REVIEWS

THEM WITHOUT PAIN . . . Between the covers

Leeds. The early early summer of 1825. Simon Westow is a Thief-taker, a man who recovers stolen goods for a percentage of their value. He has no legal powers except his own knowledge of the city and a keen intelligence. When he encounters criminals, it is up to the city Constable and the magistrates to apply the law. Followers of this series will be familiar with the dramatis personnae, but for new readers, we have:

Simon Westow, Thief-taker
Rosie, his wife
Richard and Amos, their twin sons
Jane Truscott, former assistant to Westow. Very streetwise and deadly with a knife
Catherine Shields, an elderly widow who has provided Jane with a home
Sally – another child of the streets, and Jane’s replacement

Westow is summoned to the house of Sir Robert Foley, a wealthy man whose man-servant has absconded with two valuable silver cups. Foley wants them returned. When the manservant, Thomas Kendall, is found murdered in a secret room of an old city property just about to be demolished, Westow is told, by a Mr Armistead, that the room was once the workshop of Arthur Mangey, a silversmith, who was executed over a century earlier for the crime of Coin Clipping – snipping the edges off silver coins and then re-using the silver.

When Armistead himself is found murdered, Westow finds himself chasing shadows, and unable to make the connection between the ancient misdeeds of Arthur Mangey and persons unknown who are deeply involved in all-too-recent criminality. There is a seemingly unconnected story line in the book, but old Nickson hands know that it will, eventually, merge with the main plot. A disabled Waterloo veteran, Dobson, has gained a mysterious companion known only as John, but when brutalised corpses begin to appear, John becomes the prime suspect. The corpses have been flayed and brutalised almost beyond recognition. Westow, still doggedly determined to find the missing silver cups is increasingly reliant on the quicksilver street-smarts of Sally, and the old head on young shoulders of Jane, who had hoped for a life away from the streets, but has been drawn back into the dangerous game by her determination to avenge the death of Armistead.

A recurrent theme of Nickson’s Leeds novels, both in these Simon Westow tales, and the Tom Harper stories, set eight decades later, is that of the search. Both Westow and Harper frequently become involved in a search for a key suspect, often someone from ‘out of town’. It is a very simple literary device, but a very effective one, as it provides a platform for Nickson to use his unrivalled knowledge of the city as it once was, its highways, byways, grand houses and insanitary tenements. As we follow Weston’s search for a ruthless killer, the modern streets of Leeds that many readers know are stripped away to reveal the palimpsest of the buildings that once stood there and the people who inhabited them.

Another essential feature of the books is that his heroes don’t inhabit a timeless world, where they are perpetually in their early thirties, strong and vigorous. Tom Harper aged as the series went on, but he was allowed a comfortable old age and peaceful death. Here, Simon Westow is shaken by the recognition that, like Tennyson Ulysses, the years have taken their toll:

“ Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

He is aware that his reflexes are slower, the antennae that once sensed danger and threat are less sensitive, and he is ever more conscious of his own mortality, and his need of people like Sally and Jane to watch his back.

The novel boils down to three pursuits. Simon Westow hunts the man who stole Sir Robert’s cups, Sally wants her knife deep inside the man, known only as John, who murdered her fellow urchin Harold, while Jane vows to kill the man who killed the amiable and blameless Armistead.

Chris Nickson never sugar-coats history, and makes us well aware that modern Leeds, with its universities, its international sporting venues and museums, was built on the blood sweat and tears of millions of ordinary people who grew up, toiled, loved lived and died under the smoky pall of its foundry furnaces, and had the deafening percussion of industrial hammers forever ringing in their ears. Jane, Sally and Simon-at a cost-each get their man in this excellent historical thriller, which is published by Severn House and is available now. For reviews of previous Simon Westow stories, click the author image on the left.

September 16, 2024 0

HOLMES AND MORIARTY . . . Between the covers

No fictional character has been so imitated, transposed to another century, Steampunked, turned into an American, or subject to pastiche than Sherlock Holmes. In my late teens I became aware of a series of stories by Adrian Conan Doyle (the author’s youngest son) and I thought they were rather good. Back then, I was completely unaware that the Sherlock Holmes ‘industry’ was running even while new canonical stories were still being published in the 1890s. Few of them survive inspection, and I have to say I am a Holmes purist. I watched one episode of Benedict Cumberbatch’s ‘Sherlock’, and then it was dead to me. As for Robert Downey Jr, don’t (as they say)”get me started.” For me, the film/TV apotheosis was Jeremy Brett, but I have a warm place in my heart for the 1950s radio versions starring Carleton Hobbs and Norman Shelley.

