REVIEWS

THE IRON WATER … Between the covers

I am not suggesting that it is a good idea, but were you to cut Chris Nickson open, you would probably find – after the fashion of Queen Mary – the word ‘Leeds’ engraved on his heart. He is clearly passionate and protective about the city of his birth, and this shines like a beacon from every page of The Iron Water, another case for the Leeds copper Tom Harper. Set in the summer of 1893 it is, on one level, a straightforward Victorian police procedural, but it is more. Much more.

Nickson wears his social justice heart very much on his sleeve, and he doesn’t shrink from describing the vile conditions still experienced by poor families at the time. There is nothing of the cosy period piece about the book, but Nickson doesn’t make the mistake of allowing his fervour to turn the story into a collection of protest pamphlets, in spite of Annabelle, Harper’s lovely wife, taking a position within a campaigning Suffragist movement in the city.

Harper, all of a sudden, has bodies on his hands. There’s the corpse which floats up from the depths of a local lake after a demonstration of a new water-borne weapon, the torpedo. Then there’s the girl. Well, at least her leg, which is recovered from the canal. And what’s to be made of the body of a minder usually employed by one of the city’s criminal gangs? Being garrotted is definitely not the usual fate of Leeds murder victims.

Two gang bosses, one of Irish heritage and the other local, are engaged in a tense truce. They will hold off attacking each other while Harper and his fellow officers track down the mysterious copper-headed man who appears to be connected to the deaths. Time is running out, however, and there is an even more calamitous threat hanging over the heads of the police. The powers-that-be want answers, and as Harper runs around in ever decreasing circles, he is told that if he doesn’t find the killer, then men from Scotland Yard will travel north and take over the case. This, for Harper and his boss Superintendent Kendall, will be the ultimate disgrace.

The descriptions of the city as it swelters in the summer heat, are masterly. You can almost taste the sweat, sense the baking hot cobbles under your feet as you walk, smell the dray horses and feel your throat burning from the chemical tang produced by the factories which have made Leeds a grand place to make money – for the privileged few. There’s a terrific paragraph which goes:

“The July heat showed no sign of breaking. All the faces he passed on the pavement looked on edge. Thoughts of violence hung over their heads. Another day or two and there’d be fights. Men would beat their wives over nothing at all. There’d be woundings and killings in the pubs and beershops.”

That has echoes of Raymond Chandler’s lines from Red Wind (1938) which begin:

“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch..”

But Nickson’s version fits just as beautifully into the cauldron of industrial Leeds as Chandler’s did into the hot California night.

Eventually, almost as the Scotland Yard men are about to board their train at King’s Cross, a flurry of violence and revenge seems to tie up the case, but Nickson is much too good to allow it to rest there, and the unease Harper feels about the closing of the case proves justified when he has one more terrifying ordeal to face.

The Iron Water is published by Severn House, and is available both in hardback and as a Kindle.

November 29, 2016 0

THE BOOK OF MIRRORS … Between the covers

It is 1987, and a bitterly cold winter night in New Jersey. In a rambling Queen Anne-style house in West Windsor, a man is found dead, battered to death and lying in a pool of his own blood. The corpse is that of a successful but controversial academic from Princeton, Professor Joseph Wieder. For all his erudition and his insights into the human brain – particularly the workings of memory – he is still very dead. The police dutifully stumble around in the snow, interviewing those who knew the dead man, but they fail to find anyone without a decent alibi, let alone a suspect who stood to gain substantially from his death.

Romanian author Eugen Chirovici takes this unsolved crime as the centrepiece of an intriguing and original crime mystery in which he explores the nature of memory and perception from several different viewpoints. Without getting bogged down in faux psychology, Chirovici takes an almost Proustian look at the events of that winter night in 1987, and he even tips his hat to the great man in the final sentence of the book.

We first learn of Wieder’s violent demise in a roundabout way. A literary agent, Peter Katz, is working his way through emails from hopeful authors, and consigning most of them to the trash icon, when his attention is grabbed by a submission from a man called Richard Flynn. Katz prints out the sample chapters of Flynn’s book and sits down to read them. He is hooked. Two hours fly past, and Katz realises that he has a possible best seller in his hands, but he is unsure if the book is a true crime confession, or a novel. So, what did Flynn have to say?

