REVIEWS

DEATH ON THE PIER . . . Between the covers

I hadn’t read a Pauline Rowson novel for years, but remembered that she is well known for her love of mysteries set in coastal locations. Here, in Death on the Pier, we are in a 1951 England with a recent war won, but with most ordinary people still struggling to support the costly yoke imposed by being, at least nominally, victors. Everyone, including the Metropolitan Police’s Detective Inspector Alun Ryga, still carries ration books. He is sent on an undercover mission to what was then ‘East End on Sea’, the brash resort of Southend.

A retired naval officer has found a bloodstained corpse in a municipal shrubbery. He goes to seek help and returns with a police constable, but there is no body, nor any sign that one was ever there. Is Clive Cottinglea a fraud, deluded, or part of some wider conspiracy? Posing as a tourist, Ryga befriends Cottinglea and senses that many things are not adding up. When Cottinglea is found dead in his deckchair on Southend’s celebrated pier, to quote our most celebrated crime writer, “the game is afoot.”

The dead man was clearly short of money, and his claims of being a veteran of the Battle of Jutland and skipper of one of Dunkirk’s heroic small boats have not convinced people at the local yacht club. When Ryga, literally over Cottinglea’s dead body, is forced to reveal that he is a London copper, Pauline Rowson has set the stage for a fascinating mystery.

The plot becomes deliciously complex. As Ryga waits for the post mortem to reveal just how Cottinglea died, the truth about the man’s real life is laid bare. As for being a Commander, the only people he ever commanded were a few housemaids and cooks. Cottinglea was a butler at a nearby stately home, and had been for some years. When, just months earlier, the Lady of The Manor had finally given up the struggle of maintaining Tyide Hall and recreating its 1920s halcyon days, Cottinglea had been paid off and given a decent reference, while the noble Lady sold the house and grounds to developers and flew off to America with the proceeds.

Cottinglea had enjoyed a brief but uncomfortable few days as a guest member of the local yacht club, but why had he been signed in by senior member Admiral Burnham? And why is Burnham now missing?

On one level, this is a standard murder mystery, albeit a very good one, but there is much more. Through the perceptive gaze of Ryga, Pauline Rowson gives us moving and compassionate portraits of ordinary people fighting an uneven battle against life’s vicissitudes.There is Miss Bard, the seemingly severe landlady of The Marigolds guest house. Once a bright and attractive woman, she is now an ageing spinster, saddled with debt but maintaining a brave face. Her carpets and furnishings are shabby, but scrupulously clean, and all that remains to her of a former better life are good manners and a sense of decency. Then there is Mrs Burnham, terminally Ill and virtually deserted by her husband who lacks the moral courage to cope with her illness face to face. Again, she remembers better times, but faces what is left of her future with quiet dignity.

We are also allowed to be observers of a very different England from the place we inhabit today. We meet men and women who, in one way or another, helped ‘win the war’. But what did they win? From individual workers, shopkeepers, pensioners and public servants right up to those who hold the government purse strings, there is a sense that, to quote Derek Raymond, the crust is on its uppers. I cannot claim to remember 1951, as I was just four years old then, but the legacy of those post-war years was a defining part of my later childhood.

Of course, Ryga gets to the bottom of the mystery, and we are presented with a very entertaining – if rather involved – solution. Above all, the book has a profound sense of social history and empathy with flawed but all-too-human characters, and this makes it memorable. Readers were introduced to Alun Ryga in Death In The Cove (2023) and this, the sixth in the series, will be published by Joffe Books on 26th August.

August 26, 2026 0

A SHROUD OF SNOW . . . Between the covers

Worcester, December 1145. Snow has dusted the frozen mud and filth of the streets, while the fringes of the city’s great artery, the River Severn, are beginning to freeze. Merchant Hamelin Isenmongere, apparently a benign and compassionate man from Gloucester, is found dead on the quayside, the side of his skull stove in by some heavy implement. No-one has a bad word to say about him. He was benevolent to the poor – including the child of the streets Godfilde (who will later play a significant part in the novel’s finale) – generous to the church, and dealt fairly with fellow traders in the city.

