fullybooked2017

THE BARRAGE BODY . . . Between the covers

It is December, 1944, and we are in the Birmingham suburb of Erdington. Further afield, and quite unknown to both the residents of Erdington and the American soldiers shivering in their foxholes in the Ardennes Forest, Hitler is about to launch his last desperate gamble in what would come to be known as the Battle of The Bulge. In Erdington, war-wise, things are relatively quiet, but a barrage balloon unit, staffed by young women of that WAAF, is parked up at the Dunlop rubber factory, commonly known as Fort Dunlop.

It is here that Detective Chief Inspector Sam Mason is summoned, initially to investigate what appears to be a case of malicious communications, but things escalate rapidly. First it seems that someone has stolen vital blueprints for new and improved tyres for Lancaster bombers, and then, a body is discovered tethered to a barrage balloon which has unaccountably broken free.

Mason has a veritable 2000 piece jigsaw to put together. So many questions. Who was the man found dead in the barrage balloon cables? Why was jack-the-lad teenager Simon Samuels found in a similar position? What is the connection to Samuels’ father, a guard at a Staffordshire POW camp. Painstakingly, Mason and his redoubtable Sergeant O’Rourke have to move the pieces one by one until they begin to make a recognisable picture.

Sam Mason is quite unlike most British coppers in contemporary CriFi, partly because of the era in which was working. Because it is the 1940s we are quite content for him to rather stolid, happily married, prone to the aches and pains of late middle age. His deceptively gentle and slow-moving approach masks a sharp mind and a critical eye for detail. Here, he patiently absorbs the facts of a strange case, and delivers the goods.

This is the fourth Erdington Mystery. I enjoyed and reviewed the first of them, The Custard Corpses. The series couldn’t be more different from the books for which Porter is, perhaps, better known – dramatic swords, shields and helmets dramas from Saxon and Norman times. The books have one thing in common, however, and that is the setting – Mercia, the ancient kingdom we would now call The Midlands where, incidentally, Porter was born and brought up. The Barrage Body is original, inventive, nostalgic, absorbing, and I loved it. Published by MJ Publishing, it is available now.

December 17, 2025 0

GENESIS . . . Between the covers

Guy Portman has written a splendid series of dystopian satires centred around a sociopathic killer called Dyson Devereux and, after his demise, his son Horatio, who has inherited his father’s rather peculiar intelligence. Now, in the first of two prequels, Genesis gives us a glimpse into the life of the eleven year-old Dyson. It is 1985, and Dyson’s father, long since separated from his mother, has died of what we would coyly come to describe as ‘an AIDS-related illness.’ Portman’s black humour kicks in early when, at Devereaux senior’s funeral, there is a grotesque spat between a rather fey young man (presumably the partner of the deceased) and Dyson’s aunt.

Within weeks, Dyson is an orphan. His mother never recovers from a coma induced by the prescription drugs provided by her lover, the predatory Dr Trenton. Dyson vows revenge, but shares his maximum venom for his hateful cousin Beatrice, who has taunted him relentlessly over his father’s death. After living with her and his Aunt for a while, he is sent away to boarding school. Intellectually he thrives. His rapid grasp of Latin singles him out, but his status among his peers – minor foreign royalty, sons of the landed gentry and dimwits who happen to be good at rugby – is less certain. His heroic status among (most of) his fellow pupils is cemented, however, after he engineers a memorable encounter with a boy’s glamorous mother in her Mercedes, with half the members of Upper Four B watching from behind the bushes. This memorable feat is also his downfall, as it leads to his expulsion.

Dyson’s main obsession is his cousin Beatrice. He daydreams of ways he could cause her demise. In his most exotic and Byzantine vision, he has written to Jimmy Savile (this is the 1980s, remember) asking for Beatrice to be guillotined live on TV, as the climax to that week’s Jim’ll Fix It. The unfortunate girl’s actual demise is, however, marginally less less spectacular, and it involves a parish church outing to visit Beachy Head.

