Material Witness

REVIEW: Natural Causes by James Oswald

The Edinburgh police procedural is tough terrain for a debut author. The comparative literature in the police detective segment is as celebrated as any series in British crime fiction and so James Oswald has his work cut out. 

In my idle moments I imagine Rebus slouching into an Edinburgh pub and confronting the newcomer - Oswald's Detective Inspector Tony McLean - with a gruff, "this is my patch, son". 

Oswald proves, however, in Natural Causes that Edinburgh is more than big enough for both of them. His first novel, an online publishing sensation before Penguin stepped in to present it to the traditional market next month, takes the best elements of a procedural and ties them into a fascinating plot with promising characters and a narrative pace that never lets up.

Tony McLean, newly called to the ranks of Detective Insepctor, is called in to investigate the discovery of a young woman's mutilated corpse in the locked room of a long forgotten house. The body, which has been in situ untouched for decades appears to have been arranged as part of a cruel ritual. 

McLean is handed this coldest of cases while his immediate superior DCI Duguid investigates a spate of vicious, inexplicable killings of old men, many of them notable Edinburgh citiizens. Duguid clearly does not appreciate having the youngster on his patch and the clashes between the two men - refereed by Chief Superintendent Jayne McIntyre - are among the most enjoyable passages in the book. 

And it is largely the strong characters that carry the book. McLean himself is the anti-genre copper. He's an independently wealthy, well-educated, charming and largely calm man who appears to have no destructive relationships with addictive substances. His sidekicks, Constable Stuart MacBride and the sergeant Grumpy Bob (the nickname is used consistently and somewhat annoyingly throughout the book) are well drawn and the cast of supporting characters including the pathologist Angus Cadwallader and some of McLean's friends add a little zest to the dialogue.

If the writing is a little ragged in places and if some of the scenes feel just a little too over-engineered, it's of no great detriment to the whole. Overall, Natural Causes is a highly enjoyable read and a promising addition to the crime fiction fold. A sequel, The Book Of Souls (review to follow, but better than the first) is to be published in July with a welcome third to follow. 

In an interview with Oswald, published at Crime Fiction Lover, the author explains that he did not promote his work through social media during its amazing rise up the bestseller charts because, 'Im just not very good at blowing my own trumpet'. 

Well, I have no hesitation in doing that here: If you like Rankin, you'll like Oswald. 

The Twelve: the wait is almost over - Justin Cronin discusses Alan Furst

The final pages of Justin Cronin's epic post-Apocalyptic novel The Passage made for one of the most memorable endings to a novel I can recall. I wrote at the time: "(It is) an ending so chilling I couldn't sleep for hours after reading it and just could not shake it from my head for days. There is, apparently, a sequel on its way. It cannot come soon enough for me. My need to read on is so acute it is almost a physical ache."

The ache subsided, of course, but in recent weeks a sense of huge excitement came instead, because the wait is over. On Thursday the sequel, The Twelve is published, and Material Witness is delighted once again to be part of the Blog Tour - and (here's the good part) to have both a sneak preview of the book and an exclusive interview with Justin Cronin to share.

In the video, Cronin discusses his summer reading list, and as part of that his admiration for Alan Furst, the critcally acclaimed American spy novelist: "I can't recommend him highly enough. He is my favourite writer right now."

 

The influence of writers such as Furst - whose novels are heavily character driven and, as Cronin says, always stylishly written is evident in The Twelve. Cronin too is a fine craftsman, his prose is elegant and his characters hold the reader. Politics, espionage and sabotage play a huge role in the unfolding of The Twelve, as Cronin moves his Passage trilogy into new territory that explores two human societies that grow up in the wake of the military-vampire catastrophe described in The Passage, and as he plots an inevitable clash between the two.

I'll review The Twelve later this week,, but in the meantime enjoy the rest of the blog tour, which moves on tomorrow to Wondrous Reads.  

Also check out yesterday's stop at The Tattooed Book, in which Cronin reads from The Passage.

 



Review: Books to Die For edited by John Connolly and Declan Burke

First, in the interests of transparency, a warning: I have not finished reading Books to Die For. I haven't even read a third of it - and it might take another year to complete.

But I wouldn't be without it. And nor should anyone with an interest in crime fiction, its history and in particular its writers. Books to Die For is billed as a "unique, must have anthology for enthusiasts of the mystery genre" by publisher Hodder & Stoughton, and for once the blurb is a faithful reflection of what's in the tin.

