Lucie Whitehouse - Risk Of Harm

 

Rating: 2/5

 

Review:

Not for me

I’m afraid I got very fed up with Risk Of Harm and gave up.

A young woman is found murdered in a derelict factory in Birmingham. DCI Robin Lyons and her team investigate but have great difficulty in identifying her. And, for a long time, that’s the story, except for the usual tropes about The Press Being All Over This and so on. The rest is all about Robin’s Involved Personal Life and Personal Demons. In the first four, shortish chapters we get: a terrible recent trauma in which her daughter was nearly murdered and which may threaten her objectivity on this case; an immediate boss who is an old flame; a pantomimically useless and sexist Deputy Chief Constable who hates her and insists that she gets a “nice quick solve”; and a difficult relationship with a DI whose case she solved previously and whom she has now beaten to the post of DCI. I was already wondering how much more of this was going to be trowelled on, when – surprise, surprise – there’s her racist brother who has hated her since she was born and is making life very difficult with her family.

I’m afraid this was the point at which I began to crack. Good writers can give us detectives whose personal lives are interesting and believable but which don’t dominate the story with endless, overblown “issues.” (John Rebus, for example, or Manon Bradshaw, to name but two). This sort of heavy-handed stuff just annoys me, I’m afraid. It drowns out the plot with implausible conflicts and pressures everywhere and takes the place of real insight into the human problems which crime causes.

It’s possible that I’m being too harsh and that I have missed a classic piece of crime fiction in the later parts, but I doubt it. I do know that plenty of people will enjoy this and my irritation is a matter of personal taste. Nonetheless, I really couldn’t be doing with Risk Of Harm and personally I can’t recommend it.

(My thanks to 4^th Estate for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Susanna Clarke - Piranesi

 

 

Rating: 5/5

 

Review:

Exceptionally good 

 

I loved Piranesi. I approached it with caution but I was wholly captivated and, by the end, enthralled.

It is very hard to say much about the story without giving too much away. The narrative is in the form of entries in a journal by “Piranesi” whose world is a labyrinth of halls, populated by statues and through which the sea runs and sometimes floods. These entries are dated “The first day of the fifth month in the year the albatross came to the South-Western Halls” and so on, which gives a flavour of the style and the setting. Piranesi’s only human contact is with the Other, a mysterious person who appears sometimes and who seems strikingly 21st-Century British. The truth of the situation slowly emerges as new information comes to light, and Susanna Clarke tells it in a beautifully paced and wholly engrossing story.

This is brilliant in lots of ways. It has important things to say about identity, exploitation, the nature of reality and our experience of it and much more – and it’s all done without lecturing or hectoring. Piranesi’s voice is enchanting; it has a childlike innocence and an almost Zen-like approach to existence, combined with language which I found beautiful and almost compulsively readable. I found echoes here of Z For Zachariah and of Room, but this is it’s own book with Clarke’s wonderful ability to create a vivid, wholly real-seeming world as well as showing genuine insight and humanity in her character studies.

Piranesi is one of the best things I’ve read for quite some while. I hope it wins some major prizes, and I can recommend it very warmly indeed.

Ian Moore - Death and Croissants

 

 

Rating: 2/5

Review:

Not for me

I’m afraid that, despite warm endorsements from a lot of comedians whom I like very much, I didn’t like Death And Croissants.

Richard, a middle-aged ex-pat Brit, runs a small B&B in the Loire Valley. A guest disappears mysteriously, leaving some bloodstained clues and Richard is reluctantly strongarmed into investigating by a forceful and glamorous Frenchwoman who is also a guest. It’s mildly amusing in places (with the occasional strong whiff of A Year In Provence), but I’m afraid I found it slow and rather tedious with some very laboured humour. Richard himself is an insipid protagonist which is intended to fuel a lot of the humour, but it just didn’t for me so I was left with an uninspiring character in slow, not-very-interesting story which wasn’t nearly as funny as it wanted to be.

I’m sorry to be critical, but I just got fed up and gave up around half way through. It’s possible that I missed a comic masterpiece in the second half, but I doubt it somehow. Farrago do an excellent job in bringing us a lot of both new and neglected humorous writing, much of which I have enjoyed very much. This one, though, wasn’t for me.

(My thanks to Farrago for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Oliver Harris - Ascension

 

Rating: 3/5

Review:

Rather disappointing

 

I was rather disappointed in Ascension. I thought its predecessor, A Shadow Intelligence, was very good; this wasn’t in the same class, I’m afraid.

After his traumatic time in Kazakhstan, Elliot Kane has left the Intelligence Services and is quietly lecturing on obscure subjects in Oxford. He is, naturally, dragged back to investigate the suspicious suicide of someone he had worked with previously. This was on Ascension Island, a small, bleak island in the South Atlantic which has great significance for international communications and hence for intelligence agencies. A frankly rather mundane plot develops in which Kane, very clumsily for an experienced undercover agent, looks into dodgy goings-on on the island.

