fullybooked2017

THE POSTMAN DELIVERS … Stuart Davies & Fraser-Sampson

Two books from Urbane Publications this week, and they both look very tasty. I’ve become an avid fan of Guy Fraser-Sampson’s quirky Hampstead Murders series, but David Stuart Davies (left) and his copper DI Paul Snow are, for me, unexplored territory. David Stuart Davies is, as well as being an original author, is a noted editor of ghost stories and classic detective fiction, and an expert on Sherlock Holmes. In Blood Rites, Paul Snow has a problem. A Yorkshire police station in the 1980s is not the most favourable place or time to announce that you are a homosexual, and so Snow remains firmly ‘in the closet’. The self doubt and personal turmoil do not sit easy with Snow, especially when he is trying to bring to justice a killer whose crimes are clearly connected but apparently random. Snow’s lack of success sees him removed from the case, but he is determined to find the killer, and sets about the task privately. You can buy Blood Rites here, and check out two previous DI Snow titles, Brothers In Blood and Innocent Blood.

Guy Fraser-Sampson (right) is clearly a man who has an affinity with an England which, sadly, no longer exists. Precision and subtlety of language, exquisite manners and faithful adherence to social niceties are all terribly unfashionable, but Fraser-Sampson’s respect for them is shown in his revival of EF Benson’s Mapp and Lucia characters, as in Lucia on Holiday and Au Reservoir.

Imagine presenting a premise for a new crime series to a world-weary literary agent. The two principle police officers are as follows: a sane, sober and happily married senior chap, with no personal demons or particular beef with his bosses; we also have a very posh lady detective who, if she didn’t go to Roedean, might well have. Throw into the mix a fragile and waif-like consultant psychologist who, when things get tough, imagines that he is Lord Peter Wimsey, and addresses the love of his life (the female detective) as “Harriet, old thing…” To compound the felony, the stories are set in the rarified atmosphere of one of England’s (if not the world’s) most exclusive locations – Hampstead, in London.

Now, be serious. This shouldn’t work, should it? Please take it from me that not only does it work, but it works in Spades. Fraser-Sampson is totally up-front about his influences, and what he is setting out to do. When I read the first book, Death In Profile, I was quite prepared to scoff, but within a very few pages, I was converted. This was followed in short order by Miss Christie Regrets and A Whiff of Cyanide.

The Hampstead team make a welcome return in A Death In The Night. We have professors, barristers, serial adulterers and exclusive clubs. Of course, we can’t have a crime novel without at least one body, and in this case it is that of the wife of a prominent lawyer. Can Metcalfe, Collins and Willis triumph over a distinct lack of evidence and bring a killer to justice?

If your local bookshop doesn’t stock it, then Amazon will have

A Death In The Night

To read the Fully Booked reviews of previous novels in the series, click the link

Miss Christie Regrets

A Whiff of Cyanide

November 14, 2017 0

TRANSWORLD TAKES ON THE WORLD

I was lucky enough to be invited to the distinctly upmarket Charlotte Street Hotel in London’s Fitzrovia, as a guest of Transworld for their evening showcasing what they hope will be their best-sellers for 2018. Managing Director Larry Finlay (left) took the stage first, and showed his perfectly justifiable pride in how the group’s editors had managed to pick some astonishingly successful novels over the last few years. Judging what readers might want to read months – if not years – ahead, taking a punt on the talent of someone as yet unknown to book fans, and then backing your judgment with publicity and marketing; these are the skills by which publishers stand or fall, and Larry and his team at Transworld seem to be getting the hard bits right.

Journalist, editor and host of The Vintage podcast, Alex Clark, then invited the featured authors to join her on-stage. Ruth Jones is no stranger to the world of entertainment. Television viewers will know her as writer and co-star of Gavin and Stacey, and her compelling portrayal of Hattie Jacques in Hattie. Her debut novel, Never Greener is all about the dangers of taking second chances in life. Referring to the grass implied by the title, she says,”It’s still grass. Just a different patch of it, that’s all.” As to her writing, she says that she falls in love with her characters, and relishes the fact that this work doesn’t require the make-up trolley. Her tip? Always make a note of every experience, no matter how inconsequential – you never know when it will come in handy.

