Well, wow.

Every now and then something comes along and genuinely surprises you.  I didn’t have any particular expectations for Catch and Release - Kevin Smith in a supporting role drew me to it, but only enough that it’s languished on my (virtual) shelves since its release in 2006.  I only glad I finally gave it a chance; for her first time in the director’s chair, Susannah Grant makes a striking impression.  She’s written some excellent screenplays in her time, I’ll give her that - namely Ever After and Erin Brockovich - but from her new vantage point it seems as if she’s been better able to bring out the nuances of her script: the cast positively bounce out of the screen, witty, verbose and true.

Everyone loves Jennifer Garner, and I may finally have to give up on Sheriff Seth Bullock - Timothy Olyphant comes into his own again, despite a fairly underwritten role as the other half of Garner’s inappropriate rebound relationship.  On the other hand, the script has too much time for Sam Yaeger’s Dennis, who does not convince as another of Garner’s unrequited admirers.  Otherwise, an excellent film.  I’d respectfully disagree with critics who’ve zoned out at the prospect of another romantic comedy and pulled out the stock “one for the ladies” nonsense to justify themselves.  Actually, no, that’s not terribly respectful at all.

To hell with it: they’re wrong about Catch and Release.  It’s a warm character piece with an honest-to-goodness heart of gold.  Kevin Smith is everything that’s right about this movie.  As a rather less profane version of himself, he’s cuddly, considerate and clever.  In fact, Catch and Release feels very much like the sort of flick he’d be making now if his dip into the mainstream with the ill-fated Jersey Girl hadn’t gone so awry.

At the end of the day, my possible man-crush on Kevin Smith is not the only - nor even the best - reason to see this film.  If you have a heart, Catch and Release will sing to it.

Of course it’s made me melancholy in all the usual ways.

I’ve brooded thoughtfully about the landing considering if this is the perfect time of night; I can hear cats squawling from the gardens and I feel an inappropriate urge to break the eerie silence with very loud Guns N’ Roses.  But the other half sleeps…

Bah.

***

Stay tune for an impromptu Haruki Murakami week.  There’s an embargo to obey but this morning’s post brought a copy of What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, a memoir-come-rumination on age and countless other subjects, and the latest of his work to see English translation.  I’ve still got the read the thing, but expect a review here in the next ten days.  In the meantime, I’ve a review of his last novel, After Dark, to repurpose from Amazon, and a circuituously connected piece on another Japanese weird-fiction sensation in the making: Yoko Ogawa.

So.  Cats, earlobes and other Murakamian artefacts.  Fun!

We’ve got to hold on to what we’ve got
’cause it doesn’t make a difference
If we make it or not
We’ve got each other and that’s a lot

For love - we’ll give it a shot.

I don’t know that I can justify my unfettering love for Guns n’ Roses.

I certainly don’t feel it - ah, the aches of early-onset age - but that said, I’m ever-so-slightly too young to have grown up with Axl yowling in my ears.  Thanks to my Dad’s occasional benders and his unfailing ability to work a record player even when utterly out of it, there was plenty of Led Zeppelin, lots of Dire Straits and ZZ Top and the Beatles; I think I’m most grateful to him for the Pink Floyd, but that’s neither here nor there - suffice it to say I’m not altogether surprised my favourite ladies get on with him so well.  But whatever he wanted to soundtrack his too infrequent booze-ups with, it was never GnR.

There was no Guns n’ Roses on the radio, either - wow, remember the radio?

There was Whigfield, 2 Unlimited, Shaggy, East 17, Eternal, PJ and hot-damn Duncan.  And what a tragic fucking youth that could have been.  By the time I was old enough to take an interest in music, it… well, it sucked, as far as I knew.  I heard plenty of it, but I made time for none of it.  It was when Dad got drunk - or rather, after he’d gotten drunk and the anger had passed - that I started to care.  It was at New Year’s and whenever our childminder, Walter, turned up with a bottle of malt to drink him under the table.

