The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning by Hallgrimur Helgason

Tomislov Bokšić, AKA Toxic, top hit man for the Croatian mob in NYC, is on the run. His latest target inconveniently turns out to be an undercover agent FBI agent. His spotless record ruined, Toxic has to leave his good life — prime apartment, large screen TV, voluptuous girlfriend — is directed by his boss to lay low with the LPP (lowest possible profile) in Zagreb. At the airport he finds the FBI watching his departure gate and he has to improvise. Unfortunately this is at the expense of the Rev. David Friendly who happens to be alone in the men's room with Toxic. With Friendly's clerical colar, passport, and ticket, Toxic is soon on the way to Reykjavik, Iceland.

I've been sitting on this review for a while but not because I didn't like it. On the contrary, I love it and look forward to reading more by this author. Rather I've been perplexed how to start, what tone to take, how to describe The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning.

Someone is likely to be offended by something in this book —religiously, socially, politically, sexually, nationally, and some -lys I haven't thought of — it has them all. It also has a dark, off-the-wall humor that had me snorting nearly every page and annoying my wife by insisting on reading passages.

Munita [his girlfriend] was living in Peru until her family got killed in a terrorist bombing. Then she moved to New York and found a job on Wall Street. It so happened that her first day of work was 9/11. On our first trip to Croatia together, she witnessed two killings. I have to admit that one of them was by my own hand, but the other was totally accidental. I thought it was quite a romantic scene, actually. We were having dinner in Mirko's restaurant when the guy sitting at the table next to us got a bullet through his brain. Some of his blood splattered into Munita's glass of wine. I didn't tell her. She was having red anyway.

I love the way those lean, crisp sentences lead to a punch line that is as disgusting as it is dark humor.

Toxic is an unlikely likable character: he thinks back with some fondness on his days as a soldier in the Serbo-Croatian war where he shot more people than are in his family tree; he take pride in his clean record of one bullet, one kill; he likes a nice post-killing nap. But with his  trains of thought that might take off at odd tangents, his wry comments and observations, the reader enjoys the ride as Toxic tries to understand the Icelandic people and culture and perhaps make a new life for himself. Helgason does indulge in good-natured fun at the expense of his fellow Icelanders: referring to Icelandic as the lunar language after seeing the stark landscape in the in flight magazine; mangling the pronunciation of names; shock at the low crime rate; the lack of guns. He made me want to visit Iceland.

This style of writing is difficult to do well. The dark humor can easily come across as forced and fall flat. It takes a deft hand to keep the humor fresh and edgy. This is the author's first book in English but he is able to take the venerable "stranger in a strange land" trope and give it a sharp, witty, and occasionally grotesque edge which is no mean feat since the first person narrative voice means that this is a character driven monologue of Toxic's musings.

The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning is a fun read. It is mostly on the light end of crime genre but with sharp edges that keep it interesting. Amongst the dark humor, the author includes passages that illustrate how desensitized we have become to violence. I suspect that some people will find this jarring and out of place but I like an author willing to go out of bounds if it gives insight into a character. Helgason is an author on my watch list and I wouldn't mind if he found a way to return to Toxic's world.

Capture by Roger Smith

6 people. On the high of the economic scale is Nick Exley, his wife Caroline, and four year old daughter Sunny. At the other end is Dawn Cupido and her mixed-race daughter Brittany. Connecting the two families is Vernon Saul, a former Cape Town police detective now working for Sniper Security after two bullets left him with a crippled leg.

Exley, an American, has developed an affordable motion capture system which he is marketing in South Africa. Caroline finds his use of the system to capture his daughter in life-like animation on each of her birthdays creepy. But Caroline has a severe psychological disorder that emerged after the birth of Sunny that has left her increasingly hostile toward Nick and indifferent to her daughter.

Dawn is an ex-hooker and former tik (meth) addict. Brittany is the product of a drug addled moment of unprotected sex with a white john. For his own reasons, Vernon got her out of the life, her daughter back from social services, and a job as a stripper at Lips, a raunchy bar on Voortrekker Street. The other performers see Dawn as uppity since she won't smoke tik and won't turn tricks with the customers. She doesn't want to lose her daughter — her only reason for living — to the system again.

