Thriller

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

THINK TWICE . . . Between the covers

A bit of back story. Myron Bolitar (read my review of an earlier book in the series HERE) is a New York sports agent who, before a career-ending knee injury, was a top basketball player. One of his bitterest rivals on the court – and in romance – was Greg Downing. Bolitar went on to become his agent, but not before impregnating Downing’s soon-to-be wife Emily, a young woman they had fought over. The resultant child, Jeremy, now a serving soldier, was brought up to be the Downings’ son. Citing psychological problems, Downing retired from sport, and went to the Far East to “find himself”. He never returned, but his death was announced, and his ashes returned to the USA. Bolitar, being a decent man and putting past grievances to one side, gave the eulogy at his memorial service.

Understandably, Bolitar’s jaw drops when two FBI agents enter his office, and tell him that Downing’s DNA has been found at a recent murder scene. We know from the very start of the book that someone is very good at committing murder and putting someone else in the frame by acquiring their DNA via, say, a hairbrush or a used tissue, and leaving it at the scene of the crime. To say more would be to spoil the fun, but all I will say is that readers should not make assumptions. Across New York and its suburbs, people are looking at serious jail time for crimes we know they didn’t commit but, strangely, as well as irrefutable forensic traces, the suspects have motive, too. Like the young woman who worked a building contract with her father, for a big developer. When that developer simply refused to pay them, citing shoddy workmanship, was she finally driven to desperation, borrowed her father’s rifle and shot the crooked developer dead?

Many fictional American investigators have a brutal sidekick who can be relied upon to dish out extreme violence from time to time. Robert B Parker’s Spenser had Hawk, John Connolly’s Charlie Parker has Louis, and Myron Bolitar has Windsor Horne Lockwood III, a billionaire playboy who loves guns – and using them. Here, he rescues Bolitar from having a toe removed by mobsters, and plays an important part at the end of the book. The relationship between Win and Myron is complex. Win is borderline psychotic, and he does things which, in his mind, are for the good, while knowing full well that Myron would not conscience such behaviour. He doesn’t utter the words, but he is thinking, “I will do this so you don’t have to.”

The plot becomes more complex page by page, and I trust it is not a spoiler to say that Greg Downing is very much alive and well. What neither Bolitar, Win, Emily, Jeremy nor we readers know is why Downing faked his death and – most importantly – with whom. The FBI involvement develops far beyond the two agents we met at the beginning of the novel, and heads right to the core leadership of the agency, but all the while, the pieces of the puzzle stubbornly refuse to fit together, until Coben creates a tense and violent conclusion played out – of all places – under the gloomy Gothic shadow of the Dakota Building on the edge of Central Park, while a busker does his unknowingly ironic stuff with John Lennon’s Imagine.

The book is trademark Harlen Coben – razor sharp East Coast dialogue, relentlessly entertaining, witty, and with enough violence to keep noir fans satisfied. The back cover blurb describes the author as a ‘Global Entertainment Brand.’ I am a bit old fashioned, and would much rather think of him as an immensely talented writer. Think Twice is published by Century and will be out on 23rd May.

May 17, 2024 0

THE FINE ART OF UNCANNY PREDICTION . . . Between the covers

I must confess to not having read anything by Robert Goddard (left) for a few years. Back in the day I enjoyed his James Maxted trilogy, which comprised The Ways of the World (2013), The Corners of the Globe (2014) and The Ends of The Earth (2015), which focused on a young former RAF pilot and his involvement in the political fallout in Europe after the Versailles Conference ended in 1920. I reviewed his standalone novel Panic Room in 2018 (click the link to read what I thought), and I quickly became immersed in his latest novel The Fine Art of Uncanny Prediction. Goddard introduced his unusual Tokyo private detective Umiko Wada in The Fine Art of Invisible Detection (2021). She returns in this novel, which is intricately plotted and rather complex at times. A widow, (her husband died as a result of the 1995 Tokyo Sarin Gas attack) she was once assistant to PI Kozuto Kodaka, but since his death she has shaped the business in her own way.

The strange title refers to a Japanese urban legend, which states that an unknown woman known as the Kobe Sensitive – predicted both the Kobe earthquake in 1995 and the tsunami which caused the Fukushima nuclear disaster 1n 2011. On both occasions she phoned the authorities, and on both occasions she was ignored, or so the story goes. The book spans over 70 years, but in three time frames – the immediate aftermath of Japan’s defeat in WW2, the 1990s and the present day. In the wreckage of 1945 Tokyo we meet Goro Rinzaki, the teenage factotum to the owner of an orphanage. After an accident in the ruins, Rinzaki allows his boss to die, but escapes with the a steel box which was locked in the orphanage’s safe, and it is Rinzaki who sits at the centre of Goddard’s narrative web like a malevolent spider. What the box contains is integral to the story.

