The silent sister (2014) by Diane Chamberlain

 Review by

readspoilers.blogspot.com/2015/03/the-silent-sister-rating-execrable.html

 

"I'm nervous." I glanced at her. She was watching me intently. "I'm afraid she'll act like she doesn't know me. Turn me away. That would be the worst."
I wanted to walk away in the middle of reading this book, as though someone had pointed out a news article about a burned-down office complex nearby. Time to move on to the next book, leaving no trace of my existence behind. But I soldiered on through for you, dear Reader.

I have had great difficulty in writing this review, because a small part of me wanted you to suffer as I did. I felt that perhaps you wouldn't understand how terrible this book was unless you tasted that poison for yourself. So I summarized the entire book - every superfluous plot point, every walk-on role for an extraneous character, every excruciating turn of phrase.

It was too much, reader. I am not so cruel as to submit you to that. I shall instead select a few key examples of flagrantly lazy writing and present them to you: a tasting menu, so that you know the full range of disappointment you might experience were you to mistakenly pick up and then ingest this embarrassment of a novel.

Let's begin.

The Silent Sister by the perhaps slightly overstimulated Diane Chamberlain...has a lot going on for 350 pages, most of which is detail masquerading as substance.     Let's explore.

 

The core of the novel is promising: Riley (our protagonist) is cleaning out the home of her late father and 'discovers evidence' that her sister, who everyone thinks committed suicide, might be alive. She embarks on a journey to discover her family's past.
That tidy little nugget of synopsis is stretched to a degree of agonizing attenuation over the course of the novel. The reader is forced to wade through a swamp of meaningless information - the father collected pipes, the brother likes to hunt, the suspicious girlfriend has a daughter who is recovering from a drug problem. If any of this information ever became in any way relevant to the plot or narrative, it would be redeemable. Instead, the book is nothing more than a drunk and companionless Aunt, who insists upon reporting on the affairs of all of her friends and colleagues - none of whom you will ever meet or care about in the slightest.

Do not be fooled into thinking that these characters contain multitudes - or, indeed, that they contain even a single multitude between the lot of them. False character development litters the novel like a trapdoor in the back of a hall closet: you peer at it, wondering where it might lead, but when you lift the latch, all you see are pipes and dust.

An example? Riley, throughout the book, staunchly refuses alcohol. It would seem that every person she encounters proffers wine or scotch or beer, and every time, she politely demurs. A hidden drinking problem? A fear of what will happen if she imbibes? Something repressed? It arises so many times that surely it represents a theme! Characterization! Hurrah!

But no - in one of the latter chapters, she drinks a beer (and nachos, to 'sop up the alcohol'. I am not making that language up, reader. It is dire.). Nothing happens. It is utterly insignificant. Oh, did you think that was a character trait? No, no. It was only text - meaningless detail dressed up as substance, sneaking into a party to which it was not invited.

I shall summarize the Big Twists briefly:

The sister faked her suicide with the help of the father and a totally unnecessary character named "Tom" because she didn't want Riley to grow up with the stigma of being the daughter of a murder, because she is actually Riley's mother, and she was raped by her violin teacher when she was a very young violin prodigy, and then she killed him. The sister/mother ran away to San Diego, discovered/realized/accepted that she was a lesbian, and now has two children with her wife, with whom she is in a semi-famous bluegrass band.
Riley attends a concert to meet her long-lost sister/mother:

"She started playing again, the bounce of her hair like a symbol of the freedom she'd stolen for herself."

Like a symbol. I mourn, deeply and without restraint, for that sentence.

By the end of the book, after a series of clumsy personality reversals by many of the overwritten, underdeveloped characters, Riley and her sister/mom are the best of friends. It is perhaps the most disappointing ending that could have been written for such an already unrewarding novel.

It is a rare thing, reader, for me to feel such unmitigated detestation of a book. I am a lover of books, and this book has stretched my ability to call that love 'unconditional' well beyond the breaking point.


Rating: Execrable. 

The wrong side of good bye (2016) by Michael Connelly

Michael Connelly writes with a seamless unity of tone and pace that makes reading his crime novels absolutely effortless and totally engaging. In his latest, “The Wrong Side of Goodbye,” his narrative rolls out in a perfect parade of action, memory, emotion, color and tension. The grand marshal of this pageant is Mr. Connelly’s great character Harry Bosch, and although told in the third person, the reader is firmly in Harry’s head and heart.

