"Mary should pay more attention to detail"

Last week, I was wondering why it always seemed to be snowing, raining or sleeting in Barry Maitland's Brock and Kolla books. Mystery's solved: I read another one on the week-end called The Malcontenta and actually bothered to read the author bio which said he'd been a lecturer at the University of Newcastle since 1984. Further "research" shows that now he lives in the Hunter Valley. Of course England would seem cold, dark and miserable to an emigrant sitting amongst the ripening grapes on a typical 40 degree day in January there.

The Malcontenta wasn't my favourite of his books. The plot was a bit experimental and felt awkward. An unexplained death in a large Palladian-style English mansion now used as a health farm leads to Brock going undercover to find more clues. This reminded me of one of the early Sean Connery James Bond movies where he's been sent to the fat farm but dastardly evil geniuses track our hero down! It's very unlike the normally solid procedural approach Brock takes. There's also a trip to Italy which just seemed to be an excuse to see La Malcontenta, the original model of the English house and to talk about some nice weather. It was written in the early 1990s and seems a bit odd and dated now because the police characters don't have mobile phones and hacking into computers is described in very plodding and unconvincing terms.

That aside, Brock and Kolla are exciting, complex characters and it's good to fill in another gap in their stories because later books refer to earlier events without explaining them.