Web of Deceit: Katherine Howell

From the summary at the author's website:

When paramedics Jane and Alex encounter a man refusing to get out of his crashed car, with bystanders saying he deliberately drove into a pole, it looks like a desperate cry for help. His frantic claim that someone is out to get him adds to their thinking that he is delusional. 

Later that day he is found dead under a train in what might be a suicide, but Jane is no longer so sure: she remembers the terror in his eyes. 

Detective Ella Marconi shares Jane's doubts, which are only compounded when the case becomes increasingly tangled.

Although this is the sixth book in an eight book series, this is only the third book by Howell that I have read. I read the first two books, Frantic and The Darkest Hour.  Detective Ella Marconi is the main character in the series but each book also features a paramedic who gets involved with a crime, and the case that Marconi is working on intersects in some way with the issues in the paramedic's life. In this book, we have two paramedics featured: Alex, a single father of a teenage daughter who recently was involved in a traumatic episode at work, and Jane, his partner, who is in a troubled relationship with a married man.

Katherine Howell is very good with characterization, and I find the people in the books very realistic. So realistic, in fact, that I get irritated with them and want them to get themselves straightened out. I also like the pacing of the stories. I have read the first two books in the series, and the pacing is what pulled me in. The second one, The Darkest Hour, was very long, nearly 500 pages in my mass market paperback edition, but I hardly noticed because the story moved so well. This one is a more reasonable length, 347 pages.

In some ways, this is a typical thriller. Some of the characters end up doing very stupid things that lead to problems in their lives, and the connections between various plot threads and the ending strains belief. But the story keeps the reader (at least this one) engaged, and it is easy to get involved and suspend disbelief. Although this is primarily a police procedural, I enjoy the elements of the story that follow the paramedics in their jobs and in their off hours.

Web of Deceit is the first Ella Marconi mystery published in the US. The publisher, Minotaur Books, provided me with my copy and I was very grateful. I have found it difficult to get copies of Katherine Howell's books here. I hope they will be publishing more of her books.

I did not have any problem reading the 6th book in the series without having read the three books that went before. Based on Ella's relationship with Dr. Callum McLennan in this book, some events have happened in her life that I missed by not reading books 3 - 5, but enough background detail is included. Many reviewers of this series of novels have commented that the books can be read as standalone novels, and I agree. Especially with the addition of a new paramedic each book, each story works alone very well.

See other reviews:

• Web Of Deceit received a starred review from Publisher's Weekly
• Shellyrae's review at Book'd Out
• Kerrie's review at Mysteries in Paradise
• Bernadette's review at Fair Dinkum Crime

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Publisher:   Minotaur Books, 2015 (orig. pub. 2013)
Length:      347 pages
Format:      Hardcover
Series:       Ella Marconi #6
Setting:      Sydney, Australia
Genre:       Police procedural
Source:     Review copy provided by the publisher.

Billion-Dollar Brain: Len Deighton

Brief summary at Goodreads:

The fourth of Deighton's novels to be narrated by the unnamed employee of WOOC(P) is the thrilling story of an anti-communist espionage network owned by a Texan billionaire, General Midwinter, run from a vast computer complex known as the Brain. After having been recruited by Harvey Newbegin, the narrator travels from the bone-freezing winter of Helsinki, Riga and Leningrad, to the stifling heat of Texas, and soon finds himself tangling with enemies on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

I have read four books in the nameless spy series by Len Deighton. Ipcress File was the first Len Deighton book I read and I was totally confused the whole time I was reading it. I liked Horse Under Water much better; I was more used to the style of writing and the character, and the plot seemed much more straightforward to me. Funeral in Berlin was very good; I liked the setting especially, and the plot and new characters were entertaining.

Billion-Dollar Brain seemed quite different from the others. More James Bondish, more fantastical and fun. I was still in a state of confusion for a good bit of the time, plot-wise, but enjoyed the book regardless.

Both le Carré and Deighton write about the bureaucracy in espionage; the difference is that le Carré's writing is much bleaker and Deighton's books are more fun to read. Or that is my experience so far. Admittedly, I get less confused about the plotlines with le Carre's books.

