Category Archives: Reading . . .

**The Extraditionist

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confiscated drug money

Confiscated drug money (photo: wikimedia.org)

By Todd Merer – A debut thriller that shines a light into a particularly dark corner of the legal world, The Extraditionist is the story of a talented lawyer who’s made his comfortable living representing the leaders of drug cartels at risk of being extradited to the United States. IRL, author Merer is, cover copy would have you believe, a specialist in defending these same high-ranking cartel chiefs. “He gained acquittals in more than 150 trials,” it crows. This seems a dubious business and, as a result, you may have trouble warming up to the book’s protagonist, a first-person narrator who may be no more than the author’s alter-ego.

When three potentially lucrative clients send out feelers—“a trifecta of new clients suddenly emerg(ing) from the free-fire zone of the War against Drugs”—Bluestone whips into action. He knows next-to-nothing about any of these potential clients, except that they are all dangerous men supported by large trigger-happy criminal gangs. You may have trouble keeping all the players straight. I did.

Nevertheless, Bluestone is all in, hoping for the big score that will let him retire. There’s a possibility that one of the three is the elusive Sombra, a mysterious drug lord living high in the Andes among the Logui people who reportedly pays no bribes and extorts no officials. Bluestone is skeptical. “In my experience, tales of the moral principles of drug legendaries are bullshit. On the opposite end of the spectrum, stories of their violence are underestimated.” You wonder how he’s survived.

Throughout the story, Bluestone’s friends and confidants and fixers and what-have-you are murdered by one cartel or the other, yet Bluestone soldiers on, seemingly unaffected by the death and destruction that follows in this wake. Over the course of the narrative, he develops a theory about who Sombra is (one I did not share), and you may figure out rather quickly the true identify of a couple of key characters.

The huge amounts of cash sloshing around and the casual way in which they were handled, the wholesale murder, and the efforts to obtain for drug traffickers the lightest possible sentences exposed a moral vacuum at the heart of this novel that makes it difficult to care about the protagonist or his supposedly clever doings. It’s quite a contrast to the perspective on the destructive wake of the cartels (in Mexico this time) of Don Winslow’s excellent The Cartel.

****Kompromat

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newspaper headlines

CC BY-SA HonestReporting.com, flickr/caseydavid

By Stanley Johnson – If you’re one of the millions of people on both sides of the Atlantic who look back on the elections of 2016 and say, to yourself or at the top of your lungs, “What just happened?” this satirical new political thriller is for you.

Its characters are such thinly disguised versions of today’s leading political figures, you can be forgiven for thinking you’ve inadvertently picked up a recent copy of The Times. Much-needed is the list of its many characters—from the US, Russia, Germany, China, various other countries, four “key animals” and, most numerous of all, leaders of the UK. “Kompromat” is a Russian word—a portmanteau meaning compromising material, and in this novel—as, possibly, in real life—most of these countries hold plenty of it on each other.

As the book opens, a 2016 US presidential candidate is participating in an international wildlife expedition that hopes to radio-collar a tiger. Events go wrong almost immediately. The candidate ends up in a hospital where the Russians plant a bug in his body. The CIA, ever on the ball, figures this out, and replaces it with their own bug. And they’re not the only ones. By the book’s end, America’s new president unwittingly has unwittingly become another “Voice of America.”

Meanwhile, the British have problems of their own. Its Secretary of State for the Environment is approached by the Russians, who have singled him out as a leading light of the “Eurosceptic wing” of the Conservative Party. He learns the Prime Minister agreed to the Referendum on EU membership (the “Brexit” vote) for a reason no more complicated than money. Apparently, the PM believed the vote would never actually occur and, even if it did, it wouldn’t succeed, and the Party would receive money for doing nothing.

Author Johnson devises numerous amusing and convoluted scenarios in which the hapless politicians become entangled. In his scenario, these byzantine schemes are organized and carried out by the Russian Security Service—the FSB, heir to the KGB—“ to change the whole structure of international politics.” The book is not only entertaining, it makes you think “what if?” and, as more news drifts out of world capitals, perhaps “why not?”

Johnson is a former politician and member of the Conservative Party, and a former employee of the World Bank and the European Commission, who has held a number of prominent environmental posts as well as being an environmental activist. In the time preceding the Brexit vote, he co-chaired Environmentalists for Europe. Although he’s on record as opposing the Referendum, his son Boris was a key leader of the “leavers.” The book is in development for a six-part television series too.

