conspiracy

BLACKWATER . . . Between the covers

The book begins with a terrific passage:

“The child looked like a porcelain doll. Dark eyelashes resting on pale cheeks, softly pouting lips, sandy hair swept neatly under a flat brown cap. Delicate hands folded across a miniature cotton shirt and waistcoat. A figure of peace, placed in repose on the bracken as if simply lying down to rest next to a pyramid of rocks. Even the bluish tinge to the skin could have explained away by the moonlight.“

Sarah Sultoon is not the first writer to exploit the dank mysteries of the Essex marshes. In Bleak House, Dickens used the perennial swirling mist and sense of despair as a metaphor for the obfuscations and terminal lack of transparency which enmesh Jarndyce v Jarndyce. The River Blackwater exists. It rises in rural Essex and expands into a considerable estuary, but the island in this novel is pure fiction.

On starting the novel I wondered how someone could sustain a thriller billed to be about the fabled Millennium Bug – something that never actually happened. I should have had more faith. The discovery of a dead child on Blackwater Island is only briefly mentioned on the news as the world waits for computer systems to shut down, and passenger jets to tumble from the sky, but journalist Jonny Murphy is sent down to Essex to investigate. What he finds is truly astonishing.

Deeply embedded in the mystery is Murphy, aided and abetted by his American ‘not quite’ girlfriend Paloma. He is certainly fearless, but I was reminded of those female characters in Hammer horror films, who decide to go and investigate the ruined church at midnight, dressed in a negligee, and armed only with a flickering candle. Despite our cries of ‘Don’t go there!’ she does, as does Johnny.

This is indeed a weird and wonderful fantasy. The closest comparison I can come up with may only chime with readers who share my my advanced years, but Blackwater is rather reminiscent of the African tales of H Rider Haggard. I suspect no-one reads him these days, but back in the day his fantastical tales of adventure were very popular. Essex is a long way from darkest Africa, but Sarah Sultoon emulates Haggard by creating a cast of intriguingly odd characters. Instead of Gagool, the malevolent witch in King Solomon’s Mines, we have Judith, the strange landlady of The Saxon: Haggard gave us the imposing Ayesha in She, (as in She Who Must Be Obeyed) but here we have ‘Jane’, the Amazonian former special forces trooper who lurks on the island. Sultoon then decides to go for broke and throw into the mix triplets, a grief-stricken recluse and an emaciated druid.

Aside from the goings-on in the riverside hamlet of Eastwood, where Judith’s pub serves only plates of local oysters and glasses of a locally concocted spirit consisting mainly of ethanol, there is a serious background which revolves round biological warfare and the way governments across the world will lie to the people who elected it, all in the name of ‘national interest’. Despite the improbable storyline, Blackwater is immensely entertaining, and I read it over a couple of enjoyable evenings. It is published by Orenda Books and is available now.

December 11, 2025 1

IMPOSTER SYNDROME . . . Between the covers

Joseph Knox made his name with a deadly dark trilogy of police procedural novels featuring Manchester copper Aidan Waits (click to read the reviews) and followed these with the standalone True Crime Story. His latest novel takes a leaf out of the book of Josephine Tey, whose novel Brat Farrar (1949) many consider to be her finest work. That novel was inspired by a real case, known as The Tichborne Claimant, where a New South Wales butcher claimed that he was Roger Tichborne, heir to a huge fortune, but who was supposed to have perished in a shipwreck. The butcher, Arthur Orton, was eventually found guilty of fraud in 1874 and given a long jail sentence.

Here, we meet Lynch, a young English conman. He flies out of Paris, with only the cheap suit he is standing up in, with no money, no prospects and only the bitter memory of his latest failed venture on his mind. En route, he meets a milfy heiress called Bobbie Pierce who mistakes him for her long lost brother, Heydon. Lynch immediately corrects her mistake, but is intrigued. Heydon is assumed to be dead. No trace of him has been found since his abandoned car was found on a Thames bridge five years earlier. Bobbie is something a ship foundering on storm tossed rocks, as she is on her way to yet another expensive bout of rehab in the States. She sends him a text message which contains the key codes to her parents’ house, and suggests that, as he is broke and pretty much down and out, he might find plenty of valuable items in the house to relieve his immediate Micawberish state.

