REVIEWS

IN THE WASH . . . Between the covers

Wisbech is a town in the fenland area of Cambridgeshire, and that is where I live. At which point some unkind wag will usually comment, “Well, I suppose someone has to.” That slight is not undeserved, as much of the place is pretty grim. It has some pretty Georgian and Victorian architecture, but in recent years it has had the stuffing knocked out of it by immigration. Add to that the disease infecting so many similar places in the country, that of the shops we knew and loved (but not patronised enough, sadly) being replaced with a seemingly endless supply of charity shops, mobile phone stores, bookies, coffee shops and pound stores. The town has featured peripherally in some novels; perhaps the brewery that featured in Graham Swift’s Waterland was our our own Elgoods; the town makes a brief appearance in my favourite crime novel, Dorothy L Sayers’ The Nine Tailors, gets a passing mention in some of Jim Kelly’s novels, but now there is a novel firmly centred in the town.

The legend of King John’s lost treasure is an intriguing one, and Diane Calton Smith (left) cleverly reimagines it in her novel In The Wash. I am not normally a fan of split time narratives, but she does it beautifully here, with the events of October 1216 being mirrored perfectly by a present day story beginning, also, in October. Perhaps ‘mirror’ is not the best metaphor – the two stories are more like a melody and its counterpoint in music, each complementing the other. In 1216 we meet Rufus, a young clerk under the tutelage of Father Leofric, a priest at Wisbech Castle, and the entire establishment is waiting for the arrival of King John, who is to make a break in his journey from Bishop’s Lynn to Newark. In present day Wisbech, Monica Kerridge is the curator of The Poet’s House Museum, an establishment dedicated to the life and work of celebrated Georgian poet Joshua Ambrose.

Rufus and his fellow clerks can only watch in awe from a distance as the King and his retinue arrive. Beset by political troubles both at home and abroad, the King appears tense and distracted at the lavish feast prepared for him, but his mood worsens when he receives shocking news from one of his courtiers, freshly arrived at the castle. His baggage train, a mile long and consisting of lumbering bullock carts and hundreds of men has fallen foul of the capricious tide as they attempted to ford the river mouth where it meets The Wash – with catastrophic results. In the days that follow, Rufus is called upon to catalogue the battered remains of the king’s wagons and the scores of of corpses washed up on the sea banks.

Back in the present day, Monica and several other town worthies become involved with a new group being set up to try to get to the bottom of the enduring mystery of what actually happened on that day in October 1216 and – more importantly – establish exactly where the abortive attempt to cross from Norfolk into Lincolnshire was made.

It is an established fact that King John died not long after his fateful sojourn in Wisbech, and was succeeded – at least in name – by his nine year-old son. Rufus becomes involved in a dangerous search for one particular item of John’s lost treasure – an item so precious that powerful interests in the land think little of murder in order to gain the prize. The search by Monica and her friends is less perilous, but they uncover a mystery just as intriguing.

Diane Calton Smith lets her two narrative melodies weave their magic and cleverly keeps the two time lines running almost exactly parallel, just separated by the eight centuries. Then, to extend the musical metaphor, the two themes resolve together in an very satisfying cadence to bring the piece to an end. I loved this book. Yes, the local interest intrigued me, but this is writing of the highest quality, backed by scrupulous historical research, a genuine sense of place, and shrewdly observed characters. In The Wash is published by New Generation Publishing and is available now

September 28, 2023 1

CLASSICS REVISTED … SS-GB

I had been aware of this book for ages – it was first published in 1978 – but had never read it until now. My initial reaction was to be intrigued by Deighton’s premise. It is November 1941, the Germans have invaded and the pastiche document, headed Geheime Kommandosache at the beginning of the book tells us that Britain surrendered on 19th February. So, my first thought was “What happened?” Was there no Dunkirk, no Battle of Britain? What became of The Royal Navy? Presumably Rudolf Hess never made his bizarre flight to Scotland and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is still unbreached. What of Reinhard Heydrich? Is he just a couple of months into his new job as Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia? I read on, hoping that Deighton’s rather audacious re-write of history would be plausible.

We open with what appears to be a relatively mundane murder mystery. A prominent – and successful black marketeer is found shot dead in his flat-cum-warehouse in London’s Shepherd Market, and Detective Superintendent Douglas Archer (whose boss now is Gruppenführer Fritz Kellerman) is sent to investigate. It rapidly becomes obvious that the corpse identified as one Peter Thomas is no such person, and that his death has triggered a dramatic response from Berlin, in that Standartenführer Huth, a senior SS investigator, has been sent to London to take over the case.

