Bristol

THE BOOKSELLER . . . Between the covers

Detective Sergeant George Cross is unique among fictional British coppers in that he is autistic. This apparent disability gives him singular powers when investigating crimes. While totally unaware of social nuances, his analytical mind stores and organises information in a manner denied to more ‘normal’ colleagues within the Bristol police force. When questioning suspects or witness his completely literal mindset can be disconcerting to both guilty and innocent alike. Regular visitors to the site may remember that I reviewed two earlier novels in the series The Monk (2023) and The Teacher (2024) but, for new readers, this is the background. Cross is in his forties, balding, of medium height and, in appearance no-one’s idea of a policeman, fictional or otherwise. He lives alone in his flat, cycles to work, and likes to play the organ in a nearby Roman Catholic Church, where he is friends with the priest. George’s elderly father lives nearby, but his mother left the family home when George was five. At the time he was unaware that she left because Raymond Cross was homosexual. Now, Christine, has slowly reintroduced herself into the family group and George, reluctantly, has come to accept her presence.

This case begins when an elderly bookseller, Torquil Squire returns to his flat above the shop after a day out at an antiquarian book sale at Sothebys. He is horrified to find his son Ed, who is the day-to-day manager of the shop, dead on the floor, stabbed in the chest. George and his fellow DS Josie Ottey head up the investigation which is nominally led by their ineffectual boss DCI Ben Carson.P.The world of rare and ancient books does not immediately suggest itself to George as one where violent death is a common occurrence, but he soon learns that despite the artefacts being valued in mere millions rather than the billions involved in, say, corporate fraud, there are still jealousies, bitter rivalries and long running feuds. One such is the long running dispute between Ed Squire and a prestigious London firm Carnegies, who Ed believed were instrumental in creating a dealership ring, whereby prominent sellers formed a cartel to buy up all available first editions of important novels, thus being able to control – and inflate – prices to their mutual advantage.

Then there is the mysterious Russian oligarch, an avid collector of books and manuscripts, who paid Ed a sizeable commission to buy a set of fifteenth century letters written by Christopher Columbus, only for the oligarch to discover that the letters had, in fact, been stolen from an American museum. Could Oleg Dimitriev have resorted to Putinesque methods following the debacle?

Running parallel to the murder investigation is a crisis in George’s own life. Raymond discovers that he has lung cancer, but it operable. During the operation, however, he suffers a stroke. When he is well enough to return home he faces a long and difficult period of recuperation and therapy for which George is ready and able to organise. More of a problem for him, however, is the challenge to his limited emotional capacity to deal with the conventionally expected responses. Even before his father’s illness, George has been disconcerted to learn that Josie Ottey has been promoted to Detective Inspector, and he finds it difficult to adjust to what he perceives as a dramatic change in their relationship.

The killer of Ed Squire is, of course, identified and brought to justice, but not before we have been led down many a garden path by Tim Sullivan. The Bookseller is thoughtful and entertaining, with enough darker moments to lift it above the run-of-the-mill procedural. Published by Head of Zeus, it is available now.

September 12, 2025 0

A FATAL ASSUMPTION . . . Between the covers

These Bristol based Meredith & Hodge cold-case-crime novels are rather special. Their latest case seems unsolvable. For starters it’s over a decade old. Christine Hawker was making breakfast for the children with husband Mike was upstairs getting them ready for school. The smoke alarm goes off. Mike discovered it has been triggered by a pan of burned porridge. But where was Christine? Puzzled, he took the kids to school, but then he disappears, too. The case baffled everyone, and gradually slid further and further back down the “To Do” list.

Now, the case has been reopened, because Mike Hawker’s remains have been inadvertently exposed by the bucket of a digger preparing the ground for a new supermarket. Meredith & Hodge? DCI Meredith and his wife, fellow officer Patsy Hodge are the ideal husband and wife team. Except – at the moment – they’re not. Patsy is on extended sick leave after a case went horrifically awry and has fled to relatives in New Zealand. Meredith? He’s getting over jetlag in a budget Auckland hotel having flown in to try to save his marriage.