How, then, how does this latest manifestation of The Great Man hold up? The narrative has a pleasing symmetry. The good Doctor is, as ever, the storyteller, but as the book title suggests there is another element. Alternate chapters are seen through the eyes of a man called Moran who is, if you like, Moriarty’s Watson. Gareth Rubin’s Watson is pretty much the standard loyal friend, stalwart and brave, if slightly slow on the uptake. Moran’s voice is suitably different, peppered with criminal slang and much more racy.

The case that draws Holmes into action is rather like The Red Headed League, in that a seemingly odd but ostensibly harmless occurrence (a red haired man being employed to copy out pages of an encyclopaedia) is actually cover for something far more sinister. In this case, a young actor has been hired to play Richard III in a touring production. He comes to Holmes because he is convinced that the small audiences attending each production are actually the same people each night, but disguised differently each time.

Meanwhile, Moriarty has become involved in a turf war involving rival gangsters, and there is an impressive body count, mostly due to the use of a terrifying new invention, the Maxim Gun. There is so much going on, in terms of plot strands, that I would be here all week trying to explain but, cutting to the chase, our two mortal enemies are drawn together after a formal opening of an exhibition at The British Museum goes spectacularly wrong when two principal guests are killed by a biblical plague of peucetia viridans. Google it or, if you are an arachnophobe, best give it a miss.

Long story short, three of the men who led the archaeological dig that produced the exhibits for the aborted exhibition at the BM are now dead, killed in some sort of international conspiracy. It is worth reminding readers that as the 19thC rolled into the 20thC, the pot that eventually boiled over in 1914 was already simmering. Serbian nationalism, German territorial ambitions, the ailing empires of the Ottomans and Austria Hungary, and the gathering crisis in Russia all made for a toxic mix. This novel is not what I would call serious historical fiction. It is more of a melodramatic – and very entertaining – romp, and none the worse for that, but Gareth Rubin makes us aware of the real-life dangerous times inhabited by his imaginary characters.

Eventually Holmes, Watson, Moriarty and Moran head for Switzerland as uneasy allies, for it is in these mountains that the peril lurks, the conspiracy of powerful men that threatens to change the face of Europe. They fetch up in Grenden, a strange village in the shadow of the Jungfrau and it is here, in a remarkably palatial hotel given the location, they are sure they have come to the place from which the plot will be launched. By this stage the novel has taken a distinctly Indiana Jones turn, with secret passages, and deadly traps (again involving spiders).

This is great fun, with all the erudition one would expect from The Great Consulting Detective and with a rip-roaring adventure thrown in for good measure. It is published by Simon & Schuster, and will be available at the end of September.

September 11, 2024 0

A VIOLENT HEART . . . Between the covers

David Fennell introduced us to London copper DI Grace Archer in The Art of Death (2021) Now, she returns in a complex new case which involves cold case crime and the murders of sex workers, decades apart. The investigation becomes very here-and-now when the body of a young Croatian woman called Elena Zoric is found. She died from a puncture wound to her chest, but whatever killed her, it wasn’t a bullet.

The best police procedurals always give us a fly-on-the-wall account of the personalities and tensions that exist inside a police station. Because her previous superior has been sideline and has to care for her husband, struck down with Long Covid, Grace Archer has a new boss, Chief Inspector Les Fletcher, He is described as a “gammon-faced Yorkshireman” with more than a trace of the toxic masculinity common to that breed. Archer’s wing man is Belfast born DS Harry Quinn – reliable and intuitive. Less helpful is DI Lee Parry, nephew of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, but about as much use as a chocolate fireguard. He is lazy, venal and prepared to cut corners for an easy life.

I have often observed that Detective Inspectors in British crime novels are, perhaps, overused. There are very sound reasons for this, however. DIs are perfectly placed to be both at the centre of investigations bureaucratically, while able to be out on the street, at the crime scene, and in the faces of the bad guys. Much more rare is the novel where a humble DC is the locus of activity. I can think of only one series, and that was written by Alison Bruce, and featured Cambridge Detective Constable Gary Goodhew. My review of The Silence is here. That being said DI Grace Archer is a welcome guest at a party held in a very crowded room.

