The Highlander - Zoe Saadia

   2012; 215 pages.  Book 1 (out of 7) in “The Rise of the Aztecs” series.  New Author? : No.  Genre : Historical Fiction; Mesoamerica.  Overall Rating : 7½*/10.

    Three youths, all of noble blood, all with “sneaky” habits.

    Kuini is of the Chichimec tribe, aka “the Highlanders”, and son of their war leader.  He likes to sneak down from the highlands and observe the neighboring tribes in their huge cities with tall pyramids.

    Coyotl is of the Alcohua tribe, aka “the Lowlanders”, and the son of their Emperor.  He likes to sneak out into the desert, without any bodyguards, just to feel the spirit of adventure.

    Iztac-Ayotl is Coyotl’s half-sister, the First Daughter of the Emperor’s Second Wife.  She likes to dress up as a commoner and sneak out into her city, just for the freedom to do what she wants.

    Each of them will eventually get caught sneaking around, albeit by different persons, and with various consequences.

    And all three will come to realize that being a part of the nobility, while certainly a better lot than being a peasant, also carries duties and obligations to their Empires that none of them can ever shirk or evade, no matter what.

What’s To Like...

    The Highlander is set in central Mexico in the early 1400’s, about a hundred years before Cortez and his conquistadors arrive to obliterate everybody.  We follow the interactions of several tribes: primarily the Alcohua, Chichimecs, Aztecs, and the Tepanecs.  The Mayans are mentioned, but we don’t encounter them.  Surprisingly, the Aztecs are not the dominant tribe at this point in time; the Tepanec are.

    Coyotl, Kuini, and Iztac-Ayotl are the three main protagonists, and they get more or less equal footing in the story.  Each of them faces moral dilemmas that pit their personal wishes against their responsibilities to their tribes.  None of these get resolved here in Book One of this series, but there are another six books to get things sorted out.  Book Seven was published in 2014, so I presume this series is completed.

    This is my second book by Zoe Saadia (the first one is reviewed here), and once again I’m impressed by how well-researched it is.  Cocoa beans are used as money, several Mesoamerican deities are referenced, and it’s neat that the center of attention (at least for now) is not the Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlan.  I very much liked that none of the tribes, including the Aztecs, are portrayed as pure evil and/or utterly, bloodthirsty.  They each have their own cultures, and each is of course striving to be the dominant force in the region.

    Once again, I thought I’d caught an anachronism in the tale, as the three protagonists pass notes to each other, sometimes on bark, sometimes on paper.  Serendipitously, I’ve just finished reading a book on the history of papermaking (reviewed here), and it confirmed that paper, primarily made from the agave plant, and writing were well developed in Mesoamerica at this point in time, having been developed independently of any European or Asian influence.

    I liked the cusswords employed in the tale: phrases like “manure-eaters”, “filthy bastards”, and the elegantly-lengthened “stinky, dirty, pest-ridden manure-eaters”.  There’s a little bit of bloodshed, a little bit of sex, and the phrase “piss-off” is used once, but really, there's no way I'd call this an R-Rated tale.

    We never learn the names of three of the secondary, but fairly important, characters: the visiting Aztec war leader, Coyotl’s father, and the Chichimec Emperor.  I thought perhaps this was a function of each of these persons’ exalted rank, but both the Aztec  and the Tepanec Emperors’ names are given, so that shoots down my theory.  Maybe we learn their names in subsequent books.

    There are a smattering of “native” words used, and I could suss out the meanings of most of them.  Still, it would’ve been nice to have a glossary to reference, since I never did exactly figure out what “altepetl” and “calmecac” meant.  In fairness, googling both those words as I wrote this review resolved their meanings.  Finally, as with any historical fiction tale as well-researched as this one, it would've been nice to have a “what’s real and what’s made-up” section at the back of the book.

 Kindle Details...

    The Highlander (The Rise of the Aztecs Book 1) presently sells for $4.99 at Amazon, as do the other six books in the series.  Zoe Saadia offers a number of other series at Amazon, all set in various locations in pre-Columbian America,  The e-books in those range from $2.99 to $4.99.

Excerpts...

    “So what about that princess of yours?  Who was she?”

    “They say she is the First Daughter of the Emperor’s Second Wife.”

