Fiona Griffiths excels contemporary police detectives, even such high-maintenance items as Tana French’s Cassie Maddox & Sharon Bolton’s Lacey Flint, in psychological complexity. When young she suffered from a mental illness called Cotard’s Syndrome, characterized by the delusion that she was actually dead. This has left her conscious of being able to get directly in touch with murder victims, an appropriate affinity for a criminal investigator that gives her a more than routine desire to see the victims’ killers brought to justice. With the help of a psychological counselor who was also her first love, Fiona was able to overcome her affliction sufficiently to lead a more-or-less regular life & took a degree in philosophy @ Cambridge. Her choice of a career with the South Wales police force seems a deliberately contrarian choice to go against the grain – she was reared in the wealthy family of a successfully retired Cardiff crime lord (who provides Fiona with not only private means but her own personal unarmed combat instructor, a veteran of the Russian special forces). Like Cassie and Lacey, Fiona combines a strong independent steak that makes her instantly ready to cast her police career to the winds with a strong desire to prove trustworthy & to see justice done, whatever it takes, whatever the risks.

The ongoing background: as with many series police detectives, with Fi there are several mysteries unfolding simultaneously. Her father-the-crime-lord is apparently her foster father; she was 1st discovered @ age two sitting in the backseat of his Jaguar. There are also her relationships, with Ed the ex-counselor whom she pops in on when she needs a little steadying, Lev her combat trainer, who’s one of those boring characters who speaks English with Russian grammar, & the annoyingly named Buzz(!), an ex-Parachute Regiment policemen with whom Fi came to close to settling down in the second (& to my mind weakest) book in the series, but fortunately has been effectively written out of the story in this one. I think the author has realised that as a totally unstable personality, Fi ought to have but transitory affairs. (Also, readers like me who fall for her get jealous of lovers who hang around too long.) Additionally, Fi has a list of shady Cardiff businessmen (I think all men so far) and councilors whom she keeps on Google alert & provide the author with new villainous schemes that generate crimes for Fi to investigate & solve. In the first of the series it was sex trafficking, the second was arms dealing, I’ve forgot what was behind the third in which Fi went undercover as an office cleaner ` something to do with payrolls, I think. In this one it’s Transatlantic cables, which allows Fi to go undercover as well, for what I found the most exciting thriller ending in the series yet. There is also usually a gimmick in which Fiona (& the reader) are taught a new skill. In Talking to the Dead it was unarmed & armed combat, in Love Story with Murders it was how to blow up a motor car (I now carry one of those gas grille igniters in the VW just in case I should need to get the attention of a search helicopter), in The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths how to assume another identity (definitely my favourite), & here in This Thing of Darkness it’s rock climbing. (Never appealed to me, but then I’ve succeeded in breaking my neck in my living room so why bother?)

In comparison to other young police detectives, Fi ranks for me in the top echelon & Cotard’s gives her a paranormal or psychological (depending on whether you regard communicating with the dead as a giftI – like me – or a delusion) dimension absent in her peers. But you don’t feel, as you feel with Cassie or Lacey, that Fi is so real that she’s somebody you wish you could have as a friend, even tho’ it would be a very difficult friendship indeed. But I’d rank Fi above the impressive newcomers Angela Marson’s Kim Stone & Elizabeth Haynes’s Louisa Smith, who are still a little to flat, even tho’ as a literary artist Haynes excels all contemporaries besides French & Bolton. Another rising star police detective (this one in the Southern Cross) – whom I had the good fortune to encounter with another reading group is Candice Fox’s Eden Archer, who like Fi is also the foster daughter of a crime lord. Unlike Haynes, & of course French & Bolton, Bingham fails to portray really memorable minor characters & his villains are there just to commit crimes & ultimately get caught – nothing tragic about them & they are totally forgettable. But that quality makes the members of the series stand alone very well. Could you read a Harry Bingham for a 2nd time? Not sure, but I’d consider Strange Death for another go – what I learnt about undercover work made me appreciate Dead Scared & The Likeness even more. Should This Thing of Darness be your first outing, you might like to go back & pick up Talking to the Dead for more of Fi’s back story. This one tho’ I cannot imagine wanting to read again, so I’ll hold @ four stars – but they’re very bright stars.

