Donna Leon "By Its Cover"

They say you can't, but with Donna Leon's Commissario Brunetti series that landed on its feet almost fully formed running to twenty-three titles anyone who's been along for most of the ride can take a glance at the book and have a pretty fair idea of what they'll be getting.

The elements will, of course, vary from title to title. The amount of time Brunetti gets to spend at home and when he manages to get there will affect how much of his family the reader sees in each successive title. The actual case he's dealing with may or may not present opportunities for the wonderful and  highly efficient Signorina Elettra to do her computer-based thing.

Brunetti's boss, the entirely loathsome Vice-Questore Giuseppe Patta, will appear in his office just before lunch and depart not that long afterwards, and how far his nose sticks into Brunetti's case will depend on the case's effect on the issues that matter to him.

Apart from Signorina Elettra most of the cast have been in place since the  first title in a series that landed on its feet almost fully formed from the start of Death at La Fenice. You know, more or less, what you're going to get. It's just a question of detail and delivering an outcome.

This time around it's an afternoon phone call from the director of Biblioteca Merula, a prestigious library with an extensive holding of rare books. A number of titles have had pages cut out, maps and  illustrations rather than pages of text, and others have gone missing.

As far as library director Dottoressa Patrizia Fabbiani is concerned there's an obvious suspect. American academic Joseph Nickerson, from the University of Kansas, has been using the library for research into medieval Mediterranean maritime trade but has suddenly vanished after daily visits over a solid three week period. Books he has requested are gone, others are damaged. There's your man. Q.E.D.

He's definitely a suspect, particularly after his passport turns out to be a fake and a check with the University of Kansas reveals they have no one by that name on the payroll.

But he's not the only regular visitor who passes under the gaze of library guard Piero Sartor.
Another regular reader is the former priest the library staff has nicknamed Tertullian since his regular reading matter is mainly drawn from the works of this prolific early Christian polemicist against heresy. According to the Wikipedia Tertullian has been called the father of Latin Christianity and the founder of Western theology.

According to Brunetti, on the other hand, he's dry as dust and the fact that anyone, ex-priest or not, would spend three years reading his voluminous output piques his interest. The latter day Tertullian also seems to have vanished and when he is found brutally murdered, Brunetti finds himself investigating something more serious than theft.

The Patta angle this time around kicks in when he learns that several of the vandalised or missing volumes were donated to the library by Contessa Elisabetta Morosini-Albani, the wealthy widow  whose late husband was the head of a long-established Venetian family. As a total philistine, the theft and vandalism barely register on Patta's radar. The possibility that the Contessa's nose might be put out of joint is entirely another matter and Brunetti is cleared to investigate a matter that might otherwise have been pushed to one side and pinned on the obvious suspect.

Interestingly, when Brunetti interviews the Contessa his wife's aristocratic connections come into play as Brunetti quietly goes about piecing the ins and outs of the trade in purloined vintage editions together.

By Its Cover seems to have been prompted by a wave of theft and vandalism in libraries, museums and churches, and particularly by the systematic looting of thousands of rare books from Girolamini Library in Naples unearthed in 2012. That was the work of the library's director, and here, as Brunetti patiently peels away the layers of things that aren't quite what they seem Leon gets the chance to vent through her characters.

Theft and vandalism in the world of rare books aren't the only things to attract her wrath. There's a particularly well crafted incident involving a massive cruise liner Brunetti and his offsider encounter in the course of their perambulations (or the maritime equivalent thereof) and the presence of crowds of tourists as spring starts to kick in are a perennial target as well.

When you're looking at a series that has been running this long you're always likely to suspect a tendency to phone it in, and you may well think that's operating here. There's not much that could be described as a new development, and not much room for Signorina Elettra to do her thing, but that's largely a function of the subject under investigation. You can use the internet to check things like prices of rare books, but that's about as far as it goes.

But if the author is delivering the latest episode telephonically I'd suggest there'll be a tendency on the part of the reader to put things aside. By Its Cover's blend of intrigue, theft, blackmail and murder kept me turning the pages until I got to the end and left me looking for more after a characteristically abrupt end.

The Golden Egg ended with Brunetti setting out for a brooding walk along a wind and rain swept Lido, and By Its Cover comes to a full stop because, really, once Brunetti has pulled out his phone and dialled the number of the Questura and requested the warrant there really isn't anything more that needs to be said.

Peter Corris "Silent Kill"

A silent kill, Cliff Hardy ’s friendly Intelligence Agency acquaintance informs him, is one of those rare instances where intelligence chiefs sanction the removal, leaving no body, witnesses or clues, of people whose continued existence constituted a serious threat.

To national security? Hardy asks.

Yes, Josh Carey responds, but more often to the organisation itself.

That exchange takes place at the beginning of Chapter 28, but it’s fairly obvious from very early in the piece that the ex-firebrand student agitator turned populist whistleblower Rory O’Hara would be a prime candidate for a silent kill. 

Given that description, O’Hara obviously has enemies, and he still hasn’t recovered from a hit-and-run incident that was almost certainly not an accident when Hardy’s ex-commando, stuntman and actor Jack Buchanan approaches him with a job offer. 

Buchanan has sunk a lot of money into O’Hara’s forthcoming speaking tour, which is going to attract very big, high-paying audiences and will be followed by a documentary, high-profile television interviews and a book deal.

The tour is also going to publicise O’Hara’s new political party, which looks like attracting significant defectors from both major parties and The Greens. That means you’ve got all the major parties as potential enemies, along with the people behind a massive development project in the western suburbs that  O’Hara had exposed as shonky and corrupt.

That adds a fundamentalist Christian church, a major trade union, a superannuation fund and … an outlaw bikie gang to the enemies list, along with corrupt local councillors and a state government minister.

The fear, as far as Buchanan is concerned, is that there’s a traitor lurking in O’Hara’s entourage. He wants Hardy to act as a combination of bodyguard, security consultant and traitor detector.

The first stop on the speaking tour is Wollongong, which is also where it ends after O’Hara’s girlfriend is abducted and the abductor is murdered. So much for the security consultant gig.

The murder victim’s wealthy brother, however, comes to the rescue, hiring Hardy to investigate the murder, and providing almost unlimited financial resources to fund the investigation. 

Hardy uncovers assorted hidden agendas among O'Hara's entourage, powerful political, intelligence and commercial concerns in an investigation that winds its way through Sydney, Darwin and Canberra. 

Along the way, he picks up the clues that lead him to the killer with the assistance of the resourceful Dave Burns, a Tiwi Islander (the only indigenous person with a PIA licence, as far as I knew) and an uneasy alliance with O’Hara’s former personal assistant, who has her own scores to settle as far as the killer is concerned.

The heritage township of Gundaroo delivers a terrible secret, and the pursuit leads to a Russian cafe in Manly where his quarry, who has turned out to be a rogue intelligence agent with psychopathic tendencies plays highly competitive chess for money. 

Hardy’s private life remains as messy as ever as he becomes involved with the attractive personal assistant, the former swimmer and motivational speaker Penelope Milton-Smith, who has gone back to using her maiden name (Marinos) while set tries to avoid the killer. 

That comes after the departure of his live apart girlfriend to greener pastures in Los Angeles, and while the new interests have been known to stick around from one book to the next, Penelope is damaged goods and follows professional advice to move on.

And that, as we carefully step around spoiler territory, is the gist of Corris’ thirty-ninth Cliff Hardy yarn. Given the longevity of the series, you’d expect things to verge on the formulaic, but even where it does Corris manages to avoid ‘phoning it in.’ 

It’s a remarkable achievement by one of the icons of Australian crime fiction, delivered with the regulation hard-boiled observations at a crisp, page-turning clip. Corris’ eyesight is failing, but hopefully we’ll get to Hardy #40.

Martin Cruz Smith "Tatiana: An Arkady Renko Novel"

If there wasn’t a specific link on the official Martin Cruz Smith website I probably wouldn’t be referring to the revelation that one of my favourite authors has had Parkinson’s Disease and the diagnosis dates back to 1995.

Under the circumstances, one can see why he kept it hidden from the reading public, but it was also a closely guarded secret as far as his publisher and editors were concerned. You would tend to assume, given the medical condition, that the writing might suffer, but in the period since the diagnosis he’s produced the Arkady Renko titles Havana Bay, Wolves Eat Dogs, Stalin's Ghost and Three Stations, all of which were quite sublime.

And, with Tatiana, he’s done it again, confirming a long-held belief that a new Martin Cruz Smith Arkady Renko novel needs to be approached as soon as I can get my hands on it. Better still, from my reading of the photographs here, there’s more on the way.

It’s not as if there’s going to be a lack of material to work with. While Arkady Renko has survived the transition from the old Soviet Union to Vladimir Putin’s New Russia, the country’s oligarchy is as obsessed with maintaining secrecy and enforcing its wishes through whatever means it deems necessary as any of its predecessors have been.

