Category Archives: Reading . . .

***Passenger 23

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cruise ship

(photo: ed2456 on pixabay; creative commons license)

By Sebastian Fitzek, narrated by Max Beesley, with a cast of actors. Unless you read German, the only way you can enjoy psychological thriller-writer Fitzek’s latest book is through Audible.com, which is perhaps why it’s called “An Audible Original Drama,” though it is available in print and for the Kindle in its original language.

Passenger 23 is based on a horrifying premise that sent me straight to fact-checking: Yearly, about 23 people—crew and passengers—disappear from the world’s cruise ships IRL. The true number is unknown, because ship owners have a substantial interest in keeping these disappearances quiet and in portraying those that do come to light as suicides, even when evidence of suicide is nonexistent. And, when disappearances occur at sea, the only investigation may be carried out by a lone policeman from the ship’s often tiny country-of-registry. This investigator’s work will not be mistaken for that of Scotland Yard or the FBI. It’s a perfect set-up for criminal shenanigans.

In Fitzek’s novel, undercover detective Martin Schwartz is willing to take on the Berlin police department’s most dangerous cases, in part because he’s become less attached to his own life in the five years since his wife and young son died in an apparent murder-suicide aboard the cruise ship Sultan of the Seas. When he receives a mysterious invitation to meet an elderly woman aboard that same ship in order to find out what really happened to his family, he can’t resist.

Once aboard, he finds himself drawn into the woman’s theory that a serial killer may be loose on the ship. A young girl who disappeared from the ship some months earlier reappears, carrying the teddy bear of his drowned son. But she’s not not making sense. The girl’s mother disappeared at the same time, in a chilling echo of what happened to Martin’s own family.

Solving this puzzle would be sufficient for any book, but Fitzek also provides an early teaser-scene about a man, located somewhere in the ship’s bowels, who has consented to have his healthy leg amputated. Why, and whether this secondary (and far-fetched) story has anything to do with the principal plot, we don’t learn until the end of the book. It’s in an epilogue that, oddly, comes after the production credits—glad I didn’t turn my iPod off too soon!

For my taste, Fitzek tries a little too hard for the gruesome detail. In addition, the cluster of murder-suicides of single moms and their children has one glaring common denominator that even a police operative far from his tiny island redoubt ought to find suspicious.

As to how well this works as an audiobook, I was disappointed. Beesley had a formal, almost stiff style out of keeping with the material, and while the other actors were used only for the scanty dialog, which felt intrusive. Audible has added intermittent sound effects—feet running, doors clanging, ropes squeaking, and the like—that didn’t add to the experience. I’d just as soon let the author tell me the door slammed than having to think “What was that?” Audible has produced a short trailer for the audio version, available on YouTube.

A somewhat longer version of this review appears on the Crime Fiction Lover website.

***Madame Bovary: Provincial Ways

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Madame Bovary

(graphic: wikimedia)

I’m envious of the women in my book group who are native French speakers and able to read Gustave Flaubert’s classic in its original language. I read the 2010 English translation by noted American short story writer and essayist Lydia Davis, one of the 19 produced since the book’s 1856 publication. Her intent, she has said, was “to do what I think hasn’t been done, which is to create a well-written translation that’s also very close, very faithful to the French.” Here is a Julian Barnes essay comparing notable translations, including Davis’s, across the generations. If you want to read Madame Bovary, I suggest at least skimming Barnes’s essay to  find a translation suited to your reading preferences.

The novel is a period piece, set in a particular, rather dreary locale, and not all periods and settings wear as well in terms of interest over 160 years. When Madame Bovary was published, the government said the novel was a danger to morality and religion and put Flaubert and his publisher on trial, though they were acquitted. However, in general, “provincial French woman has affairs with doltish men” is no longer a riveting or scandalous storyline, and “spends more than she should” is the modern way of life. Likewise, the beliefs and foibles Flaubert pokes fun at (conventional and bourgeois views, including religion, chief among them) are of varying relevance today. In an Introduction Davis quotes Nabokov’s view that, in Madame Bovary, “the ironic and the pathetic are beautifully intertwined,” and it is those sly revelations about society and how people move in it, rather than plot, that give the modern reader the greatest satisfaction.

