Blogtour review - The Weekenders by David F Ross

The Weekenders (Raskine House, 1) 
David F Ross
Orenda Books, 27 February 2025
Available as: PB, 292pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN( PB): 9781916788305

I'm grateful to Orenda Books for sending me a copy of The Weekenders to consider for review, and to Anne of Random Things Tours for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

It's always great to see a new book from David F Ross and it's even better that this is the first of a trilogy. 

The Weekenders introduces us to the mysterious, troubling country mansion mansion Raskine House. I think I see thematic connections between the troubling goings on there and those in Ross's Welcome to the Heady Heights which was, like this book, partly set in 1960s Glasgow. There are also some common characters. So while she doesn't appear I have hopes that in later parts we may meet Barbara Sherman again.

While The Weekenders mostly takes place in the later 1960s, it also looks back to the Second World War where a central relationship - between Jamesie Campbell, later a Glasgow trades unionist and politician, and Michael McTavish - is forged when they meet as soldiers in the nightmare of the Italian campaign. Nobody comes out well from that section of the narrative, neither Campbell nor McTavish, nor the sadistic officers who pretty much betray them. Rather, these events are a bitter prelude to the later story. The writing here makes no bones about what happened in the war: at times the book is a hard read.

Later we see what the two men have become, and what Glasgow has become, both being discovered by two outsider figures, Stevie 'Minto' Milloy and Donald 'Doodle' Malpass. Milloy is an ex-footballer, dropped from the game after a cruel injury and turned reporter, while Malpass is a courtroom sketch artist who sometimes assists the police. Several years apart, the two investigate the murders of young foreign students which seem to be connected to Raskine House and its rumoured weekend no-holds-barred parties. (one of the links I saw to 'Heady Heights'). 

As a background to that, Ross brings alive a raucous, surface-confident, but, I felt, also a hurting, city which both Milloy and Malpass are part of but are also distanced from. They have their roles, yes, but there is an Establishment, which they're not in. Both men live in a sense on sufferance from that, as does John Meikle, the veteran reporter who's Milloy's mentor. It's an Establishment that has grown fat and canny over the centuries, profiting first from enslavement and Empire, then from war, and more recently, from the ideological polarisation of the 20th century. Money and power before ideology or truth, and these puppet masters aren't going to let go a whit of its money or power.

There is another darkness here too associated with Raskine House itself - a darkness which the muck-and-brass merchants don't wholly comprehend. In this book, Glasgow is far from a safe place, whether you're a visiting student, police, nosy reporter or even one of those who think they pull the strings. Glasgow itself will, I think, have the last word here.

If all that sounds rather remote and grim, this book was, as are all of Ross's stories, also immensely entertaining, featuring rich and vivid characters who don't so much populate the page as march off it and sit down with you for a drink and a chat. Their voices sing in your head, their lives move and affect, their fates - some of them - sadden you as if they were old friends. Ross shows us real people showing how their desire simply to live and enjoy that living is baffled, diverted, sometimes blocked, but never - until the last breath - wholly defeated. (Ross's characters are all the more real for speaking in authentic language).

I am really looking forward to the rest of this trilogy!

For more information about The Weekenders, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy The Weekenders from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith or Waterstones.

#Blogtour #Review - Small Bomb at Dimperley by Lissa Evans

Small Bomb at Dimperley
Lissa Evans
Doubleday, 5 September 2024
Available as: HB, 309pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9780857528292

I'm grateful to the publisher for sending me a copy of Small Bomb at Dimperley to consider for review, and to Anne for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

Small Bomb at Dimperley sees Lissa Evans returning to 1940s England with a new novel set just after the end of the Second World War. It’s a standalone, not part of the same sequence as Old Baggage, Crooked Heart and V For Victory although many of the same themes are here. We see the improvisational quality of life, especially for those on the margins (here, a woman who has to make her way through a world that doesn't want to admit she exists - or wouldn't if it knew that she was a single mother). We see people making do, adapting, living the hands they've been dealt. 

