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THE QUIET KILL . . . Between the covers

London, early December, 1987. Detective Constable Jamie Day has been transferred from his relatively peaceful Suffolk home town to work with the Met, and his introduction to the decadent grimoire of the capital couldn’t be more horrific. He is first on the scene at Leyton railway station in east London, where the station master (with the help of urban foxes) has discovered body parts dumped in bin liners. It turns out to be the remains of Callum Michaels, a young man from Yorkshire who had recently arrived to begin work on a construction site.

It transpires that Callum was gay, and had effectively been kicked out of home by his rather puritanical father, after Callum and another lad had been rather indiscreet in a local park. Then, the frozen body parts of a middle aged homosexual, Johan Hendriks, is found in his chest freezer. The link between Callum and Johan is that they both had copies of the same ‘Tart Card’ (a business card advertising sexual services of all kinds, mostly to be found in public telephone boxes back in the day)

A third young man meets his maker, while police Top Brass are trying to keep a lid on things, due to Johan Henriks’ connection to people in High Places. In his innocence, Jamie Day is tricked into revealing details of the case to an unscrupulous journalist (is there any other kind?) and is suspended.

Robert Bryndza, like Jamie Day, is a native of Lowestoft. The Suffolk coastal town was once a thriving port but, even in 1987, it was beginning its downward spiral into being considered a significantly deprived town, with some areas ranked among the 10% most deprived in England, particularly regarding education, skills, and income. Like its near-neighbour, Yarmouth, it is a shadow of its former self.

It needs saying that this book is not a murder mystery, in the sense that there is any doubt over the identity of the killer is resolved fairly quickly. The tension comes from wondering just how the police are going to find him. It needs to be emphasised that the storyline is centred on the Gay scene in 1980s London and, in places, it is very graphic. Robert Bryndza spares us none of the gory details, but he always tells a good story, and you can read my thoughts on his earlier books by clicking this link. The Quiet Kill is published by Raven Street Books and is available now.

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WHAT THE DYING SEE . . . Between the covers

Manchester. The present day. The central character is DI Thomas Ridpath, and member of the Major Incident Team (MIT), who doubles as Coroner’s Officer. He is a widower with a teenage daughter about to face her GCSEs. We learn right from the start that a serial killer is at large. He specialises in a warped version of Assisted Dying, and injects his elderly victims with fatal doses of pain relieving drugs. We know this. The police have no idea.

Central to the narrative is Margaret Challinor, the Coroner. She has returned to work after being debilitated by a savage random assault, which resulted in her being in a coma for many weeks. She has recovered. But has she? Thundering headaches suggest that all is not well, but she is a formidable woman, and battles on through the pain.

MJ Lee clearly has experience of being the subject of word-salad management speak. Here, a new commander (recently promoted from Traffic) gives the team an inspirational address:

“The Chief has asked me to bring managerial systems and competence to the organisation of the solution of crimes, to be data-driven in this age of AI, computers and complex analytics, an approach that builds on our core competences and resilience, but takes advantage of the sizeable opportunities afforded by this new technology and analytics to create a force that is forward-thinking, creative rather than reactive, one that uses its resources to the limits of their capabilities to serve the people of Manchester, ensuring they feel secure and protected as they go about their daily lives.”

Ridpath is resolute, persistent, and no-one”s fool. Those three qualities make him a thorn in the side of his pusillanimous senior managers who are bitterly resentful that a spreadsheet macro cannot bring to justice the person who is taking such obvious delight in ending the lives of Ill and vulnerable old people. Ridpath’s dogged attention to detail closes the case, but not before his own life is put on the line.

Apart from his scathing caricature of Ridpath’s boss and his oleagenous lanyard – class pomposity, MJ Lee doesn’t preach or wave any particular banner. The story – an excellent police procedural – did make me wonder about the overly politicised leadership of our police forces. I am not a Londoner, but the replacement of the ineffectual Cressida Dick with the operational paralysis induced by Mark Rowlands is a case in point. It you can hear my sigh of impotent despair, then it will be momentary. This particular rant is for another day. What The Dying See is published by Canelo and is out now.

