Careless love

Once again it's the end of July, and as always, there is a new DCI Banks book to devour, "Careless love". Again, the title of a song and again, there's little connection between the song and the book, although maybe the third line, "You've ruined the life of many a poor girl" is appropriate. The book starts with the body of a dead girl being found in a car which had previously been involved in a crash. How did the girl die? How did she get into the car? More importantly, who is she? Another body is found with similar characteristics: seemingly a suicide, but how did the person get to where he was found (in the middle of a moor)?

Slowly but surely, our intrepid team (down to four: Banks, Annie Cabbot, Winsome Jackson and Gerry Masterson) collect scraps of information about the two cases; they finally find a link between the two, and as they do so, they are informed of a similar death in a nearby city that seemed to have occurred at the same time as the first two deaths. Painstakingly, one fact follows another and eventually a major breakthrough is made - and this is around the 75% mark!

My review at Amazon is as follows: A few disclaimers: I have read (and generally loved) all of the DCI (now DS) Banks books. As is typical with these books, they start off with a dead body and an investigation which seems to go nowhere for most of the book, with the pace picking up only towards the end. The book is an example of a police procedural, in which a steady accumulation of facts (with no sudden leaps of intuition) finally pays off. In-between, there is a fair amount of music mentioned (some classical, some rock, some jazz) as well as poetry: one's mileage may vary with this material; personally, I love it as it makes Banks much more human. There are also several very up-to-date issues mentioned, such as Brexit and Syrian refugees.

This is very much a British book, so readers coming from different backgrounds may have different expectations and may take the non-investigative material to be a waste of space. As a contrast, I have just read back to back eleven books about an American forensic pathologist; almost of all the books are about serial killers, with some stories lasting three books. Plenty of guns, plenty of swearing, the 'good guys' shooting and killing the villains, etc. Only the forensic parts were interesting. The Banks books - and "Careless love" is no exception - occur in a more polite and realistic setting.

I can't say at the moment that this is one of the better books in the series; it takes a while for the good points to shine, and I've only read the book once so far. It certainly is not a bad book. I can understand readers who will be impatient with the slow pace, but that ironically is what makes the book more life-like.

The only thing which left me scratching my head was the entire Zelda plot-line (this will be clear to someone who has read the book). I didn't mention this originally because it has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the book; it could be excised and no one would notice. But it does set up a storyline which could be the next Banks book, although the only way that Banks could be involved is by having a murder in his 'parish'.

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The American books which I mentioned are a series written by Patrica Cornwell, with lead character Kay Scarpetta, who originally is the Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia, USA. The first book was very good (it won several prizes), but the others are disappointing. The first ten books are written as first person narrative by Dr Scarpetta, which lets us know very well what she is feeling and thinking, but limits the action to what she perceives, whereas the eleventh book is written with an unlimited narrator and so the action ranges far and wide. It was very jarring to read about a character called 'Scarpetta' after having been inside her skin for so long. It is telling that she enters the eleventh book only after several other characters (none of whom are pleasant) have made their entrance, somewhere around the fourth chapter.

At first, I thought that the books would be like 'Silent Witness'; the pathology parts definitely are, but the rest is certainly not. There are a few books in those first eleven (and there are twenty five and counting in the series) where there is but one post-mortem, and that takes place only half way through the book. I'm only reading these books because I've been traveling a great deal in the past few weeks and so have the time, along with a limited attention span.