Lynch, as much out of curiosity as anything else, goes to the house but, once inside, he is detained by security men. He then meets Miranda Pierce, the family matriarch and former film star, and Bobbie’s sister Reagan. Lynch makes no claim to be the missing Heydon, but Miranda has a use for him. Just before he disappeared, Heydon Lynch borrowed money from a loan shark called Bagwan, and left a case containing family items as security. Badwan has contacted the family, calling in the loan – now greatly inflated. Miranda and Reagan want Lynch, posing as Heydon, to meet Badwan, pay him off, and recover the case.

The case is recovered, and one of the things it contains is Heydon’s phone. Through what it contains, Lynch learns two things: one, Heydon Pierce was convinced he was being targeted by some shadowy organisation; two, he had become involved with a man calling himself Vincent Control, basically a conman trying to lure gullible people into a crypto currency scam. Lynch confronts Control and learns that there was, indeed, some dark security agency involved, but their conversation is interrupted by a masked gunman. Control is shot dead, but Lynch escapes.

At this point, half way through the book, I did ask myself why Lynch didn’t just disappear. He now has plenty of money, having being richly rewarded by Miranda Pierce, so why not simply get away, maybe fly back to Paris on his forged passport, and use his new-found wealth to fund another project designed to separate fools from their money? He then sets out his reasons. He has discovered that he is dealing with some very powerful and resourceful people who, he figures, will be able to find him and settle scores wherever he goes, and however long it takes.

The plot is of Chandleresque complexity, as Lynch ducks and dives between various encounters which prove fatal for some of the characters. He suspects first one person, and then another, as he tries to find exactly why he was hired in the first place, and what actually happened to Haydon Pierce. The truth is only revealed to him (and us) in the final pages of the book.

This is a clever, tense and nervy thriller, which dwells on betrayal and the pernicious effect that the misuse of digital communications and media can have on human lives. Lynch is a long way from being an admirable character, but his street-smarts and survivalist instincts are straight out of the How To Be A Conman instruction manual.. Imposter Syndrome was published by Doubleday on 11th July.

July 14, 2024 1

CALICO . . . Between the covers

Lee Goldberg baits the hook irresistibly within the first few pages of this novel. Disgraced former LAPD cop Beth McDade has been exiled to the desert wastes of Barstow, on edge of the Mojave Desert. She attends what seems to be a routine road death- pedestrian collides with motor home, only one winner – but the autopsy on the victim is astonishing. He was wearing jeans that hadn’t been made that way since the 1880s. What remains of his dental fillings reveal an amalgam not used in decades. His tobacco tin isn’t just repro. It is original, and contains tobacco not produced commercially since the end of the nineteenth century.

Things become even more baffling when a construction company doing groundwork for a new development unearth an old coffin containing equally old bones. Beth finds her ultra rational mindset severely challenged when the bones are dated to the early 20th century, but contain titanium implants only available to surgeons in more recent times. She then receives a visit from a former LA colleague (and lover) who is on a missing persons case. He is looking for Owen Slader, a very 21st century social media personality and chef,who was last seen filling up his car with gas on the way to visit his daughter.

There are two parallel narratives, one being that of present day Beth McDade, and the other being the views and experiences of Owen Slader. On that February night he was engulfed by what appears to be a lightning storm and, when he recovers his senses, the freeway no longer exists, and he is stranded near the primitive and rumbustious silver mining settlement of Calico. And it is 1882. Slader hides his hired Mercedes in a cave, rigs up a solar battery charger to power his iPhone and, using his 21st century culinary skills, caries out a profitable life for himself cooking up delicacies for the hungry miners of Calico. He meets – and marries another refugee from another time, a woman called Wendy, but she was ‘taken’ by the Time Gods a couple of decades earlier than Slader. This is when the complexities and total unknowables of the time travel concept begin to cause brain hurt, and the obvious questions like the one below, can never be answered:
“If stamps on the titanium implants found in the bones within the ancient coffin identify the recipient as Owen Slader who, identifying as Ben Cartwright (1960s TV Western reference!), died in the early 1900s, how did he then father a daughter in the early decades of the 21st century?”

