{"id":7166,"date":"2016-11-28T12:28:13","date_gmt":"2016-11-28T12:28:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=7166"},"modified":"2016-12-01T12:28:02","modified_gmt":"2016-12-01T12:28:02","slug":"november-crime-round-up-by-n-j-cooper-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=7166","title":{"rendered":"November Crime Round-Up by N. J. Cooper"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Crash Land by Doug Johnstone<\/strong><\/p>\n

Published by Faber & Faber<\/strong><\/p>\n

Click here to buy this book<\/a><\/p>\n

Truth Will Out by A. D. Garrett<\/strong><\/p>\n

Published by Corsair<\/strong><\/p>\n

Click here to buy this book<\/a><\/p>\n

Gallows Drop by Mari Hannah<\/strong><\/p>\n

Published by Macmillan<\/strong><\/p>\n

Click here to buy this book<\/a><\/p>\n

Rather Be the Devil by Ian Rankin<\/strong><\/p>\n

Published by Orion UK\/Little, Brown US<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

November’s novels all come from the north, from Orkney, Manchester, Northumberland, and Edinburgh, and all of them deal with the interestingly wobbly lines between guilt and innocence, responsibility and self-justifying carelessness.<\/p>\n

Doug Johnson’s Crash Land<\/em> involves his hero, Finn Sullivan, with a classic femme fatale<\/em> right out of the original noir fiction.\u00a0 He meets Maddie on his longed-for flight away from Orkney and is soon enmeshed in her web.\u00a0 She’s sexy, needy, dangerous and leads him into all kinds of trouble.\u00a0 Well written, intriguing sometimes touching and with no certainties of any kind, this is a novel that grips you to the end and then leaves you thinking.<\/p>\n

A. D. Garrett is a writing duo of Margaret Murphy and Helen Pepper.\u00a0 The combination works well in this instalment of their Fennimore and \"\"<\/a>Simms series, when a mother and daughter are kidnapped in Manchester.\u00a0 Murphy brings all the perception and clever writing of her own fiction, while Helen Pepper’s experience as forensic scientist, CSI, and senior lecturer in policing adds a faultless sense of reality.\u00a0 At first I was reluctant to read about yet one more suffering child, but Lauren Myers is a wonderful creation, whose greatest disability \u2013 her inability to process food additives without going berserk \u2013 becomes her greatest asset.\u00a0 And the novel is full of incidental pleasures such as Professor Nick Fennimore’s brisk comment that, ‘Einstein said common sense was the collection of all the prejudices acquired by the age of eighteen.\u00a0 So let’s ditch the common sense and do some actual fact-checking instead.’\u00a0 Fennimore’s own tragic background adds emotional depth to this tense adventure.<\/p>\n

Mari Hannah is another writer who knows the real background to her fiction well enough to avoid forcing her readers into impossible feats of suspension of disbelief.\u00a0 DCI Kate Daniels is having more trouble in her private life, with her partner and with her father, when she’s faced with \"\"<\/a>the nightmare of working with an old enemy in DCI James Atkins.\u00a0 Kate should be away on holiday but the discovery of a young man’s corpse hanging from a gibbet involves her in a complex and painful case that gets in the way of any private pleasure.\u00a0 As with all the best crime fiction, her discoveries at work have an impact on her own life and ideas.\u00a0 Her difficulty accepting the need for compromise and so an imperfect kind of justice make the questions raised by this novel even more interesting than usual.\u00a0 At one moment she bursts out with fury in discussing the likely killer:\u00a0 ‘It goes against the grain to treat him like a patient and not the violent perpetrator he is.\u00a0 Give guys like him a label and they think they’re home and dry…\u00a0 I don’t give a stuff about his various manifestations.\u00a0 As far as I’m concerned, he’s a bully out of control.\u00a0 There\u2019s a lot of it about.\u00a0 Treatment didn’t do him much good, did it?’\u00a0 Where does responsibility for the effects of dysfunctional behaviour lie?\u00a0 Who can be blamed if their brains or psyches malfunction?\u00a0 How should their victims be protected?\u00a0 And what kind of redress should those victims be offered?<\/p>\n

Ian Rankin’s Rebus is now genuinely retired and facing a possible diagnosis of lung-cancer, but nothing can stop him fighting crime.\u00a0 In spite of \"\"<\/a>his civilian status, he interviews suspects, nicks Malcolm Fox’s business cards in order to impersonate him, invites Siobhan Clarke out to dinner so that she can provide evidence of a warrant card if his suspect demands it, and so on.\u00a0 The villains are the old familiar crew of Darryl Christie and Big Ger Cafferty, with some new charmers to add spice and danger.\u00a0 As usual crime travels all the way up and down the social scale and Rankin introduces us to some intriguing \u2013 and touching \u2013 characters.\u00a0 Even the notoriously pure Malcolm Fox becomes sucked into the mire.\u00a0 And the twin threads of suspense \u2013 whether Rebus has got cancer and who is at the bottom of the \"\"<\/a>current crop of crimes \u2013 keep up the novel’s momentum until the last page.<\/p>\n

The idea of a retired cop making himself free of police stations, computers, evidence and suspects in the way Rebus does is hard to swallow.\u00a0 But who cares?\u00a0 Rankin is so good and the revolving cast of cops and villains is so alluring that does precise verisimilitude doesn’t seem to matter much.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by N.J. Cooper<\/p>\n

Doug Johnson’sCrash Land<\/em> involves his hero, Finn Sullivan, with a classic femme fatale<\/em> right out of the original noir fiction. He meets Maddie on his longed-for flight away from Orkney and is soon enmeshed in her web. She’s sexy, needy, dangerous and leads him into all kinds of trouble […] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,17,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-reviews","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7166"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7166\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7182,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7166\/revisions\/7182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}