Richard Flynn has worked his way up from a decent but unremarkable upbringing in Brooklyn, and is in his third year studying English at Princeton. His new housemate is a young woman called Laura Baines, and he falls under her spell. She introduces him to Professor Wieder, who is her thesis supervisor. Flynn gets a part time job cataloguing Wieder’s extensive book collection. By this time, he and Laura are bedmates, but he is still wondering about the relationship between Laura and Wieder when the older man is brutally murdered.

At this point, Flynn’s manuscript finishes, and Katz seeks out the author, only to find that he has recently died. Determined to get to the bottom of the mystery, Katz employs an out-of-work investigative reporter, John Keller, to do the leg work. Keller takes up the narrative at this point but, as he pans the stream, he finds only Fool’s Gold. What he does manage to do, however, is introduce us to the third witness in the saga – a retired cop called Roy Freeman.

There is a very satisfying sense of a torch being handed from one runner to another, and it is during Freeman’s leg of the journey that we find out the truth of what really happened to Joseph Wieder. Or do we? Changing the metaphor, Chirovici tells us that we have been in one of those fairground attractions which involves walking in front of distorting mirrors. He says;

“They’d all been wrong, and seen nothing but their own obsessions through the windows they’d tried to gaze through, which in fact had been mirrors all along.”

This is a skilful and engaging work which is all the more remarkable for being written in English which, despite his many academic achievements, is not the author’s first language. The style is unfussy and direct; Chirovici makes the different participants in the story totally convincing, and the American scene-setting is faultless. In the acknowledgements section at the end of the novel he thanks many different people who, in his words, “enriched the manuscript and made it shine.” I would offer the simple observation that if the stone had not been precious in the first instance, then no amount of polishing would have made it a diamond.

The Book of Mirrors is published by Century, at £12.99 in hardback, and £7.99 for the Kindle. It will be available in January 2017, and you can pre-order here.

November 25, 2016 0

TRUTH WILL OUT … Between the covers

Nick Fennimore is a forensic psychologist, and a Professor at the University of Aberdeen. His past gives him a painful and heartfelt stake in the hunt for a serial killer, as his own wife and child were snatched. Both are now lost to him; wife Rachel, because her body was found shortly after the abduction., and daughter Suzie – well, she is just lost. Neither sight nor sound of her has been sensed in the intervening years, but Fennimore clutches at the straw of her still being alive, and he feverishly scans his own personal CCTV footage of the Paris streets and boulevards in the hope of catching a glimpse of her.

Fennimore has an uneasy relationship with DI Kate Simms, a senior police officer now working in Manchester. They too have a past, but Kate is unhappily married to Keiron, an ambitious schoolteacher who seems more concerned with his own professional advancement than keeping their marriage alive. Keiron may have a justifiable grievance, as Kate has only just returned from a high profile secondment to America, while he has been left to keep the home fires burning, and their two children fed and watered.

Julia Myers and her six year-old daughter Lauren have been taken, perhaps by the same killer who inflicted such trauma on Fennimore. Just as in the Fennimore abduction, the mother – Julia – turns up dead, but where is the daughter? We have the occasional chapter narrated in Lauren’s voice, and Garrett captures her intensity, bafflement and frustration perfectly.

Fennimore has been pursued by a persistent Essex reporter, Carl Lazko, who wants to make a headline-grabbing story out of the wreckage of Fennimore’s personal life, in addition to mounting a campaign to prove that a man called Graham Mitchell is innocent of a murder which has no connection with Fennimore but has all the hallmarks of the academic’s family tragedy.

Josh Brown is a research assistant to Fennimore and as part of his campaign to get the academic on-side, Lazko reveals that Josh is on a witness protection programme and is a member of a notorious Essex crime family. Josh has turned Queen’s Evidence, thus indicting several close family members, hence his new life and new identity. When they appear, in the later part of the book, Josh’s family – his brothers, no less – are chillingly depicted as murderous and callous hooligans. As a Briton, I do sometimes ask the question, “What is it about Essex?” That I fully expected the vindictive brothers to be thoroughly odious probably tells its own story. As I write, I can tell you that there is currently a pressure group working hard to force the removal of the term ‘Essex Girl’ from a popular and inclusive dictionary.