The atmospherics of Bad Penny Blues are so good that I felt half a century had dropped away and that I was once more in my twenties living in the London of Mary Quant, Jean Shrimpton, Screaming Lord Sutch, Christine Keeler, and the Headless Man. Cathi Unsworth’s grasp of the fashions and idiom of the late 50s-early 60s seemed well neigh perfect. Her blow-by-blow recounting of the Cassius Clay-Henry Cooper boxing match is a brilliant piece of sheer virtuosity and although it barely advanced the plot, I loved it and thought I was at ringside.

It should by now be well-known that the most important aspects of the best crime fiction (which is amongst the very best fiction, full stop) are not the crimes and the detecting, but the relationships amongst the characters. My favourites are Baroness James’s Innocent Blood, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, and Tana French’s The Likeness. Bad Penny Blues nearly belongs in such select company. As soon as I finished the book, I began rereading the early sections where Stella Reade describes how she and her friends Jackie and Jenny were art students at the dawn of the sixties starting their careers. Such poignant stories even without any murders and police procedures would have made a perfectly good stand-alone story.

Let me add a word about the paranormal elements in Bad Penny Blues, which some readers have carped about. Stella the fashion designer is a sensitive. She has dreams in which she is aware of what the prostitutes who are about to be murdered think. Now there are some readers who cannot abide the paranormal and the supernatural, but it is hardly fair for them to complain about what readers like myself who inhabit a more spacious and interesting world enjoy. Indeed, I would argue that omitting the paranormal from stories where it clearly belongs is a much worse fault. Laura Wilson’s A Willing Victim, with a character obviously based on Dennis Wheatley and partially set in the most haunted building in England, cried out for the spooky effects and Satanic rituals that we expect. Here I liked everything about Stella, especially her being a psychic as well as a brilliant designer, a loving woman, and a good friend.

When you suffer dementia you travel into a strange land from which there is no return. The first signs you’re over the border are more annoying than frightening. Someone seems to be hiding your personal effects. Then they’ve rearranged the furniture in your room or redesigned your entire house so that doors won’t open or if they do then alarms go off & people you’ve never met before seem annoyed @ something that you have no recall that you did. Even when they’re standing right in front of you they talk about you as if you weren’t there, or ask you childish questions like what year it is & you can’t remember what the right word is for whatever thing you’re trying to talk about. That’s just starters.
If you’ve been a caregiver, either @ an agency or a facility, or @ home as the PCG for someone you love, you’ll find the voice of Maud in Elizabeth Is Missing reminding you of what it is like to look after someone with dementia. When the story begins Maud is only mildly disabled. She is alert & oriented – knows who she is, where she is, & recognises her daughter Helen & her granddaughter Katie. But Maud’s short term memory is absolutely shot to pieces & she cannot remember anything that she does or is told, so that if she tries to boil a kettle for tea she’ll forget all about it & leave it on the stove. Maud is obsessed by the belief that her best friend of many years, Elizabeth, has disappeared from her house & suspects that she may have met with foul play from her son Peter, who seems to continually annoyed @ Maud. Because she cannot remember anything recent, Maud surrounds herself with slips on notepaper inscribed “Elizabeth is missing’, which give the book its title.
Because of Emma Healey’s brilliant use of a first person narration, it takes the reader quite a while to distinguish Maud’s version of events from ‘reality’ & understand why Helen, Peter, the police & Maud’s GP all find dealing with Maud so difficult & to find out what has ‘really’ occurred. I put ‘reality’ in scare commas because that is merely what we call it. We have to remember that dementia patients are no longer in our world, & that if we want to be with them, we have to go into their world & sometimes, as in this novel, there are some fascinating glimpses of a lost world, here in 1946.
The partitions between past & present often become very thin, as is true for Maud. She is also very much a little girl in postwar Britain & preoccupied with another disappearance, that of her older sister Susan, called Sukey, She is married to Frank, who is what was then termed a ‘wide-boy’ – a petty criminal who deals in black-market ration coupons & stolen military stores. Maud & Sukey’s parents also have a lodger, Douglas, who affects an American accent & is awfully vague about how he spends his spare time.
So Emma Healey gives us in Maud a seriously impaired detective describing trying to solve two mysteries almost 70 years apart. Because the first-person narration is instantaneous, Maud can tell us things that two pages later she won’t remember herself. But there is a lot of DIY for us readers in figuring out what’s supposed ‘really’ to have happened. Unreliable narrators fascinate me & this is one of the very best I’ve encountered. I give this book five stars but I realise that I am much too close to the subject of this book, that I feel that Emma Healey really gets it. I’m sure there may be readers who think they’ll find out more about dementia than they ever wanted to know. Of course if you follow the health statistical projections, you’ll see that if you live long enough you surely will find out more about dementia than you ever wanted to know, either as a caregiver or a patient. Elizabeth Is Missing is a good & painless place to start.

