Imposter Syndrome - Joseph Knox

 I've now read four out of five Knox novels.   I remain somewhat ambivalent.   He is clearly a first-rate writer; his literary style is excellent.   He has a gift for titles.   You get hooked in by his storytelling but, in the end, it's often not quite as good as it seems.

Imposter Syndrome is a perfect example.   Great title.   We get instantly buttonholed by his narrator and swept along by a twisty storyline.   But yet again, when everything is unravelled, it turns out to be ever so slightly silly.   Obviously I won't say why.   Read it for yourself and make your own judgements.

Lynch is a con man who, in the best Hitchcockian tradition, gets involved in his next scam by accident.   He literally bumps into a beautiful woman in the lobby of the Heathrow Sofitel and she mistakes him for her long-losr brother.   This is not the silliness I mentioned earlier; all such adventures srart with a jaw-dropping coincidence and rely on the general view that 'coincidences happen, don't they?'   Bobbie Pierce, the beautiful woman, goes one step further.   She tattoos a broken heart under Lynch's eye to improve the resemblance to missing Heydon.   She then introduces him to the remaining members of the super-rich, dysfunctional Pierce family.   The mother, retired movie star Miranda, offers Lynch £35,000 and free tattoo removal to recover Heydon's bag from a local moneylender.   The bag contains Heydon's phone and a video message recorded on the night he disappeared.

Lynch is hooked and digs ever deeper into the mystery.   Because everybody involved is super rich, we get private security operators, millionaires who keep themselves young with blood transfusions from their twin sons, ex-SAS psychos who now run hi-tech solution companies for the stressed over-wealthy.   There is violence and gore and compelling characters (including the occasional dud, like the wannabe Tech Bro who uses the surname Control).   It all moves at an exhilerating pace.   I wasn't at all surprised at who was responsible for it all, but nor was I convinced.   Great fun, yes.   Classic of the genre, not quite.

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ALSO by Joseph Knox and reviewed on this blog: Sirens, Smiling Man, True Crime Story.   Use the search box on the right---

Bust - Ken Bruen & Jason Starr

 Ken Bruen, who died in March 2025, was known this side of the Atlantic for his Jack Taylor series, which was dramatised for TV with Iain Glen and not adequately promoted.   Bruen later moved in New York literary circles and as such collaborated with Jason Starr on the Max and Angela trilogy (actually a tetralogy - there is a fourth) for the magnificent Hard Case Crime brand.   The first three are now collected in one volume as Supermax.  Bust is the series opener.

Max Fisher is a selfmade tech millionaire with failing health and a wife he has come to dislike.   He begrudges Dierdre the half of his fortune he would lose in a divorce.   Meanwhile he is very much enjoying the affair he is having with his PA, an Irish-Greek redhead called Angela who makes the most of what nature gave her, plus a little enhancement up front.   If only Dierdre was out of the way, Max would marry Angela in a heartbeat.   Luckily, Angela knows someone who can help with that.

Enter Dillon an expat Irish psycho-killer with a ruined mouth and a yen to become a poet.   Dierdre is duly disposed of.   Then a former US sniper and smash-and-grab merchant called Bobby Rosa, now confined to a wheelchair, looks up his old friend Victor Gianetti, now working as a glorified bellhop in a New York hotel.   Bobby's big idea is to use Victor's pass key to grab photos of couples booking a room for the afternoon and blackmail them.   His first attempt catches Max and Angela hard at it.   Bobby recognises Max from the news.  Bobby's boat has come in big time.

Unfortunately both Bobby and Dillon share Max's entusiasm for Angela (not that either of them would ever contemplate marrying her).   That's inevitably going to lead to complications.

I very much enjoyed Bust.   The collaboration between Bruen and Starr is seamless.   The dialogue is snappy, the characters well-drawn.   A morant humour runs throughout.   I particularly enjoyed the chapter epigraphs, which are quotes from other contemporary crime noir writers (including one from Bruen himself).