A.D. Garrett is the pseudonym for prize-winning novelist Margaret Murphy (above left), working in consultation with policing and forensics expert, Helen Pepper (above right). I found their latest novel well-paced and accurately researched with intense scientific detail, as one would expect from a novel co-authored by a scientist. My only criticism is that the abduction case is eventually solved in a very dramatic fashion, and this was a master-class in how an author should bring a plot to a thrilling – and bloodstained – conclusion. But then, just as we – that’s you and me, the readers – are calming down after a thrilling denouement, the authors decided to wrap up Fennimore’s own personal obsession – the whereabouts of his daughter. This is done at 110 mph, in very few pages, and I felt that it could easily have been left to another day and another novel, to allow its dramatic potential to be fully exploited.

The two previous books in the series are Everyone Lies (2013) and Believe No One (2014). Truth Will Out will be available from 3^rd November in hardback and Kindle, with a paperback version promised for early 2017. The novels are published by Corsair, which is an imprint of the Little Brown Group.

November 11, 2016 0

HOUSE OF BONES … Between the covers

Imagine, if you will, a roomful of marketing executives, PR gurus and recruitment consultants all clustered round a flip chart. Too terrible to contemplate already? Bear with me, as this only imaginary. Their task? To come up with crime fiction’s next female superstar private investigator. A Jack Reacher in a skirt, a John Rebus in a Kylie Jenner-endorsed little black dress, maybe? Never in all their hours of creative brainstorming would they have come up with Annie Hauxwell’s Catherine Berlin. She is as cranky as hell, rather bedraggled, and just a few months short of her concessionary bus pass. Oh, yes, I almost forgot. She is an addict – her drug of choice, or perhaps necessity, is heroin, but she will make serious inroads into a bottle of Talisker if the China White is not available. Or – and this is in extremis – a few codeine will have to do.

It’s always fun to come late to an established series that has many established followers, if only to see what all the fuss is about. I had covered Catherine Berlin in writing brief news grabs, but House of Bones was to be my first proper read. There is a wonderfully funereal atmosphere throughout the book. Sometimes this is literal, as at the beginning:

“Catherine Berlin followed a hearse through the grand arch of the City of London Cemetery and Crematorium. She wondered how long it would be before she passed under it feet first.”

One of the corpses in the narrative – and there are several – is found in the crypt of St Bride’s, Fleet Street, and later in the novel Berlin gatecrashes a society funeral and allows her few remaining heart strings to be tugged when she hears the evocative words of her mother’s favourite hymn:

“Where is death’s sting? Where, grave, thy victory?
I triumph still, if thou abide with me.”

The dark, end-of-days mood of the book is underlined by the dismal weather. I was reminded of the old soldiers’ song from The Great War, sung to the tune of ‘Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty.’ They sang:

“Raining, raining, raining: always bloody well raining:
Raining all the morning, and raining all the night.”

Hauxwell gives us London rain, cold, dispiriting, grey and naggingly pervasive. She also gives us Hong Kong rain, which is hot, loud and has the intensity of special effects in a disaster movie. Berlin’s London milieu is bleak. She treads the streets of Limehouse, Wapping, and Leyton. These eastern parts have modern millionaire housing developments and expensively imagined conversions of a Victorian past, but that past is never far away, like a cold sore disguised with cosmetics. The river is also a baleful presence in what becomes a nightmarish environment.

Berlin is hired by Burghley LLP:

“ a boutique outfit established by spooks and former Whitehall types. They offered discreet investigative and intelligence services. Deep pockets essential.”

Her task? To investigate the strange case of a teenage boy who has been arrested for assault. He is Chinese, and attends an exclusive public school. All fees are provided by an apparently charitable organisation which takes Chinese orphans and gives them a sociological blood transfusion, the plasma being supplied by the British aristocracy. The problem is, though, Philip Chen’s alleged victim has disappeared, and only exists on grainy footage from a CCTV camera. Who is he? Where is he? What provoked the violent assault?

Berlin rapidly becomes aware that Philip’s most visible patron is a prodigiously wealthy and well connected member of the House of Lords, Jack Haileybury. He sits, spiderlike, in a web of his own creation, which is actually a converted warehouse in Wapping. He has expensive tastes, both in narcotics, oak-aged single malt whisky and, more troubling, teenage boys.

