'TIS in Kilkenny, it is reported, the marble hearts are as black as ink - in JJ Toner's noir thriller St Patrick's Day Special, the ancient city is where a gangster tout is being hidden away from his former friends.
At the beginning of this tense story, DI Ben Jordan of the Garda Síochána is on his way to take over babysitting the tout. But when he arrives, there's nothing left to babysit: the supergrass and Jordan's colleague have been wiped out, seemingly by a murderous pizza deliveryman.
Jordan, obsessed as he is by Ireland's most vicious gang leader, Lafferty, is determined that Lafferty will go down for this: it's obviously his handiwork.
Which leads us into an intricate story involving Jordan's troubled daughter and her beaux, his unhelpful bosses in the Gardaí, his own disintegrating personality, his dicey marriage and new life in a seafront mansion in Dublin 4, and myriad twists and turns.
In a dark vision of drug-ridden post-Celtic-Tiger Ireland, Toner's Ben Jordan makes the first appearance; we're going to see more of him.
For some reason, my ability to stay awake, even for the most gripping and heartrending drama, has suddenly lessened. So my understanding of the start of the second series of the Danish thriller The Killing is... well, gappy.
Sarah Lund, detective extraordinaire, miseryguts supreme, is out of her Icelandic gansey. Now she's arrayed in a new jumper, so deep red that it appears blood-soaked. Sarah has lost her nice job investigating brutal murders. Now she's doing some, um, kind of...
Sorry. Fell asleep there. I think Sarah's a kind of security guard or something now, having failed so tragically in her last investigation, the one in the first series of Forbryselden.
Anyaway. Whatsisname, the granite-faced investigator now investigating an orrible murder of a woman found stabbed a zillion times (one fatally) and tied to a pole in a park, comes to Sarah, well known for her spooky insight into murders and murderers, and lures her into the investigation. They reckon it's the woman's husband (why am I not married, remind me?) but they want to check with Sarah's instincts.
Sarah is just sitting there thinkin', and listening to the zeitgeist, when it is revealed that the husband has confessed. So Sarah goes back to boringland, and...
I'm joking. Of course Sarah has realised that it's not the husband.
At least... in the first series everyone became a suspect at some stage, and like others watching I suspected every character, to the point where I couldn't go to Superquinn without suspecting the checkout clerk, and never mind Lidl.
Last time, an unnervingly sexy clean-cut politician on the broad road from idealist to sleazebag was chief suspect. This time he's been replaced by a stocky new justice minister who is facing down the right-wing anti-immigration party's demands for banning of specific groups - a thing which has never been done in the history of the staunchly fair and egalitarian Denmark. No doubt the minister is soon to be implicated in at least one murder.
For the moment (as far as I understood between helpless snoozes - this isn't because of the writing; it's incredibly gripping, I just can't help it; once 8pm comes I'm out cold - the main suspects are a secret group within the Danish armed forces. A second body has immediately been found: Vyg (Myg? Smyg? Styg?) - who was about to be 'deployed' to Helmand.
But as soon as you start to suspect him, Vyg (?) is found hanging upside down, dead as a cabbage, with half a dogtag dripping with his draining blood.
Somewhere in there is a handsome, sad man in jail and longing for his wife and child, but involved with all this Afghanistan stuff. He seems to be a damaged man, perhaps suffering post-traumatic disorder caused by killing plenty of Afghanis.
Oh, and the woman who was stabbed a zillion times: a video has turned up with her giving some kind of Islamic anti-Danish message. In Danish, of course, which sounds as if she's speaking through a mouthful of turnip.
I'm dying to watch the second, or maybe third episode. I just wish they'd sell it on DVD now so I could actually go back and check what really happened.
Oh, and the acting and writing and direction are great. And the sets, with their moody, dark vision of Denmark, itself a character: an honest country under attack by the forces of corruption.