The author certainly has fun with some of the more bizarre aspects of being a time traveller. He has Ben Cartwright buying copies of new novels by writers like Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson knowing that (as first editions) they will become immensely valuable decades ahead. When a cholera epidemic hits Calico, Cartwright, nursing the town judge in what seems to be his final fevered moments, takes out his iPhone and plays the dying man some music. Problem is, the judge doesn’t die, and when he recovers he goes around loudly humming ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow.’

Meanwhile, Beth McDade struggles to reconcile facts that are, at the same time, impossible but also incontrovertible. She even finds, boarded up in a cave, the 2019 rental that Owen Slader was driving when he disappeared. It is, needless to say, improbably decayed and weathered given that it can only have been there a matter of months. Eventually, our heroine tackles – and bests – the FBI and the implacable American military machine.

Lee Goldberg’s audacious plot and premise will not be for everyone, particularly those who think that Hamlet’s famous remark to Horatio was just the rambling of a confused and conflicted young man. Of course, time travel novels are nothing new, and Goldberg does nod in homage to the grand-daddy of the genre, Herbert George Wells, but also develops the ‘stepping on a butterfly’ trope that began with Ray Bradbury’s 1952 short story ‘A Sound of Thunder’. Key question, though. Does Lee Goldberg’s book work? Of course it does. The writer is also an experienced screenwriter, producer and TV executive, far too well versed in his trade to stretch the credulity of his readers and viewers to beyond breaking point. Calico is immensely entertaining, with a runaway-train narrative drive. Published by Severn House, it came out in hardback and Kindlle in November 2023 and this paperback edition was published on 4th July.

July 9, 2024 1

THE TRIAL . . . Between the covers

First up, this novel isn’t a courtroom drama. Literally, it is about a big pharma multinational testing out what could be a game-changing drug to combat the effects of dementia. Metaphorically, though, Jo Spain’s latest thriller sees the lives of several individuals put under intense scrutiny, as if being questioned by a hard-nosed barrister in a court of law. Serious questions are asked, and some people fall after being challenged.

I am not normally a fan of split-time narratives, as they are all too often distracting short cuts, but Jo Spain is too good a writer to be accused of that, and in her hands it works well. There are three time zones. In 2014 we are in a prestigious Irish university college, St Edmunds, and we meet Dani. She is asleep, but her lover – Theo Laurent, French, and a fellow student – is about to make a very serious decision. He carefully climbs down from their shared bed and leaves. Not ‘leaves’ as in just going back to his own room, but ‘leaves’ as in disappears. Totally. Completely. From the face of the earth. Anxious and baffled hours for Dani turn into days and weeks. The police are not interested. Theo’s estranged and autocratic father reluctantly tells Dani over the ‘phone that he has received an email from his son stating that he has left the academic world to go travelling.

The two other time frames are 2023 and the present day. More so than in her excellent Tom Reynolds police procedural series, Jo Spain, in her standalone novels, likes to sucker punch her readers with astonishing plot twists, none more breathtaking than in The Perfect Lie ( click the link to read my review) These literary magic tricks are usually saved until the final pages of the novel, but here she does her stuff about half way through, when she lets us know that Dani is not who or what we think she is. To say more would be to spoil the fun. Suffice it to say that Jo Spain simply encourages us to make assumptions, which she then delights in shattering.

We learn that Dani, as far as the new ‘wonder drug’ is concerned, certainly has a dog in this particular fight. Her widowed mother is slowly succumbing to the inexorable death sentence known as Alzheimer’s. What if the new wonder drug could arrest her mother’s decline, and restore her memory, and make her sit up in bed with delight when her daughter comes to visit?

Academic impartiality seems to be a things of the past, certainly in the United Kingdom, and in Ireland, where this novel is set. In England, many universities – and even some independent school – have been bought and sold with Chinese money, but in the case of St Edmunds, it is not Xi’s millions that is paying the salaries of lecturers and professors, but the big dollars of the pharmaceutical industry. A convincing report from the medical researchers at St Edmunds, stating that the new drug poses no side-effect risks means that Turner Pharma can go ahead and mass produce the tablets, and ensuring massive world-wide profits. In trying to solve the mystery of Theo’s disappearance, Dani learns that pharmaceutical companies, just like their illegal counterparts in Mexico and Columbia, employ clever but crooked lawyers, use physical enforcers, and have limitless budgets to buy off politicians and law enforcement

The Trial works brilliantly on many different levels. There is the human anguish as Dani attempts to come to terms with Theo’s inexplicable departure. Jo Spain then invites us to be disgusted at the many ways in which academic institutions can become a simple market place commodity, and sold to the highest bidder. Above all, though, is the satisfaction derived from reading something written by a natural born story teller. There is not a word out of place, not a scene that wouldn’t work as a TV screenplay and – best of all – human characters of whom we might say, “Yes – I know someone like that.” The Trial is published by Quercus and is available now.