By any standard, this is a terrific police procedural novel. Yes, all the operational details are convincing and the plotting is cleverly done. For me, however, it is the dialogue that sparkles. Marcia Turner enlivens her characters by what they say, and the idioms they use. For example, an elderly man says that he is a bit ‘mutton’. Younger readers might be baffled, but Turner knows that people of this character’s generation would recognise the rhyming slang. Mutt ‘n’ Jeff were comic book characters back in the day. Mutt ‘n’ Jeff became rhyming slang for ‘deaf’ and this later evolved into ‘mutton’ – a double play on words.

Meredith’s peacemaking overture in New Zealand is favourably received, and the pair return to the UK and face the mysteries of the Hawker case. The extended family dynamic is complex, and throws up a number of grievances. In no particular order. Christine’s father died of cancer when she was in her early teens, and she had become embittered that her mother remarried so quickly, suspecting that the relationship may have been blossoming while her father was on his bed of death. Mike’s father is cantankerous and an awkward customer, and his peace of mind was not improved a few months before his son’s disappearance when a young man met him and introduced himself as his long-lost son, conceived in a youthful fling decades earlier.

Meredith’s team clutch at what seem to be increasingly flimsy straws of evidence and imperfect recollections. What about the mysterious white van seen near the Hawker’s house on the day of the abduction? It is of no help at all that several of the potential suspects worked in trades where the proverbial ‘white van’ was ubiquitous. As is probably the case in real life criminal investigations, forensic questioning unearths all manner of ill-concealed grievances and grudges within the extended family of Mike and Christine Hawker.

Despite the proverbial quote suggesting the opposite, it is inspiration rather than perspiration which finally lifts the veil for Meredith, and it comes by way of a pleasant couple of hours the detective spends with his baby grandchildren. The next day, he calls the investigative team together, and on the whiteboard writes one simple word. The culprit returns to the interview suite, confesses, and the cold case team can chalk up another success. What Marcia Turner does so well, in addition to the captivating dialogue, is to shine a light on the petty jealousies, perceived slights and debilitating grievances that plague so many families. She is spot on. We all know what she is writing about. Thankfully, it doesn’t make us all murderers, but – as they say – we have all been there. From 127 Publishing, this excellent police thriller is available now.

March 22, 2025 0

THE BROTHERS . . . Between the covers

Every schoolboy of my generation was taught the history of Britain’s great social reformers of the 19th century, and we were able to rattle off their names – Elizabeth Fry for prisons, Florence Nightingale for nursing, Cobbett for agriculture and Wilberforce for slavery. I have to confess that until I moved to Wisbech in the early 1990s, I hadn’t heard of Thomas Clarkson. Now, as I pass his imposing memorial every time I walk into town it is a constant reminder of a man who has been called ‘the moral steam engine’ of the movement to end Britain’s connection to the slave trade.

The slave trade from Britain was a brutally simple triangle. Ships left port carrying British made goods such as cloth, muskets, ball and powder, plus such humdrum items as pots and pans. The ships were mostly crewed by human flotsam and jetsam, men often forced to make the journey due to debt or coercion. They sailed to what was known as The Guinea Coast, as shown on this contemporary map.

Once docked in West Africa, the ships’ captains would trade with slavers, almost always Africans themselves, usually members of dominant tribes. Their currency was human lives, often captured in battle, or simply raided from villages. A typical trade might be one healthy man for two muskets. The slaves were then stowed in unspeakable conditions as the ships set sail for places like the American South or Jamaica. A captain’s ambition was to reach his destination with as many of his captives – sometimes in excess of three hundred – as saleable as possible. The surviving slaves would then be sold mostly for raw cotton, tobacco, loaf sugar and molasses – highly valued in the brewing trade and the burgeoning popularity of coffee houses – plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

The ship would then complete the third side of the triangle, sailing back, usually to Bristol or Liverpool, with a relatively smaller number returning to London or ports on the River Clyde.. The slaves were not the only victims. The journey back to Britain would only need a few crew members, and the fewer that were left on board as the ship entered home waters, the fewer that needed paying, thus increasing the profit for the investors who backed the enterprise.

