REVIEWS

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 31, 2023 0

THE MISPER . . . Between the covers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 14, 2023 1

THE BONE HACKER . . . Between the covers

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 8, 2023 1

THE TRAP . . . Between the covers

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 4, 2023 0

DIG TW0 GRAVES . . . Between the covers

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 1, 2023 1

THE GENIUS KILLER . . . Between the covers

The central character of this novel is Karl Jackson. He has survived a brutal upbringing punctuated with savage beatings by his drunken father, and sexual abuse from his uncle Charlie. Karl has a twin, Nathan, but he never faced the same storm of violent rage. Karl Jackson is described in the cover blurb as a sociopath. I am no psychologist, but Jackson’s steady job as a chemistry teacher and his scrupulous and well-planned crimes make me think he is more psychopathic, but it does not matter. He is a genuinely awful human being. His spree of undetected killings started in his childhood when, merely for the fun of it, he pushed a young boy – fishing in the lake where they played – down into the water, and then watched with amusement as the lad struggled, choked, and then bobbed about on the surface as lifeless as the float attached to his fishing line.

Jackson’s genius (hence the title of the book) is to organise killings in such a way that no possible evidence can link the deaths to him. While Jackson was working as a student in Australia, one of his murders involved the ingenious combination of a sleeping bag, a sedative injection and a deadly Brown Snake on a hiking trail in the Blue Mountain region of New South Wales. Jackson exacts an elaborate – and some may say justified – revenge on his father by causing the old man’s death in hospital with a very clever use of cyanide and the sharpened end of a coat hanger.

The background to this novel is the atmospheric landscape of the English Lake District, where Jackson carries out another long delayed act of retribution on his abusive uncle Charlie by faking an accidental climbing death. When Charlie is found dead at the bottom of a solo climb, his head shattered like a melon hit with a hammer, no one believes it is anything other than an unfortunate error of judgement.

Thus far, Jackson has been clever enough to avoid any attention from the police but, inevitably, he meets his nemesis. Theodore “Tex” Deacon is a late career – but distinguished – detective slowly recovering from the trauma caused by the protracted death of his wife. As is the way with institutions these days, he is temporarily sidelined and identified as a vulnerable person in need of psychological help and treatment by the ubiquitous counselling profession. However, his many successes in tracking down murderers brings him to the attention of Debbie Pilkington, an ambitious young reporter with a local Lakeland newspaper. She alerts him to the many coincidences surrounding deaths in the Jackson family, and so he goes off piste to investigate the case.

Black humour is never very far away in this book, despite the body count. Here, Karl Jackson describes the man who is having an affair with his wife.

“Richard Turkington’s graying Beatle cut had a bald spot on top giving him the appearance of a rock star monk. A fleshy roll wobbled over the top of his chinos. Turkington had clearly ignored warning signs of middle age and had lived a pudgy existence preferring a world of pints and puddings. Quite a contrast to the sleek wire framed fell runners surrounded by them at a function like this. Richard looked like Mr Blobby.”

The Genius Killer rattles along at great pace and is sometimes darkly comic, but in Jackson, the author has created a genuine larger-than-life monster. The book ends rather enigmatically, but as it is described as No.1 in the Tex Deacon series, I suspect the Cumbrian copper will be back soon with another case. Mark Robson is a sports journalist and this is his debut novel. It is published by Orla Kelly Publishing and available now.

July 14, 2023 0

AND THEN I’LL KNOW . . . Between the covers

This novel is, on one level, an entertaining and robust police procedural. On another level, however, it is a study in obsession, and something of an object lesson about what happens when, metaphorically speaking, people lift heavy stones and are surprised at what they see scurrying around underneath. Amber Ryan is a detective sergeant with the Manchester police. The greater part of the book has a then and now narrative. ‘Then’ describes, Amber’s childhood which turns out to have many a tragic twist. Her father, a policeman, goes missing. Then, her mother dies of cancer. She and her sister Rachel are taken in by their aunt and uncle but when her uncle is killed in a road accident and her aunt goes to pieces emotionally and physically, the two girls are taken into local authority care.

Back in ‘Now’, Amber’s obsession is to find out what actually happened to her father. On the pretext that a local murder of a young woman is connected to similar murders in London, she requests permission to go to the capital and look at the files. In truth, however, she is more interested in the fact that the women killed in London all had connections to a children’s home and cases of child abuse. She knows that her father was involved in investigating this case and is convinced that she will turn up evidence which will lead her to the truth of what happened to him.

