Djibouti by Elmore Leonard

Award-winning documentary maker, Dara Barr, and her right-hand man, Xavier LeBo, arrive in Djibouti to make a film about Somali pirates. What they get instead are al-Qaeda terrorists, an elephant gun, a model with a smart mouth, the CIA, a billionaire playboy who wants to be a spy, freedom-fighting pirates,  horny goat weed and a highly explosive gas tanker.

It's a cool story that is made for the big screen. There's lots of snappy, funny dialogue and I could see the various action sequences in my mind as I read. Leonard even gets a bit meta every now and again as the main characters discuss who would play each part. The author also plays with the structure of the book, starting with a few narrative chapters that set the scene before jumping forward in time and having Dara and Xavier retell the story to each other as they edit the footage shot at sea. For me, this didn't work and I felt it bogged the story down. Thankfully, after everything is caught up to the present, the book picks up pace again and Leonard launches confidently into the finale with Dara and co. hunting a terrorist, the terrorist hunting them, and both groups trying to blow up a hijacked tanker.

I think I was unfortunate in picking Djibouti as my first Elmore Leonard book and I suspect that I picked a dud. There was more than enough material here to make a funny, fast paced thriller but it felt kind of meh and not really what I was expecting from an author as loved as Elmore Leonard.

Read On: I will give Elmore Leonard another chance and read one of his better known books, perhaps Get Shorty or Freaky Deaky. 

Scarlet by Stephen Lawhead

Hood, the first book in this imaginative retelling of the Robin Hood legend, was an enjoyable read and although I wasn't immediately compelled to pick up this book, the next in the series, I enjoyed this one as well. Stephen Lawhead shifts the action to eleventh century Wales where Rhi Bran, a king dispossessed of his lands by the invading Normans, becomes an outlaw. All of the rest of the gang are here as well in various guises, including Will Scarlet, or Scatlocke as he has been renamed. Much of the book is told in the first person as Will, languishing in jail for a crime he did not commit, tells his story to Odo, a young Norman priest. 

Stephen Lawhead writes well, with the occasional lapse into Celtic romanticism, and he obviously knows his stuff as I got a clear sense of the harshness and brutality of everyday life in the Middle Ages. Will is a great, well-rounded character and I liked that most of the story was told in his voice. What was less well done was the larger historical context. I don't know if the author assumed his readers would be familiar with the political situation in eleventh century Britain (I'm not) but I didn't really follow what was a convoluted story thread about two popes and the king's rebellious younger brother.

So, an enjoyable read but not a compelling one.

Read On: Tuck is the next in the series and I'll probably get around to reading it at some point. 

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

When Oskar Schnell's father is killed in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre, the nine-year-old sets out to solve the mystery of a key he finds in his father's wardrobe. Intertwined in his story are the stories of the grandmother he adores and the grandfather who disappeared forty years earlier.

I wanted to love this book. I thought it would be beautiful and heartbreaking, and it could have been. An act of terrorism seen through the eyes of a nine-year-old boy? A story about a little boy mourning for his father and learning to let him go? That's powerful stuff right there. Add in the stories of his grandparents, caught up in the bombings of Dresden, and you have yourself a novel that illustrates how war wastes youth and potential. Instead, it was frustrating and pretentious and difficult to read. Oskar Schnell is the worst sort of hipster trapped in a nine-year-old's body. He's a vegan. He plays the tambourine. He makes jewellery in his spare time and talks to his grandmother over a shortwave radio. The plot is as thin as a tissue paper and full of holes which are papered over by random images, including several pages of numbers which have absolutely no relevance to what's going on. And that's the other thing. Nothing happens in this book, apart from Oskar being cutesy and precocious and people leaving things unsaid.

I know many people love this book. Perhaps I'm just too literal to get it. Perhaps it's meant to be read in hour-long sessions in coffee shops. There were times when I welled up and the story hit me right in the feels, but too often these moments were lost, buried beneath layers of achingly pretentious crap. Strip away all that, lay the story out in its bare bones, and, for me, you would have had a much more powerful, haunting and beautiful story.

