100 Deadly Skills: Survival Edition: The SEAL Operative's Guide to Surviving in the Wild and Being Prepared for Any Disaster

A few months ago I bought a book that is amazing for an aspiring crime/thriller writer like myself. Titled 100 Deadly Skills and penned by an ex-SEAL, Clint Emerson, it was like a tome of forbidden knowledge. Want your character to escape from handcuffs, cable ties, the boot of car after being handcuffed? 100 Deadly Skills had it all. And there was more. Who knew, for example, that one could build a makeshift TASER from a disposable camera?

So you can imagine my excitement when a sequel hit the virtual shelves of review site NetGalley. I immediately put in my request and received a review copy of 100 Deadly Skills: Survival Edition. As its name suggests the second book focuses more on survival, survival in the wilderness, the desert, the mountains, etc. For sure there is much to recommend this tome, some great nuggets both for real life and, for the writers like myself, for fictional characters and the tales they find themselves in.

The problem is that by moving to a survival manual, Clint Emerson is shifting into an already very crowded field. There are many, many survival and field craft books out there. Shelves of them. I should know, I have quite a few of them. What made 100 Deadly Skills so unique was its originality. Not very many books teach you how to make a makeshift cosh for example. Another problem is that there is more generalised advice in this tome, whereas in the original there was much more specific examples. This is not to say that this latest offering isn't a good book, it is. Would I buy it? Would I recommend it to a friend? Probably. But I would recommend the original first.

3 out of 5 stars

Missing, Presumed by Susie Steiner

Ok, first off a confession. This whole "domestic noir" thing, Gone Girl, Girl On a Train, etc, etc, doesn't really do it for me. Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against it, even enjoyed the Gone Girl film, but it doesn't really float my boat. To be fair I'm probably not the target demographic. At risk of being presumptive, I imagine the genre is targeted at a female audience. That said, I did enjoy the film of Gone Girl (as already said) and domestic noir is the hottest thing in crime fiction at the moment, so I thought I should really give such a book a go.

So along came Missing, Presumed on Netgalley. I put in my request, received the book for review, and here we are. Missing, Presumed tells the story of Edith Hind, a Cambridge student from an affluent, upper class family, who goes missing one frozen, winter night. Cambridge police are called in by her boyfriend who finds her front door open, blood in her kitchen, and possible signs of a struggle. The story follows the investigation and the wider milieu of Edith's friends and family as they cope with her disappearance.  Chapters alternate from different character's perspective, so we get the story from DS Manon Bradshaw (one of the cops) from Edith's mother, her best friend, etc.

This is a slow burner of a book, don't expect fast paced action or plot development. Many of the characters are a little odd, so we get a lot about Manon Bradshaw's internet dating, her loneliness, her trouble with men and the gulf that exists between her and her family. While Manon is the closest we come to a main character, much time is also spent with her friend Helena and her mother Miriam.

Putting aside that domestic noir isn't really my bag, there are some criticisms I have that I feel are relevant. To my mind Missing, Presumed spends too long with too many characters. In all there are chapters told from no less than seven different characters’ perspective. While Manon takes centre stage, in that more chapters are told from her point of view than anyone else's, the number of other characters we spend time with felt like too much. The constant chopping and changing perspective made it difficult for me to warm to any one character and I never felt really felt engaged by any of them.

More galling to me was the mistakes the author made regarding the police. This wouldn't normally bother me, in fact I think some writers try too hard at accuracy with regards to police procedure, filling their pages with turgid description upon turgid description of protocol. But in the acknowledgments at the back of the book she names not one, but three serving Cambridgeshire police officers as having assisted her. She also mentions that she was given a tour of Cambridgeshire's Major Crime Unit. If you're going to boast of such access, you better get it right.