We are frequently reminded in this series that along with the turn of the seasons, and the implacable retreat and return of the sun, this was a society within which religious observance was deeply embedded. Early in the piece we are told that this is the third week of Advent. This season of the church’s year is a precious and significant time largely ignored these days, but one previously associated with great music and a sense of devotion.. A priest tells us that a woman, “did not come to Vespers, for her sons are still very small, but she came to Matins most days, and None sometimes.”

I am something of a lapsed Anglican and, of course, the religion of 12th century Worcester was the Roman Catholicism that was to endure for another four centuries, but the way in which the lives of rich and poor are underpinned by religious observances, both great and small is, somehow, comforting.

Readers of both authors may be surprised to find me likening Hawkswood to the great Noir writer Derek Raymond. The latter’s nameless sergeant, a relentless hunter of killers, does so as a service to the dead. Here, Bradecote, hunched over the body of a victim, whispers,
“A price will be paid for this, mistress.”
Like his twentieth century counterpart, Bradecote will avenge the dead, and he dedicates his labours to the lives – both noble and humble – that have been ended by acts of violence.

The English civil war of the 12th century smouldered – and occasionally burst into flames – for almost two decades. Stephen and Matilda were both grandchildren of William the Conqueror, and each claimed the throne. It has been in the background for all the Bradecote books, but here the question of dealings between noble supporters of the rival factions raises its head, causing Bradecote and his sergeants to tread very warily.

A particularly significant player in the civil war was Robert, Earl of Gloucester, the illegitimate son of Henry 1st and a fervent supporter of Matilda, and the city of Gloucester is just under 30 miles downstream in the river from Worcester. I don’t know if the Norman French version of cherchez la femme differs significantly from the modern version, but Hamelin’s widow, the Lady Sybilla seems central to the story. How genuine is her grief for her murdered husband, and what is her relationship with the boatman Ragnaill of Duiblinn? Bradecote and Catchpoll eventually confirm that espionage is at the centre of the story, but not before there are more deaths.

Any assiduous historical novelist can do the technical research on the customs, sounds, smells, clothing and political structure of the period in which they set their story. Weaving all these details into a convincing tapestry is something else all together. This is where Sarah Hawkswood (top left) is in a class of her own. For three hundred pages or so, I lived and breathed the Worcester of December 1145, and the present day became just a shadow. Like any murder mystery, A Shroud of Snow is riven with death, but it ends beautifully, just days of the most important Nativity of all, with a birth. It will be published by Allison and Busby on 20th August. For reviews of earlier novels in the series, click the author image.

August 18, 2026 0

THE HONORABLE MEMBER FOR MURDER . . . Between the covers

Maxwell Murray is personal assistant to Eliot Oakcroft MP, a handsome but utterly vacuous man with political ambitions that are routinely ignored each time there is a cabinet shake-up. The pinnacle of his career thus far is more of a gentle hillock – he is chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for miscarriages of justice, an appointment mainly designed to keep Oakcroft out of the prematurely grey hair of the Chief Whip.

The body of Charlie Cley is eventually found in a Norfolk cottage. Problem is, though, he did not die three years ago when he was first reported missing, but more like three hours earlier – and from a glass of red wine laced with poison. Rebecca Cley is released from her prison cell on the perfectly reasonable grounds that when her husband died, she was under lock and key in HMP Norton St Meals.

