The Inspector Wears Skirts IV

 

Retirement Blues

The Inspector Wears Skirts IV
aka 92 Ba wang hua yu Ba wang hua
Hong Kong 1992 Directed by Wellson Chin 
88 Films Blu Ray Zone B

Well now, apart from the first of these movies, which included Cynthia Rothrock, I’d have to say that this series of films is not something I’d really wish to revisit again anytime soon. That being said, The Inspector Wears Skirts IV starts off with a fairly strong opening half an hour, before completely blowing it for most of the rest of the running time. So this at least puts it a little higher in terms of entertainment value than the second and third films in the franchise. 

We actually start with a full blown action sequence of the remaining members of the old SKIRTS unit, trying to save some hostages, with some getting killed or injured. We then get some cartoon illustrations and later freeze frames from old films in the series to fill us in on what some of the characters have been doing since leaving the force. Then we have the graduation ceremony for the new girls, almost all of whom resign because they don’t respect their boss. However, due to a hostage situation and a gangster trying to get the police to release his kingpin father, the remaining two skirts go to recruit some of the old gals, by fair means or fowl, to help them get their mojo back (for want of a better description). They are also led by the new ‘Golden Skirt’ who is there to teach them, played by none other than Cynthia Khan. 

Now, one of the old gals they manage to get back, just about, is May, played again by Kara Ying Hung Wai as a person driven crazy by her experiences in the SKIRTS... so they have to get her released from a mental health institution (think like a female version of Murdoch from The A Team, is the way she plays her this time around). And then, of course, no SKIRTS movie would be complete without the return of Sandra Kwan Yue Ng as Amy, now divorced from the most unlikely guy in the third film and raising her son as a single parent. I have to say, this really shows up the producers idea that the third movie, though still sharing the same director, doesn’t really count as part of the franchise in their books... so it really doesn’t follow on from the character as we left her at the end of the last movie at all.

And I’d like to tell you this was more consistently entertaining than the last one but, we’re again assaulted by very crude and broad humour which mostly fails to land but, at least there’s a lot more action this time around and it feels more like a Hong Kong martial arts piece in that sense. But yeah, there’s really not much going for it and when the finale involves a school full of child hostages (including Amy’s kid) there’s even a sequence where said kid sets booby traps for a comical henchman to get repeatedly caught in, like the film just suddenly turned into Home Alone for a few minutes. 

The one thing which does raise this is the quality of the subtitles... and if you’re buying the British version put out by 88 Films, if you want an extra, unintentional comedy treat (which, lets face it, if you’re watching this series, may well be the only way you’re going to get a laugh)... then said subtitles seem like they’re particular tailored for the British audience. I lost count of the times the various characters say things on the subtitles like... “Bloody Hell”, “Bollocks”, “Piss Off” and “You Wanker”. I mean, I’m assuming this has been re-subtitled for the recent American release of this movie?

Highlights to this one would be the novelty of cartoon pictures, the moment when a gangster in a wheelchair opens fire with twin machine guns coming from said chair and a strange, metatextual moment when one of the characters comments on how dream-like a particular location is, which is all shot soft focus so she’s commenting on the camerawork as much as anything.

However, at the end of the day, a few neat moments and a strong opening do not make for a good film and are unable to hoist The Inspector Wears Skirts IV up from the mess it gets itself into. Probably the second best of the franchise but, yeah, really nothing in here for me to recommend to others, that’s for sure. 

Cure

Xual Healing

Cure
Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Japan 1997
Daiei/Eureka Masters Of Cinema
Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Spoilers... in as much as I could make out.

Cure is a genre film by Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation to the great Akira) but, having watched it and not fully understanding it... I’d have to say that I’m not sure just what genre it’s in for sure. Certain elements could (or maybe not) concede an almost supernatural bent like a ‘curse/virus’ movie... other interpretations may put it down to having slight science fiction elements. For me, I’m not sure what it’s correct interpretation really is... if indeed it has an intended one. All I am absolutely sure about is that it’s a thriller dressed up somewhat as a police procedural movie.

Now, I’ve only seen one other of this director’s similarly lionised works, Pulse (which I reviewed here) and, yeah, I really didn’t think much of it at the time. Cure, on the whole, is a film I appreciated a little more, I think... and it engaged me while, not quite giving me any kind of wrap up. Now, as a lover of foreign language films, I loved the slower pacing and the lack of spoon feeding of story conclusions but, I did feel a little short changed by this one. More, I think, because there is an extra set of loose threads which people seem to be ignoring, I think.