Eh? China? Wallander? You’re right, m’dear, this is by Henning Mankell, who writes those gloomy Swedish thrillers about depressed detective Kurt Wallander - but this time his lead is a woman and his villain Chinese. A copper? Not as such. Judge Birgitta Roslin, loosely associated with an extended family wiped out in a remote hamlet on the border between Norway and Sweden. How loosely? Her mammy was fostered by a couple now in the far reaches of antiquity, who are among the 19 members of the Andren clan to be sliced and diced. The police have a theory. Birgitta soon has a different one. But Beijing? What? Where? Meanwhile in Beijing’s wealthiest sector, a super-powerful industrialist is reading the diary of his ancestor, who was enslaved. The foreman of the railroad gang that destroyed his life was one Jan August Andren. Straightforward revenge story then? Indeed no - this is Mankell. Darker forces are at work. In Africa, the Chinese (nervous of internal revolution, as why wouldn’t they be) are preparing a plantation - they want to ship in millions of poor Chinese farmers. To Africa? You’re joking? They’re persuading the African leaders that it’s going to benefit their own people, because schools, hospitals, roads, telecommunications, etc will follow the planters to sparsely populated areas. Mankell’s making this all up out of his head? Hope so. Unnervingly, he has inside knowledge of Africa - the author lives part of his time in Mozambique. It’s linked to the killings how? The psycho who sent the killer is high up in China’s elite. And - well, read it for yourself. Good, then? Very good at times, but Mankell has trouble keeping all the themes - murder, Maoist theory, modern Chinese emigration, 19th-century exploitation - from spinning out of control. Author's site
The dome in the tome? ‘Under the Dome’ is Americanspeak for happenings in Washington: Stephen King is symbolically writing about his government in this stonking great thing. Tell the tale A Maine town is cut off from the rest of the world by an invisible dome that clangs down, chomping off a woman’s arm, neatly halving a woodchuck and de-nosing a plane in midflight. Exciting! Yeah, it starts big. The US government sends in the army, as is its wont. But nothing gets through the dome: not missiles, not acid, certainly not troops. And inside? Inside, it’s like a speeded-up view of the onset of Naziism. The corrupt Selectmen (like county councillors) already have a giant meth lab running behind the Jesus is King radio station… Eh? Surprising, all right. The police chief dies when his pacemaker explodes in the Dome’s electrical field, and evil used-car salesman and Selectman Jim Rennie hires thugs as policemen. But there’s a hero? Naturally. Dale Barbara - regretful Iraq veteran and short-order cook - is named by the President as leader. But Rennie ain’t havin any. Rubbing my hands here So was I. But after the first 200 pages, which rip along, it stumbles around for the next 700. Our Barbie isn’t MacGyver. A second crash - of an Irish jetliner - is desultorily treated. The characters are great and there are wild plot twists - Rennie’s son turns necrophiliac - but the story somehow doesn’t integrate. Should I buy it? The writer of Carrie, The Shining, Misery and a million other hits loses the plot here. I wonder if it’s because computers are so fast to write on. After that fabulous opening, the story is like an extended video game. Best points? Shows how easily totalitarianism can happen; how we’re all stuck on a planet with limited resources; how the powerful bully the weak.