In fairness, a few chapters in we disciver that Churchill has been shot by a firing squad in Germany and King George VI, like the long lost princes, is imprisoned in The Tower of London. Deighton also teases us with furtive appearances from the British resistance movement, and hints that the death of ‘not Peter Thomas’ may be connected with something deeply dangerous, perhaps connected to the search to make a nuclear weapon. Huth establishes himself, at least superficially, as the very worst kind of SS officer, but around half way through the book Deighton pulls a couple of very clever rabbits out of the hat, in terms of the plot. Regarding Oskar Huth, wise readers will reserve their judgment. Archer becomes involved with Barbara Barger, an influential American war reporter and, because of his apparently willing co-operation with the German authorities, he reaches number one on the assassination hit list of the resistance movement.

We learn the answer to the Molotov-Ribbentrop conundrum when, with a wonderfully Baroque flourish, Deighton turns the story on its head by describing a heavily orchestrated ceremony to disinter the remains of Karl Marx from Highgate and move them to Moscow. It all goes spectacularly wrong, and Archer is swept along on the tide of events. The focus of the story soon becomes clear, and it is the possession of vital information that will allow those who own it to make a nuclear bomb.

Deighton’s meticulous historical research allows him to put to good use the dichotomy between the regular German army and the ‘upstart’ SS, and the deep distrust which Hitler’s inner circle felt for the Abwehr, the intelligence agency for the army. He also describes the German unease about royalty. Remember that ‘Kaiser Bill’, the last German royal ruler was, in the autumn of 1941, only a few months in his grave. Our reluctant monarch, King George VI plays a part in the denouement of this story. Already a sick man, he is used as merely a piece on the international chess board, and not a very potent one.

Going back to my initial reservations, Deighton doesn’t explain how Hitler’s forces managed to invade Britain in spite of what we know as the serious military impediments in his path. We do learn that Hitler and Stalin, at least on paper, are still best pals, but my overwhelming response to what is a fiendishly clever reworking of history is simple: thank God for Dunkirk, the RAF – and America. This edition is from Penguin Modern Classics and is available now

THE WATER DOESN’T LIE . . . Between the covers

The story begins back in the day, in grisly fashion. A lad, in the so-called ‘care’ of a Roman Catholic children’s home in Scotland has been sexually abused to the extent that his self esteem is shattered and he sees no reason to live. He hangs himself from a beam, using torn up bed-sheets. The police are eventually called, but the patriarchal attitude of the priests (and a handy golf club connection with a top copper) means that the death is just written off for what it was, a suicide, but the cause goes uninvestigated.

Cut to the present day and we are in the cathedral city of Lincoln. The location gave me a huge amount of pleasure, as one half of my ancestry is as Lincolnshire as haslet, Sincil Bank, Mablethorpe, the wonderful Wolds – and Lincoln’s imp itself. When a body is fished out of a local lake and eventually identified as a former Roman Catholic priest (and child abuser), DI Dalton and his oppo, DS Gibb, are drawn into a murder investigation that will take them away from their bailiwick to Glasgow, and the less than salubrious visitors’ rooms of HMP Barlinnie. Someone – maybe with an accomplice – scarred by their brutal days in church care has decided to take revenge, and the body count increases.

Dalton and Gibb follow one or two false trails before they are forced to face the fact that not only is their quarry extremely adept using modern technology, and suspiciously familiar with the way modern police work is done, but they are also something of a weapons expert. As a keen target shooter myself, I can vouch for the fact that a 7.62mm rifle with a decent scope is a formidable weapon in the hands of a sniper. I am not sure if KIm Booth has had the misfortune to fall foul of the deeply secretive and self-protective world of the Roman Catholic church, but the crimes he describes here sound grimly authentic.

The procedural aspects of the story are totally convincing as one might expect from a former police officer – after several jobs and a brush with the law Booth decided to join the Lincolnshire Police, where he served 35 years mainly in investigative roles. The attention to crime-scene detail, the awareness of sharp-eyed defence lawyers for any slight slip-up in the chain of evidence and the debilitating effect form-filling and box-ticking can have on investigators is described in detail. Perhaps the author (in my view) has taken something of a risk in the way he chooses to end the search for the children’s home avenger, but Dalton and Gibb have the potential to become an established CriFi partnership, and I hope that future books will let us know a little more about the men and what makes them tick as people.

Kim Booth was born in Lincolnshire. After leaving the police he worked as a Corporate Security Manager for a well know international holiday company for a number of years. Currently he has started to fulfill a long standing intention to write true crime and crime fiction books. He lives in the city of Lincoln. The Water Doesn’t Lie is available now.