Readers who are familiar with Portman’s books will know what to expect, but for novitiates, here’s a brief primer. The author has a high powered literary rifle, and in its cross-hairs are Britain’s ‘lanyard class’, metropolitan socialists, indoctrinated social workers, people whose social consciences overlook all manner of atrocities, Guardianistas, bumbling teachers and so-called ‘community leaders’. Portman’s aim is unerring. Just like Finland’s fabled White Death, Simo Hayha, every time he squeezes the trigger, the target falls. Yes, this is satire, and fiction, but his writing carries a salutary message.

Guy Portman pushes the boundaries of humour up to – and occasionally beyond – the limits that some people might find acceptable, but he provides me, for, one, with laugh-out-loud moments. He is also a great literary stylist with a vast amoury of cultural references, and is one of our funniest living writers. Genesis is out now, and I will be reading and reviewing the next episode – Avengement – very soon.

December 15, 2025 0

BLACKWATER . . . Between the covers

The book begins with a terrific passage:

“The child looked like a porcelain doll. Dark eyelashes resting on pale cheeks, softly pouting lips, sandy hair swept neatly under a flat brown cap. Delicate hands folded across a miniature cotton shirt and waistcoat. A figure of peace, placed in repose on the bracken as if simply lying down to rest next to a pyramid of rocks. Even the bluish tinge to the skin could have explained away by the moonlight.“

Sarah Sultoon is not the first writer to exploit the dank mysteries of the Essex marshes. In Bleak House, Dickens used the perennial swirling mist and sense of despair as a metaphor for the obfuscations and terminal lack of transparency which enmesh Jarndyce v Jarndyce. The River Blackwater exists. It rises in rural Essex and expands into a considerable estuary, but the island in this novel is pure fiction.

On starting the novel I wondered how someone could sustain a thriller billed to be about the fabled Millennium Bug – something that never actually happened. I should have had more faith. The discovery of a dead child on Blackwater Island is only briefly mentioned on the news as the world waits for computer systems to shut down, and passenger jets to tumble from the sky, but journalist Jonny Murphy is sent down to Essex to investigate. What he finds is truly astonishing.

Deeply embedded in the mystery is Murphy, aided and abetted by his American ‘not quite’ girlfriend Paloma. He is certainly fearless, but I was reminded of those female characters in Hammer horror films, who decide to go and investigate the ruined church at midnight, dressed in a negligee, and armed only with a flickering candle. Despite our cries of ‘Don’t go there!’ she does, as does Johnny.

This is indeed a weird and wonderful fantasy. The closest comparison I can come up with may only chime with readers who share my my advanced years, but Blackwater is rather reminiscent of the African tales of H Rider Haggard. I suspect no-one reads him these days, but back in the day his fantastical tales of adventure were very popular. Essex is a long way from darkest Africa, but Sarah Sultoon emulates Haggard by creating a cast of intriguingly odd characters. Instead of Gagool, the malevolent witch in King Solomon’s Mines, we have Judith, the strange landlady of The Saxon: Haggard gave us the imposing Ayesha in She, (as in She Who Must Be Obeyed) but here we have ‘Jane’, the Amazonian former special forces trooper who lurks on the island. Sultoon then decides to go for broke and throw into the mix triplets, a grief-stricken recluse and an emaciated druid.

Aside from the goings-on in the riverside hamlet of Eastwood, where Judith’s pub serves only plates of local oysters and glasses of a locally concocted spirit consisting mainly of ethanol, there is a serious background which revolves round biological warfare and the way governments across the world will lie to the people who elected it, all in the name of ‘national interest’. Despite the improbable storyline, Blackwater is immensely entertaining, and I read it over a couple of enjoyable evenings. It is published by Orenda Books and is available now.

December 11, 2025 1

THE REST IS DEATH . . . Between the covers

In a silky smooth segue from 2024’s For Our Sins, Edinburgh copper Tony McLean has returned from temporary retirement and is asked to investigate an apparently trivial break-in at a Biotech facility. Nothing seems to have been taken, no-one was harmed, so why is a Detective Chief Inspector sent on the job when it would normally be handled by a uniformed Sergeant? The answer is simple. Drake Biotech is owned and funded by billion are Nathanial Drake, who just happens to be on WhatsApp terms with Scotland’s First Minister.