Thriller by Swedish reporter, ja? You betcha. Third and last of the series by the late Stieg Larsson, founder of anti-racist magazine Expo and world authority on right-wing extremist groups. He handed a publisher the manuscripts of the three books and promptly dropped dead aged 50. The books have been an international sensation. Nice for his heirs Not, it turns out, for the woman who shared his life for 30 years. Under Sweden’s tight-fisted cohabitation laws, Eva Gabrielsson isn’t entitled to a single öre. Ouchy She’s going to write about it, apparently. But meanwhile… Oh yah, the hornet’s nest Hornets’, plural. Lisbeth Salander, our hero, starts the book in hospital with a brain injury and riddled with bullets. Eee, no - it’s not about her? Not for the first 250 pages or so; you can basically skip them. At that stage, ace reporter Blomkvist - Larsson’s fictional alter ego - smuggles in her Palm Tungsten, and she’s suckin’ diesel again. Who are these eponymous hornets? Basically, Sweden’s security services - they’ve been covering up after a cell of lunatic Russian defectors and psycho killers for years - and in the process they’ve had young Lisbeth confined to a mental hospital for much of her youth. Now, facing exposure, they have too much to lose. So it’s a spy story? Ironically, in the circs, it’s about suppression of women, and how male society closes ranks to enable violent men. Salander’s a hacker, if I remember rightly And her faceless friends, citizens of the online ‘Hacker Republic’, weigh in to help her, as do unconnected women - a newspaper editor, a lawyer, a security official and a policewoman. And Blomkvist, natch. Good, then? To be honest, not as great as the first two. But I’ll bet fans will read it just to find out what happens to Salander. Stieg Larsson site
Heinemann How many bones? There are 206 bones in the human body - as forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan knows. Or should, but not if she’s an incompetent flake, as an anonymous caller claims to her bosses. Hate that A long-lost heiress turns up dead, and Tempe supposedly botches the post mortem. Then the only person who can reveal the anonymous caller’s name dies. Zut alors! This is the 12th Temperance Brennan book. In it, a particularly weird serial killer is targeting old ladies in French-speaking Quebec. A bunch of them have been found, very dead and in a decomposed state, some just skeletons. Bones! That’s it! No, the Temperance Brennan in the TV show Bones isn’t based on this series. Actually she’s based on the writer, Kathy Reichs, who is herself a forensic anthropologist. Wow, that’s pretty circuitous Tant pis. Temperance is having workmate trouble: a highly ambitious woman whose only lack is, well, qualifications, as well as a stalker who leaves her notes basically saying “Yankee Go Home” - in French, of course. And a seedy spelunker lurks in the lab. Spelunkwha? Potholer, normally. Guy who crawls through city sewers, in this case. In other news, Tempe seems to have lost some finger bones, and hasn’t noticed an obvious flaw in a child’s tooth. Canny readers suspect foul play, not incompetence. Big sellers, these series? All 11 so far made the Sunday Times bestseller list. This one is a good read, and the story keeps you interested, but there’s a certain feeling of running on the spot - tropes from the earlier books, like sports plane crashes and historic bodies, are repeated here. Any hot romance? Tempe’s old romantic interest, Detective Andrew Ryan, is dangling around, but not really on the scene until the end. A buy, or not? I’d advise waiting for the paperback. Authors site
California in the Sixties? Flowers in the hair, a joint between the fingers, a wave under your board and Hendrix’s Hey Joe floating through the air. Groovy Not quite. In this - well, historical novel, really - the LA police are deep in the heroin trade and have a hit man rubbing out union organisers and illegal immigrants. The Manson Family have just been caught for the Tate murders. Our private eye hero’s old girlfriend’s new rich squeeze has his wife putting out a contract on him. What? What? Dope fiend shamus Doc Sportello uses his stoner ESP to probe complex interlocking mysteries. Surfie band the Boards may be haunted by zombies. The Golden Fang may be a ship, a smack-dealing cartel or a tax dodge. Billionaire Micky Wolfmann may not have been kidnapped. There’s a story in there? Kind of. But this really doesn’t stick to the thriller structure - it wanders around, kinda toking on this philosophy and that and playing with words and images and concepts and… what was I saying? Does it work as a thriller? Hell, no. Every now and again something nasty happens, but it’s all in such a haze that you don’t really notice. What characters inhabit this dark world? El Drano (acronym for Leonard), who sells heroin - cut, one surmises, with America’s favourite toilet cleaner. Dirty cop Bigfoot Bjornsen. A sweet young family fighting to recover from addiction. Sixties tropes: an English moptop band (wink, wink); TVs with those giant remotes like a brick that buzzes in your hands. Should I buy it? Oh, definitely - Pynchon is the core literato, his Gravity’s Rainbow, V, etc must-reads. Just carrying this around and leaving it on cafe tables gives you instant street cred. But you should be wearing shades when you’re reading it, and endangering your health by at least smoking a mentholated.