September 18, 2023 1

CLASSICS REVISITED . . . The Mask of Dimitrios

The opening part of this book, in geo-political terms, is gloriously old fashioned. Istambul, with its reputation as being the place where east meets west, home of mysterious Levantine traders and treacherous stateless misfits has long since been pensioned off, at least in the world of crime and espionage fiction. It is worth remembering, though, that it was the starting point for Bond’s adventures in From Russia With Love when it was published in 1957, and was still thought to have a suitable ambience when the film was released in 1963.

Charles Latimer is an English academic who has found that writing thrillers is much more to his liking (and that of his bank manager) than lengthy tracts on political and economic trends in nineteenth century Europe. While in Istanbul he is invited to a house party where he meets Colonel Haki, an officer in some un-named sinister police force. Improbably, Haki is a fan of Latimer’s novels and, when they become better acquainted, Haki reveals a current real-life mystery he is investigating. The corpse of a man known only as Dimitrios – once a big player in the espionage world of the Levant and The Balkans – is fished out of the sea. Having attended the post mortem, Latimer decides to investigate just who Dimitrios was, and how he came to end up as he did.

Published on the eve of world war two, when previous atrocities would be dwarfed in scale, the novel reminds us of the horrors which took place in the region after the Armistice. The brutal civil war between Turkey and Greece, with the destruction of Smyrna in 1922, the Armenian genocide, and a succession of coups d’états in Bulgaria had left the region rife with intrigue and foreign meddling. By the late 1930s, Europe was desperately ill at ease with itself. Latimer observes:

“So many years. Europe in labour had through its pain seen for an instant a new glory, and then had collapsed to welter again in the agonies of war and fear. Governments had risen and fallen: men and women had worked, had starved, had made speeches, had thought, had been tortured and died. Hope had come and gone, a fugitive in the scented bosom of illusion.”

As he criss-crosses Europe via Athens, Sofia, Geneva, Paris – by train, naturally – Latimer is drawn into the world of a mysterious man known only as Mr Peters, memorably described thus:

“Then Latimer saw his face and forgot about the trousers. There was the sort of sallow shapelessness about it that derives from simultaneous overeating and under sleeping. From above two heavy satchels of flesh peered a pair of blue, bloodshot eyes that seemed to the permanently weeping. The nose was rubbery and indeterminate. It was the mouth that gave the face expression. The lips were pallid and undefined, seeming thicker than they really were. Pressed together over unnaturally white and regular false teeth, they were set permanently in a saccharine smile.”

The 1944 film of the book took many liberties with the story and, bizarrely, changed the clean-living, rather prim Charles Latimer into a Dutch novelist named Cornelius Leyden, and then compounded the felony by casting Peter Lorre in the role. What they didn’t get wrong, however, was in re-imagining Mr Peters. Check the quote above, and if it isn’t Sydney Greenstreet to the proverbial ‘T’, then I will change my will and donate my worldly wealth to The Jeremy Corbyn Appreciation Society. In his travels, Latimer also meets a rather down-at-heel nightclub manager called La Prevesa:

“The mouth was firm and good-humoured in the loose, raddled flesh about it, but the eyes were humid with sleep and the carelessness of sleep. They made you think of things you had forgotten, of clumsy gilt hotel chairs strewn with discarded clothes and of grey dawn light slanting through closed shutters, of attar of roses and of the musty smell of heavy curtains on brass rings, of the sound of the warm, slow breathing of a sleeper against the ticking of a clock in the darkness”

Quite near the end of the book, Ambler drops a plot bombshell which not only damages Latimer’s own sense of being able to spot a lie when he sees one, but puts him next in line for a drug-dealer’s bullet. He is in Paris, but this is not the city as envisaged by, apparently, Victor Hugo:

“Breathe Paris in. It nourishes the soul.”

Latimer sees a rather different city:

“As his taxi crossed the bridge back to Île de la Cité, he saw for a moment a panorama of low, black clouds moving quickly in the chill, dusty wind. The long facade of the houses on the Quai de Corse was still and secretive. It was as if each window concealed a watcher. There seemed to be few people about. Paris, in the late autumn afternoon, had the macabre formality of a steel engraving.”

With this book, Ambler created the anvil on which the great spy novels of the final decades of the Twentieth Century were beaten out. As good as they were, neither Le Carré nor Deighton bettered his use of language, and in this relatively short novel, just 264 pages, Ambler set the Gold Standard. This latest edition of the novel is published by Penguin and is available now.

