Simon Brett - The Clutter Corpse

 

Rating: 4/5

Review: Not bad but not his best

 

Simon Brett is always readable and The Clutter Corpse is another enjoyable mystery, but it does have its flaws.

Ellen Curtis is a professional declutterer and so goes into the houses of a wide range of people and gains an insight into their lives and emotional states. In the course of one job she comes across a body which is plainly the victim of murder. Ellen feels something of a suspect in the case and tries to get to the bottom of the mystery herself, while carrying on with her other jobs and her personal life and an involved mystery emerges.

As ever with Simon Brett, it is a well written story with a faintly unbelievable plot, which we happily forgive for the enjoyment and for the very well drawn characters. This time, however, the overall tone is rather more serious and I think he gets a bit bogged down in both background and some slightly dodgy psychology. There is a good deal about depression which is very well done, but which rather dominates the book in places so that I thought the balance was somewhat off. There were one or two other places where I found the psychological analysis a little dubious.

I read An Untidy Death, the second in the series, before this and then came back to The Clutter Corpse with high expectations. I thought An Untidy Death was excellent, with a similar, somewhat more serious tone, but a far better balance of plot, character and psychology. I can only give this one a slightly cautious recommendation in itself, but the series as a whole promises to be very good indeed. Try this first, but even if you don’t get on too well with it, do persist with An Untidy Death – and I shall certainly be looking out for the next in this series.

John Boyne - The Heart's Invisible Furies

 

Rating :5/5

 

Review:

Quite brilliant 

 

The Heart’s Invisible Furies is just brilliant. It scarcely needs another review from me, but for what its worth…

A 600-page novel about a man born out of wedlock in Ireland in 1945 and growing up gay is a description which sounds unremittingly grim and would, I admit, normally have put me off. However, a couple of strong recommendations persuaded me to try it and I’m immensely glad that I did, because it’s a wonderful read which pulled me in and kept me completely hooked. It is also full of genuine human insight, superbly drawn characters and real wit and humour alongside the inevitable sadness, rage, tragedy and bitterness.

It is a masterpiece of storytelling. We get episodes in the life of Cyril Avery at seven-year intervals, beginning with his mother’s violent humiliation at the hands of the Church and her family through to his imminent death in 2015. Cyril’s narrative voice is very engaging and there is a lovely cadence to much off the prose. The story is well outlined elsewhere, but John Boyne’s depictions of the attitudes of the times and how they may shift in some but persist in others is excellent and I found so much of it recognisable and very shrewdly portrayed, sometimes with horrifying brutality, sometimes with real poignancy and at others with laugh-out-loud wit. Much of this is due to his quite remarkable characterisation; Boyne paints his characters with extraordinary vividness but with a minimum of description, allowing them to emerge from dialogue and actions. He often achieves this is a few neat lines, much as Picasso could conjure a lifelike dog from just a few brilliant pen strokes.

I was utterly engrossed from start to finish and emerged with a sense of having learned a great deal about humanity and its lack, about the hideous hypocrisy of the Church and of many public figures, and about the nature of bigotry, of love, of forgiveness and of the possibility of redemption.

I don’t have the skill to do justice to this extraordinary book. I will just say that it is one of the best, most involving and rewarding things I have read for a very long time and that, even if you find the idea of it rather forbidding, I would urge anyone to try it. I don’t think you’ll regret it.

Val McDermid - 1979

 

Rating: 4/5

 

Review:

A decent but slightly flawed thriller 

 

Overall I enjoyed 1979, but I did have my reservations.

Set in Glasgow in January...er...1979, Allie Burns is a relatively new young journalist on a Scottish tabloid paper. A colleague brings her in on an investigative story which exposes them both to risk, and then Allie immediately sniffs out another major scoop involving dangerous undercover work and a serious risk of reprisal.

