‘Testimony by Scott Turow

Published by Mantle,
27 July 2017.
ISBN: 978-1-5089-4332-9 (HB)

At first glance, the International Criminal Court in The Hague doesn't appear to be ideal material for fiction. War crimes often require years of meticulous investigation, not to mention even more years spent trying to track down the perpetrators. But Scott Turow, master if not inventor of the art of the legal thriller, can be relied on to turn a heinous offence committed during a brutal conflict into a rattling good tale with more than a few twists.

Testimony is a meaty and many-stranded read, part legal thriller, part man in midlife crisis. It's not a story that will keep you turning the pages all night to get to the denouement, but it is a book that will make you want to come back to it time and time again, to find out exactly what is going on, who the real bad guys are, who is and isn't telling the truth, and whether any resolution can be found to the protagonist's personal dilemmas.

Ferko Rincic, a member of the beleaguered Roma community in eastern Europe, has come forward to testify regarding a massacre of four hundred of his compatriots from one makeshift village during the 1990s conflict which resulted in the break-up of Yugoslavia. His evidence states that they were rounded up and shipped out in stolen lorries, and sent to hide in a deserted mine which was subsequently blown up.

Bill ten Boom, an American lawyer of Dutch descent, has his own reasons for wanting to pursue a new career path, and when he returns to the land of his ancestors to join the International Criminal Court he finds himself heavily involved in Rincic's case – and also involved with Rincic's own counsel, the glamorous and forceful Esma Czarni, herself a Romany.

American troops, Bosnian militants and Serbian militia are all part of the story as Boom, as he is known, and his investigator Goos attempt to uncover the truth about the incident. The narrative doesn't play out exclusively in The Hague's stately legal corridors, although they are brought to life with a certain amount of wry humour. Turow can also write a great action sequence, and build suspense about what really is going on. He portrays almost destitute villages, small Bosnian towns and some of America's more affluent corners with a clarity which has to come from extensive research – of which there's a great deal of evidence throughout the book.

He also knows how to create colourful characters. I especially enjoyed Attila, the lesbian former logistics NCO, and Layton Merriwell, the former NATO Supreme Allied Commander; Boom forms warm relationships with them both as well as with the luscious Esma, with ambivalent consequences for the investigation.

Testimony is a substantial volume, but well worth the time and effort a reader will put into it. Scott Turow's earlier work has often thrown light into some of the gloomier corners of legal practice, and revealed goings-on which were previously a well-kept secret. This is no exception, and it's also a great story.

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Reviewer: Lynne Patrick

Scott Turow is the author of ten bestselling works of fiction, including Identical, Innocent, Presumed Innocent, and The Burden of Proof, and two nonfiction books, including One L, about his experience as a law student. His books have been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than thirty million copies worldwide, and have been adapted into movies and television projects. He has frequently contributed essays and op-ed pieces to publications such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic. Scott Turow was born in Chicago in 1949. He graduated with high honors from Amherst College in 1970, receiving a fellowship to Stanford University Creative Writing Center which he attended from 1970 to 1972. From 1972 to 1975 Turow taught creative writing at Stanford. In 1975, he entered Harvard Law School, graduating with honors in 1978. From 1978 to 1986, he was an Assistant United States Attorney in Chicago, serving as lead prosecutor in several high-visibility federal trials investigating corruption in the Illinois judiciary. In 1995, in a major pro bono legal effort he won a reversal in the murder conviction of a man who had spent 11 years in prison, many of them on death row, for a crime another man confessed to.

Today, he is a partner in the Chicago office of Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal an international law firm, where his practice centers on white-collar criminal litigation and involves representation of individuals and companies in all phases of criminal matters. Turow lives outside Chicago.

Lynne Patrick has been a writer ever since she could pick up a pen, and has enjoyed success with short stories, reviews and feature journalism, but never, alas, with a novel. She crossed to the dark side to become a publisher for a few years, and is proud to have launched several careers which are now burgeoning. She lives on the edge of rural Derbyshire in a house groaning with books, about half of them crime fiction.