Blacktop Wasteland - S A Cosby

 I picked this up by chance in my local library - and what a treat it turned out to be!   I recently lost a week trying to cme to terms with William Faulkner's Absolom, Absolum (great writing but the action pushed so far back I simply couldn't engage).   Blacktop Wasteland is set in a similar landscape but seen from a very different viewpoint.

To start with, the majority of characters are (like the author) black.   Beauregard 'Bug' Montage learnt how to be a wheelman from his long-vanished father Ant.   Indeed he served a manslaughter sentence in youth detention for running down a bunch of crooks threatening to kill Ant.   Now he runs an auto repair shop in Red Hill with his cousin Kelvin and lives in a double-wide with his wife Kia and two boys.   But he still has the car he did the killing with and races it sometimes in outlaw muscle-car drags.

A rival repair shop has opened up in town.   Beauregard's business takes a hit.   Debts are mounting.   Then Ronnie Sessions turns up with a diamond heist for which he needs the best possible wheelman, which is Bug.   Everyone knows Ronnie Sessions is white trash.   He still owes Bug for the last job they did together.   But Bug is desperate for ready cash.   One big score will clear all his problems and allow him to refurbish his shop and thus see off the competition.   And it turns out the hit is much bigger than anyone thought.   Problem is, the jewelry store that held it was a front for mob moneylaundering.

The standout element of Blacktop Wasteland is the way Cosby handles the driving action.   He takes us all the way into Bug's mind as he's doing it, the rational decision-making process and the visceral thrill alongside.   We speed with Bug.   We become totally invested in the outcome.   Despite the brutality, the unsparing treatment of the ripples which spread out from his illegal actions, we want him to win.

Blacktop Wasteland is no mean debut.   I'm looking out for Cosby's next.

Unhinged - Jorn Lier Horst and Thomas Enger

 What is it with senior Norwegian police officers and their pesky daughters who keep getting kidnapped by the deranged?   I can explain that.   It's not Norwegians per se; it's Jorn Lier Horst's personal hang-up which he has brought over to this collaboration with Thomas Enger, one of whose books I read so long ago that I can't remember if he has any similar baggage.

That said, the device is taken considerably further in Unhinged.   Iselin Blix is a trainee detective, so her involvement is less awkward.   She lodges with her father's protegee Sofia Kovic.   Kovic is looking into a few cold cases.   Someone breaks into the flat and executes her.   He also attacks Iselin but she manages to fight him off.   Alexander Blix is giving a speech to a class of students, which means he misses a number of telephone calls about the attack.   He is late to the scene.   He takes charge of the investigation.

Emma Ramm is a news blogger who has obviously worked with Blix in previous novels.   She is friends with both Kovic and Iselin.   There is no suggestion of a romantic interest with Blix.   She is much younger than him.   Indeed he rescued her from something horrible when she was five.   In so doing, he killed one of her abusers. 

So Blix asks Emma to accompany Iselin to the regular police trauma counsellor.   The session finishes early and Emma is not in the waiting room when Iselin leaves.   Iselin wanders out onto the street and is snatched in broad daylight, bundled into a stolen car and driven away.   Emma and Blix both miss the speeding vehicle by seconds.

The outcome of all this is only one half of the book.  The first half is framed by Blix's interrogation by Bjarne Brogeland of Kripos, the National Criminal Investigation Service.   This is a proper grilling - Bliz is the one under investigation, having apparently shot and killed someone else.  The device is really well used and adds another level of intrigue and darkness to events.

The second half is the hunt for those behind the murders and abduction.   it is well enough handled and Emma plays a more significant role, but I have to say it is not as thrilling as the first half.   Overall, though, I really enjoyed Unhinged.   A proper police thriller that is properly thrilling.    I shall certainly look out for more.   Apparently Death Deserved was the first Blix/Ramm novel, Smoke Screen second.