Allie is an engaging protagonist. She is perhaps a little implausibly 21^st Century in her standing up to the laddish culture in the male-dominated newsroom of boozing, misogyny and sexism, but that culture is very well drawn and rings true to my memory of those times. Gay issues play an important role in the story and it is shocking to be reminded that as late as 1979 homosexual activity was still illegal in Scotland and that one could be prosecuted for it. (I looked it up and this didn’t change until 1981 which this English reader, who had plenty of gay friends at the time, found horrifying.) The atmosphere of the time is generally well evoked, but I did feel that Val McDermid was straining at it a bit. She has plainly done plenty of research, but it was rather too near the surface much of the time; people seemed to do a lot of explaining to each other what it was like in 1979, even though they were living in it, for example, and (with the exception of one Pink Floyd album) everyone was listening only to music and reading only books from that exact moment...and so on. I also thought that the plot plodded just a little, with rather too much sightly laboured exposition.

I expected a little better from such an experienced and rightly respected author. This was still a perfectly decent four-star read for me and I will certainly try the next in the series, but I hope that Val McDermid will be able to relax into the story and the period rather more and allow them to develop more naturally.

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

Ferdinand Mount - Making Nice

 

Rating: 4/5

 

Review:

Enjoyable but not brilliant  

I’m a little ambivalent about Making Nice; it’s well written and quite a decent satire of the spin industry, but it didn’t feel particularly original and had an implausibly gullible character at its heart.

Dickie Pentecost is an experienced and respected political correspondent for a rather staid newspaper. While on holiday with his family he meets the charismatic and rather mysterious Ethel (short for Ethelbert) who is terrifyingly knowledgeable about the Pentecost family. When Dickie is made suddenly redundant, Ethel appears with a lucrative job offer at Making Nice, a flashy “reputation management” company. This leads him into the PR world world of spin, distraction and outright lies where truth and integrity are alien concepts and people are just data to be manipulated.

It’s well enough done and it’s certainly a very timely satire, but I did think that it had largely been said before in plenty of TV programmes like Ballot Monkeys and books like Robert Webb’s Come Again. Dickie is an experienced international journalist and I found it very hard to believe that he was so naive that he couldn’t quickly see through a corrupt African politician or the monstrous backers of a US presidential candidate. I thought his family story was better, but the denouement of the whole book was very conveniently quick and pat, so it felt a bit unsatisfactory.

Making Nice was well enough written to (just!) round 3.5 stars up to 4. It’s readable and enjoyable, but perhaps not as scathing or funny as it intended to be.

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

Susan Hill - A Change Of Circumstance

 

Rating: 4/5

Review:

Very good, but not her best

 

This is another very good Serrailler book from Susan Hill, but I have just a few reservations.

The primary driver of the book is a drugs network penetrating a town outside the major cities – the so called county lines. An apparent heroin overdose draws the police’s attention to the problem more forcibly, and we also get the stories of a two young people who are drawn into the network as couriers and their suffering as a result. In addition, the stories of Simon himself and his sister Cat continue to progress.

The whole thing is, of course, extremely well written in that way Susan Hill has of crafting elegant, readable prose which never draws attention to itself but carries the reader along beautifully. The story, too, is a timely one and in many ways well done; the stories of the children involved and of the effects on their families are vivid and gripping, for example. However, I did find the policing aspect just a little clunky and preachy; at one point the Chief Constable gives a long and rather sententious speech to his officers, after which, one comments, “Didn’t have the chief down for a rallying-cry-before-battle sort of guy, did you?” Well, no I didn’t – and he was all the better for it. Serrailler himself sounds a bit like a politician with a pre-written answer at times, too, and I’ve come to expect better from Susan Hill.

All that said, this is still several cuts above the majority of contemporary crime novels. Serrailler is, frankly, often annoying in his approach to his personal life, which is realistic and quite deliberate by Hill and which I rather admire – although there is a hint of more settled things to come. So, although this may not be the finest of the series, it is still very good.

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

Colson Whitehead - Harlem Shuffle

 

Rating: 5/5

 

Review:

Another excellent book from Whitehead 

 

I thought Harlem Shuffle was excellent. The Underground Railroad was truly outstanding; this is different in tone but just as good, I think.

