Quote:
Originally Posted by CRussel
Well, so much for good intentions. I broke down and bought it with a 35% coupon and am now 1/3rd of the way into it, having put Campion aside for a moment. Of course, this was woefully wanton, since I already had the latest Rivers of London/Peter Grant book coming (and it arrived overnight.) But so what - I have to excellent books to read, and I think I'll do the Aaronovitch book, Foxglove Summer, as an audio book first.
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Well, look at it this way: more sales = more demonstrable demand = more Ava Lee books in the future because the publishers know that people are willing to shell out money for them and the author doesn't have to work part-time at the 7/11 ekeing out a living wage (though technically I think he's already contracted through #9 or #10), which gives him more time to write, as well as do research/revisions so the books will also be reasonably decent . For this reason I haven't cancelled my library hold on the incoming hardcover of Hamilton's TKOS (although instead of reading it through, I'll just keep it for a day and return it the next if the weather/transit conditions are amenable), and I'm pleased to see it featured on the iTunes Canada's weekly bestseller list (even though I consider buying non-multimedia books at iTunes basically a fancy way of throwing money into the void).
And it's A Good Thing™, IMHO, to buy and enjoy books you like, no matter what the circumstances of their acquisition (barring murdering someone for a copy, or stealing the neighbour kids' allowance money, or the like).
As for me, finished the first new purchase of the new year (well, technically I bought other ones before this, but this is the first I've actually read through): the late
James Thompson's
Lucifer's Tears, 2nd in his Inspector Vaara, Intrepid Increasingly Morally-Compromised Finnish Murder Investigator series, which I got on discount sale after having read the previously-freebied 1st one upthread to determine if I wanted to buy this one while it was still on sale.
It turns out that this is a series you cannot read out-of-sequence at all, as while the cases themselves are standalone, the personal developments are built on from book-to-book, and thus you would end up being seriously spoilered for the previous whodunnits, as the narrative explores the after-effects of dealing with the earlier crimes on Kari Vaara and his American wife Kate, in the course of it detailing exactly what happened to whom and why.
And thus as a result of certain fallout and realizations made in
Snow Angels, Vaara and Kate have moved from his isolated Arctic circle hometown in the far north to the more cosmopolitan Helsinki, where Kate is fitting in better with a more international crowd, but Vaara feels out of place, in part due to bad memories, and in part due to having to adjust from being the top cop in his small town to interim chief murder-investigator amidst a bunch of political maneuvering and office politics amidst new colleagues and underlings who don't believe he's earned his place.
In between all this are the obligatory murder investigation (another apparently psycho-sexual crazed one, sigh, though at least not a serial killer, and with a potential hiding-another-crime motive), a further politically-fuelled clandestine investigation into WWII-era war crimes possibly committed by an elderly national hero who may have been a colleague of Vaara's grandfather, and the arrival of the in-laws, as Kate's brother and sister come for a visit, and Vaara tries to reconnect with his brother Jari, also in Helsinki.
Naturally, that last one seems to be the most awkward for Vaara to handle, as Kate's remaining family (who grew up under difficult circumstances affected by maternal death and paternal alcoholism) prove to be considerably more dysfunctional than either of them were expecting, and brother Jari's family has its own issues, which are set on a collision course. Next to that, Vaara's having to deal with the eccentricities of his latest colleague/work assistant, the demands of his higher-ups interested in covering up, and trying to prove a culprit for the murder he's fairly certain has been committed by someone who's taunting him over it and has framed someone else to take the fall, is practically a familiar routine.
The resolution to the whodunnit for this, as well as Vaara's office politics problems, is rather twisty but falls neatly into place and works fairly well with what's been established earlier, kind of like sliding one of those T-shaped pieces into Tetris and rotating it at just the right moment to take out a significant chunk of the pile.
One of the things that really worked well in this, IMHO, is the depiction of Vaara's interactions with various characters and situations and how his reactions have been those of a basically trying-to-be-decent guy who becomes less decent as he begins to resort to tactics that are less and less pure and more questionable in order to resolve conflicts that have no easy resolution which would otherwise work out in his favour or that of the parties he's trying to help.
I'd thought from author's Wikipedia entry that the Vaara's increasing moral compromise would occur more gradually in this fashion as he sauntered gently downwards what TV Tropes likes to call The Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism, but due to certain things that were set up as a result of developments in the murder investigation, it looks like it's going to happen in a rather different way over the next few books, as it seems that the hook that will get him to a more crooked level is actually going to play directly on his actual idealism rather than passively occurring as a result of increasing cynicism.
Recommended if you're interested in Nordic police procedurals involving a great deal of dysfunction hidden under an otherwise calm and normal-seeming surface, both in the actual cop, and the society surrounding him, as well as a good dose of Finland's WWII history involving their difficult position caught between their ancient traditional enemies, the Russians, and their this-was-a-bad-idea-to-team-up-with-in-retrospect allies, the Germans, and some cross-cultural exchange of varying degrees of success between Finns and Americans who are kind of stuck with each other until the divorce.
I liked this enough that I started looking up the next-in-series, which it turns out the local library has on shelf, so since it's a nice-ish day now that the torrential rains have stopped, I'll be walking out to borrow them shortly.