He’s a strange creature, my Dad.  Most of the time: quiet, unassuming and considerate.  He knows a little about a lot, and he’s happy to listen to a lot about any of the little things.  He’s clever, but not intellectual.  And baby, he’s got a temper.  There are a few known sore spots that are sure to set him off, proxy bombs of pointless anger that my Mum - although I love her to bits - knows just how to exploit.  And it’s not that kind of anger; she’s not afraid to push the proverbial button when she thinks the end meets the means.  When she does, the result is predictable.  Dad gets loud, Mum gets condescending (she’s the intellectual, you see), and I make the same choice I always do: to defend him to the hilt.

It never works.  My Mum has this infallible sense of righteousness that means she’ll stand by whatever she’s said or done long past the point it’s become clear she was wrong.  I can’t argue reason against madness; Dad doesn’t even try.  Drunk, deflated and utterly defeated, nine times out of ten he and I would end up sprawled around the record player in the corner of the old living room, reliving Dark Side of the Moon or Houses of the Holy.  But never, ever GnR.

Shine On You Crazy Diamond

I think the reason Axl brings all that to mind is simple enough.  For my Dad, music was a way of forgetting.  I’m sure it was uplifting, empowering and all that jazz, but he never went back to the fights, steered himself in the dead opposite direction.  The music helped him set an unerring course away, always away, and in those days, I enjoyed the music mostly for that.  For me, all the spite and malice are nothing next to the moments we shared; whatever the fallout, I never regretted them, only the peculiar set of circumstances that instigated them.

Guns n’ Roses come into the equation a few years later.  I was in a rather destructive relationship - I’ll spare you the particulars - and one Summer, a jolly family holiday (as if) happened to coincide with the stomping grounds of the once-intended, who spent all her time off with the folks back home.  It was a bone of contention between us, but circumstances seemed to have conspired, so I thought, what the hell, I’ll give island life a shot.  I found a seasonal job washing dishes in a pierside pub; she helped me find a place to stay in the interim.

The Blues

I was something like three months in Orkney that Summer.  And regardless of the end result, I don’t think back on the time with any resentment.  Things between us hadn’t been working for long enough that some time together on her terms wasn’t going to assuage any of our worries.  I forgot a few of them amid the novelty of it all, but that wore off quickly enough, and there they were again: our problems, made more problematic still by their re-emergence.  And there I was: on a funny little island with no-one to call a friend but her, nothing to do with my time but spend it.  There was no TV in my little rented loft; the pubs were full of strangers I didn’t feel up to meeting; mostly, though, I ran out of books too soon.

The Summer job at the Ferry Inn saved me from the doom and gloom.  More specifically, the second CD of the Live album Polydor put out in ‘99 when it came clear that Guns n’ Roses weren’t going to release Chinese Democracy after all.  Still more specifically, this is what kept me from giving it all up:

Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door

I’m awkward enough at the best of times, and it wasn’t the best of times; I was in a miserable state of mind that seemed fit for nothing more than idling about as the things I’d thought most important crumbled all around me.  I didn’t think I’d make friends.  I was sure I’d fuck off the cooks and the sous chef with my sissy fingers.

But the dishes piled up on one side of my station, came out the other side still greasy from lukewarm water, dirty so soon.  And the thing about the line is that, in there, in the heat of it, no single job is more important than any of the others.  Whether you’re prepping salads or arranging orange zest on a roasted duck, if you can’t do it right, if you can’t do it fast enough, the whole kitchen falls behind - the line breaks; simple and irrevocable as that.  So screw the marigolds and fuck my puny womanhands.  I’d fill the sink with cast volumes of water as near as dammit to boiling and bite my tongue until I grew the right callouses or developed some superpower in the doing.

