Snow Angels, by James Thompson

TITLE: Snow Angels
AUTHOR: James Thompson

COPYRIGHT: 20019
PAGES: 304
PUBLISHER: Berkley

SETTING: Contemporary Finland
TYPE: Mystery
SERIES: Starts a series

The first thriller in a new series featuring Inspector Kari Vaara: the haunted, hardened detective who must delve into Finland's dark and violent underbelly.

Kaamos: Just before Christmas, the bleakest time of the year in Lapland. The unrelenting darkness and extreme cold above the Arctic Circle drive everyone just a little insane . . . perhaps enough to kill.

A beautiful Somali immigrant is found dead in a snowfield, her body gruesomely mutilated, a racial slur carved into her chest. Heading the murder investigation is Inspector Kari Vaara, the lead detective of the small-town police force. The vicious killing may have been a hate crime, a sex crime-or one and the same. Vaara knows he must keep this potentially ex­plosive case out of the national headlines or else it will send shock waves across Finland, an insular nation afraid to face its own xenophobia.

The demands of the investigation begin to take their toll on Vaara and his marriage. His young American wife, Kate, newly pregnant with their first child, is struggling to adapt to both the unforgiving Arctic climate and the Finnish culture of silence and isolation. Meanwhile Vaara himself, haunted by his rough childhood and failed first marriage, discovers that the past keeps biting at his heels: He suspects that the rich man for whom his ex-wife left him years ago may be the killer.

Endless night can drive anyone to murder.

I was really close to moving to Helsinki last year, so I’ve since felt a sort of personal interest in Finland and picked up several books set there. The fashion for Scandi noir being what it is, they are all mysteries (and yes, I know Finland is not a Scandinavian country, but it kind of fits in the trend!).

Snow Angel features Inspector Kari Vaara. Kari spent some time as a detective in Helsinki as a young man, but has returned to his hometown, a really small town close to the Arctic circle. As the book starts, he's been living there for a few years and he is as happy as he's ever been. He has recently got married to Kate, an American woman who moved to the area to run a ski resort, and they are expecting their first child.

And then Kari gets called to a crime scene. It's very ugly. The victim is a young Somali woman, an actress who's been making a name for herself in a series of B movies. She's been horribly mutilated, including racial slurs being carved onto her chest. And the investigation quickly turns up suspects with connections, both to power and to Kari's personal life, making an already delicate case particularly difficult.

The setting was probably the best thing about this book. It's not an urban setting, which might be a bit more international (as Kari mentions, there is a large expatriate community in Helsinki), but an isolated, rural setting beyond the Arctic circle. The writer is from the US and lives in Finland and is clearly writing for an international audience, so some of the things that would be just presented unquestioned by a Finnish author writing for a Finnish audience are given a lot more context and explanation. One one hand, this makes the narrator not feel particularly natural, but it WAS interesting stuff and I enjoyed it. It’s a completey different view from the shallow conventional wisdom about Finland, a lot more negative and dark, which was interesting. I’d be interested to know what a Finn would say about some of Thompson's views of the country, though!

Unfortunately, the setting was not just the best thing about the book, it was pretty much the only good thing. The mystery was terribly done. First, the initial crime feels quite exploitative unnecessarily graphic, and the horror doesn't stop there. The body count keeps climbing, with the plot getting more and more preposterous.

And then there was Kari's investigation, which was just plain jaw-droppingly bad and unbelievable. For all that Kari tells us that Finnish police are amongst the world's best and that he has lots of experience in real investigations from the time he worked in Helsinki, he shows a remarkable lack of judgment. Just to give one single example (and there are many): the first viable suspect he identifies is the man his ex-wife left him for. That part was fine, the evidence really was pointing his way. But does Kari recuse himself from the investigation? Nope, even though he's offered the opportunity. He picks the man up himself and heads the interrogation. The fact that he doesn't see just how stupid an idea this is is bad enough, but the fact that the chief of police, supposedly a man with a great awareness of public relations, doesn't insist was incredible. And this is just the start of a string of actions that range from obliviousness to naiveté (my favourite was how he kept telling everyone everything in great detail).

I liked the relationship between Kari and his wife a bit better. Kate is starting to struggle. She knows very few people apart from Kari and none of them well, so she is understandingly feeling isolated. It was an interesting conflict, but the problem was that she sometimes reacted in ways that didn’t feel emotionally believable, like getting really shrill and unreasonably demanding when Kari is just doing his job (that's not a problem necessarily; what bothered me most was that the narrative seemed to imply some of these demands were reasonable).

