Isabel Rogers - Life, Death and Cellos

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Disappointing

There are things I liked about Life, Death and Cellos, but overall I found it disappointing.

I was looking forward to this because classical music is a real interest of mine, and I’m pleased to say that the book’s real strength is the musical background. Isabel Rogers plainly knows a great deal about the music and about playing the cello, all of which she brings to life wonderfully – and I speak with all the authority of a dreadfully bad teenage cellist who hasn’t touched the instrument for many years. :o) I thoroughly enjoyed the passages dealing with the structure of various pieces, the technicalities of playing the cello, the workings and personalities of an orchestra and even the background history of Stradivari instruments. Sadly, the other aspects of the book didn’t work nearly so well for me.

Part of the problem for me is that the book isn’t the “mystery” it is billed as; it’s more sort of chick-lit-with-classical-music as we follow Erin, a twenty-something amateur cellist, through her relationship problems, her problems at work, discovering her talent as a cellist...you get the idea. Frankly, the story felt pretty stale and dull to me, it’s blindingly obvious where it’s heading from quite early on and it plods from one unlikely but entirely predictable event to the next as things fall inevitably into place. The dialogue creaks rather and Rogers is forever explaining the meaning of conversations rather than writing good enough dialogue simply to show it convincingly. We get far too many points of view from slightly thinly-painted characters (several of whom are wholly irrelevant and are just a distraction), the humour is often pretty clunky and there’s an awful lot of filler like this, as a character gets into the back seat of a car:

“‘Shift forward Erin,’ he said, as he tried to fit his knees into the car. ‘I have real men’s legs. They are longer than you think.’

Erin obligingly slid her seat forward and felt the car’s suspension dip as Charlie’s weight fell in.”

It’s just a bloke getting into a car, for heavens’ sake! Or a couple of pages of wholly irrelevant faffing about not looking at a mobile phone immediately before the sender of the crucial text walks in and imparts the news anyway. Wading through a lot of this stuff became a real trial.

So, despite the good musical aspects, I can’t recommend Life, Death and Cellos. It may be for others but it wasn’t for me.

Stina Jackson - The Silver Road

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Not for me

I’m afraid I found The Silver Road formulaic and rather tedious. I tried it hoping that the setting in Northern Sweden would give it some atmosphere and originality, but it didn’t and I had to struggle to the end.

The central idea is oh-so-familiar. Lelle’s daughter has been missing for three years, having disappeared from a bus stop one morning. Lelle’s marriage has broken up as a result, he has developed an alcohol problem and he obsessively searches the remote countryside looking for her. Meanwhile, a dysfunctional mother and her teenage daughter move in with a local, reclusive resident...and that’s pretty well all that happens for at least the first half of the book. It’s all very, very familiar stuff, it moves very slowly and I wasn’t convinced by either the events or the setting, so even when things did begin to happen I wasn’t really involved.

The prose is adequate but tends to be repetitive and over-written in a search for atmosphere, and finding a dreadful cliché in the first couple of pages (“he knew the road like the back of his hand”) didn’t augur well. It’s not terrible by any means, but it wasn’t good enough to engage or grip me.

I’m sorry to be critical but, despite the publishers’ claims, I didn’t find The Silver Road either compelling or haunting. It’s an unoriginal story in a setting which isn’t sufficiently well painted and I can’t recommend it.

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

Sarah J. Harris - The Colour Of Bee Larkham's Murder

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Disappointing

I’m afraid I didn’t think that The Colour Of Bee Larkham’s Murder was all that good. I feel churlish saying it because it’s written with good intentions, but it just didn’t work for me.

The book is narrated by Jasper, a 13-year-old who has autism and synesthesia, so that he cannot recognise faces and experiences sounds and some other senses as colours. He has a very patchy memory and is convinced that he killed his neighbour, the eponymous Bee Larkham. The plot, which moves extremely slowly, is the emergence of the events leading up to Bee’s possible murder (we don’t know the truth for a long time) intercut with Jasper’s day-to-day perception of the events in his life.

Plenty of people have loved the book, and fair enough. It’s certainly not exploitative, it’s an original viewpoint and it is well-intentioned – although I did feel that there was some over-sentimental emotional manipulation at times. The main problem for me, though, is that Jasper’s voice just didn’t ring true as that of a 13-year-old. Just as an example, at one point he says,

“...I walked into his bedroom. He put his real book behind the cover of Lee Child’s.

Understanding Your Child’s Autism And Other Learning Difficulties.

I expect he’s studying it right now. Trying to get a grip on why I’m difficult. Why I’m different from other teenage boys.

Why I’m so hard to love.”

The use of paragraphs especially is a technique of an adult author trying to make a punchy point and to me it really isn’t the voice of a bemused young teenager. I found this throughout the book and that, combined with a rather stodgily paced story prevented me from becoming involved.

There have been some superb books written from the point of view of narrators with various mental health problems – Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident..., of course, and Nathan Filer’s The Shock of the Fall, Holly Bourne’s Am I Normal Yet?, Gavin Extence’s The Mirror World Of Melody Black and others spring to mind. This isn’t in their league, I’m afraid, and I can only give it a very qualified recommendation.

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

Soren Sveistrup - The Chestnut Man

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Standard, clichéd serial killer stuff

I ended up pretty thoroughly annoyed with The Chestnut Man. To be fair, it’s not a genre I would normally read and I wouldn’t have touched it if it hadn’t been by the man who created the excellent TV series The Killing. This means that fans of the serial-killer genre may like it far more than I did, but for me it was just a series of tired old clichés strung together, albeit strung together quite well for much of the book.

