August 2023

THE FINE ART OF UNCANNY PREDICTION . . . Between the covers

I must confess to not having read anything by Robert Goddard (left) for a few years. Back in the day I enjoyed his James Maxted trilogy, which comprised The Ways of the World (2013), The Corners of the Globe (2014) and The Ends of The Earth (2015), which focused on a young former RAF pilot and his involvement in the political fallout in Europe after the Versailles Conference ended in 1920. I reviewed his standalone novel Panic Room in 2018 (click the link to read what I thought), and I quickly became immersed in his latest novel The Fine Art of Uncanny Prediction. Goddard introduced his unusual Tokyo private detective Umiko Wada in The Fine Art of Invisible Detection (2021). She returns in this novel, which is intricately plotted and rather complex at times. A widow, (her husband died as a result of the 1995 Tokyo Sarin Gas attack) she was once assistant to PI Kozuto Kodaka, but since his death she has shaped the business in her own way.

The strange title refers to a Japanese urban legend, which states that an unknown woman known as the Kobe Sensitive – predicted both the Kobe earthquake in 1995 and the tsunami which caused the Fukushima nuclear disaster 1n 2011. On both occasions she phoned the authorities, and on both occasions she was ignored, or so the story goes. The book spans over 70 years, but in three time frames – the immediate aftermath of Japan’s defeat in WW2, the 1990s and the present day. In the wreckage of 1945 Tokyo we meet Goro Rinzaki, the teenage factotum to the owner of an orphanage. After an accident in the ruins, Rinzaki allows his boss to die, but escapes with the a steel box which was locked in the orphanage’s safe, and it is Rinzaki who sits at the centre of Goddard’s narrative web like a malevolent spider. What the box contains is integral to the story.

We then switch to the present day where Wada is engaged by businessman Fumito Nagata who wants her to make contact with his estranged son Manjiro. The 1995 time frame begins with the late Kozuto Kodaka being hired by Terruki Jinno, millionaire chairman of Jinno Construction, to investigate the financial dealings of his recently deceased father – and founder of the company – Arinobu Jinno. If this all sounds complicated, that’s because it most certainly is, but it’s how Goddard pulls the disparate threads together that makes this such an intriguing read.

There is, almost inevitably, an American connection. Clyde Braxton was an American Army officer who was very much a ‘Mr Big’ during the post war occupation, and one of his remits was to monitor a reviving Japanese film industry. By ‘monitor’, I mean that exercised an absolute veto on the subject matter of new films. After leaving the army, he used his (probably ill-gotten) wealth to start a Californian winery, but when his family died in a catastrophic earthquake of he dedicated his time and money to the possibility of predicting future disasters, which is where his Japanese connections came good. One of the film-makers who prospered under his authority was none other than Goro Rinzaki. And Rinzaki believes he can offer Bryant the Kobe Sensitive.

As Wado searches for Manjiro Nagata she uncovers a conspiracy that puts her life in danger, as well as the lives of her friends and family. At every turn, both in Tokyo and California – where she goes to try to unravel the mystery – it seems that Goro Rinzaki has strings to pull and people on the inside of all major institutions – the press, the government and industry. We eventually learn what was in the steel box rescued from the ruins in 1945, but along the way Goddard entertains us with an intricate and elegant plot, with Wada – calm, resourceful and courageous – at its very centre. The book is published by Bantam and is available now.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fine-Art-Uncanny-Prediction-Between/dp/1787635104/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1693469403&sr=8-1

August 31, 2023 0

THE WIT AND WISDOM OF BERNIE GUNTHER

Over the thirty years and fourteen books of the series, Philip Kerr’s wonderful antihero Bernie Gunther was never afraid to speak his mind, both to us as readers, and often to the real-life characters – as diverse as Reinhardt Heydrich, William Somerset Maugham and Eva Peron – who peopled the stories. Sometimes he could be profound, sometimes savagely funny, but always observant. Here is a selection of his best lines.

