Category Archives: Book Reviews

Book review: Silent Valley

Posted on June 18, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 4 Comments

International crime fiction sometimes feels like a contest between the Scandinavians and the Irish. If so, the South Africans are closing ground on both of them.

Think of writers like Margie Orford, Roger Smith and Mike Nicol, just to name a few.

Although less well known, Swaziland born, Australia-based author Malla Nunn deserves a place among this group. Silent Valley is her third book, set in fifties South Africa and featuring the character of Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper.

Her first book, A Beautiful Place to Die (2008) won rave reviews. It involved Cooper investigating the murder of a prominent Afrikaner policeman Captain Willem Pretorius, in the small town of Jacob’s Rest on South Africa’s border with Mozambique.

Her second, Let the Dead Lie (2010) saw Cooper expelled from the police and reduced to working on the docks of Durban. It didn’t do nearly so well (although I’ve heard some very good reports about it).

Silent Valley sees Cooper back in the force and in familiar territory, investigating the murder of a young girl – the bride to be of a powerful, overbearing Zulu chief, in a remote part of South Africa. There’s a truckload of suspects, everyone from the head of the local police to members of the white family she worked for as a domestic, with a bit of black magic and sexual deviancy thrown into the mix for good measure.… Read more

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Posted in Book Reviews, Crime fiction, Crime fiction and film from Africa, Malla Nunn

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Book review: Dare Me

Posted on May 26, 2012 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

Dare Me“At first, cheer was something to fill my days, all our days. Age fourteen to eighteen, a girl needs something to kill all that time, that endless itchy waiting, every hour, every day for something – anything – to begin. There’s something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls.”

So says Addy Hanlon, narrator of Megan Abbott’s latest book, Dare Me. And you better believe it.

I’ll make no bones about being a huge fan of Abbott’s work (I’ve previously reviewed her work on this site here and here). Her first four books, set in America in the thirties, forties and fifties, took classic noir themes and characters and gave them a mighty twist. The End of Everything, her break out work, was a deceptively simple coming of age tale about a missing girl in an anonymous middle class American suburb in the seventies.

Dare Me takes place in the present, in another part of the great expanse of nameless US suburbia. Addy and Beth have been best friends for years and are the top dogs of their high school cheerleading squad. Beth is the captain, Addy always her faithful lieutenant. Cheerleading and their commanding place in it is the ground zero of their world. “Let’s face it,” Addy says at one point, “we’re the only animation in the whole drop ceiling, glass bricked tomb of a school.… Read more

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Posted in Book Reviews, Crime fiction, Megan Abbott, Noir fiction

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Book review: The Cold Cold Ground

Posted on February 26, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 4 Comments

I’ve been an Adrian McKinty fan ever since reading Falling Glass last year and was keen as hell to get his latest, The Cold Cold Ground.

McKinty’s books are the kind of crime fiction I love, sharp, well written, combining political analysis with a hard noir edge.

I’ll be doing a longer review of The Cold Cold Ground in the next issue of Crime Factory. I just wanted to do a short post on it here, partly because it’s such a good book and deserves all the kudos is can garner and partly because it’s another chance for me to spruik the launch of Crime Factory Publications on March 5. McKinty will be one of the authors attending and reading from his work, along with Megan Abbott, David Whish Wilson and Leigh Redhead.

The Cold Cold Ground is set in the spring of 1981. Sean Duffy is a cosmopolitan, well education Catholic cop posted to the fiercely Protestant working class town of Carrickfergus. In other words, a complete fish out of water.

As if it’s not bad enough that Duffy has to start every day checking under his car for IRA bombs, the economy is collapsing and civil war seems imminent following the death of Republican hunger striker Bobby Sands.… Read more

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Posted in Adrian McKinty, Book Reviews, Crime Factory Publications, Crime fiction, David Whish-Wilson, Megan Abbott, Noir fiction

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Book review: The Dead Women of Juarez

Posted on January 22, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 1 Comment

It’s a tough sell setting crime fiction against a backdrop of real life horrors without coming across as sensationalist or trivial. But this is precisely what Sam Hawken attempts to do in his first book, Dead Women of Juarez, and pulls it off fantastically.

The real life horror in question takes place in the Mexican city of Juarez, just across the border from the United States. Juarez is famous for two things: as a magnet for multinational companies seeking cheap, mainly female, labour, and the fact since 1993 as many as 5,000 women have been murdered there and no one has been brought to justice.

Hawken inserts into this picture the fictional character of Kelly Courter, a washed up, junkie boxer who makes a living as a punching bag for younger, hungrier Mexican fighters. As a sideline, he traffics and sells drugs for Esteban, his friend and the brother of Kelly’s on again, off again girlfriend and women’s rights activist, Paloma.

Kelly is in self-exile in Juarez, escaping the legal and moral consequences of a fatal mistake, the details of which we learn much later on in the book. It’s a day-by-day struggle to survive in a tough town, constantly being shadowed by grizzled Mexican narcotics cop, Sevilla, apparently intent on busting Kelly for his illegal activities.… Read more

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Posted in Book Reviews, Crime fiction, Noir fiction

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Book review: The Devil All the Time and other summer reading pleasures

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Andrew Nette| 1 Comment

No matter how stressful the Christmas/New Year period is (and mine has been pretty stressful for reasons I won’t go into here) there’s always the chance to read.

This year’s been no exception. I managed to knock off several books I’ve wanted to read for a while.

The first was Dead Women of Juarez by Sam Hawken. This was a great hardboiled read, especially for a first novel. I particular admire the author for having the guts to set the story amid the real life horror story in the Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez, where since 1992 as many as 5,000 women have been murdered and no one has been brought to justice. I’ve done a longer review of Dead Women for Crime Fiction Lover and will post it to this site next week.

Another author I’ve been wanted to check out is Vicki Hendricks, who writes erotic noir fiction set in Miami. Her 2007 book, Cruel Poetry, took me back to the mid-nineties when Miami-based crime fiction was huge. The city’s crime rate was through the roof, Elmore Leonard was based there and writers like Carl Hiaason and Edna Buchanan were best sellers.

This book is very different to the other Miami crime novels I can remember reading, in a good way.… Read more

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Posted in Book Reviews, Crime fiction, Noir fiction, Vicki Hendricks

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