Karen Cleveland had the furthest to travel for the event – a little matter of 4,000 miles or so – from her home in Virginia. Avid readers of espionage thrillers will be well aware of the principle employers in the town of Langley, Virginia – none other than the staple ingredient of most international conspiracy novels, The Central Intelligence Agency. Karen actually spent years behind The Agency’s high security gates, working as an analyst and specialising in identifying potential foul play from Russia. It’s no surprise then, that her debut novel Need To Know describes a young mother and CIA analyst digitally searching files in hopes of unmasking a Russian sleeper cell in the US, but then making a shocking discovery that threatens her job, her family and her life. Karen’s tip for tyro authors – fit in your writing in any time you can, no matter what other balls you have in the air at the same time.

Anne Youngson is one of my generation – she has reached her biblical allowance of three score and ten – but she is living proof that it is never to late to write a debut novel. Unsurprisingly, Meet Me at the Museum features two people with more of their lives behind them than ahead. Anne has a formidable CV away from her writing; she worked for Land Rover, as Chief Engineer, Defender replacement and, finally, MD of the Special Vehicle Operations. Her two fictional protagonists make an unexpected connection through a love of ancient history, personal treasures, and nature. Anne’s writing tip is simple, but powerful – the more you write, the better you get.

There is nothing more intriguing than other people’s houses. A bourgeois obsession, maybe, but one to which many of us, given the thumbscrew treatment, would reluctantly admit. Rebecca Fleet’s debut novel makes the most of the darker side of the swap. A failing marriage, a mutual loss of faith, no future except one in which personal conflicts guarantee to destroy love; Caroline and Francis hope that new surroundings will provide a jump start to their stalled relationship. Marrying domestic noir with the psychological drama, The House Swap is guaranteed to chill and thrill in equal measure. Rebecca was happy to quote Samuel Johnson as her writing tip.

“A man may write at any time if he will set himself doggedly to it.”

Simon Mayo is a widely respected radio presenter. His weekly good-natured sparring with Mark Kermode on Friday afternoons on BBC Radio Five Live are not to be missed. But Mayo the writer? I have to put my hand up and say that I was unaware of his popular young adult fiction. My excuse is that I am certainly not young, and my detractors will query my being described as adult. However, Simon Mayo’s forthcoming debut in adult fiction sounds fascinating. The Anglo-American conflict of 1812 is one of history’s forgotten episodes, but as well as The White House being torched by British troops, many Americans were taken prisoner and shipped back to Britain, where they were incarcerated within the iconically grim granite walls of Dartmoor Prison. The Shakespearean title of Mayo’s novel is Mad Blood Stirring (Romeo and Juliet) and it tells the story of the violent consequences that followed the segregation of black and white prisoners in Dartmoor. Mayo offers this advice to aspiring novelists. (1) Write to find out, (2) Never be intimidated – if you have an idea that you believe in, stick with it, hold on to it, and to hell with the detractors.

November 9, 2017 0

FREE FROM ALL DANGER … Between the covers

I have become a huge admirer of the writing of Chris Nickson (left) . He says on his website:

“I’ve written since I was a boy growing up in Leeds. It all really began with a three-paragraph school essay telling a tale of bomb disposal when I was 11. Like a lightbulb switching on, it brought the revelation that I enjoyed telling stories. Along the way came diversions into teenage poetry, and my other great love, music, as both a bassist and then a singer-songwriter-guitarist. At 21, I moved to the US, and spent the next 30 years there, returning to England in 2005, and finally full circle to Leeds.”