Most of us who love great novels were aware that Philip Kerr was ill, and it was a moment of great sadness when we learned of his death in March 2018. We could not grieve in the full sense of the word. That was for his family. But we could only dream of what other adventures PK could have dreamed up for his magnificent creation, had he been granted more years. As it was, Metropolis – ironically, the book featuring Bernie at his youngest – was published posthumously. The Gunther books will be read as long as people have the desire to learn about 20thC history and the people who – for good or ill – shaped it. Also, as long as there are readers who enjoy a well-turned insult and a melancholy gaze into the human soul, Bernie Gunther will live for ever.

August 18, 2023 0

THE MISPER . . . Between the covers

Central to this powerful novel is one of the great social scourges of modern Britain – the County Lines illegal drug distribution structure. It is horribly simple. The big drug barons, most probably masquerading as genuine businessmen, use a complex hierarchy to deliver the product – weed, crack, whatever is in vogue – to their customers. The criminal equivalent of the cheerful Eastern European Amazon man who delivers your parcel on time is, typically, a teenage boy, perhaps still of school age (but he rarely attends) possessed of nothing more sinister than a bicycle, a hooded sweat shirt and a bandana to cover his lower face. The youngsters have a huge advantage over the police, glued as they are these days to the seats of their patrol cars. These lads can pedal down one-way streets, navigate the narrowest town alleys and passageways, be here one moment and gone the next. Their immediate bosses provide them with cheap burner ‘phones, which are as expendable as the people carrying them.

On this depressing armature Kate London sculpts her story. Ryan Kennedy is a teenager hooked into one of these criminal gangs, and one of his handlers has given him a handgun. When he is cornered in a Metropolitan Police operation, he shoots dead Detective Inspector Kieron Shaw, who was trying to persuade him to throw away the weapon. When Ryan is tried for murder, clever lawyers manage to hoodwink the jury, and he is given a relatively lenient jail sentence. Once inside, of course, he is lauded by fellow inmates as someone who “killed a Fed”, and the big wheels in his organisation make sure his prison term is comfortable.

Kate London then introduces the other people whose lives are radically changed by Shaw’s murder. There is DC Lizzie Griffiths who has had an affair with Shaw and now looks after Connor, the result of that liason. DC Steve Bradshaw was the undercover cop who became close to Ryan Kennedy and, in one way, created the fatal showdown. Detective Sarah Collins was deeply involved in the case, but has now been transferred to another force in the north.

Ryan Kennedy may be many things, but he is not stupid, and he pulls the wool over the eyes of his probation officer and is relocated to the country town of Middleton and given a job in a bike shop. He wastes no time in resurrecting his criminal career and is soon known as NK (apparently a Game of Thrones character) and continues to exert his malign influence.

The “misper” of the title is a fifteen year-old called Lief, who has fallen into the clutches of one of the gangs. He goes missing, and his mother – Asha – eventually alerts the police. The police tie in Lief’s disappearance with the re-emergence of Ryan Kennedy as local boss of drugs distribution in Middleton. No spoilers from me, but what happens next is a tense and vivid narrative that is crying out for a screenplay.

On one level, Kate London has written an an intense and gripping police procedural thriller, but she also poses many questions. Perhaps it is unfair to expect that novelists should provide us with answers to real-life social problems, but the questions still need to be asked. Readers of this novel can infer what they like but, for what it’s worth, my conclusions are: (1) One of the greatest calamities to befall British society is the absence of traditional fathers in the bringing up of male children in certain communities. Ryan Kennedy has no father. Lief has no father. A cynic might say that Connor has no father, because he was shot dead by a criminal drug runner. (2) The British police are being overwhelmed by a tide of budget cuts, aggressive criminal defence lawyers, strident social justice warriors and a cataclysm of civil liberties activists.

