Book Review: A Murder on the Mountain by Ellie Alexander

I don’t know it it’s just me (maybe it’s the books I’m picking up) but cosy crime seems to be trending these days towards the cosy and away from the crime. So it was with Ellie Alexander’s A Murder on the Mountain, and it’s fine, it really is, but…it’s just short on what I’m looking for in a crime novel. 

The book is set in Portland, Oregon, where wannabe investigative reporter Meg finds herself with a job at an extreme sports publication. Here, naturally, she is required to become involved in extreme sports at which (of course) she is inexperienced and so, expectedly, gets herself into a lot of scrapes. During one of these, as she is covering the filming of an extreme sports competition, she witnesses one of the competitors falling past her to his death as she clings to the side of a mountain. 

It wouldn’t be cosy crime of Meg didn’t immediately need to get to the bottom of it, despite being warned off by both the sheriff and a mysterious personage we assume to be the killer. So far, so mainstream. 

The trouble is, I found it all a bit…twee. It’s not just that Meg is improbably ditzy for a reporter, and keeps getting herself into situations which would have been avoided if she’d done as the Sheriff told her and stayed at home. It’s that the crime itself is incredibly sketchy. There are no witnesses to see how the victims came to fall and yet the Sheriff concludes that it’s homicide. We never find out why. Most of the investigation is Meg digging around to find out  the background of the contestants which, let’s face it, is something the police would be perfectly able to do for themselves — probably rather better and rather quicker. 

What we did get, instead of the crime, was a lot of froth. We had the detail on what Meg snd her friends wear, and eat, and detailed explanations of where they live. The secondary characters — friends, family, suspects — are stereotypes and without depth. Difficult mother, grandmother into crystals and alternative therapy, handsome boss vs male best friend, successful female best friend with smug boyfriend — the tropes are all there but there’s nothing to make them any more than one dimensional. That said, Meg herself, despite being on the irritating side, does at least have a complex backstory with which I was engaged, though not enough to read on beyond the end of this book to discover more.

I loved the setting, though, and was following the action with Google Maps open on my phone. The descriptions were great and really evoked the awe-inspiring setting of the Columbia Rover and its gorge, and I did like the touch of including information about all the locations at the end of the book. 

Overall, though the tone veered way too much towards the frothiness of a light romcom for my taste. Cosy or not, I’m looking for a little bit more of an edge than this in a crime novel, I’m afraid.

Book Review: The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak

I’ll be up front. Prior to reading this book my experience of reading Elif Shafak (two books, There are Rivers in the Sky and The Island of Missing Trees) propelled her right up near the top of my list of favourite writers. On that basis alone I was looking forward to The Forty Rules of Love. And maybe partly because my expectations were so high, I was disappointed.

The book is a dual timeline, balancing a journey of self-discovery for Ella, a middle-class liberal Jewish housewife in the States, against the historical story of the relationship between the thirteenth century Turkish poet, Rumi, and the whirling Dervish, Shams of Tabriz. I’m always a bit sceptical of this format, though normally Shafak does it well. Too often I find that one strand outweighs the other and so it proved in this case. Ella’s storyline felt dull to me and a faint echo of the historical story, rather than offering any kind of enrichment of it. I was less interested in her boredom than with the richness of what felt to me like the main story.

This, then, is a matter of historical fact in which the renowned Rumi becomes obsessed with his spiritual teacher, alienating many people along the way and inspiring many others, until events reach a tragic conclusion. Both Rumi and Shams are still quoted today and the book takes the reader through Shams’ Forty Rules of Love, showing us events through a lot of different points of view, which I liked.

So far so good, but I did find that for much of the book I was sucked into dense paragraphs and pages of philosophical exposition. The minor characters, who by and large don’t get bogged down in this kind of detail, are much the most entertaining and engaging (even the baddies). Shams comes across as alternatively too good or too bad to be true (perhaps that’s deliberate) and Rumi, the leader, seems overwhelmed by him to the point of neglecting family and friends. 

I found the religious debate and discussions o overwhelming that they were almost suffocating; too much of it felt as if I was being lectured, rather than encouraged, about a better way to live my life. When I compare that with the sparkling storytelling and clever construction of, say There Are Rivers in the Sky, I have to admit I was disappointed, and it took me a lot longer to read than I had thought. 

Just because this book isn’t as good as I expected doesn’t, of course, make it bad and I’m sure many other will people enjoy it. But for me, it’s not Shafak’s best.