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THE BARRAGE BODY . . . Between the covers

It is December, 1944, and we are in the Birmingham suburb of Erdington. Further afield, and quite unknown to both the residents of Erdington and the American soldiers shivering in their foxholes in the Ardennes Forest, Hitler is about to launch his last desperate gamble in what would come to be known as the Battle of The Bulge. In Erdington, war-wise, things are relatively quiet, but a barrage balloon unit, staffed by young women of that WAAF, is parked up at the Dunlop rubber factory, commonly known as Fort Dunlop.

It is here that Detective Chief Inspector Sam Mason is summoned, initially to investigate what appears to be a case of malicious communications, but things escalate rapidly. First it seems that someone has stolen vital blueprints for new and improved tyres for Lancaster bombers, and then, a body is discovered tethered to a barrage balloon which has unaccountably broken free.

Mason has a veritable 2000 piece jigsaw to put together. So many questions. Who was the man found dead in the barrage balloon cables? Why was jack-the-lad teenager Simon Samuels found in a similar position? What is the connection to Samuels’ father, a guard at a Staffordshire POW camp. Painstakingly, Mason and his redoubtable Sergeant O’Rourke have to move the pieces one by one until they begin to make a recognisable picture.

Sam Mason is quite unlike most British coppers in contemporary CriFi, partly because of the era in which was working. Because it is the 1940s we are quite content for him to rather stolid, happily married, prone to the aches and pains of late middle age. His deceptively gentle and slow-moving approach masks a sharp mind and a critical eye for detail. Here, he patiently absorbs the facts of a strange case, and delivers the goods.

This is the fourth Erdington Mystery. I enjoyed and reviewed the first of them, The Custard Corpses. The series couldn’t be more different from the books for which Porter is, perhaps, better known – dramatic swords, shields and helmets dramas from Saxon and Norman times. The books have one thing in common, however, and that is the setting – Mercia, the ancient kingdom we would now call The Midlands where, incidentally, Porter was born and brought up. The Barrage Body is original, inventive, nostalgic, absorbing, and I loved it. Published by MJ Publishing, it is available now.

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GENESIS . . . Between the covers

Guy Portman has written a splendid series of dystopian satires centred around a sociopathic killer called Dyson Devereux and, after his demise, his son Horatio, who has inherited his father’s rather peculiar intelligence. Now, in the first of two prequels, Genesis gives us a glimpse into the life of the eleven year-old Dyson. It is 1985, and Dyson’s father, long since separated from his mother, has died of what we  would coyly come to describe as ‘an AIDS-related illness.’ Portman’s black humour kicks in early when, at Devereaux senior’s funeral, there is a grotesque spat between a rather fey young man (presumably the partner of the deceased) and Dyson’s aunt.

Within weeks, Dyson is an orphan. His mother never recovers from a coma induced by the prescription drugs provided by her lover, the predatory Dr Trenton. Dyson vows revenge, but shares his maximum venom for his hateful cousin Beatrice, who has taunted him relentlessly over his father’s death. After living with her and his Aunt for a while, he is sent away to boarding school. Intellectually he thrives. His rapid grasp of Latin singles him out, but his status among his peers – minor foreign royalty, sons of the landed gentry and dimwits who happen to be good at rugby – is less certain. His heroic status among (most of) his fellow pupils is cemented, however,  after he engineers a memorable encounter with a boy’s glamorous mother in her Mercedes, with half the members of Upper Four B watching from behind the bushes. This memorable feat is also his downfall, as it leads to his expulsion.

Dyson’s main obsession is his cousin Beatrice. He daydreams of ways he could cause her demise. In his most exotic and Byzantine vision, he has written to Jimmy Savile (this is the 1980s, remember) asking for Beatrice to be guillotined live on TV, as the climax to that week’s Jim’ll Fix It. The unfortunate girl’s actual demise is, however, marginally less less spectacular, and it involves a parish church outing to visit Beachy Head.

Readers who are familiar with Portman’s books will know what to expect, but for novitiates, here’s a brief primer. The author has a high powered literary rifle, and in its cross-hairs are Britain’s ‘lanyard class’, metropolitan socialists, indoctrinated social workers, people whose social consciences overlook all manner of atrocities, Guardianistas, bumbling teachers and so-called ‘community leaders’. Portman’s aim is unerring. Just like Finland’s fabled White Death, Simo Hayha, every time he squeezes the trigger, the target falls. Yes, this is satire, and fiction, but his writing carries a salutary message.

