murder

THE BABY-FACED BUTCHER . . . Death in Leamington (2)

SO FAR: In the early hours of Monday 2nd February 1976, the butchered body of Chinese nurse Tze Yung Tong (left) was found in her room in a nurses’ hostel at 83 Redford Road, Leamington Spa. Other young women had heard noises in the night, but had been too terrified to venture beyond their locked doors. We can talk about ships passing in the night, in the sense of two people meeting once, but never again. Tze Yung Tong was to meet her killer just the one fatal time.

Gerald Michael Reilly was born in Birmingham in 1957, but he and his family moved to Leamington. After primary school, he went to Dormer School, which then had its main building on Myton Road. He was described as quiet and pleasant, but not one of life’s high achievers. In 1974 he had a brief spell in the Merchant Navy before returning to Leamington to live with his parents at 49 Plymouth Place and work as a builders’ labourer. He was engaged to be married to Julie, a young woman from the north of England he had met during his Merchant Navy days.

On the evening of 1st February 1976, he was observing the moral code of the time by sleeping downstairs, while Julie was chastely abed upstairs. At some point, he decided he needed sex. It was never going to happen at home, so he let himself out of the house, and walked the 200 yards or so along snow-covered pavements to the nurses’ hostel on Redford Road. There, he shinned up a drain-pipe, and padded along the corridors hoping for an unlocked door. He found one. It was Tze Yung Tong’s room.

This is where the story goes into “you couldn’t make it up” territory. It was estimated that Reilly spent 90 minutes going about his dreadful work on the young nurse. Then, still clutching the sheath knife with which he had disembowelled Tze Yung Tong, he retraced his steps to Plymouth Place and went back to sleep.Just twelve days later, with hundreds of police banging their heads against a brick wall, Gerald and Julie were married with all the traditional trappings at St Peter’s church on Dormer Place. In those days honeymoons were rather prosaic by modern standards, so the star-crossed lovers set off for the West Country. Julie had her “going away” outfit, but Gerald brought with him something more significant – the knife with which he gutted Tze Yung Tong. In a bizarre attempt at concealment, he hid the blade in a toilet cistern at a Bath hotel.

Below, Gerald and Julie on their wedding day

By this time, whatever passed for logical thought in Reilly’s mind had gone AWOL. Upon returning to Leamington, and hearing about the intense fingerprinting initiative, he decided that the game was up and, with his uncle for company, turned himself in. The irony is that the police, in desperation, had announced that there was one set of prints they had not been able to eliminate. Assuming they were his, Reilly offered his wrists for the handcuffs. The prints were not his.

Despite his palpable guilt, Reilly was endlessly remanded, made numerous appearances before local magistrates, but eventually had brief moment in a higher court. At Birmingham Crown Court in December, Mr Justice Donaldson (right) found him guilty of murder, and sentenced him to life, with a minimum tariff of 20 years.In 1997, a regional newspaper did a retrospective feature on the case. By then, the police admitted that he had already been released. Do the sums. Reilly, the Baby-Faced Butcher may still be out there. He will only be in his late 60s. Ten years younger than me. One of the stranger aspects of this story is that, as far as I can tell, at no time did solicitors and barristers working to defend Reilly ever suggest that his actions were that of someone not in his right mind. By contrast, in an earlier shocking Leamington case in 1949, The Sten Gun Killer (click the link to read it) the ‘insanity card’ was played with great success. Perhaps must face the fact that sometimes, sheer evil can exist in human beings who are perfectly sane and rational.

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September 3, 2024 0

THE BABY-FACED BUTCHER . . . Death in Leamington (1)

In the early hours of 2nd February 1976, an act of almost inhuman barbarity occurred in a rather grand Regency house on Radford Road, Leamington Spa. The house, number 83, was used as an annexe providing accommodation for nurses who worked at the nearby Warneford hospital. One such was 23 year old Tze Yung Tong. What were the circumstances that led her to be in Leamington? Misjudgment, or an act of cruelty by Fate?

Thomas Hardy ends what is, for me, his most powerful tragedy by commenting on the death by hanging of his heroine, Tess Durbeyfield. He says, “’Justice’ was done, and the President of the Immortals (in Aeschylean phrase) had ended his sport with Tess.” He refers to the Greek dramatist who imagined humans as mere playthings of the Gods, moved around like chess pieces for their entertainment. If you accept this concept is valid, then the Gods certainly played a very cruel trick on Tze Yung Tong.

