Anthony Horowitz - The Word Is Murder

Rating: 4/5

Review:
An entertaining read

I enjoyed The Word Is Murder, although I did have reservations about it.  It has a structure which I would expect to dislike: Anthony Horowitz casts himself in a central role in what purports to be a true-crime story, but is, of course, completely fictional.  This leads to a lot of knowing stuff about how he is going to write the book and the whole thing is as much about how he writes his work as it is about the crime story.  Horowitz does it very well and, to my surprise, I liked those aspects of the narrative.

Set in London in 2011, the story is of a woman who walks into an undertaker's office to make arrangements for her own funeral, and is then murdered a few hours later.  The case is investigated by the police, of course, but also by Hawthorne, and ex-police officer with whom Horowitz has worked as a consultant on TV screenplays.  Hawthorne wants Horowitz to write a book about his investigation, and he eventually agrees to become his amanuensis and sort of assistant.  This all works pretty well as a device; it allows Horowitz to have fun introducing aspects of his own life (which may or may not be true, of course) and also allows him to have his cake and eat it rather.  There's a good deal of "if I was making this all up, I wouldn't have done it like this" sort of stuff – which again, I was surprised to find I rather liked.  (You can tell, by the way, that he has been writing Sherlock Holmes stories, as Hawthorne's methods, if not his character, have a very Holmesian feel.)

It's not all great; the ending is pretty silly, to be honest – with the killer explaining everything to the captured investigator whom he intends to kill as a crowing cliché.  Also, there are a few characters who are made to resemble real people closely enough to be disconcerting.  A vain, manipulative actor called Damian who is about to star in a new series called Homeland?  The physical description doesn't fit and he went to the wrong acting school, but… Or a director who "wishes to remain anonymous," about whom Horwitz then gives such full, extraneous detail that she is plainly identifiable as Janet Steel.  It's odd, and it's something I didn't like.

Nonetheless, this is an enjoyable, readable book.  Place and characters are well evoked and I found it a very entertaining read for most of its length.  Recommended.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

Matthew Sullivan - Midnight At The Bright Ideas Bookstore

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Not as good as I'd hoped

I should have loved this book.  I'm a sucker for a story set in a bookshop, its central character is engaging and there's a mystery to be solved, but something about Midnight At The Bright Ideas Bookstore just didn’t do it for me.

The story is set in the 80s, I think (certainly pre-internet and mobile phones), and centres around Lydia who is 30 years old and working in the eponymous bookstore in Denver, Colorado.  In the first few pages she finds that a young man, a regular customer who has become almost a friend, has hanged himself in the store.  The events relating to his death and to Lydia's traumatic past emerge as the book progresses.  It's a decent set-up, but thesubsequent development all seemed rather pedestrian to me.

I find it hard to put my finger on why the book didn't engage me properly.  The prose is perfectly readable and Matthew Sullivan can create a good character –  the one time the book came completely alive for me was during the relatively brief appearance of a cynical, reclusive retired cop whom I found a vividly real and gripping character.  The rest, though…well, it felt a little obviously constructed, somehow, as if I could see the Creative Writing Manual showing through without really being convinced by much of it.  There are some coincidences which are central to the plot which really stretch credibility, for example, and I found the journey of Lydia's heart completely unconvincing.

I don't want to carp too much.  It's OK.  I did finish it (albeit with some judicious skimming) but I'd hoped for much better.  Plainly, other reviewers have enjoyed this far more than I did, but I can only give it a qualified recommendation.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

Nicole Krauss - Forest Dark

Rating: 1/5

Review:
Very disappointing

I thought Nicole Krauss's Great House was excellent and I was looking forward to this very much.  Sadly, I thought Forest Dark was self-regardingly flashy and ultimately empty.

The book centres around two Jewish characters who are, in their different ways, having crises of identity and reassessing both their lives and their relationships with Israel and Judaism.  Jules Epstein is a hugely successful businessman who begins to give away his possessions and have a sort of holiday from being himself, while Nicole is a writer struggling with writer's block who leaves her family to…well…find herself wouldn't be an inappropriate cliché.  The two stories intercut with each other – although I don’t really know why, other than that it's the fashion at the moment.

There is a huge amount of intellectualising here, which would be fine by me if it made some sense or had real depth – but most of it doesn't.  I know a lot of professional critics think this is a brilliant masterpiece, but it just made me cross in the end and I'm glad that neither the characters nor the author (nor Kafka, come to that) could hear what I was saying about them because I was driven to some thoroughly reprehensible language as I was reading.  Leaving aside the almost invariably ghastly idea of a writer writing about a writer who is struggling to write and the undoubtedly postmodern something-or-other of naming the fictional writer after herself, Krauss goes in for a lot of what seemed to me to be show-off cleverness for its own sake – much of which isn't really clever at all. 