Its Irish editors - John Connolly, author of the Charlie Parker series, and Declan Burke, author of the The Big O - have worked their charms on more than 120 modern authors who have in turn selected more than 120 great, even landmark, mystery novels and written essays on each.

The essays (those I've read, so far) are part review and part biography of the author and her work and time, but they also offer some insight into the essayist. Individually they are an invitation to explore dozens of new writers and novels - even the most dedicated crime fiction fan should find something new. Collectively, however, they represent a comprehensive and essential living history of the genre. I've seen it described elsewhere as a "celebration" of the genre, and it is that too.

That history flows from five 19th century novels, including Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Poe - his 1840s Dupin short stories, introduced by J Wallis Martin, are the earliest works chronicled. While the anthology is somewhat back-end loaded, amost a quarter of the novels covered were published in the 1990s, it is not unbalanced. There are more novels from both the 1930s and the 1940s than the 2000s.  

It's inevitable with anthologies of this kind that readers will scour the list looking for the obvious absentees. Burke and Connolly address this in their Introduction, noting that this is neither a "potentially exhausting litany of titles", nor a "pollsters' assembly of novels, compiled with calculators and spreadsheet".

So there are notable omissions - the recent surge in popularity in Nordic fiction is not reflected, for example - and the list is somewhat monolinguistic. But as Burke and Connolly point out, "there are fewer than might be expected". 

What the editors asked their novelists for "passionate advocacy" for "one novel, just one, that they would place in the canon". And this they get in spades. Every essay I've read so far makes such an unanswerable case for the novel in question that my "to read list" has swelled by about 20 books already - and that includes a resolve to read a number of novels for a second time. These include Lawrence Block's A Dance at the Slaughterhouse ("the conclusion is possibly the most satisfying I have read, in any book, ever" - Alison Galyin) and Suzanne Berne's  A Crime in the Neighbourhood, selected by Thomas H Cook.

And of course there's an absolute wealth of new recommendations. Readers will naturally gravitate first to their favourite authors, and I'm no exception. So Cutter and Bone by Newton Thornburg, chosen by George Pelecanos is now high on my wish list with Dennis Lehane's selection, The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley.

This really is a terrific addition to my collection. It is full of fascinating reading and it will keep me in new books and authors for months and maybe years. The sheer breadth and depth of books included in the genre show just how wonderfully varied crime and mystery fiction is, and why it keeps so many of us enthralled, entertained and informed.

And many have eviscerated the supposed wall between literary and crime fiction, that "tired, lazy distinction", as Tana French describes it in her homage to Donna Tartt's The Secret HIstory. Indeed. 

Bravo to Burke and Connolly for putting together such a terrific anthology.

Review: The Gods of Gotham by Lyndsay Faye

The premise of Lyndsay Faye's fascinating novel, The Gods of Gotham, was always going to be difficult to resist. Set against the backdrop of the great fire of New York City in 1845 it tells a story of the birth of the famous NYPD amid a great political dispute and the tidal wave of immigrants arriving from Ireland to escape the catastrophic potato famine.

There's a great deal to like about Faye's book - not least a cracking murder mystery investigated by the nascent "Copper Stars" force - but chief among them is a great wealth of historical detail outlining one of the pivotal periods of development of one of the world's great cities.

Faye's story takes place at a time when lower Manhattan is a combustible - quite literally in 1845 - cocktail of commerce and poverty, in which great fortunes are being made and laying the foundations of the City's global financial dominance but while tens of thousands of immigrants, blacks and native (not Red Indian, you understand) Americans are hovering on a desperate breadline.

Many passages of the book take the reader into quite desperate corners of humanity: brothels exploiting orphan and other lost children; the most deprived and depraved slums, such as the Five Points where misery is a constant companion to many who have fallen through the cracks of a brutal and merciless society. These passages reminded me of The People of the Abyss, Jack London's stark 1903 account of life in late Victorian East London, which detailed the struggle of the poor living on the doorstep of what was then the world's wealthiest city.

The Gods of Gotham is also an extaordinary reminder of the youth of the United States of America in general and of New York City in particular. In 1845 New York City had a population under 375,000 but was expanding at a staggering rate (by 1860 it had more than doubled) as waves of immigrants landed from the old world in search of a better life or in flight from persecution or economic disaster. But while Faye describes life in a densely packed Manhattan she also describes the orchards, woods and farmlands that separate the City from Harlem - scenes that's are unimaginable now. 