Whatever I was trying to prove, whoever I was trying to prove it to, it did the trick.  I got to know the cooks and the waiters and the KPs and everyone else besides.  I made friends, met people whose names and faces I remember still - no mean feat amongst the cacophany of my mind.  I became as much a part of that kitchen as the head chef and the stuttering boss who’d pop his head through the door to tell us to keep it down.  Of course, we never did.  I don’t know that we could have.  If the Guns ‘n Roses had stopped, I think we might just have ground to a collective halt.  For me - and not just for me, I’m sure of it - that music was what powered us.  I don’t know that cooking and cleaning seem like high-stress jobs, but for those who’ve never had the pleasure: in a busy working kitchen, believe me or not, they were.  But from Sweet Child of Mine through Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door to Don’t Cry to the epic Estranged and Paradise City at the last - that precious half-hour of glorious rock and roll made the seemingly insurmountable not just possible, not even plausible, but so natural it become almost automatic.  We’d erupt into rowdy choruses and lark inexcusably when GnR’s riff on the Dylan classic took a turn toward reggae.  And against all the odds, we’d get it done.

Better

Amazon confirms my worst fears: I still remember the order perfectly.  I’ve listened to every one of these songs on individual albums time and again since, but I still can’t shake the notes I expect at the end of each one.  I hear Dust and Bones after Welcome to the Jungle.  It’s a curious thing, but nothing I’d give up; not for the world.  Not even for Chinese Democracy.

But that mythic album hasn’t been a dream of mine for a long time now - and not for any lack of the desire to hear it.  After the latest round of leaks, I feel, in fact, like I have heard it, and wouldn’t you know it: I love almost every minute.  For Blogcritics and Ace Gamez and a million places in the erstwhile, I’ve tried my hand at a lot of things: book reviews, movie reviews, articles about TV, comic books, video games.  But a music review?  I wouldn’t know where to begin.  I know my tastes and at the same time, I know what a hard time I’d have justifying them.  Hence all this.

In the same way the Live Era album would explode the entire kitchen of the Ferry Inn, in the same way the Floyd helped my Dad feel fine despite a hoarse throat from an an evening of hateful insults, There Was a Time pumps me right up.  For seven soaring minutes I’m free.  It has me thinking I can do all the things I wish I could; I feel the promise of possibility, the budding of something greater just beyond my line of sight.  Consequences be damned: I can take all the lady loves I may, I can live like a fool forever, I can write my fucking book - I can do anything.  Everything.  I don’t need religion or a monstrous cock or a 4×4 to empower me, just the sweet sounds of wailing guitars and Axl screaming his misbegotten heart out.

During the composition of this post, for instance, I decided shaving mightn’t be such an awful idea.  Axl Rose is a ginger fleshbag of a muppet but he is not afraid.  In the process of cleaning my chin-scissors I sliced halfway through my thumb, but I don’t mind.  Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door eats the pain for me.

These things I know: Chinese Democracy is overwritten and overproduced, Axl’s past pushing it and I miss my Slash, but between all of that, this almost-album hits all the right notes to take me back to that bittersweet Summer and those long, loud nights with my poor deafeated Dad and I love it for that.

There Was A Time

I love it for that.

My apologies, dear uncertainites, for the downtime these past few days.  Excuses include: I’m nowhere near E3, but I’ve been covering the convention from afar on the Ace Gamez blog.  And I totally called it.  Animal Crossing on the Wii; lots of Little Big Planet; downloadable Ratchet and Clank episodes; and more besides.  But the point isn’t to boast - I have no particular insight, yet the only real surprise of the electronic three was Final Fantasy XIII on the Xbox 360.  And that, in itself, makes perfect sense.  Squeenix have a history of platform loyalties that aren’t loyalties at all, but canny decisions.  This is just the next decision.

For all that could have been, then, a toast.

If there’s a conference next year - and sadly, it really is a case of if and not when - I think I might make the trip.  I’d get press credentials, but I’d need a laptop, airfare, commitment.  In the twilight years of E3, I’m certainly not alone in wondering: is it still worth it?