It’s fine in its way, but unlike A Shadow Intelligence, this seemed like a pretty run-of-the-mill whodunnit with some espionage stuff thrown in. Oliver Harris doesn’t quite manage to develop a sense of place as he did so well before, nor does he give such a good picture of the messy, murky world of geopolitics. They’re there, but far less convincing this time, as Kane blunders about drawing attention to himself and it ends with a race-against-time climax which left me pretty cold.

This is a perfectly decent beach read, but I was expecting far more from Harris and I can only give this a rather lukewarm recommendation.

(My thanks to Little, Brown for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Lisa Jewell - The Night She Disappeared

 

 

 Rating 4/5

Review:

Good, after and unpromising start

In the end, I enjoyed The Night She Disappeared. It is the first Lisa Jewell I have read and while I thought there were some very good things about it, I had some reservations.

The narrative is in three timelines: it opens with Sophie moving to live next to a boarding school in the country where her partner is starting as Headteacher. I emerges that two young people went missing 18 months earlier and Sophie, a writer of cosy detective fiction, becomes involved in trying to solve the mystery of their disappearance. The other time frames are immediately after the disappearance and, intermittently, events leading up to it.

It’s a decent story, well told. Lisa Jewell writes well and unfussily, and she is especially good at creating believable characters and relationships. For example, I thought her depiction of an increasingly controlling partner was very good and seemed fresh, even though it’s a pretty well-worn idea in fiction now. The psychology and motivation of her characters was good, too, and far more plausible than is often the case. No-one came up with absurd reasons for not going to the police, nor went into obvious danger without telling anyone, which was another big plus.

The thing is, I almost gave up about a third of the way through because I got pretty bored and it seemed like some rather tired tropes were being introduced to build up tension. In fact, I went back to the book, which had picked up very well by half way, and I enjoyed the second half very much; it was thoughtful, tense, plausible and involving

So...overall a good read, but be prepared for a bit of a turgid start.

(My thanks to Century for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Bill Fitzhugh - Pest Control

 

 Rating: 4/5

Review:

Very entertaining

 

I enjoyed Pest Control. It is well written and amusing, if bonkers. It has some of the wit and craziness of Carl Hiaasen about it and I suspect if you like Hiaasen, you’ll like this.

Bob Dillon (!) is an entomologist who is somewhat obsessed with bugs and dreams of starting an environmentally-friendly pest extermination business. By a somewhat ridiculous chain of misunderstandings he is hired as a hit man (although he doesn’t realise it) and then becomes the target of the world’s top assassins. It’s a good story if you don’t expect grim realism and it is full of comic episodes. Some are very funny, some a little less so, but I found it very entertaining overall.

Bill Fitzhugh uses his character’s name to sneak in a huge array of references to Dylan titles and lyrics. Again, some are neat and smile-inducing, while the unsubtle gratuitousness of others does grate a bit. For example, I liked one trapped characters saying to another “There must be some way out of here,” and a reminiscence about being lost one time in Juarez in the rain, which fitted the narrative, but I could have done without a wholly gratuitous description of a passer-by wearing a leopardskin pillbox hat or character shooting someone and then yelling, “Those were shots of love! Infidel!”

Minor reservations aside, I did find this a very entertaining read overall and I’ll definitely try some more of Bill Fitzhugh’s books. Recommended.

(My thanks to Farrago for an ARC via NetGalley.)

 

Michelle Magorian - Goodnight Mister Tom

 

 

Rating: 4/5

 

Review:

Involving and touching

 

I enjoyed Goodnight Mister Tom, but wasn’t quite as unreservedly enthusiastic as many reviewers.

The story is of an abused and traumatised young boy evacuated to a small village at the start of the Second World War, where he is taken in by a grumpy, reclusive old man and of how they both heal as they grow to love each other. It could have been sickeningly sentimental, but is very well done so that it is actually touching and humane. Tom Oakley didn’t actually seem that forbidding to me at the start, but William’s bemusement in the face of friendship and kindness was very convincing, as were his slow acceptance of the goodness of the people around him and his discoveries about himself.

The book isn’t all sweetness and redemption; there is sorrow and loss, plus one very dark episode, but overall but is a warm and fulfilling tale. I did think that it ran out of steam rather in the closing chapters; a seaside holiday was almost Enid Blyton-esque in its idyll and Will’s final coming to terms with what has happened to him didn’t ring nearly as true as the earlier parts. Nonetheless, this is an involving and touching book which I can recommend.

(My thanks to Puffin Books for an ARC via NetGalley.)