As autumn arrives, the stream of new titles landing through my letter-box has turned into a veritable flood, and so many hard choices had to be made as to what to read let alone review, so apologies for the fact that some big names and major books couldn’t fit, as I tried to vary the fare and not always cover the same authors or sub-genres. Two books set in Venice, a place I will never tire of whether in life or fiction, the conclusion to an amazing Israel-based trilogy, an absolutely delicious new Slow Horses instalment, Australian desert noir, a major slice of American hardboiled social realism, puzzles, WW2 spies and occult goings on and more; once again the criminal palette couldn’t prove more varied.
BOOK OF THE MONTH
Mick Herron/CLOWN TOWN (Baskerville)
I get the feeling the thoroughly deserved success of the Slow Horses TV series has liberated Herron, as if by osmosis it now cross-fertilises the novels on which it is based and his new instalment after a short break is possibly the best yet; and that’s saying something. How does he do it? It’s gripping, furiously funny, more contemporary than ever, plotted to the millimetre and gives all its familiar, highly fallible characters expansive room to parade their idiosyncrasies. And yet again, (Spoiler Alert of sorts) detonates some major surprises under the reader’s eyes by killing off two important characters, one rather welcome and the other less so, emotionally engaging your attention alongside the madcap energy and double, treble and quadruple dealings of its spies on the loose. I can’t remember a book that offered so much tasty dialogue on almost every single page, alongside Jackson Lamb’s dry insults and attitudes and had me laughing out loud and wanting to reread lines aloud to savour them even better. Lamb and First Desk Diana Taverner are again at loggerheads and taking no prisoners in a struggle with untold consequences, when a book from River Cartwright’s grandfather’s library threatens to unveil a major intelligence service cover-up from the years of the Irish troubles and many interested parties become involved to awkward and often deadly effect. You read the series for the devious plots, the familiar characters, the insults and the pathos but also as a sad reflection of the state of Britain and its politics. Indispensable.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Don Carpenter/HARD RAIN FALLING (Penguin Classics)
A welcome reissue for a novel that certainly merits being treated as classic, and that at any rate in the UK has never truly been given its due. Strictly speaking it’s not a crime novel, and more of a noir social tale spanning a generation; it has echoes of Walter Tevis’s THE COLOUR OF MONEY if only because much of it takes place in smoky pool parlours and of numerous major American mainstream tomes about life inside tough jails. A recent US reprint featured an introduction by George Pelecanos, and it treads similar territory to his books, with lost souls questioning their masculinity, tiptoeing fearfully through a world of dispossessed, poverty and injustice, even on occasion reminiscent of John Steinbeck. The focus is on two opposing characters whose dance of attraction and rejection seesaws over the years: Jack Levitt is a small-time criminal haunting pool halls while Billy Lancing is a young, black hustler and cue wizard. Initially they bounce off each other in ambiguous ways until some years later fate brings them together in a dire prison cell and a curious relationship is born. Only one of them will survive the time in prison and the survivor ‘s attempt at some form of redemption forms the core of the novel’s second half, as he tries to understand the ties that brought them together and build a new life that could justify his past sins. Dostoevskyan noir, tough, uncompromising and likely to leave a powerful impression on the reader’s brain, but also a compulsive read.
Lavie Tidhar/GOLGOTHA (Apollo)
Tidhar has long been one of the most impressive jack of all trades in the popular fiction realm, endlessly switching with prolific ease between crime both traditional and noir, fantasy, the mainstream, hard SF, historical and even children’s books and making each genre effortlessly his own. GOLGOTHA is the final volume of his MAROR trilogy, an epic saga reinterpreting the birth and ensuing glories and evil of the state of Israel, long before it reached its awkward present status. However, as ever, Tidhar never takes the direct route and has turned his historical canvas into a decidedly noir epic, almost as if a Jewish version of James Ellroy was in control, with treachery, a dearth of positive characters, heroes often flirting with the dark side and turning the politics into an intricate boardgame, throwing a different light onto historical events or real-life characters, demonstrating that nation-building is as much made by gangsters, drug and arms traffickers as it is by idealists and politicians. Set in the final week of the British withdrawal of what was then Palestine, this is a bawdy tale of adventurers, poets, lovers and fighters in the Holy Land, as two men go in search of mythical treasures while the fury of war envelops the land. Polyphonic, epic, featuring memorable if two-faced characters and with a sweeping narrative in fifth gear, this is a hell of a way to complete the trilogy and met all my high expectations.
