REVIEWS

THE SHADOW NETWORK . . . Between the covers

Suspected war criminal Hannibal Strauss, a mercenary suspected of war crimes in Libya, Cambodia and elsewhere, is in custody near The Hague awaiting trial before the International *Criminal Court. The wheels of international war crimes justice grind extremely slowly, and as lawyers jostle for position, there is a terrorist outrage in the Netherlands capital. Gunmen open fire on a crowded square, the Grote Markt, killing not only individuals connected with the impending court case, but dozens of random civilians, too. One man involved in the Strauss case, Kon Frankowski, escapes and goes on the run.

*Factual note: the International Criminal Court (ICC) is separate and different from the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The ICJ is part of the United Nations, and investigates countries. The ICC investigates individuals, and is recognised by some – but not all – countries, a notable exception being Russia. Very few people have been convicted and jailed by the ICC, one being Charles Taylor, the former leader of Liberia. A third and unconnected organisation, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, did convict and jail Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić, while Slobodan Milošević died while his trial was in progress.

The mastermind behind the slaughter is an International terrorist known only as The Monk. His organisation has its roots in a pro-Tsarist resistance movement known as the Mladorossi. It has evolved over the decades, but remains a massive threat to international security.

Answering the call to investigate the Grote Markt massacre are Joe Dempsey, and agent with the (fictional) International Security Bureau, and his partner, criminal barrister Michael Devlin. They seem an unlikely pairing, to be honest. Dempsey is Special Forces trained, has killed many men in the course of his job, while Devlin is undoubtedly clever, but I’m not sure what his interlocutory skill brings to the table outside of the interview room. Hey ho, though, it’s a novel, so let’s run with it.

The reason why Frankowski is at the centre of this is that he was money-launderer-in-chief to Hannibal Strauss, and the Hungarian mercenary has entrusted Frankowski with a list of all Russian Mladorossi agents and how they are embedded across the world. This list – in the right/wrong – hands would almost certainly be the end for The Monk and his machinations. Joe Dempsey, however, has a rather delicate personal connection to Frankowski. Frankowski’s wife Maria is the former lover of Dempsey, who reluctantly ended the relationship because of the danger his work would bring to them if they became a family.

While Dempsey and Devlin are on the ground in the Netherlands, Agent Eden Grace – Dempsey’s ISB protégé, is handling things in America, and it is there that Maria Frankowski and her children have gone into hiding, as they have become an pawns in the violent chess game which seeks to find Kon Frankowski and the fatal list.

In all good spy thrillers, we must never take the author’s word that people are who we are told they are, and The Shadow Network is no exception.The Monk is hiding in plain sight, and neither we – nor Dempsey and Devlin – have a clue as to who he really is. This is a thoroughly entertaining thriller with fight scenes so real that just reading them may necessitate a visit to A & E with sympathetic wounds and trauma. It is published by Elliot and Thompson and will available on 15th February. Tony Kent, by the way, is that most unusual of pairings – a criminal barrister and heavyweight boxer. Cross him at your peril!

February 14, 2024 0

THE GHOST ORCHID . . . Between the covers

I suppose in the kingdom of detective partnerships, Holmes and Watson will never be dethroned, and quite rightly, too. I would however nominate (alongside Rizzoli and Isles, Morse and Lewis, Bryant and May, Wolfe and Goodwin) Alex Delaware and Milo Sturgis. Jonathan Kellerman’s duo of a child psychologist and LA homicide cop have for me, in dozens of novels, never failed to deliver. Yes, there’s a formula at work here, but that’s what makes all these partnerships work. Sturgis is abrasive, socially insecure and, because of his homosexuality, fighting an endless battle against his censorious LAPD colleagues, but he is a brilliant investigator: add into the mix Delaware’s social awareness, acutely attuned antennae for people telling lies, and you have a winning mix.

A glamorous woman and a younger man are found shot dead at a Bel Air property. Her expensive jewellery has not been taken, and it looks like a professional job. Sturgis asks Delaware to take a look at the crime scene*.