    “Oh, the Second Wife.  The cause of the whole war.  Interesting.”  Eyes twinkling, the man watched Kuini over the rim of the goblet.  “Take my advice, kid.  Don’t mess around with princesses.  They are usually an arrogant lot who will cause you much trouble while giving you no satisfaction.”  (loc. 1553)

    He bit his lips, trying to contain his frustration.  So, there would be no silly talk tonight and no kisses.  She might have not been able to make it for a number of reasons, he thought, but his anger grew, thinking that maybe she had just gotten enough of adventures with foreigners and commoners.

    He stood there, undecided.  Maybe it was for the best.  This girl, while being exciting and fun, had brought him nothing but trouble.  He was really better off without her wild, pretty, untamed presence.  (loc. 2536)

“It’s not every day strange warrior-boys go around kidnapping princesses.”  (loc. 1365)

    There are a couple of quibbles, one minor, one not-so-minor.

    The minor one concerns the dialogue style.  Several reviewers at Amazon and Goodreads felt there was too much English vernacular used.  They point out that phrases used here, such as “you are a mess, kid”, “you know?”, “you see?”, the aforementioned “piss off”, and the Wayne’s World-ish “No way!  Yes way!” were not used in ancient America.

     Well okay, I’m sure the 15^th-century Mesoamericans didn’t say such things.  But I’m equally sure that they had their own set of street slang, particularly among their teenage crowds.  And since we’ll never know what those sayings were, I’m okay with using the modern-day equivalents.  After all, they didn't speak English back then either.

    The more serious quibble concerns the ending.  Beyond the personal adventures of our trio of protagonists, the overarching storyline concerns an impending invasion by the Tepanecs.  Indeed, most of the actions of the adults center around meting this threat.  The tension builds nicely, the Alcohua gather their warriors and seek allies, the Tepanecs land on the nearby shores, the two armies face off, and…

    … the book ends.  Oh, we get a brief synopsis of what happens.  A half-dozen sentences covering the rest of this war.  But IMO, this book screams for a climactic battle scene, with lots of fighting, bloodshed, tactics, and heroism.  All I can think of is that maybe the author doesn’t like to do battle scenes.

    But hey, at least it wasn’t a cliffhanger ending.  I despise cliffhangers.

    7½ Stars.  The truncated ending notwithstanding, I enjoyed The Highlander.  The pacing was good, the characters were fun to get to know, and there was a nice balance between history, action, antics, drama, and wit.  I didn’t even mind when a bit of romance worked its way into the plotline.

Paper - Mark Kurlansky

   2016; 354 pages (includes prologue and timeline).  Full Title : Paper – Paging Through History.  New Author? : No.  Genre : Non-Fiction; Technology; World History.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

    Mark Kurlansky poses an interesting question at the start of Paper:   What do humans do that other animals do not?

    At first thought, that might seem like an easy question, but finding an answer may take a bit more time than you’d think.

    Yes, our opposable thumbs give us all sorts of dexterity advantages, but lots of other animals have them too: apes, of course, but also pandas, opossums, certain frogs; and some birds, although the latter's is merely an opposable digit.  And as for the skills our thumbs enable us to do – carrying, climbing, grasping, holding, etc. – creatures without thumbs can also do all of these.

    We humans can build things, and alter our environment, but the author points out that so does a beaver when he builds a dam.  We wage war against others of our species, but so do ants.  We can laugh, play, and joke around, but so do cats.  We communicate with one another, but so do bees, wolves, and monkeys.

    No, the one thing that sets us apart is our desire, and our ability, to record.  We’ve been doing it since we were living in caves – drawing glyphs on walls, making scribbles on rocks, and eventually scratching grooves into clay tablets.  But those are all painstaking ways of leaving a message.  So it’s not surprising that mankind came up (independently, and in several locations in both global hempisheres) with an easier medium to leave marks on: Paper.

What’s To Like...

    The book’s title might seem misleading to some, as paper has hundreds of uses (gift-wrapping, tissues, toilet paper, etc.) most of which only receive passing mention here.  Mark Kurlansky focuses mainly on paper being used for communicating or for artistic efforts.  He also examines paper’s forerunners (clay tablets à papyrus à parchment à paper), and its purported replacement (paper à e-mail).  Throughout the book, and especially in the chapters covering the distant past, World History gets just as much ink as Papermaking Technology, and I greatly enjoyed that.

