Andy Neill "Had Me a Real Good Time: The Faces Before, During and After"

Given the fact that the Rod Stewart quotient in Hughesy's vinyl, CD and digital music collections is limited to a digital An Old Raincoat and multiple versions of the first two Jeff Beck Group albums you might wonder why I'd bother with this hefty wrist-breaker, and after the half way point I was kind of wondering myself.

With close to five hundred pages, when the author's finished with Every Picture Tells A Story on p. 238 you'd reckon there wouldn't be a whole lot more that justifies a detailed analysis.

A quick look at the early chapters when I spotted the book on the Recent Arrivals display near the front door of the local library, however, revealed Jeff Beck Group and Small Faces content, and that was about enough to justify borrowing the thing.

Who knows? a read might do enough to push me over the side and I could end up buying Gasoline Alley, Every Picture and it might even persuade me to try the tip of the toe in the water as far as The Faces catalogue was concerned.

Rock biography is a tricky genre, and Andy Neill set himself a difficult task when he set out to tell a story that ends up combining a couple of fairly distinct strands where incidental characters will need an introduction to an audience that may not necessarily be familiar with them.

The biographer can't assume prior knowledge, readers familiar with solo Stewart might not be familiar with Jeff Beck and Beckophiles might not need background on Faces roadies and support staff. As I said, tricky.

Then there's the difficult issue that comes with personality. As a general rule people who've been fortunate enough to be gifted with prodigious talent tend to have picked up less savoury personality quirks along the way. Let's just say reading through The Faces saga tends to support that belief, note that practically nobody (including Ronnie Lane) emerges with an unsullied reputation and leave it at that.

We are, after all, talking figures with significant egos and odd perceptions of the world around them, and it's here that Neill's thorough approach comes into play. He mightn't be the most stylish rock biographer going around, but when you're working in the area style and gloss come a distant second to comprehensiveness and content. The tome is thoroughly footnoted (a big tick as far as historian Hughesy's concerned) with a seemingly exhaustive combination of chapter by chapter source notes and bibliography, a selective discography and listing of BBC TV and radio appearances, and apparently complete 1969-75 concert file.

Neill runs through each major player's career leading up to the Small Faces and the Jeff Beck Group, corrects various long-standing myths and unsubstantiated rumours. The Small Faces transformation from Mod R&B through Top of the Pops hysteria to the Itchycoo Park Ogden's Nut Gone Flake psychedelic period gets a thorough working over.

Stewart's transformation from CND folkie to vocal front man through the Hoochie Coochie Men, Steampacket and Shotgun Express to fronting the Beck Group leaves an impression of a man who was determined to make it, but needed to find a niche.

The ructions that split Steve Marriott from the Small Faces and into Humble Pie with Peter Frampton, the breakdown of the original Jeff Beck Group are explained, and there's a thorough account of the emergence of the new-look Faces, with vocalist Rod Stewart and guitarist Ron Wood joining the Small Faces rhythm section (Ronnie Lane and Kenney Johes) and keyboard player an McLagan.

The delicate balancing act between Stewart's solo work and the Faces' collective entity and its subsequent breakdown are carefully chronicled and the significant bit players including original Small Faces keyboards man Jimmy Winston, Lane's whisky-swilling replacement Tetsu Yamauchi, Stewart's original mentor Long John Baldry, pianist Nicky Hopkins, assorted Rolling Stones, their manager and Immediate Records boss Andrew Loog Oldham all get the appropriate guernseys along the way.

At the same time there's nothing that emerges from the saga that has really prompted me to head out and chase down First Step, Long Player, A Nod Is as Good as a Wink... to a Blind Horse or Ooh La La, though those early Stewart albums may end up joining An Old Raincoat in the iTunes Library if they're priced below $10 at the same time as I have an inclination to spend some money and a lack of alternative inspiration.

Neill's book, with its fairly detailed description of the circumstances that led to descriptors like drunk, loose, fun and shambolic being associated with The Faces was probably never going to change that. They may have rocked the joint, they weren't the only ones to cut a swathe through the U.S. concert scene, and as for suggestions that they were the world's second greatest rock band…

The biography, while interesting and comprehensive ends up, like its subject, interesting but definitely non-essential.

But I'll be rereading the Jeff Beck and Small Faces content before it goes back to the Library.

James Lee Burke "Rain Gods"

I've remarked elsewhere that James Lee Burke could probably come up with a convincing and totally chilling psychopath and/or sociopath in his sleep. The Dave Robicheaux novels are literally crawling with 'em, and there's a liberal sprinkling across his other titles as well.

With that ability to conjure them up there may be a willingness to kill them off, which makes me hope the other lead character in the Hackberry Holland series proves to be an exception to the rule.

One hopes that the final Hackberry Holland novel has already been written, and is scheduled for posthumous publication because on the basis of Feast Day of Fools and Rain Gods I hope we're in for an extended series that won't quite be the same if he manages to definitively kill off the Preacher..

Rain Gods slipped by unnoticed two years ago, and my enjoyment of Feast Day of Fools meant I had no choice to go back and read the prequel, and the reading experience was definitely worth it. A glance at the James Lee Burke Wikipedia entry has a Dave Robicheaux scheduled for next year and I've got my fingers crossed in the hope of a Hackberry Holland in 2013.

The landscape along the Texas/Mexico border is probably the appropriate environment for a bible-quoting sociopathic psychopath, and there's probably quite a few of them lurking out there in the border badlands, but one hopes there aren't too many like Preacher Jack Collins out there in the flesh.

I'm not aware of any literary or personal link between Burke and Warren Zevon, and the I'll Sleep When I'm Dead Zevon biography doesn't feature an index but reading these two stories it certainly seems there's a fair bit of the old eternal Thompson gunner still stalking through the night here.

With nine illegal aliens machine gunned and buried in a shallow grave behind a church, and Iraq veteran, Pete Flores, and his girlfriend, Vikki Gaddis on the run from a collection of players who want them removed from the picture, terminated, as the saying goes, with extreme prejudice Sheriff Holland and Deputy Pam Tibbs set out to piece together a picture that's complicated by personal agendas and vendettas among a variety of underworld influences.

It's a complex jumble of threads with Preacher Jack at the centre of things, a psychopath who seems to see himself as an avenging angel and manages to draw information from a variety of reliable sources that lesser mortals such as you and I might be inclined to dismiss.

So, with Pete Flores and Vikki Gaddis on the run from the people on the fringes of the killings (Pete was involved, and knows a bit too much for his own good), the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other forces of nominal law and order who are pursuing their own larger agendas and Hackberry Holland, haunted by back pain, Korean War nightmares and obsessive memories of his late wife, Rie, most writers would have left it at that and proceeded from there.

Burke, on the other hand, starts with a dozen major characters and half a dozen plot lines, throws extra players into the mix where needed, brings them back as necessary and ties things together rather deftly at the end, leaving enough room for Preacher Jack to reappear in Feast Day of Fools as the Epilogue notes sightings of an emaciated man who foraged in landfills and Dumpsters and wore rags that were black with grime and a rope for a belt and whose beard grew in a point to the middle of his chest.

After a spell in the wilderness, you just know, even without having read the sequel, that he'll be back.

Once again, Burke demonstrates his skill as a master storyteller, writing with a clarity most of us would envy and few could hope to emulate and delivering a multifaceted story where nothing is quite what it seems and tortured souls operate in their own distinct and strangely moral universe.

A masterpiece that deserves to be reread to pick up the details you missed last time around…as the reader savours the elegant mastery of language on offer. One might be tempted to apply tags like his best so far, but when each successive volume attracts the tag it seems easier to say another James Lee Burke and leave it at that.

James Lee Burke "Feast Day of Fools"

Here's a perfect example of Hughesy's need to write something down to remind himself of what he's read. Feast Day of Fools is the third title inJames Lee Burke's Hackberry Holland series, and while I have a copy of 1971's Lay Down My Sword And Shield on the shelves, there's no sign of 2009's Rain Gods in the same area, though I have vague memories of reading a Burke title from the Gold Coast Library at some stage over the past couple of years.

Then again, there's quite possibly a copy sitting in a pile of books over at The Actor's place, but whatever version of reality applies here there's something missing in the sequence as far as Hughesy's memory is concerned, and where a James Lee Burke series is concerned those memory factors are a key ingredient in the enjoyment of the reading process.

While it's not totally necessary to read these books in sequence, and latecomers to the eighteen-title Dave Robicheaux series are going to have difficulty in that regard, there's always a degree of carry over from one title to the next and while each title stands comfortably on its own there are nuances in there that only really come out if you've read the preceding title.

That applies a little more than it usually does in this case. We first encountered Hackberry Holland, cousin of Texas attorney Billy Bob Holland (Cimarron Rose, Heartwood, Bitterroot, In the Moon of Red Ponies) as far back as the 1970s in Lay Down My Sword and Shield, though there's a fair time lapse between that story of a Texan attorney and Korean War POW being pushed by his wife, his brother, and friends in the oil business to run for Congress and becomes caught up in a civil rights conflict and the later volumes.

In the intervening period since the early days of the United Farm Workers he's been a civil rights lawyer and ended up after the death of his wife as the local sheriff in a small community on the border between Texas and Mexico.

