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.)