    Paper is divided into 18 chapters, plus a prologue and an epilogue.  The earlier chapters are a nice mix of chronological and geographical happenings, covering the various places when and where alphabets, writing, and drawing developed.  Such inventions spurred the need for something to write upon and devices to print with.  Once we hit modern times (around Chapter 14) the theme switches to technological advances, such as the birth of photography and the encyclopedia, new raw materials for papermaking, innovative uses for paper, how the paper industry copes with present-day environmental issues, and last-but-not-least, e-books.

    I was impressed by just how many raw materials have been used for making paper.  Some of the main ones are: flax, cotton, rags, bark, silk, linen, hemp, jute, bamboo, agave, trees, seaweed, esparto grass, abaca, and scraps from sugar cane harvesting.  Rags may seem out of place in that list, but it was actually the major starting material used in America to make paper for hundreds of years.

    The book is a trivia buff’s delight.  Some of the things mentioned that resonated with me are:

Jackson Pollock, Moses Maimonides, Li Po, and Fibonacci  (four of my personal heroes)

1001 Arabian Nights  (Kurlansky claims it is “essentially erotic literature”)

Pencils  (first made in England in 1565)

Book Fairs!  (first held in 1541)

Haiku and Origami  (I’ve written some Haiku, and am fascinated by Origami)

Calligraphy  (I practiced writing Chinese characters when studying Mandarin)

The Kraft Process and the Sulphite Process  (my company sells products for these)

Baseball Cards!  (I had thousands as a kid)

The Iliad and the Odyssey  (I will probably read one or both of these later this year)

Massachusetts  (named for a dialect of the Algonquin language)

Chiaroscuro  (say what?)

    There are some kewl drawings spread throughout the book.  The extras in the back include a Timeline, Acknowledgements, and extensive Bibliography, and a 25-page Index.  Mark Kurlansky has written a series of historical non-fiction books with one-word titles.  I’ve read two (“1968” and now this one), and have two more (“Cod” and “Salt”) waiting on my Kindle.  Based on Amazon and Goodreads reviews, those latter two are regarded as the author’s best efforts, so I’m looking forward to reading them.

Kewlest New Word…

Xylographer (n.) : a person who makes engravings on wood, especially for printing.

Excerpts...

    These small, portable books, which Aldus called libelli portatiles, are credited with changing people’s reading habits.  This, of course, is the technological fallacy at work once again.  Aldus did not change reading habits.  Rather, a change in reading habits prompted him to produce a different kind of book.  He could see that books were too big for the way new readers wanted to use them.  Books were no longer read only by learned monks and scholars at stands in monasteries and castles but by a broad range of people, especially in Italy and France.  People wanted to read while lounging in chairs at a café; they wanted to take books to work to read on breaks or on trips.  (pg. 137)

    The expansion in reading was not simply a by-product of the revolutions in France and America, but a widespread phenomenon.  It could even be argued, as Diderot did, that the spread of reading and its accompanying spread of knowledge led to rebellion against the old order.  This was why that old order, the aristocracies and clergy of Europe, were tremendously fearful of this increasing popularity of books and newspapers and reading in general.  In the late eighteenth century, people of all economic classes, rural and urban, the well educated and the little educated, men and women, young and old – everyone started reading more.  (pg. 237)

 As the scribes of old were keenly aware, literacy is empowering and a threat to despotic rule.  (pg. 186 )

    I don’t really have any quibbles with Paper, but have to admit that at times - mostly during the technical passages -  it was a bit of a slog to read.  I don’t think this is in any way the fault of the author; this is my second Mark Kurlansky book, and his writing skills are fantastic.

    Instead, I blame the subject matter.  I suspect it is difficult to make the manufacture of paper an exciting topic due to its inherently technical nature.

     I can relate.  I once had to write a 200-word essay on “Mining in Siberia”.  I was being disciplined for some sort of transgression in junior high, this was before there was anything like Google, Wikipedia, and the Internet, and it certainly didn't merit a special trip to the city library.  My only resource was the encyclopedia at the junior high school library, which, not surprisingly, had very few words to say about the subject.  It was an extremely time-consuming piece of penance, accomplished only by me getting very wordy and spreading a lot of bullsh*t in my essay.

    That was 200 words about Russian mining.  This book is 350 pages about making paper.  I’d love to know what Mark Kurlansky’s thoughts were as he sat down to write this book.

