The Crime Warp

I’ve written about Iceland in previous posts.  It’s a beautiful country, and with such a tiny population, you’d think it would be hard to sustain a series of books with storylines that go beyond the obvious.  The good news is that Michael Ridpath has done it well with his Fire and Ice series, of which Meltwater is the third book. Freeflow is a group of activists that publish secret information, in this case, video footage of an Israeli military atrocity.  The group converge in Iceland, to release and publicise the footage and for recreation, the Freeflow members visit a volcano.  After splitting up to explore the scenery, one of the activists is brutally murdered.  As the investigation starts, the Freeflow group, led by Erika Zinn, fall into paranoia, believing that the lead detective Magnus Jonson is a CIA agent and because his colleague Vigdis is black she must work for the CIA too.  Frustrations build up as Freeflow struggle to prepare ...

I have weeks when I work away from home a lot and end up staying in a typical budget hotel on my own.   I’ve often found myself watching TV into the wee small hours as I can’t concentrate on a book when I’m by myself.   I’ve talked to colleagues who’ve found the same thing.   At other times when I’m at home, although I like to read in bed before I go to sleep, I find that there are evenings, when I can’t start a new book, or even pick one up that I’m part way through.   It just feels too much like hard work, and my view is that reading should be something I enjoy and not have to work at. A while ago, almost by accident, I started looking at short stories on Kindle - “Kindle Shorts” - individual short stories or sometimes collections of short stories.   I really like these because there’s a lot of variety in the stories you find, they don’t take too long to read and they’re pretty easy to read because the plots are quite straightforward.   So, a...

I wrote in a previous post about Brian McGilloway’s book The Nameless Dead as I found it so impressive.   Little Girl Lost is not part of the Inspector Devlin series, but introduces a new character Lucy Black, a Detective Sergeant, with the setting exclusively in Northern Ireland.    The police are focused on finding Kate McLaughlin, the kidnapped daughter of a local property developer when Black is called out late at night by someone who has seen a girl wandering in the snow covered wood.   Black is surprised when she finds the wandering girl is not the kidnap victim.   The traumatised girl refuses to speak and Black is assigned to work with the Public Protection Unit to track down the missing girl’s family.   Lucy follows the trail, and finds clues that link the two cases together, annoying Chief Superintendent Travers, who seems to want to keep her away from the McLaughlin investigation.    On the personal side, Lucy’s tr...

The holiday season seems well and truly over - I’ve been back at work for a week and as I write this post, the sky is looking overcast and it looks like a downpour is about to start.   Since my last post, I’ve read some really good books that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed and have no hesitation in recommending.   It might have been the holiday season that led me to choose lots of books set outside England, but the crime in them was always excellent, no matter where they were set. Romancrimeblogger Playing with Fire by Kerry Wilkinson   Kerry Wilkinson is a journalist that started self publishing his books, but quickly made it into print.   Playing with Fire is Wilkinson’s fifth book set in Manchester, featuring DS Jessica Daniel.   The story centres on the release of Chadwick, an arsonist, imprisoned for setting fire to a pub with a teenager sleeping inside.   The local newspaper’s new crime journalist is stirring things up reporting that the...