It does not appear to matter how many family annihilators wipe out of existance the people they are meant to love the most, shocked colleagues or neighbours still talk about what a nice, quiet man he was. We still do not believe that if we as individuals have judged a person to be safe - that maybe we are not seeing everything - so majesticly omnipresent we consider ourselves to be.
It will not be a surprise to many that the News of The World would be tangled up in this most shady episode as they became a by-word for the absolute worst of tabloid journalism, souring countless lives, with it's underhand tactics.
Last week I sat down with Dea Parkin, Secreatry of the Crime Writers Associaton. We chatted about crime and mystery, upcoming trends, and most importantly awards! So if your considering entering any of the CWA Daggers do have a listen. There's also plenty of interesting information about CWA resources for readers as well. You can …
Continue reading Interview: Dea Parkin, Secretary of the Crime Writers Association
Creature X is ultimately trying to entertain, rather than change the world, and egoistic conceit to begin with, and sometimes, as long as it is done mindfully, and conciously of impact of steriotypes entertainment for it's own sake is enough. And perhapse, while writing a hunt for a mythological creature, Dupuis has managed a few blows in getting rid of other dinosaurs altogether.
This is the strength of the book, the deeply personal decades long reflection of the victims family. However, this is not a piece of investigative journalism. So those who are expecting the rigour of someone with the caliber Gregg Olsen will be dissapointed. Cosgrove is aware of this, and admits that in his journalistic career he gravitated towards upbeat fluff pieces, and there are points where this shows.
While the story of a young boy turned gangster, turned states witness is not a new one, there are two things that makes O'Callaghans story unique. Firstly his young age, he was only nineteen when he entered the witness protection programme, barely out of a childhood which was warped by Kenny's hellish controll. Secondly that he admits to being raped by another man.
Kirat not only frees herself, there is power in speaking the truth, but she also asks important questions of those who are there not only to protect us, but whom we also expect to help deliver justice when things do go wrong. Currently Kirat is a sole voice in the wilderness, but I do not believe she will be on her own, for very long.
Ulstein is to be congratulated for a pacey and twisty police procedural, which could have easily been a paint-by-numbers scandi-noir missing girl story. Instead we dance back and forward between the present day search of Iben Lind, and people and places from twenty years before a town away.
The narrative is deceptively simple, in many ways because to really see the story you have to consider it from so many points of view, consider that what was decidedly make believe to one character was decidedly real to the world in which another lives. That in many ways we are mainly people who just happen to intersect with each other for a short time. It is impossible to truly know how other people really see the world or ourselves. It is so often time that is the only thing that gives us real perspective.
This kind of elitism and snobbishness has always existed in the arts. However what the many who tightly cling to this sense of superiority do not realise is that it is only very recently that realism has crept into literature - think about Homer, Beowulf, Shakespeare with his Wyrd Sisters, Titania and Oberon. Human beings have always enjoyed a good does of the mysterious, miraculous, mythological and the unexplainable in our stories.
