A Reading Marathon with some Recommendations

Since winter arrived I have found more excuses to ‘curl up with a book’.  That and listening to selected titles on my trusty Audible App.  I’ll give a brief rundown of some books without a lot of comment and then say a bit more about recommendations.

Continuing with my discovery of the British Library Crime Series I read Cornish Murder by John Bude and Christmas in White by J. Jefferson Farjeon.  Both enjoyed as comfort blanket 

reading.  Perfect over the Christmas interval.  Feel free to borrow!

I read my first Ken Follett, The Man from Moscow, a thriller set in London in 1914.  https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/ken-follett/the-man-from-st-petersburg/9781509862344

Other titles include Exile by James Swallow, sequel to Nomad  which I thought was much better. If you like biographies you might be tempted by Becoming by Michelle Obama.  This has been widely acclaimed and very popular amongst my reading friends but I am somewhat embarrassed to say that, even though her achievements are phenomenal,  I found it a bit too self-promoting.  Perhaps it was not such a good idea to listen to it read by the author herself.

Three to recommend:

The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman

Pullman’s second trilogy following His Dark Materials is The Book of Dust. 

I read volume 1 La Belle Sauvage where the baby Lyra Silvertongue is rescued by Dr Malcolm Polstead, and enjoyed it because I do get swept up into the alternative world around which the novels are based.  Volume 2, The Secret Commonwealth finds Lyra, now twenty years old and her daemon Pantalaimon finding their relationship is put to the test in a dangerous world that finds Lyra travelling through Europe and to the Middle East in a quest to be reunited with Pantalaimo whilst Malcolm now a man with a strong sense of duty and an attachment to Lyra is sent on a journey to find out more about the mysterious roses with special properties that only grow in a desert referenced in the diary of a murdered man.  Rose growers of any kind, even those growing “normal” roses, are being terrorised and murdered by mysterious attackers from the mountains.  Both travel far beyond Oxford where the earlier novels are set to uncover secrets and solve the mystery of the Dust.  I’m not a fan of magical realism but when an author works really hard to make his narrative credible I cannot help get swept up into it.

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

I read this for my French group.  This was a rewarding novel to read. 

Ondaatje’s prose grabbed my attention and interest : the opening sentence ‘In 1945 our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals’ suggests all manner of outcomes might be possible. From the beginning I could not be sure in what direction the narrative might lead. The Moth and then the Darter seemed to be doubtful and rather dangerous adults to be left in charge of two children. Were they going to be mistreated? This seemed a likely plot. The school arrangements were decidedly dodgy, the children deciding they would rather live at home than board as the parents had directed that they should. The Moth acquiesced and his supervision of the children seemed very lax, as the house filled up with a group of eccentric, mysterious, maybe even nefarious characters who came to populate the children’s milieu in postwar London. The narrative unfolds but the reader is never sure where the story is going. In the background I was wondering where the parents were and why they, and in particular the mother, had left so suddenly. What important reasons were there for the parents’ continued absence? I found certain notable scenes and passages particularly memorable when I came to think about the book after I finished it.   For example the greyhound runs on the Thames, and Nathaniel and Agnes’ encounters in the London house. I thought the narrative was cleverly plotted and then unveiled as a story of espionage activities with which Nathaniel and Rachel were necessarily involved.   There were no dramatic twists and turns as often is the case with novels in this genre. Events and explanations were nicely understated in the concluding part of the novel. I liked the book all the more for that.

Second Sleep by Robert Harris

I’ve read most of Robert Harris’s novels (except the Cicero trilogy) and have never been disappointed.  His latest offering is described as a genre-bending thriller: ‘All my books are about power’ he says. What connects them all is a preoccupation with power at its  apogee, on the brink of collapse.