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A WASP IN THE BEEHIVE . . . Between the covers

The Brigid Reardon Mysteries by Mary Logue are historical mysteries centered on an Irish immigrant navigating the American West in the 1880s. Starting with The Streel (2020) and followed by The Big Sugar (2023), the series features a determined, independent protagonist who solves murders in places like Deadwood and Cheyenne while seeking a better life. This is the third in the series, and begins in Salt Lake City where the eighteen year-old Brigid is applying for a job in a bookstore owned by a Mr Cutter.

We know from a brief preface that this gentleman has five wives, but this is, after all, Mormon central. Mr Cutter is something of a nasty piece of work. Not content with his five wives, he has his eyes on a sixth, Amelia. Normal terms for relatives become a problem in pluralistic marriages, but I think Amelia is his step daughter, as she is the daughter (by a previous marriage) of his second wife, Sarah. Unfortunately for Cutter’s equilibrium, sixteen year-old Amelia has fallen in love with Brandon, Cutter’s son by his first wife, Eliza.

When Mr Cutter is found dead in the sewing room of their house – a room he never has reason to visit – Brigid is reacquainted with Dr Kohler, a man she met in the bookstore. Doctor K has little to do with live patients – he is the city coroner. Cutter’s demise ushers in a delightful (for us readers) whodunnit, as a longish list of suspects is instantly available. Was it one of the wives, driven by jealousy? Brandon – or even Amelia – angered by his refusal to countenance their affection for each other? Or is it someone outside the family with a grudge against Cutter due to some slight or grievance borne out of the complex local religious politics? Whoever, the relationship between Kohler and Brigid is a CriFi match made in heaven.

At 200 pages, this is more of a novella, but none the worse for that. Spoiler alert – we are introduced to the murder weapon early in the piece, but as to who wielded it, that is rather more nuanced. There is one trivial, but unfortunate, research error. Dr Kohler refers to the methods of Sherlock Holmes. This is 1881, and it would be another six years before the character would appear, in A Study In Scarlet.

Written in the first person, the narrative of A Wasp In The Beehive ensures that we know plenty about Brigid. She is a bright, resourceful and courageous heroine. Categories are subjective, I suppose, but they are useful for tags, so I class this as Cosy Crime. Not my chosen genre, for sure, but I enjoyed this tale. It is published by The University of Minnesota Press and is available now.

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A MURDER IN SPRINGTIME . . . Between the covers

Bruno Courrèges is the Chief of Police of the Vézère Valley in the Périgord region of France. It is springtime in the little market town of St Denis. The genial Bruno does have a past, and it is somewhat darker than the constant sunlight if St Denis. He was raised in an orphanage and, as a young soldier, experienced the mind numbing brutality of the Balkan wars in the 1990s. When his friend Pamela, who runs a riding stables, returns to her house and finds her lodger, Josette Quirit, battered to death on the patio, he is informed, but is forced to recuse himself from the investigation due to his friendship with Pamela. Instead, an old friend Jean-Jacques Jalipeau from Périgeux attends, along with his colleague Fabien Panton.

There are two subplots. The gentler of the two is Bruno’s concern for the declining fortunes of St Denis in commercial terms. The weekly market is shrinking: stallholders are relocating to a nearby town, and shops are losing footfall. I realise that a picturesque Dordogne town is very different from where I live – a hard-scrabble town in one of England’s more deprived areas, but at least St Denis seems to have escaped the dubious pleasures of fake barber shops, nail bars, money laundering ventures posing as vape stores, and a proliferation of bookmakers. Bruno hatches a rejuvenation plan.

As to the second, we have a mysterious prelude, apparently unrelated to St Denis or the murdered woman. I am not keen on this literary device, and I think it is over-used, but that’s just a personal grouch. In an unidentified school, a young boy is made to stand for ages, holding heavy books on his outstretched arms. Then he falls, cracks his head, and all hell breaks loose. We come to believe that this is the same Catholic boarding school that Fabien Panton was sent by his parents. The mysterious prelude makes sudden – and rather grim – sense, when it is revealed that the school matron who inflicted the fatal punishment on the schoolboy was Joséphine Tauton, convicted of manslaughter. On her release from prison she became Josette Quirit.

