Paula Gosling

I really enjoyed my reading of Running Duck by Paula Gosling. This is an older crime story that won the John Creasey Award for the best first novel in 1974 and makes an appearance on the CWA 100 Best Crime Novels list . A young woman ad executive called Claire Randall happens to get face to face with a professional killer and could be in a position to identify him. His response is to come after her and remove that possibility. After two attempts that go wrong, the police put the pieces show more together and realize she needs immediate protection. Ex-army sniper, Detective Mike Malcheck is assigned to the case and he quickly realizes that this international assassin is getting information from someone connected to the police. He and Claire take to the road in an attempt to draw the murderer out.

Running Duck was an exciting and fast paced story that gives the reader a “love on the run” story line that has moments of humor along with plenty of excitement as the two snipers take turns playing “cat and mouse” with each other. The various settings send the reader on a mini-trip of California, from the Sierra Nevada mountains to the Redwood forests and visiting all these familiar places made the book even more fun for me. Unfortunately a rather cheesy film called “Cobra” is supposedly based on this book, although they have completely different plots. The film stars Sylvester Stallone which guarantees that I will never watch it, but this debut novel is well worth the read. show less

This is dense, complicated, and really quite enjoyable, provided you can overlook a significant degree of homophobia. It’s an academic setting. The deceased, Adamson, is a faculty member in the English department of a fictional Ohio university. In best academic fashion, all his colleagues detest him, for once with good reason: he’s a blackmailer with a hold over nearly all of them. So the detective, Stryker, has a closed list of suspects, none of whom have great alibis, all of whom have show more some motive. And away we go.

Let’s get the homophobia out of the way first. Adamson is gay, and while it’s never quite implied that he’s a detestable blackmailer because he was gay, there’s all the same a fairly strong suggestion that his sexuality is meant to be another of his detestable features. It’s only ever invoked with squeamishness or disgust or prurience, depending on which character is invoking. I think one can overlook this, but one could also be reasonably quite put off by it.

If one overlooks it, the rest is pretty good, despite some things that are usually also off-putting. The character list is long, there’s an apparently digressive plot involving a janitor, there’s arch allusion to Christie novels and other crime fiction, there’s the added complication that Stryker has history with the English department generally and one faculty member specifically.

But somehow this is all executed and integrated well enough to make the book pleasingly dense, rather than annoyingly so. It also all interacts nicely with the central investigation plot—distraction enough to make it tricky to quite see what’s going on, not enough distraction to be obfuscatory. The circle of suspects does shrink a little too early for the conclusion to be fully satisfying, but it’s presented in a genuinely tense scene. The writing is generally unobtrusive, which is more of a compliment than it seems. And there’s a lot of the sort of university faculty sniping and gossiping and such that anyone who works at a university will wish they didn’t recognise and will also enjoy recognising. Gosling goes on the list of authors from this series whose other works I’ll actively look out. show less

Paula Gosling can write at least three very different styles of mysteries. This is a classic British village mystery (though definitely not a "cosy") solved by Chief Inspector Luke Abbott. To some extent it follows the classic romance pattern in which a woman is caught between two men --in this case Jennifer Eames, a woman doctor coming home to in take over part of a general practice long handled by the uncle who raised her, caught between Luke Abbott, with whom she had had a teen romance show more when they were both poor young people growing up in the town, and Mark Peacock, the "son of the manor" , whose family has lost money as Jennifer and Luke have gained at least solid professional status. Mark also has mental issues for which he is supposed to be medicated,so when a series of three women are murdered, the second being his mother, he is an obvious suspect, though not the only one. show less

I enjoyed this, it's the first Paula Gosling I've read and I was expecting less than I got. The writing is good and there is depth to the plot. The primary character is an American woman living in England. Shortly after her husband dies in a traffic accident she begins receiving frightening phone calls that eventually escalate to threats to her and to her young son. While the characters are a bit flat, Gosling does a good job at building suspense. While I did guess "whodunit" there were some show more good surprises along the way. show less