“Late on the afternoon of Tuesday the ninth of April in the Year of our Risen Lord 1468”. A young cleric, Christopher Fairfax, is making his way resentfully to a remote corner of Wessex on the orders of his bishop to officiate at the burial of a village priest. In his opening pages Harris conjures a lost England in its mix of religiosity and brutishness. When Fairfax discovers a display cabinet in the dead priest’s study, its shelves crammed with illegal artefacts, the truth of this world is revealed. Among the plastic bottles, banknotes and toy bricks displayed there, Fairfax discovers “one of the devices used by the ancients to communicate”, its back marked with the ultimate symbol of their “hubris and blasphemy – an apple with a bite taken out of it”.  Abruptly everything shifts, slotting those strange anachronisms into place. Fairfax’s 15th century is not ours but part of a new calendar that had been reset to 666, the numeral of the Beast of Revelation. In Harris’s imagined future, God has brought down the four riders of the apocalypse on the satanic civilisation of the 21st century and the church has reasserted itself at the centre of the state. “Scientism”, the curse of the ancients, is a heresy, a mortal sin. Stripped of the medical and technological advances of the Industrial Revolution, life is once more nasty, brutish and short.

To say more would truly be a plot-spoiler.  I found Harris’s writing so easy on my reading mind, a book that was enthralling.  With a great ending.

The First Three Titles: Martin Beck

Martin Beck is a fictional Swedish police detective who is the main character in a series of ten novels by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö collectively titled The Story of a Crime. The stories are frequently referred to as the Martin Beck stories. All of the novels have been adapted to films between 1967 and 1994, six of which featured Gösta Ekman as Martin Beck. Between 1997 and 2018 there have also been 38 films (some only broadcast on television) based on the characters, with Peter Haber as Martin Beck.

I've read the first three volumes as follows:

Roseanna Book 1

Roseanna is the first book in the hugely acclaimed Martin Beck series: the novels that shaped the future of Scandinavian crime fiction and influenced writers from Stieg Larrson to Jo Nesbo, Henning Mankell to Lars Kepplar.

On a July afternoon, the body of a young woman is dredged from a lake in southern Sweden. Raped and murdered, she is naked, unmarked and carries no sign of her identity. As Detective Inspector Martin Beck slowly begins to make the connections that will bring her identity to light, he uncovers a series of crimes further reaching than he ever would have imagined and a killer far more dangerous. How much will Beck be prepared to risk to catch him?

The Man Who Went Up In Smoke Book 2
The second book in the classic Martin Beck detective series from the 1960s - the novels that shaped the future of Scandinavian crime writing.

Hugely acclaimed, the Martin Beck series were the original Scandinavian crime novels and have inspired the writings of Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell and Jo Nesbo. Written in the 1960s, 10 books completed in 10 years, they are the work of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo - a husband and wife team from Sweden. They follow the fortunes of the detective Martin Beck, whose enigmatic, taciturn character has inspired countless other policemen in crime fiction; without his creation Ian Rankin's John Rebus or Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander may never have been conceived. The novels can be read separately, but are best read in chronological order, so the reader can follow the characters' development and get drawn into the series as a whole. 'The Man Who Went Up in Smoke' starts as Martin Beck has just begun his holiday: an August spent with his family on a small island off the coast of Sweden. But when a neighbour gets a phone call, Beck finds himself packed off to Budapest, where a boorish journalist has vanished without a trace. Instead of passing leisurely sun-filled days with his children, Beck must troll about in the Eastern Europe underworld for a man nobody knows, with the aid of the coolly efficient local police, who do business while soaking at the public baths - and at the risk of vanishing along with his quarry.

The Man on the Balcony

Published in 1967 this third instalment sees a newly promoted Detective Superintendent Martin Beck setting a much darker tone than previous books.

The opening description of a nondescript, forty-year old man sitting on his apartment balcony and watching Stockholm waking up brings shivers to the spine as the traffic builds and children make their way to school feeling fairly ambivalent about the whole scene playing out under his watchful eye.