Okay... so the hook is brilliant. We see a murder which is ‘so not’ telegraphed and performed so casually and brutally (and out of the blue) that it almost acts like a jump scare, right at the start of the movie. A customer murders a prostitute with multiple blows to the head and then carves a big X in her chest/neck area.

Detective Takabe, played by superstar Kôji Yakusho, is called into the case with his ‘psychiatric advisor’ who is helping him on what turns out to be a series of murders he is investigating. Takabe finds the murderer hiding nearby in a hidey hole in the same apartment building’s corridor.

The reason Takabe has a psychiatric consultant is because this is the third victim in a spate of recent killings and in each case, the murderer is easily found nearby and, in each case, the victim has been mutilated and had an X carved into the same region on their body. And in each case, each different killer has no idea why they committed the crime and find the incident as strange as the police inspectors doing the investigating.

Takabe has problems with his wife, who we saw reading Bluebeard during her psychiatric appointment and, seemingly to me, demonstrating slight psychokinetic abilities. Meanwhile, a possibly amnesiac drifter called Mamiya (played by Masato Hagiwara) is encountering people and, it soon becomes clear, is hypnotising them into committing these crimes, which continue to punctuate the film in gruesome ways while the detective finally catches up with him.

A which point you begin to fear for the main protagonist, as well as his increasingly forgetful wife, who seems to be approaching an outward state not dissimilar to Mamiya herself. Things get blurry and it’s hard to tell, in the end, if Takabe has actually killed his wife, who he is currently entrusting to the hospital or, given the dreamlike nature of an earlier apparition of her suicide, whether she is even dead or not (at least that’s my interpretation).

Before I get to the ‘what the heck actually happened’ nature of the ending, I will say that it’s pretty nicely put together and has some beautifully designed frames. Often the director will focus on a person and their space in the middle third of a frame, through a doorway or opening with the walls in the foreground as two similarly thin slats on either side of it. At other times, such as an early beach scene, he moves away from the claustrophobia inducing, crowded slats of this style of framing and instead places his actors in isolation, small against a larger, more tranquil backdrop. So visually and also in terms of the acting, I certainly never got bored.

The ending is... somewhat open to interpretation and so, because I wanted to know if there was a definitive conclusion to be drawn from it, I read some other people’s interpretations. When a waitress serving food to Takabe picks up a knife to kill someone out of the blue, many people are concluding, perhaps correctly, that he has become the embodiment of Mamiya for himself. However, this seems to miss out a few things which might have made that a cut and dried interpretation of the story elements in this one.

Firstly, Takabe doesn’t seem to be actively trying to mesmerise anybody. Secondly, there have been some much stronger, psychokinetically induced (I believe) tremors of late in the hospital where Takabe’s wife is. And thirdly, I can’t quite work out what the connection between the novel Bluebeard and this series of, seemingly unconnected, wave of murders actually is. Fourthly, a number of people seemed to be priming the waitress for her potential action at the end of the movie... were they just asking her customer questions or is there a whole network of these people around?

I don’t know and, sadly, by this point I don’t care. What I do know, however, is that Cure is a pretty interesting film which probably deserves, to an extent, the following that it has in some countries. It’s perhaps a film which doesn’t inspire multiple revisits over a short span of time but it’s certainly something I may revisit someday and I liked it well enough. Worth a look sometime, if you are into late 1990s Japanese genre cinema (although what genre this one is actually in is still up for debate in this case, I feel).

The Miracle Of The Sargasso Sea

Eel To Reel

The Miracle Of The Sargasso Sea
(aka To thávma tis thálassas
ton Sargassón)
Directed by Syllas Tzoumerkas
2019 Greece/Germany/Netherlands/Sweden
London Film Festival 2019 screening Friday 4th October

The Miracle Of The Sargasso Sea is my first film of six at this year’s London Film Festival and it turned out to be a good choice. I’ve not seen any of the ‘Greek new wave’ movies of recent years other than Dogtooth (which was spectacular, my review here) so I didn’t know quite what to expect but this looked to me like a film with a strong, central female character and... I certainly wasn’t wrong there. Two strong central female roles, in fact. One of these is Elisabeth, played by Angeliki Papoulia, who has been forced to flee the corruption of the police division she was working in ten years prior, transferred to a Greek island with her young son to be the local chief of police. The other is Rita, played by Youla Boudali who co-wrote the screenplay with the director. She plays a member of what I will only describe as a hugely disfunctional family, who’s brother gets murdered at some point in the film.