Reader tastes have changed not just with regard to content, but regarding style, too, and a book about that same period written today would be very different from Flaubert’s approach. One consequence of what now seems a rather disordered style is that Madame’s character never quite came into focus for me. She is motivated by the ill-considered whims of a moment, a pliant object for the men around her, and rarely self-actuated until of course the end. It turns out, as Barnes notes in his essay, that translator Davis doesn’t actually much like her, or the book. Interesting.

As an exemplar of realist fiction, Madame Bovary was a path breaking book. Unlike most novels that came before, it didn’t romanticize (in the literary sense) or try to draw moral lessons—the lessons were clear from the book’s events and their consequences. Flaubert’s intention was to make the novel not just not “romantic,” but anti-romantic, in that Madame’s susceptibility to and pursuit of romanticism and shallow gratification are what cause her downfall. Occasionally, thought, the authorial voice does make a judgment in the nature of a delicious truism, for example: (about the lovers) “She was as weary of him as he was tired of her. Emma was rediscovering in adultery all the platitudes of marriage.”

Translator Davis in an introduction says this novel’s “radical nature is paradoxically difficult for us to see: its approach is familiar to us for the very reason that Madame Bovary permanently changed the way novels were written thereafter.”

Best Reads of 2015

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books, reading

5-star books of 2015 (photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

The books in my “best of” list are not necessarily published in 2015, just read last year. Of the 71 print and audio books reviewed here in 2015, I gave five stars to 10.

What are the criteria for awarding stars? In general, because I try to avoid books likely to be poor, most receive three or more. In my “system,” a three-star book is a good book, a four-star book is an excellent book, and those that earn that last star have something special in terms of language or character or can’t-put-it-downness.

  • City of Thieves – by David Benioff – During the siege of Leningrad, two young men are on a quest to find a dozen eggs (and save their lives). Full of adventure and humor.
  • The International: A Novel of Belfast – by Glenn Patterson – Set just before the start of the Troubles, the patrons and doings in this hotel bar reveal what Northern Ireland was then and lost forever.
  • Grand River and Joy – by Susan Messer – In the months before the 1967 Detroit riots, a Jewish shopowner must decide whether to stay in the city or flee to the suburbs like so many friends and family already have. A Michigan native, I know many places mentioned.
  • The Orphan Master’s Son – by Adam Johnson – Set in North Korea and filled with both pain and wry humor, this Pulitzer-winner shows how people must accommodate under a regime of total oppression. I didn’t expect to like it and did!
  • Against a Darkening Sky – by Lauren B. Davis – I was thrilled to see her bring 7th century England alive, when the advent of Christianity was rooting out the old polytheistic ways and being a traditional healer became dangerous.
  • Elsewhere – by Richard Russo – Not a particular fan of memoir, I found this first-person exploration of a son’s relationship with his feckless mother as absorbing as any novel.
  • Seveneves – by Neal Stephenson – What if the moon blew up? Would humans survive? Written with the author’s usual engaging characters, nail-biting situations, and deep humor. He understands people as well as science (860 pages).
  • Ghost Fleet – by P.W. Singer & August Cole – This near-future thriller shows how dependence on wireless communications networks, GPS, and other technologies make the U.S. military vulnerable. Such an important book and a good read!
  • The Children Act – by Ian McEwan – Moral dilemmas when law and religion collide in disputes over children’s fate. First-rate writing.
  • Clockers – by Richard Price – set in the fictional New Jersey town of Dempsey, the seesawing interactions of police and street drug dealers in this 1992 novel were one inspiration for The Wire.

Happy Reading!

****The Crossing

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watch works

(photo: readerwalker, creative commons license)

By Michael Connelly, narrated by Titus Welliver – What a pleasure it is to enter the Los Angeles airspace of Harry Bosch and his half-brother Mickey Haller. Teaming up his two protagonists from the Bosch and Lincoln Lawyer series was a brilliant move by Connelly, and I’ve enjoyed every story of the two of them, fighting crime and for justice. In this latest double-outing, Connelly does not disappoint.

In The Crossing, Bosch takes the lead. He’s retired, not by choice, and rattling around his garage doing not very much. Haller approaches him about serving as an investigator on a difficult case he’s undertaken: a man accused of a brutal murder based on supposedly irrefutable DNA evidence, but Haller is convinced his client is innocent. Bosch is doubtful. Worse, if he agrees to help the defense he’s “going over to the dark side” in his own eyes, and it will be seen as a betrayal by all his former police department colleagues. Still, reviewing the case files does raise a few unanswered questions and, as we might expect, Bosch’s investigatory instincts soon overrun his reservations, and, with nothing more than the box for a luxury wristwatch to go on, he’s off. But meanwhile, a couple of rogue cops are up to something, and the brothers are in their sights.

