Crime pays?

Dog Eats Dog by Iain Levison

Bitter Lemon Press 2008, 278 pages

Robber Phil Dixon has been wounded in a botched-up bank raid. He is making for Canada but ends up in Tiburn, New Hampshire. Looking for a place to lie low while he recovers, he stumbles across Professor Elias White in a compromising situation with an underage student and persuades White to harbour him. Meanwhile FBI agent Denise Lupo, keen to prove that she’s smarter than everyone seems to think, is following the trail that leads to Tiburn.

It’s been some time since I read a book that made me laugh out loud (hardly surprising given my usual reading matter) but this one did. The interplay between Dixon and White, White and Lupo is brilliant and the pages fair crackle with cynical humour. The story ends with the line: “everything has worked out well for everybody” which of course it hasn’t; but as we all know, crime often does pay but usually for the wrong person. Highly entertaining!

Mother’s gone mad

Disquiet by Julia Leigh

Faber and Faber 2008, 128 pages

Olivia has returned unexpectedly to her childhood home, a French chateau, to escape her violent marriage; her two children are with her. At the same time, Olivia’s brother Marcus and his wife are due to arrive with their newborn baby, but there will be no celebration of a family reunited.

As this story unfolds it has the uneasy quality of a dream as it slides towards the realm of nightmare; we observe the behaviour of the characters without knowing what they are thinking while they struggle to gain control of their situation. I first saw this one over on http://dovegreyreader.typepad.com and as I commented there, it’s another of those little gems that you can read in one sitting.