Tempers amongst the police force are frayed as a serious of vicious mugging on pensioners at the city parks is running riot, with the eighth occurrence in the last two weeks and no closer to finding the perpetrator. This man who is charged with tackling this one man crime wave is Detective Inspector Gunvald Larsson who comments that "if someone doesn't grab him soon" the perpetrator could end up taking a life. That "someone" being either the police or a civil patrol, and Larsson seems largely indifferent to just whom it is, one of many times that society seems to sympathise with vigilante action in this novel. On the night of the eighth mugging an altogether more sinister horror awaits, as the body of a young girl who has been the victim of sexual interference and assault is found dead. Jaded before even beginning the investigation, Kollberg is faced with breaking the news to the mother of the child, just as his own wife is due to give birth. When a second girl is discovered under similar circumstances it takes a tip off to bring the mugger into the police fold and establish that he has seen the murderer. Along with a three-year-old boy who is also believed to have witnessed the murderer, the details they provide bring a flash of inspiration from Martin Beck.

My thoughts:

These were 3 easy reads, not long or overly convoluted but straightforward crime detective narratives.  Written in the 60s the accessories of detection and sources available to the police which we take for granted today: the internet, databases of personal information, previous criminal history, mobiles phones and DNA techniques inevitably lead to plots which are less convoluted and the methods employed by the police are less sophisticated and immediate - for example mobile phone communication between detecting personnel which accelerates the action.  In some ways this lack of sophistication and technology adds to the tension and the reader is drawn to keep turning the pages, and delaying the moment when the book must be put aside in favour of a more pressing  task.  These are books to take on a 'plane, or on a beach.

A Duo of Police Procedurals

The Whistler by John Grisham

We expect our judges to be honest and wise. Their integrity and impartiality are the bedrock of the entire judicial system. We trust them to ensure fair trials, to protect the rights of all litigants, to punish those who do wrong, and to oversee the orderly and efficient flow of justice.

     But what happens when a judge bends the law or takes a bribe? It’s rare, but it happens.
     Lacy Stoltz is an investigator for the Florida Board on Judicial Conduct. She is a lawyer, not a cop, and it is her job to respond to complaints dealing with judicial misconduct. After nine years with the Board, she knows that most problems are caused by incompetence, not corruption. 
     But a corruption case eventually crosses her desk. A previously disbarred lawyer is back in business with a new identity. He now goes by the name Greg Myers, and he claims to know of a Florida judge who has stolen more money than all other crooked judges combined. And not just crooked judges in Florida. All judges, from all states, and throughout U.S. history.
     What’s the source of the ill-gotten gains? It seems the judge was secretly involved with the construction of a large casino on Native American land. The Coast Mafia financed the casino and is now helping itself to a sizable skim of each month’s cash. The judge is getting a cut and looking the other way. It’s a sweet deal: Everyone is making money.
     But now Greg wants to put a stop to it. His only client is a person who knows the truth and wants to blow the whistle and collect millions under Florida law. Greg files a complaint with the Board on Judicial Conduct, and the case is assigned to Lacy Stoltz, who immediately suspects that this one could be dangerous.
     Dangerous is one thing. Deadly is something else.

My notes:  This is yet another typical procedural thriller.  We know the villain, it is a matter of how to set about catching them.   It introduces a feisty female detective, there is a Native American angle, and corruption on a mega scale set, as it is, in the current Trump era.  A body fairly early on, tells the reader there really is something to chase.  The very convenient paper tissue with the blood sample sets the investigation rolling.  But is rather boring, disappointing, procedural with no suspense or twists. All too real in these days where corruption prevails and if you are one of the powerful elite you get away with it.  I am reading this at the time of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.  Nothing surprises me.  The greed of the judge is huge - emeralds, rubies, all that cash.  Greedy women.  Epilogue, with no twists but the character Myers who disappears early on turns up.  convenience of blood sample on tissue.

The Late Show by Michael Connelly

Detective Renée Ballard works 'The Late Show', the notorious graveyard shift at the LAPD.

It's thankless work for a once-promising detective, keeping strange hours in a twilight world of crime.

Some nights are worse than others. And tonight is the worst yet.

Two shocking cases, hours apart: a brutal assault, and a multiple murder with no suspects.

Ballard knows it is always darkest before dawn. But what she doesn't know - yet - is how deep her investigation will take her into the dark heart of her city, the police department and her own past...