What sort of a hero is Max Murray? Can he carry the novel’s narrative on his back for 300 pages? The short answer is – no. He is too honest, too conciliatory and too hesitant. He needs the buccaneering instincts of Diana and Ronni to drag him from the calm waters of the harbour so that he can challenge the criminal Blackbeards and Captain Kidds out there on the open ocean. Is this Cosy Crime? If one applies the AI definition, “a sub genre of crime fiction without sex, or overt violence, typically featuring an amateur sleuth solving a puzzle or murder in a close-knit or picturesque community, emphasizing puzzle-solving, humour, and with a satisfying resolution where order is restored.’ then, yes, I suppose it is. The humour here is sharp enough, and there is just enough cynicism to lift the novel above the mire of elderly ladies cycling around Cotswold villages trying to discover who killed the local Master of Foxhounds. Such books were dismembered and cleverly eviscerated by the late, great Colin Watson in his excellent book Snobbery With Violence.

The crime(s) are solved eventually. more by the perscipacity of Diana than that of Max.I have a couple of minor quibbles; the last time I went to Fincham, the pubs were quite decent, and there was no sign of the breeze-block monstrosity featured here; as anyone who holds a firearms license will tell you, a rifle and a shotgun are two quite different things. That aside, I enjoyed the book, and found it an entertaining and witty read.

David Weir was born and brought up in Edinburgh where he played a lot of rugby and sang for the Pope in a national choir at Murrayfield and in Glasgow. He was a newspaper reporter for 11 years in Fife, Hampshire, Norwich and London interviewing among others Harry Secombe, Ralph Fiennes and a lot of politicians. Then, he went to work at the House of Commons advising MPs from all parties on constitutional stuff and arcane parliamentary procedures as well as running teams reporting on the Treasury, justice, prisons, courts, migration, policing, and Northern Ireland. This is his first novel, and it will be published by Allison & Busby on 20th August.

August 12, 2026 0

FIVE THINGS I SEE . . . Between the covers

Meet Detective Grace Hartwell, a homicide specialist in the police department of Jacksonville, Florida. Detective Hartwell is a loner, shuns social contact, and her life seems to rotate around the care of her cat, and her fierce fitness regime on the beachfront just below her house. She has two cases on the burner, both seemingly intractable. The more grisly is the murder of college lecturer Daniel Stewart and his wife Jessica. Jessica has not been sexually assaulted, but what is left of her face indicates the work of s deranged killer. The killer also abducted their young son, Shawn but, after an anonymous tip-off, he is found in the boot of an abandoned car, badly dehydrated, but otherwise unharmed.

Stewart was a serial philanderer, but who could he have upset enough to open up his femoral artery and stomp his wife to death? The death of Howie Scofield, a construction site inspector, was initially dismissed as suicide after his body was found next to a drained bottle of bourbon. It was assumed he had fallen from an unprotected balcony of the building he was expecting. But why was he there at the dead of night, and why has his house been ruthlessly turned over by burglars, and what were they searching for?

One of the Stewarts’ near neighbours is a man called Eddie Snow. Apparently a humble bartender, he has a security system of the intensity only used by federal cops and drug dealers. When Hartwell is warned off by her boss and told that under no account must Eddie Snow be investigated further, she smells a rather large rodent, both deceased and decomposing. When more female murder victims are found, with each bearing the grisly marks of what was inflicted on Jessica Stewart, the pressure intensifies on the Jacksonville cops.

If that weren’t enough, Grace becomes convinced that Howie Scofield was killed because he had uncovered a massive fraud being inflicted on the city finances by Glade, the construction firm involved. And Glade’s boss? Jackson Masters, a popular and powerful councilman who just happens to be one of Grace’s personal friends.

Each chapter begins with an italicized section of conversation. These conversations appear to be between a patient and and a therapist, but their relevance is not revealed until later in the novel. One rather obvious giveaway in this excellent novel is that, just over 70% in, according to my Kindle, Grace has her man. He has means, method and motive. Having a solution that far from the end of the book sends up a pretty obvious red flag that she has made a mistake. Or has she?