As the story begins, Harry is looking out the window of an office on the 59th floor of the U.S. Bank Tower in Los Angeles. “Bosch loved any opportunity to see his city from up high,” Mr. Connelly writes. But don’t be alarmed, Harry has not gone corporate since being forced to retire from the L.A.P.D.

 

 

He’s working a “private ticket” and is there at the invitation of Trident Security, a firm employed by Whitney Vance, the 85-year-old owner of Advance Engineering. Harry is offered $10,000 just to meet with Vance at his estate, so he heads for the “money-colored” hills of Pasadena.
There the ailing billionaire says to Harry: “I want you to find someone for me. Someone who might never have existed.” Excited by the challenge, Harry’s search leads to destinations all over Southern California. (If Mr. Connelly ever tires of fiction he could certainly get a job mapping the state’s freeways.)
He visits Studio City then the Los Angeles National Cemetery where soldiers are buried from the Civil War to Afghanistan: “Thousands of white marble stones in perfect rows standing as a testament to the military precision and waste of war,” Mr. Connelly writes. From the port of Oxnard to Chicano Park in San Diego to L.A.’s Arts District to his home on Woodrow Wilson Drive, Harry is convinced that he’s being tailed.
But his most poignant journey is into the past he shares with the subject of his pursuit: the Vietnam War. A long-lost footlocker packed in 1969 with books by Herman Hesse and Tolkien and cassette tapes of music by Hendrix, Cream and the Moody Blues reminds Harry of his own days as a “tunnel rat” in the Army. He recalls a Christmas Eve from that year when Bob Hope, Connie Stevens and Neil Armstrong entertained onboard the hospital ship, the U.S.S. Sanctuary, in the South China Sea. It’s one happy memory among his own trunkful of combat nightmares.
But Harry doesn’t have time to dwell on ancient history because he’s now also a reserve officer with the San Fernando Police Department. Although the town is less than three square miles, by working as a volunteer investigator he has a badge again. Following the case of a serial rapist, known as the Screen Cutter, leads not just to a riveting manhunt but also to an insightful look at workplace interactions.
Relationships have always been difficult for Harry, but he’s older now and somewhat mellowed. He gets along well with his daughter, who is in college, and is starting to reveal things to her about his past. He even trusts his “brother from another mother,” Mickey Haller, better known as the Lincoln Lawyer. The blunt and crudely funny Haller has a small but pivotal role in “The Wrong Side of Goodbye.”
Of course Harry still gets in people’s faces and then is embarrassed by his temper, and like Mr. Connelly, he is obsessive about details. He and the author also seem to share a love of work to be done. That’s good news for all Harry Bosch fans.
Margie Romero is communications manager at the Pittsburgh Public Theater.

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Unspoken (2004) by Mari Jungstedt

Mari Jungstedt's third Gotland novel follows the same theme as her earlier novels UNSEEN and UNSPOKEN. UNKNOWN at first concerns two crimes: one in which a horse is savagely killed; and another in which a young student, Martina, is murdered. The girl has been working on an archaeological dig over the summer, part of a team excavating Viking silver and gold coins and ornaments. She's attractive, and there are a number of men who showed an interest in her, possibly including one who might want a liaison kept secret.
Inspector Anders Knutas of the Gotland police is once again in charge of these investigations. He's frustrated with the lack of progress made by his team, and the apparent lack of connection between these crimes and later ones, as he is convinced the perpetrator is the same.
Emma and Johan also continue their story. Emma has decided to divorce Olle and to have the baby she and her lover, TV journalist Johan, accidentally conceived in the last book. She feels unable to commit to Johan after the baby is born, in the face of Olle's jealous rages and her sense of duty to their two young children. Johan, in the meantime, is investigating the crimes himself, trying to discover what the police know but don't want to release to the media, in a bid to make a success of his temporary placement on Gotland so that he can stay with Emma, if she will have him.
Although the elements of UNKNOWN are put together in a professional manner, I found it rather formulaic compared with the previous two volumes in the series. The sections about the Viking history on the island certainly come to life, but the story of the investigations is flat, without much spark. The inclusion of interleaving chapters told from the point of view of the mysterious perpetrator is too much of a cliche, as are the supposed psychological insights provided by the profiler. The solution to the murder is fairly weak, and the ritualistic elements seem tacked-on and hence unintentionally amusing.
The author has a knack for conveying the apparently trivial yet all-important domestic problems of her characters, as well as a touching sympathy with the victims of the crimes she describes. However, the police procedural aspects of UNKNOWN could do with more originality and verve. These books have the potential to be as good as Henning Mankell's Wallander series, if the author can break out of the formula and follow some new leads, providing more insights into her police characters in the process, as well as continuing with her strengths: TV media politics and the family upheavals of Emma and Johan.