Read On: I may give Coer's first book, Everything is Illuminated, a miss if it's written like this one. A better story with a child narrator is The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne.

The Exodus Quest by Will Adams

An odd artifact on a market stall in Alexandria and a dead girl in the desert trigger two separate investigations that converge in the ancient Egyptian city of Amarna. Murder, conspiracy, kidnap and wild historical theories follow as archaeologist Daniel Knox stumbles into a world of fanatical Christians, tomb robbers and biblical mysteries.

Take this book as what it is - an Indiana Jones-style yarn loosely based around a historical mystery stretched to its limits of credibility. All the usual cast of characters are here; the scholarly heroes with unlikely knowledge of the esoteric, the incompetent policemen, the corrupt officials, and, of course, fanatics of various creeds. The plot races along at a reckless pace and the action never lets up. All the ingredients are here, and yet... I've read better. The constant lurching from one character's viewpoint to another's is jarring and makes it difficult to follow the story. Because of this, his characters are underdeveloped and don't ever manage to escape their stereotypes. The ending, too, is a disappointment. Adams puts so much effort and energy into the crescendo, only for it to fall flat at the end.

That said, I did enjoy it. The Exodus Quest absorbed me for the couple of autumnal evenings it took me to read it and Adams had picked an interesting historical mystery to base his story on. With a less breakneck pace and a little more character development, this could have been a much better book.

Read On: The Alexander Cipher by Will Adams (the first in the series), The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown and The Templar Legacy by Steve Berry.

Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James

Set six years after the events of Pride and Prejudice, Fitzwilliam Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett are happily married with two young children. However, their tranquil lives are thrown into disarray one wet and windy night when a carriage comes hurtling up the driveway. The door bursts open and Lydia, Elizabeth's younger spoiled brat of a sister, spills out, screaming that her husband, the charming but deadbeat George Wickham, has been murdered. Actually he hasn't, to Darcy's disappointment, and a search party finds Wickham in the woods, drunk and bloodied, beside the body of Captain Denny, babbling what sounds like a confession. But, even though he is a rogue and a serial seducer of young woman, is Wickham really a murderer?

I found it difficult to finish this book. The story didn't hold my attention and it was easy to put down, even in the middle of a chapter. To be honest, it was a dull read. I confess that I've not read any of Austen's works, relying instead on the BBC adaptations, but there was none of the witty dialogue or the wry observations so often attributed to Austen. The characters too were wooden and lacked life and personality. Elizabeth was written as an passive and dutiful wife concerned with propriety and keeping up appearances, seemingly weighed down by her responsibilities. What happened to the witty and sharp-tongued Elizabeth Bennett of Longbourn? Darcy is a little more animated but full of self-doubt and self-recrimination, constantly examining his conscience with regard to Wickham and even his own marriage. Although this insight into Darcy's inner thoughts are interesting, his constant whinging gets tiresome after a while.

Death Comes to Pemberley is disappointing on the mystery side as well. The story is tame by modern standards and there is no detective work to speak of as in those days there were no police and crimes were investigated by local magistrates. This may be historically accurate but makes for a less than exciting read. The solution is contrived and relies on the mystery solving itself at the inquest with the help of last minute revelations from cardboard characters written solely for that moment. The pace too was slow. I wasn't expecting a frantic pace - the story is set on the Georgian country estate after all - but the story plodded along.

In summary, don't bother. The glacial pace of the book, the stilted dialogue and the dullness of the characters made me lose all interest in finding out whodunnit and why.

Read On:  I'll be steering clear of Austen sequels for a while. Maybe I'll finally get around to reading Pride and Prejudice,  or try to salvage PD James' reputation by reading one of her many crime books.