Rain Gods takes place in that setting with the machine-gunned bodies of nine young Thai women found in a shallow grave behind a church, an Iraq veteran and his girlfriend running for their lives, a serial killer known as Preacher Jack Collins, the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and assorted cold-blooded killers running along intersecting plot lines (in these cases Google is your friend) as Sheriff Holland and his deputy Pam Tibbs try to figure things out.

References to those nine Thai women and your actual Preacher Jack turn up again in Feast Day of Fools, and while you don't actually need to know the back story from last time around it'd definitely help when it comes to elucidating the tricky and apparently long-standing interaction between Hack Holland and the bible-toting and quoting serial killer.

The action starts when Native American alcoholic semi-vagrant Danny Boy Lorca witnesses a man tortured to death in the desert, reports it to the authorities and the investigation leads more or less directly to the door of La Magdalena, Anton Ling, a mysterious Chinese woman known to assist illegal immigrants crossing the border.

While she claims to know nothing about the case, the dead man's companion, a government agent the killer had planned to sell to Al Qaeda, had sheltered there, and has now found his way into the company of serial murderer Preacher Jack. The killer, a former mercenary named Krill is haunted by the unbaptised deaths of his children, also turns up on her doorstep, as does his illiterate and psychopathic offsider Negrito and the Reverend Cody Daniels, an ex-convict who's looking for salvation and/or revenge (seemingly it's a case of whichever comes first).

Holland repeatedly turns up on the doorstep as well, apparently spellbound by La Magdalena's resemblance to his late wife, much to the dismay of Deputy Pam Tibbs who has her own interpersonal aspirations as far as Hack is concerned.

Psychopaths, illegal immigrants, drug smugglers and gun runners, Russian mobsters, corrupt employees of the federal government, figures from Hack’s distant past and immigrant-hating rednecks roam across the desolate landscape, and there are enough conflicts of interest to bring the strangest combinations into an uneasy alliance against mutual enemies before an enigmatic ending that sets things up for a sequel.

Burke is a master craftsman whose prose shimmers and deserves to be savoured, a story teller who gets better each new time around and Feast Day of Fools is right up there with his very best efforts.

Which, of course, from where I'm sitting ranks it right up there with the very best there is.

Peter Robinson "Before the Poison"

Having voraciously devoured almost everything in Peter Robinson's Inspector Banks series the sight of a new Robinson title in a book shop is almost invariably followed by a hit on the credit card balance.

A glance at the blurb on the back cover (a what's he got Banks into this time? sort of thing) suggested we were talking a Banks-free zone this time around, and the opening sequence, where convicted murderer Grace Fox in hanged in January, 1953 seemingly confirmed those suspicions.

Starting a story fifty-something years ago opens the possibility of a case reopened, so there could have been an opening for Banks in that regard, the accidental discovery of something that brings the case back to attention or something along those lines, but here the something is a house and the investigator isn't a police officer.

Yorkshire native Chris Lowe wants to return home after the death of his wife and buys an isolated semi-stately home (Kilnsgate House) sight unseen. After a successful career as a film score composer he has visions of working on his movie soundtracks there once he's managed to get this piano sonata out of the way.

Partly due to the aforementioned isolation, Kilnsgate has been largely unoccupied for close to sixty years, and Lowe discovers a few previously undisclosed details about the place from real estate agent Heather Barlow who turns up with a basket of supplies shortly after he has moved in.

Heather's marriage is on the verge of a break-up, and there's definitely a degree of chemistry evident from the start, so a mixture of introspective musing on past affairs and possible developments makes a significant counterpoint to Lowe's musings on a once notorious but now largely forgotten murder scandal with excerpts from Grace Fox's wartime journal and a volume of Famous Trials by Sir Charles Hamilton Morley which goes a long way to filling in the back story, which runs something like this:

On a wintry New Year's Eve a snowstorm isolates Kilnsgate House, where a dinner party has been followed by the sudden death of Dr Ernest Fox, the apparent victim of a heart attack. Allegations that Grace and her much younger lover planned to do away with her husband soon emerge, along with suggestions Dr Fox was about to take up a position in the south (a move that would separate the lovers). As it turns out, Grace and her husband seem to have quarrelled about the appointment, though the argument doesn't stem from the obvious motivation.

Grace is convicted and executed, the lover, an artist, moves to Paris where Lowe tracks him down and garners further details about the past, and the gradual unfolding of events leads Lowe to South Africa with the whole matter seemingly nutted out only to learn that he's barking up an entirely wrong tree.

Actually, he's "so far off target they'd have to send out a search party for the truth."

The truth, as it turns out, has been signalled fairly comprehensively on the way through, particularly in the latter sections of Grace's journal, and while there's no way of confirming the objective truth you're left (or at least I was) with the feeling that if it actually was homicide Grace's wartime experiences make it an understandable act.

Things aren't quite the way they seemed as far as Mr and Mrs Lowe are concerned either, and there's a neat twist involving the victims' son and his own offspring.

All in all, an intriguing read that isn't going to parlay itself into a series unless Robinson can pull some rather spectacular rabbits out of the authorial hat. It's difficult to see how Mr Lowe and Ms Barlow are going to find further cases to follow up, and this isn't a plot line that would have worked with Inspector Banks and his colleagues either.

Or rather, it might have, but you'd have to forego the Chris Lowe first person narrative, wouldn't you?

As stated, Before the Poison is an intriguing read that had me turning the pages over about a day and a half, which says something about Robinson's writing ability.

Peter Leonard "All He Saw Was The Girl"

Another lively little read set in Detroit and the environs of Rome from Peter Leonard. He apparently wants to get away from Detroit, and does a pretty good job of it here.

Secret Service agent Ray Vanelli's wife is having an affair with Mafia hard man Joey Palermo in Detroit and when Palermo learns she's married and establishes her husband's occupation decamps to his uncle's villa outside Rome, followed by a husband who wants his missus back.

Meanwhile two American exchange students hijack a taxi in Rome at the end of a drinking binge. and while they're being held in jail they cross paths with a couple of dudes from 'Ndrangheta, the Calabrian mafia. Chip Tallenger is the son of a rich US Senator, and Dad's able to extract them from this particular predicament but the story attracts the attention of the Italian press and a captioning error on the attached photo has the 'Ndrangheta dudes plotting a kidnapping but snatching the wrong student.

Ex-ice hockey player McCabe is, however, able to escape and sets about turning the tables to get the ransom money back by kidnapping the girl who lured him into the honey trap, who happens to be the head kidnapper's girlfriend and Joey Palermo's cousin.

That's all you need in the way of a plot outline, and the to-ing and fro-ing has things rattling along very nicely all the way to the end where, predictably, McCabe gets the girl.

Overall another well-written action packed effort you race through to see how things sort themselves out. An easy and highly entertaining  read, but a read oncer to borrow from the library rather than buy and place on the shelves…

Donna Leon "Friends In High Places"

Having read Tobias Jones' The Dark Heart of Italy and reached the conclusion that writers of Italian crime fiction (or, more accurately, crime fiction set in Italy) are probably understating things on the grounds that non-Italian readers wouldn't believe the reality I found the starting scenes in Donna Leon's Friends In High Places quite believable.

We've got our own heritage bureaucracy, of course, and some of their actions get people in these parts quite het up, but the local authorities wouldn't be too likely to barge into your home suggesting that it might need to demolished because they don't have any record that suggests it exists.

From my readings of Italian crime fiction, on the other hand, I find that situation quite plausible.

In any case, that's the situation Commissario Guido Brunetti finds himself in when a bureaucrat from the Ufficio Catasto calls on him at home one Saturday morning. They're in the process of consolidating the official records and sorting out anomalies and they can't find anything on the official record from the time the top floor apartment was built.

In the process of remonstrating about the obvious absurdity of the situation Brunetti notes that Franco Rossi apparently suffers from an extreme form of vertigo, which makes him suspicious when Rossi is found at the foot of the scaffolding at the front of a property being redeveloped. There's a bit of stuffing around at the hospital, and Rossi has ended up dead. When he arrived at the emergency ward with head injuries and two broken arms the doctor decided to send him to Orthopaedics to have the fractures treated before he went into shock. They were supposed to forward him to Neurology, didn't, the patient dies and Brunetti reads about it in the paper and decides to check things out.

It certainly looks like it's either an accident or suicide, but people with a severe dislike of heights don't willingly go climbing on scaffolding, do they?

Equally significant is the fact that Rossi had been in touch with Brunetti regarding something that looks suspiciously like corruption in his workplace.

As far as the reaction to the threatened demolition of their apartment goes, Brunetti and his wife agree on the approach that needs to be taken, but disagree on who to use to get it done. As far as Paola is concerned her father, a Venetian nobleman with connections right at the top of the pecking order is the obvious choice while Guido reckons they'll be able to call in favours from someone among their friends rather than relying on the father-in-law.

Calling in favours, or expecting them to be done for you is apparently common practice in Venetian circles and Brunetti is required to do a spot of fixing when Vice-Questore Patta’s son is arrested for selling drugs. There's also a disturbing death through an overdose that needs to be investigated but looking into that too closely might have implications for the boss's son.