When an old school chum approaches DI Janie Harrison with a request to look, for her missing boyfriend, a Serbian carpenter, Janie does a perfunctory search, but assumes the man has gone to ply his trade elsewhere. She has logged the photos from her chum’s phone, and is horrified to find, that when she is called out to woodland where a hastily buried body has been found, the remains are that of Vaclav Mihailovic.When the autopsy is carried out on the Serbian, the pathologist is both baffled and shocked. The unfortunate man is opened up, but there is no stench of decay. It seems that the gut bacteria that continue working away after the heart stops beating are mysteriously absent. There is no bloating and no breakdown of tissue.

Halfway through the book, Oswald escalates and complicates the narrative. First, the driver of the van that took the intruders to Blake Biotech is identified, but then rapidly disappears. McLean suspects he is working for an external intelligence agency. A professional protester called Sanderson, believed to be one of the Biotech vandals is found sitting on a park bench, stone dead. Then the bodies of both Sanderson and Mihailovic are stolen from the city mortuary. Long time fans of the Tony McLean novels have become accustomed to an element of the supernatural appearing in the narrative. Here, it comes in page one, but it is another 60 pages before we realise the relevance to Nathaniel Drake and his interests.

McLean ponders the situation:

“We’ve got a break-in at the lab by animal rights activists who turn out to be a diversion for some MI5 spook doing God knows what. One of the team turns up dead in the park, looking like he’s not eaten in months and shouldn’t have had the strength to wield a spray can, let alone smash up a lab. I’d really like to know what he died from, just in case I’ve got a new disease about to spread through the city.

But someone breaks into the mortuary and steals his body before the pathologist can have a proper look. And whoever does that has the ability to break the servers of a sophisticated security services company to order.

A company that, it turns out, is a fully owned subsidiary of Drake Corporation, whose labs were broken into. And am I going round in circles?”

Within the CriFi genre, police procedural investigations are not natural bedfellows with the paranormal. The late Phil Rickman made it work – in spades – and James Oswald does a pretty good job. He certainly pushes the boundaries here, and gives us a finale with an archetypal mad professor locked in a life or death struggle with McLean, Harrison, and the mummified heart of a man who was court magus to Vlad Dracul in the medieval Carpathian Mountains. All this aside, Oswald has given us a copper with instincts, compassion and humanity, coupled with the inner steel required to do what can often be a truly horrible job. The Rest is Death is published by Headline, and is available now.

December 5, 2025 0

AFTER THE WEEPING . . . Between the covers

David Mark novels are never for the squeamish, and this one begins as it means to go on, with a visit to hell, in the form of a flashback. We are in one of the notorious Romanian orphanages which came to light when the country opened up – after a fashion – following the fall of the Ceaucescu regime in 1989. An as-yet-unnamed foreign visitor is being shown what is known as The Dying Room, where dozens of terminally ill children are lying untended in their own filth, some in cages, others in cots.

We soon learn that the visitor was Rab Hawksmoor, the owner of a Hull haulage firm, and someone who went on to become a controversial celebrity for his attempts to smuggle some of these children out of the country, and his frequent brushes with the Romanian authorities and crime gangs.

Present day, and we rejoin the unique repertory company that has featured in thirteen previous Aector McAvoy novels. Central is Aector himself, a towering bear of a man, originally from the Scottish Highlands. He is capable of terrifying violence when provoked but is, by nature, meek, socially unsure, a devoted husband to Roisin, and a proud father of two children, Lilah and Finn. He is now a Detective Inspector, in charge of a Cold Case Unit. His closest professional colleague is Detective Superintendent Trish Pharaoh. Not only does she never ‘play by the book’, there is not a police manual from which she has not ripped the pages and then thrown on a bonfire in contempt.

Rab Hawkswood is now a shadow of his former self:

“Shrunken now. Diminished. Grey hair and straggly beard, scrawny chicken skin and a lank ponytail hanging whitely from his otherwise bald head.”

Aside from his own exploits, Hawkswood has known personal tragedy. A decade earlier, his son Davey – a bare-knuckle fighter – was found beaten to death near a local cemetery. His murder was never solved, but the case has now been resurrected, and McAvoy has the dubious privilege of leading the investigation, despite the protests of Davey’s mother.