Sometimes aided and sometimes hindered by a manic and rather disturbed policeman, DC Terence Bryant, Berlin hacks her way through the long grass of the British establishment to uncover an abomination which dwarfs some of the recent real-life exposures of what celebrities get up to. She travels to Hong Kong, and then mainland China in pursuit of the truth, but when she finally has it, she is made to wish she had looked the other way. The title? It becomes horribly appropriate only in the last few pages of the novel, but to say more would be to spoil your experience of Annie Hauxwell’s dark and compelling piece of English Noir.

House Of Bones is available in Kindle or as a paperback.

November 8, 2016 0

THE MISSING HOURS … Between the covers

Dr Selena Cole is a widow. She and her late husband Ed founded The Cole Group, operators in the secretive world of K & R – kidnap and ransom. Ed’s military experience tmh and Selena’s qualifications as a psychologist made them the go-to people for corporations and wealthy families who had fallen foul of the highly lucrative business of international kidnapping. But then, on a blisteringly hot morning in Brasilia, it all went badly wrong. Selena went shopping for children’s toys prior to her addressing a meeting of fellow professionals in the afternoon. While she was selecting gifts for their little daughters, the bad guys attacked the hotel and conference centre, shooting, bombing and delivering a stark message. “You may think you are smarter than us, but look at the body count, and then tell us how clever you are.”

Ed, having a lie-in, before the presentations, is one of the victims. Now, months later, Selena has pretty much handed over the running of the group to her sister-in-law, Orla Britten, and her husband Seth. Their centre of operations is the Cole’s elegant period house in a village not far from Hereford. Then, Selena goes missing. One minute she is watching her girls Heather and Tara play on the swings in the playground. The next, she is gone, and a neighbour has gathered up the distressed children, and the police are called.

The first responder is Detective Constable Leah Mackay. She is married – albeit precariously – and has her own children who unwittingly provide instant empathy with the two little Cole girls. First, their father has been taken, and now their mother? It all seems impossibly cruel. Meanwhile Detective Sergeant Finn Hale, precisely 82 days into his promotion, has his first murder case. A body has been discovered beside a narrow road out in the mountains. The cause of death is a throat wound, but it is clear that the body has not bled out where it was found. Before the body became just that, an inanimate mass of tissue, a corpse, it was a ‘he’ and the ‘he’ had a name and personality – Dominic Newell.

Dominic is well-known to the local police. No, not in that sense. He was a familiar face because he was a local solicitor well used to turning out and advising local villains on their rights, and when to say “no comment.” But Dominic was different. Even the police admit that. He was a decent man, nobody’s fool, and someone willing to believe the best of people. So, who had cause to kill him and leave his mortal remains exposed to the elements on a wet hillside?

When Selena reappears, less than 24 hours after she disappeared, Leah Mackay is relieved. Not only because she will not have to deliver an awful death message, but because she has become fascinated by the strange world of Selena Cole and her associates. The problem, though, is a huge one. Selena says she can remember nothing of the intervening hours. Not one thing. Not where she went. Not who she was with. Leah is told by her boss to ditch the Selena Cole disappearance and join everyone else in hunting for the killer of Dominic Newell. She nods dutifully, but does exactly the opposite.

One of the many delights of this excellent novel is that Finna Hale and Leah Mackay are brother and sister. Finn has leap-frogged his sister in the promotion stakes, despite her evident superiority – evident, that is, to us readers, but not the local constabulary personnel department. Kavanagh plays the relationship between the siblings with the touch of a concert violinist. There are all manner of clever nuances and deft little touches which enhance the narrative.

Kavanagh reveals the inner workings of K & R consultants by letting us browse through the files of The Cole Group in between chapters focusing on one or other of the main characters. The police procedural aspect of the novel is sure-footed and convincing, while the touches of domestic noir work well, despite being a well-trodden path. After all, who has ever read a novel where a detective has a blissfully happy marriage with a fully supportive spouse?

The plot twists come, as they should, with only a few pages to go, but by then you will have been totally hooked by the excellent writing, Kavanagh’s well-tuned ear for dialogue, and the authentic setting – that mystical landscape where Western England merges into Wales.