Starting off very strong with an opening sequence of terrorists being raided by the police, ten years prior to the events depicted in the rest of the film... the story offers up the metaphor that drives it, quite overtly, with a nature documentary being watched by Elsiabeth’s son, talking about eels migrating to the Sargasso Sea every year to give birth and then die. Rita herself works in an eel farm and this, in some ways, re-enforces the metaphor a little. Actually, the fact that this film is showing 'in festival' usually means it’s uncertified as yet but, if it gets a proper release in this country, I think there’s a strong chance the BBFC may want some of the scenes of the actors slaughtering live eels removed. That’s one the good things about seeing films in festival... they’re usually shown uncut.

Anyway, animal atrocities aside, the story that unfolds is of an alcoholic woman in charge of a police force who is every bit as corrupt as the one she left, with herself certainly as brutal and ‘above the law’ as the majority of her fellow officers. As the two leads go about their daily business, the camera follows them and really gets ‘in the face’ of the action. There’s a lot of hand held in this thing and it really adds to the grittiness of the piece as the various characters get up close and personal with the audience. There are times of violence, including but not limited to sexual violence... let’s just say that Rita is, kind of, a submissive personality... but the main take away from these sequences is that they don’t treat the conflict of the characters in a comic book manner. These sequences show the consequence of violence quite clearly on the wonderful make-up jobs of the bloody and pulped faces of the cast and are all the more... well not quite disturbing but certainly effective to get the message across that this kind of brutality is not something you want to be playing with in real life.

The actual disturbing part of this film, for me, was the unmitigated brutality and corruption of the various police agencies. Seriously, these make the 1940s and 1950s Los Angeles cops of James Ellroy’s novels look practically angelic...or they are at least in the same league. There was a question and answer session with both Syllas Tzoumerkas and Youla Boudali after the screening and the truly scary thing was that the two writers were both very familiar with the locales they were writing about and, in terms of the police brutality depicted in this movie, the director commented that his depiction of it was, if anything, not nearly as intense as the reality of the situation in Greece. That’s truly scary and I certainly don’t want to ever get into trouble with the police in that country if I could ever help it (though I suspect the same can be said over here too... it’s just a little more regulated and suppressed, I would guess).

Another thing which hit home is that the solution to the murder at the heart of the film is not arrived at by Elisabeth through a series of logical deductions from lots of clues. Instead, it just falls into her lap as part of some illegally obtained evidence she pretty much confiscates for her own purposes and she just gets lucky. Then, instead of using her power to do what the law requires of her and join the dots, she brutalises a confession out of the guilty party before doing something even more questionable but which is, at least, more about seeing a kind of justice done rather than carrying out the law. Something which, I suspect, is only possible because the dark underbelly of the family unit under investigation reaches right inside her own police force and so the people involved are obviously complicit in the particular brand of justice which she decides to mete out at the end of the movie.

And that’s me done with The Miracle Of The Sargasso Sea. There’s actually a lot to unpack and think about in terms of the central metaphor and the way in which the various characters experience the chaos of their life but that stuff needs to gestate in my brain a while. All I will say is that I hope that The Miracle of The Sargasso Sea gets some kind of uncut release in either the US or UK and that I get the opportunity to have another look at it. Anyone who is into police procedural movies or, more importantly, the way in which a happy family unit can appear to have a few cracks on the outside while, underneath, there is a huge problem, should get a blast out of watching this movie. I’m definitely going to have to track down this director’s other works at some point soon and give them a go.

Destroyer

Destroyer Rides Again

Destroyer
2018 USA
Directed by Karyn Kusama
UK cinema release print.

Wow... this is a really great movie.

And, I’m happy to say... it took me unawares.

So Destroyer is a tale about a cop who was working with the FBI, 16 years prior to one of the main story timelines in the film, when the job went south for reasons I won’t reveal here. The cop’s name is Erin Belle and she’s played here by Nicole Kidman in what is a pretty amazing performance. She’s joined here by Toby Kebbell playing the lead villain Silas and Sebastian Stan playing Chris, Belle’s former partner in the back story.