Leaving aside the fact that Hawksmoor’s Romanian crusade seems to have unleashed the closest human thing to a monster from hell, to add to McAvoy’s problems, Trish Pharaoh appears to be playing, not for the first time, a destructive and secret game of her own devising that is leaving a trail of bloodied bodies in its wake. That, and the fact that Roisin’s father, the dangerously ‘Papa’ Teague and his Traveler kin now appear to have skin in the game. The conclusion is predictably violent and, not for the first time, David Mark takes us on a journey through the darker landscape of human excesses and venality, and with the walking paradox that is McAvoy at his most vulnerable – and dangerous.

After the Weeping will be published by Severn House on 2nd December. Click the author image (left) to read my reviews of earlier Aector McAvoy books.

November 28, 2025 0

MURDER IN PARIS . . . Between the covers

It is April 1945, and we are in Paris. The fighting has long since moved east, but the consequences of the previous four years are very evident. Charles de Gaulle has marched at the head of his victory parade, convincing some (but not all) that he had liberated France entirely on his own. Across the country, collaborators are being executed, and the women who consorted too freely with Germans are being roughly dealt with. In the gaol at Fresnes are several women who have been liberated from Ravensbruck. They all claim to be victims of the Nazis, but are some of them not who they say they are?

Frederick Rowlands has been brought to Paris by Iris Barnes, an MI6 officer, to confirm – or refute – the identity of a woman he once knew in the days before he lost his sight. He meets Clara Metzner. She is skin and bone, after her incarceration in Ravensbruck, and he is uncertain. The next day, she is found dead in her cell, apparently haven taken her own life.

Fictional detectives seem to be perfectly able to do their jobs despite various physical and mental conditions which might be regarded as disabilities. Nero Wolfe was too obese to leave his apartment, Lincoln Rhyme is quadriplegic, Fiona Griffiths has Cotard’s syndrome, while George Cross is autistic. Christina Koning’s Frederick Rowlands isn’t the first blind detective, of course, as Ernest Bramah’s Max Carrados stories entranced readers over a century ago.

The febrile atmosphere and often uneasy ‘peace’ in Paris is vividly described, and we even have some thinly disguised real life characters with walk-on parts, such as Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Pablo Picasso, Edith Piaf, Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein and Wyndham Lewis.

As Rowlands and Barnes seem to be clutching at straws as they try to identify the girl who was murdered – a shock induced heart failure, according to the autopsy – the plot spins off at a tangent. Lady Celia, a member of the Irish aristocracy, asks Rowlands to trace a young man, Sebastian Gogarty, a former employee, who was last heard of as a POW in Silesia. He agrees, and as he and Major Cochrane, one of Lady Celia’s admirers head off on their search, they drive through a very different France. Paris, largely untouched by street fighting or bombs, is in stark contrast to the countryside further east, devastated by the retreating Germans. Gogarty has been living with a group of Maquis, but he returns to Paris after telling Rowlands and Cochrane about the execution of four female resistance members in his camp.

There is an interlude, tenderly described when, after failing to resolve issues in France, Rowlands returns to England. During the elation of VE Day, he recalls a more sombre occasion.

“He remembered standing in a crowd in Trafalgar Square as large as this one. It had been on Armistice Day, 1919. That had been a silent crowd, all the more impressive because of its silence. There had been no cheers, no flag waving as there was now. When the maroon sounded, the transformation was immediate. The roar of traffic died. All the men removed their hats. Men and women stood with heads bowed, unmoving. For fully two minutes the silence was maintained then and across the country. Everyone and everything stopped. Buses, trains, trams, and horse-drawn vehicles halted. Factories ceased working, as did offices, shops, hospitals and banks. Schools became silent. Court proceedings came to a standstill. Prisoners stood to attention in their cells. Only the sound of a muffled bell tolling the hour of eleven broke the silence.”

Rowlands and his family reconcile themselves to leaving their temporary home in Brighton for their bomb damaged home in London, but there is much work to be done. When not involved in investigations, Rowlands has worked with St Dunstan’s, the charity set up to employ blind veterans. Now, with tens of thousands of able-bodied military people being demobbed, will there still be work for them?