I’m so delighted and flattered to announce that Our Endless Numbered Days is a finalist in the ABA (American Booksellers Association) 2016 Indies Choice Book Awards. The finalists were chosen…

Source: ABA Book of the Year Award Finalist

With Helen Fitzgerald I always go someplace new & learn something I’d never thought of before, & now I know the hot place to go in Magaluf & what ‘paddle wire’ is & some fascinating new uses for it (nothing to do with either table tennis or canoeing). Unfortunately, what happens in Magaluf doesn’t stay in Magaluf, as Su, our 18 y/o principal character discovers when she unwittingly stars in a porn video that ‘goes viral’ on the internet, thanks to her sister Leah & her friends who think it amusing to see Su get drunk & get laid whilst on holiday. Su was originally named Su-Ji because she was adopted as an infant-foundling from Korea by the American-Caledonian couple Bernie & Ruth, who are respectively a musician & a sheriff. Unlike the officers here in Iowa who share the same job-title (it was originally ‘reeve of the shire’), in Scotland sheriffs do not lead a rural constabulary but are judges who try criminal cases. Shortly after adopting Su, Ruth totally unexpectedly fell pregnant with Leah, creating a complex sibling rivalry.

In Viral we follow two intertwined plot lines as Su tries to hide from her notoriety by remaining abroad & Ruth launches a parallel quest to exact ‘restorative justice’ from the sleaze-ball who uploaded the video – giving Leah a chance to expiate her complicity in Su’s disgrace by acting as Ruth’s principal agent as well as by using e-banking to keep the missing Su supplied with funds she uses to emplane in quest of her birth-mother. It’s fascinating how in my lifetime such innovations as CCTV, DNA, mobile phones & the internet have rendered many traditional plots (such as mistaken identity & missed communications) obsolete but as here have made commonplace which would previously have required pure magic. (Or @ least an ‘irrevocable letter of credit’ – am I the last person alive who remembers those?) Still, like most of Helen Fitzgerald’s stories, Viral depends on some highly unlikely coincidences & totally unexpected twists. These don’t always work in her books. Donor was a dud; too easy to suss, Amelia O’Donohue is So Not a Virgin beyond credulity, & The Exit impossible & unprofitable in any real care home. But @ her best, she’s brilliant @ sowing her stories with almost unnoticeable little details (including here the afore mentioned paddle wire) that finally & suddenly she brings together with spectacular results. (Altho’ not quite as violent, in this respect Helen Fitzgerald rivals the recently departed master of such special effects, the great Tom Sharpe!). The denouement is beyond expectation yet completely satisfying. Euripides would surely approve.