In Denmark, a series of sadistic killings (of women, naturally) is marked by the killer’s trademark Chestnut Man left at each scene. A maverick cop, sent back to the Copenhagen police after his insubordinate behaviour annoyed his Europol bosses, suspects that these killings may throw doubt on the solution to the murder of the daughter of a prominent politician a year before. There is a Race Against Time to catch the killer before...I’m sure you get the picture.

I read this while I was ill and needed brain-off entertainment. The first 400 pages didn’t do too badly on that, but I just ticked off the clichés as they went past: the maverick cop and his ill-matched partner who begin to form an attachment; the boorish, sexist police colleague; the vain, unheeding boss; the killer who is always One Step Ahead and Plays Games With The Police, child abuse as a cynical plot device, the female investigator under threat...and so on and so on. I could just about live with all that, but the final 100 pages became so silly that I lost patience, and I especially disliked the corny old Cornered Killer Climax In Which The Killer Explains Everything To The Victim scene (yeah, right), which in this case is largely repellent, misogynistic torture porn. The explanation scarcely holds together and the psychology is pretty silly, so coupled with the ludicrous implausibility of subsequent events it made me very irritated indeed.

I had expected something deeper and more thoughtful from Sveistrup, but The Chestnut Man is just another bog-standard Scandi serial-killer thriller. There’s no superbly original central character like Lisbeth Salander to lift it above the ordinary, and nor, of course, does it benefit from a brilliant screen performance from the likes of Sofie Grabol or Sofia Helin which made The Killing and The Bridge such classics. Fans of the genre may enjoy this, but I’m afraid I didn’t.

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

Karen Thompson Walker - The Dreamers

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Very good indeed

I thought The Dreamers was excellent. It’s a little hard to put my finger on exactly why, but I found it wholly involving, very thoughtful and genuinely touching in places.

A mystery illness begins to spread through a college campus in a remote California town. People fall asleep and, although they are obviously dreaming, they simply can’t be woken and the illness spreads quickly, causing national worry. The story sounds like a tediously familiar old trope, but Karen Thompson Walker makes it fresh and original. She does this partly by giving us the stories of a variety of characters affected in one way or another by the illness, which she does beautifully. These are recognisable people with recognisable emotions and responses, and Thompson Walker paints them beautifully. She catches the small, everyday events and internal responses which so define a life and a person so that I became very involved with each one of them.

Her other great strength is her style. Her prose is beautifully poised; it is unflashy but has a poetic rhythm to it and the whole book seems to have a quiet, almost soothing pulse to it, even when describing extreme events. This antithesis of the normal style of catastrophe fiction is extraordinarily effective and for me gave these events a far greater poignancy. It is just a pleasure to read.

As to what it’s actually about...well, it’s hard to be precise, but it’s important. Thompson Walker has things to say about the human condition, the wondrous complexity of the physical world and of the mind, the haphazard nature of existence and about what reality may be to a human consciousness. There are many fine, affecting stories here but one in particular about a “Dreamer” who is pregnant comes to a conclusion which I found truly moving and very thought-provoking.

I’m struggling to express clearly why I liked The Dreamers so much, but I did. I can recommend it very warmly indeed.

(My thanks to Scribner UK for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Oyinkan Braithwaite - My Sister The Serial Killer

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A very good first novel

I thought My Sister The Serial Killer was very good. It is original, involving, dark and very well written.

The book opens in present-day Lagos as Korede receives a phone call from her younger sister Ayoola: “Korede, I killed him,” and Korede goes to help. Not, it turns out, for the first time. Set in Lagos and narrated in the first person by Korede, we learn of Ayoola’s exceptional beauty, the sisters’ background and how Korede has always looked after and protected Ayoola. Tension is well built as Korede’s guilt and suppression of secrets cause her inner turmoil, added to by Ayoola’s supreme indifference to the consequences of any of her actions.

It’s a gripping story which has at its heart a brilliant portrait of someone whose sense of her own perfection and entitlement means that she does largely what she wants, oblivious to the damage to anyone else, and simply makes up a different story if the truth doesn’t suit her. (An allegory for our times, perhaps?) There is also a tense plot, shafts of wit and a good background of Nigerian society. I was impressed – not least because the book is reasonably short and all the more impactful for it. A very good first novel, which I can recommend.

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

C.M. Taylor - Staying On

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Readable and thoughtful

I enjoyed Staying On – far more that I expected to from the synopsis, to be honest.

It is the story of Tony and Laney who have been living as ex-pats in Spain for many many years, where they own and run a pub. Tony is now seventy and as both age and Brexit take their toll, very few of his ex-pat friends remain and the pub is struggling. Tony wants to return to the Yorkshire of his youth while Laney refuses to set foot in England again. As their son, his wife and their 3-year-old son come out to stay after many years, old tragedies and guilts which have lain beneath the surface emerge and have a profound effect.

Frankly, it sounds rather familiar and not really like my kind of thing. However, C.M. Taylor writes very well, he creates convincing characters and structures the story very nicely, so that within a readable and engaging story, the book makes important points about families, the meaning of home, friendship, class and other things. I found it touching rather than profoundly moving, but that’s fine with me. I thought it was an unsentimental but compassionate view of a somewhat insular community of Brits abroad and Tony made a very recognisably human protagonist.

I liked the note in the acknowledgements: “I was told by men with expensive educations that people don’t want to read about the working classes. I’d like to thank those men for the motivation.” For me, Taylor has proved them wrong with this book and I can recommend it.

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

Janet Evanovich - Look Alive 25

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Another Evanovich gem

Probably all that really need be said about Look Alive 25 is that it’s another immensely enjoyable Stephanie Plum book...which, of course, means that it’s completely absurd, quite exciting, very funny in places and just a huge pleasure to read.

