Even though we aficionados have always known that the cosy never went away, the general consensus is (thank you, Richard Osman, who must be rather embarrassed to now be lauded as the genre’s resurrectionist…) that it’s the ‘in thing’, even more so when it comes to summer reads, as I witness by an overseas pool as I write this… And why not? A large proportion of this August’s selection fall into that hallowed category and elegantly doff their hat to Agatha Christie, with important detours into wartime Paris, a troubled summer camp in the Adirondacks and New York courtrooms!
BOOK OF THE MONTH
Liz Moore/THE GOD OF THE WOODS (The Borough Press)
Liz Moore’s triumphant follow up to LONG BRIGHT RIVER confirms her status as one of our foremost practitioners of the art of the modern literary thriller, bringing a unique sensibility to the all-too-familiar missing child trope where so many other writers tend to concentrate on the mechanics of the search and its forensic landscape of cops and amateurs scrambling for clues to the detriment of the human factor. We are so lucky that yet another splendid novel, after last month’s sublime ALL THE COLOURS OF THE DARK by Chris Whitaker, hits the bullseye head-on and draws you in from the get-go, adding yet another powerful dimension to a well-worn story. A young girl disappears from her shared cabin in a summer camp in the Adirondacks, set on a wilderness property owned by a family of wealthy bankers. Not only is it actually their rebel, punkish daughter but over a decade previously their much-loved 8-year-old son also vanished into thin air, never to be seen or heard of again. The tale unfolds through the voices and eyes of a variety of characters: camp counsellors and leaders, the fragile mother of the missing children, children, locals, a rookie police investigator and the delicate web Moore engineers, going back and forward in time between the current frantic endeavour to find Barbara and the events surrounding her brother Bear’s presumed tragic death. Add a serial killer with an intimate knowledge of the forests, lakes and mountains against which the desolate tale is set, now on the loose and the tale seesaws between hope and despair and an intense highlight into broken lives, traditions of entitlement, the growing gap between rich and poor as every single memorable character brilliantly comes to life in a deconstructed waltz as the pieces of the jigsaw laboriously come together to reveal truths possibly best avoided and a final twist both joyful and full of terrible sadness. The prose is exquisite in its meticulous dissection of young girls’ dreams, teenage hopes, and beautifully-etched characters from all walks of society in this assured novel which you will find difficult to forget and might even fall in love with.
The God of the Woods Liz Moore – (amazon.co.uk)
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Chris Lloyd/BANQUET OF BEGGARS (Orion)
I have probably remarked before how much Chris Llloyd’s Eddie Giral series, set in Paris during the Nazi occupation of the city in WW2, catches the essence of the city like no other crime writer does, but in this third instalment he adds to his laurels by immersing the reader with a sharp insight into the poisonous atmosphere of 1940 when the city of necessity (and to the despair of its inhabitants) became the scene of a thriving ground for black market activities. Naturally, I wasn’t around at the time – I lived in Paris a whole decade and a half later – but the way Lloyd builds this portrait of a city with food shortages, clouds of despair, fear of the Germans and still very few glimmers of the Résistance to come, is admirable and the amount of research involved must have been massive but is kept discreetly in the wings. Giral has to work with the occupiers and is torn between his compulsion to fight the good fight and not be seen as a collaborator by his angry compatriots, a line he finds increasingly difficult to walk straight, when a minor black marketeer is found dead, with smuggled butter shoved down his throat and the trail inevitably leads to new players on the Paris crime scene who might or might not have links to the German forces and its shady acolytes. Add to his dilemmas the fact he is having an unlawful affair with a black singer and that his estranged son is on the run from the Nazis, and his balancing act is becoming increasingly hard to maintain, not helped by his own, short and violent temper, along the sarcasm he finds tough to control when confronted by his German masters. The Nazi presence in Paris has drawn out from a deep, dark hole all the rats in French society, profiteers, bottom feeders, all types Eddie knows well and that he hunts from seedy café to underground haunts, while ever moaning over the lack of real coffee in the capital; there are bad Germans and not so bad Germans even if the latter are not immediately obvious and the ominous threat of drastic, impending changes in German policy, with hostages and bloody reprisal situations on the horizon which present Eddie with strong dilemmas. All in all, an unholy mess through which he must make his way, both upholding the law and protecting the innocents as well as the guilty. Great stuff.
