Diving into the Wreck by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

“Diving into the Wreck” was a superb novella published in Asimov’s magazine in the December 2005 issue. I enjoyed it so much that I sought out books written by Rusch, including her Retrieval Artist series, so you can imagine I was quite excited to see that the original novella had been expanded to a full-length novel, just published.

The original premise is quite simple: take the idea of earth-bound wreck diving, with all its intrigue and inherent dangers, and set it in space. I absolutely love SF stories about exploring mysterious abandoned ships and/or settlements. An empty ship found floating in space is always an invitation and a threat, and I love this sub-genre, which you can trace back to the likes of Arthur C Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama and more recently to Richard Paul Russo’s Ship of Fools.

Unfortunately, I found the full-length Diving into the Wreck to be a bit of a disappointment, given how high my expectations were. Perhaps because I’ve just completed National Novel Writing Month, perhaps because it’s made up of two novellas and a third bit, it shows too many signs of being written at widely different times, and contains repetitions and contradictions which don’t work themselves out easily. You can definitely see the joins. Rusch’s heroine, Boss, comes across as paranoid and awkward for no good reason, and reads a little too much like the (similarly paranoid) Retrieval Artist.

In the end, I found long stretches of this just too irritating for pleasure, and I’m afraid that the full length book is no match for the novella. Sometimes less is more. I feel the same way about Nancy Kress’ “Beggars in Spain” which I’ve read (as a novella) several times, but would never read as a full-length book.

I recommend that you look out for the novella, but avoid the novel. Sorry.

A bunch of Wallanders by Henning Mankell

Following the relative success of the BBC’s attempt to film Wallander in English but in Sweden, I’ve been enjoying the original Swedish series on BBC 4 over the past year or so.

Inevitably, I was going to pick up a few of the books to read.

It so happened that a few crates of books arrived in the staff room at work (a colleague had died and they were donated to the school) and a couple of Wallanders were included. I read those and then ordered a couple more from Amazon.

I think I’m done with Wallander for now, having read (in no particular order):

Faceless Killers, The Dogs of Riga, The White Lioness, and One Step Behind. I also read his sole Linda Wallander novel, Before the Frost. You can read about them here on Mankell’s web site.

Those who have seen Wallander on TV will know that he is a melancholy individual, who is estranged from his ex-wife, and intermittently estranged from his own daughter. His health is not good, he drinks too much, but he generally operates like a policeman as opposed to a crazy maverick who makes up his own rules. That’s except when it’s time for one of his cases to be turned into a novel, at which point he tends to become a crazy maverick who makes up his own rules. Like Inspector Morse, he’s unlucky in love, and slightly pathetic when he tries to get lucky. He has a tendency to choose inappropriate partners and make a fool of himself.

The TV Wallander tends to be more of a team leader and a delegator. In print, he more often than not loses his head and gets himself into dangerous situations. In the end, I prefer the TV Wallander to the novel character, who basically needs a kick up the backside.

The first TV episode filmed in Sweden is actually based on Before the Frost, which is a different novel, as it’s told from the point of view of Linda, who is a much more sympathetic character. The TV series starts with Linda and then she’s in every episode (as a cop), whereas in the novel world, she is, in the main, a student with no clear sense of direction. Unfortunately, Johanna Sällström, who played Linda on Swedish TV, committed suicide, and I believe Mankell was so upset by this that he’s not planning to write any more Linda Wallander novels.

Try to keep up at the back.

The most successful of the other novels are the shorter ones, which have a tight focus on one case, which is generally following a police procedural. I guess it’s supposed to be realistic, in that the police rarely have anything to go on, until some chance event helps put things into place. Apart from Before the Frost, I’d recommend One Step Behind, which was also filmed for TV, but which has other elements, on the page, which aren’t shown on TV.

The least enjoyable of the five I’ve read was The White Lioness, which is a sprawling, double-length book, set in both Sweden and South Africa. It’s a bit like one of those double albums that would be better as a single. Wallander completely loses it in this one, and you don’t quite get why, it’s just a massive existential crisis which sends him over the edge.

He frequently moans about the state Sweden has fallen into, and there seems to be an anti-immigration, isolationist agenda, with the sense that a lot of the new types of crime in Sweden are caused by incoming Poles, Russians, Latvians, etc. Wallander frequently bemoans the state of policing and security, and questions his role as a policeman. He’s always on the verge of quitting.

I’d cautiously recommend reading a couple of these, but probably best not to do what I did and read five in a row. One health warning is to consider that, if you read them in English, you are reading a translation, so some of my criticisms may be considered unfair.