*For new readers who wonder why Delaware is brought into the case, it’s simple. It’s the way the books work. Sturgis is something of a maverick, loose-cannon, lone-wolf – choose your own metaphor- and as long as he does the business, his colleagues leave him alone, so he always welcomes the extra pair of eyes and psychological insight that Delaware brings. In case you were wondering, Delaware earns a good living as a court-acknowledged expert in legal cases involving children so, thankfully for fans like me, he can afford the time to help Sturgis.

It transpires the dead woman is Meagin March, whose husband Doug is a real estate billionaire, and the corpse alongside hers belonged to, as they say, her toy-boy. Not short of a cent or three himself, Giovanni Aggiunta is the errant younger scion of a top draw Italian shoe making firm. He receives a generous allowance to amuse himself while his older brother and other family continue creating wealth with their exclusive designer footwear. is not all she seems to have been, however, and it turns out that in a previous life she was a Vegas glamour escort. Yes, she finally snared Mr Right – and a life of luxury – but Delaware and Sturgis can find no-one who has a bad word to say about the murdered lovers, but become convinced that the woman was the intended target, and that her Italian lover was, sadly, collateral damage.

Doug March is a thoroughly unpleasant fellow. He was away on a business trip at the time, so it wasn’t his finger on the trigger of the .38 revolver, but could he have been so angry at Meagin that he hired a contract killer? Delaware is convinced that there is a message waiting to be discovered in one of the rooms of the March’s mansion. Meagin was an amateur artist and the room was her studio. All but one of her paintings are unremarkable ‘chocolate box’ scenes, but the exception seems to be a particularly severe abstract. Eventually, Delaware’s live-in romantic interest, Robin, identifies as a painting of a strange and rare flower, known as a ghost orchid*.

*Dendrophylax lindenii, the ghost orchid (a common name also used for Epipogium aphyllum) is a rare perennial epiphyte from the orchid family. It is native to Florida, the Bahamas, and Cuba. Other common names include palm polly and white frog orchid.

Robin provides more insight by suggesting that Delaware and Sturgis take a look at the unusual spelling of the dead woman’s name. I won’t say any more, but it’s not too hard an anagram to solve. These fresh clues result into a deep dive into ‘Meagin’s’ childhood which reveals horrors hitherto unsuspected. Delaware and Sturgis finally get their killer, but not quite in the way they were expecting. This is another classy and absorbing tale from the casebook of one of modern crime fiction’s most endearing partnerships. It is published by Century/Penguin Random House and will be out on 15th February.

February 11, 2024 0

SMOKE KINGS . . . Between the covers

Titles of books and movies can be meaningless word pairings dreamed up by twenty-something publicists. Remember the scene in one of the Naked Gun movies at the Oscars? In the Best Picture shortlist were spoof films like Naked Attraction, Violent Lunch, Fatal Affair, Final Proposal, Basic Analysis..? So, what to make of Smoke Kings? A few moments spent on Google rewarded me with a poem written in 1905 by W.E.B. Du Bois.

The writer was an activist years ahead of his time, and by adapting his words, Jahmal Mayfield nails his colours to the mast, although his Amazon bio declares that Smoke Kings was inspired by Kimberly Jones’ passionate viral video, “How can we win?” After his cousin, Darius, has been been beaten to death by white teenagers, Nate plots his revenge. Rather than taking out the boys who killed his cousin, Nate targets the descendants of white men and women who, he argues, are responsible for lynchings, racist beatings and murders committed by their grandparents decades previously. Nate and three friends – Rachel, Isiah and Joshua – exact a kind of third party vengeance on a succession of targeted individuals. Most escape death only because they commit to paying sums of money every month to deserving causes in the black community.

Inevitably, the quartet bite off more than they can chew. One of their reprieved victims hires a former cop – Mason Farmer- on a ‘seek and destroy’ mission. He is freshly sacked from a private security firm after he fails to tick the right number of boxes on their Inclusion and Diversity check list, and he sets out to nail the quartet of avengers.

Nate and his buddies make another serious strategic error when they kill a random redneck called Chipper, and bury him in a remote grave. Sadly for them, Chipper’s brother Samuel is the charismatic leader of a violently racist gang, and they are determined to avenge Chipper’s death.

