Passenger 23 by Sebastian Fitzek

German undercover detective Martin Schwartz is a man with nothing to lose. Five years before, his wife and young son died on a cruise ship, his wife apparently drugging and throwing his son overboard before jumping herself. Now he takes on the Berlin police force’s toughest assignments and thinks nothing of putting himself in harm’s way. When he receives a mysterious summons from an old woman who is using her retirement money to travel, and permanently live on, the same boat on which his family died, he can’t help but go. Because it transpires another child, who went missing from the ship in a separate incident, and who was presumed to have died, has reappeared.

On board Schwartz, the captain of the ship, the ship’s doctor, and another passenger who’s a professional thief all become embroiled in the mystery (though separately to an extent, the thief in particular is not linked to the others). The fear is there’s a serial killer on board. But are they in fact keeping their victims alive and captive somewhere? And if so, how?

I only recently discovered Sebastian Fitzek, reading and reviewing his novel The Package. I loved that book; it had a crazy rollercoaster of a plot and didn’t even pretend to be realistic, opting instead for non-stop thrills and twists and turns. Passenger 23 is similar in a way - there are certainly twists and turns aplenty - and it’s far-fetched, but I didn’t find it as much of a rollercoaster ride as The Package.

That said, what I did really enjoy in this novel was its sense of place. It’s a cliché when talking about crime fiction that it has to have a sense of place. While many novels strive to bring a location to life, the adage isn’t particularly true, and there are many successful and gripping crime novels which focus more on other aspects, such as characterisation. The Package didn’t really have a sense of place and the storyline could have occurred in any town, but it was still a brilliant book. Passenger 23 has a sense of place though, and a really quite unique one which the author utilises to full effect.

Every year several passengers and crew go missing on cruise ships. This is absolutely true, I’ve read about this in non-fiction news articles and seen documentaries about it, it’s a little-known aspect of the industry. Indeed, in the text of Passenger 23, a character mentions the websites and blogs set up to document all this and support the families whose loved ones have disappeared (internationalcruisevictims.org, cruisejunkie.com, cruisebruise.com); these sites all exist and can be checked out by the reader. For the novel’s purposes, the author claims 23 people go missing every year. I don’t know if that’s an actual figure or one the author has invented for the narrative, but the general idea is true: people go missing every year. Some are undoubtedly suicides, it’s easy to jump off a ship after all, but some could easily be homicides. Because again, as portrayed in the story, it’s for the police of the country the cruise ship is flagged under to investigate any incidents, and for tax and other reasons, this is unlikely to be a first world nation like the US, Germany, or the UK, but a small nation with an under-resourced police force.  

What all this amounts to, and what people don’t realise, is that cruise ships are actually relatively lawless locations, and thus the perfect place to commit a crime, not least a murder. Throughout the narrative of the novel, the author portrays this brilliantly and in fact I actually enjoyed this environment more than I did the plot of the novel. I’m surprised more crime novels aren’t set on cruise ships and while the primary plot of Passenger 23 is the potential serial killer on board, there’s another subplot which is hinted at and which could quite easily have been a story in its own right.

Passenger 23 is a psychological thriller with plenty of twists and turns. I didn’t enjoy its plot as much as I did that of the author’s previous title, The Package, but its setting was unique and he portrayed it well. This is a novel that’s certainly worth a read.

3 out of 5 stars

Blood Gun Money by Ioan Grillo

Much has been written about America’s relationship with guns, the ease by which Americans can buy guns, and in recent years, how this has fed into the never-ending roll-call of massacres (and here we have several weird euphemisms, such as “active shooters”). So people might be mistaken for assuming that they do not need yet another book on the subject, which would be wrong. Because the author of Blood Gun Money is not so interested in Americans and their guns as he is in the industry and how it feeds the narco-wars of Latin America and the gang violence which blights the projects of the inner cities. Because it turns out the legal arms industry fuels, and indeed supports, a massive illegal trade which the author calls the iron river.

Ioan Grillo proves definitely in this book that the iron river is the source of many of the criminal guns in Latin America today. What might be a surprise to readers is that most of the countries of Latin America have far stricter gun ownership laws than the US does. It’s difficult for someone to legally purchase a gun in Mexico. So what the Mexican cartels do is they get people to buy all the guns they need in the US and smuggle them across the border. And business is booming.

The NRA is (unsurprisingly) a villain in all this. By choking off even sensible gun control - such as background checks on private sales - they ensure that not only can criminals and those with serious mental health issues purchase firearms, but people can buy them for the cartels. It’s also incredibly easy to recruit straw buyers - people who buy multiple guns at once from gun shops on the criminals’ behalf - and to rob gun stores. A dirty truth is the arms industry doesn’t want to stop this. Guns are non perishable, so apart from a few serious collectors and those who truly believe an apocalypse is coming and thus they have to have an arsenal, most people buy one or two guns and then have them for years. So how does the arms industry stay afloat? Well, the criminal economy subsidises them, how else to explain why there’s more gun stores in border states? It’s not just Latin America either. There’s an internal trade, states with tougher gun control having weapons smuggled into them from more libertarian states, which undermines efforts by anyone to toughen up the law.  

