REVIEWS

THE PRINCIPAL DAY . . . Between the covers

Fenland is, today, an area of Cambridgeshire and Norfolk that was once a primeval swamp, where people survived on tiny islands just high enough above the brackish water to provide shelter and sustenance. Now, the name survives as a District Council, but the waters have long since been drained and tamed. Three novelists have found the flatlands suitable for detective stories. The greatest remains Dorothy L Sayers, albeit through one book only. The Nine Tailors (1934) is a fiendishly complex murder mystery set after The Great War, although the thunderous power of barely restrained rivers is never far away. Jim Kelly’s Philip Dryden books tap in to a more sinister side of the landscape, typified by endless skies, church towers and unbroken horizons. He tells us of isolated communities, ancient jealousies and the heavy hand of history. I nominate Diane Calton Smith to complete the triumvirate. Her novels, set in Wisbech from the time of King John up to the 15th century, portray a landscape that changes little, but a social structure that has evolved.

The Principal Day, her latest,finds us in the town in 1423, with a rather splendid late medieval church (little changed today) but in a world that has changed much since the earlier novels. Local farm workers are no longer serfs and villeins, but – in the case of more skilled men – free agents who can seek employment with whoever is prepared to offer the best pay.

There is a school. Situated in a tiny room above the porch of the parish church, it is presided over by Dominus Peter Wysman, a decent enough man, but not greatly respected by one or two of his older pupils. One of the pupils, Rupert of Tilneye is a reluctant scholar, and is just days away from leaving school to go and help run his family manor at nearby Marshmeade. After several humiliations by by the teacher, he resolves to pay the man back by slipping a tiny quantity of ground up yew leaves into his drink. Yew is, of course, a deadly poison when consumed in quantity, but Rupert administers just enough to produce a violent laxative effect, much to the amusement of the scholars.

Much of the story centres on Wisbech’s Guild of The Holy Trinity, of which Peter Wysman is a member The Guilds have no modern equivalent save perhaps Freemasonry. To belong to the Guild, you had to be rich and influential, and its chief, the Alderman, was someone of great influence. They regularly dined on rich roasted meats washed down with wines imported from Europe. When, on The Principal Day (a significant day of celebration and ceremony, often centered around the feast day of the guild’s patron saint or a major religious holiday, in this case the Feast of The Holy Trinity) the Guild members gather for a lavish feast. Wysman is taken unwell, rushes outside into the Market Place, where he collapses and dies.

Rupert’s cruel prank on Wysman was widely known to the scholars. When they are questioned, Rupert is arrested for murder and thrown into the dungeons of Wisbech Castle. His mother, Lady Evelyn, is convinced that he is innocent, and travels to Ely, where she enlsists the help of Sir Henry Pelerin, the Bishop’s Seneschal. He agrees to investigate the case.

In one way, Diane Calton Smith has crafted an excellent medieval police procedural. Sir Henry Pelerin is, I suppose, the long suffering Detective Inspector, while the Constable’s Sergeant-at-arms is a bent copper worthy of modern novels. We even have a version of the stalwart of many a thriller, the brusque and abrupt police pathologist. In the end, we even have that Golden Age prerequisite, the denouement in the library. In this case, however, the principal suspects are assembled at a feast to celebrate St Thomas’s Day. If you will pardon the obvious comment, it is here that all doubt is removed from Pelerin’s mind as to who poisoned Magister Wysman.

Diane Calton Smith weaves her magic once again, and entrances us with a tale shot through with dark deeds, heartache, love and perseverance but – above all – an astonishing ability to roll away the centuries and bring the past to life. The Principal Day is published by New Generation Publishing and is available now. For more on Diane’s Wisbech books follow this link.

August 13, 2025 0

KISS HER GOODBYE . . . Between the covers

I reviewed a previous Frankie Elkins book, Before She Disappeared, (click the link to read) in 2021, and I made the point there that Frankie is one of the more implausible heroines in modern CriFi. Rather like Jack Reacher she travels with pretty much just the clothes she is standing up in, and a bag containing a few toiletries and ID documents. Her ‘job’? I use the quote marks advisedly, because she hunts for missing people. She doesn’t charge a fee, but usually finds temporary employment in the town of city where her investigations begin. She has taken all kinds of jobs from barkeep to cleaner. but here she appears to land on her feet. Or does she?.

