The holidays are behind us, and I hope you all got as much reading done as I did... In fact, I got rather more done than I expected. For various reasons that are too complicated to go into here, I ended up in a hotel room in Houston on my own for a week...
What? You say it's not too complicated?
Well, ok... my lovely new wife was so sick that she couldn't come on what was supposed to be a combined business trip and holiday. The holiday was hers and the business trip mine - so while she could and did cancel and claim on the insurance, I couldn't. I had to go - and the result was that we spent our first married New Year thousands of miles apart. So I did a lot of reading and writing, even finishing the final draft of my latest novel Powder Burn - but more on that in the future, this post is about my holiday reading...
Rachel Abbott’s Only the Innocent was one of
the big independently-published hits of 2012, and I was intrigued to finally read
it. The cover and blurb promise an edgy thriller, and there’s no doubt that all
those elements are there – sex, abuse, murder. Nevertheless, the book still has
a lot in common with a ‘cozy’ mystery, as the detective work revolves around
the drawing room of an old manor house - but no, it wasn’t Colonel Mustard with
the knife in the kitchen, the end was much darker than that.
Only the Innocent leaves you with a central
moral dilemma – something I’m fond of in my own writing - and this lifts it
above the run-of-the mill mystery or thriller. Punish the guilty, or protect
the innocent? I can’t tell you which the book goes for without dropping some
massive spoilers, so you’ll have to read this one, and I can strongly recommend
a four star ride.
I held back a star because the central
protagonist’s necessarily meek and frightened character became a little
wearying. There’s one fabulous moment where Abbott shows the reader what Laura
was like before her marriage – unfortunately, it just made me want to read
about that Laura, rather than the one we see in the book. But that aside, it’s
a well structured, well-written mystery and well worth your time and money.
Russell Blake is a force-of-nature, I don’t
know where he’s holed up, but wherever it is there can’t be a lot of
distractions. I think he’s now published 18 books in as many months. The latest
includes the Jet series, and he launched the first four of these in the back
half of 2012. These are thrillers in the Lee Child / Jack Reacher mould, only
more so. They’re short, sharp and straight-forward – don’t expect much
sophistication in the plotting; there’s lots of action, very little sitting
around and pondering, and about as much navel-gazing as you’d get from Daniel
Craig as 007, i.e. an occasional grim look in the mirror.
And while it’s nuts and bolts stuff, Tab A
always fits squarely and neatly into Hole A, and it all comes together like the
solid piece of craftsmanship that it is, and the writing occasionally elevates
to several notches higher. I wouldn’t call it art, but there’s some excellent descriptive
stuff in here. I don’t know that I’ll be rushing back to Jet 2 in the
short-term, but I’ll get there next time I’m looking for an easy, super-entertaining
read.
This is a book I noticed flying high in the
Kindle store and with almost 400 reviews averaging close to 5 stars, I thought
it was worth a closer look – I wasn’t disappointed. It’s a great read, the tale
of an innocent man dispatched to a brutal jail for the rest of his life –
Shawshank Redemption territory.
In my view, it’s a match for that movie. It has
all the action required of the genre, but pushes home a few hard points about leadership,
the nature of punishment, violence and man’s essential self. It’s not necessary
to agree with what Herley seems to have to say about these things – it’s more
than enough that he gets you thinking about it.
This really was my kind of book, and in a sense
it brought together the thought-provoking element of Only the Innocent, with
the faster, cleaner, pacier writing style of Jet - and produced a book as good
as either one on their own terms, and better than both judged on my own
personal scale.
Richard Herley seems to be one of those writers
that publishing forgot, and more power to the eBook revolution in bringing his
work back to the surface and into the light it so richly deserves. I will be
reading more.