Vernon decides that it would be interesting to bring these families together just for the pleasure of manipulating people in terrible situations. How Vernon pulls this off can't be described without major plot spoilers so you'll just have to read the book. I can say three things: if you've read Roger's other books, you know you can expect bad things to happen to good people; Roger is a master at depicting evil; and little Brittany is very perceptive when she refers to Vernon and Uncle Vermin.

Capture is different from Roger's other works. He has always achieved a good balance between character and action but Capture is more character driven and more of a psychological thriller than an action crime story.

• Dawn is the strongest female character Roger has written. Beaten but not broken, she is fiercely protective of Brittany and determined to keep her away from Cape Flats and the horrific abuse she suffered as a child. She is with Billy Afrika (Wake Up Dead) and Ishmael Toffee as my Roger Smith favorite characters.
• Vernon is himself a product of Cape Flats and the victim of a childhood that can only be described as tortured. He is a different sort of villain for Roger. Knowing what happened to happened to him as a child, can the reader find any sympathy for a stone-cold killer and psychopathic manipulator. The reader is constantly wondering what is Vernon up to, why is he doing this. You never get entirely inside his head but watching his actions unfold has disturbing a fascination.
• Caroline is a danger to herself and family and suffering from a postpartum psychosis that has her hating her family and seeking relief with an out of character lover.
• Nick is the closest to normal of the adults in the story. A bewildered geek who gets caught up in a madman's manipulations and pushed beyond anything he thought he was capable of.

Capture is the least violent of Roger's novel but it is the most raw in language and explicit sex. I should warn sensitive readers that there are scenes that made me, a hardened reader of crime fiction, want to scrub myself with hot water and lye soap. At the same time, Roger doesn't write extreme scenes without reason and here the sex and language are essential to the characters. Anything less would be to sanitize the story.

Alert readers will notice that the company Vernon works for, Sniper Security, has figured into other stories, such as Mixed Blood. Also, Doc from Wake Up Dead, makes an appearance. Doc is one of my favorite minor characters, a "small, flabby man in his sixties, with a bald head and skin the color of piss." He is a disgusting excuse for a human being who "earns his living dealing in guns, sewing up gangbangers, and chopping body parts supplied to him by cops from the police morgue, selling  the bits off to the darkies for witchcraft." He lives on the edge of the dump featured in Ishmael Toffee.

Capture strips its characters to the bone in a raw, emotional, intimate psychological thriller. It is one of my top books of 2012 and I highly recommend it.

Granny Smith Investigates by Gary Dobbs

It is a fact without dispute that the British village is one of the most dangerous places a person can live. Many dark secrets are harboured and murder is likely at any moment. If a village fete is in progress you can be certain someone's a goner.


Sometime during the Gilfach Village Fete (in Wales), Edith Sullivan is brutally murdered. Edith had been seen arguing with her husband Stanley so the police, led by Chief Inspector Miskin, consider Stan their prime suspect. Mary Alice Smith, AKA Granny Smith, is having none of it. Besides the fact that Stan was sinking pints with her husband Arthur all evening in the beer tent, she just knows —neighbors for 20 years after all— that Stan isn't capable of murder. When the police —"we know what we're doing"—don't take Granny's observations seriously, she has to prove Stan innocent and find the guilty party herself. What did Edith see at the fete that shocked her? What's the story with the engagement of Sheila and the much younger, semi-retired but "dishy, sex on legs" London solicitor Nigel Charlton.

Granny Smith Investigates answers the question, "how might Miss Marple turned out had she been born in the 1950s instead of the 1860s." She is referred to as "Miss Marple on steroids" several times in the course of the s generally disregard the proven crime solving record of the amateur sleuth. You can deduce that Granny isn't exactly like her fictional counterpart but how she differs I will leave to the reader to find out. More fun that way. Just keep in mind that she would have been an adolescent in the 1960s.