Kate London is a former police officer and has written a grimly convincing story of a part of British society that is broken, and a criminal justice system barely fit for purpose. The Misper is published by Corvus and is available now.

August 14, 2023 1

ON MY SHELF . . . August 2023

THE MISPER by Kate London

The title is, of course, police-speak for missing person, and this gritty novel shines an unforgiving light on the scourge of the County LInes drug trade in Britain. Put simply, the couriers are teenagers of school age up and down the land who deliver baggies of drugs to their customers. They are controlled by big city criminals who use the youngsters and their bikes, who know every little lane and ginnel of their home area to stay one step ahead of the police. Central to the story is the death of a policeman – shot by one of these youngsters – and the efforts of some of his colleagues to avenge his death. Watch my main page for a full review soon.
CORVUS – HARDBACK & KINDLE available now.

MURDER AT HOLLY HOUSE by Denzil Meyrick

This a very advanced look at a novel which will be available nearer Christmas time, although given the miserable summer we have been having, it might be more topical now. It’s December 1952, and a dead stranger has been found lodged up the chimney of Holly House in the remote town of Elderby. Is he a simple thief, or a would-be killer? Either way, he wasn’t on anyone’s Christmas wish list. Inspector Frank Grasby is ordered to investigate. The victim of some unfortunate misunderstandings, he hopes this case will help clear his name. But as is often the way for Grasby, things most certainly don’t go according to plan. Soon blizzards hit the North York Moors, cutting off the village from help, and the local doctor’s husband is found murdered. Grasby begins to realise that everyone in Elderby is hiding something – and if he can’t uncover the truth soon, the whole country will pay a dreadful price.
TRANSWORLD DIGITAL – ALL FORMATS 9th November.

THE DEVIL STONE by Caro Ramsay

This is the start of a new series from the Scottish author. In the small Highland village of Cronchie, a wealthy family are found brutally murdered in a satanic ritual and their heirloom, ‘the devil stone’, is the only thing stolen. The key suspects are known satanists – case closed? But when the investigating officer disappears after leaving the crime scene, DCI Christine Caplan is pulled in to investigate from Glasgow in a case that could restore her reputation. Caplan knows she is being punished for a minor misdemeanour when she is seconded to the Highlands, but ever the professional, she’s confident she can quickly solve the murders, and return home to her fractious family. But experience soon tells her that this is no open and shut case. She suspects the murder scene was staged, and with the heir to the family estate missing, there is something more at play than a mythical devil stone. As she closes in on the truth, it is suddenly her life, not her reputation that is danger! Will Caplan’s first Highland murder case be her last?
SEVERN HOUSE – HARDBACK available now – PAPERBACK & KINDLE 31st August.

THE BONE HACKER by Kathy Reichs

This is the latest in the long-running Tempe Brennan series, and the redoubtable expert in human anthropology is playing away from her Montreal home turf – in the Caribbean paradise of the Turks and Caicos Islands – although there is a Canadian connection, in the shape of a badly chopped up body pulled out of the St Lawrence River. On the island holiday resort, Tempe has been induced to investigate the deaths of a number of young tourists, each of whom is missing a hand. Check my main page for the full review.
SIMON & SCHUSTER – HARDBACK and KINDLE available now.
PAPERBACK – 24th March 2024.

August 9, 2023 0

THE BONE HACKER . . . Between the covers

Kathy Reichs introduced us to Montréal forensic anthropologist Temperance “Tempe” Brennan in Déjà Dead (1997). The latest episode of this long running series begins with Tempe – as ever – investigating a particularly revolting partial corpse – ‘partial’ due to an encounter with a boat propeller – in the Bickerdike Basin. A geography lesson about Montréal and the St Lawrence River can wait for another time, as most of the action takes place elsewhere.