June 8, 2024 0

JACK THE RIPPER AND ABRAHAM LINCOLN . . . Between the covers

Historian and broadcaster Tony McMahon (left) sets out his stall in this book, and he is selling a provocative premise. It is that a celebrity fraudster, predatory homosexual, quack doctor and narcissist – Francis Tumblety – was instrumental in two of the greatest murder cases of the 19th century.The first was the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in April 1865, and the second was the murder of five women in the East End of London in the autumn of 1888 – the Jack the Ripper killings.   Tumblety was certainly larger than life. Tall and imposingly built, he favoured dressing up as a kind of Ruritanian cavalry officer, with a pickelhaub helmet, and sporting an immense handlebar moustache. He made – and lost – fortunes with amazing regularity, mostly by selling herbal potions to gullible patrons. Despite his outrageous behaviour, he does not seem to have been a violent man. Yes, he could have been accused of manslaughter after people died from ingesting his elixirs, but apart from once literally booting a disgruntled customer out of his suite, there is no record of extreme physical violence.

Lincoln’s killer John Wilkes Booth and David Herold, a rather dimwitted youth who, along with Mary Suratt and George Azerodt, was hanged for his part in the conspiracy, were certainly known to Tumblety, although there is little evidence that he shared Booth’s Confederate zealotry. Tumblety does not come across as a particularly political animal, although McMahon makes the point that he had friends in high places, who provided him with a ‘get out of jail free’ card on the many occasions when he found himself in court.

Tumblety (right( was a braggart, a charlatan, a narcissist and a predatory homosexual abuser of young men. Tony McMahon makes this abundantly clear with his exhaustive historical research. What the book doesn’t do, despite it being a thrilling read, is explain why the obnoxious Tumblety made the leap from being what we would call a bull***t artist to the person who killed five women in the autumn of 1888, culminating in the butchery that ended of the life Mary Jeanette Kelly in her Miller’s Court room on the 9th November. Her injuries were horrific, and the details are out there should you wish to look for them. As for Lincoln’s homosexuality – and his syphilis – the jury has been out for some time, with little sign that they will be returning any time soon. McMahon is absolutely correct to say that syphilis was a mass killer. My great grandfather’s death certificate states that he died, aged 48, of General Paralysis of the Insane. Also known as Paresis, this was a euphemistic term for tertiary syphilis. The disease would be contracted in relative youth, produce obvious physical symptoms, and then seem to disappear. Later in life, it would manifest itself in mental incapacity, delusions of grandeur, and physical disability. Lincoln was 56 when he was murdered and, as far as we know, in full command of his senses. I suggest that were Lincoln syphilitic, he would have been unable to maintain his public persona as it appears that he did.

Is Tumblety a credible Ripper suspect? No more and no less than a dozen others. Yes, he was in London when the five canonical murders were committed, but so were, in no particular order, the Duke of Clarence, Neill Cream, Aaron Kosinski, Robert Stephenson, Walter Sickert and Michael Ostrog. Much is made of the fact that Tumblety left the country in some haste, catching a boat across The Channel to Le Havre, and then back to America. He certainly had been in police custody, but for acts of public indecency, and was released on bail, which suggests that the London police did not think he was a danger to the public. The fact is that we will never know. The killings during ‘ The Autumn of Terror’ will forever remain unsolved. At some point, I suppose, the murders will fade into forgetfulness, and books advocating the latest theory will no longer have a market.

The theory that Tumblety also suffered from syphilis could account for the insane rage with which Marie Jeanette Kelly was butchered, but we must bear in mind that Tumblety lived until he was 70, dying in St Louis in May 1903, apparently from a heart attack. This said, Tony McMahon has written a wonderfully entertaining book with an excellent narrative drive, and a jaw-dropping insight into the demi-monde of mid-19th century America. McMahon’s research is beyond question, and he provides extensive footnotes and very useful index. The cover blurb says, “One man links the two greatest crimes of the 19th century.” Tony McMahon establishes beyond dispute that Francis Tumblety was that man. Whether he proves that he was responsible for either is another matter altogether.

