Sarah J. Harris - The Colour Of Bee Larkham's Murder

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Disappointing

I’m afraid I didn’t think that The Colour Of Bee Larkham’s Murder was all that good. I feel churlish saying it because it’s written with good intentions, but it just didn’t work for me.

The book is narrated by Jasper, a 13-year-old who has autism and synesthesia, so that he cannot recognise faces and experiences sounds and some other senses as colours. He has a very patchy memory and is convinced that he killed his neighbour, the eponymous Bee Larkham. The plot, which moves extremely slowly, is the emergence of the events leading up to Bee’s possible murder (we don’t know the truth for a long time) intercut with Jasper’s day-to-day perception of the events in his life.

Plenty of people have loved the book, and fair enough. It’s certainly not exploitative, it’s an original viewpoint and it is well-intentioned – although I did feel that there was some over-sentimental emotional manipulation at times. The main problem for me, though, is that Jasper’s voice just didn’t ring true as that of a 13-year-old. Just as an example, at one point he says,

“...I walked into his bedroom. He put his real book behind the cover of Lee Child’s.

Understanding Your Child’s Autism And Other Learning Difficulties.

I expect he’s studying it right now. Trying to get a grip on why I’m difficult. Why I’m different from other teenage boys.

Why I’m so hard to love.”

The use of paragraphs especially is a technique of an adult author trying to make a punchy point and to me it really isn’t the voice of a bemused young teenager. I found this throughout the book and that, combined with a rather stodgily paced story prevented me from becoming involved.

There have been some superb books written from the point of view of narrators with various mental health problems – Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident..., of course, and Nathan Filer’s The Shock of the Fall, Holly Bourne’s Am I Normal Yet?, Gavin Extence’s The Mirror World Of Melody Black and others spring to mind. This isn’t in their league, I’m afraid, and I can only give it a very qualified recommendation.

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

Soren Sveistrup - The Chestnut Man

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Standard, clichéd serial killer stuff

I ended up pretty thoroughly annoyed with The Chestnut Man. To be fair, it’s not a genre I would normally read and I wouldn’t have touched it if it hadn’t been by the man who created the excellent TV series The Killing. This means that fans of the serial-killer genre may like it far more than I did, but for me it was just a series of tired old clichés strung together, albeit strung together quite well for much of the book.

In Denmark, a series of sadistic killings (of women, naturally) is marked by the killer’s trademark Chestnut Man left at each scene. A maverick cop, sent back to the Copenhagen police after his insubordinate behaviour annoyed his Europol bosses, suspects that these killings may throw doubt on the solution to the murder of the daughter of a prominent politician a year before. There is a Race Against Time to catch the killer before...I’m sure you get the picture.

I read this while I was ill and needed brain-off entertainment. The first 400 pages didn’t do too badly on that, but I just ticked off the clichés as they went past: the maverick cop and his ill-matched partner who begin to form an attachment; the boorish, sexist police colleague; the vain, unheeding boss; the killer who is always One Step Ahead and Plays Games With The Police, child abuse as a cynical plot device, the female investigator under threat...and so on and so on. I could just about live with all that, but the final 100 pages became so silly that I lost patience, and I especially disliked the corny old Cornered Killer Climax In Which The Killer Explains Everything To The Victim scene (yeah, right), which in this case is largely repellent, misogynistic torture porn. The explanation scarcely holds together and the psychology is pretty silly, so coupled with the ludicrous implausibility of subsequent events it made me very irritated indeed.

I had expected something deeper and more thoughtful from Sveistrup, but The Chestnut Man is just another bog-standard Scandi serial-killer thriller. There’s no superbly original central character like Lisbeth Salander to lift it above the ordinary, and nor, of course, does it benefit from a brilliant screen performance from the likes of Sofie Grabol or Sofia Helin which made The Killing and The Bridge such classics. Fans of the genre may enjoy this, but I’m afraid I didn’t.

