Month: June 2014

Author, Book review, crime/thriller, Fiction, Harvill Secker, Karin Fossum, Norway, Publisher, Setting, translated fiction, women in translation

‘I Can See in the Dark’ by Karin Fossum

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I-can-see-in-the-dark

Fiction – paperback; Harvill Secker; 250 pages; 2013. Translated from the Norweigan by James Anderson.

Norweigan writer Karin Fossum is best known for her Inspector Sejer series, but I Can See in the Dark, published last year, is a stand-alone novel.

Troubled loner

The story is told entirely through the eyes of 40-something Riktor, who has no family of his own and lives by himself in a small house on the outskirts of town.

He holds down a good job as a nurse in an elderly person’s care home, gets on well with his colleagues and finds ways to fill in his time between shifts. In other words, he leads a rather dull, uneventful, but otherwise productive life.

But all is not as it seems. Riktor is terribly lonely and desperately craves love and attention.

I don’t really understand my own situation, I don’t understand this sense of always being an outsider, of not belonging, of not feeling at home in the day’s routines. Forces I can’t control have torn me away from other people. I like being on my own, but I want a woman. If only I had a woman!

But as his narrative gently unfolds over a succession of short, crisply written chapters, we begin to learn that Riktor is not the quiet, gentle soul one might expect. He’s actually a rather troubled man, who doesn’t know how to properly interact with other people. He also claims he can see in the dark (hence the title):

I can see bushes and trees, buildings, posts and fences, I can see them all vividly glowing and quivering, long after dark. I can see the heat they emit, a sort of orange-coloured energy, as if they’re on fire. I once mentioned this to the school nurse when I was about ten. That I could see in the dark. She simply patted me on the cheek and then smiled sadly, the way you smile at an inquisitive child with a lively imagination. But once bitten twice shy: I never mentioned it again.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of all is the way in which he is deliberately negligent in his job: he fails to give his patients the medicine they have been prescribed and he likes to torture them when he thinks no one is looking.

Of course, things catch up with him, and one day the police accuse him of killing a patient in his care. He is arrested and held on remand for an extended period of time.

But as ever with a Karin Fossum novel, there’s an unusual twist, because Riktor is caught in a dilemma: he definitely has blood on his hands, but the crime he has committed isn’t the one for which he’s been charged.

Disturbed man

The most intriguing aspect of the novel is the way in which Fossum puts you squarely in the head of Riktor, who is clearly simple-minded and a little bit odd. His morals are dubious and he lacks empathy, but he knows how to operate in society without drawing too much attention to himself. He is also clever enough to figure out what people are thinking and has learned how to manipulate them to get what he wants.

But at no point do you want to cheer him on: this is not a Patricia Highsmith character who is so bad he’s good; this is the type of person you know lives and breathes among us. Indeed, he quite often turns up on the news bulletins having murdered a friend or loved one because he didn’t get what he wanted.

I Can See in the Dark is not your average crime thriller. It’s not so much about what happened, but why it happened. By digging around in the mind of someone who hasn’t followed the conventions of socially acceptable human behaviour, Fossum tries to show us what makes him tick.

It might not be terribly fast-paced but it’s a low-key novel that shimmers with suspense throughout. It’s a brutally honest account of a man caught up in a world that he doesn’t understand and is a superb portrait of a psychologically damaged killer, one that is unflinching, thought-provoking and deeply unsettling.

Author, Book review, crime/thriller, Fiction, Gillian Flynn, Phoenix, Publisher, Setting, USA

‘Sharp Objects’ by Gillian Flynn

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Sharp-objects

Fiction – Kindle edition; Phoenix; 340 pages; 2009.

I recently took a couple of days off work in order to do some study for a certificate I’m enrolled in. The plan was to read lots of journal articles, to get my head in the required space, so that I could write a 3,000-word essay, which is due to be submitted at the beginning of August. Alas, I made the mistake of picking up Gillian Flynn’s debut novel Sharp Objects — and then I got so gripped by it that I spent all my study time reading it instead of doing what I was supposed to be doing.

Do I regret it? No. This is one of the creepiest, weirdest and most unusual books I’ve read in a long while. It’s also the most absorbing.

Unlike Flynn’s better known Gone Girl, which is about a couple whose marriage goes off the rails in a very dark, disturbing and ludicrous way, this one is more restrained — in prose style and plot — but feels all the stronger and more believable for it.

Two murders in a small town

The story revolves around the murder of two young girls, a year apart, in a small town in Missouri. Both girls were strangled, their bodies dumped in public places, their nails painted with polish and their teeth removed.

