Karen Campbell (1)Rezensionen

The one thing I want to come away with after reading this book is to be kinder to people.

Rocked by a terrible accident, homeless Kelly needs to escape the city streets of Glasgow. A rare moment of kindness and a lost engagement ring conspire to call her home. As Kelly vows to reunite the lost ring with its owner, she must return to the small town she fled so many years ago.

On her journey from Glasgow to the south-west tip of Scotland, Kelly encounters ancient pilgrim routes, hostile humans, hippies, book lovers and a friendly dog, as memories stir and the people she thought she'd left behind for ever move closer with every step.

Oh how, I loved this book! It gave an insight into homelessness and addiction that I have not seen before. I listened on audiobook for the @another.chapter.podcast read along and the Scottish accent really added to the atmosphere.

The story is slow and shocking in measures. It showed how Kelly's fortunes could turn by how people treated her and also how easily someone could slip into homelessness. It showed how kind people can be when they have no reason to be... and shouldn't we always have reason to be. And it showed how dogs really can save our lives.

Kelly's story is not an easy one. Abuses are hinted at that we have to fill in the blank and Kelly's reactions to certain advances are obviously born out of experience and fear but at her heart she has kept her kindness and I found myself routing for her again and again.

A top read for 2023 so far.

From the very beginning I had a hard time sympathizing the the main character, Justine, and I never really connected with her for the rest of the book. I have read other books about women who run away from a dangerous, bad man, but Justine seemed to shut everybody out a bit too much to keep the story fluent. Also the story felt kind of hokey, and the characters didn't change much, even when the situation changed.
The parts I did like was the description of the community, the Scottish landscape and the archaeology. Yes there was some wonderful writing, but the book could have used another major edit.

Picking up after the events in The Twilight Time, Anna Cameron is away n New York trying for a UN job; and Cath and Jamie are trying to get on with normal life. But Jamie, now an Authorised Firearms Officer has a bad day at work and shoots a fifteen year old girl in the heat of a mismanaged operation. He is convicted of murder, partly due to the officer in charge arse covering, and has to go to prison. Very powerful describing the prison life and the day to day struggle to cope with having taken a life, and Cath's struggle to have a day to day life. As before, messy and moving, with convincing people.½

A deeply involving book, although I can't say I really enjoyed it. It was grim, messy, gritty and felt very realistic. Could you say you wanted to know any of the characters? Maybe not, but if you did, you know you've met a character.
The story starts with Anna, a new sergeant in charge of a bolshy team, including an ex-lover. She gets off on the wrong foot with them all except Jamie, too posh, too ambitious, too aloof to fit in. Prostitutes on the Drag are being attacked and having their faces slashed, adn in a tenement, an elderly Polish WWII veteran is killed. Jamie's wife Cath, ex-police herself, and suffering from post natal depression is drawn into the story after bumping into Anna and finding that actually, they don't hate each other.
No-one is white and no-one is black; everyone has some sympathetic and some offputting characteristics.

I think it's a book I will remember for quite some time.½

First book in what is currently a four book series, authored by a former police officer, The Twilight Time is a gritty police procedural with two female characters as lead: Sergeant Anna Cameron and Cath Worth, a former police officer - now a stay at home mom - and wife to Jamie, Anna's ex boyfriend. The crime aspect of the story is pretty solid. Where this book may be a turn off for some readers is the love triangle that makes up part of the story. That and the fact that the story spends a good chunk of time examining the relationship between Anna and Cath, their personality differences, their needs, weaknesses and desires. Anna's personality clashes with department superiors and lack of following proper procedures really gives this story some of its rawness which worked fine for me. I tend to prefer the psychological side of crime stories, more so than the "how we caught the bad guys" focus some stories take. I struggled a bit with a number of the phrases that are foreign to my North American mind. My Glaswegian-raised other half was helpful in explaining a lot of the terms used and the layout of Glasgow. Better than referring to Google all the time. The overall atmosphere of the story is grim, with a filthy muck aspect to it. Considering the Flexi Unit's job is to walk the beat of the Drag where cops are viewed as anything but the good guys and the unit doesn't get the respect that the CID gets within the force, it is equivalent to working a vice squad on a shoe-string budget. The crimes being solved doesn't quite come together as a neat package at the end of the story but most of the big picture items are address so I wasn't left with an overall bad feeling about this one.