The film is directed by Karyn Kusama, who directed both Aeon Flux and Jennifer’s Body (reviewed here) and it’s a real gem of a picture. I’m going to have to tread very carefully here to avoid spoilers.

Kidman plays two sides of Erin Belle, one as the bright, young thing who was involved in the original events and one as the current, burnt out cop version of her character who has been sent some evidence that the villain who wrecked things for her 16 years ago is back and up to his old tricks. So we see her piecing together the evidence and information she needs to find this villain while, at the same time, trying to juggle the stress of managing her fraught, alienated relationship with her 16 year old daughter. The film has twists and turns and, I have to say, I was not expecting most of them at all which, if you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know is a pretty rare occurrence. I almost always see the twists coming.

The film has a nice look to it and there are some great shot set ups with some very rich colour combinations, some of which almost reminded me of old Edward Hopper paintings. The director also uses a less than usual visual syntax throughout the film, especially with her use of establishing shots to give it an edgy, off kilter feel. Or should I say lack of use of establishing shots. That is to say... even her regular establishing shots tend to pull you into a specific location. One of the things I caught her doing was using a high shot of a building as an establishing shot, for example, before tracking down and directly into the eye level of Nicole Kidman sitting in her car, shifting the focus as she highlighted the character and placed her into the frame but also filtering out the peripheral information which is now jettisoned. She then used a sharp cut to take us to a completely different scene in another location.

Most of the time, though, I have to say I was unaware of any strong establishing shots to frame the action for the audience at all and this way of following the character in a relatively close environment a lot of the time makes things somehow more intense and immediate while not giving the collective audience the little breaks and cut aways it’s used to. Which I found both fascinating and sometimes a little disorienting and I am assuming that disorientation was deliberate because...

Okay... this hopefully doesn’t amount to a spoiler but I said it gets twisty and turny and there’s a specific, big story point that’s not revealed until right towards the end of the picture. And the thing is, normally I would have seen this coming right away but, because the structure of the film involves constant flashbacks to linearly tell the back story of the main character, the real structure of the film is hidden from view... hidden in plain sight, in fact... from the audience and I suspect the constant use of close ups and so forth to begin various scenes and lead you to the story in a visually convoluted (or at least less than usual) way helps greatly with the directors very subtle and, timed just right, sleight of hand when she’s not being completely honest with certain elements of the way the story unfolds. And that’s all I’m going to say about this one, because I really don’t want to spoil it for first time viewers... other than to say that the cleverness of the story structure works hand in hand with the mise en scene and almost relies on an aspect of Nicole Kidman’s performance in a specific scene near the start of the film. Well, she totally sold it to me because it’s not something the audience has been primed to watch out for yet and Kidman plays a specific scene just right, so that there’s not even a hint that what we are watching is not always necessarily to be trusted, so to speak.

The other great thing about this movie is the incredible score. It’s absolutely stunning and shame on the powers that be for only giving this an electronic download release instead of the quality CD release this music so richly deserves... and, frankly, since this picture was released into cinemas in America towards the end of last year, I’m practically frothing at the mouth right now that this score wasn’t given an oscar nomination. It’s so striking and, almost subliminally at times, sets the viewer on edge and enhances the drama and, very much I think, the mindset of the film’s central protagonist at any given time. I didn’t know who I was listening to when I watched this but by the final quarter of the movie I had pretty much made my mind up that this thing must have been composed by Mica Levi... the score is that amazing and it seemed a perfect fit for her style. Imagine my surprise, then, when I stayed through some of the end credits to discover the music was composed by Theodore Shapiro (who did quite a good score for the Ghostbusters reboot a few years back). Shame on the Academy for not recognising the sheer power and resonance of this score and shame on the company for not putting out a CD release.

So, what more to say on this one? Brilliant performances all round, fantastic direction, genius editing, an absolute classic and powerful score and a central protagonist, perfectly played by Kidman, who’s mindset throughout the film is wildly unpredictable and who is bound to catch the audience off guard at various points in the unfolding of her story. If you are into thrillers or police procedural movies then, seriously, Destroyer is definitely the film to see this year. Pitch perfect on all levels and, though I wouldn’t normally do repeat viewings, I might have to rewatch this again when it comes out on Blu Ray so I can nitpick my way through the story structure and figure out just how the director managed to fool me on this one. Such a cool film and one which will, I’m sure, feature in many critical essays and articles in the coming decades. A truly great piece of cinema that reminds us just how much this medium is a true form of artistic expression. Go and see this masterpiece soonest.

