THE IMPOSTER . . . Between the covers

Author Leona Deakin started her career as a psychologist with the West Yorkshire Police. She is now an occupational psychologist, and this is the fourth book in her series featuring Augusta Bloom.

Dr Augusta Bloom is a psychologist who specialises in the criminal mind. Her business partner is Marcus Jameson, a former British intelligence agent. Bloom is often employed by the police as a consultant when a particular case demands her particular skill-set. The killers Bloom is requested to track down have struck twice, leaving only burnt matches as a clue. I use the plural ‘killers’ advisedly, as we know they are a team, but Bloom and the police have yet to discover this.

As with the previous novels, there are two parallel plots in The Imposter. One involves Seraphine Walker who is, if you will, Moriarty to Bloom’s Holmes. Walker, despite being clinically psychopathic, is not overtly criminal, but has recruited all kinds of people who most certainly are. She heads up an organisation which, to those who enjoy a good conspiracy theory, is rather like a fictional World Economic Forum, peopled by shadowy but powerful influencers from across the globe, united by a hidden agenda The relationship between Bloom and Walker has an added piquancy because they were once doctor and patient. The backstory also involves someone we met in a previous novel – the disgraced former Foreign Secretary Gerald Porter, a ruthless man who is now happily bent on evil, unimpeded by the constraints of being a government minister with the eyes of the world on him.

Augusta Bloom is an interesting creation. She is a loner, and not someone who finds personal relationships easy, not with Marcus Jameson nor with her notional boss, DCI Mirza, who is deeply sceptical about Bloom’s insights. When the police finally join all the dots, they realise that rather than two killings, there have probably been as many as eleven, which ramps up the pressure on Bloom and Jameson. Leona Deakin, (right) as one might expect from a professional psychologist, has constructed an complex relationship between Bloom, Walker and Jameson. As readers, we are not spoon-fed any moral certainties about the trio. Rather, we infer that their boundaries are, perhaps, elastic. As John Huston (as Noah Cross) said in Chinatown:
“You see, Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they’re capable of anything.”
Each of the trio – Bloom, Jameson and Walker – has a certain dependence on the two others, but Deakin keeps it open and enigmatic, leaving all plot options open to her. This symbiotic relationship has led to Augusta Bloom taking an industry – standard test to discover if she is herself a *psychopath. To her relief, although she is marking her own paper, she doesn’t tick enough boxes.

**Psychopathy, sometimes considered synonymous with sociopathy, is characterized by persistent antisocial behavior, impaired empathy and remorse, and bold, disinhibited, and egotistical traits.*

Finally, Bloom cracks the mystery, Mirza and Jameson see the light, and we readers realise that Leona Deakin has been pulling the wool over our eyes for nearly 300 pages. There is a tense and violent finale, and this clever and engaging novel ends with us looking forward to the next episode in this excellent series.

The Imposter is published by Penguin and is available in paperback and Kindle now. For reviews of the three previous novels in the series, click the links below.

GONE
LOST
HUNT

December 13, 2022 0

THE APARTMENT UPSTAIRS . . . Between the covers

Author Lesley Kara returns to the world she excels in describing – the apparently mundane suburban milieu where the streets and houses serve as a stage where families and friends act out a drama riddled with lies, secrets and deception.

Scarlett Quilter, a forty-something accountant, lives in the ground floor apartment of a suburban London house. She has a debilitating illness but is able to work from home. The titular ‘apartment upstairs’ was once occupied by her aunt, Rebecca, a former school teacher. Rebecca made a wrong romantic choice late in life by forming a relationship with a man called Clive Hamlin. Hamlin murdered Rebecca, and then committed suicide, so we know from the start that the apartment upstairs has deeply sinister connotations for Scarlett, as well as for her younger brother Ollie (who has inherited the house) and her father, Peter.

The Quilters have entrusted Rebecca’s funeral arrangements with a firm called Fond Farewells, which is run by Dee Boswell and her business partner Lindsay. Dee and Lindsay had a shared friend called Gina Caplin, who mysteriously disappeared ten years earlier, and they have both supported a campaign to find out the truth about what happened to their friend.