The solution to the mismatched DNA that crashes and burns Grace’s case is imaginative but plausible. The pyschotherapy conversations are eventually explained, but in a totally unexpected way. Wendy Church throws in a few well-loved tropes, such as the lazy. lack-lustre misogynist fellow officer, and the tight lipped senior cop ‘just following orders’.

Wendy Church’s novels are informed by extensive international travel and many careers. She’s been a bartender, tennis pro, management consultant, nonprofit CEO, PhD researcher, and dive bar cleaner. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her partner, and when not writing spends her time as personal valet to several furry housemates.

Like all the best female detectives, Grace Hartwell rides into The Valley of Death in the last few pages, and we fear the worst. In one way, and not a bad one, this novel is archetypal American CriFi, in that it is slick, tightly plotted, scattered with knowing product placement and cultural references. Fans of more leisurely British police procedurals may not find as much joy here as I did, but I shall now be on the lookout for Grace Hartwell’s next case. Five Things I See will be published by Severn House on 4th August.

August 3, 2026 0

BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS . . . Between the covers

“May you be in heaven half a full half hour before the devil knows you’re dead”
(Traditional Irish toast)

In this thriller, FBI partners Gus Wheeler and Vanessa Lambert travel to rural Maine to investigate the death of a teenage boy, whose shallow grave has been discovered by scavenging animals. His face is unrecognisable and, lying on his chest inside the rough pine coffin is a cross made of lead. He is eventually identified as Adam Carson. On arrival in Maine, the two agents, who might actually be on the young side to get the movie reference, realise that they are about to drive into what we older mortals might call ‘Deliverance Country’.

Fans of John Connolly’s superb Charlie Parker novels will be familiar with the forests of Maine, with its decaying cemeteries, isolated communities and memories of ancient evil. The author gives us little opportunity to draw breath. Adam Carson’s girlfriend has also gone missing, but neither her parents or their neighbours seem particularly bothered. Then, two more bodies are discovered. One is male, purely skeletal, and has been dead for some time. The second, a woman is equally unidentifiable, but for a different reason. Her corpse is charred beyond recognition, but the pathologist delivers a disturbing conclusion. She was standing while she burned.

If there was any lingering doubt in the minds of Wheeler and Lambert that they are – literally – in a dangerous place, their motel room is firebombed and they are lucky to escape with their lives. Stories of unspeakable deeds committed by religious zealots, using their faith as an excuse, are nothing new in crime fiction. An essential staple of such plots is the existence of a spiritually powerful central figure, revered but his or her congregation. The minister of the Slaves of the Secret Heart of Jesus is a forbidding character called Father Benedict, a former Jesuit now excommunicated by the Roman Catholic Church.

Few thriller writers can resist the trope of a bad guy hiding within the ranks of the good men and true. The trope works best when it comes as a complete surprise, with readers being given few if any clues, and so it is here. Authors with musical axes to grind can be mildly irritating. The late Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks had a very individual CD collection and, of course, Morse was a music lover. Mark Billingham’s Tom Thorne’s almost perpetual depression was usually accompanied by the lonesome tenor of Hank Williams. Gus Wheeler, however is a jazz man, and a string bass player. He even takes a rather dismal fold-up bass with him on his assignments. In my (probably limited) view, jazz died with Bix Beiderbecke, and so I couldn’t connect to Wheeler’s obsession, but that didn’t ruin a good novel, which has a captivating blend of menace, human frailty and the power of landscape.

R. John Dingle lives and writes from a restored 200 year-old house, on a small island in Mid-Coast Maine. The often-haunting themes of the rocky coast, as well as a lifetime of experiences in and around New England’s small towns, farms, and cities, provide excellent inspiration for the tones and moods reflected in Dingle’s mysteries and psychological thrillers. The two previous novels in this series are Karma Never Sleeps and Wings of Madness. Before The Devil Knows will be published by Tule Publishing on 29th July

The book will be available from Tule Publishing from 29th July.

