Peter Maughan - The Cuckoos of Batch Magna

Rating: 4/5

Review: 
Well written and enjoyable

I enjoyed The Cuckoos Of Batch Magna. It is very well written, engaging and amusing.

The basic story is pretty well-worn: a secluded rural idyll populated by a colourful group of often eccentric people, has its way of life threatened by an incomer bent on changing everything with a view to profit and “progress.” In this case, it’s Batch Magna, a small village on the Welsh border in Shropshire, whose de facto squire dies and the entailment of the estate means that it passes to a rather hapless New Yorker who gradually (of course) falls under the spell of the place and its people…

It sounds corny, and it is in a way, but Peter Maughan is a good enough writer to make this a very engaging, enjoyable book. It is steeped in rich, loving descriptions of the place, its way of life while his characters are very well painted and surprisingly recognisable and there is a very nice leaven of dry humour. There are moments of farce, some charming romances and a general atmosphere which is very endearing. Maughan is unafraid to confound expectations occasionally and there are some genuinely touching moments, all of which gives the book a fresh feel. I have to say that so little actually happens in the first half of the book that I began to get a bit restive, but things pick up wonderfully in the second half, which I loved.

I found this a very enjoyable read (in the end). Whether the idea can maintain a series remains to be seen, but I’ll certainly read the next one to find out. Recommended.

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

Joe Ide - Wrecked

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Another cracker from Joe Ide

I loved the first two IQ novels and this is just as good.

In this outing, Isaiah becomes involved in a couple of cases which become entangled; principally, he needs to find the mother of Grace (whom we remember from last time) who, it turns out, has compromising photos of atrocities in Abu Ghraib. The very tough perpetrators of those atrocities want them back and come after Grace and Isaiah with huge resources and horrible brutality. Meanwhile, Dodson is finding working with Isaiah tough, but we learn that he, too, has a heart and the tangled cases lead to a very exciting and sometimes very funny read.

Joe Ide is a great storyteller, balancing excitement, brutality, humour and real human tenderness perfectly, and his dialogue is quite brilliant. This is developing into a truly great series of books, in my view. I found Wrecked completely involving and I can recommend it very warmly.

Chris Brookmyre - Fallen Angel

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Not Brookmyre's best

Fallen Angel is pretty good but not brilliant, I think. I love Chris Brookmyre’s Parlabane series, but I don’t think this is quite in the same league.

It’s a pretty familiar set-up, as an extended family arrives at their Portugese holiday villas shortly after the death of the famous intellectual who was patriarch of the family. Sixteen years before, they had endured a tragedy there as a young child was killed falling over a nearby cliff and her body was never found. We get a number of points of view (including one first person narrative) and the story cuts between the present and the time of the child’s death. Dark currents swirl and secrets begin to emerge…

Brookmyre is a good enough writer to make a decent, quite fresh-seeming story out of a rather hackneyed scenario; his characters are well drawn and the surprises are generally well hidden and fairly plausible. However, I did find that not much happened for a very long time and there are quite long digressions into dreadful parenting, the iniquities of PR companies and so on which, while accurate and shrewd, did feel a bit polemical and slowed things down even further. Add to this a very large cast which was hard to keep track of and consists of of almost entirely repellent characters and I began to struggle and to skim.

I don’t want to carp too much because this is a lot better than an awful lot of “twisty psychological thrillers”, but it does have its faults and I can only give it a rather qualified recommendation.

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

Linda Grant - A Stranger City

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Well written but dull

I found A Stranger City well written but ultimately unsatisfying.

It’s an oddly-structured, fractured book. The central plot, such as it is, revolves around the discovery of a body of an unidentified woman whom no-one has reported missing, and a woman who is reported missing with a lot of social media fuss at the same time, but is discovered to be fine a couple of days later. A policeman and a filmmaker collaborate to produce a documentary about the missing woman and this device is used as a vehicle for thoughts about identity and isolation in London. In fact, the book is largely taken up with portraits of the lives of incidental characters showing the diversity of London’s population, plus reflections on the difficulty of buying property in London, the vacuousness of hip PR people in London, the gentrification and trendifying of areas of London and so on. In other words, it’s a novel about London – hence the title.

It’s well enough done. Linda Grant is a good writer and her portraits are pretty well painted, although her characters do have a tendency to make speeches rather than sound spontaneous. The thing is, it all felt very familiar and I didn’t get anything very new from it. For me, the London thing has been done to death (and I live in London), Ali Smith, Jonathan Coe and others have written novels about Britain and Brexit and I just got bored with A Stranger City. I didn’t find the characters or what was being said interesting enough to keep going and I’m afraid I gave up about half way through.

This certainly isn’t a bad book; it’s just that for me it says nothing new, in spite of saying it very elegantly. Others may like this more than I did, but it wasn’t for me.