Here, she gets a job as pet-sitter for Bart, a ridiculously rich gamer in Tucson Arizona. The house is huge and futuristic, and the pets? Here comes Frankie first little problem. The main pet is a huge Green Iguana called Petunia, and Frankie has a roomful of exotic snakes to feed with frozen rats and live crickets. And Frankie just hates snakes.

It’s safe to say that Frankie has a disturbing history. Here, she gazes into the eyes of a little Afghan girl.

‘My name is Frankie,” I murmur. She stares at me. Stares, stares, stares, until I can feel each of my sins. All of my secrets slowly being stripped bare. I let her take my full measure. The losses I have felt, the pain I’ve inflicted, the sad little girl who still lives deep inside me, longing for her father to sober up, wishing for her mother to come home. The damaged woman I’ve become, unable to stay too long or connect too deeply because the sheer anxiety of such intimacy makes me want to drink.’

Her latest crusade? To find Sabera Ahmadi, an Afghan woman who has disappeared from her temporary refugee accommodation in Tucson, leaving her husband and young daughter behind. In her own words, Sabera describes the horrific events of the previous few years. It is a particularly grisly episode in modern history, but just the latest chapter in a sorry tale of foreign powers believing they could impose some kind of external rule on Afghanistan. From the disastrous military adventures of the British in the 19th century, to the futile 1980s attempts by Russia to prevent the rise of Islamic extremism, and concluding with the equally ineffective attempts by the Americans and British to democratise the country, the inexorable resilience of the vile Taliban covers Sabera’s life like a funeral shroud.

Sabera’s husband Isaad also goes missing, but when he is found dead, with evidence that he has been tortured, Frankie feels she is no closer to the core or the case, despite help from a diverse collection of allies, including Daryl (Bart’s chauffeur and minder), Roberta (Daryl’s ballroom dance partner) and Marc, a police detective, and brother to Roberta . Oh, yes, we mustn’t forget Genni, Bart’s six-feet-four transvestite housekeeper.

However, Sabera is far from being a hapless victim of international war games, or an archetypal submissive Muslim woman. It transpires that before the Taliban retook Kabul, Sabera – like her mother before her – was already involved with international intelligence agencies, and she was valued for her mastery of several languages, and a skill with numbers and code that made her a valuable asset.

Frankie (as ever) has bitten off more than she can chew, and finds that the truth behind Sabera’s disappearance is more disturbing – and potentially deadly for all concerned – that she could have ever imagined. Lisa Gardner gives us a book that is impeccably researched and has full-on relentless pace. Kiss Her Goodbye is published by Century and will be available on 14th August.

August 10, 2025 0

POWDER SMOKE . . . Between the covers

I absolutely adored Andrew Martin’s Jim Stringer novels from the word go. The Necropolis Railway was set around the actual railway line near Waterloo that took hearse carriages containing the coffins that would be buried in the relatively new Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey, and introduced Jim Stringer, a young railwayman who would join the Railway police, and solve many mysteries, including novels set during Jim’s wartime experience on The Somme, Mesopotamia, and post-war India.

Now, we are in 1925, and Jim is a Detective Inspector based in York. The story is based on a strange encounter Jim had at the York Summer Gala in the summer of that year. He meets his boss, who insists they go and watch one of the attractions – a Wild West Show. They see the usual antics – a fake Red Indian, a ‘gunslinger’ who throws knives at his provocatively dressed female partner, then shoots clay pipes out of her mouth. Both the woman, the Red Indian and the cowboy are about as American as Yorkshire Pudding, but in the audience is a genuine American (who acts as a stooge for the performers, and a celebrated couple in the entertainment business, celebrated film star Cynthia Lorne and her producer husband, Tom Brooks.