For example, there's a long passage where Nicole hears a radio broadcast about modern cosmology and then considers the nature of knowledge.  We get stuff like this: "But in a multiverse, the concepts of known and unknown are rendered useless, for everything is equally known and unknown," which, frankly, is unmitigated tosh.  Or: "In the end we have made ourselves ill with knowledge."  Really?  How have we done that, exactly?  I suspect that quite a few people who are alive because of modern medical knowledge might well have something to say on the matter.  Or "Now, we have little choice but to live in the arid fields of reason."  What, you really think *that* is the problem at the moment?  Allow me to present you with some alternative facts.  There's also a sort of variation on solipsism which sounds as though a hippy, still tripping on the acid they took at Woodstock, has been taken to see The Matrix and, having speculated that each of us, in our own mind, may create space itself and everything in it for ourselves, Nicole says "In that moment I knew unequivocally that if I was dreaming my life from anywhere, it was the Tel Aviv Hilton."  Er…that would be the Tel Aviv Hilton which only exists in your dream, would it?  And so on and so on.

I suspect that Krauss is trying to suggest that we have lost sight of the wonder of the unknown and the numinous, a view with which I have a good deal sympathy, but writing this sort of nonsense certainly doesn't make the case.  (And in my view, Eliot's "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" says much of it better in two brief sentences.)  I do realise that this is a novel and not a philosophical treatise, but in order to have any real content it  surely requires some semblance of rationality, or at least originality of imagery.  Much of this just read to me like someone trying to show off how clever they are and getting it embarrassingly wrong.

So, I'm afraid I hated Forest Dark.  There have been some very fine novels about identity in the modern world recently (including Jewish identity).  Salman Rushdie's The Golden House, David Grossman's A Horse Walks Into A Bar and even Will Self's Phone all spring to mind.  This doesn't begin to compare, I'm afraid.  Nicole Krauss can still write a good sentence and come up with an arresting image from time to time, but as a novel I thought this was very poor.  I'm sorry to have to say this about a writer whom I respect, but my advice is to avoid this book.

Simon Lelic - The House

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A very good psychological thriller

I thought The House was a very good psychological thriller.  It is well written and very gripping.

The plot concerns Jack and Syd, a young couple who manage to buy a house which they didn't expect to be able to get.  Things then become a little sinister and gradually a series of events means that their lives begin to unravel completely and past trauma starts to emerge.  It's a tense, well developed plot which is pretty plausible until the very end, which I did find pretty unlikely.  However, it is so well done that I can forgive that.

What makes this so good is the very engrossing plot structure, which kept me very involved, and the two narrative voices.  The book is in the form of a diary or blog kept by Syd and Jack which, by mutual agreement, they write both as messages to each other and to get a clear record of what has happened.  I found the two voices completely convincing and engaging in their own ways, and Syd and Jack's relationship and how they behave under extreme pressure seemed very real to me.  By the time I got to a rather less-than-plausible ending I was completely hooked, so I didn't really mind.

In short, The House is an enjoyable, gripping read which is a cut above your average psychological thriller.  Recommended.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)

Michael Innes - Death At The President's Lodging

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Not one of Innes's best

First published in 1937, this is Michael Innes's first detective novel. This shows; it's certainly not a classic like Hamlet, Revenge! or Christmas at Candleshoe and, although it's still enjoyable in parts, it does begin to drag quite badly.

The plot, as may be imagined from the title, revolves around the murder of the President of a fictitious Oxford College.  The circumstances are contrived, to say the least, but Innes notes this with some dry remarks from his protagonists and to begin with  it's a decently put together mystery as the suspects are narrowed down to a small number of College dons.   Events move pretty slowly, so the chief pleasure of this book is in Innes's prose and characterisations.  There is a dry academic wit running through the whole thing, with an ironic tone toward the practices of the College and the conduct of its fellows – with all of which Innes himself was extremely familiar, of course.  This little extract gives the idea; a rather stolid policeman is briefing the newly-arrived Inspector Appleby from Scotland Yard:

"..the Dean; he's called the Reverend the Honourable Tracy Deighton-Clerk.' (There was an indefinable salt in the inspector's mode of conveying this information.)"

If you like that, you'll probably like the book – as I did for quite a while.  I found, though, that half way through it began to pall and that witty prose but a very contrived and complex plot being very slowly revealed wasn't really enough to carry the rest of the book.  There is a great deal of very wordy consideration of the possibilities and despite some good interludes (Appleby's interview with Empson the psychologist, for example) it became a bit of a chore.  It's an extremely intricate puzzle dependent upon precise timings and physical locations – without a map or plan to help – and whose dénouement is…well, implausible would be a kind way of putting it.  It's intended to be an ironic academic take on the genre, I think, but it didn’t really work for me.

Having enjoyed the first half, I largely lost interest.  I really struggled toward the end  and was frankly relieved when I got there.  If you like this sort of Golden Age detective fiction this is probably worth a read, but I can only give it a very qualified recommendation.

Tim Weaver - I Am Missing

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Too long and a bit silly

I'm afraid I didn't get on nearly as well with I Am Missing as a lot of other reviewers.