And we see them triumphing in odd, unexpected ways - even remaking themselves, admidst the societal dislocation and change of the war years and the immediate and postwar. 

Also evident is Evans’s ease with the setting and atmosphere as she unfolds her story in a decade that now seems so remote and different. It's only twenty years before I was born, but so much seems strange. It's not just distance in time, but a particular moment. The war is over, the future has not yet begun. A tide of change is poised, an Empire about to be dismantled - but it hasn't begun yet. The country is balanced, many wishing for a return to older ways, others already taking advantage of the new. I say Evans does this with ease, that isn't really fair, it must of course have  have taken fearsome amounts of research, of empathy, but to me the story feels very real (as did her earlier novels).

 

Small Bomb at Dimperley is set in rural Buckinghamshire. It's imbued with the rhythms and incidents of  a vanished world: ploughing competitions, knackers’ vans, market days that fill country towns with animals and farmers in damp tweed, a decaying country house, a decaying, cash-strapped gentry. The story follows the minorly aristocratic family which lives in that house and which has, due to an accumulation of deaths, ill-advised investments, and social change, come to the end of its financial road. They now face having to sell up. As a reader I had mixed feelings about that. These country houses and estates were often built on cleared villages, using wealth earned from exploitation abroad. Irene, ("My Lady") the dowager of the family (one of the dowagers - it's complicated) almost invites the thought: serves her right, as she looks down on the lower orders and plots an entitled future by marrying Valentine off to an heiress. 

Almost invites it. The redeeming quality of Irene is her tender care for her son, a young man who has a learning disability. The matter of fact moments between the two as they live their days are very touching. And Ceddy - Cecil - isn't a token figure here, he is a vital part of things.

Also appearing are Valentine, the reluctant heir to Dimperley, invalided out of the Army to manage the ruin that has been made of the family's finances and Zena, a no-nonsense young woman employed as secretary to eccentric Alaric. (He's writing a history of the family, which nobody will read). Zena has in effect found refuge at Dimperley, as will Priss and Kitty, Valentine's nieces, back from evacuation in the USA and full of modern ideas about showers and deodorant. Their mother, Barbara, occupies an uneasy space between Irene's disapproval and the adolescent scorn of her daughters. 

This is a gallery of smart, opinionated characters though they probably need an entire country house at their disposal or they'd all murder each other by page 2, and it isn't that sort of book at all. As it is, they have some space and Evans honours them all, pulling off what I always feel much be the most difficult trick a novelist can, persuading the reader to be interested in, and even sympathetic to, people who in real life one would avoid on principle. This is how we enter minds and hearts and begin to understand and appreciate others. This is the wonder of a great storyteller.

Small Bomb at Dimperley is a vivid, active book whose pages simply fly by. It has a subtle perspective combining as it does the outsider's critique of a society and a family - Kitty, Zena - the staunch traditionalist's defence of both - Alaric, Irene - and the pragmatism that just wants to keep the show on the road (Valentine, Barbara). It's not a social history, but at the same time, does tell us something about that pivotal time, about the choices that were made then, and about how they have cascaded down the years to influence the county we live in (well, that I live in) today.

There's also romance, a certain degree of growing-up, and a few shocks and surprises.

It is a wonderful read, great fun, and, in an undemonstrative way, rather moving.

For more information about Small Bomb at Dimplerley, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy Small Bomb at Dimperley from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith or Waterstones. Other online retailers are available.

#Review - The Witches of World War II by Paul Cornell et al

The Witches of World War II

Paul Cornell (words), Valeria Burzo (pencils), Jordie Bellaire (colours)
TKO Studios, 25 July 2023
Available as: PB, 160pp, e
Source: Purchased
ISBN(PB): 9781952203183

The Witches of World War II tugs at one of the many loose threads of that conflict - persistent rumours that alongside the familiar heroism, sacrifice and application of industry and science to winning the war, alongside the more shadowy departments of unorthodox warfare and military deception, the Allies used even stranger means - notably witchcraft.