So, not a success, this one. I don't think I'll be reading more in this series.

MY GRADE: A C-.

Hard Time, by Cara McKenna

TITLE: Hard Time
AUTHOR: Cara McKenna

COPYRIGHT: 2014
PAGES: 310
PUBLISHER: Intermix

SETTING: Contemporary US
TYPE: Romance
SERIES: None

Annie Goodhouse doesn’t need to be warned about bad boys; good sense and an abusive ex have given her plenty of reasons to play it safe. But when she steps into her new role as outreach librarian for Cousins Correctional Facility, no amount of good sense can keep her mind—or eyes—off inmate Eric Collier.

Eric doesn’t claim to be innocent of the crime that landed him in prison. In fact, he’d do it again if that’s what it took to keep his family safe. Loyalty and force are what he knows. But meeting Annie makes him want to know more.

When Eric begins courting Annie through letters, they embark on a reckless, secret romance—a forbidden fantasy that neither imagines could ever be real…until early parole for Eric changes everything, and forces them both to face a past they can’t forget, and a desire they can’t deny.

Annie Goodhouse is a relatively new librarian, only just settling into a new job in a new town, far away from home. The book is set, as far as I can tell, in the same decaying Michigan town as my favourite McKenna, After Hours, while Annie is originally from the South (one of the Carolinas, IIRC). Everything's different, and her new role as an outreach librarian doesn't make it any easier to settle in. That's because on Fridays the population she will be reaching out to is that living in the Cousins Correctional Facility.

Annie is initially very nervous about dealing with the inmates, but as she starts to know them and work with them, she starts feeling a bit less tense. The exception is one of them, Eric Collier. Annie has felt drawn to him right from the beginning, and familiarity doesn't really diminish the electricity of that connection. Because right from the start, Annie and Eric have began a very secret, very intimate and very forbidden correspondence.

And then Eric is given early parole, and he and Annie must figure out whether what they built through letters means something more than just words.

When I read the description of this book, that it was about an outreach librarian who started falling in love with a convict through letters, I kind of assumed automatically that it would be a correspondence that would only gradually become more personal and then more intimate. I pictured he would start writing about, say, his life and his views (maybe as a class assignment, or something), and after a while, this would turn into love letters.

This wasn’t the case. On Annie’s very first visit, Eric ‘writes’ her a letter under the guise of asking her for help writing to someone else. “Darling”, it starts, and there’s some mild sexual content. And the very next time she comes to the prison, he hands her a letter where the sexual content is quite high. He gives her the option to signal him to stop or continue, and, after some soul-searching, Annie goes for telling him to continue.

And that just felt wrong to me. I didn’t quite buy that Annie would have been ok with that, no matter how sexy she’d found him. Her acceptance of this showed a lack of judgment on her part, which she admits, but more extreme than I was willing to accept as a reader. Furthermore, I felt it was stupidly naive of her to take Eric's letter personally. What I mean is: this is a guy who hasn’t had any intimacy with a woman in 5 years and who’s latching on to the first pretty woman he has access to. It felt stupid of Annie to read anything more into it, at least at the beginning (even though it turns out she was right to do so!).

Those early letters...she and Eric don’t know each other at all when they start writing this really intimate stuff, so how is this intimacy meaningful? At the beginning, it feels more like two people writing out their fantasies. I really think this would have worked much, much better if things had been more gradual, if there had been a degree of mutual knowledge before things got intimate. Oh, the letters themselves are quite touching and sexy, it's just that they would have worked better in that different situation. And yes, this is basically me dinging McKenna for not writing the book as I would have liked it to be written. It's just that this initial setup just required stretching my suspension of disbelief way more than it could go, and it would have been so easy to write this same premise in a way that made it more believable!

The second half worked A LOT better for me. It's a really interesting conflict when Eric unexpectedly comes out. He and Annie have built something in their letters, but they can’t just pick up where they left off when Eric is out, not when for Annie, part of the appeal of her correspondence with Eric was the safety of knowing nothing could come of it. They must explore how this relationship can translate into… not a ‘real’ one (as Eric says, that was his reality when they were writing), but one with both of them outside and unrestricted.