This time Stephanie and the wonderful Lula find themselves running a deli (don’t ask) with the help of two amusing druggie cooks, whose managers keep disappearing in very suspicious circumstances. They have their usual chaotic time at their day job of apprehending Bail Bond defaulters, Stephanie has her choice of the two sexiest men in New Jerseyand Lula is her unfailingly hilarious self (her creative sandwich-making and dress sense as a waitress are simply brilliant). The only classic Evanovich trope missing here is that Stephanie fails to total a single car, although to be fair, she makes up for it spectacularly in other ways.

Evanovich’s writing is as crisp, witty and readable as ever, and 25 books in, this series shows no sign of slowing down or growing stale. This is well up to standard and warmly recommmended.

Mikita Brottman - An Unexplained Death

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A bit mixed

I found this an odd mixture of the compelling and the slightly dull, so I find it hard to give an overall view.

An Unexplained Death is the true story of Mikita Brottman’s quest, lasting over a decade, to find the story behind the death of Rey Rivera. Rivera was an ostensibly happy, successful man who fell to his death from the Belvedere building in Baltimore where Brottman lives. There seem to be a lot of mysterious cover-ups and possibly shady dealing in the background, so she is sceptical about the prevailing view that Rivera’s death was suicide.

Among the story of her investigations we get a lot of historical detail about the Belvedere (formerly a swish hotel) and its many suicides, suicide in general, Rey’s links with a company selling possibly dodgy financial advice, Brottman’s personal internal life and so on. It is by turns fascinating and slightly tedious, and her conclusions are a little unsatisfactory; they fit the physical evidence in a way that competing ideas do not, but don’t explain all the odd, shady background stuff which was the reason for her interest in the first place.

Brottman does write very well, which kept me reading. As a couple of examples, writing of hotels’ attitude to suicide she says; “...employees are instructed to be alert for guests who appear agitated and distraught, or for anyone lingering suspiciously in an elevated place. Such vigilance may appear altruistic, but human kindness is often simply a side effect of liability prevention.” Or of trying to find out more about Rey on-line, “I have now spent years of my life following Internet threads by angry speculators, investors, muckrakers, and “independent thinkers” of dubious sanity, a bizarre path of loosely connected breadcrumbs that has led me to the edge of nowhere and back again.” These readable, pithy comments made it well worth persevering, but I did find myself skimming occasionally.

An Unexplained Death is a curious mixture; I found that I wanted to read to the end but was rather glad when I go there so I could go on to something else. I have rounded 3.5 stars up to 4 because it is well written, but my recommendation comes with reservations.

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

Quintin Jardine - A Brush With Death

Rating: 3/5

Review:
A bit of a struggle

This is the first Quintin Jardine I have read. I can see that many people love this series and A Brush With Death was recommended by a friend whose judgement I trust, but I though it was a bit plodding and not very involving.

Here, DI Lottie Mann and DS Dan Provan are called to the death of a very high-profile ex-World Champion boxer. Their investigation throws up all sorts of murky, tangled intrigues, both personal and in the dodgier end of the boxing world, while dealing with their own domestic problems. Retired Chief Constable Bob Skinner is called in to help and we get almost two parallel investigations at times.

It’s OK. The characters are well drawn and behave pretty rationally (which is always a bonus). However, I thought the plot sprawled a bit and there is too much clunky exposition, often by characters telling each other what they already know. Just as an example: early on, a character says to someone else who also knows Skinner very well, “His media job’s using up all the time he can spare from helping Sarah out with the new baby and getting to know Ignacio, the son he never knew he had until the boy was eighteen years old and needed his help.” I mean – come on! That’s about as clumsy as it gets, and although most of it isn’t on that level, there’s enough of this sort of thing to keep throwing me out of the story.

I am in a small minority here, so don’t let my single review put you off, but I can only give this a very qualified recommendation.

Mick Herron - The Drop

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A good, brief read

The Drop is a very brief “novella” (an extended short story, really) which is in parallel to the Slough House series and continues the story of Hannah Weiss which began in The List. I suspect that this story may become an important feature of future Jackson Lamb books, but for now it’s a sidelight on goings on elsewhere in the Service and an introduction to a new character for Slough House.

Be aware that Jackson Lamb does not appear at all in The List, so his brilliant, hilarious cynicism is absent here and this is a much more straight-down-the-line spy story. It’s good, if not fantastic. I have to say that charging as much as many full-length books for a story of well under 100 pages does seem wrong to me, but I enjoyed reading it very much and can recommend it.

William Clegg QC - Under The Wig

Rating: 5/5

Review:
An excellent, concise account

I thought Under The Wig was an excellent account of a barrister’s life.

William Clegg QC is a leading barrister with decades of experience in the practice of English law. In this commendably brief memoir he intersperses explanations of how a barrister’s life works and some reminiscences of his own progress with outlines of some famous cases where he has acted for the defence. These include Colin Stagg, cleared of killing Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common, Barry George, cleared of shooting Jill Dando and many others. Clegg (with his ghost writer, John Troup) has a crisp, honest, matter-of-fact style which I found both readable and very effective in conveying both the interesting factual elements and the more dramatic aspects of trial work.

At about 150 pages, Under The Wig says more than a lot of books twice its length. It is both a fascinating read and a welcome, timely account. If you have any interest whatsoever in legal matters and the way the law works in England, Wales and Northern Ireland I can recommend it very highly.

(My thanks to Canbury Press for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Nicholas Blake - Thou Shell Of Death

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Enjoyable but flawed

I generally enjoyed Thou Shell Of Death, but it has its weaknesses.

