Noir

PIGEON-BLOOD RED . . . Between the covers

Frank Litvak is a Chicago loan shark. Rico and Jerry are his enforcers. Jerry is relatively mild mannered, but Rico is the alpha male. Killing and wounding those who are fellow bottom-feeders doesn’t stop him sleeping easy at nights. When Litvak gives them an expensive necklace to look after, it seems all in a day’s work, but accidents happen. While Rico is messing around with his girlfriend Jean on the back seat of Jerry’s car, the pouch containing the jewellery falls out of his pocket, and is later retrieved by the fourth passenger in the car, a deeply-in-debt businessman called Robert McDuffie.

McDuffie flees to Honolulu with his wife Evelyn, pursued by Rico. Also in the resort is Paul Elliott, a Chicago lawyer, taking an enforced break and still grieving for his wife, killed by a drunken driver months earlier. The best thrillers always have an instance of separate worlds colliding, and boy oh boy, how they collide here.

Arriving in Hawaii, Rico wastes no time in sourcing weapons, and follows Robert and Evelyn to a nearby Luau (a traditional Hawaiian feast, but now tailored to tourists). He is bemused that the McDuffies are now part of a foursome, but puts it out of his mind. As readers, we know that Paul Elliott is part of the group, and that he knew Evelyn from student days. The fourth person is Rachel Givens, a professional colleague of Evelyn’s, with whom Mrs McDuffie had intended visiting Hawaii. Robert has produced the necklace – made of priceless ‘pigeon-blood red’ rubies, and presented it to his wife in an effort to repair their marriage.

Hidden in the trees outside the Luau, Rico shoots Robert, and then Evelyn. Moving in between the panicking party-goers, he reaches down to retrieve the necklace from Evelyn’s neck, but it is not there. Making his escape, Rico later learns that the woman he shot was not Evelyn, but Rachel, and Evelyn still has the necklace.

Rico, Evelyn and Paul return to Chicago leaving the funeral directors to repatriate the remains of Robert and Rachel. Litvak, of course remains seriously unhappy, as he still wants the necklace back. His mistake is to present a binary choice to Rico: either Rico kills Paul and Evelyn and retrieves the necklace, or Jean will suffer the consequences. There is a messy finale involving the brother of a man Rico killed just before leaving for Hawaii is seeking revenge, but Rico’s rather unusual moral compass remains stable.

The ‘killer with a conscience’ trope is certainly nothing new in crime fiction. If there is any remote moral argument for killing, I suppose it is best encapsulated in the still flourishing admiration for long-dead British gangsters, the Kray Twins. The logic runs something along these lines: yes, they were brutal, but never harmed ordinary people; their victims were always fellow criminals, or rivals; and, of course, they loved their dear old mum. Amazon has this to say about the author:

“Ed Duncan is a graduate of Oberlin College and Northwestern University Law School. He was a partner at a national law firm in Cleveland, Ohio for many years. Ed currently lives outside of Cleveland, OH and recently completed the third installment of the Pigeon-Blood Red trilogy, Rico Stays.

Pigeon-Blood Red is a fast-paced and convincing noirish thriller, with a complex central character. It is published by Next Chapter, and is available now.

February 1, 2026 0

THE FRACTURE . . . Between the covers

Blake Glover – BG to his friends – is a fifty-something taxi driver in his home town,the bleak fishing port of Fraserborough on Scotland’s north east coast. In a former life he was a police officer on the mean streets of Glasgow. His career ended after a messy attempt – involving planted evidence – to bring drug boss Mitch Campbell to justice. Now, Campbell has been arrested and tried, legitimately, and is awaiting sentence in Glasgow’s notorious Barlinnie prison. Glover is about to find out that Campbell has long reach, despite his incarceration.

The book begins, however, with a dramatic and, apparently, unconnected scene. Out on the desolate Fraserborough shoreline, a homeless alcoholic guzzles his last few mouthfuls of ‘Buckie’ (Buckfast tonic wine) but sees something perturbing out there in the darkness. A man has has walked out onto the beach, taken off his clothes, shoes and socks, and walked out into the white horses of the tide. The drunk staggers towards the beach calling out, but he is too late; the man has disappeared. The strange event has a temporarily sobering effect on the drunk, and he returns to the town and reports what he has seen.