Bruno and Fabien have another lead. Vehicles captured on CCTV in the vicinity of the murder site are connected to a Netflix crew filming a historical drama series in the area.In the end, it is a curious blend of of technical data – the readings from a FitBit watch – and Bruno’s very human intuition that brings the killer to justice, and the novel ends on a festive note, if not for the victim and her killer, but for the market stallholders of St Denis.

This is, of course, cosy crime, but of a superior nature. Bruno is a confirmed gastronome, and the book is full of descriptions of meal preparation, rural charcuterie delicacies and, of course, delicious local wines. Bruno”s world is, of course pure fantasy, albeit of a delightful kind. Despite its perceived decline, St Denis has a proper boulangerie and a shop where a Belgian chocolatier creates his own irresistible treats. There is, of course a high class butcher, from whom Bruno thinks nothing of ordering a 35 kilo lamb in order to treat his friends to an Easter méchoui. Even the rather reduced market has stalls selling proper farm-made cheeses, and the hills around the town are still peopled by small vineyards, each producing delicious – and affordable – wines. This is heady stuff, especially for British readers in provincial towns where genuine locally produced food is either hideously expensive, or completely unavailable.

Martin Walker writes of what he knows, as in 2013, he was made a chevalier of foie gras, in the confrérie of paté de Périgueux, and also an honorary Ambassador of the Périgord, which means he gets to accompany the traveling exhibition of the Lascaux cave as it goes on display at museums around the world. He also helps promote the wines of Bergerac at international wine fairs, and was chairman of the jury for this year’s Prix Ragueneau, the international culinary prize. A Murder in Springtime is as light as one of Bruno’s superior souffles, but very entertaining. It will be published by Quercus on 18th June.

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THE DEFENCE . . . Between the covers

In the unlikely event of anyone reading this being unaware of Rob Rinder, please stay tuned. Rinder is a Mancunian barrister who made his name as TV presenter of popular TV shows based on trials and other legal matters. He turned his hand to writing, and I normally shun crime novels written by TV celebrities, on the grounds that when these books top the book sales charts, it will invariably be because of the fame of the author, rather than the quality of the writing.

That said, Rinder’s The Defence is very readable. A (perhaps autobiographical) barrister, Adam Green, a Jewish lad from Manchester (with no known girlfriends) is engaged to help defend Juliet Quentin, personal assistant to a wellness-guru, Adrian Wells, who died while publicly demonstrating his latest herbal panacaea. He died because his miraculous bath elixir contained fatal doses of monkshood, an ancient and deadly poison.

Juliet Quentin has ‘a past’, most significantly being her involvement in a prime time reality TV show, where she was cast as a despicable and malevolent villain, responsible for evicting some of the viewers’ favourites from the TV set. As a potential witness, she is every defence barrister’s nightmare. She is dowdy, sarcastic and surly, and seems to have every available motive for killing Adrian Wells, who was an a manipulative and opportunist chancer. While he was still an MP, he spearheaded legislation aimed at the big pharma companies who were making millions out of anti-cancer drugs. He persuaded several of his stricken constituents to abandon the NHS drugs in favour of herbal remedies which he was developing. The premature deaths of these people gives Adam a bewildering choice of people who might have had reason to kill Wells.

It would be easy to dismiss this novel as just another potboiler by a media celebrity, a book aimed at the book racks in ASDA and TESCO. It is probably guilty on both those charges, but it is better than that. It covers many complex issues. Adam Green is likeable, but he is naive and easily taken in, and his ambivalence at having to stand up in court and be clever in defending unpleasant criminals weighs heavily on him. It seemed to me that Adam is unsure about his own sexuality, but his social and professional circumstances prevent him from addressing the issue.

Rinder provides us with a few memorable characters, including the flamboyant and abrasive KC Ursula Elder, and the fractious father and son duo, one of whom is woker than woke, while the other is strict huntin’ shootin’ and fishin’.

