Ian Rankin "Standing In Another Man's Grave"

A man, it is said, cannot serve two masters and I’d suggest a novelist cannot run two protagonists, especially when they’re as diametrically opposed as John Rebus and Malcolm Fox.

News Ian Rankin had brought Rebus back to life in or around the force brought back memories of a remark from Rankin that Rebus was working on cold cases as a civilian, although the retirement age had been lifted and there was a possibility of him rejoining after five years away from the force. If he did he’d more than likely come across Malcolm Fox from The Complaints who might, looking back on the plot line of The Impossible Dead, be inclined to turn a blind eye to some of the Rebus irregularities provided his nose was otherwise clean.

Fox, I thought, worked rather neatly in those two titles, a man doing his (unpopular) job against a background of resentment and defiance that bordered, at times, on overt rebellion. With those two stories largely told from Fox’s point of view and through his eyes an author’s setting himself an impossible task if he sets out to analyse the events surrounding the disappearance of Annette McKie, the most recent of a number of girls who’ve disappeared around the A9, one of Scotland's major arterial roads, through both sets of eyes.

It probably could be done, but not without getting in the way of the plot line in operation here.

Rebus might be back, operating on the fringes, but there’s one key element that’s going to work against him rejoining, and that’s an interesting change in the nature of his interaction with his nemesis, Big Ger Cafferty. At the end of Exit Music, with Cafferty in hospital, Rebus happens to save his life, exactly the sort of behaviour that would convince the watchdog that Rebus is bent. From his own point of view, of course, Rebus wants the final satisfaction of putting Big Ger away for a long spell, something that’s not going to be possible if he up and dies on you.

In any case Rebus now gets regular visits from the supposedly retired Cafferty, which is exactly the sort of thing that’s going to further arouse Fox’s suspicions. There’s also an interesting development involving Cafferty’s interaction with the family of the latest girl to disappear which isn’t going to make Rebus look too good from where Fox is sitting.

The Rebus-Fox interactions are, at this point, very much a side issue, By the end of this particular narrative, with Rebus having sorted out a string of cold cases and the latest disappearance you can see potential for this interaction to develop further, particularly with Rebus’ former colleague, Siobhan Clarke, moving up through the ranks.

As far as Fox is concerned, Rebus should be extinct ... Somehow the Ice Age came and went and left him still swimming around while the rest of us evolved and has spent so many years crossing the line he's managed to rub it out altogether.

The assessments running in the other direction are equally blunt. As far as Rebus is concerned, Fox could have been middle management in a plastics company or Inland Revenue, so while we mightn’t end up getting a full blown Rebus versus Fox and the ethics and standards division as Fox goes about ensuring Rebus doesn’t corrupt his former sidekick we’ve got an interesting and intriguing developing subplot for future instalments.

As far as this episode is concerned, the latest disappearance on the A9, the road where Sally Hazlitt was last seen twelve years earlier, has her mother Nina, perpetually ready to hear the worst about her daughter's disappearance, reminding the cold case department of her suspicion that the disappearances of a string of young women can be attributed to a serial killer on the loose.

The problem with the theory lies in an absence of sightings, bodies and viable suspects, which explains an ongoing reluctance to take Nina’s theory seriously, until she heads in to have another go and finds the police station almost deserted, except for one John Rebus, who has never been one to shy away from apparently lost causes.

Like his former colleagues Rebus is initially unconvinced, but goes as far as requesting the records concerning the cold cases, and comes to the conclusion that, yes, there may be a connection and contacts his former protégée Siobhan Clarke, now a Detective Inspector in the missing persons department investigating the latest disappearance.

Clarke knows enough about the man to give him some rein to chase down clues no one else wants to look at, but her long-standing admiration for Rebus's detective abilities is at odds with her own career prospects in the new-style, corporate police force, which is where Fox comes into the picture when Rebus manages to get himself temporarily attached to the missing persons department to help with the case.

There’s more to link the cases than the fact that all these girls disappeared along the same stretch of road. In the most recent cases photographs of the same country scene have been sent to mobile phones belonging to friends (and not always close ones) and relatives.

The search for that scene, which has to have some significance, sees Rebus travel the length of the A9 in his battered Saab, haring all over Scotland to Glasgow, Aberdeen, Inverness and the far north, unearthing buried secrets, tracking down those who have moved or retired to remote areas, bending and breaking the rules, arguing with his superiors, and displaying the Rebus single-minded doggedness in his quest for justice.

Alongside that investigation there’s a neat little subplot involving Cafferty, the up and coming underworld player who happens to be involved with the missing girl’s mother, and her brother.

Despite the time he’s spent on the sidelines Rebus works as well as he always has. He’s the same curmudgeonly dinosaur he always was, drinking and smoking more than most of us should, listening to his favourite folk and rock classics, not quite managing the reconciliation with his daughter as he continues to play by his own rules.

Rankin writes as well as ever, and, most interestingly, has things set up rather nicely for the next couple of episodes in an evolving series. Along the course of the investigation the cold cases unit is wound up, so there’s no comfort for him there if he doesn’t get back on the force full time.

The realignments in the Edinburgh underworld have interesting implications for the future as Rebus looks to clamber back on board the train, Fox looks to ensure that he doesn’t and Siobhan Clarke continues to be torn between career ambitions and long term loyalties. It’s a prospect that’s guaranteed to have the fans scanning the horizon for news of the next instalment.

Donna Leon "Death and Judgment"

Corruption, and how far up the national and provincial pecking orders, are a constant theme through Donna Leon’s Brunetti mysteries, and there’s a particularly chilling example of how far at the end of Death and Judgment (also known as A Venetian Reckoning)

Having resolved the circumstances surrounding two obvious murders and an apparent suicide in the early hours of the morning Brunetti, dog tired, retreats home for a few hours’ sleep before he tidies up the formal side of things. He’s got a culprit, and a confession, the suspect’s safely locked up so everything ought to be cut and dried.

Six hours later he’s back at the Questura, only to find there had been a phone call from the Ministry of Justice in the meantime and some men from Special Branch showed up with some papers three hours earlier with orders to transfer the prisoner to Padua.

Earlier he’d written a short report, giving the substance of his conversations with the prisoner, and left it for Vice-Questore Patta or his acolyte Lieutenant Scarpa.  The prisoner suicides in a cell in Padua, nothing can be proved, and the breach of standard procedure gives Patta an excuse to tear strips off Brunetti. That’s a bit rich when there would seem to be only two sources who could have passed the details on to the higher ups...

And earlier, when the evidence at autopsy reveals a level of barbiturates in the apparent suicide’s bloodstream inconsistent with the perceived circumstances the official report on the procedure sees the quantity halved with the coroner’s notes and the relevant samples having gone missing.

Death and Judgment starts with one of those incidents that don’t appear to be tied in with the solution to the case by providing the motive for the murder. In this case the incident involves a crash where a truck carrying a load of timber crashes off a snow covered road in the in the Dolomite mountains of northern Italy, spilling its load, which includes eight unidentified women across the mountain side.

The murder, or at least the first of three murders, has a prominent lawyer shot on an express train from Torino, with the body being found as the train crosses the lagoon heading in to Venice. Carlo Trevisan was an expert on international law, is apparently a clean, family man and there’s no obvious reason why anyone would want him dead. Since the corpse still has his wallet, you can rule out robbery as a motive. He’s also a friend of the mayor and his wife is the secretary of the Lions Club, so when Patta assigns him the case Brunetti is instructed to use the utmost discretion.

Two days later his accountant, who also happens to be his brother-in-law is found dead in his car, shot three times, at close range, apparently by someone who was sitting beside him in the front seat.