The Brass Verdict by Michael Connelly

At the end of my review for The Lincoln Lawyer, Connelly’s previous book about Mickey Haller, self-proclaimed “sleazy defense lawyer”, I suggested that the Bosch-meets-Haller sequel wasn’t far away and here it is.

Detective Bosch and Haller are half brothers, something Bosch knows but Haller doesn’t. Haller has been off the scene for a couple of years after being gun shot and then becoming addicted to pain killers. At the beginning of The Brass Verdict, he’s about to make a tentative return to work when 31 active cases drop into his lap.

Another lawyer has died in suspicious circumstances and left Haller his practice. Unfortunately, the dead lawyer’s briefcase and laptop were stolen, so Haller has to scramble to get up to speed. One of the 31 cases is a high-profile Hollywood murder case. So far so good, but then Bosch turns up and starts asking questions about the dead lawyer and why he was fielding phone calls from the FBI, and what happened to $100,000 that disappeared from his bank account, and Haller finds himself caught up in the sleazy tactics of his predecessor before he’s quite ready to get back to full-time work.

This book, like The Lincoln Lawyer before it, is a fascinating read. The level of detail you get as Haller builds his case is extraordinary; you wouldn’t think the minutiae of practising law would be interesting, but they are. Haller is always searching for the “magic bullet”, the key piece of evidence which will blow the case wide open and plant reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury. Connelly is so very practised at writing this kind of thing that it’s all too easy to find yourself unable to put the thing down at one in the morning. A genuine page-turner that builds to a gripping climax.

Highly recommended.

The Terror by Dan Simmons

In 1865, Sir John Franklin led two ships, the Erebus and the Terror, on a doomed expedition to find the fabled Northwest Passage through the frozen seas North of Canada. While traces of the expedition have been found, none of the 100+ members of the crews apparently survived.

Apart from the foolishness of such an enterprise, the British Navy were (of course) ill-equipped for the frozen North, and the sophisticated white men were in the habit of sneering at the Inuit peoples who knew how to live on the ice. The ships were frozen in and never emerged from the ice. Although the ships’ stores supposedly consisted of rations for three years, the tinned food is thought to have been badly preserved, and the hopelessly impractical clothing would have been constantly cold and wet.

All of this is amplified in Simmons’ long novel, a fictional account of what happened to the ships out there on the ice.

While not well received in all quarters, I found this 900+ page paperback to be gripping and visceral, and though the outcome seemed a foregone conclusion there is a certain poetry to the ending which seems fitting and satisfying.

Simmons chooses several points of view to tell the story, jumping from ship’s captain to doctor, to junior officers, and back again. In some ways, the story is like a scaled-up version of “Ten Little Indians”: we know people are going to die, but we read on to learn just how it happened. The twist in Simmons’ tale is the monster on the ice, an enormous beast with preternatural powers and an uncanny ability to rise up out of the ice to dispatch people in bloody ways.

But the real horror – or terror – here is to do with the poorly equipped, incompetent, doomed sailors on their fruitless and pointless mission. The very idea that people habitually set out to sea with little understanding of proper nutrition or food preservation, of science and nature, in order to find a sea route which would – at best – be passable for a month or two each year is truly astonishing. Simmons is great at bringing home the horror:

The Holland tents were soaked and never dried. The sleeping bags they cracked open in the late evening and crawled into as darkness fell were soaked and frozen inside and out and never dried. When the mean awoke in the morning after a few stolen moments of fitful sleep … the inside of the inside of the circular and pyramid tents were lined with thirty pounds of hoarfrost that fell and dripped on the men’s heads…

Highly recommended.

Point of No Return – Scott Frost

I was disappointed by this, the third Alex Delillo novel. I’d previously enjoyed Frost’s Never Fear, but found this to be both preposterous and skippable: no point of return.

Whereas Alex Delillo of the Pasadena PD seemed quite a different sort of protagonist in the earlier book, with positive personal relationships and respect for her colleagues, here she runs all the classically stupid risks you’d expect of an out-of-control maverick cop, and it’s all so ridiculously portentous that you just want to tell her to get a grip.

Like Spook Country (see review below), this book has Iraq (and GPS chips) as part of its backdrop, but not for one moment does it seem reasonable for a detective in the Pasadena PD to get involved in the affairs of a bunch of mercenaries and military types (who operate a long way out of her jurisdiction) in her search for a missing LAPD cop she met once at a conference. What?

Conspiracy is it? Cover up? Another one?