The gunslinger, Jack ‘ Kid’ Durrant, is not only good with guns, but has ambitions to writer cowboy novels, rather after the celebrated author of Riders of The Purple Sage, Zane Grey (1872 – 1939) Not only that, the relationship between Lorne, Brooks and himself is, as they say, interesting. When Lorne is found dead, with Brooks and Durrant both missing, it is assumed that Durrant is the killer. Although it is not strictly a matter for the Railway Police, Jim feels personally involved, and visits the place where the three were last seen – the grounds of Bolton Abbey in Wharfedale. This allows Andrew Martin (left) to introduce us to what is known as one of the most dangerous rivers in Europe, The Strid. This natural phenomenon sees the River Wharfe forced through a narrow ravine, just a few feet wide. It has been described as the river ‘running sideways’, rather like a twisted ribbon and is believed to be prodigiously deep. No-one goes into it and ever comes out alive.

The best series are enlivened by recurring subsidiary characters, and one has been ever present in the Jim Stringer novels, in the shape of his wife Lydia. We met her when she was young Jim’s landlady in the first novel. Although understandably distant when Jim was on military duties in France, Mesopotamia and India, she has remained by his side. I am not sure how Martin does it but, without being in the least explicit, he makes her quite the most alluring copper’s wife in detective fiction, and their courtship in The Necropolis Railway was – and you’ll have to read the book to understand the contradiction – chastely erotic.

Central to the appeal is, of course, the heartbreaking descriptions of a railway that we once had, but threw away in various acts of criminal negligence and wrong-headedness. The magnificent smoke and almost animal fury of the engines, the cathedrals that were the stations, the legions of uniformed officials, and the fact that in 1925 you could take a train from almost anywhere to somewhere else with minimal discomfort. All now gone and, in the words of the hymn;

“They fly forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.”

Jim, of course, tries to get to the bottom of of the mystery, party because – in spite of his devotion to Lydia – he was slightly smitten by the deceased movie star. The melancholy denouement involves a London and North Eastern Railway locomotive,and a definite sense of closure – if not satisfaction – for our man. In one sense, none of this matters, as our total engagement with the pubs, hotels, railway world, social quirks of the 1920s, and the lingering legacy of The Great War has given us that comfortable sensation we feel after feeling sated after a delicious meal. Powder Smoke is published by Corsair and is available now.

July 31, 2025 0

ONE MAN DOWN . . . Between the covers

Crime fiction and comedy can sometimes make strange bedfellows, but in the right hands it can be beguiling. Back in time, The Big Bow Mystery by Israel Zangwill shared the same kind of subtle social comedy employed by George and Weedon Grossmith, while the Bryant and May novels by the late Christopher Fowler were full of excellent gags. So, how does One Man Down by Alex Pearl measure up?

For starters, this has to be tagged as historical crime fiction, as it is set in a 1984 London, in the strange (to me) world of advertising copywriters and their attempts to secure contracts to sell various products. It may only be forty years ago, but we are in the world of Filofaxes, Psion personal organisers and IBM golfball typewriters. The main thread of the plot involves two lads who are connoisseurs of the catch phrase and sorcerers of the strap-line. Brian and Angus become involved in a complex affair which includes a depressive photographer who is arrested for exposing himself to an elderly former GP on the seafront at Margate, and the attempt to blackmail a gay vicar. Incidentally, the Margate reference is interesting because in recent times the seaside town has been somewhat rehabilitated thanks to the patronage of Tracey Emin, but at the time when the book is set, it was certainly a very seedy place. Along with other decaying resorts like Deal, this part of the Kent coast was prominently featured in David Seabrook’s All The Devils Are Here.

When Brian and Angus find the photographer – Ben Bartlett – involved in blackmailing the vicar, dead in his studio, things take a macabre turn. This thread runs parallel to events that have a distinctly Evelyn Waugh flavour. The two ad-men are speculating about just how dire some of the industry’s efforts are, and Angus takes just four and a half minutes to dash off a spoof commercial for a chocolate bar campaign they know the agency has been booked to handle. Angus makes it as dreadful as he can. The pair go out for a drink, leaving the parody on the desk, forgetting they were due to meet one of the firm’s top men to talk about the real campaign. Annoyed to find them absent, the manager finds the sheet of A4, thinks it wonderful, and promptly takes it to the Cadbury top brass, who share his enthusiasm.