In between those two there’s the apparent suicide and about the only thing Brunetti and his colleagues have to go on are a list of phone numbers in his address book that don’t have names beside them. One is Trevisan’s and another is a seedy bar that links both to a network of slave traders and pornographers that reaches beyond the Venetian laguna through Eastern Europe and as far afield as Ecuador and Thailand.

That provides the link to the truck crash, but it’s still a matter of finding the murderer, which is going to be a little tricky since the top level of the network are eminent Italians virtually untouchable by the police.

Brunetti, on the other hand, with Signorina Elettra on his side, can call in a favour from a judge, and has a teenage daughter who went to the same school as Trevisan’s daughter. All of them add something to the investigation, though when Chiara provides one of the key links towards the end, Brunetti ends up wishing she hadn’t.

This fourth title in the Commissario Brunetti series has its origins in a newspaper article Leon read during the Bosnian war and as the plot line unfolds Brunetti’s struggle against a corrupt system provides a fascinating read, particularly when you look at it in the light of the anti-austerity protests currently taking place across Europe.

Donna Leon "Death in a Strange Country"

Having suggested Donna Leon has managed to land a fully formed character in the first Commissario Brunetti novel, it should come as no surprise to learn there's no hint of continuity from La Fenice to a Strange Country. Where other writers are still finding their feet with the new character and trying out different possibilities, Death in a Strange Country starts the way most Brunetti stories start, and proceeds gradually, step by step from there.

That means, of course, that there's no need to actually read these stories in sequence, since the only long term key character yet to emerge is Signora Elettra and the only reason she hasn’t turned up yet is because she hasn’t been needed.

In other words you could summarise the plot line with a semi-formulaic Brunetti is going about his ordinary day to day business when he’s called to a crime scene, the investigation meanders along and there’s an eventual resolution of some, though not necessarily all, of the issues raised in the course of the investigation.

Expressed in those terms (and the same is more or less true of anything in the genre) there’s not really that much there, and the devil (or, in this case, the charm) is in the detail the author provides to put some flesh on the bare bones, and it’s here that the distinctions that account for differing tastes come in.

James Lee Burke would people the narrative with a liberal helping of well-realised minor characters, a couple of truly impressive psycho and sociopaths and unearth the odd skeleton in several interlocking closets along the way, with frequent reminders of their own mortality and past failings for  the key players. When you’re talking the detail, that, for mine, is the devil, but it will be played out across a prose landscape that’s immaculately realised in writing that goes close to shining.

Andrea Camilleri will have Montalbano running across the Sicilian landscape, interacting with the regular cast and manipulating things to thwart the Commissioner’s efforts to hamstring him, and the whole thing will proceed at a lively clip with a definite raffish charm.

Donna Leon, on the other hand, with Venice as the backdrop and Brunetti as the ordinary family man thrown in to investigate matters that have more to them than meets the eye, moves things through a narrative that has its twists and turns and while we’re often talking serious matters the interaction of weighty issues and a decent human being are the key ingredient in a very well realised series.

Death in a Strange Country starts with the body of a young man found floating in a Venetian canal.He’s been stabbed, and there’s nothing on the body to identify him, but there were some coins in his pocket, and a look at his teeth convinces the coroner the victim was American, which at least provides a starting point for the investigation.

Given that identity and the fact that his wallet is missing it seems reasonable to assume the killing is a drug-related mugging, though a bit of preliminary checking reveals that the area where the body was found is relatively drug free (the garbage man has never complained of finding syringes on the street in the morning). As far as Brunetti’s superior, Vice-Questore Patta, is concerned, there’s a danger to the city’s tourist trade, so Brunetti had better be smart about finding a suitable culprit. Not necessarily the culprit, a culprit.

To stop him from getting too involved with unnecessary detail Patta hands him the investigation into a burglary from a Grand Canal palazzo which has all the external appearances of an insurance job.

A check around the city’s tourist accommodation fails to deliver any missing Americans, so Brunetti checks with a nearby military base. It’s not the sort of situation where the Italian police can just go barging in, but when the military authorities check around they find, yes, there’s a serviceman who’s gone missing and send in his superior officer to identify the body.

Captain Peters (Doctor Peters if we’re not talking rank), the superior officer, as it turns out, is young, female, attractive and deeply distressed when she views the body, something that doesn’t quite tally with personal detachment and her status as a medical practitioner though, in her own words on the way to the cemetery island, it’s different when you know the person. The reaction, when the identification is made, runs a bit deeper than that.

From there we’re teetering on the brink of spoiler territory, but the victim, Sgt. Michael Foster, apart from his designated position as public health inspector at the American military hospital wears another couple of hats. Brunetti’s visit to the base gives the author a free shot at some of the absurdities of a little America on foreign soil (Burger King, frozen pizza, Baskin Robbins and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream in the land of gelato).

Brunetti’s visit to the base, where he checks out Foster’s apartment doesn’t reveal much apart from a couple of plastic bags containing about a kilogram of white powder concealed in a heater. Brunetti removes them, doesn’t say anything about them and carefully empties the contents into one of Venice’s canals on the way back. He’s after the fingerprints on the packets rather than the contents, and when he gets those checked there are two sets of prints, one from the victim, the second possibly female. Hmmm...

A return visit to the apartment reveals someone has checked the hiding place, and a couple of days later Doctor Peters’ death is reported in the Sunday paper, with an overdose as the cause of death and a strong suggestion of suicide.

Since Doctor Peters had told Brunetti she’d spent six years in medical school followed by four years in the Army, and was six months off getting out (I shouldn’t even say I want to go back to my life. I want to start one) it’s fairly obvious (to Brunetti, at least) that someone is going to a great deal of trouble to cover up the reasons for the first murder, is determined to provide a ready-made solution to the crime and isn’t too particular about collateral damage.

Put all that together, and you’ve got the ingredients for an intriguing mystery, and while most of the characters hit the pages fully formed in Death at La Fenice and are unchanged here, there’s an evolutionary step in Brunetti’s relationship with his aristocratic father-in-law. After twenty years of marriage, Brunetti’s still not comfortable in his father-in-law’s presence, but Count Falier definitely has his uses. When you need to find out gossip about a German opera conductor, for instance, a social gathering at the Palazzo Falieri provides an avenue to meet the sort of people who might know.

Here, once the pieces have fallen into place and the deaths of Sergeant Foster and Doctor Peters have been explained, while it’s obvious nothing can be done through official channels a word in the right ear is enough to have the issue dealt with, though it’s fairly obvious no one is entirely happy about it.

Still, there’s no doubting Brunetti’s father-in-law is an integral part of the whole plot resolution puzzle. With his contacts within, and knowledge of, the upper echelons of Italian society he can get Brunetti’s investigations into places that wouldn’t normally be accessible, and when Signora Elettra hits the ground running in the third title in the series everything’s in place, and since that’s the case, the changes in Brunetti’s relationship with the in-laws will, of course, be a narrative strand to watch as I work through the rest of the series in order.

Andrea Camilleri "The Age of Doubt"

Given the fact that Andrea Camilleri usually starts a new Montalbano story around dawn, long term readers will hardly be surprised to learn The Age of Doubt kicks off in the wake of a ferocious overnight thunderstorm that has sent waves over Salvo Montalbano’s front porch and washed out the road into town.

Montalbano’s been jolted into consciousness after a dream about his own death. Entering the station to inform Catarella that he's off on a surprise trip to visit Livia in Genoa, he’s told he can’t go because he’s dead, and can’t investigate the case because he's too personally involved.  Such nocturnal ramblings are never comforting affairs, and Salvo, as he goes about his morning routine, spends his time musing on the significance of the long-suffering Livia’s refusal to attend his funeral. She’s apparently got other, more significant demands on her time.