*****Beneath the Mountain

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Bletterbach, mountain, the Dolomites, gorge

The Bletterbach – photo: Esther Westerveld

By Luca D’Andrea, translated by Howard Curtis – When a debut thriller appears that sold to thirty countries within a month, became a bestseller in the author’s home country of Italy and in Germany, and was greeted with breathless praise like “can be compared (with no fear of hyperbole) to Stephen King and Jo Nesbø,” you know you’re in for quite a ride.

D’Andrea delivers. Beneath the Mountain is set in the northern Italian province of South Tyrol, in the village of Siebenhoch, whose Italian residents speak German. Siebenhoch is near the end of the eight-kilometer Bletterbach gorge in the jagged Dolomite mountains. Hikers are warned they enter the steep terrain “at their own risk,” because of rockfalls, mudslides, freezing water, and flash floods. The geological characteristics and history of the gorge are essential to D’Andrea’s story, anchoring it to a reality that could not have existed anywhere else.

Thirty years before the novel begins, three experienced hikers—Kurt, Evi, and Marcus—trekked deep into the gorge and were set upon first by an unusually powerful storm, then by one or more unknown assailants who hacked their bodies into pieces. By the time a four-man rescue team arrived, any forensic evidence was washed away or lost in the mud.

The deaths of these three young people reverberated through the community, affecting, disastrously, not only the men who found them but also their families. One time or another suspicion has fallen on a disappeared paleontologist with some bizarre theories that Evi thoroughly discredited, on a wealthy developer who built a visitor center on land her analyses had shown was unstable, on various members of the insular community, even on the rescuers themselves.

Now, American screenwriter Jeremiah Salinger, his wife Annelise, and their five-year-old daughter Clara have relocated to Siebenhoch. The fresh location inspires a new television series about the work of Dolomite Mountain Rescue. As its name implies, the rescue service comes to the aid of stranded tourists, injured hikers, and others in distress among the precipitous peaks. Jeremiah is party to a disastrous helicopter crash that kills four rescuers and a tourist, but his physical injuries are nothing compared to a serious case of PTSD, compounded by guilt and fear, that impairs his judgment. The booze doesn’t help. To distract himself, he starts investigating the 1985 Bletterbach murders, a deeper, more dangerous rabbit hole than the one he’s already in.

D’Andrea frequently introduces new information through the device of a community member offering to tell Jeremiah a story, which is a powerful enticement for the reader as well. Especially engaging is Jeremiah’s relationship with daughter Clara. Their word game—she loves to spell—is a theme throughout, which becomes ironic when, despite his obvious devotion to her, he puts his off-the-books investigation before even her.

****And So It Began (Delaney Book 1)

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Child_beauty_pageant

photo: Lloyd Gallman, creative commons license

By Owen Mullen – Brave of a resident of Scotland and the Greek Islands to write a police procedural set in one of America’s most iconic cities, one with a strong and unique culture, history, and personality. Still, he’s chosen New Orleans for the first in his series featuring protagonist Vincent Delaney—former NOPD detective, now a private investigator.

For the most part the character of the Big Easy comes through in the details Mullen chooses to provide, though the deep trauma of Hurricane Katrina receives only a single mention. There’s maybe too little attention to food and the weather, some nice references to music (Delaney plays in a band), and directly related to the story, a reopening of the old wounds of NOPD corruption that have helped poison race relations in the city.

Delaney has three—make that four—issues on his hands. First is a background hazard in the form of Julian Boutte, a mentally deranged African American man whose brother Delaney killed a decade back when he was still an NOPD detective. Boutte has escaped from prison, and there’s no question that he plans to kill Delaney.

A group of African American small business people from the North Le Moyne area are having to pay protection money they can ill afford and seek Delaney’s help.

The third problem, and the one that takes up most of the book’s plot deals with a bizarre phenomenon of American life, the child beauty/talent pageant. Across the southern states, children who participate in these pageants are being murdered. One of the victims is a five-year-old boy, killed only minutes after winning with a memorable Charlie Chaplin imitation—inspiration for the paperback’s striking cover (below).

The FBI leads the investigation, but there are some 5000 such pageants in the US every year, and they cannot begin to cover them all, so bring in local help. Delaney’s niece is a pageant participant, which gives him an ideal opportunity to meet organizers, participants, obsessed parents, and, possibly, a killer.

