The Kittiwake's Nest

This is the first of the Tony Hill/Carol Jordan series that I have read, and as it's the 6th and latest book in the series, it probably wasn't the best one to start with. That said, the relationships between the members of the MIT squad and Dr Hill were clear and enough of the back-story was included that I didn't feel lost. Although I've never watched "Wire in the Blood", even having seen the trailers over the years meant that I was picturing Robson Green and Hermione Norris as Tony and Carol.

The relationships between the characters were believable, but the murder mystery was a bit lame. It relied too much on coincidence and in some places the investigators seemed a bit dim and slow on the uptake for a squad of supposed high-flyers. I'm sure most readers would have guessed what "ur real" in Jennifer's web-chat might have been referring to, whereas the police and the profiler didn't have a clue. And when they were wondering how the main suspect might have found his victims, it never occurred to them that what he did for a living might have anything to do with it!

However, it was still an enjoyable read, and I will read the other books in the series if they come my way. The ending makes me think that this could well be the last book in the series, but at least I will be able to read the earlier books without worrying too much about what will happen to the main characters.

Book 3 of the Avignon Quintet

Immortality must feel something like this for a poet. Suppose I were to tell you that here, in perfect peace, we sail eastward under cloudless skies upon a windless cerulean sea with not one Homeric curl in it . . . The Khedive is the royal yacht which is carrying us to Egypt and safety. No, it is totally unreal to find myself here under an awning of brightly striped duck, lounging beside the calm Prince, drinking a whisky and soda with grave reflective delight. Contemplating the abyss which has opened at our feet - the war.

Europe is on the brink of war, and the young people who spent the summer at Tu Duc are about to go their separate ways. Constance is returning to Geneva to finish her psychoanalytic studies after a hurried marriage to Sam who has already joined up, Livia has disappeared and is thought to be in Germany, Felix will move on to another posting after closing down the Avignon consulate, and Blanford is hoping to escape the war entirely by going to Egypt as the Prince's secretary.

Sutcliffe and Toby turn out to be real people, much to the surprise of Constance who meets them in Geneva when Sutcliffe's wife Pia becomes her patient. However, both Blanford and Sutcliffe still see them as being characters invented by Blanford, and when Blanford and Sutcliffe finally meet, they discuss the book(s) they are writing, which are two versions of the same story. So it's all very convoluted, with much blurring of the boundaries between what is real and what is not. The story doesn't even really match what happened in the earlier books in the series. According to them, Blanford has a long unhappy marriage with Livia, who tortures him for years with her manipulative behaviour, mysterious disappearances and lesbian affairs, but in this book their relationship only really lasts for a single summer in 1939. By the time the war starts, they may be married or engaged (it's not clear which as it only says that Blanford has given Livia a ring), but Livia has disappeared into Germany, and by the end of the war she is dead, so they never meet again. I suppose this is linked to the way that in the first book it was never clear to me whether Sutcliffe's wife Pia was dead, or if he just wrote about her as if she was dead because he couldn't bear that she had left him.

I liked this book rather more than I enjoyed "Livia", the previous book in this series. The only part I didn't enjoy was when Constance and Affad got together. There was way too much information about the first time they made love (blood everywhere!) and for me it went rapidly downhill from there, with Constance becoming increasingly annoying as she wholeheartedly embraced Affad's odd theories on relationships between men and women, and expounded on them to anyone who would listen.

Surprised at the resentment shown by Guan's neighbour, Chen said, "No matter in what position we work, we're all working for socialist China."
"Working for socialist China?" her voice rose querulously. "Last month I was laid off from the state-run factory. I need to feed my son; his father died several years ago. So making dumplings all day is what I do now, from seven to seven, if you want to call that working for socialist China. And I have to sell them at the food market at six in the morning."
"I'm sorry to hear that Comrade Yuan," he said. "Right now China is in a transitional period, but things will get better."
"It's not your fault. Why should you feel sorry? Just spare me a political lecture about it. Comrade Guan Hongying did not want to make friends with us. Period."

Guan Hongying, whose given name meant Red Heroine, was a national model worker whose life was held up as an example to all China, but she still ended up dead, wrapped in a garbage bag and dumped in a little-used canal.

This is the first in a series of police procedurals set in a rapidly-changing Shanghain in the 1990s. Chief Inspector Chen Cao has been promoted due to his current role due to the patronage of Party Secretary Li, and his colleague Detective Yu is resentful about this, but they knuckle down to investigating the murder, even when a surprising development leads to political ramifications that could threaten both their careers.

