Tag Archives: Alex Smith

Fiction, Reviews

‘Whip Crack,’ by Alex Smith

Leave a comment

I know you probably regard me as a man of iron, inured to all pain, physical and emotional. But in fact, there are limits to my endurance. It’s possible to write books that drive me away just by being too good, in terms of action and dramatic tension.

I think that’s the situation with Alex Smith’s Whip Crack, fourth in his DCI Robert Kett series. (SPOILER ALERT: If you are reading this series and have not yet finished the third book, Three Little Pigs, you should stop reading here. Parts of my synopsis must necessarily give away some of the ending of that book.)

Robbie Kett has been suspended from the force, due to the extremes he went to, to rescue his children and his wife Billie (who had been kidnapped and held prisoner 5 months). Now they’re back together, but they’re all damaged. Especially in his relationship with Billie, he’s walking on eggshells, never sure what to do to help her readjust to freedom and love.

When four young teenagers disappear in a lonely town on the Norfolk coast, his superior doesn’t order Robbie to go investigate, but pointedly lends him his holiday “caravan” (trailer) near the crime scene. He knows Robbie can’t resist this kind of case.

The four teenagers, all close friends, have been lured away from their homes by recordings on cassette players. Similar players have been left behind with messages for the investigators. With difficulty, the police are able to trace the man who bought the players, a local drug dealer. The only problem is that he’s killed himself. If they’re going to locate the missing kids, they’re going to have to solve the recorded riddles he left behind.

But there’s more to the mystery than even that. Robbie can sense something more is going on – and he’s right. I thought I had figured it out, but it was even weirder than I imagined.

Whip Crack is taut, harrowing, and exciting. The prose is good, too. I can’t fault author Smith on his craftsmanship. Also, he employs some tricks to avoid too much profanity.

But give me a break, guy. Poor Robbie has been through four thrillers now, and in each book he gets injured more – physically and emotionally – and he hasn’t been given time yet to heal up from the first book. My empathy needle is spiking here. I don’t think I can handle the next installment.

Recommended, if you’re made of sterner stuff than I am.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Three Little Pigs,’ by Alex Smith

Leave a comment

I’ve been following Alex Smith’s exciting Robbie Kett thriller series. Book Three, Three Little Pigs, rounds out a narrative cycle in the series.

My review of the first book was, in retrospect, conspicuously lacking in perception. I described the book as psychologically extreme, rather than physically extreme. The second book proved me wrong, in spades, and Three Little Pigs takes it even further. Hero DCI Kett doesn’t actually pull needles out of his arm and stagger out of an ICU unit (as so many thriller heroes are wont to do), but that’s about the only extreme he doesn’t go to in this excruciatingly suspenseful story.

As you may recall, Robbie Kett is a London Metropolitan police detective who was dispatched to the more bucolic city of Norwich after his wife Billie was forcibly abducted and disappeared without a trace, five months back. Robbie had been obsessing over the investigation, and his superiors thought it would be best to get him away and let cooler heads look for her. However, he’s seen plenty of action in Norwich – he’s still healing up from wounds he sustained two books ago, not to mention the ones from the second book.

Then a call comes from London. A woman has been found in a weird, abandoned house that seems to have been set up for cult practices. She’s still in shock in the hospital and not talking, but it looks as if they have a real lead now. Robbie is back in London like a shot. His orders are clear – he can observe, but isn’t to interfere with the investigators. As if that’s going to happen.

As Robbie plunges into things, he’s surprised to find clues where no one has before. Granted, he goes to extremes nobody else will, but it almost looks as if the others weren’t really trying. As he functions as a loose cannon in the investigation, earning repeated reprimands and finally house arrest, he begins to dimly glimpse how big the forces involved here are, and to realize there’s nobody he can trust. Nobody at all.

This book nearly killed me as a reader. The stakes started high and kept rising. What looked like a major resolution toward the end turned out to be only the start of new horrors. Three Little Pigs is a page-turner, without a doubt. As is common in such stories, a certain lack of plot logic hardly counts.