You don't have to accept the supernatural or the power of magic to see that this is something that could really happen. Deep in the layers of psyops, it would surely have registered that at least some high-ranking Nazis fervently believed this stuff, and that very belief could be used against them. 

That paradox is at the heart of The Witches of World War II. Cornell has assembled here a crack team of practitioners and theorists from the occult world of the first half of the 20th century, and posed a "what if...?" about their potential use in warfare, and beyond that, about the nature of their own beliefs and the power of belief itself. Cornell acknowledges, as does the Afterword by Prof Ronald Hutton, that this group never actually met (unless the records of that meeting have been even more than carefully weeded) but we might imagine similar characters carrying out the actions described here, some of which are based on those persistent rumours...

So the premise is intriguing. That wouldn't though be enough, without Cornell's excellent story and its interpretation by the brilliant comic artists here, to produce the immersive and fun narrative that The Witches of World War II is. I felt it captured the spirit of that dangerous time, all done in muted khaki, green, brown and grey, as it introduces us not just to the would-be witches themselves but also to their world. That world includes the would-be upper class Quislings and fellow-travellers who would have sold their country out at the drop of a hat, if they could. Against these fifth-columnists, our hero, Doreen Valiente, shows steely nerve as she negotiates a maze of mirrors, never sure who is going to back her and who will betray her. 

A sceptic herself, Doreen encounters dangers including a curse that can only affect those who don't believe, and slippery customers like Aleister Crowley, the self-proclaimed Wickedest Man in the World. (Who, exactly, believes that they are themselves wicked? I was reminded of the "are we the baddies" sketch...) The double crosses, hints of things below the surface build tension, with the poignancy of Doreen's lost sweetheart giving the story real bite by reminding us that this isn't all some fantasy, that regardless of the occult and its reality or otherwise, real people suffered and died in those years.

With a complex plot, many twists and turns and layers of deception, it all makes for a rewarding read, with just that hint of mystery as to what really went on...

For more information about The Witches of World War II, see the author's website here.

#Blogtour #Review - The Grand Illusion by Syd Moore

The Grand Illusion (Section W, book 1)
Syd Moore
Magpie, 4 April 2024
Available as: HB, 368pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance e-copy
ISBN(HB): 9780861541607

I'm grateful to Syd Moore and to Magpie for giving me access to an advance e-copy of The Grand Illusion to consider for review, and to Anne Cater for inviting me to join the book's Random Things blogtour.

The Grand Illusion - set during the Second World War - takes place in the same world as Moore's Essex Witch mysteries (we meet Septimus!) It isn't I think a direct prequel - but this is the first of three, so who knows where things will go...

Daphne Devine is assistant to stage magician Jonty Trevelyan. Adept at being cut in half, tied up, and handling concealed doves, she's about to face a whole new scale of challenge as she and her boss are recruited to a shadowy branch of the UK's Security Service. In the first half of the book we're shown a bewildering number of different activities of Section W, with the two unclear exactly where they fit. I rather enjoyed this tour d'horizon, which creates an authentically wartime sense of barely-controlled chaos, of being sent from pillar to post and back again. Are they engaged in valuable work or is everyone just going round in circles? 

It's a world where the brilliant and war-winning plan may sit on the same table as the bonkers and time-wasting one. Indeed, they may come from the same pen, on the same day. There is a sense of near panic, of a nation and Government which are, behind Churchill's stirring rhetoric, ready to try anything that may bring victory, or avert defeat.

So we see elaborate deceptions, suited to a stage illusionist. These are things it's known took place (although my understanding is that some of the details have never been revealed). We also see more troubling plans - ostensibly directed at a known weakness of the Third Reich, its obsession with occult ritual and pseudohistory. Playing on such a weakness might seem wise, and again, Jonty's and Daphne's talents in illusion and deception might boost the effect of that, but is there more going on here besides? We are in the Essex Witches universe, after all.