One thing that comes through clearly in the book is how elderly people, finding it hard to make ends meet on their pensions as inflation soars, are taking part-time jobs to earn extra money. There is Commissar Zhang, whose advice Chen has to listen to although Party Secretary Li tacitly makes it clear that does not need to follow it, an old woman selling ices in the street, for some reason still wearing an ancient Best Socialist Mobile Service Woman* armband, Uncle Bao, who runs the telephone kiosk outside Guan's building and provides the clue that leads to a breakthrough in the stagnating case, and Detective Yu's old father, Old Wang, an ex-policeman who patrols the local market and warns Chen when he is straying into dangerously political waters.

A fasinating story due to its setting, but the mystery is not in fact very mysterious at all, and the policemen are not terribly proactive in their investigations.


* euphemism for prostitute

If Homo sapiens were to mutate again and shake the kaleidoscope of particles that makes him, it is possible that he could retain his modern mind by losing his madness. Possible. But the truth is, we have always, from the moment of our origination, been a profoundly flawed species - mad in the basic particles of our being, radically insane - and the building of the great asylums only served to show us the magnitude of our madness, as the rural lunatics were gathered up and put beneath one roof with their urban cousins for the first time. Psychosis, ladies and gentlemen, is the price we pay for being human.

This was an interesting novel, and could have been more so, but there was so much detailed information about developments in the understanding of mental illness in the late 19th and early 20th century, that it tended to drag at times. If I wanted that much information, I would read a non-fiction book on the subject. When Jacques and Thomas gave public speeches outlining their theories, I really didn't need to read the whole texts of the speeches, pages and pages of i, but the worst example of this info-dump came when Thomas was in Africa. He decided to remove the brain from a dead Masai guide, not because he thought the brain would be in any way different from that of a European, but merely in order to pontificate on his theories about the link between evolution, consciousness and madness in tedious detail to the big game hunter he was travelling with, who eventually said he didn't want to hold the brain any longer and went off to bed, leaving Thomas talking to himself.

Apart from that, the main problem was that the main characters weren't particularly likeable or engaging, and never really drew me into their story, so I didn't really care what became of the two main couples. The thirty pages following Daniel's time as a soldier in Flanders and Italy during WWI were moving but didn't really seem to fit in with the rest of the book, and when the focus returned to his parents, uncle and aunt for the last few pages of the book, it only emphasised how little I had engaged with them.

Next he came to a small study, with an open bureau bearing a Halda typewriter, documents in pigeon-holes, a pile of dusty correspondence papers which he blew at gently until the name and address were legible. From it he learned that the house's owners had been called Eriksson, that they were indeed in Sweden, near a place called Umeå, which he would have to look up on a map when he got home, and something else which struck him as simply incredible!
Their skelter code was printed on the letterhead!

The skelter is a transportation device that lets you walk through its door and out of any other skelter on the planet, as long as you know its code. There are even skelters that open straight into to the heart of an incinerator, although their codes are strictly controlled to stop people making use of them to dispose of dead bodies and other evidence of criminal activity, rather than just rubbish.

Supposedly the invention of the skelter caused worldwide devastation, as there was originally no way of preventing access to anyone who knew the code. As well as facilitating robbery and crimes of violence, it also allowed terrorists and saboteurs easy access to plant bombs and make a quick getaway to the other side of the world, and allowed diseases to spread with impunity. The human race has been decimated by the skelter, and a disease called contagious puerperal fever has led to a gender imbalance, with 5 men to 3 women (and not many of them are fertile, since any woman not immune to CPF is sterilised for their own safety). Now that a device called the privateer has been invented that allows you to screen incomers to your skelter, and deny them access, the elite, skelter using population tend to live on islands, although there are some people who are 'stuck', unable to bring themselves to walk through the door of a skelter, for fear of what might happen, and there are also skelter-hating populations living at a lower technological level. Stealing skelter codes or using them to invade someone's privacy is punishable by being forced to wear a bracelet that prevents access to the skelter system.

I can't see that anyone would actually want to have such an insecure device providing access to their homes. In reality, the rich might have private skelters (although I am sure that they would be placed just outside their well-guarded perimeter defences), but I am sure that everyone else would just use public skelters.

"I'll probably be back here around five in the morning for a snack," he says. "I'll be hungry again. I hope I see you then."
"Why?"
"Hmm, I wonder why."
"'Cause you're worried about me?"
"That's part of it."
"'Cause you want me to say hi to my sister?"
"That might be a little part of it, too."
"My sister wouldn't know the difference between a trombone and a toaster oven. She could tell the difference between a Gucci and a Prada at a glance, though, I'm pretty sure."
"Everybody's got their own battlefields," he says with a smile.