All is not sweetness and light between Dee and Lindsay. Lindsay has abused the trust placed in her by the friend of a dead man – think treasured possessions and eBay. She is caught out but manages to placate the grieving customer in a way which leaves Dee fuming. The contrast between the two women is cleverly drawn. Lindsay is more confident, perhaps even reckless and, in contrast to Dee, is knowingly certain of her sexuality.

When Scarlett discovers that her late aunt was connected to the missing girl, Gina, things start to get interesting. Lesley Kara lays a trail of particularly juicy red herrings which include the possibility that the truth about Gina’s disappearance might lie very close to Scarlett’s home, in a ‘Fred West patio’ kind of way.

Lesley Kara always enjoys directing her readers up the proverbial garden path in terms of plot, and here she serves up a couple of turns which are more like double somersaults than twists. The clues are there for more suspicious readers, but they are far from obvious.

The Apartment Upstairs is a dark journey into a world where a violation of trust is made even worse because it is happening between close friends and family members. It is published by Bantam Press and is available now. For more on Lesley Kara, click on the image (below)

July 1, 2022 0

ON MY SHELF . . . July 2021

I have a healthy To Be Read stack as July swelters its way towards August, as well as some interesting-looking blog tour stops to fulfil.

THE NAMELESS ONES by John Connolly

A new Charlie Parker novel is always one of the significant way-points in my reading year. Centre stage in this latest adventure for the Portland private eye is his loyal – but violent – friend, Louis. Instead of the customary Maine woods or the craggy North Atlantic shoreline, the actions shifts to Amsterdam, where an old friend of Louis’ has been murdered after tangling with Serbian war criminals. Fans of this excellent series will know what to expect – violence, a sense of deep unease that echoes Hamlet’s famous advice to Horatio, and a genuine present day battle between good and evil. The Nameless Ones is published by Hodder and Stoughton, and is available now.

INVITE ME IN BY Emma Curtis

The trope of the seemingly happily married woman with lovely children and and a handsome, supportive husband – but who is hiding a terrible secret – has become very popular in domestic thrillers, but Emma Curtis, in this account of what happens when Eliza Curran takes on a new tenant, gives it fresh legs. Published by Transworld Digital, Invite Me In is out now as a Kindle, and the paperback version will follow in September.

THE DAY OF THE JACKAL by Frederick Forsyth

As the late lamented Sandy Denny once sang, “Who Knows Where The Time Goes?” It was fifty years ago that former RAF pilot and journalist Frederick Forsyth’s political thriller was first published. If you want a copy of the UK first edition, you might need a grand or so to play with, but this 50th anniversary edition from Arrow – with the added bonus of an introduction by Lee Child – is much more reasonable. I won’t waste time and space by outlining the plot (which is still as original and compelling as when it was written) but you can get this paperback here and still have change from a tenner.

A SLOW FIRE BURNING by Paula Hawkins

In the publicity blurbs all the great and the good among contemporary crime fiction jostle to praise Paula Hawkins and her writing. The Zimbabwe-born author certainly hit the big time with her breakout bestseller The Girl on The Train and her second novel Into The Water. Can she make it a hat-trick of triumphs? All the ingredients seem to be there – female centred, tense, anxiety-driven and a complex emotional undertow which threatens to drag the unwary participants away. Three women – Laura, Carla and Miriam – face different challenges that force them to re-evaluate how they calibrate innocence, guilt – and danger. A Slow Fire Burning will be out on 31st August and is published by Transworld Digital

SAFE AT HOME by Lauren North

More domestic angst and tension now from Lauren North, whose debut novel was The Perfect Son (2019). Her latest novel features Anna James, described as “an anxious mother” When she has to leave eleven-year-old Harrie home alone one evening, she can’t stop worrying about her daughter. But nothing bad ever happens in the sleepy village of Barton St Martin. Except something does go wrong that night, and Anna returns to find Harrie with bruises she won’t explain. The next morning a local businessman is reported missing and the village is sparking with gossip. Anna is convinced there’s a connection and that Harrie is in trouble. But how can she protect her daughter if she doesn’t know where the danger is coming from? This is, again, from Transworld Digital and will be out as a Kindle at the beginning of September, and in paperback at the end of that month.