Alex Pearl (left) isn’t a reluctant name-dropper, and walk on parts for Julian Clary and Kenneth Clarke (in Ronnie Scott’s, naturally) set the period tone nicely. 1984 was certainly a memorable year. I remember driving through the August night to be at my dying dad’s bedside, and hearing on the radio that Richard Burton had died. Just a few weeks earlier we had been blown away by Farrokh Bulsara at Wembley, while Clive Lloyd and his men were doing something rather similar to the English cricket team.

Back to One Man Down. All’s well that ends well, and we have another murder, but one that saves the career and reputation of the blackmailed vicar. This is not a long book – just 183 pages – but I thoroughly enjoyed it. I am a sucker for anything that mentions cricket, and here the story more or less begins and ends on the cricket pitch. The solution to the murder(s) is elegant and subtle. The book is published by Roundfire Books and is available now.

July 30, 2025 0

HOME BEFORE DARK … Between the covers

November 1967, Iceland. Fourteen year-old Marsi has a secret pen pal, a boy who lives on the other side of the country – but she has been writing to him in her older sister’s name. Now, she is excited to meet him for the first time. But when the date arrives, Marsi is prevented from going, and during the night, her sister, Stina, goes missing. Her bloodstained anorak is later found at the place where Marsi and her pen pal had agreed to meet. No trace of Stina, dead or alive, is ever found.

The narrative jumps backwards and forwards between 1967 and 1977, the 1967 voice being that of Stina and the 1977 voice belonging to Marsi. Marsi receives a letter purporting to be from her pen pal of ten years earlier and, when a Danish au pair is found dead by the roadside (apparently from exposure) another letter addressed to Marsi is found on the body.

If you wanted an archetypal Nordic Noir novel, this certainly ticks all the boxes. The unrelenting climate and landscape dominate everything; angst, suspicion, nightmares, neuroses and dark thoughts combine to make a vast umbrella which keeps out anything remotely humorous or optimistic. Marsi dreams:

“Not long afterwards, I drifted off to sleep. For once, I dreamt about Dad. Dreamed he came and sat on my bed, stroked my cheek and gazed at me with staring, deep-set eyes.But every time he opened his mouth to speak, I heard the croaking of a raven.”

One of the problems the reader may face as regards working out what is going on, is that Marsi is, to put it mildly, a rather disturbed young woman. Some might say that she is as mad as a box of frogs, but how reliable a narrator is she? Is her memory warped by trauma? I should remind readers that the book consists of two first person accounts of events, that of Marsi and that of Stina. This, of course, raises the technical dilemma of Stina’s account. Because she is telling us what is happening in the winter 0f 1967, are we to assume that she is still alive? It is not quite such a conundrum as that of Schrödinger’s Cat but, outside the realm of supernatural fiction, the dead cannot speak.

Eva Björg Ægisdóttir (left) gives us few clues as to the fate of Stina until a violent denouement finally reveals the truth, but before that happens we are drawn into the mystery of a reform school for girls thought to be wayward – think of an Icelandic version of the Magdalene Laundries – and, in particular the fate of one young woman suspected of having a ‘special relationship’ with an American soldier. There is certainly an air of perpetual darkness about this book, which has all the aspects of a particularly unpleasant nightmare from which, despite your having reached out and turned on the bedside lamp, and no matter how many times you blink or shake your head, you simply cannot wake up and leave behind. Home Before Dark was translated by Victoria Cribb and was published by Orenda Books on 17th July.