Seeing Bosch and Haller work in their respective roles—investigator and courtroom advocate—lets Connelly show off his characters’ different skill sets and keeps the reader (listener, in this case) well entertained. It’s instructive to hear Haller’s reminders that, while Bosch may be on a search for the truth, the client must be their uppermost concern.

As to the effectiveness of the audio version, Welliver’s excellent reading, combined with Connelly’s clear writing style, made it easy to keep track of the characters and the story. Welliver is super-prepared for this reading, as he played the character of Harry Bosch in the eponymous Amazon television series that premiered in 2015. An interview with Connelly and Welliver is included in this Crime Fiction Lover preview of the television series.

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****A Better Goodbye

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doorbell, red

(photo: Thomas Hawk, creative commons license)

By John Schulian – If you’ve wondered what goes on in those sketchy “massage” parlors, this expertly written and well paced debut thriller is your chance to find out. Set in Los Angeles on the bitter fringes of the entertainment industry and reeking of fake glamour, the story pulls you into its world from the opening chapter. It’s classic noir, dealing with people who don’t have much going for them who will probably never go far. Schulian has done a remarkable job recreating their lonely world, an inspiration he describes in this interview.

A multiple point-of-view story, the principal characters are Jenny Yee, a Korean college student earning tuition money in the massage business, Scott Crandall, a washed-up out-of-shape television actor whose main source of income is the massage business he owns, his would-be friend Onus DuPree, and Nick Pafko, a former boxer still haunted by the freak accident that killed an opponent when the poor sap hit the ropes exactly wrong.

Scott was glad to hire Jenny, as his last Asian girl was leaving, and in their business he needed someone to please the “rice chasers.” Meanwhile, her priority is a new job where there is someone to provide security. A string of vicious massage parlor robberies has made the women nervous. An out-of-work ex-boxer who will also keep the books sounds like just what Scott needs. Nick can’t quite get over being offended to be working in a jack shack, but it soon becomes obvious the girls need him.

Always playing the angles, Scott has no respect for the girls, for Nick, or, for that matter himself. “What a f— town. Shake a tree and whores fell out of it. Whores and actors, like there was any difference between the two.” Scott is drifting into a closer orbit with his scary friend DuPree, putting everyone at increased risk—not from the cops or any of the other forces of order, but from the climate of violence DuPree creates, like a mountain making its own weather.

One thing about this book is you learn a whole new vocabulary [!] and a lot about a subculture of desperate young women. IRL erotic massage is estimated to be a $1 billion a year business in the United States, often involving immigrant women with few choices. The exploitation isn’t a surprise, nor is the potential for violence, but Schulian’s uncanny ability to get into the minds of these quite different individuals makes for a compelling read.

He comes by his skills honestly, with respect to character development and a driving storyline. Although this is his first novel, he has published short stories, and his main career has been as a Hollywood scriptwriter, working for television programs such as L.A. Law, Miami Vice, and JAGS. He co-created Xena: Warrior Princess—for a while the world’s foremost syndicated TV series. He has been a sports and magazine writer and has edited two anthologies of writing about boxing, which no doubt contributed to the authenticity of his character Nick’s voice.

The book title comes from a Patty Griffin song, “And I wonder where you are, And if the pain ends when you die, And I wonder if there was some better way to say goodbye.” A knockout.

A somewhat longer version of this review appeared on the Crime Fiction Lover website.

****Wolf Winter

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arctic wolf

(photo: myri-_bonnie, Creative Commons license)

By Cecilia Ekbäck, narrated by Alyssa Bresnahan – Swedish-born writer Ekbäck’s debut crime thriller is set in remote north Sweden in 1717. The long darkness of winter is closing in, and the scattered homesteads on Blackåsen Mountain are preparing for what the signs suggest will be a rough time. The Lapps who have come south for the season say it will be a “wolf winter,” which they describe as “the kind of winter that will remind us we are mortal. Mortal and alone.”

