Fred Vargas "An Uncertain Place"

Towards the end of An Uncertain Place, having cracked the case and tied the ends together, Commissaire Adamsberg phones the Serb translator who has helped sort things out. Asked about plans for the future, the translator replies that he's off to a conference and will be back on the straight and narrow which as you know does not exist and is neither straight nor narrow.

Which is, looking at it, a remarkably accurate summary of both existence and your typical Adamsberg story.

In both cases there's an apparent progression through a seemingly continuous narrative which simultaneously unfolds and jumps from place to place without apparent rhyme or reason as influences you thought were unrelated turn out to be intertwined.

You can, of course, take most detective novels and reduce them to a straightforward formulaic plot line. Detective is presented with challenging case and solves the mystery which turns out to have an unexpected element or consequence.

The first thing your average writer will do is to throw that plot line into an environment with a group of characters whose interactions are going to keep things going and add subplots and other intriguing influences to the mix.

Fred Vargas (the nom de plume of French historian and archaeologist Frédérique Audouin-Rouzeau), as anyone who has read her fiction knows, does all that at the start and then takes things off in directions that increasingly defy your expectations even when, having read everything you've been able to get your hands on. you don't actually have any.

My invariable reaction to an Adamsberg story is to scratch my head and ask myself how the (expletive deleted) could anyone come up with that?

For a start, having noted the rise of a substantial genre involving (teenage? dunno, haven't actually read, not really interested) vampires I hadn't anticipated reading any of it since that whole Nosferatu/Vlad the Impaler thing doesn't really float my boat, yet here we are wandering off to not-quite-Transylvania to track down a case that seemingly involves interactions between and among the undead and their legacy.

Then there's the strange coincidence of people who've got it in for Adamsberg who turn out to be related in unexpected ways, and not necessarily related to Adamsberg.

Or not. As the case may be.

The key point is, I think, that when you pick up an Adamsberg novel you know you're headed for strange territory, so it's a case of suspending logic and any set of expectations and settle down for the ride.

Put bluntly, this time around Adamsberg starts off at a a three-day conference in London where he encounters (shock! horror!) a macabre, bizarre and brutal case. Returning to Paris he encounters a second case which turns out to be related to the first one and needs an excursion to Serbia to tie the elements together.

Oh, yes, and the whole thing centres around the undead and represents the culmination of themes that run back a couple of centuries.

Along the way you know you're going to encounter an extravagance of eccentricities, and once again they're present in spades. Adamsberg, for a start, blithely wanders through a conference conducted in a language he doesn't speak while his translator, the encyclopedic Danglard becomes smitten by a female participant whose name appears to be Abstract. Apart from his lack of English, there's Adamsberg's inability to remember precise detail, so New Scotland Yard's Inspector Radstock becomes Stock, and London's baroque old Highgate Cemetery becomes Higg-gate. It's all in the detail, you see.

The starting point for the ride, once the scene has been set, is a collection of seventeen shoes, each containing a severed foot, apparently seeking admission to the cemetery. Danglard notices that some of the shoes are French, but Adamsberg cautions him against getting involves. Let the English handle it, and all that.

Back in Paris, there's a brutal murder in suburbia where the victim's body has been pulverized by a miscellaneous assortment of sharp, blunt and powered devices to the point where there's nothing left to identify him except for traces of DNA and there's some sort of logic behind the apparently random scattering of body parts around the crime scene.

The victim, a rich semi-retired legal-journalist who was not quite cordially disliked by almost everybody, including his son (who describes him as chateau-bottled shit), has left most of his fortune to his gardener, who happens to have a criminal record involving a number of violent offences, which naturally puts him straight into the frame.

Characteristically, Adamsberg doesn't think he did it and isn't inclined to expend too much energy when he escapes, having managed to disable two police guards.

Checks reveal a similar death in Austria, where the killer has been labelled Zerquetscher, the Crusher, an epithet Adamsberg diminished to Zerk, who eventually arrives in Adamsberg's home, claiming to be his son.

These things happen all the time when Adamsberg's about.

There are also the regulation complications among Adamsberg's squad, with Danglard distracted by Abstract and the usually efficient Inspector Mordent distracted by his teenage daughter, who's facing serious criminal charges and provides an excuse for someone to get at her father.