While the culprit in Mullen’s tale is more obvious early on than the elusive true-life murderer of JonBenet Ramsey, still at large after twenty-one years, the child beauty pageant world is ripe for exploration. Mullen does a nice job highlighting the different motivations of several sets of parents and their young daughters.

If all these work challenges weren’t sufficient, Delaney has woman troubles, though he has a mostly good relationship with his sister and brother-in-law, as well as several friends still on the force. Mullen describes the interaction between Delaney and his family and friends warmly, and they feel real.

There are more books in the Delaney series to come, and especially if you like the New Orleans setting (I miss Treme!), they may just put the chickory in your coffee.

*****The Never-Open Desert Diner

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Utah Highway

photo: Bhanu Tadinada, creative commons license

By James Anderson – This debut novel is masterfully travels a remote strip of high desert highway to all the important destinations of the human heart. Recommended by the fine folks at Scottsdale’s Poisoned Pen bookshop, it checks a lot of genre boxes. It isn’t typical crime fiction, though there are crimes in it. It has a nice dose of both mystery and romance. It’s inescapably a Western, as it takes place in a desolate section of Utah. The one genre it doesn’t draw from is science fiction, though strange things certainly do happen out there in the back of beyond.

I would put this unforgettable 2015 book on my short list of “must-reads.” Reviewer Patrick Anderson in The Washington Post calls it “outstanding in every regard—writing, plot, dialogue, suspense, humor, a vivid sense of place.” Agreed, whole-heartedly.

Ben Jones owns a business as a short-haul truck driver whose route takes him back and forth along a hundred-mile stretch of Utah highway 117, between Price and the fictional former coal-mining town of Rockmuse. (For purposes of the novel, Anderson has relocated this highway about 40 miles east of its IRL location.) He makes deliveries for FedEx, UPS, and other companies to the scattered residents along the route, and, if they put out a red handkerchief by the road, he stops to get their orders for goods to be delivered from town.

Anderson sets up the isolation and the harsh conditions so effectively that Ben’s description of his clients—“Such folks were a special breed”— is almost superfluous. You anticipate meeting some real characters hidden away out there, and you do. Chief among them is Walt Butterfield, owner-operator of The Well-Known Desert Diner, though locals have amended that to the more accurate “Never-Open Desert Diner.” Walt is an angry geezer who restores old motorcycles. He lost his wife years earlier after an episode with some violent customers, and the extent to which he hasn’t recovered becomes apparent only over time. Each time any of Anderson’s characters wander into a scene, something interesting happens.

Ben happens upon a barely started housing development across the road from the diner, hidden by a rise, and containing only one house. Inhabited. The woman who lives there plays a cello with no strings, except, it transpires, those of Ben’s heart. About their initial prickly contacts, Ben gives one of his typically colorful and insightful comments: “I knew from experience that if you’re about to do something you probably shouldn’t do, the best advice you can give yourself is not to think about it too long. It ruins the surprise when the worst happens.” Soon odd events begin, and the strong plot unfolds like the road in front of Ben, going toward a place not particularly desirable, but barreling toward an ending.

Ben is a likeable and perceptive narrator, with especially acute radar for bullshit. Yet he looks upon the troubled and eccentric people he encounters with a nonjudgmental, compassionate eye. He respects their desire to be left alone. All of them are struggling, him included. When the world starts to open up for him, is it real or just another desert mirage?

This is the kind of story that really couldn’t take place anywhere but in such a remote location. The isolation engenders insights as well as eccentricity. It has those quality of literary genre work that inspire closing the book for a moment for reflection and a head-nod. The lyrical language in talking about such a dusty and forlorn place elevates the story and makes it unforgettable: “The highway ahead lolled in sunlight. It was mine and it made me happy. It didn’t bother me that it was mine because no one else wanted it.”

The Next Generation of Mystery/Thriller Readers

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Nancy DrewThe fiction that appeals to teen readers follows certain general principles (notably, lack of adult supervision) that will sound familiar to adults who grew up with Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. In retrospect, these stories of mystery and adventure may seem weak broth alongside the themes popular now.  Today’s teens seem mired in a world of hurt: dystopian novels and series, like the Hunger Games and Divergent, vampires and werewolves, and, more recently suicide narratives.

