Dorothy L. Sayers - Clouds Of Witness

 

 Rating: 4/5

Review:

Very good, but not Sayers' best

This is the second of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels. It’s very good, but not an absolute Sayers classic, I think. (For me, she really hit her stride in the next one, Unnatural Death.)

Here, Wimsey’s elder brother, the Duke Of Denver, is discovered with the body of the fiancé of their sister Mary at 3am during a shooting weekend in Yorkshire. He refuses to provide an account of his movements and it is then up to Peter and the redoubtable Inspector Parker to get to the truth of a tangled affair. It’s a decent plot, if a little overburdened with coincidences, but it is Sayers’ characters and descriptions which really make her, in my view, the greatest of the Golden Age writers. She has enormous fun, for example, with both the solemnity and absurdity of the trial of a Peer in the House Of Lords, and there are plenty of other very enjoyable and interesting situations and characterisations. Some is just a little crude, like her view of the taciturnity of Yorkshire people, for example, and Peter’s facile manner can become rather too much at times – before settling down into the delightful character of the later books.

This may not have quite the five-star quality of the later books, but it is still a very enjoyable and involving read which I can recommend.

Jo Browning Wroe - A Terrible Kindness

 

Rating: 5/5

 

Review:

Exceptionally good 

 

 I thought A Terrible Kindness was excellent: it is readable, insightful, thoughtful and humane.

The story of William Lavery opens at a flashy dinner in 1966 where he is celebrating his qualification, aged 18, to be an embalmer and to work with the newly dead before their funerals. The occasion is interrupted by an appeal from Aberfan for help after the unspeakable disaster which overwhelmed the primary school and many homes and William volunteers. We see his work there, his response to it and its effect on him, and then jump back to his time as a boy chorister in Cambridge as the loving relationships and tensions in his family evolve and where a traumatic event has plainly occurred. It is a book about a decent, kind young man’s inability to deal with his own emotions and about both the difficulty and the possibilities of healing in friendship, love and music.

There are so many ways in which this could have gone wrong, but Jo Browning Wroe gets it pitch-perfect, I think, never once straying into mawkishness, sentimentality, exploitation, facile psychologising or any other of the traps looming around such a story. The opening section at Aberfan brought me to tears more than once with its delicate humanity and compassion, and I was close to tears at other times in the book, too. Wroe’s depiction of William is quite brilliant and utterly believable, and her evocation of his work as an embalmer is engrossing, moving – and fascinating, too. She is also really good at writing about music; the Welsh song Myfanwy and Allegri’s setting of the Miserere both have a very powerful part to play here and she conveys their power as well as any writing about music I have ever read, as well as the joy and transcendence which can come with performing.

I may have made the book sound a difficult read; in fact, it’s anything but. I was completely engrossed and always wanted to read just a bit more. Wroe’s prose (in the present tense) is poised and unobtrusively brilliant, I think, so that everything from the strongest emotions to the feel of Cambridge in the early 70s (and I was there, so I know) is excellently but quietly done.

A Terrible Kindness is among the best books I have read this year and I can recommend it very warmly indeed.

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

Shaun Bythell - Confession Of A Bookseller

 

Rating: 4/5

 

Review:

Very enjoyable 

 

I enjoyed this just as much as Diary Of A Bookseller. Shaun Bythell has lost none of his acerbic wit or his enjoyment of books and the people he is surrounded by, even if he does hide it under a veneer of grumpiness.

This probably doesn’t need a long review; if you enjoyed Diary Of A Bookseller, I think you’ll enjoy this one. Shaun is a little more meditative about things, especially to do with his personal life, and there are moments of genuine sadness. There is also a lot of interest to be found in the way a bookshop works, the way customers behave and the community of Wigtown. Shaun’s grumpiness is still – amusingly – in evidence but his sometimes mocking observations about others are often underpinned with real affection, as with Emanuela, whom he says, quite genuinely, that he will really miss when she returns to Italy, for example.

This may not be great literature, but I found it a very engaging, enjoyable and rewarding read. Warmly recommended.

