Simone Buchholtz (Trans Rachel Ward)
Orenda Books, date, 27 April 2023
Available as: PB, 243pp, audio, e
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB/ PB):
I'm grateful to Orenda for sending me a copy of The Acapulco to consider for review, and to Anne Cater for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.
It's always good to catch up with Chastity Riley's life. We last saw the Hamburg based State prosecutor getting a measure of closure over her family history in a visit to Glasgow. In The Acapulco, though, we don't get the next story - we're back to the beginning and able to read, for the first time in English, the first book. So we perhaps see a slightly less moody Riley than we're used to and those around her aren't, as it were, quite in their familiar settings.
Hamburg is still, though, throwing grim mysteries Chastity's way. Young women - dancers from the Acapulco club - are being murdered and mutilated, and Riley finds that something about the case makes it difficult for her to get into the mind of the murderer, her usual approach in investigating crimes. That family history, which is hinted at here (though if you've been reading these books you'll know a bit more than is directly stated) may be messing with her. Or it may be something else...
The study of a Chastity coming apart at the seams, so to speak, is as brutal but also as touching as ever. Drinking too much, smoking too much, her personal and professional lives both muddled and decaying, it's impossible to say whether she is suffering because she is trying to box in and control desperate underlying pain and trauma, or because she's failing to do that, and it is overwhelming her.
Also as ever, salvation seems to come from that small circle of friends, some of whom seem to bring a modicum of normality and sanity (though others, not so much - I'm looking at you, Klatsche.)
These are books where the noir atmosphere almost seems to take tangible form, a neon-lit, smoky, netherworld that has substance and personality all of its own, breeding both monsters and moments of beauty. Reading them - The Acapulco, if anything, even more than the others - is like being bathed in silver nitrate then dyed monochrome and developing-lamp red and transported inside the silver screen to sit in a corner of that club, that bar, simultaneously in 2020s Hamburg and a 1940s Hollywood flick, close - indeed at times, almost too close - to the action.
The writing - magnificently translated by Rachel Ward - is punchy, allusive, knowing, done in broken sentences and rueful, suggestive lines. Fittingly for the book that kicked it all off, unlike in some of the others, the point of view is all Riley's (apart from some interspersed sections which I'm not commenting on for spoiler related reasons) giving this story a very narrated quality - you can almost imagine her voice as a commentary to the film, sorry, the book. That also means there is little sense of what is happening out of view, with the atrocities committed by the serial killer coming as increasingly jarring, unpredictable shocks.
It is a short book but powerful, punchy and very dark. I found it hard to put down, even sitting reading it in the cinema in the gloom before the films started.
A magnificent addition to this sequence.
For more information about The Acapulco, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below.
You can buy The Acapulco from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.
Thanks for the blog tour support x
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