Mayfield is at his most assured when describing the complex relationships between the four would-be avengers, and how they sometimes bicker about how black they actually are. Mason Farmer, too, has his preconceptions about race and identity tested when, while searching for Nate and company, he meets a mixed race woman – a campaigner for justice – called Elizabeth, and falls for her, despite her antipathy towards him. Farmer’s attitudes towards race and identity are already complicated, as his estranged daughter has a son by a black father.

The racist gang term themselves The Righteous Boys: they are deeply unpleasant, and live even worse lives:
“He drove on into the night, past fields of wild grass, old farmhouse buildings slumping like stacks of damp cardboard boxes, useless tractor equipment rusted the colour of dirty bricks. A forgotten and desolate wasteland. No wonder The Righteous Boys had chosen to call the area home.”

I read the novel pretty much back to back with re-reading a couple of Harlem Detectives novels by Chester Himes, and it left me wondering if someone had written A Rage In Harlem or The Real Cool Killers today, whether or not anyone would publish them, such is the glee with which Himes portrays the eccentricities and sometimes deeply venal nature of some of the characters. Smoke Kings is very different, as there is little ambiguity about where good and evil reside. The narrative of the book raises all kinds of very contemporary questions about ancestral guilt, both on an individual and national level. Smoke Kings is a breathless journey down the bumpy track that leads to revenge, and is published by Melville House, available now.

February 8, 2024 0

ARCADIA . . . Between the covers

Psychopathy and comedy are not natural companions, but Guy Portman has this strange relationship down to a ‘T’ In his novels Necropolis (2014), Sepultura (2018) and Golgotha (2019) we followed the rise and fall of the elegant, analytical and ruthless killer Dyson Devereux. Then, in Emergence (2023), we learned that he had a love child. Well. let’s rephrase that. He had a child. The mother was a well-meaning but rather naive Antiguan social worker called Rakeesha Robinson and the youngster was christened Horatio.

Although Horatio never met his father he is, as they used to say, a chip off the old block. He is fascinated by trigonometry and algebra and is prone to instant acts of extreme violence, but also capable of meticulous planning to set up his deeds. An example of the latter was the way in which he disposed of mum’s loathsome boyfriend in Emergence. My review of that book described the killing in some detail, but as it caused me to be banned by Amazon, that’s all I will say here. You can find the hilarious details by clicking the link.

Seeking to give Horatio a new start, Rakeesha has taken him to Antigua, where the two of them are to stay with her extended family. Incidentally, as can sometimes happen with genetics, Horatio is as white as his father was, which makes him distinctive among the native Antiguans. He starts school, and soon establishes himself as brighter than average, but his Caribbean idyll is marred by the fact that he has to work weekends and holidays in his grandfather’s laundry centre, piling insanitary bedding from the tourist hotels into the washers, and then ironing the same hotels’ tablecloths with – as you would expect from Horatio – geometric precision.

As you might expect from our lad, he soon finds a way to boost his meagre wages from the laundromat. Antigua is full of low-rent tourists, many of who are anxious to score drugs, and Horatio finds that his innocent demeanour, coupled with his skin colour, enable him to establish a nice little business, buying product from a dissolute and disreputable dealer who lives in a shack just out of town, and then selling it to the European tourists (at a healthy profit).

Horatio, figuratively holding his nose when he goes to the dealer’s house, notices two things: first, a handgun badly hidden underneath a cushion and, second, a tin cash box in which the dealer keeps his cash. Putting these two observations to work allows Horatio to rid Antigua of a parasite and enrich himself to the tune of several thousand XCD (Eastern Caribbean Dollars) He also seizes an opportunity to exact revenge on a dimwitted local youth who has been harassing him.

Guy Portman is a wonderful satirist. He targets the cant, pomposity and box-ticking that have become ever-present backdrops to most people’s lives in Britain. In Horatio Robinson he has created a malevolent hero who continues to disprove Lincoln’s adage, in that – so far – he has managed to fool all of the people, and all of the time. However, like his late father, is his luck due to run out?

