I am not much of a reader of crime fiction and I know all the critism about Craig Russell's Fabel series being overly-clichéd in some ways, yet I always enjoyed the books. The only one I didn't like so far was "Blood Eagle" which I didn't read first (I started with "Brother Grimm" and then read "Blood Eagle" to complete the series. Also I was really looking forward to a new Fabel novel and hence "A fear of dark water".
And was disappointed. Not only Jan Fabel seems even more slow to catch the meaning of some things than before (thought that is probably necessary for the plot advancing) and Susanne suddenly talks like straight out of a chick-lit novel while Anna Wolff has turned into a kind of pre-Vitrenko Maria Klee (has lost all her drive). What is really annoying is that this time it is not only cliché but Sarrazinism (I wonder if Mr. Russell has read his Sarrazin), the handicapped persons (called "disabled" which is discriminating) in the book are generally the bad ones who lost it and portrayed in a way as if brain-cell damage leading to palsies generally meant you are mental and bad and are portrayed as self-pitying sods. I don't guess Mr. Russell has read up on the Zentrum für Disability Studies, coincidentially based in Hamburg, or the Germany "Selbstbestimmt Leben" empowered movement or taled to people concerned. Then he had probably learnt that most people are the exact opposite of what he portrays and that his portrayal is insulting. There is no doubt that as with any group some individuals might get politically radical but that as with every group has reasons. In another book of the series Russell couldn't help but go on endlessly about how guilty the Germans of Fabels generation felt due to the nationalsocialism. Of an authors who does that I would have expected that if he steretypes and clichés handicapped people into terrorists and murders he would at least plunge into the history of post-war education of the handicapped which mainly consisted of being hidden away and kept intentionally dumb in so-called "Sonderschulen". Hamburg based lawyer Oliver Tolmein could have told him a story or two about that. Some with Turkish characters. Fabel has nothing better to do than to reveal his narrow-mindedness of the particular way it became chic since Sarrazin by asking Berthold Müller-Voigt if his girlfriend, a Turk, was legal.
Not to mention that in Germany a woman shot like Anna Wolff would not get back into the murder commission and probably not even police service but be sent for an office retraining or something at a Berufsförderungswerk institution with that kind of injury.
I think I was the last Fabel I read. Of all his books, and I certainly know that fiction can be a bit off the wall, this is the least credible. Neither it is gripping but predictable. I guess Mr. Russell might be Fabel weary. Either that or trying to change the direction of the series at any cost.