On his way into work, after a quarter of an hour persuading the car to start and twenty minutes wedged tight in a traffic jam he decides to investigate the cause, and after being immediately soaked straight down to his underpants reaches the head of the queue to find both lanes of the road washed away, a car teetering on the edge of the abyss that’s still being undermined and a young woman just over thirty wearing eyeglasses with lenses as thick as bottle bottoms in the car

Chivalry isn’t dead as far as Montalbano is concerned, and after identifying himself as a police officer he persuades her to join him, first in his car, then to change her clothes and dry out at his villa.

As you do...

There he learns her name is Vanna Digiulio, and she tells Montalbano she was on her way to Vigàta harbour to see her aunt, whose luxury yacht was due to arrive that day. The yacht, coincidentally, happens to be named the Vanna. Given the weather conditions the yacht doesn’t dock until much later than the ten o’clock E.T.A. and when it does dock it’s carrying the disfigured body of a man, face bashed in so he can’t be identified, they’ve collected from a dinghy adrift near the harbour mouth.

That’s an obvious case for the local constabulary, and when Montalbano questions Livia Giovannini, the imperious signora who owns the Vanna, it turns out she doesn’t have a niece.

Given the fact that Salvo’s been harbouring suspicions from when the supposed niece appeared on the scene something definitely smells fishy and as he sets about sniffing out the details he meets Lt. Laura Belladona of the Harbour Office, young, attractive and very much on the ball.

Montalbano, surprise, surprise, is instantly smitten and, interestingly, the attraction appears to be mutual.

The key to the case seems to lie in getting somebody on board the Vanna to investigate what’s going on under the surface, and since the owner case proves to be something approaching a ravenous nymphomaniac Mimi Augello, whose wife has conveniently gone to her parents’ place, is just the man for the undercover under the covers work.

That’s about as far as one can go without letting one of several cats out of the bag, but in The Age of Doubt Camilleri has once again delivered an interesting well-paced mystery the usual linguistic mangling from Catarella and the rest of the supporting cast doing their regular thing as Montalbano goes on his merry way.

Given the other female involvement there’s not much Livia this time around, but pathologist Dr Pasquano makes his appearance in the usual manner, Commissioner Bonetti-Alderighi is his usual pain in the backside self, though Salvo has managed to find ways of returning the anguish his boss delivers (there’s a wonderful little interview where Bonetti-Aldigheri is driven to the verge of insanity by Montalbano the walking Thesaurus).

Dr Lattes’ regular inquiries as to the welfare of Montalbano’s non-existent family produce the news that a little boy, grievously ill in one conversation has passed on in the next and in turn provides the means to avoid signing a mountain of paperwork recreated to replace what had been water-damaged when the roof of Montalbano’s office sprang a leak during the thunderstorm.

It may be titled The Age of Doubt, but there’s no question that Camilleri has, once again delivered a highly enjoyable and well paced mystery with all the elements long-time fans have come to know and love.

The English translation of next title in the series, La danza del gabbiano (The Dance of the Seagull) is due in February 2013.

Donna Leon "Death at La Fenice"

The fact that I’ve enjoyed whatever Donna Leon title I’ve picked up probably means she was a prime contender for reread the series from the start status, but if I hadn’t chanced upon Death at La Fenice in the el cheapo bins at Townsville’s Target that prospect would probably be something for the distant future.

As it turns out, now that I’ve got, and have read, the first title, there have been orders for the next couple (currently substantially discounted to the point where there’s not that much difference between tracking them down at Fishpond and scouring the el cheapo bins for the little devils.

So, One down, Two and Three ordered, a couple more on the shelves, two already reviewed on the website, what’s the G.O. here?

Well, for a start, it has been a long time since I found a first title in a seres that’s as fully formed as Death at La Fenice. Usually you start reading a series and things gradually fall in place as the author comes to terms with the key characters and the setting, but here, most of the elements that run through the series are firmly in place.

Admittedly, some of the characters who become key players in later titles have yet to make an appearance, the key one being Signora Elettra, computer wizard and secretary of Commissario Brunetti’s boss, who wouldn’t have been able to work her magic when Death was written because 1992 (the year the book was published) was comfortably before the development of the World Wide Web she trawls so efficiently.

But, effectively, from the get go we’ve got Guido Brunetti, devoted family man whose in-laws come from one of Venice’s foremost aristocratic families. He’s not exactly thrilled about this. Despite the fact he’s been married for seventeen years he isn’t sure of how to address the father-in-law and isn’t comfortable in their presence.

His wife and children are, from the start, much the way they continue to be through twenty years and twenty-one titles.

Paola Brunetti, University lecturer in English literature, has most of the mannerisms that continue through the series in place from the start, though her reputation in the kitchen is still to come to the fore and the two teenage kids age a little over the series, but it’s not as if Brunetti’s about to become a grandfather any time soon.

Another key piece who falls into place almost fully formed is Brunetti’s superior, Vice-Questore Giuseppi Patta, the vain and almost insufferably pretentious man who’s not very bright. While he’ll suck up to the rich and influential he doesn’t seem to have bothered to dig around enough to learn Brunetti’s father-in-law has two doges on his mother’s side of the family or maybe he’s too busy associating himself with politicians and the like to be admitted to the patrician circles where the really influential Venetians are found.

In any case, news that world famous conductor Helmut Wellauer has been found dead at the end of the intermission between Acts Two and Three of Verdi’s La Traviata in La Fenice Opera House is certain to be greeted with alarm among Patta’s superiors so he’ll inevitably be throwing his weight around in the quest for a quick solution to a death that casts the city in a very bad light, isn’t he?

Brunetti, on the other hand, goes about his business systematically, using clever mental stratagems to avoid excessive angst prompted by Patta’s posturing and tackling the suspects diplomatically as he comes to realise that the key to the mystery lies somewhere in Wellauer’s personality and quite possibly in the long distant past.

From the moment the body is discovered there’s no doubt about how he died. There’s a smell of bitter almonds in the dressing room, to the extent that the doctor who’s called to the scene and Brunetti both know there was cyanide in the maestro’s coffee even though they’ve only read about that sort of thing in detective stories.

Backstage at the opera house isn’t what you might call the most security-conscious of environments (it’s supposed to be, but from remarks made by musicians, singers and stage hands during the investigation you know it isn’t) and there are a number of people nearby who could have delivered the deadly dose of caffeinated cyanide.

For a start, Wellauer was a noted homophobe, director Franco Santore is gay, and Wellauer has refused to honour an agreement to cast Santore's protege is a role that would possibly make his name.

There’s also the question of leading soprano Flavia Petrelli, whose lesbian liaison with independently wealthy American archeologist, Brett Lynch, Wellauer was reputedly threatening to expose, an act that would see the singer’s Spanish ex-husband gain custody of their two children.

There’s a much younger, suddenly wealthy widow, who would naturally attract suspicion, and allegations of pro-Nazi sympathies in Wellauer’s past, which may have something to do with things but it’s not a case where forensic evidence is going to throw any light on the matter.

The only fingerprints on Wellauer’s coffee cup are the maestro’s own, and given the number people who would have used the dressing room there’s not going to be much joy there so, in the end, the only way through to a solution is to piece things together from gossip, chance remarks and a bit of historical research.

The search for scuttlebutt takes Brunetti from the lofty heights of a party at Count and Countess Falier’s (his in-laws) palazzo through assorted dressing rooms, back stage areas, hotel rooms and apartments to the wretched circumstances of a destitute soprano living on the island of Guidecca, and along the way Brunetti uncovers lurid tales from Wellauer’s past and unearths fascinating stories about many of the suspects.