Meanwhile, attending the funeral of an elderly lady he knew from childhood, Glover notices something disturbing. In the teeth of a furious and drenching storm, one of the pallbearers loses control of his rope lowering the coffin into the grave. That corner of the coffin thuds into the earth – and splits. The gravediggers in the mini JCB furiously pile the earth on top of the coffin before Glover can investigate, but he drives away from the churchyard trying to make sense of what he saw. He learns that in the darker corners of the funeral business it is not unheard of for relatives to order and pay for a top of the range oak coffin, only for the corpse to be switched to a more fragile plywood version at the last minute.

The man on the beach left his wallet with his clothes and has been identified as Ray Cocklestone, a former local farmer. He is classed, at least for now, a missing person, but few locals think it will be long before he is declared a suicide. Glover is interviewed by the police, as he may have been one of the last people to have talked to Cocklestone, having taken him in his taxi from his home to a local pub.

Morgan Cry (pen name of Gordon Brown, but no, not that one) creates an intriguing and, in the end, deeply sinister plot line which links the mystery of the splitting coffin and the disappearance of Ray Cocklestone with the truly dreadful things that take place courtesy of The Dark Web and the anonymity it gives its users. The Mitch Campbell storyline develops separately, and is one which comes to threaten not only Glover’s relatively modest current career, but his freedom and, perhaps, his life itself.

There are two central characters in the novel. One is the flawed, but likeable Glover. His lifestyle is certainly destructive, at least from a dietary point of view. He exists on industrial quantities of service station pasties and Mars bars, washed down with copious draughts of that peculiar Scottish delicacy, Iran-Bru. His taxi driver life is a miasma of unwashed passengers and the sickly scent of yet another air-freshener dangling from the rear view mirror. The other imposing presence in the book is Fraseborough itself. The town is frequently battered by the storms swirling in from the North Sea. The reluctant hedgerows and trees dolefully wear their permanent Christmas decorations of discarded plastic bags and wrappers from last night’s fish supper. The pubs, the houses, the leisure centres and the rain washed supermarket car parks are all bleak enough, but the people of the town are lovingly painted for the most part, with their impenetrable Aberdeenshire accents and their abiding love of gossip. The Fracture will be published by Severn House on 4th November.

October 31, 2025 0

HOME BEFORE DARK … Between the covers

November 1967, Iceland. Fourteen year-old Marsi has a secret pen pal, a boy who lives on the other side of the country – but she has been writing to him in her older sister’s name. Now, she is excited to meet him for the first time. But when the date arrives, Marsi is prevented from going, and during the night, her sister, Stina, goes missing. Her bloodstained anorak is later found at the place where Marsi and her pen pal had agreed to meet. No trace of Stina, dead or alive, is ever found.

The narrative jumps backwards and forwards between 1967 and 1977, the 1967 voice being that of Stina and the 1977 voice belonging to Marsi. Marsi receives a letter purporting to be from her pen pal of ten years earlier and, when a Danish au pair is found dead by the roadside (apparently from exposure) another letter addressed to Marsi is found on the body.

If you wanted an archetypal Nordic Noir novel, this certainly ticks all the boxes. The unrelenting climate and landscape dominate everything; angst, suspicion, nightmares, neuroses and dark thoughts combine to make a vast umbrella which keeps out anything remotely humorous or optimistic. Marsi dreams:

“Not long afterwards, I drifted off to sleep. For once, I dreamt about Dad. Dreamed he came and sat on my bed, stroked my cheek and gazed at me with staring, deep-set eyes.But every time he opened his mouth to speak, I heard the croaking of a raven.”

One of the problems the reader may face as regards working out what is going on, is that Marsi is, to put it mildly, a rather disturbed young woman. Some might say that she is as mad as a box of frogs, but how reliable a narrator is she? Is her memory warped by trauma? I should remind readers that the book consists of two first person accounts of events, that of Marsi and that of Stina. This, of course, raises the technical dilemma of Stina’s account. Because she is telling us what is happening in the winter 0f 1967, are we to assume that she is still alive? It is not quite such a conundrum as that of Schrödinger’s Cat but, outside the realm of supernatural fiction, the dead cannot speak.