With a mixture of good fortune, instinct and background knowledge, Amber is able to refocus the investigating team on the murder of the young women. As a result she is then seconded for a further two weeks and comes something of a blue eyed girl in the eyes of the senior officers. This is not to the satisfaction of everyone in the team. Temporarily promoted to Detective Inspector, it has to be said that she pushes her luck she interviews some of the men who were found guilty of historic child abuse crimes. The interviews are not particularly friendly or gentle, and she moves from one appointment to the next hoping to stay ahead of phone calls of complaint to Professional Standards. Amber also suspects that there is someone on the investigating team who is leaking information to the very people they are trying to track. But who?

Two thirds of the way through the book it turns into anything but a police procedural as Amber breaks every rule in the book in her determination to find the truth. This final section of the book,where Amber goes very much off piste, may not be to everyone’s taste and it has to be said some of it does stretch credulity. There is certainly something of a “with one bound she was free”element to what goes on. Amber’s heroics result in the bad guys being brought down, but it does not bring the outcome that she was looking for. She is almost drowned by a tidal wave of betrayal, shattered childhood dreams and a bitter sense of betrayal. It could be said, though, that at the very end Amber does gaze into the abyss but sensibly turns away before the abyss gazes back at her. She is left with another personal challenge, another search and possibly a deeper sense that this final quest will bring her personal happiness.

And Then I’ll Know is certainly a gripping read (I finished it in two or three sessions) and is clearly a departure from Brady’s previous two novels – comedy thrillers on the theme of food. The Meal of Fortune and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Chef may not have caused much of a stir in the world of crime fiction, but this latest book deserves to be read and admired by a wider audience. And Then I’ll Know is published by 5W Press and is available now.

https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/and-then-i-ll-know

July 9, 2023 1

WATER STREET . . . Between the covers

Britain’s relationships with both North and South during the American Civil War (1861-65) are something of a historical byway these days, but at the time, the conflict was a major issue in the port city of Liverpool. When the Union navy blockaded Charleston, Savannah, New Orleans and Mobile, it prevented shiploads of raw cotton from departing in the direction of Liverpool, thus dealing a crippling blow to the spinning and textile industries in and around Liverpool. The popular and political sentiment in the city became very much pro-Confederacy, and despite the national government remaining stoically neutral, shipyards on the River Mersey continued to build fighting ships – such as the Alabama – and sell them to the South.

Water Street is a highly entertaining novel set in the summer of 1863, and features murder and mayhem involving Union and Confederate spies trying to outwit each other and advance their respective causes with the British government. Author JP Maxwell centres his tale around two women – Harriet Dunwoody and her creole companion Conté Louverture. Harriet is married to a grotesque man called Banastre Xavier Dunwoody, an ardent and violent secessionist who plans to swing the support of Britain’s government – led by a seriously ill Lord Palmerston – behind the cause of Jefferson Davies and the Confederate States. Harriet is playing a very dangerous double game, along with Conté, as they conspire behind Dunwoody’s back to thwart local efforts to boost support for the Confederacy. In doing so, they enlist the aid of a rather ramshackle band of Irish nationalists, led by a thug called Royston Chubb.

Having thoroughly enjoyed the book (a quick read, just over 200 pages) I did want to step back and examine if – and to what extent – the characters in the book are based on real life historical figures. First, Palmerston. Although he was sick and elderly in 1863, there is no evidence that he was comatose and incapable of thought. The novel has Edward Seymour as First Lord of The Admiralty, and this he certainly was, but it seems his real life influence on Palmerston was nowhere as crucial as portrayed in the book. There was a Confederate agent in Liverpool called James Dunwoody Bulloch who did his very best to advance the Confederate cause during the war years, and he was certainly instrumental in pushing through deals with shipyards like Cammell Laird to build warships for the Confederacy, but he wasn’t the drunken gunslinger portrayed here.

One character who Maxwell doesn’t play fast and loose with is the official US Consulate to Liverpool – Thomas Haines Dudley. Dudley worked tirelessly for the Union cause, always being careful to stay within the constraints of diplomacy. The most curious real life character in the book is that of Major General Benjamin Butler. History has not been kind to him as either soldier, lawyer or politician, but there is no evidence (that I have seen) that he was running a ring of Union spies in the UK, nor that he visited Liverpool in 1863. In an edgy epilogue, Maxwell has Butler listening cynically to Lincoln’s famous speech at Gettysburg on 19th November 1863. He is joined by two characters called Surratt and Wilkes-Booth. If you know, you know!

To be fair, JP Maxwell has not claimed that Water Street is accurate historical fiction, and so my comments on real historical people can be ignored if you enjoy the book. The writing is very much ‘larger-than-life and, to borrow a sporting cliché, Maxwell leaves nothing in the dressing room. I loved every page – it’s full of drama, period detail and vividly portrayed characters. It was published on 1st July – a significant date, in the context of the story – by BK Books.