Quirky Commie murders? Back in 1978 the aged Dr Siri Paiboun, hero of the Laos revolution and now national coroner, is about to become a married man and father of two at the ripe old age of seventysomething. Hardy man Indeed. Not only has Dr Siri been snaffled off the shelf by an aged beauty, a former comrade in arms, he’s also forced to attend the Communist Party’s Quarterly Planning and Progress Conference. A thousand flowers will bloom And he’s being haunted by ghostly American thugs who chase him down the dark streets of an otherworld ‘hood sneering racial insults. Where does the pogo stick come in? What? Oh, the title? The toy is worshipped by Hmong hill people. Someone brought it home from a war and it caused mayhem - all the kids fought over it. Convinced it was demonically possessed, the tribe set it up with its own shrine. And sure why not? While Dr Siri is up in the hills with the pogo stick worshippers, his assistants - lovely Dtui, and Mr Geung, whose Down’s Syndrome makes him particularly efficient as Dr Siri’s assistant - are trying to thaw out a suspicious deep-frozen corpse. Where do writers get these ideas? My question exactly. But this series of books about Dr Siri have a sweet, feelgood vibe that’s kindly and reassuring. The characters are all good people, except the ones who are satisfyingly bad. And tell me this, what’s a communist doing being haunted? You know how it is with occupied countries - it’s not just the country that gets occupied. Soon the citizens are culturally colonised too. Dr Siri has become the habitation of a thousand-year-old shaman, who is a magnet for bad guys from the spirit world. Best thing you’ve ever read? Wouldn’t quite go that far. But if you want a sweet and fuzzy book with plenty of gentle laughs, this is the one for you. Author's site
Little, Brown I’ve lost my job! Oh, pet! Here, have some tea… and cake, quick, cake. I’m going to be back in work in a week - determined Of course you will. But you need to recoup your forces after a shock like that. Comfort reading is what you need. And you recommend? Things are tough here, no question - but in Botswana, bordering on Zimbabwe, South Africa, Namibia, Angola, Zambia, the AIDS epidemic has cut life expectancy from 65 years to 35. They know about hard times. This is supposed to cheer me up how? The ‘traditionally built’ (22 stone) ladies of the No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency sail through life, oiling the wheels with kindness and courtesy. These are truly life-affirming babes. Sounds serious Funny, actually - a gently ironic humour based on Botswana’s sweet-natured way of doing things. In the 10th in the series, detective-in-chief Mma Precious Ramotswe and her trusty sidekick Mma Makutsi are trying to find out why the Kalahari Swoopers football team has lost its swoop and is losing every game. Not a thriller, I’d say? In its way. A ruthless man-stealer is moving in on Mma Makutsi’s fiance with her effective bed-selling skills. A client’s husband has invited his boss to dinner - not knowing that his boss is her husband too - she’s a woman rich in husbands. And Mma Ramotswe finds out that her own husband’s apprentices are more than they seem. The writer is, um, Motswana? Alexander McCall Smith was born in Zimbabwe, not Botswana, and is now Emeritus Professor of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh. But these books are gorgeous, just the thing to read when you’re in trouble. You promise… Go to bed with a pot of tea, a big box of chocolates and this book, and it will salve your wounded soul. By the time you’re finished, you’ll be ready to leap up and get that work. Author's site
Daniel Depp? I know that name! Johnny’s big brother, indeed. Oooh, a babe? Mmwell, when the talents were divvied up in Clann Depp, Johnny got a fair share of the handsome gene. Daniel has more of a Bilbo Baggins look - if you like ‘em short, plump and beardy, he’s the man for you. But he has a lovely personality. Hmm. Can he write? Hilarious and dark and heroic. ‘Loser’s Town’ is Hollywood - and Depp knows La-La-Land from the inside. As one of the characters, a gangster turned producer, says: “Movies make heroin and cocaine look like child’s play.” Yeah, yeah. But is Johnny in it? Heavens, no. Just a superstar called Bobby Dye. Bobby Dye, Johnny Depp. No resemblance Actually, no. Johnny Depp is a nice guy, from all accounts. Bobby is a weak little sniveller who’ll compromise his every friend for the sake of his career. And Hollywood is run by the Mafia. So far, so noir Yeah. Bobby’s getting death threats - “You’re going to Die, Dye!” So our hero - tall, taciturn, rock-like white knight David Spandau, a heartbroken former stunt man who’s now a detective - is brought in to help. All so typically