July 24, 2025 0

CLASSICS REVISITED . . . Sleeping Dog

In 1985, Dick Lochte presented us with perhaps the most extraordinary detective pairing in the long history of the genre. Leo Bloodworth is an LA investigator, Korean war veteran in his 50s, overweight, unfit, and tends to come off second best in fights with the bad guys. Serendipity Renn Dahlquist is 14 years old, as smart as a tack but would probably be described as ‘on the spectrum’ in these ever-so-enlightened days. Her dad never made it back from Vietnam, her mum is, as they used to say, ‘no better than she ought to be’, and the girl lives with her grandmother, an actress in a long-running TV soap.

What brings them together? Bizarrely, it is because Sarah (for short) has a dog, a bulldog called Groucho. And he has gone missing. When she goes to the police, one of the officers jokingly refers her to Bloodworth. While he never formally agrees to take on the case, events force Leo and Sarah into a reluctant partnership. In one Chandleresque paragraph, Bloodworth describes the situation:

“I had a dead partner. I had a plastic faced knife artist. I had guys in suits tossing my office and my apartment looking for something called the Century List and talking about blackmail. I had an old lady who’d had a wall toppled on her. I also had a kid with a lost dog and her mother was mixed up in dog fights with some low life from the Mex Mafia.”

The plot spins this way and that, and draws in financial swindlers, the grim subculture of dog-fights, impersonations enabled through cosmetic surgery, and incompetent PIs. The core of the book, however, is the relationship between Bloodworth and Serendipty. It would have been as fraught with risks in 1985 to suggest any sense of sexual spark between the two as it would be now. However, on a couple of occasions, Lochte (left) flirts with danger. There were several subsequent novels featuring Leo and Serendipity, but I have not read them, so I am unable to report on how their relationship developed.

This novel, 40 years on, will not disappoint fans of LA investigator crime fiction. Of course, Lochte doesn’t hold a candle to Chandler, but then who did? I would nominate Robert B Parker as a contender, but then Spencer operated in Boston, so the milieu was altogether different.The plot spins this way and that, and draws in financial swindlers, the grim subculture of dog-fights, impersonations enabled through cosmetic surgery, and incompetent PIs. The core of the book, however, is the relationship between Bloodworth and Serendipty.

The story behind the initial search for Groucho is as complex as anything ever dreamed up by Chandler. At least we do not have to ask, “Who killed the chauffeur.?” In a rather contrived ending, Bloodworth, several tequilas to the good, explains it all away to his former cop partner, Rudy Cugat – and, of course, to us.

July 17, 2025 0

THE BETRAYAL OF THOMAS TRUE . . . Between the covers

Thomas True is the son of the Rector of Highgate. Now a sought after London suburb, in the early 18th century, at the time in which this novel is set, it was a country village. The young man has, for some years, been aware of his homosexuality and, unfortunately, so has his fire and brimstone father, who has done his best to beat out of his son what he sees as ‘the Devil’. Thomas has saved up his allowance and is determined to escape the misery.

Unknown to his parents, Thomas has been writing to his cousin Amelia in London, with a view to living with her and her parents. Within minutes of jumping down from the mail coach into the mire of a London street, he has been drawn into a world that is both breathlessly exciting and profoundly dangerous. The world of the molly houses in London was already well established, and would continue as a forbidden attraction well beyond the scandal of the Cleveland Street raid in 1889 in which Queen Victoria’s grandson, Prince Albert Victor was implicated, although there has never been any conclusive evidence that he was a customer of this male brothel. A molly? There is a lengthy explanation here.

Thomas meets a young man called Jack Huffins who is quick to recognise the lad as a kindred spirit, and he introduces him to Mother Clap’s which is, I suppose, the eighteenth century equivalent of a gay nightclub. We also meet a significant figure in the story, a burly stonemason called Gabriel Griffin. Working on the recently completed St Paul’s cathedral is his day job, but by night he is the bouncer at Mother Clap”s. He is also a man in perpetual mourning, haunted by his wife and child who died together three years earlier.

