JOST A MON

We were invited to a magnificent lunch in the hotel banquet room. I was like a kid when it came to the taramosalata and the mousaka, the souvlakia with tzatziki - small pieces of roasted pork seasoned with lemon, herbs, and olive oil, accompanied by the famous sauce made with yogurt, pepper, garlic, and mint - and the original kleftico. Especially delicious were the incomparable Greek breads made with raisins, spices, greens, olives, or cheeses. For dessert, a little freska frouta. Who could ask for anything more? Mediterranean cuisine is the best in the world. Farag proved that by eating enough for three or four people.

We were invited to a magnificent lunch in the hotel banquet room. I was like a kid when it came to the taramosalata and the mousaka, the souvlakia with tzatziki - small pieces of roasted pork seasoned with lemon, herbs, and olive oil, accompanied by the famous sauce made with yogurt, pepper, garlic, and mint - and the original kleftico. Especially delicious were the incomparable Greek breads made with raisins, spices, greens, olives, or cheeses. For dessert, a little freska frouta. Who could ask for anything more? Mediterranean cuisine is the best in the world. Farag proved that by eating enough for three or four people.

Most of the good fish had been picked over by that time of day. I bought some squid, at one forty-nine a pound, from a cross-eyed salt who was attempting to stare at Lee. We took it back to my apartment. 

After removing the ink sacks and the center bone,  I sliced the squid laterally into thin rings, and shook them in a bag with a mixture of bread crumbs, garlic, and oregano. Then I fried them in olive oil in a hot skillet. 

We ate these with lemon and a couple of beers as we watched the first half of the Skins game. For the second half we napped together on the couch in roughly the same arrangement as the night before. We woke as the afternoon light was fading. I drove her back to her car at the store and kissed her good-bye.

Welcome to the twenty-fourth instalment of the Giant’s Shoulders, the monthly carnival of science and history-of-science blogging from around the planet. In this issue, there’s a bit of a preponderance of historical vignettes, which I trust you’ll find interesting.

Shall we start with a timeline of scientific discoveries, analyses and inventions? How about this – from years that end in 24 in every century? I’m missing several years, so if you’d like to fill those in, please be my guest.

I can’t think of any particular grouping in this carnival. You know, by subject and all that. It’s pretty motley. Chronological order is somewhat unsatisfying, like arranging books on your shelf in alphabetical order of title. Let us, therefore, be whimsical.

From New at LacusCurtius & Livius, we have Bill Thayer’s introduction and a link to a classic paper about how people developed effective ways to compute the heights of mountains. It’s a wide-ranging work, starting from the Ancient Greeks and working its way through Kepler and The paper is from 1929, so expect nothing on GPS in it!

Continuing with mensuration, Ethan Siegel at ScienceBlogs has a neat little piece about how to determine distances to the stars. In How Far to the Stars, he explains the principle of parallax, notes that Copernicus thought he could use it to tell distances, and then goes on to Christiaan Huygens’s idea of using luminosity to compute how far Sirius is from us.

So we are able to measure distances with excellent accuracy. But what of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle? Surely it’s impossible to measure simultaneously (to arbitrary precision) both the position and the momentum of an object? This is certainly true on the scale of the truly small, but why is it not so evident on the scale of our senses? Why does quantum mechanics explain to remarkable accuracy the weird behaviour of the minute but loses that weirdness at the macroscopic? On homunculus, Philip Ball presents Big Quantum, where he talks about this explanatory lacuna in the transition between the very small and the large. It’s all due to decoherence!

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How about some pseudoscience? Alchemy has had a bad rap, and yet it provided the foundations for chemistry. Via Thony C., we have Lawrence Principe and the Rehabilitation of Alchemy – another lecture in Utrecht posted at Heterodoxology.

For another example of the genre, we have Caroline Rance at The Quack Doctor with an interesting little piece about one type of alternative medicine – uroscopy. This is the use of urine’s colour, consistency, taste and smell as a diagnostic tool. By the 19th century, professional medics had discounted this as quackery, but common people continued to frequent piss-doctors. In Cameron the Piss-Prophet, we learn how one such worthy was hoist by his own petard.

From one aspect of quackery, we move on to another. In 1726, a woman named Mary Toft (or Tofts) was a sensation in England for having allegedly given birth to rabbits.

