Gerald Seymour - The Outsiders

Rating: 4/5

 Review:
Another intelligent novel from Seymour

This is another intricately plotted and minutely researched novel from Gerald Seymour. It is very well-written and makes an enjoyable and interesting read.

In this book, Seymour deals with the fight against global organised crime, and specifically the Russian "mafiya." As always, he sets out not just to entertain but to illustrate the processes and politics of intelligence operations, the moral dilemmas they pose and the effect on the individuals involved. Seymour's agenda is clear early on when his characters lament the tiny budgets allocated to fighting organised crime while anti-terrorism attracts many millions. One of them reflects that, "The threat to her country of international terrorism was minimal compared to the dangers posed by organised crime. The first might splash blood and summon the headlines of outrage, but the other moved in darkness, evil and secrecy, contaminating all who came within its reach... Terrorism scratched spectacular but superficial wounds; organised crime caused terminal and irreversible sickness."

Seymour paints a convincing picture of this in a semi-clandestine operation by MI5 in Spain against a brutal Russian crime boss who murdered an agent years before. The individuals involved are all well-painted from the obsessive director of the operation to the young, innocent tourists who become caught up in it. The criminals themselves and the effects of their criminality are also convincingly portrayed, the plot moves slowly and meticulously but never drags and I found myself very caught up in it. The book does have its flaws, though. The characters tend to make speeches to each other to get the author's points across rather too often, rather than talking in convincing dialogue, but that is always a hazard with Seymour and I found myself just taking it in my stride in the end. The structure is little irritating at times with flashes of random meetings at Europol to allow long, clunky expositions about Organised Crime, and the climax seemed a little implausible to me.

The Outsiders is very good (Seymour always is) but for me not quite in the same class as his last novel, A Deniable Death, which I thought was quite exceptional. In spite of its flaws, though, I can recommend it as an intelligent, involving read.

Nicci French - Tuesday's Gone

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A well written, involving thriller

I enjoyed this second book in Nicci French's Frieda Klein series. Although not essential, it will help if you have read Blue Monday first (even though it's not quite as good) because there are personal and plot issues which carry on from there.

The plot of Tuesday's Gone is well summarized elsewhere on this page and again involves psychotherapist Frieda Klein reluctantly assisting with a police investigation. The book hits its stride straight away and I was very quickly drawn in and thoroughly gripped for most of the time. Frieda's character develops well and more naturally this time without all the slightly laboured scene-setting of the previous book. Tension builds nicely and the plot is well developed with a couple of genuinely clever twists and Nicci French's characteristic excellent writing and sense of pace.

Once the main mystery is solved there is a frankly rather silly coda of about 50 pages whose purpose seems to be to provide the apparently mandatory Investigator In Peril Climax and to further the through-plot which looks as though it may run for the whole series. I didn't think it added much and I would have preferred the book without it, but it didn't ruin the book either and this remains a very well written, involving thriller which I recommend warmly.

Carol O'Connell - The Chalk Girl

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A very enjoyable thriller

I really enjoyed this thriller. It is very well written and thoroughly gripping.

It is a complex tale involving multiple murder, criminality among New York's rich, corruption in high places and so on. This sounds like very standard fare but Carol O'Connell manages to breathe fresh life into it through the excellent team of Mallory and Striker whose relationship and approach is original, satisfying and sometimes very funny. The writing is excellent: O'Connell's prose is pacy, unfussy and very readable and the plot is superbly paced and structured. I found the present-day events gripping and the emergence of old horror extremely well done. The characters are well drawn (if a little over-done in places) and there are some very touching and occasionally heart-rending aspects to the book.

The whole thing kept me completely engrossed and I found it very enjoyable and satisfying. For some reason I have not come across Carol O'Connell before, but I will certainly be looking out her earlier Mallory books and warmly recommend this one.

Imogen Robertson - Circle Of Shadows

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A well written historical novel

I found this a well written and on the whole enjoyable historical crime novel. I had not read any of the previous novels in this series but I didn't find that detracted from this one; necessary details are very well woven into the story and although it may be better to read the series in order it certainly isn't necessary.

The story is set in the fictional German province of Maulberg in 1784. Imogen Robertson paints a convincing period backdrop and I found the sense of time and place one of the strengths of the book. She has elected to make her characters speak in a slightly more formal version of modern English rather than in the idiom of the time, and again I think this works very well, allowing the dialogue and story to flow while still giving an impression of taking place in the eighteenth century. The characters are generally well-drawn and interesting and I was happy to spend time with Harriet Westerman and Gabriel Crowther.

The plot itself involves a wrongly accused friend in need of salvation, political intrigue, mysterious cabals, poisonings and so on and is quite enjoyable. I did feel that it could have done with some trimming: things began to drag a little after 250 pages, I never felt completely gripped by the story and the sheer number of characters with Germanic names made it a little hard to keep track of, which didn't help.

Nevertheless, it was well written and well plotted and made a largely engaging read. If if you like historical fiction or a decent crime novel I can recommend it.

Barry Lyga - I Hunt Killers

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Far better than it sounds

This is a very readable and exciting book, and it is also surprisingly insightful. I think it is rather ill-served by its title and cover which give the impression that it is just another gory, formulaic serial-killer novel. It isn't - it is quite original in its approach, has some thoughtful things to say and offers some real depth of characterisation.

A plot synopsis sounds very conventional - it is told from the point of view of Jazz, the son of a vicious sociopathic serial killer and schooled by his father from an early age to follow in the footsteps of Dear Old Dad who is now in jail. He has resisted this, and when a killer begins to mimic Dear Old Dad's murders, Jazz becomes determined to catch him. So far so predictable, but what makes this far, far better than it sounds is the character of Jazz, his relationships with his contemporaries and the interesting psychological insights the author produces from his set-up. In particular, Jazz's turmoil over who he really is and how other people see him, and his worries about whether his relationships are genuine or just the manipulative pretence in which his father tried to school him seem to me to give a very insightful portrait of teenage angst in general. Barry Lyga also catches the relationship between Jazz and his friend brilliantly and the relationship with his girlfriend is also very well done. These aspects surprised me with how good they were and really made the book stand out for me.

