Crime Beat

In keeping with Crime Beat’s closing week for 2009 which is devoted to krimi bookishness, Jassy Mackenzie takes a read of Patrick Woodhead’s The Cloud Maker (Random House) and gets entranced. Here’s one for the beach or the mountain or the game reserve or the poolside or wherever it is you’ll be chilling.

Patrick Woodhead is one of those authors whose life reads like a thriller. He worked on rhino conservation sites in Namibia before he swapped sunshine for snow and travelled to Kyrgyzstan with a group of mountain climbers. While attempting to reach the summit of previously unclimbed peaks, he decided that he wanted to spend his life travelling to the last unexplored regions of the world.

Since then, he has kayaked down uncharted tributaries of the Amazon, completed a record-breaking sail across the Atlantic, and broken the speed record for travelling to the South Pole. In 2004, he wrote about this expedition in his first book, Misadventures in a White Desert.

The photos on Woodhead’s site (www.thecloudmaker.net) put other thriller writers to shame. If you think the shot of you with your cat had a certain mystique about it, let me tell you that it pales in comparison to the pictures of Woodhead hanging from a vast sheet of vertical ice, and kiting across endless swathes of snow. One photo showed him amid a sea of greenery and I clicked hopefully, imagining that this might be, “Author relaxing in his garden at home.” Alas, no. When enlarged, it proved to be, “Author hacking through rhododendron forests in Tibet.”

Not surprisingly for a writer whose life is defined by action, this debut thriller offers a big, bold, action-packed adrenaline rush. The hero of The Cloud Maker, Luca Matthews, is a climbing addict who will do anything to reach the summit, even if it means endangering the lives of his companions. While on an expedition in the Himalayas, Luca spots a mysterious, pyramid-shaped peak in the distance. He becomes obsessed by this sighting, and he convinces fellow adventurer Bill Taylor to accompany him on a dangerous mission to scale it.

The peak lies in an area of Tibet which is highly restricted by the Chinese, and Luca and Bill soon find themselves targeted by a particularly brutal unit of the Chinese secret police, led by the sadistic Zhu.

After their guides desert them, the two British climbers find themselves having to rely on a local woman, Shara, to help them find a way through the treacherous mountains. It soon becomes evident to all of them that the pyramid-shaped peak is much more than it seems. It holds a treasure so rich that, for centuries, lives have been sacrificed to protect its secrets – and the Chinese, who are in hot pursuit, are willing to take many more lives in order to destroy it.

This is a fast, engrossing, easy read, well spiced with local colour as well as touches of humour. I particularly loved the climbing scenes, which are vividly described and fascinating in their detail.

My only gripe is that the spark of romance that is hinted at between Luca and Shara never gets a chance to take hold. I hope that Woodhead has a series planned for the charismatic Luca, and that in future books he does more than kiss the cheeks of his leading ladies. After all, as a red-blooded hero, he needs to live up to the readers’ expectations in every area.

Jassy Mackenzie is the author of the recently published My Brother’s Keeper and last year’s Random Violence.