February 4, 2024 0

AN HONEST LIVING . . . Between the covers

TAXONOMY – The current taxonomic system now has eight levels in its hierarchy, from lowest to highest, they are: species, genus, family, order, class, phylum, kingdom, domain.

I throw in this apparently random piece of information merely to suggest that An Honest Living does not fit easily into a genre, and many readers, especially of crime fiction, love genres and little compartments into which books can be placed. This is the story of a New York lawyer, apparently the author himself, who becomes involved in a complex case involving arcane transcripts of historic legal cases. Sounds dull? Yes, probably, but the actual content transcends the banal description. This is, in no particular order, a love poem to a 2000s New York City that, two decades later, has all but disappeared. It is an account of a decent man drawn into a complex conspiracy. It tells of men and women who, despite their elevated social status, can act with the veniality and simple greed of lesser mortals.

Our man has left a well-paid corporate legal position to work for himself, trusting in his innate skills to keep the bills paid. When he is hired by the estranged wife of a prominent bibliophile to denounce the man as a scoundrel, he accepts the case – and the bundle of high value notes – with alacrity. A few weeks later, when the man’s wife is exposed as a fraud – and Newton Reddick’s real wife appears on the scene, Murphy is in a world of trouble. As it happens, he gets away without being sued for libel, and he also gets to keep the cash. More importantly, however, he establishes a relationship with Anna Reddick, a successful author writing under the pseudonym AM Byrne.

When Newton Reddick is found hanged in a seedy hotel, matters take a distinctly sinister turn. Is there a connection with Anna Reddick’s father, a rich but not-entirely-honest businessman?

Although I enjoyed the book, I would take issue with the back cover blurb which calls the novel “hard-boiled”. If you are expecting anything resembling Noir as in, say, Jim Thompson, Ted Lewis or Derek Raymond you will not find it. This is much more delicate stuff and we are taken on a stylish and nostalgic meander through the streets and districts of New York as it was two decades ago, in the company of some intriguing characters, whose vicissitudes we share. Published by No Exit Press, this edition is available now.

February 1, 2024 0

THE SPY COAST . . . Between the covers

Have you ever wondered were CIA spooks go when they are pensioned off? Tess Gerritsen tells us that a number of them have settled down in the tiny Maine harbour town of Purity. Among them is Maggie Bird, once a stone cold killer for the Company, but now just a chicken farmer with the common ailments – such as aching joints – shared by all senior citizens. Her neighbours are mostly of a similar age and background – particularly Ben Diamond, Declan Rose and the elderly couple Lloyd and Ingrid Slocum.

When Maggie is visited by a current CIA operative, a young woman who identifies herself only as Bianca, she is reminded of an unwelcome part of her past, in the shape of a fellow agent called Diana Ward. Ward is still active, but has gone missing, her bosses are concerned, and are offering to pay Maggie to help trace the missing woman. Maggie rejects the offer, saying she does not care if Ward is dead or alive.

Why the indifference? It is, as they say, complicated, and we learn that Ward and Maggie go back a long way, with the pivotal point in their professional relationship being an attempt, years earlier to take out a British wheeler-dealer – and international gangster – called Phillip Hardwicke. Long story short, the end result was a CIA sting that ended in disaster for Maggie. Her doctor husband, Danny, had been working as Hardwicke’s personal physician, and a private jet they were were traveling in left Malta, only to explode mid-air and crash into the sea with the loss of all on board.

Back in present day Maine, Maggie is with her friends, discussing the mysterious visit of Bianca, when she hears that police have surrounded her house. Rushing home to investigate, she finds there is a corpse lying in the frozen snow of her driveway. It is the woman who called herself Bianca, and she has been tortured bt then professionally despatched with two bullets to the head.

Maggie realises that the carnage is all about her and her past and so reluctantly she packs a few things, arranges some chicken-sitters, and goes back on the road to see if she can exorcise the ghosts of her past. Her travels take her into immediate and present danger, in Thailand and across Europe. My copy of the book came with a couple of cocktail recipes (above). The Spy Coast has all the hallmarks of a classic mainstream American thriller – taut as piano wire, danger round every corner and with convincing portraits of exotic locations.