The plot is very well paced and moves along nicely while allowing time for the characters to breathe. Lyga generates a good sense of place, avoids stereotyped characters pretty well and there are moments of real humour, too. Aspects of this book were so good that for a time I thought this might be a five-star review, but I wasn't so keen on the rather conventional (if reasonably exciting) ending setting up a sequel and possibly a series. Nevertheless, there is far more to this book than I was expecting and it's a very enjoyable read. Recommended.

Cornelius Medvei - Caroline: A mystery

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Readable, wise and enjoyable

I thought this was an excellent, hugely enjoyable book. It is beautifully written, thoroughly original, amusing, touching and rather wise. It also has the immense merit of being short; there is nothing superfluous and the author has crafted a little gem in 150 pages.

The story is simple and unusual. It tells of what is effectively a love affair between a rather unfulfilled man on the verge of retirement and a donkey whom he finds while on holiday with his family and brings home to the city. The love is wholly spiritual and rather beautifully portrayed, as is the effect on him, his family and others. It sounds absurd (and in places probably is) but it works wonderfully. Medvei cleverly creates a very real-seeming city in which the story takes place but it is not clear where it is - it could be almost anywhere in the world - and this gives the story some of the atmosphere of a fable which allows the odder aspects of the story to seem really quite plausible. There are no sentimental set-pieces and no neat little Life Lessons are learned, but there seems to me to be great insight and compassion here, quietly and unshowily conveyed through a good, original, well-written story.

Medvei's unaffected prose and his remarkable ability to create very human, recognisable characters for me make this an exceptionally good book. It probably won't be for everyone (I have tried to resist saying that it isn't 50 Shades Of Bray, but I have failed - sorry) but if you like a thoughtful, quirky, engrossing and beautifully written book I would recommend this very warmly.

Lisa Ballantyne - The Guilty One

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Generally good, but has its flaws

I thought this was a generally well-written, readable and thoughtful book. It cuts between the stories of Daniel, a solicitor defending an 11-year-old accused of murdering a playmate and of Daniel's own troubled childhood which lends him empathy with the accused boy. There are many good things about it: the prose is readable, the structure which cuts between the present and Daniel's past works extremely well for much of the book and the courtroom scenes are convincing and very gripping.

I did think that the book had its flaws. At 450 pages it is too long. Lisa Ballantyne does a good job of creating the atmosphere of Daniel's childhood and of constructing his inner world but there is an awful lot of it and, as with the present-day story I found it dragged rather after a while, and toward the end as the trial becomes really gripping the flashbacks to Daniel's childhood which worked so well earlier become a serious intrusion. Ballantyne makes some good points about the law and the influence of the press on trials, but often through some terribly clunky dialogue and they could have been made more tellingly with a little more finesse. I also found that after I'd finished the book, I wasn't entirely convinced by the characters or the explanations of their actions, which somewhat undermined the publisher's claim that this is a "deeply psychological book" and the idea that it is a profound study of the nature of guilt.

Despite these reservations I thought this a pretty good book. I don't think it is as profound as it thinks it is, but overall is still recommendable as an often gripping and interesting read.

Umberto Eco - Numero Zero

Rating: 2/5

Review:
An unconvincing mish-mash

This is a strange book.  It's a mixture of a treatise on press malpractice and a rather silly conspiracy thriller, and neither works well as a readable book.

There is a sort of Kafka-esque unreality to Numero Zero.  It is narrated by a struggling writer and translator who is recruited to work in Milan on a strange sort of dummy-newspaper whose secret purpose purports to be to allow its proprietor to frighten and effectively blackmail influential people into allowing him access to power.  Much of the book is stilted discussion which reads like the transcript of a Media Studies seminar on shady tabloid tactics.  It's a timely message, but not especially original in its insights and it really doesn't really make for a good novel.

Part of the problem is that it is clunkily structured and a good deal of it is not very well written.  I realise that it is tantamount to sacrilege to say this about Umberto Eco, but I think it's true.  One problem is that huge chunks of carefully structured information for the reader are presented, ridiculously, as spontaneous dialogue.  For example, early on when the narrator is being recruited, we get this exchange with his prospective employer:

"The one who's paying is Commendatore Vimercate.  You'll have heard of him…"

"Vimercate.  I have heard of him.  He ends up in the papers from time to time; he controls a dozen or so hotels on the Adriatic coast, owns a large number of homes for pensioners and the infirm, has various shady dealings about which there's much speculation…" and on and on and on.  It's ridiculously amateurish; no-one would respond spontaneously in that way, and if it were written by a less august author than Eco any decent editor would tell them to go away and do it better. 

There's a lot of this sort of stuff: people telling others things that they already know, dialogue which reads like a sequence of carefully prepared speeches which don't sound like real characters talking to each other at all, and so on.  There's a character who is a bit obsessive about lists and detail who goes on literally for pages listing every detail of various brands of car, or the labyrinthine intricacies of the various orders of the Knights Of Malta.  I would be amazed if anyone actually read all of this carefully – the point has been made after a paragraph or two and I skimmed several pages several times without missing anything important.  Even his exposition of the Conspiracy Theory that Mussolini escaped alive in 1945 is hard going.

The narrator says early on that his own writing is poor because he keeps peppering it with literary references which he knows he shouldn't do – and then carries on doing exactly that throughout the book, allowing Eco to carry on showing off while pretending that he isn't.  And so on.  I found the book increasingly irritating as these things mounted up.

To be fair, this book is trying to make some quite important points, but it doesn't make them very well, I'm afraid.  Thirty years ago I struggled (and skimmed) through the first hundred pages or so of The Name Of the Rose, and then found the rest of the novel gripping, brilliant and very memorable.  A little later I read an interview with  Eco in which he said that he had deliberately made the beginning difficult because he didn't want just anyone reading his book.  That put me off him so much that I haven't read another of his novels until now, and on this evidence I think I've saved myself a good deal of unnecessary suffering. 

I am just an ordinary reader, so Eco may well think that I am not qualified to comment on this, but for me Numero Zero doesn't really work as a novel at all.  The premise doesn't really hang together, it is clumsily done and, frankly, became a chore to finish.  I can't recommend it, I'm afraid.

Gordon Ferris - Bitter Water

Rating: 4/5

Review:
An enjoyable thriller

I enjoyed this book. It is s very decently plotted crime novel set in Glasgow in 1946. I hadn't read the first in the series, but that didn't interfere with my enjoyment because anything relevant from the first book is neatly explained where necessary. The plot itself is well summarised elsewhere on this page, and I found it reasonably plausible and comprehensible. The characters are well drawn and believable, the sense of place is strong and the prose is unfussy and easy to read.

