Life must be filled up

Some people have a policy of never writing about a book they don’t like. Very nice of them but I think that if I’ve been sent a book to review, I should tell it as I see it. I finished this book feeling disappointed, cheated and outraged that there was no proper ending and too many loose ends. I actually could not believe the 100% which appeared at the bottom of the Kindle page, because who ends a book like that? I was really angry with the author beacuse I like everything wrapped up. Although there is a crime at the centre of the novel and one with many ramifications, it’s not enough to fill a novel, at least, not as written here. The book is padded out with chapters about things we already know: Simon’s demons (fed up with them); Cat’s niceness (she’s as lovely as ever); their father’s appalling behaviour (same old, same old). Nothing is added to our understanding of any of the characters.

This is formulaic, lazy writing; the formula being that of all the other Serraillier books. In addition, Susan Hill seems to have wanted to include everything she’s heard on the news that’s frightening about modern Britain. For example, two completely gratuitous incidents: a machete attack at the police station and the fatal stabbing of a teenage boy on a London street. I felt it failed completely as a detective mystery, the few moments of tension ending too quickly, so that there is no pace at all. Would this book have been published if it were a debut novel?

This is the tenth Serraillier mystery, so I’ve missed one. I wrote about #8 here.
I read this thanks to NetGalley and it will be out on October 3rd.

If you would like to read a real thriller, I recommend Ben MacIntyre's The Spy and the Traitor, the true story of KGB agent Oleg Gordievsky who spied for Britain, providing invaluable information. The plan to spring him from Moscow if it became necessary was amazingly complicated and there were so many ways it could go wrong that, not knowing the story, I was on tenterhooks waiting to find out what happened. It also sheds interesting light on just who gets to know about such top secret plots and reflects rather well on Margaret Thatcher.

Wow! How does Mick Herron do it? This sixth Jackson Lamb thriller is as brilliant as the previous ones, gripping from the first page to the last. (Link to my reviews here.) The trouble with reading one is that you just have to know what happens next but don’t want to finish the book too quickly. A cunning plan of switching scenes throughout the narrative leaves the reader in a permanent state of suspense.

Joe Country opens with a startling image and a casual remark about bodies. This means that for most of the rest of the book you’re wondering who was killed and hoping it wasn’t a favourite character. In the second chapter we have the now trademark meander around the decaying ruin that is Slough House. Then the Slow Horses appear, our spooks (fewer now), who have allegedly failed at Park House (HQ) but still manage to foil the bad guys before ‘Lady Di’ (Diana Taverner, now First Desk) and her minions.

This book is achingly topical: Brexit; a woman Prime Minister; Salisbury; a royal personage (unnamed but easily guessed at) in shady company. A new member of the team (if you can call it that), has been sacked for having child pornography on his work computer, a charge he denies but which sticks. Since it’s hard to hack into Park House computers, it seems there’s been foul play. That’s a story line which turns out later to be important. The thriller aspect of the book comes when various slow horses set off to Wales, in terrible snowy conditions, in search of the missing son of a dead colleague. The chase, the battles with the bad guys, have you reading faster and faster.

I’ve said before that what I particularly like about the Jackson Lamb series is that the books are not only exciting but funny. The comments on modern life, the despair over the state of the country, are somehow made amusing. As for Jackson Lamb, he of the gross personal habits, it’s uncanny how he manages to solve problems from his desk, rather than by haring all over the country. He insults and puts down his ‘joes’ all the time but mess with them and he er, doesn’t like it much, shall we say? I find all his remarks funny. As I read a proof copy, I can’t quote from it (Publisher’s Rules, ha ha), but imagine that someone just happened to ask Lamb how on earth he knew a certain fact and he said something like, ‘Let’s suppose I’m a spy.’ You find that funny or not; I certainly do.

I can’t recommend Mick Herron highly enough; this is the best series I’ve read in a long time. I do recommend that if you’re new to Jackson Lamb, you start with the first book, Slow Horses. Many thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for the advance e-book. Joe Country will be out on 20th June.

