Garry Disher "Chain of Evidence"

One of the attractions about reading a series in sequence lies in the speculation regarding future directions the interpersonal relationships between the key players is going to unfold, and having scanned the blurb on the back of the local library's copy of Blood Moon (purely to check where it fitted into the sequence, you understand) I knew that Hal Challis and Ellen Destry were due to become an item, though that hasn't quite transpired yet.

At the same time you can see Disher setting things up so they'll end up there.

Chain of Evidence opens with Challis off the scene called to his ailing father's bedside and finding some family history to keep him occupied as the inevitable decline takes its toll.

That leaves Ellen Destry in charge of the Peninsula East CIU. After the  breakup of her marriage, with the daughter away at University and Challis away there's a certain logic in having her house sit his temporarily vacant home. After all, she needs to live somewhere, and it gives her an excuse to be there when Challis gets back.

Along the way, with the daughter on site after breaking up with the boyfriend and freaking out in the pre-exam swot vac, Disher has the ex-husband arrive on the doorstep, taking daughter Larrayne out for a Thai dinner where he breaks the news that Dad's got a girlfriend.

It's a case of removing the obstacles one by one, after Challis' ex-wife's suicide in prison and the death of newspaper editor Tessa Kane at the hands of Snapshot's hitman and although those matters remain unconsummated at the end of Chain of Evidence the reader gets the feeling that it's only a matter of time before they are.

But that's very much a side issue as Challis delves into his brother-in-law's disappearance and Ellen Destry is faced with the abduction of ten-year-old Katie Blasko. Katie has, however, been known to wander, but having the benefit of inside information the reader's fully aware that there's a paedophile on the loose, and there are early clues that he's part of an organized ring.

Disher works this kind of thing well, with the reader knowing enough of what's going on to appreciate touches like Scobie Sutton's growing awareness of how close his adored daughter may have come to sharing Katie's fate while still leaving room for a sting in the tail of the tale as police corruption issues rise to the surface.

That's because we've actually got three intertwined plot lines here.

There's Challis, at Mawson's Bluff in the back blocks of South Australia with time on his hands and an unexplained family mystery. His brother-in-law, a warden with the RSPCA has disappeared in circumstances that would suggest suicide if it wasn't for the fact that his assumed widow has been receiving unexplained items through the mail.

Destry has the Blasko abduction to pursue, and is forced to do that in an environment where the operational budget is being closely monitored by  Detective Superintendent McQuarrie and the forensic work has been outsourced to a privately operated laboratory where careless procedures leads to contaminated evidence.

And there are other issues within the Waterloo police station, apart from the third element, an on-going frustration at their inability to come up with a conviction that will start to break up the malevolent influence of the Jarretts, a family of petty criminals terrorising their neighbourhood.

Throw in significant professional jealousy in an environment where the uniforms aren't impressed by the rise of the female detectives and each officer has their own personal agenda and, in most cases, some long-simmering resentment against one or more of their colleagues.

Those issues aren't helped when details of the Blasko case are leaked to a TV current affairs show, which the reader knows is due to cash-strapped Constable John Tankard's discovery that his dream car is an unroadworthy lemon that'll cost an arm and a leg to fix up and has already produced a hefty hire purchase debt.

All in all, while we're looking at a police procedural much of the difficulty in the course of the multiple investigations stems from the inability of those involved to follow the appropriate procedures in an environment where personal agendas get right in the way of team cohesion.

I finished Chain of Evidence less than twenty-four hours after Snapshot, and while I've got a couple of other volumes to knock over before I head out to chase down Blood Moon it's very high on the upcoming agenda (as is monitoring the horizon for the imminent Whispering Death).

Garry Disher "Snapshot"

Given the fact that the Inter-Library Loan turned out not being an option, and with no visit to the Gold Coast with the subsequent opportunity to check whether there's a copy in the library there, reading the Challis and Destry novels in sequence meant I was going to have to buy a copy, and a visit to Fishpond produced a US hardback copy from the Soho Crime imprint.

After The Dragon Man and Kittyhawk Down there are a couple of developing inter-personal loose ends that need tidying, and while Snapshot doesn't quite deliver Inspector Challis and Detective Sergeant Ellen Destry into a relationship you can see that's where they're going to end up eventually. Whether that'll be an on-going concern is anybody's guess.

Snapshot starts with a rather clever bit of reader manipulation, with psychological counsellor Janine McQuarrie generating a fair degree of reader sympathy as we learn that having succumbed to her husband's pressure and joined in the erotic adventures on the Mornington Peninsula swingers' circuit she's apparently found the prospect of true love elsewhere.

She's driving her seven-year-old daughter around with her on a pupil-free day as she muses on these matters, before being shot in an obvious contract hit outside a rundown weatherboard house on a quiet country road near Penzance Beach. The daughter would have died as well, but the hit man's pistol misfires.

You get an inkling that she's not quite the assassinated innocent from the fact that she has just posted off some photos from the most recent orgy to several male participants, including her husband. Police inquiries reveal she's not that popular with colleagues or clients either, so there are plenty of possible motives for the hit.

There's also an additional complication since she's the daughter-in-law of Hal Challis' boss Detective Superintendent McQuarrie, who's inclined to meddle even when he's not personally linked to a case. His son, of course, has to be a prime suspect, but he's hardly the only one, and Dad seems more interested in protecting the son than finding the killer.

The reader already knows who carried out the hit, so there's the regular challenge of spotting the way Disher's going to line things up for a solution as the hit man receives frequent instructions via text messages from an anonymous employer and goes about removing various figures around the periphery of the case whose continued existence could prove problematic.

Along the way, as things unfold there are the interpersonal dynamics that drive a good series, both inside Waterloo Police Station and among the officers' nearest and dearest.

Detective Sergeant Destry's marriage continues to disintegrate. Well-meaning Sergeant Scobie Sutton continues to extol the wonders of his ten year old daughter to an uninterested audience while his wife gets the chop from her welfare job with the notification arriving via email. Constables Pam Murphy and John Tankard still manage to only just tolerate each other as they drive a sports car around the district in a public relations exercise, rewarding courteous drivers with bags of goodies.

As has been the case through the other Disher titles I've read, the author integrates these elements seamlessly, switching perspective adroitly and sketching in any relevant details where they need to sneak in without disrupting the flow of the on-going narrative. That means you can read his work out of sequence, handy in a world where some of the earlier titles might not be that easy to track down in your local bookshop, though it also means you aren't going to get the unfolding interpersonal dynamics in quite the same way.

That's a significant consideration because it's the characters as much as the deftness with which Dis\her manipulates the elements in his plot line that are likely to bring the reader back to line up for the next one in the series. Disher's success in that regard can be gauged from the fact that within twenty-four hours of finishing Snapshot I had borrowed Chain of Evidence from the local library, knocking it over within a day, and if it's more than twenty-four hours before I'm queueing up for their copy of Blood Moon that'll only be because I've got a Shane Maloney Murray Whelan trilogy and another title I borrowed at the same time as Chain of Evidence.

Fred Vargas "Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand"

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 other individuals who all seem to 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.

Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand is the fifth in the Adamsberg series, following on not long after This Night's Foul Work. 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 that 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 and his associated. There's also the possibility that 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 a number of seemingly accidental deaths of Norman virgins whose graves have subsequently 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 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 Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand is another 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 the forthcoming 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?