There are disturbingly familiar events at the beginning of Tatiana after reporter Tatiana Petrovna is alleged to have thrown herself from the sixth-floor window of the Moscow apartment she was trying to save from demolition by corrupt developers who want to convert the area into a shopping complex.
Her death coincides with a power vacuum at the top of the criminal food chain after the execution-style murder of mob billionaire Grisha Grigorenko, a member of the Moscow Chamber of Commerce  and patron of charities and the arts whose status stems from his interests in drugs, prostitution and stolen weaponry. While Grigorenko is buried with the trappings associated with a feudal lord, his death paves the way for a war of succession involving his son and heir apparent, and other Mafiosi with criminal empires of their own.

Given the tendency for mobster funerals to attract persons of interest, Renko and his offsider attend Grigorenko’s funeral, where Arkady is sidetracked by a protest about Tatiana’s death. Her record of exposing corruption and cover-ups in government circles means there were any number of people who’d want to see her dead and the official verdict of suicide seems a little less than credible. There is a witness who heard her screaming as she fell.

What caught Arkady’s attention was that a neighbour had heard her scream. Suicide usually took concentration. People who committed suicide counted pills, stared in fascination at their pooling blood, took the high dive in silence. They rarely screamed.

Renko finds himself on the receiving end of some police brutality at the protest, but is  persuaded to take a closer look at the investigation into Tatiana's death. The Cynical Reader might find this a little hard to accept, but a combination of Renko’s background and the fact that he’s carrying a bullet in his skull after a near-death experience in a past investigation means he’s not particularly concerned about the consequences of a little inquisitiveness.

Add Arkady's neighbour and interim lover Anya Rudenko’s involvement in the demonstration, the cemetery’s refusal to inter Tatiana’s body which couldn't be located at any of the city's morgues and then was allegedly found and cremated before any investigation could begin and you’ve got a combination of circumstances that are almost guaranteed to pique a predilection towards inquisitiveness.
Then there’s the notebook and the tapes.
As Arkady starts sniffing around, assisted by his loyal alcoholic comrade, Sgt. Victor Orlov, the investigation leads from Moscow to the Baltic port of Kaliningrad, a geopolitical oddity populated by hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russians.
The city was originally Konigsberg, part of eastern Prussia wedged between Poland and Lithuania taken by the Red Army in the dying days of World War II and held by the Soviet regime as a closed strategic region. Stalin forced the entire population to relocate and repopulated the city with Russians, but no one admits they are from Kaliningrad.
They call themselves Koenigs instead.
In the post-Soviet era Kaliningrad remains an important port, is the centre of the amber industry, boasts the highest crime rate in Russia and, interestingly, happened to be Grisha Grigorenko’s power base.
Kaliningrad also gives us another body, that of cycling fanatic interpreter Joseph Bonnafos, whose death on  a deserted Kaliningrad beach at the hands of a psychopathic butcher who stalks the beach in a van with a smiling plastic pig on its roof is described in the Prologue. He’s the author of the mysterious notebook, kept in a cryptic form of shorthand by a linguist who loved word games.

And the dead interpreter’s notebook seems to link the other two deaths, with possible details of all sorts of dodgy dealings in the interactions between the government, criminal gangs and foreign powers. All that’s needed is someone who can crack the translator's personal and seemingly indecipherable code.

In the end, of course, the code is cracked and the notebook delivers details of a clandestine meeting attended by Moscow’s leading criminals along with a series of revelations about  corruption and greed.

And the tapes.

Having entered Tatiana’s abandoned apartment, Renko finds the archive of tapes that hold her spoken accounts of horrific crimes. Her accounts clash with the Kremlin's official versions of, among other events, the sinking of the Kursk nuclear submarine in 2000, the terrorist takeover of a Moscow theatre in 2002, the Beslan school massacre in 2004 and the Moscow metro bombing of 2010.

Many of those events were covered by Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist and human rights activist gunned down in the elevator of her Moscow apartment building in 2006. She provides the obvious template for Tatiana. Since her death was obvious payback for her aggressive reporting of events on the ground in Chechnya and exposés of corruption it was never going to be investigated too vigorously, and Moscow prosecutors ended up assigning blame to a former policeman sentenced in December 2012.

Anna Politkovskaya didn’t have Renko on the case.

Here, once he has access to the tapes, as he listens to Tatiana's recorded notes about scandals at home and abroad (Both sides have the same weapons … because our Soviet soldiers have traded their weapons for vodka. Here in Afghanistan, vodka is the great equalizer) the details are enough to have the reader lining up beside Renko in the quest for truth and justice without descending into overworked doom and gloom.
There are other difficulties that cast themselves into the path as Renko sets out to get to the bottom of things, and the chief among them is his semi-official foster son, Zhenya. The moody seventeen-year-old chess prodigy is blackmailing Renko to give him permission to enlist in the Army. In return for that permission, Zhenya will have a go at cracking the code, assisted by another chess prodigy, an attractive young woman whose grandfather paints portraits of Stalin. While they're hunkered down with the notebook in Arkady's Moscow apartment, Renko has plenty on his hands as he continues to pursue his investigations in Kaliningrad.

And that is where we start to get rather close to spoiler territory. Things work out in the end, and work out a deal better than the reader has any right to expect. But while Tatiana ends on a comparatively high note the reader just knows there’ll be another case, or another issue with Zhenya that’ll have Renko out in pursuit of a more civilised Russia.

The brutal criminal billionaires at the top of the pecking order aren’t going away anytime soon, bureaucratic incompetence that has become endemic is never going to disappear, the lines between organised crime and big business are going to stay blurred, investigative journalism will still put lives at risk and a reluctance to investigate matters that might involve the rich and powerful will continue in official circles.

On that basis, it’s just a matter of waiting to see what attracts Renko’s attention next time around.
I, for one, hope it won’t be a long wait.

Garry Disher "Bitter Wash Road"

With Wyatt seemingly taking time out to recuperate and plan his next job and Hal Challis and Ellen Destry on hiatus it’s good to know Garry Disher is still churning out quality fiction.

I’ve tended to stick to a series once I find one I like, and both the above mentioned are right up there with the best of them, but based on what I read here I was straight out chasing other titles.

I couldn’t find Play Abandoned in iBooks or Kindle, so it’s off to the Libraries to chase them up, but Two-way Cut has duly been downloaded and added to the Read These list. The problem, based on the Bitter Wash Road experience, is that I’m likely to sit down to it one afternoon, have it finished before I go to bed that night and be up in the morning looking for another helping of tautly written, immaculately plotted quality crime fiction.

Set in the isolated South Australian wheat belt, an hour or so north of Clare, Bitter Wash Road runs with a fairly limited focus through the eyes of Constable Paul “Hirsch” Hirschhausen, a former Adelaide detective who has been returned to the uniformed branch and exiled to a one-man police station in the middle of nowhere in the wake of a corruption scandal. He’s a city cop pushed into a country lifestyle where his colleagues have their own way of running things and regard him, thanks to his involvement n the corruption case, as a whistleblower, dog, and maggot.

As things turn out, rather than being a whistleblower committed to justice Hirsch is a decent bloke who has chosen not to do the wrong thing, been caught on the edge of the investigation, which is ongoing through the plot line and adds a further degree of tension, and is being made to pay in much the same way as he would have been if he’d turned the wrongdoers in himself.

That’s a distinction his small town colleagues aren’t inclined to make, so things work out the same regardless of whether he actually blew the whistle.

Three hours north of Adelaide, Tiverton is a town south of the Flinders Range that’s doing it tough. Forty kilometres closer to the capital, Redruth is slightly larger and boasts a three man one woman police operation with Hirsch’s boss Sergeant Kropp and his male offsiders having carved themselves a nice comfortable niche, going about what they see as their duty with the casual arrogance of people who know and get on with everyone who matters.

The rest of the population, ground down by isolation, lack of opportunity and shrinking incomes won’t get in the way,

Or rather, they won’t, if they know what’s good for them.

It’s a community of haves and have nots, and if you’re one of the latter you don’t want a ticket for speeding, driving under the influence or (believe it or not) jaywalking.

At the start of the story, Hirsch is despatched to investigate gunshots that have been heard just out of Tiverton. He finds the culprits in the shape of a couple of bored kids taking potshots at jam tins with a .22, and is then redirected to the scene of what appears to be a hit and run on a back country road.

Teenager Melia Donovan is the victim, and as far as his colleagues are concerned it’s a clear case with an obvious explanation and enough time elapsed to make it impossible to track down a culprit. Hirsch, however, digs around, comes up with question marks, but is frustrated by the way crime scenes and associated evidence have been treated.

It’s much the same story when Alison Latimer, who has recently left her abusive husband and is seeking a divorce is found dead, in a location she detested in an apparent suicide. Hirsch has his doubts, but before he can do anything the scene, and her estranged husband’s homestead are rendered useless for anything approaching accurate forensic science.

But there’s enough there to keep Hirsch sniffing away, regardless of the hostility surrounding him, and he ongoing corruption investigation, with the internal investigations crowd determined to pin something on him and any number of disgruntled colleagues who’d be only too happy to assist in the attempt.

And, in the background, there are ongoing concerns regarding the overwrought media coverage of a couple of thrill killers roaming the outback in a black Chrysler station wagon.

As the narrative unfolds what looks on the surface like an exercise in low level small town corruption turns into an investigation with implications considerably higher up the pecking order and the picture becomes increasingly disturbing as the layers are peeled back.