Banquet of Beggars Chris Lloyd – (amazon.co.uk)
Steve Cavanagh/WITNESS 8 (Headline)
The latest Eddie Flynn, the quick thinking New-York-based lawyer and ex-con man, from that most American of Irish authors is, as usual, a slick piece of intricate suspense with misdirections à go-go and a complex set of red herrings, false suspects along for the ride through breathless legal shenanigans. Called to defend a wealthy surgeon accused of murder and with the evidence against his client piling up, Eddie and his resourceful team have to untangle the threads of the murder on a posh street where there lived an actress past her prime, but still seductive enough to have had affairs with several men amongst her neighbours. But, from the outset, the reader is informed he is actually innocent and a young girl who has worked as a nanny for many of the street’s residents actually witnessed the crime and has wrongly accused him anonymously and planted the murder weapon in the unlucky man’s house. Add the fact that, having shamed a cop in a separate trial, Eddie has become a target for a gang of corrupt lawmen out for revenge and is now the prime target for a hit that is attracting many outside contractors. Also in the gleeful brew are some further twists to the simmering stew and you have a top-notch legal thriller to savour. This is already Eddie Flynn’s eighth appearance in print and the formula is well-oiled, with all his colourful associates getting their time in the sun, but as much as the true motivations behind Ruby, the babysitter out for revenge, are initially difficult to fathom (to allow a final major twist, of course) the multiple plots do slow the race to the finish down and this is possibly not one of Cavanagh’s best when it comes to pacing, but aside from Michael Connelly and his Mickey Haller series, few writers have such a relaxed grip on their thrillers and satisfaction is guaranteed.
Witness 8 Steve Cavanagh – (amazon.co.uk)
Bonnie Burke-Patel/I DIED AT FALLOW HALL (Bedford Square)
Anna Deerin has turned her back on the big city and is seeking out a new life off the grid in the peace of the English countryside in this quietly assured traditional whodunit, a strong debut by a young British author which pays an affectionate homage to territory familiar to Agatha Christie fans but gently subverts and modernises it in the process. Now settled in a remote Cotswold cottage in the village of Upper Magna, Anna’s quiet life is turned upside down when she discovers human remains while gardening. D.I. Hitesh Mistry, who also has reasons of his own for his move to rural parts, is tasked to investigate the case; a man out of place through class, race and gender and as much an intruder of sorts amongst the tranquillity of village life under which mysterious currents move in silence. Forced allies obliged to work together to solve the crime, they are also seen as strangers in the community, and face an uphill battle in their quest. The bones belong to a woman from another time, but Anna and the detective feel a strong obligation to unearth the truth behind her death, much to the opprobrium of locals, setting up a tense game of investigative cat and mouse amongst gentle but powerfully etched folk with possible secrets they wish to conceal and many with a motive for murder. An effortless modern twist on the country house mystery genre, this is also at times a rather tender meditation on how British society’s views on women have changed and how much the past still imprisons us in its cage of guilt. Evocative of country life, characters that draw you in and that the reader will have empathy with, all in all a strong variation on a popular mystery trope and a worthy accomplishment.
I Died at Fallow Hall Bonnie Burke-Patel – (amazon.co.uk)
Tom Mead/CABARET MACABRE (Head of Zeus)
Tom Mead is fast establishing himself as a modern successor to John Dickson Carr and a whole tradition of locked-room and impossible crime specialist authors with his Joseph Spector series, of which this is the third glittering volume which confirms his agile sleight of hand and outrageous imagination. Retired magician Spector and his acolyte Scotland Yard Detective George Flint are tasked with two parallel investigations involving Judge Drury, who was responsible for the detention in a sanatorium of Victor Silvius, a man presumed mad whose sister Caroline is now convinced her brother is under threat, while Judge Drury is, to the dismay of Lady Elspeth, his high society and scandal-conscious wife, the target of anonymous letters. Summoned to the obligatory country house, the two cohorts are soon faced with not just one, but two impossible deaths. A man is found dead in a canoe in the middle of a frozen lake with no rational explanation as to how he could have made its way there in the snow and cold, while a gunshot fired from outside the building kills a man inside a room without shattering the glass window that shielded him. Perfect conundrums for our investigators to inveigle against the background of a grand English estate in the shivering heart of winter. Clues, a sleight of misdirections, broadly-sketched characters, mischievous puzzles that defy all logic and a set of wry sleuths juggling gentle humour and deductions as they methodically carve away a path to unlikely explanations through a morass of confusions and contradictions. Mead orchestrates the whole proceedings with a reverence for the rules of the game, for this is a game but a terribly enjoyable one, resurrecting the charm of the Golden Age of crime fiction, with a twinkle of the eye, or rather on the corner of every single page. The author visibly had terrible fun writing this and so will every reader!
