Katherine Howell

Once I started Web of Deceit I couldn’t put it down, which led to a very late night given I had intended, at midnight, to read only a chapter or two before getting some sleep. I really should have known better as I always find Howell’s series to be compulsive page turners, packed with intrigue, action and excitement.

Web of Deceit opens as Sydney paramedics Jane and Alex attend a minor car accident. The driver, Marko Meixner, blames the incident on a stalker and even though his almost show more incoherent ravings suggest a psychiatric disorder, Jane wonders if there might be some truth in what he is saying. Unfortunately there is little more they can do other than deliver him to the local hospital and notify the staff of their concerns. The incident is quickly forgotten as they continue on with their day, Alex’s mind is on his rebellious teenage daughter and Jane is simply eager for their shift to finish so she can rendezvous with her secret lover. Nearing the end of shift, Jane and Alex are annoyed when they are called to extricate a body from under a city train, but when they identify the corpse as the morning’s patient, Jane feels compelled to share her concerns with the on scene detective, Ella Marconi and her partner. Now it is up to the detectives to determine is Marko fell, pushed or jumped in front of the train, dragging them into a tangled web of secrets, lies and violence.

While Ella and Murray follow paper trails, badger unreliable and reluctant witnesses and try to avoid the censure of their penny pinching captain, they become convinced that Marko was in fact murdered. Their prime suspect is a newly released parolee who was incarcerated after Marko testified against him for murder more than a decade previously, but they can’t easily dismiss Marko’s boss and his partner, who have been siphoning the company’s funds. As always I love the realism Howell injects into the police procedure – mountains of paperwork, petty office politics, leads that don’t pan out and the sheer leg work to solve a case.

Detective Ella Marconi is the anchor of this series, but in each book Howell introduces a new paramedic team that are integral to the plot, ensuring the series never goes stale and the installments work well as stand alone novels. The paramedics contribute their own subplots as Howell skillfully weaves the personal and professional stories of each character into the main storyline, often with surprising crossover. In Web of Deceit, Jane is dealing with her ex-husband’s crazed wife and her new lover’s secret identity while Alex is struggling with PTSD and a recalcitrant daughter. Both are fully realised, complex and likeable characters.

The patients, victims and perpetrators are also of interest in the story. Rarely is any character, even the villain, a convenient stereotype. Howell demonstrates insight into the emotions and motivations of each – a wronged wife, a frightened girlfriend, a frantic father, heightening the tension by connecting the reader with characters that feel familiar.

Web of Deceit is Katherine’s sixth novel, and I think has edged out the others in the series as my favourite by the slimmest of margins. Fast paced, slick and utterly absorbing this is a fabulous read which I recommend without reserve. show less

It's nearly impossible for a reader to understand what it must be like to write a series of books, based around the same characters. All we can do is be extremely grateful that writers like Katherine Howell can do it, book after book, maintaining the same high standard, giving us new stories, and new situations for the characters to appear in, keeping the series fresh and interesting all the time.

Following on from FRANTIC and THE DARKEST HOUR, the third book COLD JUSTICE again simply does show more not miss a beat. Part of the reason that these books are so good is the shifting viewpoint. Not only does the author use her paramedic / ambulance officer background to great effect, writing characters from within that world, she combines them with a good, solid, interesting police cast, concentrating on a central character - Detective Ella Marconi. This switching perspective gives the stories some real depth, although, in COLD JUSTICE, the formula is twisted slightly again. Georgie Daniels is a paramedic with current day work problems, and a teenage connection back to the murder of a classmate. Nineteen years ago she discovered the body of Tim Pieters hidden amongst bushes. His family was devastated and Georgie's own friendship with Freya destroyed overnight. All these years later, having problems with an out of control boss, she's transferred to a new ambulance station and finds herself working with (and being assessed by) her old school friend Freya. At the same time the investigation into the death of Tim Pieters is reopened and Ella Marconi has nowhere else to start but with the person who discovered his body, his friends at school and his family members.

There's some really good balancing of all of the elements in this story - Marconi has a work life, and a personal life, and they coincide and collide realistically. Whilst everything in her life isn't perfect, it's also not so imperfect that it's unbelievable (although I'd kill any boyfriend who taught my mother how to send text messages like that!). Georgie and Freya have their own lives as well - Georgie and her husband, away from their beloved country home and animals, Freya with kids and a husband she loves no matter what sort of a twit he can make of herself. Both women have a demanding work life, and a not straight-forward private life and the complications of their teenage friendship, the murder of Tim and how they went their separate ways creates a prickliness between them which really works. On the victim's side the damage that was done to Tim's family as a result of his murder is carefully displayed - the pain and struggle of his mother Tamara in particular is graphic.

The final balancing act, however, is to give a good cast of characters a great plot to work within. Resolving a cold case from so long ago isn't an easy task for Marconi, but persistence, focus, good sixth sense, and a willingness to put reluctance aside and work with the less than ideal partner that is assigned to her, and eventually the truth is revealed.

COLD JUSTICE is a terrific book. It would work as a standalone, or it works as part of the continuing story of Ella Marconi. It works as a character study, or as a plot driven police procedural. Basically it just works. Really really really well. show less

It's odd, the things that can occur to you when you're reading books. In the case of SILENT FEAR I just could not stop thinking how glad I was to be a reader and not a writer. Honestly, how do these people come up with such consistently good characters and excellent plots? Howell makes her life that little bit more difficult by always bringing in a Paramedic thread, mostly with new characters each book, weaving what happens to them on the job into the plot of an excellent crime fiction / show more police procedural book. Even allowing for a background as a paramedic, I've no idea how she consistently builds these plots, creates these characters and writes these tremendous books!

