The Missing by Chris Mooney
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have never been a huge fan of the serial killer sub-genre; I love Thomas Harris's 'Silence of the Lambs' and consider the predecessor, 'Red Dragon', a masterpiece. And the movies made from these novels are classics (I am including Michael Mann's 'Manhunter' here, not the Anthony Hopkins 'Red Dragon') as is Fincher's 'Seven'. However, aside from these, and very few others, and perhaps because of the success of 'Seven', it seems that every serial killer novel has to have a fiendish villain who meticulously lays out his victims in biblical tableaux, or in the styles of the great artists, or in tribute to classic 'Friends' episodes - actually that's not a bad idea, "The One with the Missing Limbs".

Chris Mooney is an author I had never come across and, though drawn by endorsements from Michael Connelly, George P. Pelecanos and, especially, John Connolly, I approached the first Darby McCormick novel with some trepidation. I am glad I did.

The book is well-written and Mooney has a talent for description and an ear for dialogue. The plot follows Darby, whose teenage encounter with a killer and survivor's guilt, has led her to a career as a CSI. The book speeds along with some genuinely tense and frightening sequences. Darby is an interesting protagonist and the bulk of the story is hers with visits into the head of the killer used sparingly and in short scenes to keep the suspense level just right. There a couple of twists which, in less capable hands, could have fallen into the clichés of the genre but which Mooney makes work. I enjoyed 'The Missing' a lot and look forward to the rest of the series, although I will still be wary that, should Darby McCormick stumble from one serial killer to another, Mooney may struggle to maintain the suspension of disbelief.

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Blood Tide by Claire McGowan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Aside from one short story, this is the first time I have read Claire McGowan (courtesy of Headline and NetGalley) and, despite it being the fifth book in the Paula Maguire series, I had no difficulty in picking up the story. Maguire, a Forensic Psychologist and missing persons expert, is sent to a remote island off the west coast of Ireland to aid in the investigation into the mysterious disappearance of an English husband and wife. Bone Island resonates with Paula as this was the last place she holidayed with her parents before her mother's equally mysterious disappearance over 20 years before. Wife of a Roman Catholic RUC officer in Northern Ireland, Margaret Maguire was assumed to be among 'the disappeared', victims of IRA killings, presumed 'touts', buried in secret, but Paula has recently discovered a note left by her mother which suggests that she may have left voluntarily.

The two threads run in parallel as Paula discovers that the couple's disappearance is only the latest in a series of strange occurrences on the island while we also discover in flashback that an ex-colleague of her father's may have more knowledge of Margaret's fate than he has ever revealed. Some of the missing couple's life on the island, including some suspicions about the local seaweed processing plant, are revealed through the words of the wife, Fiona, the local GP of whom many of the islanders appear wary.

Claire McGowan is excellent at creating suspense and generating a feeling of unease. What appears initially to be a police procedural takes a left turn into almost gothic horror but never becomes unbelievable. She is also good at dialogue, realistically capturing the differences between the Northern and Southern Irish voices. My only criticism is that one or twice things are revealed to the main character and artificially withheld slightly longer from the reader to try and increase the tension - the story does not need this. Paula's messy personal life and her mother's arc are obviously series storylines and I look forward to both going back to the start of the series and finding out what happens next....

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Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink by Elvis Costello
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Despite having listened to Elvis Costello’s music since 1977, following his career from his early angry, spiky New Wave recordings with The Attractions, through the country songs of ‘Almost Blue’ and later collaborations with the Brodsky Quartet and Paul McCartney, knowing he is married to Diana Krall, when I think of Costello it is still the skinny, snarling young man spitting cynical lyrics from behind a Fender Jazzmaster that I picture. Only when you list the artists that Costello has written, recorded and performed with - Attractions, Imposters, Nick Lowe, Specials, Daryl Hall, Diana Krall, Ray Brown, Chet Baker, Solomon Burke, Aretha Franklin, Ann Sofie Mutter, Brodsky Quartet, Bob Dylan, Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Burt Bacharach ,Bill Frizzell, Allen Toussaint, George Jones, James Burton, Jerry Scheff, T-Bone Burnett, Paul McCartney, Jerry Lee Lewis, Robert Wyatt, London Symphony Orchestra, The Roots - do you appreciate the breadth of his music and the impact he has had on the musical landscape of the last 40 years.

In ‘Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink’, written without ghostwriters and narrated in the audiobook version by the author himself, Elvis Costello tells of this perhaps unlikely journey and his experiences along the way. It is not a traditional chronological autobiography - “I was born in Paddington in 1954….” - rather a series of themed chapters dealing with particular aspects of his love of music. Costello is candid about his personal life but these stories are told in context and always framed by the music. The music is the most important character in this book. We learn about his grandfather, a White Star Line trumpet player, and his father, the big-band singer, Ross McManus, through Costello’s reflections on the life of a musician on the road. His chapters on, for instance, Allen Toussaint and Burt Bacharach concentrate on these collaborations across several years.

Costello, as anyone who has listened to his lyrics will know, is a natural storyteller and his stories here are frank and honest, as when he talks of his drinking and his marriage failures, but also comical like the unlikely sounding story of how he and Solomon Burke stood in a corridor outside Aretha Franklin’s dressing room hoping to speak with her only to have the Queen of Soul fling the door open and snap their picture with a disposable camera, or he and Bob Dylan accidentally locking themselves out of a concert hall and having to make their way back through queuing fans.

This is a big book but it rattles along. It is almost liking sitting with Costello as he relates a series of “Did I ever tell you about the time…” stories, illustrating points by quoting song lyrics, both illuminating their meaning and sending you back to the recordings. I began this book as an Elvis Costello fan, albeit intermittently over the last 10 or 15 years. I finished it with an increased admiration for, and appreciation of, one of the most singular talents of the last 40.
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Link to Costello speaking about the book on November 3, 2015 as part of the 26th annual Chicago Humanities Festival - https://youtu.be/_wVjxAN8j-8

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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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