I’ve enjoyed Elly Griffiths’ Dr Ruth Galloway mysteries, so when I learned that she’d written a children’s book about a schoolgirl detective, I just had to read it. Luckily, the publishers and NetGalley obliged and I got an advance proof copy.

When Justice Jones’ mother dies, her father, a criminal barrister, sends her to boarding school on Romney Marsh. Her first sight of the forbidding building makes her think it has ‘potential for murder’. As she’s never been to any school before, the rules, the terrible food and the cold are a shock to her. But almost as soon as she arrives, she learns that there’s been a death in the school which seems to have been hushed up and she’s on the case. I needed several clues before I was able to set the story between the wars. Justice finds that she’s hopeless at lacrosse but advanced in Latin, thanks to her mother's teaching. Some girls are snobbish and hostile but she chums up with nice Stella and with Dorothy, one of the servants, who will both help in her investigations.

As winter creeps on the cold intensifies, snow sets in and the school is cut off from the outside world. Justice doesn’t know who to trust when there’s another unexplained death. Why are so many people wandering about the old building in the night? Could even the charming yet scary headmistress, Miss de Vere, be involved? There are more murder attempts and it takes all Justice’s resourcefulness and courage, with the loyalty of her new friends, to discover the criminal at work in their midst. It helps that she’s read all her father’s murder cases and her mother’s detective novels.

I see this book is recommended for fans of Enid Blyton, presumably because the school has four towers, for I can see no other connection. Justice is far more like Flavia de Luce than any of Blyton’s heroines. If you enjoy Robin Stevens’ Wells & Wong mysteries, you’ll love this. It’s a genuine school story in the classic mould but with a brilliant twist. It’s out on 2nd May and I recommend it highly to all lovers of both school and detective fiction.

The Christmas Sisters, Sarah Morgan
Appleby Talks, Michael Innes
The Ghost it Was, Richard Hull
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J K Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
The Levanter, Eric Ambler
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
( brief thoughts )

Curses! When I know I have to review a book I try not to read a review until I’ve written mine. Imagine my chagrin when, sitting peacefully eating lunch and reading Private Eye, I found that the current issue’s victims of ‘What You Didn’t Miss Pt.94’ are William Boyd and Sebastian Faulks. The Eye’s literary pages exist only to condemn. Much is fair game, e.g. celebrity memoirs by people you’ve never heard of but the writers really like to get their blue-pencil-and-knife-wielding claws into an esteemed literary author. (For as long as I’ve been reading the magazine they’ve had it in for Martin Amis.) In this issue (1479), William Boyd’s Love is Blind is linked with Faulks’ Paris Echo, each book having the alleged fault of ‘La Surabondance de Detail’, as a Paris restaurant is amusingly named in the clever pastiche of the books.

I disagree that there can be too much detail (of the kind the writer describes) in a novel. Writers! Don’t, please, tell me ‘she was well dressed’, ‘the garden was full of bright flowers’ or ‘they ate their meal in silence’. The novelist who doesn’t describe what the lady wore, which flowers were in the garden and what the characters ate is in my opinion failing in his or her duty to the reader. There is a lot of detail in Love is Blind, for example about piano tuning, but I found it anything but boring.

The book’s hero, Brodie Moncur, comes from a large motherless family living in a bleak manse. The children (now adult) are dominated by a bullying, drunken father, who nevertheless draws large crowds to hear his hellfire sermons. Brodie is the only one to get away, by working as a piano tuner in Edinburgh (he has perfect pitch). He is sent to Paris to work in the office there and his adventures begin. After an unfair dismissal, he begins working for a virtuoso pianist known as ‘the Irish Liszt’. Unfortunately for him, he falls madly and permanently in love with a Russian woman who lives with the famous pianist and his menacing brother. The group travel Europe, spending much time in Russia until events there lead Brodie and his love Lika to wander Europe, always on the run, never feeling safe. Because of his poor health, Brodie ends up in the Andaman Islands, working for an anthropologist. No spoilers, but the ending is very sad. William Boyd has said that Brodie is ‘an innocent’ and sure enough, time and again I was thinking, ‘silly boy, can’t you see that …?’ Well written, like all Boyd’s books, I thought it was beautiful and enjoyed it.
I read this thanks to NetGalley.

