Book 43: "Forests of the Heart" by Charles de Lint

'So these wolves that come to our yard,' Bettina tried. 'En otros palabras - in other words. They are evil?'
Nuala shook her head. 'Not as you're using the word. Long ago, they followed the Irish emigrants to the New World, but this land already had its own guardian spirits. So there was no place for them. But here they remain all the same. They are homeless, unbound, and they neither feel nor think the way we do. When the Gentry gather in a pack they can be like a wild hunt, ravening and hungry for blood, but even on an individual basis, they're not to be trusted.'

There are a couple of very stupid people in this book. For all their knowledge about the Gentry and other fairy folk, they have not grasped this one basic truth about the inhabitants of the spirit world. They are dangerous and untrustworthy and anyone who thinks that they will stick to their side of a bargain is a fool. Miki understands this and I am sure that even Chantal, whose only knowledge of such things comes from fairy tales she was told as a child, would too, so why don't they?

Charles de Lint does irritate me quite a lot. In this book there is the way he has Bettina say a phrase in Spanish and immediately afterward repeat it in English, which gets tiresome quickly. And then there's the info dump about music since some of this book's characters work in a record shop. In the last book of his that I read the info dump was about guitar making since the protagonist was a luthier. But music and especially Celtic music seems to be an obsession of the author's. So your characters have great taste in music and are therefore cool and artistic and allowed to have contact with the spirit world. I get it! You can stop the constant name-dropping of musicians!

But the story was good, and I did enjoy it.

Book 44: "Cocaine Nights" by J.G. Ballard

He seized me from behind. There was a strange smell on his hands, perhaps some sort of special oil that professional stranglers use.

When travel-writer Charles Prentice is summoned to Spain after his brother Frank is arrested, he assumes that he has been fitted up by the Spanish police, but on arrival he is stunned to discover to find that Frank has been charged with murdering five people, and has pleaded guilty. Frank is the manager of a sports club in Estrella de Mar, a community of northern European ex-pats near Marbella and Charles decides to stay there and try to find out what really happened, since no-one, not even the Spanish police, seems to believe he is guilty.

Charles Prentice is not so much an unreliable narrator, as an unobservant, easily led and obtuse narrator. He veers from wildly over-imaginative (see above) to willfully blind:

'I've watched him at work, Paula. He genuinely wants to help everyone. He's stumbled on this strange way of getting people to make the most of themselves. It's touching to see such simple faith. He's really some kind of saint.'
'He's a psychotic.'
'Not fair. He gets carried away sometimes, but there's no viciousness in the man.'
'Pure psycho.' She turned her back on the mirror and stared critically at me. 'You can't see it.'.

I first read this book when it came out in paperback and I think I preferred it then, when the dark underbelly of Estrella de Mar came as a surprise, as it was the first of J.G. Ballard's books on that theme that I had read.

Nottingham Round the World Reading Challenge
SPAIN / ANDALUCIA / COSTA DEL SOL