E3 was once the axis around which the games industry spun, the great stationary star at the centre of an elaborate mobile.  The publicity machines all began there, with an announcement at one press conference or another or a demo on the show-floor.  Games began their time in the media at E3 by necessity, though, not choice.  There was no better network to begin diffusing whatever information publishers opted to share.  There was no Kotaku; news was slow.  Broadband was just a binary glimmer in some techhead’s beady eyes; there were no streaming conferences, no game-video aggregators for fans to frequent.  Largely, it was E3 or nothing, and amid the craven crowd, so many brilliant little games simply didn’t show right.  There was no time for depth or complexity, subtlety or artistry of any sort.  At the end of the day, if a game didn’t sell itself in a two-minute trailer or a quarter-hour demo, it was dead on arrival.

It didn’t work, then.  But however negative an experience it may have been for publishers and developers, for those of us on the outside, E3 was a joyous spectacle.  And I don’t care how many massive LCDs Sony daisy-chained for their press conference - it’s lost that grandiosity.  Development budgets have blossomed into behemoths in every other sense but for the LA presentations that used to be so pivotal.  Enthusiasts are better equipped now to learn about a new game, no matter the season or the mainstream press coverage.  And there are other events: Leipzig, E for All, PAX, the Tokyo Game Show, to name just a few.

Industry yuppies Gamecock threw an attention-seeking funeral march for E3 last year, and I despised them for it.  In 2008, I wonder if, all their hateful, juvenile shenanigans aside, they mightn’t have been mistaken.  All that the conference serves to do these days is showcase the next few months of the gaming calendar, and there are easier, cheaper, more appropriate ways to do that; ways that don’t see tens of developers wasting precious time on imagined milestones; hundreds of perfectly worthwhile games slip through the cracks; thousands of journalists swept off their feet in all the madness; and millions of fans disappointed, time and again.

But don’t misunderstand me.  There were some absolutely brilliant games at the convention this year; more, I think, than in 2007.  The horror genre in particular looks to be seeing something of a renaissance, with Dead Space leading the charge:

For all the wonderful perversity of scoring your teaser with a terrifying rendition of Twinkle Twinkle Little Starl, however, there’s another, more traditional horror game on the way that has my (proverbial) panties well and truly twisted.  The newly christened Silent Hill: Homecoming is the fifth instalment proper in the franchise, and after the disappointment of the next-gen debut of Alone in the Dark, I couldn’t be more excited to see the genre’s best and darkest return to the fore:

I won’t get bogged down in the particulars of whether or not Pyramid Head has any place outside of Silent Hill 2.  I won’t mention that Pyramid Head, as the embodiment of James’ guilt over slaughtering Mary, shouldn’t exist now that the town has held him accountable for his hateful sins, because if I’m honest, my reaction to his promised appearance in Silent Hill: Homecoming was basically profuse pant-wetting.

There were, too, a few noticeable absences.  There was nothing to be seen of the 360 motion controller that’s had the interwebs all abuzz lately, and for that, I’m grateful to all that’s holy.  There was no New Super Mario Brothers 2 or Wii Zelda.  Neither were Level 5, the fan-favourite developers of Dark Cloud and Dragon Quest VIII, anywhere to be seen, and with Metal Gear Solid 4 come and gone and the next Final Fantasy no longer platform exclusive, their latest effort, White Knight Story, stands as Sony’s strongest trump card.  Excepting, perhaps, the absence I felt most profoundly: anything new from the Ico team.  Shadow of the Colossus is still the greatest game of all time - never have I been touched or played by a game in quite the same way - and it’s been too long since I wandered that masterful world.  Much too long.

I still miss Argo.

TGS and the inevitable reveal can’t come soon enough, then, but until then, the new Prince of Persia is an obvious homage, and so breathtaking I can hardly conjure the words to do it justice.  I’ve already tried once and lost a post amid my procrastinations, so.  Without further ado:

If you’re still hungry, there’s a few new articles over at Ace Gamez for your enjoyment.  In my Space Invaders Extreme review I suggest that even girl turrets stand a chance, while in the Ticket to Ride piece I talk a little about cock-blocking, which is always fun.