That someone, it seems, has contacts among the upper echelons of the French political and legal establishment and is in a position to conceal the identity of the culprit and simultaneously destroy Adamsberg’s career.

Faced with that threat, Adamsberg makes himself scarce, heading to Serbia and a village close to the Romanian border, which turns out to be the victim's ancestral home and gives Vargas the chance to fill in the gaps in our knowledge of vampire-related folklore.

The sojourn also gives Adamsberg the chance to tie things together, though the vital clue, as usually happens, passes you unnoticed until the Aha! moment, when, of course, you find yourself wondering why you didn't notice that at the time.

Or at least, on this occasion wrapped up in the developing narrative, I did.

And that, I think is the point. An Adamsberg story develops throws up a bewildering range of apparently unrelated elements as Jean-Baptiste and his colleagues set about their investigations with Adamsberg adopting a scatter-gun approach and seemingly investigating everything that might be relevant and quite a bit that probably isn't but, in some cases, turns out to be.

If you're a fan of logical development through forensic analysis and standard procedures there's every chance Fred Vargas isn't quite your cup of tea. On the other hand, each of the Adamsberg stories has rolled along quite marvellously as a remarkable character and his inimitable squad wander through a surreal world that parallels reality but doesn't quite manage to exist within it.

An eighth title, L'armée furieuse is already out in France. Hopefully we're not looking at a repetition of the three years An Uncertain Place spent in translation. though these matters cannot and definitely should not be hurried.

James Lee Burke "The Glass Rainbow"

Eighteen titles, twenty-three years and the Dave Robicheaux series is still going strong, though The Glass Rainbow has the New Iberia detective picking up ominous signs.

I've seen suggestions that, with Robicheaux and long-time associate Clete Purcel seriously wounded at the end of the story this may well be the end of the series, but I'd counter that with an if Dave Robicheaux's dead how come we're getting a first person narrator?

There are a couple of things that come in handy when you're looking at an extended series of crime fiction, and James Lee Burke continues to tick most of those boxes along the way.

For a start, in the absence of the long term good guy/bad guy scenario you find operating between Ian Rankin's Rebus and Big Ger Cafferty or Graham Hurley's Joe Faraday and Bazza McKenzie you need an on-going ability to roll out convincing psycho and sociopaths.

While you'd think that Burke could roll these characters out in his sleep bestselling celebrity ex-convict author Robert Weingart is right up there with the best of his villains, pulling the strings and manipulating those around him a Robicheaux digs around the latest in a series of brutal murders in neighbouring Jefferson Davis Parish.

Then there's the psychotic  Vidor Perkins, a truly nasty piece of work who gets his comeuppance in a salutary manner shortly before a close Robicheaux escape from the same fate at the hands of a ruthless batch of hired hands.

Or pimp/crack dealer Herman Stanga, beaten up by Clete Purcel and subsequently shot beside the swimming pool that's the only attractive feature of his increasingly dilapidated residence in a previously upmarket neighbourhood.

Most authors would probably draw a line around there but Burke goes further.

There's novelist and scion of local local landowning family Kermit Abelard, who's become involved with Robicheaux's stepdaughter Alafair, who's in the process of embarking on a literary career.

You can add local boy made good investment tycoon Layton Blanchet, on the verge of going under in the wake of a Ponzi scheme, his scheming wife Carolyn, who's got form relating to Robicheaux's boss Sheriff Helen Soilau and Mississippi prison gun bull Jimmy Darl Thigpin to that little array of nasties.

Thigpin inconveniently disposes of a black convict whose sister, high school honour student Bernadette Latiolais is one of the seven  women who have been brutally murdered. in the neighbouring county.

Given the wealth and quality of villains in the area, I tend to start a new James Lee Burke with an intention to explore the story a chapter or two at a time in a limited bit by bit strategy. Inevitably, however, the narrative drags you in to polish the rest of the story off is a flurry of reading activity.

You want to take your time, savouring Burke's seamless prose without overdosing on the thugs and low lives and end up churning through the pages to see how it all works out.

Another factor in the continuing series side of things is a certain degree of timelessness. Do the maths. Robicheaux and Clete Purcel served in Vietnam. You're not sure when, but given the fact that they started Vietnamization after January 1968's Tet Offensive and US forces were gone from the country by 1973, thirty-six years later those who served in Vietnam are going to be pushing sixty, hardly the age to be living the Clete Purcel lifestyle or engaging in running gun battles.

