murder

THE ANTIQUE HUNTER’S DEATH ON THE RED SEA . . . Between the covers

There’s a backstory to this engaging novel of skullduggery in the international antiques trade, but I’m going to be mean and direct you to my review of the debut novel in the series The Antique Hunter’s Guide To Murder. A few minutes read will explain everything! Now, Freya Lockwood and her eccentric Aunt Carole have inherited the antiques business owned by the late Arthur Crockleford in Little Meddington, Suffolk.

A quick peep at the author’s bio will tell you that she is lucky enough to live in Constable country. The action starts in that idyllic spot, but soon moves further afield. In pursuit of a stolen painting – and involves trying to solve a murder at a little maritime museum in Lowestoft, our two Noble Dames join a specialist antiques lovers cruise sailing from Greece to Jordan. Central to the plot is the existence (or not) of a mysterious antiques crime supremo known as The Collector. The legend has been around for 200 years, so we are not talking about a supernatural being, but more like a criminal version of The Pope, in that a new Collector is elected when the old one dies.

Back in the 1970s the now unjustly forgotten crime novelist Colin Watson wrote a book called Snobbery With Violence, in which he excoriated the Golden Age of crime fiction. The writers, he believed, portrayed a world which, if it ever existed, was totally removed from the humdrum lives acted out by most readers of the genre. As good a writer as he was, I think he missed the point. CL Miller is not setting out to emulated Sayers, Marsh, Allingham or Christie, but she does allow Freya and Caroline to achieve what, for most of us, would be ‘the impossible.’ Freya and Caroline desperately need to join the cruise, so crucial to the plot. In one paragraph, Carole beguiles the flunky at the other end of the phone to let them join the cruise and, with the next call, books flights to Cyprus so that she and Freya can be piped on board the ship. Implausible? Yes, of course it is, but entertaining? Absolutely.

Back to the plot. Freya and Carole blag their way aboard the MVGoldstar as it cruises sedately towards the Red Sea and the ancient ruins of Petra. There is a convention in this kinds of mystery that very few people are who they claim to be, and so it is on the decks and in the luxury restaurants of the ship. Much mayhem ensues, including gunfire echoing around the magnificent ruins of Petra, an FBI agent posing as a member of the ship’s crew, an enigmatic painting which may (or may not) contain a clue to the whereabouts of a priceless Ming vase, and all manner of villainy from people posing as respectable tourists. The book is, of course escapist, but thoroughly engaging, and just the thing to brighten up a drab day in the British winter. It is published by Macmillan, and is available now.

February 24, 2025 0

THE MASKED BAND . . . Between the covers

Two things immediately endeared me to the the main character in the book (a.k.a. the author, I imagine) First, he is a fan of country music, and was quick to reference the divine trio of Emmylou, Dolly and Linda. Second, he is no fan of the more self indulgent excesses of modern jazz. But there’s a good story here, too.

The Okay Boomers are a celebrity amateur rock band. In two ways. Confused? The five-piece outfit are actually media celebs themselves, but they wear masks on stage. Masks of Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Debbie Harry and David Bowie. They play a pub gig in the affluent London district of Barnes, and have an ‘after party’ at the mansion owned by one of the band members. When a body is discovered the next morning, dead as can be on the gravel underneath a balcony, DI Garibaldi hops on his bike (literally, as he doesn’t drive) and joins the investigators at the crime scene. The dead body is eventually revealed to be that of Frankie Dunne, an unremarkable young man who – apparently – was completely unknown to any of the Okay Boomers.

Bernard O’Keefe has some sly fun with a couple of the celebrities. There’s Larry Benton, a former footballer turned presenter who sees himself as the champion of middle class liberal sentiments, and Charlie Brougham, the handsome, floppy-haired toff whose boyish charm once graced many a British comedy drama. Hmm. Let me ponder. Who could he have been thinking of?

