Reviews: Grisham, Fyfield, Hiekkapelto, Higashino

The coalmining communities of the Appalachian Mountains provide the setting for John Grisham’s Gray Mountain (Hodder & Stoughton, €19.99), a legal thriller that opens ten days after Lehman Brothers folds. The financial meltdown that follows has a knock-on effect in the legal world, as Samantha Kofer, a third-year associate with New York’s largest law firm, finds herself one of many lawyers who have been downsized out of their comfortable lifestyles. Scrabbling for any kind of work that might keep her ticking over until the world sets itself to rights again, Samantha takes a position with the Mountain Legal Aid Clinic in the small town of Brady, Virginia. Anticipating something of a cosy but boring ‘furlough’, Samantha is shocked to discover a world of poverty, brutality and corruption, and an entirely legal scandal that goes to the very heart of American politics. Grisham is a former lawyer and politician, and one who remains heavily involved in the Innocence Project in the United States, and Gray Mountain has the feel of a very personal project. The story lacerates ‘Big Law’ while celebrating the non-profit legal aid organisations, who make the most of their limited resources in their fight on behalf of the sick and dying miners who are victims of the politically connected coal companies, while also detailing the environmental disaster of strip-mining in the Appalachians. The daughter of two very different kinds of lawyer, Samantha is already deliciously cynical about the legal process when we first meet her, but Grisham deftly blends her professional awakening to the ugly truths of the American legal system into Samantha’s complex personal development. It’s a stirring tale, despite the occasional didactic digressions into a whole raft of issues – black lung disease, meth addiction, political apathy – bedevilling the Appalachian communities.
  In Casting the First Stone (Sphere, €20.50), Frances Fyfield brings together two heroines from previous novels. Diana Porteous, widow and art collector, is introduced to Sarah Fortune, the sister of Diana’s agent, and together they hatch a plot to recover paintings stolen from an old woman by her son. As befits a story that revolves around an unusual art heist, however, the plot – or many sub-plots, to be precise – isn’t really the most important aspect here. Fyfield is more concerned with mood, tone and texture, and the story is less a straightforward narrative than it is a collection of pen portraits, as Fyfield offers intriguing psychological profiles of a host of fascinating characters, from plucky young boys to grizzled ex-policemen and avaricious capitalists. There’s an ethereal quality to the prose that seems to flit back and forth between dream and nightmare, reflecting the sharp contrast between the settings of the wild coastline of Diana’s home and the bustle of the London she is forced to visit in pursuit of justice. At the heart of the story lies Diana’s quest for a sense of identity, of belonging: the widow still in mourning for her beloved husband rather poignantly collects a particular kind of painting, the unsigned and unattributed art that would otherwise languish unloved in someone’s cellar or attic.

  Identity is also key to Kati Hiekkapelto’s The Hummingbird (Arcadia Books, €13.40), the Finnish author’s promising debut novel. Born in Serbia, of Hungarian ethnicity, Anna Fekete’s experience as an outsider growing up in Finland gives her an unusual insight into the immigrant mind-set when she becomes a detective in the Finnish police service. Her first day on the job is something of a baptism of fire: a jogger is shot to death on the outskirts of the city, while Anna and her colleagues also receive a desperate call from a young Kurdish woman who believes she is about to be murdered by her family in an ‘honour killing’. The twin investigations provide The Hummingbird with its narrative spine, but much of the story, which is translated by David Hackston, is engaged in exploring what it means to be Finnish, a place where ‘people were expected to unflaggingly present a play directed by market forces, a performance called Western civilisation.’ The plot isn’t entirely convincing as it arrives at its conclusion, but for the most part Hiekkapelto provides an unsentimental account of Finnish society and its cultural traditions, in particular the Finnish obsession with hunting and guns, which means that, in theory, virtually anyone could be the killer on the rampage.