PS: Scarred was the Thomas Enger novel I reviewed on this blog back in February 2015.   I didn't much like it but I did admire Enger's writing style.

Deep Shelter - Oliver Harris

 Deep Shelter is the middle novel of Harris's Nick Belsey trilogy.   Belsey is on restricted duties.   He sees a speeding BMW and gives chase,   The chase ends, the BMW gets out and legs it into what Belsey knows is a blind alley down the side of Costa Coffee - and disappears.

Belsey eventually discovers an entrance to the underground network that lies beneath London, not just the Underground itself, but also the abandoned mail rail system and bunkers built during WW2 and expanded during the Cold War.    Belsey decides it would be a cool idea to take his new girlfriend down there for a date.   While they are down there, the date gets snatched, abducted.   Ultimately Belsey gets an email.   The man he chased, who calls himself Ferryman, has the girl and wants Belsey to come and find her at Site 3.

Belsey of course goes off the radar.   Starts digging into the little information that exists about the subterranean network.   A former spy chief is dumped, naked and dead, behind Centre Point in the middle of London - and all traces spirited away by what looks like the emergency services and isn't.   Very high, very secret police departments start taking an interest in Belsey's case.   His sergeant, and former lover, Kirsty Craik is also taken, first by Ferryman and then by the aforementioned hush-hush squad.   Belsey is sent everywhere, from London homeless shelters to a remote village in Wiltshire as he tries to impose order on chaos.

I love stories of alt-London, secret London, the 'other' megapolis.   I don't know that I have come across a better, more thought-through version than this.   It is also a first rate thriller.   Oliver Harris is a top writer, perhaps the top in contemporary crime fiction and bloody good in spy fiction too.

The Hollow Man - Oliver Harris

 The Hollow Man is the first of Harris's Nick Belsey series.   Belsey is already deep in trouble when we meet him.   He's up in front of Internal Inquiries and knows it's only a matter of time before he's sacked.   He's basically filling in time when he gets the call about a missing person in The Bishops Avenue, one of select Hampstead's most exclusive addresses.

The misper is a reclusive Russian oligarch called Devereux.   Even the maid has never set eyes on him.   So Belsey does what we'd all do under the circumstances.   He moves in and starts taking over Devereux's home, belongings and identity.   If he can parlay the latter into, say, a hundred grand, he can quit Britain for somewhere warmer, with no extradition treaty.

But then a sniper assassinates an eighteen year-old girl in a local Starbucks, right in front of Belsey, who remains a good enough cop not to let such things pass.   He gets drawn deeper when he realizes that the girl was an escort claiming to be in love with Devereux.   There's also the complication that Belsey has found Devereux sitting in his own safe room at the house with his throat slashed open.

Belsey digs and uncovers conspiracies and cons involving international high finance, high stakes gambling in highly unusual locations, and high level corruption in the City Council.   It's complicated, gripping, and occasionally comical.   The characters leap off the page.   The pace is incredible - and I'm reasonably sure this was Harris's debut.   I've read the third Belsey novel and also the first of Harris's spy novels.   He is different and extremely good.   Thriller is a term used too easily.   Oliver Harris is one of the few actually writing them right now.

The House of Fame - Oliver Harris

 I first stumbled across Oliver Harris by chance - I picked up, and was enthralled by, his spy novel, A Shadow Intelligence, last September (see my review below).   I said then I would be interested in his earlier Nick Belsey novels - and here we are with the third of them (out of four to date).   It was written in 2014 and seems oddly dated.   Not in style, content or pace, but nevertheless dated.   I suspect it is the sort of police corruption involved, the old-style heavy-handed fit-ups and sharing out the booty afterwards.   To my mind that's the Met circa 1980, the era of The Sweeney.   Nowadays the Met is corrupt by bending over backwards to the government of the day, beating up the weakest member of any protesting group, and - because the leadership is political and therefore weak - recruiting psychopaths and deviants and giving them guns.