Along the way Brunetti also becomes aware of the activities of a couple of loan sharks and the whole bundle of strands continually returns to what's emerging as the central theme of Italian crime fiction - cronyism and corruption at the highest levels of government and society, the ways it trickles down through society and what ethical people with some degree of moral integrity can do about it.

In the end, however, there's not a great deal Brunetti can do. Everyone involved (or at least everyone who isn't occupying the very bottom rungs of the pecking order, who don't have too many friends at all) have Friends In High Places and even after he's found Rossi's killer and established the motive behind the killing there's not a great deal he can actually do about it.

He manages, predictably, to do something in his own small way, but it's hardly the sort of consequence the perpetrators deserve and Brunetti's reaction to the personal, moral and professional challenges he encounters that makes the series such a reliable source of reading pleasure.

Katherine Howell "Cold Justice"

Given Katherine Howell's past as an ambulance officer there's a degree of detail as Georgie Daniels and old school friend but now working partner who'll be writing an assessment Freya Craig go about their business that means some readers might be casting Cold Justice into the too much information, no thanks basket.

Cardiac arrests, emergency procedures, projectile vomiting, that kind of thing.

On the other hand, when you've taken out the gory (actually, more gritty) ambo detail, you're left with a rather cleverly worked crime novel that drops hints along the way in the approved manner and delivers the denoument in a flurry at the end. It's a very good read, and has resulted in Howell's other three Ella Marconi titles going on the Watch out for these list.

I'm not, on the other hand, particularly inclined to rush out and grab them right away.

Georgie Daniels is coming off a number of personal and professional issues in an ambulance station in rural New South Wales, has been temporarily relocated to The Rocks and is facing an appraisement that could terminate her career. The responsibility of writing the assessment has been handed to Freya Craig, coincidentally her very best friend from high school days, though she'd disappeared shortly after Georgie found the body of fellow student, Tim Pieters, hidden amongst bushes, in a murder case that remained unsolved for close to twenty years.

The case, however, has been reopened after political pressure. Tim's cousin is now a State MP on the Government side and the cold case is assigned to Detective Ella Marconi, who's coming off a wounding in the course of duty.

Howell runs the threads of the story line together nicely, with most of the major players looking over their shoulders, even if it's only (in Ella Marconi's case) in frustration at the continual interruptions by well-meaning parents who are being aided and abetted by her boyfriend. There's a message in here and it's something along the lines of Never give a doting Italian mother a mobile phone and teach her how to send text messages.

That's a lighter note that goes down well amidst the personal issues as Marconi carefully works back over the details of the case and anonymous tipsters throw in suggestions that the girl who found the body knows more than she's letting on.

Actually, most of those involved know more than they're letting on, and while the reader's aware that this is the case Howell keeps the actual details well veiled until the rush that unravels the mystery at the end.

A good read and I'll be back for more, though not, perhaps, in a hurry. A good author to bear in mind for a rainy day when you really need something good to read.

Roddy Doyle "The Dead Republic"

While you don't always get the chance to read a series of novels in the right order there's always a desirable sequence, and, as a corollary, an undesirable one.

I came to Roddy Doyle's trilogy about the life and times of Henry Smart through a passing reference to his role as Louis Armstrong's white man in a review of 2004's Oh, Play That Thing, hunted it down and, having read it, set off in search of A Star Called Henry.

Oh, Play That Thing worked well enough as a stand alone story with the back story that explained Henry Smart's hasty exit from Ireland efficiently filled in, and going from there to A Star Called Henry enriched that back story and provided ample explanation for someone's involvement with the antecedents of recent Irish Republican terrorist attacks.

It must be difficult for someone sitting around the cusp of the twenty-first century, back in that pre-GFC period when Ireland was still the Celtic Tiger and offered tax-free status to creative writers to grasp the awful realities of slum life in urban Dublin a century earlier.

Having read A Star Called Henry I was left wondering why anyone wouldn't have gone down the path that took Henry Smart from the Dublin slums to become the youngest participant in the Easter Rising and from there to assassin status in the revolutionary years from 1916 to 1921.

It's also obvious tthere are some people you don't want around after the desired result of revolutionary activity looks to be within reach, so I could understand why someone would be signing the hard man's death warrant, and, equally, why the hard man would be looking to make himself scarce.

Smart's flight across the Atlantic brings him right into the middle of the Jazz Age and the Great Depression, and while you could take issue with the likelihood of the detail, Smart's reunion with his wife, who happens to have also been his teacher and partner in terrorist action, provides the basis for a lively run through the thirties, culminating in the fall from a box car that costs Smart a leg and separates him from his family.

He's still doing it tough and sleeping rough when he crawls off into the desert to die, only to be resurrected at the end of Oh, Play That Thing when  a casual act of urination brings movie director John Ford into the equation and provides a starting point for The Dead Republic.

While it's possible to take issue with some of the detail up to this point things work well enough as a narrative to encourage the reader to suspend disbelief and accept repeated coincidences that seem, on the surface, to be far too coincidental to be based in reality.

Which is where the sequencing bit comes in. While the best sequence to read the trilogy is 1-2-3, my 2-1-3 spread over five or six years worked for me, and having gone 2-1 I was scanning the literary horizon for 3, which slipped by unnoticed a little over twelve months ago and probably appeared in the reviews section of The Weekend Australian within a week or two of Hughesy's giving it the flick pass.

I may well have passed over a hard copy without noticing on one of my infrequent bookshop visits but a Google a couple of weeks ago advised of the book's existence, and since there was a digital version in the Kindle store, here we are with a three-part story that runs through the later years of what would have been a remarkable life.

The story begins with Henry Smart's resurrection as 'IRA consultant’ as Irish-American director John Ford sets out to turn Henry’s story into a screenplay. He eventually does, though The Quiet Man, directed by Ford and starring John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara, bears absolutely no resemblance to the details we know from A Star Called Henry.

The recasting of reality into something that will work on screen and at the box office forms the basis of conversations in which Henry recounts his story and Ford suggests cinematic and commercial alternatives that fluff up the romance, knock off the rough edges and recasts the narrative into sentimental Emerald Isle stereotypes.

Revisiting that back story has Henry setting out to revisit old haunts – the house in which he lived with former schoolmistress fellow revolutionary Miss O'Shea scenes of ambushes and avenues of escape before he lit out for the States to avoid being rubbed out by former colleagues.

As he becomes disillusioned with the trivialisation of his story, he beats up the director and abandons the set in the west of Ireland.

Henry settles into a Dublin suburb, working as a gardener, then as the janitor at a boys' school, where he intimidates over-zealous teachers who beat their students. He's a popular figure who's wary of becoming too well known until a bomb planted by Northern Irish Protestants explodes in 1974.

Injured in the blast, Henry becomes a Republican hero thanks to a journalist who writes a story full of inaccurate details accompanied by a photograph of someone else. The Provisional IRA, believing Henry was a member of the 1921 government, want to use him to drum up support for the republican cause in the north and as hunger strikers in Long Kesh begin to die, he's a valuable propaganda tool.

As was the case with Ford, we've got people who want to reshape his story for their own purposes.

Henry has more personal concerns which centre around the reunion with the woman who was his wife and the daughter he left behind. As a symbol of Ireland's struggle for independence and a focus for the Republican movement he knows he's a fraudulent symbol of the past as history becomes myth.

Henry is only too aware of the savagery that achieved independence and while he goes through the motions for his new masters he's disillusioned with continuing violence and unimpressed by the emerging reality.

As the culmination of an intriguing trilogy there is, at times, a sense of frantic tying together of sundry threads, and while some readers may have difficulty suspending the old disbelief (the reunion with Miss O'Shea definitely seems to be stretching it a bit too far) the recasting of a history of hardship and hardheadedness to justify the random violence of the Troubles gets skewered neatly here.

Henry Smart has been there and done that, and his reaction to the I.R.A. Provos who split from the moderate “official” I.R.A. reflects a remark from an elderly relative of an acquaintance with some Republican form and an Irish lilt to the voice. He's stuck, however, because the Provos and the Irish police have found enough about his past and his activities to ensure that he toes the party line.

Neatly entwining historical fact and fictional fancy, the three volume saga unwinds with an intriguing mix of stark detail, mordant black humour and presents Ireland, its nationalist ethos and its romance with America over the last century in a light that emphasises the tragedy that comes as revolutionary spirit is trivialised into institutionalised violence.

George Pelecanos "The Cut"

A sense of place is a strange creature when you're reading fiction set in a particular location, and with almost all of George Pelecanos' sixteen novels set in the gritty streets of downtown Washington D.C. the reader may or may not feel the need for a map to accompany the narrative as the characters make their way through the setting.

I've griped before about the matter of maps in fiction, most recently re. Ian Rankin's Glasgow, noting books with Reading Group Notes at the back accompanied by a map, although it's impossible to locate most of the locations in the story on the map.  If you go to the trouble of whacking a map inside the covers you might as well select one that allows the reader to figure out (at least roughly) where we are.

Most of us, for example, aren't overly familiar with the geography of downtown Washington, so you might think some form of cartographic assistance would be appreciated, but Pelecanos has a style that slips over the ground well enough to make one unnecessary.

