Garry Disher

I guess, when you look at it, it's fairly obvious why practitioners in the realm of crime fiction tend to base their series around the notional good guys rather than their counterparts from the underworld.

For a start, there's the expectation the forces of justice are going to prevail, at least in the long run, and that means your average criminal is going to be spending his or her share of time safely behind bars, which is hardly the sort of thing you can base a lengthy series around.

Then, when you’re talking about a police procedural the cop shop setting provides the author with a set of characters to develop as the series goes on, with developing relationships, conflicting ambitions and simmering animosity in an environment that more or less equates to just add water, though when you're talking crime fiction the water's going to be something like a psychopath on the loose.

And there's the additional factor that, once you've sorted out one little mystery you can come up with another sociopath, throw him or her into the same setting and you're off again. I suspect it's a bit easier coming up with mysteries that need to be solved than it is to invent crimes that can be successfully committed with the protagonist getting away in the end.

Having run across Garry Disher's The Wyatt Butterfly and The Dragon Man in the local library, I hit The Dragon Man, coincidentally the first title in the Challis and Destry novels first, and it definitely seems like a series that's worth following. 

I spotted Blood Moon on the shelves at the library the other day, and a glance at the blurb on the back suggests that Inspector Challis and officer in charge at the local station Sergeant Ellen Destry end up getting it on together, and you can see that as a logical development of one of the subplots from The Dragon Man as Destry's marriage is subjected to the strains of personal differences, professional ambition and (I'm guessing here) teenage daughters going through a difficult phase.

Those considerations suggest it might be best to read the rest of the series (Kittyhawk Down, Snapshot, Chain of Evidence, Blood Moon and the forthcoming Whispering Death) in sequence.

The two-story The Wyatt Butterfly double-decker omnibus (a natural fit since The Fallout follows straight on from Port Vila Blues), on the other hand, comes late in an already well-established series, and one in which our protagonist is one of the bad guys.

Which explains the earlier musings on today's morning walk. 

As a professional criminal, central character Wyatt needs to get through each story without being caught, not necessarily unscathed but definitely not in the position where he's going to end up cooling his heels in the clink, and based on what was on offer here it looks like a series that's well worth tracking down, though the lack of a cop shop type framework means that reading things in the right order might not be quite so important). 

Given the concept of a professional burglar and hold-up man who operates on his own you're probably going to find each story is more or less self-contained. The standard operating procedure seems to involve having Wyatt embark on a bank robbery, jewel heist or whatever, unaware that there are other influences lurking in the woodwork surrounding his operation.

In Port Vila Blues he starts off with what seems like a straightforward burglary which yields a valuable piece of jewellery that was part of the haul from another robbery and when the corrupt police responsible for that one learn it's back in circulation it comes as no surprise to learn they want to find out what's going on.

The Fallout is exactly that. After escaping from Port Vila with a different bundle of jewellery Wyatt is inveigled into helping his nephew with an art heist while the nephew is being conned into joining a search for bullion in a sunken wreck.

Much of the attraction in both stories lies in the characters that surround Wyatt.

While his nephew is in some ways a chip off the old block, he's an interesting contrast to the cautious, business-like unemotional Wyatt, blowing the proceeds of a series of bank robberies across rural Victoria at the Crown Casino, and keeping a collection of annotated press clippings in his semi-swisho apartment.

The central baddie in Port Vila Blues, the crooked judge De Lisle, is a suitably loathsome piece of work, and the corrupt cops seem professional enough on the surface, but they have their fatal flaws while good cop Liz Redding ends up on the other side, suspended for failure to follow S.O.P.

I'll be off to the library to see about the rest of Disher's work in the two series, but while the Challis/ Destry side of the equation will involve a request for Kittyhawk Down, along with the other Wyatt stories, Kickback, Paydirt, Deathdeal, Crosskill and the eponymous Wyatt I'll probably be asking for the lot and tackling them as they turn up on Interlibrary Loan if they're not actually on the shelves in Bowen.

Magdalen Nabb "The Marshal Makes His Report"

One of the advantages of the exotic setting for crime fiction is the opportunity such locations provide to add local colour, tradition and customs to the more straightforward whodunnit? aspects of the investigation.

That's not to suggest that the whodunnit? side of things is going to be straightforward. Oh, yeah, I knew that's the way is was from the start doesn't make for an interesting reading experience unless the author's managed to throw in a couple of substantial distractions along the way, but if you knew it from the start that probably means the distractions and false trails could have been done better.