Gradually, and teasingly, Moore creates a setting filled with distortions and red herrings, one where it's not clear just who is manipulating who. What matters more, illusion or reality? Is the febrile wartime atmosphere perhaps fertile ground for thinkers who are normally marginalised? Might they use it to their advantage, even if ostensibly what's going on is simply psyops? Just who is falling victim the that "grand illusion"?

Questions, questions - with some answers, but many, teasingly, withheld.

Everything that has happened may have a rational explanation. Or there may be other stuff going on. As tempting as it may be to rush through this book to the conclusion, it bears careful attention though because I think there are some clues... and I'll be looking forward to future novels in this series for some of those answers.

Turning to the characters, I loved Daphne. Trapped by circumstances in a difficult corner - her family connections make her an objection of suspicion to some, and give the Government leverage over her so that in many respects she's not free to say "no" when the Ministry comes knocking - she plays a difficult hand well. Even though those around her frequently underestimate her capabilities (being female, they often don't seem to expect much of her) she continually steps up and sees the way through. Jonty and the others are perhaps a bit less-well defined, but as Daphne is the focus that works fine for me. What does come through, as external circumstances get more desperate, is a rising sense of internal tension in Daphne. She's clearly being swept to some major trial or crisis and she responds to that knowledge, but Moore gives little away and while there is a respite by the end of the book I didn't think that matters had come to a head. In a story with plenty of menace, threats and talk of spies, Fifth-columnists and collaborators it isn't clear whether the threat is of espionage or the supernatural, or both, and I suspect there is more of it to come. 

I'm really looking forward to the next part of this series!

For more information about The Grand Illusion, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy The Grand Illusion from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

#Review - Murder Crossed Her Mind by Stephen Spotswood

Muder Crossed Her Mind (Pentecost and Parker, 4)
Stephen Spotswood
Headline, 7 December 2023
Available as: PB, 384pp audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781035409495

I'm grateful to Headline for providing me with an advance e-copy of Murder Crossed Her Mind to consider for review.

I'm a bit behind with reviewing (the end of 2023 was pretty intense work-wise and we are in the middle of planning a house move) so only just catching up with the latest Pentecost and Parker mystery.

For those who haven't come across these books yet (and if you haven't, please go back and read them in order) Willowjean "Will" Parker and Lillian Pentecost solve crimes in postwar New York City. Will is a runaway who worked for a time in the circus: Lillian is the city's foremost private detective. 

In Murder Crossed Her Mind, the two investigate the disappearance of Vera Bodine, a retired legal secretary who has a preternatural memory but has become a "shut in" - a hoarder who refuses to leave her apartment and lives surrounded by years of clutter. Bodine's only friend, a slippery defence lawyer who gave Lillian a hard time on the witness stand in an earlier book, begs the women to look for Vera but at first they're not inclined to accommodate him. In a slick opening section to the book, Will, suffering after being assaulted and Lillian, struggling with her MS, spend a gruelling 24 hours establishing that there is something to investigate - all of this absolutely top-notch procedural work, a joy to read, really.

If Bodine has suffered harm, it soon becomes clear that there may be many motives - Vera's prodigious memory may mean that she retains information from her legal career, but it also seems she assisted the FBI in hunting Nazi spies. She's dropped a hint that she may want to report a crime. And then there are other suspects, closer to home, like the mysterious buyer who wants to take over the apartment building...

Pentecost and Parker navigate all of this with aplomb, also negotiating their own ongoing cases running on from previous novels, some of which seem to pose threats that I'm sure will come back to bite them in future books. Will's assurance and independence continue to increase (as I noted in reviewing the previous book, Secrets Typed in Blood) but here she's brought down a notch or two by Lillian - I love the relationship between the two women, both strong and complex personalities, both pointedly not saying a lot that they might. Indeed I'll go further and say that for all the genuinely intriguing detective stuff, it's that relationship which is at the heart of these books. Spotswood is taking his time showing it evolve, and I am in no rush for that: I want to enjoy what happens at a decent pace (so while it was great to get two instalments in 2023, I'd prefer these books to continue at one a year!)