The huge and unfettered growth of Gotham creates the conditions that make it necessary for the City's fathers to instigate its first police force: not least the religious and economic tension between the new arrivals with their "popery" and the city's existing residents who fear for their jobs, their way of life and even their lives at the hands of the demonised, dehumanised Irish.

Into this heady mess our hero Timothy Wilde is pitched. After his savings and his dreams of marriage go up in flames during the fire, his politico brother Valentine arranges a commission for Tim in the newly former Copper Star force, walking the beat in the dangerous 6th ward - "hell's privy pit". 

As Tim adjusts unhappily to his new life and circumstances, he has his world turned upside a second tiem when a young, terrified girl, covered in blood, runs into him during his rounds. Tim takes the girl to his landlady for care and shortly after is confronted with a second, bllody child - this one dead in suspicious circumstances.

Tim's investigations, gently encouraged by George Washington Matsell, a historical figure later to become the City's first Commissioner of Police, open up a can of worm that the City's political agitators are determined to turn into a religious war on the Irish.

It's a heady, raucous brew, enlivened by extraordinary characters such as the City's army of paperboy entrpreneurs, an early anatomist and Matsell himself. Early NYC is vividly brought to life and the story is further enriched by the liberal use of the "Flash" language, the Rogue's Lexicon recorded for posterity by Matsell.

Faye keeps an ambitious and involved plot moving at a good speed and doesn't let her clear fascination for the history hinder the unfolding of her story. The Gods of Gotham is a worthy addition to the historical crime canon, and I hope a second installment follows.  

Review: The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers

One of the regular features of the radio news bulletins in the UK begins like this: "A British soldier was killed today in Afghanistan..."

It's become such a sadly regular occurrence that there is a danger that the public becomes immune to these bulletins, and that we forget that behind every bulletin is a young life cut short, a grieving family and an individual story. The media has little time for nuance and detail and a life lost is no more than a brief, depressing flash except for those closest to the casualty.

Kevin Powers, a poet and American veteran of the Iraq war, has told one such story in The Yellow Birds, an intense and powerful pyschological novel that follows the campaign of two young soldiers - the 21-year-old Bartle and the 18-year-old Murphy - in the battle for the town of Al-Tafar, as well as their sergeant, Sterling.

The Yellow Birds reminded me of a brief conversation I once had with an American uncle, who in the 1950s, as a green teenager from the industrial northern city of Pittsburgh, signed up for the US Army and quickly found himself fighting the Korean war, following a basic training stint in Kentucky. I rarely heard him talk about his war time experiences, but on this occasion he did offer one insight into his journey: "Hell, I didn't know where Kentucky was, never mind Korea." 

Murphy and Bartle are equally disoriented and lost - pitched into a battle they don't really understand, fighting an enemy they cannot see in a land they do not know. They move forward, one foot after another through the dust, because they have no choice. But as the violence builds and their exposure to the horror of their war grows, Murphy begins to detach from the world. Bartle - the tale's narrator - charged by his mother with keeping Murphy safe, clings on as long as he can but ultimately his friend's distress and terror is too much and their story accelerates into a tragic conclusion.

Interspersed with the story from Iraq, is Bartle's narrative of events of both before and after Al-Tafar, which provide poignant and damning bookends to the events of the battle. Collectively they tell a tale of betrayed innocence, of futility and of the closed minds and turned backs of those at home whom the likes of Bartle and Murphy supposedly fight for.

This is an important book - a timely reminder of the savage personal cost of our public wars. It is also a beautiful book, touched by poetic genius, even as it reaches deep into man's darkness, a domain of cruelty, grief, anger and despair. What makes the story all the more powerful is that Powers delivers his message without resorting to polemic. He doesn't need to, hes far too good a writer for that.

Powers had me at his opening paragraph: "The war tried to kill us in the spring as grass greened the plains of Nineveh and the weather warmed... It tried to kill us every day, but it had not succeeded... While I slept that summer, the war came to me in my dreams and showed me its sole purpose: to go on, only to go on. And I knew the war would get its way." And he never let up. Throughout the narrative and the description is utterly compelling.

In the prologue, Powers says The Yellow Birds began, "as an attempt to reckon with one question: what was it like over there?" only to dismiss his question, declaring himself "unequal to the task of answering it". He goes on, "if there is any thing true in this world it is that war is only like itself".

