Kala, by Colin Walsh.

 

            Colin Walsh has already made his reputation as a prize-winning short-story writer:  this is his first novel and he may cover all the bases of a competent thriller, but it takes an extraordinary talent to elevate efficiency to brilliance, and Colin Walsh has it in spades.

            The reader is spared no mercy as we are subjected to every good, bad and ugly emotion throughout this story of solid teenage friendship that has disintegrated into reluctant acquaintance fifteen years after the disappearance of Kala Lanann, the heart and soul of the little group.  Her boyfriend Joe is now a famous rock star;  her best friend Helen has returned to Ireland from Canada to attend her father’s forthcoming wedding to Pauline Lyons, mother of Aidan, Joe’s mate and drummer in their little rock band, and Mush – Mush is Aidan’s cousin, horribly scarred and doomed to be his Mam’s assistant in their Cafe in the tourist town of Kinlough till death do them part.  Kala’s staunch-to-the-death friends haven’t survived well without her, and no-one – NO-ONE, wants to revisit the last time they saw her:  each of them know that they could have behaved differently.  Kala was in trouble;  she needed them, and they let her down.

            But her body has never been found, so that should surely mean something, especially to her poor, wheelchair-bound  grandmother with whom she lived – until her bones are discovered on a local building site in a gym bag.  Her badly broken skull is on top of the bag, with a photo of two young girls positioned beneath.  Are they the next targets?  And why was Kala, a vital, fearless, talented 15 year-old murdered?  What did she know or discover to cause her horrible death, and could her friends have prevented it?

            The nature of friendship casual or deep is relentlessly explored in this searing exposé of the corrupt underbelly of a seemingly prosperous and scenic Irish seaside town:  the police control law and order – but who controls the police?  To their consternation, the broken, wounded adult versions of Kala’s much-loved friends discover that everything has its price and for some, it is too high to pay.

            With this outstanding debut novel, Colin Walsh proves that he can carry on admirably the great literary tradition of Irish storytelling:  it’s all wonderful craic and I can’t wait for the next example of his brilliance. Will he make me laugh and cry again, and recoil in horror at the cruelty his characters visit upon each other?  I shall be waiting because I must, but I hope he doesn’t go on his holidays!  SIX STARS.

 

    

             

 

Killing Jericho, by William Hussey.

 

            How many Crime novels have you read where the protagonist is a burnt-out investigator, near the end of his tether but with still-enviable skills at detecting and smelling rats of all kinds?  William Hussey’s main man Scott Jericho is all of these things, but he’s also of a different stripe:  he’s a Traveller – a Pikey, a Gypo, part of the travelling fairs of Gypsies who still visit different locations in Britain – and he’s gay.

            He also won a scholarship to Oxford, experienced contempt from every class of student because he was a traveller, and found love with a fellow student, Harry Wainhouse, who was the one ray of sunshine in his bleak, unlovely life.  Naturally, with his luck, everything eventually becomes unstuck, especially his precious relationship, and after a time of booze, pills and doubtful employment in ‘security’ he eventually finds salvation of a sort:  as a policeman, causing great consternation to his travelling family, who don’t take kindly to coppers, who have never taken their side, even when they should!

            His mentor is a Detective Inspector Garris who sees great promise in Scott’s cleverly deductive reasoning of various crims and crimes, and for a time Scott Jericho is almost happy in his work, until a particularly hideous crime involving the burning to death of three small children causes him to snap and try to beat the perpetrator to death.  His punishment is severe, with a degrading jail term and damages awarded to the perp:  when he is released he is ready to die;  his life means nothing any more – until his old mentor Garris needs his thoughts on a case which appears to mirror an awful historic event concerning his own travelling family:  three people have already died in dreadful copy-cat killings of a tragic event that occurred one hundred and fifty years before.  Nothing accidental or suspicious – all bloodthirsty murders, every one.  Scott cannot resist his good friend’s plea.  He will help if he can and all he can:  it’s time to come back to the world again.

            Except that the more he delves into the crimes, the worse they become, and will he solve the myriad puzzles they present with every turn, or will he become another victim?