The paperback edition of The Missing Hours is out on 17th November

November 5, 2016 0

MOSKVA … Between the covers

It might be thought that all the books about the problems of law and order in communist and post-glasnost Russia have already been written. Didn’t Martin Cruz Smith corner the market with his accounts of Arcady Renko and his tussles with the authorities? Or what about Boris Starling and Vodka, his tale of gangsters and oligarchs in a Russia struggling to come to terms with the free market?

Jack Grimwood’s Moskva sets out to convince us that there is room for one more tale of conflicted lives in a modern Russia full of paradox and uncertainty. The book came out in hardback earlier this year, and is now available in paperback, from Penguin. Does Grimwood, who made his name writing science fiction and fantasy novels, hit the spot?

Tom Fox is one of those rough, tough individuals who is paid by men in suits to go to dangerous places and do unpleasant things for Queen and Country. He has, however, been doubly traumatised: firstly, a tour of duty working undercover in the bitter sectarian war in Northern Ireland has left him psychologically scarred; secondly, his marriage is pretty much over after his teenage daughter drove her Mini into a tree at 80 mph. Suicide? Drugs? No-one knows for sure, but the blame game has been played to its conclusion, and Fox has lost. Now, in the winter of 1986, his instability is such that his paymasters and handlers in London have packed him off to Moscow, ostensibly to write a report on the state of religion in Gorbachev’s Russia but, in reality, he has been sent far away to keep him out of trouble.

As soon as Fox makes the acquaintance of ambassador Sir Edward Marston and his wife, he is left in little doubt that he is as welcome as a man with something vile on the sole of his shoe trampling over the embassy Axminster. At a reception Fox meets Sir Edward’s fifteen year-old step-daughter Alex and, noticing that she has self harm marks on her lower arms, makes a flippant remark which he soon has cause to regret.

“Beneath her cuffs, not quite visible and not quite hidden, raw welts crossed both wrists. A blunt knife would do it.
‘What’s it got to do with you anyway?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Exactly’
‘Wrist to elbow,’ he said.’Wrist to elbow. If you’re serious.’”

Despite their disdain for Fox, Sir Edward and his wife Anna soon have need of his rough talents when Alex goes missing. There is no ransom note, and no apparent motive except a possible link with the body of a dead boy found frozen in the snow near The Kremlin. Fox is an excellent linguist, and his near-perfect Russian enables him to ‘go native’ in the search for Alex.

His investigation takes him to a back street drinking den run by Dennisov – a one-legged veteran of Russia’s Afghanistan war – and his sister Yelena. Their father is a distinguished veteran of that most blood-stained period in modern history which ran from 22^nd June 1941 to 9^th May 1945, known with reverence by many Russians as The Great Patriotic War. The further Fox digs into the mystery of Alex’s abduction, the more he realises that there is a motive – but one which has deep roots in the days and deeds of April 1945 when the Russians unleashed 20 armies, 6,300 tanks and 8,500 aircraft to crush the defenders of Berlin.

The breadth of this novel in terms of time sometimes makes it hard to work out who has done what to whom. Patience – and a spot of back-tracking – will pay dividends, however, and the narrative provides a salutary reminder of the sheer magnitude of the numbers of Russian dead in WWII, and the resultant near-psychosis about The West. To top-and-tail this review and answer the earlier question as to whether Jack Grimwood (right) “hits the spot”, I can give a resounding “Yes!”. Yes, the plot is complex, and yes, you will need your wits about you, but yes, it’s a riveting read; yes, Tom Fox is a flawed but engaging central character, and yes, Grimwood has sharp-elbowed his way into the line-up of novelists who have written convincing crime novels set in the enigma that is Russia.

Moskva is available in hardback, paperback and Kindle.

November 1, 2016 0

SKIN AND BONE …Between the covers

Georgian England in the early autumn of 1743. The George in question is Number Two, and earlier in the year he had the distinction of being the last monarch to lead British troops in battle, that being at Dettingen, where an uneasy alliance of British, Austrian and Hanoverian forces – known, bizarrely, as ‘The Pragmatic Army’ – defeated those eternal adversaries, the French.

This, then, is the England of Handel and Hogarth (at least he was English) and the looming threat from the Jacobites north of the border. Author Robin Blake, (left) however resists the easy win of setting his story in the bustle of London. Instead, he takes us to the town of Preston, sitting on the banks of the River Ribble in Lancashire.

