Customer Reviews

Siren of the Waters (Commander Jana Matinova Investigation)

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This is the first in a series featuring Commander Jana Matinova of the Slovak Republic's national police. We first see her on the scene of a possibly suspicious traffic accident. She finds a burning van and seven bodies. The lone male has two passports. Five of the six dead women are foreigners and all are prostitutes.

Matinova quickly concludes that the "accident" is murder and that the Slovak Republic is a transit point in the flesh trade in Europe. Her superiors quickly grant the request of the chair of the EU committee dealing with the flesh trade and send Matinova to Strasbourg to attend and speak at the meeting, a meeting that is promptly disrupted by the murder of a participant, soon followed by the killing of another.

Matinova finds herself on the trail of Koba, a ruthless and brilliant master criminal whom few have ever seen. He is now fighting back against attempts to kill him and seize control of the criminal organization that he created. It is not the first time. He has been "killed" often but never stayed dead. He strikes unexpectedly, swiftly and invisibly. He has never lost. His enemies, powerful but terrified of Koba, are also reacting violently.

Matinova is a good character. She is a tough, honest and brilliant detective in a society that gives cops great leeway in their work but where, because of the Communist past, the public mistrusts the police and many of the cops are corrupt. The novel comes alive when Matinova is on stage. Unfortunately she is the only fully realized character in the story. Everyone else is supporting cast at best.

Koba is obviously a superman. He is a phantom not only to the other characters but to the readers, who are told nothing of his methods. Matinova's immediate superior seems to have no function other than to be endlessly supportive of her, with no clear motivation for the risks he takes. Matinova's husband's actions under the Communist regime (told in flashbacks) are so dangerous and stupid as to defy belief. The back history, motivations and actions of other key players are total blanks, leaving yet more holes in the plot. Nonetheless the story rips along at an exciting pace and is enjoyable. There is promise here but work to be done also.

The van skidded on ice near Bratislava, Slovakia before bursting into an inferno roasting to death the occupants, a pimp and his six hookers. Slovak Criminal Police Commander Jana Matinova believes this was no accident that the victims were murdered. Evidence seems to point to human sexual slave trafficking from the east coming through Bratislava to the west.

Meanwhile Police Chief Trokan sends Jana to Strasbourg, France to attend a conference on prostitution. When two of the guest speakers are killed with the murder weapon being an ice pick and with the E.U. approval, Jana teams up with Russian Levitin; both believe the culprit in Strasbourg and Bratislava is master criminal Ivan "Koba" Makine. As they search for evidence, he seeks his missing sister allegedly part of Friends of Russia Ball in Nice and she prays for reconciliation with her married daughter who holds her culpable for the death of her father under the communists.

This is a terrific European police procedural with plenty of misdirection that takes the heroine and readers to the Ukraine and France. The story line is fast-paced and fabulously supported and enhanced with a subplot involving Jana's relationship with her spouse and surviving under the communist regime. She makes the tale work, past and present, as her attitude is take no prisoners not even her daughter. Fans will relish this strong whodunit.

Harriet Klausner

This is a page-turner which skillfully interweaves a wrenching love story from the past with a present-day mystery. I didn't know much about life in SSRs like Slovakia, either before the communist regime or afterward... but 'Siren of the Waters' gave me a sharp taste of that place and time.

The protagonist is a female police commander who's seen too much but never lost her dedication nor her ironic wit. Fans of television's Jane Tennyson/Prime Suspect stories will enjoy Jana Matinova. The book is set up as the first in a series... I'll be waiting for the next to appear.

Michael Genelin" debut novel "Siren of the Waters" is a mixed bag. On one hand he has a deft hand in describing the life in new Slovakia and a marvelous new detective Jana Matinova, lady with lot of scars , both on her body and her soul.On the other hand his plotting is convoluted and clumsy. Maybe his next book will fulfill the potential this writer obviously has.