As you might expect, beneath the veneer of showbiz cameradie, the members of The Masked Band have, in private, little good to think or say about each other. In a rather neat bit of technical business Bernard O’Keeffe has five of the band masks go missing from the crime scene, with the only surviving mask – that of Mick Jagger – placed on the face of the defenestrated corpse, thus placing the latex Bowie, Dylan, Harry and McCartney faces out there in the community and ready to be used and abused.

We know from the brief and enigmatic prologue, that a young man who has drunk well rather than wisely heads of in search of his girlfriend and his missing ‘phone. He arrives at the house where he thinks both are and ….. end of prologue.

Were you to organise a convention of fictional Detective Inspectors you would need something larger than the average town hall. So how does DI Jim Garibaldi measure up? Italian heritage, obviously; lapsed Roman Catholic, parents died together in a road accident – hence his refusal to learn to drive; his marriage broke down, but he has a bond with his son, renewed every time they go to Loftus Road to watch QPR; he is widely read but wears his learning lightly.

Garibaldi is an engaging central character. Like all the best fictional DIs, he is prepared to think outside the box. The quirky copper resolving cases that baffle his senior officers is an oft repeated trope in police procedural novels, but it works well here. The identity of the person responsible for Frankie Dunne’s death does not exactly come out of the blue, but it is cleverly hidden until the final pages. This is a thoroughly engaging police procedural tale with just the right blend of mystery, dry humour and credible characters. The Masked Band is published by the Muswell Press and is out now.

February 24, 2025 0

BYE BYE BABY . . . Between the covers

DI Jack Hawksworth is a rising star in the Metropolitan Police. He is clever, charismatic, and very good looking. His life has not been without tragedy. His parents died in a dreadful road accident, but thanks to a family bequest, he is able to live in an otherwise unaffordable apartment in London’s much sought-after Hampstead. When a man in Lincolnshire is found dead with his hands apparently clutching the remains of his genitals – and his lips – local police soon realise that this is too big for them to handle, and Hawksworth and his team are called in.

The killing is soon repeated in almost identical circumstances, but in Sussex, and it becomes obvious that there is a serial killer at work. The two dead men are linked by where they went to school – an unremarkable High School near Brighton, but what happened back in the day that someone should want to enact such terrible vengeance? Meanwhile, Hawksworth has become romantically involved with a young woman called Sophie who lives in the apartment above his. She suffers from a wasting disease and is mostly wheelchair bound, but she is funny, intelligent, vivacious – and very attractive.

One of Hawksworth’s team, DS Kate Carter is – despite being engaged to an IT expert called Dan – becoming increasingly smitten with her boss, but is trying (and mostly failing) to keep things as professional as possible. Fiona McIntosh invites readers to fall into the same traps as her investigating coppers, and those traps involve us making assumptions, which she delights in overturning. The plot is labyrinthine in its twists and turns, and McIntosh achieves the difficult task of making both the police officers – and us readers – have more than a sneaking sympathy for the killer.

As good as this novel is, in publishing terms it is unusual, in that it was first published in Australia in 2007. It is mildly frustrating that it ends enigmatically, at least in terms of Hawksworth and the serial killer. The follow up novel was Beautiful Death, which is, according to Amazon UK, a steal at just under £60, due to the strange price protocols of the world of publishing! Presumably, Australian readers know what happened next. The author was born in England, but seems to spend much of her time in the beautiful city of Adelaide. I can only say that Bye Bye Baby is a complex and sometimes gruesome read, but a brilliant police thriller. As I mentioned earlier, this is the first in an established series, but UK publishing rights are now with No Exit Press, and this edition is available now.

January 26, 2025 0

ARDEN …Between the covers

This cleverly crafted novel has two timelines. In the first, we follow the fortunes of Alice Arden, nee Brigandine. She is married to Thomas Arden, a Kentish merchant, and we are in the fourth and fifth decades of the sixteenth century, in the dying days of the rule of Henry VIII, and the brief reign of his son, the boy King, Edward VI. A young Warwickshire man, Will Shakspere*, who works as a glove maker in his father’s business, is the second subject. We are in the same century, but in its final two decades. On the throne is the daughter of Ann Boleyn, Elizabeth.