    8 Stars.  Let’s close this review with a pair of trivia questions from Paper; one serious, the other more tongue-in-cheek.  1.) What was the world’s first novel and when was it published?  2.) What, according to Pliny, are humans incapable of doing that other (similarly equipped) animals can?  (Answers in the Comments section.)

Inspector Hobbes and the Blood

   2013; 308 pages.  Book 1 (of 4) in “Unhuman” series.  New Author? : Yes.  Genre : Dark Humor; Crime-Mystery; Paranormal; Culinary (Culinary?!  WTF, Amazon? Where’d ya come up with that one?).  Laurels: Shortlisted for the “Impress Prize for New Writers” (2012).  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

    There’s been a strange breaking-and-entering at Mr. Roman’s estate.  Someone smashed open one of the windows, climbed through, and stole one of Mr. Roman's violins.

    It was a good violin; you could even call it an expensive one.  But it wasn’t a collector’s item, and there were many more valuable items in the house that were left untouched.  Apparently Mr. Roman was quite upset about all this; he hanged himself shortly thereafter.

    The police have assigned Inspector Hobbes to investigate the case.  He’s quirky, can be heavy-handed at times, but has an excellent record for solving these kind of perplexing crimes.  And tagging along will be Andy Caplet, a journalist with the local Sorenchester and District Bugle, known for his poor record as a reporter.  It seems no one else at the office wanted this assignment, so they sent Andy.

    It seems this heist is just the start of a string of robberies in the Sorenchester area.  A short time later, cups and knives, and even people are going missing.  Will Inspector Hobbes be able to figure out what’s going on, and will Andy’s assistance, help or hinder him?

What’s To Like...

    Andy and Hobbes are an entertaining pair of protagonists – somewhat reminiscent of the Sherlock Holmes & Dr. Watson team.  But there are lots of differences too, and Wilkie Martin is to be commended for not slavishly duplicating the famous duo.  I’ve read some of the modern-day authors who write “new” Sherlock Holmes series (they can do this because the copyright on that name has expired), none of them yet has come close to matching Arthur Conan Doyle’s writing skills.

     The story is set in the fictitious cities of Sorenchester and Pigton, which are situated in the real Cotswolds area of England, and which I presume is the author’s stomping grounds.  Unsurprisingly, it is written in English, not American, which meant oodles of new words for me.  You can munch on chocolate Hobnobs (I found some of these over here with some help from my friends), get your food via a takeaway, or make a slap-up meal of your own, have a top-up if your drink runs low, and hope that your manky rug isn’t pong.  There were several dozen more of these expressions in the book; a few more of them are listed below.  I was in Anglophile heaven.

    the primary plotline was well-contrived – a string of burglaries of a strange set of artifacts.  Andy and Hobbes know the purloined pieces are connected in some way, the fun is figuring out exactly how.  The secondary storyline concerns the book’s genre itself – are there some paranormal critters scampering around Merrie Olde Englande, or is Andy’s imagination just running wild?  The reader gets a pretty good idea what the answer to that is by the end, yet a sliver of doubt remains.

    I thought the humor was handled very well.  Puns, wit, and tall tales abound, yet it’s not overdone.  The end result is a funny story, but not a silly one.  The ending is suitably climactic and exciting.  The final chapter is essentially an epilogue, with the various plot threads being resolved via Hobbes explaining to Andy how the evildoers did their evil.  Shades of Holmes and Watson finales!

    I loved the use of one of my favorite words, “Daliesque”, and chuckled when “thistledown” made an appearance.  I don't recall ever running across this word before this year, and now this is the third time in 2019 it’s cropped up in books I'm reading.

     The chapters are of moderate length: 19 of them covering 308 pages.  That averages out to around 16 pages per chapter.  Amazon touts the book as being a “cozy” mystery, and for the most part it is.  But it should be noted that there is a fair amount of cussing; I thought it fit in well, but cozy purists may wince at this.  Inspector Hobbes and the Blood is a standalone story as well as the first book in a series.

Kewlest New Word. . .

Shtum (adj.; British; informal) :  silent, non-communicative.

Others: Cagoule (n., British); Hob (n. British); Myxmatosis (n.); Scarpered (v.; British).

Excerpts...

    “Right, d’you fancy a cup of tea?”

    “Yes, please,” I said.

    “Good.  Make me one as well, would you?”  A banana-sized finger pointed to the bottle.