Michael Genelin, The Magician's Accomplice (2010). Soho Crime. 336p. $25 ($18.08 through Amazon.com)

Michael Genelin. Siren of the Waters (2009). Soho Crime. 304p. $13 ($11.05 through Amazon.com) (pb.)

Michael Genelin. Dark Dreams (2009). Soho Crime. 368p. $14 ($11.20 through Amazon.com) (pb.)

I came upon the third of these three mysteries (The Magician's Accomplice) while checking out the New Books shelf in my local library. After reading it, I scurried back to take out the first two books. They feature a Slovakian police commander, Jana Matinova, who survived years of suspicion and scrutiny under her country's Communist government and was alienated from her family, but soldiered on and remained that rarity among eastern Europeans, an honest and effective policewoman. At the close of the second book (Dark Dreams) her life becomes brighter when she meets a strong man who loves her as much as she loves him.

I don't want to spoil these police mysteries by telling too much about the stories. Suffice it to say, each book involves a series of seemingly unrelated violent deaths, which occur all over the place, not even confined to one country, and which ultimately link together, showing the outline of vast multi-national conspiracies. Jana is tough, determined and intelligent, and she has cultivated unexpected allies in neighboring countries who help (mostly) her to see her way through to a conclusion. She is a very appealing heroine, but not at all soft or sentimental, and as a consequence, she can appear upon first reading to be a bit flat -but she isn't -she's just been burned too often in the past. Besides, in the maze of corruption, confusion and incompetence that is all too familiar in eastern European police work, Jana has to stay focused if she wants to solve anything.

The third book is the best crafted of the three. The viewpoint shifted from chapter to chapter in Siren of the Waters, the first of the series: until you knew all the players on the scorecard, the shifts were sometimes vaguely disorienting. Genelin seemed to be trying to stuff too much -Jana's past history as well as present events --into one narrative. The first chapter in the second book, Dark Dreams, grabbed one's attention but didn`t seem to tie in with the narrative that followed. It did, but it took too many pages to learn that. The most recent entry, The Magician's Accomplice, also starts with a seemingly random killing, but soon Jana finds connections between that killing and another killing, of someone close to her heart, and from then on, the connections -and the dangers-- keep piling on. Only a few characters in these books can be taken at face value. Corruption is endemic. The bad guys are very, very bad and they are all too willing to terrorize others into doing their will. It's a dangerous world that Jana Matinova operates in, but also an intriguing one to the reader who abandons himself to the ride.

Slovakia is a good setting for a detective series. It's well supplied with crime and corruption and also a country of transit for human trafficking.

The story opens with six women prostitutes and a man found burned to death in a car wreck, the fire clearly aided by chemicals. Another woman is pulled from the Danube with a bullet in her head. These cases put Commander Jana Matinova at the heart of an investigation into trafficking.

Oddly enough, there's not much about the methods or the victims of trafficking in the book. The story alternates between flashbacks to Jana's terrible experiences under communism and her encounters in Strasbourg and Nice with various unsavory characters in the underworld.

Jana, a middle-aged police veteran, is surprisingly un-neurotic for a woman who has lost her husband to political struggles, and whose daughter is estranged.

A pro at her job, Jana has a wonderful way of walking calmly onto a crime scene and spotting all sorts of things that the male cops missed. And because she's so matter-of-fact, her brilliance never seems to irritate anyone. She's generally admired by her fellow officers. She's also good at getting out of scrapes, relying on brains rather than brawn.

Although the plot is rife with thugs and unexpected criminals, Jana's particular nemesis is a cold-hearted king of crime who favors singularly unpleasant methods of killing. His "siren of the waters" is one of the many surprises in the plot.

This is the first book in the Commander Matinova series. It doesn't feel like totally polished storytelling yet, but I enjoyed it for the most part and intend to give the next book a try.

Michael Genelin is a master storyteller. Intricate plot. His characters are finely etched. And he writes with an intimate knowledge of the secretive worlds his characters inhabit. Be sure to set aside some time when you won't be disturbed because you won't want to put this novel down.