Eva Björg Ægisdóttir (left) gives us few clues as to the fate of Stina until a violent denouement finally reveals the truth, but before that happens we are drawn into the mystery of a reform school for girls thought to be wayward – think of an Icelandic version of the Magdalene Laundries – and, in particular the fate of one young woman suspected of having a ‘special relationship’ with an American soldier. There is certainly an air of perpetual darkness about this book, which has all the aspects of a particularly unpleasant nightmare from which, despite your having reached out and turned on the bedside lamp, and no matter how many times you blink or shake your head, you simply cannot wake up and leave behind. Home Before Dark was translated by Victoria Cribb and was published by Orenda Books on 17th July.

July 24, 2025 0

DON’T SAY A WORD . . . Between the covers

Cumbria traffic cop Salome ‘Sal’ Delaney has a startling back-story, which you can speed-read by checking my review of the previous novel, When The Bough Breaks. Now, we have a mysterious prologue which seems to describe a man being buried alive, but then Sal is called out on a bleak and rainy night to discover why a 4×4 has swerved into an unforgiving dry stone walk out in the middle of nowhere. The past hangs over this narrative like a pall, forcing the reader to be very careful about distinguishing between then and now.

Former drama student Theo Myers has spent an age in prison for a murder he did not commit. Now, finally, he is free of his prison walls, but shackled to a life of uncompensated poverty and a society that views him with suspicion. He reconnects with someone from his past, former policeman Wulf Hagman, who has also spent long years in jail.

Sal’s road accident takes a bizarre turn. The driver of the 4×4 swears he swerved into the wall to avoid what he calls a ‘zombie’. 4×4 man Sycamore Le Gros is stone cold sober but, hearing unearthly noises in a thicket beside the road, Sal discovers a stricken creature, whose state justifies the description Le Gros has given.

We are reunited with Detective Superintendent Magdalena Quinn, a police officer nicknamed The Succubus by male colleagues. She is certainly the embodiment of evil, devious, beautiful, manipulative and corrupt. If you are a Thomas Hardy aficionado, think Eustacia Vye, but with the moral compass of Lucretia Borgia.

The ragged, undead thing with horror in his eyes that Sal discovered in the undergrowth now has a name – Mahee Gamage, a solicitor of Sri Lanka origin, last known to be living in a village near Middlesbrough. The case takes an even more sinister turn when Sal learns that Gamage was the duty solicitor on the fateful night that Theo was arrested, and it looks probable that the advice he gave the young man was fatally flawed.

David Mark, like a cat with a mouse, enjoys playing games with his readers. As Mahee Gamage hovers between life and death in his intensive care bed, it seems clear that he was captured, imprisoned and brutalised because of his incompetence in representing Theo Myers. Was the culprit Theo himself, his obsessive mother Tara, or maybe her second husband Alec, the campaigner with his hatred of the British establishment? Perhaps it was joint enterprise? Or is Gamage’s torturer someone completely from Left Field? Further evidence, if any were needed, that the ambience of this novel is not sun dappled Cotswold limestone, thatched cottages and Inspector Barnaby, comes by way of an examination of the contents of Mahee Gamage’s stomach where the investigators find clear evidence of partially digested human flesh. Like Aector McAvoy, David Mark’s other memorable character, Sal Delaney frequently has to face a world of almost unfathomable moral blackness, and it is only her own spiritual integrity which enables her to survive. Don’t Say A Word is compulsive, dark – and sometimes extremely graphic. It is published by Severn House, and available now.

June 4, 2025 0

THE DARKEST WINTER . . . Between the covers

Bologna, northern Italy, November 1944. The introduction to this excellent novel explains the political situation in more detail but, in a nutshell, Italy is divided. The provisional ‘free’ government has surrendered to the Allies who are, painfully, fighting their way north up the spine of the country. Most of Italy – including Bologna – is still under German control. The city, with its ancient churches, porticos and squares, now resembles a giant farmyard. Rural villages around the city have now moved in, bringing livestock and farm carts full of straw and root vegetables.

Bolognese copper Comandante De Luca has three murders to investigate. The three dead men giving De Luca a headache are: Francesco Tagliaferri, in life an engineer, in death just a corpse with a shattered head, slumped against the column of a portico in Via Senzanome; Professor Franco Maria Brullo, of the city’s Faculty of Medicine, shot dead through the eye; most problematic, given the Germans’ penchant for violent retribution, is the corrupted body of a minor SS functionary, Rottenführer Weber, found floating in a flooded cellar. The latter is key, as if De Luca doesn’t solve the killing of the SS corporal the Nazi authorities will execute ten random Italian prisoners pour encourager les autres {or its equivalent in Italian.