            William Hussey comes from a travelling background and knows whereof he speaks;  he has created a very plausible, flawed hero (who does get the guy at the end!), and there will be more Jericho novels to come.  I wouldn’t bet the farm on it, but I’m pretty sure you won’t figure out Whodunnit until that fact is revealed, and you’ll have to keep reading the series (as I will) to find out if the monster is finally bought to justice.  FOUR STARS.

 

The Sparrow, by Tessa Duder.                Young Adults

 

            Auckland writer Tessa Duder dedicates this book ‘to the memory of the women and girls cruelly and unjustly convicted, transported and imprisoned 12,000 miles from their homeland, to those who died and those who, against all odds, survived.’

            And one such survivor in 1840 is Harriet, convicted at the age of 10 of stealing an apple at a market in her Sussex home town:  she didn’t steal the apple;  her jealous older brother connived with his friend to get her arrested by the local constable for theft – that would teach her to think she was better, and better-loved by their parents who, regardless of their desperate attempts to save their little girl from her fate, were powerless to stop her being transported to Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania).

            As if the sea voyage weren’t horrific enough, the destination is even worse, and an attempt by Harriet to escape brings even more punishment raining on her cruelly shaved head.  She will die soon:  she knows it - except for the human kindness we all should have, shown to her by one of the jailors.  She engineers a successful escape for a little girl whom she feels is not destined to die in such a hellhole and Harriet, eventually disguised as Harry stows away on the very same ship that transported her to Hobart:  she’s desperate to return home to her parents, but a side trip first to New Zealand is a compulsory exercise – she can hardly go to the captain as a stowaway and demand to be taken back to England.  But once more she meets kindness in the shape of an Irish seaman who discovers her hiding place and provides her with food and advice – lots of it, to the effect that when she arrives in Auckland, her boy’s disguise complete, she has no problem becoming a messenger boy and earning coins from all the Big-Wigs who have arrived to establish Auckland as the new capital of New Zealand.

            Along with material for a 16-room mansion for the new Governor, the class system has been imported, too – there are clear guidelines as to where everyone should settle:  manual workers at Mechanics Bay, Officials at Official Bay, and business people at Commercial Bay.  And everyone in their little tent villages is supplied with food and vegetables by ‘the natives’.  Who are not to be trusted.  Just because.  They are brown, have tattoos, are half-naked, and don’t speak English.  Never mind that they provide most of the food the settlers eat – that’s immaterial.  They are not to be trusted.

            Ms Duder’s account of our early years as a nation is ruthlessly honest and uncompromising, and she has created in Harriet the same qualities, along with courage and resourcefulness.  This story was a pleasure to read.  SIX STARS.  

 

 

 

Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane.

 

It is Summer, 1974.  In Boston, Massachusetts, a judge has just decreed that public high schools be desegregated:  black teenagers will travel by bus to white high schools – but only in the poorer areas.  Prosperous suburbs with private schools will be exempt.  In the predominantly poor Irish district of Southie racism is rearing its ugly head:  if the rich want desegregation, let them bus all the niggers to their own schools!  The mood is ugly, and there have already been demonstrations, engineered by the local criminals;  they don’t want competition from any nigger gangs on their turf.  The atmosphere is explosive, and the weather is not helping.  Everyone is feeling the heat, not least the mayor, the judicial system, and the police:  something will have to give.

Mary Pat Fennessy is a hard woman – hard-faced, hard to like, and hard-done-by in her personal circumstances:  her first husband, father of her children and a small-time criminal, died in suspicious circumstances;  her beloved son succumbed to heroin’s charms and died as a result;  her second husband Ken has recently left her, and her cherished remaining child, 17 year-old Jules, didn’t come home last night. And a young black man has been found dead overnight in Southie, too, and the police are making a lot of enquires.