June 5, 2024 1

THE ESTATE . . . Between the covers

Police Scotland’s Detective Inspector Cara Salt has been sidelined (because of a serious career blip, of which more later) into what can only be described as a dry and dusty branch of law enforcement, the Succession, Inheritance and Executory Department, SIE for short. Their job is to deal with breaches of the law that happen as a consequence of wills that upset people who assumed they were going to be beneficiaries but, for whatever reason, feel they have been short-changed.

A celebrity hedge fund manager, Sebastian Pallander has died on TV. No, not ‘died’ as in a comedian who fails to get a laugh, but ‘died’ as in suffering a massive heart attack while being interviewed on a live politics programme. It is his will – and its consequences – that are central to this story. When one of Sebastian’s sons, Jean Luc, manages to blow himself up while trying to sabotage a wind turbine, DI Salt is initially surprised to be asked to investigate. Along with her recently acquired assistant, DS Abernathy Blackstock, she visits the site of the wind farm, and finds that young Jean Luc is in many pieces, decoratively spread across the Scottish hillside.

Blackstock is not all he seems to be. The fifty-something Sergeant has not only been working on a top secret investigation into the late Sebastian Pallander’s links to highly dubious Russian money men, but he is the scion of a formerly wealthy branch of Scotland’s aristocracy.

One by one, the Pallander siblings seem to be the in the cross hair gun-sights of some rather nasty people. First Tabitha is kidnapped, then rescued by a mysterious man who tells her that she and her husband must make themselves scarce. When the hotel they are staying in, anonymously, catches fire, Cara Salt decides that Tabitha needs sanctuary – with none other than her former boyfriend – and fellow copper, Sorley MacLeod, now running a laptop refurbishment business in London, but with an lonely fishing cottage out in the Essex marshes as a retreat.

Meanwhile, Silas Pallander, once destined to take over his father’s business but – since the reading of the will – relegated to manager of the family estate, has also been seized, along with his personal assistant Anna. He is forced to sign certain papers, and then the gang make a hasty exit, leaving Silas and Anna to emerge, blinking, from their captivity, to find themselves in a disused Belgian airfield.

About halfway through the book, we learn the reason that Cara Salt is now involved in a policing operation that is as far from the mean streets of Glasgow as it could be. She had headed up a police take-down of a violent local gangster. It went pear-shaped and, faced with her Detective Sergeant – Sorley MacLeod – being held at gunpoint by the man who was the target of their raid, she took a chance and fired two shots. The first shattered MacLeod’s shoulder, but the second hit the gangster right between the eyes. Salt was sidelined and, after a long and painful recovery, MacLeod left both the police force and the world of Cara Salt.

Macleod and Tabitha Pallender, after a helter-skelter chase and a too-close-for-comfort brush with the bad guys, are eventually reunited with Salt and Blackstock, and are whisked back to relative safety in the Pallander company helicopter. However, anyone connected to the Pallander financial empire is about to enter a whole world of hurt. Pallander and his associates had for years basically been operating a Bernie Madoff-style financial scam and, with his death, the corporate chickens are about to come home to roost.

Towards the end of the book Denzil Meyrick (left) throws a sizeable spanner into the works in terms of what we think we know about what is going on, but this nothing to the shock we get during his version of the classic crime novel denouement in the library. In this case, it’s not the library, but the baronial dining room of Meikle House, the home of the Pallanders. The Estate is fast paced, witty and full of those plot twists that make Meyrick’s books so entertaining. It is published by Transworld/Bantam and is available now.

May 21, 2024 0

TO KILL A SHADOW . . . Between the covers

There was a saying beloved of football managers and commentators that went something like, “He’s a whole-hearted player – he leaves nothing in the changing room.” The metaphor was meant to describe someone who gives – and here’s another cliché – “one hundred and ten percent” on the field. To Kill a Shadow is a bit like that. It has corrupt coppers, SAS types thundering about on motor bikes, a brave-but-flawed heroine, murders, torture, kidnap, a military-industrial conspiracy, ground-breaking neuro-technology and political chicanery. The central character is called Julia Castleton which is, confusingly, also the name of the author of the novel. Of Julia in the book, more later, but the author’s name is the nom-de-plume of what the end papers say is “an internationally best-selling and critically acclaimed writing duo”.