Disher is a class act, and his books invariably exhibit strong plot lines, a diverse cast of characters who are rarely what they seem and enough twists and turns to keep the reader turning the pages.

Which, of course, is why I finished this one so quickly, and why I was out earlier this morning looking for more.

Hirsch’s situation might not be the sort of thing that can be parlayed into a series, but there’s definite potential there. The character and Disher’s narrative approach, which limits things to what you can see through his eyes have definite possibilities.

Carl Hiaasen "Bad Monkey"

Long term fans will come to Carl Hiaasen’s latest south Florida mystery knowing, more or less, what to expect, and while there’s something different in the approach (it’s as close as Hiaasen’s likely to get to a police procedural), and the plot line strays beyond the Florida state line (but only as far as the Bahamas) virtually everything else is reasonably familiar.

This time around Hiaasen’s protagonist is Andrew Yancy, who’s had issues with the Miami Police Department and now finds himself in the Sheriff's bad books in Key West after he assaulted the prominent dermatologist who's married to his future former girlfriend. He’s of the opinion that the husband had a bad case of bees up the bum, and had attempted to fix the problem, in public, with a vacuum cleaner. It was, apparently, all over YouTube in a matter of minutes.

As a result of a plea bargaining deal and a suspended sentence, he's been reassigned as a restaurant inspector, on the roach patrol and the things he finds in Key West kitchens is making him physically ill. He has, to all intents and purposes, stopped eating, and is also engaged in an ongoing struggle against a neighbour building a monumental spec house that contravenes the local planning regulations, will tower over his more modest home and cut off his view of the sunset across the Gulf of Mexico. It has already scared away the little Key Deer population.

In true Hiaasen fashion, the steps he takes against the neighbour involves scaring off potential buyers, planting dead raccoons, hives of angry bees, Santeria shrines, and, lastly, his ex-girlfriend and her new beau on the premises. He’s not above using his own misfortunes as well when he becomes entangled in another matter.

But that’s back story.

You know you’re in familiar territory as soon as you read the opening paragraphs:
On the hottest day of July, trolling in dead-calm waters near Key West, a tourist named James Mayberry reeled up a human arm. His wife flew to the bow of the boat and tossed her breakfast burritos. 
After calming herself, Louisa Mayberry remarked that the limb didn't look real. 'Oh it's real,' said James Mayberry, 'Just take a whiff'. Snagging a fake arm wouldn't make for a good story. A real arm was major high-fives from all his peeps back in Madison. 'You caught a what? No way bro!'

The arm, as a DNA match reveals, belongs to entrepreneur Nicky Stripling, who made millions billing Medicare for nonexistent electric scooters called Super Rollies to non-existent senior citizens. Florida, the reader learns, is the Medicare-fraud capital of America, where the most experienced dirtballs came to gorge ... the slickest and slimiest —  former mortgage brokers, identity thieves, arms dealers, inside traders and dope smugglers. Stripling’s done pretty well out of it (he’d socked away eleven-plus million dollars) but, if the severed arm’s to believed, has been lost at sea and ended up as a shark’s lunch.

Yancy, on the other hand, suspects foul play. The victim’s wife, who stands to inherit a fortune, doesn’t ring true and the victim’s daughter accuses her step-mother of doing away with her husband to collect the two million dollars’ insurance money. There’s also the possibility, if there is foul play involved, that he’ll get his old job back if he can crack the case.

That’s not the way his boss, Sheriff Sonny Summers (who won office because he was the only candidate not in federal custody) sees it. As far as he’s concerned, the severed arm needs to be delivered to the Miami Medical Examiners office, given the fact that Miami is the floating-human-body-parts capital of America, and the severed limb won’t do much for tourism in Key West.

Miami, on the other hand, don’t want it either. It doesn’t match any known victim, it was found outside their jurisdiction, and the currents probably wouldn’t have carried anything originating in or near Miami to the Keys, which, basically is why Yancy ends up with a human arm alongside the Popsicles in his freezer.

Oh, and the shark teeth embedded in the flesh are from an inshore variety that doesn't frequent the area where the arm was found.

The trip to Miami, however, hasn’t been a complete waste of time since it put him into contact with pathologist Dr. Rosa Campesino, who has a penchant for hot sex on a cold mortuary slab kinky sex in locations like slabs.

Meanwhile it seems Bonnie, his former girlfriend, who still seems to have the hots for Yancy, is really Plover Chase, a Tulsa English teacher who’s on the run after being convicted of extorting sex from one of her students in exchange for giving him an A on his report card.

Hiaasen novels tend towards the ornate when it comes to unusual subplots.

Yancey’s investigation has him moving back and forth between Key West, Miami and the Bahamas, which is where he meets the eponymous Bad Monkey, a nasty little creature named Driggs who’d been the official “Rally Monkey of the Los Angeles Angels” but lost the gig after a scrotum-grooming reverie, broadcast live on the stadium Jumbotron.

Sold off to a freelance animal wrangler, he’s ended up in the Bahamas as a backup to another, more docile simian, on one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies but a repeat of the execrable antics that had cost him the Angels gig saw him sold for seventy-five Bahamian dollars to a sponge fisher who passed him on to a gullible fisherman named Neville Stafford.

Living on a diet of batter-fried chicken, conch fritters and coconut cakes, Driggs loses most of his hair and is traded to voodoo priestess the Dragon Queen when Neville needs a spell cast on the property developer who’s managed to bump him off his property, which is about to become part of a timeshare resort.

The property developer appears to be Stripling’s widow’s new boyfriend, which, of course, adds to the suspicions about her husband’s death, and that’s about as far as we can go without crossing over into spoiler territory.

Bad Monkey mightn’t be Hiaasen at his best (I had a feeling all the way through that I’d enjoyed other titles more, but nothing concrete to base that suspicion on) and might lack the outrageousness that lands on the page as soon as The Skink appears on the scene but it’s still a wickedly funny read where the good guys, despite everything outrageous fortune and the weather can throw up against them, ultimately prevail.

You knew they would, of course, and though the outcome isn’t really in doubt it’s the journey that delivers the reader there that makes a Hiaasen novel an ingenious entertainment.

Peter Robinson Friend of the Devil

Typical, really. Having watched the DCI Banks episode based on Playing With Fire I figured I’d read Friend of the Devil before watching the adaption, and found I probably needed to reread two more Robinson titles, one of which appeared at the time to be a non-Banks title.

This, of course, comes after putting the reread them all in order (I’d only covered the first title, so it wasn’t as if that had progressed too far) project on hold while I watched the adaptions. Having recently read (or having your review available to consult) Aftermath (five titles earlier in the Banks sequence) and Caedmon’s Song (the non-Banks title that goes back well before the two Banks titles) probably isn’t totally necessary, but since the two stories link into what’s going on here it’d help keep things tidy.

The link to Aftermath, #12 in the series (this is # 17) is pretty clear from very early in the piece since Karen Drew, the quadriplegic victim found on an isolated cliff near Whitby still sitting in a wheelchair with her throat slit turns out to be Lucy Payne, the partner in crime of Terrence Payne, the perpetrator of a series of sadistic crimes committed against girls lured to what was later dubbed The House of Payne. He died of injuries inflicted in the process of apprehending him, while Lucy jumped through a window and damaged her spine while trying to escape arrest.

Until the previous identity is revealed there’s nothing obvious about Karen’s past that would explain the murder because, basically, when Annie Cabbot starts digging around looking for a motive, there isn’t much of a past. The cover story has Karen Drew left in the wheelchair as the result of a car crash, and it’s the search for motives for her murder that leads Annie to the firm of lawyers who looked after her affairs and provided the cover story.

Explaining away a quadriplegic’s background would seem to be a fairly straightforward affair if the person you’re doing it for is unable to communicate or do anything to blow the cover story, but someone seems to have let the cat out of the bag. That breach of security, wherever it was, has allowed an alleged acquaintance called Mary to sign Karen/Lucy out the nursing home and do away with her, leaving the body to be found by some innocent passer by.

DI Annie Cabbot has been temporarily seconded to Eastern Area Headquarters, and seems, on the surface at least, to be in severe danger of unravelling completely.  The phone call that alerts her to the murder finds her waking in a strange bed after a one-night stand with a much younger man and she’s self-medicating like it’s going out of style almost throughout the investigation.

And the same Mothers' Day morning Chief Inspector Alan Banks, with his only scheduled commitment being the obligatory call to Mum has his leisurely morning interrupted by a phone call from Detective Inspector Kevin Templeton reporting the discovery of a scantily clad nineteen-year-old girl’s body in The Maze, a complex tangle of narrow cobbled alleyways behind the market square in Eastvale, right across the Market Square from the Eastvale police station.

Eastvale College student Hayley Daniels may have been attractive, with any number of admirers, but she’s also inclined towards outrageous behaviour, which means she’s not going to wait till her friends arrive at the next location before voiding the bladder after a group of yobs trashed the toilets at The Fountain. After giving the bartender a mouthful she departs, along with the rest of her party, announces she’s going to relieve herself in the warren of alleys. Her partly clad body is found in the storeroom of a leather goods shop when the proprietor opens it in search of offcuts the next morning and Banks finds himself looking at rape and murder on an alcohol-fuelled Saturday nigh with any number of suspects, from the crowd she’d been partying with, through older men who had ogled her at the pub (including the one who found the body) to a lecturer at the college.