And it's not just adapting to physical contact being a possibility. Annie has a big issue with Eric’s view of what he did that got him sent to prison. He still feels he did what he had to do, punishing the man who hurt his sister (and neither we nor Annie know the details there, as Eric’s sister doesn’t want to share them). Annie doesn’t have a problem with that so much, but with the fact that Eric feels he would have to do the same again in similar circumstances, even if it’d have disastrous consequences to himself (and by extension, to the woman who’s contemplating being his long-term partner). The interesting thing is that this showcases a very different world-view between Eric and Annie, one that, as I was reading, I thought might well be a valid reason why the relationship shouldn’t go anywhere. In romance, 99.9% of the times I think of any internal conflict “of course you can get over this!!”. I wasn’t so sure here, which was interesting.

McKenna resolves this in a way that was satisfactory to me, but didn't stretch either too far from their original world-view. It's a good ending, and I liked seeing Annie begin to build a relationship with Eric's family, even though they come from very different backgrounds. However, I really would have liked to see how Annie’s family dealt with Eric, too. Annie's father is in law enforcement, so it's going to be much more of a stretch for him to accept an ex-con as a brother-in-law than it was for Eric's family to accept a comparatively posh woman as a partner for him.

This wasn't my favourite book by this author, mainly because my difficulty buying the circumstances of the start of the relationship. Apart from that, though, I enjoyed it. I particularly like how McKenna has regular working-class people as characters and how they live in regular working-class places. Those places are shown, warts and all, but without being used as plot points to, say, create danger for the protagonists. In a genre where aspirational fantasy seems to get more and more dominant (Billionaires! Pro athletes! Billionaire pro athletes!), I really appreciate McKenna's style.

MY GRADE: A B.

Breasts, by Florence Williams

TITLE: Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History
AUTHOR: Florence Williams

COPYRIGHT: 2012
PAGES: 352
PUBLISHER: WW Norton and company

SETTING: N/A
TYPE: Non Fiction
SERIES: None

An engaging narrative about an incredible, life-giving organ and its imperiled modern fate.

Did you know that breast milk contains substances similar to cannabis? Or that it’s sold on the Internet for 262 times the price of oil? Feted and fetishized, the breast is an evolutionary masterpiece. But in the modern world, the breast is changing. Breasts are getting bigger, arriving earlier, and attracting newfangled chemicals. Increasingly, the odds are stacked against us in the struggle with breast cancer, even among men. What makes breasts so mercurial—and so vulnerable?

In this informative and highly entertaining account, intrepid science reporter Florence Williams sets out to uncover the latest scientific findings from the fields of anthropology, biology, and medicine. Her investigation follows the life cycle of the breast from puberty to pregnancy to menopause, taking her from a plastic surgeon’s office where she learns about the importance of cup size in Texas to the laboratory where she discovers the presence of environmental toxins in her own breast milk. The result is a fascinating exploration of where breasts came from, where they have ended up, and what we can do to save them.

I didn't really do much research before borrowing this one. A "natural and unnatural history" of breasts sounded interesting. Turns out I was hoping for something a bit different from what I got.

I thought this would be a mix of science and social history, but it was all science. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; I like science. And the first few chapters were great. They covered things like: how and why the breast evolved and how there is a history of male scientists automatically assuming that it evolved to please men visually, when the evidence is quite different; how the “plumbing” works; and how breast implants started.

But then the rest of the book was basically about chemical exposures and how these affect things like the contents of breast milk and the incidence of breast cancer. And these chapters, I’m afraid, were quite stultifying. Just to make it clear, I don’t find the subject itself boring. I’ve actually worked on chemicals regulation. I’ve written and supervised work on assessing impacts of occupational exposures. And some of the completely dry scientific documents I’ve had to read for that have been much more interesting to read than these chapters. They felt repetitive and the writing style didn’t work for me at all. The latter reminded me a bit of Mary Roach's (I like her books, but am iffy on her writing style, which often makes her come across as a bit lame).

Also -and I don’t blame Williams for this- it all felt very hopeless. As she herself admits, there’s very little we can do as individuals. Even if we know all the complex science and are determined to avoid contact with substances that are problematic, there’s often no way to know what’s out there and to avoid being exposed. We can do something at a societal level (and we really should), but that’s more for the sake of our descendants. We, personally, are screwed already. That’s the message (yeah, perfect holiday reading!).

