Tangle's Game by Stewart Hotston: A Bit of a Mess

As always, thanks to NetGalley for allowing me to read an advanced copy.
They say "never judge a book by its cover", to which in the case of this book a further injunction should be added which is "never judge a book by its title". What can I say? The cover is beautiful, the concept seductive but as for the text itself, well, C- would be doing it a favour.

The fundamental problems are, the plot rather than intricate is facile, the characters rather than characters are stereotypes, sometimes it seems even borrowed from far greater works, and Tangle isn't even the protagonist, this is his rather insipid and far less inspired or inspiring former flame, Amanda. Don't get me wrong it's good to have a techno thriller starring South Asians with a female lead but I really really wish this were better written.

Apart from the defects I've quoted above, there is a fundamental lack of research. For the most part if you are going to write solid sci-fi and solid thrillers you need to do your homework and it seems very little was done before writing this. I even checked the author's background to see if this shortcoming was simply because he was a man of letters writing about science, but no, apparently he has scientific qualifications it's just that the technical backdrop to this is as flimsy and unconvincing as one of those studio scenarios in the original Star Trek. It simply comes over as lacklustre. something that really got my teeth on edge was his use of "Frame" for what clearly was an IT "Window".

Regrettably I had much better things to do with my time than read this novel.

A New Beginning: The Never Game by Jeffrey Deaver

Many thanks to NetGalley for allowing me to read a copy of this novel in advance.

Arthur Conan Doyle once grew so sick of writing about Sherlock Holmes that he killed him off. The greatest detective in the world accosted his arch enemy Prof Moriarty literally on a cliff edge overhanging Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland and after a furious tussle they both apparently fell to their deaths.

Happily, insofar as we know, Lincoln Rhyme is still alive and well in his New York apartment overlooking Central Park. But his author has decamped from East Coast to West and is focusing on a new character. This has always been a tough gig. Deaver has attempted this before with the character of Kathryn Dance, an expert in kinesics, the study of human movement and gestures, Kathryn never really worked for me.

Does Colter Shaw, the protagonist of The Never Game? Colter is one of the three children of a survivalist family headed by two former university professors brought up and home-schooled in an isolated estate in the Californian wilderness. He is an expert tracker and he makes his living by collecting rewards for finding disappeared people. We are soon told that he is not to be confused with a bounty hunter. The apparent kidnapping of a young female student following an argument with her father sets Colter up against a criminal mastermind of his own. Soon dubbed "The Gamer" this miscreant seems to be recreating with his victims the scenarios involved in an old survivalist-type game where the player is left in a hostile location with a certain set of objects as his/her only means of escape. Set exclusively in California, the plot has all the twists and turns you have come to expect from Deaver.

Unfortunately, I have to say I found Colter unconvincing and unlovable.Home-schooled almost in isolation in the wilderness yet he's completely au fait with modern gadgetry? Ah, but his parents were professors! He knows a massive amount about culture and psychology? Well, they had a library, you see... Sorry Jeff but I ain't buying.

As for his personality... Well... Um... He doesn't really have much of one. At first I thought one of the reveals would be that Colter is autistic he was so much of a blank slate, well it wasn't. Damn. Lincoln may be in a wheelchair but he oozes personality, I especially like his occasional musings on "crips" as he calls himself, his disability, his arrogance and his attempts to get at the whiskey. Entirely absent in Colter.

Don't get me wrong, Deaver is a good writer, the twists and turns of the story made this novel go down quick but I couldn't help missing Lincoln or any other personality come to that. There is only one thing that might be the hook that'll make me pick up the next Colter Shaw book, the family mystery of who killed his father and why.

A Triptych of Human Frailty: A Nearly Normal Family, by M. T. Edvardsson

Thanks to NetGalley for allowing me to read an early copy of this book.

Although I am a great fan of whodunnits I am a relative novice when it comes to Scandi Noir. I managed to miss all those trendy TV series, and apart from a brief fling with Henning Mankell, I have only read two Scandi Noir novels proper. So I was looking forward to reading A Nearly Normal Family to make up for this obvious shortcoming in my history as a fan of the genre.

Alas! This ambition has been thwarted once again. Because A Nearly Normal Family is not a Scandi Noir novel. That isn't the same as saying that it's not a bloody good read, because it is. It is also not saying that it does not excavate somewhat the shortcomings of Swedish society, because it does. Or that at its heart does not lie a murder mystery, because, again, it does. It is simply saying that it does not have the narrative viewpoint of your typical police procedural.

It is a finely balanced text structured in three parts. We hear first the voice of the father, then that of the daughter and finally that of the mother. If this has a somewhat religious resonance, I am fairly sure it is intentional.

The father here is, literally, a father, a Pastor of the Church of Sweden. In other words an establishment figure but, for all that, I have to say of the Scandinavian type, in other words forward-looking and relatively liberal, but above all, moral. It is through him that we first confront the main plot knot of this novel, the murder by stabbing of a well-off youngish man, with his 19-year old being accused of killing him. We are faced with his confusion and his questions and he offers his point of view on his daughter's conflicted background as well as the first clues pointing to the circumstances surrounding the killing. At first we are sympathetic but then being in his, rather limited, head, besides the central dilemma confronting him, becomes somewhat wearing. Just when we are about to set the book aside with a sigh...

The second part begins with the daughter's point of view. Needless to say she is quite a different person from her father or what her father would wish her to be. 

And this is all to the good making a very refreshing change. The lack of stimulation of her current circumstances, she is being held in jail pending trial, contrast strongly with her vivid recollections of her life outside. She is at the same time passionate and contradictory, strong and weak, perhaps a far more believable character than her father, living in a completely different, more visceral, world from him. Her capacity for self-reflection is stimulated by a particularly inspired prison psychologist who gives her to read texts such as Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, The Catcher in the Rye and Crime and Punishment, which are also clear references for this novel.

The mother’s narrative seems far shorter than either of the former, and for me, less convincing, for example, she is supposed to be a highly qualified criminal lawyer, who is married to a Pastor, and she is unaware of basic biblical tales? Being an unbeliever does not make you ignorant of religious basics… Also her position is far, far, murkier than that of her husband and child, she knows but she almost does not dare to know. She acts as the ultimate “fixer”, like the holy spirit, who in church tradition may be female, and whose main function is to mediate between the father and his child.

Overall, I have to say as a novel, this worked brilliantly, and the central whodunnit is not resolved until the very last lines, but by then this question has lost all urgency and what the reader really wants to know is “Why was it done?” and “Will justice be done?” Which are, perhaps, far more important questions.

In summary, this novel may not be the Scandi Noir I expected it to be… But it may be all the better for that.