We have here something of a whirling dervish of a plot, which spins this way and that and incorporates apparently disconnected events. We have a bizarre (but sadly all-too-credible) social ‘influencer’ called Calvin ‘Dixy’ Dixon whose latest Tik-Tok sensation shows him talking to the dessicated corpse of a woman sitting in a wheelchair in an abandoned house. There is also something that might become a ‘love interest’ angle, when Liam, a builder friend of Harry Quinn, is booked to renovate Archer’s house. He also happens to be extremely handsome, and brings with him freshly baked croissants to share before he starts work each day.

Then there is Mallory Jones, the guiding light in a successful podcast called Mallory Jones Investigates. She alternately helps and hinders Archer’s search for a man whose weapon of choice appears to be some kind of bolt gun. Finally, in far-off Berwick on Tweed, we have the Mercer family. Barry and Isla, and Isla’s brother Simon. Barry and Isla are both ex-coppers, but their teenage daughter Lily has fallen in with a bad crowd, and makes fistfuls of cash by appearing in amateur porn videos with her bestie, Gemma.

Archer is concerned to discover that, back in the day, her new boss Les Fletcher was, as a young PC, involved in the older murder investigations, and her informants tell her that he was rude and unsympathetic, strongly showing his prejudice that as ‘working girls’, getting assaulted by clients just went with the job.

As you might expect, David Fennell seizes the frayed ends of these plot strands and weaves them together to make for a highly satisfying conclusion. There is a savage and sanguinary denouement in, most appropriately, a disused abattoir. Not everyone survives the carnage, but as the emergency vehicles trundle off into the night, we have catharsis. Grace Archer certainly has her own demons to torment her, but she is a courageous and resourceful copper with a fierce determination to pursue the truth. A Violent Heart is published by Zaffre and is available now.

September 5, 2024 1

THE DARK WIVES . . . Between the covers

Readers who have also watched the successful TV series dramatising the Vera Stanhope novels will have their own views on how Brenda Blethyn’s Detective Inspector matches up to the woman on the printed page. I stopped watching TV versions of police procedurals years ago, with the demise of John Thaw, so my take is purely based on the book. Vera Stanhope is a dowdy, frumpish woman in her 50s, lonely and probably a social misfit. Brought up by an eccentric father, Hector, in a moorland cottage in Northumbria, denied (by premature death) a mother’s love, she is a formidably intelligent detective. She drives a battered Land Rover, has holes in her socks, and doesn’t suffer fools gladly.

Here, she is handed a complex case that has splintered into myriad issues. At its heart is the apparently motiveless murder, by hammer attack, of an undergraduate and part time social worker, Josh Woodburn. A teenage girl, Chloe Spence, who was a reluctant resident at Rosebank, where Josh worked shifts, has gone missing. Where is she, and why was film and media enthusiast Josh, unbeknown to his family, moonlighting with shifts at a children’s home?

Vera has the death of one of her team, a Detective Constable called Holly, on her conscience, but she takes a maternal interest in Holly’s replacement, Rosie Bell, a rather glamorous and fashion conscious young woman who is actually a very good copper. When another inmate of Rosebank, a young chancer called Bradley Russell is found dead in a remote hillside bothy, the case becomes more complex.Without, I hope, giving too much away, Vera’s hunch is that Josh Woodburn’s death is connected with what he was really doing at Rosebank. Josh was a decent, caring young man, and very good with the children, but that wasn’t the main reason he was there. When Vera, with the help of fellow officer Charlie, joins the dots, the picture also explains why Brad also had to die.

Both the season and the mood of the book are distinctly autumnal. Vera’s work is her life, and there seems to be little outside the job. The depressing world of broken homes, absent fathers, and a society where children’s homes are run by shadowy corporations on a distinctly for profit basis does not improve Vera’s downbeat view of the world but, to borrow a line from Matthew Arnold’s Thyrsis, “The light we sought is shining still.”, and in Vera’s case the faint glimmer is provided by bringing justice to the dead. She couldn’t be more different from Derek Raymond’s nameless detective in the Factory Novels (click for more information) but they have the same fierce resolve.