    “Oh, right.  Of course.  Umm … do you take milk or sugar?”

    “Two lumps of each, please.”  (loc. 478)

    “What are you here for?  I’ve done nothing.”

    “Nothing?” said Hobbes.  “I’m not sure about that.  Didn’t you knock out a customer’s teeth on Wednesday?”

    Featherlight scowled.  “That’s a lie.  I did no such thing – it was on Tuesday and it wasn’t all of them.  I didn’t hear the customer complain.”

    “He was unconscious.”

    “He was out of order, whinging about a dead mouse in his beer when it was only a bit of one.”  (loc. 1471)

Kindle Details...

    Inspector Hobbes and the Blood currently sells for $2.99 at Amazon.  The other three books in the series are all in the $4.07-$4.99 price range.  Alternatively, you can buy the first three books in a bundle; it goes for $6.29 right now. Other than one short story (52 pages) that goes for $0.99, I think that’s all the Wilkie Martin books available at Amazon for now.

 “Your reputation for stupidity doesn’t do you justice.”  (loc.  4451)

    A number of Amazon reviewers totally hated Andy, consequently giving Inspector Hobbes and the Blood some extremely low ratings.  Well, Andy is certainly not the noblest of characters.  He’s insanely jealous of a coworker, even to the point of planting false evidence to implicate him.  He also repeatedly goes snooping around in Hobbes’s house, uncovering secrets he’s not meant to know about.

    Everyone’s entitled to his own opinion, but personally I like anti-heroes.  They are always more interesting than can’t-do-anything-wrong protagonists, and I have a feeling that Andy will mature a bit as the series progresses.

    9 Stars.  I’ve been meaning to read Inspector Hobbes and the Blood for quite some time now, and was pleasantly surprised by the book’s charm, particularly since it is the author’s debut effort.  Here’s hoping he puts out many more books, and that the 4-volume Inspector Hobbes series is not yet completed.

Valhalla - Tom Holt

    2000; 261 pages.  New Author? : No.  Genre : Mythopoeia; Humorous Fantasy; Absurdism; Satire.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

    Valhalla!  A great hall located in mighty Asgard, administered by Odin, and every Viking warrior’s idea of paradise.  If you die in combat, the Valkyries will personally escort you there to spend the rest of your eternal existence in utter bliss.  But what exactly do dead heroes do to pass the time there?

    Well, Valhalla is a drinking hall, so that’s one activity.  And since the Norsemen there have been fighting all their lives, that’s also what they probably consider to be a fun time.

    But lately Viking warriors dying in battles are few and far between.  So The Valhalla Group Incorporated (they’re a business now) has branched out.  If one has enough money and the right connections, even common folk like you and me can enter Valhalla.  Odin will even tailor an afterlife to suit your fancy, at least to the best of his understanding of the modern way of life.

    For instance, if you've been a cocktail waitress all of your life, you might end up as a serving wench in Valhalla.  For eternity.  Catering to Viking customers with some very outdated ideas about the role of women.

    Or if you loved to play simulated war games with your buddies on weekends (think “paintball” or Civil War reenactments), you could find yourself doing the same sort of thing in Valhalla.  Except with real weapons and ammunition and getting blown to bits every day, then reincarnated every night.

    For eternity.

What’s To Like...

    Valhalla is one of Tom Holt’s mythopoeic stories, and those happen to be my favorite subgenre of his works.  I’ve read his hilarious takes on the Holy Grail myth (Grailblazers, reviewed here) and the Flying Dutchman (Flying Dutch, reviewed here) and found both of those to be quite entertaining.  Valhalla measures up nicely as well.

    As with any Tom Holt offering, there are multiple storylines to follow, meaning readers need to stay on their toes to keep up with all the zaniness going on.  I noted five storylines in Valhalla.  They are:

1.) Carol finds herself wenching in the mead hall, and doesn’t want to do that for eternity.

2.) Her dad, Lin, an agent for the gods, pulls strings to rescue her.

3.) Howard plays real war games each day, every day, whether he wants to or not.  He dies a lot.

4.) Attila the Hun and other famous war leaders watch paint dry.

5.) Vinnie miraculously escapes death in disaster-after-disaster, no matter how long the odds.

     Tom Holt is a British author, so Valhalla is written in English, not American.  You’ll travel on the M5, put on armour, be sceptical, get a flat tyre, become stroppy, put up with cissies, wear pyjamas, and use sellotape.