 Jules’ mutton-headed boyfriend Rum says that he hasn’t seen her and left her to walk home by herself.  Oh, really?  Rum is unprepared for Mary Pat’s ‘physicality’ when Mary Pat tracks him down, for Mary Pat is a dirty fighter whose main advantage is surprise – surprise and shock that a little woman could turn herself into a bone-breaker, and in Rum’s case, a testicle-cutter – not fatal, you understand, but so painful and bloody that Rum begs the investigating police to keep him in a cell so that she can’t get him – and in return he’ll tell them what he and Jules did on their last date.

Dennis Lehane doesn’t let the reader move an inch away from the page as he holds us all in a stranglehold of suspense, first as to Jules’ fate, then the nature of Mary Pat’s terrible revenge.  And hubble-bubbling away like a dirty underground stream throughout this explosive and powerful story is the racism that never goes away, never changes, and certainly never disappears, even though fifty years have passed.  This was a hard book to read, (including all the f-bombs!) hard because of all the uncomfortable truths that it exposes, especially about how we, as children, are taught to hate:  this is a great book.  SIX STARS.   

 

After That Night, by Karin Slaughter.

 

I’ve done it again:  started reading a series at the end instead of the beginning, to my eternal shame.  Ms Slaughter’s latest book is advertised as a Will Trent thriller and I thought ‘no problem – there will be a backstory’.  And there is, but so many Will Trent novels have preceded this one, with so many truly great permanent characters, that I spent most of the time while I read trying to figure out relationships, friendships and families, and my lasting regret is that I’ve missed out (unless I trawl through the Will Trent Canon, and will I live that long?) on a continuing story that embodies perfectly the thriller genre.  Even though I’m lacking in previous details, especially concerning Will Trent’s early life, I’m so fortunate to finally meet him.  Better late than never!

            GBI special agent Will Trent is engaged to Sara Linton, a brilliant Doctor who is working in the Emergency Department of an Atlanta hospital.  They are planning their wedding in a month’s time and both are thrilled to be starting their new life together, until a young woman is brought into the E.D. in terrible condition.  She has driven a late-model Mercedes very gently into an ambulance parked outside the hospital, then collapsed.  Her injuries are horrific and eventually fatal despite everyone’s efforts, but it is also obvious that she has been brutally raped.  Which awakens terrible memories for Sara:  fifteen years ago, the same terrible, animal thing happened to her, and after that night, nothing in her life would ever be the same, including injuries so bad she can never have children.

            But that’s not all.  An investigation turns up cold cases, rapes and fatalities that remain unsolved, all involving young women of approximately the same age, usually students – with the same knife-markings on certain  parts of their bodies – and always missing a left shoe:  the cases are all connected, but actual evidence is thin on the ground, until Sara and Will piece together fragile clues linking her assault and the dying girl with the Mercedes, all linking however tenuously to a group of her fellow medical students, now prosperous specialists, trailblazers in medicine and powerful men in their own right – but spectacular failures in their personal lives.  They took the Hippocratic Oath:  they pledged to do no harm.  They couldn’t be mixed up in this sadistic cruelty:  could they?

            Ms Slaughter leads us competently through the story, never letting the reader up on the suspense and examining sometimes minutely the sacrifices that people (particularly parents) will make for those they love – and those they don’t:  think medical staff and police.  As always she gives us HEAPS to think about – and regret:  wish I’d read all the backstories!  FIVE STARS.    

   

Pet, by Catherine Chidgey.

 

        
    Catherine Chidgey proves that the acclamation earned by ‘The Axeman’s Carnival’ and her earlier novels was fully justified.  Her boundless imagination and dazzling skill at creating characters that are all too horrifyingly credible is beautifully realised in the story which opens in 2014 when Justine Crieve is visiting her father in Dementia care:  the new carer who is helping her father looks just like someone from her childhood that she would rather forget, generating harsh memories of a class of 12 year-old children who happily come under the sway of their new teacher, Mrs Price.