He is likely right - I, like most of us secure in our beds listening to the morning news bulletins am fortunate not t know. But his intense and moving novel should give pause to thought to everyone that reads it and persuade many that we should do everything in our power to avoid sending any more young men "over there".

Author warfare in the Amazon jungle - the dark side of online reviews

One of the great benefits that Amazon has brought to the book-buying public is its online review system that allows the buyer access to a range of reader opinions on books.

Take the book I am currently reading: The Gods of Gotham by Lindsay Faye. At its Amazon UK page, The Gods of Gotham has 41 reader reviews, and an average rating of 4 stars (about right, judging by the 150 pages I have read so far). There's more than enough there to persuade an uncertain reader to take the plunge.

Access to reviews at the point of purchase is a fantastic resource for readers, who through blogs and online communities and Twitter have never before had such a wealth of information to help them make informed choices.

Now imagine that you discovered the 5 Star Amazon review that persuaded you to buy a particular book was written by the author under a false name? Or a close friend or associate of the author? Or that the author had paid for the review?

You'd be angry, and rightly so - you have essentially become the victim of fraudulent behaviour. Somebody has misrepresented opinions in order to part you with your cash. At best it is highly unethical behaviour, at worst, I'm not sure, Im not a lawyer.

I'm sorry to say that such behaviour, appears to fairly widespread, with authors paying for reviews - as outlined in this Bookseller blog - or indluging in "sock-puppetry", which in this context is the practice of authors using false accounts to acclaim their own books and slam other authors.

As I write this, an absolute storm is raging in the crime fiction community about the alleged activities of one author - RJ Ellory, a favourite of this blog over the years - who was accused last night of having apparently engaged in this appalling behaviour.  

The author Jeremy Duns, who has campaigned relentlessy online recently against such activity, accused Ellory in tweets captured here. Other writers accused of similar include Stephen Leather and Matt Lynn. Following his tweets there was a two-hour long Twitter discussion of the issue that included crime fiction luminaries Ian Rankin, Harlan Coben and Val McDermid. That discussion continued this morning and while I have been sitting here writing this The Crime Writers Association has tweeted that it will be making a statement on the issue and drawing up a code of conduct.

UPDATE: On Sunday evening, Ellory issued a statement, reported by the Telegraph online, blaming a "lapse of judgment" and apologising to his "readers and the writing community".

Even as he did so, yet another writer was accused of the same practice by Stuart Neville.

The CWA, on Saturday, issued a statement condemning a practice it described as, "unfair to authors and also to the readers who are so supportive of the crime genre".

It seems highly unlikely that this whole depressing episode ends here, and I suspect we'll see others brought to book by similarly excellent detective work to that conducted by Duns.

My position on this is simple: authors posting fake reviews of their own work are cheating and betraying their readers and demeaning their profession; authors slamming their peers through the same system, whether for some sort of commercial advantage, petty jealousy or something else, is utterly despicable. I look forward to seeing the CWA's response.

I am both shocked and deeply saddened by these extraordinary activities.  

Regrettably, it seems all but impossible for the practice to be stopped in any way other than the sort of industry-policing that Duns has so admirably led. (For more on this visit his excellent blog, The Debrief and the Left Room, the blog Steve Mosby, who has also written extensively on the subject). The strength of the Amazon reviewing system - the openness that allows all-comers to participate - is also its weakness. It is wide open to abuse and offers a perfect platform of anonymity and reach for those wishing to sock-puppet. It is very very difficult to see that changing.

That brings me to the main purpose of this post - aside from commenting and exposing this activity - how to reassure readers that what they read on Material Witness is genuine.

This blog is in seventh year now and never during that time I have felt the need to publish an editorial policy or review or submission guidelines. When I started, this sort of blog was relatively rare and the status and influence of bloggers in the crime fiction community was all but marginal. I believe Material Witness remains largely marginal - I don't blog as much as I'd like to - but overall the influence and scope of blogging is immeasurably greater than it was in 2006 when I started. The role of bloggers and their relationship with writers and publishers has become the subject of a great deal of debate, most of which, I confess, I have ignored.

But I recognise that my ostrich approach to these issues needs revising in the light of the sock-puppetry scandal and other ongoing debates, and that the integrity of my work likely does not speak for itself. I have therefore decided that I will publish an editorial policy for Material Witness to give its readers confidence in the reviews published here and publishers more information about what I do and why. I need to think it through thoroughly, and that will take some time. 