Courtroom dramas are not normally my thing, but Rob Rinder, with his vast experience, keeps the tension bubbling. At times he is a bit preachy when talking about LGBTQ issues, but this was a minor irritation. I could also have done without. Adam Green’s cartoon Jewish mother (does anyone have Maureen Lipmann on speed dial?) but The Defence is an entertaining and immersive addition to the CriFi genre. It will be published by Century on 18th June.

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GRAVE INTENT . . . Between the covers

We are in New England, and it is the present day. Carla James, an academic and archaeologist, is about to begin a week’s summer school at an annexe of Jericho College (American for university), an establishment for well-to-do youngsters from connected families. The first few pages of the book, however, take us back to 1870; same place, but we observe a small but significant domestic tragedy involving a woman called Meg Woodthorpe.

For Carla, well known locally for using her archaeological skill to help in criminal cases, the mysteries are not long in arriving. One attendee, a mature student called Melissa, had not arrived. Then, Carla is called in by the local pathologist (an old friend) to examine the body of a woman whose face had been hacked into shreds by a metal weapon. That weapon seems to be a geological hand pick, found near the corpse. On the wooden handle is stamped ‘Anthropology Department Jericho College’.

Finally, what is the significance of the antique framed embroidered picture in Carla’s room, which shows a hare in full flight, above the stark warning, ‘Beware’? The significance of the brief prologue is soon explained, as some of the course members have picked up on a local rhyme:
“Poor little Meg, who wouldn’t stay dead,
They buried her under a tree.
She threw off her stone and chewed on a bone
Until her spirit was free”

Bear in mind that the course Carla is running is a commercial venture, and open to all. The participants are a mixed bunch. There is Trudy Cai, a property lawyer from Chicago; Annie Lockley, an administrator at Jericho, and Belle, an older woman with iron grey hair. The missing Melissa is a care home worker who feels she missed out on a college education. Riley runs a bar somewhere, and his luggage includes cases of beer and wine. Shawn and Lauren are a younger ‘pair’, but Shawn is possessive and edgy. Another older man is Scott, “a tall laconic man with a ponytail, who gave off an ageing hippy vibe.” Jack Caron is another academic, who is co-tutor on the course, and has chosen to live off-site in an attempt to breathe life into a troubled marriage.

The missing Melissa is found, but in a place that neither she, Jericho College nor her nearest and dearest would have chosen. The plot is deliciously twisted, and takes us through the highways and byways of New England history, legends of witchcraft and the truly complex folklore surrounding Lepus Europeanis – the hare. This delightful animal is almost certainly entirely innocent of supernatural qualities but, over the centuries, country people have ascribed to it all manner of wizardry, ranging from a harbinger of fertility, being a feminist symbol and a creature in touch with the world of The Dead.

Eventually, the body of the woman whose face was so brutally obliterated is Identified as that of Jacky Ek, a local woman well connected to the College and also to the Lepus Society. Clare also learns that the field where her body was found is known locally as the Strevens Land. Catherine Strevens was a near contemporary of the unfortunate Meg Woodthorpe, and there is a strict deed of covenant attached to land, which states that it can never be built on.

Carla James is a convincing central character, even if she too often emulated the scantily clad young women much used in Hammer films, who ill-advisedly ventures in the dark crypt in the dead of night, armed only with a flickering candle. Fans of the Ruth Galloway novels by Elly Griffiths, will enjoy this. Grave Intent will be published by Canelo Books on 11th June.

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DEATH AT THE CASTLE GATES . . . Between the covers

We are back on duty with Nick Oldham’s gutsy Lancashire cop, Sergeant Jessica Raker. We are in the unpretentious town of Clitheroe, and Raker’s colleague DC Doolan is in the final stages of pancreatic cancer, but is determined to do his job until the – literally – bitter end.