What I didn't like about the story were parts of Anna's personality - her steamroller/bulldozer approach to getting the job done - and I am really not all that keen on the whole love triangle aspect, even though it does provide the author with an anchor to dance the two female lead characters around and a secondary conflict that requires resolution, outside of the crime. Overall, a solid piece of writing - not spectacular or stellar - with enough going on to keep my interest as I was reading. I will be keep an eye out for copies of further books in the series.½

Fictional story about refugees in Glasgow. Intro to each chapter describes places, buildings and activities in the city.

"After the Fire" (AF) is the third in the Anna Cameron series about a bright, ambitious Glasgow-based police inspector. The opening of AF blew me away like no other book has in a long, long time. There is a long chapter detailing the incarceration of a former policeman for murder. The reader is exposed to every detail of the remand process; Jamie is humiliated, treatened, abused far beyond his expectations. These pages are heart-wrenching and very upsetting to read; they expose every man's fear - going to prison for a crime not committed or at least not intended. The book then jumps back several months. Jamie's wife, Cath, a former cop, is struggling with a pair of weens, 4 year old Eilidh, and 2 year old, not-quite potty trained, Dan. They are a handful, everything goes wrong at once. And you wonder - if these two present such a struggle, how will this woman cope with what's just around the corner for her on top of everything else? We are also witness to Jamie's training to become a gun-toting officer, still a rarity in the UK. There is a process for everything, from loading a gun to patching a shot up target. Then on to Jamie's first active crime scene. Chaos, and its aftermath. And where is heroine Anna all this time? In NYC, in training and evaluation for a possible long term UN assignment related to human trafficking. Back to Glasgow. There's been an incident and everyone has turned on Jamie. Then there's the trial.....Well, enough o the storyline. What makes this book so special is that everyone of these scenes is laid out in such exquisite detail. It is impossible not to feel yourself walking in Jamie's shoes.

Campbell is an excellent author. You feel that you are in Scotland, she does the dialect so well. The prison scenes are especially engrossing, the dialog seems spot on. And yes, people in prison and on the streets scraping by do tend to use rather impolite language. Deal with it, or read some Edith Wharton instead.

AF is not a perfect book, even though I've scored it a "5". I think the climax is a bit melodramatic, and I did not at all appreciate the "voice" of a future victim running on throughout the story. Nevertheless I recommend this book highly. It can be read as a stand-alone.

Instead of the usual 1-2-3 order, I read these books in a 3-1-2 order, and I do not recommend that at all for this series. My rationale for starting with the 3rd, 4th or even 5th book in a series is to give the author time to develop the characters and hone her/his writing and story telling skills a bit. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. All three books are very well written, but I had a number of issues with the third book. I found the first one to be a good deal better, and needless to say book #2 is exceptional. Enjoy!

Imagine committing your life to serving justice only to have justice fail you.

Jamie Worth, career cop with the Scottish Police is due to go on holiday with his wife (an ex-cop) and two kids when there is an armed call out on the other side of town. Newly qualified to respond to firearms incidents he is detailed with another young recruit to assist officers already on the scene who advise of shots fired in a poor part of town and reports of a young girl brandishing a gun. In the high tension moments that follow WOrth guns down the threat only to be shocked she was not armed at all.

What ensues is a case of his comrades closing ranks to make an example of him as a public increasingly concerned by firearms incidents demand their pound of flesh and Worth and his family have their life turned upside down as one by one their friends, their colleagues, and the system they served and believed in seemingly conspires against them, and ultimately Worth is imprisoned for murder.

Serving time is hard for anyone, imagine being a cop who put some of these criminals away? Going against everything he believed in civvy street, Worth must live to a new order to survive while his wife does likewise as she struggles with two kids and a community which has turned on her.

But someone steps in to help. Across the Atlantic, Anna Cameron, a Scottish officer serving the UN hears of Worth's plight and comes home to investigate the investigation. There's one small issue; she's the former mistress of Jamie Worth, a fact that Worth's wife is well aware of.

In a brilliantly written novel the reader is taken from the mundane to the unbelievable in the life of the police force, the normality of domestic life to the seedy underbelly of the child sex trade, and how far people will go to save their own skins, whether by fight or flight, or by altering the facts.