Titus Cragg is a lawyer, and the coroner for the town. He is called to investigate a macabre and piteous discovery – that of a tiny baby found at the bottom of a malodorous sludge-filled pit, one of several used by tanners in the town to turn rough animal hides into leather. Once the muck and slurry have been washed away from the infant, Cragg discovers a nasty wound on the back of its head. It takes a more detailed examination by a local physician – Luke Fidelis – to reveal that the little girl did indeed die from violence, but of a much more sinister kind.

The investigations carried out by Cragg and Fidelis reveal a growing schism between the tanners and the wealthy men of property who run the town’s affairs. The leather workers are an inward looking community. This state is mostly driven by the fact that they live and work alongside the noisome waste materials – mostly faeces and urine – which are essential to the tanning process, and therefore most local people literally turn up their noses at the tanners. The burgesses and council-men of Preston, on the other hand, have their eyes on what they believe to be an acre or so of valuable land – ripe for redevelopment – currently occupied by the tannery.

What’s in a name? To answer the ill-fated Juliet, there is always something. Cragg, as his name suggests has something rock-like about him, while Fidelis has a touch of enigma and mystery. Fidelis, the more exotic of the pair, causes suspicion among the bluff Lancastrians of Preston, if only because his modern views and deep knowledge of the science of medicine contrast dramatically with the more superstitious practices of other local doctors. Cragg and Fidelis do eventually discover the truth about the awful death of the baby, but not before Preston is set on its collective ear by another murder and the downfall of one of its most respected residents and his family.

Skin and Bone scores highly in all the categories which make for good historical crime fiction. At its core it has an intriguing and inventive mystery, not just a standard murder parachuted into a period setting. The Georgian details are established without fuss, showmanship or over-anxious dollops of historical fact splashed on the canvas in the name of authenticity. Most importantly, the dialogue is natural and untainted by any attempt to create what the author might imagine to be the vernacular speech of the time. Cragg – and his wife – are likeable and convincing, while Fidelis provides just enough forensic flair to point his friend in the right investigative direction.

This is the fourth Cragg and Fidelis story and it came out in Kindle earlier this year. The hardback is out today, 25th October and the paperback will be out on 3^rd November, You can check further details of this and the previous books at Robin Blake’s own website, or his Amazon author page.

October 25, 2016 0

WW2 Historical Crime Fiction – (5) A Man Without Breath

Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther novels bestride the 20^th century, from the rise of the Nazis in 1930s Germany to the post war period when many countries still sheltered mysterious German gentlemen whose collective past has been, of necessity, reinvented. Gunther is a smart talking, smart thinking policeman who has kept his sanity intact – but his conscience rather less so – by dealing with such elemental forces as Reinhardt Heydrich, Joseph Goebbels, Juan and Evita Peron, and Adolf Eichmann.

A Man Without Breath (2013) sees Gunther is working for an organisation whose very existence may seem improbable, given the historical context, but Die Wehrmacht Untersuchungsstelle (Wehrmacht Bureau of War Crimes) was set up in 1939 and continued its work until 1945. In 1943, on a mission from the Minister for Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, Gunther is sent to Smolensk and entrusted with proving that the thousands of corpses lying frozen beneath the trees of the nearby Katyn Forest are those of Polish army officers and intellectuals murdered by the Russian NKVD, and not those of Jews murdered by the SS.

The action is set against a resurgent Red Army slowly grinding its way west, and a small but growing body of opinion among the more aristocratic members of joseph-goebbels-speaf9d239 the German military that Hitler is a dangerous upstart who has already damaged the country beyond repair, and must be stopped. Adrift on a sea of violent corruption, Gunther constantly plays the role of the decent man, but in the end, he follows one theology, and one theology only. If he wakes up the next day with his head firmly attached to his shoulders, and has feeling in his extremities, then he has done the right thing. His conscience has not died, but it is far from well; it competes a whole chorale of competing voices in his head, each wishing to be heard. As he is left helpless by the world of spin and disinformation orchestrated by Dr Goebbels, (right) he must resort to his basic copper’s instincts to protect himself and uncover the truth.

The Katyn Forest murders are a matter of historical record, but it is only in relatively recent times that Russia has officially admitted responsibility for the massacres. As recently as 6 December 2010, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev expressed commitment to uncovering the whole truth about the massacre, stating “Russia has recently taken a number of unprecedented steps towards clearing up the legacy of the past. We will continue in this direction”.