This is classic Golden Age stuff: a famous War Hero who is now a virtual recluse receives some threatening letters. Naturally, he throws a Country House party for all the people he thinks may possibly be responsible and asks Nigel Strangeways, the private detective, to join the party to try to work out what is going on. Well, of course he does – who wouldn’t?

The whole set-up was like a very laboured Agatha Christie, but with more pretension and condescension toward anyone who is not connected to the nobility and living in an expensive part of London. I found it very wearing. However, after 80 pages or so, there is a death, the plot begins to move and a little wit started to show, too. The development was well done and kept me reading; it is tightly, if not wholly plausibly, plotted and it’s an enjoyable read. I found the dénouement rather a trial as the long slog through repeated convoluted explanations became a bit of a chore.

Overall, this is an enjoyable Golden Age detective novel. Its posh, well-connected detective puts it in a similar sort of genre as Dorothy L. Sayers or Margery Allingham; for me it’s nothing like as good, but much of it makes a diverting read if you can wade through the turgid opening. 3.5 stars, rounded up.

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

James O'Brien - How To Be Right

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Intelligent and humane

I thought How To Be Right was excellent. It is readable, thoughtful, intelligent and humane.

James O’Brien writes very well indeed. Drawing on his experience as a print journalist and then as a long-standing and very successful radio phone-in host, he dissects the prejudices, myths and downright lies which pollute our debates so badly these days. What is so striking, though, is that he tries to believe that people are sincere but have been misled by powerful politicians, media outlets and the like, so he is less concerned with “winning” the argument than with trying to get people actually to analyse and justify their positions. As he says and illustrates well with transcripts from his shows, the absurd, the vitriolic and the hateful rhetoric which is now so common, almost always crumbles in the face of simple questions like “Why do you think that?” or “Can you give me a concrete example?” or “How is that actually affecting you?” He won’t let go of these and explores the logical conclusions of what people say they want to do. It’s refreshing to hear genuine rationality and reality rather than an exchange of pre-digested, unexamined clichés, and his analysis of where we are and its possible future consequences is very shrewd.

This is a brief, intellectually stimulating and enjoyable (if often slightly depressing) read. I can heartily recommend it to anyone who values genuine fact and rationality in a world where “alternative facts” and echo-chamber discourse are becoming more and more dominant.

(My thanks to Penguin/Ebury for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Tana French - The Wych Elm

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Another outstanding novel from Tana French

This is another outstanding book from Tana French. I think her Dublin Murder Squad series has been excellent and this stand-alone book is just as good. It’s a psychological thriller which of itself would have put me off rather; dd to this a description including a damaged, unreliable narrator and dark family secrets coming to light and frankly, if it had been by almost anyone else I wouldn’t have bothered. However, French takes these well-worn tropes and makes something rich and rewarding from them.

The plot revolves around the narrator, Toby, a good looking, intelligent young man from a comfortable, supportive family whose life so far has been an easy cruise, smoothed by circumstance and easy charm. However, at the very start of the book he suffers a head trauma which changes everything. This is followed by a grisly discovery in the garden of a family house; the police investigate and slowly a past of which Toby has been blissfully unaware begins to emerge.

This is a long book at over 500 pages and events unfold slowly, but it never dragged at all for me. French is brilliant at creating wholly believable characters and situations and her portrait of someone trying to come to terms with genuine struggle for the first time in his life is exceptionally good. Anyone who has had to watch someone they love go through a terminal illness will recognise that this, too, is superbly and sensitively done...and so on. And throughout all this runs an increasingly tense plot as Toby tries to piece events together. French writes lovely, unfussy but very evocative prose, and her ear for dialogue is superb, I think. I found it compulsively readable and utterly engrossing throughout.

In short, this is a very fine novel with crime as its driver but which is much, much more than just a thriller and is in a wholly different league from the usual “Gripping Psychological Thrillers.” It’s definitely one of my books of the year and very, very warmly recommended.

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

Anthony Horowitz - The Sentence Is Death

Rating: 4/5

Review :
A very enjoyable read

I enjoyed The Sentence Is Death – probably rather more than its predecessor The Word Is Murder. It can be read as a stand-alone book, but it may help to set the background if you read The Word Is Murder first.

Anthony Horowitz, narrating as though these events really did happen to him, is again roped in to “help” and write the story of the enigmatic ex-detective Hawthorne as the police call him in to assist with the investigation of the murder of a divorce lawyer in his Hampstead home. Needless to say, a complex plot ensues involving an old caving accident and another death, as Anthony tries to make sense of it all while Hawthorne makes Delphic remarks and asks apparently irrelevant questions.

It’s a lot of fun. There is more than an echo of the Holmes/Watson partnership here – which Horowitz acknowledges with plenty of references to Holmes stories – and it works very well. He also has fun at the expense of literary pretension and some of the clichés of detective fiction, but at bottom it’s a well constructed mystery which is, as you’d expect from Horowitz, very well told. (And I’m pleased to say that, while the usual slight suspension of disbelief is necessary, the ending is much less far-fetched than in the first book.)

This is a fun read which is also rather gripping and holds some entertaining puzzles, too. Recommended.

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

Khurrum Rahman - Homegrown Hero

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Exceptionally good

I thought that Khurrum Rahman’s first novel, East Of Hounslow, was very good. Home Grown Hero, its sequel, is even better. (Although you can read Home Grown Hero as a stand-alone novel, I would strongly recommend that you read East Of Hounslow first – things will mean far more to you.)