July 24, 2021 0

THE WHISPERS . . . Between the covers

We are in a small town called Clearwater on the coast of England. Time – the present day, just before Christmas. Grace Goodwin, a young woman in her early thirties lives alone with her young daughter Matilda, as her husband is currently working abroad. Grace is a native of the town, but in her teens she was taken to Australia by her parents. Now, she has returned to England, and has sought out the company of her best school friend, Anna Robinson, who lives in the town with husband Ben and their child, Ethan. One evening, Anna invites Grace to join her – and her more recent friends, fellow school-gate-mums Nancy, Rachel and Caitlyn – for a girls’ night out in a local pub. It doesn’t go well for Grace. She feels cold-shouldered, and leaves. The next day she is told that Anna didn’t return home the previous evening.

After a few days, Anna does return, and her reason for leaving provides one of the many clever twists in the plot . What follows is a complex – but intriguing – narrative, concerning an event which happened years earlier, when Grace and Anna were teenagers. Another girl from their class – the very cool and rebellious Heather – was found dead at the foot of one of Clearwater’s imposing cliff faces. Who was with her that night? Who knows the truth now, and who is prepared to reveal it?

The main stresses that begin to cause fractures in the the relationships between the characters are friendship, jealousy and control. I am sure it happens between male friends, but perhaps not with the intensity of the bond between teenage girls. If those bonds are retained – and tested – when the girls become adults, then sparks can fly, as they seriously do in this book. This is tense and nervy stuff which explores the dark world of childhood friendships, lies – and death, as did Heidi Perks’s previous novel Come Back For Me (click to read the review).

The escalating tension between Anna and Grace, and – for us – the uncertainty of what actually did happen on that fateful evening back in 1997, makes for an unnerving read. There is a kind of catharsis at the conclusion of this story, and it brings to mind a phrase we were encouraged to sneak into our ‘A’ level essays on Milton’s Samson Agonistes – “all passion spent.” Suffice to say, for Grace and Anna the story pretty much ends where it began. Without over-egging the pudding, I can say that Heidi Perks (below) has written something which bears all the hallmarks of a classical tragedy, in that people who are not inherently evil, but have serious character flaws, pay an extreme price for their faults.

The author gives us mainly the viewpoints of Anna and Grace, but also uses the mothers outside the primary school as a kind of Greek Chorus filling in parts of the action with their own observations. Perks also has great fun with the ‘unreliable narrator’ trope and keeps the reader guessing right until the end of the novel. The Whispers is published by Century and is out now as a Kindle. It will be available in paperback from 15th April.

April 4, 2021 0

THE MUSEUM OF DESIRE . . . Between the covers

The strange-looking empty mansion in the dry hills above Los Angeles is rented out as a venue for everything from cancer charity fundraisers to wild parties. As the much put-upon guy from the agency wearily pushes his cart of cleaning materials up the hill, he is expecting the usual joyless cocktail of spilled food, used needles and condoms. What he actually finds causes him to part company with his breakfast burrito.

In a stretch limo parked in front of the house, he finds four people, each very, very dead, and with the floor of the car swimming in blood. Cue another case for LAPD Detective Milo Sturgis and psychologist Dr Alex Delaware. Veterans of the long-running series (this is book number 35 since When The Bough Breaks in 1985) will know the basic set-up. Delaware’s day job is in child psychology, while Sturgis is, in now particular order, gay, unkempt, a brilliant cop and eternally hungry.

The four corpses in the limo seem to have nothing at all in common aprt from being dead; a thirty-something professional bachelor with an insatiable – but perfectly legal – love life, and elderly chauffeur, a gentle and harmless man with mental problems who lives in sheltered accommodation, and a rather unprepossessing middle-aged woman who, it transpires, had drink and drug issues, and lived mostly on the streets. To add to the mystery, the forensic team analyses the blood on the floor of the car – and it is canine.