The difficulty I had with the book was the language used. Told in the first person, the narration and dialogue are liberally strewn with 21st century vocabulary and phraseology - "choice of lifestyle", "As if!", "paper trail" and many other examples - which hadn't been invented in 1946 and there is also a strong infusion of 21st century attitudes, so that I found little sense of period here. However, the book was well enough written to engage me throughout and, despite the obligatory slightly silly Big Climax, I would recommend this as an enjoyable and reasonably original thriller.

Steven Dunne - Deity

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A decent police thriller

This is an enjoyable police procedural, although I did have my reservations about it.

Set in and around Derby, the story concerns two series of events, the bodies of homeless alcoholics turning up in unusual circumstances and the disappearance of college students, both of which are investigated by Inspector Brook. Brook, naturally, has a Troubled Personal Life and difficult relationships with colleagues and authority although this isn't too badly overdone. The book is well written in readable, unintrusive prose, dialogue and characters are by and large believable and the story is well told.

I have two main reservations. Firstly, at 530 pages the book is too long. I don't mind a long book provided there is a lot to fill it, but I felt there wasn't a real sense of place generated and some rather clumsy speechifying rather than the subtle emergence on important issues so eventually things dragged a little and some editing would have improved this a lot. Secondly, the climax and explanations were quite remarkably implausible and in the end I found it just silly.

However, the book did keep me reading to the end and this and the writing itself would make three stars very churlish. It's a decent thriller if you are prepared to stretch your ability to suspend disbelief.

Tim Weaver - Vanished

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Good but flawed

This is, for most of the book, a well-written, well plotted and gripping thriller centering on a private missing persons enquiry and a police investigation into multiple disappearances and possible murders. I found the central character a believable and engaging narrator and much of the story engrossing. In particular, the early parts of the book are excellent with slow, meticulous research revealing tantalising and interesting clues about the disappearance. There are also some rather good character insights and a well-drawn sense of place, especially on the London Underground.

I must say that, in spite of all the qualities of the book, I found it ultimately rather unsatisfying and in places very irritating. It is difficult to say exactly why without undesirable spoilers, but I lost count of the number of times I mentally shouted "Go to the police!" and the reasons for not doing so were ludicrously flimsy. I also got very fed up with the absurd, overblown ending which would have been far better without the implausible "twists".

This is still a recommendable four-star thriller but could have been much better with a bit more restraint.

Antonio Hill - The Summer of Dead Toys

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A decent, if unspectacular, police procedural

This is a very solid, readable crime novel. It is well written and involving, the characters are well enough drawn to convince much of the time, the story is well-paced and the dialogue generally believable.

Set in Barcelona, the story revolves around an apparent accident which, on further investigation, reveals murky goings-on in respectable families and family secrets from the past. It is a good story which moves at a decent pace. What I found lacking was a real sense of place and atmosphere. Somehow, I never really got a feel of Barcelona, and although we are repeatedly told it is very hot, the details were lacking which might have made this a convincing, pervading factor.

Minor reservations aside, this is a decent police procedural which isn't particularly original but is well enough written and constructed to be entertaining and generally pretty engrossing.

William Osborne - Hitler's Angel

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A cracking adventure for young adults

I really enjoyed this adventure for early teenagers. The premise of the book is utterly preposterous, the plot creaks a bit and the language and attitudes are often more 2012 than 1941, but I really didn't mind. It's a great adventure story which carried me along very well.

The plot involves two young teenage refugees from the Nazis living in Britain who agree to return to Germany undercover (after two whole weeks training) to take a child out of captivity and into Switzerland. This mission is vital to the British War Effort at a time when the war was being lost. So far, so unlikely, but it's an exciting adventure not a historical documentary so you need to forget your scepticism and just enjoy the ride. The storytelling is fast-paced and exciting, the lead characters (one male, one female) are engaging, the villain is very villainous and the historical background is well sketched without weighing down the narrative. There are constant narrow escapes and exciting action and I'd have loved this aged 12. I still liked it a lot aged...well...a lot more than 12, and I'm sure it will appeal to young adults of both sexes.

I have one criticism - the map at the front. It is very helpful to know the geography of the area, but it also clearly shows their entire route which acts as a rather large spoiler in places and I'd recommend not looking at it first if you can avoid it. Otherwise it's tremendously enjoyable - perhaps not an enduring classic, but a cracking read nonetheless and warmly recommended.

Jason Webster - A Death In Valencia

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Well written, but...

I found this book surprisingly hard going for much of it's length. It is well written and has a good deal to say about modern Spain and the attitudes and rivalries which compete there, but as a story it took a very long time to get going and by page 100 I thought it was heading for 3 stars at best. In fact it picked up quite well and the second half of the book did draw me in and made it worth reading.

I think my problem with the book is that it is largely about Spanish politics: the struggle between the relatively new democracy there and those who want to return it to a deeply reactionary Franco-style state, the influence of the Church, corruption in the police and government and so on. It's well enough done, but doesn't leave a lot of room for plot and character (although I did find Camara himself to be rather well drawn.) Given what seemed like rather long periods away from the investigation of the crimes I also found that I had forgotten who various witnesses, suspects and so on were by the time they reappeared, which isn't something I usually have a hard time with.

Once things began to move and gel together a little I did enjoy the book (although I could have done without the cliché-ed Cornered Killer Climax) and have given it four stars for that reason and because I liked the writing which is unobtrusive, unpretentious and enjoyable. You need to be prepared for a long slog in the first half of the book, though, so I can only give this a qualified recommendation.

Mark Douglas-Home - The Sea Detective

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Promising but flawed

I thought this was a very good idea which was reasonably well done.  I would like to have given this four stars because there's promise here, but it did have some pretty serious flaws and in the end I couldn't, I'm afraid.

This is a crime novel with both police and private detective elements.  Cal McGill is a rather geeky (but apparently rather sexy) marine expert who can track beached objects back to their source at sea.  He is slightly clumsily introduced, as is the police officer Helen Jamieson, a bright, capable officer whose colleagues despise her because she is plain and a bit overweight.  Three stories intertwine: two criminal and one personal to Cal who is struggling to right an ancient injustice done to his grandfather.