We don’t actually catch up with the shocking ending of East Of Hounslow until almost a third of the way through the novel, as we see Jay reorientating his life. He is a cooler, rather more mature character after the events last time, but his narrative voice is still as real and entertaining (and expletive-strewn) as before. However, the decisions he had to make are catching up with him and a thrilling, twisty plot ensues as we get more insight into the nature of international terror and of home-grown conflict and hostility. There is a rich and mature treatment of the influences, biases and characters which make these matters so complex, and it is Rahman’s remarkable human insights which make this book so good – including a heartrending picture of the pain of being on the receiving end of racist abuse and thuggery, plus some genuinely touching moments concerning family and confounded stereotypes. It is also an absolutely cracking story which is full of tension, extremely exciting and which I found difficult to put down.

This is, in short, a really good thriller which also has genuine intellectual weight and important things to say about some of the critical issues of our time, while still being a pleasure to read. I thought it was absolutely excellent and can recommend it very warmly indeed.

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

Jonathan Coe - Middle England

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Rather a struggle

I have enjoyed much of Jonathan Coe’s previous work and he writes as well as ever here, but overall I struggled with Middle England.

Having dealt with wealth, poverty and finance in modern Britain in Number 11, Coe’s latest state-of-the-nation novel takes us through the politics of the last eight years from the 2010 General Election to the political earthquakes in 2016 and beyond. As ever, he writes beautifully and readably and creates convincing, if slightly exaggerated, characters. The trouble is that there’s precious little in the way of the wit and satire which have made his previous books readable and enjoyable. Also there is such a wealth of detail both in the period settings and his characters’ lives that I began to get very bogged down and found myself skimming – something I’ve never done before with a Jonathan Coe novel.

All this meant that, although I am in sympathy with Coe’s point of view, I didn’t find much new insight, satire or enjoyment here and for me it became a rather dismal litany of all that has been wrong with British politics (with references to the US as well) in the last decade or so. Plainly, others have enjoyed Middle England very much but for me, while it’s certainly not terrible, it was a disappointment.

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

Matt Haig - Father Christmas And Me

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A good Christmas read

Father Christmas And Me is a little slow to get going, but once it does it’s a lovely, exciting Christmas story, full of Matt Haig’s usual humanity and wisdom.

In this instalment, Amelia (a human girl from a cruel workhouse now living with Father Christmas) goes to elf school and generally settles into life at Elfhelm. This opening section seemed a little slow to me, even though it is very imaginative and has important things to say about inclusivity. The pace picks up as the wicked Father Vogol begins to publish lies to try to whip up hatred of humans, and we enter another perilous race to save Christmas.

It’s a good read and has some very well-delivered messages about truth and how lies can be used to manipulate people. Perhaps one of Matt Haig’s true targets is revealed just once as Father Vogol says “I will make Elfhelm great again,” and adults will see all sorts of echoes of current political developments. However, it’s not so much a political as a deeply human and ultimately heart-warming story.

For me, this isn’t a true Matt Haig classic like How To Stop Time, but it’s a smashing book for children at Christmas and I can recommend it.

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

Cornwall & Trevelyan - Scoundrels 2, The Hunt For Hansclapp

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Funny and enjoyable

I enjoyed this second volume of Scoundrels even more than the first, about which I had some reservations. In Volume 2, the gross humour and absurdity is all still there but toned down a couple of notches most of the time, which to me made it a rather funnier parody of those Ripping Yarns of effortlessly gifted posh boys saving the world.

The plot...well, the plot is bonkers as our two heroes go on various “undertakings” for the club throughout the late 50s and the 60s, but it sort of hangs together, though, as they attempt to save the world from arch-villain Hansclapp. It makes for very entertaining reading which made me laugh out loud several times as they become absurdly embroiled in major (sorry) world events, with Hollywood stars and even in the Wimbledon Mixed Doubles Championship. It’s full of sexual and genitally-based humour and some of it (like the wedding photos) is just shameless schoolboy innuendo, so be warned – the more sensitive reader may find it crude and offensive. Personally, though, I found it well done enough to make me laugh rather than cringe. There are some very funny and innocent jokes, too (including a fine running gag about cigarettes), plus some rather touching events as well, so there’s a good deal more to it than just somewhat gross knockabout humour.

This may not be an immortal comedy classic, but I enjoyed it very much so I’ve rounded 4.5 stars up to 5. If it sounds like your sort of thing, do give it a try. I was a bit sceptical before I read Scoundrels, but found it a really amusing read and I can recommend it warmly.

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

Philip Kerr - Greeks Bearing Gifts

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A good read

I realise that this is tantamount to sacrilege, but I didn’t get on very well with the early Bernie Gunther books and haven’t read one for some time. I thought I’d try Greeks Bearing Gifts to see whether the later books suited me better and was pleasantly surprised to enjoy it.

It is 1957 and Bernie (under an assumed name) is eventually helped into a job as an insurance investigator, which he proves to be very good at. He is sent to Greece to look into the apparently accidental sinking of a boat and becomes embroiled in a plot involving German war criminals, gold plundered from the Jews murdered in Greece and so on. It’s a complicated, twisty plot, but a good one, which is rich in Kerr’s research into the subject and which makes for an involving read.

I have to say that the book is too long and Kerr is very keen to show off his research in lengthy speeches by various characters which, while accurate, don’t really ring true as dialogue. However, the relentless hard-boiled wisecracking of the earlier books is largely absent and the gratuitous misogyny is dialled down to the level of sexism which might be expected from someone like Bernie in 1957, both of which were a considerable relief to me.

So, for me this is a good read rather than a brilliant one, but well worth a look; there’s plenty to like and to think about here.

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

Deon Meyer - The Woman In The Blue Cloak

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A good mystery

I enjoyed The Woman In The Blue Cloak. It’s a well done police procedural with an excellent backdrop of modern-day South Africa.