February 1, 2024 1

THE LONGEST GOODBYE . . . Between the covers

This tough and unflinching Tyneside police thriller is the latest outing for Mari Hannah’s DCI Kate Daniels. The Longest Goodbye is the ninth in a series which began in 2012 with The Murder Wall. We are in late December 2022, and in Newcastle, like other cities across Britain, revellers are raising two fingers to the recently discovered Omicron variant of the Coronavirus, and are out in the clubs and pubs wearing – because it is Newcastle, after all – as little as possible, despite the freezing weather. Two lads in particular – homeward bound from overseas, and just off the plane – are determined to have a few beers before being reunited with mum and dad.

However, neither the two bonny lads nor mum and dad quite fit the ‘home for Christmas’ template. Lee and Jackson Bradshaw are only in their twenties, but have already done serious time for violence, and are returning from a European bolthole where they have been hiding from British police. Mum and Dad? Don Bradshaw is a career criminal, but pales into insignificance beside his wife Christine, who is the ruthless boss of the region’s biggest crime syndicate.

When the two prodigal sons are gunned down on the doorstep of their parents’ (recently rented) home just as they are about to sing ‘Silent Night‘, la merde frappe le ventilateur (pardon my French) The police are called and Don Bradshaw, brandishing the handgun dropped by one of his sons, is shot dead by a police marksman. No-one on the staff of Northumbria police will mourn three dead Bradshaws, but for Kate Daniels, the incident opens up a particularly unpleasant can of worms. Three years earlier, her best friend and police colleague Georgina Ioannou was found dead in a patch of woodland. Shot in the back. Executed. And it was the Bradshaw boys who were prime suspects.

Kate is forced to think the unthinkable: that Georgina’s twins, Oscar and Charlotte, now both police officers, were involved; even worse is the thought that Georgina’s husband Nico, although ostensibly a peaceful restaurateur, has avenged his wife’s murder. Revisiting old cases is never easy, and this one is made even worse by the fact that the Senior Investigating Officer at the time, was lazy, incompetent, and all-too-willing to cut corners.

Mari Hannah does not spare our sensibilities. She takes us through the painful process of self-examination one uncomfortable step at a time. It isn’t just Kate Daniels who must own up to past mistakes and errors of judgment, it is the whole Major Incident Team. Meanwhile, although the appalling Christine Bradshaw is safely behind bars facing a murder charge (the Firearms Officer she brained with a baseball bat has since died) like a badly treated tumour, malignant cells remain, and these men, enabled by her corrupt lawyer, are hard at work on the streets and in the pubs, clubs and private homes of Newcastle, determined to prevent the police from discovering the truth.

The Longest Goodbye, with its gentle nod to the Raymond Chandler thriller of almost the same name, grips from the first page, and we are fed the reddest of red herrings, one after the other, until Mari Hannah reveals a murderer who I certainly had not suspected. While few mourn the two dead criminals, when their killer is finally unmasked it is heartbreaking on so many levels. This is superior stuff from one of our finest writers. The Longest Goodbye is published by Orion and was published on 18th January.

January 24, 2024 1

THE RUNNING WOLF . . . Between the covers

In Helen Steadman’s Solstice (click to read the review) she showed us the astonishing capacity for malice that lurked in the hearts of some Puritan Christians. In The Running Wolf, set slightly later in time, sectarian divisions are more in the background as she draws us into a Britain in the late years of the 17th century and the first decades of the 18th century. In 1688, when the Catholic King James II was replaced by the hastily imported Protestant William of Orange, the sectarian divide was not healed, but merely temporarily bridged.

Central to the story is an unusual migration – that of sword makers, based in the German town of Solingen who, in 1688, moved, lock stock and barrel, to the tiny settlement of Shotley Bridge in County Durham. The reason for their move was basically economic. Solingen was almost literally bursting at the seams with sword makers, and work was becoming increasingly hard to come by. The departing craftsmen and their families, however, faced the wrath of the exclusive town guilds – to whom they had sworn an oath never to reveal the crucial secret techniques which made a Solingen sword one of the best in the world.

