Hey!! Let's get some action going! What are we reading?

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

I'm also reading (in an old hardback!) Catweazle by Richard Carpenter. A novelisation of a TV series from my youth.

Heavens - that's a "blast from the past". I remember that series . Looking it up, I see it was broadcast in 1970 and 71: 44 years ago!

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Heavens - that's a "blast from the past". I remember that series . Looking it up, I see it was broadcast in 1970 and 71: 44 years ago!

It's also available on DVD. I bought the DVD for my son. He returned the favour by finding an old copy of the book for me!

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by CRussel

Arrgghhh. How am I supposed to keep my buying down if you keep reminding me that there are new books I really want to read out?? I thought I had a bit before The King of Shanghai was out. Sigh. Well, maybe I'll get lucky and the BC Library download site will get it in before I give in to temptation.

Originally Posted by ATDrake

At least it'd be money well spent on a book you're sure to enjoy (I'll note that there's less of the particular sort of personally-oriented violence that IIRC both you and I disliked in #5-6)? And on supporting homegrown award-winning Canadian authors as well?

If you can hold out until the next coupon contest comes around, and Kobo keeps it at the current competitive-with-iTunes-and-Amazon new release discount price of $10-ish CAD, maybe you'll luck out on a good code and can get it for a lower cost if the BC Library doesn't oblige in time.

Well, so much for good intentions. I broke down and bought it with a 35% coupon and am now 1/3rd of the way into it, having put Campion aside for a moment. Of course, this was woefully wanton, since I already had the latest Rivers of London/Peter Grant book coming (and it arrived overnight.) But so what - I have to excellent books to read, and I think I'll do the Aaronovitch book, Foxglove Summer, as an audio book first.

[HarryT]

Thanks - I'll put that DVD on my buying list .

[Dngrsone]

Starting the second book of the Mistborn trilogy... I liked the first book a lot.

[Hampshire Nanny]

Now reading A String of Beads by Thomas Perry, the latest in his mystery series featuring Jane Whitefield, a guide who helps innocent people adopt new identities to escape from those who would do them harm. Think "private witness protection program", except Jane will not take a client who is simply tattling on others. She's the last resort for battered wives, the falsely accused, an inadvertent witness, and the innocent whistle blower. So far, I'm enjoying it.

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by CRussel

Well, so much for good intentions. I broke down and bought it with a 35% coupon and am now 1/3rd of the way into it, having put Campion aside for a moment. Of course, this was woefully wanton, since I already had the latest Rivers of London/Peter Grant book coming (and it arrived overnight.) But so what - I have to excellent books to read, and I think I'll do the Aaronovitch book, Foxglove Summer, as an audio book first.

Well, look at it this way: more sales = more demonstrable demand = more Ava Lee books in the future because the publishers know that people are willing to shell out money for them and the author doesn't have to work part-time at the 7/11 ekeing out a living wage (though technically I think he's already contracted through #9 or #10), which gives him more time to write, as well as do research/revisions so the books will also be reasonably decent . For this reason I haven't cancelled my library hold on the incoming hardcover of Hamilton's TKOS (although instead of reading it through, I'll just keep it for a day and return it the next if the weather/transit conditions are amenable), and I'm pleased to see it featured on the iTunes Canada's weekly bestseller list (even though I consider buying non-multimedia books at iTunes basically a fancy way of throwing money into the void).

And it's A Good Thing™, IMHO, to buy and enjoy books you like, no matter what the circumstances of their acquisition (barring murdering someone for a copy, or stealing the neighbour kids' allowance money, or the like).

As for me, finished the first new purchase of the new year (well, technically I bought other ones before this, but this is the first I've actually read through): the late James Thompson's Lucifer's Tears, 2nd in his Inspector Vaara, Intrepid Increasingly Morally-Compromised Finnish Murder Investigator series, which I got on discount sale after having read the previously-freebied 1st one upthread to determine if I wanted to buy this one while it was still on sale.

It turns out that this is a series you cannot read out-of-sequence at all, as while the cases themselves are standalone, the personal developments are built on from book-to-book, and thus you would end up being seriously spoilered for the previous whodunnits, as the narrative explores the after-effects of dealing with the earlier crimes on Kari Vaara and his American wife Kate, in the course of it detailing exactly what happened to whom and why.