This novella is the latest in a series featuring Captain Benny Greisel. I hadn’t read the previous ones, but it works very well as a stand-alone book. It’s a good mystery beginning with the discovery of a body covered in bleach by the side of a country road and leads to a story of Old Masters and greed. I liked the quiet tone of the prose, which gives the book a sense of reality, as does the excellent picture of South Africa today as a very convincing but never intrusive backdrop. Meyer’s characters are well painted and the story, while perhaps not entirely plausible in the end, held me and kept me reading.

This is a brief book, and all the better for it, I think. It’s an enjoyable read and I’m encouraged to look out previous Benny Griesel novels. Recommended.

(My thanks to Hodder & Stoughton for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Geoff Dyer - Broadsword Calling Danny Boy

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A delight

I loved Broadsword Calling Danny Boy. It’s funny, affectionate but knowing and rather insightful in places.

Fairly obviously, this is written for people who know the film Where Eagles Dare and preferably who love it – a group which includes most of us who were teenage boys when it came out in late 1968. I still remember seeing it for the first time at the cinema, and, for example, the roar of laughter when Richard Burton announces that he has uncovered a plot to assassinate the Führer. Geoff Dyer approaches the film in the same way – loving its absurdities while pointing them out and relishing the gleeful excitement, dated attitudes and haircuts and so much else. He made me laugh regularly, while also providing some genuinely interesting and illuminating background. He perhaps dwells a little too much on Burton’s drinking and fading-star status, but otherwise I think he gets the tone just right.

Not all reviewers agree with me; several don’t share Dyer’s sense of humour, for example, but I found it a delight, which also has the immense merit of being under 130 pages long and not over-stretching itself. Personally, I can recommend this very warmly.

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

Jonathan Pinnock - The Truth About Archie And Pye

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Readable and funny

I enjoyed The Truth About Archie And Pie. It’s a comic mystery which is actually funny and which has some genuine content to it as well.

Be warned, the plot is bonkers. Tom Winscome, a rather smug pillock in PR (who narrates the book) comes into possession of some mathematical manuscripts, and as his life then comes apart he finds himself in the middle of murder plots, possibly being threatened by the Belarusian mafia and so on while having to solve some mathematically-based mysteries to find out what is going on and save himself and his friends. Put like that, it sounds pretty terrible, but it’s well written, witty enough to make me laugh out loud several times, the maths elements are enjoyable and simply explained, and it has a plot which is just (just!) coherent enough to make a decent mystery.

Jonathan Pinnock has an easy, readable style with neatly-painted (if sometimes absurdly extreme) characters, like the vicar who “had a plummy, earnest voice that managed to sound sympathetic and judgemental at the same time,” and he gets Tom’s hopeless lack of self-awareness very well. I liked this little line after he has been a pain to his girlfriend who has left him a note saying that she has gone out with Samantha to discuss man problems: “Samantha’s boyfriend was an arse, so I wasn’t a bit surprised by this.” Tom does develop a little during the book, which is also a good aspect.

Pinnock also takes some neat, humorous swipes at a lot of modern idiocies, like

‘What if he’s got a gun?’

‘We’re in Hoxton, Tom. If anyone found a gun in Hoxton, they’d use it in some kind of post-ironic artwork.’

OK, it’s an easy target, but it’s nicely done and there’s plenty of enjoyable stuff in the same vein about internet behaviour, conspiracy theories, absurd corporate language and so on.

This isn’t a comedy classic for me; I couldn’t quite give it five stars because I felt it could do with a little tightening up in places, but it’s a very enjoyable read and I will be looking out for the sequel.

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

Sara Paretsky - Shell Game

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Classic Paretsky

I thought Shell Game was very good. I enjoyed Sara Paretsky’s early books but I haven’t read one for many years. I’m pleased to say that she’s still as good as ever.

Here, Vic is drawn into two apparently separate investigations involving friends and family as a young great-nephew of a close friend is suspected of murder while a niece (sort of – it’s complicated) comes to her because her sister has vanished. A complex plot develops involving stolen Middle Eastern artefacts, corporate malfeasance, Russian mobsters, Vic getting knocked about...well, it’s classic Paretsky. There is a monumental coincidence at its heart, but it hangs together well and makes an exciting and involving read.

Paretsky uses her very well-drawn characters to cast light on the present-day USA, with a convincing picture of the increasing, mindless conflation of “muslim” and even “immigrant” with “terroroist,” and some sharp stabs at the current political situation in general. Some are a little crude, but for the most part she gives an intelligent critique and creates a very convincing atmosphere.

Shell Game shows that Sara Paretsky deserves her place in the pantheon of great contemporary crime writers and that she is writing as well as ever. I enjoyed it very much and I can recommend it warmly.

(My thanks to Hodder & Stoughton for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Graham Norton - A Keeper

Rating: 3/5

Review:

Excellently written but slightly disappointing

Graham Norton has shown himself to be a very good, insightful and humane writer. All these qualities are plain in A Keeper, but as a novel I didn’t think it quite delivered.

The story is told in two time-frames; Elizabeth Keane returns to the small town in the west of Ireland where she grew up to deal with the estate of her recently dead mother. She discovers a cache of letters from the father she never knew and we get the intercut stories of her search for the truth of her origins and of the events of the past as they happened. It’s a sad, rather bizarre story whose lessons are mirrored in current events for Elizabeth.

Graham Norton writes beautifully. As in Holding (which I enjoyed very much) it is a delightful surprise that an apparently frivolous, rather waspish TV host can create such rounded, human and sympathetic characters and conjure atmosphere and sense of place so evocatively. Early on, for example, we get a poignant picture of the emotional bleakness of revisiting a now-unoccupied childhood home and excellently painted portraits of relatives whose desperation to pry and to get their hands on things from the house is dressed up as concern for Elizabeth.

