Hamilton Crane - Watch The Wall, Miss Seeton

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Very enjoyable

I enjoyed Watch The Wall, Miss Seeton enormously. These books are always fun, but I found this one especially good.

The plot...oh, who cares, really? I mean, who reads Miss Seeton for the plot? They’re always slightly bonkers and this is no exception, involving metal theft, murder (quite a grisly one, too, by Miss Seeton standards), misunderstanding and, of course, smuggling. Hamilton Crane enjoys herself enormously with the Kipling song and other literary references, even introducing a couple of minor characters with names from classic novels for us to spot. Miss Seeton is her usual benevolent self, Plummergen’s characters are as wonderful as ever and the MissEss’s inspired artworks solve the mystery as always.

It’s terrific fun, but the real pleasure here is the writing, which is witty, deceptively insightful into character and extremely skilful. I offer a couple of very brief examples which I enjoyed:

“In the post office, the regular gossips were gathered to discuss the latest doings, and to dissect the characters of the absent in a spirit of genial malevolence.” And this, after a character has used a number of (implied, of course) obscure and original swear words in the course of being arrested: “The voice of [spoiler redacted] was raised in more vocabulary-enhancing protest as he was led away...”

Profound literature or gritty thriller it ain’t, but the whole thing was a real pleasure to read. I don’t want to make direct comparisons, but there are hints of the prose style of people like P.G. Wodehouse, Margery Allingham, Colin Watson and others, while keeping a distinctive voice of its own. If you like that sort of thing, you’ll like this. Warmly recommended.

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

Kate London - Gallowstree Lane

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Intelligent and gripping

I enjoyed Gallowstree Lane very much. It had it’s little oddities, but it’s a well written, thoughtful and gripping police procedural.

This is the third in the series. I haven’t read the preceding two but it works fine as a stand-alone book. It’s a story of gang activity in London, including a murder, and of a major police operation to prevent guns being delivered to a gang leader. The two investigations overlap with conflicting interests and needs, which presents a genuine and well-delineated problem for the protagonists.

It’s a cracking story, told largely from the point of view of two female police officers, Sarah and Lizzie, one in each investigation, and also of Ryan, a very young gang member who becomes caught up in events which are well beyond him. All are well painted, but it is Ryan’s story and character which really makes this special; I found the picture of him, his circumstances and his actions completely convincing and in many ways sympathetic. It’s something we really need to understand and Kate London really does show insight into this serious current problem. The police procedure was also excellently done, with a detailed understanding of the issues and plausible behaviour by the officers (yes, really!) while still making it a gripping read.

I did have some niggles. The personal life of Lizzie dominated to an unwelcome extent, especially in the first part of the story. I know Kate London needs to flesh out her characters, and the issues she raises are very important, but it felt like a bolt-on intrusion, it was more irritating than illuminating and for a while it got in the way of the story quite badly. A street girl, far gone in crack addiction, takes inspiration from her memories of Shakespeare plays (seriously?), there is the odd over-ambitious simile and so on. For a while I dithered between four and five stars, but there is so much good stuff here and it became so good in the second half that it’s still a five star book for me. It’s much more intelligent and well written than many of the huge slew of crime novels around now, and I can recommend it very warmly.

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

Alex Micheledes - The Silent Patient

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Not for me

I wasn’t keen on The Silent Patient. To be fair, this is partly because I don’t normally get on with psychological thrillers, but the blurb led me to expect a rather more subtle, insightful book than usual in the genre. I didn’t get it.

The set-up is well explained in the blurb: Theo Faber is a psychotherapist who becomes obsessed with treating/helping a woman who has not spoken for the six years since she was convicted of killing her husband. There follows an unconvincing plot with, inevitably A Huge Twist which, as is so often the case, means sacrificing any credibility of plot or character just to try to make the revelation a surprise to the reader. Combined with a lot of glib psychotherapyspeak I’m afraid it just made me cross. Add to this a faintly irritating writing style which on occasion isn’t afraid of being both unrealistic and using a clunking cliché at the same time (“I became resolved to stop at nothing until Alicia became my patient”) and has a habit of ending chapters with that Punchy Sentence technique, like “I wondered why Christian was so positive I would fail. But it made me even more determined to succeed.” which I began to wait for like the next drop in the Water Torture. I was, frankly, glad to get to the end.

Fans of the psychological thriller have plainly enjoyed this far more than I did, but personally I can’t recommend it.

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

Alan Parks - February's Son

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Another very good thriller from Parks

February’s Son is another very good, very dark thriller from Alan Parks.

Be warned, this is about as Noir as it gets; it’s cold, wet and dark all the time, there is some horrible violence and some very unpleasant characters, plus liberal (although entirely realistic) use of the f- and c-words. Parks is a good enough writer to forge this into a convincing and gripping novel.