Thomas Clarkson cuts a distinctive figure. A gangling man, over six feet tall, with a shock of unruly red hair he has the courage of a zealot. He begins gathering his evidence about the sheer inhumanity of the slave trade by visiting Bristol, where he speaks to men who have witnessed the barbarity of the triangular voyages. He makes the acquaintance of Dr Gardner, forced by fate and circumstance to enlist as physician on board the soon-to-depart ship, The Brothers.

Busy as Bristol is, it is nothing compared to Liverpool, where slave ships are moored row on row in the docks. Clarkson travels north, and goes about his fearless business despite death threats, and focuses his attention on one English sailor, Peter Green, whose death typifies the inhuman treatment of members of the ships’ crew. The irony is, of course, that the countless Africans who die on these voyages have no names. But Green was born and baptised an Englishman. He had kith and kin. His miserable death is a powerful weapon in Clarkson’s campaign.

Clarkson narrowly avoids becoming the victim of a mob in Liverpool. Meanwhile, as readers, we are privy to Dr Gardner’s diary written during the voyage of The Brothers. The two narratives become parallel: at sea, once the slaves have been offloaded, the voyage of the vessel – in theory a relatively safe and simple return home – is blighted by what seems to be a malignant spirit at work in the depths of the ship. The crew members disappear, one by one, and the barbarous Captain Howlett is driven mad.

Back in England, we share the frustrations of Clarkson and fellow campaigner Granville Sharp, as – to stay with a nautical analogy – the good ship Abolition founders on the rocks of vested interests and parliamentary procedure. This story is set in the late 1780s and it wasn’t until 1807 that the British involvement in the slave trade was ended by parliamentary decree. For the record, Wilberforce’s part in the campaign was not inconsiderable but, as MP for Hull, he was able to fire the bullets that Clarkson had made for him.

Readers will glean a solid historical background to more recent events, like the statue-toppling in Bristol, and demands for reparations for the descendants of historical crimes. It is worth pointing out that the loan taken out by the British government to compensate those whose wealth was diminished by abolition, was only paid off in 2015.

The Brothers is a tale of an unspeakable and barbarous trade, and of the physical and moral courage of one man who fought to end it. The novel is available now.

April 10, 2024 1

WATCHING YOU . . . Between the covers

Josephine “Joey” Mullen has returned home to Bristol from living and working hand-to-mouth in sunny Spain. With empty pockets and zero job prospects, she might be downhearted, but on the positive side she has a handsome new husband and a generous older brother who is prepared to share his home with the newly-weds. While Joey finds a job dishing out chicken nuggets and mopping up puke at a children’s party venue, Alfie (nice-but-dim and with a very fit bum, if you are into that sort of thing) works in a bar and is trying to establish a painting and decorating business.

Watching You by Lisa Jewell takes us to the chic urban village of Melville Heights. Jack Mullen is a successful consultant in cardiology, while his wife Rebecca is “something in systems analysis.” A couple of doors down live the Fitzwilliam family. Tom is a charismatic and nationally renowned Head Teacher with an impressive record of turning round failing high schools. His adoring wife Nicola has no CV as such, unless you want to list an over-awareness of body image and a devotion to the latest fads in fashion and diet. Their teenage son, Freddie – an only child, naturally – is very keen on all things technical, particularly digital binoculars, spy software, and a fascination with the lives and movements of anyone he can see from his bedroom window.

This is a clever, clever murder mystery. Lisa Jewell gives us the corpse right at the beginning – while keeping us guessing about whose it is – and then, by shrewd manipulation of the timeline we are introduced to the possible perpetrators of the violent death. By page 100, they have formed an orderly queue for our attention. Of course there’s beautiful, feckless Joey and her husband Alfie. Freddie Fitzwilliam is clearly at the sharp end of the Asperger spectrum, but what about his bird-like – and bird-brained mother? Schoolgirls Jenna and Bess are clearly fixated – for different reasons – on their headteacher, and as for Jenna’s mum, with her persecution complex and incipient madness, she is clearly on the brink of doing something destructive, either to herself or someone else. And who is the mysterious woman who flew into a rage with Tom ten years earlier while the Fitzwilliams were on a family holiday to the Lake District?

