Carys Bray - When The Lights Go Out

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Not for me

I struggled with When The Lights Go Out. I loved The Museum Of You, but somehow I couldn’t get into this one.

This is the study of a marriage between two people with very different outlooks, and of the effects of climate change which also form a sort of backdrop metaphor for coping with the changing of a relationship as it ages. Carys Bray still writes very well and has her trademark keen-eyed but compassionate insight into her characters’ flaws and foibles. It may just be me or the times we’re living in, but even this couldn’t grip me this time. The combination of Chris and Emma, both of whom have a fixed and unrealistic view of life – pessimistic and optimistic respectively – plus the relentless, oppressive atmosphere of the weather just failed to engage me and I really struggled to get through to the end (even with some judicious skimming).

I’m sorry to be critical of a fine author whose work I have liked very much in the past; others plainly liked this, too, but I’m afraid it wasn’t for me.

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

Susie Steiner - Remain Silent

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A great read

I thought Remain Silent was excellent. It is readable, has genuine content and quite brilliant characterisation.

This is the third Manon Bradshaw novel. I’ve not (yet) read the previous two but it works fine as a stand-alone. Manon is a Detective Inspector in the Cambridgeshire Constabulary, this time investigating the death of a migrant worker from Lithuania. The plot is nicely structured and I found it refreshingly free of implausible action, but it moves along well and hangs together – two things which are by no means universally true of police procedurals. Susie Steiner also gives a fine, nuanced (and sometimes horrifying) view of migrant labour in East Anglia and of the reaction from local residents.

What makes this special, though is Steiner’s portraits of her central characters, most notably Manon herself. She is a wholly believable middle-aged woman coping with a family, her career and the irritations and difficulties of life. She seems so utterly human in her responses and her internal monologue, which seems to me to be the voice of a real, likeable, flawed person rather than just a novelist’s Character Study or yet another detective given a Complex Personal Life for Interesting Background. She is also very funny at times and exceptionally wise about marriage and relationships. I love the way she flip-flops between loving her partner and family desperately and thinking it’s all an oppressive, stultifying mistake – sometimes both at once. I have been half in love with easful Manon.

I’d not read any Susie Steiner before and this was a delightful discovery for me. I shall certainly be reading the others in the series and I can recommend this very warmly indeed.

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

Christopher Fowler - Oranges and Lemons

Rating: 5/5

Review:

A real treat

I loved Oranges and Lemons. It’s very well written, witty, involving and a good, if slightly implausible mystery.

I hadn’t read the immediate predecessor, The Lonely Hour; there have been some pretty cataclysmic events in that which shape the beginning of Oranges and Lemons and it’s probably best to read it first if possible but I managed fine without. This time a series of murders occurs, apparently linked to the eponymous rhyme, and the PCU is reformed to try to get to the bottom of them. Bryant is in his element, with his encyclopaedic and arcane knowledge of London and the unit is generally in fine form. I laughed out loud several times, was hugely entertained and genuinely involved with the characters. There are fascinating bits of obscure London history, some amusing and well-aimed swipes at some of the idiocies of modern life and plenty more of real substance along with the story and the humour.

I’d only read one Bryant & May before this - Hall Of Mirrors, which I wasn’t especially taken with. I’m glad I gave them another try because this was a real treat and I’ll definitely be reading more from this series. Very warmly recommended.

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

Tom Bradby - Double Agent

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Another decent spy thriller from Tom Bradby

Double Agent is another readable spy thriller from Tom Bradby. It follows on directly from Secret Service and I would strongly recommend that you read Secret Service first.

Kate and the rest of the small MI6 circle concerned are trying to recover after the events of last time. The question of whether there is still a high-level traitor remains, and Kate is now offered evidence by Mikhail. There again begins an operation to determine the veracity of this and we get more office and political manoeuvring, Kate putting herself in danger again and so on. It’s all pretty well done and Tom Bradby knows a lot about what he is writing about here – perhaps to the point of overdoing the detail at times.