A short book, whose events take place over the course of one night. So soon after reading "Grotesque", it was strange to read another Japanese book, featuring both a young woman who is jealous of her beautiful sister, and illegal immigrants from China. However, although Mari Asai is insecure, she is not so insanely jealous of her elder sister Eri as the protagonist of "Grotesque", and her meeting with the tomobonist Takahashi and the women who work at the Alphaville love hotel seems likely to be a turning point in her life.

To start with I wasn't sure that the story was going to go anywhere, but as soon as Kaoru appeared and asked Mari to interpret for a Chinese prostitute, I began to enjoy it, and at a couple of hundred pages long, it is well worth a few hours of your time.

'How to find our way back? How to realize a whole vision of life? Not some self-sealing intellectual construct; no shabby, patchwork compromise, but a regenerative, transcendent change. One that reconciles matter with spirit, heart with mind, the female in us and the male, the darkness and the light. That was the problem which engaged the spiritual intellect of the true alchemist. That was the Elixir, the Stone, the Gold . . . aurum non vulgi - no common gold. they are all symbols for what cannot be said - only experienced. As is', he added pointedly, 'the chymical wedding - the promise of which you saw celebrated in your dreams.'

In the Norfolk village of Munding in the middle of the 19th century, Sir Henry Agnew struggles to transform hermetic secrets into poetry, while Louisa Agnew, his daughter and alchemical soror mystica, decides to write a book that will act as an introduction to her father's work. In the 1980s a poet called Alex Darken comes to the village to lick his wounds after the collapse of his marriage, and becomes entangled with the elderly poet Edward Nesbit and his young lover Laura, who are investigating the Agnews' work and the mystery of Louisa's frater mystica.

I thought that this would be my type of book, since it features alchemy, green man and a church with a sheela-na-gig embedded in its wall. Unfortunately, both eras were peopled with obsessive drama queens, and by 120 pages from the end I had lost patience with their idiotic behaviour. As I was so far through I forced myself to finish it anyway, but it's my least favourite book of the year so far.

It was the hair, I think, which drew me most. If I had ever seen women with hair as short as hers, it was because they had spent time in hospital or prison; or because they were mad. They could never have looked like Kitty Butler. Her hair fitted her head like a little cap that had been sewn, just for her, by some nimble-fingered milliner.

Nancy's story is a roller-coaster ride, as she goes from oyster girl to theatrical dresser, music-hall artiste, rent boy, and kept woman, before eventually finding her niche in life. It's interesting how slang terms change their meaning over the years - In 1890s London, a tom is a lesbian, while a gay girl is a prostitute.

This is the third Sarah Waters book that I have read, and although I enjoyed this one very much, I think "Affinity" is still my favourite.

Two sequels to "Odd Thomas", which I read last year.

Forever Odd

The flesh on the nape of my neck did the crawly thing that it does so well. Some people say this is God's warning that the devil is near, but I've noticed I also experience it when someone serves me Brussels sprouts.

Odd Thomas, a young man living in a small desert town in California, has the power to see the lingering dead. When he is woken one night by the ghost of Dr. Jessup, his friend Danny's father. Going over to his house, he finds Dr Jessup dead and Danny missing. But this time danger threatens Odd himself rather than the whole town.

Brother Odd

The wintry morning ticked toward whatever disaster might be coming. Recently I had learned that really brainy guys divide the day into units amounting to one millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second, which made each whole second that I dithered seem to be an unconscionable waste of time.

Needing to recuperate after the events of the first two books, Odd Thomas has spent the last few months living in the guest quarters of St. Bartholomew's Abbey in the Sierra Nevada. Surprisingly humorous in parts, such as Odd's discussion with the Mother Superior about which of the monks would be most suitable to help Brother Salvatore (aka Brother Knuckles) defend the abbey against the coming supernatural dangers.

Death. A wall that had suddenly appeared before me. One short climb over it and I was free to drop from the other side, my worldly cares dissolving as I fell.
Death. I could say it now, knowing that I finally had the measure of its power.
Death. Each time it formed on my silent lips, it shrank a little.
Death. The word replaced the sound of my heart.
Death. Reduced to a dictionary position.
Death. Its strength vanishing.
Death. Smaller still.
Death. Smaller.
Gone.

And Life.

This was actually quite an unpleasant book, and not one to read while eating. I nearly didn't make it to the end, when all was explained and wrapped up neatly.