Belsey's antagonist and former mentor, Geoff Bullseye McGovern, is the psychopath.   He recruited Nick to the dark side back in the day.   Nick is now suspended, under heavy investigarion, and squatting in a disused copshop in Hampstead (very contemporary).   An oldish lady bangs on the door, so confused she still thinks that's how to contact the forces of law and order.   Her thirty-something son has gone missing.   Nick has nothing better to do, so offers to help.   The son seems to be obsessed with media star Amber Knight, whose upcoming wedding is the talk of the tabloids.   Missing Mark Doughty seems to be a little too interested.

So Nick wanders the short distance from Mark's mum's council flat to Amber's mansion in Primrose Hill - and blunders into a crazed celebritiy cult in which dissenters are murdered.   Bullseye McGovern is the SIO.   Nick finds himself the chief suspect.

What really caught my eye was the way that Nick never tries to disguise who he really is.  He uses his real name, sometimes tells people that he's a cop facing serious jail time, other times let them go with their first assumptions.   He does much of his investiagting on his phone.   It's fascinating how skillfully Harris steers us through the madness.   And the ending is not only unexpected, it's sheer bloody brilliance.

So that's two series by Oliver Harris I am now obliged to pursue, the spy novels featuring Elliot Kane, and the other novels in the Belsey series.   It sounds like hard work but, hey, somebody's got to do it.

Drive - James Sallis

 Drive (2005) is the best known novel by James Sallis, mainly thanks to the 2011 movie, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, starring Ryan Gosling.   It's the story of the unnamed Driver who runs away to Hollywood as a teenager with dreams of being a stunt driver in the movies.   With the help of established stunt man Shannon, he gets a chance.  Driver himself develops a sideline as a getaway driver.   He doesn't want to know about the crime; he just drives.   One heist goes badly wrong.  Crime boss Nino refuses to pay Driver's fee.  Bad idea...

Drive  is contemporary US noir at its very best.  James Sallis is the best US writer of noir crime since James Ellroy.   Some of us would argue that he is as good as Ellroy in the early novels, a lot better than Ellroy this century.  Drive is short, taut, cleverly structured, and packs a terrific punch.

Past Life - Dominic Nolan

 Dominic Nolan's debut novel is standout.  A brilliant concept - a cop who has forgotten everything about her former life who seeks to find herself by completing her last case - brilliantly carried out.  

Abigail Boone is investigating a missing person case when she is kidnapped, abused, and thrown out of the window of a block of flats.  Her injuries alone would probably have ended her police career but there's the added problem of amnesia.  Apart from the last few minutes of her ordeal - trying to escape, falling - there's nothing.  Her husband and teenage son are strangers.  She now thinks of herself as Boone, a new person.

A couple of friends stick by her - an exploited young woman she rescued and her gangster father; one fellow female cop.  Husband and son do their best but Boone cannot find the love that must have been there before.  Slowly but surely she tracks down the other woman who was in the flat the night she fell, then the gangsters themselves.  The climax is genuinely thrilling but Nolan also manages to keep the tension taut for all the 400 pages, which is some achievement for a first-time novelist.

I have read a number of highly-touted young British crime writers over the last couple of years.  I have now read two of Dominic Nolan's three novels and have made up my mind: Nolan is the one to follow.

Vine Street - Dominic Nolan

 An absolute stunner!  One of The Times' Crime Books of the Year and no wonder.  I was unfamiliar with Dominic Nolan but now I am mad keen to read his two earlier books Past Life and After Dark.

Vine Street has everything we could want in contemporary British noir - metropolitan vice, gangsters, dodgy coppers, serial sex murders - and a truly jaw-dropping plot twist about three-quarters of the way through.  Vine Street spans seventy years, from 1935 to 2005, mostly concentrating on the Fascist ascendancy before WWII and the war itself.  The lead characters are Leon Geats, a copper born to police the mean streets of Soho, his assistant Constable Billie Massie (female) and Mark Cassar, formerly of Vice, now risen to the Flying Squad and dreaming of greater things.  The three of them come together over the death of a whore which leads to a crew of French gangsters.  The trail runs cold but the bodies keep coming, into the Blitz and even after the war.  It is in the mid-Sixties that they finally uncover a suspect and even then there are secrets to be kept.