Cabaret Macabre Tom Mead – (amazon.co.uk)
Stuart Neville/BLOOD LIKE MINE (Simon & Schuster)
Neville’s earlier police procedurals set in Belfast and Northern Ireland were both angry and powerful in their description of a cop trying to keep his head above water during a time of sectarian violence and its bloody legacy, and left a strong impression. Presumably for commercial reasons Neville moved on to more conventional thrillers, including some on the borderline of horror under the Haylen Beck pseudonym. This new novel remains in that territory, initially posing as a road thriller with THELMA AND LOUISE elements only to gravitate sharply into the realms of gory horror. Single mother Rebecca Carter and her teenage daughter Moonflower are on the run down the endless American highways. Fleeing from their past but also leaving a bloody trail of dead bodies in their wake. Special FBI agent Marc Donner is chasing a monstrous serial killer with a legacy of sheer horror and a very particular modus operandi in its wake. Inevitably their paths will cross to dreadful effect. A powerful cat-and-mouse suspense with a deeper layer steeped in body horror and folklore myths, this never falters and cleverly engages the reader’s sympathy with both sides in the hunter/hunted equation with eminently flawed characters in search of impossible redemption from their nature, but all in all and despite the skill involved, the novel at times feels like a brazen attempt at a movie (or TV series) pitch for the American market. Slick and professional and with powerful, conflicted characters driving a turbo-charged plot, but it left me with a feeling Neville’s writing was riding the clutch and we know he is capable of much more. But Stuart Neville in lower gear is still superior to many other writers and he dutifully delivers the thrills.
Blood Like Mine Stuart Neville – (amazon.co.uk)
Janice Hallett/THE EXAMINER (Viper)
Hallett, surely by now the queen of the unconventional narrative mystery, strikes again with a clever thriller set around the educational art world, which spreads its tentacles out through a complex web of emails, letters, essays, text messages, internet forums and anything but traditional dialogue and exposition. The head of a university department has to gather six students for her Multimedia art course before her funding is slashed and is confronted by a gallery of characters all with different motivations and backgrounds: a gallery owner, an art supply store operator, a single mother and graphic designer, a mere hobbyist and an overqualified actual artist who appears to be slumming it amongst their midst, alongside the eponymous examiner brought on board to assess and grade their work, and making sense of the ensuing art installation project through a flurry of communications on the net, message boards, He promptly comes across malice afoot, with one of the participants under threat of death, or maybe even no longer of this world. Hallett is the most mischievous of writers, seeding her story with twists, misdirections in abundance and a talent for sending the reader down numerous dead ends and making him/her responsible for the investigation underway and she certainly never makes it easy. You either love or hate her playful mysteries, depending on how much you wish your grey cells to be put to work when you are enjoying a book. The coursework we are presented with is, naturally, seeded with clues and opens windows into the respective characters’ backstories and motivations and unlike Hallett’s previous puzzlers is intimately wedded to modern technology and communication methods, a setting lacking the old school charm of her debut set against a small-town amateur dramatics troupe, and this sometimes jars if you are not up to date on the intricacies of the modern world. Not Hallett’s best but still a totally unique piece of work.