We then switch to the present day where Wada is engaged by businessman Fumito Nagata who wants her to make contact with his estranged son Manjiro. The 1995 time frame begins with the late Kozuto Kodaka being hired by Terruki Jinno, millionaire chairman of Jinno Construction, to investigate the financial dealings of his recently deceased father – and founder of the company – Arinobu Jinno. If this all sounds complicated, that’s because it most certainly is, but it’s how Goddard pulls the disparate threads together that makes this such an intriguing read.

There is, almost inevitably, an American connection. Clyde Braxton was an American Army officer who was very much a ‘Mr Big’ during the post war occupation, and one of his remits was to monitor a reviving Japanese film industry. By ‘monitor’, I mean that exercised an absolute veto on the subject matter of new films. After leaving the army, he used his (probably ill-gotten) wealth to start a Californian winery, but when his family died in a catastrophic earthquake of he dedicated his time and money to the possibility of predicting future disasters, which is where his Japanese connections came good. One of the film-makers who prospered under his authority was none other than Goro Rinzaki. And Rinzaki believes he can offer Bryant the Kobe Sensitive.

As Wado searches for Manjiro Nagata she uncovers a conspiracy that puts her life in danger, as well as the lives of her friends and family. At every turn, both in Tokyo and California – where she goes to try to unravel the mystery – it seems that Goro Rinzaki has strings to pull and people on the inside of all major institutions – the press, the government and industry. We eventually learn what was in the steel box rescued from the ruins in 1945, but along the way Goddard entertains us with an intricate and elegant plot, with Wada – calm, resourceful and courageous – at its very centre. The book is published by Bantam and is available now.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fine-Art-Uncanny-Prediction-Between/dp/1787635104/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1693469403&sr=8-1

August 31, 2023 0

THE WIT AND WISDOM OF BERNIE GUNTHER

Over the thirty years and fourteen books of the series, Philip Kerr’s wonderful antihero Bernie Gunther was never afraid to speak his mind, both to us as readers, and often to the real-life characters – as diverse as Reinhardt Heydrich, William Somerset Maugham and Eva Peron – who peopled the stories. Sometimes he could be profound, sometimes savagely funny, but always observant. Here is a selection of his best lines.

Most of us who love great novels were aware that Philip Kerr was ill, and it was a moment of great sadness when we learned of his death in March 2018. We could not grieve in the full sense of the word. That was for his family. But we could only dream of what other adventures PK could have dreamed up for his magnificent creation, had he been granted more years. As it was, Metropolis – ironically, the book featuring Bernie at his youngest – was published posthumously. The Gunther books will be read as long as people have the desire to learn about 20thC history and the people who – for good or ill – shaped it. Also, as long as there are readers who enjoy a well-turned insult and a melancholy gaze into the human soul, Bernie Gunther will live for ever.

August 18, 2023 0

THE BONE HACKER . . . Between the covers

Kathy Reichs introduced us to Montréal forensic anthropologist Temperance “Tempe” Brennan in Déjà Dead (1997). The latest episode of this long running series begins with Tempe – as ever – investigating a particularly revolting partial corpse – ‘partial’ due to an encounter with a boat propeller – in the Bickerdike Basin. A geography lesson about Montréal and the St Lawrence River can wait for another time, as most of the action takes place elsewhere.

The remains are that of a young man who was a very long way from home – fifteen hundred miles across the ocean in the Turks and Caicos Islands. He didn’t drown. He didn’t die from the swirling blades of a propeller. He had been shot. Straight through the chest. Perhaps now is the time for a little geography. TCI is a tiny chain of islands in the Atlantic. To the south is Haiti and The Dominican Republic; sail south-east and you hit Cuba; north-west lie The Bahamas and the Florida; sail north east for half a lifetime and you may end up in Bantry Bay.

When Brennan makes contact with the TCI police she speaks to Detective Tiersa Musgrove. Not only is Musgrove interested in the death of her young countryman, she surprises Brennan by insisting on flying straightway to Montréal. The demise of the young man – a gang member called Deniz Been – is not the reason Musgrove is anxious to be face-to-face with Tempe Brennan. Her motivation is to persuade Brennan to fly to TCI and cast her eye over a series of unexplained deaths which have completely baffled the TCI authorities. I’m not entirely sure why Brennan would drop everything and fly off into the unknown, but this is, after all, crime fiction, and pretty much anything can happen.