Magdalen Nabb's The Marshal Makes His Report is set, as usual, in Florence (I'd call it Firenze if she did) and this time around we get the local colour side of things with the city's medieval football tournament, which weaves its way through the investigation of a death that everyone involved wants to be an accident even though suicide would appear to be the more likely scenario.

Suicide would have important implications for the deceased's insurance policy, so while Marshall Guarnaccia is assigned to report on the death, he's working within fairly obvious investigative constraints.

The setting for the death itself, a palazzo whose owners have fallen on straitened financial times and have been forced to subdivide and lease out a large part of the property, provides plenty of suspicious circumstances that need to be looked into while the Marshal is poking around the possible crime scene.

Start with the just-widowed aristocrat whose pretensions to continued grandeur aren't quite matched by her financial circumstances, a sickly son who has issues of his own, and a couple of retainers who add their own complications to matters and place them in a building with concealed doorways and passages that allow for plenty of surreptitious scampering and furtive eavesdropping.

For extra complications throw in the tenants, including a female doctor whose living quarters and surgery are probably a major source of rental income but has issues of her own with her landlady, an artist, a ballet school and an English girl who's absent throughout proceedings but is a key element in the solution and there's plenty of intrigue before Guarnaccia steps outside the building in the course of his investigations.

An interesting read that didn't resolve things till right at the end, and while the Marshal does, finally, make his report, the report he makes isn't quite the one he started on. I'll be looking for the rest of the series though it's not, at this stage, one that needs to be read in sequence.

Graham Hurley "Deadlight"

Graham Hurley's Deadlight fits just before the point where I came in on this particular series after one of the occasional I've run out of interesting reading, any suggestions? threads on the Elvis Costello and Richard Thompson email lists.

EC and RT fans tend, in my experience, to have reasonable taste when it comes to fiction in general and crime fiction in particular and I added Hurley to an extensive list that includes the likes of Andrea Camilleri, Colin Cotterill, Donna Leon and Peter Robinson. The standard modus operandi under these circumstances is to keep an eye on the el cheapo bins in the book stores and newsagencies while checking the text file of what I've already bought or read, so you're not necessarily going to run across titles in the appropriate sequential order.

My initial encounter with Hurley's bird-watching detective Joe Faraday had disgraced DC Paul Winter doing a bit of work for Portsmouth crime boss Bazza McKenzie while Faraday investigates around the edges of the operation, and one of the subplots here has Winter involved in the dangerous driving incident that provided the excuse for the Hampshire Constabulary to cut him loose.

As usual there's more than one plot line here, but the main issue at hand is the investigation into the murder of prison officer Paul Coughlin. From the start you know there's something else going on since the first chapter deals with the sinking of HMS Accolade during the Falklands War, but it takes time for the exact connection between Accolade and Coughlin's murder to clarify themselves.

The initial investigation, predictably, centres around Coughlin's time working in HM Prisons rather than the Royal Navy, with an obvious suspect in the form of a recently released prisoner who'd spent his time inside strenuously maintaining his innocence while Warder Coughlin went out of his way to make his time inside a living hell.

Ainsley Davidson's not, predictably, distraught to hear of his tormentor's demise, and has a comfortable alibi though he's firmly in the frame as far as ex-Met detective Andy Corbett is concerned.

Corbett provides another of the subplots here, along with Winter's ongoing pursuit of a gang of teenage hooligans and an apparent stalker pursuing female officer Dawn Ellis. Given Portsmouth's status as a naval base there are also issues with ex-service personnel, which is where the investigation ends up heading.

Coughlin, as it turns out, was a particularly nasty piece of work as a warder, so it comes as no surprise to learn that he exhibited the same character traits during his stint as a petty officer in the Navy.

As a setting for the series soccer-mad Portsmouth provides plenty of possibilities when it comes to crime, and the World Cup finals provide another thread winding through the narrative as does Faraday's interaction with his signing son J.J. and Australian film maker Eadie Sykes.

This latest encounter with another series that's well worth investigating had me turning pages at a significant rate and I'll be keeping my eyes skinned for further instalments. At some point, of course, we'll be talking a start from the beginning sequential read, but in the meantime we'll just have to take things as they come.