The set-up is excellent: David Raker, a specialist in missing persons, is contacted by a man with amnesia to try to find out who he is. It's an intriguing premise and I thought the opening of the book was very good. The story is narrated by Raker and I liked his voice, too, so the whole thing was promising. However, this didn't last. Raker is no fan of concision, so we get an awful lot of it-might-be-this or perhaps-it's-that which doesn’t add up to a lot, plus a great deal of over descriptive scene-setting and it gets pretty wearing. Later, too, Weaver begins to resort increasingly to clichés like "Slowly, this was heading somewhere. *Somewhere bad.*" I wholeheartedly agreed with "slowly," but really, "Somewhere bad," as an italicised sentence? It's pretty cheesy, as is the rather sentimental ending. Weaver can write well, so it's a shame to mar decent prose with this sort of stuff.

The other problem is the plot holes and absurdities, like the frankly incomprehensible failure to go to the police with vital evidence when the resulting police work would help Raker hugely. Twice (!) he deliberately puts himself alone in inescapable places which he knows are controlled by those who wish him dead. A succession of slightly implausible villains are going to kill him, but carefully explain to him everything they have done, including their motivations, before…I wouldn't dream of including spoilers, and I'm sure you can't guess. And so on and so on. I did finish the book, but 540-odd pages of this was an awful lot it was a bit of a chore and I did get very fed up with it.

This might make an OK, brain-off beach read but as a plausible, enjoyable thriller I can only give it a very lukewarm recommendation.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

Quentin Blake & John Yeoman - The World's Laziest Duck

Rating 5/5

Review: 
A delight

This was originally published in 1975 as The Puffin Book Of Improbable Records, and has been making me smile ever since.  The wonderful absurdity of imagination combined with Quentin Blake's incomparable illustrations make this an absolute joy – even to this definitely-not-young person.  I mean, who wouldn't want to know that the friendliest woodlouse in the world is called Sidney, and that he has 985 friends?  Or that the world's soppiest fairy story is Cuddly-Bunnykins and Little Fairy Twinklewand by Emily Tichweed?  I rest my case.

This is an absolute delight of a book.  Very warmly recommended.

Luke Jennings - Codename Villanelle

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Enjoyable and exciting

This is a very enjoyable load of old hokum.  It could be utterly dreadful – a ruthless, beautiful highly trained female assassin (the eponymous Villanelle) working for a shadowy group of ultra-rich people protecting their own interests isn't exactly a fresh-sounding set-up - but it's well done and actually very entertaining.

I've largely summarized the plot in the last sentence, but we also meet a British intelligence operative whose mission it is to catch and kill Villanelle.  She is a rather engaging character: brilliant and determined but unglamorous and ordinary in her personal life, she makes a good foil to Villanelle's character, and I like that the two chief protagonists are both women.  Luke Jennings writes well, presents a good, detailed background and creates pretty believable scenes and characters - within the overall implausibility of the whole thing, of course.  He structures the plot well and I found it an exciting and easy read.

I did think that a couple of the sex scenes were gratuitously explicit – especially one in which a potential target for Villanelle visits a brothel and indulges in some, shall we say, very niche practices which were described in needlessly graphically detail.  Also, this is the set up for at least one more book; there is no real resolution at the end and I'm not sure that the idea will carry a series.  Nonetheless, I did enjoy Codename Villanelle and I will look out for the sequel.  Recommended.

(I received an ARC via NetGalley.)

Susan Perabo - The Fall Of Lisa Bellow

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Not for me

I didn't get on with this book at all.  It's supposed to be a profound and searching study of trauma and survivor guilt, but I'm afraid I just found it extremely long-winded, turgid, unconvincing and, frankly, very dull.

The story is of Meredith an ordinary-ish girl who is, like many others, despised and mocked by the bitchy "Popular" clique in her school, led by the eponymous Lisa Bellow.  When something finally actually happens, Meredith and the eponymous Lisa find themselves caught in a robbery.  The armed robber takes Lisa with him but leaves Meredith behind, and the remainder of the book deals with the psychological effects on Meredith and her family.

Susan Perabo does this through long, minute detailing of the internal monologues and feelings of both Meredith and her mother.  This can be a very effective device, but although Perabo writes very good prose, I found the whole thing quite staggeringly tedious.  I didn't find either character very convincing and I thought there was little new or fresh in what was being said.  The structure didn't help; suddenly leaving Meredith's experience for extended flashbacks into her mother's psychological past, for example, was just annoying, especially as I didn't really care about it, and other oh-so-artfully placed flashbacks to leave little cliffhangers were just as irritating.

I got more and more bored and frustrated and eventually I couldn't face any more.  I should have been really interested in Meredith's internal state but, for example, when she went to the mall to buy shoes and the self-examination kept on and on and on, I found myself muttering, "How much *more* of this?"  I very rarely do this when reading a book which I have been sent for review, but around half way through I simply couldn't face any more and gave up.  As Meredith's mother would probably have said (many times), words cannot express the sense of relief I felt.

Holly Bourne's brilliant Am I Normal Yet?, the stunning My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent and others have, in different ways, taken me right inside a teenage girl's head and completely gripped me.  This completely failed to do either for me.  I have given this two stars rather than one because it is written in good prose, but although other readers have plainly enjoyed it, I really, really didn't.

(I received an ARC from NetGalley.)