Domestic Noir in crime fiction borrows jealousy, lust, anger, greed and pride from the early Christian list of vices but no modern thriller in the genre ignores the fatal flaw of obsession. The Big ‘O’ is certainly at the root of the plot of Watching You, and we willingly suspend our disbelief that so many disturbed characters should end up within a stone’s throw of each other in a posh Bristol suburb.

Lisa Jewell peels away veil after veil, but like Salome in front of Herod, she tantalises us with exquisite cruelty. Just when we think we have understood the truth about the complex relationships between the characters, we are faced with another enigma and a further conundrum. There are flashes of absolute brilliance throughout this gripping novel. The relationship between Jenna and Bess is beautifully described and even though we suspect he may end up with blood on his hands, Freddie’s strange but exotic view of the world around him makes him completely appealing. In the end, of course,we learn the identity of the corpse and that of the murderer but, just like the Pinball Wizard, there has got to be a twist. Lisa Jewell (left) provides it with the last 39 words of this very special book, and it is not so much a twist as a breathtaking literary flourish.

Watching You is published by Century, and is out on 12^th July.

July 6, 2018 0

DEADLY DANCE … Between the covers

Detective Inspector David Vogel, of Avon and Somerset Police, cuts a rather different dash from many of his fellow fictional DIs. He is a tall, bespectacled and slightly shambling figure, teetotal and resolutely vegetarian. His only leisure pursuit is assembling crossword puzzles. Formerly with the Metropolitan Police in London, he, wife Mary and daughter Rosamund had moved from their Pimlico flat out to the suburbs of Bristol to an unassuming bungalow which had an unusual attraction – its own swimming pool. Rosamund has cerebral palsy, and we are told:

“She was a happy and intelligent girl, trapped within a body that consistently failed her, except when she was in water………the water gave her freedom. In water, her body was no longer an encumbrance.”

When the battered body of teenager Melanie Cooke is found amid the garbage bins in a seedy Bristol alleyway, it is obvious that she has been murdered. Only fourteen, she is dressed in the kind of clothes which would be considered provocative on a woman twice her age. Vogel goes to make the dreaded ‘death call’, but he only has to appear on the doorstep of the girl’s home for her mother and father to sense the worst. Like many rebellious teenagers before her, Melanie has told her parents that she is going round to a mate’s house to do some homework. When she failed to come home, their first ‘phone call confirmed Melanie’s lie, and thereafter, the long dark hours of the night are spent in increasing anxiety and then terror, as they realise that something awful has happened.

The book actually starts with a prologue which at first glance appears to be nothing to do with Melanie’s death. It is only later – much later – that we learn its true significance. Bonner (right) is determined not to give us a straightforward narrative. The progress of Vogel’s attempts to find Melanie’s killer are sandwiched between accounts from three different men, each of whom is living a life where all is not as it seems.

Saul is socially inept and has reached early middle age without achieving his ambition to become a caring husband and father. His first attempt at marriage had been a disaster, and subsequent efforts to find a life partner have been impeded by his inner sense that his mind harbours demons over which he has little or no control should they choose to wake within him. He settles for internet dating, and heads up his CV as follows:

“My name is Saul and I am a 33 year-old supply teacher. I live in a village near Swindon and I would like to meet a young woman of around my age whose intentions are as serious as mine….. my interests are simple and quiet. I like to read and go to the cinema. If you are out there, please get in touch. I need you.”

Leo is a very different kind of fellow. He spends his leisure time cruising gay bars and clubs in London. He clearly has some kind of day job where ‘coming out’ is not an option. He cultivates the blokeish image when at work, but when he goes to London he adopts a different persona, but one with which he is not entirely at ease.

“I didn’t have the slightest desire to be gay. I didn’t even like the word. I’ve never liked euphemisms and that’s surely what ‘gay’ is. When you called yourself a homosexual it didn’t sound quite so modern and attractive. And what about queer? Is that what I was, queer?

Leo’s misgivings are put to one side, however, when he goes on the prowl. Just as he puts on the skinny Levis, gels his hair, squeezes into a black T shirt that reveals his six-pack and insouciantly slings his studded leather jacket over his shoulder, Leo adopts a different mental mindset from his ‘one of the lads’ image.