July 28, 2026 0

CRIME IN THE GYM . . . Between the covers

The best fictional detective pairings are usually chalk and cheese, Yin and Yang, oil and vinegar – choose your own metaphor. DI Gilbert ‘Gil’ Markham and George Noakes fit the bill. Markham is subtle, erudite, good looking, and conflicted in love. Former Sergeant, now civilian consultant Noakes is blunt, uncouth, dressed like a nightmare – and is happily married. In their latest case, a celebrity Paralympic athlete is found battered to death in the weights room at the local Fitness For All gym. Jack Donahue, despite being confined to a wheelchair, was handsome, charismatic, and something of a poster boy. To some. To others, he was egocentric, vain, controlling and irretrievably damaged by a poisonous childhood. Donahue was doing a PhD at Bromgrove University and there is an extensive list of people who Donahue had upset, in one way or another.

Bedwell, Eloise – Secretary to the University Sociology dept.
Chase, Douglas – a right wing activist and post-graduate student
Crozier, Neil – gym manager
Cunningham, Deirdre – Donahue’s former personal trainer
Dade, Camilla – Donahue’s psychotherapist
Dawson, Vergie – Donahue’s alcoholic estranged mother
Dempser, Mr – former solicitor and gym member
Dixon, Poppy – ghostwriter of Donahue’s proposed autobiography
Eliot, Valerie – supermodel, and Donahue’s former girlfriend
Eyre, Dr Peter- Deputy Head of Sociology
Fairbairn, Isobel – ‘Silverfit’ gym member
Gage, Diana – disability rights campaigner
Gannon, Professor – Head of Sociology
Gillespie – piano accompanist for Silverfit dance classes
Goodwin, Richard – Donahue’s agent
Grosser, Michael – elderly gym member

I normally like to have a sense of place in crime novels, but I am not sure where we are here. The town is called Bromgrove but, even with a missing ‘s’ we are not in Worcestershire. There is a Medway Medical Centre, so perhaps we are in Kent, but the author gives us few clues. Markham’s love life is temporarily on hold. His long term relationship with his former lover Olivia, a vivacious but edgy woman, had ended, but they have established an uneasy platonic friendship. Meanwhile, he has distinctly unprofessional thoughts about his colleague Kate Burton, woman who is as cool and enigmatic as Olivia is emotional and impulsive.

When two older women connected with gym are also found murdered, the case becomes even more complex. I checked the sequence of Gil Markham novels, and it looks as if this is the 24th in the series since 2019, with some years producing four episodes. This may not be what it seems, as Joffe Books sometimes republishes novels under different titles. Despite the remarkable quantity of novels, here, at least, the writing is excellent throughout, with Catherine Moloney adopting a cool, almost sardonic tone and, wisely, underpinning Noakes’s near-clownish persona with hints that he is a serious copper and a decent family man. She has a wicked sense of humour as she describes Georges wife:

“Mrs Noakes, as ever when entertaining Markham, was dressed as if she expected to be photographed for Country Life, modelling a satin floral dress that made Olivia think of somebody’s missing curtains.”

Markham has a parallel case to contend with, that of a sexual predator who is targeting women at a local beauty spot known as Black Wood, but when a local journalist who has been helping the police is found dead, Markham feels surrounded by death, with no clue in sight, and no sign of a breakthrough. The sexual assaults and the murders are eventually solved, but I have a confession. In the end, I wasn’t that bothered who killed Jack Donahue. He seemed to be self-obsessed and abrasive. Not that those deficiencies should earmark someone for death, because someone, somewhere, loved him.

The reason for my lack of interest? The sheer quality of the writing describing Markham’s team and its inner dynamics made me laugh, made me think, and made me glad I was a fly on the wall. Forget who committed what, but revel in the superb characterisations that Mooney brings to the table. This is high quality writing – observant, witty, subtle and engaging. Crime In The Gym will be published by Joffe Books on 27th July.