I was left feeling dissatisfied, in addition to hopeless. There was such a lot that I felt was left out that I would have liked to know about! A lot of it is more on the social science end, but even with this being a hard science book, there were lots of other areas to cover, many potentially more interesting than the ones we got. For instance, Williams talks quite a few times about the effect of different kinds of underwear, but leaves it at that. That could have been a fascinating chapter.

MY GRADE: A C-. The first few chapters were good, but I didn't think much of the rest.

Festive in Death, by JD Robb

TITLE: Festive in Death
AUTHOR: JD Robb

COPYRIGHT: 2014
PAGES: 400
PUBLISHER: Putnam

SETTING: 2060s New York
TYPE: Police procedural & romance
SERIES: By my count, 41st full-length title in the In Death series

Eve Dallas deals with a homicide—and the holiday season—in the latest from the #1 New York Times bestselling author.

Personal trainer Trey Ziegler was in peak physical condition. If you didn't count the kitchen knife in his well-toned chest.

Lieutenant Eve Dallas soon discovers a lineup of women who'd been loved and left by the narcissistic gym rat. While Dallas sorts through the list of Ziegler's enemies, she's also dealing with her Christmas shopping list—plus the guest list for her and her billionaire husband's upcoming holiday bash.

Feeling less than festive, Dallas tries to put aside her distaste for the victim and solve the mystery of his death. There are just a few investigating days left before Christmas, and as New Year's 2061 approaches, this homicide cop is resolved to stop a cold-blooded killer.

Eve's latest case is the death of a womanising personal trainer. Someone's taken exception to his assholic approach to romance and stuck a knife in his chest. Meanwhile, it's coming up to the holidays and the now traditional Christmas party Roarke insists they host at their house.

Festive In Death is an unremarkable entry in the In Death series. I enjoyed reading it, but it's one of the more forgettable ones. There's just nothing here that stands out.

The case Eve is investigating is good, but not great. It's an interesting setup, and the investigation is well-done, as usual. The solution was a little bit surprising to me, which is good, but on the other hand, I don’t know just how much I believed it (especially the final flourish, if you can call it that). This element of the book is... competent, but has nothing to raise it above that. There is no particular urgency to get justice, Eve is not particularly affected by it on a personal level and it's not a particularly clever, intriguing premise. Just ok. It really needed some tension and suspense.

And I guess I could say similarly about the personal stuff. I liked visiting with these old friends, but they keep telling the same stories, so some of the set pieces felt a little bit tired this time. They were just a bit too predictable… “oh, here comes the scene where Trina slathers some gloop on Eve”. Hard to get excited about that.

I still do like Robb's characters, though, both the ones we know very well and the ones who have tiny bit parts in each book and we only meet for a little while. The first scene speaks of how well these characters have been created: the body is found by the victim’s ex and her friend, and the friend, who is unnamed in that initial scene, is clearly someone we know. And I could tell immediately who it was, just through how she spoke and reacted.

I also liked Eve’s continued minute progression. She continues to unbend a bit about loving the people who have become part of her life and showing it, and that's good to see. She's not as she was early in the series, but she's changed in a way that feels believable, especially if one has been with her every step of the way. Good stuff but, again, not surprising and by now not novel in any way.

Finally, I feel I should probably mention yet again (as I've done in my previous In Death reviews) that the OTT nature of Roarke as a character continues to not really fit in what the series has become. At least his role in Eve’s investigation was not particularly prominent here. When he did get involved, though, it felt strange and wrong. He goes on all sorts of random interviews as civilian consultant. Seriously, the police show up to question you and this world-famous billionaire businessman just happens to be along for the ride? I question that defence lawyers don’t have a ball with that.

MY GRADE: A B-.

Back!

Hi, everyone, I'm finally back! I had a wonderful, long holiday, mostly spent playing with my baby newphew (who's now almost 2 and incredibly funny and sweet) and sitting by the swimming pool reading up a storm (see the book covers below).

My little nephew drinking mate

I also did some travelling. Physical travelling (a weekend in Buenos Aires, which was fab), but also travelling through books. I spent time in space (Mars and further afield), and in lots of places on Earth. Various locations in the US and Britain, of course, and also places like Italy, Malaysia, Nigeria, Finland, not to mention the imaginary ones (think dragons, barbarians and all sort of cool things). I did have a fair few DNF and meh reads, but I did read several books that I'd been hoarding for my holidays, so a nice proportion of what I read was really good. I'll be posting reviews over the next weeks.