It's not bad.  Mark Douglas-Home writes decent prose and I became quite interested in a couple of the characters and in the development of the stories.  However, it lacks the discipline and structure to work really well.  Plot details don't quite hang together sometimes; for example, a very nasty, painful rib injury and a sprained ankle suddenly vanish and are never heard of again.  The book sometimes meanders and lacks focus, with the story flagging badly in places and could have done with some pretty firm tightening up.  The stories are told from too many different viewpoints which breaks the narrative up badly, and although they are all decent stories in a way, their respective denouements all seemed very pat and convenient to me, with the sudden, convenient intervention of hitherto unmentioned people or evidence.  And the finale, intended to be a nail-biting showdown climax, just became plain silly, I'm afraid.

Douglas-Home tackles important themes here.  It's a fine idea to make Helen a bit physically unattractive, for example, and to examine the way in which people respond to her as a result.  However, it does need to be done with a little subtlety and realism to be believable, and the creation of a bad-guy boss for her who is vain, libidinous, incompetent and vindictive to the point of being ludicrously pantomimic weakens rather than strengthens the point being made.  If he had a moustache, he would unquestionably twirl it, and much the same can be said about other villains in the book.   It really is like a children's story in which all the horrid nasty people are eventually thwarted by the ingenuity of the nice, virtuous underdogs, which undermined its credibility for me.

So, this is a decent but flawed first book in what may turn out to be a good series.  There's enough promise to encourage me to try the next one but this comes with a rather qualified recommendation.

(I received a free ARC via Netgalley.)

Salley Vickers - The Cleaner of Chartres

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Enjoyable, thoughtful and engaging

This is a beautifully written, thoughtful and engaging book. I enjoyed Miss Garnett's Angel many years ago and tried The Cleaner of Chartres on the strength of it. I was very happy that I had because I enjoyed it very much.

Salley Vickers is a marvellous storyteller and she very subtly creates very believable and recognisable characters, showing their inner lives with gentle penetration and, on the whole, great compassion. I found this aspect of the novel especially involving and her gently-painted psychological insights are what have lingered most strongly with me, and her portraits of aspects and origins of kindness and malice, of decency and selfishness, of humility and self-certainty and so on were very shrewd and delicately done.

Vickers also generates a wonderful sense of place, and the redemptive tale of Agnes, an orphan lost in the world and despised by some but finding her place among people who have come to respect and admire her is both captivating and wise in itself. There are notable similarities to Miss Garnett: the central character is a lonely woman who, without overtly searching, stumbles toward spiritual and personal fulfilment, the central setting is a cathedral where an ancient image is being restored and so on. Nevertheless, it works very well as a tale in its own right and I never felt I was being fobbed off with a re-hash.

You may get a flavour of the style from this: "The sun, shifting in its westward path, was already lighting the South Rose window and smudges of colour, refracted through the glass, were blessing the grey stone of the walls by the scaffolding that concealed the benign Blue Virgin." I found that, and a lot else in the book, extremely evocative and read it all with unalloyed pleasure and I recommend it very warmly - it's a really enjoyable read which will stay with me for a long time.

Ferdinand von Schirach - The Collini Case

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Gripping and intelligent

I found this a gripping, well-written and thoughtful book.

The plot summary seems to feature many of the clichés of the genre - a young, inexperienced lawyer agrees to defend a murder case but finds that his client obviously committed the crime but won't say why. The lawyer finds that he has a close personal connection to the victim and to his family. His legal opponent is a brilliant, powerful and respected lawyer and the victim one of the richest and most influential men in Germany whose past begins to emerge... It all sounds like the usual sort of legal/conspiracy blockbuster, but is in fact very different. This is a brief, concentrated and quietly powerful book celebrating personal and legal integrity and making important points about the manipulation of the law.

The narrative is beautifully constructed and excellently told (and translated) in unflashy prose which I found gave it real strength and drive. The characters and dialogue are wholly believable and the tension in the courtroom scenes builds very well. This may perhaps make more impact in Germany where the legal revelations are more directly relevant, but as a non-German I still found it very gripping and very interesting.

Michael Rosen's Sad Book

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A masterpiece

This is an absolutely superb book.  It talks gently, truthfully and humanly about Michael Rosen's response to the death of his son Eddie at the age of 19.

The book is very brief but it says more about loss and grief than many books of hundreds of pages.  Michael Rosen has a rare combination of the insight to see what is happening, the courage to accept it and the honesty to speak it plainly.  It is a deeply human and humane book in which – thank heavens! – he acknowledges that grief makes you very sad (there is no talk of "closure" - ugh! - or "moving on")  and that this is a natural human response.  He brings out the simple truth, so often not understood, that trying not to appear too sad for the sake of others is not the same as not being sad yourself.  Throughout, the book is gentle but truthful, very funny in places and very touching in others.

Quentin Blake's illustrations are quite wonderful.  He catches and expresses the intangibles and complexities of feeling in all of this quite beautifully and his observation is, as always, brilliant.  There are some very touching pictures, but some very witty ones, too: watch out for Eddie's sock in the Sofa Football sequence, for example, and the picture of a startled cat made me laugh out loud.

This, quite simply, is one of the best things I have ever read about loss and grief.  Everyone of every age should read it in my view.  It's a miniature masterpiece.

Samantha Hunt - The Invention of Everything Else

Rating: 1/5

Review:
Not for me

I am a physicist by training and wanted to like this book because it is about Tesla for whom I have a huge admiration (and who is honoured in science by having the unit measuring the strength of a magnetic field named after him). Furthermore, I don't like writing critical reviews and usually only review things I've liked, but with Vine you review what you receive and the truth is that I really disliked this book.

My main objection to it is the style, because it is so mannered, so overblown and so obviously striving for STYLE that it badly interferes with the story and development of character. Really brilliant writers like Wodehouse, Runyon, or Chandler, for example, can create a style which adds to, or even becomes more important than narrative. Sadly, Samantha Hunt is nowhere near that league and her attempt at individuality and quirkiness is simply irritating and very intrusive. For example, the opening of Chapter 2 begins, for no reason whatever, not just in the middle of a sentence but in the middle of a word, and turns out after more than two rather tedious pages to be a radio play which Louisa, a hitherto unknown character, is listening to. It's a pointless, uninteresting trick and simply annoyed me.

