Reviews: Books – The Blue Place

I just finished reading The Blue Place by Nicola Griffith. I’ve had all three books of the Aud series sitting around, unread, since Christmas, but after a bad experience with a Kathy Reichs novel, I haven’t been in the mood to read detective stories until now. Thankfully, Nicola got rid of the bad Kathy taste in my mouth, and has left me in the mood to read more.

I couldn’t decide at first whether or not this book was a parody or totally serious. It starts off in a fairly standard film noir way: While out walking in the middle of the night in the pouring rain, our hero, an angsty ex-cop and current PI encounters a mysterious woman running away from a house that explodes just minutes later. This woman then shows up at her door, asking for her help. Cue dramatic music.

The Aud character is part James Bond, part Sam Spade, and part Batman. Although this book is a “mystery,” the mystery matters only in that it gives Aud opportunities in which to flex her heroic muscles. It’s like a James Bond story – you know he’ll win in the end, the story exists only to let James wear fancy tuxes, drive expensive cars, and seduce beautiful women. Aud is so perfect, so capable, so amazing, that it verges on laughable. Okay, so it actually is laughable. But in a good way. I even started keeping a running catalog of Aud’s incredible traits.

Aud…

1. Is a former member of the elite Red Dogs unit of the Atlanta Police Department.
2. Has inherited a vast sum of money, leaving her wealthy enough to never work again.
3. But that’s not who she is, so she keeps busy working as a bodyguard and private detective, charging exorbitant fees, driving expensive cars and wearing gorgeous suits because she’s worth it.
4. Her mom is head of the Norwegian consulate to the United Kingdom, and has connections to everyone. Aud is thus a dual citizen with Norway and the UK, and seems to be a permanent resident in the US as well. She speaks Norwegian, English, and Spanish, and I’m sure many other languages that didn’t come up as part of this story. She seems to have been everywhere at least once and knows everything about everything. And I mean everything.
5. She can drive stick.
6. She is also a pool shark.
7. She is six feet tall and much of the book is devoted to long passages extolling her exceptional muscle tone and piercing eyes.
8. In her (seemingly endless amount of) spare time she:
a) Teaches self-defense to rookie cops.
b) Practices at keeping her black belt in some form of exceedingly difficult martial art.
c) Lays sod, digs flowerbeds, and generally creates a garden paradise in her backyard.
d) Does home renovations by herself that include building an entire deck and replacing the
beams in her ceiling with antique wood.
e) Expertly builds custom furniture by hand.
f) Climbs glaciers specifically looking for deadly crevasses to peer into.
g) Can seduce any woman she wants, just by existing in the same room.
9. She has saved a skydiver from certain death by cutting the cords of her own parachute, plummeting to Earth like a rocket, grabbing the person with a faulty chute and holding on to them with her thighs, pulling her emergency chute with just seconds to spare.
10. She looks great in evening gowns and combat gear, but spends a lot of time standing around, gloriously naked.
11. She can hold her breath for minutes while remaining under freezing cold water.
12. She can treat bullet wounds to her own back while suffering from hypothermia.
13. She can drive any speed she wants without ever getting pulled over.
14. She can kill people left and right and never get in trouble.
15. She even makes her bed in the morning.

In conclusion, Aud is awesomer than that awesomest thing that ever did awesome. She is like Wonder Woman, Ripley, Sarah Connor, and a unicorn – all rolled into one hot package. The funny thing about Aud, this parody/wish-fulfillment character, is that she’s placed into a very serious book. This kept the story from heading into farce, and was what made it such an enjoyable read. It was like taking James Bond out of his universe full of magical technology and villains with clever names, and depositing him in the real world, where violence is fast and brutal and people don’t die in melodramatic swoons, but in convulsions and spasms and screams, where there’s a cost to everything. I’m very excited to read the next books and see where the fallout from this first entry in the series takes Aud.