Guy Portman pushes the boundaries of humour up to – and occasionally beyond – the limits that some people might find acceptable, but  he provides me, for, one, with laugh-out-loud moments. He is also a great literary stylist with a vast amoury of cultural references, and is one of our funniest living writers. Genesis is out now, and I will be reading and reviewing the next episode – Avengement – very soon.

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THE REST IS DEATH . . . Between the covers

In a silky smooth segue from 2024’s For Our Sins, Edinburgh copper Tony McLean has returned from temporary retirement and is asked to investigate an apparently trivial break-in at a Biotech facility. Nothing seems to have been taken, no-one was harmed, so why is a Detective Chief Inspector sent on the job when it would normally be handled by a uniformed Sergeant? The answer is simple. Drake Biotech is owned and funded by billion are Nathanial Drake, who just happens to be on WhatsApp terms with Scotland’s First Minister.

When an old school chum approaches DI Janie Harrison with a request to look, for her missing boyfriend, a Serbian carpenter, Janie does a perfunctory search, but assumes the man has gone to ply his trade elsewhere. She has logged the photos from her chum’s phone, and is horrified to find, that when she is called out to woodland where a hastily buried body has been found, the remains are that of Vaclav Mihailovic.When the autopsy is carried out on the Serbian, the pathologist is both baffled and shocked. The unfortunate man is opened up, but there is no stench of decay. It seems that the gut bacteria that continue working away after the heart stops beating are mysteriously absent. There is no bloating and no breakdown of tissue.

Halfway through the book, Oswald escalates and complicates the narrative. First, the driver of the van that took the intruders to Blake Biotech is identified, but then rapidly disappears. McLean suspects he is working for an external intelligence agency. A professional protester called Sanderson, believed to be one of the Biotech vandals is found sitting on a park bench, stone dead. Then the bodies of both Sanderson and Mihailovic are stolen from the city mortuary. Long time fans of the Tony McLean novels have become accustomed to an element of the supernatural appearing in the narrative. Here, it comes in page one, but it is another 60 pages before we realise the relevance to Nathaniel Drake and his interests.

McLean ponders the situation:

“We’ve got a break-in at the lab by animal rights activists who turn out to be a diversion for some MI5 spook doing God knows what. One of the team turns up dead in the park, looking like he’s not eaten in months and shouldn’t have had the strength to wield a spray can, let alone smash up a lab. I’d really like to know what he died from, just in case I’ve got a new disease about to spread through the city.

But someone breaks into the mortuary and steals his body before the pathologist can have a proper look. And whoever does that has the ability to break the servers of a sophisticated security services company to order.

A company that, it turns out, is a fully owned subsidiary of Drake Corporation, whose labs were broken into. And am I going round in circles?”

Within the CriFi genre, police procedural investigations are not natural bedfellows with the paranormal. The late Phil Rickman made it work – in spades – and James Oswald does a pretty good job. He certainly pushes the boundaries here, and gives us a finale with an archetypal mad professor locked in a life or death struggle with McLean, Harrison, and the mummified heart of a man who was court magus to Vlad Dracul in the medieval Carpathian Mountains. All this aside, Oswald has given us a copper with instincts, compassion and humanity, coupled with the inner steel required to do what can often be a truly horrible job. The Rest is Death is published by Headline, and is available now.

 

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SHOCKING CRIMES . . . Between the covers

We are in Dorset. Bournemouth, to be exact. But this is not the genteel Budmouth, Regency watering place of Thomas Hardy’s novels, but a much more hard-edged kind of place. The cast of coppers includes Detective Chief Superintendent Sophie Allen, Detective Chief Inspector Barry Marsh and Detective Inspector Lydia Pillay, Bournemouth CID, newly appointed to the role of DI.

Thirty eight year-old Pippa Chandler has been arrested for the murder of her disabled boyfriend Joshua Quick. She had recently inherited a house from her uncle and, while searching the property, police find a scrap of yellowing paper on which appears to be written a cry for help from a ten year-old child. A slapdash search of the house has revealed nothing of interest, but then a more assiduous crime technician discovers a false panel in the roof space. And behind the panel is a battered suitcase containing a grisly find – the dessicated remains of a child, later revealed to the corpse of a little girl.

