Jane Harris: The Observations

A young woman tries to escape her sullied past by taking a job as a maid in lonely house outside Edinburgh. She is fascinated by her beautiful new mistress, if somewhat confused by the lady’s increasingly strange requests. As her affection for her mistress grows so too does her jealousy toward her predecessor-a young woman who died under mysterious circumstances. Learning that her employer preferred the dead girl to her, she decides to ‘punish’ the woman. But her practical joke takes a turn for the serious and she soon finds herself caught up in a web of sex, lies and insanity.
Through it all she remains faithful to her mistress but can’t help but wonder what really happened to the other young woman and to make matters worse, her past is catching up with her, threatening to destroy the tenuous hold she has on her new life.
As the mysteries are unveiled one by one everything falls into place sending her life off on a tangent she never expected.
I really enjoyed this intriguing tale, particularly the unexpected ending. Though some of the secondary characters were a little clichéd, the main pair was quite well developed. Historical detail is scattered throughout with a light hand and the style imparts a strong sense of place.
It took me a little while to customise myself to the liberal use of dialect in the writing, something that I am not usually fond of but that works here. (And I was surprised at just how many words and phrases are still in use today-at least in my house).
This is an unusual story, and a step apart from others of its genre.-Lynn

To the Hilt - Dick Francis

Artist Alexander Kinoch has always been the odd one in his family - spurning London and convention, he lives in a remote bothy off the beaten path in Scotland. Arriving home one evening he is set upon by four men who pause the beating only to ask, over and over, "where is it?" Alexander has no idea what "it" is and has no response. Thrown over the side of the mountain and left for dead, when he crawls back home he discovers destruction - everything's been overturned or ruined. But his artistic talents allow him to recognisable sketch his assailants.
Called to London to comfort his stricken mother - her husband, head of one of Britain's leading breweries, has had a heart attack in the wake of discovering that the company is on the verge of collapse due to the financial director's embezzlement of millions of pounds. Ivan gives Alexander power of attorney, to the utter fury of Patsy, Ivan's daughter, who has always suspected Alexander of trying to finagle his way into her inheritance.
Less horsey than Francis' usual work, To the Hilt is just as pacy, engrossing and character and plot driven as the rest of his work. The hilt the title refers to is an immensely valuable sword given to one of Alexander's predecessors by Bonnie Prince Charlie; Scottish history and culture are woven throughout the narrative, with the bagpipes Alexander's chosen method of emotional expression, and golf not only a favourite pastime but also Alexander's more recurring painting theme.
In addition there's missing treasure, skulduggery, an ex-wife, a hidden racehorse (not completely removed from Francis' more oft used setting), and a cast of convincing characters including the thoroughly likable firm of Young and Utterly, who I'd love to see recur in another book. This was a magnificently enjoyable action novel that beautifully balances character development with action. - Alex

Country of the Blind – Christopher Brookmyre

The murders of media tycoon Roland Voss, his wife and two bodyguards in a country manor house owned by the government sent a wave of (tabloid-fuelled) rage throughout England. The manhunt for the four men responsible is fevered; when they escape from a prison van, killing three guards in the process, the press bay for blood.
Only Nicole Carrow, a junior lawyer, believes the men are innocent, based on an envelope she was given by one of them the week before the bunged robbery. It’s only thanks to the conspiratorial instincts of investigative report Jack Parlabane that Nicole escapes a cunning attempt on her life and, working together, Nicole and Jack begin untangling a complicated plot that involves the highest levels of government.
The second in the Parlabane series, Country of the Blind is twisted, involving and quite brilliant. The dialogue snaps, the twists are unpredictable (particularly the two surprising and supremely rewarding occasions when hunter becomes hunted), and the tense pace is ferocious.
Brookmyre’s writing is always inclined toward the political, and Country of the Blind is no exception – set in Major’s Britain there’s a decided leftward lean I related to; the main thrust is grounded in EU reform, with decided distrust of government and big picture ideology and politics. The pivotal plot point was both convoluted and believable.
As with other of his novels, Brookmyre sprinkles humour and realism throughout. I was reminded of my own, eighties era activist past when one character’s recollections of (Thatcherite-era) youthful activism brought back memories of one group falling out with another

“over some minute point of interpreted socialist principle, and the Labour Group got shirty with the Marxist Group about what slogans to put on their placards, and the Intergalactic Socialists for a Marxist Universe started a spat with the Vegan Organic Hamster Protection League…”