While Bonner might coax a sliver of sympathy from us as we read of the personal lives of Saul and Leo, when Al introduces himself it is abundantly clear from the start that he is a wrong ‘un.

“They get what they deserve, these young girls in their skimpy skirts and the little shorts they call hot pants. They’re hot all right. Everything about them is hot. Burning hot.”

Al cruises around the streets of Bristol, usually in a stolen van, ogling schoolgirls, and occasionally trying to bring his sordid fantasies to reality, but without success. Until he discovers a teen dating site on the internet, and he is amazed at the ease with which he can construct a fake profile and attract the attention of a teenage girl whose hormones are racing in the opposite direction to the concerns and limitations her parents seek to impose.

Deadly Dance works very effectively as a police procedural. Vogel is an interesting character, very much left field of his fictional contemporaries, and I anticipate that he will have a long and successful career between the covers of British crime novels. Bonner’s solution to the apparent dislocation between Vogel’s investigation and the lives of Saul, Leo and Al is audacious. To reveal any more would be to give the game away, and no-one will thank me for that. Does it work? I think it does, but you must be the judge. Deadly Dance will be published by Severn House next month, August 2017.

July 11, 2017 0

WHAT ALICE KNEW … Between the covers

Back in late 2016, I had the pleasure of listening to T A Cotterell read an extract from his debut novel, What Alice Knew. He made it clear that this was a book about secrets, and about that strange beast, family life. Family life. The words are anodyne, mild and reassuring, but we all know that many families are not what they seem to be to an outsider. Cotterell’s question, though, is simply this: “How well do members of a family know each other?”

This particular family is as close to the notion of perfection as can be. Husband Ed Sheahan is a senior obstrician at a Bristol hospital while Alice Sheahan, née Tenterden, is a successful and highly regarded portrait painter. They have two adorable children and a beautiful house in a sought-after Bristol district – one of those places which delights in calling itself a village, complete with ‘proper’ shops which strive to be terribly artisan and traditional.

As Alice is driving home from painting a commission in Suffolk, she takes a ‘phone call from daughter Nell. The first five words send a stab of anxiety through her. “Mummy – Daddy hasn’t come home.” Ed Sheahan simply isn’t the kind of father to leave his children alone in the house at night. He is not answering his mobile, he is not at the hospital, his suitcase, hold-all and travel bag are still in their cupboard. Eventually Alice discovers that Ed was last seen at a party with some younger colleagues.

Much to Alice’s relief, the absent Ed finally breaks surface and reveals, much to his embarrassment, that he had drunk well rather than wisely and had passed out in an expensive apartment belonging to a mature art student called Araminta Lyall. The apartment is in the district of Stokes Croft, which Cotterell describes as:

“..home to artists’ studios and vegan cafés, squatter collectives that sprout in disused buildings, all-night clubs, wraith-like dealers, protest groups.”

Ed Sheahan makes his way home very much with his tail between his legs. Alice is actually rather amused, because he is no sort of a party animal and much less a drinker. She is just happy that the temporary scare and anxiety have passed with no real harm being done to the family. But – and of course there is always a ‘but’ in domestic noir thrillers – her contentment is short lived when she reads the newspaper headline SOCIETY GIRL DIES, and when she reads to story, one name leaps out at her. Araminta Lyall.

From this point on, the dreamy soft-focus life of the Sheahan family descends into a nightmare reality, all jagged edges and harshly grating contrasts. The visual metaphor is actually totally appropriate, as one of the great strengths of the novel is how Alice sees much of life through her painterly eyes. Rose madder, cadmium yellow, viridian, alizarin crimson and flake white. Alice’s world is the world of the quaintly named oil paints on her palette. It came as no surprise to me to learn that Cotterell (right) studied History of Art at Cambridge.

One of the most gripping chapters in the book is the description of Alice being commissioned to paint a mystery sitter, who turns out to be a woman who was her best friend at school, but from whom she parted under traumatic circumstances. The woman has become dazzlingly rich through business, and has changed her name. In an atmosphere that could be sliced with a razor, the two eventually come face to face. Even if you read another two hundred books this year you will not experience a more tense and excoriating account of the power of memory, guilt and bitterness.