Brennan arrives in TCI – capital city Providenciales, known as Provo – and finds a luxury holiday paradise, complete with the corpses of a handful of young male tourists – each minus a hand. When Musgrove is found dead in her apartment, Brennan realises that she is neck-deep in a criminal swamp that threatens to drag her under and choke out her life. There are enough conundrums to satisfy the most demanding Sherlock Holmes buffs. Why was a state-of-the-art luxury boat found drifting off-shore? Why has an FBI agent ‘gone rogue’ on the island? Was Musgrove killed by her vengeful ex, or the same person who killed the young men?

After the demise of Detective Musgrove, enigmatic local copper Monck (who has been in the wars – he has a titanium hand) reluctantly brings Brennan into the investigation. When she eventually gets access to a sufficiently powerful microscope she discovers that the blade which separated the young men from from their hands bears the stamp of discernible writing, and it is in Hebrew. A local shochet (kosher slaughterman) looks a shoo-in for the one-handed corpses, in that he has all the right kit, but why? He does himself no favours when he goes on the run, and it is not until the arrival on the island of two suitably tight-lipped and sharp-suited FBI men, in search of their errant colleague, that it dawns on Brennan and Monck that there is a deeper criminal conspiracy at work here, and one that involves ransom demands and an international conspiracy.

The Bone Hacker has qualities which one finds in so many American thrillers – it is slick, pacy and immensely readable. Tempe Brennan is quick-tongued and even quicker of thought, and the gory medical details bear witness to the author’s distinguished career as an academic and as one of her country’s foremost forensic anthropologists. The book is published by Simon and Schuster, and is available now.

August 8, 2023 1

I WILL FIND YOU . . . Between the covers

Sometimes, the best writers set themselves challenges by posing a plot problem that appears to deny a plausible solution. One such was back in 2021 when, in The Perfect Lie, Jo Spain pulled the wool over our eyes. There, the deception hinged on a few words – and our (wrong) assumptions.

https://fullybooked2017.com/2021/05/13/the-perfect-lie-between-the-covers/

In his latest novel, Harlan Coben – to use the metaphor of Houdini – has wrapped himself in so many chains and padlocks that it seems impossible that he can set himself free. Why? Try this. Five years ago, David Burroughs was jailed for life for murdering his three year-old son, Matthew, with a baseball bat. He now languishes in the protected section of a high security jail, alongside child rapists, cannibals, and other monsters. After refusing to see any visitors for five years he is finally forced to see one – because he omitted to fill in the annual paperwork. It is his former sister-in-law Rachel; his wife, Cheryl has, inevitably, divorced him. Rachel shows David a photo (taken by a friend) of a family group at an amusement park. On the edge of the picture is a little boy, clutching the hand of an adult, otherwise out of picture. It is Matthew.

Coben gives us a drive-through account of the back story. David Burroughs was home-alone with Matthew that night. Cheryl, a surgeon, was at work. David was in a bad mood, put his son to bed without a bedtime story, and proceeded to get outside of the best part of a bottle of Bourbon. Somehow awakened by a sixth sense that something was wrong, or perhaps by the smell of blood, David staggered to his son’s bedroom only to find a mangled and unrecognisable corpse on the bed.

The first key to the mystery is, of course, that the shattered boy’s corpse was just that – unrecognisable. It was, however, in Matthew’s bed, wearing Matthew’s pyjamas. When, a little while later a baseball bat, with David’s fingerprints all over it, is found buried in the garden, David’s status changes from bereaved father, through suspect, to convicted killer.

The next key has to be putting David in a situation – i.e. no longer behind bars – where he can investigate the possibility that the child in the photograph is Matthew, and prove that the murdered boy in Matthew’s bed was someone else. The Governor of Briggs Penitentiary is Philip Mackenzie, and he has history with David Burroughs. David’s dad, Lenny, was, long ago, a grunt in Vietnam with Phil. The pair survived and went on to become partners in crime prevention as precinct cops. Now, Phil is just months away from retirement and a double pension, while Lenny is in the advanced stages of dementia. Suffice it to say there is a fairly improbable break-out from Briggs but this is, after all, crime-fiction.

Coben then throws a fairly heavy spanner into the works by revealing that at a rough stage in their marriage, when Cheryl and David were unable to conceive, Cheryl booked an appointment at a sperm donor clinic. This cleverly opens up all manner of potential twists and questions, which the author exploits to the maximum. It certainly had me guessing right up to the final few pages. If I say this a typically American slick thriller, it is meant as an entirely positive description. Somehow – and I won’t say they are better than British writers – American novelists such as Coben, Connolly, Baldacci and Kellerman produce a polished and gleaming product which has, to extend the automobile metaphor, a distinctive ‘new car smell’. I Will Find You is published by Century and is out now.