If you wanted to quibble about it, you might end up interpreting the detail thrown into the narrative here as padding (there's certainly enough of it there to raise that suspicion) but it's almost a case of an author who renders the question of an accompanying map immaterial by going to a level where you'd need a small scale street directory if the anorak brigade were going to be able to check these things out.

The main issue, as far as I can see, is keeping the reader going, turning the pages and heading towards the conclusion and Pelecanos manages to do that rather well. He's a class act, and I don't recall spending any more than a day or two on any of his previous efforts because I wanted to find out the ending.

Which is what it's all about in crime fiction isn't it?

I'd actually gone off Mr P's work a while back, largely due to the psycho'd out factor, but this time around there's less focus on the extreme end of the psycho- and sociopath spectrum, though you wouldn't be wanting to run across any of these dudes late at night in a dark alley.

Iraq War veteran Spero Lucas has picked up a nice little earner as an unlicensed private investigator, doing the leg work for, among others, a prominent criminal lawyer. On the side he tracks down objects that have gone missing, operating on a 40% commission. The two strands of his career run together when his work on the ground results in a teenage kid getting off a car stealing rap, largely because Spero's photographic investigations of the scene of the arrest calls the accuracy of the eye witness testimony into question.

Those photographic investigations are, by the way, carried out using the private investigator's new best friend, the iPhone. As Spero mentions at one point he could have taken a camera, a notebook and a voice recorder but he's got the lot in a device that fits in the palm of his hand.

We soon learn the kid's father is a wholesale drug dealer on remand while he waits to go on trial. His operation is running on, managed by his two lieutenants who he apparently trusts implicitly. They're bringing large quantities of marijuana into Washington via FedEx, with deliveries going to unattended addresses where the swift removal of the object in question isn't going to attract attention.

The problem is that, within the five minute window between delivery and the planned removal someone else has made off with a couple of packages. Anwan Hawkins wants his stuff back, and he's willing to pay the 40% so…

His two trusted lieutenants, however, get taken out early in the piece, and while you'd think that would be the end of the matter Spero has turned up enough to be going on with and a text message on the iPhone provides the key to figuring out what should have been a pair of run of the mill and forensic free drugland killings.

On that basis, things are straightforward, but Spero's digging has brought a few other elements into the mix, including a teenage kid with a movie fixation who actually saw the delivery go missing but needs to have the information coaxed out of him, The intern from the lawyer's office gives Spero the means to utilise the clue (once he's figured out what it was) and a couple of opportunities to get his rocks off in the interim. Actually, I guess, the 'er rather than the 'im, but I digress…

As a red-blooded twenty-nine-year-old with some catching up to do she's not the only flame in town, though what his adopted mother (he's the white non-Greek adopted son of an Orthodox family that also took in two black kids) would make of his nocturnal activities is best left to the imagination.

Spero's also remarkably well acquainted with the quality end of the D.C. dining scene, which definitely helps when you're setting things up for the horizontal mambo and trying to persuade someone to do you a small favour via an anonymous phone call on an untraceable mobile.

His brother, who teaches at the all-black high school a block away from the scene of the most recent heist, also slots in as a fairly significant player on the goodies' side, while the other side has a cop who's been inveigled into the heist by his ex-rogue cop father and a couple of heavies who'll take out the opposition with no compunction whatsoever.

It's a limited cast, but one that allows Pelecanos to explore issues related to masculinity and the question of whether you take your responsibilities seriously. Spero's brother obviously does, coming across as a dedicated teacher devoted to getting some of his pupils out of the ghetto. Spero might have issues of his own but he's headed (more or less) in the right direction and Anwan Hawkins may be looking down the barrel of a long stretch inside but once he's had the merchandise retrieved (it's a territorial rather than a financial matter) and Spero's collected his commission the rest of the proceeds are going to his ex-missus who's looking after the formerly wayward son.

With the dudes on the other side, however, responsibility doesn't enter into the equation. Sure, they deal drugs, kill people and the rest of it, but the notional good guys aren't exactly spotless. The good guys do, however, look after their families, respect their women and maintain a relationship with their kids.

But they're not all totally irredeemable. Re-establishing contact with his father brought errant cop Larry Holley into the intrigue, but when he has to make a choice…

Sharp, well-written crime fiction that's a satisfying read and may well parlay into an extended series.

You won't be needing a street map.

Marco Vichi "Death in August"

While it's always good to get in on the ground floor and start off a crime fiction series right at the beginning, there are certain side issues that emerge alongside the pleasure of making a new and interesting discovery.

In this case, having read and enjoyed Marco Vichi's Death in August those issues include the fact that Vichi's work is translated into English by Stephen Sartarelli, whose regular translation gigs include Andrea Camilleri's Montalbano series.

Sartarelli is, as far as I can gather, a full-time translator, but you can't help thinking more commissions means a slower rate of processing the translations…

While it was Sartarelli's presence in the background that drew my attention to Death in August endorsements from, among others, Andrea Camilleri had a bit to do with the order going in, along with references to Florence and food. It certainly seemed like a promising combination.

It's mid-summer in 1963 and with most Florentines away on holidays there isn't a lot to keep Inspector Bordelli occupied. An elderly wealthy woman isn't answering the phone but the bedroom light is still on, so her daytime companion contacts the police around midnight. The Signora is one of those people who take their own security seriously, so the companion doesn't have a key to let herself in and investigate matters for herself.

The companion's sure Signora Pedretti has been murdered, so while it's the middle of the night Bordelli, suffering from heat and incessant mosquito attacks, heads for the house in the hills above the city, and finds the Signora's body in bed, apparently the victim of a severe asthma attack.

She had, Bordelli learns, a violent allergy to a particular strain of South American pollen, though a double dose of her medication should have been enough to save her.

Things, however, don't quite add up.

While there's apparently untouched asthma medication on the bedside table, and some in the mouth a number of inconsistencies turn up in the autopsy to suggest foul play.

The question is how anyone could have committed murder without a set of keys or access to the house.

It becomes, in other words a how rather than a whodunnit, and while he's pondering how to prove his suspicions in court, with little in the way of official duties to occupy his time, Bordelli becomes the mentor of a Sardinian recruit whose father was Bordelli's comrade in the Resistance during World War Two.

Recollections, reminiscences and flashbacks to wartime action take up a substantial part of the story.

The investigation brings Bordelli into contact with the victim's family - an eccentric brother who's an inventor, and a couple of nephews who would expect to benefit from the will, and are, along with their wives, fairly obvious suspects. They're an unlikeable quartet with what seems to be a set of cast iron alibis, so it seems to be a matter of working on them until someone cracks (which in turn revolves around finding the how, doesn't it?)

When he's not reminiscing about wartime experiences, his childhood sexual awakening and the ins and outs of the matter under investigation, Bordelli's planning a dinner party for the circle of acquaintances that will presumably become regular characters as the rest of the series unfolds.

As with all these series, it's the background cast that provide the basis to keep the reader interested, particularly when there's not a lot happening as far as the investigation is concerned.

Some of them are, more or less, predictable.

Piras, the Sardinian recruit looks like the inevitable off-sider and sounding board, while we also encounter the regulation quirky pathologist. Quirky pathologists seem to be de rigeur for any self-respecting crime series and crusty curmudgeon Diotivede fits the bill to a pathological T.

There would, one suspects, also be an on-going place for the victim's brother around the dinner table which may prove to be one of the centre pieces of the series.

Some of the supporting characters who end up around the table for the drunken dinner that supplies the inspiration Bordelli needs to crack the case are less predictable.

Bordelli has an idiosyncratic attitude to law enforcement and a sympathy towards people who steal to feed themselves that's bound to create on-going issues with his superiors, so it probably comes as no surprise to learn several of his closest acquaintances are petty criminals.

There's an ex-convict with extraordinary culinary skills, a semi-retired petty thief who turns out to be a useful odd job man, and a retired prostitute. As the basis for an on-going series it's a cast that works rather well.

While it only runs to a tad over 200 pages (the volume's padded out with a chunk of the sequel, a fact that obscured the Translator's Notes we've come to expect where Santarelli's involved) Death in August is substantial enough to establish Bordelli as a figure worth following.

He comes across (at least to this reader, as in all cases your mileage may vary) as a likeable, idiosyncratic maverick, not a million miles from Andrea Camilleri's Montalbano in his social and political leanings, with a wartime background that should be a significant element as the rest of the series unfolds and offers all sorts of possibilities.

He's compassionate, conscientious enough to see things through to the end, quite willing to take short cuts where necessary but inclined to keep hammering away until someone cracks where the short cut doesn't exist.

Having stated that it was Stephen Sartarelli's presence as translator that brought me to the series, while the story lacks some of the dialect issues you'd find with Camilleri and Catarella, the translation reads smoothly and there's little to indicate that the story wasn't originally written in English. He's a class act.

The second in the series, Death in the Olive Grove isn't due out in hardback until January next year, and based on the relative slimness of Death in August I'd be inclined to wait for the paperback for $15 from Fishpond, rather than the $22 they're asking for the hardback pre-order.

Still, with the US paperback of Camilleri's The Potter's Field out later this month I'll have something to fill in part of the wait.