Grillo travels to various locations to demonstrate all this - talking to gun manufacturers, FBI and ATF agents, and criminals. He visits the ATF gun tracing center in West Virginia, which despite being hampered by ludicrous legislation which prevents them from holding any records or registers (again, courtesy of the NRA, who really has much blood on its hands) proves repeatedly the source of weapons which turn up in killings in Mexico and elsewhere. All this brings colour to the statistics, but it’s the data which proves his case, and there’s just so much evidence. 

This is an eye-opening read, though quite depressing, because you know as a reader that it’s unlikely to register with the US electorate. Trump and others (the Democrats play this game as well) bemoan illegal immigrants and drugs coming north, while turning a blind eye to the export of weapons which kill and maim. Yes, the ATF arrests and prosecutes people (and if the NRA are a villain of the piece, the ATF really are unsung heroes) but sentences are far too low, and the political will is just not there to do more.

To be fair to the Democrats, Biden has pledged to plug some of these legislative holes and we’ll have to see if he manages it, because this book shows America needs to do so. 

5 out of 5 stars

The Foreign Girls by Sergio Olguín

This is the second novel of the author’s Veronica Rosenthal series to be translated into English and follows on from the events of the previous title, The Fragility of Bodies. Veronica, an investigative journalist, has gone travelling through the north of Argentina, a holiday to escape the stress of the aftermath of her exposure of the mafia gang which was betting on the lives of youngsters playing chicken against trains in the first novel. In the small town of Yacanto del Valle she meets, and hooks up with, two women who are also travelling: an Italian and a Norwegian. They get invited to a party where Veronica falls out with them and they part ways. But then Veronica discovers the two were murdered that night and the scene made to look like a black magic ritual.

 

Veronica returns to Yacanto del Valle to investigate and finds a town which town holds many secrets, with powerful landowners holding sway over the townsfolk and able to do whatever they want, and corruption in the institutions of the state. Complicating her investigations is the fact that one of the hitmen from the last novel is pursuing Veronica looking for revenge.

 

The Foreign Girls is a solid novel and is well-plotted, giving a good insight into the corruption which blights Argentine society. I have read similar non-fiction accounts and so the depiction the author gives appears accurate. Like much of South America, the country is in desperate need of land reform and in rural areas particularly, the wealthy enjoy near-immunity from prosecution. Similarly, there are still dark shadows left from the dictatorship it endured in the not-so-distant past. 

That all said, while I enjoyed this novel, I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as the previous title. In part this because The Fragility of Bodies had a more original plot than The Foreign Girls, but also because I found the writing in this second outing to be a bit more stilted.

 

The Foreign Girls remains a great novel however, and with The Fragility of Bodies it had much to live up to, so perhaps it's harsh to compare it with its predecessor.

 

3 out of 5 stars

 

The Children God Forgot by Graham Masterson - Extract

 

My stop on the Blogtour for this title, and I have an extract. Here it is:

Detective Constable Jerry Pardoe had paused by the front desk of Tooting Police Station to chat to PC Susan Lawrence when his iPhone rang. It was Detective Sergeant Bristow.

     ‘Where are you, Pardoe? Have you taken yourself off home yet?’

     ‘I’m on the verge, sarge.’

     ‘That’s all right, then. I’m going to need you to do a spot of overtime. There’s been a stabbing outside that karate club on Streatham Road, the one over Tesco. There’s two squad cars and an ambulance on the way there now. Mallett can go with you.’

     ‘Oh, shit. What is it, fatal?’

     ‘Don’t know yet. Two blokes having a barney over some bird, apparently.’

     ‘Hope she was worth it. Okay. You can tell Mallett that I’ll meet him out the back, in the car park.’

     He turned to PC Lawrence and pulled a face. He had fancied her ever since she had been posted to Tooting, three weeks ago. She had high cheekbones and feline eyes and short-cropped light brown hair, and her white uniform blouse only emphasised her very large breasts. He had said to his friend Tony at the garage that she had the face of a TV weather girl and the figure of a Playboy model. He had been just about to ask her if she fancied a Thai at the KaoSam restaurant in the High Street when she finished her shift, but now it looked as if he was going to be spending the rest of the evening trying to get some sense out of bloodstained teenagers out of their brains on dizz.

     ‘Oh well, duty calls,’ he told her. ‘You don’t happen to be free tomorrow night, do you?’

     ‘Tomorrow? No. It’s my partner’s day off. We’re going ice-skating.’