They are hunting a local low-life called Rory Walton, now wanted for murder, after he fire bombed his girlfriend’s house. She subsequently died while in intensive care. Although a raid on Walton’s hideout goes pear-shaped, the police discovered a cache of cannabis and firearms. More importantly, it triggers a memory in Doolan’s mind – the shadow of a twenty year-old unsolved murder case, which Oldham gives us a glimpse of in a brief prologue.

Hanging over the book, the series even, is the baleful shadow of Mags Horsefield (nee Goss) a once beautiful but always formidable woman who ruled with a local criminal reign of terror, but has now disappeared, along with her daughter Caitlin, a great friend of Jess’s daughter Lily.

We soon learn that Mags is alive and well. With Caitlin, she is living in a secure villa in Malta, protected by bodyguards and the same ferocious XL Bully dogs who terrorised her Lancashire scrapyard. Her criminal web is largely intact, and she sits at its centre, like a malevolent spider, controlling her empire via burner phones.

Back in Clitheroe, Jess Raker’s life becomes ever more complex. Her absent – and errant – husband, living away because of work, seems likely to become very ‘ex’. Rory Walton has teamed up with his equally-criminal brother, and she has to concoct a plan to take them down.

Her Boss, DI Price is determined to belittle her at every opportunity and is (unknown to her) in the pay of serious criminals. Added to those problems, she has encountered the spirits of two children murdered in Victorian times. It is unusual for Nick Oldham to venture into supernatural territory, and I was intrigued to see how this thread would be resolved.

As one might expect from an ex-copper, Oldham makes the policing details utterly utterly convincing and, as with his long running and much loved character Henry Christie, he makes Jess Raker very human and totally believable. Death at the Castle Gates will be published by Severn House on 2nd June. To read my reviews of earlier novels in this series, click this link.

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JUST KILL . . . Between the covers.

Leah Hutch is a detective working with London’s Metropolitan Police, and she has two murders to solve. That of Ray King is bizarre. His corpse is found on the downstairs sofa of Gabriel McMahon – who swears he has never met the dead man. Sarah Franks, a teacher with a drug problem is found with her throat cut in her dingy flat.
It is an unwritten rule of crime fiction, at least in Britain, that police detectives have to be emotionally damaged in some way. I could list examples, but most CriFi fans will know what I mean. Leah Hutch ticks most of the boxes. Her father, Eli Carson, murdered her mother and boyfriend when Leah was little, and is now serving a life sentence. Leah was brought up by her paternal grandmother, Margaretta who was loving – but in her own peculiar way.
A friend from Hutch’s schooldays, Sami Mograbi, is found near the scene of Sarah’s murder, but there is no evidence to connect him with the killing.There is also an apparently unconnected parallel plot. A teenager, Zechariah Okoro – known as Zed – is troubled, because his mother has gone missing. The conundrum about what Zed has to do with the story resolves in dramatic fashion. The boy, alone in his mother’s bouse for 24 hours, has noticed a man watching the property. After following the stranger across London, Zed sees the man leave his home, apparently for a run. Zed breaks in. The next thing we know is that Hutch and her sidekick Randle have decided to pay Gabriel McMahon a visit. No reply to their knocks. They phone him and hear his mobile ringing inside the house. After forcing an entry, they find two people. McMahon is dead. Very dead, his blood spattered over the walls. The second person is a terrified Zed, in a foetal crouch, hiding in a wardrobe.
Approaching the half way point of the novel, we have are led to believe that there is a professional killer at work. We know him as Chris. He is currently employed by someone as yet unknown, and we assume he is responsible for the deaths of Sarah Franks, Ray King, Gabriel McMahon and – possibly – the disappearance of Zed’s mother. My initial reaction was that Chris doesn’t ‘disappear’ people – he simply murders them and leaves their corpses to provide puzzles for the police.
Zed’s mother, Ogechi Okoro, is eventually found alive, after being kidnapped and tortured. Hutch finally discovers a link between Okoro, McMahon and Mograbi. They all studied medicine together at university. But what of Sarah Franks, and Ray King? That question is temporarily pushed to one side when Mograbi is found dead, killed by the same clinical slash to the carotid artery that ended the lives of Sarah Franks and Gabriel McMahon.
Hutch discovers something else about the three former medical students – they each took time out to do what was basically work experience in Ghana. Hutch flies to Ghana to investigate – unofficially – and what she discovers not only links the three med students, but also Ray King and Sarah Franks. We also learn that a woman called Bisi, who we know has been followed by the mysterious killer, Chris, was also in the same Accra hospital.
There is yet another turn in the plot road, but this time it is more of a hairpin than a gentle bend. The killer of Sarah, Gabriel and Sami is brought to justice, and the final pages hint at a resolution to one of Hutch’s Great Unknowns – the location of her murdered mother’s grave.
British Nigerian Emmy-nominated producer, Remi Kone has worked on a number of well-known television dramas, such as KILLING EVE, SPOOKS and LEWIS. She lives in London, and Just Kill is her second novel. It is cleverly written, with a veritable vortex of a plot, is published by Quercus and is available now.