Burke describes the way it went down in the year 2009, but apart from that and passing references to a hurricane that could provide a  point on a timeline there isn't much to date the story. People use mobile phones, there are issues when they're out of range and a couple of references to the internet, but they've been doing those things for a good fifteen years now, and an absence of other specifics makes it easy for the reader to avoid having his or her attention drawn to things that mightn't quite add up.

But more than anything else the would-be author of a lengthy crime series needs a setting that will accommodate a variety of plot lines, the authorial skills to carry it off and, almost invariably a strong moral element in the protagonist's commitment to getting to the heart of the matter.

Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen might be a time server who keeps getting into matters he'd prefer not to become involved with along the way but he's operating in a society where corruption and individual shortcuts are an accepted way of getting through everyday life.

When it comes to societies teetering on the edge of dysfunction it's hard to come up with a better long term example than Louisiana, where the issues that came to light in the days after Katrina were expressions of long standing social divisions that come directly out of the region's history and will, more than likely still be there in a century's time.

An awareness of that history, and a righteous indignation at continuing injustice is the main motivation that drives Dave Robicheaux, and when he's called to interview a convict on a chain gang it trips off a chain reaction that draws the reader in as Robicheaux struggles with his stepdaughter's involvement with Kermit Abelard who's ten years older and also closely involved with the manipulative Robert Weingart.

Robicheaux's reaction to the relationship might be seen as the response of an over-protective parent, but there's definitely something there from the earliest stages of the story that doesn't quite add up.

And doesn't quite add up is probably a fair assessment of Clete Purcel's continued survival, having broken most of the rules and seemingly avoided official or unofficial retribution. Robicheaux, of course, is inclined to ascribe that survival to fear on the part of the Mob and the hapless army of miscreants that dwelled like slugs on the underside of the city based on a recognition of Purcel's unwillingness to obey rules or recognize traditional protocol but as he continues to wreak random havoc through the narrative the reader is left scratching his head on the basis that Clete's run of luck can't last forever.

But, of course, it does, even if it means a serious wound as he takes out a bunch of skilled operatives who've been together Senegal to South Africa, Uzbekistan to the Argentine.

Some readers may take issue with the fact that the story ends shortly thereafter without a neat tying together of the various threads, but that's fine with me. While we don't have all the details of the two killings that provided Robicheaux's motive to go digging we're pretty sure of the who and the where, and there's a fair chunk of why taken care of as things get shaken out.

There's nothing much that's new or different here, but The Glass Rainbow gives the reader another chance to roam through Burke's fictional world, and as a long-time fan with an interest in most things to do with Louisiana I have to admit a reluctance to actually experience the Gulf coast environment.

Somehow I suspect that the reality would fall short of Burke's shimmering prose, and there's always the chance that he's on the money when it comes to the psycho- and sociopaths...

Donna Leon "Drawing Conclusions"

I spent much of the morning walk the day after I finished Drawing Conclusions musing on my reading habits.

Actually, that's not quite right. I started off trying to figure a lead-in to a review of this latest title from Donna Leon, and those musings lead fairly directly towards a consideration of why I like what I like and why this was another highly enjoyable read.

Looking at these matters, it's fairly obvious that if I'm going to add an author or a series to the list of things to chase down it'll be because I like the characters and the setting rather than intricacies of plot line, action and suspense, which I tend to take for granted.

Donna Leon's Commisario Brunetti works as a character, and given the Venetian setting and the fact that Italians tend to eat and drink well the series is a fairly obvious candidate for the Little House of Concrete Bookshelves. It has the additional advantage of not necessarily being a series that needs to be read in order, which means I can grab the missing titles and read (or re-read) them as I find them.

There's also the undeniable fact that the subset of crime fiction usually labelled police procedural has a couple of fairly obvious attractions for the aspiring author. Any police station and its surrounding support and ancilliary services offers an almost ideal environment in which to create those intricate plot lines we've come to love.

After all, the hierarchy of any police force is going to feature any number of prickly characters, ambitious individuals and obnoxious prigs, and your main character's interaction with them is always going to give you something to work with.