Paavo, his wife Maija (MY-ah), and their daughters, 14-year-old Frederika and six-year-old Dorotea, are new arrivals from Finland, and they haven’t spent a winter this far north before. They aren’t sure what to expect, even though they don’t know the mountain’s dark history of evil portents and mysterious disappearances. One thing they do not expect is for Paavo to decide to leave his womenfolk on their own and travel to the coast to try to earn some money. He won’t return before spring. And they definitely don’t expect that Frederika and Dorotea will discover the mutilated corpse of one of their new neighbors, a man named Eriksson, in a glade where they’d intended to pasture their goats.

When Eriksson’s death comes to light, some of the neighbors attribute the savage attack to a bear, others suggest wolf, but Maija who is an earth-woman by training—a midwife and healer—insists the death was caused by a human agent. Almost certainly, a murderer is in their midst.

Yet no one misses Eriksson, a man who made it his business to ferret out and exploit people’s weaknesses. “Sometimes God did take the right people” seems to be the view. In this tiny community in which everyone knows everyone else and, presumably, most of their secrets and hidden grudges, the layers of deception keep being peeled back.

In the region’s central town the immense power of the church resides in the person of the priest, Olaus Arosander. He starts out as Maija’s adversary, skeptical of her belief Eriksson was murdered. While he doesn’t trust her kind of knowledge, he has secrets of his own that put him at odds with his church’s views. Over time, Maija and Arosander both become committed to determining what happened to Eriksson, and whether his death is the end of violence on Blackåsen Mountain or the beginning.

The notion of wolves takes on both a corporeal and metaphoric significance in the story. It becomes clear that predators are ravaging the countryside, preying on the community’s weakest members. Darkness, too, means more than the months’ long absence of sunlight. It also refers to the special knowledge—call it intuition, call it the ability to read signs, call it something more, but don’t dare call it sorcery—that helps Maija sort truth from misdirection. In that place and time, such “special knowledge” was a potentially deadly inheritance, one that Maija received from her dead grandmother and which she fears has been passed on to Frederika, who doesn’t yet understand its power or how to control it.

Wolf Winter works well as an audio book. Bresnahan’s narration is clear, and the characters are easy to distinguish both by the reader’s voice and Ekbäck’s helpful cues regarding the speaker’s identity. This is a perfect listen for the shortest days of the year—preferably in front of a fire, in heavy socks and woolly robe, because the novel’s chills come from both the weather so ably described and the hearts of the characters. Another great contribution to the Nordic noir tradition.

A somewhat longer version of this review appeared on the Crime Fiction Lover website here.

****The Man in the Wooden Hat

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tulips

(photo: Denise Krebs, creative commons license)

By Jane Gardam — Getting to know intimately one half of a married couple can ill prepare you for meeting the other half, who may fail to live up to their superior advance billing, or, as likely, be so surprisingly normal—even pleasant—that you mistrust your own memory of past marital revelations. Award-winning British writer Jane Gardam’s books Old Filth (from the husband’s point of view) and The Man in the Wooden Hat (the wife’s) apply these different lenses to the same 50-year marriage.

I’ve read only this one, published in 2009, but went back to reviews of Old Filth (2006) and found that many of the animating events in the couple’s life are described in both novels. While the bones of the relationship remain the same, “Little here is as it seemed in ‘Old Filth,’ and both books are the richer for it,” said Louisa Thomas in her New York Times review.

The sobriquet Old Filth—created by and applied to talented barrister Edward Feathers, later Sir Edward—is an acronym for “Failed In London, Try HongKong.” Try there, he does, and succeeds. Also in Hong Kong, his future wife Elisabeth Macintosh debates whether to marry him, decides to, and carries through at rather a slap-dash pace in ancient borrowed finery. Eddie’s preoccupation is that Betty should never leave him, and she promises she won’t. This is a promise Betty learns will be enforced by Edward’s best friend, the card-playing Chinese dwarf Albert Ross (“Albatross”): “If you leave him, I will break you,” Ross threatens, and she is sure he means it.

The wedding ceremony follows by a few hours a one-night affair, in which Betty is deflowered by Eddie’s nemesis, rival barrister Terry Veneering, a secret to which The Albatross, unfortunately, is privy. Trust Charles Dickens to recognize an allusive name when he hears one; like the nouveau riche social climbers in Our Mutual Friend, this Veneering has a charming surface. His attraction for Betty lasts for decades, and he weaves in and out of the story of the couple’s marriage.

