Dark Narratives

Nearly one month has passed since my last post and I have got through a number of books.  Most of them have been somewhat bleak.  With the prospect of three weeks on a small boat, with another couple, I chose some reading material that would not require a low threshold of concentration.  Thrillers tick that box for me.  With hindsight, given the anxious days preceding the EU referendum and the pain of the days after the result I might have chosen something lighter.......

Based on the recommendation of my friend William I had bought Philip Kerr's trilogy Berlin Noir.  I tackled the first novel, March Violets, and found it to be an engaging
thriller set in a Berlin on the threshold of World War.  Bernhard Gunther is a private eye, specializing in missing persons. And in Hitler's Berlin, he's never short of work... Winter 1936. A man and his wife shot dead in their bed. The woman's father, a millionaire industrialist, wants justice - and the priceless diamonds that disappeared along with his daughter's life.As Bernie follows the trail into the very heart of Nazi Germany, he's forced to confront a horrifying conspiracy. A trail that ends in the hell that is Dachau...  Stylishly written and powerfully evocative, Kerr's crime classic transports readers to the rotten heart of Nazi Berlin, and introduces a private eye in the great tradition of Hammett and Chandler.


I followed this with another Mo Hayder thriller, Ritual, which makes for even more grim reading than the two former titles which I have read.  Her protagonist, Detective Inspector Caffrey, is a troubled man who has never managed to get past the abduction and presumed murder of his younger brother when they were boys.  In Ritual just after lunch on a Tuesday in April, nine feet under water, police diver Flea Marley closes her gloved fingers around a human hand. The fact that there's no body attached is disturbing enough. Yet more disturbing is the discovery, a day later, of the matching hand. Both have been recently amputated, and the indications are that the victim was still alive when they were removed.
Jack Caffery has been newly seconded to the Major Crime Investigation Unit in Bristol. He and Flea soon establish that the hands belong to a boy who has recently disappeared.

Their search for him - and for his abductor - lead them into the darkest recesses of Bristol's underworld, where drug addiction is rife, where street-kids sell themselves for a hit, and where an ancient evil lurks; an evil that feeds off the blood - and flesh - of others ...


I have also chosen two more titles in the Detective Erlendur series.  Black Skies and Voices follow Arnaldur Indridason's whodunit formula of offering the solution of two crimes, in effect two stories, in between the covers of one book.   In Black Skies Detective Sigurdur Oli is in trouble.  Moving from the villas of Reykjavík's banking elite to a sordid basement flat, Black Skies is a superb story of greed, pride and murder.  After a school reunion exposes the chasm between his life and those of his much more successful contemporaries, leaving him bitter and resentful, one of his old friends asks him to pay an unofficial visit to a couple of blackmailers.

He readily agrees, only to arrive to find one of the pair lying in a pool of blood. When the victim dies in hospital, Sigurdur Oli is faced with investigating a murder without revealing his own reasons for being present at the murder scene.

In Voices it is a few days before Christmas and a Reykjavik doorman and occasional Santa Claus, Gudlauger, has been found stabbed to death in his hotel room in a sexually compromising position. It soon becomes apparent that both staff and guests have something to hide, but it is the dead man who has the most shocking secret.  Detective Erlendur soon discovers that the placidly affluent appearance of the hotel covers a multitude of sins.