The actual series:
Turnstone (2000) (Got it)
The Take (2001)
Angels Passing (2002)
Deadlight (2003) (Reviewed here)
Cut to Black (2004) (Got it, first encounter with the series)
Blood and Honey (2006) (Got it)
One Under (2007)
The Price of Darkness (2008)
No Lovelier Death (2009)
Beyond Reach (2010)
Borrowed Light (2010)

Fred Vargas "Seelking Whom He May Devour"

While you expect your fictional detectives to have the odd quirky foible, Fred Vargas' Commissaire Adamsberg takes the biscuit when it comes to extending quirks and foibles into genuine eccentricity.

Vargas (a.k.a. French historian, archaeologist and authority on the epidemiology of the Black Death and bubonic plague Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau) seems to specialise in odd characters, with her other series The Three Evangelists involving three historians, specialising respectively in prehistory, medieval life, the Great War (an odd mixture in itself), sharing a house known as The Disgrace with retired Commissaire Old Man Vandoosler, a mixture that doesn't sound anywhere near as off the wall that it turns out to be.

There's only one Evangelist story translated into English, so apart from The Three Evangelists, which has definite oddball appeal, if you're looking for a genuinely off the wall read you're probably going to be heading for the Commissaire Adamsberg books.

He's not quite in the same league as the National Coroner of Laos, but Adamsberg, a practitioner of Zen and the art of solving murder mysteries has raised the bar when it comes to inscrutable eccentric investigators, aided in his efforts by the more methodical Danglard, an ideal candidate to carry out the leg work that allows Adamsberg to come to the instinctive solution to a problem anyone else would be inclined to dismiss as insolvable.

Musician and plumber Camille Forestier, an avid reader of The A to Z of Tools for Trade and Craft drifts in and out of the stories, providing the means to link Adamsberg, busy in Paris avoiding a prostitute intent on murderous revenge after he very accidentally killed her pimp, with a chain of slaughters and savagings that start in the mountainous Mercantour National Park near Nice and may or may not be the work of a werewolf.

Camille, having taken up with a Canadian expert on wolves, is in the mountains with him when debate whether the mutilated sheep being found across the Alpine pastures are victims of a marauding wolf or something more sinister breaks out.

After farmer Suzanne Rosselin is apparently murdered by the rogue wolf or wolf-man Camille is enlisted to drive the sheep truck while Suzanne's adopted African orphan son Soliman, who has, it seems, swallowed a dictionary and elderly shepherd Watchee set out to track down the suspect, an  outcast abattoir worker named Massart whose lack of body hair makes him, in the minds of the locals, a prime candidate for lycanthropy, since werewolves have all their hair on the inside.

Massart may have disappeared, but wolf-watcher Lawrence Johnstone has found a map left in his house tracing a route across France to a supposed destination in an English slaughterhouse, and once the three avengers realise they've failed to track down Massart, Camille turns to her old flame Adamsberg for assistance, learning that he has conveniently wound up in Avignon pursuing another matter and lying low while avoiding the would-be avenger in Paris.

Having run across one of the later Adamsberg stories in the local library and read The Three Evangelists, I had Fred Vargas on my list of authors to watch for, and Seeking Whom He May Devour confirms that Adamsberg's a character of genuine eccentric charm. I've got This Night's Foul Work on the waiting to read pile, so it's a case of chasing down copies of The Chalk Circle Man, Have Mercy On Us All, Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand and An Uncertain Place to round out a series that is a definite keeper.

Rick Koster "Louisiana Music" (Relocated)

Under normal circumstances you'd expect to be finished a book before you set about writing a review, but I doubt that I'll ever be finished with Rick Koster's Louisiana Music.

With an interest in the music from around the mouth of the Mississippi that dates back to a various artists' compilation called Another Saturday Night, and Dr John's piano-powered R&B revival Gumbo, and progressed through the Meterfied fonk of In The Right Place and Robert Palmer's blue-eyes Sneakin' Sally Through The Alley, Professor Longhair and assorted bits and pieces, I've always wanted to explore the subject more thoroughly. There are gaps in the collection that could accommodate a transitory Mack truck.

The problem, of course, is always where to start, how to separate the wheat from the chaff, and if it's all good, sorting the stellar and sublime from the merely excellent.

Louisiana Music may not be the only reference volume out there, but it's the only one I've run across to date and certainly offers plenty of jumping off points for further investigation.