For more information about Murder Crossed Her Mind, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - Secrets Typed in Blood by Stephen Spotswood

Secrets Typed in Blood (Pentecost and Parker, 3)
Stephen Spotswood
Headline, 12 October 2023
Available as: PB, 384pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy 
ISBN(PB): 9781035409464

I'm grateful to Headline for providing me an advance e-copy of Secrets Typed in Blood to consider for review.

I was excited to see not just one new Pentecost and Parker mystery this year, but two. I'll be reviewing Murder Crossed Her Mind, Book 4 in the series, shortly - but before that, what did I make of Secrets Typed in Blood?

Well, this is a clever, sharp detective novel that nicely explores the 1940s scene around the writing and publication of pulp detective novels while - at the same time - being a rather superior example of the genre, and indeed one with a distinctly noir-ish twist. But all that apart it's a real pleasure to welcome back Lillian Pentecost and Willowjean Parker.

The two sleuths - or perhaps I should say, New York's foremost private detective and her assistant - are called in by Holly Quick, a writer of hard-boiled murder tales for half the pulp magazines in the city, when her scenarios begin playing out in real life. Bound on her honour to keep Holly's secrets - Holly has her reasons for these - Lillian risks souring her relationship with the New York police as the bodies pile up. There's also tension between Lillian and Will and, as ever, the latter doesn't take it well when Lillian tries to keep her away from the action.

I simply loved this book. Its gallery of smart women who know what they're about - not just Lillian, Will and Holly, but others besides - are a formidable counterpoint to the somewhat patronising NYPD. The introduction of Holly - a chain smoking, reclusive writer who spins out her stories paid by the letter - is a masterstroke, as is the involvement of a gumshoe Lillian brings in (to Will's disgust). We also learn more about how Will and Lillian support the women of the city, whether it's running self-defence classes, giving pro bono advice or tracking down missing relatives. (The background there is a clearly darkening climate for womens' rights, as they are squeezed out of "mens'" jobs and pushed back into the home, their behaviour policed and deviancy increasingly not tolerated).

Best of all though we see Will playing a lead role in things, and how far she's come since the first book. Juggling an undercover role on a separate case with investigating Holly's problem and discreetly supporting Lillian who (as regular readers will know) isn't in good health, she provides a running commentary (often a frustrated commentary) on progress which keeps the book moving at a brisk pace and hints at what is to come.

At the heart of things though is as classic a mystery as you could wish, the what and the why teasingly elusive even as Pentecost and Parker get further into the detail. It's all here in plain sight but also, it's fiendishly difficult to decode - just as a detective mystery should be.

All in all, another cracking instalment in this series which, to my mind, just gets better and better.

I'll be back with a further update when I've finished Murder Crossed Her Mind. You'll forgive me if I sign off now to do that...

For more information about Secrets Typed in Blood, see the publisher's website here.

#Blogtour #Review - The Lazarus Solution by Kjell Ola Dahl

The Lazarus Solution
Kjell Ola Dahl (trans Don Bartlett)
Orenda Books, 27 April 2023
Available as: PB, 295pp, e, audio
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781914585685

I'm grateful to Anne Cater at Random Things Tours for sending me a copy of The Lazarus Solution to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

In The Lazarus Solution, Kjell Ola Dahl gives us a satisfyingly murky, noir-infused thriller set in Stockholm in 1943. The characters are exiles from the Nazi occupation of Norway, spies of various nations, patriots, collaborators. (There's even a femme fatale). Some of the people we meet are several of these things at once. 