While a story of interpersonal relationships, the book takes place after World War II, and is necessarily revelatory about broad social upheavals in Britain. Class and privilege are never the same after the unraveling of Empire, the economic upheavals of the decade before the war, and the war itself. The world into which the three protagonists were born simply disappeared beneath their feet and dissolved out of their arms.

Gardam’s novel follows the couple from youth to old age, with Betty’s death planting tulips in their rural garden. Mostly, though, it focuses on their early relationship, including the tragedy of a miscarriage that leaves Betty unable to have her heart’s desire, children. The closest relationship she maintains with a young person is with Veneering’s precocious son, Harry, whom she meets when he is nine years old and “crunching a lobster” under the table at a banquet. She has numerous lively and colorful friends in Hong Kong and later in London, whose appearance in the narrative is always welcome.

As for the everyday relationship between the spouses, the reader is shown the benefits of accommodation rather than the head-to-head battles that often characterize “relationship books.”

Well plotted and carefully written, full of good humor and getting on with it. A third book in the Old Filth trilogy, Last Friends, was published in 2013. It’s a view of the Feathers’s marriage from Veneering’s point of view. Now that should be interesting!

***Deceits of Borneo

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hong kong, woman traveler

(photo: ksobolev0, pixabay)

By H.N. Wake – This is the second full-length thriller by H.N. Wake and a repeat outing for her gutsy female protagonist, CIA Agent Mac Ambrose. (Read my interview with H.N. Wake to find out what she loves about this character.) The action takes place in Hong Kong and various spots in Malaysia—Kuala Lumpur, Miri, and the rain forests of Sarawak Province—with occasional scenes back at the CIA mothership in Langley, Virginia. Wake’s familiarity with Asia and Southeast Asia, gained during more than 20 years’ working overseas for the U.S. government, stands her in good stead here, as the ease and detail with which she describes these lush locales effectively transport the reader right into the setting.

Mac is deep under cover in Hong Kong, at a new job in the Risk Analysis department of a major international financial institution called Legion Bank, and her real identity is known only to one of the bank’s executives. When another Non-Official Cover CIA agent—Josh Halloway—goes missing out of Kuala Lumpur, Mac’s boss back in Langley tells her to find him.

Gradually we learn her concern about Halloway’s disappearance is not just collegial solidarity, it’s also personal. Halloway is handsome, charming, and intriguing, and they’d met and connected in Hong Kong. Mac was falling for him. The Bank provides cover for her search, when she’s assigned to the risk appraisal of a potential Malaysian client, Alghaba Financing, a major player in Malaysia’s timber and palm oil industries. If the bank takes the company on, it will receive millions of dollars in fees.

Given the opportunity to kill two birds at once, Mac flies to the Malaysian capital. When she checks in with the U.S. Embassy, she finds the ambassador has a chip on his shoulder the size of a teak log and is unwilling to help her. Evidence on the ground is scant, but Mac picks up Halloway’s trail, and the game is literally afoot in the jungles of Borneo. Wake’s choice of a female protagonist with the investigatory skills, cunning, and physical courage to undertake her next steps make this a refreshing antidote to the overdose of testosterone in many thrillers.

However, the goings-on back at Langley aren’t as persuasive. They add complication and some coincidence that detract from the main story. Perhaps it’s a reflection of how people in the field always regard the folks back at the main office: “What are they thinking?” At times Mac’s own behavior is a bit murky. She frequently presses a little too hard in trying to get information from a potential informant, and I never did figure out how she got the key to Josh’s room at the Miri Beach Resort.

What Mac discovers in the rain forest, the lengths people will go to keep her discovery a secret, and the fate of Josh Halloway are the key questions of this compelling story. Wake knows how to put together an exciting narrative, an exotic and interesting setting, and believable characters. H.N. Wake is an exciting new author worth tracking.

A somewhat longer version of this review appeared on the Crime Fiction Lover website.

***Impact

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moon

(photo: halfrain, creative commons license)

By Douglas Preston – This 2010 thriller with a sci-fi premise keeps the reader guessing—and turning pages—start to finish. And, what’s with the moon? Our benign space companion has suffered calamitously in several books I’ve read this year. Not good for us earthlings.