Searching

Screen Of The Crime

Searching
2018 USA Directed by Aneesh Chaganty
UK cinema release print. Pre-release preview.

Okay, so Searching is a really interesting movie with a fairly fresh (or should that be refresh) take on the old police procedural style movies where a family member helps the cops to solve a crime. And it’s really great because it gives us a fairly new kind of cinematic experience ... it’s a little like the format of Unfriended (reviewed by me here) but with a much more ‘filmish’ bent to the way in which it is shot... I’ll explain that statement in a minute but this is definitely a much more sophisticated beast than the low budget horror movie mentioned above.

The plot, as you'll know if you’ve seen the trailer, is about David Kim (played by the new Mr. Sulu himself, John Cho), a father whose teenage daughter Margot (played here by Michelle La) goes missing. As events unfold, he realises that what she has been telling him about her life for the last six months and the actual reality of that are two different things. As little revelations occur, he uses various computers and online web sites to help Detective Rosemary Vick (played by Debra Messing) in her search for his girl. And that’s the basic set up and that’s mostly about all I’m going to reveal to you about the plot, such as it is.

The film starts off with a montage of David going through files on his computer... and all you see is the computer screen as he goes through various images, messages and videos and, for the next five or ten minutes, we see Margot born and how she grows up over the years. We learn about how important David’s wife, Pamela Kim (played by Sara Sohn) is to everybody and we watch her beat cancer only for it to come back and claim her life. All this set up is great, beautifully conveyed (and emotionally scored... there’s a lot of piano here too, to reflect the fact that Margot is learning the piano throughout her life) and if the sequence had just finished after that opening, I would still be heaping praise on this movie even if it turned out to be a clunker but, as it happens, the film is quite special. Here’s why...

I don’t know how I didn’t pick up on this when I saw the trailer but, the screens don’t stop when this sequence is done. The whole of the movie is told through what people, mostly David, are seeing and doing on their computer screen. You see David a lot because he’s often on Face Time or on Skype and, as you may or may not know, the camera on the computer often leaves a live feed of you and what you’re doing when nobody is on the other end of those kinds of software applications. So quite often we can see Dave in one of the windows as he fiddles with various things on screen and this gives the audience the desired stimulus to empathise completely with his character.

But this movie is way better than that... it’s not just blandly looking at a static image of one screen or another. The director takes this footage and, just as he would with first hand footage, he will zoom or pan into certain bits of the screen and edit out what’s not required to highlight and de-emphasise desired story elements. It even, as I mentioned before, has a score playing through the film... a quite effective one by Torin Borrowdale, to add tension and drama as certain revelations happen on screen.

The director also effectively uses little rest points to signal, almost subconsciously, the end of certain sequences and the beginning of others... such as using a giant shot of a blank flashing cursor quite memorably in a couple of places to usher in the next stage of the movie. There’s a lovely sequence where something fairly familiar to PC users suddenly becomes a surreal moment due to the unfamiliarity of seeing it so big on screen and with an underscore... not going to say what it is but the way it suddenly brings rest to the film’s pacing is quite brilliant.

I also enjoyed that at, one point, the film footage switches from David’s IBM compatible PC Windows machine to his daughter’s machine, which is a proper Apple Mac, because the blocky and slightly blurry picture resolution seemed to sharpen up a little while the Apple computer was telling the relevant portions of the story. As an Apple user both at work and home for over two decades, this really worked for me.

Now, I have to say that, if this was a movie shot in a standard manner, then I would have seen the ending of this film coming way before the finish. As it was though, because of the format that has been chosen to express this, my initial lead suspect (and perpetrator in this piece) was soon pushed out of my mind as I didn’t think the writers and director would even begin trying to attempt a twist of that magnitude in this kind of style. I really didn’t expect them to be running before they’d even proven they could walk but... oh yeah... they totally go where I suspected they wouldn’t for the end game of the movie and, bearing in mind the limits of the format, they really don’t cheat, much, in the way they achieve the general unfolding of the story. In fact, there’s a brilliant scene where David has set up multiple screens recorded on his computer (not being monitored by him at that time because he has to be in the footage) and, not known to him but clear to the audience, a major break in the investigation appears to be coming in from the detective but he’s not around to answer any of her calls.