*I have retained the spelling of the surname used in the novel, rather than the modern alternative.

Alice has been married off to Thomas Arden, an unscrupulous merchant who, for all his cut and thrust in the business world, has absolutely no interest in Alice as a sexual partner. Her dismay is compounded by the fact that, before her marriage, she had an intense physical relationship with a local tailor, Tom Mosby. Thomas and Alice have moved to the town of Faversham, where Thomas has been made Mayor. When Mosby turns up and seeks to renew his relationship with Alice, she is drawn into a maelstrom of desire and wrong decisions that will have fatal consequences.

The dissolution of the monasteries, in the later years of the reign of Henry VIII, might be viewed as an act of cultural vandalism today, but for the secular world at the time, it provided endless business opportunities. The monasteries had huge land holdings and when Henry’s Treasury put these acres up for sale, merchants and investors sensed an unmissable business opportunity. Inevitably, rivals clashed, and two such were Thomas Arden and Sir Anthony Aucher. It is no exaggeration to say that they were sworn enemies.

As this rivalry blew hotter and hotter, Arden and his wife had come to an astonishing domestic arrangement. Tom Mosby had reappeared, and had sought out his former lover, Alice. Arden was still dependent on the patronage of Sir Edward North, Alice’s stepfather. Arden reluctantly allowed Alice and Mosby to carry on their passionate affair, metaphorically under his nose, but literally under his roof.

Years on from the events in Faversham, Will Shakspere is increasingly frustrated with his lot. He and his wife Ann and their three children rely on Will’s wage from his father’s glove business. Will is not a great craftsman. Profits are made by making the maximum pairs of gloves from any given hide, and Will botches more often than he succeeds. In a desperate attempt to provide meat for his table and leather for his workshop, Will tries to poach a deer from Charlecote Park, but he is caught by Sir Thomas Lucy’s gamekeepers, and is forced to flee Stratford to avoid serious punishment. He scrapes out a living in London as a bit-part actor, trying his best to send money home to Anne and his children.

The book’s title resonates throughout its pages, but in different ways. It was the dense forest that covered much of what is now the West Midlands in Roman times. It was the family name of Shakspere’s mother. They had once been noble, but had fallen from favour long ago. And of, course, it became Alice’s married name when she and Thomas were wed.

Will eventually makes his mark as a playwright in London, but before works such as The Taming of the Shrew made him rich and famous, he dramatises the events in Faversham fifty years earlier. However, as it contains obvious references to families who are still rich and powerful, it is never performed properly.

Aeschylean tragedy, used by Shakspere in such works as Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth, is based on the idea of men and women brought down not because they were inherently evil, but because of poor decisions, ambition, vanity, and human traits like jealousy. Thomas Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge is one such and, like him, Thomas Arden comes to grief when he offends one too many local officials and merchants, and loses all his power and authority. Alice Arden, another tragic figure, makes the mistake of trusting her lover, Tom Mosby, and becomes sucked in to a plot to kill her husband. It goes disastrously wrong and, within hours of the deed, she is arrested, thrown into jail, tried and burnt at the stake, but not before she is subject to an astonishingly vile act of revenge by the local authorities. Decades later, Shakspere learns of this and, now a celebrated and wealthy man, is determined to place on record the last hours of Alice Arden’s life.

Arden is beautifully written, with meticulous historical research. Alice Arden is a truly tragic figure, certainly not a heroine, but a woman brought low by her own desires and poor choices. I have not read a book that brings Will Shakspere to life with such energy since Anthony Burgess’s 1964 novel Nothing Like the Sun. Arden is published by Ginger Cat and is available now.

January 16, 2025 0

THE SERPENT UNDER . . . Between the covers

Leaving aside for a moment the question of whether or not this Sherlock Holmes pastiche is any good, I will tell you that in terms of design and printing, it is to be treasured. The cover is magnificent, and the illustrated capitals at the beginning of each chapter are a delight – each a miniature masterpiece.