And thus as a result of certain fallout and realizations made in Snow Angels, Vaara and Kate have moved from his isolated Arctic circle hometown in the far north to the more cosmopolitan Helsinki, where Kate is fitting in better with a more international crowd, but Vaara feels out of place, in part due to bad memories, and in part due to having to adjust from being the top cop in his small town to interim chief murder-investigator amidst a bunch of political maneuvering and office politics amidst new colleagues and underlings who don't believe he's earned his place.

In between all this are the obligatory murder investigation (another apparently psycho-sexual crazed one, sigh, though at least not a serial killer, and with a potential hiding-another-crime motive), a further politically-fuelled clandestine investigation into WWII-era war crimes possibly committed by an elderly national hero who may have been a colleague of Vaara's grandfather, and the arrival of the in-laws, as Kate's brother and sister come for a visit, and Vaara tries to reconnect with his brother Jari, also in Helsinki.

Naturally, that last one seems to be the most awkward for Vaara to handle, as Kate's remaining family (who grew up under difficult circumstances affected by maternal death and paternal alcoholism) prove to be considerably more dysfunctional than either of them were expecting, and brother Jari's family has its own issues, which are set on a collision course. Next to that, Vaara's having to deal with the eccentricities of his latest colleague/work assistant, the demands of his higher-ups interested in covering up, and trying to prove a culprit for the murder he's fairly certain has been committed by someone who's taunting him over it and has framed someone else to take the fall, is practically a familiar routine.

The resolution to the whodunnit for this, as well as Vaara's office politics problems, is rather twisty but falls neatly into place and works fairly well with what's been established earlier, kind of like sliding one of those T-shaped pieces into Tetris and rotating it at just the right moment to take out a significant chunk of the pile.

One of the things that really worked well in this, IMHO, is the depiction of Vaara's interactions with various characters and situations and how his reactions have been those of a basically trying-to-be-decent guy who becomes less decent as he begins to resort to tactics that are less and less pure and more questionable in order to resolve conflicts that have no easy resolution which would otherwise work out in his favour or that of the parties he's trying to help.

I'd thought from author's Wikipedia entry that the Vaara's increasing moral compromise would occur more gradually in this fashion as he sauntered gently downwards what TV Tropes likes to call The Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism, but due to certain things that were set up as a result of developments in the murder investigation, it looks like it's going to happen in a rather different way over the next few books, as it seems that the hook that will get him to a more crooked level is actually going to play directly on his actual idealism rather than passively occurring as a result of increasing cynicism.

Recommended if you're interested in Nordic police procedurals involving a great deal of dysfunction hidden under an otherwise calm and normal-seeming surface, both in the actual cop, and the society surrounding him, as well as a good dose of Finland's WWII history involving their difficult position caught between their ancient traditional enemies, the Russians, and their this-was-a-bad-idea-to-team-up-with-in-retrospect allies, the Germans, and some cross-cultural exchange of varying degrees of success between Finns and Americans who are kind of stuck with each other until the divorce.

I liked this enough that I started looking up the next-in-series, which it turns out the local library has on shelf, so since it's a nice-ish day now that the torrential rains have stopped, I'll be walking out to borrow them shortly.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Next up: Lightspeed Magazine #56 edited by John Joseph Adams. The latest issue from my subscription that I got through their 2014 Kickstarter.

Which I've just finished, and was very good. I especially liked the novella, as it was set in (a somewhat changed) Norfolk.

Still reading Catweazle, but also reading the latest Grantville Gazette (#57!).

[sneakyspider]

Been on a bit of an ebook buying spree lately. I tend to read several books at the same time, and currently I'm reading:

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
The Enchanted by Rene Denfeld

Bought a few others that I plan to start on after I finish these three.

[Dngrsone]

How it's The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, sneaky? I was tempted by the title, though I'm afraid it sounds kind of Steampunkish, and I've been reading a little too much of that genre lately.

[meeera]

I've just finished Laurinda by Alice Pung, and it's brilliant and biting and engrossing. A poor ethnically Chinese girl (whose family fled Vietnam to come to Australia) wins an "Equal Access" scholarship to a very posh private girls' school. There she learns that this superficially glossy and perfect-looking environment hides undercurrents of maliciousness and manipulation that verge on the horrific. She has to learn to navigate this environment and find out who she is and who she wants to be.