And there’s a bunch in the pipeline for All Things Uncertain over the next few weeks, including a review of the Blu-ray of There Will Be Blood, a look at Tana French’s forthcoming In the Woods follow-up, and something about Yoko Ogawa’s The Diving Pool, which the lovely folks at Harvil Secker sent along this morning to tide me over until galleys arrive for the next Murakami.  I’ll say this much already: it looks startlingly original.

For now, though - that’s all, folks.

***

Soundtrack to this entry: Filter - Title of Record

Let it be said I have not forgotten how awesome Skunk Anansie were.  Charlie Big Potato is perhaps the single greatest song title in existence and, wouldn’t you know, it rocks some, too.  That is all.

Last week, I booted up my big black shiny lean mean grilling machine to download the 2.4 update.  It brought in-game access to the cross-media bar, apparently, and trophies - as if we need another metric by which to measure our e-penises.  But we all know how this story ends.  The 2.4 firmware borked a few PS3s; Sony shortly withdrew it and returned to their programmer mancaves with hearts weighty with sorrow.  My console survived the update without injury - I suspect most did; crafty fanboy buggers on the internet, you see, they have ways of making you think there are more of them than there are.  I turned it off.

This morning, I turned my PS3 on to download 2.41.  I turned it off again.

When exactly is Metal Gear Solid 5 coming out?

***

Was at work on a few reviews but stalled a bit over the weekend.  We had very lovely visitors and they left me - through no cause of their own devising - a lot tired and a little melancholy.  The urge to write an absolutely bleak short story slumped along and I took it.  She said she’d show me hers if I showed mine first and so.  The misery will continue until I’m done with poor Judd.

In the meantime, there’ll be a few reviews from litle old me at Ace Gamez through the next week.  I’ll link to them in time.  For now, a few trailers for movies that my panties already rock for in anticipation:

But before Bond can rub shoulders with Bourne some more, the Dark Knight himself comes to save us from the clutches of another Summer of truly awful proportions:

He comes, oh yes.

***

Wordtrack to this entry: The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe

This is brilliant.  I don’t know if it’s new news or age-old, but according to the BBC, ‘Babylon’ by David Gray is among the greatest hits of US torturers in Iraq.

Amongst all the musician’s unsurprising whines, of course, he has a point: play anything to death and it becomes an annoyance, whether it’s trash or Tchaikovsky.  And yes, whatever the comedy value of their choice of song, they’re still torturers, and torturers are bad people with rotten capitalist hearts and teeth yellow as pissed-in snow.

Still - what could be funner?

If only someone had the wit to strip the detainees naked and ride them like pack animals… hillarity would ensue, surely, to a predictable Benny Hill soundtrack.  Enough, even, that these jolly sadists might memorialise a few Kodak moments for the family album?  Now there’s a thought.

:O

That is all.

Well, they’ve only gone and done it.  Kotaku are reporting that Rock Band 2 has been announced - officially this time.  And it’s coming sooner than you might think - sometime in September, which, would you believe it, is less than three months from now.  On the bright side, Harmonix have already sworn that it’ll be the first game “to support fully fuctional cross-title DLC”, and that’s a relief to say the least.

Still.  This wasn’t supposed to be a cash cow.  The dev team are the very best at what they do, and they’re perfectly entitled to roll in the profits of their efforts, but you just know there’s going to be a new set of instruments - sure, you’ll be able to use your old guitars and drums, but the new ones will be better put together; they’ll offer extra functionality, new knobs and waggly bits only true Spartans could resist.  I fear I’m not up to the task.

Just as well I hadn’t gotten around to getting the original Band in a Box, then.  Kiss your £100 goodbye Harmonix.  Admittedly you can probably have it this holiday anyhow, but I won’t take any pleasure in giving it to you.  Oh no!

Do stroll on over to Ace Gamez for my latest review.  My PSP doesn’t get much use, and not just because it’s pink and I’m not sure I can pull it off, but since I signed on with Geoff and Paul and the rest of the poor fools who maintain the site, it’s been going overdrive.  I guess free pre-release games are all the motivation I need.