Read another review of UNKNOWN.
Maxine Clarke, England, thanks for this comprehensive review February 2009
Maxine blogs at Petrona.
Details of the author's other books with links to reviews can be found on the Books page.
More European crime fiction reviews can be found on the Reviews page

The dinosaur feather by S.J.Gazon

Rats. I really thought this was the year that the Scandinavian stranglehold on suspense fiction was going to be broken. As of early fall, no new Stieg Larsson , Karin Fossum , Jo Nesbo or Helene Tursten had surfaced to claim attention as the newest Northern Light of Noir. Just as well, I thought. All these crime stories featuring very pale, sexually progressive detectives have been getting a bit frostbitten of late, like a forgotten jar of lingonberry jam in the back of the fridge. But now an English translation of “The Dinosaur Feather” — the first mystery by Danish writer S.J. Gazan — has appeared on these shores, and without a fight, I surrendered all my critical superlatives to yet another Viking.

Simply put, “The Dinosaur Feather” is the weirdest and most ingenious new mystery I’ve read in years. I could be wrong (but I don’t think I am) when I say that Gazan disposes of one of her murder victims here by a hellish means that no other mystery writer — not even the resourceful Dame Agatha — ever dreamed up.
“The Dinosaur Feather” takes readers deep into the insular world of scientists, centered at the University of Copenhagen, who are investigating dinosaur evolution, particularly the question of how birds descended from dinosaurs. (Although a few renegade scientists insist otherwise, recent fossil discoveries in China have pretty much settled the theory that Big Bird and Barney do, in fact, share the same gory family tree.)
An exhausted single mother and graduate student named Anna Bella Nor is hard at work in the university’s creepy Institute of Biology when she hears screams coming from the office of her faculty supervisor. When Anna reaches his door, she discovers that someone has rendered Dr. Lars Helland extinct. Lying on his lap is Anna’s dissertation, dotted with blood. Lying on his chest is the source of the blood: Dr. Helland’s tongue, the far end of which looks like “a severed, bloody limb, elongated and shredded like a prepared tenderloin.” Given that everyone at the Institute of Biology knew that Anna “loathed” her eccentric supervisor, it looks as if she now has bigger troubles to contend with than the flat academic job market.

 

This is just the tip (akin to a fragment from an apatosaurus’s little toe) of Gazan’s complex — and consistently engrossing — plot. Readers are treated to dark and stormy back stories about scientific rivalries, sexual yearning and family secrets that have warped the lives of most of the main characters. Soren Marhauge, the police investigator assigned to the case, is one of those loner detectives whose only life is his work. Soren prides himself on his intellectual ability to “knit backward,” but he finds Helland’s murder to be a stumper. (And, you don’t want to know what Soren discovers about that hard pustule in the dead man’s eye. You really don’t.)

entertainment

When sour-tempered Anna silently nicknames Soren “The World’s Most Irritating Detective,” we readers have reason to hope that sparks will fly. But first, Soren needs to “knit backward” through hatreds as labyrinthine as the hallways running through that echoing Institute of Biology. He also must spend time bravely interrogating academics. Here’s his impression of a biologist named Johannes Trojborg:
“Soren had met many oddballs in his time, people whose head and body decorations were so extreme that you could barely make out the naked person underneath them. Johannes, however, was one of the most peculiar creatures Soren had ever seen. His transparency reminded Soren of those little white creatures you find under paving stones. Johannes’s hands were long, slender and silken, his skin stretched tight and pale across his face and he stooped. Only his red hair and intelligent eyes contradicted Soren’s impression of being in the presence of something stale and musty.”
A few years after it was first published in Denmark in 2008, “The Dinosaur Feather” was anointed the “Danish Crime Novel of the Decade” by the Danish Broadcasting Corporation. The Danish ice floe may not be as crowded with crime fiction as the Swedish or Norwegian drifts, but it will be obvious to readers why Gazan’s novel would be the leader of almost any pack. Moody and intricate, “The Dinosaur Feather” is every bit as unforgettable as its creepy title.