A new thriller introducing a driven young detective trying to prove herself in the LAPD.

Renée Ballard works the night shift in Hollywood, beginning many investigations but finishing none as each morning she turns her cases over to day shift detectives. A once up-and-coming detective, she’s been given this beat as punishment after filing a sexual harassment complaint against a supervisor.

But one night she catches two cases she doesn’t want to part with: the brutal beating of a prostitute left for dead in a parking lot and the killing of a young woman in a nightclub shooting. Ballard is determined not to give up at dawn. Against orders and her own partner’s wishes, she works both cases by day while maintaining her shift by night. As the cases entwine they pull her closer to her own demons and the reason she won’t give up her job no matter what the department throws at her.

What I thought:
Call me a reading snob but I would never choose a Michael Connelly, this was the choice of fellow reader in my Splinter Book Group.  I did not want to read the book in truth, and I laboured through yet another police procedural as I saw it.  But there were some interesting slants, our protagonist Renee Ballard is banished to 'The Late Show' - the so-called Graveyard Shift, for making a complaint against a colleague.  And in Ballard we have a principled feminist, charismatic, her passion for surf-bording, her attachment to her dog Lola, staying at her grandmother's.   I can see she might get a champion's following as a for example has Jack Reacher.  The book closes on a subtle cliffhanger , that is a clever device.  I listened to this title on Audible, it was useful adjunct to ironing bed linen and gardening. 

The Daughter of Time

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey  - first published in 1951

My niece Katharine who lives and works in Paris came down to St Vaast for the weekend bearing books.  Amongst these was a copy of The Daughter of Time.  An introduction to Josephine Tey for me.

Synopsis:
Richard III reigned for only two years, and for centuries he was villified as the hunch-backed wicked uncle, murderer of the princes in the Tower. Josephine Tey's novel The Daughter of Time is an investigation into the real facts behind the last Plantagenet king's reign, and an attempt to right what many believe to be the terrible injustice done to him by the Tudor dynasty.

Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard, recuperating from a broken leg, becomes fascinated with a contemporary portrait of Richard III that bears no resemblance to the Wicked Uncle of history. Could such a sensitive, noble face actually belong to one of the world's most heinous villains - a venomous hunchback who may have killed his brother's children to make his crown secure? Or could Richard have been the victim, turned into a monster by the the Tudors?

Grant determines to find out once and for all, with the help of the British Museum and an American scholar, what kind of man Richard III really was and who killed the Princes in the Tower.

There is a very good page in Wikipedia on the subject of this novel.  There is a summary of Grant's case for the innocence of Richard III.  Much has probably been written since Tey published in 1951 on the probability of Richard's guilt.  Winston Churchill evidently did not give much credence to Tey's theories as propounded via her protagonist Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard.

This is the portrait around which the novel is written: 

What I wrote to my niece:

Hi Kat

I thought I'd just drop you a quick line to say that I finished the Tey, a little while back, and I thought it was very cleverly constructed and obviously received many plaudits but I struggled with a detective story approach to the Two Princes. I am sure it was quite something when she published it and I wonder what academic studies have been carried out since to try and solve the mystery.  For example in Tey she seems to refute that Richard III had a deformed back but I thought that this was one of the things that helped solve the mystery of the 'skeleton in the Leicester carpark'.  That and the DNA.   I love the detective genre but here in the Tey I knew there would not be a definitive outcome.  However I would like to read a 'proper' Tey thriller (if you see what I mean) so I have ordered the Franchise Affair to await my return to the UK.  

In summary, I struggled with this book.  By and large I like a crime thriller, a whodunit, but this book somehow did not sit easily in that genre for me, despite the accolades the novel has received over the years.  The novel is listed as number one on the CWA's Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time list and number four on the MWA's Top 100 Mystery Novels of All Time list.

  

False Mermaid

False Mermaid by Erin Hart

Amazon says:  AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR ERIN HART DELIVERS A SEARING NEW NOVEL OF SUSPENSE, BRILLIANTLY MELDING MODERN FORENSICS AND IRISH MYTH AND MYSTERY IN THIS CHARGED THRILLER.