I first read – and thoroughly enjoyed – his books featuring Detective Inspector Tom Harper, and relished his recreation of the smoky, noisy and turbulent city of Leeds in the 1890s. Next, for me, came his Leeds during WWII, as seen through the eyes of Womens’ Auxiliary Police Constable Lottie Armstrong. I had not, until now, gone back to the eighteenth century to investigate Nickson’s tales of the town’s Constable, Richard Nottingham. It seems that Nickson had ushered Nottingham into a well-deserved retirement but, rather like the resurrection, by popular demand, of Sherlock Holmes after his apparent demise at the Reichenbach Falls, Nottingham has returned to duty in Free From All Danger.

You will be pushed to find better opening words to a novel even were you to search all year:

“Sometimes he felt like a ghost in his own life. The past had become his country, so familiar that its lanes and byways were printed on his heart.”

Thus we learn that Richard Nottingham has his best years behind him. With stiffened limbs and diminished vigour he has withdrawn to his home and family – although that family has been diminished by tragedy. When Simon Kirkstall, his successor as town Constable dies, he is persuaded by The Mayor to return to his old job, at least temporarily, while a suitable successor is found.

We are in the year of Our Lord 1736, November, and winter seems to have come early. As Nottingham dusts off his old working clothes he is immediately called into action when a body is pulled from the river. This is no drowning, as the savage slash wounds on the man’s throat testify all too readily. It is as if someone out there in the cobbled lanes, dank ginnels and misty river banks of the rapidly expanding wool town has learned of Nottingham’s return and is determined to challenge him. Murder follows murder, but despite their best efforts neither Nottingham nor his deputy Rob Lister are coming anywhere near to identifying either the assailants or their motives.

As the November 5^th celebration approaches, with huge bonfires being assembled across the town, Nottingham is convinced that the killers – who have been identified as a man and his two sons – are going to target a significant victim while the fires blaze and the mill apprentices drink themselves stupid and taunt the forces of law and order.

In Nickson’s writing you will find neither false flourishes nor furbelows. He doesn’t show off, nor does he have time for tricks and verbal trinkets. Bear in mind that he is a songwriter, and you will understand that he knows how to tell a story with the minimum of fuss. Free From All Danger is a straightforward – but impressive – police procedural, albeit one set in a time when the procedures were based on the wisdom and intuition of the coppers, rather than a two-hundred page manual.

If you have any appreciation of good storytelling, you will enjoy this book. You will, however, need fingerless gloves, warm socks and a good woollen vest, preferably woven in Yorkshire. This November in Leeds is cold. It is a cold that gnaws at men’s bones, chills their souls, and has them heading for the hearths of home, or the fireside of a crowded inn. The cobbles glint with frost, and the mist from the rivers and becks conceals a multitude of dark deeds. Free From All Danger is historical crime fiction right out of the top drawer. It is published by Severn House, and is available here. Please take the time to read Fully Booked reviews of more Chris Nickson novels. Just click on the images below.

November 9, 2017 0

GETTING CARTER … Between the covers

One of the many feelings I had after finishing Nick Triplow’s superb account of the life and writing of Ted Lewis was that it was all such a long time ago. The crucial decade from 1970 to 1980 just seems – and there is no other phrase that fits – like another country. A summary, then, for people who may not even have been born when Lewis was writing. Ted Lewis was born in 1940 in Manchester. After the war he and his parents moved to Barton on Humber, in North Lincolnshire. On leaving school, Lewis, a talented artist, traveled every day across the River Humber to art school in Hull. After graduating, Lewis found work further south with various advertising agencies, but his abiding passion was his writing. As well as enjoying a drink, however, Lewis was a serial womaniser. Lewis’s old Barton friend, Mike Shucksmith, recalls that the writer had a way with women.

“There was something about him that snapped their knicker elastic. I couldn’t see it, but whatever it was, he had it.”

In 1965, All the Way Home and All the Night Through was published. It is a thinly disguised autobiographical novel, but Lewis’s breakthrough came in 1970 with the publication of Jack’s Return Home. The title was, bizarrely, taken from a spoof melodrama acted out by Tony Hancock, Hattie Jacques, Sid James and Bill Kerr as an episode of Hancock’s Half Hour. The novel, however, has few laughs. It describes the revenge mission of a London-based enforcer, Jack Carter, as he returns to his northern home town to investigate the death of his brother. The novel was adapted and filmed as Get Carter, and the rest, as they say, is history. Fame – and money – did not sit comfortably on Lewis’s shoulders, however. A mixture of drink and personal demons led to the break-up of his marriage, and a solitary return to Barton to live with his widowed mother. He died there, of heart failure connected to his ruinous drinking, in 1982.