It could be said that misfortune had played a part in putting the young Chinese woman in that particular place at that particular time. Trained as a nurse, she had married a travel courier in Hong Kong in 1973, and the couple had moved to Taiwan. The marriage did not last, however, and Tze, pregnant, moved back to her parents’ house in Hong Kong. When her son, Yat Chung Lam, was born, she made the fateful decision to move to England where the pay was much better, reasoning that she could send sufficient money home to better provide for the boy’s upbringing. The picture below shows Tze with her son in happier times.

On the morning of 2nd February Tze’s body was found in her room. The subsequent autopsy found that she had been stabbed multiple times in what must have been a frenzied assault. She had also been raped. At the murderer’s trial, the prosecution barrister told the jury:

“Two police officers came and were greeted with a horrible sight. Blood was everywhere, even splattered on the walls. Among evidence found by detectives were footprints on the roof leading to the landing window, and fingerprints on the landing windowsill, and on the outside of nurse Tong’s door. The pathologist examined the ghastly scene. Firstly there was a superficial cut on the nurse’s neck and it is considered the deceased was held at knife-point prior to her throat being cut. Also her clothes had been taken off after her throat had been cut. The pathologist also found she had laying on the bed completely passively in part because of loss of blood and partly through fear.”

Below – the house where Tze was murdered, as pictured in a 1976 newspaper and how it is today.

In researching these murder stories, I often wonder about the metaphor of a random rolling of the dice that puts two people on a collision course. More often than not, murders are committed by someone known to the victim, often a family member, but was this the case here? It also proved to be a case where the police, despite a huge allocation of manpower and resources, literally had no clue as to the identity of Tze’s killer, and it was only a loss of nerve on his part that resulted in his arrest and trial.Tze had finished her shift at the Warneford at around 9.00pm on 1st February and had walked back along the snow covered pavement to the nurses’ hostel. Again, fate intervened. The girls had been warned repeatedly to make sure their room doors were locked before they went to bed. Tze’s keys were found hanging on a hook on the side of her wardrobe.

Tze’s ravaged body was eventually released to her family, in this case her mother Kit Yu Chen who had flown in from Hong Kong, and one of her sisters – Patricia Tze Min Fung – who had travelled from Canada. Whatever secrets the girl’s remains held were consumed by the flames at Oakley Wood crematorium on 26th February. Her relatives did not stay for the funeral.

The police threw everything they had into the investigation but in a way, it was doomed from the start. There was no jealous boyfriend. Tze, with what might be called her ‘real life’ 6000 miles away in Hong Kong, was pleasant and polite, but had shown no desire to establish a social life in England. The Warneford was just somewhere where she could advance her midwifery skills before going home and use her qualifications to provide a better life for herself and her son. The police clutched at straws. Who was the well-spoken mystery man she had shared a meal with at a recent course in Stratford on Avon? Could local tailors shed any light on a pair of trousers found near the murder scene? Would the mass fingerprinting of thousands of Leamington men shed any light on the mystery?

Ironically, it was the latter scheme which would produce a result, but not in the way police imagined.

IN PART 2
A wedding
A honeymoon
A confession

September 2, 2024 2

THE DARK WIVES . . . Between the covers

Readers who have also watched the successful TV series dramatising the Vera Stanhope novels will have their own views on how Brenda Blethyn’s Detective Inspector matches up to the woman on the printed page. I stopped watching TV versions of police procedurals years ago, with the demise of John Thaw, so my take is purely based on the book. Vera Stanhope is a dowdy, frumpish woman in her 50s, lonely and probably a social misfit. Brought up by an eccentric father, Hector, in a moorland cottage in Northumbria, denied (by premature death) a mother’s love, she is a formidably intelligent detective. She drives a battered Land Rover, has holes in her socks, and doesn’t suffer fools gladly.

Here, she is handed a complex case that has splintered into myriad issues. At its heart is the apparently motiveless murder, by hammer attack, of an undergraduate and part time social worker, Josh Woodburn. A teenage girl, Chloe Spence, who was a reluctant resident at Rosebank, where Josh worked shifts, has gone missing. Where is she, and why was film and media enthusiast Josh, unbeknown to his family, moonlighting with shifts at a children’s home?