The book’s Julia is actually Julia Danby, the younger daughter of a millionaire businessman and man of influence. Marital fidelity was not his strong point, and while Julia’s mother was dying of cancer, he was off in the south of France with his latest girlfriend. This made Julia furious with her father. At the time, she had a proper job as a journalist with The Times, but the family conflict sent her completely off the rails, and she ended up – in no particular order – being sectioned under the Mental Health Act, losing her job, and becoming mother to a baby boy whose father – such was her mental disorder – remains unknown.

Now, she has somewhat recovered, and writes a political blog called The Castleton Files which seeks to expose fraud and deception. Spurning financial help from her father, from whom she is now estranged, she earns small change from advertisers on her blog, and people who choose to become subscribers. Living in a shabby flat, she tries to keep a roof over her head and that of her little boy, Alex.

When a former military medic who saw service in Iraq and Syria contacts her with what she sees as a breakthrough story, she puts the dossier – basically alleging that British arms manufactures made a fortune selling their goods to ISIS – online, and all hell breaks loose. Initially, hits on her website go through the roof and she is bombarded with requests from mainstream media for interviews and further information.

But – suddenly – it all goes pear-shaped. UK government strongly refutes Julia’s allegations, her history of chaotic mental health is made public but – worse still – many of the details in her dossier are shown to be palpably untrue. The people from Social Services are trying to prove she is not a fit mother to Alex, the police bust down the doors of her flat and then claim they have found Category ‘A’ images of child abuse on her laptop and, in a further descent into her mental hell, Julia starts self harming again, and gulps down her Tegretol – a drug used for controlling the effects of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Julia eventually discovers what the conspiracy is all about, and it is actually far more alarming than the story of the arms sales. The military medic had discovered something so fantastical and improbable, that were it to be true, the whole nature of warfare would be changed.

I didn’t find Julia a very sympathetic character. Keeping Alex is clearly important to her, but at the first nudge, she heads off with her mates – mostly ex-SAS – to various parts of the country, in order to chase down the latest lead. Meanwhile, the little boy is left in the care of her older sister Elaine, whose elegant lifestyle and bourgeois values Julia clearly disdains.

This reservation aside, I won’t lie. I read the book cover to cover with great enjoyment in a few sessions, and the action is relentless. Needless to say, Julia’s hunches are eventually proved to be solid fact, and her credibility as an investigative journalist is restored. To Kill a Shadow is published by Pendulum books and is available now.

March 7, 2024 0

I WILL FIND YOU . . . Between the covers

Sometimes, the best writers set themselves challenges by posing a plot problem that appears to deny a plausible solution. One such was back in 2021 when, in The Perfect Lie, Jo Spain pulled the wool over our eyes. There, the deception hinged on a few words – and our (wrong) assumptions.

https://fullybooked2017.com/2021/05/13/the-perfect-lie-between-the-covers/

In his latest novel, Harlan Coben – to use the metaphor of Houdini – has wrapped himself in so many chains and padlocks that it seems impossible that he can set himself free. Why? Try this. Five years ago, David Burroughs was jailed for life for murdering his three year-old son, Matthew, with a baseball bat. He now languishes in the protected section of a high security jail, alongside child rapists, cannibals, and other monsters. After refusing to see any visitors for five years he is finally forced to see one – because he omitted to fill in the annual paperwork. It is his former sister-in-law Rachel; his wife, Cheryl has, inevitably, divorced him. Rachel shows David a photo (taken by a friend) of a family group at an amusement park. On the edge of the picture is a little boy, clutching the hand of an adult, otherwise out of picture. It is Matthew.

Coben gives us a drive-through account of the back story. David Burroughs was home-alone with Matthew that night. Cheryl, a surgeon, was at work. David was in a bad mood, put his son to bed without a bedtime story, and proceeded to get outside of the best part of a bottle of Bourbon. Somehow awakened by a sixth sense that something was wrong, or perhaps by the smell of blood, David staggered to his son’s bedroom only to find a mangled and unrecognisable corpse on the bed.