If years of reading police-procedural crime novels has taught me anything, it is that well-balanced, happily married Detectives are not fun. Vera Stanhope is forever on the edge of things, caught up in her own personal history and sense of regret, reluctantly wearing a halo of missed opportunities and ‘what ifs’.. Her fierce empathy with those society has cast aside, combined with her innate shrewdness and ability to pick out a ‘wrong-un’ make her one of the genre’s most treasured creations.

The Dark Wives of the title are three stone monoliths on the fellside near Vera’s home. Legend has it that they were three strong willed women who were turned to stone by husbands fed up with their feistiness. In the preface, Anne Cleeves writes:
“The book is dedicated to teens everywhere, and especially to The Dark Wives – uppity young women with minds of their own, struggling to find a place in a difficult world.”
The novel is published by Macmillan and was published on 29th August.

September 1, 2024 1

THE LAZAR HOUSE . . . Between the covers

Diane Calton Smith’s medieval mysteries, set in Wisbech, don’t follow a continuous time line. The most recent, Back To The Flood, is set in 1249, while The Lazar House, published in 2022, is set in 1339. The geography of the town is much the same as in The Charter of Oswyth and Leoflede, where the author takes us back to 1190. In this book, most of the town still sits between two very different rivers. To the west, The Wysbeck is a sluggish trickle, easily forded, while to the east, the Well Stream is broader and more prone to violence.

South of the town is the hamlet of Elm (now a prosperous village) and on its soil stands The Lazar House. It is a hospice for those suffering from leprosy. Basically under the governance of the Bishop of Ely it must, however, be self financing. There was a deeply held belief, in those times, in the concepts of Heaven, Hell, and their buffer zone of purgatory. People believed that if they had any spare cash or – more likely – produce, and they gave it to a charity such as The Lazar House, then prayers would be said that would minimise the time donors’ souls had to spend waiting in the celestial ‘waiting room’ of Purgatory.

A rather grand supporter of The Lazar House is Lady Frideswide de Banlon. Widow of a rich knight, she has bestowed on The Lazar House tuns of fine ale from her demesne’s brewery, and it is a vital part of their constant attempts to stay solvent. Remember that ale, of various strengths, was a standard drink for all, as there was little water safe enough to drink.

Sadly, there is a downside. Frideswide is scornful, aggressive and deeply unpleasant in her dealings with those she deems lesser mortals. There is no shortage of people she has belittled, offended or denigrated. Much of the story unfolds through the eyes of Agathe, daughter of a local Reeve. She has chosen to work as what we now call a nurse at The Lazar House. Despite her robes, she has not taken Holy Orders and, should she choose, is perfectly able to accept the offer of marriage, proposed by another lay member of the community, Godwin the Pardoner. Put bluntly, his job is rather like that of a modern politician working with lobbyists. In return for financial favours or donations in kind, he has licence to forgive minor sins and guarantee that prayers of redemption will be whispered on a monthly, weekly – or daily basis – depending on the size of the donation.

When Lady Frideswide is found dead beside the footpath between The Lazar House and the brewery, the Bishop’s Seneschal, Sir John Bosse is sent for and he begins his investigation. His first conclusion is that Frideswide was poisoned, by deadly hemlock being added to flask of ale, found empty and discarded on the nearby river bank. He has the method. Now he must discover means and motive. Bosse is a shrewd investigator, and he realises that Frideswide was not, by nature, a charitable woman, therefore was the valuable gift of ale a penance for a previous sin? Pondering what her crime may have been, he rules out acts of violence, as they would have been dealt with by the authorities. Robbery? Hardly, as the de Banlon family are wealthy. He has what we would call a ‘light-bulb moment’, although that metaphor is hardly appropriate for the 14th century. Frideswide, despite her unpleasant manner, was still extremely beautiful, so Bosse settles for the Seventh Commandment. But with whom did she commit adultery?

When Bosse finds out the identity of her partner ‘between the sheets’, he is surprised, to say the least, but the revelation does not immediately bring him any nearer to finding her killer. The solution to the mystery, in terms of the plot, is very elegant, and worthy of one of the great writers of The Golden Age. It comes as a shock to the community, however, and brings heartbreak to more than one person. Diane Calton Smith draws us into the world of The Lazar House to the extent that when they suffer, so do we. The last few pages are not full of Hardy-esque bitterness and raging against life’s unfairness. Rather, they point more towards the sunlit uplands and, perhaps, better times ahead.