Suspicions start to become obvious from fairly early on in the piece. Wellauer’s second wife committed suicide when their daughter was twelve, and the current wife’s early teenage daughter from a previous marriage is away at boarding school, which strikes Brunetti as extremely suspicious when he notes the total absence of anything you’d associate with a teenage girl in the conductor’s Venice apartment.

After all, even if she was only on the premises intermittently, Brunetti is all too aware of the teenage female’s ability to leave things behind. He’s got one at home, hasn’t he?

While the reader is pretty sure which way things are heading, there’s a neat twist at the end that leaves Brunetti with a difficult moral issue a the end. While he knows what happened it’s not the sort of case where you’d want to be revealing too much of what went on behind the scenes of the victim’s life.

And that, I think, is what makes this first title in an extensive series so remarkable. Donna Leon has managed to deliver what was originally a one-off joke prompted by a friend’s suggestion that she try writing a crime novel and put in place elements that are good enough to keep her, and the reader, going through twenty titles without adding too much to the original mix.

Of course, when you’ve got a setting like Venice, an eye for detail, and an intimate knowledge of sensibilities in La Serenissima, you’ve probably got a walk up start, but Brunetti’s an engaging character, the interactions with his family down to the surreptitious support for an anti-capitalist son who gloats over winning at Monopoly work, and his dealings with his loathsome boss reflect a degree of pragmatism in a character who’d be, one suspects, an idealist by inclination.

Alafair Burke "Long Gone"

After half a dozen titles in the crime fiction police procedural side of things Alafair Burke’s seventh novel shifts to the other side of the investigatory fence. Portland, Oregon prosecutor Samantha Kincaid and NYPD Detective Ellie Hatcher are handed cases and given the task of figuring out who was responsible for the killing but in Long Gone art gallery manager Alice Humphrey is presented with a corpse and an empty gallery and has to prove she wasn’t responsible.

That’s hardly an unusual basis for a pot line when you’re talking thrillers. There are plenty of similar efforts involving an honest, Officer, it wasn’t me narrative, and the key ingredient, as far as I can see, is to make the suspect’s situation and protestations of innocence believable while keeping the reader turning the pages to find out which of the seemingly innocent characters surrounding the protagonist was the one whodunnit.

That, in turn, requires a believable and slowly unfolding back story, and Alafair Burke seems to have that department pretty well nailed.

Alice Humphreys is the daughter of acclaimed movie director Frank Humphreys and Oscar nominated actress Rose Sampson, was a child actress and now wants to make her way on her own merits rather than sponging on the parental prominence. Having been laid off by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she’s desperate for work when an offer to manage a new art gallery in the trendy Meatpacking District lands at her feet.

Now, you might think these things are too good to be true, and if that’s the way it looks it probably is, but Burke neatly works her way around that point, making Alice the sort of person who stumbles across things rather than going out actively looking. She landed her Manhattan apartment, for example, from an overheard conversation. Some readers might find this side of things far fetched, but given her background you might anticipate that things tend to fall into place rather often.

That child actress gig more than likely came about because one of her parents’ Hollywood peers suddenly ‘realised’ Alice was just perfect for this part they were having the devil of a time filling.  Nothing to do with an ambitious stage mother. Of course not...

So Alice is at an art show when Drew Campbell, snappily dressed corporate wheeler dealer offers her a gig managing a new gallery that’s going to start by displaying the work of the not excessively talented lover of the eccentric and predictably well-heeledand anonymous owner.

Once that show’s out of the way Alice is free to go her own way and set about making a name for herself as a savvy gallery operator without exploiting the family connections. Fair enough?

Well, it would be, if the exhibition didn’t turn out to comprise nude photos of questionable artistic value that attract the attention of a fundamentalist pastor who pickets the building, raises suspicions about the age of the subjects portrayed and the question of possible child pornography. Things are getting rather desperate when Alice contacts Campbell, needing to get in contact with the mysterious owner and arranges to meet Campbell at the gallery the following morning to sort things out.

She duly arrives to find the place stripped bare, Campbell dead on the floor, and a string of circumstantial evidence that makes her the prime suspect for his murder.

By this point Burke has already thrown in another two intersecting plot lines involving the disappearance of New Jersey teenager Becca Stevenson who has, it turns out, been keeping secrets from her (single) mother and FBI agent Hank Beckman, who’s obsessively stalking the man he believes to be responsible for his sister's death.

These other two plot lines are, of course, connected to Alice’s story in some way, and it’s the finding out how that keeps the reader turning the pages.

The first question, as far as Alice’s innocence is concerned, comes down to finding out who this Drew Campbell really was since there’s nothing concrete to tie the corpse to the assumed identity. The mobile phone number Alice has been calling links to a disposable phone, the artist whose work she displayed doesn't seem to exist and there’s no way of tracking down the anonymous benefactor who’s been financing the gallery.

And, predictably, the missing teenager’s fingerprints turn up on the premises at the gallery.

As far as the NYPD are concerned, there’s no question about who’s guilty, and as the rest of the story unfolds Alice unravels the details, uncovering carefully staged deceptions, discovering secrets her family would rather forget and learning that those around her aren’t necessarily quite who they appear to be.

Those issues result is an interesting, lively-paced read with some contemporary issues (social media playing a significant part in the plot line) getting an airing. I think I’ve read all of Ms Burke’s previous efforts (even if they’re not reviewed hereabouts) and Long Gone is right up there with the rest of them, to the point where I’ll have the eyes peeled for the return of Ellie Hatcher in the forthcoming Never Tell (due out in August).

Stuart MacBride "Blind Eye"

When The Actor turned up on the doorstep with a previously unread Logan McRae title from Stuart MacBride I was left scratching the noggin with vague memories of familiarity, and a few pages in I realised this was, in fact, one that had got away from the review process, presumably read in Southport and filed away as a subject for a Library Fiction entry that subsequently failed to materialise.

The main plot line has Aberdeen's Polish community under attack from a serial offender who leaves mutilated victims on building sites with their eyes gouged out and the eye sockets burned. Given the fact that these discoveries are regularly followed by threatening letters with an abundance of exclamation marks it seems safe to assume we’re looking at a psychopath with deep anti-Polish sensibilities, but there is, as usual, more to the case than meets the eye.

Given the gruesome descriptions of the victims in an investigation that, predictably, has been codenamed Operation Oedipus, you’d hardly be expecting a story that’s partly driven by humour, but that lack of expectation would stem from a lack of awareness of Logan McRae’s increasingly out there boss, DI Steele, who mightn’t quite steal the show but gets within a short half head of doing so. With adoption having been ruled out of contention Steele and her partner’s desire for a child has seen them turn to IVF, and when that idea’s torpedoed it’s a matter of doing it yourself with a suitable sperm donation.

Attempts to coerce McRae into the donor’s role (particularly after he’s been caught in flagrante with the Identification Bureau’s only tattooed Goth) contribute to the show stealing, as do Steele’s regular interactions with her colleagues, but the main focus of the story starts to come into question when Simon McLeod, owner of the Turf n' Track bookmaker’s operation, rather than another Pole becomes the latest blinding victim.

A reluctance to talk is would be understandable where the Poles were concerned, but McLeod isn’t talking either, not even when his business is firebombed and we’re seemingly looking at a takeover of Aberdeen’s underworld as foreign powerbrokers start to impinge rather seriously on the turf of Aberdeen's prime and most vicious crime lord.

With plenty of action, an intriguing story line, an aside trip to Poland where things definitely aren’t the way they seem on the surface, the regulation group dynamics as McRae angles for a vacant DI’s position and Steele and the pointedly prickly DCI Finnie go about their business without too much regard for the niceties of polite interaction and an underlying sense of humour that leavens the mix rather well Blind Eye was another cracking read in a highly enjoyable series.

So how the hell did I manage to miss reviewing it first time around?