American pathologist Nora Gavin fled to Ireland three years ago, hoping that distance from home would bring her peace. Though she threw herself into the study of bog bodies and the mysteries of their circumstances, she was ultimately led back to the one mystery she was unable to solve: the murder of her sister, Triona. Nora can't move forward until she goes back-back to her home, to the scene of the crime, to the source of her nightmares and her deepest regrets. Determined to put her sister's case to rest and anxious about her eleven-year-old niece, Elizabeth, Nora returns to Saint Paul, Minnesota, to find that her brother-in-law, Peter Hallett, is about to remarry and has plans to leave the country with his new bride. Nora has long suspected Hallett in Triona's murder, though there has never been any proof of his involvement, and now she believes that his new wife and Elizabeth may both be in danger. Time is short, and as Nora begins reinvestigating her sister's death, missed clues and ever-more disturbing details come to light. What is the significance of the "false mermaid" seeds found on Triona's body? Why was her behavior so erratic in the days before her murder? Is there a link between Triona's death and that of another young woman? Nora's search for answers takes her from the banks of the Mississippi to the cliffs of Ireland, where the eerie story of a fisherman's wife who vanished more than a century ago offers up uncanny parallels. As painful secrets come to light, Nora is drawn deeper into a past that still threatens to engulf her and must determine how much she is prepared to sacrifice to put one tragedy to rest . . . and to make sure that history doesn't repeat itself.

Searing novel of suspense this book is most definitely not!

Stolen Prey and He Said, She Said

Stolen Prey by John Sandford

A new author for me, this novel was lent by my reading friend Claire

Lucas Davenport has seen many terrible murder scenes. This is one of the worst. In the small Minnesota town of Wayzata, an entire family has been killed: —husband, wife, two daughters, dogs.

There'’s something about the scene that pokes at Lucas'’s cop instincts, —it looks an awful lot like the kind of scorched-earth retribution he'’s seen in drug killings sometimes. But this is a seriously upscale town, and the husband was an executive vice president at a big bank. It just doesn'’t seem to fit.

Until it does. And where it leads Lucas will take him into the darkest nightmare of his life.

A well stitched page-turner of a crime thriller.

............. and then again another kind of thriller is one of the books I needed to read for my book group, Splinter.

He Said, She Said by Erin Kelly

In the hushed aftermath of a total eclipse, Laura witnesses a brutal attack. She and her boyfriend Kit call the police, and in that moment, four lives change forever.

Fifteen years on, Laura and Kit live in fear.

And while Laura knows she was right to speak out, she also knows that you can never see the whole picture: something is always hidden . . . something she never could have guessed.

A cleverly spun plot with twists and a surprise in the closing pages.  The kind of outcome that makes you think, I should have spotted this earlier.

Murders in the Community - one genre, two very different eras and styles

The Dry by Jane Harper (2015)

Synopsis:

After getting a note demanding his presence, Federal Agent Aaron Falk arrives in his hometown for the first time in decades to attend the funeral of his best friend, Luke. Twenty years ago when Falk was accused of murder, Luke was his alibi. Falk and his father fled under a cloud of suspicion, saved from prosecution only because of Luke’s steadfast claim that the boys had been together at the time of the crime. But now more than one person knows they didn’t tell the truth back then, and Luke is dead.
Amid the worst drought in a century, Falk and the local detective question what really happened to Luke. As Falk reluctantly investigates to see if there’s more to Luke’s death than there seems to be, long-buried mysteries resurface, as do the lies that have haunted them. And Falk will find that small towns have always hidden big secrets.