Hovering in the background to the revelry at Mother Clap’s is The Society for the Reformation of Manners. They actually existed, as did Mother Clap’s. The Society was, collectively, a kind of Mary Whitehouse (remember her?) of the day, and they existed to root out what they saw as moral decay, particularly of a sexual nature. They were far more sinister than the Warwickshire-born Christian campaigner however, as back then, men convicted of sodomy, buggery and ‘unnatural behaviour’ could be – and often were – hanged. The Society has inserted ‘ a rat’ into Mother Clap’s community. Quite simply, he is paid by his masters to identify participants, and give their names to two particularly repugnant officers of The Society, Justice Grimp and Justice Myre (Grimpen Mire, anyone?) The main plot centres on the search for the identity of ‘the rat’.

At times, the picture that AJ West (his website is here) paints of London is as foetid, grotesque and full of nightmarish creatures as that seen when zooming in to a detail in one of Hieronymus Bosch’s apocalyptic paintings. West’s London is largely based on history, but there are moments, such as when Thomas and Gabriel are captured by a tribe of street urchins in their dazzlingly strange lair, that the reader slips off the real world and drifts somewhere else altogether.

What the author does well is to show up the anguish and insecurity of the men who feel compelled to posture and pose as mollies, in an attempt to nullify the boredom of their respectable family lives. The bond of love that develops between Thomas and Gabriel is genuine, and certainly more powerful than the silly nicknames and grotesque flouncing at Mother Clap’s. The book ends with heartbreak. Or does it? Given that Gabriel is susceptible to ghosts, he is perhaps not a reliable narrator, and AJ West’s last few paragraphs suggest that the Society has, like the President of the Immortals at the end of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, ended its sport with Thomas and Gabriel. This paperback edition is out today, 3rd July, from Orenda Books.

July 2, 2025 0

CLASSICS REVISITED . . . Journey Into Fear

Eric Ambler (1909 – 1998) was one of the finest story-tellers of the middle years of the 20thC, and he had a profound influence on later writers of the espionage thriller, such as Le Carré, Fleming and Deighton. When I revisited The Mask of Dimitrios (1939) I remarked that in those days, Istanbul still carried the aura of the exotic but dangerous place where east-meets-west. Central character Mr Graham is an engineer who works for a British armaments corporation, and has been sent to Istanbul on a business deal. The trip has been successful, but on the evening before his return to England his host insists on taking him to a nightclub. You could pick virtually any paragraph from the book as an example of Ambler’s skill, but I liked this particular description of a suspicious customer at the club:

“He was a short, thin man with a stupid face, very bony with large nostrils, prominent cheekbones and full lips pressed together as if he had sore gums or were trying to keep his temper. He was intensely pale and his small deep-set eyes and thinning curly hair seemed in consequence darker than they were. The hair was plastered in streaks across his skull. He wore a crumpled brown suit with lumpy padded shoulders, a soft shirt with an almost invisible collar and a new grey tie.”

Returning to his hotel in the small hours, Graham unlocks his room. Mayhem ensues. Three shots ring out, one of which takes a chunk out of his hand. The gunman escapes, and in the fallout from the incident, Graham is taken to meet the sinister chief of Istanbul’s secret police. He is told that this wasn’t a robbery gone wrong, but an attempt on his life. Why is he so important? As an expert in the ballistics of naval guns, he has information that Germany would prefer not to be spread further, and so if his knowledge dies with him, then so be it. Historical note: despite its alliance with Germany in the Great War, Turkey remained resolutely neutral in WW2, despite a token declaration of war against the Axis in February 1945.

Graham’s planned return journey by rail is aborted, and he is put on an Italian cargo ship bound for Genoa, on the grounds that he will be safe there. After a brief stop in Athens, Graham is appalled to see the the Sestri Levante has a new passenger – the man from the Istanbul nightclub and, presumably, the person who tried to kill him.

The real threat to Graham comes not from the nightclub man but from an elderly archaeologist called Haller, whose long winded monologues about Sumerian funerary rites have made meal times such a bore for the other passengers. Haller is, in fact, a Nazi agent called Moeller, who has been trying – to use chess metaphor – to wipe Graham’s knight off the board for several weeks. This is one of those novels, all too easily parodied, where no-one is who they claim to be. It is from what was, in some ways, a simpler age, where storytellers just told the story, with no ‘special effects’ like multiple time frames and constant changes of narrator.