So what does the author get wrong? First off, early in the book she refers to a WPC. Female police officers haven't been WPCs in years, they're now PCs like their male counterparts. This is an especially galling error for a female author to make. But worse is her prose concerning early interviews conducted by the police with Edith's boyfriend and some of the other witnesses. Quite frankly they're what PACE (the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, the law which governs such things) terms "oppressive". In other words, the author has her police question these people aggressively. A little disclaimer, I have friends in the police, two serving officers and one ex-officer. I've had exhaustive conversations with them about how these things are done, and despite what is shown on the telly, British cops at least don't do aggressive interviewing. This is not a naïve point about British cops being ‘better than that’ or more ‘civilised’, it's just a fact. The scandals of miscarriages of justice of the past have forced their hand and PACE explicitly bans it. Of equal importance is that such tactics are just not as effective. What works, what the British police now do instead, is calmly draw the interviewee's story out, testing it all the while for inconsistencies. Don't believe me? Just watch footage released by the police of interviews with any famous convicted murderer. You can find such footage of interviews with Steve Wright, the Ipswich Strangler on Youtube. Even when they have the suspect bang to right, they never interview like the author describes in this book, they never get aggressive. They methodically trap the suspect in his lies, asking the same question repeatedly in different ways, prising open the gaps in their narrative. As I say, this wouldn't bother me in most novels, it's fiction after all. But if you are going to boast of your access in the acknowledgements then you're creating a hostage to fortune with any mistakes.

Having said all that, Missing, Presumed isn't a bad book. It's not a page turner exactly, but it's ok, it kept my interest. Would I recommend it? Putting aside my criticisms, if domestic noir is your thing then this might well be up your street.

3 out of 5 stars

Ash and Bones by Mike Thomas

Mike Thomas, a former Cardiff police officer turned author, first came to my attention with his novel A Pocket Notebook, a dark, funny tale of a firearms officer going off the rails. Next up was his hugely enjoyable Ugly Bus, literally one of the best books I have read, and one of the few to feature as its protagonists’ members of the TSG. The Territorial Support Group is the nearest UK police forces come to having a riot squad, and as such when it does appear in fiction it’s usually as knuckle dragging simpletons. Both of these books are well worth a read, Ugly Bus in particular deserving a recommendation. It is with more than a little excitement that I heard recently that Ugly Bus has been picked up by the BBC for dramatisation and I for one will be glued to my TV when it airs.

But what do after penning two original tales? How often can one come up with something unique? For his third book, Mike Thomas has chosen to tread the safer ground of the police procedural. This choice is understandable as it allows him to develop a small group of characters, the protagonist and a support cast if you will, and flesh them out over a series of novels. It also allows him to tell a more traditional crime story than he has so far. Of course this is not without risk. Until now Thomas’s has been an original voice, one that stood out from the mass of other crime writers with their serried ranks of police detectives and serial killers. Might he sink into cliché and pastiche?

Luckily for his fans Thomas delivers. Ash and Bones is a superior police procedural to much of the opposition. Quite simply it’s a better story. First let’s look at the plot. A squad of police raid a flat looking for low-level criminal. Unfortunately, someone else is there and one of their number is gunned down and killed. The occupant of the flat, the criminal they were after, is also shot and ends up in a coma. Enter DC Will McReady and his colleagues in the CID. It’s Will’s first day and he’s frustrated to have a bit part in the murder investigation, shunted onto other cases with a colleague, Sergeant Charlie Becks.

Of course Will, who has various problems at home, isn’t willing to take this and is determined to insert himself into the centre of the action. This might sound predictable, the cop with the dysfunctional personal life playing maverick, but Thomas is too smart a writer to play that trick. While it’s true that Will manages to bend the rules and uncover leads that others have risked it’s not without cost. There are consequences to his lone ranger antics and his superiors first bollock him and later punish him for doing so. Also his actions have real negative effects and at one point an officer alongside him gets seriously hurt in direct consequence of him disobeying orders. Real police work is teamwork and while the author gives his protagonist leeway to pull the narrative along, this is never forgotten in this tale.

The other thing I liked is he avoids what I consider the lazy device of the serial killer. In my opinion far too many crime writers have a serial killer in their novels. And not just a serial killer, one who kills in outlandish and byzantine ways. As well as being cheesy and completely unrealistic, I’ve always found these tales - the writers of whom seem to enjoy just a little too much penning scenes of young women being tortured and abused - sensationalist and salacious. Thomas forges a different path. His tale revolves around some nasty criminals but they’re not the lazy creations of most writers. And while there is violence in this book, descriptions of bodies which have been tortured and butchered, it’s never titillating.

In fact, the author has managed that rare beast: a crime novel that is both hugely enjoyable whilst also trying to say something. The reader feels like they get an insight into the coal face of policing in modern British city, the nature of organised crime, the jaded cynicism of some police officers whilst others (in this case Will and Sergeant Becks) try to keep hold of their humanity.

In conclusion this is a really good read and an impressive start to a new series. On Amazon it’s listed as Ash & Bones (Will McReady 1) so I guess we will revisit Will and Co in the future. I hope it’s soon and I will be reading.

5 stars