The remains are that of a young man who was a very long way from home – fifteen hundred miles across the ocean in the Turks and Caicos Islands. He didn’t drown. He didn’t die from the swirling blades of a propeller. He had been shot. Straight through the chest. Perhaps now is the time for a little geography. TCI is a tiny chain of islands in the Atlantic. To the south is Haiti and The Dominican Republic; sail south-east and you hit Cuba; north-west lie The Bahamas and the Florida; sail north east for half a lifetime and you may end up in Bantry Bay.

When Brennan makes contact with the TCI police she speaks to Detective Tiersa Musgrove. Not only is Musgrove interested in the death of her young countryman, she surprises Brennan by insisting on flying straightway to Montréal. The demise of the young man – a gang member called Deniz Been – is not the reason Musgrove is anxious to be face-to-face with Tempe Brennan. Her motivation is to persuade Brennan to fly to TCI and cast her eye over a series of unexplained deaths which have completely baffled the TCI authorities. I’m not entirely sure why Brennan would drop everything and fly off into the unknown, but this is, after all, crime fiction, and pretty much anything can happen.

Brennan arrives in TCI – capital city Providenciales, known as Provo – and finds a luxury holiday paradise, complete with the corpses of a handful of young male tourists – each minus a hand. When Musgrove is found dead in her apartment, Brennan realises that she is neck-deep in a criminal swamp that threatens to drag her under and choke out her life. There are enough conundrums to satisfy the most demanding Sherlock Holmes buffs. Why was a state-of-the-art luxury boat found drifting off-shore? Why has an FBI agent ‘gone rogue’ on the island? Was Musgrove killed by her vengeful ex, or the same person who killed the young men?

After the demise of Detective Musgrove, enigmatic local copper Monck (who has been in the wars – he has a titanium hand) reluctantly brings Brennan into the investigation. When she eventually gets access to a sufficiently powerful microscope she discovers that the blade which separated the young men from from their hands bears the stamp of discernible writing, and it is in Hebrew. A local shochet (kosher slaughterman) looks a shoo-in for the one-handed corpses, in that he has all the right kit, but why? He does himself no favours when he goes on the run, and it is not until the arrival on the island of two suitably tight-lipped and sharp-suited FBI men, in search of their errant colleague, that it dawns on Brennan and Monck that there is a deeper criminal conspiracy at work here, and one that involves ransom demands and an international conspiracy.

The Bone Hacker has qualities which one finds in so many American thrillers – it is slick, pacy and immensely readable. Tempe Brennan is quick-tongued and even quicker of thought, and the gory medical details bear witness to the author’s distinguished career as an academic and as one of her country’s foremost forensic anthropologists. The book is published by Simon and Schuster, and is available now.

August 8, 2023 1

THE TRAP . . . Between the covers

The story centres around Lucy O’Sullivan whose sister Nikki is one of three young women abducted from the night time Irish streets. No trace of any of them has been found. Lucy has devised a very risky ploy in order to try and track down her sisters abductor. She has purposely put herself in harms way on lonely country roads at night, hoping to be picked up by the same person who took her sister. So far, she has been unsuccessful.

“The slip road didn’t just take them off the motorway, but all the way back to 2008, the year the Celtic Tiger choked and died, to what was surely supposed to have been just the first phase of an entirely new community full of hopes and dreams and overstretched mortgage payers, but which, in the economic carnage that followed never made it past that. Enormous apartment blocks, apparently inspired by the Soviet era,towered behind rows of tiny boxy houses, glued together in never ending rows, without so much as a grassy verge between their driveways, on a bleak desolate landscape of burnt grass, weeds and bare soil. To get to them you had to pass a U-shaped retail park that at first glance looked completely empty but, on second at least had an Aldi. A huge flag like sign lied that the other units represented a prime retail opportunity as it flapped in the wind, its end ripped and fraying.”

We are introduced fairly early in the piece to the supposed abductor. He seems to be an amenable sort of chap; he and his wife Amy spend their evenings on the sofa. He has one eye on a book, usually historical non fiction, while his other eye is on the TV screen, which is usually showing some kind of true crime drama, a genre much loved by his wife.