She had supporters and deriders in equal measure; scientists argued both in her favour (e.g. a medical doctor, John Maubray) and against (Sir Richard Manningham, a male midwife). William Hogarth’s Cunicularii at the Wellcome Library Item of the Month (besides analysing some lovely etchings by the great artist) raises a subtle question.

Leaving quackery, we ponder another form of obfuscation. Via Thony C. we have an article titled “Follies of the present day”: Scriptural Geology from 1817 to 1857 by J.M. Lynch at A Simple Prop. Who were scriptural geologists? These were scientists who tried somehow to unify vast geological time with their faith in the Bible’s six days of creation. Note that these people did not believe (pace Ussher) that the Universe was formed in 4004 BC.

Why did these Christian scientists not pay closer attention to James Hutton? In 1785, he had published an article Concerning the System of the Earth, Its Duration, and Stability in which he began the study of deep geological time. Via Thony C., we have John F. Ptak’s Raising Greatness: James Hutton’s Deep View of Time, 1795 posted at Ptak Science Books talking about Hutton’s remarkable intuition, as he saw the entirety of Earth’s history explained in the sloping red sandstone at Siccar Point.

While on the subject of deep time, a fossil of the Archaeopteryx was first discovered in 1861. Since then palaeontologists have argued whether this transitional creature (between dinosaurs and true birds) was capable of flight. Ed Yong presents First Birds Were Poor Fliers at the Discover Magazine Blog. There were some reasons to believe that the beast could fly but also good reasons why not.

Fossils and da Vinci - who would have thunk it? Via Thony C., we have Brian Switek's Leonardo da Vinci - Palaeontology Pioneer at the Smithsonian Magazine's blog.

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Dorset Ancestors have a biography of Francis Glisson, a native of that English county, who went on to great success as a doctor in 17th century London. When he heard of a new debilitating disease among children of Dorset, he studied it carefully and concluded that this bone-deformative condition (which we know as ‘rickets’) was caused by malnutrition.

A sesquicentennial after Glisson plied his investigative mind, another Englishman began to consider the various causes of deafness in people. As a diagnostic tool, John Harrison Curtis invented the Cephaloscope, which is described in Jaipreet Virdi’s post The Cephaloscope on From the Hands of Quacks.

John Harrison Curtis also insisted that aurists – students of auditory illnesses – should also be attached to medical hospitals. Jaipreet Virdi’s related post The London Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb tells this story.

From illnesses of the body, we segue to a illness of the mind. The dreaded African disease, sleeping sickness, when in an advanced stage, often resulted in violent mania. Was this true insanity on the part of the natives, or just a manifestation of a fear of isolation in a camp? From Sleeping Sickness and Lunacy at the Colonial Psychiatry Hub, we learn that much documentation of the effects of sleeping sickness on the local population is available from the British staffers of the Colonial Office (Uganda).

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Just for variety, here’s something to watch rather than to read. Via Thony C., we have Lens on Leeuwenhoek: Videos about his life, times, and accomplishments posted at Lens on Leeuwenhoek.

This video is an overview of the life, times, and accomplishments of Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723), the Dutch scientist who used hand-made single-lens microscopes to become the first human to see protozoa, bacteria, sperm, and red blood cells, among many other things.

And although that video’s only 7 minutes long, it promises more riches to come. Can there be any more to van Leeuwenhoek, then? Indeed there can, and Thony C. presents Lego-nhoek? posted at Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Centraal.

van Leeuwenhoek, of course, was a contemporary, competitor and Royal Society colleague of that polymath Robert Hooke. I found several blogs on this brilliant Englishman, and planned to chuck them in here, but closer scrutiny revealed that at least one of those pieces was a copy of a Wikipedia article. I hope this is not a similar copy: Leland Velazquez discusses the Physics of Bungee Jumping. Hooke’s work on elasticity leading to his eponymous law is the underpinning of this extreme sport.

If Robert Hooke is around, Christopher Wren can’t be far behind. Another brilliantly multifaceted man, Wren involved himself in astronomy, mathematics, architecture, art, and – we learn from Christopher Wren and the Bees by Gene Kritsky at Wonders & Marvels – beekeeping. Why is this scientifically relevant? He also developed the transparent beehive that was suitable for the scientific observation of bee behaviour.