Meanwhile, a seemingly unrelated investigation into a more recent tragedy is in focus. In a Bournemouth nightclub, a student called Holly collapses on the dance floor. She is rushed to hospital, where she lies between life and death. This wasn’t drink spiking, but ‘jabbing’ –  a surreptitious injection with a throwaway hypodermic syringe, and Holly had an existing heart condition. In a dramatic and significant twist, Holly’s mother admits her historic links to the house where the child’s remains were found.

In general, there are two kinds of police/private investigator thrillers – the ones where the author keeps the perpetrator/s hidden from both us readers and the forces of law and order until the last few pages and those where we learn who the bad guys are early in the piece, with the entertainment coming from watching the police untangle the knots. Shocking Crimes largely falls into the latter category but Michael Hambling actually gives us the best of both worlds here. Yes, we learn early doors that Bruce Greenfield is a wrong ‘un, and we also know who his criminal associates were, but exactly who did what – and to whom – we discover through the eyes of the detectives.

Although elegantly plotted and with credible dramatis personnae, Shocking Crimes makes for uncomfortable reading at times as it delves into the fraught world of child protection, now known as Safeguarding. Having worked in this area myself, I am aware of the dark litany of historic failures laid at the door of professional adults charged with keeping young people from harm. In the end, as this novel shows, there are human beings so depraved and devoid of decency that no foolproof system to combat them has ever been devised. The novel will be published by Joffe Books on 13th November.

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BLACK AS DEATH . . . Between the covers

This novel is the final episode in an Icelandic CriFi saga and, as ever, I am late to the party. Long story short, An Áróra’s sister Ísafold was being abused by her partner Björn, and when Ísafold went missing, with her body found much later, it was assumed that Björn was the killer. When his body is then found at the same site, the investigation is blown wide apart. An Áróra is in a relationship with Daníel, a detective, and when he finally reveals the chilling fact that Ísafold’s body has had the heart ripped from it, this grisly twist sets the stage for a thrilling and addictive narrative.

For series newcomers like me it takes a page or three to discover what An Áróra actually does for a living. She is a freelance forensic accountant, employed by various agencies – some government owned, some private – to mine down into the financial affairs of companies who seem to be doing rather too well.

Flashbacks tell us about Ísafold’s relationship with Björn, and they make painful reading, typifying everything we think we know about women who are dependent on abusive boyfriends or husbands. Björn was a minor cog in a drug empire run by a man called Sturla Larsen. Daníel has asked An Áróra to investigate the affairs of a coffee house chain called Kaffikó. They seem small and insignificant compared to the big international players, so why are they making a huge profit? An Áróra learns that Kaffikó have an influential private investor  who owns half of the company stock.

It is then ‘answers on a postcard’ time as it appears that someone is using Kaffikó as money laundering scheme, and there are no prizes for anyone making the connection between the two apparently unconnected cases. It is easy to see why the five book series has been an outstanding success. The writing has tremendous pace, and verve, with An Áróra a striking and convincing central character. LIke most English readers my knowledge of the original language is absolute zero, but the translation by Lorenza Garcia seems both fluid and fluent.

My only criticism is that the ending was rather downbeat, but then who I am I to expect happy endings from the Icelandic Noir genre! Black as Death is ingeniously plotted, taut, and, occasionally, very bloodthirsty.  It is out today, 23rd October, and published by Orenda Books.

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THE HALLMARKED MAN . . . Between the covers

Confession time. Neither I nor my children were born recently enough to have been remotely interested in Harry Potter, and so when JKR entered the CriFi world with her Cormoran Strike books, I was only mildly interested. My loss. My mistake. ‘Bestseller’ is a fluid and relative term, much abused by hyperactive publicists, but if ‘Robert Galbraith’ has sold thousands of books, then good for her. She writes beautifully. Former military policeman turned private investigator Strike is “a broken-nosed Beethoven… over a stone off his ideal weight..” And with just half a leg.