As another example, later in the chapter Louisa, goes to work in a hotel. This is described thus: "Through the pale esophagus of service passages, past the stomach that is the laundry...Louisa finds herself in the tiny gallbladder of the lady employees' changing room." The digestive tract is a clumsy, unnecessary and inappropriate metaphor for the hotel's corridors which contributes nothing to either our picture or understanding of the situation. And `gallbladder'? For heaven's sake! All this, coupled with a confused and fragmented structure (not to mention an attempt at magical realism), was too much for me, and I found the whole thing to be an over-written mish-mash which in the end wholly failed to engage me and added up to very little other than a desperate and rather poor attempt at chic writing.

Plainly others feel differently about this book, and many have enjoyed it. Another reviewer described the writing which I can't stand as "vibrant prose." Fair enough: tastes vary and anyone reading this review should read the other reviews too because like their authors you may enjoy it. I'm afraid that I certainly didn't.

Claire Fuller - Our Endless Numbered Days

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Exceptionally good

I thought this was exceptionally good.  It's unusual, extremely well written and utterly gripping.

The bones of the story are pretty well explained in the publishers' blurb.  In 1976, 8-year-old Peggy Hillcoat's father is a "survivalist" who believes the end of the world is coming.  One day, inexplicably, he suddenly takes Peggy on a "holiday" to an isolated hut in a European forest where they survive together for nine years without contact with the outside world. 

The narrative is by Peggy aged 17, having just returned to her home in London.  It is exceptionally well done, I think.  Her voice is completely convincing , as are the details of her experiences and her childlike perceptions of them.  The prose is excellent, the cutting between present and past is very skilfully done and Claire Fuller crafts the narrative extremely well.  There are echoes of Room, Z For Zachariah and other books here, but it doesn't feel at all derivative and stands very well with those fine books.  I found myself completely engrossed and the story and characters have stayed with me strongly afterward. 

This is a thoughtful, haunting book as well as being a really good, gripping read.  I think it is quite exceptional as a first novel, and I can recommend it very warmly.

Caleb Scharf - Gravity's Engines

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A good if slightly florid account 

This is a good, generally readable account of the nature of black holes, recent discoveries about them and their influence on the universe. Caleb Scharf is a distinguished scientist in the field, giving him a depth of knowledge and insight which makes the content of this book very good.

Scharf takes us through the basics of gravity and relativity needed to understand these extraordinary objects and manages to do it without any mathematical equations, which will probably be a relief to the non-scientific reader. He gives a pretty clear account of the physics of the formation and evolution of the universe, of stars and galaxies and of the behaviour of black holes themselves. He manages to describe very comprehensibly the recent discoveries about black holes and the deductions which he and others are beginning to make about their role in the development of the universe and possibly of life here.

The book is generally well written but does have its flaws, chief of which is the tendency, common in US-based science writers, to overdo the florid language and metaphors in their wish to make the subject accessible. As just one example, Scharf introduces a fairly good analogy of a sack full of a representative sample of the universe, but precedes it with a rather lengthy, wholly irrelevant rigmarole about imagining a box delivered to our door which we bring in, puzzle over, open and find a sack inside... and so on. There is quite a lot of this sort of thing and while it isn't enough to spoil the book, I certainly found it rather irritating. Scharf is at his best when describing his own research and discoveries which he does with an excitement and directness which really brought it alive, and I wish the whole book could have been written in this tone.

In spite of the flaws, I can recommend this as a very interesting and up-to-date (as of February 2013) account of some of the most extraordinary and fascinating objects in the universe. Well worth reading.

A.K. Benedict - The Beauty of Murder

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Quite good but could have been much better

This debut novel by A.K. Benedict involves time-travel, serial killers and some academic musings, especially in philosophy. It is reasonably successful but I have some reservations about it.

The plot is bizarre but interesting. I don't want to give anything away, so I will say only that a Cambridge academic becomes embroiled in a weird series of murders which turn out to involve time-travel. Benedict generally handles this well and, to her credit, makes the silly-sounding idea work. The plot swings into life early on and I enjoyed the first 100 pages or so very much, but I thought that things got tangled and messy and hence dragged rather in the middle of the book, and it could have done with some firm editing.

There are, as seems almost compulsory these days, multiple narrators. They all speak in the present tense which in a time-travel novel is probably just as well for clarity but did feel a little mannered to me. The prose is readable and the book is generally well written, but particularly the often mildly ironic tone of the central character, the philosophy don Stephen Killigan, did get a bit much at times. I could certainly have done without things like the description of a dawn outing beginning, "The sun is barely breaking wind under the duvet of clouds when we climb into the boat," the like of which crop up fairly regularly. I also found some anachronisms rather spoiled the atmosphere for me - saying "It's okay" in 1635, for example, or talk of banknotes in the same year (they weren't in use until much later) and so on. I don't want to nit-pick, but there was enough of this sort of thing to interfere somewhat with my enjoyment.

Good editing and some serious tightening up could have made this a very good book. As it is, I can offer only a somewhat qualified recommendation.

Frances Ashcroft - The Spark of Life

Rating: 5/5

Review: 
Readable and fascinating

I thought this was a terrific book. The subject perhaps sounds a little dry, but Frances Ashcroft writes exceptionally well and shows, with genuine enthusiasm and great expertise, how the electrical systems of the body determine so much of its ability to function and their effect on our everyday (and not so everyday) lives. She is at the forefront of research in this area (specifically ion channels) and her depth of knowledge and understanding are apparent throughout the book.

Ashcroft explains the molecular mechanisms by which electrical signals are transmitted in the body, their effects and their vital importance with great clarity and very interestingly. She often draws on examples of familiar (and not so familiar) illnesses and the effects of well-known poisons to illuminate what she is saying, and the book is well illustrated with very clear line-drawings which I found invaluable. I found the whole thing fascinating and although this certainly isn't a book which you can read like a novel, I often found myself engrossed and wanting to read just a bit more.

If you have any interest in science this book will interest you. It isn't always a light read and requires some pretty serious concentration in places, but the effort is well worth it. Some background knowledge of chemistry or biochemistry certainly helps but is by no means essential, and anyone who has tried Brian Cox's books, for example, would find this on a comparable intellectual level but with far less mathematics and fewer utterly counter-intuitive ideas. This is one of the best science books for the general reader which I have read for some time and I recommend it very warmly.