The first key to the mystery is, of course, that the shattered boy’s corpse was just that – unrecognisable. It was, however, in Matthew’s bed, wearing Matthew’s pyjamas. When, a little while later a baseball bat, with David’s fingerprints all over it, is found buried in the garden, David’s status changes from bereaved father, through suspect, to convicted killer.

The next key has to be putting David in a situation – i.e. no longer behind bars – where he can investigate the possibility that the child in the photograph is Matthew, and prove that the murdered boy in Matthew’s bed was someone else. The Governor of Briggs Penitentiary is Philip Mackenzie, and he has history with David Burroughs. David’s dad, Lenny, was, long ago, a grunt in Vietnam with Phil. The pair survived and went on to become partners in crime prevention as precinct cops. Now, Phil is just months away from retirement and a double pension, while Lenny is in the advanced stages of dementia. Suffice it to say there is a fairly improbable break-out from Briggs but this is, after all, crime-fiction.

Coben then throws a fairly heavy spanner into the works by revealing that at a rough stage in their marriage, when Cheryl and David were unable to conceive, Cheryl booked an appointment at a sperm donor clinic. This cleverly opens up all manner of potential twists and questions, which the author exploits to the maximum. It certainly had me guessing right up to the final few pages. If I say this a typically American slick thriller, it is meant as an entirely positive description. Somehow – and I won’t say they are better than British writers – American novelists such as Coben, Connolly, Baldacci and Kellerman produce a polished and gleaming product which has, to extend the automobile metaphor, a distinctive ‘new car smell’. I Will Find You is published by Century and is out now.

April 10, 2023 0

OUTBREAK . . . Between the covers

This is the third Luke Carlton thriller by the BBC Security Correspondent Frank Gardner, following Crisis (2016) and Ultimatum (2018). Carlton is a former Special Forces operative who now works for MI6, the foreign intelligence service of the United Kingdom. The novel begins in the frozen wastes of Svalbard, the Norwegian archipelago formerly known as Spitzbergen, and three environmental scientists from the UK Arctic Research Station have been caught out by a blizzard and, too far from their base camp to make it back safely, they seek refuge in a hut. What they find there makes them wish they had braved the snow and wind and tried for home. They find a gravely ill man, and one of the scientists, Dr Sheila Mackenzie gets rather too close to him:

“As Dr Mackenzie turned back to face the sick man, without warning he arched his body forward off the back of the couch with surprising speed. His whole body shook with involuntary convulsions. In that same moment, he coughed violently. His mouth wide open in a rictus gape, he emitted a spray of blood, bile and mucus into the air, his face less than two feet from hers, before collapsing, quivering on to the wooden floor.”

That, then, is the Aliens moment. Events move with terrifying speed. Mackenzie is airlifted back to England and isolation and the wheels of government and the intelligence agencies begin to whirr. Given that there is a large Russian presence in Svalbard, ostensibly for mining operations, the fingers of guilt begin to point towards Moscow, particularly when the virus is found to be man-made.

Gardner doesn’t allow either Carlton or readers pause for either thought or breath. The action zig-zags between the MI6 building at Vauxhall Cross in London, the Arctic Circle, Vilnius, Moscow, GCHQ in Cheltenham and – less exotic but rather more deadly – a down-at-heel industrial estate near Braintree.

This is an impeccably researched novel, as you would expect from someone with Gardner’s experience in the worlds of soldiering, news gathering and international affairs. Most of the story is all-too-horribly plausible, given what we know about what is euphemistically known as ‘mischief’ from Moscow and Beijing, but then Gardner has a surprise for us. The Russians are involved, certainly, but not the Russians we might have expected. To say more would spoil the entertainment but I did find the identity of the conspirators not entirely plausible, given what we know (or think we know) about terror cells operating around the world. But hey-ho, this is not a documentary but a novel – and a bloody good one, too.

Gardner has a box full of thriller writer tools, and he uses them to great effect – punchy, short chapters, many of them shamelessly cliff hanging, whirlwind globe trotting, a convincing (if rather conventional) hero, something of a romantic backstory, breathtaking amounts of cyber-wizardry, and enough military intelligence acronyms to satisfy the geekiest security geek. You won’t be surprised to hear that Carlton eventually triumphs, but I advise caution. The last twelve words of the book might set alarm bells ringing …..

Outbreak is published by Bantam Press and is out now.

June 7, 2021 0