What I thought:
This novel is described as a breathless page-turner.  Well certainly the second if not pacey.  I did not want to put the book down, I needed to find out who killed the Hadler family.  Let's call it a satisfactory thriller, not a brilliant one, but it is well plotted.  The writing is adequate, it was not a style of writing which made me squirm, or want to get out my red pen!!   I have some picky gripes though.  The author does not make a strong case for the supposition at the outset, that there is more to the killings than a matter of the father killing his wife and child.  That there is foul play which goes beyond a domestic tragedy.  It would be more logical to lay some reasons for this before the reader.  Early on in the narrative the present day killings are linked to the death of Ellie Deacon twenty years earlier.  This gives a bit more length and substance to the novel.  Quite a lot of the book is given over to the flashback narrative (italicised) leading up to Ellie's death.  The whispering campaign against Aaron Falk kicks off without a real explanation.  We learn that the alibi Luke and Aaron have is flawed but that is not widely known.  I did think that the author was quite skilful in placing Gretchen as a possible culprit when she wrote the rabbit-shooting scene two thirds of the way through, throwing in the question of paternity for her child for good measure.  Ultimately I thought the matter of the proper interpretation of the word 'grant' was a clever device to introduce a perpetrator and a motive.  One of those twists you look for in a whodunit.  The finding of the rucksack corroborated Aaron's suspicion that Ellie Deacon was being abused.  I also thought the denouement taking place in the tinder-box conditions of the parched terrain on the outskirts of the town was a clever way to bring a resolution in the context of the extreme drought which had put the town under so much tension.  There were enough twists and turns in the plot to keep the story moving.  I enjoyed it.

The Hog's Back Mystery by Freeman Wills Crofts (1933)

Amazon

Dr James Earle and his wife live in comfortable seclusion near the Hog's Back, a ridge in the North Downs in the beautiful Surrey countryside. When Dr Earle disappears from his cottage, Inspector French is called in to investigate. At first he suspects a simple domestic intrigue - and begins to uncover a web of romantic entanglements beneath the couple's peaceful rural life. The case soon takes a more complex turn. Other people vanish mysteriously, one of Dr Earle's house guests among them. What is the explanation for the disappearances? If the missing people have been murdered, what can be the motive? This fiendishly complicated puzzle is one that only Inspector French can solve. Freeman Wills Crofts was a master of the intricately and ingeniously plotted detective novel, and The Hog's Back Mystery shows him at the height of his powers. This new edition of a classic is introduced by Martin Edwards.

Review from Crime Review

Review

Julia Earle, living near Farnham in Surrey, has invited her sister, Marjorie and an old school friend, Ursula, to stay a few weeks with herself and her husband, Dr James Earle. It becomes clear that all is not well with Julia's marriage. Could she be having an affair with a younger neighbour or is her husband the one having an affair? The marriage is going to be put under a spotlight because, a few days into the visit, Dr Earle vanishes from his house, as quietly and completely as though he had been spirited away.

When the local police are unable to find Dr Earle or any plausible reason for his disappearance they call in help from Scotland Yard. Thus, Inspector Joseph French arrives on the scene. It soon becomes clear that this is not a simple disappearance; another woman has gone missing in the area. Is this murder, or an affair? French has to puzzle through a tangle of alibis, clues and lies to get to the truth.

Freeman Wills Crofts was a crime writer during the 'Golden Age' of crime fiction. And this book is very much set in that era; middle class people in the mid-war years. There are maids, cooks, drivers and gardeners to interview. Chemists make up powders according to doctors' individual recipes. French rarely travels by car, but uses trains, bicycles and his own feet as he traces the crime around the Hog's Back hill.

Crofts was also a member of the Detection Club, and one of the tenets of that body was that the author should 'play fair' with the reader so that they could solve the puzzle from the information presented in the book. And this book is very much a puzzle. There are no deep, psychological insights into the human condition or the criminal mind to be found here. Indeed, it does not seem that Crofts is particularly interested in the personalities of the people involved. I felt I knew as much about a clue-bearing chemist as I did about the main players. It turns out that the murderer has the simplest of motives, but a very complex means of achieving it.

Did Crofts play fair? Yes, and to prove it page numbers are provided when French is explaining things. I did not solve the crime, only spotting one dodgy alibi and the body disposal site. In my defence, the explanation requires (and provides) a timetable of the suspects’ whereabouts and a map showing their movements.

I enjoyed this book, and it's worth reading just to see how far the genre has developed since it was written.