September 12, 2023 0

THE DEVIL STONE . . . Between the covers

Detective Inspectors – and their bosses the DCIs – are hardly a dying breed in crime fiction, so what is distinctive about Christine Caplan, the central figure in Caro Ramsay’s latest book? For starters, she has been demoted from DCI because her previous case involved some evidence mysteriously going ‘walkies’. Her run of bad continues when, after a night out the ballet in Glasgow (she used to be a dancer) she inadvertently becomes involved in a mugging, and the drug-frazzled perpetrator subsequently dies from falling from his bike. Family-wise, things are not much better. Her husband, Aklan, formerly something of a creative high flyer, has a serious case of depression and rarely leaves his bed. When he does, it’s only to stagger to the sofa where, wrapped in a blanket, he binges on daytime TV. Son Kenny is a ne’er-do-well drug user, flunking college and a bit too handy with mum’s credit card. Daughter Emma is the only glimmer of light. She seems relatively healthy, bright and has something of a future once she finishes her degree.

Things don’t improve for Caplan when she is sent off to the Scottish west coast where, near the village of Cronchie, a multiple murder has taken place. Two teenage boys – “neds”, to use the Scottish slang, have broken into Otterburn House, a mansion belonging to the McGregor family. The intruders get more than they bargained for:

“…jerking the phone, causing the beam to drop suddenly where it caught the ghostly white face staring at the ceiling with nacreous clouded eyes. Unable to stop himself, he looked along. Another face. Then another. Five of them in a row, cheek to cheek. Dried white skin clinging to thin cheekbones, mouths open, teeth bared.”

The lads – one of whom is a devotee of Satanism – have burgled the house looking for a legendary artifact known as The Devil Stone which, according to the ancient lore, is able to predict impending tragedy. They leg it away from the house as if Old Nick himself is chasing them. They are hospitalised suffering from shock, the police are summoned and a major investigation is triggered.

In charge of the investigation is Detective Chief Inspector Bob Oswald, a highly respected officer just weeks away from retirement. When he goes missing, Caplan finds herself put in charge of the case, rather to her own discomfort and the resentment of the local team. One member of the McGregor family – Adam, a New Age hippy and something of a black sheep – is missing from the gruesome line of corpses, and thus he becomes the main suspect.

When Bob Oswald is finally located dead – in mysterious circumstances – Caplan realises that whatever happened at Otterburn House is part of a much bigger conspiracy, involving the distribution of a dangerous new narcotic known as Snapdragon. While she suspects that a nearby New Age community living on the nearby island of Skone may be involved, another discomforting thought is nagging away at her, and it is the suspicion that someone in the police team is batting for the other side. How far can she trust DC Toni Mackie, a larger-than-life woman, with a slightly cartoonish air about her? And what is to be made of the bumbling DC Craigo, with his strange slow blink, and his lack of social graces?

Already facing a twin-pronged attack on her career, Caplan realises that her relentless determination to solve the Otterburn House mystery has brought her head-to-head with some people who are determined to take her life if she gets in their way.

This edition of The Devil Stone is published by Canongate and is out now.

September 5, 2023 0

RUSTED SOULS . . . Between the covers

Leeds, March 1920. Tom Harper is Chief Constable of the City force and, with just six weeks until his retirement, he is dearly hoping for a quiet ride home for the final furlong of what has been a long and distinguished career. His hopes are dashed, however, when he is summoned to the office of Alderman Ernest Thompson, the combative, blustering – but very powerful – leader of the City Council. Thompson has one last task for Harper, and it is a very delicate one. The politician has fallen a trap that is all too familiar to many elderly men of influence down the years. He has, shall we say, been indiscreet with a beautiful but much younger woman, Charlotte Radcliffe. Letters that he foolishly wrote to her have “gone missing” and now he has an anonymous note demanding money – or else his reputation will be ruined. He wants Harper to solve the case, but keep everything completely off the record. Grim-faced, Harper has little choice but to agree. It is due to Thompson’s support and encouragement that he is ending his career as Chief Constable, with a comfortable pension and an untarnished reputation. He chooses a small group of trusted colleagues, swears them to secrecy, and sets about the investigation.

He soon has other things to worry about. A quartet of young armed men robs a city centre jewellers, terrifying the staff by firing a shot into the ceiling. They strike again, but this time with fatal consequences. A bystander tries to intervene, and is shot dead for his pains. Many readers will have been following this excellent series for some time, and will know that tragedy has struck the Harper family. Tom’s wife Annabelle has what we know now as dementia, and requires constant care. Their daughter Mary is a widow. Her husband Len is one of the 72000 men who fought and died on the Somme, but have no known grave, and no memorial excep tfor a name on the Thiepval Memorial to The Missing.. Unlike many widows, however, she has been able to rebuild her life, and now runs a successful secretarial agency. Leeds, however, like so many communities, is no place fit for heroes:

“‘Times are hard.’
“I know,” Harper agreed.
It was there in the bleak faces of the men, the worn-down looks of their wives, the hunger that kept the children thin. The wounded ex-servicemen reduced to begging on the streets. Things hadn’t changed much from when he was young. Britain had won the war but forgotten its own people.”