Kinky Friedman "Ten Little New Yorkers"

Well, I guess that there are eight homicides and two presumed fatalities in Ten Little New Yorkers suggests that's about it for the Kinkster, folks.

I've had a feeling that Mr Friedman was starting to run out of ideas through the last few volumes. Where once the crime side of the plot line hit the ground running, Curse of the Missing Puppet Head almost seemed to have Chinga Chavin's little difficulty with the hit and run accident thrown in to provide the Kinkster with something to do that would require a little celebration once it was accomplished, and the celebration, in turn, provided the excuse to locate the missing object.

In much the same way, the dose of malaria in Prisoner of Vandam Street provides an excuse for a gathering of the usual suspects (the Village Irregulars) and the crime, when it kicks in, serves to provide them something to spark off as they question the Kinkster's sanity and long term health prospects.

This time around, with winter chills slowing activity around Vandam Street to a near halt (even Winnie Katz's lesbian dance class has gone into hibernation and the cat has gone missing), the Kinkster lights out for the warmth of Texas.

He's not there long, though. A phone call from Mz Katz reveals the discovery of someone's wallet on the floor of a certain loft, and a subsequent call from Detective Sergeant Mort Cooperman has him winging his way back to the Big Apple to assist police with their enquiries.

The wallet found on the floor belonged, as it turns out, to a certain Robert Scalopini, who seems to have been the fourth in a series of brutal murders and the killings keep on coming, along with clues on the crime scene that seem to point towards a certain well known ex-country singer and amateur private detective or a close acquaintance with an in depth knowledge of his habits and music.

Maybe that's why the only Village Irregulars on hand are McGovern, whose articles on the killings aren't actually helping matters, and Ratso, cast in his regular and seemingly preferred role as Watson to the Kinkster's Sherlock.

While we don't get a cut and dried solution to the murders it's pretty clear that we've reached the end of the Kinkster series. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that, in the end, the stories are as much about the Irregular interaction as they are about the crimes themselves, and there are only so many ways that the regular elements - Ratso, McGovern, Rambam, the cat, the puppet head, lesbian dance classes, Big Wong's and the other landmarks around Greenwich Village - can be arranged, and Friedman has run out of possibilities.

Given the fact that Friedman has spun a reasonably limited palette out to eighteen titles that probably comes as no surprise, and while I've reached the end of the series they'll continue to provide reasonably easy and relatively lightweight reading while I'm in transit between airports and waiting around on the ground.

They're not everyone's cup of tea, but if you've tried one and liked it, they're rather moreish...

Kinky Friedman "The Prisoner of Vandam Street"

After spending the first half of Curse of the Missing Puppethead distracted by the disappearance of the device used to deliver the key to 199B Vandam Street to visitors, Kinky Friedman goes one step further in The Prisoner of Vandam Street, confining himself to base for the whole story (on doctor's orders in the novel, but let's speculate about the authorial intention here).

Like the preceding volume it takes a while for the Kinkster to get to a case that needs solving, and this time around he sets things up so that he's not going to be the one doing the solving.

Fictional Friedman is drinking with McGovern when he collapses, the victim of a long dormant dose of malaria, involving Plasmodium falciparum, the "truly deadly" quarter of the four strains of the disease, presumably contracted while on Peace Corps duty in Borneo. It's a serious enough case to have him spending a lengthier spell than he'd have preferred in hospital (invariably spelt horespital) and when he's finally allowed to go home he's confined to barracks for at least six weeks.

It's a situation guaranteed to produce a severe case of cabin fever even if he hadn't been surrounded by supportive Greenwich Village Irregulars who, predictably, set about turning the apartment into the proverbial den of iniquity and drunken debauchery with catering by Pete Myers of Myers of Keswick.

In a rare moment of solitude amid the Irregular party action, Kinkster finds himself looking out the kitchen window through a pair of opera glasses, watching a young woman in an apartment across the street.

What starts off as a piece of harmless perving turns ugly when a man appears and brutally attacks her.

As far as the observer is concerned, he's witnessed a crime, but when he calls the cops, but they fail to find find a victim, an apartment or any other witness who has seen or heard anything suspicious.

Predictably, while the Kinkster insists there's been foul play hiss support group, Ratso, McGovern, Brennan, Myers and a VB-swilling Piers Akerman just in from Australia, are convinced it's all the result of a fevered imagination.

As a result, Village Irregular vigilance intensifies, and the Kinkster Irritability Index soars to an all-time high, while the cat embarks on a vicious turd dumping campaign targetting Ratso's back pack and similar paraphernalia.

Kinky sticks to his story and a few days later sights the man again, this time with a gun. He becomes convinced he's witnessing a cycle of domestic violence that will eventually escalate as far as murder.

Fortunately, Hollywood-based licensed private investigator Kent Perkins gives him the benefit of the doubt and arrives on the scene to look into the case. Perkins starts the investigation on the Internet before bringing his full array of resources, including hypotism, to bear as he sets about establishing whether Kinky's claims are real, identify the woman and contact her with reassurances that there is an escape route available should she wish to avail herself of it.

Along the way there are all the elements the Friedman fan has come to expect, though one suspects that Friedman the author is running out of new situations to land his fictional alter ego into, a suspicion that's got a lot to do with the Kinkster-free Kill Two Birds reviewed recently and the fact that he spends about half of Curse of the Missing Puppet Head and this story filling in a back story that has little to do with the actual investigation.

Still, as someone who's been along for the ride for close to twenty years and knows pretty much what lies in store, the prospect of eventually running out of a series long on lesbian dance troupes, grinning puppet heads, gratuitous feline defecation, an abundant supply of alcohol, Cuban cigars and yum cha isn't something I'm looking forward to...

There is (or should that be are?) however, only Ten Little New Yorkers to go.

William Least Heat-Moon "Roads to Quoz"

When you're looking at lifetime achievements, you may well be pushing it to findsomeone who could match the following statement:

If you put your finger on a map of the United States, I have been within at least 25 miles of that place.

William Least Heat-Moon (if you want to be pernickety and stick with things like birth certificates, William Lewis Trogdon, born 27 August 1939) made that statement, and, according to p. 504 of Roads to Quoz he's got the details logged in a 1966 U.S. road atlas to prove it.

You may look at that statement, and the topographical corroboration and ask why anyone would bother.

In that case you'd probably be advised to read no further, because Least Heat-Moon isn't likely to be your cup of tea.

On the other hand, having read and thoroughly enjoyed Blue Highways: A journey into America, PrairyErth (A Deep Map) and River Horse: A Voyage Across America I was lining up for a copy of Least Heat-Moon's latest wanderings as soon as I noted its existence, though I must admit it took me a while to get through it.

Least Heat-Moon isn't the sort of writer that'll have you churning through the pages to find out what happens in the end, the way I've done recently with Stephen Booth and Stuart MacBride crime novels. It's more a case of keeping the book beside the reading chair and delving into the next part when the mood takes you.

And if the mood doesn't take you for a day, or a week, that's fine. It took me two months to finish a book that I started soon after it landed in the P.O. box in late June.

To deal with a few background issues…

First, the name.

Least Heat-Moon, whose genealogical background traces back through English, Irish and Amerindian (specifically Osage) roots, is the second son of a man who called himself Heat Moon. Since the big brother was Little Heat Moon, the youngest son would be Least Heat Moon, assuming, of course, there are no further siblings down the line.

Second, the other titles in what's not an over-large bibliography given a writing career that stretches back over three decades.

1982's Blue Highways, effectively the travel journal associated with a three-month road trip in 1978 identified him as a writer worth following.

Losing your job and separating from your wife is likely to leave a bloke at a loose end, and while some might be inclined to mope and hit the bottle, Heat-Moon hit the road, specifically the secondary roads coloured in blue on U.S. road maps, avoiding cities and travelling the back blocks as he circumnavigated the United States in a van called Ghost Dancing.

Elvis Costello's My Dark Life contains references to obscure locations like Ugly Texas, Nameless Tennessee and Peculiar Missouri, and while the index to Blue Highways is completely bereft of mentions of Ugly and Peculiar the asterisk beside Nameless indicated a place of encounter or extended comment, as do similar marks beside such intriguing locations as Dime Box, Texas and Tuba City Arizona.

That sort of travelogue isn't the sort of thing that can be repeated ad nauseum, though there will be some who'd be inclined to try, and Heat-Moon followed it with an ecological and historical account of Chase County, Kansas in PrairyErth (A Deep Map): An Epic History of the Tallgrass Prairie Country.

He's writing about a place where towns have populations under a thousand, and there's not much more than the odd creek running through prairie grassland, though it's rather close to the geographic centre of the continental United States. You'd expect an author would be pushing the proverbial uphill with a forked stick to get anything much out of such a subject, but this rather hefty tome weighs in at over six hundred pages.

Not something you're likely to devour in a single rushed read, but worth exploring for those who find that sort of thing intriguing.

