Much of this book feels like furniture arranging for the sequels, but there’s enough action and gallows humor in this...
There’s plenty of life in Scandinavian crime fiction, though the bodies pile up with especially terrifying speed in this book’s grim milieu.
The hero of Swedish author Söderberg’s debut, the first in a planned trilogy, is Sophie, a young widow who works as a nurse while raising her teenage son. At the hospital, she meets and starts to fall for Hector, who unbeknownst to her, is about to escalate a war with Russian and German mobsters over supply routes for drugs and weapons. Stockholm police are investigating, but true to Söderberg’s peculiar, amoral universe, the cops are as filthy as the hardened criminals. So while Sophie is the novel’s focal point, she feels less like a full-blooded character than a mirror upon which Söderberg can project mockery of traditional concepts of good and evil. One of the cops following Sophie is Lars, a milquetoast prescription drug abuser whose surveillance work takes increasingly obsessive and sexually transgressive turns, while the thuggery of those working under Hector (the Andalucian of the title) has a protective tinge to it. (Only anonymous German and Russian goons are purely blackhearted.) Söderberg is masterful at upending the usual moral expectations for characters like Hector and particularly Lars, whose expansive addiction is rendered as both terrifying and seductive, and the closing chapters so deliberately reverse the stock conceits of vengeance, redemption and recovery that it flirts with satire. Söderberg’s innovations are tempered somewhat, though, by the bagginess of the plotting, overly thick with detail about smuggling schemes. And Sophie’s blankness, however deliberate, makes her so much of a cipher that a tragic turn in the late chapters fails to deliver its intended emotional effect.
Much of this book feels like furniture arranging for the sequels, but there’s enough action and gallows humor in this overture to carry it along. A promising start to a trilogy.Pub Date: March 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7704-3605-6
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
The intricate puzzle and continuing Irish atmosphere make this the series’ best to date.
A clever Irish lass is not afraid to voice her opinion.
Siobhán O’Sullivan may be still fairly new to the Garda, but she seems to have a real aptitude for crime solving (Murder in an Irish Churchyard, 2018, etc.). In addition, she and her boss, DS Macdara Flannery, have established an unapproved romantic relationship, and she’s “mother” to her siblings, all of whom help run a bistro in Kilbane, a picture-perfect town that’s hosting both an Arts and Music Festival and an International Poker Tournament. The card players include top-seeded Eamon Foley, aka the Octopus, who’s brought along his heavily pregnant wife, Rose. Foley’s closet rivals, Clementine Hart and Shane Ross, are eager to unseat him. After winning big with “the Dead Man’s Hand,” Foley is accused of cheating. Unhappy referee Nathan Doyle announces that he’ll review the tapes and deliver his ruling the next morning. Meanwhile, the unruly and well-oiled crowd moves on to Sharkey’s Pub, where the next morning Siobhán finds the body of Foley hanging in a locked storeroom. His death looks like suicide, but Siobhán, certain it’s murder, pleads her case to Macdara. The contents of Foley’s pocket include a set of brass knuckles, two defaced playing cards, and an apparent suicide note but no keys, wallet, money, or mobile phone. Among the locals who had placed unwise wagers with Foley before he died is Henry Moore, who bet his daughter Amanda’s racehorse. Both of Foley's rivals would be glad to see him gone, and his wife’s sorrow is limited to the prize money she’s never going to collect. Despite some reluctance from Macdara, Siobhán continues to dig, even in places he warns her to avoid, straining their relationship in her determination to leave no stone unturned.
The intricate puzzle and continuing Irish atmosphere make this the series’ best to date.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1904-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Though the impatient, tightfisted, homophobic lead detective is impossible to love, the mind-boggling plot triumphs over its...
Television writer/Christie-loving Sherlock-ian Horowitz (Magpie Murders, 2017, etc.) spins a fiendishly clever puzzle about a television writer/Christie-loving Sherlock-ian named Anthony Something who partners with a modern Sherlock Holmes to solve a baffling case.
Six hours after widowed London socialite Diana Cowper calls on mortician Robert Cornwallis to make arrangements for her own funeral, she’s suddenly in need of them after getting strangled in her home. The Met calls on murder specialist Daniel Hawthorne, an ex-DI bounced off the force for reasons he’d rather not talk about, and he calls on the narrator (“nobody ever calls me Tony”), a writer in between projects whose agent expects him to be working on The House of Silk, a Holmes-ian pastiche which Horowitz happens to have published in real life. Anthony’s agreement with Hawthorne to collaborate on a true-crime account of the case is guaranteed to blindside his agent (in a bad way) and most readers (in entrancingly good ways). Diana Cowper, it turns out, is not only the mother of movie star Damian Cowper, but someone who had her own brush with fame 10 years ago when she accidentally ran over a pair of 8-year-old twins, killing Timothy Godwin and leaving Jeremy Godwin forever brain-damaged. A text message Diana sent Damian moments before her death—“I have seen the boy who was lacerated and I’m afraid”—implicates both Jeremy, who couldn’t possibly have killed her, and the twins’ estranged parents, Alan and Judith Godwin, who certainly could have. But which of them, or which other imaginable suspect, would have sneaked a totally unpredictable surprise into her coffin and then rushed out to commit another murder?
Though the impatient, tightfisted, homophobic lead detective is impossible to love, the mind-boggling plot triumphs over its characters: Sharp-witted readers who think they’ve solved the puzzle early on can rest assured that they’ve opened only one of many dazzling Christmas packages Horowitz has left beautifully wrapped under the tree.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-267678-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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