Vera has the death of one of her team, a Detective Constable called Holly, on her conscience, but she takes a maternal interest in Holly’s replacement, Rosie Bell, a rather glamorous and fashion conscious young woman who is actually a very good copper. When another inmate of Rosebank, a young chancer called Bradley Russell is found dead in a remote hillside bothy, the case becomes more complex.Without, I hope, giving too much away, Vera’s hunch is that Josh Woodburn’s death is connected with what he was really doing at Rosebank. Josh was a decent, caring young man, and very good with the children, but that wasn’t the main reason he was there. When Vera, with the help of fellow officer Charlie, joins the dots, the picture also explains why Brad also had to die.

Both the season and the mood of the book are distinctly autumnal. Vera’s work is her life, and there seems to be little outside the job. The depressing world of broken homes, absent fathers, and a society where children’s homes are run by shadowy corporations on a distinctly for profit basis does not improve Vera’s downbeat view of the world but, to borrow a line from Matthew Arnold’s Thyrsis, “The light we sought is shining still.”, and in Vera’s case the faint glimmer is provided by bringing justice to the dead. She couldn’t be more different from Derek Raymond’s nameless detective in the Factory Novels (click for more information) but they have the same fierce resolve.

If years of reading police-procedural crime novels has taught me anything, it is that well-balanced, happily married Detectives are not fun. Vera Stanhope is forever on the edge of things, caught up in her own personal history and sense of regret, reluctantly wearing a halo of missed opportunities and ‘what ifs’.. Her fierce empathy with those society has cast aside, combined with her innate shrewdness and ability to pick out a ‘wrong-un’ make her one of the genre’s most treasured creations.

The Dark Wives of the title are three stone monoliths on the fellside near Vera’s home. Legend has it that they were three strong willed women who were turned to stone by husbands fed up with their feistiness. In the preface, Anne Cleeves writes:
“The book is dedicated to teens everywhere, and especially to The Dark Wives – uppity young women with minds of their own, struggling to find a place in a difficult world.”
The novel is published by Macmillan and was published on 29th August.

September 1, 2024 1

THE LAZAR HOUSE . . . Between the covers

Diane Calton Smith’s medieval mysteries, set in Wisbech, don’t follow a continuous time line. The most recent, Back To The Flood, is set in 1249, while The Lazar House, published in 2022, is set in 1339. The geography of the town is much the same as in The Charter of Oswyth and Leoflede, where the author takes us back to 1190. In this book, most of the town still sits between two very different rivers. To the west, The Wysbeck is a sluggish trickle, easily forded, while to the east, the Well Stream is broader and more prone to violence.

South of the town is the hamlet of Elm (now a prosperous village) and on its soil stands The Lazar House. It is a hospice for those suffering from leprosy. Basically under the governance of the Bishop of Ely it must, however, be self financing. There was a deeply held belief, in those times, in the concepts of Heaven, Hell, and their buffer zone of purgatory. People believed that if they had any spare cash or – more likely – produce, and they gave it to a charity such as The Lazar House, then prayers would be said that would minimise the time donors’ souls had to spend waiting in the celestial ‘waiting room’ of Purgatory.

A rather grand supporter of The Lazar House is Lady Frideswide de Banlon. Widow of a rich knight, she has bestowed on The Lazar House tuns of fine ale from her demesne’s brewery, and it is a vital part of their constant attempts to stay solvent. Remember that ale, of various strengths, was a standard drink for all, as there was little water safe enough to drink.

Sadly, there is a downside. Frideswide is scornful, aggressive and deeply unpleasant in her dealings with those she deems lesser mortals. There is no shortage of people she has belittled, offended or denigrated. Much of the story unfolds through the eyes of Agathe, daughter of a local Reeve. She has chosen to work as what we now call a nurse at The Lazar House. Despite her robes, she has not taken Holy Orders and, should she choose, is perfectly able to accept the offer of marriage, proposed by another lay member of the community, Godwin the Pardoner. Put bluntly, his job is rather like that of a modern politician working with lobbyists. In return for financial favours or donations in kind, he has licence to forgive minor sins and guarantee that prayers of redemption will be whispered on a monthly, weekly – or daily basis – depending on the size of the donation.