It could be possible to overdose of Brookmyre, which is part of the reason why I’m pacing myself. The other is that my library seems not to have the third Parlabane novel and so I’ll have to request it. Strong, clear, funny, clever – if I’m not careful Brookmyre will be my favourite author of the year again. - Alex

Quite Ugly One Morning - Christopher Brookmyre

Jack Parlabane has fled the US and is laying low in his native Scotland. When he wakes, hung over, the smell of fresh vomit is familiar, but he has no memory of creating the source of the smell. A gust of wind locks him out while he investigates and, clad only in a pair of boxers and a grubby t-shirt, Jack decides to get back in through his downstairs neighbour's place. That's when he discovers the source of the odour - his neighbour's dead, his throat cut, two severed fingers stuck up his nose, a tide of vomit washing the floor, and a giant turd on - of all places - the mantelpiece. Which is when a WPC finds him.
I don't want to go too much deeper into the plot, because unravelling its tangled tendrils is part of the enjoyment - through the course of the novel we discover why Jack ran from the US, why he's unhappy to find he's living opposite a cop shop, and why his first thought on being locked out is not to get a locksmith or ask one of the helpful polis to help him but to break and enter. That all runs alongside not only a great mystery that involves the behind-the-scenes machinations of Britain's tortured NHS, but also some great characterisation and dialogue.
With a health care background myself, I particularly liked the scene where Sarah Slaughter, an anaesthetist and the victim's ex-wife, deals with a particularly painful orthopaedic surgeon:

Surgeons chronically misunderstood the role of the anaesthetist. They thought that he, or she, was there in an auxiliary, subservient capacity, to gas the patient and keep the awkward bugger quiet and still why they worked their little miracles. The anaesthetist saw his/her role instead as keeping the patient (a) alive and (b) comfortable while the surgeon did his/her best to ensure otherwise.

There's more, but I'd end up quoting most of the book.
This is Brookmyre's debut novel, and he does a brilliant job of conveying place and sensibility. His work's been criticised for its language and "stomach-turning olfactory and vomitory detail" (reviews are posted on Brookmyre's home site), but I found myself fascinated rather than repelled, albeit glad the book doesn't come with a scratch'n'sniff option. I have already read and reviewed a number of Brookmyre's books, but this is my first in the five (to date) Parlabane novels and it's only through rare discipline (I will make inroads in my own books) that I've not already borrowed the rest of the series from the library. In fact, it's only because they didn't have this first in stock that I haven't already read them. Great fun, absorbing and funny, Brookmyre's a winner. - Alex

A Darker Domain - Val McDermid

It seems like the coldest of cold cases when DI Karen Pirie is asked to locate a man missing for almost quarter of a decade, but Mick Prentice's daughter is desperate to find a potential bone marrow match for her dying child. She and her mother had closed their hearts to Mick since the night he, and five other scabs, vanished from the mining town of Newton of Wemyss in the middle of the 1984 national miner's strike; anonymous envelopes of money begin arriving shortly afterward, postmarked Nottingham. It was, according to all account, atypical for a man so devoted to the cause, but emotions and tension were high, and the devastating effects of Thatcher's union busting strategies had left many families in despair. Only, when Karen looks, Mick isn't in Nottingham with the other scabs...
At the same time as Mick's disappearance, a young mother and her infant child were kidnapped in nearby Fife. The only child and grandchild of wealthy Sir Broderick McLellan Grant, they were worth a small fortune, a price Grant was prepared to pay. However, in the handover process something went awry, and Grant's daughter was shot dead, his grandson vanished, and his wife died by her own hand shortly thereafter. Two decades on Grant is remarried, with a young son, but his first family have never left his mind. When journalist Bel Richmond discovers a clue to the mystery while in Tuscany, the case is reopened.
There is an interesting duality throughout the novel - two cases, two places, two mysteries, two very different social landscapes, and two eras - as the text switches between between police and journalistic investigations, and between 1984/85 and 2007. In general, as a character references events in the past the text takes us there, providing a concrete example (which I'm usually so poor at doing) of what sets McDermid's work above the usual mystery hack's efforts.
I particularly liked the neat and integral incorporation of the social contexts of the strike action - the consequences for miners at the time, the corruption of the union, and the pressures on both those who stayed and those who left. Markedly different from her well-known Wire in the Blood series, A Darker Domain is ambitiously complex and it's all show no tell, gripping and nuanced, with a spectacular pay off.
These strong elements make the obvious connection between the cases, and the length of time it takes Karen to discover them, all the more disappointing. As I've said before, I don't read mysteries with the intention of discovering what happened for myself, so when I do I'm usually displeased. I was waiting for a twist to reveal that I'd been mislead, but instead the novel concludes with a character acting without forethought and in unnecessary panic. Many of the characters were at least partly unpleasant, leaving me nobody to root for.
However, McDermid sub-par is still better than many of her colleagues, and for the most party I did enjoy A Darker Domain, and look forward to more of her work. - Alex