Louise Welsh - The Second Cut

 

 Rating: 4/5

Review:

Very good

I enjoyed The Second Cut. It haven’t read its predecessor, The Cutting Room, (although I soon will) but it works fine as a stand-alone book.

Rilke is a middle-aged auctioneer, active on Glasgow’s gay scene. His job sometimes brings him into contact with characters from the darker side of Glasgow’s underworld, and his sexual activities can be risky, too – although he is cautious by the standards of some other characters. When an old acquaintance from the scene gives him a tip about a valuable house clearance and is then found dead on a doorstep, apparently from an overdose in an already abused body, Rilke finds himself dealing with some very dodgy characters indeed. A fairly complex but comprehensible plot develops involving vicious drug empires, modern slavery and other skulduggery.

It’s readable, involving and quite exciting in places. Its main feature, though, is the background of Glasgow, its violent underworld and the current gay scene – not all of which is comfortable reading. The degree to which homophobia persists is disturbing, although Louise Welsh makes it clear how far attitudes and laws have progressed in twenty years. I also found the auction house side of the book very interesting and could actually have done with rather more of it.

I thought the first half of the book was exceptionally good; it is well written, thoughtful and involving, with Rilke’s relationships with different characters especially well done. It did tail off a little for me later on as some standard implausibilities in the plot began to emerge, like the extremely unlikely but convenient overhearing of a conversation, or the now horribly familiar decision not to call the police but to investigate alone, and so on.

In spite of these minor flaws, I still think this is a very readable, involving book with some important things to say. Recommended.

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

Lisa Gardner - One Step Too Far

 

Rating: 4/5

 

Review:

Some good aspects, some serious implausibility 

 

I enjoyed a lot about One Step Too Far, but in places it strained credibility just a little too far itself.

The story is narrated by Frankie Elkin, rather a rootless, lost soul and recovering alcoholic, who travels around trying to locate people who have been missing for a long time. She appears to be doing this to escape from her own demons, although she repeatedly asks herself “Why do I do this?” without managing an answer. For her trouble she gets paid nothing, it seems, so she’s poorly equipped to join an expedition to try to find Tim, a young man who disappeared five years ago on his pre-wedding trip with his friends into the Wyoming wilderness. Tim’s father has organised these trips annually and the group of friends, riven with guilt, join in along with two more experienced wilderness explorers plus a cadaver dog and her handler.

The beginning is very well done, even if the group’s acceptance of Frankie is pretty unlikely. The preparations and development of a serious hike into the wilderness are interesting and absorbing, and the dynamics in the group are interesting and very plausibly developed. As things – inevitably – turn more sinister, plausibility begins to recede somewhat, but for some time it’s well within the bounds of suspension of disbelief. I have to say, though, that it did become pretty silly toward the end. Lisa Gardner’s writing is very good, so the tension and exhaustion of being stranded in the wilderness while apparently being hunted is very well portrayed, but some of the events themselves strained my credulity well beyond its elastic limit. The Big Reveal was also, shall we say, unlikely in the extreme, both in the revelation itself and the manner in which it happens, so the later parts of the book took some of the shine off the very good opening for me.

Overall, this remains a four-star book because Gardner’s characterisation, sense of place and so on are good enough to compensate for much (but not all) of the later plot implausibilities. Certainly a decent holiday read, and with enough here to encourage me to try the next in the series.

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

Georges Simenon - The Strangers In The House

 

Rating: 4/5

 

Review:

Excellent in parts 

I am slightly ambivalent about The Strangers In The House. A good deal of it was excellent, but there are aspects I wasn’t so keen on.

First published 1940, it’s a story with a pretty well-worn trope at its heart: a misanthropic recluse forced back into daily life by circumstance and beginning to live again. This part, Simenon does with great subtlety and considerable insight, I think, as a murder in the house of lawyer Hector Loursat brings him inevitably back into contact with the pre-war small-town society he has shunned and despised for so long. I found the portrait of Loursat, of his small household and of the bourgeoisie of the town very convincing and rather gripping. Curiously, the story of the murder seemed much less successful – especially its courtroom denouement which didn’t ring true at all – which meant that the book rather lost its way for me, although the central thread of Loursat’s character continued to be very well done.