Reporter Camille Preaker, who grew up in Wind Gap but escaped it 10 or so years ago, is dispatched to her home town to report on the crimes for Chicago’s Daily Post. Of course, no one wants to talk to her — they don’t want the town’s tragedy turned into entertainment fodder for a national audience — and it’s an uphill struggle to even win the trust of the police.

Camille, who narrates the story in the first person using strong, forthright language, is headstrong, feisty and full of attitude, but she’s also got a few secrets of her own to keep: she’s a reformed self-harmer and for much of this novel she’s constantly battling her deep psychological need to carve words into her skin.

It doesn’t help that living back at home with her seriously kooky mother, oddly quiet step-dad and highly sexualised 13-year-old half sister brings back memories of the past: her younger sister, Marian, who died of an unspecified illness when Camille was a young teen still haunts her.

Southern Gothic

As you can probably tell this is not your average “who dunnit” — mainly because it’s more reliant on characterisation than plot, but also because Camille is constantly on the back foot trying to seek out clues from people who don’t want to help. In other words, there’s not much of a procedural element to it, but it is a good insight into how reporters do their legwork (although I don’t think it’s usual to sleep with the murder detective and then the prime suspect — just saying).

In fact, I’d suggest that Sharp Objects is probably closer to horror — don’t let that put you off — because it has all the feel and claustrophobic atmosphere of Southern Gothic (even though it’s set in the mid-west),  something Donna Tartt might have cooked up with Stephen King. Consequently, it’s quite a dark, edgy read — there are scenes involving drug-taking and plenty of sex, for instance, but it’s all in keeping with the book’s themes and subject matter.

And while this is not the kind of “crime thriller” that is full of twists and turns, when the culprit is finally unveiled at the very end of the novel it feels like a genuine shock.

In 2007, Sharp Objects won the CWA New Blood Fiction award and the CWA Ian Fleming Steel award. It was shortlisted for the Gold Dagger (won by Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore) the same year.

Author, Bloomsbury, Book review, crime/thriller, Fiction, London, Lucie Whitehouse, Publisher, Setting

‘Before We Met’ by Lucie Whitehouse

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Before-we-met

Fiction – Kindle edition; Bloomsbury; 289 pages; 2014.

Lucie Whitehouse’s Before We Met may just be the best £1.54* I’ve spent in quite awhile. Anxious to read something fast-paced and thriller-ish to get me over a reading slump (I would pick up a book, quickly get bored or distracted, put it aside and begin the process all over again with another title), I found this novel to be the perfect foil to a series of disappointing starts.

Told in the third person, but largely from the perspective of 30-something Hannah Reilly, it has a noirish psychological feel to it, a kind of cross between Helen Fitzgerald and Nicci French. I’ve since heard it billed as a British Gone Girl, which I’m not sure is a good comparison  — that book might have been fast-paced and fun, but it was over-written and had a ludicrous and unbelievable plot.

Before We Met does, occasionally, stray into the over-written territory (far too much unnecessary description and back story, for instance), but it never seems too far-fetched to be true. I read it with a  growing sense of unease and a desperate need to get to the end as quickly as possible, just to see how everything panned out.

A husband’s secrets

Set in modern-day West London (and some very familiar locations, such as Hammersmith and Bishop’s Park, to this reader), it tells the story of one woman slowly realising that the man she has married – after a whirlwind romance – may not be the fine upstanding citizen and successful businessman he purports to be.

The pair of them have a happy marriage — not surprising, given they’ve only been together for eight months — but the cracks begin to appear when Mark fails to arrive home after a business trip to New York. Could the plane have crashed? Could he have missed his flight? Why isn’t he answering his phone or emails?

With Hannah’s paranoia going into overdrive, she does some digging around, only to discover that Mark’s work colleagues think he’s in Rome for a romantic weekend. She’s devastated by the prospect of him having an affair. She’s even more devastated when she realises he’s also done some “creative accounting” on her behalf.

From there, the fast-paced narrative swings from one revelation to another. All kinds of dirty secrets and blatant lies are uncovered, and the tension mounts to a nail-biting — and violent — conclusion.

Before We Met is not exactly rocket science and the characters aren’t particularly well fleshed out, but if you’re looking for a holiday read you could do worse than pack this one in your suitcase. It’s a proper page-turner, with plenty of unexpected twists and turns, and bucketloads of suspense. I gulped it down in just a couple of sittings and stayed up late into the night to finish it, something I haven’t done in a very long time.

* The price of the Kindle edition on Amazon during a recent promotion. The normal recommended price is £7.99.