At the start of Drawing Conclusions, Brunetti is undergoing the ordeal of a dinner  with Vice Questore Patta and Lieutenant Scarpa when an incoming call on his mobile gives him the excuse to get away from Scarpa's unfavourable assessment of the oenological practices of the Veneto region. It's one of those occasions that you'd prefer to avoid at all costs, but there are things that can't be evaded, and Brunetti has been known to use calls from his wife as a pretext for escaping such events.

It's not, however, Paola on the other end of the notional line. The body of Costanza Altavilla, a retired female teacher has been found by her upstairs neighbour, who has just returned from a disappointing holiday in Sicily and went looking for her mail, which the neighbour had been looking after.

In a situation where any excuse will do, Brunetti heads off to check what has all the appearances of death due to heart attack, though there are signs that could be consistent with some degree of violence - an obvious wound on the head and what could well be bruising near the collarbone — or could stem from falling onto the nearby radiator.

With the coroner's verdict favouring the heart attack theory, you'd expect that would be it, but there are things that intrigue Brunetti enough to poke around a bit further on the grounds that something may have created conditions that led to her heart attack.

Meetings with the woman’s son, called to identify the body, the upstairs neighbour, and the nun in charge of the nursing home where she worked as a volunteer leave Brunetti's suspicions undiminished. The son seems distracted by something, the neighbour witnessed something suspicious, and the nun, initially reluctant to reveal anything eventually describes the deceased’s terrible honesty.

There's still, of course, nothing to base a formal investigation around, but Brunetti continues digging away, aided by his offsider Vianello and Signorina Elettra, whose ability to infiltrate supposedly secure websites and similar sources of information proves, as usual, invaluable while simultaneously raising various ethical and moral issues.

The first aspect to be clarified involves the discovery of changes of clothes in various sizes in the deceased's apartment and discussions with the Signorina Elettra suggest Altavilla was helping abused women escape their abusers.

Well, there's a motive, for a start, and while the disappearance of her most recent guest seems to offer an explanation, but closer examination reveals a reality that differs from what appears on the surface.

With that avenue of investigation seemingly closed, Brunetti turns his attention to the nursing home, where Signora Altavilla volunteered, in search of an explanation for the heart attack. She was, he learns, someone willing to listen to stories told by people who have little left but their own memories, and in such circumstances she became the sort of confessor who hears things people would keep concealed from members of their own families.

That proves to be the secret here, though in the end it's not the sort of case where Brunetti's likely to press charges.

These things play out against the familiar Venetian backdrop, with Leon drawing on whichever of the familiar elements fit into the developing narrative. There's only marginal room for Brunetti's aristocratic in-laws, though the family connection turns out to be a key factor in solving the puzzle.

Brunetti misses his lunch on occasion, something the average reader wouldn't be doing if the dishes Paola prepares were visiting a kitchen near you, and the mealtime interactions with the family provide a stark contrast to the lunchtime scenes at the nursing home.

Against that backdrop there's plenty to muse on as far as the state of Italian society is concerned.

Signorina Elettra's electronic snooping isn't exactly ethical, but one suspects that if she wasn't doing it cases wouldn't end up being solved. Buying  flowers for the office and getting the Questra to pay by substituting a receipt for printer cartridges would be sailing pretty close to the anti-corruption wind in other jurisdictions but here, one suspects, if the substitution didn't occur the flowers wouldn't end up in the office.

There's nothing startlingly new in the twentieth tome in the series, but there's a niche-market familiarity that ensures that Leon fans will continue to track down successive Brunetti stories as they appear in the marketplace.

Andrea Camilleri "The Track of Sand"

Andrea Camilleri's on record as saying that he puts out a new Montalbano story every so often to appease the character and allow him to work on other projects, while there are some of us who'd prefer to have a new title every couple of weeks or so.

While that frequency is a case of in your dreams the fact that I tend to fall on a new Montalbano and devour it in one or two sittings means I'd like to see  new titles landing in the LHoC more often than they actually do, though I understand the reasons why that doesn't happen.

A glance at the shelves suggests titles in the series are getting slimmer, which taken with that comment about appeasement might suggest that things are becoming formulaic or perfunctory, but as far as this reader is concerned when you're on a good thing you stick to it, and it'd be a shame to vary what amounts to a winning formula.

As he approaches his 86th birthday Camilleri's long past spring chicken status, but as long as he's still with us and has Stephen Sartarelli doing the translations I'll be devouring whatever he comes up with in much the same way Salvo Montalbano devours platefuls of the usual mullets.