It’s been a busy week for my critic’s hat.  (Really though, when they come in the night to sign you up you get one, like a certificate.)  The Crisis Core article has gone live, and it’s a beast.  Much longer than it needed be, but it takes in the whole of the so-called ‘Compilation of Final Fantasy VII‘ and the legacy of that veritable PSone classic.  I scored it somewhere in the middle of the scale (the scale according to metacritic, that is) but I was surprised to see so few of the other reviews pick up on some pretty significant problems - I came to dread unskippable cutscenes and the profusion of load screens that heralded their arrival.  Despite its flaws, though: a great game.

There should be another three reviews - count ‘em - in the next while.  I scored Space Invaders Extreme, and although its only an hour long, I love it unconditionally.  I’ve got the 360 version of Battlefield: Bad Company to hunker through too, and my first XBLA review, for Ticket to Ride (which is to say, Catan for trainspotters) is nearly done.  Suffice it to say I’ll be playing all three of these games long after I’m done with reviewing them.

But - damn.  I’ve still got GTA IV to finish and Metal Gear Solid 4 to start; the pile of shame grows ever taller…

Pray tell, whatever happened to the Spring drought? 

***

Soundtrack to this entry: Coheed and Cambria - The Hound (Of Blood and Rank)

Plenty to report, but it’s all a little scattershot; the day job’s been keeping me plenty busy lately, leeching at the time I put aside to keep All Things Uncertain a going concern.  To hell with it.

I’ve a couple of interesting news stories earmarked for your pleasure.  First of all, there’s been another outbreak of mad scientists and the otherwise well-to-do making science-fiction a reality.  The Earth, reports the BBC, is not at significant risk from the Large Hadron Collider.

If you’re too lazy to click the link, let me spell it out: in a facility on the French/Swiss border due to become operational this Summer, particle physicists mean to collide quarks and gluons inside protons - creating, in so doing, their very own bonzai black holes.

Exciting stuff, but we all know what black holes do: they suck.  They suck at everything around them, they consume all the particles within their grasp, growing ever-larger until they’ve devoured, well, our entire planet.  But a report from the European Organisation for Nuclear Research is reassuring: apparently, we need not fear the killer strangelets - and I kid you not, that’s what they’re called.  EONR are, of course, renowned for their vast experience with black holes; and theoretical physicists, in their turn, know exactly what to expect.  Theories, after all, are fullproof.

Right?

It’s hard to imagine how the brainiacs behind the collider could have gotten so far without learning that abiding principle, Murphy’s law: what can go wrong, will.  And there’s so much that could…

I really don’t know that we can trust even the brightest minds of our era to mess so fundamentally with our world.  It’s great that science has come so far: I love my gadgets and my tech and my flying car can’t be far off now - but there are some things even I think we shouldn’t fuck with.  Time and again, opportunity after opportunity, humanity has proven itself an irresponsible bastard child, impossible to redeem, destroying the planet and one another in the meantime.  If we take to the skies and beyond to wreak havoc beyond the reaches of even our imagination, God help us.

Still, it’s fun to read the BBC reporter desperately trying to wrap his head around things to explain them in layman’s terms: ‘weird hypothetical particles’ indeed.

In other news, a man has been found guilty of dangerous driving for having thirteen people in a Volvo.  He’s Welsh, of course.  And the beeb have kindly reconstructed the crime for our amusement.

Frankly, I think they could have tried a little harder.  Come on, BBC - earn my license fee.

Talking of which: did you know it’s illegal now to have a phone or a computer without springing the £140 for Chris Moyles’ lunch?

***

Soundtrack to this entry: Red Hot Chilli Peppers - Dani California

One Summer night, two decades ago, three missing children.  Peter, Jamie and Adam.  For them, the woods that reach around Knocknaree have been a home away from home.  They’ve picnicked in the ruins of an dilapidated old castle, made mischief in their favourite clearing, but they’re almost in their teens; adult enough, at least, to understand that change is in the air.  Jamie’s mother is about to send her to boarding school, and the children know that her looming absence will mean the end of the precious bond that ties them together.  They take to the woods.  It’s as easy a decision for them as A, B, C.