PrairyErth appeared in 1991, and was followed eight years later by River Horse: A Voyage Across America, at around five hundred pages a slightly lighter effort, though readers who've been aboard from the start would know what to expect as the author takes four months to travel from coast to coast by boat trip in a flat-hulled twenty-two foot C-Dory he named Nikawa (in Osage, that's River Horse). He doesn't quite manage to get all the way by water, but the reader will be surprised how close he actually gets…

Then, another nine years later, with a side excursion into history with 2002's Columbus in the Americas, Roads to Quoz:An American Mosey sort of takes up where Blue Highways left off. This time, rather than starting here and proceeding on a single journey till he arrives there he's detailing a number of shorter journeys over a number of years in the company of his lawyer/historian wife Jo Ann, referred to throughout as Q.

The assumed destination, Quoz, in case you're wondering, is an 18th-century word that can be defined as anything strange, incongruous, or peculiar.

I'd add obscure to that little definition.

Readers with an interest in world exploration may have heard of the Lewis and Clark expedition, commissioned by Thomas Jefferson to find a direct & practicable water communication to the north-west Pacific coast of the United States, study the plants and animal life along the way and discover how the region could be exploited. Heat-Moon covers some of the same territory in River Horse close to two centuries later.

Lewis and Clark were examining the upper portion of the territory added to the United States through the Louisiana Purchase, and even if the reader is aware of them, you've probably never heard of the Dunbar-Hunter Expedition of 1804 which travelled through  the lower part of the Purchase, following the course of the Ouachita River from its source in Arkansas to its confluence with the Mississippi and provides one of the starting points for Down an Ancient Valley, the first of half a dozen journeys chronicled in Roads to Quoz that covered around  twenty-five thousand kilometres of wanderings over three years.

Along the way he takes the reader to the Great Mound, the second-highest pre-Columbian earthworks in America, erected by a remarkable civilization a thousand years before Civil War soldiers built a gun emplacement on the top and Louisiana Governor Huey Long's highway department reduced the rest of it to almost street level in 1931, removing a significant archeological feature for use as road fill.

From there, it's off to meet a friend from university who wants to investigate the vanishing waterman’s taverns along Florida’s Gulf Coast. That's a trip for the boys, with the wives off on a side trip as the husbands travel through the state's panhandle, searching for the lost Florida that's maybe a step ahead of extinction through development, and finding the Road to Nowhere which turns out to be a landing strip for the local drug running fraternity.

As you may have gathered the narrative ranges widely across the landscape, tracking down the Quapaw Ghost Light in Missouri, delving into the case of freethinker William Grayson, shot down on the street in Joplin, Missouri, in 1901, and tasting Oklahoma spring water that locals use to kill ticks on dogs.

As you'd expect, the pages abound with characters, a long term correspondent whose carbon footprint was that of a house cat, a man who set out to raise the funds to establish a school for disadvantaged children by massaging lonely widows with special massages, the guy who looks after the thirty-something metre original scroll manuscript of Jack Kerouac's On the Road and men who've set out to photograph every mile of the Ouachita and US highway Route 40, allegedly more significant than the better known Route 66).

That last task is rendered marginally more difficult by the fact that Route 40 no longer exists as an identifiable entity and various sections need to be, more or less, rediscovered. Whether there's much else out there to be discovered would be at consideration when it comes to writing a sequel.

You'd suspect, for example, there's not much point in a similar exercise once you've ridden a bicycle along abandoned railroad tracks. While there are probably plenty of other abandoned railroad tracks out there you'd encounter issues if you wanted to cycle down a lot of them.

Having sailed down the Intracoastal Waterway from Maryland to Florida once, you're probably not going to be doing it again. There seems to be an extension of the Waterway that'd take you from Florida to Texas, but still…

Still, on the basis of Blue Highways and Roads to Quoz, if there are enough chance encounters and idiosyncratic individuals in the United States to form the basis of a third, similar volume, William Least Heat-Moon would be the man to track them down.

He did, after all, parlay a county with an area a tad over two thousand square kilometres and a population (at last count) of less than three thousand into a six hundred page book.

As the man himself puts it, If you leave a journey exactly who you were before you departed, the trip has been much wasted, even if it's just to the Quickee-Mart. That's probably as good a description as you're going to get of the modus operandi of a man who's less interested in where he's going than how he gets there and who he meets along the way.

Heat-Moon's probably an acquired taste, but for those who have an interest in his literary territory (an odd mixture of literature, wordplay, homespun philosophy, history, geography, travelogue and memoir) it's a taste worth acquiring.

Stuart MacBride "Shatter the Bones"

Here's a perfect example of the way a crime fiction series can suck you in,  because if I'd read the blurb on the back cover and noted the Aberdeen's own mother-daughter singing sensation are through to the semi-finals of TV smash-hit Britain's Next Big Star I may well have been inclined to put it back on the shelves.

I may have glanced at that phrase, but the Stuart MacBride on the front of the book meant I wasn't going to be put off by reality TV shows on the back.

Now I wouldn't presume to suggest MacBride shares my aversion for what I regard as a poisonous television genre and my disdain for the audiences that allow themselves to be inveigled into they're only celebrities because the hype machine says they are celebrity gossip, but the genre, its procreators, the participants, and the fans aren't presented in a favourable light.

I haven't made a practice of watching the real life reality TV equivalents of MacBride's fictional Britain's Next Big Star, but I assume a combination like a widowed mother and her six year old daughter singing Wind Beneath My Wings to a deceased Dad killed in action in Iraq mightn't be a good thing to take out the big one at the end of the series but would be guaranteed to keep the publicity machine in overdrive up to the point where they're eliminated and for a few weeks thereafter…

Of course, if some unscrupulous type was to kidnap Mum and daughter and hold them to ransom, publicity machine overdrive would be guaranteed to turn into media feeding frenzy, and if the kidnapper went on to amputate two of the little girl's toes…

With a public appeal to raise the ransom, the glare of media attention and the predictable public vigils there's plenty to keep the Aberdeen police hopping, and it's not as if the regular criminal around the city is going to take a back seat to allow the police to focus their attention on the search for Alison McGregor and daughter Jenny.

It's obvious from the start the kidnapping isn't the work of total amateurs. Those responsible for the act obviously know the ins and outs of forensic evidence and there's nothing on the crime scene, in the phone booth where the severed toes are found or anywhere else that provides anything much in the way of forensic evidence.

MacBride works this side of things very well, delivering a narrative from a couple of viewpoints including the internal thought processes of the kidnapped daughter, who's determined to be a Brave Little Girl through it all. There are a number of clues scattered through there to catch the reader's attention though, of course, none of them are going to help the police with their inquiries.

Those familiar with the series will know what to expect, and MacBride runs through the regular elements while throwing in a few new ingredients to vary the mix.

Journalist Colin Miller continues to drop bombshells in press conferences and on the front page of the local paper. The Aberdeen police are, as usual, undermanned, overworked with the overtime budget blown out of the water, so, as usual there's twenty-four-seven on call involvement for MacRae and his colleagues.

The new element here comes in the form of Superintendent Green from the Serious Organized Crime Agency, who's been landed on them as part of the MacGregor investigation and has obviously based his approach to policing on what he's seen on TV.

There are glimpses of DI Steel's partner and daughter, and given MacRae's tendency to get himself seriously injured in the course of his duties it probably comes as no surprise to learn that his Goth girlfriend ends up in an induced coma in what seems, at first, to be collateral damage as part of an on-going drug investigation.

So, as the investigation into the kidnapping and the on-going dramas associated with a drug bust intertwine, the fan hysteria and the media pressure for a successful outcome build and MacRae's in a position where the temptation to cut corners has implications and intriguing possibilities for the next few titles in what has been a very good series.

It's not, however, one for the faint-hearted, and anyone with an aversion to almost unrelentingly bleak subject matter and extreme violence would be well advised to look elsewhere. DI Steel and Biohazard Bob continue to provide semi-light relief, though neither of them are family dinner table-friendly fare either.

Stuart MacBride "Dark Blood"

The whole point of this book blogging exercise, at least as far as Hughesy is concerned, is to keep track of what's been read and what I thought about it, particularly when I'm looking at an on-going series that will more than likely be re-readi at some indeterminate point in the future.

It's been a while since the last Stuart MacBride title, and with nothing sitting in the archive about any of the preceding five stories in the Logan McRae series I found myself scratching my head fairly early into Dark Blood and wondering whether chain-smoking DI Roberta Steel, the out there and totally unashamed lesbian who leads the Screw-up Squad has been quite as gross in past episodes as she turns out to be here.

You wouldn't expect a female officer in a predominantly male culture like the police force to be a shrinking violet, but I don't recall DI Steel being quite as gross in earlier episodes as she's turning out to be here.

Maybe it's the external pressures of impending parenthood, but she seems to be passing off a substantial chunk of her case load onto DS Logan McRae, creating the territorial turf war with Detective Inspector Beardy Beattie that produces a fair chunk of the tension that's threatening to overwhelm McRae as the Grampians police are handed the responsibility of looking after the relocation of vicious rapist Richard Knox, native of Newcastle with roots in Aberdeen and a penchant for geriatric males.

Knox is a serial offender who might have done his time for the single offence the authorities have managed to pin on him, seems to have got through the prison system surprisingly unscathed, may or may not have found religion, but is definitely a nasty, dodgy and manipulative piece of work.