Sure, there's a formula, but the point of the exercise at least as far as this reader is concerned is to sample the new offering to see what variation Camilleri has come up with this time, going back a while later for repeated exercises in picking over the bones.

That formula involves the regulation quirky death, in this case an equine carcass on the beach outside Montalbano's house, an obvious explanation that fails to satisfy Montalbano (the horse was killed to provide meat for illegal immigrants) and the in character cameos from Montalbano's off-siders, acquaintances and bureaucratic sparring partners as the reality is uncovered.

Those elements don't turn up in exactly the same way this time around (there's no spot for the friendly TV reporter or his less congenial counterpart on the other channel this time around) but they end up providing a comfortable framework that slips over the reader's (and, presumably, the author's) attention the way a comfortable jacket fits over the shoulders.

In this case the horse has been bludgeoned to near death further along the beach and had fled as far as Montalbano's before the final collapse. Having found the dead animal, tracked back to the scene of the crime and called in his merry men to investigate the atrocity Montalbano places a call to City Hall to arrange for the carcass to be removed and spends half an hour drinking coffee in the kitchen with Fazio. By the time the municipal workers have arrived to dispose of the body it has disappeared.

It's fairly obvious from the start that the disappearance is intended to ensure that the animal can't be identified, but that leaves the reason for the killing as a matter for investigation.

It soon becomes obvious that the horse may have belonged to equestrian champion Rachele Esterman, who arrives at police headquarters to report one missing. She's in Sicily to ride in a charity ladies' race at the private hippodrome of local aristocrat Baron Piscopo di San Militello, is staying with Ingrid Sjostrom and has stabled her steed with horses belonging to local millionaire Saverio Lo Duca.

Complications set in when we learn that a second horse has been stolen from the same stable, and it seems likely that the carcass has been removed to ensure no one can tell which horse is actually dead.

When burglars repeatedly break into Montalbano's home it becomes obvious that someone's keeping the place under surveillance and is intent on sending Salvo a message. It's not, however, clear whether the message relates to the horse or to a forthcoming trial involving a Mafia suspect.

That's probably as far as we can go wiith the detail without giving things away as far as the main plot line is concerned, but there are the usual array of set pieces and sidetracks to carry things along. Fazio gets to display his mania for detailed information, Mimi Augello is being kept awake at night by his infant son and Gallo continues to impersonate a Formula One driver at Monza.

And Catarella continues to be Catarella, though he does manage to escape telephone duties at the station since his presence would work against the sting that Montalbano comes up with that may unlock the case.

Predictably, food continues to occupy a key place in the narrative, though it's not always of the highest quality. When Ingrid drags him along to the races a main course of mullet that had been dead for a week provides Rachele with the opportunity go get Salvo out of his pants and there's the regulation guilt and attraction issues that threaten Montalbano's long standing relationship with Livia.

With The Potter's Field, Number Thirteen in the series due in September there's not that long before the next instalment, but I'd be a lot happier if it was right there on the horizon right now, preferably closely followed by The Age of Doubt. With two more titles in the pipeline after that there's no immediate end to the series in sight, but then, when you're dealing with an author in his eighties...

But, in the end, all the reader needs to know is that The Track of Sand is another Montalbano book with everything we've come to expect present though not quite correct as the plot twists and turns towards the eventual explanation.

Ian Rankin "Mortal Causes"

According to Ian Rankin the Rebus series stems from the author's desire to use the character to explore issues he wanted to write about rather than an interest in crime fiction as a genre and in Mortal Causes he's found an interesting sociopolitical issue to play around with.

Against the backdrop of the Edinburgh Festival this exploration of links between Scottish nationalism and Northern Ireland Loyalist paramilitaries might seem to be stretching things considerably, since you'd expect the Republican side off the Ulster Troubles to be a more likely fit with Scottish separatists, but if you can suspend that notion for a bit what happens here works fairly logically, though the plot line develops with the regulation quota of twists, turns, blind alleys and dead ends.

It's fairly obvious from the start that there's some Ulster influence in the murder in Mary King's Close that starts things off, with the IRA known to render enemies or traitors immobile for the rest of their lives with bullets to the elbows, kneecaps, and ankles. Having done that, however, in this case a seventh bullet has finished the victim off.