            Mrs Price is almost impossibly glamorous.  She drives a white left-hand drive Corvette (it only has two seats – how exciting is that!), wears the latest fashions, calls everyone darling, and generally captivates all (except the overweight mums, who are inclined to mutter nasty asides to each other about her not being all that she should be), and she goes to Sunday Mass as a teacher at a Wellington Catholic school should.  There are rumours that she has been the victim of a tragedy;  her husband and little daughter died in a car accident in Auckland, but no-one wants to ask her any questions – who would want to resurrect such sorrow?  Regardless, every child in her class wants to be her ‘Pet’, that exalted, favoured position whereby certain children are allowed to clean the blackboard and dusters after school, tidy the stationery cupboard, dish out papers to the mere mortals, and generally bask in the warmth and outright favouritism of being Special.

            Justine Crieve and her best friend Amy Fong would both love to be Pets, but know it will never happen:  Justine has seizures and her Mum died of breast cancer a year ago.  Her dad isn’t managing at all well and is drinking a lot.  Amy is Chinese;  her family owns the fruit and veg shop, but much as they try they’re not fitting in;  instead both girls imitate (unkindly) the Pets.

            Until Justine is brought home by Mrs Price after a seizure, and the two adults find they have much in common, including prior tragedies.  And it’s not long before Justine becomes a Pet – at the expense of her friendship with Amy, who thinks Mrs Price is a thief:  she saw her pinch Jasmine Tea from her parents’ shop!  And what about all the stuff missing from the classroom since Mrs Price started?  Justine refuses to hear anything nasty about her heroine, for Mrs Price and her father are getting married – and taking her on their honeymoon!  Amy can go and get forgotten about.

            Catherine Chidgey has created a thriller which has more twists and turns than a pretzel, all of them clever and unexpected.  And tragic.  The sadness doesn’t end, right down to the last word.  FIVE STARS.       

 

Fatherland, by Burkhard Bilger.                       Non-fiction.  Memoir.

 

 
           Burkhard Bilger is a respected writer for The New Yorker, and has contributed many times to other publications – The Atlantic, Harper’s and the New York Times among them.  Born in Oklahoma, he is also of German ancestry;  his parents emigrated to the USA after the Second World War.  Bilger Senior was a Physicist and his mother was a schoolteacher who eventually returned to university to qualify as a historian:  life was full of promise – the American Dream was possible for all in the sixties in Oklahoma (provided your skin was white.)

            But Burkhard wasn’t so much concerned with skin colour eventually, as much as the gaps in his parents’ reminiscences of their early lives in the Germany of the War years spent in the Schwarzwald, the Black Forest near the southern border of France and the Swiss border:  there was, among the fairy-tale sounding stories of Wurst und Speck and snow up to the eaves in winter, absolutely no mention of the War, or the fact that Burkhard’s mother’s father, his grandfather, was a longtime member of the Nazi party, and Nazi Chief representative in Bartenheim, a small southern village on the Rhine.   Originally a school teacher, Grandfather Karl Gönner embraced as did so many others, the new prosperity promised by Hitler.  After so many years of poverty and inflation when Germany and its remaining wealth was parcelled out to others in the infamous Treaty of Versailles, it was now time to take back what had been stolen.  It was time for the ascension of The Third Reich:  Sieg Heil!

            Bartenheim during the war years was, as always, an uncomfortable mixture of die-hard French inhabitants, and equally intransigent Deutsche counterparts – which was nothing new, for every time the two countries went to war, the victor always determined which language took precedence all along the French/German border, only this time the Nazi troops were much more trigger-happy, more ruthless in fact, than in previous times. Which meant that there were a lot more informers and turncoats all ready to turn someone in for money – or spite.  Grandfather Karl, in his capacity of local headmaster but ultimately Chief Nazi Officer of the area, turned out to be fair game for those local politicos with a grudge once the tide of victory had turned – and there were many.  He was sent to prison at the end of the war.

            His grandson Burkhard’s sterling efforts on several trips to Germany to peel back the layers of history to get at the plain, unvarnished truth;  his hours, weeks and months of research, delving through archives miraculously still available, and all the heart-rending  personal interviews have produced a beautifully written family history, a deeply affecting account of a nation’s guilt, shame and redemption – and the posing of the worrisome question in the wake of today’s world situation:  have we learnt anything at all?  FIVE STARS.