One Good Turn - Kate Atkinson

Paul Bradley's having a little trouble navigating his way around Edinburgh - he hadn't factored in the festival and ensuing crowds. When a minor bingle turns nasty, he finds himself at the wrong end of a baseball bat.
Mild-mannered Martin Canning writes soft-boiled mysteries, starring a genteel 1940's heroine, under an assumed name. Haunted by mysterious events in Russia several years earlier, he's never done anything bold in his life, until he hurls his laptop at the maniac attacking a stranger in the street, a stranger he now feels a duty to accompany to Casualty, even at the cost of losing a copy of his latest novel.
Fleeing a well-witnessed scene of road rage, PI and former cop Jackson Brodie, in Edinburgh for his actress girlfriend's fringe performance, stumbles over the body of a girl floating in the ocean. Despite his best efforts, he can't drag her on land before the tide whisks her away, leaving the police dubious about whether she ever existed.
Detective Inspector Louise Monroe is attracted to the Englishman who, despite the lack of any evidence, insists he found a dead body. And wherever she turns thereafter, there he is. And that's not the only coincidence - a missing property manager and his company (who built the crumbling house she and her young petty thief son live in), a cleaning company, and a mysterious man with a dog and a baseball bat, keep turning up too.
The theme of Russian matryoshka dolls (that fit inside one another) echoes through the novel, both in the Russian elements and the intersecting plots, though sometimes with a too heavy hand, and the interweaving of initially disparate lives was quite effective. I did find some elements grating, including the recounting of characters pasts and internal landscapes - while this add a layer of depth to the novel it slowed the action down considerably, and was not always necessary. For example:

She was distracted by the sight of a smear of chocolate on her white blouse. She supposed it was from the chocolate digestives she had breakfasted on. She imagined the little factory of cells that was her body taking in the chocolate and fat and flour (and probably carcinogenic additives) and sending them off on conveyor belts to different processing rooms. This industry, dedicated to the greater good that was Gloria, was run on co-operative, profit-sharing lines. In this model Gloria factory, the cells were a cheerful, happy workforce who sang along to Workers' Playtime from a tannoy radio. They were unionized and benefited from subsidized housing and healthcare and never became entangled in machinery and mangled to death like her brother Jonathan.

A vivid internal landscape, to be sure, but (especially as we already know about brother Jonathan and his fate) not exactly plot moving.
The mysterious something that happened to Martin in Russia some years earlier, involving a beautiful woman, is doled out through the novel and culminates in something less than a climax. This is not unlike the surprise "twist" at the end, that lands with a gentle thud rather than a frisson of surprise.
One of the elements of One Good Turn I particularly disliked was the periodic tendency of Atkinson not to articulate her characters' thoughts, while having other characters respond as though they had spoken. I have only a poor example, but it at least gives a sense of what I mean:

There was a woman being some kind of statue of Marie-Antoinette. Was that really a suitable job for a woman? For anyone, come to that? How would he feel if Marlee grew up and announced she wanted to do that for a living?
"Oh, I don't know," Louise Munroe said, "doing absolutely nothing all day, I could do with some of that."

It does make it a little difficult to tell what characters in company are having unexpressed thoughts, and it happens relatively regularly through the book.
All this makes it sound as though I didn't enjoy Atkinson's work, and that's not the case. One Good Thing gave me a sense of how good, and how intricate, her writing is when she's writing at her full potential. It's just that this isn't it. But when I get home I'll see if the library have got anything else by her, and have another punt. - Alex