Things become complicated fairly quickly when the victim is identified as the previously unknown son of gangster 'Big Ger' Cafferty who might be behind bars but certainly isn't going to pass up any opportunity to exact revenge. An SaS tattoo seemingly links the body to Sword and Shield, a supposedly defunct Scottish Nationalist group and Rebus finds himself seconded to the SCS (Scottish Crime Squad) working with London-based Special Branch DI Abernathy, a scenario which coincides nicely with Rebus' tendency to follow his nose regardless of instructions from above.

That tendency is aided by his SCS colleagues' reluctance to let the newcomer in on the action, and in the end the whole secondment is a fairly adept bit of manipulation in the course of another, related, investigation.

There are also the usual related subplots along the way. The Rebus/Patience relationship continues across thorny territory, with its progress not exactly helped by a rash encounter with a randy lawyer with ambitions of her own.

Rebus' continuing contact with the Catholic priest he ran across in The Black Book throws in an additional subplot, involving a youth club at Pilmuir's Garibaldi Estate, which seems at first to be tangential but eventually delivers Rebus to the heart of the matter.

In the end, though, the story represents a fairly chilling exploration of the ways in which seemingly incompatible entities can cut deals with each other, and when Big Ger engineers an escape from jail to exact his own version of revenge he's also providing the fuel for Rebus continuing obsession with bringing him down.

Ian Rankin "Strip Jack" and "The Black Book"

With three Rebus novels under his belt and, presumably, the majority of the short stories that comprise A Good Hanging under his belt, you'd have to guess that Rankin knew he had the makings of an on-going series when he started on 1992's Strip Jack.

As the first of the stories collected as Rebus: The St Leonard Years Rankin admits in the foreword that the fourth Rebus novel is a conscious move out of a fictional Edinburgh into a real one. Up to this point, Rebus has been operating out of Greater London Road, but with that fictional location about to close he's moved over to the actual headquarters of the Lothian and Borders Police at St Leonards. However one wonders why, having read that comment and noted a map in the Reading Group Notes at the back of the book, it's impossible to locate most of the locations in the story on the aforementioned map.

If there's a bit of the anorak in that comment, let's just point out that, having noted the presence of a map in the book, one should be able to locate roughly where we are on it. Otherwise, why bother to put the map in there in the first place? You don't need massive detail, and you can read the Donna Leon novels, set in Venice with all its twists and turns in the back streets, without being too concerned by exact locations. He caught the vaporetto here, and got off there sort of thing…

Apart from that very minor quibble, there are a couple of emerging themes that get a fairly thorough going over in Strip Jack, with the main one being Rebus' attempts to dig around under the surface to find out what's actually going on where the movers and shakers who actually run the show are concerned.

Kicking off with a Saturday night raid on a discreet brothel operating in a fairly swish neighbourhood (one of the better streets of the New Town) largely occupied by Saab and Volvo driving  lawyers, surgeons and university professors, the plot immediately thickens when one of the punters caught in the cot turns out to be popular hardworking MP Gregor Jack.

Much of that thickening comes when those inside are escorted off the premises and have to run the gauntlet of the reporters and photographers who've seemingly been tipped off about the raid and the possibility of it landing a reasonably big fish.

No prizes for guessing the front page story in the Sunday papers.

Under normal circumstances the standard operating procedure in cases like this is to have the friends and family gather 'round the bloke under the floodlights, but in this case Jack's wife Elizabeth, a noted partygoer who's always been inclined to follow her own path, has gone missing and it soon becomes obvious that Jack's friends, most of whom share the same home town, have issues of their own.

Lizzie's body is found in circumstances that seem to match another recent death, and there's an obvious suspect, a drunk who brags about the first killing, is released for lack of actual evidence, gives a false address and vanishes while Rebus is preoccupied trying to track down a valuable collection of stolen books..

Mrs Jack's body turns up on property owned by actor Rab Kinnoul, a key member of the Jack social circle, and while Rebus starts out sympathetic to the MP's problems, it soon becomes obvious that someone out there is out to destroy him by stripping him of his good name and political standing in a real life equivalent of the Strip Jack Naked card game, which provides the book's title.