This is as clever a whodunnit as you could wish to read, and an evocative recreation of fourteenth century England. The author brings both the landscape and its people into vivid life. Published by New Generation Publishing The Lazar House is available now.

August 26, 2024 0

THE LOST COAST … Between the covers

Sometimes, how co-writing works seems fairly obvious. Ambrose Parry is the husband and wife writing team of Chris Brookmyre and Dr Marisa Haetzman. Their books are set in early 19th century Edinburgh, and centre on a physician called Will Raven. I imagine Chris provides the crime fiction experience – plotting, dialogue and such, while Marisa provided the (sometimes gory) medical details. Much as I admire James Patterson for his early books (and his amazing work for charity) I imagine that these days, when you see a novel by JAMES PATTERSON (large print) WITH (slightly smaller print) RANDOM NAME, all he is doing is replicating the painting school in Renaissance Europe, where a painting might be identified today as “school of” Raphael, or Leonardo, but was actually produced by apprentices working to a set formula. Incidentally, I am told that there is a “school of” Damien Hurst, which involves budding young artists sitting in a studio making objects in the stylle of ‘the master’. I am a huge fan of Jonathan Kellerman’s Alex Delaware books, and if his son has some input with this, the latest book in the Clay Edison series, then fair play, as long as it is readable – and it certainly is.

Clay Edison is a former San Francisco coroner, and I reviewed previous books in the series, Lost Souls and The Burning (click the links to go the reviews). Now, Edison has given up working for the state, and is registered as a private investigator. This case starts when an old friend is unexpectedly named as executor in a deceased relative’s will. He asks Edison for help, because he has discovered that the old lady had been paying monthly amounts for years into what seems to have been a mortgage on a property in a remote coastal settlement called Swann’s Flat.

Initially doing much of the work online, Edison suspects that a massive scam has been set up. Yes, Swann’s Flat exists, but the houses and building plots are nothing like those shown in the glossy brochures which have sucked in many gullible people. The business structure is a complex web of false corporations hiding behind other companies that exist in name only.

Edison makes the long drive to see for himself. The place is wild, remote, and the last few miles into the settlement are a terrifying drive along a steep trail that rises and the plummets between vertiginous cliffs and gullies. When he finally makes it into the tiny town, he finds one or two larger houses behind forbidding security arrangements, but most of all he sees ‘streets’ that have name posts, but no houses, no utilities and a general sense of being abandon. There is, however, a hotel, where he checks in under an assumed name. Later, after meeting Beau Bergstrom and his father Emil, who seem to be the town bigshots, he convinces them that he is looking to buy a building plot.

By now, the writers have introduced what seems to be a separate plot involving a missing college-age boy called Nicholas Moore, whose poster was pinned up, with several others, outside a grocery store in the next town along. Edison is intrigued by this, and when he leaves Swann’s Flat, telling the Bergstroms that he is going to sort out all the arrangements for the land purchase they think he is going to make, he returns to The Bay Area, and makes contact with the boy’s mother,Tara. She is single, neurotic, and initially doesn’t trust Edison. She tells him she no money to pay for another investigation, but gives him the name of the last person she hired, a woman called Regina Klein.

There is yet another strand to the plot, and this involves an avant-garde novelist called Octavio Prado, with whom Nicholas had become obsessed. Prado, too, has disappeared, leaving only the one widely acclaimed published work, and another which was so over-the-top that his agent failed to find a publisher. It remains, in original handwritten form, and this becomes key to what is going on. The case has thrown up many seemingly unconnected questions, but Edison believes that the answers to them all lie in Swann’s Flat. He persuades Regina Klein to join him and, posing as man and wife they return. The Kellermans, père et fils, bring all the seemingly disconnected plot strands together with a final – and violent – flourish. This entertaining thriller is published by Century and is available now.

August 21, 2024 0

SERAPHIM . . . Between the covers

Seraphim – red-winged angels which, with , are among the first hierarchy of angels next to the throne of God. According to the Book of Isaiah in the Old Testament, they had six wings, one pair for flying, another covering the face and the third pair covering the feet.