The bees were able to move between the various layers of the hive, and glass panels set into the structure allowed an observer to see the honey cascading down inside it. Although Wren’s construction had not been an immediate success (due to a failure to realise that bees worked downwards), it offered the prospect of an ever-increasing stock of bees and honey within the same hive. [from here]

Speaking of polymaths, there was Florence Fenwick Miller in the 19th century. She was a suffragette, a journalist, an educator, and a qualified medical doctor. From Peacay at the absolutely ravishing BibliOdyssey, we have An Atlas of Anatomy.

From Peacay at BibliOdyssey again, we have Fungis Danicis, a lovely set of illustrations of fungi studied by a Danish lawyer-turned-botanist named Theodor Holmskjold in the 18th century. This worthy actually identified over fifty new species during two years of observation in the countryside near Aarhus.

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Now for some controversy! When scientists without training in history try to develop works in the history of science, clearly feathers are ruffled.  Via Thony C., we have Renaissance Art or Neuroanatomy? Part 1 and part 2, posted by Darin at PACHSmörgåsbord. It appears that there have been a series of papers over the past 20 years by various scientists trying to find hidden anatomically precise messages in Michelangelo’s art.

R. Donald Fields wrote up a guest blog at Scientific American recently that discusses the oeuvre; as it turns out, none of the scientists involved is a trained historian. As the rebuttal at PACHSmörgåsbord makes clear, this is dangerous practice:

Why does this matter? Because such articles attract the attention of editors and contributors at places like Scientific American. These contributors then post a redaction of the article on the website, where the post becomes one of the most popular. Such redactions misrepresent the history of science, suggest that anybody can write the history of science, and deny that historians of science have a discrete expertise. That’s why it matters.

But just to show that not all scientific speculation on art is ill-founded, check out this interesting bit of detective work by a bunch of astronomers at Texas State University. Via Thony C., we have a post by Roger Sinnott on Sky And Telescope titled Walt Whitman’s Meteor-Procession, we learn about the great poet’s imagery (“the strange huge meteor-procession" that went "shooting over our heads" with "its balls of unearthly light”) and an interesting astronomical phenomenon.

I’m not sure if this next piece fits within the purview of our Carnival (as it may be more aligned to sociology) but I think it relates to a seminal work of behavioural psychology, so perhaps I can present it? Christopher Greene’s Clarks’ Black-White Doll Experiment Replicated at Advances in the History of Psychology blog discusses an even more controversial subject than that in the preceding paragraph, and highlights its most recent replication under the aegis of CNN (full report here in PDF).

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On to more jolly subjects. Remember Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation? It is 50 years since the invention of the (optical) laser. Via Thony C., we have Happy Birthday! posted by Matt Springer at Built on Facts.

Another anniversary is that of Vannevar Bush’s visionary piece sixty-five years ago in the Atlantic Review about associative links in information, which one can easily see as an early precursor to hypertext and all that. Via gg, we have Simon Harper’s review ‘As We May Think’ at 65 from his blog Thinking Out Loud.

In the 19th century, by a gradual process of socialisation, the scientific and professional communities in the USA began to differentiate themselves. Will Thomas posts Paul Lucier on ‘Professionals’ and ‘Scientists’ in 19th century America at the Ether Wave Propaganda blog.

We end on a luminous, numinous note. What links a certain 1980s teen film, a song by John Parr, the Chinese sea-goddess Mazu, and – wait for it – ionised air? In St Elmo’s Fire, Captain Skellet of A Schooner of Science explains the whys and the hows of the gorgeous blue glow that appears on the tips of masts on sailing ships.

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[And there you have it. Thanks for stopping by. I hope this encourages  you to write up your own pieces on science and its history and philosophy. Do consider submitting your blog article to the next edition of the giant's shoulders at The Dispersal of Darwin. You can use the carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on the blog carnival index page.]

Keen-eyed readers may have observed that the ninth month of roundups of translated crime fiction never appeared in these pages. The same readers may have then shrugged and moved on with their lives. A recent holiday interfered with the sequence of posts, so I'm combining two months' worth here. Camomile Street library has come up trumps with several of my books on order, and we have a bit of variety this time around.