To the text. Holmes and Watson receive an urgent summons to Windsor Castle, where a lady-in- waiting to an elderly duchess has been found dead in her bath. Palace officials have peremptorily declared the death as suicide, cleaned the area where the body was found, and moved her remains to another chamber. One glance at the corpse of Miss Jane Wandley is enough for Holmes to realise that she has been murdered. Not only is it impossible that the two slashes on her wrists to have been self administered, she is covered in fresh and unhealed tattoos, depicting an ancient symbol, the Ouroboros – a snake eating itself.

We are reunited with one of the more improbable characters in this series, a young girl known as Heffie, who is an ex-officio member of the Baker Street Irregulars (a staple of the original stories), a gang of street urchins who use their anonymity to eavesdrop on conversations between ladies and gentlemen on London’s highways and byways. They were a brilliant invention by ACD, as they give Holmes eyes and ears in places where he would be too conspicuous to be effective. Heffie is roughly spoken, but highly intelligent and observant. There is just a hint of Pygmalion about this, as Heffie is anxious to speak ‘proper’ as Holmes, in his Henry Higgins mode, corrects her language and pronunciation.

Bonnie MacBride wastes no time in presenting us with a selection of dubious characters. Jane Wandley’s own father will not leave his Home Counties mansion to identify his daughter’s body sending, instead, his estate manager Peter Oliver, a handsome and charismatic university graduate. Jane Wandley’s fiancée, a vulgar and vain German of very minor royal descent, has a cast iron alibi for the probable murder timeline, but is definitely a person of interest.

The key to the mystery lies in the elaborate and professionally executed tattoos on the dead woman. Someone is obviously sending an arcane message, but to whom? And what is the message? Holmes traces the tattoos to the work of a celebrated Japanese artist, much in demand in his home country where his top customers are Yakuza gangsters. However, he was in London at a Japanese cultural event, was kidnapped along with his little daughter and forced to work on Jane Wandley with a knife held to his daughter’s throat. She has been released, but of him there is no sign. Things become more complex when it is discovered that Jane Wandley’s younger brother is an artist who creates designs for an upmarket fabric company. His patterns all feature, guess what? Snakes.

Holmes tributes, pastiches, homages – call them what you will – are almost as old as the original stories. I can cope with most of them, provided they stay in period. Attempts to put him in modern dress, or make him Steampunk, or recast him in a comedy parody, are, for me, beneath contempt. Life shortens by the day, and so I don’t have statistics, but I make an educated guess that SH ‘reimaginings’ probably now outnumber the originals.

I have made this point before, but it is well worth repeating. With the exception of the four novella-length tales, A Study in Scarlet, The Valley of Fear, The Sign of Four and The Hound of the Baskervilles, all other Holmes stories were short and pithy, aimed at magazine readers. Modern novelists are, therefore faced with an inbuilt challenge, which is to keep their stories ticking over throughout 400 pages or so. Hence the need for having other story lines running parallel to the main one – in this case the mystery of who is attempting to damage and disrupt a fledgling women’s rights movement. I have a rather ‘left field” yardstick for these books. If I can imagine Holmes’s dialogue being delivered by Jeremy Brett, then all is well. In The Serpent Under, all is not just well, but flourishing. This is a clever re-imagining of our old friend, and very, very readable. Published by Collins Crime Club, it is available now.

January 16, 2025 0

THE MYSTERY OF A HANSOM CAB . . . Between the covers

Fergus Hume’s 1886 novel is rightly regarded as one of the building blocks of crime fiction.To put it into some kind of chronological context. Emile Gaboriau published Monsieur Lecoq in 1867, The Moonstone appeared in 1868, while A Study In Scarlet came out in 1887.