When Lady Frideswide is found dead beside the footpath between The Lazar House and the brewery, the Bishop’s Seneschal, Sir John Bosse is sent for and he begins his investigation. His first conclusion is that Frideswide was poisoned, by deadly hemlock being added to flask of ale, found empty and discarded on the nearby river bank. He has the method. Now he must discover means and motive. Bosse is a shrewd investigator, and he realises that Frideswide was not, by nature, a charitable woman, therefore was the valuable gift of ale a penance for a previous sin? Pondering what her crime may have been, he rules out acts of violence, as they would have been dealt with by the authorities. Robbery? Hardly, as the de Banlon family are wealthy. He has what we would call a ‘light-bulb moment’, although that metaphor is hardly appropriate for the 14th century. Frideswide, despite her unpleasant manner, was still extremely beautiful, so Bosse settles for the Seventh Commandment. But with whom did she commit adultery?

When Bosse finds out the identity of her partner ‘between the sheets’, he is surprised, to say the least, but the revelation does not immediately bring him any nearer to finding her killer. The solution to the mystery, in terms of the plot, is very elegant, and worthy of one of the great writers of The Golden Age. It comes as a shock to the community, however, and brings heartbreak to more than one person. Diane Calton Smith draws us into the world of The Lazar House to the extent that when they suffer, so do we. The last few pages are not full of Hardy-esque bitterness and raging against life’s unfairness. Rather, they point more towards the sunlit uplands and, perhaps, better times ahead.

This is as clever a whodunnit as you could wish to read, and an evocative recreation of fourteenth century England. The author brings both the landscape and its people into vivid life. Published by New Generation Publishing The Lazar House is available now.

August 26, 2024 0

BACK TO THE FLOOD . . . Between the covers

It is March 1249, and England is ruled by Henry Plantagenet (Henry III) son of the unfortunate KIng John, who featured in an early tale of medieval Wisbech by this author, In The Wash (click to read the review). For Wisbech people, the King and his court are far away and unknown. Their immediate overlord is Hugh of Northwold, Bishop of Ely, for who much of Wisbech is his manorial property, meaning that residents must pay him annual rent. In November 1236, however, a disastrous tide (what we would now call a North Sea Surge), devastated the flimsier properties of the town, and when, thirteen years later, the Bishop’s Seneschal*. Roger of Abynton arrives to make an audit of rents and repairs, he finds that many of the Bishop’s buildings have not been rebuilt and remain unoccupied, thus providing no income stream.

*Seneschal – an agent or steward in charge of a lord’s estate in feudal times.

When Alured, a local baker, is found dead in the reeds at the edge of The Wysbeck (then a sluggish stream, but now the tidal River Nene) most people assume that he drunkenly fell into the water after one two many ales in one of the inns he frequented. Sir Roger, after examining the body, is not so sure. Scratches on the torso suggest that the man was dragged to the river bank. Finding people with a motive to kill Alured is the easy part. He was a cheat, drunk, foul of mouth and temper and seemed to live his life with one aim only – to antagonise and goad everyone he meets.

Sir Roger is, by modern standards, a decent detective. He comes to realise that Alured was not murdered because he baked contaminated bread, or because he was an argumentative drunk who enjoyed starting fights in pubs. The book’s title is completely apposite. Everything that happens is a result of what happened – or didn’t happen – on that fateful night when the North Sea surge crashed through the banks and defences of Wisbech and changed lives for ever.

So deeply does Diane Calton Smith immerse us in 13th century England that we are not in the least surprised to learn that the New Year began on 25th March, or that there was an extensive calendar of Saints’ Days, very few of which would be celebrated by feasts, at least in the modern sense of the word. There is also a sense of how big the world was in those days. A journey from Wisbech to Leverington, two minutes in the car these days, took hours on treacherous and often impassable tracks. We are also reminded of the sanctity of Lent. Meat was seldom a regular item on the tables of most poor townspeople, but during the Holy observance, the daily ‘pottage’ would contain only root vegetables, perhaps made more palatable with ‘ransom’ – not a criminal demand for payment, but something akin to what we call Wild Garlic. Ale was ubiquitous, because there was little or no safe drinking water. It would have tasted very different to modern beer, as the use of hops in the brew would not come for another three hundred years.