I may be going out on a limb when I say that the development of popular literature generally follows the same pattern around the world. As a society becomes literate, readers will prefer light material - novellas and pulp, generally involving thrills or spills and sex and romance. Penny dreadfuls take off, often competing for attention by means of lurid covers and suggestive blurbs - not just because it doesn't require intense concentration to appreciate, but also because it is invariably cheaper than middle-class literature. The occasional pulp author will then transcend the genre and establish himself or herself with critical acclaim and gradually move up-market. The readership often will follow this author and introduce itself to other, more literary works. Meanwhile newly literate people continue to fill the voids left behind by this upward mobility and eagerly embrace the canon of pulp.

How's that for a thesis? I mentioned penny dreadfuls, but I should probably also include other gems of the canon, such as those anthologised in the The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction (selected and translated by Pritham Chakravarthy), and those lovingly referred to in Patricia Melo's In Praise of Lies. Both Brazil and India are roughly at the same level of economic development as far as the vast majority of people are concerned, and both countries have an enormous thirst for light reading and sensationalism. (One can see this in the wide reach of daytime soap operas on television in both countries.) The English translation of the original Tamil stories serves to include a more middle-class audience for what is essentially vernacular fiction; likewise Patricia Melo discusses the popularity of Brazilian noir among the socially downtrodden, and the cut-throat competition to serve it.

Now Melo does not address the consumers of the cheap literature; rather, she prefers to poke fun at the industry that supplies it. So we have Jose Gruber, a hack who copies the plots from greats of world literature and passes on the texts to a publisher who is unaware of Dickens and Dostoevsky; the readership doesn't know or care either. Jose falls in with a herpetologist, Melissa, who, unaware of his inspiration, believes that his is a fertile imagination. She then involves him in concocting clever plots of kill her husband, who she claims abuses her, and Jose is such a moral and physical coward that he ends up helping her. The stress results in his literary career stalling, with the publisher rejecting proposal after proposal (which lengthen in proportion to his desperation) as unworkable and uninteresting. The noirish aspects of the novel might have served to keep the plot ticking, but Melo is dissatisfied with satirising only the pulp industry and she switches her target to the self-help books that also attract a wide readership in Brazil. Between the crime committed and the unravelling of Melissa's and Jose's relationship, and his sudden success as a hack self-help author, there are suddenly too many threads in the novel, and it all gets increasingly inchoate. While the book started funny and clever, it appears as if Melo loses the plot herself as she goes along, and it ends up trying my patience.

The Blaft book is an uneven collection as well. There are two or three absolute sparklers, but the rest are somewhat pedestrian and obvious. I loved the brilliant wit and repartee of Pattukotai Prabakaran’s ‘Sweetheart, Please Die’ and the innuendo and bonhomie of Subha’s ‘Hurricane Vaij’, which were possibly the best stories in the book. Some of the stories are overtly preachy – offering a defence of a woman’s sexual rights, say, or urging honesty in a politician – and some involve mad scientists and that old favourite of Indian films, reincarnation and revenge. I guess this is not surprising: they must appeal to the lowest denominator, and so become obvious and forced. Still, it’s heartening to see that the remarkably prodigious authors of the stories (some of whom have written thousands of tales and novellas) are often capable of superb and sophisticated imagination, refusing to pander to the base, and, fortunately for us, Pritham Chakravarthy has located several gems of the genre, and published them here.

Being obvious is possibly the worst comment a reader can make on a crime novel, but what  is obvious to one person may be opaque to another. In Tefcros Michaelides's Pythagorean Crimes, the twist at the end depends for its surprise entirely on whether the reader knows the history of mathematics or not. The plot is rather straightforward - a Greek mathematician is found murdered and his best friend (the narrator) looks back on his career, hoping to find clues to his death in his past. The description of this past is possibly the weakest part of the book: Michaelides evidently believes that describing the excitement and fervour of early 20th century mathematics is insufficient to drive the book forward, so he throws in a long section on the development of modern art in the back alleys of Paris, introducing Picasso and his coterie, and claiming that Picasso's art was much informed by his own fascination for the foundations of logic. The plot hinges on an important question on the underlying consistency of mathematics, but surely it defies logic that the resolution to this question should verily be a life-and-death matter?