Ben Alder is a Jewish lawyer from Massachusetts, but currently working, with his partner Boris, in post Katrina New Orleans. The pair work for the Public Defender’s Office, meaning they pick up what we in the UK call Legal Aid work. It is badly paid and they deal with people who are at the very bottom end of society. The novel deals with Ben’s attempts to save a father and son from a lifetime in jail. The father, Robert McTell is accused of burglary by going equipped with tools to steal copper pipe from a school abandoned after the destruction of Storm Katrina. His son, Robert Johnson is in much more serious trouble. He has admitted shooting dead a much loved community figure, Lillie Scott, who has been a leading light in the attempts to rehabilitate and rebuild the city after the devastation of the storm. Another savage murder, where four youngsters, were gunned down while they were listening to music in a stationary car, works its way into the story

Reviewers of crime fiction like to put books in genre pigeon holes. If nothing else, it gives potential readers a heads-up about the content and style of a novel. After all, there are thousands of new CriFi books published every year and, for many readers, leisure time is a valuable commodity. I have to say that Seraphim refuses to be categorised. The closest I can get is to call it literary crime fiction. Despite the blurbs, it certainly isn’t a legal thriller. There are no tense courtroom exchanges between defenders and prosecutors. The world Ben Alder inhabits is a dystopia of broken lives, broken homes and broken promises, fogged in a miasma of disillusionment, cynicism and expediency.

One commodity that is notable for its absence in the criminal justice world of New Orleans is truth. Everyone, from the judge down, through legal counsel to the men shackled in cells – lies. Habitually and constantly. The prisoners don’t deal in truth, because experience tells them it will bring only pain. The lawyers’ version of truth is to put a story together that a jury might possibly believe, and this tale can be many miles away from what actually happened.

The timeline of the novel needs you to pay attention. Some sections are the here and now, while others are pre-Katrina. Other events take place far away from New Orleans in places like Memphis, where the homeless are temporarily re-homed. Neither Ben nor readers of this powerful novel ever do find out who shot Lillie Scott. There was certainly another boy, Willard, present on that fateful evening, but in spite of Ben’s elaborate narrative – designed to be told in court – that Willard was smaller and much more clever, and Robert was clinging to him as his only friend, the ‘truth’ never emerges. This, of course, is entirely in keeping with the premise of the novel, which is basically that there is no such thing as truth. Ben, shyly homosexual, even invents two mythical sons so that he can throw them into conversations to boost rapport with his clients.

The narrative is shot through with grim poetry, sonnets of death, rejection and betrayal. Despite not being a devoted Jew, Ben’s upbringing and education make the symbolism of the Hebrew bible very important to him, hence the title of the book. Seraphim is a provocative and potent work of literary fiction, where violence, revenge and cynicism are shared out equally between the battered streets of New Orleans and its courts of justice. Published by Melville House, it is available now.

August 11, 2024 0

BACK TO THE FLOOD . . . Between the covers

It is March 1249, and England is ruled by Henry Plantagenet (Henry III) son of the unfortunate KIng John, who featured in an early tale of medieval Wisbech by this author, In The Wash (click to read the review). For Wisbech people, the King and his court are far away and unknown. Their immediate overlord is Hugh of Northwold, Bishop of Ely, for who much of Wisbech is his manorial property, meaning that residents must pay him annual rent. In November 1236, however, a disastrous tide (what we would now call a North Sea Surge), devastated the flimsier properties of the town, and when, thirteen years later, the Bishop’s Seneschal*. Roger of Abynton arrives to make an audit of rents and repairs, he finds that many of the Bishop’s buildings have not been rebuilt and remain unoccupied, thus providing no income stream.

*Seneschal – an agent or steward in charge of a lord’s estate in feudal times.

When Alured, a local baker, is found dead in the reeds at the edge of The Wysbeck (then a sluggish stream, but now the tidal River Nene) most people assume that he drunkenly fell into the water after one two many ales in one of the inns he frequented. Sir Roger, after examining the body, is not so sure. Scratches on the torso suggest that the man was dragged to the river bank. Finding people with a motive to kill Alured is the easy part. He was a cheat, drunk, foul of mouth and temper and seemed to live his life with one aim only – to antagonise and goad everyone he meets.

Sir Roger is, by modern standards, a decent detective. He comes to realise that Alured was not murdered because he baked contaminated bread, or because he was an argumentative drunk who enjoyed starting fights in pubs. The book’s title is completely apposite. Everything that happens is a result of what happened – or didn’t happen – on that fateful night when the North Sea surge crashed through the banks and defences of Wisbech and changed lives for ever.