Karen Thompson Walker - The Age Of Miracles

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Brilliant idea and wonderful writing, but badly flawed development

In many ways I thought this book was quite brilliant. It is not at all like the effects-driven disaster movies we may be used to, but a subtle exploration of the effects of gradually increasing natural disruption. It is exceptionally well-written in quiet, beautifully poised prose, I became very engrossed in it and the story carried me along very well. Karen Thompson Walker manages to produce wonderful evocations of character, atmosphere and place with a few beautifully chosen phrases. The narrator, Julia, is an adult describing events as she approached her twelfth birthday and I also thought that the general sense of disruption and uncertainty was subtly but powerfully paralleled by Julia's similar feelings about entering puberty and sense of awkwardness and alienation.

This has the quality of imagination and writing to be a five-star book, but there is a big problem with it: the science is hopelessly confused and just plain wrong in many places. The Earth mysteriously slowing down in violation of known laws of physics is fine here because it is a sort of fantasy and an ingenious plot driver. However, the book is riddled with mistakes and absurdities on which the plot depends and which have nothing to do with the basic fantastical premise. There are some which are fairly trivial, like failing to grasp the basic notion that, no matter how slowly the Earth turns, in the Northern hemisphere days in November will be shorter than nights. However, there are also absurdities which make important plot developments a nonsense - two examples being the idea that there is an increase in gravitational strength due to "centrifugal force" and, more seriously, a complete lack of understanding of the difference between the type of solar radiation which gives us warmth, light and sunburn, for example, and the ionising particles which are deflected by the Earth's magnetic field and which would most certainly not be kept out by drawing curtains and whose biological effects are most certainly not just serious sunburn.

I think this is a terrible shame. I realise that the science isn't the point of the book: it is an examination of the effects of major disruption on society and on the individuals who compose it and in that it is quite brilliant, so the basic errors may not bother some readers. For me, though, it isn't just nit-picking - the wrongness of it kept throwing me out of the story because things just could not be like that. It is a grave (and avoidable) flaw in an otherwise excellent book and means that I can only give this a qualified recommendation.

Simon Flynn - The Science Magpie

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A delightful compendium of interesting oddments

I absolutely loved this book. Miscellanies like this can be very trying if poorly done, with uninspiring or patronising rehashes of familiar stories, a lot of gee-whizzery and jokes that aren't nearly as funny as they think they are. Simon Flynn has avoided all that and produced a delightful pot-pourri of science-related snippets which, for me, gets the tone exactly right. It is enthusiastic and witty without being gushing or flippant and the sheer variety of stuff here is a delight.

Each "article" is brief - the longest are five or six pages, covering things like Galileo's dispute with the Holy See, Darwin's impact or Einstein's ideas about Relativity. If you want a detailed examination of any of these things, this isn't the place to look, but for a really well-written, engaging summary of the important points with the odd interesting aside it's brilliant. For example, Flynn makes sure to mention Milton's visit to Galileo while he was under house arrest as well as giving a excellent summary of Galileo's dispute, complete with a translation of his famous Recantation - and all in four short pages. I have studied all this at university and have actually read quite a lot of Galileo's writing and I still found the section fresh and fascinating. Other bits are so varied it's impossible to give an overall flavour, but they include things like radioactive decay, a spoof of Shelley's Ozymandias, the meaning of the Richter Scale, and so on. There are even some good jokes scattered throughout the book.

Some reviewers have criticised the book for having too much literature and not enough hard science, and for jumping from one topic to another in a jumbled way. I think this is the whole point of the book: you never know what is coming next - a spoof analysis of the thermodynamics of Hell, a historical summary, a quirky fact, an explanation of the binary system - and this is a great part of the book's charm for me. The science is always spot on. The explanation of Schrodinger's Cat, for example, which is one of the most misunderstood notions in popular science, is accurate, readable and placed in its proper historical context. The only error I noticed in the whole book was Flynn's assertion that a solar eclipse was important in Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, when, as my adolescent memory reminded me, it is in fact a lunar eclipse. I think I can forgive him this single slip, and the only other fault I can find is that the book cries out for an index which is sadly lacking, if only so you can find that little bit you wanted to look at again.

I recommend this book very warmly - it's a huge pleasure to dip into and, because of it's haphazard structure, has kept me looking at "just one more section" well after I should have gone to sleep. It's neither a reference book nor a serious popular science book. It is a delightful compendium of fairly random bits and pieces by someone with an obvious love of science, and anyone with a curious mind who takes pleasure in scientific oddments as well as important ideas will almost certainly get great pleasure from it.

Cathi Unsworth - Weirdo

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Brilliant but bleak

This is an extremely well written and fantastically atmospheric novel. The plot revolves around the investigation by a private detective of sorts into a horrible crime many years ago in a small Norfolk town, and the narrative moves between the present-day(ish) investigation and events at the time of the crime. It is exceptionally well done: the plot is believable, the characters are very well drawn and plausible, and the setting is so well conjured as to be positively claustrophobic.

The book is pretty unremittingly bleak. The story of the original crime is a grim, gripping tale of teenage angst, insecurity and cruelty, and the investigation story conjures a hostile community closing ranks against an outsider very well. I found it compelling but by no means an easy read, and I felt very unsettled by it quite a lot of the time. This is an excellent thing in a book, but doesn't make it comfortable reading.

Don't expect a conventional crime thriller here. There are many aspects of such a thriller in the book and they make it very engrossing, but this is more of a novel about the psychology of teenage alienation and cruelty and of the ethos of a closed community. It is, however, an excellent novel, beautifully written and constructed with important things to say, and I recommend it very warmly.

Carol Anshaw - Carry The One

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Disappointingly artificial

I didn't get on at all well with this book. I was expecting to enjoy it because it tackles interesting-sounding ideas, and attempts to explore important ideas about how lives develop and how they can be shaped by events, character and individual decisions. Sadly, I don't think it did it very well.

Part of the problem for me was structural in that Carol Anshaw introduces a large cast of characters to follow over many years, but then often gives only a sketchy account of their lives. A good deal of the development takes place away from the narrative and people pop in and out of the book with important things like the state of their relationship having changed but with no analysis of why. It all felt a bit sparse, and both emotionally and intellectually unsatisfactory in a book whose purpose is to examine exactly what is so often left unexamined. Partly as a result of this, I found the characters distant and not terribly real.