Corrigan, who teaches literature at Georgetown University, is the book critic for the NPR program “Fresh Air"

The man who watched women by Michael Hjorth and Hans Rosenfeldt

Review written by Michael Hjorth and Hans Rosenfeldt, translated by Marlaine Delargy —


 In this suspenseful serial killer thriller, Stockholm is beset by a heatwave and a series of brutal killings of young women. The national police homicide unit, Riksmord, realises early on that the ritualistic killings are copycat crimes. They mirror perfectly the macabre handiwork of Edward Hinde, who was locked up 15 years ago with the help of expert profiler Sebastian Bergen. Is Hinde somehow orchestrating the murders from the inside? We learn early on that Hinde is indeed communicating, via a contraband modem, to an unknown devotee, who has deep-seated Mommy issues and follows orders without question.
The homicide team considers bringing back Sebastian Bergman, who was instrumental in nabbing Hinde, but who is a notoriously difficult maverick. When we first encounter Bergman, he is a troubled soul who is a shadow of his former self. He hasn’t published a single professional paper in a decade and loses himself in alcohol and one-night stands. The arrogant, self-destructive womaniser harbours a burden of deep grief from losing his wife and child in a tsunami. It is no surprise when he obsessively stalks his newfound daughter, born out of wedlock, who happens to be an accomplished detective herself and member of Riksmord.
Bergen recruits another former member of the team, ex-cop Trolle Hermansson – a corrupt, muckraker with a nose for dirt – to dig up information to discredit his daughter’s adoptive father. We learn more about that development as the team reluctantly recruits Bergman to help nab the killer before he strikes again.
As Bergman struggles with his personal life, former student and counselor Stefan convinces him to attend therapy. A woman he meets at the session, whom he sleeps with that night, winds up as the next murder victim the following morning. When he rejoins the crime squad, he realises the copycat is not only being controlled by Hinde, but that all the murders link to Bergman himself. Hinde, the master manipulator, wraps the new governor of Lövhaga Prison around his finger and uses him as a tool for his own master plan.
Bergman is forced to seek out all the women he’s been with in the past. Worse still he suspects that Hinde knows about his family secrets. Although he is finally back in his element, Bergman also feels separated from what he cares for most. As he faces an inevitable showdown with Hinde, who escapes from prison, he plunges into an all-or-nothing gambit – one of protecting those he loves and redeeming himself.
The Man Who Watched Women was penned by Scandicrime stalwarts Michael Hjorth (highly regarded crime drama writer of Wallander television episodes) and Hans Rosenfeldt (co-creator of The Bridge). Like Cilla and Rolf Börjlind, Hjorth and Rosenfeldt’s scriptwriting chops are evident here in the fluid plot development and tightly interlocked, suspense-building episodes. There are some appealing supporting characters here too: tough but compassionate Chief Inspector Torkel Höglund, competent but conflicted Ursula Andersson, unyielding top gun Vanja Lithner, and young and eager tech expert Billy Rósen.
On the plus side, this book, which is the second part of a series, moves like a well-paced TV crime drama, and indeed, some may have seen the adaptations of the series starring Rolf Lassgård. On the downside, Hjorth and Rosenfeldt’s heavy-handed style devotes inordinate detail to the angst of the characters, especially Bergman and the murderer. We are continually force-fed character motivation during the 500+ page thriller, leaving little to the imagination that might be more effectively expressed through action alone.
The Man Who Watched Women is fluidly told, engrossing, and above all, entertaining, so it’s easy to forgive its ready-made characters and all-caps emotional emphasis.

Beyond the truth ( ) by Hanne Wilhelmsen

(Book #7 of A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel)

By Anne Holt

 

In the seventh installment of the Hanne Wilhelmsen series, the brilliant female detective must untangle the complex and bitter history of one of Oslo’s wealthiest families after a celebratory get together at their home ends in a multi-victim homicide.

Shortly before Christmas, four people are found shot dead at the home of the Stahlbergs, a wealthy family of shipping merchants notorious for their miserliness and infighting. Three of the victims are members of the family, and the fourth is an outsider, seemingly out of place. Cake had been set out in the living room and a bottle of champagne had been opened but not yet poured. Yes, family gatherings during the holidays can be difficult, but why did this one become a bloodbath?

As Hanne Wilhelmsen investigates the case alongside her longtime police partner, Billy T., motives for the murders emerge in abundance; each surviving member of the Stahlberg family had good reason to want the victims dead. As she searches for the killer, Hanne will once again risk everything to find out the truth. But this time, will she go too far?