In the meantime let me says this: I write for my own amusement and to help readers find new authors and vice versa. I am not paid to review the books, and the opinions expressed here are genuine.

I love writing Material Witness. I enjoy playing a small (marginal) role in the crime fiction community, which has enabled me to meet a lot of great people and find a lot of great books. May that long continue.

REVIEW: The Fall by Claire McGowan

If your 2012 Summer getaway coincides with the holiday weekend and you're looking for a sharp and gripping thriller, then pick up a copy of Claire McGowan's debut novel The Fall, which is published in paperback this week.

McGowan has clearly learned much from her role as Director of the Crime Writers Association, as The Fall is an immaculately engineered thriller that initially threatens to head into genre cliche territory but avoids all the traps and emerges as a fresh, challenging and enjoyable novel. It is also stylishly written, with a light and often witty touch.   

The Fall tells the story of two women from opposite ends of the social spectrum whose lives crash into one another after a murder in a night club. Charlotte, a PR professional, is there with her banker fiancee Dan a few days before their perfect, extravagant wedding and fabulously expensive honeymoon. Keisha is there with her feckless, abusive boyfriend Chris.

Until Dan is arrested for the murder of the nighclub's owner, Charlotte's prime concern in life was her table plan and ensuring that the flowers don't clash with the linen at the reception of the Mandarin Oriental. Within days of his arrest she discovers that her middle class life was more fragile than she could have imagined. Her friends desert her with indecent haste, her career is in crisis and her banged-up boyfriend was up to his ears in debt.

Keisha, who already knew she was penniless, is pre-occupied by regaining access to her daughter Ruby who is in care and her sick mother.

Although neither realises it, the two women have more in common than their link to the murder, and this is what I liked best about The Fall: its subtle and clever analysis of the lines of class and colour that criss-cross London and their deconstruction as Keisha and Charlotte form an unlikely alliance. The passages that track their developing relationship are the most compelling in the book. While the men in the story are mostly hopeless - even likable investigating copper Matthew Hegarty demonstrates less than ideal judgment - the women are strong and resourceful, particularly Keisha.

The crime often feels subsidiary to this character-driven plot - even though it is the hinge that joins the two women - but that narrative is kept up as Hegarty, Charlotte and Keisha all negotiate their way through the web that has entangled them.

This is a strong, confident debut that deserves the praise that has been heaped on it, and I daresay that most who read it will be waiting expectantly for McGowan's next star turn The Lost, when it is published next year.

 

REVIEW: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Four pages from the end of Gone Girl, I could only marvel at the ability of Gillian Flynn to maintain an electric level of tension and mystery throughout a 400-pls page novel. Four pages from the end, I still had no idea how this mesmerising book would end, and was every bit as gripped as I had been from the very first page.

A day earlier, at 1.30am in a hotel room in Germany, I was torn between two competing and mutually exclusive demands. I had to know how Gone Girl finished, and therefore read the final 150 pages, but I had to try and get some sleep.

Gillian Flynn has that effect on me, and many many others. In the six years I have been writing Material Witness, no author has delivered a three card trick as powerful as Sharp Objects, Dark Places and now Gone Girl.

In my review of Dark Places, I wrote that Flynn's greatest strength is her ability to put the reader "inside the story, having them live every twist and turn", with her characters.

And she repeats the trick here, in a very clever story in which nothing is quite what it seems and nobody quite who people think they are.

Nick and Amy Dunne are celebrating their fifth wedding anniversary when Amy disappears from their home amidst signs of a struggle. The ensuing investigation - in which Nick, who has no alibi for the critical period, inevitably becomes the focus of suspicion - begins to chip away at the facade of their marriage. In parallel we learn their history through Amy's diaries, which detail the souring of the perfect love story as both lose their jobs and they move back from New York City to Nick's childhood home town on the Mississippi in Missouri.

Seeing the story in alternate chapters from twin perspectives - the present through Nick's eyes, history through Amy's words - is a simple device that immediately ratchets up the tension, lifting the lid on the private institution of marriage and putting husband and wife at loggerheads.  

Even if most married couples do not experience the extremes of Amy and Nick, every one will recongise the telltale signs of the stresses and strains of relationships, the petty resentments and irritations that, if allowed to fester, infect everything very quickly. This makes the story both disturbing and compulsive, like a motorway pile-up, and sustains it for 400 pages.