The story begins simply enough. It is the small hours of the morning in 1880s Melbourne. A cab driver sees two men, dressed in evening clothes. One appears to be very drunk. The sober man puts his drunken companion into the cab and walks away. The drunk is trying to explain to the cabbie that he needs to go to St Kilda, a suburb near the sea. Just then the sober man returns, and tells the driver to take them to St Kilda. About half way there, the sober man tells the cabbie to stop. He says that he will walk back into the city, but that his drunken friend will let the driver know where to drop him off. The cabbie continues for a while but, hearing nothing from the passenger, stops to check. The man is dead, a handkerchief soaked in chloroform across his face. The cabbie turns around and heads for the city police station.

Mr Gorby, the police detective investigating the crime, soon has the case cracked. The dead man is Oliver Whyte. His companion in the cab was, apparently, Brian Fitzgerald. The men were rivals in love, the lady in question being Madge Frettlby, the daughter of a rich businessman. Fitzgerald appears to be the only possible suspect, and he is arrested.

Awaiting trial, Fitzgerald frustrates his expensive lawyer by stating yes, he did meet Whyte and put him in the cab, then walked away but, crucially, did not return. We then have perhaps the earliest use of what has become a tried and trusted crime fiction trope – that of the suspect who has a genuine alibi, but dare not reveal it because of the dishonour it would bring down on someone else. Perhaps we could call this The Gentleman’s Dilemma.

Fitzgerald claims that a woman delivered a written message to him at his club, after he had left Whyte with the cabbie. The message implored him to visit a dying woman in a gin den in an alley off Little Bourke Street. The messenger was one Sal Rawlins who has since disappeared, being last heard of traveling to Sydney with a Chinaman. After a hefty reward is offered Sal is found and testifies, thus establishing Fitzgerald’s alibi. But who was the dying woman, and why did she need to use her final moments to talk to Fitzgerald? Hume’s solution is both neat and daring.

The book is certainly ‘of its time’ in some ways. One of the conventions of the day was that words spoken by ‘the menials’ – working class or peasant characters – were heavily phoneticised, so that no missing final ‘g’ in words ending in ‘ing’ or any missing ‘h’ at the beginning of ‘he’, ‘has’ or ‘home’ goes unpunished.

Imagined as a screenplay, TMOAHC is magnificently melodramatic, with enough betrayal, dark secrets, swooning, hands clasped to fevered brows and tarnished virtue to set Victorian (in both senses of the word) pulses racing. It is cleverly done, however, and the true identity of the killer is only revealed in the last few pages. Hume, towards the end, devotes several pages to the theme that we mortals are little more than chess pieces being moved about the board for their own amusement by the ‘Immortals’ of Greek myth. Just five years later, in 1891, Thomas Hardy was to end Tess of the d’Urbervilles with the same bitter thoughts.

Hume was forced to self – publish the first edition of this novel, but sales gathered pace thereafter, and it has been endlessly reprinted. In his preface to this edition Hume reveals that prior to publication he made several changes, including the identity of the killer. He also tells us that he sold the rights to the novel to a group of speculators, no doubt for a tidy sum, but in doing so cut himself off from later profits. He regarded himself as, first and foremost, a New Zealander. His parents moved from England to New Zealand when he was very young, and it was there that he was educated and graduated as a barrister. He then moved to Australia for a few years, but eventually returned to England, where he died in 1932 at the age of 73. If you click the image below, it will take you to Project Gutenberg where you can download a free digital copy.

December 26, 2024 0

THE DISAPPEARANCE . . . Between the covers

At the heart of this excellent legal thriller is the conundrum of how it is that the legal team defending seriously evil people can do their job. The novel is set in Poland, but we can look at notorious cases in the UK. Brady and Hindley, Shipman, Dennis Nilsen, Dale Cregan – each had lawyers and barristers fighting their corner in the courts, and trying their best to convince the jury that their clients were innocent. The fact is that the legal teams are taught not to believe or disbelieve what their clients are saying. They have one job, and one job only, and that is to use every skill at their disposal to present the available evidence to the court as persuasively as possible. It is not in their remit to search for ‘the truth’. That is real life, of course, but in crime novels, lawyers regularly break away from witness statements and points of law to go ‘into the field.