As Caliban said, “The isle is full of noises,” and among the ‘noises’ to disrupt the lives of Bologna’s citizens are The Black Brigades (ultra violent fascist volunteers), the Bodogliani (left wing partisans loyal to the the King) and activists with all manners of allegiances in between. Rather like Philip Kerr’s immortal Bernie Gunther, De Luca tries to be a decent copper with his left hand tied behind his back and the fingers of his right holding his nose against the stench of corruption.

Parts of Bologna resemble a nightmare visualised in a Bosch painting. A young man in a derelict theatre – where shattered families are trying to rebuild their lives in the boxes once patronised by wealthy theatre-goers, faces Deluca. When challenged for his identity, he says,

“What do you want to see? My military rank? My exemption from labor?” He beat his hand on his shoulder and grimaced because he must have hurt himself. “Here are my documents. This,” he shook the empty sleeve, “I left in Russia. And what I am wearing,” he held the flap of his coat, “is all I have left.”

The Bologna winter is certainly dark, but Lucarelli’s prose renders the shattered city with the inky blackness of a genuine Noir novel.

“There was in the air the scent of old smoke, ashes and wet filth which Bologna always had during that year and a half of war. Damp and sticky in summer, dry and biting in winter. The stench of boiled cabbage and burnt oil, of urine and excrement, sweat and dust, cold and coarse like rusted iron.”

While reading this, my mind strayed to Joseph Heller’s Catch 22. Not only was Bologna the target for Yossarian’s squadron but, towards the end of the book, a cold wind blows away the buffoonery, and we are left with the blacked out streets, and the grim murder of the maid Michaela, by the psychopathic navigator, ‘Aarfy’ Aardvark.

Lucarelli gives us a labyrinthine plot and a reassuringly fallible central character, who makes many mistakes and wrong calls as he searches for the truth. Reassuringly, there is also a full glossary explaining the multitude of different factions and splinter groups which made up the Italian political landscape in 1944. Bizarre though it sounds given their brutality, the Wehrmacht and the SS give a sense of relative unity to what was, otherwise, chaos.

This novel follows on from three earlier books, known as the De Luca trilogy, consistg of Carte Blanche (it: Carta bianca, 1990), The Damned Season (it: L’estate torbida, 1991), and Goose Street (it: Via Delle Oche, 1996). The Darkest Winter, translated by Joseph Farrell, is published by Open Borders Press/Orenda Books, and will be available on 22nd May. For an Englishman’s view of a very different Italy, a few months earlier than Lucarelli’s story, you should read There’s No Home by Alexander Baron, where we join a British unit in the south of the peninsula, not long after the Germans had retreated to their defence lines further north.

May 18, 2025 0

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.

December 2, 2024 0

REDEMPTION . . . Between the covers

Young Joshua Moore loved rabbits and hares. He had pestered his mom and dad – Evelyn and Tobias – for a pet, and so they bought him a white rabbit. The family had only just moved from London to San Diego, and the rabbit in its hutch mesmerised the nine year old boy. Reluctantly, because they were only just finding their USA feet, Evelyn and Tobias allowed Joshua to go away on a school camp in the nearby desert. On arriving, Joshua had seen a desert hare and, as darkness fell, it appeared again in the moonlight. Chasing it to get a closer look, and running across the highway, Joshua was struck by a car and killed instantly. The driver of the car didn’t stop.

Evelyn spends the next eleven years brooding over her son’s death, and plotting revenge. We get an early indicator which reveals her mindset:

“I spent a whole month in bed after the funeral, listening to the rabbit we’d bought for him hopping around in its hutch on the other side of the window. The rustling of the sawdust. The chomping and crunching of the vegetables. I lay there for a month loathing it, it’s mere existence feeding my rage until it was a living, breathing thing, for bigger and stronger than me. When I finally got out of bed, the first the thing I did was stride towards that hutch and snap the rabbits neck. It never did get a name.”

Driving the car was Aaron Alexander. a young, gay, drug-addicted drifter. He was traced, tried, and jailed. Now, eleven years later, he is out of prison, and scratching a living as a pump attendant at a gas station in Beatty, Nevada. Evelyn, with Tobias a reluctant passenger, gets in the car and heads for Nevada. Among minimal clothes changes and toiletries in her bag are a handgun, boxes of ammunition, rope, duct tape and a black canvas roll containing every variety of butchers’ knife. The relationship between Evelyn and Tobias has long since soured. She cannot bear his touch, and yet he clings on desperately, hoping she will someday emerge from her frozen state.