For some reason his relocation is being overseen by DSI Danby from Northumbria Police, the man who put Knox away but somehow has been transformed into his minder while volunteers from SACRO (Safeguarding Communities Reducing Offending) babysit Knox, and the Grampian Police monitor his security. Danby has a definite interest in something about Knox, though it takes a while before you pick up where he's coming from.

Much of the tension in the book comes from the fact that Knox is hardly the only matter of concern to the Grampians Police, and most of the other matters seem to be landing on Logan McRae's plate with three different superiors pushing him in three different directions, questioning his attitude while they do so. As McRae self-medicates the whole box and dice results in regular interviews with the Professional Standards unit.

Apart from looking after Knox there are issues as Edinburgh hard man Malk the Knife McLennan muscles into the Aberdeen property boom that's coming out of Donald Trump's golf course development, setting up the possibility of a turf war with local crime lord Wee Hamish Mowat. McRae's on the edge of that rivalry as Wee Hamish starts flowing financial largesse his way with envelopes of cash unenthusiastically delivered by Hamish's number one offsider, Reuben, though it's not immediately obvious why.

Then there's reporter Colin Miller, McRae's old sparring partner, who, among other little bombshells, splashes Knox's whereabouts on the front page of the paper. The headline produces waves of protest that end up with Knox's house (actually, it was his grandmother's, but she's long gone) burning down though Knox has been relocated in the meantime.

The key to the main plot line lies in the fact that Knox had been the accountant for the late and not entirely lamented Newcastle heavy Mental Mikey Maitland and presumably knows where his considerable fortune is hidden. Under those circumstances it's no wonder Knox is apparently able to call on outside help that brings about an escape from the “safe” house, where they've relocated him, and it's not long before Danby disappears under suspicious circumstances.

Actually, there are more than two missing persons. A third is Steele's unofficial/unauthorised informant Steve Polmont, gone missing working undercover on one of Malk the Knife's building sites.

As if that's not enough to be going on with, MacBride throws in counterfeit goods, fake banknotes, raids on jewellery shops involving sawn-off sledgehammers, a group of heavies from somewhere or other lurking on the periphery and a lawyer alleging malpractice in the interrogation department after a vindictive DI Beattie has doctored the documentation.

In other words there's plenty there to keep McRae hopping.

Enough, in fact, to have him hitting the bottle to the point where goth crime scene technician girlfriend Samantha is about to call it quits. MacBride handles all this with a deftness that keeps you turning the pages through a fast moving story line with plenty of dark humour and the occasional flatulence-induced belly laugh (and no, they're not all the work of McRae's colleague Biohazard Bob).

Through it all McRae continues to come across as a believable and likeable character who attracts the reader's sympathy as the pressure of his job, along with constant criticism in his personal and professional life produce an entirely understandable attitude problem.

When DI Beattie comes unstuck through his own incompetence I found myself hoping McRae would be getting a well-deserved promotion, though at the same time one hopes he doesn't since that would make DI Steele his equal rather than his superior, a situation that wouldn't have the same je ne sais quoi as the current set of circumstances

Stephen Booth "The Devil's Edge"

Having sorted out some of the Diane Fry issues in Lost River, Stephen Booth has taken the soap opera side of things several steps further in The Devil's Edge but it's always the crime side of things that provides the series with an ongoing raison d'être.

With an apparently well-off couple the victims of a bashing in the course of a home invasion the investigation gives newly promoted Ben Cooper and his squad something to get their teeth into while Diane Fry has been moved sideways into a management-training scheme where boredom and the unwelcome attention of a male colleague brings things unstuck and creates a need to give her something useful to do.

That something comes in the form of an incident involving Cooper's brother, who shoots midnight trespassers. It's a case where conflict of interest rules Cooper out of the investigation, though he's inclined to offer helpful suggestions, regardless of what the regulations might say.

The fact that Cooper's suggestions help to rule out a possible move to Derby is a nice touch as well. Brought in to supervise the Matt Cooper investigation, and with the matter resolved, DCI Mackenzie was preparing to leave when he drops the following bombshell.

You're a real farm girl, aren't you? A proper expert on rural life. I was thinking of offering you a job with my team in Derby, but you're obviously more at home here in the country.

In the rest of the soap opera scenario Ben Cooper and SOCO Liz have announced their engagement, and at the end of the story Diane Fry and the recently recruited war widow and RAF Police veteran Carol Villiers, an old school acquaintance of Cooper's, hitting it off well.

And, with Diane Fry removed from a supervisory capacity, Gavin Murfin, nearing the point where he can collect his superannuation emerges as a wryly sardonic character with an ability to do something other than munch his way through everything in sight.

But it's the latest incidents in what seems to be a series of home invasions that delivers the main plot line here, and it's a particularly strong one this time around. As far as the media are concerned, the events in the middle class rural village of Riddings are the latest burglaries  by a gang they've nicknamed The Savages but Cooper's not so sure.

For a start, unlike other cases in the same suspected series of offences, when Zoe and Jake Barron are bashed the only things that have disappeared are a mobile phone and a wallet. It's not as if their home, set on the edge of an affluent conclave that's hardly your common or garden rural village, lacks objects you'd expect to attract the would-be burglar's attention.

And as Cooper and company set about the investigation it's obvious that Riddings isn't a haven of bucolic tranquility. Nestled at the foot of an imposing ridge of solid rock, Riddings is a community of fenced-off, gated properties where security cameras are the rule rather than the exception, and the inhabitants aren't inclined to socialise outside the annual village show. There's no pub, post office or sense of community and and the villagers almost invariably have personal issues.

There's the village snooper, who discovers Zoe Barron's body and alerts the authorities, a greedy and territorial lottery winner, a disgraced headmaster on leave after an incident with a student and any number of others with a possible motive, the capacity, and in most cases the likely opportunity to do away with a neighbour though there are few obvious leads among an abundance of suspects.

Under a veneer of respectable affluence there's a seething mass of resentment and conflict as a second home is broken into with a victim apparently dead of fright and with the pressure on the investigation is increasingly based around Cooper's instincts as he solves the puzzle. You're left pretty much in the dark until the final rush at the end of the story, which is the way things should run in crime fiction, and Booth has managed this variation on the genre deftly, weaving the main plot line around the side issues and driving things forward right to the very end.

One of the best in the eleven book series, and one that has me looking forward to the sequel.

Kinky Friedman "Curse of the Missing Puppethead"

Curse of the Missing Puppethead didn't appear to have been too widely circulated before The Kinkster started reclaiming and rereleasing his back catalogue as ebooks under his own imprint at Vandam Press. They'll also allegedly be coming out as audiobooks in the foreseeable future.

Coming off reading Kill Two Birds & Get Stoned, it's hard not to ascribe that title's lack of the familiar Kinkster elements to an on-going lack of Kinkster inspiration, given the fact that a substantial chunk of this one involves the search for the device that gives visitors access to the fourth floor loft on Vandam Street.

If you're unfamiliar with this key element in the Kinkster oeuvre, the visitor stands on the sidewalk, hollers up a request for the key, which is lodged in the mouth of a small grinning Negro puppet head which is, in turn, attached to a parachute.

The Kinkster's literally in mid-thrust with an unnamed female associate after a party in the loft when he notices the puppet head ain't where it's supposed to be. The realisation brings with it a case of erectile dysfunction which may account for his failure to turn the loft upside down rather than setting off to investigate the disappearance by interrogating the Greenwich Village Irregulars, each of whom, in turn, pass him on to someone sighted standing near or dealing with the iconic object.

Along the way Kinky's sister calls from Hanoi, incidentally passing on the news that disappearing puppets are seen as a sign of doom in Vietnamese superstition. The curse, in this case, seems to be continued erectile dysfunction in an environment where Lexie, a gorgeous participant in Winnie Katz's lesbian dance class seems intent on exploring her alternative options. It seems that until The Kinkster finds his big puppet head, his little puppet head will continue to be missing in action.

The plot thickens a little over half way through when Kinky's college room mate Nick Chinga Chavin arrives on the doorstep, on the run from The Mob, who are out to avenge the hit-and-run murder of Big Jim Cravotta, the Butcher of Staten Island's son.

Chinga's driver Frank Holmesley has been arrested, confined on Riker's Island and word on the street suggests Chinga is destined for the high jump unless The Kinkster, with assistance from Rambam, can persuade the avenging mobster that there's an alternative explanation for the fatality.

That explanation comes too late to save the driver, but with Chinga holed up in the Vandam Street loft, drinking heavily, reading poetry and bonding with the cat, despite regular deliveries of drink, drugs and pizza, no one thinks to investigate Chavin's known associates, even after Kinky approaches Mafia boss Joe the Hyena to arrange negotiations.

That explanation duly arrives, and, fortunately checks out accurately, so during the ensuing celebrations in the Vandam Street loft once the explanation has been delivered the cat came scooting out from under the couch, chasing before her what appeared to be an extremely dirty ball of yarn. With the missing puppet head restored to its rightful location what follows later that night when Lexie and three beautiful, adventurous young friends stole their way into the place like a band of brigands was probably inevitable.

All in all, a variation on the regular Kinkster elements that's entertaining enough, but one suspects we're getting a little light on for inspiration.