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

Kate Atkinson - One Good Turn

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A great read

One Good Turn is the second in the Jackson Brodie series and it is very enjoyable - at least as good as the first, Case Studies.

This time, Brodie is in Edinburgh as his sort-of-partner Julia is in a dire production at the Fringe. In a slightly bonkers plot, he is a witness to an assault and then becomes involved in a series of slightly bizarre and sometimes violent incidents as a story of corruption, exploitation and ultimately murder evolves. It’s a great read, with some very sharp barbs aimed at the excesses of crooked property developers and others, some genuinely funny moments and a rather gripping, well structured plot.

One of the book’s chief pleasures is Kate Atkinson’s wonderful character portraits (Case Studies, in other words) with her exceptional eye and ear for people’s actions, speech and internal monologues. The shy, repressed but successful author, the ageing wife of the corrupt, unfaithful businessman and others, plus Jackson himself and the police officer with whom he becomes involved – possibly in more ways than one – are all superbly painted and the whole thing is a pleasure to read.

This is an exceptionally good series, I think, and I can recommend this instalment very warmly.

(My thanks to Random House for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Jane Casey - Cruel Acts

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Another good instalment from Casey

Jane Casey is a class act in crime fiction and Cruel Acts is another good instalment of the Maeve Kerrigan series.

It needs someone with Casey’s skill to make a good book from this, because there’s a lot of very familiar stuff (alone and confronted by the killer...of course) and, to me, some very off-putting plot elements – especially the serial killer torturing and killing women theme, of which I have had quite enough now, thank you. Nonetheless, Casey’s ability to create very real, human characters and to structure her story well makes it a gripping and enjoyable read. Maeve Kerrigan is an interesting narrator, with both her strengths and failings very well portrayed and other characters convincingly depicted.

This isn’t perhaps a classic of the genre, but it’s good. Jane Casey is always worth reading and Cruel Acts is no exception. Recommended.

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

Paul Beatty - The White Boy Shuffle

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Good, not brilliant

I’m glad to have read The White Boy Shuffle, but I found it slightly hard going.

I thought The Sellout was simply brilliant. This, Paul Beatty’s first novel, has many of the same qualities: his use of language is remarkable and often poetic, the insights into race, class and personal relationships are very sharp and very cleverly expressed as satire and he makes very important and valuable points about vital contemporary issues. However, even though it’s witty in places, there was to me a slightly worthy feel about it which made some of it a slightly turgid read. By the time he wrote The Sellout, Beatty had honed his style and technique rather more, so that book had all the qualities of insight and analysis of this, but was also hilariously funny and immensely readable – qualities which are a little harder to find here.

So, recommended overall but a bit of a struggle at times.

(My thanks to Oneworld Publications for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Victor Canning - Mr Finchley Discovers His England

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Very enjoyable

I enjoyed Mr Finchley Discovers His England. Originally published in 1934, it’s a celebration of an ideal of rural England and of a staid, dull Londoner who discovers the joys of adventure and the outdoors, and of his own resilience.

The story consists of a series of mildly improbable vignettes as Mr. Finchley, a single solicitors’ clerk, takes his first holiday in over 20 years. Events conspire to take Mr Finchley not to Margate as planned but on a curious adventure through the South West of England in which he meets gypsies, tramps and thieves (quite literally), eccentric aristocrats, smugglers and so on. He ends up in a life on the road, with loving descriptions of English countryside and features as well as some adventures in which he adopts all kinds of unfamiliar roles. There is almost a feel of Bilbo Baggins about Mr F as he is taken well out of what would now be called his comfort zone and discovers some of his own qualities. The sense of the book is probably summed up in the heading for Chapter IX: “How Mr Finchley is nearly throttled and finds happiness in a view.”

The prose is enjoyable and very readable and the whole book is a warm, escapist treat. Recommended.

Kate Atkinson - Case Histories

Rating: 5/5

Review:
An excellent novel

I thoroughly enjoyed Case Histories. I’ve not always found Kate Atkinson that easy in the past, but this was excellent.

Really, it’s a series of character studies, loosely held together by a crime story. It’s a diffuse plot with several points of view in the narration, but somehow it all works extremely well. Atkinson writes beautifully and paces her story very well so I found it very gripping and kept wanting to get back to reading more, but the chief pleasure for me is her superb characterisation. She creates a wholly plausible and very diverse set of characters whose portraits are forensic, humane and very clear-sighted.

Not everything is tied up neatly at the end, which I found a strength of the book. I think it’s a brilliant piece of fiction and far more that just a crime novel. I’ll definitely be looking out the next two in the series and I can recommend this very warmly.

(My thanks to Random House for an ARC via NetGalley.)