The Examiner Janice Hallett – (amazon.co.uk)
Susie Dent/GUILTY BY DEFINITION (Zaffre)
Celebrity crime novels come and go but at least this debut from TV lexicographer Susie Dent, already a successful non-fiction author and unarguably someone who loves books and displays much genuine sympathy for the traditional whodunit form. A mysterious, anonymous letter arrives at the Oxford offices of a team of experts hard at work putting together a new dictionary, posing them a challenge. Senior editor Martha Thornhill’s beloved older sister and family golden child Charlie went missing in 2010, and the cryptic letter – soon to be followed by others of a similar ilk – obliquely refers to that fateful year which turned Martha’s life upside down, following a lost decade spent grieving in Berlin. But what is the relevance of this personal tragedy to the dictionary being assembled by her team, some of which come on board to assist her and share the narrative strands? Putting aside the novel’s strong roots in language and etymology, this is an accomplished if at times a bit forced traditional whodunit with echoes of Christie as the Clarendon English Dictionary team and Martha journey along a complex and twisty path towards the answers. There is no denying it is well-written and paced, as well as full of hidden treasures, wit and affection for all that is resolutely old-fashioned about the tropes of the Golden Age genre and is exactly the sort of novel one would expect of Susie Dent and her fascination with words, but where will she go from here or will this be a one-off? I, for one, am intrigued as to what Dent will do next and what sort of crime writer she might turn into. One for the future?
Guilty By Definition Susie Dent – (amazon.co.uk)
Ragnar Jónasson/DEATH AT THE SANATORIUM (Michael Joseph)
Jónasson brings back Detective Inspector Hulda Hermannsdottir, who last appeared in THE DARKNESS, in a compelling thriller set over two periods. In 1983, Hulda and her boss Sverrir are called to an old tuberculosis sanatorium in the north of Iceland to investigate the grisly murder of Yrsa, an elderly nurse, only to be confronted by a handful of possible suspects amongst the establishment’s staff. A confusing web of misinformation lingers in the air and a caretaker is arrested following a false testimony by another nurse and then later released for lack of genuine evidence, only for the hospital’s head doctor to be found dead a week later, seemingly by suicide, a possible admission of his guilt and the case is closed despite Hulda’s doubts. Nearly 30 years later, young and ambitious Reykjavik cop Helgi Reykdal returns from studying criminology in England to take over Hulda’s job as she is about to retire. A devoted fan of Golden Age British crime mysteries, Helgi chooses the old case as a subject for his dissertation, intrigued by the fact that the mostly forgotten murder and its initial five suspects appears to shadow so many of the ingenious books he is a fan of. The sanatorium is now closed and both creepy and derelict, adding a further level of atmospherics to the renewed investigation by Helgi. Jónasson, of course, began his criminous career as one of the Icelandic translators of Agatha Christie and the ensuing novel is both a tongue-in-cheek homage to her and the type of painstaking sleuthing characteristic of her time, although few books of the Golden Age actually dealt in cold cases but Jónasson pulls it off with clever sleight of hand and delivers an entertaining modern perspective on a classic tradition.
Death at the Sanatorium Ragnar Jónasson – (amazon.co.uk)
Pamela Samuels Young & Dwayne Alexander Smith/SOUNDS LIKE A PLAN (Faber & Faber)
Jackson Jones and MacKenzie Cunningham are two fleet-footed and brash black American private investigators whose professional rivalry is spicily enhanced by a welter of romantic feelings in this featherweight but fun thriller. When they are both hired by her worried and dying mother to find her estranged daughter Ashley, we find ourselves dipped into the world of the super wealthy with all the excess and glamour that entails as the dual narrators ‘meet cute’ and have to find a way of working together while juggling a dangerous form of attraction alongside their sleuthing. Full of repartee and inside jokes, this is fluffy but also fast-paced and a variation on the Mr and Mrs Smith theme where the characters are constantly unsure whether to kiss and when to fight, while constantly exchanging barbs and dodging bullets, racing cars or dubious folk who mean them harm in a thousand ways. A novel that feels lifted off the TV screen or destined for it, visual, at times pyrotechnic but also somewhat calculated and carefully engineered for a very specific audience. Jackson and MacKenzie bicker and blunder their way through the exotic California surroundings and sun from Malibu to Century City and back with bravado and fizz to spare, while an army of bad men stalk their every step. Avowedly commercial and aimed at a black middle-class reader with aspirations, more American than British, this hasn’t the charm of, say, Dashiell Hammett’s Nick and Nora or Tommy and Tuppence, but aims to introduce a contemporary version of them and entertain readers with a few hours to spare by the pool, and offers as much satisfaction as an ice-cold drink, and why should we hold that against it?
Sounds Like a Plan Pamela Samuels Young & Dwayne Alexander Smith – (amazon.co.uk)