The London PI has a deliciously fraught relationship with his business partner Robin Ellacott. He tries to push back thoughts that he is in love with her while, at the same time, mourning the suicide of his girlfriend, who slit her wrists in the bath because she knew what he knew. Meanwhile, Robin is unattainable, because of her commitment to her Met Police detective partner.

The latest case begins in a  bizarre fashion. Strike is summoned to a near-derelict house in rural Kent, where a rich restaurateur, Decima Mullins, conceals a three-week-old baby beneath her poncho. The baby’s father, she tells him, was Rupert Fleetwood, an impoverished but well-connected ne’er do well. She believes he is dead, murdered and mutilated in a botched raid on a celebrated London silversmith. Her problem is that the police have identified the body as that of someone else altogether, and Decima wants closure.

A subtle touch of genius is the way in which the early action is framed around the English conventions of Christmas. Galbraith avoids the obvious, but hints at the family tensions; singletons quietly dreading the few days back with mum and dad, despite the echoes of happier times; the monstrous extravagance of Harrods; the relentless joviality in pubs and bars, smothering – for a while – any sense of loneliness, loss and insecurity, yet all the while, making for an emotional hangover that is sure to descend once the TV adverts ditch snowflakes and baubles for the equally false promises of holidays under a Mediterranean sun.

This book is very, very long, at just short of 900 pages, but its length gives the author the space to write with great perception and detail, in an almost Dickensian or Hardyesque way, about the way the main characters react and speak to each other. In the hands of a lesser writer, this might make for laborious reading, but here, every paragraph is precious.

Galbraith introduces a touch of the esoteric into the plot, and what can be more esoteric than the arcane symbolism of Freemasonry? The original robbery which gave us the dismembered corpse of – well, there’s something of a queue to join this particular ID parade – involved Masonic silver artifacts, not intrinsically priceless, but of great significance to the initiates.

I must mention the quotes at the beginning of each chapter. Some are from an obscure manual for Freemasons, written by Albert Pike, but others, from Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, AE Housman are more evocative. We also hear the voice of John Oxenham, a long forgotten writer from the early twentieth century.

Nagging away, like a persistent bass counterpoint under the main tune, is the situation between Robin, her Met boyfriend Ryan, and Strike. Ryan Murphy seems to be everything that Strike is not; conventionally handsome, deeply in love, resolutely honest and utterly devoted to Robin. Murphy wants the elusive first home, the hungry cry of an infant in the night. But what does Strike want, or offer? Robin tells us:

“He was infuriating, stubborn and secretive when she wished he’d be open. But he was also funny and brave, and he’d been honest tonight when she’d expected him to lie. He was, in short, her imperfect best friend.”

The plot is Byzantine in its complexity, and Strike and Ellacott scour the country from Sark to Scotland before they finally discover the identity of the ‘hallmarked man’ and who killed him.. The denouement – in an unremarkable terraced house in the West Midlands – is breathtakingly violent, but my abiding thought about this magnificent novel is, “My God, how did she do this?” The Hallmarked Man is published by Sphere and is available now.

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A RAGE OF SOULS . . . Between the covers

This begins as one of the most baffling and impenetrable of Simon Westow’s cases. We are in Leeds, 1826. He solves a case of fraud, the fraudster is sentence to hang, but reprieved. He then returns with his wife to shadow the man he originally tried to defraud. The man, who calls himself Fox, seems connected to his victim, a Mr Barton, via Barton’s wayward son, Andrew. Westow, like Ulysses in Tennyson’s great poem, no longer has “that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven,” due to a serious wound sustained in a previous case, but his eyes, ears – and legs on the street are provided by his lethal young assistants Jane and Sally.

One of Nickson’s many skills as a writer is to point out the dramatic contrast between the industrial stink of Leeds and the uncorrupted countryside not many miles outside the city. Andrew Barton goes missing, so Jane and the boy’s anxious father make the journey in a chaise towards Tadcaster. Jane investigates the ancient church of St Mary, Lead, solitary and empty in a lonely field. Near the church runs the Cock Beck, which was reported to have run red with blood during the nearby Battle of Towton in 1461, and as she crosses the stream , she makes a terrible discovery.

Quietly, Nickson references the timeless joy of reading. Jane, once an illiterate street urchin, has been taught to read by Mrs Shields, the old lady who has become the mother she never had. Now, Jane spends her spare hours immersed in the novels of Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, borrowed from the circulating library. The printed words take Jane away from the perils and drudgery of her own existence to a world of daring, adventure and hope. In his own way. Nickson does precisely the same thing.

