Review - Disappeared by Anthony Quinn

I got this book through NetGalley.

From Goodreads: In Northern Ireland’s darkest corner, the Troubles have never ended.

Though bombs no longer rock Belfast, for some the fight goes on. Retired Special Branch agent David Hughes disappears after looking into the previously closed case of Oliver Jordan, who went missing at the hands of the IRA decades ago. Soon after, a former spy is found bludgeoned to death, the day after placing his own obituary in the newspaper. Beneath Northern Ireland’s modern calm, ancient jealousies threaten to rend the country asunder once more.

A Catholic detective in a Protestant nation, Celcius Daly knows too well the agonies of sectarian strife. To solve this string of murders, he must reach decades into the past, confronting a painful history that Ireland would prefer to forget.

Celcius Daly is the detective in this novel. Although he is from Northern Ireland, he had been working in Glasgow until some time before Disappeared starts. He is an outsider to all the events in recent History, as he doesn’t seem to have been involved in any, although we later learn that he was involved during his childhood. He just wants to solve the crime and is not scared of reopening older cases. This doesn’t get him many friends because there are many people who want to leave the investigation unfinished.

The book was good, but at some points I found it a bit confusing. I wasn’t really sure on which side some characters were. This is probably the idea; to confuse the reader because some people are not who they seem to be. I think my main problem was that although I had some basic knowledge of the History of Northern Ireland, there were some things that I had to look up to fully understand everything the characters were saying, so I may have missed or misunderstood something important at the beginning that would have made the reading much easier. Once some things start to clear up, everything is easier to understand.

The plot is very interesting and well thought. The disappearance of the Special Branch agent and the murder are linked in a way I hadn’t predicted to things that had happened years earlier and everything is more complicated than political ideas. Saying much about it would be revealing too many spoilers though.

What's On Your Nightstand #5 (Jul '12)

I thought that being on holidays I would read more, but I had forgotten all the things I had left to do on the holidays. Mainly fixing things or, more accurately, calling people to fix them. I don't mind if it is a computer, plugs, bookshelves etc because I can do that myself. But I really dislike having to tidy up and consider what things may end on the ground and should disappear before calling anybody to fix anything. My room looks like a minefield with action figures in front of books and a very unstable tower of books and comic books on the ground, so if somebody crashes against my shelf they may find themselves with Magneto or Pikachu on their heads.

But I still had time to read some books, just not as many as I whished.

Read books: I'll post reviews for some of these books soon.

• Ten Little Niggers / And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
• Woman with Birthmark by Håkan Nesser: review here.
• Disappeared by Anthony Quinn: will post the review tomorrow.
• Several comic books / graphic novels: mainly Captain America, Wolverine and Doctor Who. I have to find a way of reviewing those. I was thinking that I could review the individual stories, because many ongoing series are made up of story arcs that have a clear beginning and an end.

Will read next: some of these are leftovers from last month's next-list. Not listed in any special order:

• A is for Alibi by Sue Grafton
• The Oxford Murders by Guillermo Martínez
• Ghost of the Glen by Alan C. McLean: I found this book while I was tidying up. It's YA, but it doesn't sound too bad.
• Run To Ground by D.P. Lyle
• The Mine by John A. Heldt
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë: this is a classic I had never read, but I watched the movie a few days ago and liked it, so I'll read the book.

Review - Woman with Birthmark by Håkan Nesser

From Goodreads (shorter): A young woman shivers in the December cold as her mother's body is laid to rest in a cemetery. The only thing that warms her is the thought of the revenge she will soon take...

Then a middle-aged man is killed at his home, shot twice in the chest and twice below the belt. He had recently received a series of bizarre phone calls where an old song is played down the line - evoking an eerie sense of both familiarity and unease. Before the police can find the culprit, a second man is killed in the same way.