But while the aim seems fairly clear the key questions concern the who? and the why? Delving into matters Rebus discovers that Lizzie, the only child of mogul Sir Hugh Ferrie, has a well-disguised private life based around wild weekends at an isolated cottage and the investigation meanders through a labyrinth of red herrings, deceitful alibis, secret liaisons until a remark to Rebus' offsider Brian Holmes brings in the key element that slots everything into place.

Along the way there are the regular Rebus issues with the demon drink, Rebus' own inner demons and the on-going difficulty of maintaining personal relationships when you're a semi-obsessive sleuth working long and irregular hours.


Those issues run right through the series, but the interpersonal themes are a key component of the plot line of the fifth Rebus novel, 1993's The Black Book which introduces key character Siobhan Clarke and brings Big Ger, Morris Gerald Cafferty, who's been an incidental character up to this point in the series, to the forefront as Rebus' bete noir.

On the personal front, there's the on-going attempt to maintain the relationship with new female interest Doctor Patience Aitken, complicated by the fact that he's effectively moved in with her and has leased his flat to a group of students. That becomes an issue when, first, Rebus' brother Michael reappears on the scene, seeking accommodation.

He ends up in the box room at the flat, which means that Rebus, locked out of Patience's place after failing to arrive for dinner, ends up sleeping on his own sofa for a spell. That happens after an unexpected encounter with an old Army acquaintance, the dodgy Deek Torrance, who can get his hands on 'anything from a shag to a shooter'.

These things play out against a background where Operation Moneybags is aimed at taking down one of 'Big Ger' Cafferty's money-lenders and Rebus's colleague Brian Holmes is in a coma after being attacked in the carpark of the Elvis-themed Heartbreak Cafe.

Investigating the Holmes attack, Rebus interviews restaurant owner Eddie Ringan, Eddie's gay and business partner Pat Calder, and Brian's girlfriend, Nell Stapleton who mentions Holmes' notebook, suggesting that something in it prompted the attack.

One particular entry in the eponymous Black Book sparks Rebus' interest, a cryptic shorthand reference to a poker game on the night of the fire that burned down the Central Hotel five years ago. An unidentified body was found in the ruins, and the autopsy reveals a shot through the heart rather than the fire as the cause of death, and that the victim had suffered a broken arm at some point in time.

Piecing these things together takes time when you're supposed to be doing something else, but a glance at the list of those who were on the premises when the hotel burned down reveals someone Rebus knows well enough to chase down details in the form of the elderly Matthew Vanderhyde who may be blind but was at least on the premises.

As it turns out Vanderhyde was there to have a quiet word with 'Black Aengus' Gibson, heir to the Gibson brewery and subsequently reformed wild man. At the time 'Black Aengus' was in full wild man mode, though his family's influence has managed to remove his name from the official record of the incident.

Then, when Rebus discusses the matter with the newly-arrived Siobhan Clarke, who's been reading around the case, comes up with Tam and Eck Robertson, the 'Bru-head Brothers', who disappeared around the time of the fire and match part of the shorthand reference. Before they disappeared they were working for Big Ger, which suggests that Cafferty may have been there as well.

Sniffing around Big Ger, however, has its dangers. With the possibility of the attack on Holmes being related to the case, after Michael Rebus is found hanging by his legs from the Forth Rail Bridge and an attack on Rebus himself, her decides he needs protection, and when Holmes regains consciousness he's quick to confirm Rebus' suspicions and inform him that the source of the information was restaurant owner Ringan, who was was moonlighting at the Central.

From there things move rather swiftly, with the regulation twists and turns, apparent dead ends and although Rebus manages to put things together there's a nasty sting in the tail when the hand gun he buys for protection turns out to be the weapon used to kill the previously unidentified corpse from the fire.

All in all, with matters seemingly sorted there's the problem of managing a conviction, and when you look at it, failure to do so, given the circumstances in this story will be enough to fuel Rebus' on-going pursuit of Big Ger well into the future.

Fred Vargas "This Night's Foul Work"

Taking a glance along the bookshelves there are a number of series represented in (almost) their entirety, and in most cases they're, predictably, based around a central character who, in most cases, has some significant degree of eccentricity.

It's easy enough to base a series around a character who's basically a decent bloke (in most cases the key character's male, with Alafair Burke's books the significant exception to the rule) but that means he needs something to add an element of interest and continuity through the series.