Fatherland by Robert Harris

Hitler has won. It is 1964 and the Greater German Reich stretches from the Netherlands to the Ural Mountains. Xavier March, a cop and a good man despite his SS uniform, investigates the murder of an old man who was once a Nazi bureaucrat. What March uncovers is a conspiracy that reaches to the highest echelons of the German Reich, a truth that could topple governments, change history and get him killed.

Robert Harris isn't the first author to imagine a world in which the Nazis won, and he won't be the last, but Fatherland is probably one of the best. Harris uses his lovely, sparse writing style to perfectly evoke the mood and the people of a fascist Germany. There's no long-winded and tedious back story to wade through, instead Harris hooks you in with comments and flashbacks which hint at but never fully reveal his divergent history. The same sparse description is used to bring his characters to life. Xavier March is an interesting and well written protagonist and more than just a world-weary detective; he's an honest man working for a criminal regime, a war veteran disillusioned by Nazi ideology and an independent thinker in a nation of followers.

The plot itself is gripping and the tension and paranoia ramps up as the full extent of the conspiracy is gradually unveiled. You can sense disaster coming, it's inevitable, and yet you can't stop reading. The ending is abrupt with not even an epilogue to tie up the many loose ends. I guess this untidy conclusion was intentional, perhaps reflecting that reality is untidy, perhaps leaving the reader wondering long after the book has been finished.

In summary, Fatherland is a well written and absorbing crime noir where the crime is solved but a grim evocation of life in a fascist state lingers long in the memory. Well worth the read.

Read On: I enjoyed Robert Harris' Enigma so I may go on to read another of his books, such as The Ghost, or An Officer and a Spy. The what-ifs of alternative histories intrigue me, so I may crack open Dominion by C.J. Sansom, a spy thriller based in Nazi Britain.

One Shot by Lee Child

Six shots, five people dead and a small Indiana city is thrown into a state of terror. Within hours, the cops have solved it. It's a slam-dunk case but there's one problem: even in the face of overwhelming forensic evidence, the accused says they've got the wrong man. And he wants Jack Reacher to prove it. Jack Reacher, an ex-military cop and drifter catches the news on the television and immediately heads for Indiana. What he finds is the accused in a coma and a case that's a little bit too perfect.

One Shot is not great literature but that's not Lee Child's thing. What is Lee Child's thing are fast-paced, smart, and well written thrillers that may be implausible but are a lot of fun to read. The action starts slowly as Child sets everything up. Once the pieces are in place, the pace picks up, the plot thickens and a case that originally looked watertight starts to unravel. Jack Reacher too is a great character. In a genre full of alcoholic, divorced, world-weary detectives, he's a breath of fresh air. He rides into town on a Greyhound bus, analyses the hell out of everything, kicks everyone's ass and rides off into the sunset with a clear conscience. Some of the stuff he does is frankly implausible but he does make enough mistakes to prevent him appearing omniscient. 

In summary, not a great work of literature but a good thriller. The fast pace and smart plot makes this a real page-turner and One Shot will keep you hooked until the last page.

Read On: One Shot is the ninth book featuring Jack Reacher and the tenth is The Hard Way. Other rollicking thrillers with kick-ass characters and implausible storylines include Ice Station by Matthew Reilly and Map of Bones by James Rollins.

Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less by Jeffery Archer

Four men invest their life savings in a North Sea oil company. The next day they realise they've been conned. With nothing to lose, the four men - an Oxford don, a Harley Street doctor, an art dealer and a lord - get together to hatch a plan, con the conman and get back every penny they lost.

Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less has a great idea behind it. Four men, each with their own talents and connections, work together to con the man who tricked them out of thousands of dollars. It's a shame that Archer couldn't pull it off. The schemes the men come up with are clever - although the conman is conveniently gullible at times - but too often Archer misses opportunities to ratchet up the tension so that I never felt involved in the action. There is also little in the way of character development. Each of the characters he has created have potential; the young lord struggling under the expectations of his family, the society doctor bored with his wealthy, needy patients, the French art dealer navigating his way through society, and the brilliant but naive American scholar. However, like the plot, Archer misses opportunity after opportunity. His characters lacked personality, back story and, for the most part, emotions and so I never really understood their motivations (beyond retrieving their lost money) or grasp what was at stake if they didn't succeed. 