Ian Rankin "The Impossible Dead"

It takes a special kind of cop to work effectively in Internal Affairs, the Office of Complaints and Conduct, Professional Ethics and Standards, Standards and Values or whatever label the authorities in your part of the world have tagged the internal investigators Ian Rankin calls The Complaints.

For a start, every case, regardless of how humble it may look on the surface, has the potential to reach upwards into the highest echelons of the force in question.

At the start of The Impossible Dead Edinburgh-based Inspector Malcolm Fox and his colleagues Sergeant Tony Kaye and Constable Joe Naysmith arrive in Fife to interview three police officers after suggestions Detective Paul Carter, who has been found guilty of extorting sex from women he's arrested and is awaiting sentencing, has been protected by his colleagues in the small coastal town of Kirkcaldy,

It’s the sort of allegation that’s going to be fairly inevitable in such cases, and it’s equally inevitable that the crooked cop’s colleagues are going to resent the investigation, so, predictably, Fox and his team run into the usual hostility and lack of co-operation from the local Constabulary. Par for the course (and, while we’re referencing golf, they’re not far from St Andrews).  As Fox and company arrive in Kirkcaldy, they are stonewalled by Kirkcaldy's entire detective force. The three men they have come to interview, DI Scholes, DS Haldane, and DS Michaelson, are on duty or unavailable due to illness.

In a way, you get the feeling all this becomes a bit of a game.

When the Complaints arrive, they're going to walk in expecting the antagonism from their fellow officers. Scholes, Haldane, and Michaelson are close friends of Carter’s and have more than likely covered up for him in the line of duty. When they arrive the Desk Sergeant may not be able to let them in, there may be no rooms available to work from, whatever facilities they are offered will be substandard, insecure or inconveniently located,whoever’s in charge will be away from the office attending meetings and the interviews they want to arrange will run up against all sorts of obstacles.

Faced with the predictable not quite passive resistance, Fox’s team set out to do their jobs. With Kaye and Naysmith assigned to chase up the interviews they’re supposed to be doing Fox heads off to talk to the person who reported Carter. The complainant, as it turns out was Carter’s uncle Alan, a retired police officer who now operates a security business and lives in isolated Gallowhill Cottage with his aged border collie, Jimmy Nicholl.

Fox’s team also talk to Teresa Collins, the woman who originally testified against Paul Carter, but news Carter has been released on bail causes Collins to cut her wrists. Then Alan Carter is found dead at his kitchen table, surrounded by papers relating to a cold case from 1985 with a pistol that had theoretically been destroyed by the police beside him. It looks like suicide until Fox points out a few inconvenient details.

Sure, it might be suicide, but the gun is in the wrong hand, and a dog lover would have arranged something for an aged and infirm border collie, wouldn’t he?

Given the fact that Paul Carter is out on bail, has a fairly obvious motive, made the last phone call his uncle received before he died and was seen driving in the area he becomes the obvious suspect.

The crux of the matter turns out to be the cold case Alan Carter was investigating. A lawyer named Francis Vernal was killed in a suspicious car accident, his death wasn’t properly investigated, and his widow (whose health is failing) wants some questions answered before she dies. She has persuaded an old friend to hire Alan Carter to revisit the circumstances surrounding his death.

Vernal was involved with radical groups trying to achieve independence by a violent campaign of violence that included packages of anthrax in the mail, kidnappings, murders and violent marches. Predictably, their activities attracted the authorities’ attention with undercover agents assigned the task of infiltrating the movement. His death had been treated as an accident or suicide, but he was in the habit of carrying sums of money with him and there’s none in the wreckage when his body was discovered. Fox is convinced Vernal was murdered.

Twenty-five years later many of those nationalists have reached the upper echelons of the Scottish National Party as devolution brought the SNP to power in Edinburgh.

As Fox starts digging it seems that someone wants something covered up (predictable, the radicals would doubtless have skeletons they’d prefer to keep in the closet) and with a contemporary terrorist plot in the offing MI5 is also sniffing around.

Fox sets out to discover what became of the other members of the nationalist movement and as he does he also has to deal with his father’s bouts of dementia and his increasingly strained relationship with his sister.

Fox’s father, Mitch, is in a nursing home, Fox is paying the bills, and while he feels guilty about the arrangement the alternative would probably involve Mitch living with him which wouldn’t work either.  His sister Jude is constantly accusing him of not caring about their father and has given Mitch a box of family photographs to jog his fading memory. One of them includes Fox’s uncle, who was involved in the nationalist movement and died in a motorbike accident around the same time as the Vernal crash.

That, in a nutshell is the basic plot line and the major subplot. There are, of course, others. There’s Fox’s interaction with Evelyn Mills, a member of Fife’s Complaints and the only friendly face in Kirkcaldy. She’s a married woman with whom Fox once had a one-night stand when she was slightly drunk and might be open to a rematch.

And Paul Carter, out on bail and under suspicion after his uncle’s death, drowns in the local harbour. Suicide? Murder? Another victim of someone who wants to keep the secrets hidden in the past under wraps?

As all these matters intersect the result is an absorbing read that kept me turning the pages, confirming a suspicion here, adding another strand there and throwing in the odd red herring to keep things interesting. Highly recommended, and a worthy successor to The Complaints, with the prospect, now that the retirement age for Scottish police officers has been raised to sixty-five that we might yet see John Rebus, retired but apparently sifting over the details of old, cold cases, come across Malcolm Fox, whose professional duties, as we’ve seen here, are always likely to push him in the same direction.

Andrea Camilleri "The Potter's Field"

The leopard, as I was wont to remark to the late Lester, cannot change his stripes, nor the zebra his spots.

Like that mangled quotation, when Mimi Augello strays from the straight and narrow in the thirteenth title in the Montalbano series he doesn't get it quite right. Long term readers will have been aware of the former lothario's conversion to devoted father and would have wondered hoe long the conversion would last.

The distraction involved when he does forms one of the strands in the plot line in The Potter's Field, and if he doesn't quite get his choice of nocturnal playmate or his alibi for the presumably unsuspecting Beba quite right, neither do those responsible for the killing that provides the main excuse for another exploration of the interpersonal relationships that revolve around Salvo Montalbano.

By this point in the series, of course, there's not going to be much that will be new. There'll be a body, Montalbano will investigate and eventually sort out the puzzle, Mimi Augello will feel undervalued, Fazio will indulge his inclination towards the encyclopaedic when it comes to background research, Catarella will mangle messages, surnames and the language in general, and Livia will engage in trunk line terrorism where Montalbano's peace of mind is concerned.

This time around the corpse has been hacked into thirty pieces and concealed in the titular potter's field in what appears to have been a Mafia killing. The thirty pieces, the environment in which they are deposited and the identity of the body, once revealed all seem to point towards Vigata's aging godfather who has a grudging respect for Montalbano and is, we learn towards the end of the story, opposed to the death penalty.

Identifying the body, however, is going to be largely a matter of guesswork. It has been concealed for a couple of months, does not seem to match any person reported missing, and the killers seem to have gone to some trouble to ensure that identification is impossible. After a couple of months buried in a garbage bag  investigators aren't going to be able to reassemble the pieces to gain an accurate resemblance, are they?

There is, however, one minor detail they've managed to overlook. The autopsy reveals a dental bridge in the victim's stomach. and examination of the object reveals a South American origin.

Then, conveniently, Dolores Alfano, a stunning Colombian beauty whose skin carries the faint scent of cinnamon,  arrived at the police station to report her husband, a sailor with ties to the local godfather, is missing. While his shipboard duties keep him away for months at a time he allegedly makes up for lost time when he manages shore leave, and now, having left a conveniently located love nest to board his ship he appears to have vanished.