American Ah, but there’s an Irish angle. Spandau’s sidekick is wee Terry from Derry, who learned martial arts in the IRA - Eh? - and now lives on a houseboat in Ventura, listening to Bach and reading Tolkien and longing for love. And overcoming big guys with magical kung-fu grace. My kinda guy Don’t get too attached. I warned you it was noir. But the writing is gorgeous. When a criminal psycho meets the girl he loves as he’s on his way to do a murder, he “felt happiness come over him like a cool mist”. And funny too? Really funny - full of bitchy cracks and crazy scenarios, and you like the characters - even the creepos. And written like a bullet: hard and fast. Worth buying? Run, don’t walk, and be first to grab it before it goes. Publisher's site
A tense, riveting thriller? Shh, I’m reading. Yeah, finished in a minute. G’way. I can’t put down The Insider, Ava McCarthy’s cracking first thriller. With a lovely love story? Far from. A story where you clutch the book, eyes bulging, tongue sticking out of the corner of your mouth, not realising you’re holding your breath until you gasp with horror. Plot twists? Thrills? More twists and turns than a property developer’s back pocket. More thrills than a day in Limerick. Geeky grrrl Harry Martinez is pursued by a maniac who signs threatening anonymised emails ‘The Prophet’, and kills her friends. Can’t she, er, hack The Prophet back? You’d think so - but the emailer knows all about the €12 million her father and his rogue trader pals stashed away in a numbered account. Of course, €12 million goes nowhere nowadays Oh yes it does - it appears in Harry’s own bank account, then, just as she’s arranged to pay it back to the bad guy, *pouf*, it disappears again. Trouble coming every day. But a tough babe has her ways? Oh yes. Harry would mind mice at crossroads - and hack into their user accounts while she did it. She follows the money all the way to the Caribbean - but I won’t spoil it. Wait - what about the da? Wouldn’t he know who’s after the €12m? He’s the last thing Harry wants to see - a gambler who lost the house when she was a kid, and now a thief. Also he’s due for release from Arbour Hill, and she doesn’t want to queer his pitch. Blood will tell? You might say. Harry has inherited his creative way with a problem, and he taught her to be a poker ace when she was in nappies. The writer knows her stuff? Yup; an analyst programmer for the London Stock Exchange’s trading division; she got a first in physics and a masters in nuclear medicine - and she can write. Is it a buy? Mos’ def. Right to the end - where there’s a fabulous final twist - she keeps you hanging on.
HarperCollins €20.24 CRIME passes down through families. A couple of youngsters turn up in court, then a few years later it’s their children. By the time the prosecuting gardai are old and grizzled, it’s their grandchildren. Swedish thriller writer Camilla Lackberg’s new murder feast is about a family steeped in crime. The grandfather, Ephraim, was a simple con man. Posing as a preacher he brought his two beautiful little boys around to cure the sick. But the ‘sick’ were people he’d bribed to pose as terminally ill patients so they could be miraculously healed. The criminal family is so complicated that we could have done with a family tree. Two of Ephraim’s grandsons are the local burglars, and blackmail is rife within the clan. Years after Ephraim became respectable (on inheriting money from a grateful parishioner), three bodies turn up in the village where the family lives. One is fresh and bloody. It’s lying on the bones of two earlier murder victims - two girls who disappeared 20 years ago. The local small-town cops start to investigate. Then another girl goes missing. Lackberg has a sweet subplot about a shy officer finding romance. And some funny stuff about sedulously ass-kissing officers, and bone-selfish families. Anyone who loves Scandinavian crime fiction will enjoy this laid-back thriller by the author of The Ice Princess. Writer's site
Harper €13.49 MURDER in the English style, complete with house parties, cosy vegetable gardens, proper tea in teapots - it has to be Agatha Christie. But hold - is that a graphic novel? It is! The story comes from the Agatha Christie stable, and trots along with the familiar gait: discontent with the growing permissiveness of society - it was published in 1969; approval of unimaginative, conformist, tweedy, caste-bound lives. The victim is a liar and a fantasist, a young teenager who claims to have witnessed a murder long ago. No sooner are the words out of her mouth than her head is in the apple-bobbing bucket, and that’s all she wrote. Hercule Poirot, moustaches a-twitch, is soon on the scene and discovering a village awash with dastardliness. The drawings owe a lot to the styling of the Agatha Christie’s Poirot TV series. They don’t make up for the lack of Christie’s own hackneyed but compelling descriptions. This is one of a series of Christie’s most famous murder mysteries re-imagined as graphic novels. It’s an idea that has its parallel in Belgium, where a series of Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu offered, well, a recherché charm. It can only be weeks before someone brings out Finnegans Wake, The Graphic Novel, Penned by Shem. Publisher's site