The closed circuit TV footage shows Hayley entering the Maze on her own, and a scan of the earlier images fails to reveal anyone entering the area earlier, though there is another entrance where the camera coverage isn’t as good. On that basis, the obvious conclusion is that there’s someone lurking in there waiting for a victim, Jack the Ripper style, and as far as Kevin Templeton’s concerned that’s where the explanation lies.

Crass, uncouth, insensitive with a hide equivalent to a rhinoceros, and more front than your average supermarket, Templeton has managed to get everyone he works with, apart from Banks who’s still 50/50 on him, and decides to conduct a one-man stakeout in The Maze, a decision that ends up costing him his life. His death, however, brings the two cases together since he’s found with throat is slashed from behind a la Lucy/Karen.

The answer to the Lucy/Karen/Templeton side of things turns out to lie in the 1989 disappearance of a man believed to be the serial rapist and killer of half a dozen young (the main plot line of an earlier non-Banks title, Caedmon’s Song). Along with the disappearance there’s an unsolved death and a vicious attack, and all three happened in and around Whitby.

At this point, again, we’re teetering on the brink of spoiler territory, but we knew the two main investigations were going to merge, because Robinson has them unfolding in parallel, switching back and forth between the two from paragraph to paragraph rather than chapter to chapter. In a lesser writer this approach could become confusing, but Robinson has the writerly chops to make it work, and the close to seamless integration of the twin narratives provide the chance to drive the soap opera side of things on a bit further.

In the big picture Friend of the Devil is as much about the long-lasting aftereffects of physical and psychological trauma and serious crime on both victims and survivors as it is about the two cases and when the cases are finally solved it’s hard to disagree with the explanation offered by Lucy/Karen’s killer for what would seem to be a cruel and totally unnecessary killing. That’s not to suggest I’m inclined to agree, either, but it’s one of those situations where you can see where they’re coming from.

That sort of big picture dark side of human emotions and motivations can become very heavy very quickly, which is why we need the light and shade that comes with the soap opera interactions of the regular cast of characters. Banks and Annie are still feeling the fallout from their emotional entanglement, Banks is still rebuilding his life and getting over the aftermath of Playing With Fire and there are little subplots involving Jamaican Detective Constable Winsome Jackman, Detective Sergeant Kevin Templeton (the wake following his death catches the rather complex web of emotions surrounding his death rather well) and Banks' demanding boss, Superintendent Catherine Gervaise.

Bring all those strands together and the result is an absorbing read that maintains the suspense right up to the end and left me interested to see how the transition to the small screen was going to be managed.

Donna Leon "The Golden Egg"

I read Wasting no more words on her Brunetti left the hospital to go and get the boat to the Lido to go for a walk on the beach, turned the page and came to the regulation copyright notice one finds at the ends of certain brands of e-book. “Hang on,” I thought, “there’s something missing here.”

A reread of the final couple of pages, however, revealed Donna Leon had nothing more to say on Commissario Brunetti’s investigation into the death of Davide Cavanella, a deaf and mentally disabled man who worked in Brunetti’s neighbourhood dry cleaner because, basically, there was nothing more to say. Another author might have been tempted to moralise or comment, but with the mystery explained the rather matter of fact Brunetti is off for a walk on the beach.

Not that his stroll is likely to be particularly enjoyable. The story starts with the first leaves of autumn beginning to fall, and the investigation doesn’t take that long, but an autumnal, a cold, wet Venice, with the architecture shrouded in grey sheeting mizzle is probably the right setting for Brunetti to brood over the depressing details of what he’d found.

A lesser author would take the reader out to the Lido, deliver the protagonist’s melancholy meditations and belabour the moralisations. Readers who’ve been aboard for a while, however, will have a fair idea of the trend Brunetti’s thoughts would have taken and a definite opinion about what he’d have gone on to do afterwards.

That, of course, is probably either what he’d done once he’d taken the initial steps that needed to be taken after the latest self-serving directive from Vice Questore Patta (asked Vianello if he’d like to come for a coffee) or, if the time was right, head home for lunch or dinner with his wife and family, drink a little wine and possibly read a little Tacitus.

Patta’s request involves Brunetti looking into a seemingly minor violation of the public vending regulations committed by the business partner of the mayor’s future daughter-in-law. It’s an election year, Patta’s out to avoid any hint of a scandal and Brunetti, while he has no desire to help Patta consolidate his political connections, has no choice but to follow the directive, which is, basically, to find out if the vigili involved are trustworthy.

The vigili urbani, for those who mightn’t be quite up with the terminology, are the unarmed officers whose job it was to see that city ordinances were obeyed. In this instance they seem to be ignoring the tables set up outside a shop in Campo San Barnaba that sells masks, next to the one with the expensive cheese (Brunetti lives nearby and knows the area fairly well) and it’s possible the proprietors of the mask shop don’t have all the permits to use that space. A petty matter, but where Patta’s concerned, par for the course.

Brunetti delivers the task of making a discreet inquiry to a junior officer before heading off with his right hand man for a coffee, learning, along the way that Vianello’s concerned about the ecological implications of his wife’s proposed holiday in the Seychelles. A farm stay hotel in Umbria’s more his style.

Brunetti passes through Patta’s antechamber to compare notes with an increasingly subversive Signorina Elettra (Why do we tolerate this ... and not go after them with clubs?) on the way back, and arrives in his office to find the phone ringing. It’s his wife, Paola, informing him of the death of the boy who doesn’t talk at the dry cleaner’s.

Although he was actually aged over forty, a deaf mute with the intellectual age of a child, as far as the neighbourhood was concerned he was the boy who helped out at the dry cleaner’s, and nobody knew his name or anything much about him. He seems to have died as the result of an accidental overdose of his mother's sleeping pills, having presumably swallowed a handful because they looked like candy. Paola can’t help being distraught at the thought that he lived a joyless life and died without anyone noticing him, helping him or understanding his situation.

But when Brunetti starts making a few inquiries about Davide Cavanella a number of intriguing issues raise their heads, centred around the question of how a man in his forties could have passed through several decades without leaving anything in the way of a paper trail. There’s no birth or baptismal certificate, no passport, no driver’s license, no credit cards and he never seems to have visited a doctor or been enrolled in the school system. In short, there’s nothing that might serve to verify that he actually existed.

That’s strange, because given the obvious disability issues, both he and his mother would have been entitled to financial support from government programs designed to help the disabled, and in a country where unethical claims for state assistance are rife, he’s a disabled person for whom no claims were ever lodged.

According to Ana Cavanella, who doesn’t want to discuss the death at all, her son’s papers were stolen years ago, and it’s obvious there’s much more to the story than she is letting on. There’s an extra complication since she lives in a working-class neighbourhood where the state is the enemy, and when the police come around asking questions the neighbours become as deaf and mute as the subject of the inquiries.

As the clues start to stack up, Brunetti comes to believe the death may not have been an accident and suspects the wealthy Lembo family, aristocratic copper magnates who employed Ana Cavanella for many years and Brunetti gradually draws out the information he needs to form the full picture of Davide Cavanella’s existence.

Along the way, of course, he has this other issue with Patta’s request, and there’s also a move afoot to remove Signorina Elettra from her current office and install Patta’s loathsome offsider Lieutenant Scarpa as his official receptionist. That won’t do at all, and Brunetti manages to find a means to prevent it.

But the main issue is the Cavanella case, and while Brunetti might have embarked on the inquiry expecting to find nothing suspicious, what he stumbles across instead is chilling, calculating and deeply disturbing.

Disturbing enough to have Brunetti, once he’s sorted things out in his own mind (there’s nothing much he can do in any official sense) setting out for a brooding walk along a wind and rain swept Lido.

The Golden Egg might seem to be a relatively low-key affair for much of the story, but there’s a sting in the tail and along the way the reader comes across all the elements we’ve come to expect in a Donna Leon story. Brunetti’s family and colleagues go about their business, providing the opportunity for evocative references to Venetian history and architecture, moody ruminations on Italian politics and society, and the regulation descriptions of the city’s food, weather and social life.

It’s Number Twenty-two in the series, and shows an author who doesn’t seem to be running out of steam. Remarkably, given the longevity of the series, for my money it’s getting better.

Marco Vichi "Death and the Olive Grove"

About half way through Death and the Olive Grove I came to the conclusion that I’d better do a bit of digging into what has been termed the Italian Civil War, given the fact that his wartime experiences weigh heavily on Inspector Bordelli’s mind and the aftermath of the War shapes much of the plot in this second Inspector Bordelli investigation.

A subset of World War Two, we’re talking the period between 8 September 1943 and 2 May 1945 as the forces of Mussolini’s Italian Social Republic and the German forces in Italy fought the Italian partisans and the remnants of the Italian Royal Army who remained loyal to King Victor Emmanuel III.

Mussolini had been deposed and arrested on 25 July with the King appointing Pietro Badoglio as Prime Minister and although the new regime initially continued fighting on the Axis side, they surrendered to the Allies on 8 September with King and Cabinet fleeing Rome. Lacking orders and direction, over half a million Italian soldiers were rounded up by the Nazis though most of them (allegedly as many as 95%) refused to swear allegiance to the Italian Social Republic created on 23 September after the Germans occupied most of the Italian peninsula under an operation planned and carried out by Rommel.