Our hero, Jomar Kraby, seems an unlikely participant in all this. A writer (whose works have been censored by the Swedish government, anxious to place the Germans and not be drawn into the war) he's asked by the Norwegian government-in-exile to investigate the killing of one of its couriers on occupied soil. Kraby, whose daily business seems to be drinking and failing to write, proves an unexpectedly skilful, resourceful and determined investigator, so much so that one feels there is more to him than we are being told.

Indeed that's one of the pleasures of this book - while comparatively short, it gives the impression of a peek into a larger world, whether through the presence of the Soviet embassy (which is clearly up to something) under its grizzled spymistress, Kraby's messy unfinished business with his ex back in Norway or the administrative rivalries between various branches of the Norwegian legation. Romantic, professional and ideological motives become confounded - and that's even before we learn more about the dead man, Daniel Berkåk, and his connections to refugee Kai Fredly and his Nazi-supporting brother.

Kai's history and that of his brother provide the opportunity for a bit of necessary exposition, detailing both Marxist and Nazi ideologies and showing the events that might have shaped young men and women in Norway before the invasion. Again, it's complex, and Kjell Ola Dahl illustrates how divided loyalties can become - this isn't a book that deals in moral absolutes at all. For a crime novel, that is of course wonderful as it makes absolutely everybody suspect, but it also drives a story in which what matters is less who was where at a given time, or what the condition of a body tells us about a death, but rather, how each character stands in relation to all of the others.

As such, a writer like Kraby, used to dealing in motivations and weighing characters, is perhaps just the right figure to be investigating what happened. Less a sleuth, perhaps, than the author of a story, he moves through the shadows of wartime Stockholm - as well as Norway itself - to dark corners where all manner of mischief is going on with surprising bedfellows (in both senses of the word) up to a world of chicanery. 

I loved Kraby as a central figure, recognisably walking the mean streets yet keeping his humanity, a witness to what happens in the dark without consenting to it. A witness, one feels, who will be ready to give evidence when the war ends and the reckoning - which many here, on all sides, hope for or fear - finally comes.

Simply a brilliant, compelling novel of humanity and collusion, ably translated by Don Bartlett into flowing English.

I would definitely recommend this one!

For more information about The Lazarus Solution, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy The Lazarus Solution from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

#Review - Murder Under Her Skin by Stephen Spotswood

Murder Under Her Skin (Pentecost and Parker, 2)
Stephen Spotswood
Wildfire, 7 December 2021
Available as: HB, 352pp, e, audio
Source: Advance HB copy
ISBN(HB): 9781472291677

I'm grateful to Wildfire Books for an advance copy of Murder Under Her Skin to consider for review.

It was a joy to return to the 1940s New York of detective duo Willowjean (Will) Parker and Lilian Pentecost following their debut in Fortune Favours the Dead.

In the opening pages of the new story we see Ms Pentecost in court, turning the tables on a murderer despite the best efforts of his lawyer. We also see the toll that takes on her. Lilian suffers from MS, something that means courtroom jousting and long-distance travel will have consequences - the realistic portrayal of a long-term illness being one of the ways in which these books are, despite outward appearances, very far from being "cosy crime". 

Another is the focus on figures who are very much outsiders in their world, one where conformism and keeping up appearances is becoming more and more important. Will, for example, is bisexual. The story will also explore the position of war veterans as well as the showmen and -women with whom Will previously travelled. When word arrives that an old friend of Will's from the circus has been murdered, there's never any doubt that Lilian Pentecost will want to take matters in hand, whatever the cost to her health. The scene therefore shifts from the big city to the small country town where Ruby died and which - surely not a coincidence? - is also the place she originally came from as the two women, arriving after a marathon train journey, set to work to disentangle circus rivalries, small town bitternesses and jealousies, and darker hints about Ruby's earlier life. This young woman, who appeared in the sideshows showing off her prolific tattoos, seemingly rejected the morality of her birthplace, never returning even for her parents' funeral. Might that act of rebellion have led to her death?