History tells us that the dead of Katyn included an admiral, two generals, 24 colonels, 79 lieutenant colonels, 258 majors, 654 captains, 17 naval captains, 85 privates, 3,420 non-commissioned officers, and seven chaplains, 200 pilots, government representatives and royalty (a prince and 43 officials), and civilians (three landowners, 131 refugees, 20 university professors, 300 physicians, several hundred lawyers, engineers, and teachers, and more than 100 writers and journalists.

We know the terrible details but Gunther only has his suspicions. Kerr weaves a brilliant tale where Gunther’s arrival at the truth has the ironic consequence of removing culpability for the deaths from one group of brutal criminals and bestowing it upon another. Those of us who are old enough to remember the post-war years, if only as children, will be familiar with the feeling that the Russians were bastards every bit as awful as their Nazi opponents, but at least they were our bastards – at least until they reached Berlin.

A Man Without Breath is available in all formats.

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October 14, 2016 0

THE BLACK FRIAR … Between the covers

Shona MacLean opens the door of her time machine and takes us to the city of London in the third year of Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate, 1655. It is almost exactly six years since the severed head of King Charles was shown to the crowd around the scaffold in Whitehall, but Cromwell’s England is still a troubled place. There are still pockets of secret Royalist sympathy up and down the land, and the dead king’s son is in exile, waiting his moment to return.

By far the deepest thorn in Cromwell’s side, however, are firebrand extremist preachers (some things never change) who believe that The Lord Protector has compromised the purity of the cause. One such group is The Fifth Monarchists, a group of zealots who hold true to a strange prophecy in the Book of Daniel, which said that the four kingdoms of Babylon, Persia, Macedonia and Rome would pass away before the fifth kingdom would be visited on the earth – that of Christ himself.

We are quickly introduced to a stern and forbidding Yorkshire soldier called Damian Seeker. He is a veteran of the recent wars, and is now a Captain of the State Guard. It seems that he is directly answerable to Secretary Thurloe, Cromwell’s spymaster – and to Old Noll himself. When the body of a man, dressed in the distinctive black robes of the Dominican order, is found walled up in a ruined priory, those involved are amazed that the corpse is relatively intact after 300 years of entombment. Seeker lets the rumour fly around the streets of the city, but he soon realises that not only has the man been dead only for a matter of weeks, but that he knows his identity.

The dead man is none other than Carter Blythe, one of Thurloe’s most secretive and effective agents. He had embedded himself at the heart of a group of Fifth Monarchists in order to keep track of their plans for insurrection, but he has clearly been rumbled. While keeping the dead man’s true identity a close secret, Seeker – whose surname has earned him the sinister but appropriate appellation of The Seeker – tries to discover the fate of a number of children who have mysteriously disappeared in recent weeks.

The author introduced us to Seeker in her 2015 novel, The Seeker. He is big, tough, implacable – and more or less indestructible. This enables him to stride about the place with great physical authority, and where this is ineffective, he seems to have a direct line to the most powerful man in the country – The Lord Protector himself. The scene–setting is excellent, and I breathed a sigh of relief when it became obvious that MacLean has allowed her characters to talk to each other relatively normally, without any attempt to replicate the conversational mannerisms of the time – whatever they may have been.

MacLean (right) has great fun with prominent real-life characters who would certainly have been involved in affairs of state at the time. We have a nicely imagined Andrew Marvell, the poet best known for his erotic supplication To His Coy Mistress, and a walk on part for Samuel Pepys. The great diarist is merely a clerk at The Exchequer, but his later reputation as a serial seducer of young women is hinted at. We see the spymaster John Thurloe apparently at death’s door with some unspecified illness, but in real life he was to survive the restoration of the monarchy, and died peacefully in his bed in 1668.

This is, I suppose, a 17^th century police procedural, and eventually Seeker gathers his evidence, exposes a Royalist plot, and enhances his reputation as the Jack Reacher of his day. The Black Friar is recommended to anyone who might like a convincing glimpse of old London, with a decent cast of villains and a sturdy plot. The Black Friar is out today, 6th October, and is published by Quercus.

The image below shows contemporary portraits (left to right) of
Andrew Marvell, Samuel Pepys and John Thurloe.

portraits