As in Gary's other writing, he puts great care in crafting his characters, gives them dimension, then puts them in a setting where their personalities fit the story. A second novel is due out later this year and Gary promises a more "densely plotted whodunit" but not at the expense of the characters. I'm particularly interested to see what he does with Gerald, Granny's son. I keep thinking about the character Daffyd in the BBC comedy Little Britain.

Dobbs says that he hadn't read much in the cosy genre before he wrote Granny Smith Investigates but he hits the tropes and his modernized approach to the genre is great fun. He adds "broad humour" which you don't find much of in the Miss Marple mysteries. He considers the genre in this post, What is a Cozy Crime? About his approach to the cozy Gary writes, "I'm reading more and more cozies now and so I'm starting to understand the genre boundaries - all the better to hop over them". I'm looking forward to seeing how Gary places his stamp on this venerable genre.

About the author:
There are some curious aspects to Gary Dobbs you have to account for when introducing him. He is, variously: a Welshman; he writes novels set in the American West (as Jack Martin); he is a bit of a Ripperologist (A Policeman's Lot/The Rhondda Ripper and on Amazon); he's an actor who has appeared in Doctor Who and Torchwood (swoon), and has a good role in the horror film The Reverend; and on Jan. 1, 2013, he will hang up his taxi license and become a full-time writer. I did a three part interview with Gary back in 2010 which is due for an updating. He blogs at The Tainted Archive.

Nobody Dies by Zirk van den Berg

Published by Say Books in 2011.
Available from Say Books and Amazon Kindle Store.
If you purchase from Say Books you get both the epub and Kindle formats. Also, the author and publisher get a bit more if you purchase from Say Books.

Daniel Enslin is a man adrift.

He had never planned to live like this, with the promise of half understood fictions slowly being throttled in the tightening grip of everyday responsibility. Although his ambitions had always been too vague to act upon, they were strong enough to imbue himself with a sense of failure. His personal life had little more allure than a game of solitaire played with an incomplete deck of cards.

With a failed marriage and a nothing job, the only thing that makes him feel the least bit alive is his relationship with Cape Town gangster Frank Redelinghuys. Frank publicly plays himself as a self-styled entrepreneur, maybe a little shady, but who is a drug dealing, murdering gangster. Daniel feels excitement, "in touch with a world beyond the ordinary" when he hangs around and does little odd jobs for Frank. This changes when Daniel sees Frank commit a brutal murder. Frank doesn't know for sure what Daniel might have seen but when the death is reported in the paper the next day, both Daniel and Frank begin to worry for their own safety.

Scared that Frank might be looking at him as a liability, Daniel contacts detective Mike Acker who Frank had mentioned as hating his guts. Mike is also someone with an acute sense of failure. He has failed to nail Frank on other occasions. Pushing fifty and sidelined into a cul-de-sac job, Frank is desperate for a breakthrough case that will put his career back on track and Daniel might be the one to get him that break. Daniel reminds Mike of himself when he was younger, "a misfit trying to make good in some modest way" and Daniel starts to see Mike as his only friend.

Mike soon realizes that protecting Daniel is going to need a more permanent solution and he turns to Erica van der Linde . Erica handles witness protection and is an expert at making people disappear. Erica is everything Mike isn't, younger, successful, likely to be promoted, and "everybody's darling." She is also the daughter of a legendary Pretoria cop. Erica comes with her own demons, with amends she is trying to make. Her father was taken from her violently while on the job when she was young and impressionable. His philosophy that "once a man puts himself on the wrong side of the law, he loses the right to the law's protection" has a strong influence on how Erica approaches witness relocation.

Four characters, four goals— stay alive, dispense justice, find success, eliminate a threat.

When I read Nobody Dies, I thought of it as straight forward crime fiction. You have a Cape Town gangster, deaths, corruption, betrayal, police procedurals. Now I'm seeing Nobody Dies as a story about identity— three people trying to define themselves, trying to find their place, trying to give meaning to their lives—with the crime fiction elements as a vehicle. van den Berg achieves an intimacy with his treatment of Daniel, Mike, and Erica that invests the reader in their story.