That’s where things got really messy, with clashes between pro- and anti-Fascist forces, partisans and Germans and conflict fuelled by rivalries between the various members of the anti-Fascist front.

Having been an active participant in the fighting it’s hardly surprising Bordelli would be inclined to reminisce, and the camaraderie and shared experiences would account for Bordelli ending up Piras, the son of a partisan colleague, ending up as his offsider and probably explains his affinity with petty criminals around Florence. I’m guessing they’re the sort of people who would have been disinclined to support the established authorities who would presumably have leant towards the Mussolini camp in a bid to maintain order and prevent anarchy.

There was still fighting on the front lines between the Germans and the Allied forces who’d landed at Salerno on the Italian peninsula on 9 September and closer to Rome at Anzio (23 January 1944) and after they’d captured Monte Cassino at the end of a campaign that ran from January to May 1944 the Allied forces continued north, reaching the Gothic Line, something that was made possible by the US insistence on diverting troops from Italy to invade southern France rather than wrapping up the German forces in Italy, in August. That would have taken the fighting right through Bordelli’s territory on its way towards Pisa and Bologna before a stalemate through the northern winter.

It’s a side of the War that has been largely ignored as historians focussed on the big picture items elsewhere (notably on both sides of Germany and in the Pacific) but the fact that the war in Europe didn’t finish until May 1945 meant the partisans (and, presumably Bordelli) had something like twenty months of extremely muddled conflict that didn’t actually finish when the War itself ended (see Tobias Jones’ The Dark Heart of Italy on this side of things).

In any case, from where I’m sitting those factors mean it’s natural for Bordelli to be brooding on his wartime experiences, and you’d expect there’d be a fair degree of what we’ve come to know as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in there as well. I’d also point out that much of this would be familiar territory to Italian readers, though that mightn’t be obvious to English, American or Australian readers of Stephen Sartarelli’s translation.

Some twenty years on from the War, in April 1964 (though spring hasn’t quite sprung) a small time thief named Casimiro, who happens to be a dwarf, has been foraging for food in an olive grove where he discovered a man’s body. Casimiro reports his find to his friend Bordelli, who does his best to look after his underworld contacts, but when the pair return to the apparent scene of the crime the body has vanished.

The olive grove is right beside a villa in the Florentine hills, owned by a German aristocrat who’s noticeably absent. While they’re there a large dog attacks them, is shot by Bordelli and they head off figuratively scratching their heads. Bordelli returns to the scene to find the dog has gone as well, Casimiro volunteers to keep his eye on the villa, and Bordelli turns his attention to the death of a seven year old girl found strangled with a strange bite on her belly.

When a second girl is found dead a couple of days later with the same macabre signature it’s obvious we’re looking at a deranged serial killer, and as the victims continue to pile up and Casimiro stays missing, Bordelli and his partner latch onto a suspect and place him under surveillance, which turns out to be an issue when the killings continue with the suspect seemingly sitting on an ironclad alibi.

Along the way they find Casimiro’s body, packed into a suitcase in his flat, and as the investigation continues there isn’t too much in the way of the forensic detecting we’ve come to expect in recent takes on the police procedural.

Actually, Death and the Olive Grove isn’t really a police procedural at all, more a police perambulation as Bordelli goes about his business, musing on his wartime experiences, picking up snippets of information from the numerous underworld figures that make up his circle of acquaintances and reassuring all and sundry that he’s working on the case and expects to come up with a solution soon.

The solution, when it arrives, is triggered by an involvement with a beautiful (and very much younger) associate of Nazi hunter Dr Levi, a sort of colleague from wartime, when they exacted an eye for an eye revenge against Germans who were responsible for atrocities involving Italians (Bordelli) and Jews (Dr Levi). Dr Levi is still on the case, pursuing a particularly nasty war criminal but isn’t interested in delivering him to the Italian criminal justice system.

If you’re looking for action packed tales involving forensic nitpicking, close attention to detail and a lively pace Bordelli probably isn’t for you, and if you’re averse to textual references to what amounts to high-powered chain smoking he’s definitely not for you, but if you’re a fan of Andrea Camilleri’s Montalbano Bordelli's cut from much the same cloth with a healthy disrespect for his superiors, an obstinate determination to do things his way and an appetite that takes him into the kitchens of the Florentine restaurants he frequents.

An interesting character in a setting that suits the quirks in his personality, Bordelli might not be everyone’s cup of tea but he’ll do me. The next title in the series is an automatic purchase as far as Hughesy is concerned, and I’ll be watching the horizon for subsequent instalments...

Andrea Camilleri "The Dance of the Seagull"

In a note attached to the source that provided the recipe for Hughesy’s favourite slow-cooked Bolognese sauce someone commented along the lines of it doesn’t matter how old and doddering you get, if you can still put out a really good sugo (or, I guess an excellent ragu) people will continue to beat a path to your door. Salvo Montalbano’s hit 57, his creator has around thirty years on his creation, and The Dance of the Seagull delivers another hearty serve of character study disguised as crime novel.

Actually, I could come up with any number of food related observations when discussing a Montalbano novel, starting with the observation that I preordered this title through iTunes, had it downloaded immediately after publication and demolished it in a couple of sittings in much the same way as Montalbano demolishes a platter of the usual mullets.

Montalbano novels, much like the protagonist’s gastronomic accomplishments, tend to be hearty fare based around familiar ingredients and flavour profiles. Montalbano might be equal parts hearty eater and gourmet but he isn’t (at least as far as Hughesy can make out) the sort of diner who’s going to spend time lingering over subtle flavours and nuances.  He’ll spend his share of time pondering preoccupations with the physical changes that start to kick in as you move through your late fifties, and his internal monologue will rail against incompetence and corruption in Sicilian politics and the Italian bureaucracy while events around him follow a familiar (to long term fans and readers) pattern.

This time around his early morning insomnia has him staring at the ceiling around five-thirty, bitterly recalling his younger days when he was able to sleep through. Opening the doors to his beachside home the morning he’s due to head to Palermo to pick up Livia, his long-time main squeeze, he watches a seagull land on the beach, perform a peculiar dance, turning in circles with beak pointed to the sky before collapsing, dead. Placing it in a bin bag, Montalbano swims out to give it a respectful burial at sea and heads off to collect Livia, who has never seen some of the more picturesque parts of the island.

Montalbano might need a break, but he doesn’t need one in the Val del Noto, because he wouldn’t want to run into a film crew shooting an episode of that television series just as we’re walking around there . . . They film them around there...Predictably, the last thing he needs is to find himself face to face with the actor who plays me, a phobia (or, in Livia’s words a childish complex) he should be well and truly over, not least because he doesn’t look the least bit like you.

Before he can head off there are papers that need to be signed, which means a brief stop at the office, where a request to send Fazio to him produces the news that he hasn’t come in and seems to have gone missing, having apparently gone out alone on an investigation Montalbano knows nothing about.

According to his wife Fazio was meeting Montalbano at the docks the previous night and failed to return home, so the harbour’s an obvious place to start looking, and the vacation is, for all practical purposes, off. Arriving at the docks, Montalbano hears reports of shots fired in the dead of night.

Acting on information received they search a chiarchiaro, effectively a Mafia cemetery in a landscape of sinkholes and dry wells, the legacy of a cancelled highway project that took green and arable land and made a desert of it. There’s no immediate sign of Fazio, but two bodies are found before they track down Fazio in the same area, badly wounded having walked into an ambush with little memory of the finer details of the sequence of events that landed him there.

There’s obviously something dodgy going on at the waterfront, and it’s up to Montalbano to ensure that Fazio stays safe while his memory returns, figure out the identities of the bodies they’d found and get to the bottom of whatever it is that someone wants kept quiet.

Those things were never going to be easy, but there are a couple of issues that make them more difficult than they should be. For a start, with Fazio out of the investigative picture, Mimi Augello is distracted by an ongoing argument with his wife, Beba, the hospital is a fair drive from Vigata and he needs to make the journey there and back twice a day to fit in with visiting hours supervised by the nurse Salvo labels the Sing-Sing prison guard and when he gets there he’s easily confused by the hospital’s labyrinthine corridors and passageways.

Fortunately, there’s Angela, a helpful and very attractive nurse on hand to guide him to the requisite destination, though her apparent availability and willingness to participate in a bit of horizontal mambo comes across as definitely dodgy and, of course, along the way there are the regulation and requisite interactions with Catarella on the station swishboard, Commissioner Bonetti-Alderighi and his doorman, Deputy Commissioner Lattes (Caffè-Lattes behind his back) who continues to inquire politely regarding the health of Montalbano’s non-existent wife and children.

Fazio’s injury is the sort of thing the c'mishner is going to want to be kept up to speed with, and this time around the excuse that keeps Montalbano from attending requested interviews involves an impending visit by a Swiss specialist named Gruntz, who’ll be performing a rectal procedure called the double Scrockson. Given the excuse, Montalbano can’t be seen eating at Enzo’s trattoria when the Commissioner is eating there, so he’s forced to hole up in a back room, which has absolutely no effect on the Montalbano appetite.