Six hundred plus pages of tense narrative, beautiful prose, staggering plot.  A work of pure genre genius.

Robert B Parker's Payback - Mike Lupica

 Lupica has continued Parker's series about Boston PI Sunny Randall. Parker himself only wrote six of these and what was impressive to me was the depth of the backstory here.  Sunny Randall is connected to the Boston Irish mob through her ex-husband, the Boston Irish cops through her father.  Her wingman Spike is a gay restauranteur.  And the current man in her life is - yes, it's Jesse Stone, perhaps because by the time Payback came out in 2021 Mike Lupica was also writing the Jesse Stone continuation series.

I admit female PIs are not always my first choice for recreational reading, but I took to Sunny straight away.  Lupica has a way with characterisation through dialogue and internal monologue that is very persuasive.

The story here is international money-laundering, Russian mobsters, high stakes poker and frat boy hedge funds - all set against a background of the Covid 19 pandemic.  And, just in passing, while others write novels about the pandemic, Lupica has the skills to make it simply the background.  Because of the pandemic, chancers and gamblers are running out of money and have to take risks, robbing Peter to pay Paul - or, more appropriate in this case, Pyotr and Sergei.

There is bags of action, three interconnected lines of investigation and lots of vivid images of the Boston setting.  I enjoyed it hugely.

Streets of Darkness - A A Dhand

 

Bradford is burning.  A A Dhand knows how to set the clock running and amp up the tension.  Detective Harry Virdee is on his early morning run when he finds the crucified man - a pillar of the Asian community, hugely wealthy and the winner of last night's Parliamentary by-election.  Race was the issue in the election - the city was stuffed with BNP activists.  And now Shakeel Ahmed has been murdered in the most brutal, blasphemous way.  Today is Eid.  The Asian community will be celebrating.  The BNP is planning to march...

Harry is suspended but his boss gives him a career-saving mission - to find notorious racist headcase Lucas Dwight, recently released after serving fourteen years - the only nutcase mad enough for a murder like this.  Meanwhile, Harry's wife is about to give birth and wants to celebrate Eid properly.

This is a fascinating read, the best launch of a crime series I've read in ages.  Bradford is Dhand's city, this is his community.  Everything rings true.  Harry is Sikh but has married outside the community - Saima, his wife, is Muslim.  For that, both families have rejected them - all except Harry's businessman brother Ronnie, with whom he shares a dark secret.  The other characters are striking - Dwight, the boxer with a murderous liver punch, has changed in prison.  Taxi driver Bashir Iqbal, ostensibly Dwight's counterpoint in the Asian community, is truly terrifying.  The pace is relentless, the tension at times overwhelming.  You wonder, how much more twisted can this get?  Edge of the seat time.

The Chemistry of Death - Simon Beckett

 

The Chemistry of Death is the first novel in Beckett's series about the forensic anthropologist Dr David Hunter.  We begin with Hunter on the run from his high-pressure job following the accidental deaths of his wife and daughter in a car crash.  Hunter understands better than anyone the processes of death and decomposition but has no idea how to cope with simple human grief.  So he reverts to his original profession as a GP and joins the rural practice of wheelchair-bound Henry Maitland in the sleepy Norfolk village of Manham.  Three years on and David has almost assimilated into the community.  Then a local woman goes missing, turning up dead several days later.  Routine inquiries bring police to the local surgery and DI Mackenzie discovers David's past.  David tries not to get involved but inevitably gets drawn in.  He knew this woman - they flirted briefly - and the clues, such as they are, are most definitely in David's area of expertise.  Then another woman disappears, and a third - the young schoolteacher Jenny, the day after she and David became a couple...

