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.