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A review by alexandramilne
The Beautiful Dead by Belinda Bauer
3.0
Read my other book reviews at booksibled.wordpress.com
I’m quite fussy about crime fiction. Too often I find it unnerving and not for the right reasons. Crime fiction as a genre is generally written by men, often with men as the focal point. That’s not to say there isn’t crime fiction written by women, or written by men with women as their main characters but I’m generalising because it directly links to my main issue with crime fiction and, I suppose with the real world too.
I’m sick of women being murdered.
I love a good murder mystery, Midsummer Murders is such a big part of my family’s TV lives that we can watch 30 seconds of it and my mum will be able to tell you if we’ve seen it before and probably who the murderer is. I loved Castle before it got a bit…meh, I have a huge amount of affection for The Mentalist and Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lecter series too. Britain in particular has had a strange fascination with murder for centuries, as detailed in a fantastic book and TV series by Lucy Worsley both called ‘A Very British Murder’ which I highly recommend. Also there’s a podcast called ‘My Favourite Murder’ which is awesome if you’re really interested in murder and mystery but not in gang killings or your average wife-beating waste of space. It’s much more about why people snap and the freaky unsolved stuff or bungled investigations and that sort of thing…but I digress.
Writing about murder for people interested in murder shouldn’t mean you can just go about ripping women up and degrading them in your book just because your story isn’t about them but your self-insert hero with a tragic past who all the ladies love and yet he’s so mysterious he has to leave in the night to save the seemingly endless population of faceless, history-less and friendless prostitutes once again being terrorised by a fiendish and highly intelligent mastermind. I’m just kind of over the descriptions of entrails and missing but shapely limbs, the lifeless staring eyes and soulless pink smeared mouths. Because we all know, the author/hero isn’t really in it for that poor meat puzzle woman but for the thrill of the game that inevitably follows. At the end of the day, she’s still in bits in a morgue and he’s drinking whisky out of a hip-flask, waving a gun around and winking at every attractive woman he sees, it’s boring and it’s heartless.
Now you’re wondering why I bothered to pick this up aren’t you. Well, firstly it’s written by a woman and the main character is a woman. Secondly I was interested by the premise of a crime reporter who hated gore to the extent that it makes her sick and of Belinda’s decision to deal with dementia and mental illness as well. Thirdly I had a long train journey to make and no book and it was fairly cheap. So sue me.
I’m not going to say that it was fantastic and everything I wanted from a good crime story because that would be a lie. Some of the ideas were a little too familiar to someone who used to watch a lot of crime dramas. But that being said, I will give it this: I was surprised by this book. I started reading ready and raring to tear it apart and the opening scene with yet another shoe obsessed, faceless, unimportant woman chased down in her work building and stabbed repeatedly did nothing to change that. But I did actually start getting into it. I was interested by Eve Singer and her life looking after her sick father. The love story was so unimportant to the story line that you barely know it’s there which was good because I don’t think it would have been believable otherwise and also I found the killer creepy and understandably hard to catch.
I still think that it’s problematic to cast the clearly mentally ill person as a serial killer. I still think that his reason for killing was a bit weird and that, on the whole, the whole it was all a little unconvincing. But it kept me reading right to the end and there were genuinely moments when I felt I just had to know what happened next. If you like murder mysteries, especially ones with women as main characters rather than sexualised still-life dolls, then I think this is one of the better ones I’ve read but it’s no ‘Black Eyed Susans’. As for me, I’m heading back into the world of fantasy thanks.
P.S. If you like crime fiction, especially crime fiction driven by the journey of a fairly average woman who doesn’t like violence then this is the book for you. But personally I’m not rushing out to delve back into crime fiction any time soon.
I’m quite fussy about crime fiction. Too often I find it unnerving and not for the right reasons. Crime fiction as a genre is generally written by men, often with men as the focal point. That’s not to say there isn’t crime fiction written by women, or written by men with women as their main characters but I’m generalising because it directly links to my main issue with crime fiction and, I suppose with the real world too.
I’m sick of women being murdered.
I love a good murder mystery, Midsummer Murders is such a big part of my family’s TV lives that we can watch 30 seconds of it and my mum will be able to tell you if we’ve seen it before and probably who the murderer is. I loved Castle before it got a bit…meh, I have a huge amount of affection for The Mentalist and Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lecter series too. Britain in particular has had a strange fascination with murder for centuries, as detailed in a fantastic book and TV series by Lucy Worsley both called ‘A Very British Murder’ which I highly recommend. Also there’s a podcast called ‘My Favourite Murder’ which is awesome if you’re really interested in murder and mystery but not in gang killings or your average wife-beating waste of space. It’s much more about why people snap and the freaky unsolved stuff or bungled investigations and that sort of thing…but I digress.
Writing about murder for people interested in murder shouldn’t mean you can just go about ripping women up and degrading them in your book just because your story isn’t about them but your self-insert hero with a tragic past who all the ladies love and yet he’s so mysterious he has to leave in the night to save the seemingly endless population of faceless, history-less and friendless prostitutes once again being terrorised by a fiendish and highly intelligent mastermind. I’m just kind of over the descriptions of entrails and missing but shapely limbs, the lifeless staring eyes and soulless pink smeared mouths. Because we all know, the author/hero isn’t really in it for that poor meat puzzle woman but for the thrill of the game that inevitably follows. At the end of the day, she’s still in bits in a morgue and he’s drinking whisky out of a hip-flask, waving a gun around and winking at every attractive woman he sees, it’s boring and it’s heartless.
Now you’re wondering why I bothered to pick this up aren’t you. Well, firstly it’s written by a woman and the main character is a woman. Secondly I was interested by the premise of a crime reporter who hated gore to the extent that it makes her sick and of Belinda’s decision to deal with dementia and mental illness as well. Thirdly I had a long train journey to make and no book and it was fairly cheap. So sue me.
I’m not going to say that it was fantastic and everything I wanted from a good crime story because that would be a lie. Some of the ideas were a little too familiar to someone who used to watch a lot of crime dramas. But that being said, I will give it this: I was surprised by this book. I started reading ready and raring to tear it apart and the opening scene with yet another shoe obsessed, faceless, unimportant woman chased down in her work building and stabbed repeatedly did nothing to change that. But I did actually start getting into it. I was interested by Eve Singer and her life looking after her sick father. The love story was so unimportant to the story line that you barely know it’s there which was good because I don’t think it would have been believable otherwise and also I found the killer creepy and understandably hard to catch.
I still think that it’s problematic to cast the clearly mentally ill person as a serial killer. I still think that his reason for killing was a bit weird and that, on the whole, the whole it was all a little unconvincing. But it kept me reading right to the end and there were genuinely moments when I felt I just had to know what happened next. If you like murder mysteries, especially ones with women as main characters rather than sexualised still-life dolls, then I think this is one of the better ones I’ve read but it’s no ‘Black Eyed Susans’. As for me, I’m heading back into the world of fantasy thanks.
P.S. If you like crime fiction, especially crime fiction driven by the journey of a fairly average woman who doesn’t like violence then this is the book for you. But personally I’m not rushing out to delve back into crime fiction any time soon.