April 10, 2023 0

LIGHTS DOWN . . . Between the covers

For those new to this wonderful series, here’s the back story. Enora Andressen is an actress in her early forties. She has won fame, if not fortune, by starring in what used to be known as ‘art films’ – often European produced and of a literary nature. She has a twenty-something son, Malo, the product of a one-night-fling with a former drug boss, Harold ‘H’ Prentice. ‘H’ and Enora have become reunited, after a fashion, but it is not a sexual relationship. In the previous novel, ‘H’ is stricken with Covid, and barely survives. That story is told in Intermission.

Taking an extended break from her nursing of ‘H’ down at Flixcombe, his manor house in the south of England, Enora returns to her London flat. She is contacted by Rémy Despret, a film director with whom she has worked many times. He is a charming as ever, but seems to have lost his touch regarding viable screenplays. He pitches his latest – Exocet – to Enora, but she thinks it is rubbish, and turns him down. She also suspects he is using his yacht to smuggle drugs, and may be in serious trouble with some very dangerous people. She also meets her agent, Rosa, who tells her she is representing a woman who has written a potentially explosive – because real identities are thinly concealed – novel about the extra marital affairs of a senior politician.

Enora receives a chilling ‘phone call from the woman who is in charge of things at Flixcombe. Not only is ‘H’ suffering physically from Long Covid, it seems he has developed dementia. When Enora drives down to see for herself, she is staggered to find that ‘H’ has no idea who she is. In the previous books, ‘H’ has been a force of nature. Physically imposing and nobody’s fool, the former football hooligan, has to borrow from Shakespeare, been a criminal Caesar:

“Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men.
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonorable graves.”

Now, sadly, he is much reduced physically and mentally and is given to such bizarre behaviour as appearing naked at windows. Also, his money is running out. Huge sums of it went on private nursing care during his battle with Covid, as he absolutely refused to go into an NHS hospital. Incidentally, readers will always conjure up their own mental images of the characters in books they read, but I occasionally play the game of casting books ready for imaginary film or TV adaptations. My four penn’orth has a young Anne Bancroft as Enora, and Bob Hoskins as ‘H’.

With the help of long time friend and former copper Dessie Wren Enora discovers that the ‘bonking politician’ novel has more sinister undertones than being simply a kiss-and-tell story. Graham Hurley makes it convincingly up to date with the inclusion of the Russian state-backed mafia and PM Boris Johnson, although with the latter, the story has been overtaken by events.

Undaunted by Enora’s rejection of Exocet, Rémy Despret has come up with an idea which she finds much more interesting. Evidently Flixcombe was used during WW2 as base for Free French intelligence agents and propagandists and the ‘Vlixcombe‘ movie has already attracted backers with the big money. If the project comes off, there will be a starring role for Enora, and enough money to keep at bay the predators circling the ailing ‘H’ Prentice. But then there is a murder, things begin to unravel, and Graham Hurley writes the most astonishing ending I have read in many a day.

I make no apology for my enthusiasm for Graham Hurley’s writing. Not only was his Joe Faraday series one of the most intelligent and emotionally literate run of police procedurals I have ever read, but the sequels featuring Faraday’s former sergeant Jimmy Suttle were just as good. Hurley is also a brilliant military historian, and has written several novels centred around particular conflicts in WW2. His book Kyiv seems particularly relevant just now, and if you read it, it will give you a huge insight into the subtext of the Ukraine-Russia relationship which is barely mentioned in current news coverage.

Lights Down is published by Severn House and is available now. If you click on the cover images above, a review of each novel should open in a new tab.

July 12, 2022 1

NOBODY’S AGENT . . . Between the covers

Central character Ronin Nash is a Scot who found himself in America, did a spell in the armed forces, and then worked as an FBI agent. When he is sidelined as a scapegoat in a kidnap case which went tragically wrong, he retreats to a lakeside log cabin hideaway, but is recruited by his former boss to join a new outfit, the Inter-agency Investigation Bureau. He is sent to the small town of Finchley in upstate New York to find out the investigate the discovery of three dead bodies in an abandoned mine just outside the town.

I did wonder about the wisdom of a British writer setting a novel in America. Of course, James Dover Grant (aka Lee Child) made a pretty good job of it, as did John Connolly (although he’s Irish, of course) with his Charlie Parker books. Stuart Field does pretty well at creating an authentic small town America backdrop, to be fair, and the only distractions were some odd typos which should have been spotted by the editor.

