Nordic noir harks back to fireside Agatha Christie

16 July 2014 - 02:00 By Andrew Donaldson
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Andrew Donaldson
Andrew Donaldson

If you read one book this week

'Buried Angels' by Camilla Lackberg (HarperCollins)

Unlike many of her Nordic noir contemporaries, Lackberg's novels are at the "cosier" end of crime fiction, and are almost Agatha Christie-ish. This is the eighth to feature detective Patrik Hedstrom and his wife, novelist Erica Falck, and they're all set in Fjällbacka, an otherwise small, sleepy Swedish fishing village. Here, our husband-and-wife team are slowly drawn into the case of a local woman who has returned decades after her entire family mysteriously disappeared without trace in 1974.

The issue

Spare a thought for Hillary Rodham Clinton. Her memoir, Hard Choices, has been knocked off the New York Times best-seller lists by Edward Klein's Blood Feud: The Clintons vs The Obamas, a book described by the Times as ''full of implausible passages". One example: the former president demands that his wife has a facelift. When she refuses, Bill gets one instead.

Crash course

Young capitalists wishing to get on top of Business Administration 101 may find Matt Lewis's Last Man Off: A True Story of Disaster and Survival on the Antarctic Seas (Viking) a worthwhile undertaking. Not only is this an excellent edge-of-the-seat account of survival and extraordinary heroism in the Roaring Forties but also a compelling case study in workplace dysfunction and psychopathic ''bottom-line" management. Everything about the Sudur Havid, a South African fishing vessel, suggested disaster when Lewis, then a 23-year-old marine biologist from the UK, first clapped eyes on the trawler in Cape Town's docks in May 1998.

She was a leaking rust-bucket with a dodgy safety certificate. When he met the crew of drifters, poachers and alcoholics, Lewis realised he perhaps should have stayed ashore - especially when he's told they'll be stabbing one another for a place in the life rafts if the boat starts to sink.

It did - on June 6 - in a severe storm in freezing waters off South Georgia in the southern Atlantic. Seventeen of the 38 crew members were lost in the chaos that followed: men drowned in the melee as they scrambled for rafts, or they died of hypothermia afterwards.

There had never been any safety drills on board, and some of the men couldn't even swim.

This is not an account that shores up that myth of comradeship and solidarity on the high seas.

The real villains are, of course, the ship's owners, the corporates safe ashore. It was they who insisted on the cheap pumps that failed when the Sudur Havid began taking on water, who hired officers and poorly qualified crew with false papers, and insisted that the trawler fish harder, chasing increased profits in some of the most dangerous seas on earth.

The bottom line

''I've written six books, and Anne [Frank]? She didn't even complete her one." - Diary of a Mad Diva by Joan Rivers (Berkley)

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