July 9, 2023 1

LEHRTER STATION . . . Between the covers

John Russell is an Anglo American journalist turned spy. His problem is that he has spied for too many different countries. He has spied for the Russians, the Nazis, the British and the Americans – and they all have a piece of him. In his heart of hearts he is a pre-Stalin communist. Once a member of the party, he is a man who once believed in the promise of genuine socialism.

December 1945 finds him in London with his long term girlfriend Effie Koenen, his son by his marriage to a wife long since dead, and Effie’s sister. He is basically a puppet waiting for the next tug on his strings. This time it comes from the Russians. Such is Stalin’s power and reach in the postwar world that he can easily persuade his allies to terminate Russell’s temporary haven in London, and so it is that Russell and Effie are forced to return to the shattered remains of Berlin.

Effie was a considerable star in the pre-war film world and is anxious to resume her career. For Russell it is a question literally of life and death. If he does not follow the instructions of the NKVD he knows that his life will not be worth living, nor those of Effie or his son Paul. Paul fought in the Wehrmacht in the dying days of the war but has been allowed to re-settle in London as part of the Russian deal for Russell’s continued cooperation.

One historical issue that runs through the book is the plight of Europe’s Jews. Despite survivors living in Berlin being given special victim status by the occupying administration, and thus receiving better rations, further afield many Jews still found themselves homeless and unwanted. The British are determined to limit the number of Jews heading to the new land in Arab Palestine. The Russians are indifferent and the Americans are torn between support for the British and an awareness of the voting power of Jewish American citizens.

Across central Europe there are several Jewish organisations determined to avenge the deaths of their fellow citizens, by whatever means necessary. Russell meets a young man called Michael who is in one such group.

Michael smiled for the first time and it lit up his face.

“Do you know Psalm 94?” he asked.
“Not that I remember.”
“He will repay them for their iniquity and wipe them out for their wickedness. The Lord our God will wipe them out.”
“The Nazis I assume? So if God has them in his sights, where do you come in? Are you God’s instruments?”
“Not at all. if there is a God he has clearly abandoned the Jews. We will do the work that he should have done.”

Screen Shot 2023-07-09 at 08.43.41

David Downing (left), writing this book in 2012, was obviously well aware of how things have played out in our own times, but he has Russell reunited with a young Jew who he had helped escape Germany years earlier.

“And I’ll tell you something else,”. Albert said. “I understand why the Poles are expelling the Germans from their new territories, and I understand why they are making it impossible for the Jews to return. If my friends and I have our way the Arabs will all be expelled from Palestine. Anything else is just stirring up trouble for the future.”
“That will put a bit of a strain on the worlds sympathy, don’t you think?”
“Once we have the land we can do without the sympathy.”

Russell’s sense of world weariness and and the depth of his cynicism about those who employ him does not prevent him from being a compassionate man. In order to file a marketable story with his London agent, Russell embeds himself with what could be called a gang of people smugglers, except the people that are being smuggled are Jews desperate to get away from Europe and start a new life in Palestine. The route involves a long and arduous trek – literally across mountains and rivers in – order to get to Italy and then to the Mediterranean Sea. There is one bitterly ironic scene where, on the way, Russell meets up with a man who he knows is a former SS officer. The man is with his young son and Russell promises not to betray them to the Jews, basically because of the young boy. In an awful reversal of what happened to so many Jews years earlier, the pair are identified as non Jews because they are uncircumcised. Russell cannot prevent the father being gunned down; neither can he persuade the boy to leave his father’s body as the convoy moves on.

In another sub plot of the book, Russell tries to locate two missing Jewish people. One is very much close and personal to him and Effie. Earlier in the war Effie had given a home to Rosa, an apparently orphaned Jewish girl. She has now taken Rosa as the child she now knows she will probably never have, and Rosa has gone with them to England. However, at the back of Effie’s mind is that if either of Rosa’s parents should be discovered alive, this will pose a great problem should they wish to reclaim their daughter. Using the same sources – mostly meticulous Nazi bureaucratic records of who was sent where – Russell also tries to discover the fate of a young Silesian Jew called Miriam who we met in an earlier book in this excellent series. (Click the link below for more information)

https://fullybooked2017.com/tag/david-downing/

With a mixture of luck, cunning – and favours from friends – Russell manages to survive the t. ands of his Russian minders goes fatally wrong. By the end of the book Russell has peeled back layer after layer of spectacularly evil deeds committed by all parties and nationalities, but somehow his personal integrity – and that of Effie – survive. This is a compelling literary journey through a wasteland which is both moral and literal.

July 9, 2023 0