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

Karen Thompson Walker - The Dreamers

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Very good indeed

I thought The Dreamers was excellent. It’s a little hard to put my finger on exactly why, but I found it wholly involving, very thoughtful and genuinely touching in places.

A mystery illness begins to spread through a college campus in a remote California town. People fall asleep and, although they are obviously dreaming, they simply can’t be woken and the illness spreads quickly, causing national worry. The story sounds like a tediously familiar old trope, but Karen Thompson Walker makes it fresh and original. She does this partly by giving us the stories of a variety of characters affected in one way or another by the illness, which she does beautifully. These are recognisable people with recognisable emotions and responses, and Thompson Walker paints them beautifully. She catches the small, everyday events and internal responses which so define a life and a person so that I became very involved with each one of them.

Her other great strength is her style. Her prose is beautifully poised; it is unflashy but has a poetic rhythm to it and the whole book seems to have a quiet, almost soothing pulse to it, even when describing extreme events. This antithesis of the normal style of catastrophe fiction is extraordinarily effective and for me gave these events a far greater poignancy. It is just a pleasure to read.

As to what it’s actually about...well, it’s hard to be precise, but it’s important. Thompson Walker has things to say about the human condition, the wondrous complexity of the physical world and of the mind, the haphazard nature of existence and about what reality may be to a human consciousness. There are many fine, affecting stories here but one in particular about a “Dreamer” who is pregnant comes to a conclusion which I found truly moving and very thought-provoking.

I’m struggling to express clearly why I liked The Dreamers so much, but I did. I can recommend it very warmly indeed.

(My thanks to Scribner UK for an ARC via NetGalley.)

Oyinkan Braithwaite - My Sister The Serial Killer

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A very good first novel

I thought My Sister The Serial Killer was very good. It is original, involving, dark and very well written.

The book opens in present-day Lagos as Korede receives a phone call from her younger sister Ayoola: “Korede, I killed him,” and Korede goes to help. Not, it turns out, for the first time. Set in Lagos and narrated in the first person by Korede, we learn of Ayoola’s exceptional beauty, the sisters’ background and how Korede has always looked after and protected Ayoola. Tension is well built as Korede’s guilt and suppression of secrets cause her inner turmoil, added to by Ayoola’s supreme indifference to the consequences of any of her actions.

It’s a gripping story which has at its heart a brilliant portrait of someone whose sense of her own perfection and entitlement means that she does largely what she wants, oblivious to the damage to anyone else, and simply makes up a different story if the truth doesn’t suit her. (An allegory for our times, perhaps?) There is also a tense plot, shafts of wit and a good background of Nigerian society. I was impressed – not least because the book is reasonably short and all the more impactful for it. A very good first novel, which I can recommend.

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

C.M. Taylor - Staying On

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Readable and thoughtful

I enjoyed Staying On – far more that I expected to from the synopsis, to be honest.

It is the story of Tony and Laney who have been living as ex-pats in Spain for many many years, where they own and run a pub. Tony is now seventy and as both age and Brexit take their toll, very few of his ex-pat friends remain and the pub is struggling. Tony wants to return to the Yorkshire of his youth while Laney refuses to set foot in England again. As their son, his wife and their 3-year-old son come out to stay after many years, old tragedies and guilts which have lain beneath the surface emerge and have a profound effect.

Frankly, it sounds rather familiar and not really like my kind of thing. However, C.M. Taylor writes very well, he creates convincing characters and structures the story very nicely, so that within a readable and engaging story, the book makes important points about families, the meaning of home, friendship, class and other things. I found it touching rather than profoundly moving, but that’s fine with me. I thought it was an unsentimental but compassionate view of a somewhat insular community of Brits abroad and Tony made a very recognisably human protagonist.

I liked the note in the acknowledgements: “I was told by men with expensive educations that people don’t want to read about the working classes. I’d like to thank those men for the motivation.” For me, Taylor has proved them wrong with this book and I can recommend it.

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

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.)