Once the sample of her husband's DNA has been tested, the body that has been hacked to pieces turns out to be, as one might suspect, Giovanni Alfano and subsequent investigations reveal that Giovanni's father had been executed in Colombia after falling foul of Balduccio Sinagra, though the local Mafia heavy seems to have adopted the son.

And, as things turn out, Giovanni's dad was hacked into thirty pieces after his death, reflecting the thirty pieces of silver Judas was paid for betraying Christ. Presumably the son has made a similar mistake since his job would provide opportunities to engage in the trade in contraband cocaine. That's what we're supposed to think, of course, and Montalbano knows the truth lies elsewhere.

Discovering the truth, however, is complicated by interactions with those around him. Mimi Augello is in a permanent state of agitation, his wife Beba is concerned and expresses those concerns to Livia who, in turn, gets onto Salvo's case about it. Mimi is, allegedly, involved in numerous overnight stakeouts that Montalbano hasn't actually authorised, but we know what he's really been doing, don't we?

The equally predictable question involves the identity of who he's been doing it with (no prizes for guessing here) and the reason why he's insisting the investigation into the murder be handed over to him. As a result, Montalbano is forced to solve the mystery while apparently off the case himself, save Mimi's marriage and keep Livia from finding out what's been going on.

While all that detail could be seen as a spoiler, the actual plot line is, as always, secondary to the personal interactions and pointed political and social commentary. As usual, Montalbano ends up tying the loose ends together rather well in what might just be the best of the series so far.

That's promising, since the eighty-six year old Camilleri has another seven titles waiting for translator Stephen Sartarelli's attention. On this latest evidence he's still got it, with plenty more to come. The next title, The Age of Doubt is, by all accounts out in the US next May.

But that's for confirmed Camilleri connoisseurs. If you're new to the man and his work I'd strongly advise starting with The Shape of Water and dealing with the stories in sequence...

Graham Hurley "Beyond Reach"

Many years ago on one of the few occasions my family had access to a TV set (limited to school holidays if results merited it) I recall seeing an episode of Z Cars where the police cars were chasing someone who'd vandalised a bus shelter (or some similar structure) and after an hour or so of low key action had failed to catch the culprits,

It was, to put it mildly, a bit of an eye-opener back in an era when the forced of law and order invariably got their man when they set out in pursuit of serious crime.

Since then there have been plenty of examples of the good guys failing to catch the baddies in print, on film and over the TV ether, and the ongoing battle of wits between the Portsmouth police and their arch-rival Bazza Mackenzie has driven Graham Hurley's Joe Faraday series along very nicely indeed.

Mackenzie, for those unfamiliar with the series is the former soccer hooligan turned drug dealer who has managed to elevate himself above the pack and diversified his interests to the point where he's got a finger in most of the pies going around, and the Pompey Plod know it.

The diversity of Mackenzie's interests means most criminal activity in Portsmouth is bound to impinge on them, even if Bazza's not personally involved from the start, and as he becomes involved the possibility that this might just be the chance to get him comes into the calculations as far as the Constabulary are concerned.

Almost invariably, something goes amiss and the opportunity goes down the gurgler, which is what happens here in Beyond Reach, which is where Bazza seems to be permanently located at a distance that's tantalisingly adjacent.

There are at least three chances to nail him here this time around, though the story starts off in a predictably non-Mackenzie manner when a mangled body found on a main road turns out to be a thug who has been terrorising the Portsdown estate. It's obviously a hit and run, but Kyle Munday has been at the centre of a couple of investigation into the stabbing murder of teenage would-be musician Tim Morrissey on Guy Fawkes night. While Faraday and his colleagues aren't exactly heartbroken at this development there are definite questions that need to be asked.

To muddy the waters and provide a degree of distraction, Faraday's latest lady friend has headed to Montreal and an academic position that threatens to become permanent, while his superiors are starting to question his ability to continue in his current role. They have have effectively sidelined him by handing over a twenty-five year old rape case that just might be able to be reopened thanks to developments in the realms of DNA testing techniques.

None of this has an obvious link to Mackenzie, and he's got problems of his own since his married daughter is cheating on her husband, which mightn't have been a problem if it wasn't distracting her from issues involved with Dad's business interests, which is what brings Dad to ask ex-cop turned minder Paul Winter to look into these things.

When Winter does, it turns out that she's gone and got herself rather deeply involved with a certain high-ranking detective, which suggests there's undercover intrigue afoot. We soon learn while DCI Perry Madison had once been second in command on the Major Crime Team he's almost universally loathed by his colleagues. While his involvement with the girl might be part of a wider plan to bring Bazza unstuck you get the distinct impression that his colleagues would be loath to see the man get any credit for anything.

Hurley does internal police force intrigue and machinations consistently well.

His involvement with Esme, however, has also created a second avenue the authorities could use to bring Baz unstuck, though Esme's smart enough to avoid spilling the actual beans. Winter's despatched to tidy things up when a partner in one of Mackenzie's schemes (a block of apartments and a hotel in Spain) turns out to be a London drug dealer with the Metropolitan Police breathing down his neck rather than the casino operator he presented as.

Then, with marital discord causing Esme and her merchant banker husband to leave their three kids in an isolated country house with the au pair some thug breaks into the house and kidnaps the eldest son in an almost clinical operation. The matter is reported \and offers another avenue to infiltrate the Mackenzie organisation since they're going to need officers on the spot when the phone calls about the ransom start coming in.

Apart from tidying up the various strands involving Esme and the Spanish development, Winter also has a problem in the shape of the Tide Turn Trust, Bazza's new pet project which will cement his new respectability through an intervention in the lives of Portsmouth's underprivileged youth.

Although he's been allocated the responsibility for looking after Tide Turn it's not Winter's kettle of fish, and he manages to persuade Bazza they need assistance from a professional social worker, and he comes up with the perfect solution in Mo Sturrock, currently on gardening leave after speaking his mind at a conference rather than reading from the prepared script he was supposed to deliver.

Sturrock's plan to intervene and turn around the lives of the hard core youth gangs that are running an extortion racket to fund Kyle Munday's funeral is the sort of thing that needs a major occasion to launch, and invitations are duly sent to Faraday's superiors, who are still smarting from being outwitted by Mackenzie's decision to pay the ransom for the grandson's kidnapping himself without police involvement and send Winter, supposedly with a million pounds in cash that has ostentatiously been withdrawn from the bank, to lead the police on a wild goose chase.

Then, when Sturrock's scheme looks like providing an opportunity to leave Baz with egg on his face, that one blows up in their faces as well.

Having run through this series as I ran across the titles rather than hitting them in the appropriate order I can vouch for the fact that the individual titles work well enough as stand alones, but I'd still suggest Turnstone as the best starting point. As a series, the books are good enough to have the missing titles on the watch list (you'll find the odd Hurley title in the el cheapo bins at various newsagents) and I'll eventually be doing a reread in the right order exercise.

That's going to happen because Hurley works his plot lines skilfully, with half a dozen seemingly unrelated strands getting themselves tied together in the end. Fair enough, you might say, that tying together apparently unrelated subplots is a key part of the whole crime fiction genre. The difference here lies in the developing interaction between good cop who's rapidly becoming disillusioned (Faraday), bad cop who's gone over to the dark side but still has time for his old boss (Winter) and Mackenzie, who should, by rights be bringing himself unstuck but miraculously stays one step ahead of the pack.

That interaction makes the Faraday series, for my money, one of the best going around and Beyond Reach is quite possibly the best of the series to date.

Ian Rankin "The Complaints"

Having read Exit Music, been disappointed by Doors Open and headed off to reread the Rebus series in order I'd been quite happy to let The Complaints slip past on the basis that I'd wait and see whether the new character had legs, a policy that lasted roughly as long as it took to hear a Rankin segment on Radio National, decide the new character had promise and bring myself into contact with a hard copy of the story.