I also found the style rather clumsy and the prose not that easy to read. In the first few pages we are quickly introduced to a great many people in a rather clunky way, and there is a sex scene on page 3, clearly designed to shock (mildly, of course) and to engage the reader's interest. It all felt rather forced and unnatural to me, a feeling I never quite shook off because I was very often aware of the techniques the author was using and never really caught up in the narrative itself. The prose is competent, but there is a lot of stuff like this (on p.223), for example: "She and Rob were having dinner at the home of some friends, a meal that was going on forever. Actually it had hit the forever mark about an hour ago." I find that sort of thing slick and glib while not really telling me much. It gets very wearing after a while, and there's a lot of it in the book.

Others have obviously enjoyed this book so do read their reviews before being put off by mine, but I'm afraid I found it unengaging and somewhat artificial and I can't really recommend it.

Anthony Doerr - All The Light We Cannot See

Rating:2/5

Review:
Not for me

Oh dear. I'm afraid I'm badly out of step with the rave reviews because I didn't like this novel. It's a decent idea and has its moments, but for me the story and characters were constantly swamped by a deluge of self-conscious style. Plenty of people will disagree - and fair enough - but this is my take on it, for what it's worth.

The story is of two very different characters growing up before the Second World War and the impact of the War on them and on others. One is an orphan German boy who turns out to be a genius with radios and is recruited into the German army, the other is a blind girl in Paris who eventually has to flee westward to Saint-Malo. How their stories develop and interact is well explained elsewhere and it's a decent vehicle for a story, but I found that the story and characters often disappeared beneath an avalanche of adjectives and adverbs, and the whole thing was so fast-edited that it seemed like an MTV video at times. Obviously, many people don't agree, and you may well like the style too - these things are a matter of personal taste, after all - but the style the author describes as "lyrical" I found overblown and pretentious, so that it positively detracted from the story rather than enhancing it. It is prose which draws attention to itself rather than to the narrative or the characters, and I felt it was forever glancing coyly in my direction to make sure I'd noticed how frightfully *good* it was. The result was that I found his protracted, over-written descriptions of being caught in an air-raid, for example, far less powerful than the much lower-key but quite brilliant description by Clare Morrall in After The Bombing

I also found the structure very hard to deal with. It has a fractured timescale (a current fad in fiction) and we jump backward or forward in time every 50 pages or so. This can be effective, but I couldn't really see the point here, other than to create little cliff-hangers which began to irritate badly. Then, within each section there are very short chapters which jump between different scenes; until about page 450 I don't think there are two successive sections which actually follow on from each other. Again, rather than being an effective device I just found it mannered, and it became very wearing.

I would like to know what a blind person thinks about this, but I also have to say that, certainly in the first part of the book, in his desire to appear empathetic Doerr gives very high-octane descriptions of what it is like to be blind which seemed far more like his own "oh my God, how would I cope if I went blind?" ideas than the responses of someone for whom it was part of everyday life - brilliantly and matter-of-factly evoked by Marcus Sedgwick in She Is Not Invisible, for example.

I know that lots of people liked this novel and that its Big Themes and Fabulous Style will attract a lot of praise. For me, though, it was overblown, over-long and a good deal too pleased with itself. In the end I didn't think it added up to all that much, I'm afraid, and I can't recommend it.

Ian MacGregor - Shakespeare's Restless World

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Fantastic

This is a terrific book - readable, interesting, thoughtful and full of quirky insights into all sorts of things. Neil MacGregor based his radio series and now this book on objects which have a story to tell about the world in which Shakespeare lived. They are a motley bunch of things, some very costly and fine, some scruffy and poor and some frankly gruesome (the eye of a martyr in a silver case, for example) but Dr MacGregor extracts a fascinating story from each one, relating them not only to Shakespeare's time and his plays, but also to our own age.

The book is beautifully produced with excellent and lavish illustrative photographs. It is a thing to love and keep and to dip into or years to come. It's an absolute cracker and very warmly recommended.

Favel Parrett - Past The Shallows

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Haunting and memorable

I thought this was an excellent book. It could have been terrible - a story of children with a bitter, cold and brutal father struggling to survive in a desolate part of Australia has the potential to be unreadably grim or repellently sentimental but this is neither. It is excellently judged and beautifully written, and I found it compelling and haunting.

Favel Parrett has previously written short stories and I think that is a great benefit to this debut novel. The book itself is commendably short and she shows the concision of the short-story writer in her wonderful ability to conjure character from a few thoughts and actions rather than long descriptions. Parrett also describes the landscape and sea of southern Tasmania beautifully, creating a real sense of the place and of its toughness and desolation. The story is told in the third person from the points of view of Miles and his younger brother Harry and I found the narrative engrossing and at times very touching. Parrett captures the sense of young Harry's kindness and of his insecurity very well. For example, Harry hears about someone whose brother went away to the war and never came back and "...thought that if Miles got lost, if Miles never came home, Harry's insides would go wrong and might never come right again." I found that really a moving evocation of a young boy's fears, and there is a lot here of a similar quality.

There is no a fast-paced plot, but there is often real drive and tension to the narrative. It is thoroughly involving and has a lot to say about kindness, about what family means and about the need to balance one's own freedom with one's responsibilities to others. This is a haunting and memorable book and I recommend it very warmly.

Pierre Lemaitre - The Great Swindle

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Dull and unconvincing (and poorly translated, too)

I really didn't get on with this book.  I tried it because I read Alex a while ago and thought it a decent thriller.  This was a very severe disappointment.

The story begins close to the end of the First World War in 1918 in the French lines where a frankly pantomimic villain tries to kills two of the soldiers under his command.  The subsequent plot involves their entangled subsequent activities in conflicting scams in the years immediately after the war…and I'm afraid I thought the whole thing was dismally poor.

Part of the problem is in the wholly unconvincing characterisation, which seemed to me to be clunky and clichéd, and in the period setting which is incredibly laboured but again failed to convince or involve me at all.  The style is plodding, and having characters say things like "The guy is overwrought," or "Is there a problem?" made it seem utterly unlike 1918.  And, oh dear - it does go on.  And on and on.  It takes ages for anything to happen as we're dragged through seemingly unending descriptions of things and events which don't convince.