I’d not rank Viral with The Cry, & perhaps put it slightly below Dead Lovely (lol funny) & The Devil’s Staircase (where I 1st discovered Helen Fitzgerald’s novels thanks to a GR group & whose setting brought back memories of my own summer as a 20-something Yank living in London’s Kangaroo Valley). Still, it’s a solid four-star, equally (as the Roman poet specifies) for the ‘profit & delight’ of YAs embarking on holiday & OAPs travelling vicariously in their lounge chairs.

Rural Northumberland can be so lonely as to be downright scary & provides a perfect setting for an update of the classic country house weekend murder mystery. A hen party or do is what we Yanks would call a bachelorette party, & the narrator, Nora, is unexpectedly invited to join one for her old schoolfriend Clare, whom she’s not seen in ten years. Even more surprising is Nora’s discovery that the groom will be James, the first & only great love of her life who unceremoniously dumped her by text message. So I really wanted to like this one, but it requiring swallowing too much that I found implausible.

For me that point I’d exclaim incredulus odi (as Horace expressed it) varies with the genre. Fantasy & science fiction are the most permissive, then there’re supernaturals & paranormals, & stricter still are romantic fiction & tragedy, which require real-seeming human characters but with more coincidences & a higher level of intensity than any of us can achieve in ordinary life. Detective fiction is the least permissive, because the reader is trying to figure out who did it, & why & how, on the basis of clues to what we can expect can actually happen. In fairness to the author, I credit her with putting all her cards on the table. (She goes to so much trouble to get a shotgun into the story that one character makes a theatrical joke about it.) I sussed out the main plot device but the method & the perpetrator eluded me because the villain’s motives seemed insufficient & the plan too complicated to imagine anyone’s trying it in normal life. I also could not believe that the exes had absolutely no contact over a decade after a sudden unexplained breakup by text message. Surely one or the other would have had an irresistible urge to hit the call button after listening to Taylor Swift’s I Almost Do too many times, or a mutual friend put them in touch.

We all have different thresholds of credulity, & some readers might well find this book a four star fast-read thriller, tho’ with such flat characters & no spiritual or moral issues, it’s not close to a five star. I was tempted to hold @ two, but the setting pushed it up a notch.

Carol Goodman has a special place in my life as a reader, perhaps even in my spiritual life, as the author who brought me back to reading crime fiction with The Lake of Dead Languages. I’d read a lot of mysteries in my teens & 20s but while I was a professional literature teacher & scholar I read little imaginative literature for recreation. But as a school story about a Latin teacher, her 1st novel, Lake of Dead Languages, appealed to me. Since then I have read several of Carol Goodman’s books. The Night Villa was the one I liked best both for its setting on the Bay of Naples & because it is based on the classical scholarship of a BF (who so far as I know hasn’t murdered anybody). I chose River Road expecting a one-time fast-read traveling audio hoping for a four-star but I fear I was disappointed. Perhaps it’s just that I’ve had a surfeit of academic intrigue in real life–tenure committees, faculty love affairs, professors with a “drinking problem” (i.e. no trouble drinking), and plagiarism are what I lived with for forty years. As Nan the main character is a fiction writer (substituting ETOH for her deficiency in creative juices), there’s not as much classical scholarship as I’d have liked, tho’ I enjoyed Scully the drug dealer as the Scylla & naming the institution SUNY/Acheron was lol funny. How I’d love a degree, honoris causa, from that place!