Also... and again this may be due to the nature of the format... I was completely taken in by a scene where a character is suspected of ‘doing the deed’ and then it turns out to be a red herring. Was totally invested in the film being over soon after but then... things carry on and there’s a beautiful plot revelation at the eleventh hour which I won’t elaborate on here but, in keeping with the various apps and websites used throughout the movie to track and progress the investigation, it all involves around a stock photography site. Considering my own profession as a graphic designer, I especially liked this element.

So... yeah... Searching is an old school missing person yarn with a very modern setting (computer screens) but which is expressed through that modern setting by a very traditional film-making skill set, such as the use of pans, zooms, tracking shots, time edits, establishing shots of sorts (rendered as website landing pages, etc) and an accompanying musical score which is again, composed and performed fairly traditionally to capture the emotions and tension of the story. It’s all very well done and, though I hate to think it’s going to be that influential in terms of having to sit through a hundred gazillion copycat movies of this one anytime soon, I really think that lovers of cinema and the thriller genre in particular, should go and see this one. Searching hits UK cinemas at the end of August 2018 (and US cinemas next week) and is well worth a visit. My one piece of advice would be, due to the resolution of this kind of format on a big screen, that you don’t sit too near the front... get some distance on it. Definitely go and take a look at this one, though.

Scared to Death

Truth Or Scare

Scared to Death
by Rachel Amphlett
Saxon Publishing
ISBN: 978-0994433763

Warning: There will be a spoiler here but I will
put a warning around the paragraph in question.

I probably should warn you up front that I am quite torn about this book and so my review is going to be a little ambiguous at best, I should think. On the one had I found a lot of it truly terrible, for one reason or another but, from another point of view, I found there were the occasional golden nuggets and I certainly rushed through the thing quick enough so... yeah, not 100% sure of what to make of this one but I’ll give it a go. If, however, you find yourself reading this and you happen to be the author of this novel or a huge fan of said author, please do yourself a favour and ignore this review. It’s certainly not my intention to hurt anybody and, since my insights into what makes good writing are wholly subjective and therefore questionable, you might well be better off not delving into this one.

Now, the first thing I have to say about this is that I have no idea who Rachel Amphlett is and I had never heard of this book. What happened was this... long story short. Somebody asked me what I wanted for Christmas and I mentioned a book about the use of film scores in horror movies called Scored To Death. However, due to the capacity for the fragile interface between the human brain and the giant that is Amazon.com to sometimes yield a breakdown in communication, I somehow found myself, not with a tome which analysed the use of different styles of music in genre cinema but, instead, Scared To Death... a British police procedural thriller. That being said, I’m all for reading something I’d never heard of before and my regular two mystery writers, who I ritualistically read new books from during the Christmas period - Patricia Cornwell and Kathy Reichs - both had a year off this year with their respective lead characters for some reason so... yeah... I thought I’d give this a go anyway.

I’m still not sure if that was a mistake or not.

The book opens with two parents driving to an unknown location, racing to save their kidnapped daughter. Within a couple of pages I was quite impressed with the writer’s turn of phrase in the following passage...

“The glass and concrete superstructures of the bigger enterprises that had lined the inner sanctum of the centre of the estate lay dormant, while empty windows stared accusingly at the quiet roads that encircled them...”

I loved the idea of the windows grumpy at the roads that didn’t carry the customers to sustain the various businesses to the industrial estate and I thought I was in for a good ride. Well... yes and no. There are some good things but... well, let me get my main problems with the novel out of the way first.

The book is the first in a series of stories about Detective Kay Hunter of the UK Police and the story is, apart from the odd chapters where it splits off with other characters, told mostly through her eyes somewhat (although it is written in the third person so we at least know that anything could happen to the main protagonist, should the author desire). They must be fairly successful because there is a whole slew of these Kay Hunter novels plus various other book series by the same writer... so that, in itself, renders anything negative I might say about these things somewhat redundant anyway.