As day draws on and the evening gives way to a forbidding darkness, the police are called in to comb through the forest.  After hours of searching, aided by townspeople and fearful parents, they find only Adam, catatonic against a tree.  His shirt has two appalling tears through it; his shoes are sodden, black with blood.  He survives, but his memory fails.  Ryan grows up an amnesiac, unable to remember anything about the night his innocence was stolen – along, presumably, with the lives of his closest friends.

This snapshot of a countryside idyll shattered in an awful instant is only the beginning of something greater, but the intrusion of horror on normalcy informs much of Irish-born author Tana French’s astonishing debut.  Harrowing and haunting, to dismiss In The Woods as mere genre fiction is to the miss the point entirely.  Its principle character is indeed a detective: Adam Robert Ryan, all grown up – going now by his middle name but no closer to the truth of that fateful night.  The narrative, too, is driven in large part by an investigation that bears striking similarities to the events he has done so much to distance himself from – the disappearance and tragic death of a young girl, Katy: an aspiring ballet-dancer whose hopes and dreams are forfeit for the sake of some sick scheme.  She’s the daughter of a local man who’s been making noise about the development of a motorway through Knocknaree, so naturally there’s no shortage of corruption and conspiracy to navigate.  Where In The Woods sets itself apart from the by-the-numbers books that its genre is unfortunately rife with is in its clever use of some fairly standard devices.  At each turn French is positively gleeful in her subversion of our expectations.  There is, perhaps, something of Christopher Nolan’s oft-acclaimed Memento in the way the author turns insignificances and asides on their head to embellish new meanings upon them.  She’s meticulous in her documentation, but restrained enough that she never so much as startles the flow of the story; her sense of pacing is excellent, her plotting precise and yet elegant.

What’s most striking about French’s knowing first novel, however, is that it takes the time to develop an utterly convincing friendship which, by the end of In The Woods, has become as essential to the narrative as the closure of a case satisfyingly solved or a memory recovered at last.  In the Murder Squad, Ryan is partnered with an unpredictable element in any old-boy’s institution: a woman.  And what a woman.  French resists the usual means of addressing such issues, painting Cassie Maddox as fierce but unapologetically feminine.  She’s neither hateful nor haggard, but pretty and quick-witted – sassy, you might say.  In the workplace and indeed, the novel, she succeeds on her own merits, without resorting to the typical literary tropes of such situations, and her relationship with Ryan is nothing so simple as a Mulder and Scully will-they, won’t they; there’s certainly an element of that to it, but French acknowledges as much with a writerly tip of her hat and moves right along.  This aspect of In The Woods also impresses.  There are lulls in the investigation, of course, but the controlled pace with which the sordid story unfolds lapses only occasionally: when the list of suspects is exhausted, there’s always the recurrence of Ryan’s memories to move things along, or a fiery friendship to contend with.  A few timely discoveries aside, it’s a testament to the effectiveness of this convincing new author’s voice that the developments in each of the concurrent plot threads do not stand out as narrative conveniences.  French writes with an effortless authority that bodes well for the future of the crime thriller, although it wouldn’t be spoiling things to say the same cannot be said for her choice of narrator, who asserts at the novel’s very outset: “What I warn you to remember is that I am a detective.  Our relationship with truth is fundamental but cracked…  I crave truth.  And I lie.”

On the other side of the experience of In the Woods, the brilliantly realised notion of Ryan as an unreliable narrator is the least of the novel’s myriad triumphs.  French’s debut has at least three endings, and she pulls them off with effortless panache; they are, at once, ambiguous, irrevocable, and fulfilling.  Let the further adventures of Detective Cassie Maddox roll on, because – wouldn’t you know it – there are startling signs of life left in the old genre after all.