Within this dangerous predicament, Daniel is able to take command of his life and deal with the situation on his terms. Erica, Mike, and Frank have their paths defined by Daniel giving him an influence you wouldn't expect from the man you see at the beginning.

I enjoy Zirk's style of writing very much and would characterize it as edging into literary fiction. The characters are reflective but not in a way that slows down the narrative. While there are good action sequences in Nobody Dies, it is more character than action driven. As I finish this review more than a year after I read the book, feelings of sadness and affirmation still surface as I recall the characters and the road they travel within the story.

Zirk, if you read this, I don't want to condemn you to prequels and sequels but there are some good stories in these characters. Nudge, nudge.

Zirk is from South Africa but has immigrated to New Zealand with his family.

Ishmael Toffee by Roger Smith

Available from Amazon in a Kindle edition.

Fans of Roger Smith's crime thrillers will find the start of this novella (based on an earlier short story) a little different. Ishmael Toffee has all of the characteristics of Roger's horrifying villains: Cape Flats, heavily tattooed gang assassin with countless kills from his Okapi knife, just out of Pollsmore Prison. What makes it different is that Roger gives Ishmael humanity, even a soul, beneath the prison ink that covers host of his body.

One day out in the prison yard, Ishmael decides he doesn't want to kill any more and walks away from a hit. This makes him a marked man and the warden pulls him out of general population and turns him to gardening where Ishmael finds peace with his hands covered in the dirt instead of blood.

He is deemed rehabilitated (Ishmael isn't sure what that means), released, and given employment as a gardener for a wealthy white man, John Goddard, in the Cape Town suburb of Constantia. Goddard is a widower, living with his six year old daughter Cindy and colored housekeeper Florence April. This perfect looking household has a black secret, Goddard is abusing little Cindy.

Cindy sees something to trust in this scrawny little man covered in pictures and finds a way to tell him that her daddy hurts her. All of Ishmael'survival instincts tell him that this isn't an affair for a brown man  in a white man's world but he can't help but try to help this little girl who is willing to put her fate into his hands.

This is where the short story ended and Roger continues the novella with Ishmael's attempt to get the girl to safety. With Tin Town (Cape Flats) lusting for the huge reward the father has offered, Ishmael's efforts to conceal a little blonde white girl in one of the most dangerous places on earth becomes desperate.

If asked to recommend a work by Roger Smith that would give a reader a feel for his style of writing, I'd suggest starting with Ishmael Toffee. In this compact story you get the range of his dark view of contemporary South Africa. Roger's novels are known for their brutal violence but it is social commentary that underpins his work. He wrote in an email: "And the same people who suffered under apartheid -- the people who live in the urban ghettoes and the rural slums -- are still suffering now (as victims of violent crime, poverty, HIV/Aids and TB)." In Ishmael Toffee you experience the heat, the smells, the struggle to live in Cape Flats and the lives of the people who probe the dumps looking for something that will keep them going for another day. He contrasts this with the wealthy suburb of Constantia, not far from Polsmoor Prison where Ishmael spent much of his life, where Ishmael's arrival is treated with suspicion even by the colored maid working in Goodard's walled estate. Both the maid, Florence April, and Ishmael, grew up under apartheid and neither are comfortable negotiating their way in this new world. This and their fear of authority affects their decisions. The reader might wonder why they take the actions they do but how they react is a result of what happened to them in the past and it makes them real people and not cardboard cutouts.

Roger is a meticulous researcher and you will find this youtube interview of Ice, the man who inspired Ishmael Toffee interesting. Personal note: the knife you see in the first few seconds is an Okapi 907e. I have one though I've only used it to slice cheese...so far.

Falling, a short story, is included with this novella. It is a nice, raw, piece of noirish writing with doomed characters. Ford was a highly respected cameraman until drugs reduced him to filming porn. The opening begins with scenes that will probably kill any interest you might have in viewing porn, if you had any interest that is. Ford is trying to make a comeback but finds himself linked to prostitute/porn actress/meth addict Trinity. Can they pull themselves out of this marginal existence and make something better of themselves? If you've read any Jim Thompson you'll know the answer to this question. As a bonus, a character from Ishmael Toffee figures into the story.