The ‘small town, big secrets’ trope has been a staple of crime fiction and movies for a long time, perhaps never better than in Bad Day at Black Rock, the superb 1955 film based on the short story “Bad Time at Honda” by Howard Breslin, but how does Nobody’s Agent match up? Very creditably, in my view. Stuart Field handles the stock characters – the town gossip, the flawed Sheriff, the maverick investigator and the suspicious townsfolk – with flair and confidence.

We learn pretty quickly that something is not quite right in Finchley, but Nash spots this, and realises he is being played. He is smart enough to let the players assume he is ignorant of what is going on and the only question in his mind is just how many of the Sheriff’s Department – and other significant townsfolk – are in on the secret.

Stuart Field (right) is a British Army veteran who now works in security after serving twenty-two years in the British Army. As well as working full time he writes in his spare time. Stuart was born and raised in the West Midlands in the UK. His love for travel has been an inspiration in some of his work with his John Steel and Ronin Nash thriller series. As well as future John Steel novels, Stuart is working on a new series and standalone novels. Nobody’s Agent is published by Next Chapter, and is available now.

July 10, 2022 1

HOT HOUSE . . . Between the covers

Mari E is an LA private investigator, distinctly low-rent to judge by her business premises, a converted container in a down-at-heel part of the city. Her premises neighbours are mostly scammers and grifters of one kind or another. She is a former government agent. She has been hired by an federal appellate judge to find out who is blackmailing him. Whoever it is wants her off the case and has been threatening her with anonymous notes. She is also certain she is being followed. For back-up she hires a partner, former LAPD detective, and now a PI himself, Derek Abernathy. He is very smart, though, and soon works out that Mari E leads a double life.

“So I have two jobs, what’s the big deal? A girl’s gotta make a living, right?”
“Jobs? More like lives,” he hissed back, pointing outside towards the parking lot.
“Mari E, as you call yourself, drives a fifteen year-old dented Honda and wears a weathered hoodie artificially inseminated with the smell of smoke and vanilla cologne. Mar-ISSA, on the other hand, drives a freaking Porsche and buys her eight-hundred-dollar Ferragamo shoes in Beverly Hills, which she wears to her Culver City art gallery!”

That is just a quick sample of the whip-crack dialogue in the book, which fizzles and sparks like electricity across terminals. Very soon Mari and Derek realise that the blackmailed judge is also connected to the unsolved murder of a French duel-passport student, Sophie Michaud, and the fate of two women journalists who investigated the case, one of whom is dead and the other missing.

Mari has her own crusade, which is related to her being shot while on a case twelve months or so previously. Her father resolved to take his own revenge on the European crime boss responsible, but neither has been seen since. She realises that if she can discover who killed Sophie, the rest of house of cards will come tumbling down. Big problem, though. She discovers that Sophie was not just one person. Yes, physically she was one body, but psychologically two separate beings lived under that particular roof, and were even known by different names – Sophie and Sasha. One was a dreamy and talented creative artist, while the other was a calculating sexual schemer who used information about potential blackmail victims with the ruthless logic of a criminal Marie Kondo.

Good crime writers can be lyrical when they need to be, and if there were any doubt that LIsa Towles is a genuine California Girl, this passage dispels it.

“There were some places where the quality of the light is always good, and others where it’s never quite right. Too bright to see an incoming text, too dark to find your keys in the bottom of your bag. Besides California, I’d lived in three other states, and somehow the light in LA had a quality that didn’t exist anywhere else. Sometimes the sun was so high and bright, it bled out all detail leaving a luminous silvery cloak over the sand and surf. Then at dusk, that same beachfront hides in climbing shadows, with only small details visible beneath the streetlamps. It was the unsinkable promise of light and dark that anchored me to this place, this stretch of rugged coastline with its seagulls and secrets.”

In the end, the blackmailer of the judge is located, and the killer of Sophie/Sasha is brought to justice, but with literally the last sentence, Lisa Towles poses another puzzle which will presumably be addressed in the next book. Hot House is everything a California PI novel should be. It has pace, great dialogue, totally credible characters and a pass-the-parcel mystery where Lisa Towles (right) has great fun describing how Ellwyn and Abernathy peel back the layers to get to the truth. Sure, the pair might not yet stand shoulder to shoulder with Marlowe, Spade and Archer, or even more modern characters like Bosch and Cole, but they have arrived, and something tells me they are here to stay.

Hot House is published by ‎ Indies United Publishing House, LLC, and will be available in the UK as a Kindle, audiobook and hardback from 15th June. The paperback was published in March. For my reviews of three earlier novels by Lisa Towles, just click on the cover images