Sphere €13.49 ONCE in a while a thrilling author loses the thrill. Breakneck was like that for me. It starts with a computer hacker murdered for his password. He or his friends have stolen $500,000 he happened to find lying around in a bank account. Investigating the killing is detective ‘MC’ (Mary Catherine) Riggio, a nice girl from a big Catholic Italian family who’s about to marry the man of her dreams. Then he’s killed. Then MC’s cousin Tommy is killed. It should be thrilling. But somehow it all felt ho-hum. It was as if the writer was working from a formula. She finally lost me when - after yet another murder - MC and her partner arrive at a suburban house garlanded with crime scene tape and surrounded by police cars. They go in to interview the grieving parents, who tell them that the kids haven’t been told yet. The idea that anyone could conceal such delightfully gruesome excitement from a house full of kids is just not tenable. There is a pleasingly evil bad guy, and Spindler has done her research about the shadowy world of the hackers. And the life of big extended Italian families that love and protect every sister, kid and cousin. If you love the subterranean world of the cracker, but long for a pasta-packing mama, you’ll love Breakneck. Author's blog
Bloomsbury €12.99 (Easons price) MARY Boulton is bolting. She’s killed her husband - it’s not clear why, but there seems to have been a baby involved - and she’s on the run, pursued by his implacable red-headed rifle-toting giant twin brothers across the wilds of 1903 Canada. So far so good. Gil Adamson’s first novel was 10 years in the writing, and it is a honed and crafted piece of work. As ‘the widow’ flees from shelter to shelter, the writing is impeccable, beautifully observed. But somehow I didn’t warm to the story. Mary takes shelter first with an old widow who takes in waifs and strays, then, disappearing in the night with the widow’s mare and some valuables, she wanders starving and crazy through the mountains. As she meets other strangers to life, we’re given glimpses of her life with her late husband - marital rapes, dying baby, gambling. We discover her childhood in the black-bordered home of a depressive minister in mourning for his dead wife. The Canadian libraries’ candidate for the IMPAC award, this comes with impeccable credentials. It’s soaked in turn-of-the-century authenticity, and calls up a more realistic version of the world celebrated in a thousand cowboy movies. An interesting new writer - let’s see what she does next. Publisher's site
Quercus €22.94 IF YOU want a book to take on your lifetime trip on the Trans-Siberian Railway, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl who Played with Fire is the one. Better to load it on your Kindle or iPhone if possible, though, because it’s a huge thing. Larsson, a Swedish investigative journalist, brought his thriller trilogy to his publisher and promptly died of a heart attack at 50, is a hellish loss to literature. The characters are the same as in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the first of the series, but they’ve grown up. Lisbeth Salander, genius hacker and a paragon of body art, is wandering the world, discarding her nipple and tongue rings but (weirdly) getting her boobs done. Mikael Blomkvist, editor of Millennium magazine, is preparing to publish a book about sex trafficking - as Larsson put it, “the finances of rape”. Salander discovers that this probe revisits her own violent past. When a series of brutal murders happens, she’s right in the frame, and becomes a tabloid star as Sweden’s answer to Psycho Killer. The tension torques tighter and tighter, there’s a shock with every page you turn, and the characters are tightly written and very likeable. The best thriller I’ve read in ages. Publisher's site