Atlantic commentator Heather Horn suggests such books, rather than fostering a dark view of the world, reflect the view our youth already have. “The young are attracted to the genre because it so perfectly mirrors their experience of the at once vibrant and sinister world of middle school and high school.” There’s a chilling thought.

Since people sat around campfires listening to stories, they’ve taken pleasure in tales of mystery and adventure. Today’s teens are reading less and less, availing themselves of fewer narratives of success and accomplishment to pattern their own lives on. Can they be drawn back to reading with good stories? With plucky protagonists who figure things out, who solve problems, who cleverly elude dangers here in the real world?

I’ve read two new novels lately that I think manage this.

****League of American Traitors

Written by Matthew Landis – This debut YA thriller is set in the modern day, with one foot firmly planted in American history. The promising (but ultimately rather far-fetched) idea underlying the story is that the descendants of American heroes (from the Revolutionary War, Civil War, and World Wars I and II) belong to a shadowy group called the True Sons of Liberty, while the descendants of history’s notorious traitors belong to the equally shadowy and eponymous League of American Traitors.

When a traitor descendant turns 18, he or she will be challenged to a duel and must accept the challenge or go into a lifetime of hiding. Descendants who choose the duel and survive are free to live in peace thereafter. Author Landis keeps the teens’ interactions at a slangy and superficial level; further, some of the adult portrayals are overly stereotyped and the dialog is a touch Hollywood. For the most part, there’s little exploration of the backgrounds of the characters’ ancestors, which seems like a lost opportunity. Perhaps it will interest teens in delving further.

The book nevertheless raises thought-provoking and unexpectedly timely issues. When discussing the impact on the duelist of actually killing another person, one of the hero’s friends admonishes him, “Don’t rationalize it. That’s what the Libertines do—use honor to make murder okay.” My longer review of this book is available at CrimeFictionLover.com.

****Trell

By Dick Lehr – Inspired by the true case of a Boston preteen’s murder and the false imprisonment of a young African-American father for the crime, this compelling first-person narrative recreates the efforts of the convict’s teenage daughter to exonerate her father and vividly portrays the allies and enemies she makes along the way. A highly engaging character, Trell has grown up without a father in her life, but by sheer willpower and a growing mound of evidence convinces a has-been reporter and a dogged lawyer to join her fight. Author Lehr is a former reporter for The Boston Globe’s Spotlight team (yes, that Spotlight team), which took on the case. The father was no saint, but he wasn’t a murderer, either.

*****Maisie Dobbs

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cup of tea

photo: Raheel Shahid, creative commons license

Though this book hasn’t acquired the patina of age, the legion of fans for the award-winning 13-book series would no doubt enthusiastically endorse its classic status. Having read the first one, I’m eager to read more.

Maisie’s story begins in London in 1929, when she opens her office as a “psychologist and investigator.” She’s enormously advantaged—not because she’s born to the upper classes, like the roughly contemporaneous Lord Peter Wimsey—but because of her own pluck, hard work, and keen insight.

Her first client is a man who believes his wife’s strange behavior hides a possible dalliance. Maisie shadows the woman and uncovers something quite different behind her mysterious disappearances. Before she will reveal the wife’s sad secret, she makes sure the husband is prepared to act on her findings and thereby to relieve his wife’s distress.

Maisie’s insights have been cultivated by the celebrated detective Dr. Maurice Blanche. Raised the daughter of a costermonger, financial straits require her to enter service at a young age, and in a long section in the middle of the book, we learn how Maisie’s employer, Lady Rowan, discovers her reading the Lord’s library in the wee hours of the morning. Her intellectual gifts recognized, Maisie’s education is turned over to Lady Rowan’s friend, Dr. Blanche. Hard work subsequently gets her into university. Her academic career, if not her education, is interrupted by World War I, and she serves as an aid station nurse behind the front lines of France.

Now it’s 1929, and though the world powers have signed a peace treaty, for many Britons, the Great War is not over. Both the client’s mysterious wife and Lady Rowan’s own son—suffering from what was then called shell-shock and today we call PTSD—have links to a murky organization called The Retreat, which purports to give veterans who simply cannot live in society a safe haven. But is it what it says it is? By combining a clandestine investigation of The Retreat with Maisie’s strong emotional connection to the experiences of war, author Winspear has created a truly compelling story.