Hand in hand with the astonishing historical detail we have a very clever whodunnit. Wisbech these days is not much of a place, but at least we have our history. I am acutely aware, thanks to this superb novel (and its predecessors) that every time I walk into town, there is a palimpsest beneath my feet, a resonant reminder that these very streets were walked on by our ancestors, and that we tread in their footsteps. This is superb historical fiction, full of insight and empathy but, most importantly, forging links of a chain that connects us with our roots. Back To The Flood is published by New Generation Publishing and is available now.

August 11, 2024 0

PREY . . . Between the covers

I have to confess that I haven’t read a crime novel written by a New Zealand writer since, years ago, I blitzed the Inspector Alleyn stories by Ngaio Marsh. Although she was born and died in Christchurch, those stories are quintessentially English. Vanda Symon, by contrast, has written a successful series featuring Dunedin cop Sam Shephard, and Prey is the latest of these. Sam has returned from maternity leave, and almost immediately the state of open war between herself and boss, DI Greg Johns, resumes. He immediately gives her a cold case to work on. Twenty five years earlier, a priest at St Paul’s Cathedral, was found dead at the foot of some stone stairs. He had been stabbed, but also had a broken neck. Despite every best effort, no-one was ever arrested for the murder. And there is a problem. The Reverend Mark Freeman had a teenage daughter, Felicity. And now she is married to DI Johns.

As Sam struggles to adjust being back at work, and worries about ‘abandoning’ baby daughter Amelia (for those who like that sort of thing the author spares us no detail of the baby’s rather spectacular digestive system) she realises she has been handed a poison chalice. The crime scene has since been walked over by tens of thousands of pairs of feet, and there are a mere handful of people alive now who were connected to the case at the time. These are, in no particular order:
Yvonne Freeman, the murdered man’s widow. She has terminal cancer.
Felicity Johns, née Freeman, now married to DI Greg Johns.
DI Johns himself was on the investigating team as a young police constable.
Brendan Freeman, Felicity’s brother.
Mel Smythe, a young youth worker at the time of the killing. She has since become estranged from the church, and has fallen on hard times.
Aaron Cox, of Maori origin, and a former criminal. Mark Freeman had worked hard to put him on the straight and narrow path.

When Sam goes to interview Mel Smythe (for the second time) she finds her dead – stabbed with a kitchen knife, which makes the case very much a current murder investigation. But is it – and if so, how – connected to the death of Mark Freeman? It has to be said that in the first few pages of the book, a female witness watches, from behind a church pillar, a struggle between two people, one of whom is the Reverend Mark Freeman. Make of that what you will.

Sam Shephard is a very human creation with none of the foibles and weaknesses that many British writers love to give their police detectives. She is a proud mum and loyal partner to little Amelia’s father, fellow copper Paul Frost. She has a keen brain and a healthy sense of humour, and it is her intuition that allows her to finally realise she has been lied to, and thus crack the case open. This only happens, however, in the final pages of the novel, and not before we are led up many a garden path. The connections to the case of DI Johns and his wife only make more hot coals for Sam to walk over, and she faces an unenviable task of doing her job without becoming badly burned.

Vanda Symon creates a convincingly clammy picture of a wet and wintry Dunedin, and at the centre of it all, glowering over the wrongdoings of its congregation, is the menacing Victorian Gothic bulk of St Paul’s Cathedral. In addition to the gripping plot, Symon explores those eternal ingredients of all good crime novels – money, greed, shame, blackmail, hypocrisy and family secrets. Prey is published by Orenda Books and is available now.

August 8, 2024 1

WHISPERS OF THE DEAD . . . Between the covers

Lin Anderson’s battle-hardened forensic investigator Dr Rhona MacLeod returns to make another journey through the grisly physical mayhem that some human beings inflict on others. In a disused and vandalised farmhouse in Glasgow’s Elder Park, a man’s body has been found. His eyes and mouth have been sewn shut and, strapped to a metal chair, he has been thrown through an upstairs window. A trio of teenage scallies have been using the old building as a base for their minor law-breaking, and they are the first people to see the body,

In another part of the city, an American film crew have informed the police that their leading man is missing. With the assistance of DS McNab, who has interviewed the movie-makers, Rhona MacLeod becomes involved, and wonders if the missing actor is the mutilated corpse found in the park.