It could be labelled YA just because it's set in high school and includes a coming of age story, but it reads as an adult book with crossover appeal to me. On the surface it's a Mean Girls novel, but really it's about class and race and elitism and corruption and what matters in life, and about how even a little bit of social power can be enticing yet dangerous. There is also a powerful examination of 'benevolent' racism, how it functions, and how it feels on the receiving end. Highly recommended. (Since "best book of the year so far" doesn't mean much at this point!)

[ATDrake]

Finished Helsinki White & Helsinki Blood, 3rd & 4th in the late James Thompson's Inspector Vaara, Intrepid Increasingly Morally-Compromised Finnish Murder-Investigator series, which brings us to the point where it suffered Author Existence Failure, with the forthcoming 5th novel partially completed and apparently now completed for publication, possibly with some assistance, and slated for release late this year.

So it's probably just as well that these installments form a complete 2-book character mini-arc for Vaara, his wife Kate, and his team as a kind of story of a downfall and crawl back up.

Once again, the actual investigative cases inside are self-contained, but the developments arising from them are not at all standalone, as each novel feeds into and refers back to others as a tightly interwoven ongoing personal and professional development storyline.

As part of the outcome of #2, Vaara gets increased autonomy and resources to run things his own way throughout the start of #3, which of course is something that comes back to bite him, as the persons responsible for his added authority have their own agendas, naturally, which Vaara finds himself in increasing disagreement with, but no easily apparent way from which to extricate himself from the situation.

I did wonder how Thompson was going to handle Kate's role in reacting to Vaara's increasing moral compromise, and find it rather refreshing they've kind of solved part of their earlier marital communication problems, even if it does kind of make her an accessory and they don't reach anything near full disclosure, which is probably for the best. And rather than being a well-adjusted deniable-criminality couple as the result of this sharing, or even having an initial agreeability ending in a falling-out, it actually does begin to affect their marriage in more subtly stressful ways.

And of course, there's Vaara's hand-picked team of close colleagues, who along with some characters from previous books, start to form a surrogate family with him, even as he's working on his legal family, neither of which turn out in quite the manner anyone would have been expecting. (Quite frankly, Vaara's squad simply aren't fit for the spirit of the law enforcement work that they're ostensibly doing, and it's just as well that they're kept in line in some manner and made to serve the cause of justice in an extra-legal sense, more or less. Better than letting them run loose on the streets, I suppose.)

It's probably just as well that in between their new clandestine stopping-street-level-crime-by-technically-committing-a-whole-lot-of-it duties, Vaara still has a murder or two to investigate, this time kicking off in #3 with what seems to be a politically motivated attack on an immigrant-supporting politician by racist hate crime groups, which ends up sparking a series of terroristic related killings, which may in turn be related to an unsolved kidnapping/murder of members of one of Finland's elite families.

This, as I've mentioned before, is a series that's somewhat on the gory sensationalistic side for its murders, which seem to be the trend in Nordic noir crime thrillers, and the shift in Vaara's actual duties pretty much ensures more regular violence as a matter of course, but #3 was actually more upsetting for the hate crime content and use of racial slurs, even if Vaara and his gang are confronting neo-Nazi groups and their supporters, some of whom are shown as fairly high up in the mainstream Finnish hierarchy, than any of the actual depictions of violence, IMHO. I suppose like littering, it's just too close to reality.

Thompson takes the time to write an Author's Note in the back of #3, regarding some of the real-life cases and conditions he based part of it on, as well as some commentary on the politically/racially-motivated Norwegian 2011 spree killings that happened shortly after he finished writing the book.

Anyway, as a direct result of #3, #4 starts out with Vaara, his team, and his family in a rather bad place, as they deal with some serious damage incurred (one of the relative positives of the series is that the narrative does not shy away from the physical and emotional consequences of their high-risk activities, even on persons who aren't directly involved), not to mention, some rather rabid chickens start coming home to roost. And Vaara tries to regain at least a part of his initial idealism in acquiescing to the very idea of his extra-legal crime-squad by trying to fulfill at least one of its initial objectives in stopping human trafficking.

As a result, this is actually the first Vaara case which doesn't involve investigating a murder, at least at first, and it's a refreshing change. (Although it does end up causing plenty of them, as usual.)

Unfortunately for him, though, he kind of has to do it while under siege from parties in previous books trying to get back at him for damages inflicted, and the whole of it goes to a rather thriller-esque and slightly surrealistic commando action plan which wouldn't be out of place in a Hollywood movie.