I really loved the way that Spotswood gets under the skin (as it were) of both communities and characters here. The circus he describes is in some ways more exotic than the upper-class moneyed world of the last book, but actually it comes across as much more relatable, more of a family. Similarly the town has its own ways and in particular Spotswood doesn't swerve from the fact that it displays open racism yet he resists the temptation to create clichéd backwoods villains. Rather we get what feels like a convincing and real network of relationships, both for good and bad, in each community.

Which doesn't make this an easy crime to solve. Both circus and townspeople are suspicious; the circus is failing, with crowds no longer flocking to the Big Top. There are hints of money troubles and defections. In the town, we see war veterans who have returned with injuries, visible or invisible, which nobody wants to hear about. There is also a revivalist religious element who are picketing the circus, and a Sheriff who sees the place very much as HIS town and who would be glad to pin the blame for the murder on one of the showfolk.

The truth is hidden among all this, but there is (of course) little time to get to the bottom of things. 

Are Pentecost and Parker daunted? Of course not. But getting to the roots of it all will mean Will having to tread on uncomfortable ground, with Ruth's background and her own open to question.

A really fun, intriguing detective mystery with great depth, shrewd characterisation and convincing characters and locations. A strong follow-up to Fortune Favours the Dead.

For more information about Murder Under Her Skin, see the publisher's website here. 

#Review - Fortune favours the Dead by Stephen Spotswood

Fortune Favours the Dead (Pentecost & Parker, 1)

Stephen Spotswood
Wildfire (Headline), 12 November 2020 (HB), 22 July 2021(PB)
Available as: HB, 322pp, PB, 336pp, audio, e
Source: Advance reading copy
ISBN: 9781472274779 (HB), 9781472274816 (PB)

I'm grateful to Wildfire Books for an advance copy of Fortune Favours the Dead to consider for review.

If you're looking for your next detective series, and you want it to be smart, set in 1940s New York, to feature two women who'll take no nonsense from anyone and who are brilliantly realised and just, well, themselves - then this might be the book for you.

Fortune Favours the Dead introduces Lilian Pentecost, detective extraordinary and Willowjean Parker, her new protégé, lately of a travelling circus (where she picked up many useful skills including knife throwing, lock picking and escapology). Told in Will's voice, it ranges over three periods: the two women's first meeting late at night during the War, the notable case, a couple of years later, that is at the centre of the story, and a later perspective, the time from which Will is telling the story, allowing her to be somewhat self-critical, freighting the account with some hard-won knowledge about life, detective work and herself.

The setting Spotswood creates here is strong. Moving from the exciting world of the circus (Will acknowledges its drawbacks including both a gropy mentor and having to shovel out the tigers' cages) to Pentecost's HQ, a three storey townhouse with an archive, basement for combat practice, resident Scottish cook and a consulting room, taking in the world of the industrial elite and the clubs of queer New York where Will likes to spend her time, it has a great sense of place. The central mystery is fun - it involves both a locked room murder and a fashionable medium - but a Pentecost and Parker investigation will not allow itself to get distracted by flashy mechanics. The focus of the two women is very much on the "who" and the "why", with the "how" expected to follow so we don't get endless discussion of ingenious, but wrong, solutions to that puzzle. 

Pursuing that "who" and "why" is what leads Lilian and Will into moneyed society which - no surprise - proves to be afflicted with the same human problems as everyone else.

I really enjoyed seeing Ms Pentecost and Ms Parker set about their case here. They are very unlike physically - Lilian has MS, which tends to frustrate and then she suffers after pushing herself; Will is strong and somewhat overconfident - but Spotswood catches, or presents, the ways in which they spark off and complement each other, showing what dear friends they are without ever quite coming out and saying it. There's a vulnerability here, hinted at by others in the book, both women are outsiders in different ways and in New York the pendulum is swinging back again from a degree of tolerance required during the war to - something else. I felt both that Lilian's imposing headquarters was a refuge, ands that it was threatened. 