The answer to the big, Fazio-related question turns out to involve a Mafioso with a big secret, the Russians, Arab terrorists and a prominent figure in the national government, a fact that would have the big boys from out of town stepping in if Montalbano can’t keep his cards close to his chest, which he (predictably) manages to do, using the usual mixture of intuition, inspiration and attention to seemingly insignificant detail.

And having done so, settles down to enjoy a substantial plate of caponata.

Donna Leon "Beastly Things"

It has taken twenty-one volumes to do it, but Commissario Brunetti’s son Raffi has (finally) finished school and headed off to University. Apart from that development practically nothing (apart from the emergence of Elettra Zorzi back in Dressed for Death, the third volume in the series) has changed as far as the major characters are concerned since the first episode. It’s fairly obvious that Donna Leon hit on a winning formula way back in Death at La Fenice and has been able to spin the same elements out every year since. It’s a remarkable achievement.

Of course, it helps to have the right setting. Given the endemic corruption in the Italian political system and the wealth of social, political and environmental issues and throw in a healthy dose of ambition, and a heaping helping of greed and you’ve got plenty to work with. Greed drives the wrongdoers, and Brunetti has to tackle cases with thorny implications while steering around Vice-Questore Patta’s determination to look after the well-connected and maintain Venice’s reputation as a Mecca for cashed-up tourists. Brunetti, of course loathes them, detests him, can almost read him like a book and has worked out how to manage him.

This time around the investigation is prompted by the discovery of a body in a canal, hardly an unusual starter either, and the corpse isn’t carrying a wallet or anything else that might help to identify him. No one has been reported missing, there no hotel guests unaccounted for, and the face has been damaged while in the water. He is, however, missing a shoe and the one he’s was wearing is rather distinctive. Every little bit helps.

A bigger help is a rare, disfiguring disease. Madelung's disease (Benign symmetric lipomatosis) is a condition that results in extensive fat deposits around the head, neck, and shoulders, often related to alcohol abuse, though there’s no sign of it in this case.Given that condition there’s something familiar about the man, and Brunetti realises he’s seen the victim before, at a farmers' protest that was filmed by news camera crews and a look at the video footage delivers an image that Brunetti can use in the investigation.

When Brunetti and Vianello set out to canvass the shoe stores they end up in Mestre on the mainland, and learn the victim was a kind man who had a way with animals, and he’s eventually identified as Dottor Andrea Nava, a popular veterinarian whose funeral, described in a moving epilogue, attracts a large congregation that includes nearly as many pets as it does people. epilogue Leon describes the funeral service for an upright, yet all too human, veterinarian where there are as many pets as people in the congregation.

Which leaves the question of why someone would want to stab him in the back three times and dump the body in a canal. He might be estranged from his wife but she faints when Brunetti and Vianello, break the news to her. Guilt or grief? His assistant at his veterinary practice, can shed no light on his death although she reveals he was working moonlighting as a part-time meat inspector at a local abattoir. That’s the environment that resulted in the dalliance with Director Alessandro Papetti’s personal assistant Giulia Borelli, though that doesn’t seem to provide a motive for murder.

A tour of the slaughterhouse brings Brunetti and Vianello up against the realities of the meat industry that made vegetarians of his colleague Vianello and his daughter Chiara.
That particular sequence is a gruesome read though the experience isn’t enough to turn Brunetti into a vegetarian. It does, however, shape dinner conversations in the Brunetti household and interactions with Vianello and Signorina Elettra at the Questura. If you’re not inclined towards the gory details you won’t miss anything by skipping over that section.

Outside the ethical issues associated with slaughterhouses there are the usual elements running alongside the main investigation. Signorina Elettra, as usual, manages to hack into the computer system of whatever Italian institution or government department and Vianello is starting to pick up the same skills but has a way to go to catch the Signorina.
Brunetti’s conscience isn’t entirely happy about this, but he’s not going to forego the useful info, is he?

The investigation meanders along clearly and logically, with everything falling neatly into place in the end and discussions about marital fidelity and the risks therein (Vianello reckons he’d be shot, and Brunetti would either be pushed off the balcony or a rapid transferred to a Mafia infested town in the South), Italian losses in the First World War (Raffi’s studying modern history at the University) and the relative strengths of various players’ social connections.

There’s nothing there that’s new, and Beastly Things is of a piece with everything that has gone before. Number Twenty-two, The Golden Egg, is due in April. The preorder is already in.

Donna Leon "Acqua Alta"

A North Queensland wet season with the regular river rises and frequent flooding is probably a good time to read something set in the middle of the Venetian acqua alta (high water). One of Leon’s strengths is the way Venice is portrayed through Venetian eyes, and the portrait isn’t always painted at the most attractive time of the year.

Acqua alta refers to exceptional winter tide peaks in the Venetian Lagoon and the northern Adriatic. There’s partial flooding in Venice as the tides are reinforced by seasonal winds, the southerly sirocco and the north-easterly bora, which blows across the Venetian lagoon. The two combine to hamper the usual outflow resulting from winter rains, which is also affected by the long rectangular shape of the Adriatic (there’s an oscillating water motion, the seiche, that supplements the regular tidal cycle to produce more extreme tidal events than you’d find in the rest of the Mediterranean basin), the shape of the Venetian lagoon, soil subsidence in Venice and the coastal areas around the Lagoon and rising sea levels.

When all these factors coincide they prevent one high tide from ebbing, which means the next high comes over the top of it in a sort of self-perpetuating cycle and it’s time to sound the sirens and alert the citizens of an intense event (80 to 109 cm above regular sea level, affecting up to 14% of the city), a very intense episode (110 to 139 cm, up to 54%) or exceptional high waters (above 140 cm). If it gets to two metres the whole city will go under.

The flooding isn’t uniform due to differing heights above sea level throughout the city, distances from channel and canals, the height of the footpaths (fondamenta), and the layout of the sewerage and drainage network. In such circumstances no sensible person will leave home without their gumboots and the routes they take to and from work, shopping and whatever leisure activities they’re inclined to indulge in aren’t necessarily the shortest line connecting two locations. Police work and civil rescues are affected by the waters, and the ways in which the locals deal with the day to day issues adds colour to the series, and fleshes out a rather straightforward plot line.

As far as that plot line is concerned, Acqua Alta reintroduces us to American art historian and archaeologist Brett Lynch and her lover, operatic diva Flavia Petrelli from Death at La Fenice, the first book in the series. Brett, who organised an exhibition of Chinese pottery, is savagely beaten by two well-dressed men, who warn her not to keep an appointment with Dottor Semenzato, director of the museum where the exhibition was displayed.

Brunetti is one of the few who are appalled by the attack, since he knows Brett and Flavia from the earlier episode, and he’s determined to track down the culprit. Vice-Questore Patta isn’t that concerned by an assault on a foreigner who happens to be a lesbian, but when museum director Semenzato is murdered there’s a bit more urgency in the investigation (as far as he’s concerned, anyway).

There’s more than likely some connection between the two cases, and even if it turns out there isn’t, that assumption is the obvious place to start. As Brunetti continues the investigation it becomes clear that the exhibition of Chinese antiquities is a key piece in the jigsaw puzzle.  It seems Semenzato had been peddling artworks, including some lifted from the Chinese exhibition and replaced with close replications, and his customers include some influential people, including a Sicilian who simultaneously is and isn’t the stereotypical Mafia boss.

By the fifth title in a series that runs to more than twenty and counting, the themes that underlie a Brunetti mystery are firmly in place and the long term reader knows, more or less, what the story’s going to be about. In those circumstances the local colour, the acqua alta, the intricacies of the heating system in the Questura and the interactions between and among the regular characters are what keeps the reader coming back for more, assuming the Brunetti stories are the kind of thing that floats your boat.

Marco Vichi "Death In Sardinia"

If you don’t believe in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder you might be inclined to suspect Marco Vichi’s Inspector Bordelli is eventually going to run out of wartime recollections to obsess over. On the other hand, when Death in Sardinia opens the war has been over for more than twenty years, and Bordelli’s still getting regular flashbacks, so if he hasn’t run out of them yet it’s not likely to happen any time soon.

Still, to keep a series moving you need new elements, and I can’t help thinking Vichi is setting things up rather nicely for the next couple of years with some of the sideline issues in this story set in Florence and Sardinia in December 1965 when the body of a loan-shark is found in his Florentine apartment with a pair of scissors sticking out of his neck.

At the same time his offsider Piras is recuperating after serious gunshot wounds at home in Sardinia and is faced with the apparent suicide of a family friend, which seems fairly straightforward and obvious until Piras notes there’s no empty cartridge nearby. Suicide victims aren’t in the habit of cleaning up after themselves, therefore someone else must have done it, which leads one to suspect it wasn’t suicide.

Bordelli, as it turns out, has been on the loan shark’s case for a while, and had attempted to obtain a warrant to search his apartment for evidence of blackmail and other illegal activities, and the murder delivers the opportunity senior figures within the Florence legal system hadn’t been willing to grant him. Bordelli had gone as far as visiting his old mate the burglar cum chef in jail, suggesting they might be able to co-operate on a quiet break and enter once Botta’s current spell inside has finished.