It is February 1973 in Glasgow, just a few weeks after the events of Bloody January (which I would recommend you read first). DI McCoy’s shady relationship with Stevie Cooper continues as their joint childhood history comes back with a bang, and there’s a deranged gangland hit-man on a killing spree. A tangled (but comprehensible) plot develops involving the manhunt, struggles for power in the criminal underworld and historical child abuse. The latter is a terribly over-used trope in crime fiction nowadays, but again, Parks handles it with real skill so that it never seems like a lazy device but is a genuine part of the story. The prose and dialogue are excellent, painting very realistic portraits of both the setting and the characters and he paces and structures the story very well.

I have to say that the climax did get a bit silly and over-the-top, but it didn’t spoil my enjoyment. I thought this was very good and this is shaping up to be a very fine series. Recommended.

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

David Quantick - Go West

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Very entertaining

I like David Quantick’s journalism and broadcasts very much and I’m pleased to say that I enjoyed Go West, too. It’s amusing, completely bonkers in places and rather a gripping read.

Charlie Bread is an “Antiques Whisperer” who is employed to spot fake antiques. He is sent to Devon to examine a manuscript...and things get complicated. An absurd but entertaining plot ensues involving sinister men pursuing him, a beautiful but mysterious woman who keeps cropping up, fake identities and so on, plus a strange journey though the South West of England.

David Quantick is an accomplished and witty writer, so the book is a pleasure to read. Don’t expect a serious thriller, although it is quite an exciting story; there are ridiculous coincidences and unexplained absurdities in places, but I didn’t mind that at all. The whole thing works on its own terms and we also get quite a lot of obscure musical references (of course) and some enjoyable commentary on aspects of English life and travel which reminded me a little of some of Stuart Maconie’s books – which is high praise.

Go West is involving, witty and often funny and it is built on rather erudite foundations which gives it some substance, too. Recommended.

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

Isabel Rogers - Life, Death and Cellos

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Disappointing

There are things I liked about Life, Death and Cellos, but overall I found it disappointing.

I was looking forward to this because classical music is a real interest of mine, and I’m pleased to say that the book’s real strength is the musical background. Isabel Rogers plainly knows a great deal about the music and about playing the cello, all of which she brings to life wonderfully – and I speak with all the authority of a dreadfully bad teenage cellist who hasn’t touched the instrument for many years. :o) I thoroughly enjoyed the passages dealing with the structure of various pieces, the technicalities of playing the cello, the workings and personalities of an orchestra and even the background history of Stradivari instruments. Sadly, the other aspects of the book didn’t work nearly so well for me.

Part of the problem for me is that the book isn’t the “mystery” it is billed as; it’s more sort of chick-lit-with-classical-music as we follow Erin, a twenty-something amateur cellist, through her relationship problems, her problems at work, discovering her talent as a cellist...you get the idea. Frankly, the story felt pretty stale and dull to me, it’s blindingly obvious where it’s heading from quite early on and it plods from one unlikely but entirely predictable event to the next as things fall inevitably into place. The dialogue creaks rather and Rogers is forever explaining the meaning of conversations rather than writing good enough dialogue simply to show it convincingly. We get far too many points of view from slightly thinly-painted characters (several of whom are wholly irrelevant and are just a distraction), the humour is often pretty clunky and there’s an awful lot of filler like this, as a character gets into the back seat of a car:

“‘Shift forward Erin,’ he said, as he tried to fit his knees into the car. ‘I have real men’s legs. They are longer than you think.’

Erin obligingly slid her seat forward and felt the car’s suspension dip as Charlie’s weight fell in.”

It’s just a bloke getting into a car, for heavens’ sake! Or a couple of pages of wholly irrelevant faffing about not looking at a mobile phone immediately before the sender of the crucial text walks in and imparts the news anyway. Wading through a lot of this stuff became a real trial.

So, despite the good musical aspects, I can’t recommend Life, Death and Cellos. It may be for others but it wasn’t for me.

Stina Jackson - The Silver Road

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Not for me

I’m afraid I found The Silver Road formulaic and rather tedious. I tried it hoping that the setting in Northern Sweden would give it some atmosphere and originality, but it didn’t and I had to struggle to the end.

The central idea is oh-so-familiar. Lelle’s daughter has been missing for three years, having disappeared from a bus stop one morning. Lelle’s marriage has broken up as a result, he has developed an alcohol problem and he obsessively searches the remote countryside looking for her. Meanwhile, a dysfunctional mother and her teenage daughter move in with a local, reclusive resident...and that’s pretty well all that happens for at least the first half of the book. It’s all very, very familiar stuff, it moves very slowly and I wasn’t convinced by either the events or the setting, so even when things did begin to happen I wasn’t really involved.

The prose is adequate but tends to be repetitive and over-written in a search for atmosphere, and finding a dreadful cliché in the first couple of pages (“he knew the road like the back of his hand”) didn’t augur well. It’s not terrible by any means, but it wasn’t good enough to engage or grip me.

I’m sorry to be critical but, despite the publishers’ claims, I didn’t find The Silver Road either compelling or haunting. It’s an unoriginal story in a setting which isn’t sufficiently well painted and I can’t recommend it.

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