All the hallmarks of success from Flynn's first two books are here: a pacey, emotional narrative; characterisation of the highest order and first class writing.  

Gone Girl is a strong candidate for thriller of the year - it's certainly the best I've read in 2012 and it should add to the reputation of Gillian Flynn, who surely now ranks in the highest echelons of the thriller writer world.

 

REVIEW: Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov

Death and the Penguin has proved to be the iced gem of last year's Christmas offerings (yes this review is a little late) - a book that is warm, witty, intelligent and sufficiently unusual to be genuinely compelling.

Consider this. Your local zoo can no longer afford to feed all of its animals and asks concerned local citizens to adopt smaller animals that they can look after. What do you take? A meerkat, perhaps? (Very trendy). A snake? A monkey?

Viktor Zolotaryov plumps for a penguin, MIsha, that lives in a gap behind his sofa and feeds on frozen fish provided by his new owner.

Its an odd sort of decision to make, not least because Viktor later proves not to be the decisive type. He is lost in the new Ukraine - the story was first published in 1996, just as the former Soviet republic was making its way as a free state - and Misha the penguin, a true fish out of water, is a mirror to Viktor.

In addition to his new role as penguin-keeper, Viktor also finds himself in a new job, writing obituaries for a local newspaper, a turn that brings even more strangeness into his life than having an Antarctic bird living behind the sofa. Viktor rapidly discovers that his writing of obituaries heralds death on its subjects, rather than the other way round.

The obituary writing heralds other changes in Viktor's life. First he finds himself the inadvertant guardian of Sonya, a young girl left on his doorstep by a mysterious "friend" Misha, known as Misha-non-Penguin. And when he hires a nanny to help with Sonya, he finds himself at that centre of an accidental family.

And while this brings the illusion of normalcy - penguin notwithstanding - Viktor's life takes on an increasingly surreal quality. He is paid to attend funerals with his increasingly depressed penguin,  in the role of chief mourner just as his own blameless, if directionless, life begins to converge with Ukraine's burgeoning organised industry.

Death and the Penguin is a strange book, a satirical novel that shouldn't really work, but does and does so brilliantly that the ending is merely a visual prompt to the immediate ordering of its sequel, Penguin Lost. It works because Viktor and Misha (penguin) offer such a perfect perspective on the emerging Ukraine and the bewildering changes to personal and public lives ushered in by ideological change. And it does so because Kurkov untethers himself from both convention and reality and uses his freedom to offer a series of profound, philosophical observations on the human (and penguin condition) bound together by a charming narrative, laced with wit and insight. Just brilliant.

Review: Beastly Things by Donna Leon

A Guido Brunetti novel from Donna Leon is the literary equivalent of comfort food. They are familiar, reassuring, utterly reliable and always welcome.

Food, of course, is a constant theme throughout the Brunetti series, which has become beloved of readers as much for the tastes and aromas of Paola Brunetti's kitchen as it is for her husband's cases. In Beastly Things, Leon takes the food theme one step further, placing Brunetti at the centre of a murder investigation that involves the processing of beef cattle for human consumption.

Recent novels in this wonderful series have addressed a number of philosophical, political and ethical themes that have broadened out beyond the analysis of the chaotic and corrupt state of Italian public and commercial life - although this inevitably plays a role in most affairs. 

In Beastly Things, the main subject of debate is the rearing and consumption of meat. The discourse is played out in dialogues between Brunetti and Paola, or with his two closest colleagues, the enigmatic Signorina Elettra or the principled, taciturn Vianello, and it is these that provide the emotional centre of the of the book and much of the enjoyment.

Brunetti, an equable and likable character, is often cast in the role of ingenue, surprised by the complexity of the world and by the depth and ferocity of his companions' thinking and opinions. He too, however, is quietly principled and a man whose moral compass determines the direction of his investigations, a necessity in Italy where nothing, including justice, is straightforward.

This is an unusual Brunetti novel in one sense, in that the crime becomes apparent immediately rather than after 100 pages or so of reflections on life and society as has been the case in recent books.

A murder victim fished out of a canal leads Brunetti and Vianello through a murky trail of sexual politics, profiteering, political intrigue and finally to the gates of a slaughterhouse where the dead man worked.

Despite the gruesome nature of the investigation, and the diseased world it unveils, Beastly Things is a joy. I usually take these books on holiday as a special treat for the beach. I'll miss it this year.