Gareth Rubin/THE WATERFALL (Simon & Schuster)
It’s on record that I have been far from enthusiastic about Gareth Rubin’s previous novels, each a bit of an opportunistic variation or improvisation on a theme or subject other writers had initiated, like a Britain under German rule post WW2, a Sherlock continuation or a double-headed novel à la Ace-double, for instance. THE WATERFALL superficially follows this tradition in offering four separate interconnected stories like a set of Russian dolls, with each new tale echoing the previous and predicting the next. The individual stories move chronologically through the ages, beginning with Shakespeare himself investigating the mysterious death of fellow playwright Christopher Marlowe, which leads on to the 19th century and Gothic times when a Shakespeare manuscript is discovered in an isolated priory. The third tale brings us to the Golden Age of mystery writing as valiant amateur sleuth Honora Feldman travels to Venice to investigate dirty deeds amongst the expatriate community, while the final story, and the least successful, is an attempt at an American 1940s hardboiled noir tale which closes the loop with metafictional references to previous Rubin books. As he strives for originality, and despite an easy narrative pace and slick plotting, Rubin offers glimpses of what he could achieve were he not so enamoured with thematic and structural innovation. But maybe I’m proving too finicky, and many will love his clever variations on a theme!
Janice Hallett/THE KILLER QUESTION (Viper)
The Janice Hallett tsunami continues in full flow, bringing the fun and the puzzle back into modern mystery fiction as her latest instalment continues to be as innovative and engaging as ever, deconstructing its compelling plot through a welter of quiz questions, phone messages, email and WhatsApp texts against the background of a pub trivia night. The local pub was named The Case is Altered and was run by retired cops and quiz fanatics Mal and Sue Eastwood but now, five years later, stands closed and boarded up, following the discovery of a body in the nearby river and the reader is invited to solve the mystery by sifting through the remaining evidence; Hallett has proven herself a witty mistress of misdirection taking you through a maze of twists as Mal and Sue’s nephew Dominic endeavours to sell the story to Netflix and unravel the murky web of intrigue that led to the closure, with a series of competing teams harbouring opposing agendas involved in the quiz patently instrumental in the establishment’s demise. The mischievous (and so highly original) plotting and exposition have become the author’s trademark and placed her at the front of the current craze for solving your own mysteries and THE KILLER QUESTION stands as I feel her best since the resounding success of her debut THE APPEAL. Maybe Netflix should take the hint and actually bring this to the screen?
Jane Thynne/APPOINTMENT IN PARIS (Quercus)
Following on from the highly successful MIDNIGHT IN VIENNA which introduced MI5 watcher Harry Fox and involuntary spy Stella Fry and was my Book of the Month on publication, Jane Thynne brings her characters forward to 1940, with Hitler poised to launch his invasion of England. Harry is currently suspended and plying his trade as a private investigator but is brought back into the fold by a former boss when the body of a POW Luftwaffe officer is found in the grounds of a stately home and a ‘listener’ assigned to previously spying on him goes missing. Harry calls on Stella, now in the backwaters of a documentary film unit, to assist and a parallel investigation is set in motion, adding tense espionage thrills to a detailed historical panorama of a vital time in WW2, with Neville Chamberlain about to pass the baton to a scheming Churchill. To complicate matters, the missing man was someone Stella had once been close to, so loyalties are put in question as the duo separately attempt to assemble the disparate pieces together in a race against time before the expected German invasion, with Stella stranded in Europe. Meticulously true to historical facts, sympathetic and humane, fallible characters and a splendidly Machiavellian plot, this a first-class thriller and a series growing in stature.