At the very beginning of the book Lin Anderson introduces what develops into a parallel plot thread. A woman called Marnie Aitken has served six years in prison for the murder of her four year-old daughter, Tizzy, despite the fact that no trace of Tizzy, dead or alive, has ever been found. Marnie is known to Rhona MacLeod, and to her colleague, psychiatrist Professor Magnus Pirie. On her release, Marnie – abused as a child and as a young woman – is placed in sheltered accommodation. She goes missing. but not before sending a bizarre gift to Rhona. It is a beautifully sewn and knitted doll, in the likeness of a young Highland dancer. Rhona realises its significance, as Tizzy Aitken was a promising dancer, but she is also appalled to see that the doll’s lips have been sewn shut with black thread. What message is Marnie sending?

Marnie is located at her old cottage on the Rosneath Peninsula, and but she returns to Glasgow, where the police find that she is linked – albeit at a tangent – the the killing of the man in Elder Park. Meanwhile, DS McNab – who was involved in the original investigation into Tizzy’s disappearance, but kicked off the case – has realised that the script and screenplay of the film – now abandoned after the disappearance of its star – is inextricably tangled up with the murder.

Right from the beginning of the novel, we know that Marnie still talks to Tizzy, and Tizzy still talks to her. Is this merely, as Magnus Pirie suggests, a grieving woman’s way of coping with her loss? Or is it something else? On the first page of the book, Marnie looks out of the window:

“It was at that moment the figure of a girl, dressed in a kilt and blue velvet jacket, arrived to tramp across the snow in front of the main gate. As though sensing someone watching, the girl stopped and turned to look over at her. Marnie stood transfixed, then shut her eyes, her heart hammering. ‘She’s not real. It’s a waking nightmare. When I look again, she won’t be there.’
And she was right.
When Marnie forced her eyes open, the figure had gone, or more likely, it had never been there in the first place except there were footprints in the snow to prove otherwise.”

When Rhona visits Marnie’s seaside cottage, she walks down to the beach where Tizzy used to go with her mother:

“The snow at sea level had gone and the muddy ruts were studded with puddles and the shape of footsteps leading both ways. Her forensic eye noted three in particular, ranging in size: a small childlike print, a medium one and a large one, going in both directions.”

Lin Anderson doesn’t resolve this for us. She leaves us to draw our conclusions, and I suppose it depends on how feel about Hamlet’s oft-quoted words to Horatio in Act 1 Scene 5 of the celebrated play. The police procedural part of this novel plays out in the favour of the good guys, but aside from this, Lin Anderson has written a thoughtful and moving account of the nature of grief, and the indelible legacy that the death of a child bequeaths. Whispers of The Dead was published by Macmillan on 1st August.

August 5, 2024 1

FIRE AND BONES . . . Between the covers

To use a cricketing term, the Dr Temperance Brennan book series by Kathy Reichs (left) is 24 not out, and still looking good. The series featuring the forensic anthropologist began with Déjà Dead in 1997. For anyone new to the novels, I’ll just direct you here for background information. Tempe (her preferred nickname) is in her Charlotte NC autopsy room and has just finished one of her trademark investigations into long-dead human remains. She is planning a few days away with her long-time boyfriend, Quebec cop Andrew Ryan, but when she gets home, she has a series of ‘phone calls which persuade her to drive to Washington DC to help with the investigation of a fatal fire in an old house in Foggy Bottom.

The Victorian property had been most recently used as a low rent boarding house, and amid the devastation, there are four dead bodies, all victims of the fire. When part of the ground floor gives way under the weight of one of the fire officers, a hidden cellar full of alcoves and passages is revealed, and it is in one of the chambers that Tempe discovers another corpse tied inside a burlap sack. While the charred remains of the four fire victims are quickly identified, the corpse in the burlap bag is more mysterious. The body is that of a woman, small and slender, but how long she had been in that bag, in that cellar is more problematic. Via one of those nerdish experts who specialise in arcane knowledge, Tempe learns that the sack in which the victim was confined probably dates from the late 1940s.

Tempe, with the help of a TV reporter called Ivy Doyle, learns that the reason for the fire may be connected to a group of hoodlums back in the prohibition era. The Foggy Bottom Gang. The ringleaders were Leo, Emmitt, and Charles “Rags” Warring, who had worked as laborers in their father’s barrel shop. When the (illegal) booze started flowing, all three quickly got caught up in the wild and sometimes violent underworld of Washington, D.C. But what is the connection between events decades ago and modern day Washington DC? Eventually, Tempe finds out the truth, and it reinforces the old adage about revenge being a dish best served cold and, in this case, slow.