July 24, 2026 0

THE QUIET KILL . . . Between the covers

London, early December, 1987. Detective Constable Jamie Day has been transferred from his relatively peaceful Suffolk home town to work with the Met, and his introduction to the decadent grimoire of the capital couldn’t be more horrific. He is first on the scene at Leyton railway station in east London, where the station master (with the help of urban foxes) has discovered body parts dumped in bin liners. It turns out to be the remains of Callum Michaels, a young man from Yorkshire who had recently arrived to begin work on a construction site.

It transpires that Callum was gay, and had effectively been kicked out of home by his rather puritanical father, after Callum and another lad had been rather indiscreet in a local park. Then, the frozen body parts of a middle aged homosexual, Johan Hendriks, is found in his chest freezer. The link between Callum and Johan is that they both had copies of the same ‘Tart Card’ (a business card advertising sexual services of all kinds, mostly to be found in public telephone boxes back in the day)

A third young man meets his maker, while police Top Brass are trying to keep a lid on things, due to Johan Henriks’ connection to people in High Places. In his innocence, Jamie Day is tricked into revealing details of the case to an unscrupulous journalist (is there any other kind?) and is suspended.

Robert Bryndza, like Jamie Day, is a native of Lowestoft. The Suffolk coastal town was once a thriving port but, even in 1987, it was beginning its downward spiral into being considered a significantly deprived town, with some areas ranked among the 10% most deprived in England, particularly regarding education, skills, and income. Like its near-neighbour, Yarmouth, it is a shadow of its former self.

It needs saying that this book is not a murder mystery, in the sense that there is any doubt over the identity of the killer is resolved fairly quickly. The tension comes from wondering just how the police are going to find him. It needs to be emphasised that the storyline is centred on the Gay scene in 1980s London and, in places, it is very graphic. Robert Bryndza spares us none of the gory details, but he always tells a good story, and you can read my thoughts on his earlier books by clicking this link. The Quiet Kill is published by Raven Street Books and is available now.

July 9, 2026 0

WHAT THE DYING SEE . . . Between the covers

Manchester. The present day. The central character is DI Thomas Ridpath, and member of the Major Incident Team (MIT), who doubles as Coroner’s Officer. He is a widower with a teenage daughter about to face her GCSEs. We learn right from the start that a serial killer is at large. He specialises in a warped version of Assisted Dying, and injects his elderly victims with fatal doses of pain relieving drugs. We know this. The police have no idea.

Central to the narrative is Margaret Challinor, the Coroner. She has returned to work after being debilitated by a savage random assault, which resulted in her being in a coma for many weeks. She has recovered. But has she? Thundering headaches suggest that all is not well, but she is a formidable woman, and battles on through the pain.

MJ Lee clearly has experience of being the subject of word-salad management speak. Here, a new commander (recently promoted from Traffic) gives the team an inspirational address:

“The Chief has asked me to bring managerial systems and competence to the organisation of the solution of crimes, to be data-driven in this age of AI, computers and complex analytics, an approach that builds on our core competences and resilience, but takes advantage of the sizeable opportunities afforded by this new technology and analytics to create a force that is forward-thinking, creative rather than reactive, one that uses its resources to the limits of their capabilities to serve the people of Manchester, ensuring they feel secure and protected as they go about their daily lives.”

Ridpath is resolute, persistent, and no-one”s fool. Those three qualities make him a thorn in the side of his pusillanimous senior managers who are bitterly resentful that a spreadsheet macro cannot bring to justice the person who is taking such obvious delight in ending the lives of Ill and vulnerable old people. Ridpath’s dogged attention to detail closes the case, but not before his own life is put on the line.

Apart from his scathing caricature of Ridpath’s boss and his oleagenous lanyard – class pomposity, MJ Lee doesn’t preach or wave any particular banner. The story – an excellent police procedural – did make me wonder about the overly politicised leadership of our police forces. I am not a Londoner, but the replacement of the ineffectual Cressida Dick with the operational paralysis induced by Mark Rowlands is a case in point. It you can hear my sigh of impotent despair, then it will be momentary. This particular rant is for another day. What The Dying See is published by Canelo and is out now.