This book has memorable characters, in addition to the unnamed agent and his boss, Dawlish, and his secretary, Jean. Harvey Newbegin and the KGB colonel, Stok, were both in Funeral in Berlin. General Midwinter is larger than life and very scary. There is a young Finnish girl, Signe Laine, who is an agent for some group, maybe the Americans, maybe the Russians.

And on a side note, the depiction of a supercomputer in this novel (and the film) was interesting to me. Although I work in computer technology, I don't know much about the history of computing and what was available when. I worked in computers in the 1980s, although at a level of data entry and computer operations at that point. I remember using punch cards and reel-to-reel tapes. Very nostalgic.

Deighton's introduction to the book adds more value and insight. He talks about his travels to all of the places included in the story, and the importance of going at the same time of year as the setting of the book. Since the protagonist visits Helsinki, Latvia, Leningrad, New York, and Texas, that is a lot of traveling.

Deighton also talks about the writing process:

Editors and publishers said my books were too cryptic; too fragmented and demanded too much of the reader. They all pressed me to conform to the orthodox methods of 'popular fiction'. For instance, they were united in expecting a full description of each character at the first entrance. I resisted all this fiercely; I hadn't followed any such rules in my previous books and I refused to be tied to them now. I reasoned that, just as one never gets to the end of discovering new aspects of old friends and relatives, so I wanted all my characters -- even minor ones -- to be more completely revealed as the story continued.

The film adaptation, Billion Dollar Brain, with Michael Caine, Karl Malden, and Ed Begley, was also fun. I have pointed out that the book is more the James Bond type of story than any of the previous books in the series. Same for the movie.

There are many differences between the book and the film, including the way the plot is resolved. The film adaptations for The Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin were closer to the books, and watching them illuminated my understanding of the books. In this case, the two were very different, and hard to compare.

Just a few notes:

• There  were cameos by Donald Sutherland and Susan George but they were so brief I did not notice them.
• A lot of the names are changed but most of the characters are there. 
• The novel features a rich billionaire running a conspiracy plot with a huge computer, but the computer is not the most important aspect of the story. The movie gives more time to the computer and General Midwinter's invasion.
• The computers in the film were provided by Honeywell.

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Publisher:  Reissued 2011 by Sterling (first published 1966)
Length:      282 pages
Format:     Trade paperback
Series:       Nameless Spy
Setting:      Helsinki, Latvia, Leningrad, New York, and Texas
Genre:       Espionage fiction

New (to me) Authors - 1st Quarter 2016

At the end of every quarter, Kerrie at Mysteries in Paradise hosts a meme for the best new-to-me crime fiction authors. Check out other posts for this quarter.

This quarter I read only two new authors, and I was impressed with both of them.


I read two books by Anne Holt: What is Mine, the first book in the Vik and Stubo series, and Blind Goddess, the first book in the Hanne Wilhelmsen series. Anne Holt is Norwegian and both of her series are set in Oslo.

What is Mine, first published in 2001 in Norway, is a book about child abduction, a very unappealing subject. However, the book does not relentlessly focus on that subject, and I found the story to center more on Johanne Vik, a former FBI profiler, and Adam Stubo, a police detective, and how they approach working on this case together. I enjoyed the story a lot, so much that I decided to read another of her books.

Blind Goddess, published in 1993 in Norway, was Anne Holt's debut novel. The heroine of the series is Hanne Wilhelmsen, a lesbian police detective. The book also features two other major characters, Hakon Sand and Karen Borg, both lawyers. This book was not quite as compelling as What is Mine, although the fact that I was reading on an e-reader may have affected my enjoyment. The story was very complicated, but I did eventually get pulled into the plot and enjoyed the ending very much.

The second new to me author was Quentin Bates, author of the Officer Gunnhildur series. I read Frozen Assets (titled Frozen Out in the UK), the first book in the series . The strength of that book is Gunna, or Officer Gunnhildur. She is a middle aged policewoman and is portrayed in a very realistic way; she is not glamorous, she tries to do a good job, and being there for her teenage daughter is as important to her as her job. This was another very complex plot, covering conspiracies in government and the financial difficulties in Iceland, but without the engaging central character, it would have been just another story for me.