The book rattles along at breakneck speed, and Tempe Brennan is her usual sassy, quick-thinking self, a persona that Kathy Reich’s millions of readers have come to know and love over the 27 years since Tempe first appeared. Thy narrative style is unmistakably and uniquely American – slick, witty, and sharp as a tack. It won’t appeal to readers who like gentle cosy crime mysteries set in idyllic British locations, but it is a testament to its style and commercial appeal that a TV series based on the books ran from September 13, 2005, concluding on March 28, 2017, airing for 246 episodes over 12 seasons.

Fire and Bones is gripping and addictively readable, despite the fact that – like books in other long-running American series by writers like Jonathan Kellerman, James Patterson and Harlan Coben – it is formulaic. The formula works, readers love it, so you will hear no complaints from me. It is published by Simon & Schuster, and is out today, 1st August.

August 1, 2024 1

INTO THE FLAMES . . . Between the covers

I lived and worked in Australia for a while, but being a city lad, I never came close to a bush fire. From speaking to people who had, and reading about them, they seem to be the very worst kind of natural disaster. Perhaps it is invidious to compare tornadoes, tsunamis, landslips and volcanlc eruptions, but bush fires seem to have an almost animal intensity. They devour people, buildings and forests like some kind of raging beast. Here, Aussie cop Alex Kennard has been bounced out of his job in a Sydney suburb for, as his bosses saw it, making the wrong call when he was forced to deal with a hostage situation. He is now more or less twiddling his thumbs dealing with drunks, petty thieving and the odd traffic incident in the town of Katoomba, in the heart of The Blue Mountains.

The little nearby town of Rislake is threatened by a serious bush fire, and Kennard drives across to help with crowd management in the event of a major evacuation. The local cops and fire service are basically taking a roll call, and it is soon apparent that one woman is missing. Tracey Hilmeyer is the wife of one of the firefighters and, against orders, Kennard and the woman’s husband, Russell, head out to the Hilmeyer property which is in danger of being engulfed. They find Tracey, but she is dead at the foot of the stairs, battered with a heavy implement. Russell Hilmeyer is distraught and wants to move the body of his wife, but Kennard insists that she stay in place and he attempts to preserve and record the crime scene as best he can.

Russell Hilmeyer is a local lad who didn’t quite make the big time on the football field, due to a career-ending injury. It has no bearing on the plot, but I am pretty sure Hilmeyer played Aussie Rules rather than what Americans call Soccer, or the major Sydney code of Rugby League. His wife Tracey was a glamorous prom-queen type in her teens, and had ambitions to be an artist. The gallery she ran in town has had to close, and she had become depressed, and only got through her days and nights with the help of prescription items like co-codomol. She had an abrasive relationship with her sister Karen who, with her husband, runs the farm that used to belong to their late parents. It is hard scrabble land, and they barely make ends meet. Did Karen and her Pacific Islander husband Alvin hate Tracey enough to kill her? The post mortem reveals that Tracey Hilmeyer was pregnant. Given that the couple had been trying for years to have children, does this add yet another dimension to the search for the killer and their possible motive?

The author has great fun making Kennard and his temporary partner DS Layton jump to one false assumption after another, while the fire grows steadily worse, a little like Satan as described in the office of Compline:

“Be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour:”

The conclusion comes with Layton temporarily out of action due to the fire having triggered her asthma, and we have Kennard, almost immobilised by the weight of his protective clothing, pursuing the killer in a Dante’s Inferno of blazing eucalyptus trees and showering sparks. Only one small problem. The person he is following isn’t the killer of Tracey Hilmayer. To say any more would clearly spoil your fun, but this is as exciting an end to a crime novel as I have read in many moons.

We lost the two modern giants of Australian crime fiction, the two Peters – Corris and Temple – within six months of each other in 2018 but, along with Jane Harper, James Delargy – although he now lives in England – taps into to the great tradition established by those writers. Into the Flames is seriously good CriFi and it got its teeth into me and wouldn’t let go until I had finished the novel in just a few sessions. Published by Simon and Schuster, it is available now.

July 9, 2024 1