Delaware and Sturgis are convinced that the killings took place elsewhere, and the interior of the limo was an elaborate stage set. But who is the director of this hellish drama, what is the message of the play, and who was the intended audience?

Bit by bit, one slender thread at a time, the tangle of the mystery is unpicked. As per usual Kellerman (right) gives us a spectacularly complex solution to the quadruple murder. It’s almost as if we are passengers on a train journey, and some of the sights that flash by the window before we reach our destination include erotic Renaissance paintings, a chillingly damaged autistic teenager and a brief glimpse of Herman Göring’s fabled collection of looted art.

There will be, no doubt, some people who will look down their noses at this book – and others like it – while dismissing it as formulaic. Of course it is written on a certain template, but that’s what makes it readable. That’s why readers turn, again and again, to books that are part of long running series. We don’t want John Rebus to start behaving like Jack Reacher, any more than we will be happy for Carol Jordan to turn into Jane Marple. The Museum of Desire is slickly written, for sure, but I think a better word is ‘polished’. Both the dialogue and interaction between Delaware and Sturgis crackle with their usual intensity, and we are not short-changed in any respect in terms of plot twists and deeply unpleasant villains.

The Museum of Desire is published by Century/Arrow/Cornerstone Digital, came out in hardback and Kindle earlier this year, but this paperback edition will be available from 12th November.

November 9, 2020 1

LOST . . . Between the covers

Leona Deakin introduced to Dr Augusta Bloom, her psychologist-turned-PI in Gone, which came out in 2019. Click here to read the review of that and get something of the background to Lost, the second novel in the series.

Augusta and her professional partner Marcus Jameson have had a major professional and personal falling out after their involvement with a manipulative psychopath called Seraphine. Jameson is a former military intelligence analyst, and has a decent pension, so he hasn’t needed the work, but Bloom’s latest case is just too intriguing for him to turn down.

An apparent Islamic terrorist has bombed a social event at the Royal Navy base of Devonport. There have been a handful of fatalities, but one of the injured – a Navy officer called Harry Peterson – has disappeared. He was seemingly taken away by ambulance, but his girlfriend Karene – dazed but uninjured in the bomb blast – has been unable to locate him in any of the local hospitals.

Karene gets no joy from either the Navy or the police, and so she turns to her friend Dr Augusta Bloom for help. Peterson eventually turns up, smuggled into a hospital by person or persons unknown. He has head injuries which were not sustained in the Devonport bombing and, when he wakes, he has suffered a substantial loss of memory.

Someone, somewhere is desperate for Harry Peterson to have no memory of the previous four years. Unfortunately for, those four years saw Peterson’s wife begin an affair which led to the breakup of their marriage and, more crucially, the beginning of Peterson’s romance with Karene. Now, he has literally no idea who Karene is.

As Bloom and Jameson chip away at what seems to be a granite wall of military secrecy, Peterson’s cousin, living a blameless and apparently mundane life in rural France, is found tortured to death. Photographs found in his cottage hint at a link to the goings on in England.The re-appearance of the malevolent Seraphine does nothing to clear the miasma round who is cleverly messing around with Harry Peterson’s mind – and why?

In the last quarter of the book, the pace turns frenetic, the plot ever more knotted and the scenery – from a torture room in a Central African Republic military base to a bank safe deposit vault in Peterborough – diversifies. Leona Deakin has great fun mystifying not only Bloom and Jameson but us the readers. The relationship between the pair of investigators is tested to breaking point with Jameson increasingly believing that he is being played for a fool, and when the case splits wide open to reveal not only political chicanery but links to people trafficking, then all bets on a peaceful and tidy solution are definitely off.

Lost, published by Transworld Digital, first came out in Kindle in the summer of this year. It will be available as a paperback, under the imprint of Black Swan, at the end of October.