The murder rules that out, but delivers Botta into a situation where he can cook a French Christmas dinner for Bordelli and friends.

Now, with the loan shark dead and Bordelli assigned to the case he can search the premises to his heart’s content, musing all the while that if he’d been given the search warrant he originally asked for the victim might still be alive. Bordelli would, as far as he’s concerned, found something that would have sufficed to take Totuccio Badalamenti out of circulation, which would, in turn, have prevented the killer from getting at him.

Badalamenti’s apartment has been ransacked, but it’s obvious that whoever did it wasn’t as thorough as he could have been. Conducting his own rather more thorough search Bordelli finds a bundle of photographs featuring an attractive girl apparently named Marisa (that’s the name written on the back of each of them) in a variety of provocative poses behind a framed picture. He also locates the hidey hole where Badalamenti was wont to conceal the promissory notes that were the basis of his loan sharking. A call to the pathologist later in the day reveals the discovery of a gold ring inscribed with the name Ciro in the dead man's stomach.

Those discoveries provide a couple of leads that need to be tracked down, and since it seems fairly obvious the killer was either one of Badalamenti’s actual clients or someone very close to one of them the clue to the identity would probably lie in the bundle of documents Bordelli has found.

That’s the outcome of an equation something like Dead body + Ransacked flat = (Probably) Something the killer wanted but didn’t find, and on that basis it makes sense to return the promissory notes to the loan shark’s victims. It’ll be a nice Christmas present for them, and will, more than likely, deliver the evidence that unveils the culprit who, according to the infallible and predictably prickly pathologist Diotivede, is left-handed.

Doing that brings Bordelli into contact with a number of characters who could well become significant players in an ongoing series. There’s the Marisa from the photographs, a stunning beauty who might be making come hither noises to the detective who is old enough to know better and manages to resist the temptation for the moment, her brother, a pot-smoking Rolling Stones fan, and the son of a widowed mother who just happens to have inherited a rural property that just happens to strike Bordelli as an ideal place to retire to. Just to strengthen the links to the emerging sex, drugs and rock’n’roll culture, Bordelli’s ex-prostitute friend introduces him to the herb. Interesting.

Equally interesting is the unfolding string of events in Sardinia. Piras, as we are aware, is the son of one of Bordelli's resistance colleagues, and is impatient to get the recuperative process out of the way, ditch the crutches and get back to Florence and his highly attractive Sicilian girlfriend. With time on his hands, he is drawn into the events surrounding the suicide of a neighbour's cousin which, as previously mentioned, he begins to suspect is not suicide at all.

That supposition is based on the absence of the spent cartridge near the body, but regardless of whether it was actually suicide a bloke with time on his hands is going to dig a little bit to see what was happening around the victim in the days leading up to his death. That bit of digging around suggests he was in the middle of selling off his property, but negotiations had reached an impasse.

Fair enough, you might think. Financial issues (or whatever) prompt the bloke to put the property on the market, things break down, bloke can’t carry on and decides to top himself. Yes, a reasonable enough explanation in theory. But who’s the buyer?

Again, someone who has his plate full might leave it at that, but Piras has time on his hands, a motive to dig in the form of deeply distressed relatives who were close to the victim, and keeps on going. Checking out the buyer reveals a man whose background seems to lie in areas where all the official records had been destroyed, which is possible, but uncomfortably coincidental, and when a personal encounter reveals a prickly individual with a spent cartridge caught in the sole of his shoe...

Go much further than that and you’re in spoiler territory, but that’s two of the three strands that run through the novel accounted for. The third, predictably, has a seasonal focus as Bordelli sorts out a Christmas present for Rosa and sets up a Christmas dinner to be cooked by Botta. He hadn’t been released from jail in time to help with the break-in that might have saved Badalamenti’s life but is just in time to look after the seasonal feast. There are, of course, other delicacies mentioned during Bordelli's visits to Toto’s restaurant kitchen and Piras’ recovery is accompanied by his mother’s Sardinian home cooking.

Three books into the series you might be inclined to gripe about the continued recurrence of wartime reminiscences and the repeated appearance of Fascist and Nazi nasties, but with five years to go until he retires that’s going to bring him into the middle of the violent years of the late sixties and early seventies, The Years of Lead with plots, coup attempts, bombings, intrigues, the rise of right- and left-wing paramilitary groups, and street warfare between rival factions.

Given Vichi’s habit of keeping characters from earlier episodes on the edges of the action is subsequent stories, you’d expect the long-haired dope-smoking Stones fans to stick around the periphery and they’re the sort of people who could well end up in some offshoot of the Red Brigades. On that basis you’d have to suspect Vichi has set things up rather nicely for a very interesting ongoing series.

Bordelli's world view, his friendships with ex-criminals, prostitutes and others who have been marginalised by mainstream society make it fairly obvious which side he’ll be leaning towards.

Garry Disher "Whispering Death"

Six titles into the Challis and Destry series you sense Garry Disher has a few characters and situations at the Waterloo Police Station approaching their use by dates.

Hal Challis may have had his share of professional and personal troubles in the past, but he should be reasonably happy as he heads towards a new phase in his developing relationship with Ellen Destry, but she’s off to Europe on a study tour and will be setting up a new Sex Crimes Unit when she gets back. He’s still having issues with her daughter Larayne, and will be sort of house sitting and doing a few odd jobs around the place Ellen bought after the marriage broke up.

Scobie Sutton’s wife seems to be coming out of depression, while his daughter continues to be the apple of his eye and he’s starting to find the grim reality of police work difficult to deal with and Constable Pam Murphy has issues with anti-depressants after events in the previous episode in the series and the physical symptoms that ensue when you stop taking the things.

On top of the soap opera side of things Disher serves up an intriguing blend of plot lines that start out separately and end up intertwining neatly.

The first involves a rapist wearing a police uniform. Rogue cop or impersonator? That seems to be a fairly natural question to ask, and one that, at the same time, an investigating officer would be looking to avoid answering directly. When Challis is confronted by a journo who insists on asking it he responds with spray to about budget cutbacks in an area where the population is expanding rapidly. Predictably, this doesn’t go down well with his superiors.

The rape investigation brings a feisty sergeant from the Sex Crimes Unit into the picture. After she returns from Europe this role would be filled by Ellen Destry, but while Jeannie Schiff is on the scene she ruffles a few feathers among the male officers and lays down a possible soap opera development as far as Pam Murphy is concerned.

Matters are complicated by the fact that the rapist knows enough about forensics to make it difficult to track him down, and after the first victim is found wandering dazed and naked in a nature reserve, a second is found dead in the boot of a crashed car.

The second involves a female cat burglar who, by rights, shouldn’t enter into things at all. She lives across on the western side of Port Phillip but gets there on her way back from interstate jobs using the ferry that crosses from the Mornington Peninsula after she’s deposited the proceeds of her latest job in a safe deposit box in Challis’ base at Waterloo.

While she’s careful to avoid working in her own state, the result of careful grounding in the basics of maintaining a low profile delivered by a crooked former cop who is looking to track her down and even up a few old scores, a series of coincidences brings that policy unstuck.

You know the cat burglar will become involved in the main plot, though it’s not immediately clear how Disher’s going to do it, and he muddies the water a bit further by arranging a home invasion by the the bikies living next door to Destry's new house and having the bloke responsible for a series of bank robberies looking to be heading towards Waterloo as well.

Challis, meanwhile, has a Triumph TR4 sports car he may as well dispose of since it is finally starting to fall apart and a restored 1930s Dragon Rapide that he has worked on for a decade but since it represents a phase of his life that has come to an end it might as well go too.

Those matters come on top of the rape investigation in a station that’s stretched as far as they can go. Challis lands himself in hot water for shooting his mouth off to the local media about budget cuts.

Meanwhile a socially conscious graffiti commentator is spray painting announcements like CASHED UP BOGAN LIVES HERE and I’M COMPENSATING FOR A SMALL DICK on driveway entrances that lead to architectural monstrosities erected (and I’m using that verb deliberately) by newly arrived residents with more cash than taste and no sense of humour.

Disher weaves these different lines around each other, keeping the tension between individual characters tightly wound and bringing the lot together at the end, filling in the relevant bits of back story for readers who aren’t up to speed on the earlier episodes,  doing it concisely enough so it doesn’t become an issue for those of us who have and leaving enough space for readers to go back and explore those earlier episodes should they feel so inclined.

That’s a rather tricky juggling act, but Disher, as long term fans have come to expect, carries it off with panache, delivering a complex story that works on just about every front. He’s a class act, who consistently delivers and this is one of his best.

Peter Robinson "Gallows View"

Given the number of Peter Robinson titles sitting on the shelves he’s always been a candidate for a read them in sequence operation, so I’ve been watching the el cheapo bins for a while, and with the early titles pretty well covered early 2013 seemed like a good time to start on the time trip back through the Chief Inspector Banks series.

The interesting part in such exercises is always checking how fully formed the characters are from the get-go, and how subsequent developments and long term players are brought into play.

Six months after his relocation from London, Banks, his wife and two kids are, on the surface, pretty comfortably settled into the new surroundings. Sandra mightn’t be overly happy about the change, but has her interest in photography to keep her going, and it’s an interest that contributes to one of the plot lines, and the two kids seem fairly contented, or as contented as the teenage offspring of a policeman who works long and irregular hours can be expected to be.