    I’m a history buff, so I was happy to see the Battle of Chalons cited; it was the turning point for Attila’s invasion of Europe.  Ditto for the nods to Mithraism, Henrik Ibsen, and Robert the Bruce’s spider.  My present residence of Arizona gets mentioned twice, and I recall the Tesco’s stores from my visits to England, but had to look up  what “The Two Ronnies” is.  The “anti-thanaton displacement beam” may not be real, but it is way-kewl.

    At 261 pages, the book is relatively short, and the 15 chapters average out to about 17 pages/chapter.  There’s a fair amount of cussing, but that’s about it for R-rated stuff.  Valhalla is a standalone novel, and not part of any series.

Kewlest New Word (and all of them are Britishisms)...

Mug’s game (n., phrase) : a profitless or futile activity.

Others :  Breeze block (n.); Faffed (v.); Penguin biscuit (n.) .

Excerpts...

    It was bathtime; culture shock registering 10.9 on the Richter scale.  Not that old Attila had never got wet.  Far from it.  He could remember days and nights of unspeakable discomfort as the caravan trudged and squelched through snow and driving rain, the water streaming down the inside of his saturated clothes.  He’d always put up with it – no choice in the matter – but it stuck in his memory as one of the most wretched things he’d ever experienced.  Here, for some bizarre reason, they got wet on purpose; these people, with their amazing watertight roofs, had even built a special room just for getting wet in.  Perverts, the lot of them.  (loc. 1667)

    “You hear the voice of Ronald McDonald inside your mind?”

    “All the time.  Actually, he confuses me sometimes.  I remember once, we were besieging this castle in Normandy and nobody could understand why I kept ordering the artillerymen to bombard the walls with sesame seeds and dill pickle.  Still, he’s a bit more lively than the speaking clock.”  (loc. 3358)

Kindle Details...

    Valhalla currently sells for $5.99 at Amazon, which is the price for most of Tom Holt’s e-books there.  You can find a couple going for $4.99, and his half-dozen or so most-recent e-books sell for $9.99.  Most, if not all, of Tom Holt’s novels are now available in Kindle format, which is a great thing, since finding them in the local used-book stores here in Arizona is a rare occurrence.

Your worst nightmare, if you’re a god: humanus ex machina.  (loc. 4560)

    The ending is adequate and twisty, but not compelling.  All the disparate story threads mentioned above are deftly brought together and tied up, but to me things seemed rushed (it’s all done in a single chapter), and a case of humanus ex machina.

    Still, Tom Holt novels are always steeped in absurdism, so this sort of ending should be expected, and might even be deliberate.  I’ve seen Amazon and Goodreads reviewers express difficulty in following the storylines in Tom Holt books, but that’s the essence of the absurd.

    I tend to think Tom Holt books are an acquired taste.  They’re difficult to read at first, but once you get the hang of them, they’re delightful satires..

    8 Stars.  If you end up reading Valhalla, like it, and want more of the same motif, I highly recommend Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips (reviewed here).

The Bat - Jo Nesbo

    1997; 369 pages (English translation from the Norwegian in 2012 by Don Bartlett).  Book One  (out of 11, and soon to be 12) in the Inspector Harry Hole series.  New Author? : No.  Murder-Mystery; Police Procedural; Norwegian Crime Noir.  Overall Rating : 8½*/10.

    It’s undoubtedly the longest business trip in Harry Hole’s career with the Oslo Crime Squad.  All the way from the northwestern European country of Norway to the tip of southeastern Australia, with only one single plane-change in Bahrain.  That's a lot of sitting.  Harry's back was killing him when he finally made it to Sydney.

    Let’s just hope it’s not a wasted trip.  A young, pretty, minor Norwegian TV celebrity has been brutally raped and murdered in Sydney, and Harry has been sent to “assist” in the case.

    Understandably, the Australian police force are somewhat lukewarm about having some foreigner looking over their shoulders.  The Head of the local Crime Squad, Neil McCormack, immediately puts Harry on a short leash.  Harry will do no independent investigating and he will report any and all thoughts or findings he has about the case at once to McCormack.

    Ah, but Harry has a history for bucking orders from his superiors.  You can bet your sweet didgeridoo that he’s not going to play by McCormack’s rules.