For 400-odd pages you could not ask for a better book to read as it builds to a climax that must surely be of biblical proportions, however in the one letdown in the book, the end came to quick. I felt somewhat ripped off not having more detail on the aftermath as Worth's conviction was appealed and those who conspired against him, both in prison and in the police force, and still, a day later I feel like a chapter was forthcoming. But regardless, a great crime novel for anyone, and dare I say it, in poetically written Scottish which conjures up none other than Billy Connelly..

This Is Where I Am tells the stories of Deborah, a lonely Scottish woman getting over the death of her husband, and Abdi, a Somalian refugee who is allocated Deborah as his mentor (she volunteers at the Scottish Refugee Council). In alternating chapters we learn of both characters' pasts and how they give each other hope for the future.

It's a large book, but one I got through pretty quickly. The writing is excellent, and the story is moving, enlightening and ultimately uplifting. I really enjoyed reading about the contrast between Deborah's and Abdi's lives, and how having her as his mentor went some way to mending him and giving him a new life in Scotland. It's an empathetic portrayal of two people trying to get their lives back on track and it's a story of friendship and healing.

An excellent and different read.

This was a book group choice when we were reading Scottish crime fiction. It is Campbell’s first book and she has since written a second which includes some of the characters who are introduced in this story. I was a little off-put by the fact that the ‘blurb’ is a lengthy quotation from Mark Billingham, a crime writer whose work I have not particularly enjoyed. Would I still enjoy the story?

The premise

Sergeant Anna Cameron moves jobs to head up a new unit and discovers that she has difficulties working with her new team, especially Jamie Worth, a man she dated during police training and who is now married to the woman he left her for. Meanwhile, crime is happening in Glasgow. An old man is killed, possibly by a burglar, and prostitutes are being attacked, their faces carved up in increasingly violent attacks. Can Anna solve these crimes while handling the tensions within her own team?

My thoughts

To be honest, I didn’t find the initial premise particularly interesting, especially as the focus seemed to be more on the relationships between the police than on the crimes themselves. I prefer crime stories which are built around interesting crimes and where the focus is on solving the crime. From that perspective, I found this a disappointing read. The story itself does not seem to be particularly important to the publishers as the inside cover primarily focuses on the relationships developed in the story. Similarly, rather than referring primarily to plot, the blurb focuses on atmosphere and characterisation. This sets the tone well for the book itself, which, to me, was never really about the crime, but was about Anna, Jamie and his wife, Cath.

From the beginning, there was such a strong focus on relationships that the crimes felt like a series of background events. We see Anna try to settle into her new office, get on badly with her superior and her inferiors, be stunned by the news she will be working with her ex (this bit of text would work well in a Mills and Boon or similar romance novel) and begin to develop familiarity with the local area. I might not have minded this focus on relationships so much if I liked any of the characters. However, I found all three central characters unsympathetic and the supporting characters underdeveloped. Anna bitches, Jamie backstabs and Cath whinges. I could not warm to any of them and therefore did not care what happened to them.

The actual crimes that are the background to the book are introduced casually and developed at intervals, in-between power-plays, flirting and moping. Police work seems to mostly consist of gathering gossip from other prostitutes and training newcomers in how to complete the requisite paperwork. Before turning her hand to writing Campbell was a police officer in Glasgow, so presumably this is a fairly true to life depiction of crime detection, but I would have preferred more ‘investigation’ to be happening. I think if the author removed all the relationship material then this would be a very short book indeed.

Some chapters focus on Cath’s perspective, which initially seemed a little odd as she is no longer a police officer but is a stay-at-home mum. The reader experiences her intense frustration as Jamie fails to appreciate how hard she works as a mother and a housewife. She also reflects upon their unsatisfactory sex life and seems unable to stop herself snapping at her husband. However, as the book develops she becomes involved in the investigation and the chapters which focus on her seem more justified. That said, I found the relationship which develops between her and Anna to be bizarre and unconvincing. Similarly, I couldn’t work out whether Jamie was really interested in Anna or simply fed up with Cath, as he seems to alternately treat his new boss with an intimacy that is inappropriate given their ten year silence and a scathing dislike. I found most developments in their relationships confusing and therefore irritating.