The inner voice of Delillo, as she agonises and labours every point and lurches from place to place, grates on the nerves. What has this got to do with her job? Nothing. But she takes “a few days off” anyway to look into matters, never seeming to notice that she’s making everything a lot worse than it was to start with. There are no scenes here with more than two people: Delillo goes through a series of one-on-ones with people who either (a) drop dead, or (b) disappear, and whinges so much about every little thing that goes wrong that you wish she’d (a) drop dead, or (b) disappear.

No point, no return, not recommended.

Never Fear by Scott Frost

I can’t remember why or when I picked this book up, but there it was on my shelf, and not yet read.

This is a US crime thriller in the vein of Michael Connelly’s Bosch series, also set in Los Angeles, but with a female protagonist/narrator in the form of Alex Delillo, a Lieutenant in the Pasadena PD. Unlike Bosch, Delillo has a positive relationship with her superior in Pasadena, and is very close to her current partner.

Just as the Bosch series have been sometimes critical of the Los Angeles PD (an easy target since the King case, after all), this novel pits Delillo against the LAPD machine as she investigates the death of a half-brother she didn’t know she had.

This 400-pager is tightly plotted, irresistible reading, with a labyrinthine story that should keep you guessing. There’s a high body count, and a quite bleak view of the justice system in Southern California.

I hadn’t read any Frost before, and there’s clearly at least one Delillo story before this one (Run the Risk). Before turning to thrillers, Frost has written scripts for Twin Peaks, Babylon 5, and Andromeda, among others. This is not surprising, as his more famous brother is Mark Frost. It says on the book’s blurb that he wrote for The X Files, too, but this credit isn’t on his IMDB entry.

This is good stuff, and I’d certainly pick up another one. A little bit despairing, perhaps, and with a title that doesn’t really mean anything or have much to do with the story, but you don’t read thrillers for the laughs.

Alien Influences by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

This 1994 novel by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, author of the recent Retrieval Artist series, came into my hands via the Oxfam shop. Though not part of the Retrieval Artist sequence, it does concern itself with jurisprudence in a situation complicated by alien cultures, so it has a similar theme, and could be seen as an early attempt to tackle the same subject.

The subject is relevant to the world we live in, in which cheap international travel and foreign policy frequently place individuals at the mercy (or lack thereof) of “alien” legal systems. In the case of Alien Influences, it’s the human legal system that finds itself being undermined by the so-called alien influences. There’s also a link to contemporary concerns about cultural relativism: when is it right for “westerners” to cry foul against “barbaric” practices considered “normal” by other cultures?

A group of neglected children on a troubled colony planet start to copy rituals they’ve seen the local indigenous life-forms (called Dancers) doing. Unfortunately, these rituals involve mutilations which (in the case of the Dancers) help adolescents become adults. When practised by humans, however, the result is simply death. A xenopsychologist is called in to investigate by the corrupt local authorities, who have a hidden agenda. The resulting mess takes decades to untangle.

The scope of this book is enormous, tackling as it does such huge subjects. The problem is that it feels too disjointed, as if cobbled together from several shorter works. The characters don’t get a chance to develop, you don’t know who to care about, and the central mystery never really becomes compelling enough to be truly gripping. The edition I was reading (different cover art to that shown above) was also quite poor, with a lot of typos, which kind of spoils the enjoyment.

It was an interesting enough premise, but ultimately there are too many villains and inadequate heroes (perhaps too much like real life). When the book reaches its climax, I felt cheated because the author inserted an elision, a 3-year jump, and then winds it down with a final chapter. I wanted to see some of the venal and self-serving humans get theirs; I wanted to learn more about some of the aliens featured. This certainly wouldn’t put me off reading more Rusch novels, but I still haven’t read anything by her that’s anywhere near as good as her novella “Diving into the Wreck”.

Gone to Ground by John Harvey

John Harvey has been one of the leading British exponents of the police procedural since the 1989 publication of Lonely Hearts, the first in the Nottingham-based Resnick series that ended with Last Rites 10 years later. (Except Resnick is back, in Harvey’s just-published Cold in Hand.)

This 2007 novel, Gone to Ground (The paperback came out in January 2008), is a police procedural in a similar vein, with Cambridge police officers Will Grayson and Helen Walker investigating what appears to be a hate crime – the brutal murder of a gay academic. There are also links to Nottingham, though, so you’re constantly reminded of the Resnick series and some of its supporting characters.