What sets the series apart from the norm is the interplay of psychological elements and Maisie’s strong empathy. Take, for example, the interesting notion drilled into her by Dr. Blanche that, when you pry a story or a confession out of someone, you need to recognize that “the story takes up space as a knot in a piece of wood. If the knot is removed, a hole remains. We must ask ourselves, how will this hole that we have opened be filled?” In other words, investigators’ responsibilities don’t end when they’ve wrung a confession out of someone.

The book is written in an easygoing style, and the details of daily life, manners, and attitudes seem to perfectly fit the post-war era in which it is set. Never stodgy, it moves along briskly, in part thanks to strong secondary characters. The occasional clashes in social strata keep things interesting, as dramas like Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey exploited so effectively. In Maisie, I’ve found a terrific new literary companion!

****The Snowman

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The Snowman, Jo NesboBy Jo Nesbø, narrated by Robin Sachs — As the film of Jo Nesbø’s quintessential police procedural The Snowman (2007) comes to the big screen, listening to the audio version is perhaps a dramatized alternative between reading this terrifying bestseller and seeing the film (trailer), which, if the critics are to be believed, is pretty much a bust.

The book begins in 1980 on “the day the snow came.” A clingy married woman and her lover have a final midday assignation while her young son waits outside in the car. A hint of menace, a sense of being watched, hangs over the scene. The watcher turns out to be nothing more than a snowman, but the boy says the snowman gave him a message: “We’re going to die.”

The book then jumps to 2004, again November, again a first snowfall, and a missing woman, Birte Becker. She and her husband Filip also have a son. A snowman mysteriously appears on the Becker’s lawn.

The Snowman was the seventh outing for Nesbø’s prickly alcoholic detective, Harry Hole. Harry’s notoriety from capturing an Australian serial killer in book one (The Bat) haunts him in the Oslo department, making his superiors and colleagues reluctant to believe Harry’s contention that a serial killer is at work in Norway. The psychology of these interactions is strong. There’s a lapskaus (Norwegian stew) of grudging respect and desire to downplay another’s success—in short, all the petty office jealousies that interfere with getting work done.

A bright new transfer from the Bergen PD, Katrine Bratt, is assigned to work with Harry on the Birte Becker case. While he at first doubts her usefulness, her experience on the Bergen sex squad gives her good insight. They investigate cases of missing women going back a number of years, and Bratt discovers they all coincided with winter’s first snowfall. Another previously unrecognized common denominator is that a snowman stood near where each woman disappeared, an innocent symbol transformed into a diabolical observer.

The trope of settling first on one suspect, then having that theory demolished and settling on another, and so on, has become a bit hackneyed, though this is an excellent example of where it works well. When you are only 50 pages (or an hour) into a book and the police start saying they have their man, you know they’re wrong. Twists and turns inevitably lie ahead, with the real culprit laying down a succession of misleading clues. Nesbø is so clever with his logical traps that, even though you are sure they lie in wait, they’re still a surprise.

The Scandinavian setting is, basically Nordic noir. Snowy. Wet. Dark. And the story moves through the slush in a doggedly determined fashion, like Harry himself, without any of the literary attributes that help crime fiction rise above the genre.

Well-developed secondary characters—a slimy plastic surgeon, the strangely distant father Filip Becker, a chauvinist playboy media mogul, and a now-dead policeman involved in an earlier Snowman case—are all attractive suspects whom Nesbø dangles in front of you.

The narration by the late English actor Robin Sachs is solid. Sachs has a good feel for the characters, having narrated several Harry Hole books, even though he makes Harry sound older and more dissolute than I picture him. A bit of a problem for audio that wouldn’t arise in reading this story is that the characters’ names are hard to remember, especially those of the victims. Regular readers of Harry Hole novels would have an advantage here, because they’d be already familiar with the Oslo PD personnel. It’s a minor quibble and requires only a little extra attention.

For more on Harry Hole and his universe, read CrimeFictionLover.com’s complete guide to the series here.

*****The Cossack

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photo: Ivan Bandura, creative commons license

By KJ Lawrence – Though this debut espionage thriller kicks off with a murder in winter 2014, it’s not the usual intercontinental bloodbath. In fact, in a nice twist, the killer—a Russian hit man named Mikhail Petrov—is having serious second thoughts about his choice of career. He regrets the string of corpses he’s left in his wake, and is weighing the likelihood he could change occupations without himself becoming a victim of the SVR—the heir to the KGB. With the death that opens this book, at least he gets what he came for: a set of 18th century banking documents.