Joanna Chylka, senior member of a top Warsaw law firm, is called by an old acquaintance from younger days, Angelika Slezyngier. Joanna is solitary, abrasive, and abrupt. She has few friends, and Angelika is certainly not numbered among them. Angelina’s three year-old daughter has been abducted from the lakeside house, near the border with Latvia and Belorus, and the police have decided that Angelika and her businessman husband, Awit, are responsible.

To the police, the case has all the elements of a locked room mystery. Awit says he set the alarm, covering most of the windows and doors, but not the skylights, at 7.00 pm, when (they say) Nikola was safely in bed. No alarms were triggered, and there is no sign of a break-in, but the little girl is gone. An elderly man, Antoni Ekiel, who lives near the Slezingier house. tells Joanna that he saw Awit walking away with Nikola on the night of her disappearance.

When Joanna and her trainee, a young man called Kordian Orynsk, arrive at the scene, they are confronted with a complete lack of evidence. The house has an extensive alarm system covering all the doors and windows, and it seems a physical impossibility for the toddler to have been taken away through one of the skylights.

Kordian is younger and has fewer battle honours than his senior partner. He is inclined to believe what Angelika and Awit are saying, but Joanna keeps insisting that what he believes is irrelevant. Their job is to convince the court that the Slezyngiers are not involved in their daughter’s disappearance.

Mróz gives us few clues about Joanna’s age or appearance. We are left to assume that she is perhaps in her late 30s, and still very attractive, as she turns heads whenever she and Kordian go into a bar or a restaurant. Her treatment of Kordian is little short of cruel. She is sarcastic, constantly critical of his opinions and judgments, and scathing about his lifestyle choices. She is firmly in the red meat camp, while Kordian is edging towards vegetables or – if he wants to indulge – ethically sourced fish.

The case comes to court, and Angelika makes a statement which turns the case on its head, compels her to employ a different legal team, and puts Awit in the line of fire. When Joanna is involved in a serious road accident, and barely escapes with her life, Kordian has to follow his instincts while Joanna is in intensive care fighting for her life.

In the end, the initial instincts of Joanna and Kordian prove to be wide of the mark, as the fate of Nikola Slezyngier is revealed. The court scenes are intense, and the Polish landscape is a memorable background to this tense and nervy thriller. Disappearance was translated by Joanna Saunders, published by Zaffre Books, and is available now.

December 10, 2024 0

DEAD SWEET . . . Between the covers

A well-connected Reykjavik civil servant and former politician fails to turn up to his 50th birthday party. The body of Óttar Karlsson is later found on an isolated beach. He had been beaten, and has died of his wounds. Police detective Sigurdís Höllódottir is part of the investigative team. She has just returned to duty after being reprimanded for over-enthusiastically restraining a young man who was beating up his girlfriend. Sigurdís’s intolerance of such behaviour is rooted in her own traumatic childhood, where her father was a serial abuser. After he served a prison term for a serious assault on her younger brother, Einar he disappeared. The family hope he is gone for good but Einar receives a message on Facebook. It seems that his father is working on a farm in Denmark, and is using the name Daniel Christensen but, much worse, he is determined to return to Iceland.

There is another strand concerning the reappearance of Sigurdís’s father. The violent evening where he nearly killed Einar was the culmination of years of abuse melted out to his wife. He was a serving police officer and his colleagues, including Sigurgeirsson, knew perfectly well what was going on – and they did nothing. Now, however, Sigurgeirsson is determined to redeem himself by monitoring the man very closely, if and when he returns to Reykjavik.

The search for Karlsson’s killer opens up the proverbial can of worms, as it becomes obvious that the dead man had many secrets, not the least of which is his time in America as a young man, and his involvement with a mysterious cult and its charismatic leader.

To say the denouemont is unexpected would be an understatement. The author cleverly leads us away from the truth page by page and red herring by red herring. Neither Sigurdís or her boss Garđar Sigurgeirsson really come near the truth until Sigurdís makes a trip to Minnesota, on the pretext of taking a week’s leave, and hears the real history of Óttar’s time in America.