The tale is told from first to last by Alice herself. This poses interesting possibilities for the reader, particularly in the light of the shocks contained in the final few pages of the novel. Is Alice a reliable narrator? Does her ruthless honesty as a portraitist extend to what she is telling us – and herself? Cotterell certainly takes a huge gamble and puts our credulity on the table as stakes. I think it works, thus seating him up there on the High Table where the more established purveyors of domestic noir sup and dine. As ever, you must judge for yourselves. What Alice Knew is published by Transworld/ Black Swan/Penguin Random House and is available here.

April 28, 2017 0

CLOSE YOUR EYES … Between the covers

A BRUTAL DOUBLE MURDER in a remote Somerset cottage has baffled the police, and inflamed local opinion over what they see as the ineptitude of the investigating officers. In charge of the case is DCS Ronnie Cray – and yes, she has changed the first letter of her surname – and almost in desperation she enlists the help of forensic psychologist Dr Joseph O’Loughlin.

O’Loughlin is reluctantly drawn into the efforts to track down the killer who butchered Elizabeth Crowe beneath the satanist pentangle daubed on her wall, and efficiently suffocated her teenage daughter, Harper, in her bed upstairs. To say the very least, O’Laughlin has enough problems of his own. He is trying to live a normal life while battling the early symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease, and his delight at being invited to return to the cottage occupied by his daughters Charlie and Emma, and his estranged wife, is tempered when he learns that Julianne has been diagnosed with ovarian cancer.

Robotham introduces us to a possible culprit in the opening pages of the book. This man describes his assaults on various women, while describing his awful childhood. His once-brutal father is now in a care home, and has advanced dementia, but our narrator recalls with hatred the beatings – both physical and psychological – he suffered at his father’s hands. Even more telling is the lasting legacy of his mother’s death. She was, perhaps understandably, given her husband’s predilection for violence,’playing away’, but was killed in a bizarre road traffic accident.

Elizabeth Crowe was, to use the old cliché, “no better than she should have been”. After an acrimonious divorce, she has used her new-found freedom to explore the dubious delights of dogging, and it is the participants of that strangely British open-air activity who are the obvious suspects in the investigation. There is no shortage of other suspects, however. How about the dim-witted Tommy Garrett who lives with his grandmother in the neighbouring property? Or maybe Elizabeth’s former husband, Dominic? Not only did Elizabeth cheat on him with her body, but she also ruined him financially.

Robotham leads O’Loughlin – and you, the reader – a merry dance. There are red herrings a-plenty, as O’Loughlin tries to establish the connection between the contrasting deaths of Elizabeth and Harper Crowe, and a seemingly random series of attacks on people which leaves some of them dead, but all with a crude letter ‘A’ cut into their foreheads. But of course, in detective novels, nothing is ever really random, or no fictional crime would ever be solved. Robotham is a clever enough writer to allow O’Loughlin to make the mother of all mistakes before a terrifying climax is played out on a storm blasted cliff top above the raging seas of the Bristol Channel.

Remember the famous scene in Jaws, where we are watching the Richard Dreyfuss character probing the hole in the half-sunken boat? Just as we are expecting the shark to come charging in, Spielberg gives us an even greater shock when the severed head rolls in to view. Robotham does something rather similar at the end of Close Your Eyes as he blind-sides us with a killer blow that we never see coming. This novel, which came out in hardback and digital versions last year, and is now out as a Sphere paperback, will further cement Robotham’s reputation as one of the cleverest and most effective writers of modern crime thrillers.

Click the link to check out buying option for Close Your Eyes

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Robotham was born in Casino, New South Wales in 1960, and after serving an apprenticeship on a Sydney newspaper, moved to London, where he eventually became deputy features editor for The Daily Mail. In 1993 he began his literary career, first as a ghostwriter for several notable personalities who were writing their autobiographies. His first hit crime novel was The Suspect in 2004, and he has since won many awards for his books. He has returned to Australia, and Close Your Eyes is the eighth novel in the Joseph O’Loughlin series.