Some readers have suggested that Glasgow is so well painted here that it becomes almost another character in the story. I did find some of the early passages describing Glasgow quite evocative, but I certainly didn’t feel that I gained a real feel for the place. Possibly, some readers found that the use of Scots vernacular (‘neds’ and ‘hoors’) helped to create a strong sense of place. This didn’t really have much of an impact on me but I think it does help to create a certain sense of place.

The story concludes in a way that is completely fitting to what has gone before: the crimes are briefly resolved and relationships are the main focus, including Anna’s relationship with the old man who was beaten to death. The ‘villain’ who has been attacking the women is so irrelevant to the story that I still have no clear picture of who he was or what his motivation was. I think that this was a suitable ending to a story that had really been about people and the horrible ways they treat each other, rather than about crime.

Obviously, prostitution is a key theme. Early on a police officer states that it simply isn’t possible to arrest all the women at once, so they have a ‘kind of rota’ that means the women are able to earn enough to pay their regular fines. I realise that responding to this type of crime is difficult, and throughout the book the police try to get the women to help themselves, but I would have liked a stronger sense of resolution at the end. Maybe no one is going to cut up their faces anymore, but they are still very vulnerable. Again, I suppose this is a realistic ending.

Finally, the written style is interesting in that, when writing from a character’s viewpoint, Campbell writes in non-standard sentences which seem designed to reflect exactly what the character is thinking, even though the narration is written in the third person throughout. I thought this was quite a nice touch which helped to create a sense of realism and allowed the reader to really grasp the character’s perspective.

Conclusions

You’ve probably realised by now that I won’t be reading this again – or the next in the series, which focuses on Jamie ending up in prison. I was disappointed in this as I was hoping to read a police procedural but ended up reading what I would categorise more as a gritty episode of a soap opera. All the focus was on the relationships between the characters, which would possibly have mattered less if they had been less unpleasant. I certainly wouldn’t spend £12.99 (RRP) on the hardback version of this and am glad I borrowed it free from my local library.

However, I recognise that my voice seems to be a dissenting one: many readers on Amazon and elsewhere seem to have absolutely loved this. According to the front cover, Kate Atkinson loved it and felt that ‘the plot fairly whizzes along’. If you like your crime to be subsumed by the misery of difficult relationships and stroppy work colleagues then you should definitely give this a go. It has been described as atmospheric, but I didn’t really get a feel for anything other than misery and discomfort for 339 pages. On the plus side, chapters are reasonably short and broken into sections, which mean that it is very easy to find a stopping point when reading. If I haven’t entirely put you off, I would suggest borrowing rather than buying to see if the author’s style appeals to you.

I had read the third of this three book series and didn't particularly enjoy it, but knowing that it is popular with bloggers and other critics I thought I'd give the series another try and read Book One - and I enjoyed it very much. Anna is new to her unit, comes in as a sgt., labeled a fast tracker, with hints that she has a special friend in the higher levels who is pushing her career along. She doesn't wait long to enforcing her way of doing things and her expectations, and the troops resent the new discipline. One of the troops is Jamie, a former lover, and married to a former cop, Cath. Cath and Anna become entangled for a good part of this story with mixed results. Anna is bright but makes several poor decisions along the way and is called onto the carpet where her career path is temporarily altered. But in the long run, she does something heroic and she contributes to the solution of a major crime. By book's end, Anna seems to get her act together, but one wonders for how long. There is a lot of ruminating, a lot of internalizing, a lot of introspection here. A Lot! And the personal stuff of relationships seems to fill 60% of the story with the balance related to policing, but I may be off there. A solid effort and I'll read book two but I'm still book-to-book on this series.

I enjoyed it but I think of it as an introduction to the following novels.

Good plot but gives new meaning to gritty.½

A gritty police story set in Glasgow which almost needs the equivalent of sub-titles with its strong Gasgow "patois". I found it difficult to empathise with the main characters and a rather depressing read. I presume it won't do anything for Glasgow tourism!