Lately in thriller-mysteries there’s more villainy than one baddie can handle, so as in this book more are required (sort of like the famous 3rd murderer in Macbeth, one reckons) which means an extra hare’s-breath ‘scape for the MC too. First the reader meets an ostensible villain who’s known well-before the end of the book, but after that character is rendered hors de combat, the main character & the reader (because there are a couple of chapters still to go) find a hidden malefactor who is the real lead villain. This is usually some seemingly innocuous minor character (in a British police procedural I read it was a FLO–a nice touch!), often someone who pretends to be a friend. In River Road I didn’t quite suss the hidden villain but it was someone high on my list of likely suspects & I’d nailed the motive, something endemic in academia. We also are given another favorite fictional-villain cliché. After the villain gets the drop on you or otherwise renders you helpless, rather than dispatching you immediately & skedaddling, the villain has to expend several pages informing the intended victim of the details & motives of the crime, giving the cavalry enough time to arrive. It is also characteristic of this sort of fiction that characters who so far as we are aware have no experience with firearms are able to get hold of an unfamiliar pistol & kill with a single shot.

Not a bad book, but I regret the time wasted not listening to something better. Tho’ I am grateful to Carol Goodman for reviving my love to this genre, I find now her wares, both the characters & the setting, seem to have become awfully shopworn.

The Blue, by Lucy Clarke, was one of the best stories that I read in 2015, & but three weeks into 2016 it is already clear that Clara Salaman’s The Boat will be in my top echelon this year. An extremely attractive couple of teenage newly-weds are enjoying a travelling honeymooners hitchhiking round the Med. Johnny a keen dingy sailor with some deepwater experience delivering yachts, & the 17 y/o Clemency (called ‘Clem’) are madly in love & surviving on pick up jobs, the latest of which in Turkey involved deep-sixing a lot of expensive & probably hot items that result in their being on the run from a bunch of plug uglies. Fortunately Johnny & Clem find their way onto a 30’ sailing yacht with the unlikely name Little Utopia, the floating home of an English family, Frank & Annie & their 5 y/o dtr Imogene (called ‘Smudge’).

As they cruise along the Turkish coast, life aboard the yacht appears idyllic. Frank & Annie are generous with food & (quite plentiful) drink, Smudge is an inquisitive & attractive child, & Johnny & Clem make themselves quite useful supplying nautical expertise Frank surprisingly lacks – he doesn’t even know how to sail! But it is not long before we start hearing ominous chords in the background. (Appropriately, when we first hear the voice of Annie, she’s singing ‘Bad Moon Rising’!) Tho’ the setting is contemporary, Frank sounds like he’s straight out of the Esalen Inst. or Tavistock Sq. ca. 1970 & it’s clear that Frank & Annie have what was then termed an ‘open marriage’. Slowly, tho’, as his jealousy mounts, Johnny discovers that worse, much worse,than adultery may be occurring aboard Little Utopia, but who is he to believe?

I most loved The Blue for the on-board relationships & moral issues & in the case of The Boat these are torqued even tighter. What was very close up in The Blue feels claustrophobic here & when Johnny senses an overwhelming impulse to get himself & Clem off that boat, the reader empathizes completely. Sometimes I simply had to turn off the audio – listening was too intense, esp. whilst trying to drive a car. As in The Blue, the question isn’t whether to notify ‘the Authorities’ as landsmen in civilised societies are supposed to do when something bad or criminal comes to notice. At sea it’s ‘What Authorities?’ as the author has Clem ask. Not much in way of police – not to mention child protective services – out in the Med off the Anatolian coast.

Readers will surely differ in their judgements on how Johnny finally deals with both what has been ongoing aboard Little Utopia & in his relationship with Clem. If you read my review of The Blue, you’ll not be surprised that I thought Johnny’s handling of matters involving Frank was absolutely dead-on right. Sometimes there is only one thing for a real sailor to do: Cast the legalisms over the side & then take care of business, whatever that may entail. (In another era I can imagine Johnny captaining an armed merchant brig off the Javanese coast like Tom Lingard in Conrad’s The Rescue.)

As for Johnny & Clem’s relationship, so often I wanted to shout ‘Please don’t do it. Don’t do that!’) @ both of them @ different times. but when each of them does something foolish or thoughtless, it is absolutely in character: Johnny, as fits a good sailor, too exacting, & Clem, as a very free spirit, too impulsive & giving.