Sigurdís’s primal fear of her father’s reappearance starts off as side issue, but the consequences of his return to Iceland are explained in the final two pages, and strongly hint that there may be a sequel. Dead Sweet is an excellent debut novel by Katrín Júlíusdóttir who is a former politician herself, having held the position of Minister of Finance and Economic Affairs of Iceland. This experience undoubtedly adds authenticity to the pacy narrative. Dead Sweet is translated by Quentin Bates, published by Orenda books and is available now.

December 10, 2024 1

PAST REDEMPTION . . . Between the covers

The new Aector McAvoy novel by David Mark begins with a bloodbath. A man is being literally ripped to pieces with the savagery torturers used to flay saints in medieval times. Just as it seems the victim is done for, someone comes to his rescue, in the shape of a small but fierce woman. We soon learn that the tortured man is Decland Parfitt who would, after he made an almost miraculous recovery, be jailed for child sexual abuse. His rescuer? Aector McAvoy’s long time boss, the formidable Chief Detective Superintendent Trish Pharaoh.

The story actually begins with a man driving in the pouring rain along a remote minor road in East Yorkshire. The driver, a man named Joe, is getting an ear-bashing from his ex-wife – who is on speaker phone – over the way he has let their daughter down. Distracted by her tirade and with the windscreen misting up, he feels a large bang, and knows he has hit something. When he gets out of the car he sees what appears to be a large black bag lying in the road. Rapidly calculating that there will be no cameras nearby, he gets back in the car and drives off. The bag is later found to contain a body – that of John Dennic, jailed for a savage assault on a police officer, and an acquaintance of Parfitt in prison. Dennic had been on day release when he went missing.

Parfitt was an arch-deceiver. He brought fun and laughter to countless youngsters across the region as a children’s entertainer. Dressed rather like Lofty in It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, he was everyone’s favourite uncle, with his jokes, his performing animals and his sunny disposition. He was a single man, but that rang no alarm bells with the local authorities when he applied to be a foster parent to two damaged sisters. Incredibly, his request was granted. One of the girls, Gaynor, suffered such abuse at his hands, that she later committed suicide. Younger sister Ruby, however, adored her foster dad and swore on oath that Gaynor was in a state of drug induced delusion.

Trish Pharaoh has two major problems to deal with and, by definition, they become McAvoy’s too. It seems that the prison authorities are determined to release Parfitt from prison, and Pharaoh needs to stop this. Second, she needs to disturb Ruby’s deep conviction that her foster father is a decent man who was wrongly convicted. Pharaoh is also convinced that Parfitt was also responsible for the abduction and murder of at least two girls, whose bodies have never been found.

The cast of villains in many of David Mark’s novels resemble the creations of the great Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. Bosch was obsessed with the darker side of humanity, and if you take a magnifying glass to his paintings, you can see tormented individuals, scurrying this way and that in the hellish landscape in which the painter has placed them. Bosch painted a figurative mouth of Hell, a gaping maw into which humans are sucked. Mark’s villains, such as Parfitt and Dennic are consumed by a metaphorical hell created from their own misdeeds. This is dark stuff, and not for the cosy crime community. Past Redemption is, however a fierce and gripping tale of evil deeds committed against the grey and dreary background of a city once vibrant with the noise and smells of its fishing industry, but now reduced to a backwater trying to celebrate what it once was.

The novel plays out with dramatic revelations of people who have pretended to be one thing, but were something else entirely. It is no coincidence that the man who nearly killed Parfitt, and may have killed Dennic has the nickname Virgil. David Mark himself plays Dante’s Virgil, as he leads us through Purgatory and Hell, contrasting his monstrous villains with McAvoy who, although, a physical giant, is gentle, endearingly clumsy, but fiercely brave. Past Redemption is a magnificent reminder that the English Noir genre, pioneered by Ted Lewis and Derek Raymond, is alive and kicking. The novel is published by Severn House and will be available on 3rd December.