Doubleday €10.79 DOWN in the basement, Dad's playing Texas Hold Em and chatting online with DesertMissy when - blam! - someone takes off the top of his head with a Golden Boy .22. Since the final lines of his online flirt refer to the person who's just come in as "my wife... #19", it's obvious that the technologically savvy polygamist has just been done in by one of his handmaidens. And that's just the start of The 19th Wife, a bestseller in the US. How well it will do here is moot. This book is hard work, with interlinking narratives and a multiplicity of viewpoints and styles. The main narrator is sweet, gay Jordan, who grew up hard and fast when the voice of God told the ma that she should abandon him on the road when he was 14. Yes, that's the suspect, that mother #19. Jordan is determined that the ma is innocent. And so she seems. Innocent, otherworldly and totally dim - the kind who's waiting for the Rapture. Peeking out from between the story of Jordan's investigation into his father's murder is another story - author David Ebershoff's retelling of the factual story of Brigham Young's renegade 19th wife. Hideously funny and way, way too long, this makes a perfect desultory Christmas read. Publisher's site
ROAMING bands of adolescents spend their days in many Irish housing estates, as their parents work long hours, leaving them without supervision or help. The same in Iceland, it seems. Arctic Chill begins with the image of a stabbed child, frozen to the ground by his own blood, dead outside a deserted block of flats. This is the latest in a series of haunting stories about Icelandic police investigating not just crime, but the chill sadness at the centre of their own lives. As detectives Erlendur, Elinborg and Sigurdur Óli investigate the death of the half-Thai, half-Icelandic boy, everyone stymies them. What kind of people are the family, Erlendur asks the interpreter, and she replies: "Very ordinary people. People like you and me. Poor people." And immigrants. And in Iceland, where people speak plainly and keep a distance from their neighbours, there's a certain distaste for incomers. The police are halted at every turn, but gradually their work turns up leads: the seedy man with a computer loaded with pornography; the teacher who thinks "they shouldn't let those people into the country"; the feral middle-class children. Written in a plain, down-to-earth yet lyrical style, Arctic Chill is a cool examination of our value for children - as well as a gripping, harrowing story. Publisher's site
Puffin €14.99 NO ONE can say I didn't warn the government that if they dug up Tara, they'd have no luck: those signing the order would be out of a job, and the economy would go down the tubes. The goddess Bóinne and the Sidhe don't mess about. Any Artemis Fowl reader could have told Bertie and his pals the same. But did they listen? Eoin Colfer's latest is the perfect Christmas present for any literate kid. But as with drum sets, it's a gift that will come back to haunt you. It's full of jokes that are incredibly funny when you're young, and demand to be shared. Former evil mastermind Artemis Fowl has turned his family. Now the criminal dynasty are out to save the world, investing in green power and peace. But his past misdeeds have rebounded on him. Ma Fowl has the deadly fairy virus Spelltropy. The only cure came from the silky sifaka lemur, and Artemis, in a typical piece of Fowl play, sold the world's last one to (gasp) Extinctionists. He must go into the past and steal the lemur from his younger self. The result is hilarious. Perhaps the best thing is the haiku Artemis composes on the sight of a dwarf's bottom as it tunnels magically into the lemur's cage. But it's just one treat in a book full of treats. Pure fun. Author's website:Eoin Colfer
Quercus €18.84 OLD communists in the Laos of the 1970s are the unlikely heroes of Colin Cotterill's thrillers - and especially his hero, Siri. Dr Siri Paiboun spent his youth fighting in the jungles, side-by-side with his wife, to free his country from French occupation. By now he's in his mid-70s, a lonely widower, and in any civilised country he'd be settling into retirement with the comfort of a pension and a medical card. No such luck for the aged revolutionary: he's national coroner, and uses his medical skills and his love of Maigret to investigate mysterious deaths. One of Dr Siri's cases is the drowning of a kid from a fishing village - an ace swimmer, whose corpse is covered in mosquito bites and splinters above the waist, but not below. The other is a blind semi-retired dentist (ow!) killed by a truck - after picking up a letter written in invisible ink. Dr Siri and his friend Civilai, a top government cadre, go off together to investigate. They're friends even though Civilai is one of those who stole the governing of the country from the founding revolutionaries. It's very funny - particularly when the two pals attend a Bruce Lee show re-voiced in Lao, where the audience rock with laughter as the evil capitalist somersaults backwards onto the roof, snarling "We slaves of the Western money culture will always prevail, you common coolie". Very funny, and very political, and quite instructive.