Artistically there are some flaws; Lucy Clarke is a better sailor (at least within the covers of a book) than Clara Salaman. I cannot believe that Frank had only motored, never sailed, before. (I quite agree with Johnny about motors – once you turn on the engine the most graceful sailing yacht morphs hideously into the Hong Kong-Macao ferry – as I learnt spending a week crewing my brother’s father-in-law’s no-so-graceful motor sailer once upon a time, when I also broke another of my rules Johnny & Clem learnt the hard way, never crew for a skipper who knows less about sailing than you do!) Sometimes I wondered about the author’s nautical vocabulary. One ‘hoists’ or ‘raises’ sails – one doesn’t ‘put them up’ like overnight guests. Also yacht sails haven’t been made of canvas since synthetic fabrics were introduced in the 1950s.

Leon Williams narrated in what sounded to me like perfect Estuary dialect, which is precisely what these English characters ought to speak, & I loved listening for what linguists call non-rhoticity, intrusive-R, & L-vocalisation (to my North American ear, ‘saw’ sounded like ‘soar’ & ‘Fireball’ like ‘fibreboard’) But for some strange reason, Williams pronounced every nautical term with an over-exaggerated (I always thought that expression an illiterate pleonasm till now) emphasis on every syllable that you’d never hear from the mouth of any real sailor on either side the Atlantic, who’d pronounce ‘bowline’ to rhyme with ‘strollin’ & not ‘now fine’! Scarlett Mack was a much better narrator of The Blue & this book deserved her too.

All in all, whatever you make of the ending, The Boat is a superb sea adventure story & a very moving tragedy,

Of Hades, the first book in this series, I’d remarked that “this book fails to haunt my memory or raise the kind of moral & spiritual issues needed for five stars.” Such is true of Eden as well, but it has also brought back to me the distinctive pleasures of a series featuring very good fast-read four-stars with lots of thrills. You’ll probably never read the same one through again. (Martin Amis was horrified @ seeing the toll alcoholism had taken on his father when he’d found Kingsley re-reading a Dick Francis!) Instead, you’re eager to snap up the sequel as soon as it appears. Indeed, Fall has already been published in Australia & I am so jealous of the Aussies, as neither Amazon.com nor Amazon.co.uk has it yet. In the meantime, if you’ve not yet read Hades, drop everything now & read it, & then you’ll really be ready to enjoy Eden, which is even better. I found it hard to get into Hades Archer’s backstory, which alternates with the current adventures of detectives Eden Archer & Frank Bennett. But it was worth the effort. We find out that the young Hades was perviously known as the Dogboy of Darlington & how he acquired that sobriquet, as well as how he exchanged it for Hades. In the main plot, Eden goes undercover @ a farm run by real low-lifes to find out what happened to some girls who disappeared. Of course you’re expecting her to kick some serious arse & you’ll not be disappointed. I also liked Frank better this time. He’s still your generic middle-aged divorced male detective found in squad rooms from Oslo to Aberdeen to LA to Sydney & who deals with grief by opening another bottle. But he does a good job of being a cop in this one as he seeks out the mystery of Hades’ long-lost love. Like Frank, we feel every sense of the word ‘awe’ towards Eden: fear, fascination, admiration & attraction – the way you might feel if you shared your home with a leopard. Unlike my favourite fictional detectives such as Cassie Maddox or Lacey Flint, Eden’s not someone you wish you could have as a friend & fortunately for us, ‘What would Eden do?” isn’t applicable to most of our life-choices. But as a character in a story book she’s pure 190 proof bad-ass chick & huge fun to follow. Despite my resolutions to devote what leisure time I have exclusively to the pursuit of aesthetic & spiritual excellence, I’m salivating to lay hold the next in the series.

My thanks to Netgalley for an advance gratis review copy.