It's not often one hears of crime fiction from Africa that is written in a non-native language, although now that Afrikaans has been spoken in South Africa for close to 300 years, perhaps it is as native a tongue as any other. Deon Meyer is a successful author of thrillers set in that country, and he uses the medium to explore several unsavoury aspects of South African history. The nexus between the apartheid regime and the vastly influential military-industrial complex is reasonably well-known; what is perhaps less known is its constant interference in the affairs of neighbouring countries, either on the pretext of containing Communism, or to co-opt corrupt Black leaders of those countries. The story in Blood Safari is, as far as thrillers go, fairly faithful to the genre: a rich young woman thinks she has seen her long-dead brother on TV, her house is firebombed, she buys the services of a top-notch bodyguard (named Lemmer) who helps her in her search for her brother. Of course, the enemies are many and vicious, and when both get injured in an attack, Lemmer decides to go on the offensive himself. He is a man with a short fuse and can be indescribably vicious himself, so when the villains meet their comeuppance, they don't go gently into the unknown. Meyer throws in social commentary on present-day South Africa as well. There is corruption at higher levels that thwarts honest policemen, there are social schisms between the Afrikaners and the English-speakers; there is suspicion at every level between the blacks and whites; and there are tensions between the various nations of blacks, too, as they scramble for economic advancement and funding from an impoverished state. Underlying this all is a passionate cry to save Africa's wildlife as well, not just the popular creatures of tourist imagination, but also birds such as vultures that are held in such distaste by everyone.

Véronique Ovaldé's Kick the Animal Out is a narrative from the viewpoint of a mentally-unbalanced girl desperate to locate her mother. This is an exploration of the lush mindscape of the fifteen year-old Rose who adores her mother and is baffled and upset by her father's seeming lack of anxiety when her mother vanishes. She seeks answers in her mother's past, uncovering details of old loves and past crimes. This is a slim book set in a sunny coast of France completely at odds with Rose's anguish, and it drags the reader into her world of 'immeasurable loss' more surely and heartbreakingly than weightier tomes by less assured writers. Well worth a read.

One of the great canards of medieval life that have been promoted to outraged titillation in the world of entertainment is the putative droit du seigneur, the right of a feudal lord to bed the wives of his serfs on their wedding night. There is almost no evidence that such a right ever existed in law, though it is undeniable that serfs were abused and their wives very likely forced into granting sexual favours. Still, this is a favourite trope among writers of historical fiction (equally, directors of films set in the Middle Ages), and Ildefonso Falcones in his Cathedral of the Sea proves no different. Perhaps, though, we should believe Falcones - he is, after all, a lawyer himself, and he quotes Catalan legal documents (the Usatges) that purport to grant such rights. The novel, a sweeping history of the construction of the magnificent Cathedral of Santa María del Mar by indigent labourers as an act of love and devotion, starts with the violation of a woman on the night of her wedding. The story then follows the fortunes of the woman's husband, and then their son, against the background of the rise of Barcelona's maritime power. It is a gripping tale, incorporating miracles, internecine feuds, pogroms against Jews, naval battles, detailed explanations of construction techniques, sex and strife between diabolically devious women and inhumanly good men, envy between brothers, religious schisms, class struggles, and, if all this were not enough, the Inquisition. I'm well pleased with this, especially because there was nary a mention of the Templars.

Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Pledge is a tale of the fall of a brilliant Swiss detective. The denouement is somewhat pat, but the analysis of the detective's psyche is very good. A little girl is savagely murdered and the detective makes a promise to her mother that he will find the killer. When a suspect is arrested and he subsequently commits suicide, everybody is satisfied that the case is closed, even the victim's parents. But the detective is not convinced, and against all evidence and in the face of his superiors' disapproval, he lays an intricate trap to catch the killer. He is so obsessed with this plan that he doesn't mind sacrificing everything he has - his reputation, his relationships, even his 'adopted' family - to fulfil his pledge. The plan fails and he loses his mind, and when the explanation arrives (a bit contrived and convenient), it is far too late to save the detective. This is a small book, a quick but agonising read, and well worth for its insight into the extremes of human nature.

Gianluca Morozzi has written a neat claustrophobic thriller set in the elevator of a residential building. In Blackout, three individuals, strangers to each other, enter the lift. Shortly thereafter, the power goes out and the trio is trapped between floors. Their back-stories are filled in between chapters that describe the continuously rising paranoia and terror within the cramped quarters of the lift. I’m not giving anything away when I say that one of the three is vicious serial killer, and his is the only background that is really relevant to the story. The other two could have been pilots or scuba-divers for all their lives had any consequence up to the point they are trapped. So far, so good. True to the genre, the innocents have to escape. How though? And is that all to the story? This is where Morozzi cranks up the unlikeliness factor, and the story – to my mind – degenerates to droll fantasy. It is written in that arch, self-consciously-talking-to-the-reader fashion that might grate on some; the staccato sentences might alienate others, but it is a thin book, trying a bit to be too clever, and will serve as a decent page-turner on a short trip to work.