The subtitle: A journey from R&B to Zydeco, Jazz to Country, Blues to Gospel, Cajun music to Swamp Pop to Carnival Music and Beyond says it all really, as Koster, who's also the author of Texas Music, takes the reader through the genres one by one, starting with Jazz, as one might expect and moving through Rhythm & Blues, The Blues, Music of Southwest Louisiana (Cajun, Creole and Zydeco), Louisiana Rock and a final section labelled The Wondrous Sounds (Voodoo, Swamp Pop, Mardi Gras and Carnival, Gospel Country, Rap and Hip-Hop, Classical and World Music).

Within each section, he starts with the major names and then trawls back through their antecedents and successors, influences and legacy, linking each into the tradition they've emerged from and referencing the cross pollination you're going to find in a musical environment like Louisiana. At $9.99 for the Kindle version it's remarkable value as a reference and will be sitting on the iPad for the duration.

Unfortunately, 2000's Texas Music isn't available in the same format yet, but I'll be on the lookout for a copy (after I've got into tackling the backlog of music from Louisiana that needs to be explored, of course). 

Stephen Booth "The Kill Call" (Relocated)

If there's an official checklist of things to do when you're embarking on a crime fiction series the first two items on the list probably involve finding an appropriate setting and a couple of characters whose interactions can give the author a constant subplot to work the investigations around.

As far as settings go, Stephen Booth has struck gold in Derbyshire's Peaks District, a jumble of villages and moorland with enough lanes, walking tracks, disused mine shafts and other under and above ground features to allow a plethora of ways in and out of crime scenes,means to dispose of bodies and so on.

On top of that, in a rural area close to major cities a constant stream of day-trippers and other passers-by provides plenty of potential suspects, victims and red herrings, and a mixture of well-heeled landed folk, wealthy refugees from the urban sprawl and secretive, cloistered villagers who more than likely have something to hide means that you’ve got plenty of potential on the ground regardless of blow-ins from outside.

Booth hasn't done too badly with his core characters either. Start with edgy city girl with nasty things in her past Diane Fry, who’s landed the Sergeant’s position local boy son of much-loved copper Ben Cooper was aspiring to, and throw in if it moves I can probably eat it bloke Gavin Murfin who mightn't add much to the investigative action but serves as a constant source of irritation for Fry as he does a lot of the foot-slogging associated with an investigation and you’ve got plenty to work with.

By the ninth story in a series you'd expect those elements to be more or less down pat, and might suspect the author's going to have difficulty adding new elements to the mix, but Booth manages it well, intertwining contemporary issues about fox hunting (plenty of room for conflict and potential suspects and motives there) and recent historical factors most of the population have conveniently forgotten about.

The discovery of the body of a man whose head has been crushed in one spot along with an anonymous call reporting the same body half a mile away is enough to get things off to a racing start, particularly when you've got a nearby gathering of the local hunt and horseshoe tracks all around the corpse.

As is the way of these things there are a couple of issues that muddy the waters. For a start there's an enigmatic diary that must have something to do with things, but it's not clear what that something is (at least, not at first) and a youthful loner who makes off with the dead man's wallet and mobile phone, but has nothing to do with the presumed murder.

The most obvious motive lies in the confrontational and occasionally violent world of hunting and hunt protesting saboteurs, and investigations reveal that the dead man is involved in shady dealings that probably involve horse theft and the meat trade. It would help greatly of Fry and Cooper were able to track down the dead man's accountant, but he seems to have gone to ground, and in the end, that's the way it turns out to be.

So, as the investigation meanders down a complex trail we have the odd entanglement creeping in there as well. Cooper's cat dies and needs to be replaced, and he's growing increasingly distant from the surviving members of his family. Diane Fry continues to have trouble with her past, which refuses to quietly recede into the background, and we get an introduction to the 'plague village' of Eyam (pronounced 'Eem', just to provide another means to underline the Diane Fry doesn't fit in with the local yokels theme) which is a contemporary tourist attraction. 

Then there's the secondary theme that shows the oft-remembered sixties through a different perspective, a time as much about the threat of nuclear warfare and four-minute warnings as it was about Swinging London, Carnaby Street, peace, love and understanding.

As a series, this doesn't quite rate up there with my favourites, but it's good enough to warrant a check through the 'B' shelves at the local library and is something to watch for when scouring the el cheapo display at the local newsagent. 