‘Reconciliation for the Dead’ by Paul E. Hardisty

Published by Orenda Books,

30 May 2017.
ISBN: 978-1-910633-68-7 (PB)

Reconciliation for the Dead is the third volume of a four-part series featuring Claymore Straker, a former SADF (South African Defence Force) paratrooper. It follows The Abrupt Physics of Dying (set in the Yemen in the early nineties) and The Evolution of Fear (set in Istanbul and Cyprus). There is a common theme to all three novels: how governments and huge corporations are conning us, wasting and destroying both human beings and the natural environment.

In Reconciliation for the Dead it is the South African apartheid government, military establishment and BOSS (Bureau of State Security i.e. secret police). The novel starts with Clay (as he is known) in his hotel in Maputo, Mozambique. He has just left South Africa where he has been testifying to Archbishop Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, about a massacre of civilians in Angola, in which he had participated. We now switch back thirteen years or so to the Namibian-Angolan border in 1980. There is a vicious civil war between two factions who had been allies in the independence struggle against the former colonial power, Portugal: the MPLA, now in government, supported by the Soviet Union and Cuba, and UNITA with its ally, South Africa. This war is presented to the young naïve soldiers as a war of self-defence against communist aggression. In fact, it is, as Clay comes to realise, a race war.

Clay and his philosophical friend Ebben are sent on patrol (authorised by an officer who is a member of Torch Commando, a clandestine group of dissident white South Africans) into Angola in order to report back on secret activity carried out by certain elements in the SADF and secret service in collusion with UNITA. They witness medical experiments supervised by a Mengele-type character known as Doctor Death (this is based in fact). Later, Clay meets Vivian, a doctor in a military hospital where he is being treated. She persuades him to help her gather information on this sinister programme.

Other important characters are his friend Brigade, a black tracker working for the SADF, and, above all, his commanding officer, nicknamed Koevoet or Crowbar, a consummate professional killer, nevertheless an inspiring leader who has won the devotion of his men. All these characters are well-drawn and interesting.

Interspersed with the narrative are excerpts from the Commission hearing, in which Clay’s reliability as a witness is subjected to considerable doubt.

Lastly, let me say that Hardisty writes brilliantly, combining sharp, punchy narrative with beautiful reflective and descriptive passages. I can’t wait for the next, and final, instalment. Readers might also be interested in an interview with Paul Hardisty in Mystery People in which he talks about his writing.

https://promotingcrime.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/paul-e-hardisty.html

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Reviewer: Ranald Barnicot

Canadian-born thriller writer Paul E. Hardisty has lived all over the world in his career as a professional scientist, hydrologist and engineer, and is now settled with his family in Perth, Australia, where until just recently he was Director of Australia’s national water, land and ecosystems research programmes, and he is an adjunct professor at Imperial College, London, and at the University of Western Australia.  In addition, he is a pilot, sailor, outdoorsman, and conservation volunteer. And in all this, he has found time to write in vivid, eloquent prose three long, fast-paced, action-packed, complex eco-thrillers, with a fourth one coming out soon. In all those the protagonist is South African Claymore Straker, very much the action man but whose experiences over many years, which take him on what might be called the classic ‘hero’s journey’, lead him to view the world very differently in his maturity to the way he viewed it when young. 

 

Ranald Barnicot is a recently-retired teacher of EFL/ESOL, who has worked in Spain, Portugal, Italy, and the U.K. His last employment was at Barnet and Southgate College, London. He is perhaps less of a connoisseur than other contributors to his site but enjoys reading thrillers and crime fiction. His main interest, though, is writing poetry – these days mainly translations. He has had both original poems and translations (Catullus, Horace, Verlaine) published in various journals (print and online). He is married and had two daughters.

‘The City in Darkness’ by Michael Russell

Published by Constable,
6 April 2017.
ISBN: 978–1-47212–191-2 (PB)