Some of this is due to the translation, which I think is verging on the insultingly bad.  It is larded with cliché and stale usages; the second paragraph of the book begins, "He knew all too well…" which made my heart sink, and a couple of pages later in a just a single paragraph we get "his parlous situation", "legend had it", "the inexorable decline", and "rested squarely on his shoulders."  The whole book is like this and stale, amateurish stuff like this simply isn't good enough from a professional translator - or a respectable publisher, for that matter.  Tenses slip confusingly and randomly from present to past, the tone is inappropriately arch or ironic in places…I could go on, but that will do.  It is rare for me to give up on a book, but after diligently slogging through the first 120 pages I decided that life was too short and just skimmed and sampled the rest.  It didn't get better – and I grasped the story without having to wade through the prose, which was a blessing. 

I'm sorry to be so critical, but I really thought this was a poor book.  I have given it two stars, but only because it wasn't quite bad enough to made me actively angry (unlike Alex Grecian's The Yard, for example – but it's best not to get me started on that one) but I wouldn't recommend this at all.

M.J. McGrath - The Boy In the Snow

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Slightly formulaic

This is a perfectly decent thriller. I quite enjoyed it but in the end I found it followed a rather familiar formula despite the arctic setting which I had hoped would make it distinctive and more interesting.

The plot follows a pretty familiar course. Edie, an Inuit woman from the Canadian High Arctic travels to Alaska to support her ex-husband in the Iditarod race. Before she gets to the start she makes a gruesome discovery which local police fail to investigate to her satisfaction, and so...well, you can probably guess. The plot involves political corruption and ambition, untrustworthy policemen, dark secrets of sexual misdemeanour and child-abuse, our heroine coming under mortal threat and so on. It really did all feel very formulaic and wasn't really redeemed by the setting which I didn't find all that well evoked. The one exception to this was a terrific few pages toward the end where Edie and two companions are stranded and need to try to survive out on the sea-ice. Suddenly both Edie and the environment sprang to life for me and I thought it was a remarkably good passage.

I have given this four stars because it had this flash of brilliance and the rest was perfectly well-written. It's an easy read but rather disappointingly unoriginal, and I can only give it a somewhat qualified recommendation.

Malcolm MacKay - The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Original and gripping

Somewhat against my expectations, I thought this was a really excellent book. The story, set in present-day Glasgow, is of a request for a professional gunman to kill a small-time drug dealer and of its consequences for the various people involved. It sounds like a rather run-of-the-mill crime thriller, but turned out to be original, gripping and, to me at least, very haunting.

It is less a police procedural than a sort of drugs-world contract killing procedural. The narrative style is very pared down with few adjectives and almost no similes. It generally uses very short sentences. Quite often without a verb. I found this extremely effective and I was very quickly engrossed. The narrative is all third-person, but we get the thoughts and perspectives of a number of characters throughout the book, each of whom is very well portrayed. Descriptions are brief but very evocative, like this when a character hides in an alley: "The smell in the alley doesn't help. It's nothing specific, just a dirty smell. A mixture of all of life's ugly things, all pushed into the corners." We also get some very perceptive glimpses of people's inner worlds, like the young hit-man reflecting on his future: "It's a chilling thought. You work hard, take risks and make sacrifices when you're younger, and all you end up with is a craving for the things you sacrificed."

The plotting is excellent, the pacing is very taut and it makes for an exceptionally well-told and gripping story - but it is a good deal more than that, I think. For once, the publisher's hype is close to being justified; I think Malcolm MacKay really is a remarkable new voice in crime fiction and one that I enjoyed very much. I will certainly be looking out for the next in the trilogy, and I recommend this one very warmly indeed.

Andrew Taylor - The Scent of Death

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Generally enjoyable

I very much enjoyed Andrew Taylor's The Anatomy of Ghosts and was looking forward to this one. It is not as good, but is still an enjoyable read.

Set in New York in 1779-79 during the War of Independence, the plot concerns Edward Savill, an English civil servant sent from London to deal with claims by Loyalists who have lost property during the fighting. Narrated in the first person by Savill the story develops into a mystery and an adventure in which he and his acquaintances become embroiled and endangered. I won't give away any plot - I wouldn't have wanted to know more than that before I started - but it is a period mystery/thriller which began well, dragged somewhat and then picked up for the last two hundred pages or so.

Taylor creates a very good sense of place and of period. The privations of a freezing winter are especially well done and I thought this a real strength of the book. His prose is easy to read and preserves a good sense of the language of the time while not sticking rigidly to it: a difficult balance which he pulls off very well. The plot unfolds at a leisurely pace, and while this can be very effective, I did feel that there wasn't quite enough real content to carry the book for quite long periods in the central section and I thought it could do with being a good deal shorter.

Nevertheless, I think this is a generally involving and enjoyable book, and I recommend it, especially if you like historical fiction.

Aly Monroe - Black Bear

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Er...

I find it hard to write this review because I wasn't really sure what I made of the book overall. In many ways it is excellent: it is well written and readable, often gripping and often both subtle and penetrating in its characters and period setting. However, it is *so* subtle and often digressive that I sometimes had the sense of just catching tiny, faint glimpses of narrative through a thick mist of character and setting which left me feeling rather rudderless and lost.

Peter Cotton is a British intelligence agent in 1947 New York. For the first 120 pages of the book he is recovering in a clinic from having been subjected to mind-altering drugs, and the remainder of the plot is largely his recuperating while trying to determine who did this to him and why. The narrative is elliptical, digressive and slow-paced which in many ways I liked, and I found the long opening in the clinic very gripping even though almost nothing really happens. In fact, the book is an awful lot of nothing really happening much of the time, most of which is fine but which does get a bit wearisome at times - especially as John le Carré's most Delphic characters seem positively forthright by comparison with with many here, so that making sense of what is going on and what is being said or not said is sometimes extremely difficult.

I have given this book four stars because I thought it well written, it was certainly tense in places and it has stayed with me in rather a haunting way, but I wouldn't want to tackle another one in the series for a while. Anyone looking for an action-packed spy thriller with a strong, clearly articulated plot should give this book a wide berth, but if you like a subtle, allusive and occasionally bewildering novel this may well be for you.