At the motel where they rest up for that first night, Evelyn does what she had obviously been planning for ages. While Tobias sleeps, she takes his wallet, cards, phone and shoes, and drives off into the early dawn. The remainder of the book is a hypnotic dance of death that plays out in cockroach infested motels, desolate gas stations miles from anywhere and the endless Nevada desert, where rapidly encroaching wildfires make the air sting. Very simply, Tobias is trying to get to Aaron before Evelyn can kill him, and it becomes a very bloody affair. Fans of dentist torture à la Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man mustn’t miss the scene where Evelyn, driven mad with toothache, removes the offending molar herself, with the help of a hammer, chisel and pair of pliers.

There is an ironic problem with the premise that Tobias’s main aim is to save Evelyn from herself, by stopping her from killing Aaron, because by the time they are grimly reunited,in a desolate former auto repair shop, she has already done enough damage to ensure that – always assuming that she survives – she will be put away for a very long time.

Redemption – noun, the action of saving or being saved from sin, error, or evil.

How apposite, then, is the book’s title for the three main characters? Perhaps it is for Aaron and Tobias. For sure, Aaron’s upbringing was tough, but his brother Chris survived, and it was Aaron being open about his sexual preferences which precipitated a slide into self pity and woeful lifestyle choices. By the end of the book, he has come through the firestorm of events with something akin to self-respect and moral courage. Tobias is more complex. He is the Hamlet of the piece, beset by doubt, a reluctance to act decisively and timidity in the face of Evelyn’s white hot anger. But he survives, and no-one comes out the other side of the horrific violence towards the end of the story a weaker person. Evelyn? For me, her ever increasing derangement puts her beyond any sense of redemption, but you must make up your own minds.

There was a term – Grand Guignol – applied, retrospectively, to the blood-stained stage dramas of the Jacobean period and, in the twentieth century there was, in Paris, Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, which specialised in acting out scenes of horrific violence with spectacular special effects. Redemption certainly has elements of Grand Guignol, but it is a powerful novel which lays bare the dreadful things people will do to each other when they are – physically and emotionally – pushed beyond the limit. Published by Simon and Schuster, it is out today, 20th June.

June 19, 2024 1

WHEN THE BOUGH BREAKS . . . Between the covers

David Mark has taken a temporary break from his excellent Aector McAvoy series (click the link to find out more) and his latest novel has a prologue that is as violent and visceral as any of the disturbing scenes in Derek Raymond’s I Was Dora Suarez. If you have read that masterpiece, you will know what I am talking about. If you haven’t, then you should. Here, copper Wulfric Hagman wakes up in a charnel house, apparently of his own creation. His former lover, Trina Delany lies butchered on the bed, while he seems to have tried to hang himself with a length of baler twine.

That was then, but now, Hagman has served a prison sentence, been released, and is now living in a moorland farmhouse he gifted by Jarod, one of Trina’s children. His twin sister, Salome is also living there. She is a traffic cop, formally known,in today’s jargon, as Collision Investigation Officer. At Hagman’s original trial, both Sal and Jarod gave chilling evidence testifying to the abuse they – and the other children – received at Trina’s hands.

Against this unusual human background and with the Northumbrian hills carpeted in deep snow, David Mark weaves his magic. The plot is complex, but this is a breakdown of the main characters.

Salome Delaney, police officer.
Jarod Delaney, Sal’s twin. Now a farmer, living in a house signed over to him by …
Wulfric Hagman, former policeman, served a long prison term for the murder of Trina Delaney. He now lodges with the Delaneys.
Dagmara Scrowther, charismatic Children’s Services officer. Worked with the Delaney family.
Lewis Beecher, senior police officer, divorced. Has recently ended a long term relationship with Sal Delaney.
Barry Ford. Once a child tearaway, now relatively respectable. Former lover of Trina Delaney.
Detective Superintendent Magda Quinn. Has re-opened the Hagman case, believing him to be guilty of more murders.

With transport paralysed by deep snow, Salome – although on leave – receives a call from a fellow officer asking her to go and investigate a car that has come off the road just a couple of miles away. She clings on grimly as Jarod’s quad-bike makes light work of the snow drifts. She finds the wrecked car, but the macabre feeding habits of local crows lead her to a man’s body. Some of the crows who have fed on the corpse are collapsing and dying. The reason? The body has had acid poured into his throat.