A Keeper is a pleasure to read in this respect, but I didn’t find enough real content to keep me fully engaged. There is a tension, but its resolution is signalled early on, the Life Lessons applied to Elizabeth’s current situation felt a bit clunky, and the emotional insights didn’t seem that original, however beautifully portrayed the characters may be.

Overall, this didn’t deliver as much for me as Holding. However, this may be just a personal response; A Keeper is very well written and well worth a try to see if it suits you, even if I’m a little lukewarm about it.

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

Ian Rankin - In A House Of Lies

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Classic Rankin

Rebus may have been told that he is in a “managed decline,” but I’m delighted to say that Ian Rankin certainly isn’t. In A House Of Lies is excellent.

When long-dead body is discovered in an abandoned car Siobhan Clarke and Malcolm Fox are part of the MIT investigating. Rebus, now well retired from the force, was part of the original investigation and becomes involved in this, too – not always to the delight of the team. It’s classic Rankin: complex, well structured and nuanced, with his three central characters especially being extremely well drawn.

There’s a lot of good crime fiction being written at the moment, but for me, this shows why Ian Rankin still stands out from the rest and remains among among the very best writers in the genre. He generates an excellent and wholly unforced atmosphere, sense of place and feel of police work and his characters, plot and dialogue are all completely convincing to me. That long, shadowy, complex relationship between Rebus and Big Ger Cafferty is still a brilliant feature and Rankin is doing an excellent job of widening the central focus of the books to include Clarke and Fox. Most of all, In A House Of Lies is completely compelling; I was hooked and sorry to reach the end.

Probably all that really need be said is that this is a very fine Ian Rankin novel. The man is still at the peak of his form and I can recommend this very warmly indeed.

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

Chris McCrudden - Battlestar Suburbia

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Enjoyably witty

I enjoyed Battlestar Suburbia; it is witty, imaginative and well written, but it did go on rather too long for me.

Chris McCrudden has taken an old SF trope and given it a fresh and amusing tweak. It is several millennia in the future; machines rule the world and permit humans only to perform menial cleaning functions and to live on orbiting “Dolestars”. However, McCrudden’s machines are the products of a type of evolution which gives them character traits reminiscent of their original ancestors – a homely, domestic breadmaker or a bossy, arrogant smartphone, for example. He uses the story of the accidental spawning of a human rebellion to sling satirical barbs at a good deal of current human activity, including use of the internet, sexism, scaremongering totalitarian politicians and much besides. It’s well done and often made me smile and even chuckle once or twice; the notion of a nuclear missile with the personality of a sulky teenager might give you the idea. (And, by the way, I liked that, without making a fuss about it, almost all the chief protagonists were women.)

It’s a good read which, crucially, never feels as though it’s congratulating itself on being so cleverly amusing. However, I found it became very fractured at times and even the willing suspension of disbelief didn’t quite make up for some of the more absurd developments and illogicalities in the machines’ make-up. I found that the central tenet didn’t quite support the book until the end and it could have done with a little tightening up.

I can recommend Battlestar Suburbia. It is the first of a series, though, and I’m not sure that I’ll rush to read the next book; I think that for me the idea may have run its course.

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

Neil MacGregor - Living With The Gods

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Another gem from MacGregor

This is another excellent book from Neil MacGregor. I have no expertise in this area, but as a lay reader I found it a thoughtful, erudite and immensely illuminating book.

MacGregor takes a similar approach to that in his previous outstanding books, A History Of The World in 100 Objects and Shakespeare’s Restless World, in that he uses artefacts fascinatingly to illustrate his subject, basing each brief chapter around a subject which has has religious significance like sacrifice, water and so on. Thus, this isn’t a conventional history of religion at all, but a very insightful look at the way in which worship in its many diverse forms has played a part in human life from the earliest objects we know of to the present day. As always, MacGregor makes shrewd, penetrating and very humane points, leaving us with much to think about. It’s a great book to read a chapter or two at a time, I think, and then to come back to.

The book is beautifully illustrated and MacGregor’s unfussy, readable style is a pleasure. I can recommend this very warmly.

Eric Ambler - The Levanter

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A very good period thriller

I enjoyed The Levanter. It is (to my shame)the forst Eric Ambler that I have read, and I’m impressed. It’s a good story, well told.

Set in Syria 1970 (and first published in 1972), this is the story of Michael Howell, a businessman whose factory is taken over by very radical terrorists who are manufacturing the means of a terror attack. Howell is compelled to go along with this and the story becomes very tense and gripping as the planned attack approaches.

I found the first 30 pages or so rather unengaging, but it got much better quite quickly, so do persist if you’re not immediately gripped. Ambler’s style is quiet, detailed and more about building tension than violent action, which he does extremely skilfully. It is largely narrated by Howell himself, with two other voices to help set the scene and who also imply that Howell himself may not be an entirely reliable narrator. It all adds up to an interesting, gripping story.

I can see why Ambler was so highly regarded in his day and on this evidence I’ll be happy to try some more of his books. Recommended.

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

William Boyd - Love Is Blind

Rating: 3/5

Review:
A bit bored by Boyd

I enjoyed parts of Love Is Blind, but I found a good deal of it dull and I’m not sure that it added up to much in the end.

The book follows Brodie Moncur from his early working life in the late 19^th Century as a talented piano-tuner in Edinburgh as his work and his health needs take him to various places in France, Russia and beyond. He develops an obsessive love for a Russian singer and this is both the driver of the book’s events and the main subject of William Boyd’s interest.