Syd Moore/THE GREAT DECEPTION (Magpie)
Moore has long straddled the liminal lands between thrillers and fantasy, with her marked penchant for the supernatural. THE GREAT DECEPTION is the second volume in her Section W series, following THE GRAND ILLUSION, which introduced magician’s assistant Daphne Devine who has been called up by a secretive branch of the intelligence service set up to combat the Nazis during WW2 in occult areas Hitler believes in, with a view to thwart his aims by any means. In a way, the series is becoming a kind of quirky parallel history, leading the reader to doubt versions of reality but delivers a breathy romp, with adventures and conspiracies a-plenty and proves immense fun, like an old Saturday morning serial. In 1940, the Nazis invade Denmark and in counterpart the British forces disembark in neutral Iceland and, undercover, Daphne is tasked with tracking down a local clairvoyant suspected of collaborating with the Germans. Travelling North into Strandir, a shadowy land of sorcerers, Daphne soon finds herself the object of unwanted attention and the prey for forces unknown, with magic to the fore. An exhilarating romp with a likeable heroine with a difference, this is simply great fun.
Adele Parks/OUR BEAUTIFUL MESS (HQ)
Some authors reach the giddy heights of bestsellerdom with little critical attention and Parks is certainly one of them, to the extent that she is mostly ignored by the diehard mystery audience, trawling her millions of readers from the mainstream; gleefully review proof. Which doesn’t detract from the fact that she delivers, book after book, consummate thrillers with a domestic twist on Hitchcockian notions of suspense with regularity and alacrity. Connie is a highly successful freelance photographer, happily married for 30 years and mother to three daughters. When the eldest returns home announcing she is pregnant, Connie is taken back by the fact that the father, Zac, bears an uncanny resemblance to a man she once had an affair with, which almost destroyed her marriage. Add the fact that both other younger daughters also have secrets and rebellious streaks and the quiet comfort of Connie’s life takes a sharp blow and the domestic peace is in for a roller-coaster ride of gripping proportions, like a wave pulling Connie under. Carefully choreographed with rising tensions delivered with metronomic regularity and a cohort of characters in turmoil and you have the perfect recipe for a twistiest and deeply involving family drama with dread secrets and emotions rising to the surface like a deadly periscope. Another bestseller? Of course.
Chris Hammer/LEGACY (Wildfire)
I was a judge for the CWA’s John Creasey first novel award when it was won by Chris Hammer’s initial Martin Scarsden novel SCRUBLANDS and it was a unanimous choice with my fellow judges and has certainly withstood the test of time, what with a successful TV series adaptation and Hammer now established at the top of the Australian posse of top class authors. LEGACY brings Scarsden back after a long interval during which Hammer wrote 4 titles in the Ivan Lucic and Nell Buchanan series, and absence has done nothing to diminish the appeal of its investigative journalist and the challenging world he inhabits. Someone is after him after his book launch is bombed and his home town targeted, sending Scarsden back into the outback in a bid to outrun his mysterious enemies, only to find out that the arid, barren terrain and oppressive atmosphere in the small town on the Queensland border has not stopped his pursuers and his only resort is to identify them and their hidden motives. Strikingly atmospheric and evocative, Hammer’s plots and characters are unrelenting and sprawling, insidiously getting under your skin as they meander in staccato mode towards explosive conclusions. Another winner.
John Banville/VENETIAN VESPERS (Faber & Faber)
A bit of a change of course from the mainstream Booker-winning Irish author whose frequent incursions into criminal territory have sometimes been pseudonymous but relatively contemporary: a historical mystery set in Venice towards the end of the 19th century. Evelyn Dolman, an unlikeable hack with a strong misogynistic streak cynically marries wealthy Laura Rensselaer, the daughter of an American industrialist, with a beady eye on her eventual inheritance. However, for reasons unknown a rift with her father sees her disinherited and the couple journey under a cloud to Venice for an extended honeymoon only to lose themselves amongst the mysteries and noxious fogs of the floating city, with a patchy gallery of new and increasingly malevolent would-be friends and acquaintances muddying the already poisoned waters of their own relationship. As they try to celebrate the New Year at shady Count Barbarigo‘s Palazzo Dioscuri, life takes a turn for the worse with the hapless and resentful anti-hero and his new wife soon questioning their own sanity as the mists rise from the malodorous canals. No one character is likeable and the moral ambiguity that ensues colours the labyrinthine plot although the writing, as always with Banville, is sublime in its power of evocation. Think baroque Simenon roman dur in a historical context and the nefarious beauty of the Venetian environment. Gripping and fascinating.