The art of the police procedural is to show the puzzle of the crime being solved by slow, painstaking increments: leg work, paper work, and blind chance. Harvey brings to life the harsh realities of ASBO Britain, the violent, struggling underclass and their casual hatreds; and the venal, corrupt business men and their lawyers.

Neither Grayson nor Walker strike you as being brilliant: though Walker seems to have better instincts. The inquiry into one murder is complicated by another, and the officers (and the original victim’s sister) follow investigative paths that don’t necessarily pay off, but lead – eventually – to some form of resolution. Don’t come here expecting to find a maverick loner who solves crimes singlehandedly and beats up the bad guys in his spare time. Instead you get something of the flavour of what it must really be like: knocking on doors, trawling through paperwork, interviewing witnesses who may be lying – but not necessarily because they’re guilty of this particular crime.

Accurate and realistic it may be, but I didn’t find this particularly gripping. It’s been a while since I read a police procedural, and I found the progress to be a bit slow. I shouldn’t complain; the last crime novel I read, I seem to remember complaining it was all a bit skimpy. Still, if police procedural is your thing: with believable characters and a sense of how difficult it really is to get the evidence you need for a successful prosecution, then they probably don’t come better than this.

Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds

I’ve previously reviewed Absolution Gap by British hard SF writer Alastair Reynolds. I liked Pushing Ice much more.

This novel seems to exist outside the Revelation Space future history of which Absolution Gap forms a part. In fact, it makes something of a refreshing change from the current trend for milliennia-into-the-future “new space operas”. Which is not to say that it doesn’t involve some of that kind of thing, but the core of the novel is the crew of ice-pushing comet miners who get caught up in a First Contact situation, and their story starts relatively close to our times.

One of the moons of Saturn, Janus (the sixth moon), suddenly powers up and leaves the orbit it has been sharing with Epimetheus: it turns out to be not a 100-mile-wide lump of ice but an incredibly advanced alien space vehicle disguised as a lump of ice. This sets up the central mystery of the novel and proposes a solution to the real-life mystery of Janus’ mysterious orbit, which you can read about here.

The ensuing adventure reminds me of nothing so much as one of he favourite novels of my formative years: Arthur C Clarke’s 1973 novel Rendezvous with Rama. In the Clarke novel, a mysterious alien artefact (a 50km-long cylynder) arrives in the solar system. It doesn’t appear to be visiting, just using the sun to provide a power-saving gravity assist on its way to somewhere else. A mission is sent from Earth to investigate, and they encounter (of course) the Technological Sublime.

Which is naturally what Pushing Ice is all about. The humans who hitch a ride on Janus are more reluctant than Clarke’s heroes, and they are riven by factional bullshit and political manoeuvring, but they still encounter the Tech Sublime and have to come to terms with some major changes to their life plans.

This is an enjoyable hard science “new space opera”, well-written and packed with ideas. My only criticism is that where the humans end up and what happens there is less interesting than some of the things they discover along the way. There’s a hint early on that Janus is programmed with some strange algorithms, but these don’t seem to be followed up. I could also have done with less of the “office politics” side of events – a little bit of that kind of thing goes a long way.

Recommended.

The Overlook by Michael Connelly

I’ve had a grumpy bumper summer of reading, and this one didn’t help my outlook. I knew what to expect, because I’d heard Connelly talking to that nice Simon Mayo about it on Five Live, but the in-studio reviewers were raving about it, so I bought it anyway.

My copy was one of a pile “signed by the author” in my local Waterstones, but I wouldn’t have been bothered about that if the hardback hadn’t been half price, too. Anyway, Connelly’s signature looks like he was holding the pen in his mouth and signing four other books with his hands and feet at the same time.

So, what have we got? At 272 pages this is skimpy, an afternoon’s read. Originally serialised in the New York Times, Connelly rejigged it some for the book edition, but what you’ve got is a 24-style time-of-the-essence thriller featuring Harry Bosch.

It starts off with an execution-style killing, Bosch is called to the scene, the FBI get involved, blah blah. I’m reluctant to give more of the plot away. Quite a lot was given away on Five Live, and just one phrase was enough for me to know exactly how this one was going to turn out.

Unfortunately, we’ve seen the conflict-of-agency thing too many times, and frankly I’d expect more of Bosch these days – given the knocks he’s taken in recent outings – than that he’d get involved in yet another one.

There’s nothing wrong with Connelly’s writing in this one, it’s just that it’s all too thin. I think this was best left as an outing in a newspaper, perhaps publishable along with another (or several other) short piece(s). Strictly for completists, and whatever you do, don’t pay full price for it, because it is not a full-price book.