Peter Robinson's D.I. Banks, for example, has his music while Stephen Booth's Ben Cooper has his family and the on-going prickly interaction with DS Diane Fry, who has her own issues to deal with.

But then you have the central characters who have their, shall we say, eccentricities.

James Lee Burke's Dave Robichaux and Burke's other key characters have their interactions between alcohol and their pasts, all of which have elements that are going to drive them.

George Pelecanos has an ongoing and intersecting circle of Washington-based sociopaths, most of them with an interest in music and a background of substance issues if not actual abuse.

Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen has his quirks as far as diet and other matters are concerned as he tries to manoeuvre himself into a comfortable sinecure, something that he never quite manages to achieve.

There are a few of them that are pretty much out there.

Kinky Friedman and the Greenwich Village Irregulars, Andrea Camilleri's Montalbano and his merry men and Colin Cotterill's Dr Siri and his social circle being prime examples, but when it comes to characters that are way out there where the buses don't run there aren't too many that are further out there than Fred Vargas' Superintendent Jean Baptiste Adamsberg.

Adamsberg's the leader of a ragtag twenty-seven strong assembly of oddballs, including the alcoholic single father and walking encyclopedia Danglard, the formidably substantial Violette Retancourt and a variety of others who all have some degree of obsessive compulsive disorder with walk on roles for his on and off girlfriend, plumber and musician Camille, mother of his son and recurring source of strange situations.

This Night's Foul Work is the fifth in the Adamsberg series, following on not long after Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand. After a few weeks off work, a new home which may or may not be haunted by a ghost who may or may not only have it in for women there are a couple of new players as Adamsberg engages in the demarcation dispute with the drug squad that's the starting point of another highly coincidental plot line.

He needs an ally to keep the investigation into the possibly drug-related deaths of two large men within his own Serious Crime Squad bailiwick, and the most obvious ally is leading pathologist Ariane Lagarde. There's a back story to their interaction here, involving a clash of opinions over a previous case Ariane had categorized as suicide which Adamsberg, correctly as it turned out, saw as murder.

There's also a back story to the newest member of Adamsberg's team The New Recruit whose home in the Pyrenees is the village next door to Adamsberg's. Eight-year-old Veyrenc was attacked by a gang of four toughs from that village while a fifth boy looked on, and it's soon obvious the on-looker was Adamsberg.

The attack left Veyrenc with physical as well as mental scars, and his family background has delivered an extraordinary ability to speak in alexandrines, rhyming lines of twelve syllables that were a staple of Baroque German literature, modern French poetry and English drama before Marlowe and Shakespeare. In another series this would be remarkable, here it's an almost regulation personal quirk.

There's no obvious link between the are they or are they not drug related? deaths under investigation and shootings of stags in Normandy, and Adamsberg only encounters those incidents because he's called to babysit young Tom while Camille plays cello in an orchestral concert.

The Norman villagers outraged at these seemingly senseless acts have their own foibles, as you'd expect, and Adamsberg's drawn into investigating aspects of those killings which, as readers familiar with the quirks of Vargas' plot lines would have come to expect, turn out to be related to this other case.

The most likely suspect seems to be a recently-escaped elderly district nurse, jailed for more than thirty killings of old people and possibly out for revenge on Adamsberg, who, predictably, cracked  the case. There's also the possibility  she's gathering the ingredients for a potion that will deliver eternal life, and the deaths that kicked the story off would seem to be part of that. There are seemingly accidental deaths of Norman virgins whose graves have  been disturbed, more than likely by the two men whose bodies Adamsberg wants to keep out of the clutches of the drug squad, as part of the process of gathering those ingredients.

That quest for the eternal elixir might also explain the mysterious disappearance of possibly-virginal Violette Retancourt, a matter that is resolved when her unconscious body is located by Snowball the tracker cat.

It would be quite possible to go further into the intricacies and interlinkings as Adamsberg goes about another instinctive investigation, but out of consideration for the reader, I'm inclined to draw a veil over those matters, pausing only, on the way out, to point out that This Night's Foul Work is a worthy addition to a series that will eventually find its way, complete, onto Hughesy's bookshelves.

Between public libraries in Bowen and southport and book shop purchases I've read the remainder of the series, and as we keep our eyes peeled for An Uncertain Place and subsequent volumes there's definitely a place for rereading their precedents, which means they need to find their way onto the shelves, don't they?