Dry Bones in the Valley by Tom Bouman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have had this novel on my to read list since shortly after it was published. I went to a "Northern Irish Noir" panel at the local library featuring crime-writers Brian McGilloway, Stuart Neville and Steve Cavanagh and, from memory, at least two of them were reading it. I'm glad I finally got round to it.

An atmospheric slice of rural noir, 'Dry Bones in the Valley' is set in a Pennsylvania community full of simmering tensions and interfamily suspicions. Officer Henry Farrell, a melancholy widower, following the discovery of an unidentified corpse on the land of a reclusive neighbour, is drawn into an investigation hampered by these long held resentments and feuds, many brought into sharp focus due to the potential windfalls offered by a fracking company to the otherwise extremely poor landowners.

The key to the book is the atmosphere and sense of place, the cold sparse backwoods and Tom Bouman, in his first novel, proves an immediate master of suspense with several tense nighttime confrontations. His observations on the plight of the American poor - "Poor people aren’t thin anymore, like when I was a kid; now they’re fat on the cheap food feeding the ghost of the American dream." - are well-constructed and thought-provoking, some hoping that the natural gas that lies in the shale below their dwellings will be their salvation, others dealing drugs.

I liked Henry Farrell - he's no barrel of laughs but he is a compelling and authentic voice. I was drawn in by the descriptions of dark woodland and bogs, possibly due to the similarity with rural Ireland, and I look forward to revisiting when Bouman's second Farrell book is published later this year. I suspect, as I suspect does Farrell, that the fracking bonanza may not be the positive change some of his neighbours are anticipating.

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Police at the Station and They Don’t Look Friendly by Adrian McKinty
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Several years ago I chanced upon "Dead I Well May Be" by Adrian McKinty, a novel about a Belfast ex-pat, Michael Forsythe, becoming embroiled in New York gangland, a slice of violent noir, with wonderful dialogue, with the action punctuated with poetic, almost mystical passages. The book and the author quickly became favourites. I read the complete "Dead" trilogy and the rest of McKinty's work and, five years ago, began to follow his new trilogy set in 1980s Belfast. "The Cold, Cold Ground" introduced Sean Duffy, a Roman Catholic in a predominantly Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary. The books are all five-star, the series uniformly excellent, McKinty one of the best crime-writers currently writing. But nothing has usurped "Dead I Well May Be" - until now...

"Police at the Station...", the sixth in the Duffy trilogy (take that "Hitchhikers..."), may be the best novel Adrian McKinty has written to date and it deserves to be widely read. Duffy, a little older, perhaps slightly wiser, has undergone some life-altering changes since the end of the last novel and is struggling to get used to being a father and nearly-husband. Meanwhile somebody is murdering drug dealers with a crossbow.....

As with McKinty's previous work, the story is filled with snappy, authentic dialogue and the investigation brings Duffy, and his loyal team, McCrabban and Lawson, into contact with real-life 'Troubles" in Belfast, in this case the terrible aftermath of the March 1988 SAS shooting of an IRA team in Gibraltar which led to rioting in Northern Ireland, Michael Stone's attack on the IRA funerals and the televised lynching of two British Army corporals. But, again as usual, there is also a lot of humour in the book as well as Duffy's love of literature and music - he is listening to a lot of 20th Century classical this time around and at one point memorably, and correctly, characterises the 1980s pop-music as “anodyne, conformist, radio-friendly bollocks, lacking in soul, grace, intelligence or joy.”

Adrian McKinty is a literate and intelligent writer of clever and exciting crime thrillers and, despite being completely wrong about Denis Villeneuve's "Arrival" and putting the irritating "I'd of.." in Duffy's mouth twice in this novel, should be on any self-respecting crime fan's to-read list well ahead of any amount of Scandi-bollocks and James Patterson's weekly output.

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The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"It was about ten-thirty in the morning when the little yellow-sashed Mexican orchestra got tired of playing a low-voiced prettied-up rhumba that nobody was dancing to."

This is probably my favourite book, Raymond Chandler certainly my favourite author. Recently, belatedly discovering James Crumley sent me back here. It has been a few years since I read the Marlowe novels, and I intend to read them all again. Chandler took what other "hard-boiled' pulp storytellers, particularly Dashiell Hamnett, were doing and made it an art-form, the template followed by Ross & John MacDonald, James Crumley, Robert B. Parker, Robert Crais, Dennis Lehane, Michael Connelly and John Connolly, Ace Atkins, and so many other writers I have come to love. Marlowe affected me so much, my first son is named Philip - "Down These Mean Streets..."

This time I read my lovely, Bill Amberg leather-bound, Penguin Classic which made the book a joy to hold as well as to read. It was fun reacquainting myself with the Sternwoods, Geiger and Brody, Bernie Ohls and Eddie Mars and wondering who killed the chauffeur... But, it's the language that matters. Open the book to any chapter, any page, and passages like that with which this review begins appear. It's like re-listening to favourite music and finding an organ line in the mix that hadn't been immediately apparent. I love the tune and, what lyrics.....

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Cosi Fan Tutti by Michael Dibdin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Not the most successful of Michael Dibdin's Aurelio Zen novels but an interesting experiment. Loosely based around the plot of Mozart's similarly named opera, the plot is similarly farcical. Zen, never the most dedicated of policemen, is here a lazy, work-shy bumbler who rarely seems to know what is going on and at times the plot became so convoluted that I shared his bemusement. But there is enough here to make the book worthwhile and some laugh out loud moments such as the taxi driver who interprets American-English to Italian despite her only English being Cockney dialect.

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