The action reverts to Paris, wth Rowlands returning, accompanied by young Jewish man, Clara Meltzner’s brother. It becomes increasingly obvious that some organisation is determined to prevent the true identity of the young woman murdered in Fresnes gaol being revealed. Rowland’s problem is that, despite the Germans no longer being physically present, everyone is at each other’s throats – the rival Résistance groups, Gaullists, communists, Nazi sympathisers – each has much to lose, and violence has become a way of life.

Christina Koning’s spirited account of a Paris springtime takes in so many evocative locations – Le cimetière du Père-Lachaise, the sinister depths of the Catacombs, the newly bustling shops fragrant with fresh baked bread and ripe fromage – that we are transported into another world. Murder in Paris will be published by Allison & Busby on 20th November.

November 18, 2025 0

FOR OUR SINS . . . Between the covers

Edinburgh, the present day. A man is found dead in near-derelict church, his head crushed by a collapsed wall. His wallet reveals that he was Kenneth Morgan, an elderly ex-criminal who had been living quietly on his own since coming out of jail five years earlier. In charge of the case is Detective Sergeant Janie Harrison, who remains central to the story, despite the distant presence of her former boss, Tony McLean who has retired from the force. McLean is contacted by investigative journalist Jo Dalgliesh, who asks him to meet a middle-aged man, Robert Murphy who, as a child, was the victim of sexual abuse by his parish priest. The priest was murdered in what appeared to be an interrupted robbery of church silver. Murphy has the strangest of tales to tell.

“I was a witness. And nobody listened to me when I told them what he’d done. And if he died, then how come I saw him on the street just a few weeks ago?”.

When another elderly man is found dead on the floor of a church, this time definitely by foul play, the police realise they have something strange on their hands. Both men were long-term associates of notorious gang boss, Archibald Seagram, a man who has remained conspicuously untainted by criminal convictions, despite being at the helm of an organisation responsible for much of the city’s serious crime for decades.

Meanwhile, Tony McLean is making the best of his ‘retirement’ and dutifully looking after his girlfriend Emma, who is slowly recovering from a stroke. He is acutely aware, however, that with the lack of mental and intellectual challenge that his job provided, One of the ‘ever presents’ in the excellent Tony McLean series is the transvestite spiritual medium Madam Rose, and it is his/her intervention that finally persuaded our man to do what his inner soul has been pressing him to do for months – offer himself back to Police Scotland.his life seems hollow and empty of purpose. Softly, softly, James Oswald is preparing us for some kind of comeback.

Every good police procedural novel needs a bad cop, and few are as loathsome as Detective Superintendent Pete Nelson. Detective Sergeant Jamie Harrison is at the core of the first half of this book, and Nelson is ‘on her case’ in all manner of ways, from professional vindictiveness to drunken groping in the pub. McLean’s former office still lacks a new tenant, and the department is worryingly understaffed, and so he returns, ostensibly just to help with this particular investigation.What we know, as readers, thanks to the short and intermittent flashbacks to 1980s, seen through the eyes of teenage altar boys, is that there is a religious aspect to this case and, specifically, connected to the Roman Catholic church.

McLean is one of the better fictional coppers in British crime fiction, and Oswald is a fine writer. Although McLean’s return to work is, to a degree, successful, we are left with no neat and conclusive answer to the reason why the three former criminals died. Nor do we learn why the severely disturbed Robert Murphy killed them, and his conviction that his church vestry abuser is still out and about is never explained, except perhaps because of his own mental state – or something paranormal has happened. For Our Sins was published by Headline in 2024, and there will be a new Tony McLean novel later this month.

November 16, 2025 0

SHOCKING CRIMES . . . Between the covers

We are in Dorset. Bournemouth, to be exact. But this is not the genteel Budmouth, Regency watering place of Thomas Hardy’s novels, but a much more hard-edged kind of place. The cast of coppers includes Detective Chief Superintendent Sophie Allen, Detective Chief Inspector Barry Marsh and Detective Inspector Lydia Pillay, Bournemouth CID, newly appointed to the role of DI.