October 5, 2020 0

KEEP HIM CLOSE . . . Between the covers

Keep Him Close is quite an apt title for Emily Koch’s second thriller. The key word is ‘close’ as the whole story has the feel of events and emotions being observed at very close quarters, almost through the lens of a microscope. We see every little twitch and tremor in the lives of the two main characters, and the tension is quite claustrophobic at times. Two women. Two mothers. Two lost teenage sons. Alice’s son Louis is now in a police mortuary after falling – or having been pushed – from the roof of a car park. Indigo has, effectively lost Kane, but this time to the criminal justice system as he awaits trial for murder, after he admits responsibility for Louis’s death.

The two women have little in common except the convergence of the social lives of their sons and the fact that neither has a husband in the house. Alice was married to Etienne, but he is long gone, having fallen in love with someone else. Indigo’s husband took his own life. Indigo is what some might call an ageing hippy. She dresses rather chaotically and earns a living as an art therapist. Alice once had dreams of being a concert pianist, but now works as a librarian. She has a certain primness associated – rightly or wrongly – with that profession. Let us be generous and say that Alice appreciates order and method.

What began as a night out for post-exam teenagers ends with the dreaded late night knock on the door by police officers and expands into a nightmare as Alice and older son Ben try to come to terms with the death of Louis, while Indigo can only look on in confusion as Kane is, first, identified on CCTV as someone who the police would like to speak to and, second, blurts out his guilt in a police interview room.

Where the story develops its edge is when Indigo – something of a flustered airhead when it comes to technology – goes to the local library to use one of their computers. By investigating Kane’s social media activity she hopes to locate other youngsters who were witnesses to the apparent fracas which ended with Louis plunging to his death. Who should be the kindly library assistant who helps Indigo check her son’s Facebook profile? Why, none other than Alice! The frisson starts to do its shivery work because Alice recognises Indigo, but Indigo has no idea of the identity of her helper.

There are one or two sub plots by way of diversion. Former hubby Etienne turns up, we suspect that the police have been less than thorough in their investigation and we are given to wonder if Ben knows more than he is telling. We only meet the soon-to-be-late Louis in the early pages, and while he comes over as not being the most adoring of sons, we later learn the reason for his apparent antipathy.

The structure of the book is intriguing; we learn about the contrasting characters of Alice and Indigo in different ways; Alice’s story is told third-party, while Indigo tells us herself. This has the effect of making Alice more aloof and remote, and is a clever device which hints she is somewhere on the autistic spectrum.

Emily Koch (right) ratchets up the social and emotional tension as Alice and Indigo dance their stately sarabande to the tune of the legal recriminations following the tragic conclusion of what may have been just a drunken scuffle – or something far more sinister. This book is a must for those who like their psychological dramas acted out on a small stage but exquisitely observed. Keep Him Close is published by Harvill Secker and is out in Kindle on 12th March and in print on 19th March

March 9, 2020 0

THE SECOND WIFE . . . Between the covers

The Second Wife is Rebecca Fleet’s second novel. Her first, The House Swap, was well received and now she takes her skill at writing engaging domestic thrillers to the next stage. I will say at the outset that as much as I was gripped by The Second Wife, I was cursing quietly to myself because it contains a seismic plot shift towards the end which completely demolishes every assumption the reader may have made about what is going on, based on what he or she has been told by the different narrators. But why the curses? Simply because it makes a summary doubly difficult, because no reviewer wants to be known as the person who gave the game away. I loved the book, however, and I want you to love it too, so here goes – treading on eggshells.

There are three narrative viewpoints; centrally, there is Alex. He is a widower with a teenage daughter, Jade. He works in an advertising agency in Brighton, on England’s south coast. His first wife died from cancer when Jade was just a little girl, but he has remarried. The titular second wife Natalie is one of the storytellers, and she does her best to be a decent ‘second mum’ to Jade, although hormones have started to kick in and Jade is, like every modern teenage girl, obsessed with her social media profile and perceived slights from her step mum.

The novel begins with a serious fire in Alex’s house. Natalie, overcome by the smoke and flames, has been unable to rescue Jade, but the emergency services arrive in time to bring the teenager to safety. Temporarily relocated to a hotel, Alex and Natalie take turns at Jade’s hospital bedside as she slowly recovers from the ordeal. As Jade comes back to life, Alex is both puzzled and horrified at his daughter’s insistence that there was a strange man in the house at the time of the fire. Now, Alex’s disquiet turns to genuine alarm, and Natalie admits to him that she has a disturbing back-story.