For the first third or so of the book I was carried along by Boyd’s easy prose and the interest which, slightly surprisingly, I found in the details of Brodie technical work on pianos. The trouble is, I wasn’t very convinced by Brodie’s passion and found that I was more interested in his piano-tuning than the state of his heart. I got no real sense of obsession and I also found it completely un-erotic, despite some fairly graphic descriptions. This is not a good combination in a tale of overmastering passion and as the story moved from place to place I kept thinking, "OK, you're somewhere else now and you're still in love with her. And…?” I wasn’t drawn in by the period setting, either. The language isn’t always convincing and there are some rather clunky references to contemporary events and so on.

Things picked up a little in the later part of the book with some more dramatic developments and sense of threat, but it still wasn’t all that involving. It wasn’t helped by a somewhat melodramatic feel and in the end I was quite glad to finish the book, whose emotional climax didn’t affect me in the slightest, I’m afraid, because it felt contrived and overdone. Love Is Blind is by no means terrible, but it certainly isn’t one of Boyd’s best and I can only give it a very lukewarm recommendation.

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

Stella Rimington - The Moscow Sleepers

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Not for me

I didn’t get on well with The Moscow Sleepers. It felt rather formulaic and wasn’t well enough written to convince me of the characters or the plot.

The book is about possible Russian agents (“sleepers”) in the west and MI5 and related agencies’ attempts to uncover them and their activities, with her principal character, Liz Carlyle of MI5 at the centre of things. Stella Rimington obviously knows this world intimately, but portraying it convincingly in a novel is another matter. She has a slightly forced prose style, as though she hasn’t quite moved from official documents to a relaxed, flowing style of her own in fiction. Some stale usages and clichés crop up fairly regularly, like the character who, before going away, “had to get her ducks in a row first” for example, which I found off-putting.

There are an awful lot of characters, almost invariably introduced as they are travelling somewhere or waiting for something and thinking about...followed by a lengthy, sometimes very over-lengthy, potted history. All these rather clunky introductions made each one seem less like a rounded, real person and more like yet another slightly unconvincing character to keep track of. I began to mutter “Oh, for heavens’ sake” to myself when, even well into the novel, yet more new characters were introduced in exactly the same way, complete with physical description and biographical background. It gets very wearing.

Rimington does like to tell us things rather than show us, often at tediously painstaking length; there is none of the subtlety and tension of le Carré or the wit of Mick Herron, for example, nor even the slow, meticulous plot and character development of Gerald Seymour. Take this little extract, for example: “Liz window-shopped apparently aimlessly, though a close observer would have noted how she lingered at the fronts with large curved windows, and a professional observer might have concluded that she was using the windows to keep an eye on what was going on behind her. She seemed to conclude that nothing was amiss, for she turned with no hesitation into Stresemannstrasse.” Quite apart from the infelicity of the use of “conclude” twice so close together, it’s a terribly laboured description of something so easy and basic. It all got too much for me, I’m afraid.

All this made the book rather a slog for me. I found it pretty unconvincing throughout, it didn’t engage me and I can’t really recommend it.

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

Patrick deWitt - French Exit

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Dull, self-regarding and mannered

I’m afraid I didn’t get on with French Exit at all. It seems to me to be a novel which thinks a great deal of itself but adds up to very little.

Frances, a wealthy, viciously bitchy, snobbish New York widow (Really? Again?) completely dominates her overweight, ineffectual son Malcolm, and destroys any other relationship he may develop (Really? Again?). Her financial profligacy means that she is reduced to the abject penury of her last few hundred thousand dollars, and her only (improbable) friend offers her use of a vacant apartment in Paris. This takes the best part of a hundred pages and although the book improves a bit in Paris, I simply couldn’t raise any interest in the story or its uninteresting and clichéd characters. We are told that Patrick deWitt is taking satirical jabs at his subjects, but to me it just felt like another uninteresting novel of New York’s rich – in whose lives the rest of the world ought to be hugely interested, apparently. Malcolm has a fiancé (well, any woman would fall in love with an obese, gauche, inarticulate man with some bizarre habits who is utterly dominated by his vile mother, wouldn’t she?) who at one point thinks, “The mother of the man she had accidentally fallen in love with did not approve of their union: this was so. But it was a common problem, wasn’t it? It was a trope.” Well, yes, it is, as is much of the rest of the book. The trouble is that none of it is much more than that.

Oh, it’s “beautifully written” of course – but in that self-conscious “beautiful writing” way that makes it often seem tediously arch to me and sometimes downright mannered; the use of “this was so” in the little extract above, or “Malcolm was yet in his hotel room,” (“yet”?) for example. It just jars on me, seeming out of place in context and thoroughly self-regarding.

French Exit has had some favourable reviews, but I found it to be dull, mannered and much of it was a struggle to get through. There have been some very fine novels involving New York’s rich; The Bonfire Of The Vanities, A Little Life and some others spring to mind, but this doesn’t have anywhere near their quality of satire or insight. I didn’t utterly hate it, but it was hard work and I really didn’t get much from it. I doubt whether I’ll bother with any more of Mr deWitt’s work.

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

Victor Cornwall & St John Trevelyan - Scoundrels

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Amusing stuff

I found Scoundrels amusing but not quite as hilarious as some other reviewers did.

It purports to be the memoirs of a couple of upper crust chaps, now long retired, who have had all sorts of outrageous adventures and who, in between chapters of reminiscence, snipe at each other very amusingly. It’s well written and quite outrageous; they are self-seeking, brutal and uncaring with a casual, blind arrogance which far outstrips any abilities they may have. The scrapes they get into are absurd and often entertainingly disgusting (Cornwall’s recovery from fugu poisoning is quite appalling, for example).

How funny you find this will depend on your sense of humour, but it’s well done (in a field which has some terrible turkeys in it). I find it quite entertaining; I read it in smallish chunks, but I do keep going back for more and I will certainly read any subsequent volumes.

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