The level of scientific detail is impressive, capitalising on the novel's USP.  The characterisation is good, the writing style just right, but what makes the book is the plotting.  Anyone in the village could be the killer and Beckett manipulates us into considering the most likely suspects one by one.  The actual killer is fair game but then comes a killer twist.  Eminently satisfactory.

Beckett has written other books and is by no means a beginner.  He risks what many beginners often stumble over - occasional switches from the first-person narrative of David Hunter to third-person accounts of two of the women who disappear.  He just about pulls it off.  These episodes are not essential to the novel but they do add to the horror quotient and one towards the end is a clever red herring. Highly recommended.

Blind Eye - Stuart MacBride

A Logan McRea story from 2009, this is MacBride on top of his form - dark, witty, and set in Aberdeen. Polish people are turning up with their eyes removed and the sockets burnt. Some of them survive. Inevitably, McRae, back from sick leave (having eaten human flesh in the previous novel) gets seconded to DCI Finnie's team. Meanwhile his immediate boss, DCI Roberta Steel, is pressuring him for a donation to her wife Susan's dream of a baby. On the positive side, his luck is in with the tattooed girl from IB and he uncovers a lead which gets him a free trip to Poland.

In Poland he meets a hot Polish policeman and a blinded bomb maker. This leads to McRae and the girl getting blown up - and we're still only about two-thirds of the way through the book.

I have always enjoyed MacBride. For me, he has overtaken Ian Rankin at the top of the Scottish crime fiction tree. Rankin's problem is that his hero has become aged and inactive. That hasn't yet happened with McBride, but Blind Eye reminds me how great he was in his pomp and that things have faded slightly over more recent novels. Still, as with Rankin, I won't be able to resist new instalments.

Rather be the Devil - Ian Rankin

This is the 2016 instalment of Rebus and continues the high standard of recent Rebus novels. Again, Rebus is shadowed by the insipid Malcolm Fox, former Professional Standards chief, now attached to the Scottish Crime Campus at Gartcosh. Fox is meant to be the antithesis of Rebus, the good cop who plays by the rules, but he never manages to do so and is far too dull to do anything but get in Rebus's way. This was not the case in the two standalone Fox novels, The Complaints and The Impossible Dead, both of which I greatly enjoyed, but the sooner he is ditched from the Rebus series the better. The only contrast we need with Rebus is his former oppo Siobhan Clarke, whose character continues to add richness to successive novels.


The structure here is complex. Rebus is taking his mind off his health problems by looking into an almost forty year old cold case, the murder of Maria Turquand, strangled in a city centre hotel full of bankers and pop stars and crooks. The police, meanwhile, are investigating an attack on local gangster Darryl Christie. His gangland mentor, Big Ger Cafferty, is a prime suspect and so is Anthony Brough, the missing grandson of banking buccaneer Sir Magnus Brough, who was peripherally involved in the Turquand case insofar as his deputy was married to Maria. Thus Rebus is drawn in to the inquiry.


In fact, the cold case storyline rather fizzles out. The main story, however, is full of fun. Big Ger himself plays a full and active role - Rankin is so taken with him, indeed, that this edition contains a short story 'Cafferty's Day' "exclusive to Waterstone's" (which is not as impressive as it might sound, since Waterstone's is the owner of W H Smith's and now Foyles' and is thus the only British mass market book chain). In fact the story is neither here nor there. It could have been worse - at least it ties in to the main novel.


In summary, then: a top quality police procedural, as good as anything similar in the market and a good deal better than most. Rankin remains on top form, which is saying something given that 2017 was the 30th anniversary of the first Rebus.

Savages - Don Winslow

Savages (2010) comes between The Power of the Dog and The Cartel. It is connected in so far as it is set against the cartel wars in Mexico which are the subject matter of the two linked novels. Some of the key characters in those get a mention in this. Otherwise Savages is very different. The Power of the Dog and The Cartel are like James Ellroy on good cocaine rather than bad speed. Savages has flavours of Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen and the texture of George V Higgins stripped down.
What? you wonder. Can you get more stripped down than George V? Winslow can. As The Donald might say, Bigly.