Arch and knowing books are, thankfully, not a dime a dozen, but Jef Geeraerts’s Public Prosecutor, The is another such. Geeraerts doesn’t have much time for organised religion, I gather from this fable, or for money-grubbing men or women, most of whom end up perishing in some gruesome fashion or the other. The protagonist of this parody of the paranoid thriller genre is the Public Prosecutor of Antwerp, a man who owes his position to his wife’s noble family. He leads the usual life of an alpha male – he has a beautiful young mistress; his wealth does not stop him from seeking more; and, of course, he detests his wife, and hardly has any time for his sons. The wife is a deeply religious Catholic who wants one of her sons to enter Opus Dei, the usual villain in books involving religious skullduggery, and to that end is willing to sacrifice everything, including her husband. There are other unsavoury Opus Dei operatives with connections at the highest reaches of power – both financial and administrative – and there are sundry criminals out for revenge. None of the characters has any redeeming qualities but the Prosecutor, harried and hassled, ends up being strangely sympathetic. This is so earnest a book I cannot imagine Geeraerts wasn’t grinning ironically all the while he was writing it; good fun.

And the humour continues in the latest caper from Latin America that I’ve read: the Uruguayan-Cuban author Daniel Chavarría’s Adios Muchachos is a rollicking dissection of Cuban life, where years of Communism have only served to drive the capitalist fervour of the masses to feverish pitch and materialism rules above all. Unlike the corruption and drug-addled misery limned in Leonardo Padura’s Havana series, Chavarría’s book is far too good-humoured. It is also a sexy romp with the pneumatic bottom of the wondrously bright and beautiful Alicia running riot, trying to ensnare rich foreigners who might then take her away to their own rich lands where she could lead a life of luxury. Her modus operandi is to ride her bike, wiggling her alluring bottom to attract a rich man in a fancy car, and then falling spectacularly before the sucker, prompting him to come to her rescue. Her mother aids and abets her schemes, providing fancy food and culture to the man, causing him to get more and more besotted by Alicia. Unfortunately, Alicia then falls in with a Canadian ex-con whom she mistakes for her latest wealthy conquest. He is leading a double-life himself, trying to persuade a multinational corporation to fund marine archaeology (to make money out of selling salvaged treasure) while also hiding his less than salubrious past from his employers. An accidental death sparks panic in Alicia and Victor, but also hands them possibility to make large amounts of money, and at this point, Chavarría’s grip over the plot begins to loosen, and confusion takes over. In the classic manoeuvre of the author who’s lost interest in the proceedings, there’s a final roundup of what happens in the subsequent lives of the various characters. I’ve often wondered what purpose such a roundup serves: it’s as though the story somehow were unable to close by itself, and so an artificial conclusion is forced on the reader. Dissatisfying, surely?

And, to round off this roundup, we have Jean-Christophe Grangé’s The Empire of the Wolves, as harrowingly graphic as any lesbian crime author’s work (as Ian Rankin once pointed out to much controversy). A secret right-wing Turkish sect is busy butchering its way through the textile-worker community in Paris (all trafficked women from Turkey). The wife of a senior bureaucrat is having violent flashbacks that lead her towards paranoia and breakdown. The policeman investigating the serial killings is forced to rope in a retired colleague, a man who has been well-known for his efficiency in keeping crime down in the Turkish quarter in the past (and notorious for his corruption and brutality). The two of them determine that political schisms in Turkey and the spread of transnational criminal gangs led as much by ideology as mere lucre are the cause of the murders in Paris. Naturally, the killers are in search of one particular person, and it’s not difficult to discern early on who this person might be. After all, there are only two supposedly disparate strands in this novel, and so they have to connect at some point. The denouement is, once again, in classic mode: in the end there are two people out to get each other, there’s some grandiose recrimination, and an obvious conclusion. This novel, I thought, was a bit over the top; for a much more satisfying experience, check out Dominique Manotti’s Rough Trade (Eurocrime Series), which is taut, gripping and eminently true to life.