Recommended, if you can handle the tension. Cautions for language and serious perversity.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Bad Dog,’ by Alex Smith

Leave a comment

“Can you describe the two people for me?” Kett asked. “The man and the woman.”

“She was, like, a woman,” he said, concentrating so hard it looked like his head might pop clean off his shoulders. “He was more like, I don’t know, a fella.”

When I reviewed Alex Smith’s first DCI Robert Kett novel, Paper Girls, a few days back, I remarked that while many mystery writers these days go “extreme” with their stories in terms of action and the physical suffering of the protagonists, this book went extreme with the hero’s emotional suffering. Sent to Norfolk for a country break in the wake of the unsolved kidnapping of his wife, Robbie Kett gets involved in a local case. He’s supposed to be decompressing emotionally and spending time with his three little daughters, but he ends up helping to solve the kidnappings of three local girls.

I couldn’t describe the suffering in the second book, Bad Dog, as primarily emotional, though there’s plenty of that. This time out, Kett is still recovering from wounds received in the Paper Girls case, and he goes on to multiple further injuries in this one, enduring with increasingly implausible stoicism (which is not to say that he isn’t suffering inside too, because he definitely is).

A young couple are out walking in the forest when they are attacked by – something. The woman’s body (her husband disappears completely) has been torn up as if by a dog attack – but the teeth marks are human. The locals immediately attribute the killing to “Black Shuck,” a legendary monster said to be a ghostly black hound, kind of like the Hound of the Baskervilles. Kett’s suspicions incline more to some neighbors who seems to be running a dog-fighting ring. But the real solution will be more bizarre than anyone ever dreamed.

Which was kind of my problem with the book. Not only was extreme physical suffering added to Kett’s emotional challenges, but the crime itself kind of pushed the limits of plausibility for me – though maybe I’m just naïve.

However, the author threw in a tantalizing cliffhanger at the end, so I’ll have to get the next book.

I didn’t like Bad Dog as much as Paper Girls. But the characters are still good, and there are very funny moments. And some fair values. Cautions for language and grotesque violence.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Paper Girls,’ by Alex Smith

Leave a comment

It’s common to find “extreme” thrillers on bookshelves today. Usually that means extreme in terms of action – improbably indestructible heroes taking damage that would permanently cripple lesser men, ripping drip lines out of their arms and escaping hospitals, and dominating climactic showdowns against impossible odds amid large explosions.

Alex Smith’s Paper Girls is extreme in a different way. It’s extreme on the interior level, driving its hero to the limits of his emotional resources (before he nearly gets killed in a fight).

Detective Chief Inspector Robert Kett is a London policeman on compassionate leave; he’s moved temporarily to Norwich to decompress and spend time with his three daughters, one of them a baby. Famed for his skill as a finder off missing persons, he’s tormented by the fact that he couldn’t locate his own wife, who has been kidnapped.

His down time is interrupted, though, when his boss calls and asks him for a favor. The local police in Norwich need help with a pair of kidnappings. Two eleven-year-old girls, who made money delivering newspapers, have been snatched. Everyone knows that after the first few hours, chances of discovering the victims alive sink to almost zero.

Personally, I don’t think I’d have put up with the guff Kett takes when he shows up to help. His temporary boss, rather than being grateful, is openly insulting and uses him as a scapegoat when things go wrong (though he’s a layered character; I like that in a book). And Kett has more than enough on his hands trying to care for his traumatized girls. But he doesn’t quit because he cares deeply; he can’t help himself thinking about what the victims are suffering. He can’t help believing that if he can find these girls, maybe he can find his wife too.

The detective work was pretty plausible. The characters were very good. Paper Girls was almost too intense for me – I have a hard time dealing with kidnapping stories in general. But I stayed with it and was glad I did. There was a cliff-hanger at the end, but the author played fair.

Male readers will enjoy the suspense and the action. Female readers will enjoy seeing a man find out what women have to do all day. I highly recommend Paper Girls. Cautions for language and mature subject matter.