In Impact, Princeton dropout Abbey Straw uses her new telescope to snap a photo of a brilliant meteor coming to ground somewhere in the island-dotted vastness of Muscongus Bay. “It ruined your picture,” says her friend Jackie, peering over her shoulder. “Are you kidding? It made the picture!”

The astronomers all guess the meteor landed somewhere in the Atlantic, where it’s lost forever. Abbey, armed with her photo and data from a buoy showing no sea level perturbations at the time of the crash, believes it hit an island and she can find it. Selling a meteorite will do a great deal to replenish her empty bank account. If she gets there first.

Meanwhile, the President’s science adviser has sent former CIA agent Wyman Ford to Southeast Asia. He’s to investigate the source of some strange new gems finding their way into circulation up from the seedier layers of the international gem market. Called honeys, they’re beautiful, but laced with deadly radioactivity—Americium 241, an isotope of an element not found in nature. The U.S. government, fearing the stones could be ground down to make a dirty bomb, wants a quick and quiet mission to investigate, not the heavy boots of the Agency. If Ford goes, he goes as a freelance. No cover, no backup.

And, Mark Corso, working on a government-funded Mars observation project visits his former professor and mentor’s home and discovers his body—a murder the police describe as a random robbery-gone-wrong. The dead professor had been obsessed with tantalizing evidence that something on Mars is doing the impossible, emitting gamma rays, and sent Mark classified data and an illegal hard drive to prove it. Mark is determined to follow his lead, even though project managers forbid him to spend time on it.

These three pieces of the story come together, of course. Hidden in the islands, in the jungles of Cambodia, and in a crater on Mars’s moon Deimos, is a literally earth-shattering threat. But before that can be understood, more than one opponent is determined to stop them.

The plot moves along energetically and the characters of Abbey and Ford are engaging and believable. Corso is more than a bit irresponsible and self-satisfied, heedless of consequences. In fact, all the staff at the National Propulsion Facility (modeled on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory) are two-dimensional. Preston expertly describes the settings Abbey and Ford must negotiate, whether the Cambodian jungles, the labyrinth of Washington, D.C., science agencies, or the stormy waters of the Atlantic.

This book “dances on the edge of sci-fi but definitely is structured like a contemporary thriller,” says Amy Rogers on the review site ScienceThrillers. I enjoyed it, although at the very end, just when the reader understands the significance of the book’s title, he pulled his punches. He has a new one in the Wyman Ford series (The Kraken Project), and I’d certainly read it, too.

***The Red Road

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UK Courtroom

(photo: fayerollinson, creative commons license)

By Denise Mina, narrated by Cathleen McCarron – Denise Mina has earned her place in the group of distinguished Scottish crime writers whose works are known collectively as Tartan Noir. This award-winning novel about the long, entangling tails of murder has its beginning in Glasgow in 1997, when a young boy is accused, convicted, and imprisoned for years for murdering his brother. Those events resurface in the current day, in which Detective Inspector Alex Morrow is increasingly dubious about her future with the police force and about her own testimony in the same man’s trial for arms-dealing. Her doubts come to the fore when the fingerprints of the accused turn up at a recent murder scene, one where it would have been impossible for him to have been present. The reader/listener knows from early on that he was falsely imprisoned and who the real killer was, a 14-year-old prostitute, but who mixed up the fingerprints? And why?

The tentacles of the conspiracy reach far and wide, and over the intervening 15 years. They even may extend as far as Morrow’s brother Danny, a known gangster, but one she’d rather not be involved in bringing to justice. Meanwhile, all the people involved in the earlier false accusation and coverup, if that’s what it was, have their own reasons to want to shut her investigation down. Despite their efforts to thwart her, Morrow is determined to persist. And in doing so, she must confront the crucial difference between justice and law enforcement.

Focusing on this as an audiobook, despite my cred as a devoted audiophile, it wasn’t totally satisfactory. The plot was so complicated—a plus in a print volume—and the characters so numerous that it was hard to keep the story straight. The narration was in part responsible for this, as there a was less sharp delineation among character voices than typical. Glaswegians may well be able to detect subtle differences in characters’ accents (class, etc.), but my American ears could not. Generally, authors stick with a particular narrator for all their books, at least in a series, so it’s surprising that Mina has had several readers, with McCarron her most recent.