Now, I’m used to reading books in this particular genre by, as I said, Cornwell and Reichs but, those two are actually doing in real life what their characters do. They have first hand knowledge to throw in, along with whatever else research they do, of the profession of their main protagonist and this more than comes across in their central narrative choices. In Scared To Death I felt like I was reading a novel where the writer was not really telling me anything about the procedures involved in working a homicide in the UK. I didn’t feel like she had ever worked on the force, for instance and, from what I could find out about her from her own website and from her amazon bio, I think that’s pretty much correct... she doesn’t come from that background. Yeah, alright, people don’t need to have lived a specific subject in order to write great prose about it but, in this particular case, I just felt it would have helped. That being said, I’ve done stints of jury service three times in my life now (yeah, I’m old) and almost every time the police really have often seemed like they were completely asking the wrong questions, unable to get any kind of real evidence against those on trial (when the right questions asked of the right people would have been quick, easy and decisive) and even completely contradicted each other when on the witness stand. So... I dunno... maybe the police procedure in the UK really is as haphazard and make-shift as it comes across here... in which case, the writer certainly nails it.

Another problem is the structure of the story. As we go along and find out the motivation of the serial abductor/killer... the writer starts revealing other characters who were also in the mix, withholding one character’s identity until the end although... it’s not too hard to work out. The slow parcelling out of information seems like the writer is just hitting anchor points to reveal things in short bursts... which is fair enough but the problem here is that it’s done in such an obvious way. However, the biggest ‘twist’ of the book is so ludicrously handled that I immediately had to flick back and re-read to see if I missed anything earlier because I couldn’t believe how clumsily the information was revealed.

Okay... here’s the big spoiler warning...

Towards the end of the book it’s revealed that a second teenage girl who has been kidnapped while the detectives are still trying to solve the initial kidnapping/murder case is, in actual fact, the daughter of one of the detectives. Say what? Oh... right... he felt embarrassed and didn’t want to mention to any of his colleagues that he was related to one of their initial leads. That’s really realistic and great policing just there... right? I mean... seriously? This kind of 'implausible in the face of the previous part of the story reveal' barely works well in cinema, where it’s a little easier to succeed with stuff like that because you don’t follow the thoughts of the characters in the same way. In a novel... I am really surprised that anyone tried to get away with this kind of reveal in this way, to be honest. It did nothing to endure me to the writer.

End of Spoiler Warning.

Okay, one last negative thing before I concentrate on the positive.

The kidnapper/killer is a ‘bastard’. Everybody says so.

I mean literally everybody. No matter what character they are or from what walk of life they come, they seem to all have ‘a thing’ where they will mutter the word ‘bastard’ under their breath in relation to the killer. Enough already. There are other curse words available. I’ve mentioned before that a terrible thing that even some of the most revered writers do is to give all their characters a kind of inadvertent, shared language... which they no doubt share with the writer. This is not how it happens in real life people. Everyone has their own way of phrasing things and their own ways of reacting to things. Sure, like-minded people tend to gather together and react in a similar way for the most part... friends and lovers. But people thrown together at work or, in this case, people from different walks of life who have nothing to do with each other... they’re not going to sound the same. So, yeah... this book is one of those which, unfortunately, tends to have everyone expressing themselves in the same voice. It’s a bit of a bastard to be honest. Oops.

Okay, so I said a whole bunch of negative things here but let me tell you about the positive stuff...

Well, as I said at the start, the writer can turn a good phrase. She has a knack for capturing situations and boiling them down to only the bits you need to know. Now, personally, I’d prefer more descriptions about the every day little details to add a sense of realism to these kinds of situations but there’s no wrong way of doing this and Amphlett’s approach is certainly one that gets the pacing moving. Like a good pulp writer, she runs through the story at a pretty fast gallop and, I have to say, this was a quick read which had me hurtling along to the end game very quickly. I would have liked a little more detail about the background of the main character but I could tell the writer was deliberately holding back so she can reveal more details in a future novel in the series.

So, yeah, it was a quick read and I actually wouldn’t mind reading another, to be honest, just to see if she’s going to take the solution to a 'missing evidence' issue in the main character’s past life to the conclusion I expect she’s going to take it. However, with the mountainous book backlog I have at the moment, that’s unlikely to happen, in all honesty. That being said, although Scared To Death has a lot of downsides, I think regular readers of crime fiction might find this one a good thing to pack away for light summer holiday reading in between their other, favourite tomes. Not the best I’ve read, by a long chalk but, it certainly has a bizarrely addictive, un-put-down-able edge to it... that I can’t quite deny.