As an indication, we have 290 chapters in 302 pages. Some lines are so fragmentary they don't have full stops. Sometimes Winslow takes the time to explain the etymology of some of his acronyms. Ophelia's mom, for example, is Pacu - Passive Aggressive Queen of the Universe. Others you are left to work out for yourself. Some passages are presented as movie script - a fun inside joke once you realise that Oliver Stone had bought the movie rights before Savages was even published. I have mentioned the Stone movie before. It's his best in twenty years and well worth a watch. But it's not as good as the novel.


Ben and Chon grow dope in South Orange County, the best dope on the market. Ben is a third world activist, Chon an ex-SEAL who has served in all the nastiest theatres of post-millennium war. Ben and Chon are best buds from childhood. They are both in love with Ophelia, who calls herself simply O. O loves them both equally.


But then the Baja Cartel seeks to muscle in on their action. Ben and Chon say no. They are happy to walk away and leave the Baja Cartel to it, but the Cartel says no. They want to market Ben's genetically modified blow. They want the boys' market, they want their people. And to make their point, they kidnap O and threaten to dismember her with a chainsaw.


Which is when things get really nasty...


The pace is relentless, the action bloody. Yet Winslow's gift is to stay perfectly balanced on the thin line between violence and schlock. Even the worst of the bad guys have backstory, people they love. The characterisation is rich and varied. It is, in short, a masterpiece.

The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths - Harry Bingham

This is the third in Bingham's superb series (I know I'm reading them in reverse order, but what can you do?). It is slightly better than The Dead House, which I thought was brilliant, and just as good as The Deepest Grave.


The premise - that Fiona is given the chance to enhance her skills with an intensive course in undercover policing, then gets to do it for real in a multinational computer scam - allows Bingham to explore his character's tangled psyche. We already know that Fiona is 'different' psychologically, but the assumed personalities she has to take on for the sake of the story throw into sharp relief just how shallowly-grounded her actual personality is. Fiona Grey, for example, is a muted version of Fiona Griffiths, Jessica Taylor is Fiona Griffiths turned up to eleven. And of course all this is described in first person, present tense, by the Fiona Griffiths we are used to.  Her underlying disorder, Cotard's Syndrome, which put her in the psychiatric hospital as a teenager, bubbles up throughout. No wonder boyfriend, wannabe fiance Buzz stands no chance of a permanent relationship. No wonder hitman Vic very nearly wins the girl.


Again, I cannot recommend the Fiona Griffiths series highly enough. If you like dark crime fiction, you really must check it out asap.

The Dead House - Harry Bingham

Harry Bingham is one of those relatively new crime writers I've seen reviewed and wondered about reading. I have to admit that what put me off was the female lead. Not that I have anything against women detectives - but few male authors can really do great things with them; even as a male reader I get the feeling there is always something missing.

Good news - Harry Bingham is an exception to that rule of thumb. DS Fiona Griffiths is a fabulous series character. Yes, there remains something missing but that is expressly the point. The entirety of her life before adoption is missing. The people who adopted her, who love her and whom she loves in return, have dubious connections. There is a massive backstory hanging over this, the fifth in the series, which - brilliantly - Bingham refers to but does not expound upon. He is playing the long game and we, as readers, are happy to trust him to reveal it when the time comes.


The setting is Wales - big city Wales (Cardiff) where Fiona is based, and the remote village of Ystradfflur, the valley of flowers, where she finds her crime scene. As Bingham puts it---

Deep Wales. Real Wales,

This is the Wales that pre-existed the Romans, that will outlast our foolish time on earth, our crawl across the face of this dark planet.