Not, in other words, the greatest thing since sliced bread, but a definite cut above a lot that's out there.

40: A Doonesbury Retrospective (Relocated)

I can't think of a better argument for the iPad as a reading platform than this hefty volume which at around 4.3kg moves the wrist-breaker descriptor into a whole extra dimension, and the colour portion of the contents would probably come up rather well on the iPad screen.. 

I've been following Doonesbury from the early seventies, not always with the consistency I'd like as the strip appeared and disappeared through various newspaper incarnations, and over the years I've picked up a fair collection of paperback collections from various stretches of the saga of this bunch of college students and their associates as they've meandered through forty years of American life. 

As is invariably the case with these things, there are gaps in the collection that need to be filled, which goes part of the way to explaining the decision to purchase this particular tome.

On the other hand, ever since those first roughly-drawn depictions of early seventies college life with their wry take on the quirks and foibles of late adolescents as they move inexorably towards adulthood, I’ve been a firm fan of Trudeau’s work, and the prospect of consolidating the cartoon collection into one volume was not to be missed.

Forty years of cartoon strips, with six daily four-panel black and white strips each week and a page-sized panel for the Sunday colour supplement means that we were always looking at a hefty compendium, and if you're looking for everything this ain't quite the place to go, folks.

Or maybe it is, since you don't expect 100% genius and perspicacity over forty years, and as I browse trough the close to seven hundred pages it seems like most of the major themes are there and crucial episodes and plot lines get reasonably detailed coverage.

For the uninitiated, Mike Doonesbury, your common or garden nerd, starts off at Walden College sharing a room with footballer B.D., an arrangement that morphs into an off-campus communebeside Walden Puddle, drawing in the other long-term key figures, arch-slacker Zonker Harris, student radical Mark Slackmeyer, B.D.'s girlfriend Boopsie, runaway housewife Joanie Caucus and the rest of an extended family who've all headed off on their own tangents tat allow cartoonist Garry Trudeau to focus on a wealth of issues over the past forty years.

Along the way Mike moves from college student through a career in advertising into software and e-commerce while B.D.'s involvement with the R.O.T.C. military program gets him to Vietnam and subsequent involvement in both Gulf Wars in between a career as college football coach and manager of Hollywood starlet and third girl in shower Boopsie (a.k.a. Barbara Ann Boopstein).

Various factors bring media personalities into the mix as well. Mark Slackmeyer moves from college radio DJ into current affairs talk-back and gay activism, while Roland Hedley Jr turns up to collect details of the student mood early on and meanders through various plot lines as he moves from foreign correspondent to would-be celebrity journalist tweeter and Rick Redfern, heavyweight political journo starts off covering a political campaign, marries Joanie and produces a son who ends up working for the C.I.A. in Afghanistan and tweets his own personal mythology as Sorkh Razil (Red Rascal), bane of the Taliban.

That's the briefest skim over the surface of a cartoon strip that has delivered some of the most biting and insightful coverage of American socio-political and cultural issues, neglecting, among others, the zigzagging career of Zonker's Uncle Duke, archetypal wheeler dealer who appears in various guises from Governor of American Samoa, Ambassador to China, to proprietor of orphanages and bars and skipper of Donald Trump's personal yacht.

40: A Doonesbury Retrospective hasn't quite rendered that pile of paperbacks redundant, but will be occupying a prime piece of shelf space beside mys reading chair for some time to come....

Hari Kunzru "My Revolutions" (Relocated)_

Hari Kunzru "My Revolutions"

Although I've been buying music on line for at least six years, I found the speed with which I went from never heard of My Revolutions to holding it in my hot little hand rather gob-smacking given the fact that I'm still waiting for delivery of a number of subsequent on-line book purchases.


The story, a lengthy meditation prompted by a couple of sudden and apparently unrelated incidents, unfolds cutting back and forwards through thirty-five years the way such meditations do, and makes for an absorbing read. Not quite in the Le Carre class, perhaps, but not a million miles away from it either.


As Michael Frame muses and rambles through the back roads of his memories, I found myself absorbed to the point where I finished the story in a couple of lengthy sittings. Of course, in many ways, with an interest in sixties radicalism and countercultural matters I was probably a sympathetic audience, but Hari Kunzru does an excellent job of drawing the reader in through the yes, I can see why things would go that way doorway.