In SILENT FEAR the connection between paramedic Holly and the police investigation into the shooting death of Paul Fowler is multi-faceted. She's one of the crew called when he collapses in a park, only to discover a bullet wound. Another connection is her estranged brother Seth, best friend of Paul, on the scene in the park when the shooting occurred. Things get even more complicated once her background starts to reveal, and her fiancé gets involved.

In Holly, Howell has again created a very interesting, fleshed out and realistic character. Her story is cleverly woven into the ongoing police investigation, ensuring that the reader gets a real chance to connect with her, whilst never feeling that the book is wandering off the point. Readers have had the earlier books in the series to really get to know Detective Ella Marconi, the lead voice in the detective group investigating Fowler's death. Marconi does seem to be getting an easier time in SILENT FEAR than she has in the earlier books. Aside from a bit of grief from a slimy new colleague, which she's handling, and her partner's worry and lack of communication, her ongoing relationship with her parents is considerably simpler (in this book they are cruising around New Zealand making lots of ship to shore calls to keep in touch), so everything's pretty smooth on the Marconi front. There is, however, a great cast of supporting police - male and female - with a good, solid combination of angst and normality in the entire group, leading to more than a sneaking hope that there could be an ensemble building.

One of the things that Howell does particularly well is to balance the personal and the professional, the paramedic and the cop lines. At no point do you feel the action wandering, or stalling, or wading around in uninteresting waters. There's no misdirection or padding in any of these books, and markedly so in SILENT FEAR. The story clipped along at a good pace, the author's not been afraid to cause her characters some serious angst, and it's possible for a reader to get a strong feeling of connection. The only downside, and a very very minor one at that, seemed to be the drawing together of a couple of plot lines that didn't quite work - perhaps because it seemed to be a unnecessary?

But seriously, the only real downside to SILENT FEAR is that you're going to have to be prepared before you start. It's flagged as "A Book You Can't Put Down", and they mean that. Emphatically. show less

By now the excited anticipation with which I approach each of Katherine Howell’s new novels is tinged with a smidgen of dread that her normal high quality won’t be maintained. But within a few pages of starting WEB OF DECEIT I knew my worries were needless as I was reminded that Howell has few equals when it comes to the consistency of her intricate plots that manage never to stray into ridiculous territory while gripping the reader from the outset and not letting go until the final show more page.

Howell’s sixth novel starts out with paramedics Jane and Alex attending a minor car crash where the victim, Marko Meixner, appears to be uninjured but possibly suffering from a mental illness as he refuses to be removed from his car and talks of being followed. After finally coercing him from his car they take Meixner to the nearest hospital and leave him waiting for a psychiatric consultation. Later that day they are called to assist with a body recovery from underneath a city train and the victim is Meixner. Jane expresses her doubts that it is a case of suicide to Ella Marconi, one of the detectives called out to the scene. Ella and her partner Murray are soon deeply involved in trying to determine if Meixner fell, jumped or was pushed under the train, all the while fighting against their new boss’ penchant for bringing cases in on budget.

The novel is aptly titled in more ways than one as its plot really does form a web of stories which meet and part and meet again in surprising ways. The police must investigate Meixner’s past, in particular a single incident from nearly 20 years ago, as well as his current life to uncover who, if anyone, might have had a motive for killing him. Is there something dodgy happening at his seemingly normal workplace or could he have become the victim of his wife’s stalker? I loved the way that each person they talk to – wife, colleagues, doctor, friends – describes a different version of the same man and it’s up to the detectives to build an accurate picture from everyone’s impressions. This helps to keep the reader guessing about who the culprit might be, if indeed there even is a culprit, as well as offering genuine insight into the phenomenon that we humans seem to have an infinite capacity to be different people depending on the environment we’re in.

In addition to this side of the book there are threads dealing with the work and personal lives of the paramedics which, not unreasonably, intersect with the work of the police on a regular basis. Alex’s story is particularly heart-wrenching as he is the single dad to a teenage girl who is being particularly troublesome and, when the book opens, he has recently returned to work after a very stressful incident left him psychologically damaged. This incident, as well as several others described throughout the book, shows how demanding and traumatising this work must be which is something Howell, an ex paramedic herself, manages to do with sensitivity that never crosses the line into being maudlin.

To top all this off WEB OF DECEIT has real heart in its depictions of the people affected by trauma and violent crime, be they victims, investigators, paramedics or family members. When Ella and Murray are confronted with the wife of a victim who refuses to accept her husband is dead the dialogue, the awkwardness and the emotions ascribed to all involved are touchingly realistic and an example of what makes the book such a great read, if a sad one on occasion. At different times the key players are dedicated, frustrated, exhausted, frightened or desperate for a brief respite and as readers it is easy to be drawn into their emotional journeys because at least some of the situations in which they find themselves are ones we recognise from our own experiences and the rest are easily, scarily imaginable.

Fans of the series will be pleased that a development in Ella’s somewhat rocky personal life awaits them in this instalment but I have to say this is one series you can start anywhere. Personally I’d recommend you read all six books, starting with FRANTIC, but if you’ve not read any of Katherine Howell’s novels you could easily leap right in to her version of Sydney with WEB OF DECEIT. It’s a fast, clever, sometimes sad, sometimes funny romp of a tale. Highly recommended. show less