    Because there wouldn’t be much of a story if he did.

What’s To Like...

    The Bat is the first book in Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole series, and, since Harry's already a veteran cop, there is a fair amount of time spent on his backstory, which contains a fair amount of uncomfortable baggage.  He conforms to the standard, anti-hero, police-procedural protagonist – he’s jaded, somewhat burnt out, drinks and smokes a lot, gets into bar fights, and  doesn’t follow the wishes of higher-ups well.  As a reader, I’m okay with that.

    I liked the way the setting, Sydney and its immediate environs, was handled.  I felt like the author had spent some time there, instead of just pulling data from the Wikipedia article.  And for a change, the Sydney opera house doesn’t play a part in the story.

    The translation is written in English, not American, which means you have car “boots”, things are “posh”, the carpet gets “hoovered”, and you use a “torch” to see your way around in the dark.  You also learn the proper way way pronounce Harry’s last name: “HOO-leh”.   I naturally assumed it was a one-syllable, long-O word; and most of the Aussies he meets just call him “Harry Holy”.  I also enjoyed the Aussieisms used: “fair dinkum”, “drongo”, and a couple others listed below in the Kewlest New Words section.

     Besides the main storyline questions – who killed Inger Holter?, was it a serial killer?, did it involve drugs? – the book examines the more serious themes of: the deep-seated prejudice against aboriginals, and the self-destructive woes of being an alcoholic.  The pacing is brisk, which will always be a challenge when writing a crime-mystery tale of 350+ pages.  Jo Nesbo works a number of aboriginal folk lore tales into the tale, as well as some hookers, flashers, and the Sydney gay community.

    This is my second Harry Hole book (the other one is reviewed here), and I was once again impressed with the author’s wit and writing skills.  The fight scene (pages 132-134) was particularly fun to read.  Harry Hole books are for adults – there’s lots of cussing, gruesome murders, and oodles of sex, drugs, and booze.  The Bat is a standalone story, as well as part of a series.  There are 57 chapters covering 369 pages, so if it’s time to turn off the lights and go to sleep, you're probably seven pages or less from a chapter break.

Kewlest New Word...

Fair Dinkum (phrase, Aussieism) : used to emphasize or seek confirmation of the genuineness or truth of something.

Others : Kip (v.; a Britishism); Twig (v.; a Gaelicism); Spliff (n.); Snaffling (v.); Squiz (v.; a Britishism).

Excerpts...

    “Mr. White, a woman whom you knew well and with whom you had an intimate relationship has just been murdered.  What you might or might not feel about that is not our business.  However, as you are no doubt aware, we are looking for a murderer, and unless you try to help us this very minute, we will be forced to have you taken to the police station in Sydney.”

    “I’m going to Sydney anyway so if that means you’ll pay for my plane ticket, fine by me.”  (pg. 71)

    “Where do you think (he) will end up?”

    “What do you mean?”

    “Do you think his soul will go up or down?”

    Toowoomba wore a serious expression.  “I’m a simple man, Harry.  I don’t know much about that kind of thing, and I don’t know much about souls.  But I do know a couple of things about (him), and if there’s something up there, and if it’s beautiful souls they want that’s where he belongs.”  He smiled.  “But if there’s anything down there, I think that’s where he’d prefer to be.  He hated boring places.”  (pg. 288)

”We’re living in Sydney, the only town in the world where people are closet heteros.”  (pg. 175)

    It helps to realize that The Bat is a Police Procedural, not a Whodunit.  You can try to solve the murder(s) by walking alongside Harry, and you might even catch some critical clues that Harry later kicks himself for not recognizing sooner.  But the information learned from those clues is not given until Harry announces the identity of the perpetrator.

    That occurs on page 322, at which point, the final fifty pages switches from “who did it” to “how are we going to nab em”.  The finale has an obligatory chase scene, is suitably exciting, and finishes off with an ending that, IMO, is just a bit over the top.

    Some Amazon reviewers give The Bat low ratings, most of them saying that it’s one of the weakest books in the series.  This was only my second Jo Nesbo book, so I don’t feel qualified to comment one way or another on that.  For me, The Bat was an exciting book that kept me turning the pages.

    8½ Stars.   Scandinavian authors kick butt when it comes to writing murder-mystery stories.  Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson, and the team of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo are all masters in this genre.  And now Jo Nesbo can be added to that list.