Rather disappointing.
I had been given to understand that Karen Campbell was set to rival Ian Rankin and Stuart MacBride as a leading purveyor of Scottish Crime Noir, but someone certainly sold me the dummy there. The plot was thin to the point of translucence, the portrayal of Glasgow's underbelly utterly unconvincing and the characters were totally unsympathetic. Still, at least the font was nice.
I bought this secondhand on Amazon for £0.01, and if it hadn't been for the postage and packing charge I might just about have believed I got my money's worth!½

This is the third in a series of books in which Anna Cameron is featured (my first in the series). There is a lot I liked about the book and a few key things I disliked, hence the low rating overall and my present feeling that I may not read other Karen Campbell novels. First the pro's: 1) Interesting to read a crime fiction (CF) novel that focuses on the mid to upper levels of a major city's police department, 2.) I have read many cf novels by Scot authors, e.g. Rankin, Mina, Atkinson, MacBride, etc. but none had the seemingly genuine "feel" of Scottish environment and language, so genuine that some of the dialog was incomprehensible to me 3.) the story was well paced and the plot was interesting. But now the con's: 1) I didn't care for the protagonist/heroine for much of the book (I don't mind "in-your-face" but much of it initially felt unnecessary) 2) there was so much plotting/counter-plotting re career planning that it started to feel a bit soap operish, 3) there didn't seem to be a lot of detectives doing the basic detecting, it was all done by the higher levels 4) the romance didn't feel right, perhaps it was too fast. I don't understand why this book is under consideration for a prestigious award; perhaps that will be explained by how well this book plays for Brit vs. American audiences....½

THE TWILIGHT TIME is the debut novel from ex-cop Karen Campbell - featuring Sergeant Anna Cameron as the central character. In 2009 Campbell won Best New Scottish Writer at the Scottish Variety Awards, and there is now a second book out: After the Fire, which switches the viewpoint to two characters from the first book - Jamie and his wife Cath.

But THE TWILIGHT TIME is a book that was recommended to me by somebody whose preferences I follow closely, and coincidentally was nominated as a discussion book on one of my email lists, so it was with some pleasurable anticipation that it was shunted up the To Be Read list.

When Anna Cameron is bought into a local station as part of an active policing unit there's some disquiet around the place - she's mostly been a head office / policy sort of police officer before this and nobody's all that convinced about her ability to take over and run a unit. Fragile emotionally after Jamie dumped her anyway, discovering that she'll be working with him puts her under increased (self-imposed) strain, and when she finds that there is active resentment against her from other members of the squad, she starts to fall apart. Becoming obsessed with the murder of Ezra, a frail, old Polish man doesn't help her cause with anybody - especially as it isn't one of her own cases. When she is injured in the chase for a man who has been carving up the faces of prostitutes, Anna doesn't cope at all well when Jamie's wife Cath (an ex-cop in her own right, with a very bad case of post-natal depression), reaches out to her, having known Ezra as well.

There's a hefty dose of angst, personal instability, depression, obsession, resentment, dislike, mistrust, lack of understanding, and selfishness in just about everybody in THE TWILIGHT TIME. To the point where it can be very off-putting. It's not often that you read a book and come out of it realising that there was a point in the narrative where you'd have cheerfully slapped just about every character. As somebody commented in the discussion we had about the book - there is a fine line between tough and obnoxious and some readers may choose to believe that Anna is tough - and others will be voting obnoxious. Personally I'm not adverse to a flawed central character, and I liked that Anna wasn't perfect and that there were signs of redeeming factors, although I will admit in THE TWILIGHT TIME there were too many flaws in too many of the characters. Having said that, I like characters that aren't too perfect and screw up and have bad days and are a bit grumpy and a bit stupid and occasionally daft as a brush, but stick with things, and care about something - and I really liked the way that Anna and Cath both cared about what happened to a lonely old man.

In terms of plot - there were some good touches, with the mystery of the death of Ezra, and what seems to be, on the face of it a racist plot, quite interesting. It was also touching to be reminded that an old man could die, alone and mostly unforgotten and unremarked on. The other case that is being pursued by Anna's team is the carving up of prostitute's faces. This is resolved reasonably well, although at points it does seem to disappear into all the personal stuff a little, and in both investigations there were a few procedural twists and turns that didn't make a lot of sense. This is a debut book however, and sometimes they can have some flaws. The question really is would reading THE TWILIGHT TIME make me want to pick up the second book and it certainly did that.

She's good!

Enjoyed it and look forward to the next books

Love her books