Alongside this is Kate’s struggle with insomnia and anxiety. Again, Bradby knows a lot about this, writes pretty well about it and it is a very important subject, but for me I didn’t fit comfortably with the style of spy thriller in the rest of the book. I found the two aspects distracted from each other rather than enhanced the book and I struggled a bit as a result.

I don’t want to be too critical; Double Agent is perfectly readable, it has good things about it and I’m sure there will be a third novel in the series which I shall probably read. I hope it is a little more tightly focussed, though, and branches out from the slightly samey structure of the first two.

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

Nicholas Shakespeare - The Sandpit

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Disappointing

I began by liking this character-study/thriller a lot, but it began to pall quite badly in the second half.

The story is of John Dyer, an ex-journalist now divorced and living in Oxford where his son attends the private school where Dyer himself went. The opening is a slow revelation of Dyer’s circumstances and mental state which I found very well done. Then, Dyer finds himself in possession of some potentially world-changing information which a lot of people in governments and big, powerful international businesses are very keen to get their hands on. It becomes a sort of espionage novel, with Dyer’s great moral dilemma about what to do at its heart.

Much of the book is taken up with Dyer’s life and character, plus that of those around him – wealthy, rather self-obsessed people, some of whom have rather sinister backgrounds of one sort or another. The thriller part is rather less than thrilling a lot of the time, with Dyer being infuriatingly indecisive and rather pusillanimous in the guise of weighing up moral matters, and the denouement doesn’t help this. Also, Nicholas Shakespeare’s style becomes a bit wearisome. He is a very good writer in many ways, but especially after about half way I found the prose becoming a little show-offy and mannered.

As an example, every so often he slips from a normal narrative past-tense to present tense for a few sentences and then back again, like this:

“He dashed into the Dragon Cinema, and bought a ticket to a film that had already begun. He fell asleep after ten minutes, and when he wakes up the three people in the cinema are leaving. It’s the middle of the day as he emerges. He has no memory of what he’s watched. He feels in another time zone, another country. In slow steps, he headed back towards the town centre, plunged into a canal of images.”

Now, perhaps I just haven’t studied English Literature to a sufficiently advanced level to appreciate some subtle emotional intensity in this technique, but to me it was just extremely irritating – and it got more frequent and more irritating the longer the book went on. It kept throwing me out of the narrative, leaving me trying to re-orientate myself and wrestle with the prose and I eventually got very grumpy about it. (And “a canal of images”? Seriously?)

There are also rather over-long episodes seemingly designed to show us how much Shakespeare knows about academic Oxford, fly-fishing and other subjects, at least one monumentally convenient coincidence and so on.

I was disappointed overall. I expected a thoughtful, insightful, well-constructed and involving book from such a respected author, but I didn’t really get it in the end and was left feeling that there is less here than meets the eye. It’s by no means a bad book, but it’s not all that good either.

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

Terry Pratchett - Snuff

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Classic Pratchett

Snuff was written when Terry Pratchett was already suffering from the dementia which eventually killed him, but it’s still very good indeed.

This time, Sam Vimes is persuaded to go on holiday to his and Sybil’s country estate, where, inevitably, he feels completely out of his element, but his copper’s nose tells him that something is badly wrong. An excellent, entertaining story emerges in which some familiar themes emerge: the equality of everyone before the law, the importance of law itself, the abhorrence of racism and slavery, the policeman’s moral dilemmas and so on. It is, in the best Pratchett tradition, gripping, very funny in places and full of real moral weight. It also contains some fine nuggets of wisdom like this, for example:

“Commander Vimes didn’t like the phrase ‘The innocent have nothing to fear’, believing the innocent has everything to fear, mostly from the guilty but in the longer term even more from those who say things like ‘The innocent have nothing to fear’.” He is also still brilliant at knockabout comic absurdity with things like the names of oriental dishes and streets called the rue de Wakening, and I laughed out loud regularly, even on a re-reading.