This children’s book is the best thing I’ve read all month and will probably be one of my books of the year. I’ve been a great admirer of Hilary McKay since first reading The Exiles years ago and this book is what you’d expect from her: well written and full of characters you care about. The story begins in the early years of the twentieth century, which fills the adult reader with the dread of foreknowledge. First, there’s Peter and Clarry, brother and sister living with their distant and uncaring father in a cold and neglected house. The children live for their annual visit to their grandparents in Cornwall, where they find sun, sea and endless happy days with their cousin Rupert, a golden boy. Later, there’s Simon, ‘the bony one’, Peter’s schoolfriend and Simon’s sister Vanessa, who becomes Clarry’s best friend. The relations between these five children take the story into their adulthood.

Clarry is an adorable heroine. She’s loving, even when she gets little return for her love from an indifferent father and bad-tempered brother and unquestioningly accepting of the hardness of her life. Luckily, after meeting Vanessa, she determines to go to the Grammar School, where she turns out to be clever. Her father considers education for girls a waste of time but with the help of teachers and Peter, Clarry learns to be ambitious. Poor girl; she’s so badly dressed, so naïve, so anxious to help and please everyone. This makes her sound like a horrid little prig but she so isn’t.

By the time war breaks out, only Rupert is old enough to fight. The others are all still at school and Peter can never be a soldier because of a crippled leg. Life on the home front consists of endless making do, worrying, writing letters to the front and for Vanessa, nursing. Naturally, no one at home can imagine the horrors of the Western Front and Rupert does not enlighten them. Tragedy, humour, love and friendship are all mixed together in a very enjoyable way.

I do have a caveat. The publishers aim this book at nine to eleven-year-olds. When I was nine I had frightened myself reading Jane Eyre and Oliver Twist but most of my fiction reading consisted of happy family stories by Monica Edwards, Noel Streatfeild and Jane Shaw. How would I have coped with slaughtered horses, massacred men and homosexuality? I can’t imagine. Modern children are more exposed to horrors than we were and it’s up to parents to decide whether a book like this is nightmare-inducing or life-enhancing. I think the latter.

I read this thanks to the publishers and NetGalley and it will be out on 20th September. Only a month to wait!

I’ve just finished The Clockmaker's Daughter, after galloping through it in about two days, and am marvelling at the complexity of the plotting. Layer upon layer of stories about people from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, all linked by a connection with a magical house, Birchwood Manor and a priceless jewel, the Radcliffe Stone. At the heart of the book is a heart-breaking tragedy which influences the lives of all the other characters. The reader is left guessing for a long while before that particular secret is revealed; I’m only sorry I did guess it. The many characters remain with you: all so different and all interesting and sympathetic. This is the perfect long read and I think it’s Kate Morton’s best yet.

If you like a long book with a lot in it and can tolerate the supernatural, this is for you. Don’t be put off if, like me, you’re tired of novels with ‘wife’ or ‘daughter’ in the title. It’s a pity it’s not out until September as it’s just right for long, hot days. I read it thanks to NetGalley.