So deeply does Diane Calton Smith immerse us in 13th century England that we are not in the least surprised to learn that the New Year began on 25th March, or that there was an extensive calendar of Saints’ Days, very few of which would be celebrated by feasts, at least in the modern sense of the word. There is also a sense of how big the world was in those days. A journey from Wisbech to Leverington, two minutes in the car these days, took hours on treacherous and often impassable tracks. We are also reminded of the sanctity of Lent. Meat was seldom a regular item on the tables of most poor townspeople, but during the Holy observance, the daily ‘pottage’ would contain only root vegetables, perhaps made more palatable with ‘ransom’ – not a criminal demand for payment, but something akin to what we call Wild Garlic. Ale was ubiquitous, because there was little or no safe drinking water. It would have tasted very different to modern beer, as the use of hops in the brew would not come for another three hundred years.

Hand in hand with the astonishing historical detail we have a very clever whodunnit. Wisbech these days is not much of a place, but at least we have our history. I am acutely aware, thanks to this superb novel (and its predecessors) that every time I walk into town, there is a palimpsest beneath my feet, a resonant reminder that these very streets were walked on by our ancestors, and that we tread in their footsteps. This is superb historical fiction, full of insight and empathy but, most importantly, forging links of a chain that connects us with our roots. Back To The Flood is published by New Generation Publishing and is available now.

August 11, 2024 0

PREY . . . Between the covers

I have to confess that I haven’t read a crime novel written by a New Zealand writer since, years ago, I blitzed the Inspector Alleyn stories by Ngaio Marsh. Although she was born and died in Christchurch, those stories are quintessentially English. Vanda Symon, by contrast, has written a successful series featuring Dunedin cop Sam Shephard, and Prey is the latest of these. Sam has returned from maternity leave, and almost immediately the state of open war between herself and boss, DI Greg Johns, resumes. He immediately gives her a cold case to work on. Twenty five years earlier, a priest at St Paul’s Cathedral, was found dead at the foot of some stone stairs. He had been stabbed, but also had a broken neck. Despite every best effort, no-one was ever arrested for the murder. And there is a problem. The Reverend Mark Freeman had a teenage daughter, Felicity. And now she is married to DI Johns.

As Sam struggles to adjust being back at work, and worries about ‘abandoning’ baby daughter Amelia (for those who like that sort of thing the author spares us no detail of the baby’s rather spectacular digestive system) she realises she has been handed a poison chalice. The crime scene has since been walked over by tens of thousands of pairs of feet, and there are a mere handful of people alive now who were connected to the case at the time. These are, in no particular order:
Yvonne Freeman, the murdered man’s widow. She has terminal cancer.
Felicity Johns, née Freeman, now married to DI Greg Johns.
DI Johns himself was on the investigating team as a young police constable.
Brendan Freeman, Felicity’s brother.
Mel Smythe, a young youth worker at the time of the killing. She has since become estranged from the church, and has fallen on hard times.
Aaron Cox, of Maori origin, and a former criminal. Mark Freeman had worked hard to put him on the straight and narrow path.

When Sam goes to interview Mel Smythe (for the second time) she finds her dead – stabbed with a kitchen knife, which makes the case very much a current murder investigation. But is it – and if so, how – connected to the death of Mark Freeman? It has to be said that in the first few pages of the book, a female witness watches, from behind a church pillar, a struggle between two people, one of whom is the Reverend Mark Freeman. Make of that what you will.

Sam Shephard is a very human creation with none of the foibles and weaknesses that many British writers love to give their police detectives. She is a proud mum and loyal partner to little Amelia’s father, fellow copper Paul Frost. She has a keen brain and a healthy sense of humour, and it is her intuition that allows her to finally realise she has been lied to, and thus crack the case open. This only happens, however, in the final pages of the novel, and not before we are led up many a garden path. The connections to the case of DI Johns and his wife only make more hot coals for Sam to walk over, and she faces an unenviable task of doing her job without becoming badly burned.

Vanda Symon creates a convincingly clammy picture of a wet and wintry Dunedin, and at the centre of it all, glowering over the wrongdoings of its congregation, is the menacing Victorian Gothic bulk of St Paul’s Cathedral. In addition to the gripping plot, Symon explores those eternal ingredients of all good crime novels – money, greed, shame, blackmail, hypocrisy and family secrets. Prey is published by Orenda Books and is available now.