in the Commissario Ricciardi series set in Naples before World War II and featuring some paranormal elements (and a third Ricciardi novel is set to be published in English in November). I'm not normally drawn to either historical crime novels or supernatural ones, so I hadn't picked up the Ricciardi books, but the publisher, Europa, kindly sent me a copy of De Giovanni's contemporary novel, The Crocodile (and having read that book, I expect to go back to have a look at the other series). The Crocodile is about a serial killer, but not a psychopath of the sort we've come to know so well. This is a methodical killer (hence his nickname and the book's title) who plans carefully, lies in wait for his prey, and kills mercilessly but without a desire to inflict pain on the murdered victims. His motive lies elsewhere, as the police and a disgraced detective, Giuseppe Lojacono, wil...

This second novel (and the first episode of a new series) is a "heart of darkness" story in both its present and its flashback sections. It begins like a serial-killer novel, but quickly turns into something else. Beginning with a flashback, three young graduates decide to leave London for a holiday, and on a whim pick Uganda rather than India (where "everyone" is going). Once there, taking a wrong turn, they end up as captives of a militia. The narrative returns to this adventure/horror again at intervals. The "present" action concerns Jack Carrigan, one of the young men, now a Detective Inspector in London. He is in charge of the investigation of the brutal, sadistic murder of a young African student in her apartment. The police authorities, however, don't trust Carrigan and send a formerly disgraced Sergeant, Geneva Miller, to assist him and report on his conduct of the case. African politics and violence are the main theme, even in the London narra...

Why do I keep on reading Ken Bruen's Jack Taylor novels--there seems to be another one coming out before I can even finish the current one, and they have gotten progressively darker. They're also very loosely constructed, and the most recent one I've read, Purgatory, is very loose indeed. Bruen has mixed his usual characters (the ones that have survived), a serial killer plot that is almost beside the point, a new girlfriend and her boss (both Americans), and lots and lots of pop-culture references. And though there's a lot of misery in the whole Taylor series, this one is indeed a purgatory. The quotes and other mentions of crime fiction have always been a part of the Taylor novels, but they reach a crescendo here (and Taylor, in his first-person narration--though not all of the book is in his voice, even begins to refer to past events in terms of Bruen's book titles, a metafictional gesture totally in keeping with Bruen's method). What's compelling is Brue...

Argentine novelist Claudia Piñeiro's new book (published by Bitter Lemon Press and translated by Miranda France) shares some common ground with her previously translated All Yours (a death that may be accidental, a feuding couple, their troubled daughter) but A Crack in the Wall is a fuller and more interesting book (the best of her three books translated so far, in my opinion). Pablo Simó is an architect who repeatedly sketches his design for an original building but spends most of his time doing non-design work for an architectural firm that doesn't value him any more than he does himself. He's a worker-bee, without ambition (except for his sketches), the underground man (in a Dostoevskyian metaphor, he commutes via subway when there are more direct ways to get to work on the surface). H longs for Marta, his coworker in the firm, while settling into dull routines with his wife at home as much as his working life in the studio. The novel opens with a disruption from the pa...

I started reading a book from my tbr pile that I've been looking forward to, based on readers' reviews and the publisher's blurb (and the book will remain nameless here). There was an interesting opening chapter set primarily in the past, an event that will color the rest of the book, and then an opening passage in the "present day," with the Detective Inspector arriving at a crime scene to find a naked, disembowelled woman tied to a bed. At that point I found myself stopping, uncertain whether I want to go on with the book. Haven't we had enough crime scenes like that, and is it inevitable that if we continue reading this one we're going to be treated to lots more women tortured in extravagant and lurid manners? I've pretty much stopped reading serial killer books because I'm weary and nauseated by this sort of thing, but these scenes seem to be unavoidable even in the police procedural and noir segments of crime fiction. Are there no other plots ...

Recently reprinted and hailed as a great work of the British avant-garde of the 1960s, Ann Quin's Berg begins with a premise right out of 1940s-'50s noir: "A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father..." What follows is a short, frequently funny dismembering of both noir fiction and the literary establishment of Quin's day (she swam out to sea and never came back in 1973), having only published 3 other short novels. The seaside town of Berg is evidently Brighton, but Quin's evocation of the out-of-season resort is quite different (and much less lurid) than Grahame Green's version in his famous Brighton novel. Quin's style is partly stream-of-consciousness and partly close observation of streets and rooming houses, with large doses of crisp dialogue. Her allusive writing can seem a bit difficult at first, but once you get into the flow, the novel rocks quickly along its downward path. Berg include...