The retail copy I found myself dragging home was, predictably, The Impossible Dead rather than The Complaints, which in turn produced the do we read these things in order quandary and scrutiny of the shelves down at the Library that produced the volume pictured above.

It was, I thought, best to work in sequence, particularly since I'd heard a bit of background about the character and Rankin's desire to create a completely Rebus-free zone around him.

Well, maybe not quite Rebus free. There could, at some point in the indeterminate future, be an opportunity to bring the two together because Malcolm Fox, working for the Professional Standards Unit at the Lothian and Borders Police, could well end up investigating a matter that has had Rebus involvement.

Professional Standards were, after all, frequently called in to examine aspects of Rebus' career.

As far as the new character was concerned, the aim was to create a non- or anti-Rebus, which Rankin seems to have done by literally listing all the attributes we've come to associate with John Rebus and making Fox the almost diametrical opposite.

Sure, both are divorced, but where Rebus repeatedly sticks his toe in the water Fox isn't up for emotional involvement. There are no children, he's shunted his elderly father off to an expensive retirement home and he's been keeping his sister at arms length due to a combination of her binge drinking and her taking up with an abusive Englishman. His Dad's not that keen on her partner, either, Fox wants Vince Faulkner charged, but sister Judith won't press charges.

Some of that distance comes as a result of Fox's status as a recovering alcoholic, though he's still inclined to visit the bars frequented by his colleagues, drinking Virgin rather than Bloody Marys but not far enough removed from his demons to escape fantasies about the taste of single-malt whisky and the burn of vodka in the back of the throat.

That brings us to the biggest difference between the two characters. While Rebus was quite happy to go off on his own, Fox is working in an environment where he and his colleagues are loathed by their peers and have to work as a team if they'e going to get anywhere.

It's the intrigue that looks to be the driving force behind what could, if the first volume's anything to go by, be a cracker of a series.

As the story starts, Fox has just completed what appears to have been a successful investigation of Glen Heaton, a popular and high-ranking officer,who has allegedly been on the take for years, bending the rules to his advantage and trading favours among a network of criminals while still seeming to maintain a n impressive success rate in his investigations.

On the surface, when the Child Exploitation and Online Protection investigators ask him to look into a possible pedophile, it seems fairly straightforward. Jamie Breck is a young officer on the way up, but his name and credit-card details have turned up in a child-pornography inquiry.

Fox sets about preliminary investigations, and we're shown how much his team's activities, which must, of course, be conducted in extreme secrecy, are disliked by their colleagues, and he's not far into the investigation when a phone call advises him that his sister's partner has been found dead.

The phone call, in an amazing coincidence comes from Jamie Breck, who happens to be stationed at Heaton's old station, where there are plenty of people who'd like to get square with Fox, who has an obvious motive for the killing though the reader's fairly sure he didn't do it.

This results in the rather tricky situation where you've got two blokes investigating each other (more or less) as circumstances seem to be conspiring to push them closer together and a tentative friendship threatens both careers.

Breck, as it turns out, isn't quite what he seems to be. Younger than Fox, upwardly mobile, with a sharp intelligence and a cynical awareness of the way things operate, the reader could see his relationship with a female officer as cover for pedophile activities, and his penchant for role playing computer games would probably register him as more than a tad sus, but as it turns out he's straight, and just as concerned as Fox to find out who's pulling the strings behind the scenes.

Before they know it, Fox and Breck are suspended, leaving them relatively free to work together to find out what's really going on and repair their lost reputations amid a fair bit of string-pulling in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, with failed property deals, abandoned building developments and investors (including major crime figures) who've lost a bundle, are looking to claw it back and will happily turn a blind eye to whatever's involved in doing so.

That situation, in itself, creates an interesting dilemma for Fox, a man who's used to working by the book, investigating carefully in collaboration with a team to build up a case that will then be passed on for review. In these circumstances he's forced to throw away the rule book, become proactive participant rather than a detached observer and cut a few corners.

All in all, after the relative disappointment of Doors Open, we've got a character who holds the attention, may be more subdued and controlled than the old Rebus (who's apparently retired and doing a bit of digging over old cold cases so he's not totally done for) but finds himself amidst connections, apparent coincidences and conflict of interest complications. He's a believable character, doing a nasty job that he takes seriously and wants to do well. It's a character, and a situation, that has definite potential when it comes to Rankin's preferred subject matter, the moral dimension and ethical issues involved with police work and the interactions between the police and the wider community.

Actually, the only thing that's keeping me from starting on The Impossible Dead is the knowledge that it'll be a while before I can get my hands on a sequel.

Maya Jasanoff "Liberty’s Exiles: The Loss of America and the Remaking of the British Empire"

Since my year studying Problems in Australian History back in 1971 I've been interested in the reasons behind the British colonisation of Australia and a cursory glance at this title sitting in the Recent Arrivals section of the local library suggested I might find something of interest herein. As it turned out, there's nothing much that links the Loyalist refugees to Australia's First Fleet, but it was definitely an interesting read.

History tends to be written by the winners, and the conventional wisdom of American history probably leans towards Republican Revolutionary victory rather than Loyalist courage in the face of defeat, so over the years it has been difficult to avoid an impression of patriotic revolutionaries against despotic Red-coated tyranny. I have memories from childhood of a Walt Disney TV series called The Swamp Fox starring Leslie Nielsen as Revolutionary War hero Francis Marion.

In that sort of setting you're not going to find too many references to the fact that when the British evacuated New York and other cities in November 1783 they took 75,000 civilian refugees with them. At the start of the struggle as many as one-quarter of colonists had been inclined towards loyalty to Britain rather than the Continental Congress.

Seven years of struggle and forced persuasion reduced that support significantly, but there was still a substantial Loyalist rump willing to go into exile, largely to Canada, the Bahamas and Jamaica with some venturing as far as Sierra Leone, the venture that had lead me to expect there just might be something related to Australia's First Fleet contained herein.

As it turned out, there wasn't a great deal, although one of the earliest suggestions of Botany Bay as a site for British settlement came from Loyalist James Matra, who'd been an able seaman on Cook's voyage that called there in 1770.

This account, based on extensive research through the archives of all the major Loyalist destinations and the records of the Loyalist Claims Commission, set up to compensate the refugees for their losses and reward their fidelity to the crown provides what could well be the definitive history of the Loyalist diaspora around the Atlantic.

Loyalists, the reader learns, came from most classes and ethnicities, including Creek and Mohawk leaders looking to protect their communities against American expansionism and included Mayflower descendants alongside recent immigrants, Anglican clerics with Methodist preachers and Quaker practitioners, back country farmers from the Carolinas and urban sophisticates from New York and Boston, colonial administrators beside butchers, bakers and candlestick makers and Benjamin Franklin’s son William.

Loyalists opposed revolutionary anarchy, the Boston Tea Party’s fancy-dressed hooliganism, mob-rule tar and feathers. They saw those Boston merchants groaning about taxation as ingrates unwilling to contribute to the coffers after British taxpayers had protected their interests through the French and Indian War while paying, on average, one-fiftieth of the impost on British residents.

Around sixty thousand Loyalists departed for exile, at least eight thousand of them free blacks, with an additional fifteen thousand slaves added to the exodus. Their descendants played a significant role in the British expansion in India (Benedict Arnold’s sons), and with Sierra Leone's Freetown founded by 1,200 black Loyalists literally on the doorstep of a major slave trading depot.