Nick Triplow (above) examines Lewis’s other books, all concerned with the dark side of British criminal life, far far away from the cosy crime novels where long-suffering policemen chased cheerily crooked villains. One of the most controversial later novels was Billy Rags (1973) – the story of a convicted robber and his attempts to escape from prison. Many of the book’s key moments are, word for word, identical to a memoir written, from his prison cell, by the ‘celebrity criminal’ John McVicar. A final novel, GBH, published in 1980, tells the story of a doomed London gangster trying to escape vengeful rivals by moving to a windswept and isolated coastal village in Lincolnshire.

The centrepiece of Triplow’s book is, quite rightly, concerned with the novel itself, and its journey from a brutally honest and ground-breaking novel through to a partial re-imagining as one of the finest crime films ever made. Of Jack Carter, Triplow stresses that, despite the iconic image created by Michael Caine and director Mike Hodges

“it’s important to place him in context as Lewis originally intended. An ultra-real small town enforcer, violent, sadistic, irretrievably flawed, shouldering the burden of guilt; one of us maybe, if we dare to think it, taken a wrong turn, corrupted and unflinching.”

It would take a reader with a heart of stone and devoid of empathy to finish this book with anything other than a sense of sadness. The heartbreak is, of course, in our wisdom after the event, in our knowing that for Lewis the 1970s – the Get Carter years – were the apogee of his personal success and realisation that his immense talent had been recognised and rewarded, both financially and in terms of reputation.

Aside from describing what must have been harrowing conversations with Lewis’s widow and children, Triplow employs both the depth and breadth of his knowledge of British crime fiction to convince us just how good Ted Lewis was. It is intriguing that Triplow, supported by no less an authority than the magisterial Derek Raymond, makes a fascinating case for GBH being the apotheosis of Lewis’s talent, despite the groundbreaking style and success of Jack’s Return Home. Getting Carter is a sober and sombre account of the life of a man whose talent both defined and destroyed him, and Triplow makes no attempt to sanitise his subject. Lewis was clearly a man of huge personal charm when not in the grip of drink, but from the early days of illegally bought pints of beer in the 1950s through to the grim years of decline and death, alcohol had him firmly by the throat.

Anyone with more than a passing interest in the evolution of British crime fiction should read Getting Carter and celebrate the brilliance of the man at the centre of the story. It would be salutary, however, to keep Shelley’s words in mind:

“Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Getting Carter is published by No Exit Press and is on sale now.

November 6, 2017 1

THE POSTMAN DELIVERS … Jayson, Gilbertson & Bartram

We have two new books from Matador this week, plus the very welcome return of the genial crime reporter, Colin Crampton.

The Last Squadron is a military thriller from debut author Dan Jayson, and it is set fifteen years from now, and the most pessimistic soothsayers have been proved right. The ethnic and religious schisms which had been festering for decades have bloomed into an apocalyptic hell of different wars across the globe. Nowhere is safe, and unlikely political alliances have been forged. A squadron of mountain troops has been serving on the inhospitable Northern Front, but as they fly home for much needed rest, their aircraft is shot down – and they realise that their nightmare is only just beginning. Dan Jayson’s bio tells us that he is the co-founder of an underwater search and salvage company. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Marine Engineers and served in the British Territorial Army. He is based in south-west London.The Last Squadron is published by Matador, and is available now from Amazon, or from the Matador/Troubador website.

