The Wait Goes On

Day 2 of the great wait. I am now convinced that my calls to a certain person who's meant to tell me what to do are being avoided. I've tidied my desk, cleaned out my email and filed for the first time in a year. Maybe I should just go home.

I did read another Barry Maitland book on the week-end. It was called "No Trace" and was about the abduction of the small daughter of a conceptual artist who immediately exploits her absence in his work. There's a lot about art in it and a lot of beautfully observed humour about the 'Art World' of Turner Prizes and Tate Moderns.

These books alwys have an amazingly convincing sense of place. Maitland includes a map of the location in the front of this this one. I'm not sure if he's done that with the others but usually I tend to skim over spatial details in novels and he doesn't let you get away with that. You know exactly where each scene is set and if you're on the 10th floor you know what you can see through the window.

His main characters, Detectives Brock and Kolla, are more or less married to their jobs which as a potential victim of crime I find extremely reassuring in crime fighters. That is probably the point. If crime fiction is to make us feel safe by describing and then defusing our nightmares, then we want our police heroes not to be distracted by private lives.