I will be continuing reading books by both of these authors. After not buying any books for three months, yesterday I purchased the next in the series for each.

Reading in March and Pick of the Month

These are the crime fiction books I read this month:

• Minute for Murder by Nicholas Blake
• Blind Goddess by Anne Holt
• The Looking Glass War by John le Carre
• Billion Dollar Brain by Len Deighton
• Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming
• Frozen Assets by Quentin Bates
• Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carre

The good thing is I read seven books this month and I enjoyed all of them. The bad thing is I have done a post for only one of them. I am way behind on review posts.

This month was primarily a month of spy fiction. I had begun my project of reading all the Smiley books by John le Carre, and I read the fourth and the fifth novels in March. The Looking Glass War was grim but Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was wonderful.That got me in the mood for more spy fiction. I continued reading the Nameless Spy books by Len Deighton with Billion Dollar Brain and I read the 2nd James Bond book by Ian Fleming, Live and Let Die.

All of these spy thrillers have been adapted as films or TV shows. Shortly after I finished the book, we watched Billion Dollar Brain with Michael Caine. We have started watching the BBC TV mini-series, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which we have seen before multiple times, but remember little about. After that, we will watched the film version with Gary Oldman for the first time. Live and Let Die with Roger Moore will be watched in the next week or two; I cannot say if I have ever seen it before. I prefer the Bond films with other actors as Bond. But I am sure it will be fun and worth watching.

Minute for Murder by Nicholas Blake was my book for the Crimes of the Century meme (hosted by Rich at Past Offences) for the year 1947. The year for April is 1945, and surprise, I picked a spy thriller.

The remaining two books were set in Nordic countries. In February I read What Is Mine by Anne Holt, a book which had been on my TBR pile for about nine years. That was the first book in Holt's Vik and Stubo series. (I have not reviewed that one either.) Anne Holt is Norwegian and her books are set in Oslo. I decided I wanted to go back and read her first novel, Blind Goddess, the first book in the Hanne Wilhelmsen series. I did not find it nearly as good as What Is Mine, but it was her first book, and I know that the Hanne Wilhelmsen series is very well thought of, so I will be reading more of both series.

I also read Frozen Assets by Quentin Bates, an author who was born in England but lived and worked in Iceland for many years. His Officer Gunnhildur series is set in and around Reykjavik. The best thing about this novel for me is the main character, who is a single mother with a teenage daughter and a grown son.

March was the third and final month in the TBR Triple Dog Dare. For three months I only read books from my TBR piles. I read a total of 20 books, although I don't know if I can truly count the three Rex Stout books in January. They are rereads but I always planned to reread them... again and again. The best part was that I did not buy any new books during those three months.

The Crime Fiction Pick of the Month meme is hosted at Mysteries in Paradise. Bloggers link to summary posts for the month, and identify a favorite crime fiction read for the month.

This month it is easy to pick a favorite: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carre. It was everything I hoped it would be and more.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold: John le Carré

From the description at Goodreads:

In the shadow of the newly erected Berlin Wall, Alec Leamas watches as his last agent is shot dead by East German sentries. For Leamas, the head of Berlin Station, the Cold War is over. As he faces the prospect of retirement or worse—a desk job—Control offers him a unique opportunity for revenge.

I consider myself quite fortunate that I was able to go into the story knowing very little. It is hard to say that one enjoys reading a book with such a cynical, dark theme, but it is a great story and I am very glad I finally got around to reading it. And viewing the movie too, after all this time.

John le Carré writes so eloquently, and his writing engages me. He develops his characters bit by bit and pulls me into the story. Somehow I knew that this story would not be a happy one, but I kept hoping for some glimmer of a happy ending. The story was very suspenseful, but also filled with fear, distrust and betrayal. The last few chapters of this book were unrelentingly dark, and I was appalled at the manipulation of human beings in the name of the greater good.

The setting of Germany after the Berlin Wall has gone up was especially appealing. In le Carré's introduction to the edition I read, he talks about going to see the Wall as it was built... and how terrifying it was.