Stephen Booth "Lost River"

After nine stories in the Ben Cooper - Diane Fry series one almost gets the impression that Stephen Booth has said something along the lines of sod this for a joke, time to tie up a few loose ends as far as Diane Fry is concerned.

As far back as series opener Black Dog we've known Diane Fry has personal issues stemming from the sexual assault in Birmingham that prompted her move to Derbyshire's Peak District. After skirting around the issue in subsequent volumes and gradually unpeeling the details of Fry's personal background, particularly her dysfunctional relationship with sister Angie it's hard to see what further mileage Booth is going to get out of the assault as anything other than a disturbing element in Fry's turbulent past.

The prospect of new DNA evidence that could well be the basis for a successful prosecution has Fry heading off to Birmingham on indefinite leave of absence to co-operate with the investigation while her absence provides the excuse for Ben Cooper to get the promotion to Detective Sergeant that was stymied by Fry's arrival on the rural Derbyshire scene.

By the end of the story, however, with Booth having taken the prime suspects for the assault out of the on-going picture, revealing more about Fry's personal background than he managed to give away in nine previous volumes you get the impression that the series is about to veer off in an entirely different direction as Fry seems to be intent on closure that'll involve a posting away from Cooper territory in Derbyshire.

That move doesn't entirely preclude some on-going Cooper-Fry interaction, however, since the failure of the rape prosecution to develop along the lines Fry would have preferred has her departing from her previously straight up and down by the book persona and displaying an unexpected willingness to throw away the rule book and cut corners in direct contravention of the procedures outlined in the standard operating manual.

Cooper, on the other hand, has issues of his own, most of which centre on his involvement in the apparently accidental drowning of eight-year-old Emily Nield. As far as anyone can tell, Emily was mid-stream playing with the family dog when she slipped and fell, hitting her head on a rock. Cooper was in the vicinity, races to the scene of the accident but arrives too late to save Emily's life.

That sort of scenario is going to throw in some personal issues along the I wish I'd been able to do more lines that has Cooper getting closely enough involved with the grieving family to realise that there's something seriously amiss in the background, particularly where teenage computer gamer Alex Nield is concerned.

The reader's reaction to this story in particular is going to depend on where you're coming from as far as the series is concerned, and the departure from the Peak District countryside (the Fry-centric action is, predictably, almost entirely set in Birmingham) way well be getting away from what kept the reader going through the series to date.

Then there are the coincidences that seem to be piling up to an extent that you wouldn't expect in real life as Fry's foster brother and the man who appears to have been her biological father turn up contaminating the DNA evidence that was supposed to be bringing the rape case towards a court appearance.

There are also hints, as Fry goes around her investigations about what went wrong with the prosecution, of some previously unsuspected bigger picture that may well be the new engine that'll take the series forward now that we know, more or less, what happened in the sexual assault and have a fair idea of who was responsible.

Sighting number eleven, The Devil's Edge in the Cannonvale Big W was what prompted the search that turned up Lost River in the local library, and with the series pretty evenly split between what's sitting on my own bookshelves and what's been tracked down using the library card. More will be revealed when I tackle that one, and developments from here will be interesting since Booth has effectively killed off one major plot driver here.

Tim Severin "Corsair", "Buccaneer" and "Sea Robber"

As far as I can recall, I first encountered Tim Severin on television, probably in a doco about one of his recreations of a legendary voyage. He's done a number of such projects, taking historical or mythological figures and retracing a probable route to see how closely the travelogue that has been passed down over the generations resembles what you'd encounter en route today.

I was particularly taken by The Brendan Voyage, more than likely the subject of the aforementioned doco, which took Severin and his offsiders across the Atlantic in a leather currach, retracing the probable route of St Brendan and making it as far as Newfoundland. The legendary Brendan story is full of encounters with sea monsters and other seemingly imaginary phenomena but Severin's account has the voyagers encountering natural and entirely understandable explanations for elements in the legends that could easily be dismissed as the product of ignorance fuelled by an overactive imagination.

There are similar themes running through The Sinbad Voyage, where the same basic outfit sailed a traditional Arab dhow held together with rope made from coconut fibre rather than nails from Oman in the Persian Gulf to China and The Jason Voyage, retracing a route from Greece to Georgia that seems to have been the basis for the quest for the Golden Fleece.

Each of those journeys, along with subsequent recreations of Ulysses' voyage from Troy to Ithaca, a Crusader's travels from France to the Middle East, an attempt to cross the Pacific in a bamboo raft and quests in search of Genghis Khan, Moby Dick, Robinson Crusoe and a voyage through the Spice Islands retracing the travels of evolutionary biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, necessarily involved considerable historical research, which makes Severin a fairly obvious candidate for the sweeping historical saga that sits on the edge of mythology and popular legend.

He's tackled two of those, the Viking trilogy (Odinn's Child, Sworn Brother and King's Man) and the adventures of Hector Lynch, where a seventeen-year-old boy and his sister are captured in southwest Ireland by north African Barbary corsairs from North Africa and the boy goes on to travel to the furthest corners of the known world.

I'd read and enjoyed the Viking series enough to have grabbed Corsair, the first of the Hector Lynch stories, as soon as I spotted it, but having read it I wasn't in a hurry to catch up with the rest of the series.

The Viking series had worked rather well around Thorgils Leiffson, son of Leif Ericson who spends his early years in Greenland before traversing the Norse world, reaching Constantinople before ending up back in Sweden, where he plays a part in the lead-up to William the Conqueror's invasion of England which in turn signals the end of the Viking world.

Apart from the travels and adventures, given the notion that young Thorgils has inherited his mother's mystical second sight, there's an on-going theme running through the series with the clash between the ancient ways and 'Old Gods' of the Norse peoples and the missionary zeal that's bringing the 'White Christ' into the pagan world.

Unfortunately, at least as far as this reader is concerned, the Hector Lynch stories don't hang together quite as well.

The mysticism and the tug of war between the Old Ways and Christianity gave Severin a framework to move the characters through that isn't there after Hector moves through the slave market of Algiers, where he's separated from his sister. The quest to be reunited with her might form the basis of an on-going series she's hardly likely to be travelling to the furthest ends of the known world, is she?

And if she was, having been sold off in Algiers, you'd guess she'd be moving through the Middle East towards Zanzibar, the Seychelles or Mughal India.

Hector, unable to catch up with Elizabeth, teams up with Dan, a Miskito Indian from Central America, converts to Islam to get out of of the slave pens, serves aboard a Turkish corsair vessel and when it's sunk ends up as a French galley slave before being shipwrecked on the coast of Morocco and making his way down the west African coast to the point where Hector, Dan, and French galley slave Jacques find an abandoned vessel that'll take them across the Atlantic to Dan's homeland.

And that's Corsair.

Buccaneer has the trio and a couple of freed African slaves reaching the Caribbean, where Hector falls into the hands of notorious buccaneer, John Coxon who's under the impression that Hector has family connections that'll turn out to be useful in the on-going politicing between the Governor of Jamaica, Sir Thomas Lynch  and his bitter enemy Sir Henry Morgan.

The failure of things to pan out the way Coxon would have liked has Hector on the run again, falling in love with a girl way beyond his station, and ending up in central America where a hurricane and another shipwreck reunites him with Dan and Jacques in time to join a pirate expedition across the mainland to the Pacific. The excursion along the Panama coast turns out to be less lucrative than they'd hoped, though they succeed in capturing a vessel carrying the wife of a high-ranking Spanish official and her attendant, Maria, whose testimony, once Hector has made his way back to England and been arrested for piracy is enough to save him from the gallows.

Sea Robber has Hector in a Danish slaver off the west African coast when his ship is captured by a bunch of buccaneers en route to the South Seas and young Mr Lynch is enlisted to navigate the vessel around Cape Horn, something that will hopefully give him an avenue to be reunited with Maria, whose testimony and the subsequent disgrace of her mistress' husband has seen them relocated to the Thief Islands (Magellan's Ladrones, the modern day Marianas), on the other side of the Pacific.

Having found that out, that's, predictably, where Hector, Dan, Jacques and ex-prizefighter and timbergetter from the Campeachey coast Jezreel are headed. Along the way, finding an emaciated islander adrift on a sinking fishing boat boat. brings them to a poverty-stricken island jealousy guarded by a Japanese warlord.

When they've extricated themselves from that little difficulty, an alliance with the Chamorro, the indigenous people of the Ladrones, and a night raid to release hostages from a Spanish fort reunites Hector and Maria and from there they're off around the edges of the Spice Islands in search of somewhere safe where the young couple can settle down, though safety will necessarily equate to somewhere safely away from Spanish influence.

The quest for a sanctuary will presumably give Severin the subject matter for a fourth Hector Lynch volume, which will presumably get them into the Indian Ocean.

There's no indication that I can see at the time of writing of a fourth volume in the series, but if I had to speculate I'd guess that Hector and Maria will find themselves in some quiet backwater in the Seychelles or the Comoros where Mr Lynch's long lost sister Elizabeth will turn out to be a person of some influence.

Given the fact that I wasn't over-impressed by Corsair, and only grabbed Buccaneer and Sea Robber when I sighted them heavily discounted in one of those el cheapo outlets I don't think I'll be in a hurry to track down the fourth volume if and when it appears.