     ‘Won’t catch me doing that, I’m afraid. Last time I tried I spent most of the time sliding around on my arse.’

     ‘I’m not that good, either. But my partner – she’s brilliant.’

     ‘Oh. Been together long, have you, you and your – ah, partner?’

     ‘Nearly a year now.’

     ‘Oh. Well, have a good time.’

      Jerry went out of the back door of the police station and across the car park to his silver Ford Mondeo. Just my bleeding luck, he thought, as he sat behind the wheel. The tastiest-looking bit of crumpet that’s turned up at Tooting nick ever since I’ve been here and it turns out that she’s the L bit of LGBTQ.

     DC Bobby Mallett came hurrying out, trying to zip up his windcheater while holding onto a half-eaten cheese-and-tomato roll. He was short and tubby, with prickly black hair and bulging brown eyes and a blob of a nose. Everybody at the station called him ’Edge’og.

     He climbed into the passenger seat and twisted around to find his seatbelt.

     ‘I hope you’re not going to be dropping crumbs all over the shop,’ said Jerry, as he started the engine. ‘I just spent a tenner having this motor valeted.’

     ‘Bloody kids stabbing each other,’ said DC Mallett. ‘What’s that, about the fourth one this week? They don’t get it, do they, all carrying knives and machetes around and threatening each other? They don’t seem to understand that when you’ve snuffed it that’s it. You don’t wake up the next morning and say, cor, that was horrible, that was, being splashed like that.’

     ‘That kid yesterday afternoon, that one who was stabbed outside Chicks, he snuffed it last night.’

     ‘Yes, I heard. What was he, only about fifteen?’

     ‘Fifteen last week,’ said Jerry. ‘And the kid who stabbed him’s only seventeen.’ He put on his drill rap voice. “He was trapping round my ends and it was peak. No way man was going to stand for that.”

     ‘What a pillock.’

     ‘It’s your Generation Z, ’Edge,’ said Jerry, as he turned down Links Road towards Streatham. ‘They might be tech savvy but when it comes to anything else they don’t know their arse from their elbow.’

     It took them less than five minutes to reach the crime scene. Two squad cars were already parked outside Tesco’s supermarket, with their blue lights flashing, and an ambulance was parked outside the Polski Sklep grocery store. A small crowd had gathered but they were already being held back by police tape. Jerry pulled up behind the ambulance and he and Mallett climbed out. It was a chilly evening, and their breath smoked, so that they looked like old-fashioned coppers in a black-and-white 1950s crime film.

Deity by Matt Wesolowski

This is fourth outing for online journalist Scott King and his Six Stories podcast, and he’s looking into the mysterious life and death of pop megastar Zach Chrystal. Chrystal shot to fame as a child star with his sister Naomi, but then went solo and became a superstar. Unlike many in show business though, he rarely gave interviews and was an elusive figure. He also visited hospitals and befriended troubled teenage girls in the wards. He was regularly the subject of tabloid speculation, but used his army of well-paid lawyers to shut down troublesome rumours and questions. One day he went missing, and no one knew where he was, only to reappear and announce a new album and tour. This injected his career, which had flagged in recent years, with new impetus, and his old albums sold once more; he soared to new heights. But then there was a fire at his remote mansion and he died in the blaze.

So, that’s the subject of this edition of the Six Stories podcast, and as usual, it’s told in six parts, each taking a unique perspective on Zach Chrystal’s life. Along the way we meet a paedophile hunter who thought they had ensnared Zach on social media trying to meet an underage girl; a pro-Chrystal blogger, and one of an army of fanatical fans ready to harass and doxx anyone with a bad word to say about their icon; a former employee of Chrystal’s who worked in his mansion; and the mother of a girl who he befriended and has since run away. There are two other guests who I won't reveal in this review as I don’t want to divulge spoilers.

My guess is that Zach Chrystal is modelled on Michael Jackson (the mega stardom; the elusiveness and rare media appearances; the outrageous clothing; the befriending of underage teenagers and having them stay over, and defending this behaviour by saying he’s just a child at heart; the fanatical fan base eager to attack those who criticise him), with some influences from Jimmy Savile (visiting hospital wards to befriend those sick or injured, and giving money to those hospitals to ensure they're in hock to him). 

Certainly, this is a book about stardom and how it can shield wrongdoing. But of course, there’s a supernatural element too. Wesolowski is an author who always imbues his tales with a whiff of the occult, and here we have a strange beast that stalks the forest in which Chrystal has built his mansion and which the pop star is obsessed with. Might this creature be responsible for the death of two of his fans in those woods?

Deity is yet another brilliant novel in this series, and the Six Stories franchise, if I can call it that, is as strong as ever. I look forward to reading the sixth Six Stories tale, or indeed, whatever the author chooses to write next.

4 out of 5 stars