July 7, 2026 0

THE WORDS I NEVER WROTE . . . Between the covers

Jane Thynne’s novel spans many decades, and takes us from London, Paris and Berlin to New York. The central characters are sisters Cordelia and Irene Capel. Born into an aristocratic English world, the sisters take very different paths when Irene marries the heir to a German industrial empire and moves to Berlin. Cordelia, meanwhile, hoping for a career as a writer, takes a job as a secretary at the Paris office of a London newspaper.

Irene discovers – at first with amusement and then, as the true nature of the party is revealed to her, dismay – that her husband Ernst is an admirer of the Nazi party – and the feeling is mutual. At social functions she rubs shoulders with, among others, Herman Goering and Reinhardt Heydrich. She also meets Martha Dodd, the captivating daughter of the American Ambassador. Dodd went on to have a career as a novelist and Soviet spy, but shortly before her father is recalled to America, she tells Irene what Berlin is really like:

“I had a lover once who was chief of police and he put the fear of the devil into me. He said Berlin was a vast network of espionage, terror, sadism and hate from which no one could escape.”

Along the way, we meet other real life characters such as Hardy Amies, Adolph Eichmann, Arthur Koestler and Kim Philby. Jane Thynne’s account of the paradox of late 1930s Germany is familiar, but still painful to read. On the one hand there was the booming economy, miniscule employment, and a burgeoning sense of national identity. On the other hand, the relentless surveillance by the Gestapo and the descent into state sponsored thuggery should haunt everyone, including modern Germans and its neighbours who sat back and watched it happen.

The narrative is cleverly constructed, and its master stroke is the introduction of modern day photographer Juno Lambert who buys an old portable typewriter for a photo shoot and uncovers a mystery that is as enchanting as it is chilling. Jane Thynne poses an exquisitely painful moral question, which is centred around the life of Irene. We see her as a newly-wed in the heady days of pre-war Berlin, with a glittering social life on the arm of her husband, Ernst. Their villa on the shores of the Wannsee, is a paradise, with a fertile garden rich with fruit and delicious vegetables. Literally ‘the house next door’ was where Reinhardt Heydrich chaired the infamous conference which drove the final nail into the coffin of Europe’s Jews.

We see Irene in the early months of 1945. The house is undamaged, but Ernst is long dead, killed on the Eastern Front. She boils the remains of vegetables to make an apology for soup. She trades her Cartier watch for a rabbit at the butcher shop. Everywhere, the talk is ‘what will happen when the Ivan’s arrive?’ The women of Berlin know only too well.

The moral question is this. Do we sympathise with people like Irene, betrayed by a corrupt and vainglorious government, or do we opt for that word (that only the Germans could invent) Schadenfreude? Although, wordwise, most of the novel is full of the stories of Irene and Cordelia, Juno Lambert is the key which unlocks the past. Juno rents the Villa Weissmuller in 2016 and, having read Cordelia’s manuscript, hidden in the case of the antique typewriter, she is anxious to find out if the sisters were ever reconciled.

There is an exquisite moment of irony when, with the Red Army rampaging through Berlin, we read how Irene’s recent lover, Obersturmbannführer Alex Hoffman, and the young Jewish man she has been sheltering for weeks, cower together in the hastily constructed hiding place behind the ornate shelves of the house’s library.

This magnificent novel is many things: a record of atrocities almost too awful to contemplate, let alone describe in words; several stories of love, some of which end in tragedy; a hymn of praise for Berlin, a city which has suffered unspeakable cruelty, but a place resilient enough to reinvent itself; finally, it is an encomium for the human spirit and an echo of Larkin’s words, “What will survive of us is love.” The Words I Never Wrote is published by Sharpe Books and is available now.