The book is quintessentially English. We are left pretty much to our own devices to decide what Graham even looked like. We don’t even know his Christian name, but neither do we need to. The novel was filmed in 1943, but Americanised. It had a decent cast, with Joseph Cotton as Graham, but by then, America had been at war for two years, and the whole political and diplomatic background had shifted. It may – or may not – be a decent film but, looking at the plot online, I probably will not bother. Back to the book. Graham, until the last few pages ponders his fate and, like a twentieth century Hamlet, he ‘suffers the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.’ When he does take decisive action it is violent, and he certainly does ‘take arms against a sea of troubles.’ This Penguin edition was published in 2023.

June 30, 2025 0

THE HOUNDING . . . Between the covers

For those who believe in geopsychology – the connection between place and the human mind – there is actually a place called Nettlebed. It is in Oxfordshire but not, as in the book, two hamlets, Little and Greater, divided by the River Thames. Given that the story mentions that, in living memory, older people remember the soldiers of the English civil wars, we e connection between Little Nettlebed and Greater Nettlebed is a simple punt ferry, operated by Pete Darling. Perhaps it is stretching things a little far, but the concept of the Ferryman in literature goes back into the mists of time and includes, of course, the mythical Charon, who carries passenger not across the placid upper reaches of the Thames, but a much darker river altogether. On one side of the river is the local ale house, frequented all too often by Pete Darling, and on the other bank, the farm owned by the elderly Joseph Mansfield. His wife is dead. His son and daughter in law are dead. All that remains are his five granddaughters – and his failing sight. Now, he lives as much by scent, touch and memory, as his milky eyes see only vague shapes and shadows.

Among the many joys of this book is the attention paid to the flora and fauna of the villages. My first thought was of the wonderful poem by Matthew Arnold, The Scholar Gypsy, where he writes, also of the Ofordshire landscape:

“Screen’d is this nook o’er the high half reaped field.
And here till sundown, shepherd, will I be.
Through the thick corn the scarlet poppies peep,
And round green roots and yellowing stalks I see
Pale pink convolvulus in tendrils creep;
And air-swept lindens yield
Their scent and rustle down their perfumed showers
Of bloom on the bent grass where I am laid.”

Xenobe Purvis gives us Agrimony, Figwort, Mignonette, Cow Parsley, Dog Roses, Foxgloves, Buttercups and Camomile. Be not distracted, however. The Nettlebeds are no balmy rural paradise, no Arcadia. We see a brutal rural custom which involves the burial of a woman who has died in childbirth. Local custom decrees that the six pallbearers must be women who are pregnant, as if to warn them that their fertility has consequences. When Ferryman Darling believes he has seen the Mansfield sisters turn themselves into dogs, some dismiss his claim as the imaginings of a drunk but, crucially, some people are only too ready to see this as a perfect explanation for why the five young women are so strange, and so aloof.

There are moments in this unsettling novel where I felt drawn into a Samuel Palmer painting. His England was full of mystery, a place where men and women were merely bystanders in an intense landscape of a setting sun sharing the canvas with a harvest moon, a land where thousand year-old traditions and phantom ancestors have a potent effect on present people.

The Ferryman is, perhaps, the key figure in The Hounding. As the river shrinks to a stream that people can easily wade through, his livelihood withers, and his daylight hours are seen through an alcoholic haze. He is the lightning conductor which seems to channel all the negative energy hovering over the hamlets. He sees – or thinks he sees – the five sisters for what they are:

“The fierce one, the pretty one, the tomboy, the nervous one, the youngest. That was what had frightened him the most: they were not mere doltish dogs. They were girls with teeth and claws.”

The novel ends with death and delusion, and the author, in narrative terms – and perhaps wisely – does not provide a definitive conclusion to the events in Little and Greater Nettlebed, but leaves us with the feeling we have after awaking from a strange and troubling dream. The Hounding is published by Hutchinson Heinemann and will be on sale from 26th June.