Set in 1959 to 1964 Ray Carney is a nearly-respectable furniture store owner in Harlem, where shady dealings and outright criminality are never far away. We see Ray’s story develop as he strives to do well for his family (including his deeply dodgy cousin Freddie) and behind the facade he becomes drawn more into Harlem’s underworld while trying to maintain a legitimate business.

It’s a very well told story with wholly believable characters and an engaging protagonist in Ray as he tries to negotiate the tough realities of life in Harlem. I think the publisher’s blurb is a little misleading in describing it as “gloriously entertaining” and “hilarious.” It is a very engaging, enjoyable read, but it’s a novel with real social and political content, as you would expect from Colson Whitehead. The picture of Harlem is remarkably good, and the background of a corrupt city which runs on influence, payoffs and kickbacks (the “exchange of envelopes”) and the racism of the time are extremely well done. Whitehead never becomes solemn or preachy, which often makes the ingrained, everyday nature of it all the more powerful – with obvious present-day resonances. For example, the wit of having the 1964 riots described by a thug who is annoyed because the mayhem means that he can’t buy a sandwich for lunch is brilliant, I think, but it doesn’t detract one jot from the horror and rage sparked by yet another black child being shot dead by a white policeman with impunity.

This is, in short, a great read. It is gripping and entertaining while having genuine weight and I can recommend it very warmly.

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

Peter Lovesey - The Last Detective

 

Rating: 2/5

Review:

Disappointing

 

I tried this, my first Peter Lovesey, having read good things about his books. I was disappointed. It had its decent features, but never really took off and rather fell apart in the final third.

Written in 1992 The Last Detective is set in Bath, where Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond has fairly recently transferred from the Met. A woman’s naked body is found in a lake, leading to a difficult identification and then a tricky murder investigation involving academics, possibly dodgy businessmen and others. Diamond himself is an irascible, technophobic man whose old-fashioned coppering is at odds with more modern police procedure, especially the use of the dreaded computers. It’s a decent set-up and the opening is pretty good, if somewhat familiar. The sense of place in Bath is very well done and there is a well researched, wry and interesting look at Jane Austen’s connections with the city in the background.

It’s all OK, if slightly plodding, for a while, but the clichés of the genre and implausibilities begin to mount up, and after a cataclysmic (and hard to believe) event in Diamond’s career there is a good deal of extraneous detail as another officer smugly pursues an obvious solution. (Does the excessively described smugness and self-satisfaction perhaps give you any clue as to whether he is right or whether he will be made to look foolish by Diamond in the end?) Following a scarcely credible one-to-one death struggle in a famous but deserted location, the whole thing became ludicrously implausible, I’m afraid, including late and blindingly obvious realisations presented as shrewd insights, a laughably unlikely courtroom confession and an apparent Total Personality Transplant for Diamond.

I became very fed up with all this by the end. I may possibly try another instalment sometime, just to see whether things improve – and how this can possibly be a series after developments here – but not for some while, I’m afraid.

Bill Fitzhugh - The Exterminators

 

 Rating: 4/5

Review:

Very enjoyable

I enjoyed The Exterminators a lot and I think it’s even better than Pest Control. It is witty, exciting and full of wry satire.

This time, Bob and Klaus have been successfully living under cover in Oregon for several years, avoiding the drug lord who thinks they are dead. An agent of the Government’s defence agency recruits them to develop anti-terrorist insect weapons. Needless to say, things become very complicated, they end up with assassins on their tails again and wanted by the US authorities. They need an ingenious plan to get them out of trouble.

It’s completely crazy, of course, but Bill Fitzhugh structures it and writes so well that it makes a kind of sense and is a very entertaining read. There is some amusing farce and a good deal of very penetrating satire of Hollywood, US politics, the Christian Right, conspiracy theorists, the broadcast media and so on. Fitzhugh avoids the frequent, rather clumsy Dylan references which were a feature of Pest Control and the book is all the better for it, with just a few much more subtle references like “...that rainy night in Juarez…” which don’t intrude but which Dylan aficionados will appreciate.

In short, this is a thoroughly enjoyable read with some satirical substance to it as well. Warmly recommended.