Thirty eight year-old Pippa Chandler has been arrested for the murder of her disabled boyfriend Joshua Quick. She had recently inherited a house from her uncle and, while searching the property, police find a scrap of yellowing paper on which appears to be written a cry for help from a ten year-old child. A slapdash search of the house has revealed nothing of interest, but then a more assiduous crime technician discovers a false panel in the roof space. And behind the panel is a battered suitcase containing a grisly find – the dessicated remains of a child, later revealed to the corpse of a little girl.

Meanwhile, a seemingly unrelated investigation into a more recent tragedy is in focus. In a Bournemouth nightclub, a student called Holly collapses on the dance floor. She is rushed to hospital, where she lies between life and death. This wasn’t drink spiking, but ‘jabbing’ – a surreptitious injection with a throwaway hypodermic syringe, and Holly had an existing heart condition. In a dramatic and significant twist, Holly’s mother admits her historic links to the house where the child’s remains were found.

In general, there are two kinds of police/private investigator thrillers – the ones where the author keeps the perpetrator/s hidden from both us readers and the forces of law and order until the last few pages and those where we learn who the bad guys are early in the piece, with the entertainment coming from watching the police untangle the knots. Shocking Crimes largely falls into the latter category but Michael Hambling actually gives us the best of both worlds here. Yes, we learn early doors that Bruce Greenfield is a wrong ‘un, and we also know who his criminal associates were, but exactly who did what – and to whom – we discover through the eyes of the detectives.

Although elegantly plotted and with credible dramatis personnae, Shocking Crimes makes for uncomfortable reading at times as it delves into the fraught world of child protection, now known as Safeguarding. Having worked in this area myself, I am aware of the dark litany of historic failures laid at the door of professional adults charged with keeping young people from harm. In the end, as this novel shows, there are human beings so depraved and devoid of decency that no foolproof system to combat them has ever been devised. The novel will be published by Joffe Books on 13th November.

November 11, 2025 0

NASH FALLS . . . Between the covers

Wily veteran of scores of thrillers, Baldacci certainly builds down his central character in the first few pages. Walter Nash is a lanky, scrawny, rather uptight family man who only ever really loved his deceased pet dog. He is, however, thanks to his number crunching skills with a multinational company, prodigiously rich. And, after his fashion, he tries to be a good husband and father.

His own father, recently deceased, was a brawling and profane Harley-riding Vietnam vet who, to all intents and purposed, despised Walt for his prissy ways and lack of physical presence. One night, Walt has an unwelcome visitor in the shape of an FBI agent, and he has grim news to impart. Walt’s firm, coyly named Sybaritic, has been infiltrated (via one of its senior employees) by a criminal corporation connected to Chinese drug producers. The FBI people explain to Walt that the Chinese, unable to match the USA either militarily or economically, have chosen to inflict a slow death on America through the over-production and distribution of drugs like Fentanyl.

We learn that the ‘inside man’ on this operation is none other than Rhett Temple, the son of the firm’s founder. Then with customary narrative verve, Baldacci describes how Walt Nash’s near-perfect life is reduced to rubble by the perfect storm of an international criminal regime, corrupt cops and bent businessmen desperate to hang on to their wealth. Faced with false – but appalling – accusations, Nash is forced to go on the run, helped by one of his father’s old army buddies, a fearsome black man known as Shock.

What follows is, perhaps, the most implausible part of the story. It is a version of the old riff of a physically inept man who, by training and will power, is transformed into a formidable opponent. Under Shock’s watchful eye Nash is transformed from the puny guy who once had sand kicked in his face by beach bullies, to a remorseless killer. If you don’t get the sand reference, Google ‘Charles Atlas’. The internet will do the rest.

The portrayal of Nash, from his buttoned-down corporate executive days, via family tragedy through to his emergence from that chrysalis as someone quite different, is impressive. My last thoughts, are, I am afraid, something of a spoiler, but I always try to be honest. Walt Nash certainly undergoes a dramatic transformation and, motivated by a sense of vengeance, he rejoins the world from which he had been exiled, his true identity hidden from former acquaintances. However, those wishing for a conclusive resolution to the story must await the sequel, which is trailered at the end of this novel. Nash Falls is published by Macmillan and is out now.