Her estranged sister, Sadie, has led a wayward and self-destructive existence which has forced Natalie to put some distance between herself and her sister, and reinvent herself using a different identity. Sadie’s obsession with a violent criminal has gone disastrously wrong, and Natalie is trying to lead a new life. By this time, Fleet (right) has given Sadie a voice of her own, and we listen to the musings of a sexually promiscuous young woman who has used men like Kleenex, and has a moral compass that barely makes the needle flicker beyond zero on the scale. But she has fallen under the spell of Kaspar, a London club owner who uses women in the same way that Sadie has come to use her queue of suitors.

So, we have the three viewpoints. Timewise, they span almost a decade. All I can say is that one of them – and you have to choose – is telling the mother of all lies. The Second Wife is anxiety-on-a-stick and, although the plot twist left me wondering who on earth I could rely on to tell me the truth, this was a brilliant read, and a novel that confirms Rebecca Fleet’s place at the top table of contemporary crime fiction writers. The Second Wife is published by Doubleday and is out today, 5th March.

March 4, 2020 0

THE BETTER LIAR . . . Between the covers

The basic premise of The Better Liar, the smart and sassy debut thriller from Tanen Jones, is that a man has left a large sum of money to be divided between his two daughters, on the proviso that they both turn up together to be instructed by his lawyer. Not too much of a bind, you might think, but Robin and Leslie have not seen each other for half a lifetime. Leslie has stayed home, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, while Robin, with her killer looks and body, has cut herself off from home altogether and is, as the song goes, somewhere out there.

When their father dies after a long illness, Leslie sets out to find Robin and eventually tracks her down to a seedy apartment block in Las Vegas.One slight problem. Robin is face down on the bed in the cockroach infested room, dead of a drug overdose.

Leslie flees the scene, trying to process multiple emotions.It’s too much of a shock for her to face regretful recollections of her childhood with Robin, but not too soon for her to realise that she might be kissing goodbye to her share of her father’s legacy. Quite by random, she meets Mary, a young woman working as a waitress in a Vegas restaurant. Here’s the thing, though. Mary has more than a slight resemblance to Robin, at least the Robin of old, before she became an emaciated drug victim. Leslie dreams up a seemingly preposterous plan: what if Mary, an aspiring actress, agrees to pass herself off as Robin? No-one in Albuquerque has seen Robin since she was a rebellious teenager, least of all the lawyer who will make the big decision to sign off the bequest to the two grieving daughters.

Tanen Jones has great fun dividing the narrative between three voices, those of Leslie, Mary – and the late Robin. Of course, all is not what it seems to be, and when the counterfeit Robin agrees to go along with the deception, the pair drive back to New Mexico to await the crucial meeting with the lawyer.

Trust is the central issue in tricksy thrillers such as this. Tanen Jones, through her narrators, tells us stuff. But who are we to believe? Is Leslie really a slightly OCD homebody, and what is her cash-flow problem? What about her genial husband Dave? Is he leading a double life? Devoted dad to one year-old Eli, or a serial philanderer?

Alert readers may well figure out what is actually going on well before we get the big reveal, but even if you do, it won’t spoil the enjoyment. Tanen Jones (right) takes a wry look at modern obsessions, including a single mom who earns a living for herself and two little boys by posting stuff on Instagram, the debilitating half life lived by relative strangers messaging each other on social media, and the grim reality of women hooked into relationships with parasitic and abusive men.

One thing is for certain; Tanen Jones has created one of the most devious, damaged and deadly female central characters that I have encountered for many a day. Thing is, though, which one is it, Leslie, Mary or Robin. Who is the better liar?

The Better Liar is published by Harvill Secker and is out now.

Tanen Jones grew up in Texas and North Carolina. She has a degree in American History and spent several years editing law and criminal justice textbooks. She now lives in New York with her partner, and her website is here.

You can also find her on Twitter where she is @TanenJones

February 6, 2020 0