Which leaves Banks, still finding his way in his new station while a peeping tom sets about spreading alarm through the women of Eastvale, a series of break and enters keeps the constabulary busy and the death of an elderly woman needs to be investigated because it could be murder.

There’s every chance these three strands are going to end up intertwined, and, of course, they are, since two of them tie into the street that gives the novel its name.

Along the way we’re introduced to the two young thugs who are responsible for the break-ins, as well as the young, attractive female psychologist who is recruited to assist in building a personality profile of the surreptitious voyeur. There is, after all, the possibility that his activities may escalate beyond just looking, and given the demands of their respective jobs Banks and Jenny Fuller meet to discuss these matters over a jar or two in the evenings, a situation you might suspect is likely to escalate into intimacy (and it’s not as if Banks isn’t tempted) that also contributes to the way things shake out in the end.

Right from the start Chief Inspector Banks comes across as an intriguing character, perceptive, innately curious and displaying a degree of compassion you might have expected a stint in the city to knock out of him. Perhaps it was the fear of such a development that prompted his move to the Yorkshire Dales in search of a quieter lifestyle.

Having arrived there and settled in, the wave of break and enters are a pain in the neck, though Banks picks (correctly) a couple of likely suspects fairly easily, but the peeping tom is creating issues with the local feminists, who allege police insensitivity to the issue means they’re not pursuing the peeper as vigorously as they might. That, in turn explains the decision to bring the feminist psychologist into the equation.

The burglaries may have escalated into murder when the body of 87-year-old Alice Matlock is found in her home, which has been ransacked. The problem there is that there’s a concurrent sighting of the peeper in the same vicinity, which poses an interesting bracket of questions that need answers.

As it turns out there’s another explanation for Alice’s death, which wasn’t caused by an escalation of the peeper’s intent or a burglary gone wrong, but finding the explanation requires an escalation of the peeper’s intent and a burglary that turns into rape and provides the key that unlocks the whole tangled tale.

The book itself, first published as far back as 1987, is fairly obviously a first effort in a planned series, with things being set in place for sequels, with some fairly obvious generic elements but there’s a sense of place and the characters work fairly well. Banks is a likeable character, the dialogue is tight and believable and while you could pick on a number of cliches there’s obviously enough potential there for the author to keep going and the reader to stay involved.

Arnaldur Indridason "Black Skies"

Set in pre-crash Iceland in 2005, with Erlendur away on an extended and ominous trip to the east of the country, and Elinborg working on the case described in Outrage, Black Skies has Sigurdur Óli drawn into what appears, at first to be a rather straightforward case of blackmail gone wrong.

Approached by Patrekur, an old school friend, Sigurdur Óli is inveigled into delivering some unofficial assistance to help Patrekur's sister-in-law, who has political ambitions, and her husband, who are allegedly being blackmailed after becoming involved in a wife-swapping circle. Sigurdur Óli visits the blackmailers' home, blundering into the middle of a brutal attack, which subsequently develops into a murder investigation.

That investigation is the strand that holds the story together, but as you'd expect there are other elements that interact with it, including Sigurdur Óli's breakup with his long-time partner and the actions of Anders, a derelict alcoholic who regularly appears at the police station, looking for Erlendur and babbling about an evil man who has ruined his life and although the priggish Sigurdur Óli has little sympathy for such people he is drawn into an attempt to help him.

Sigurdur Óli has never been a likeable character, but as that strand unfolds it does so in a manner that explains his personal quirks, though you don't (or, at least, I didn't) find yourself liking the man.

But you can understand why he is that way, which is something, and a little more than can be said for the real villains behind the main plot line, some of the lesser players among the new Vikings, who are driving Iceland's on paper economic boom that's on the verge of going bust, ruining the country's economy and the lives of many of its citizens.

Ian Rankin "Standing In Another Man's Grave"

A man, it is said, cannot serve two masters and I’d suggest a novelist cannot run two protagonists, especially when they’re as diametrically opposed as John Rebus and Malcolm Fox.

News Ian Rankin had brought Rebus back to life in or around the force brought back memories of a remark from Rankin that Rebus was working on cold cases as a civilian, although the retirement age had been lifted and there was a possibility of him rejoining after five years away from the force. If he did he’d more than likely come across Malcolm Fox from The Complaints who might, looking back on the plot line of The Impossible Dead, be inclined to turn a blind eye to some of the Rebus irregularities provided his nose was otherwise clean.

Fox, I thought, worked rather neatly in those two titles, a man doing his (unpopular) job against a background of resentment and defiance that bordered, at times, on overt rebellion. With those two stories largely told from Fox’s point of view and through his eyes an author’s setting himself an impossible task if he sets out to analyse the events surrounding the disappearance of Annette McKie, the most recent of a number of girls who’ve disappeared around the A9, one of Scotland's major arterial roads, through both sets of eyes.

It probably could be done, but not without getting in the way of the plot line in operation here.

Rebus might be back, operating on the fringes, but there’s one key element that’s going to work against him rejoining, and that’s an interesting change in the nature of his interaction with his nemesis, Big Ger Cafferty. At the end of Exit Music, with Cafferty in hospital, Rebus happens to save his life, exactly the sort of behaviour that would convince the watchdog that Rebus is bent. From his own point of view, of course, Rebus wants the final satisfaction of putting Big Ger away for a long spell, something that’s not going to be possible if he up and dies on you.

In any case Rebus now gets regular visits from the supposedly retired Cafferty, which is exactly the sort of thing that’s going to further arouse Fox’s suspicions. There’s also an interesting development involving Cafferty’s interaction with the family of the latest girl to disappear which isn’t going to make Rebus look too good from where Fox is sitting.

The Rebus-Fox interactions are, at this point, very much a side issue, By the end of this particular narrative, with Rebus having sorted out a string of cold cases and the latest disappearance you can see potential for this interaction to develop further, particularly with Rebus’ former colleague, Siobhan Clarke, moving up through the ranks.

As far as Fox is concerned, Rebus should be extinct ... Somehow the Ice Age came and went and left him still swimming around while the rest of us evolved and has spent so many years crossing the line he's managed to rub it out altogether.

The assessments running in the other direction are equally blunt. As far as Rebus is concerned, Fox could have been middle management in a plastics company or Inland Revenue, so while we mightn’t end up getting a full blown Rebus versus Fox and the ethics and standards division as Fox goes about ensuring Rebus doesn’t corrupt his former sidekick we’ve got an interesting and intriguing developing subplot for future instalments.

As far as this episode is concerned, the latest disappearance on the A9, the road where Sally Hazlitt was last seen twelve years earlier, has her mother Nina, perpetually ready to hear the worst about her daughter's disappearance, reminding the cold case department of her suspicion that the disappearances of a string of young women can be attributed to a serial killer on the loose.

The problem with the theory lies in an absence of sightings, bodies and viable suspects, which explains an ongoing reluctance to take Nina’s theory seriously, until she heads in to have another go and finds the police station almost deserted, except for one John Rebus, who has never been one to shy away from apparently lost causes.

Like his former colleagues Rebus is initially unconvinced, but goes as far as requesting the records concerning the cold cases, and comes to the conclusion that, yes, there may be a connection and contacts his former protégée Siobhan Clarke, now a Detective Inspector in the missing persons department investigating the latest disappearance.

Clarke knows enough about the man to give him some rein to chase down clues no one else wants to look at, but her long-standing admiration for Rebus's detective abilities is at odds with her own career prospects in the new-style, corporate police force, which is where Fox comes into the picture when Rebus manages to get himself temporarily attached to the missing persons department to help with the case.

There’s more to link the cases than the fact that all these girls disappeared along the same stretch of road. In the most recent cases photographs of the same country scene have been sent to mobile phones belonging to friends (and not always close ones) and relatives.

The search for that scene, which has to have some significance, sees Rebus travel the length of the A9 in his battered Saab, haring all over Scotland to Glasgow, Aberdeen, Inverness and the far north, unearthing buried secrets, tracking down those who have moved or retired to remote areas, bending and breaking the rules, arguing with his superiors, and displaying the Rebus single-minded doggedness in his quest for justice.

Alongside that investigation there’s a neat little subplot involving Cafferty, the up and coming underworld player who happens to be involved with the missing girl’s mother, and her brother.

Despite the time he’s spent on the sidelines Rebus works as well as he always has. He’s the same curmudgeonly dinosaur he always was, drinking and smoking more than most of us should, listening to his favourite folk and rock classics, not quite managing the reconciliation with his daughter as he continues to play by his own rules.

Rankin writes as well as ever, and, most interestingly, has things set up rather nicely for the next couple of episodes in an evolving series. Along the course of the investigation the cold cases unit is wound up, so there’s no comfort for him there if he doesn’t get back on the force full time.

The realignments in the Edinburgh underworld have interesting implications for the future as Rebus looks to clamber back on board the train, Fox looks to ensure that he doesn’t and Siobhan Clarke continues to be torn between career ambitions and long term loyalties. It’s a prospect that’s guaranteed to have the fans scanning the horizon for news of the next instalment.