Nickson’s descriptions of his beloved Leeds are always powerful, but here he describes a city – like many others – reeling from a double blow. As if the carnage of the Great War were not enough, the Gods had another spiteful trick up their sleeves in the shape of Spanish Influenza, which killed 228000 people across the country. Many people are still wearing gauze masks in an attempt to ward off infection.

The hunt for the jewel robbers and Ernest Jackson’s letters continues almost to the end of the book and, as ever, Nickson tells a damn good crime story; for me however, the focus had long since shifted elsewhere. This book is all about Tom and Annabelle Harper. Weather-wise, spring is definitely in the air, as bushes and trees come back to life after the bareness of winter, but there is a distinctly autumnal air about what is happening on the page. Harper is, like Tennyson’s Ulysses, not the man he was.

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.

As he tries to help at the scene of a crime, he reflects:

“There was nothing he could do to help here; he was just another old man cluttering up the pavement and stopping the inspector from doing his job.”

As for Annabelle, the lovely, brave and vibrant woman of the earlier books, little is left:

“The memories would remain. She’d have them too, but they were tucked away in pockets that were gradually being sewn up. All her past was being stolen from her. And he couldn’t stop the theft.”

This is a magnificent and poignant end to the finest series of historical crime fiction I have ever read. It is published by Severn House and will be available on 5th September. For more about the Tom Harper novels, click this link.

September 4, 2023 0

THE RAGING STORM . . . Between the covers

Ann Cleeves introduced us to Detective Matthew Venn in The Long Call (2019). Police officers in crime fiction are ten-a-penny, so writers strive to make their creations a bit different, or to have what marketing people call a USP. Venn is married to a creative arts chap called Jonathan. This is, to say the least, an unusual circumstance in the rugged North Devon fishing village of Greystone, where he goes to investigate the mysterious death of a media-savvy – and much televised – adventurer and sailor called Jem Rosco. Venn is, however, no stranger to Greystone. It is where he was brought up as a member of an exclusive group of evangelical Christians called The Barum Brethren.

Rosco has turned up in Greystone, more or less out of nowhere, although the villagers have seen him often enough on their TV screens. After a few weeks of holding court in the village pub – The Maiden’s Prayer – Rosco disappears, but is then found dead in a little boat anchored just off-shore, in a violent storm. The local RNLI bring his body back, and then his demise becomes a case for Matthew Venn, based in Barnstaple, the largest town in the area.

This is certainly not one of those ‘murder comes to seaside idyll’ stories. Greystone is a grim little village which is frequently battered by the weather. For Its residents life is something of a struggle; there are few amenities, and employment is hard to come by. With all the skill she displays in her other novels set by the sea, Ann Cleeves allows the village to develop a rather forbidding character all of its own.

There are several well-drawn local characters, all of whom Venn is forced to consider as he tries to answer the age old question about a mysterious death – “Cui Bono?“. Pub landlord Harry Carter may be every bit of the jovial ‘mine host’ he appears to be, but do shady financial dealings in his past bring him into the web of suspects? Mary Ford is the first woman to be skipper of the local lifeboat, but her life is shot through with anxiety over the future of her son who suffers from a degenerative disease. As a teenager, she had an unrequited passion for Jem Rosco, so has his re-emergence in the village triggered an act of revenge for past slights? Barty Lawson, alcoholic Commodore of the nearby Morrisham Yacht Club, has bitter memories of the days when Rosco – irreverent, mocking and disrespectful – used his celebrity to belittle him. The hint of an old romance between Rosco and Lawson’s wife Eleanor has further soured the man’s mind but, in a rare sober moment, was he capable of engineering the complex piece of theatre which appears to have framed the discovery of the sailor’s body?

When Lawson’s body is later found shattered at the foot of a towering cliff, Venn wonders if this was the final act of a guilty man, but Ann Cleeve provides a solution to the mystery that is much more elegant – and unexpected. The Raging Storm is, on one level, a standard whodunnit, and sticks to the standard framework of a police procedural novel, but it is shot through with subtle characterisations, clever plot twists and an abiding sense of deep unease. Published by MacMillan, the book is available now.

September 1, 2023 0

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