There is a deep sense of poetry in the book, not just in the words, but in the juxtaposition of images. The book begins with Jane witnessing the result of a horrifying industrial accident.  A young girl is being roughly carried to the surgeon, her leg mangled beyond repair. This haunts Jane throughout the book, but then, near the end, there is a kind of redemption. One of the regular characters who ekes out a living on Westow’s streets is Davy, the blind fiddler. Jane’s trauma is redeemed:

“Up by the market cross, Davy Cassidy was playing a sprightly tune that ended as she drew close. He gazed around with his sightless eyes and a girl appeared whispering a word into his ear. He lifted his bow and began to play again, low, mournful. Then the girl stepped forward and began to sing. Jane knew her face. She’d lived with it for months. She’d seen it contorted with pain as the girl was carried from the mill, her leg in shreds. Then when it returned night after night in her dreams. Now she was here, one-legged, supported by a crutch, a voice as unearthly sweet as a visitation as she sang about a girl who moved through the fair. She stood transfixed as a disbelief fragmented and disappeared. The pain she’d heard in the girl that day in February had become beauty. The small crowd was silent, caught in the words, the singing while the world receded around them. The last note ended, a stunned silence, then applause and people pushing forward to put coins into the hat on the ground.”

Eventually, by a mixture of judgment perseverance and good fortune, the mysterious Fox is run to ground in a bloodthirsty finale. A Rage of Souls is Chris Nickson at his best – complex, compelling and, above all. compassionate. It will be published by Severn House on 7th October. You can take a look at earlier Simon Westow books here.

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THE HOWLING . . . Between the covers

I reviewed an earlier novel in this series twelve months ago, and you can read what I thought of The Torments by clicking the link. Now, Annie Jackson (with her brother Lewis) returns in another mystery set in the evocative landscape of the Scottish Highlands. Annie’s USP, to be flippant for a moment, is that she has inherited a curse, passed down through female ancestors. She is subject to terrifying revelations that show how certain people she knows are going to meet their death. In the last book her vision was that of a young man from the local lifeboat crew being killed in a car accident. He duly was, and Annie suffered opprobrium for her perceived inability to issue a credible warning.

In that previous novel, she survived a life-and-death struggle with a satanic madwoman called Sylvia Lowry-Law. Lowry-Law is now a permanent resident of a secure mental hospital but, exercising her rights under the bizarrely liberal UK legal system, she requests a meeting with Annie. The prisoner offers to remove Annie’s familial curse, but asks, in return, that Annie searches for – and finds – Lowry-Law’s long lost son.

Annie is sent in the direction of Lowry-Law’s former solicitor in Edinburgh, but the office is now empty except for the former receptionist, an elderly woman called Joan Torrans. She reveals that her former boss took his own life some weeks earlier. Returning to the now deserted office a few days later, after Torrans suddenly dies, Annie and Lewis discover a mysterious room, its door concealed behind a bookcase. In the room is a sinister altar surmounted with a horned skull and spent candles. It seems that the solicitors were connected to a satanic cult known as The Order.

As Annie and Lewis discover that The Order dates back centuries, and is deeply embedded in Scottish history, they learn that its modern operations are financed by a poisonous web of blackmail aimed at some of the richest families in the land. Then, a shocking act of violence turns the narrative on its head.

The author reminds us that in some parts of Britain, the past lays a heavy hand on the shoulder of the present. Annie and Lewis face a struggle, not only against the present day black arts of Sylvia Lowry-Law, but against centuries of superstition, folk memory, and bloody deeds soaked into the very landscape. The finale is worthy (and this is for older readers) of something the cult director Roger Corman might have concocted for one of his Edgar Allan Poe adaptations.

The Howling is a gripping read, and mines into a deep seam of violence embedded in Scottish history and legend. The misty lochs, forbidding hillsides and bleak settlements are perfect settings for memories of witchcraft and lycanthropy. I am normally no fan of split time narratives, but that is just a personal gripe, and the device is skillfully used here to tell the story of a terrible wrong that was done centuries earlier. The Howling is published by Orenda Books and is available now.

 

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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.

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