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A RIVER RED WITH BLOOD . . . Between the covers

This is the twenty-third in a series that began in 1999, with Every Dead Thing and here, our man investigates the apparent drowning of a troubled teenager, Scott Thierault, who had absconded from an institution set up to provide ‘hard love’. His father, a career criminal serving a jail term, hires Parker out of a mix of deep parental guilt, and a sense that something is ‘just not right’. In an apparently unconnected thread we meet three men who call themselves ‘The Game’. They were once a quartet, but that is another story. Kenney, Teal and The Saint are sexually sadistic serial killers. They target prostitutes, vulnerable addicts and other women who are on ‘the wrong side of society’. Their kills are planned with military precision, forensic awareness, and scrupulous attention to local CCTV capability.

We don’t have to wait long before learning the link between the players of The Game and Parker’s new case. When he does his preliminary research into the death of Scott Theriault Parker discovers that another Maine teenager, Mallory Norton, went missing at about the same time.

Meanwhile, in a Detroit bar, Teal and Kenney are wondering if their partner The Saint has gone rogue, and may be responsible for whatever has happened to Mallory Norton. We learn about The Spero, the institution from which Scott Theriault absconded. The building itself seems to be cursed. It had been built by the Cistercians in the 1950s, but by the 1990s they had given up on the insect ridden summers and bitter winters, and moved out. It became a National Guard training HQ but, likewise, those tough guys couldn’t hack it. The present owners bought it for a song, and it must be said that Spero School LLC are categorically not a ‘not for profit’ educational provider.

We are less than halfway through the book when we learn two things; the identity of The Saint, and what happened to Scott Theriault. Also, a spiritualist medium called Sabine Drew is at work in the county, attempting to ‘get a sense’ of what happened to Scott and Mallory. Unfortunately for Kenney and Teal, their last victim, a woman they took to be a prostitute, was something else altogether, and now they have some very dangerous people, with limitless resources, on their track.

Parker’s connection to the world of the supernatural is, of course central to the series, and you either get it or you don’t. Way back in the day, Parker’s wife and daughter were brutally murdered, and now Jennifer, his daughter, occasionally appears to him as some kind of dark angel, not malevolent, but often the harbinger of bad things which are about to happen to her father.

The best thing about the Charlie Parker novels is the peerless prose, sometimes poetic, often violent, but always – always – beautifully addictive. A close second, though, comes the reliable repertory company of subsidiary characters. There’s Moxie Costin, Parker’s lawyer: sharp as a tack, as slick as oil, but actually a deeply moral man. As for the Fulci brothers, Tony and Paulie, they are barrel-shaped human wrecking balls: men who are easy with violence but, once again, with a strange ethical perspective. Then we come to Parker’s longstanding confreres, Louis and his life partner Angel. Louis is, again, a man of violence, his nature tempered by his memories of racial intolerance in The South: Angel; scruffy, Latino, but with an intense intelligence nurtured in a criminal past. Readers, we are in impressive company.

There are two endings to the story, neither of which contradicts the other; the first is purely human and criminal, while the second definitely belongs in another world altogether. A River Red With Blood will be published by Hodder and Stoughton on 7th May. Reviews of earlier novels in the series can be found here.

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