 In Ystradfflur is a Dead House, the place by the chapel where poor Victorian villagers could lay out their loved one for visits prior to burial. There lies a young blonde woman in a white dress ringed by candles. She has had high quality plastic surgery but hasn't shaved her legs recently. Fiona notices this because she spends the night with the corpse, who she decides to call Carlotta. She communes. She holds hands. And we start to realise just how strange and damaged Fiona really is.



The supporting characters are equally well drawn - vivid where they need to be, prosaic when their main purpose is the highlight the flaws in Fiona. The plotting is multi-layered and complex. The denouement is hinted at throughout but I certainly did not see it coming. I have read a lot of books in my life, averaging at least two a week over half a century and I have never ever seen that ploy used. Yet it works brilliantly. There is real danger for Fiona, real tension for us, both there and in the caving sequence and in her interaction with Len Roberts, the failed smallholding hill farmer who has gone primitive and who is suspected of dark deeds.



The best British crime novel I've read this year. Highly recommended.

 

Love Like Blood - Mark Billingham

Love Like Blood is by my calculation the fourteenth in Billingham's Tom Thorne series. What Billingham brought to the crime fiction table back in the early Noughties was contemporaneity.  His cops were good examples of the fictive type - conflicted, maverick, a little raucous - but the subject matter came straight from the headlines. That remains the case here, where Billingham takes on the culturally sensitive issue of honour killing. He adds a further twist which is horribly credible: few people in any community have the capacity to kill, extremely few could bring themselves to murder their own child - so what if someone offers to do it for them, for a price?

Brilliant.

The problem, though, is that after thirteen novels Billingham's characters have developed far too much back story which has to be acknowledged. It's a tricky balance for any series writer and Billingham doesn't quite pull it off. To be fair, he has given himself an extra problem in that Thorne is shacked up with Helen Weeks, his other series character, who is, I'm sorry to say, excruciatingly dull. Admittedly I am slightly biased in that I hate the dull-as-dishwater TV adaptation of In the Dark currently going out on BBC1, which even the great MyAnna Buring cannot save. To be fair to myself, I started Love Like Blood before the series started and it was only later that I realised the uninteresting woman in the novel was also the boring woman on TV. We also have the storyline of DI Nicola Tanner, whose partner has been murdered in their own home. It is Tanner who has the contract honour killing theory and she gets in contact with Thorne who is already investigating a possibly linked murder. This plot device works very well and is entirely credible, but again it provokes yet more back story and, ultimately, that proves to be the final straw - though I must say there is a staggering plot twist which brings all the storylines together at the end in a stroke of sheer brilliance.

Overall, then, Love Like Blood is good - very good in parts - but not great. There is an imbalance between exposition and action, and it tilts the wrong way, which is really unfortunate because Billingham is so good at action.

I expected brilliance from Billingham after something like twenty books in total, an assumption based, not unreasonably, on the promise of his first three, Sleepyhead, Scaredy Cat and Lazybones, all of which I really admired.

Savage Night - Allan Guthrie

This is a creditable effort at a Tartan Noir, well-written and intricately plotted. Sadly, it doesn't quite make it. It just doesn't have the side-of-the-mouth twang of proper noir.

The plot is grim but somehow underplayed. On the face of it, Savage Night is a revenge story. Jailbird Park believes, wrongly, that ex-tobacco smuggler Tommy Savage is responsible for the gangland murder of his daughter's boyfriend's father and embarks on a complex kidnap plot to exact financial retribution. Then his own son is accidentally caught in the crosshairs, which makes things personal. We then move to a narrative of two clans trying to extinguish one another. The twist which saves some and condemns others is left-field and I quite like it. The problem is, none of the characters is nasty enough to warrant the degree of carnage. They are insufficiently distinct to warrant our emotive investment. Fatally, they all speak the same, functional, unadorned plain English. OK, this is Edinburgh rather than Glasgow, to surely there is some form of local dialect?

Anyway, it rolls along. It keeps us entertained. It is all resolved within its own terms. The problem is, it lacks a final layer of dark polish.