A Tale Etched in Blood and Hard Black Pencil - Christopher Brookmyre

Two partially disfigured bodies are discovered lying in a shallow pit. The rather inept attempt at burning the bodies is compounded by the fact that the bodies not only still have ID in their pockets but there's also are receipts for both a chemical (an acid used to disfigure the bodies) and for petrol alongside one body. The police quickly decide there were two killers working together - "Two of them then," says Alex... "Makes sense, I suppose. Hard to imagine one person being capable of so much stupidity on his own. To be this incompetent would require a pooling of efforts."
Karen Gillespie, now a Superintendent, went to school with one of the dead men, and with the son of the other, and the roots of the crime extend back to those primary school days over twenty years ago.
Brookmyre's used an unusual technique in A Tale Etched in Blood and Hard Pencil - he flits between chronologically following a group of 1970's Glaswegian Catholic children on the journey from first day at school to adolescence, and modern day Scotland and the investigation of these murders. The switching from one era to another is straightforward enough, and the technique certainly allows a greater level of understanding about how the characters have developed the way they did and why they interact the way they do. However it does make the plot difficult to follow, in no small part because some of the characters have since changed names. It's not until more than half way through, for example, that the 'then' identity of one of the suspects, Noodsy, is revealed. When I discovered who Noodsy was known as in his early days at school part of me wanted to go back and reread to that point. The rest of me, though, was already sick of trying to keep track of everyone.
A Tale Etched in Blood... has a lot of characters, and keeping them all (and their relationships with one another) straight would have been a little difficult even without the time switching. Other issues I had include rather shallow characterisation (difficult for it to be otherwise given the size of the cast) and somewhat random plotting. Brookmyre always included a hefty dose of dialect, and though a bit stronger this time around, I had no trouble understanding it, which is why I was amused by the glossary at the back (put there, I suspect, for an American audience - the interpretations are themselves quite funny).
It was an interesting read, and if at all autobiographical then Brookmyre's school days were distressing to say the least - the institutional cruelty and bias are breathtaking, and although substantially different in many respects from my experiences brought back memories of my own 1970's primary school experience. However I think this is far from Brookmyre's best work, and anyone new to the author would be better beginning with another of his works, perhaps All Fun and Games (which also has a school reunion theme) or The Sacred Art of Stealing, to start with. - Alex

One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night - Christopher Brookmyre

I'm not even going to try to describe the plot this time! Suffice it to to say that Brookmyre manages to combine an inept band of mercenaries, a daring operation, a unique (and not in a good way) holiday resort, a collapsing marriage, a recently retired policeman, and elaborate series of twists with a high school reunion to stunning effect. (If you do want a comprehensive plot review, check out this one from blogcritics).
As with the previous Brookmyre novels I've had the joy to encounter, One Fine Day... sparkles with wit, fantastic characterisation, a brilliantly unique premise, intelligent plot twists and (which I only noticed this time around) truly gifted use of dialect - enough to give the reader a strong sense of place without being intrusive.
Of course, it's the high school reunion that tips this over the edge for me - they exert a strange spell of fascination over me that I can't resist, and Brookmyre delivers on this promise comprehensively. He manages to take stock characters - the overlooked nobody turned success, the violent bully fighting his own demons, the strong man turned sensitive new age artist (in this evening's performance the roles of violent bully and strong man will be played by Davie Murdoch), the loud mouth turned successful comedian, the Hollywood star regaining perspective by returning to his roots, the retired inspector falling over mayhem in his own back yard, and the unarmed civilians fighting off an invading force using only equipment to hand and their own plucky ingenuity - and make them fresh, compelling and original, while making the most outlandish scenarios seem wholly convincing.
Don't even read another novel until you've begged, borrowed or stolen a Brookmyre. It's the perfect thing for getting the taste of eh! out of your mind's eye. Bet Brookmyre wouldn't mix his metaphors like that! - Alex

The Sacred Art of Stealing - Christopher Brookmyre

Harry's stuck in a small Mexican town, a hitman for the Estobal family, now led by Alessandro, a guy too dumb to know he's dumb. Angelique de Xavier's an Aberdeen detective, workaholic, different from her colleagues and holding her ground. Mr Jarry's the mastermind behind one of the most daring and outrageous burglaries in British history - and he has his own agenda.
The plot is intricate and deft, and though there's much more to it I can't really describe anything without diminishing the power of the book - I did finish it and want to go back and re-read it just to pick up plot points and subtle touches I know I missed on the first read through. Unlike anything I've read before, Brookmyre masterfully establishes a variety of strands, dynamically culminating each separate plot line into a cohesive, spectacular and satisfying whole. And he manages to convey, which I had never before even dreamt of, the complex importance of football supporters in Scotland - who you barrack for partly articulates who you are and what you believe, or at least what others think you are and believe.
I've seen Brookmyre's books around for several years but, for some reason, have avoided reading any until my eye was caught by this one on the library shelf last week. Now I'm conflicted - what a waste, but what a joy I now have them to look forward to! Funny, filthy, breathtaking and clever, if The Sacred Art of Stealing is anything like the rest of his writing I'm going to have to pace myself. - Alex