David Gilbertson (right) is a writer whose knowledge of policing and counter-terrorism is second to none. He had a long and varied career as a police officer. He served in uniform and CID in the UK and abroad, (attached to the New York City Police Department in 1988 and seconded to South Africa in 1994 as the Director of Peace Monitors for the first post-Apartheid elections). His latest novel, The Path of Deception, is set in a Britain devastated by a terrorist atrocity of hitherto unimagined scale. The police and security services are faced with the very real possibility that their attempts to prevent the outrage have been sabotaged from within. Suddenly, the task of making safe the imminent coronation of King Charles III is thrown into a very different focus. You can read more on the Troubador/Matador website, or visit Amazon.

Crime reporter Colin Crampton (as imagined by Frank Duffy, left) is a delightful invention by journalist and author Peter Bartram. Only he could verify the extent to which Colin is autobiographical, but suffice it to say that Bartram has spent in his working life in journalism, and knows Brighton in and out, top to bottom, and backwards and forwards. In Front Page Murder, Crampton once again becomes involved in a very literal matter of life and death. Set in the 1960s before the abolition of the death penalty, Crampton is persuaded to establish the innocence of Archie Flowerdew – awaiting the hangman’s noose for the murder of a rival artist. Peter Bartram wrote an excellent piece for Fully Booked on the peculiarly English attraction known as What The Butler Saw machines, and you can read the entertaining feature here. The previous Colin Crampton tale involved these risqué seaside attractions, and you can click on Stop Press Murder to read the full review.

Front Page Murder is published by Roundfire Books, and will be available at the end of November.

November 6, 2017 0

THE HANGED MAN … Between the covers

The tragic events described in Simon Kernick’s previous novel The Bone Field hang over this thriller like a pall of noxious smoke, darkening the landscape. Maverick police officer Detective Inspector Ray Mason staggers through the poisonous fog like Wilfred Owen’s soldier, “stumbling and flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…” He and his partner Dan ‘Dapper’ Watts are, once again, trying to bring to justice an implacable criminal gang for whom murder is just too quick and simple. The gang leaders Cem Kalaman, Alastair Sheridan – and their sinister enforcer known only as Mr Bone – use Satanic rituals and blood sacrifice to spice up their recreational violence.

In The Bone Field, Mason tried – and failed – to bring the gang down. The bloody conclusion to the confrontation at a remote Welsh farm haunts him. His bitterness and sense of a score still not settled drive him on, but he is now working under the mandate of the National Crime Agency – and they play by the rules. The fire and desire for retribution burning in Mason’s soul will force him to abide by those rules only as far as they suit him. His personal background – a childhood shaped by violence and cruelty – has endowed him with a sense of what is right and what is wrong which diverges dramatically from the code followed by his boss, Sheryl Trinder.

The novel starts with the Kalaman gang attempting to silence Hugh Manning, a lawyer who has become entangled with their misdeeds but is, at heart, a decent man caught up in a toxic spiral of temptation and his own weakness. He escapes the killers sent to eliminate him and goes on the run, pursued by both the gang and the police. He knows all too well that the gang have insiders within the criminal justice system, and he would be signing his own death warrant simply to walk into the nearest police station and offer his wrists for the handcuffs.

Mason has a girl-friend. Tina Boyd is a former copper herself, but fate has forced her to ‘go private’ and she is now a successful and well-known enquiry agent. As she tries to unravel the complex tangle of relationships and loyalties which bind together the various members of Kalaman’s gang, she puts herself in harm’s way. She is smart and has a nose for danger, but does she have the killer gene which will enable her to tackle Mr Bone on his own terms?

As Mason rides roughshod over police procedure in his drive to avenge those who died at The Bone Field, his partner, Dan Watts, tries to reign him in and see the bigger picture, which is the one depicting Kalaman and his underlings tried in a court of law, and sentenced for their crimes. Watts, however, has secrets of his own, and these secrets make him particularly vulnerable to the manipulations of the unscrupulous men – and women – who he is trying to bring down.

Who is ‘The Hanged Man’ of the title? Kernick keeps his cards very close to his chest, but a quick internet search into the significance of the melancholy Tarot card suggests that he is:

“A martyr, renouncing a claim, putting self-interest aside, going one step back to go two steps forward, giving up for a higher cause or putting others first.”