It was the Berlin Wall that had got me going, of course: I had flown from Bonn to take a look at it as soon as it started going up. I went with a colleague from the Embassy and as we stared back at the weasel faces of the brainwashed little thugs who guarded the Kremlin’s latest battlement, he told me to wipe the grin off my face. I was not aware I had been grinning, so it must have been one of those soupy grins that comes over me at dreadfully serious moments. There was certainly nothing to grin at in what I saw, and inside myself I felt nothing but disgust and terror, which was exactly what I was supposed to feel: the Wall was perfect theater as well as a perfect symbol of the monstrosity of ideology gone mad.

That brought back memories from my preteen years. My father was in a National Guard unit in Alabama that was called up to active duty for nearly a year during the Berlin Crisis. He left in October 1961 and was stationed in France for a few months and in Germany the rest of the time.  I don't remember how I felt about the Berlin wall going up; I only remember that it was a difficult year for me, my mother, and my sister and brother while my father was gone. It was two years later when this novel came out and I don't remember anything about the book from that time either, although I have read that it created quite a stir.

I read this book at this time because it is listed in many places, including John le Carre's web site, as one of the Smiley novels. Having read the first five of the Smiley novels, I can see now that there is no need to start at any one point, but I think I gained a lot from reading this book and The Looking Glass War before moving on to Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The 3rd and 4th books feature Smiley only incidentally, but they show another side of him.

Here are a couple of posts that give an overview of John le Carré's books: at Tipping My Fedora and Mrs. Peabody Investigates.


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Publisher:   Pocket Books, 2001 (orig. pub. 1963) 
Length:       212 pages
Format:      Trade paperback
Series:       George Smiley novel
Setting:      Germany, UK
Genre:        Spy thriller
Source:      I purchased this book.

A Murder of Quality: John le Carré

I am currently working on a project to read all the Smiley novels by John le Carré. I read the first one, A Call for the Dead, eight or nine years ago and did not get to the second one until early this year. A Murder of Quality has much in common with the first book, in that both are really detective stories, and not spy novels at all. It was a surprise to me initially that the espionage element is missing but that made no difference in the end. Yet it is something that readers should be aware of if what they are looking for are spy novels.

Miss Brimley, editor of The Christian Voice, receives a letter from a subscriber, Stella Rode, the wife of an assistant master at the Carne School. She fears that her husband is planning to kill her. Brimley worked with Smiley during the war and knows he is not currently employed, so she calls and asks him to follow up on the accusation. Smiley makes an introductory call to the Headmaster at Carne and finds that Mrs. Rode had been murdered the previous night. He takes the letter to Inspector Rigby in Carne. Rigby, knowing that Smiley will have easier access to the staff at the school, asks him to aid in the investigation.

Some reviewers make a case that le Carré is writing more about British society and the class system than about espionage in all of his books, and I can see that point of view. Being from the US, I may not notice so much. This book is set in an academic setting, and in the introduction to the book, le Carré makes clear his hatred of that type of elite boy's school environment, based on personal experience.

From the introduction, written in 1989:

Rereading the book now, I find a flawed thriller redeemed by ferocious and quite funny social comment. Most of all I recognise the dankness of those old stone walls that formed the limits of my childhood and left me for the rest of my life with an urge to fight off whatever threatened to enclose me.

Le Carré is one of those authors that I can read just for the way he tells the story. I am not saying that I can do without any plot at all, but the plot is not the main attraction. Le Carré does characterization very well but most of the people in this novel are extremely unlikable. The school environment is a closed society, and the relationships between various members of the faculty and their wives are competitive and strained at best, sometimes adversarial. I was rooting for some of them to be the murderer, they were so horrible.

I am now reading Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. In late January I read The Spy Who Came In from the Cold and more recently The Looking Glass War. Both of those books are very grim. Even though those books feature Smiley for just a minimal amount of time, I think they add to the picture I have of Smiley going into Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

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Publisher:   Walker & Co., 2004 (orig. pub. 1962) 
Length:       152 pages
Format:      Hardcover
Series:       George Smiley novel
Setting:      UK
Genre:        Mystery
Source:      I purchased this book in 2007.