This grim discovery sets off a train of events that are as violent and disturbing as anything I have read in recent crime fiction. I am a great admirer of David Mark’s writing, and I make no apology for frequently comparing his style to that of Derek Raymond. Like Raymond, Mark takes us into dark places where monsters – in human form – ply their trade. Like Raymond’s nameless Sergeant in the five Factory novels, Mark’s heroes are often gravely damaged, but have a depth of compassion that always brings about a sense of redemption at the end of the journey, no matter how hellish the road.

The body in the snow is eventually identified as being that of Barry Ford, a man who was a troubled youngster but, thanks to the perseverance of Dagmara Scrowther, seems to have turned himself into something of a decent citizen. However, when Salome, hastily drafted back to work as a Family Liaison Officer, has to break the news of Ford’s demise to his current girlfriend, she opens a Pandora’s Box from which fly demons of cruelty and bestial abuse. Also in the mix is the fate of Lewis Beecher’s divorced wife. She and her two daughters – Nola and Lottie – have a new ‘dad’. He seems jolly and full of jokes, but is he genuine?

In this superb novel we cross paths with many human monsters. Trina Delaney is one, certainly, and Barry Ford is not far behind. But a third monster lurks in plain sight. Its identity is known to me, but you will have to find out for yourselves. When The Bough Breaks is published by Severn House and is available now.

June 6, 2024 0

THE KITCHEN . . . Between the covers

As her name suggests, Hamburg State Prosecutor Chastity Riley has American antecedents, but her work and life are both firmly centred in the German city that sits astride the River Elbe. Author Simone Buchholz leaves us pretty much to our own devices to imagine what she looks like, but we know she smokes, enjoys a drink or three, can be foul-mouthed, and has an on-off relationship with a chap called Klatsche.

From the word go, Buchholz drops a broad hint about what is going on, but Riley only finds out much later. Her immediate problem is that two packages of body parts have been recovered from the Elbe, disturbed by dredging. The men have – literally – been expertly butchered and the parts neatly wrapped up in plastic and duct tape. It turns out that the dead men have a history of serious abuse towards women, and a witness report suggests that two women are linked to the killings.

A third body is found, this one being intact, but Riley has another problem to solve. She has a friend named Carla, who runs a coffee shop and is a very important part of Riley’s life, fulfilling the dual function of sister and mother. When Carla is attacked and raped by two men, Riley becomes angry with the police’s apparent lack of urgency, but is powerless to intervene. As well as trying to solve the mystery of the Elbe packages she is central in a current court case where two people traffickers are on trial. Their business model was to travel to rural areas in places like Romania, and persuade young women that a glamorous lifestyle awaits them in Germany. The reverse is true, of course, and the girls are soon put to work in Hamburg’s notorious sex trade.

Events in Riley’s personal and professional life seek to be spinning out of control. First, thanks to the defence lawyers in the trafficking case successfully making out that their clients are really nice chaps who had traumatic childhoods, and who’ve just had a bit of bad luck recently, the smirking criminals get the lightest sentence possible. Then, she and Klatsche discover that Carla – with the assistance of a shady friend called Rocco – have done what the police failed to do, and have captured the two rapists. It is only with the greatest reluctance that Riley realises she must persuade Carla to hand the two men over to the police.

When, with a mixture of instinct and sheer luck, Riley identifies the two women responsible for the three earlier murders, her professional integrity is put to its sternest test. In some ways this is a very angry book and is centred on the evil that men do, particularly to women. It is obviously entirely appropriate to the tone of the book that much of it is set in the St Pauli district of Hamburg, an area that began its notoriety centuries ago as a place that provided entertainment for sailors. Its infamous Reeperbahn remains a living – and sadly prosperous – example of women being made into a commodity to please men. Despite her obvious anger, however, Buchholz (left) doesn’t moralise. Chastity Riley realises that Hamburg is what it is, and if the needle of her moral compass occasionally swings in an unexpected direction, then so be it.

The Kitchen proves that a book doesn’t have to be 400 pages long to be effective. The prose is precise, spare, icy cool and as dark as ink. Simone Buchholz has serious style – in spades. The book was translated by Rachel Ward, published by Orenda Books and is available now.