The story opens with one of those milestones that make you pause and look around you, with Michael Frame about to turn fifty as associated festivities are being prepared. He's in what most of us would probably describe as a pretty good place, semiretired and working part time in a second hand bookshop. This lifestyle is funded by his partner Miranda Martin, the emerging entrepreneur behind Bountessence Natural Beautycare, a range of herbal products, who's in the middle of shifting her business onto the big stage.


Those factors would probably have the average individual pondering the changes, but there's more.


Miranda's daughter Sam has just moved away from home to study Law, and Michael and Miranda take themselves off to France for a holiday.


In circumstances where you'd be inclined to reflection, a chance visit to a village called Sainte-Anne-de-la-Garrigue, the site of a bloody siege during the Albigensian crusade, has Michael and Miranda sitting outside a cafe drinking mineral water when Michael sights a woman with familiar mannerisms.


That, in itself, would be one of those things you'd probably pass off with an I wonder what happened to? But there are reasons why Michael needs to investigate further, and those matters centre around the fact that the subject of the alleged resemblance died in an embassy siege in Copenhagen some twenty years earlier.


Back home, with Miranda in full grow the business mode, a moderately successful dinner party with Miranda's financial backers, prompts a row that in turn prompts Mike's involvement with Pelham Antiquarian Books, which is, as it turns out, a No Smoking zone.


As a result a stressed Mike's smoking under the town’s Market Cross when an apparent tourist photographing the cathedral recognizes him. Miles Bridgeman may not be quite what he seems, but then again Michael Frame isn't what he seems either.


At a time when underground radical Chris Carver needed an identity a graveyard revealed a tombstone for a long-dead infant named Michael Frame, born in the right year and obviously someone who'd lack a lengthy paper trail, which in turn makes him a prime candidate for an alternative identity.


In his earlier life, Chris Carver, a restless youth from suburban London was entering his teens as the 60s started, a time when the teenager was a relatively new phenomenon and the circumstances encouraged rebellion.


The sixties, as the reader may recall, was the decade of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam as much as it was the era of The Beatles, flowers in your hair, peace, love and Woodstock.


Those two strands intertwined for many of us so there's nothing particularly unusual about a kid who discovers politics, joins the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, renounces his family and enrols at the London School of Economics. One thing leads to another and he's imprisoned after being arrested in front of the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square in 1968.


Again, nothing particularly unusual there. A prominent figure in Brisbane's anti-Springbok demonstrations went on to become Premier of Queensland.


From there, however, Chris Carver's path diverges from the one most of us ended up following. The catalyst is Anna Addison, the ex-model ex-wife of a photographer who's joined the alternative society and draws young Carver into a vortex of squats and communes in Notting Hill.


Anna, Chris and their comrades are, initially, not that far removed from the mainstream of contemporary youth, but as events unfold there's an increasing radicalism as individualism morphs into collectivism, pot and acid are increasingly replaced by amphetamines, and those who condemned of political violence beginning to consider acquiring guns and explosives.


It is a familiar story, and one that has been explored in a number of novels including Christopher Sorrentino's Trance, a fictionalised account of Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army after the death of the original head honcho. The challenge for the writer under these circumstances, is to make the transformation seem logical and comprehensible.


As Chris, Anna and their circle carry out exercises in self criticism they decide to attack property but not people, then move on to strike at both property and people, and finally target people as they are drawn into the revolutionary circles that gave us the Baader Meinhof Gang, the Weathermen, and the Japanese Red Army Faction.


Lurking on the edge of those circles filming the participants for a documentary is Miles Bridgeman, and all these years later his apparently accidental encounter with Michael Frame results in an attempt to manipulate him into revealing material that would halt the ascent of a prominent politician. That pressure prompts Michael's excursion to verify whether the woman in France is the long dead Anna.


It's a framework that allows Kunzru to peel back the layers of the story bit by bit, as Michael flees from threatened exposure and arrest, and he does it rather well, throwing in a depth of period detail that adds to the verisimilitude and has the reader saying yes, I can see that.


That's where the parallels with Le Carre are so pronounced. In, for exampleAbsolute Friends, The Mission Song and A Most Wanted Man Le Carre takes ordinary people and deftly manoeuvres them through circumstances that could beggar belief and does so in a way that allows the reader to accept the unlikely and improbable as credible and understandable.


Kunzru, in My Revolutions, gets rather close to matching the master.