Or possibly:

“Having an emotional release, accepting what is, surrendering to experience, ending the struggle, being vulnerable and open, giving up control and accepting God’s will.”

I suspect that by the time you turn to the last page of this excellent thriller, you will have made up your own mind as the the identity of The Hanged Man. The book is published by Cornerstone/Century, and will be out in Kindle and hardback on November 16^th.

October 31, 2017 0

THE POSTMAN DELIVERS … O’Driscoll & Oram

RG Oram (left) is Welsh through and through, being born in Swansea and living most of his life in Carmarthenshire. His debut novel Much Needed Rain introduces David Lewelyn, who is the human equivalent of a polygraph, as he has developed a unique sense of perception which recognises dozens of little facial tics and mannerisms which indicate that the subject is lying. His relationship with the Los Angeles Police Department – in the shape of Detectives Forsythe and Baker – undergoes a dramatic volte-face, however, when his secretary is found murdered, and he becomes a prime suspect rather than a valued consultant. Much Needed Rain is out now in Kindle and paperback, is published by Matador, and is available here. You can follow RG Oram on Twitter and contact him on Facebook.

From the principality of Wales we dart across the Irish Sea to the beautiful city of Cork, where we find Sean O’Driscoll (right) and his latest novel, Steal Big: Vatican City. This is the second in the series exploring the exploits of a daring criminal called The Mastermind. He cannot be accused of lacking ambition, since the first book in the series, Steal Big: New York, has our man planning to walk away with a cool 6.7 billion dollars. Now, he takes on not only the FBI, but perhaps the most powerful, secretive and ruthless non-governmental body in the world – the Catholic Church.

Sean O’Driscoll is on Twitter: Steal Big: Vatican City is published by Matador and is out now on Kindle and in paperback.

October 27, 2017 0

THE PEOPLE vs ALEX CROSS … Between the covers

Back in the day, James Patterson’s Alex Cross books were my go-to choice for police thrillers with something just a little different. Along Came A Spider, Kiss The Girls, Jack & Jill and Pop Goes The Weasel were all sustenance for a hungry man. But round about the time when Patterson had exhausted his nursery rhyme references for the book titles, I began to lose interest. Maybe it was the Washington cop’s implausible bad luck in choosing wives and girlfriends. For such a demonstrably clever bloke, he was becoming a serial bad judge of character. Was it his Mother Teresa of a grandmother, Nana Mama? Apart from the fact that she must have reached the age of at least 130, had her unfailing wisdom and saintliness begun to grate? Whatever the reason, I moved on. When, however, the good people at Century sent me a crisp new hardback copy of The People vs Alex Cross, I thought it would be rude not to see what the good Dr Cross was up to in his 27^th outing, almost a quarter of a century after his first appearance.

Alex Cross is in trouble. Big trouble. He is the victim of a beyond-the-grave revenge attack from his very first opponent, Gary Soneji. Gary is long dead, blown up by his own bomb in a subway. It is not beyond Patterson’s audacity to resurrect someone, but in this case it is supporters of the late Mr Soneji who are responsible for Cross being accused of homicide. He is lured to a warehouse where members of the Soneji cult are waiting for him. In the fire fight that follows, members of the cult are killed and wounded, but when Cross summonses emergency backup, no weapons other than Cross’s own can be found. The words happy, trigger and cop are immediately rearranged into a well-known phrase or saying by the sensation-hungry media.

As Cross prepares for his trial he is, naturally, suspended from police duties. Again, perfectly naturally, since it is Dr Alex Cross we are dealing with, he becomes unofficially involved in the investigation into a series of kidnappings and murders. Whoever the kidnapper is, he or she has a penchant for willowy blonde young women. Cross’s best buddy, the almost indestructible cop John Sampson, is knee deep in the chase to find the missing girls, and the search leads the pair into the darker-than-black world of snuff movies and the mysterious cyber phenomenon known as the dark web.