Catherine Ryan Howard shines an unforgiving light on the way in which the media treats the parents and family of women or children who have been abducted or murdered. Jennifer Gold was the youngest of the three missing women. She was conventionally beautiful, a scholar, high achiever and photogenic. Likewise her mother Margaret is polished, well groomed and an assured media performer. By contrast, Tana Meehan – the first woman to be abducted – was overweight and something of a wreck of a person, having left her husband to go home to live with her elderly and ill parents. Nicki O’Sullivan, or so it was reported, had been last seen staggering around on the pavement after drinking too much at a party.

Heading up the investigation – Operation Tide – into the three missing women is Garda Síochána detective Denise Pope. She has an unlikely – and highly unofficial assistant in the shape of civilian employee, Angela Murphy. Angela wants to be a proper copper, but is not in the best of shape physically, and she failed the fitness test which all would-be trainees have to pass. She has to settle for being little more than a secretary, handling calls and paperwork involving missing persons. Fate gives her a helping hand, however, when a member of the public, frustrated at not being taken seriously by the officers, hands her a potential clue. The woman works in a charity shop, and brings Angela a handbag, the contents of which have the potential to turn the case on its head.

The Trap has a complex plot, with many a twist and turn on the way. The novel ends rather enigmatically, in my view, but it is another fine thriller by a writer who knows exactly how to make her readers’ spines tingle. It is published by Bantam and is out now in Kindle and will be on sale from 17th August as a hardback.

August 4, 2023 0

DIG TW0 GRAVES . . . Between the covers

I thoroughly enjoyed an earlier book in the series, and you can click the image below for the link.

I mention this, because Dig Two Graves begins literally as the final scene of The Temenos Remains fades out. We are in Norfolk and crime fiction buffs will know that this is no rural idyll; readers of Jim Kelly’s Peter Shaw series – and the excellent Ruth Galloway novels by Elly Griffiths – will be well aware that away from the “Chelsea-On-Sea” second homes of North Norfolk and the gentle downlands beyond Sandringham, Norwich and Great Yarmouth provide, to adapt the immortal words of Ben Obi-Wan Kenobi, as wretched a hive of scum and villainy as one could wish to experience.

The “scum and villainy” in this case are provided by the brutal Lithuanian gangsters Constantin Gabrys and his psychopathic son Mica. As a local, Heather Peck will be only too cogniscant of the fact that Freedom of Movement in the dark days of EU membership brought tens of thousands of Eastern Europeans to the area to pick and process the food crops on which we all rely; like many others, she will also know that with the decent folk came gangsters, drug barons and people-traffickers, and this is the background to this novel.

DCI Greg Geldard and his team have found a Romanian woman – Madame Trieste, real name Adrianne Laurientiu – brutally murdered. The killers, in no particular order, have crucified the nail-bar owner, cut her throat, and made her swallow her own eyeballs The first police officer on the scene, DI Sarah Laurence has been abducted by the killers. The search for Sarah Laurence and the determination to bring her captors to justice drives the police on, and provides us with an excellent read.

I finished this excellent novel in just two sessions, and that should tell you that it is a genuine page-turner. My rather weather-beaten maxim for judging crime novels is in the shape of a question – do we care about the principal characters in the novel? Here, I can deliver a resounding ‘Yes!”. Geldard is thoroughly human and believable, and it doesn’t hurt that he his “significant other” is colleague DS Chris Matthews. Heather Peck doesn’t make a meal of this relationship, but she makes us aware that the police top brass are not entirely in favour. Peck resolves the problem, rather delightfully, in the last few paragraphs.

Dig Two Graves is a superior police procedural that rattles on at a breathtaking pace, and features genuinely vile criminals pursued by well-observed and authentic coppers. It was published by Ormesby Publishing on 28th June.

August 1, 2023 1