  Malice (Little, Brown, €18.75) by Japanese author Keigo Higashino revolves around an investigation into the murder of best-selling novelist Kunihiko Hidaka. Police detective Kaga is initially stumped by what appears to be a classic ‘locked room’ mystery, but soon comes to suspect Hidaka’s best friend, children’s author Osama Nonoguchi, when he discovers notebooks in Nonoguchi’s apartment which suggest that Nonoguchi was in fact the ghost-writer of Hidaka’s novels. Translated by Alexander O. Smith, and delivered in a crisp, clinical style (the story proceeds by way of written accounts delivered by the main players), Malice offers an unusual take on the traditional police procedural while also functioning as a critique of the crime novel, as the business of writing becomes the art of murder. In this it parallels Higashino’s English-language debut, The Devotion of Suspect X (2011), although Malice is more playful and inventive (and blackly humorous) when it comes to reworking the genre’s staples and conventions. As much a psychological thriller as it is a police procedural, Malice is rooted in a search for identity, albeit one in which Higashino invests the conceit of the ambiguous narrator with an notable complexity. The result is that the novel represents another bold statement of intent, and while Higashino isn’t exactly reinventing the crime novel, Malice is a superb example of how flexible the genre’s parameters can be. ~ Declan Burke

  This column was first published in the Irish Times.

On Gene Kerrigan, Agatha Christie And Quantum Mechanics

The latest of the Irish Times’ Crime Beat columns was published yesterday, and led off with a review of THE RAGE by Gene Kerrigan. To wit:

THE RAGE (Harvill Secker, £11.99) is the fourth novel from journalist Gene Kerrigan, a serial chronicler of Dublin’s criminal underworld who was last year shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger, and was the winner of the Irish Book Awards’ crime fiction prize, for his previous offering, DARK TIMES IN THE CITY (2009). THE RAGE essentially blends two stories, that of Detective Sergeant Bob Tidey, who is investigating the apparent suicide of a banker of dubious morality, and that of Vincent Naylor, a low-level criminal recently released from prison with plans to move up in the world. That the men will eventually cross paths is inevitable, although it’s Kerrigan’s quality of gritty realism that renders THE RAGE an enjoyable page-turner as Tidey negotiates the blind alleys of a labyrinth constructed by officious judges, corrupt lawyers, and even his own superiors. Largely recession-proof (“Bob Tidey was in the law and order business, and whatever else went belly-up there’d always be hard men and chancers and a need for someone to manners on them.”), Tidey is an empathic character, pragmatic rather than idealistic, but what makes THE RAGE a compulsive document of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland is Tidey’s growing awareness that the moral anarchy that reigns at all levels of Irish society means that the old rules no longer apply, especially when it comes to enforcing a crude approximation of law and order, by any means necessary.

  Also reviewed are SJ Watson’s BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP, Erin Kelly’s THE POISON TREE, Mary Higgins Clark’s I’LL WALK ALONE, and Keigo Higashino’s THE DEVOTION OF SUSPECT X, which last I heartily recommend as an erudite, thought-provoking thriller. For the full column, clickety-click here …
  Meanwhile, there was some interesting short-list nominations during the week. Mind you, the only real surprise would have been had Tana French’s ubiquitous FAITHFUL PLACE (which has so far been short-listed for an Edgar, an Anthony and a LA Times book award this year) not made the Best Mystery list in the Macavity Awards.
  A less-trumpeted title, on these pages at least, is John Curran’s AGATHA CHRISTIE’S SECRET NOTEBOOKS: FIFTY YEARS OF MYSTERIES IN THE MAKING, a labour of love that contains no less than two unpublished Poirot short stories, and which pops up in the Best Mystery-Related Nonfiction section. Incidentally, the follow-up to SECRET NOTEBOOKS will be published in September under the title AGATHA CHRISTIE’S MURDER IN THE MAKING, all of which may or may not mean that Curran’s doctoral thesis on Christie, undertaken at Trinity College, Dublin, may or may not be on the backburner for now. For the full rundown of Macavity nominees, you know what to do …
  Elsewhere, William Ryan beat off some stiff contenders (oo-er, vicar, etc.) to make the Theakston’s Old Peculier shortlist, a feat that’s all the more impressive when you consider that his novel, THE HOLY THIEF, is a debut offering. Another serial nominee, which has already been under consideration for Best Novel awards with the CWA and the Listowel Writer’s Week, THE HOLY THIEF will see its sequel, THE BLOODY MEADOW, published in September. All of which means that William Ryan is very probably feeling rather pleased with himself right now, and deservedly so. For the full list of nominees, via Kiwi Crime, clickety-click here …
  Finally, those of you pining for the stentorian tones of the Dark Lord himself, John Connolly, should click on this interview with the Daily Telegraph, in which the HELL’S BELLS author waxes lyrical about hell, bells and why he was entitled to, and duly received, an apology from CERN for the quality of his understanding of quantum mechanics. Proper order, too …