Thompson, apparently, was a long-time resident of Finland, but his US roots are very much showing in this book, which is kind of like watching a hybrid of The Godfather trilogy and The Shield TV series done on Finnish soil, but with slightly happier end-results.

In any case, it did make for a completed story/character development arc, and sets up the stage for the next set of adventures to start from a mostly-better place.

Medium-firm recommend overall if interested in the setting/themes for the series as a whole thus far, which can be treated as a completed mini-series, since the author is dead and Inspector Vaara's story can be regarded as essentially finished, even with the final posthumous volume coming up. It's an interesting stylistic trajectory which evolves from police procedural crime investigations to national political corruption conspiracy dirt-digging-up action thriller and goes from spending time solving-and-proving whodunnit to planning how-to-do-it-and-get-away-with-it, and then back again, in the space of four books.

Also, the development and fleshing out of the characters and their interactions over time is pretty good, IMHO, going to unexpected but overall logical places from their starting points as circumstances alter the people they might otherwise have ended up being. And there's a strong Finnish cultural flavour to all of this, which makes it more interesting to see all the more American-style tropes kind of grafted on to that base, in contrast to the generally lower-key Nordic crime books I've read from native-born authors (of all the previous ones I've read, Thompson seems closest to Jo Nesbø in grand guignol style and love of twisty twistiness, even though Harry Hole never really got his own secret vigilante squad and kind of had do to that mostly all by himself).

I will warn again that #3 will probably be rather disturbing to Gentle Readers for the extreme racism and hate crime content which is its focus, but overall, I don't regret spending the money to buy #2 on sale, or walking out to the library this afternoon to pick up #3 & #4, and I'll be putting a hold on the forthcoming posthumous #5 when the library gets it, as I'm quite interested to see where Vaara and his people will go from the status quo (re-)established in the end.

[Gazella]

Just started The Bone Collector by Jeffery Deaver. The first Lincoln Rhyme novel.

[Luffy]

Summer Knight (The Dresden Files #4)
by Jim Butcher - 4/5

Jim Butcher is a delightfully expert author and also a frustrating one for me as well. His finales, broken over in large segments over each book, hinder his books from being perfect 5 stars rated ones. I can only speak for myself, but I think the closer one's approaching the end of any Dresden story, the more haphazard and clunky the showdowns turn out to be. Partly this is because the stakes are upped so much that it's stretching the sense of disbelief how the far from witless-and-limitless Harry Dresden survives the hammer blows that are dealt to his person. Also, it's difficult to come up with a whole new arena or battlefield in each book (so far) without being repetitious.

What I like about JB's books are the ease and economy by which he quietly goes about creating his world and fleshing out his characters. Literary or long winded non fiction writers should take note of his style of writing. Sub stories within the book are brought to life so easily, you might think this writing malarkey is within the reach of anyone. Some hints here and there, the presence of a photo album or so, a short silence here and there do the trick. This is what many writers and movie directors think they cannot afford to do. Some think that not tarrying enough is the wrong thing to do. Others just want to move to the next lieu of action. The author here knows how to let his scenes breathe. When Harry Dresden tells someone he's been looking for her "...for years. Years." you believe him. When a small time troll or pixie aligns himself against and with Dresden respectively you buy that.

And the dialog, oh my. You really think that this world is peopled with a huge number of persons, mortal or not, most of them with their own voice. The writer is one of the few males who can craft an interesting and subtle female character. Karrin Murphy is easily one of the best supporting characters I've ever come across. To me she's far better than the unlikely Hermione of J.K. Rowling. Now I must address my growing feeling that this series will not garner a perfect score with me. The prolonged battle scenes are there, in each book. Clearly many fans of the series enjoy these set pieces. I must be missing something. But if Harry Dresden can rescue his damsel and his friends without being ridiculously spared dying then I'd appreciate that. Or if the build up is so good that it transcends the book's faults, then I can see myself giving a future Dresden 'file' 5 stars. But if such a book never materializes, then so be it. At least I'm getting a huge bang for my buck. Let Summer Knight be the harbinger of good times with the Dresden files.

[Rumpelteazer]

Originally Posted by Gazella

Just started The Bone Collector by Jeffery Deaver. The first Lincoln Rhyme novel.

I started it last night and read the first chapter. So far, so good.