Woman with Birthmark is the fourth novel in the Inspector Van Veeteren series, but you don’t need to have read the other three to understand everything. At least I haven’t read the rest of the series and I don’t think I missed anything important (or anything at all). Maybe if you know what happens in the previous books you have more insight on the characters, but they are described here as if the reader is meeting them for the first time.

The characters are well written. As is it a group of characters, some have better lives than others, but they are all more or less happy. Not much of their home lives is described though, so there may be details in other books that point to the opposite.

What I liked about this novel is that the murderer is a woman and that she is shooting her victims and not poisoning them. This confuses the detectives, because at first they believe the criminal is a man.

The book in general is good, but part of the plot is predictable. Once you consider the possibility that the murderer is a woman, her reasons are a bit obvious. The victims are all men and they’re shot “below the belt”. It is easy to imagine why.

Review - Artemis Fowl: The Lost Colony by Eoin Colfer

I got this book through NetGalley.

From Goodreads (shorter): The island of Hybras was catapulted into Limbo, where it has remained for ten thousand years. But when the spells deterioration accelerates, the materializations become unpredictable. Even the fairy scientists cannot figure out where the next demon will pop up. But someone can. Artemis Fowl, teenage criminal mastermind, has solved temporal equations that no normal human should be intelligent enough to understand. So when a confused and frightened demon pops up in a Sicilian theater, Artemis Fowl is there to meet him.

Unfortunately, he is not the only one. A second, mysterious party has also solved the temporal equations, and has managed to abduct the demon before Artemis can secure him. Once again, Artemis will have to pair up with his old comrade, Captain Holly Short, to track down the missing demon and rescue him, before the time spell dissolves completely and the lost demon colony returns violently to Earth.

Even though this book is more focused on the demon (who will later be important in the next book) than Artemis, we can see how the boy and Holly are now best friends. A complete change if you compare it with the first book. There is one interesting thing about Artemis in this novel though. He’s a teenager now and has to deal with feelings for girls he doesn’t completely understand and tries to rationalize. It doesn’t help that the second party is a teenage girl.

If The Opal Deception was the darkest book in the series, this one is the lightest. It’s not only because of the plot. The little demon is like an innocent child who doesn’t really understand what’s going on or why some things are happening.

I also think The Lost Colony is the weakest book in the series. I never felt that there was any real danger. Artemis and company were in danger, of course, but there was always a feeling of a perfect magical solution for the problem. It’s like one of those average episodes in tv series: OK, but nothing too special.

Review - The Devil's Highway by R. Scott Douglas

I got this book as a review copy.

From Goodreads: A coded treasure map. Outlaw bikers. Drug smugglers. The legendary Chupacabra. The deadliest road in America.

These are the obstacles faced by Bobby Black and Frank Shuster on The Devil's Highway. The newfound friends have decoded an antique treasure map that will lead them to the fabled golden city of Cibola. Their trip won't be easy, though. The map doesn't disclose the exact location of the city. [...]

The road to the treasure will be marked by the natural dangers of this mysterious area, betrayal, unexpected alliances and encounters with the blood-sucking beast of the desert — the Chupacabra.

Bobby and Frank are interesting characters; neither is what they told the other they are and both are hiding a dangerous secret. Throughout the book we learn that they are morally ambiguous characters.

Only very few things about these characters are revealed at the same time until the moment when the whole truth is shown. It is done in a good way and leaves the reader wondering who they are, because the small clues can point in several directions (good, bad or neither).

I won’t say what happens with the chupacabra because I would be spoiling the mystery, but there is an explanation for the enigmatic creature that makes sense.

This book is different to most thriller / adventure novels at first. There is no clear main character or group, although Bobby and Frank appear in more pages. We have a few people who are all important for the development of the story (some are not so important at the beginning, but they become very important later). At the middle of the novel this changes and two main groups are formed. At this point it becomes clear who the good guys and who the bad guys are.

While the first few chapters might be a bit slow, the rest of the plot is fast-paced and full of bullets. You will want to continue reading to find out more.