The fate of the blacks, both free men and slaves makes for particularly interesting reading, with many of them finding their way to Nova Scotia rather than more obvious destinations like the Bahamas or Jamaica. The difficulties slave owning Loyalists experienced in Britain's largest Caribbean colony are also explored against a backdrop of slave rebellions in Santo Domingo.

An interesting read, though it didn't deliver what I'd been looking for when I started reading, which is, in its own way, a significant recommendation since I kept ploughing through a hefty volume when I could have been shooting it straight back to the Library.

John Tully "Dark Clouds on the Mountain"

Given author John Tully's position as a lecturer in Politics and History at Victoria University it's safe to assume Dark Clouds on the Mountain is a one off rather than a title in an ongoing series. Apart from a number of titles in the realm of Southeast Asian history there's an earlier fiction title in Death Is the Cool Night that, based on this title is worth seeking out, but one doubts we'll be seeing any more of Jack Martin, born Martinuzzi, left-leaning Tasmanian detective with working class roots.

There's plenty of detail here that would, in an ongoing series, have been glossed over, particularly when it comes to the back story. A series would have these details spread out, and Martin's past as a top athlete in a small town could have been an interesting element as he went about tackling issues (not necessarily murders, if the town's small enough to have that gun cricketer/footballer that people of a certain age remember years later you're not going to get an interesting murder case every couple of months). The broader community tends to have limited contact with the Police, so repeated oh, yes, I remember you incidents through a series would, I think, work, but this title is, as far as I can gather, a one-off.

We've got the regulation family dramas you tend to get in a police procedural, lurking behind the main action with the threat of violence around the corner, though we see the aftermath rather than the actual incident.

On the subject of aftermaths, it's the aftermath of World War Two, and the subsequent wave of immigration and its impact on working class Tasmania that drives the main plot lines. Martin's father was an Italian communist who fought with the partisans in the Balkans but was murdered in Hobart in 1948. Martin grew up with his mother, a hopeless alcoholic, and her father in Queenstown, did a trade, tried his luck on the mainland, but couldn't hack the big smoke.

As a result he's moved back to the Apple Isle, joined the police force, married and now has a teenage daughter whose politics bring her into the edge of the plot line, so the paternal concern factor adds another aspect to the main character's mental processes.

That's his back story, and it's one that ties in with a couple of others as antisemitic graffiti is scrawled on the synagogue in Hobart, a Greenie protest encampment is attacked in the forest near Queenstown and a Jewish tailor is found dead in Hobart.

Other back stories work backwards to Nazi war crimes, death camps in the Ukraine, young left wing campaigners for Palestinian rights, right-wing extremism, Slavic prejudice and domestic violence.

Throw in a touch of the old workplace rivalries and police corruption for good measure and you may be thinking formulaic, but it works.

Run those elements together, and the result could be a messy tangle, but Tully keeps it tightly wound as the dark secrets, Nazi plots, family tensions interact in a web of intrigue. It's well paced, easy to read and full of seemingly authentic detail, real locations and sharply drawn characters in a predominantly working class setting.

On the strength of this one I'll be seeking out Death Is the Cool Night and I'll be keeping an eye out for subsequent volumes. Highly recommended.

Colin Irwin "In Search of the Craic: One Man's Pub Crawl Through Irish Music"

British journalist Colin Irwin may have spent much of the seventies and eighties as  assistant editor of Melody Maker and written about singer-songwriters, folk rock, and traditional folk for The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent,  Mojo and fRoots but his real passion, from what I can gather through reading In Search of the Craic lies in the traditional Irish music that might find its way from time to time into concert halls and major venues but is best sampled in the environment from which it emerged.

Doing that, at least as far as Irwin is concerned,  involves an extended pub crawl through the back blocks of the Irish countryside with the occasional spell in a major centre and regular encounters with characters who may or may not be legends of the genre (though he tracks down plenty who are).

Late nights, early morning, the black stuff by the bucket load and an abundance of music provide the fuel that powers a book that's part travelogue, part music history, part whimsical observation and high on the Enjoyable Read Index.

On the strength of this one I'd be interested in tracking down his In Search of Albion: From Cornwall to Cumbria: A Ride Through England's Hidden Soul though I think I'll be giving his biographies of Dire Straits and Abba the big flick pass.

Steve Almond "Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life"

I suppose in a different generation and a more promising geographic location I, too, could have been a Drooling Fanatic. By author Almond's definition DFs mourn their failure to make it as rock stars or one-hit wonders or near-misses or bar bands or wedding bands or KISS cover bands or midget KISS cover bands which explains the different generation remark.

It didn't take me long to realise anything approaching rock star status was out of the question, whereas a decent collection of music could help get me into slightly hipper circles than would otherwise have been the case. I was way too early for Kiss, who struck me as a formulaic quest for a section of the demographic that was at least a decade behind my back. While you could see where they were coming from, it wasn't territory you really wanted to revisit.

On the other hand, wannabes, geeks, professional worshippers ... who acquire albums compulsively … and cannot resist telling other people sounds awfully familiar. Some personality traits exist beyond musical generations.

Almond's DFs, in other words, equate reasonably closely to Hughesy's music freaks, and a glance through the contents when I spotted this title on the shelves in the local library suggested a read that might fit in with some aspects of my writing projects.

As things panned out, given that generational shift (Almond fits into the circa-Nirvana grunge scene the way I fitted into the classic expressions of late sixties experimentation) there wasn't much that fitted in with the projects, though there was plenty of familiar territory.

A career in journalism and a spell teaching writing means we're talking a bloke who writes well, delivers his points with verve and gusto (well he would, wouldn't he? He's a music freak writing about his obsession) and the result is an entertaining read that demonstrates the music freak isn't going to be disappearing off the face of the Earth any time soon.

He seems to suggest that we're all, potentially, Drooling Fanatics, a proposition Hughesy's inclined to discount, but that's probably the geography and demographic I've been associating with over the past forty years.

Almond, on the other hand, thanks to journo spells in El Paso and Miami and exposure to live music scenes where people I've never heard of can manage to carve out an almost viable musical career while still flying under the radar of mass recognition has plenty of first person experiences that fit into the Drooling Fanatic side of things.

Looking at it, he was probably in the right place to get hit badly by the music bug in areas far enough from the big time to leave him free to explore local music in between visits by passing megastars, though he manages to get a couple of newspaper paid gigs to cover the Grammys and similar exercises you and I might see as junkets but working journos know are located in an adjacent postcode to Purgatory.

An interesting read that had me rolling over to the iTunes store to check out a few of the lower profile acts he name-checked and enthused over without having the investigation move too much further than an Oh, yeah, this Ike Reilly dude's got a few albums out and a click on the sound samples that sounded like things I've heard before somewhere without paying it all that much attention. A glance at the eleven tracks on Nil Lara didn't suggest anything out of the pleasantly Latin, so it's probably a case of you really needed to be there at the time.

Exposure to an abundant supply of strong drink would, of course, have helped. Almond probably wouldn't have got a lot out of the equivalents in these parts (Kieran McCarthy springs to mind here).

On the other hand, his lists, starting from Bands Shamelessly Overexposed by the 'Alternative' Press through Ten Things You Can Say to Piss Off a Music Critic, Rock's Biggest Assholes and The Many Silly Names of Rock Star Spawn may not be serious, but are entertaining reads.

That's where Almond, with the provincial background in regional newspapers differs from your common or garden metropolitan rock critic. They may be in the right locations to catch the cool gigs, check the latest trends from close up (after all, they're where the action supposedly is, aren't they?) enjoy the junkets that come with prominence and access, meanwhile, for the humble journo toiling away in the back blocks…

Sort of like the sixty-year-old fan tucked away in the wilds of north Queensland, innit?

An interesting read. As noted, your reaction is going to reflect your own experience, though that’s hardly a surprising conclusion.