Hand on heart, I have to admit to really enjoying this book. Patterson (right) hasn’t achieved his world-wide pre-eminence as a best selling writer by not being able to tell a story. The action comes thick and fast and in this book at least, the portrayal of Cross disproves the old adage about familiarity breeding contempt. Yes, Nana Mama is still there, serving up delicious meals for all and sundry and being annoyingly stoical in the face of her grandson’s adversity. Yes, Cross’s annoyingly geeky nine year-old son spots something that a top FBI data analyst has missed, but at least our man’s current love interest seems to be a good sort.

The book pretty much turns its own pages. It is pure escapism, but a damn good read. Long time fans of the series will not be disappointed, and apostates like myself may well be converted back to the old religion. The People vs Alex Cross will be out on 2^nd November in hardback, Kindle and as an audio CD. The paperback edition is due in April 2018.

October 20, 2017 1

SLEEPING BEAUTIES … Between the covers

In the beautiful valley of Glendalough there are ancient stones, shades and spirits of the holy men who prayed in the monastery – and in the cemetery, lichen-covered headstones of generations of Byrnes, Cullens, Farrells, Nolans, Waldrons – all, both monks and villagers, at peace now. But the body of a young woman has been found. Interred without sacrament, beyond the gaze of those who would mourn her. In a shallow grave on a hillside, wearing the clothes she disappeared in. It is all that remains of Una Dolan, a twenty four year-old lass from Waterford. Last seen April 29^th, 2011.

Inspector Tom Reynolds, of Dublin’s An Garda Síochána, is called to the scene on a blisteringly hot summer afternoon. The police tapes are strung out, a tent is put over the body, the hundreds of tourists shepherded away beyond gawping distance, but Una does not lie alone in her woodland grave:

“The Inspector frowned and examined the earth under the trees. As he scanned the glade, his stomach lurched.
One, two, three, four. Five, counting the mound of earth disturbed under the tent.
Tom counted five separate patches where the same delicate blue flower was blooming. And then he saw it …
Somebody had cleared the earth of its natural layer and sown their own flowers.
In five places.
Five graves.”

Reynolds and his team are already searching for another missing woman, Fiona Holland, but as the forensic experts do their macabre job and try to identify the five Glendalough women, Fiona’s name doesn’t seem to be among them. Instead, the unresolved disappearances of the last few years are narrowed down in a business-like but brutal fashion.

While the guards go about the melancholy business of dashing the hopes of the girls’ relatives, Tom Reynolds has more than one disagreeable offering on his plate. One unpalatable mouthful is his immediate superior. The very model of a modern career policeman, Joe Kennedy sits in the ergonomically designed executive chair which Tom himself was offered, but turned down because the job would have distanced him from all the aspects of policing which energise and inspire him. Kennedy is, to put it bluntly, a prick. Worse, far worse, is that Sean McGuiness, Tom’s previous boss and mentor, is facing the retirement from hell as he tries to cope with the regressive dementia of his wife, June. Tom and his wife Louise feel helpless as their old friends face the worse crisis of their lives.

Tom Reynolds is compassionate and perceptive, but he is also driven by his own desire to see justice done. His investigative team are sympathetically drawn, and the sense of police teamwork is palpable. The guards must combat the possibility of police corruption and deal with the pent-up anger of frustrated and grieving families but, just as the killer appears to be cornered, caught and convicted, the gut-wrenching possibility arises that the case may not be ready for filing in the “solved” drawer.

Jo Spain writes like an angel. No fuss. No bother. No pretension. The narrative flows as smoothly as a glass of Old Bushmills slips down the appreciative throat, and she has us looking this way and that as we stand beside Tom Reynolds as he searches for the killer. This is, on one level, a police procedural, but Jo Spain doesn’t let methodology bog the story down. We know that she knows how the police operate, and that is more than enough. Her rural Ireland is beautifully described without unnecessary frills and furbelows, and she gives us as perceptive a story of the heights and depths of human behaviour as you will read all year. If you have come a little late to the Tom Reynolds party, the first episode of his career is With Our Blessing, followed by Beneath The Surface.