Coming Home to the Comfort Food Café, Debbie Johnson
Murder isn’t Easy, Richard Hull
Birds, Beasts and Relatives, Gerald Durrell
The Garden of the Gods, Gerald Durrell
The Durrells of Corfu , Michael Haag
A Month in the Country, J L Carr
The Lost Letters of William Woolf, Helen Cullen
In Farleigh Field: A novel of World War 11, Rhys Bowen
The Silver Music Box, (Silver Music Book Series Book 1) Mina Baites
Old Baggage , Lissa Evans
The Woman in White , Wilkie Collins
Crooked Heart, Lissa Evans
The Only Story, Julian Barnes
( opinions )

Once you start reading a book by Mick Herron, it’s very hard to stop. I did try rationing myself, so as to prolong the reading pleasure, but it was no good. London Rules is the fifth Jackson Lamb mystery, about the failed secret service agents, known as Slow Horses, who work in Slough House (great name), under the supervision of the superb Jackson Lamb, a man of repulsive habits and apparent laziness, who nevertheless is always in the right place at the right time. He constantly abuses his minions yet will defend them against the might of Regent’s Park, where the top spooks work.

This book, like the others, opens with a terrorist incident which totally misleads the reader about its perpetrators and their aims. It then moves, in what has become a familiar Dickensian trick in these novels, to positing some entity, perhaps a cat but in this case the dawn, which explores and describes Slough House. This takes time and sets the pattern for the contradiction in the novels: the apparently slow narration of what are action-packed stories. Someone is out to murder Roddy Ho, the computer genius of Slough House, who is a walking deluded giant ego, generally loathed by his colleagues. What has he got mixed up in? The Slow Horses work out what it is and follow the trail but needless to say, they mess (euphemism) things up as usual. It’s so enjoyable to see Lamb yet again taking on ‘Lady Di’ and other grandees of the Service, and winning. As I’ve said before, one of the great pleasures of these books is that they are both exciting spy stories and funny; Lamb is very funny.

London Rules? They vary throughout the book but the first seems to be ‘cover your arse’. There’s a lot of covering to do, as the Service seems to be an institution based on back stabbing and looking after number one. If you’re new to these books, I recommend starting with the first, Slow Horses. What a treat it is to come to them for the first time. I read this book courtesy of the publishers and NetGalley and it’s out on 15th February.

Michael Innes (the academic J I M Stewart), is hardly a neglected crime writer; I’ve had a lot of his books in green Penguin crime editions over the years and see that I still have a couple after numerous book purges. The Daffodil Affair was first published in 1942 and has now been reissued by Ipso Books, ‘a digital publishing company, dedicated to bringing readers dynamic writing from classic and contemporary authors.’ It begins so well. A young London girl disappears, presumed abducted. This is a matter for Scotland Yard detective Hudspith, who is obsessed by the terrible things that happen to girls. Almost simultaneously, an apparently valueless horse called Daffodil is stolen. This sends Innes’ hero Appleby up to Yorkshire at the request of his aunt, whose friend is upset by the loss of her favourite carriage horse. On a detour in Harrogate, Appleby fortuitously witnesses the disappearance of another girl, one with the reputation of being a witch. Back in London, an entire eighteenth century house, reputedly haunted, just disappears. What can be the connection between these strange events? Everything is set up for an Appleby investigation of something extraordinary.

Unfortunately, this is where the book lost me. We are to believe that an important man like Appleby would look into horse theft. Then, which really stretches credulity, that two Scotland Yard men travel to South America, in wartime, in pursuit of horse, girls and house, with no evidence of a crime. More, they travel in company with the people responsible and know they are doing so and might get bumped off at any moment. We then spend an uncomfortable time travelling up an unnamed South American river full of alligators to an unnamed jungle area full of ‘savages’. The crime is quite outside the scope of normal detective work. At one point, Hudspith says, ‘We’re in a sort of hodge-podge of fantasy and harumscarum adventure that isn’t a proper detective story at all. We might be by Michael Innes.’
‘Innes? I’ve never heard of him.’ Replies Appleby. Clever. The whole book is clever, full of allusions for those who get them. Of course, Appleby solves the case but the greatest mystery remains (for me), how did they get the horse back to England?

I admit that a lot of my disappointment with the book is due to my irrational dislike of anything to do with South American jungles. I always think of The Man Who Liked Dickens. If you have no such prejudices, this is a witty and entertaining novel. I read it thanks to NetGalley.

Perhaps I should give these two a try and see if I can still read Innes.