In rural Ireland, one Christmas Eve, a village postman, Billy Byrne, vanishes. The other villagers deny all knowledge as to where he has gone or what might have become of him. In County Wicklow, Ireland, in 1932, a young woman called Maeve, while swimming in the Upper Loch, Glendalough, is deliberately drowned by someone she knows. In 1937 in Spain, deep in the throes of a bloody civil war where atrocities are being committed by both sides in the conflict, some Irishmen have joined the Republican cause, others the Nationalist. One of the Republican Irishmen is committed Communist and IRA supporter Frank Ryan, but for all that when young Nationalist Mickey Hagan is captured and threatened with summary execution Ryan intervenes and saves his life. And in December 1939, when England had declared war on Germany but little actual fighting had taken place while the Irish Republic remained neutral, Detective Inspector Stefan Gillespie of the Irish Special Branch is occupied with checking up on the numerous Irishmen who for one reason or another had joined the British forces. Stefan himself is the protagonist in the two previous novels, City of Shadows, set in Ireland and Danzig in 1933, and City of Strangers, set in Dublin and New York in 1938. He is essentially an outsider, his father being an Irish protestant, his mother German. From her he has learned fluent German, and from his outsider status he is better able to empathise with the English point of view – or so his boss, the outwardly affable but in reality devious Superintendent Terry Gregory, appears to think. And a fourth plot strand is introduced when Stefan overhears Gregory discussing with senior IRA official Cathal McAllister plans for a raid by the IRA on a Dublin Arms depot: for all the past, the Irish Government now has no wish to encourage the IRA which is still fighting its war against the British with tacit German support. All in all, Stefan is glad to get away for Christmas to the village where his parents and his beloved little son Tom especially since Kate will be with them.

But it is then that all these plot strands begin to come together when Stefan is sent by Terry Gregory to the village where the postman went missing. He has mixed feelings about this, because the village is near Glendalough where Maeve died and because there are suspicions back in Dublin that the local police are dragging their feet over the investigation. But it is when Stefan goes through Billy Byrne’s desk that he finds grounds for suspecting that Maeve’s death was not an accident and that other young women had died or disappeared. Moreover there are mysterious payments into Byrne’s bank account. And correspondence between Byrne and others who, like him, had been with the Irish contingent on the Nationalist side one of whom was none other than Mickey Hagan. So when Stefan is required to accompany the Irish ambassador to Spain to Dublin it gives him the opportunity to continue the search for the truth about Maeve’s death but it also draws him into the morass of what is going on first in Spain then in Portugal, both countries neutral, endeavouring to stay out of involvement in the war which we know will overwhelm not just the rest of Europe but the whole world.

The City in Darkness is the third in this excellent series and has been nominated for the CWA Historical Dagger. The various plot strands are woven together in a complex web which is eventually unwound in a highly satisfying manner. In order to understand the plot, it is not necessary to read the earlier books but to do so would enhance enjoyment of this title. Some of the characters have appeared in those books and they also include notes describing the historical context, particularly that involving the newly founded Republic of Ireland, of the events in each book. It might have been helpful if this volume had given an outline of the Spanish Civil War but no doubt a resume is available via Wikipedia and other sources. I do very highly recommend all three books and am looking forward to the next one, City of Lies, set in Ireland and Berlin, which is published this year.

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Reviewer: Radmila May

Michael Russell has a degree in English and began his career as a script editor on ITV’s Emmerdale Farm later becoming series producer, then a script consultant and then producer in ITV’s drama department. He left ITV to write full-time. He has contributed regularly to Midsomer Murders and scripted the last ever episodes of A Touch of Frost which topped the ratings. He now lives in County Wicklow, Republic of Ireland, with his family, ‘not a million miles from Stefan Gillespie’s home’, and writes full-time. His two previous Stefan Gillespie novels have been shortlisted for Crime Writers’ Association awards as has City of Darkness. Although City of Darkness does not have the historical background notes that the two earlier ones have, on the author’s website there is a long and fascinating article included under the heading ‘War’ discussing not just the role of Ireland in World War but also that of Spain and Portugal under their respective dictatorships.

www.michalerussellforgottencities.com

Radmila May was born in the U.S. but has lived in the U.K. since she was seven apart from seven years in The Hague. She read law at university but did not go into practice. Instead she worked for many years for a firm of law publishers and still does occasional work for them including taking part in a substantial revision and updating of her late husband’s legal practitioners’ work on Criminal Evidence published late 2015. She has also contributed short stories with a distinctly criminal flavour to two of the Oxford Stories anthologies published by Oxpens Press – a third story is to be published shortly in another Oxford Stories anthology – and is now concentrating on her own writing.