I have been somewhat dubious about all of Simenon’s non-Maigret books that I have read; this was one of the better ones for me. I see that John Banville has described it as a masterpiece and it does carry many of the hallmarks of Banville’s own work in its intense study of the minutiae of a character’s behaviour and personality, although it has a commendable concision which Banville often lacks. I can’t agree that it’s a masterpiece, but it has enough real quality to be an involving and rewarding read which I can recommend.

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

Kinky Friedman - The Love Song Of J. Edgar Hoover

 

Rating: 4/5

 

Review:

Very entertaining 

 

I have enjoyed Kinky Friedman’s music for years but The Love Song Of J. Edgar Hoover is the first of his novels that I have read. I enjoyed this, too.

It features a version of Kinky Friedman himself in a sort of modern pastiche of hard-boiled detective fiction of the 30s and 40s, with added comic dialogue and Kinky’s musings, conversations (one way) with his cat and so on. It begins in the classic way with a cool, beautiful blonde coming to Kinky’s agency asking him to find her husband. It then gets progressively more strange and frankly bonkers as odd events happen, people try to kill him (or do they?) and a possible trail to a man called Leaning Jesus and thence to Al Capone begins to emerge. It’s pretty crazy, but it does hang together and I became rather involved with the story.

It does start pretty slowly and rather clumsily, I thought, but it picked up very nicely. There’s a good balance of plot, action and Kinky’s reflections on all manner of things, which are amusing, often shrewd and deceptively erudite in places. I thought it was great fun and I’ll certainly be trying more in the series. Be prepared for a slightly stodgy start, but I can recommend this as a very entertaining read.

Simon Mason - A Killing In November

 

 

Rating: 4/5

 

Review:

A promising new series 

I enjoyed A Killing In November far more than I expected to. It’s well written and well structured so that I found any implausibilities and familiar tropes perfectly forgivable.

On the face of it, it sounds like a collection of clichés of the genre strung together: the chalk-and-cheese partners, the rebellious working-class detective in a posh environment and so on. Add to this the idea that Ryan, a CID Inspector, would turn up to investigate a death in an Oxford college wearing tracksuit bottoms and a baseball cap on backward, tell the Provost to “calm the [copulatory obscenity] down” and so on and it sounds utterly preposterous. And it is, really – but somehow it’s well enough done for that not to matter much. The two sides of Oxford are well portrayed, there is some pretty good characterisation and Ryan’s relationship with his 2-year-old son is especially well painted, I think.

The story is a good one, too. There are several possible avenues to consider, including possible jihadi action, straightforward theft, sexual harassment and so on. Each is, in its own way, well considered and I found it an involving and in places an exciting read. The two central characters are perhaps a little overdone, but they are interesting studies nonetheless, both flawed in their own way and with plenty of messy stuff left unresolved, rather than the trite little Life Lessons which so often pollute this kind of portrayal.

So, slightly to my surprise, I can recommend this as an entertaining read and a promising start to a new series. I’ll certainly be looking out for the next one.

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

 

 

Christopher Fowler - Off The Rails

 

Rating: 5/5

 

Review:

Another very good instalment 

 

This is another very enjoyable instalment in the excellent Bryant & May series. This one follows on directly from On The Loose; it works fine as a stand-alone book, but I would strongly recommend reading the series in order for maximum enjoyment.

The team are still officially disbanded but still on the trail of “Mr. Fox” in King’s Cross. A series of events means that if they catch him and solve another seemingly unrelated death on the Underground, the Unit will be reinstated. And so begins the usual intricate investigation, with Arthur steeped in the history of the Underground as it seems to be the key to everything. There are perhaps fewer really esoteric “consultants” used by him here, but some equally fascinating people who know the Tube intimately. The characters from the Unit are their usual engaging selves, including the hapless Raymond, and as always there is an involving plot, some genuinely funny humour and a background of London’s history.

In short, this is another fine Bryant & May book. Probably no more really need be said. Warmly recommended.