Mikhail is an ethnic Russian who grew up in the Ukraine, and his victim is a young Ukrainian named Ivan, working in London as an assistant to noted photographer Daniel Brooking. Ivan has disappeared, but it’s happened before, and Daniel is not too worried about it until he receives a visit from Ivan’s friend, British intelligence official Anthony Graves. Finding out what happened to Ivan becomes a truth mission for Daniel. All he has to go on are some documents relating to a mysterious financial transaction during the American Revolution.

Across town, Mikhail Petrov likewise studies the papers he stole from Ivan. Though Ivan had cleverly divided his resources, both sets of documents converge on one location, a bank headquartered in New London, Connecticut. Mikhail travels there, and finds Daniel a half-step ahead of him. In author Lawrence’s hands, the shifts between these two characters’ points of view work well. They’re well-rounded, believable, interesting, and temperamentally different from each other. Daniel may be the novel’s main character, but Mikhail is more sympathetic than you’d expect and has considerably more skills for dealing with the hazards this unlikely duo eventually confronts.

You can almost smell the dust on the half-forgotten legend they uncover concerning a fortune in gold. What could this far-fetched tale have to do with modern-day Ukraine? Why was Ivan killed for delving into it? A question that does not occur to Daniel, at least at first, is whether poking a stick at this particular bear puts him at risk too.

Lawrence creates a strong sense of urgency by interspersing a parallel story line involving Ukrainian protests against the Russian-supported government, which peaked in 2014, the time when this novel is set. Ivan’s sister Yana, a physician, is an active participant in Kiev’s independence movement and a witness to the violence perpetrated by the Ukrainian police. Yana is poking a bear, too, determined to put an end to the careers of the worst offenders. Although this thread of the story is thinner than the main tale, it provides a real-life grounding and urgency to Daniel and Mikhail’s activities continents away.

The Cossack is a fine debut, with Lawrence a compelling—and compassionate—author worth watching.

*****His Bloody Project

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Scottish Policeman - 1882

Original photo, c. 1882 by Peter Swanson, reproduced by Dave Conner, creative commons

By Graeme Macrae Burnet, narrated by Antony Ferguson. This remarkable faux “true-crime” thriller was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize and an immersive, inventive fable it is. The conceit is that the author, in researching his family history, uncovers a 17-year-old relative named Roderick Macrae, who in 1869 stood trial in Inverness, Scotland, in a notorious triple murder case. In trying to get to the bottom of this episode, the author has assembled a variety of original documents. He presents this evidence, and the reader must weigh it along with the court.

After some prefatory remarks, the story picks up steam in the longest section of the book, a confession written by Roddy himself. Opinion at the time, the author notes, held it was entirely unlikely that a barely educated crofter, living in desperately reduced circumstances, could write such a literate account of himself and his life.

Roddy freely admits he committed the murders. The nub of the case is whether he was in his right mind when doing so and whether the then rather new insanity defense is appropriate. His victims were Lachlan Mackenzie, the autocratic and vindictive constable of the area, who seems, for various reasons and an inherent meanness, intent on breaking apart the Macrae family; Mackenzie’s 15-year-old daughter Flora, whom Roddy has gone walking with a few times and hopes to romance; and Mackenzie’s three-year-old son Danny.

In describing life in the tiny, poverty-struck village of Culduie, Roddy’s memoir recounts a great many petty tyrannies visited on the family by Mackenzie, which might (or might not) be sufficient motivation for murder. Since Roddy’s mother died in childbirth, the Macrae family has lurched through life, bathed in grief and laid low by privation. From Roddy’s confession as well as other testimony, readers gain a detailed picture of daily life and the knife-edge on which survival depends. Fans of strong courtroom dramas will relish the way the courtroom scenes in the book both reveal and conceal.

The audiobook was narrated by Antony Ferguson. He gives sufficient variety to the speech of the characters to make them both easily identifiable and compelling individuals, from the engaging Roddy to the condescending psychiatrist and prison doctor, whom author Burnet based on the real-life J Bruce Thomson, to the ostensibly straightforward journalistic accounts.

The format of this book makes it unusual in crime fiction. It is a more literary version of the dossier approach used by Dennis Wheatley, in such classics as Murder Off Miami and The Malinsay Massacre, which our family loved to read and solve.