It’s not perfect; it does go on a bit too long and sometimes labours its message just a little too much, but it’s still a great read and a favourite Pratchett of mine. Very warmly recommended.

Tom Bradby - Secret Service

Rating: 4/5

Review: 
A decent spy thriller

Secret Service was a decent spy thriller, but I did have my reservations.

Tom Bradby has created Kate Henderson, family woman and chief of the Russia section at MI6. A tip-off leads her and her team to begin a hazardous operation which reveals both possible Russian interference in the appointment of a new Prime Minister, that there may be a Russian agent among the candidates and that someone is leaking secrets to the Russians. The plot moves along quite nicely, the who-can-I-trust stuff is nicely done and Tom Bradby writes pretty well much of the time. It does get a bit clunky in places, and although the dialogue is generally convincing, characters do tend to lapse into pretty stilted speeches rather regularly. Bradby is also no stranger to a cliché, which gets a bit much at times with sentences like, “I’d like to bury my head in the sand, but I need to go home and face the music.”

Overall, it was sufficiently involving to keep me interested until the end. It’s nothing that special but it’s not bad by any means and I’ll try the next one because there’s promise here. 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4.

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

Matt Parker - Humble Pi

Rating: 5/5

Review
Brilliant

I thought Humble Pi was simply brilliant. It is fascinating and very funny in places.

Matt Parker is both a mathematician and a comedian, both of which show strongly here. He gives us a book crammed with extremely interesting examples of the importance of maths in our world and of what can go wrong when the maths isn’t done right. These extend from bridge disasters and medical tragedies to glitches in computer games, financial fiddles and so on.

It sounds like the sort of book where I’d normally expect to read a couple of chapters, take a break and come back to it, but it is so interesting and so entertaining that I read the whole thing from start to finish with great pleasure. Parker writes with flair and real wit, with the odd laugh-out-loud one-liner, too. I found it an absolute joy and even if you’re not very interested in maths, I can recommend this very warmly indeed.

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

Georges Simenon - Three Bedrooms In Manhattan

Rating: 1/5

Review:
Soulless, purposeless and miserable

I didn’t like Three Bedrooms In Manhattan. I enjoy the Maigret books very much but I found this a disappointment.

It’s fairly plotless: a French actor has ended up in New York with little money left (although enough for an awful lot of whiskey drinking) and meets an enigmatic woman whose life story is hard to believe and they embark on a strange few days of walking through New York, drinking, lovemaking and the odd bout of misogynistic violence. It’s intended to be an intense character study (something Simenon was usually very good at) but it didn’t work for me at all. I didn’t really believe in the characters and I certainly didn’t care about them. There is a strong whiff of second-rate existentialist writing here, in that everything is a bit bleak, the protagonist does inexplicable things in an alienated way, and so on. It all seemed soulless and miserable to no purpose and I’m afraid it’s a genre that I can’t stand.

So, not for me, then. I’m afraid I gave up about two-thirds of the way through because I just couldn’t slog through any more. Give me a Maigret any day, but I can’t recommend this.

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

Louise Penny - A Fatal Grace

Rating: 5/5

Review:
A delight

This series is becoming a real delight. I enjoyed the first one; this, the second, was just great and I am now hooked.

Here, Gamache and his team return to Three Pines in the dead of winter to investigate the bizarre murder of a deeply unpleasant woman. The convoluted means of the murder make the resolution of the story slightly silly in the end, but by that time I didn’t mind one bit. Louise Penny’s writing is so good and the characters she creates are so well done that the details of the plot become secondary. The setting is superbly done and the cold of the Quebec winter is so vividly evoked that I almost began to feel it myself.

An enduring plot strand begins to emerge here – as if I needed any more reason to continue with this series. One advantage of coming to them late is that I still have so many to look forward to and I shall definitely be reading the lot. Very warmly recommended.