This may be a little harsh. Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less was a diverting read on a rainy day and I would have forgiven Archer if the ending hadn't been so bloody disappointing. It was like he just ran out of ideas and gave up in the final few chapters, writing a conclusion so lazy, contrived and frankly implausible that I felt cheated. In summary, it's a great idea poorly executed. 

Read On: Maybe I'll give Archer another chance with Kane and Abel. Or maybe I won't.

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

In the 1860s a new literary genre appeared. Lurid, shocking and too much for some Victorian sensibilities (one critic even described it as 'unspeakably disgusting'), the sensation novel peeped beneath the skirts of Victorian respectability and revealed a world of madness, bigotry, murder and violence. One of the best tellers of the sensational tale was Wilkie Collins. At times a clerk, lawyer and would-be painter, he was a great friend of that other purveyor of sensationalism, Charles Dickens.

The Moonstone, written in 1868, is a typically elaborate tale revolving around the theft of a fabulous diamond. Looted from an Indian shrine, the moonstone brings a curse upon all those who possess it. The book is a sprawling tale, written in three chunks each with a different narrator telling their version of the same events. Think Vantage Point, Victorian style.

As for the madness, murder and violence, there is plenty of it but compared to modern crime fiction, it's pretty genteel madness, murder and violence. More interestingly, The Moonstone is arguably the first English whodunnit and it's in this book that Collins establishes the conventions of the genre; the country house setting, the renowned detective, the large number of loosely related subjects and, of course, liberal amounts of red herrings. Collins also throws into the mix the quintessentially Victorian ingredients of India, opium and an obsession with the gothic.

I liked this book. Compared to the gritty crime dramas and forensic thrillers of today, it seems like tame fare but it's easy to see that The Moonstone would have scandalised and delighted Victorian readers. The plotting and interweaving of the different narratives is skillfully done but a lot of the appeal for me lies in the unintentional evocation of Victorian England.

Read On: I know Dickens is the Victorian sensationalist writer, but I have such a hard time when it comes to reading his novels. The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale is a modern retelling of a real-life crime that shocked Victorian society, while The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle is a typically chilling whodunnit.

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

So a dame walks into a private detective's office...

Sound familiar? It probably does but luckily this is the noir detective novel. This is no ordinary dame and the office belongs to no ordinary detective. They are Miss Brigid O'Shaughnessy, the original femme fatale, and Sam Spade, the PI on which all fast-talking, tough, wisecracking PIs are based. 

Spade's partner is murdered on a stakeout, the cops want him for the murder, a beautiful redhead with a heartbreaking story and dubious motives begs for his help, gun-toting villains demand a pay-off he can't provide and everyone wants a fabulously valuable golden statuette of a falcon. Who has it? And what will it take to get it?

I'm not going tell you - you'll have to read it to find out! But I will reveal that The Maltese Falcon has gunfights, fistfights, lots of well-dressed men trading banter while well-dressed women watch, bodies pile up, the police blunder about, everyone drinks a lot and it is awesome! The solution is as complicated as the motives of the people gathered in Spade's living room but this book doesn't flow neatly, like our hero it swaggers through the streets of 1920s San Francisco with a gun in one hand and a lighted cigarette in the other.

Sorry if it seems like I'm gushing but I loved this book! The Maltese Falcon is all about the writing, especially the dialogue. It's stuffed full of snappy dialogue, brooding tension and a cast of odd and engaging characters without a good guy in sight. Sam Spade is the hero only by default; his motives are as grey as the clouds above and he saunters through the book as cool and as slick as a teflon cat. 

Read On: The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler is another must-read for fans of the detective novel.