Hermann Molle (who actually existed) makes the journey, with his family, to Shotley Bridge, and slowly builds his business again. As Lutherans they are, to an extent, on the right side of the ‘Protestant Angels’, but the supporters – the Jacobites – of the exiled King James are growing in strength and, particularly across the English Channel, their numbers begin to pose a significant threat. Check this historical timeline:

We watch as Hermann, his family – and the other German exiles – gradually rebuild their lives in Shotley Bridge, integrating as necessary, but preserving their own culture and customs. Their swords are, initially much sought after, but as the century draws to a close the craftsmen begin to feel the winds of change. While some men of wealth are still prepared to pay for a well made sword, the blades are beginning to be valued more for ornamental use than as lethal weapons, and the smiths of the future will have to turn their hands to fashioning gun barrels rather than cutting edges.

The men of Shotley Bridge have another problem – what we would nowadays call cash flow. Customers are not paying their bills, but the dealers who provide the raw material insist on being paid in full and on time. Hermann takes a risk, returns to Solingen and attempts to smuggle a consignment of German blades back into England. He is caught, and thrown into Morpeth gaol, with every expectation that he will be hanged for his pains.

Helen Steadman tells a gripping story, using the twin timelines of the Germans establishing their craft alongside the River Derwent and, using a corrupt gaoler as narrator, Hermann’s time of misery as he languishes in the squalor of his prison cell. There is fascinating detail about the craft of sword making, set against the rumbling of military and political events far away, but equally mesmerising is the way Helen Steadman captures the minutiae of the daily lives of Hermann and his family. This is historical fiction of the first order. The Running Wolf is published by Impress Books and is available now.

January 18, 2024 2

THE ESSENTIAL HARLEM DETECTIVES . . . Between the covers

To say that Chester Himes lived the life he wrote about is not strictly true, but his life was full of incident. His childhood was fraught with unhappy events, including being indirectly responsible for his brother’s blindness, and as a young man he did serious jail time for armed robbery. Fired from his job as a Hollywood screenwriter because Jack L Warner didn’t like black people, he eventually quit America for good, disgusted at the racism he faced every single day. He wrote:

I would sit in my room and become hysterical about the wild incredible story I was writing. And I thought I was writing realism. It never occurred to me that I was writing absurdity. Realism and absurdity are so similar in the lives of American blacks one cannot tell the difference.

Himes moved to France in the 1950s, and lived among the Bohemian set in Paris. He eventually moved to the south of France, and then to Spain, where he died in 1984.

There were to be eight completed novels featuring Harlem detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, and one – Plan B – remained unfinished at Himes’s death. This compendium, from Everyman’s Library, includes A Rage In Harlem (1957), The Real Cool Killers (1959), The Crazy Kill (1959) and Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965). The book is beautifully bound and presented, and even has a book-mark ribbon. This is a definite keeper, to be dipped into during the long-haul nights from January through to springtime. For good measure, there’s an introduction by SA Cosby and – this I really did like – a triple chronology of Himes’s life set against other literary events of the time and what was going on in America and the wider world, socially and politically.

The style of the novels is bleakly comic and, at times, very violent. As their nicknames suggest, the Jones and Johnson live with death as a daily companion and they themselves have no compunction about matching force with force when it comes to serious criminality, although they are generally relaxed in the company of petty criminals such as card sharps, whores and lottery spivs. Despite the sharp banter between the pair, Harlem is a pretty grim place most of the time:

This was the neighborhood of the cheap addicts, whisky-heads, stumblebums, the flotsam of Harlem; the end of the line for the whores, the hard squeeze for the poor honest laborers and a breeding ground for crime. Blank-eyed whores stood on the street corners swapping obscenities with twitching junkies. Muggers and thieves slouched in dark doorways waiting for someone to rob; but there wasn’t anyone but each other. Children ran down the street, the dirty street littered with rotting vegetables, uncollected garbage, battered garbage cans, broken glass, dog offal — always running, ducking and dodging. God help them if they got caught.

There was a new Penguin edition of A Rage In Harlem a couple of years ago, and you can read my review of it by clicking this link. The Essential Harlem Detectives is available now.