Overall, this book was great fun, showing how a humble "cirky girl" finds herself a new career, a home, even perhaps a family. The focus is on deepening relationships, rather than the details of crime, casting a bit of light on an era and place often seen through Hollywood and Broadway stereotypes. This will hopefully be the beginning of a fine series - I look forward to reading more!

For more details of Fortune Favours the Dead, see the publisher's website here.

#Review - Testament by Kim Sherwood #YoungWriterAwardShadow

Cover design by Andrew Smith

Testament
Kim Sherwood
riverrun, 12 July 2018
PB, 455pp

This is my second (of four) reviews as part of shadow judging the The Sunday Times / University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award. I am part of the Shadow Panel which will make its own choice from the shortlist for the award.

The four shortlisted books are Stubborn Archivist by Yara Rodrigues Fowler (Fleet/ Little, Brown), Testament by Kim Sherwood (riverrun), The Perseverance by Raymond Antrobus (Penned in the Margins) and salt slow by Julia Armfield (Picador).

About the Author

Kim Sherwood was born in Camden in 1989 and lives in Bath. She studied Creative Writing at UEA and is now Senior Lecturer at the University of the West of England. Her pieces have appeared in Mslexia, Lighthouse, and Going Down Swinging. Kim began researching and writing Testament, her first novel, after her grandfather, the actor George Baker, passed away and her grandmother began to talk about her experiences as a Holocaust Survivor for the first time. It won the 2016 Bath Novel Award, was longlisted for the 2019 Desmond Elliot Prize and shortlisted for the 2019 Author’s Club Best First Novel Award.

About the Book

'The letter was in the Blue Room - her grandfather’s painting studio, where Eva spent the happier days of her childhood. After his death, she is the one responsible for his legacy - a legacy threatened by the letter she finds. It is from the Jewish Museum in Berlin. They have found the testimony her grandfather gave after surviving the labour camps in Austria. And, since he was one of Britain’s greatest twentieth century artists, they want to exhibit it. But Joseph Silk - leaving behind József Zyyad - remade himself long ago. As Eva begins to uncover the truth, she understands the trauma, and the lies, that have haunted her family. She will unravel what happened to József and his brother, who came to England as refugees. One never spoke of his past - the other couldn’t let it go. Their story - and that of the woman they both loved - is in her hands. Revealing it would change her grandfather’s hard- won identity. But it could also change the tide of history. This testament can lend words to wordless grief, and teach her how to live."

My review

Testament is one of those books which begins with a story that seems small, personal and intimate and then, almost without you realising, blossoms, expands and acquires wider resonance, deeper relevance and added meaning. While still remaining, in a sense, small, personal and intimate.

Eva is devoted to her elderly grandfather, artist Joseph Silk (Jószef Zyyad to some), who, as a young man, survived the horrors of wartime Hungary. As a Jew, he was enslaved, tortured, marched from camp to camp in the dying days of the war and lost his parents and sister, afterwards making a life for himself in England. Silk's (as he is generally referred to) choice was then to turn his back on the past, on the family he lost, the country that is no longer his own, the house he grew up in, everything from before. he certainly never wanted to tale part in reunions, contribute his testimony to museums, or to explore what was lost.

Granddaughter Eva, close to Silk and feeling herself rejected by her father John, is keen to protect Silk's legacy and reputation but most of all perhaps, his privacy. Approached by curators, journalists and art historians who want something of this eminent figure, this eminent survivor, she asks herself what Silk would want - and then closes down, even as she's dealing with the sale of his house and studio and the need to decide what should happen to everything, to decide how Silk should be marked in the world (even the text for a gravestone is impossible to settle). Inevitably that can't, in the end, hold, and Eva embarks reluctantly on a search for the truth, her easy trust in and love for Silk eroded by the discovery that he told her lies, lies, lies.

This is then a story about survival. While we are shown episodes from the Holocaust - those affecting Jószef, his brother László, and a young woman Zuzka - and these are very grim, the story is necessarily  selective there (I don't think what we told is by any means the worst that happened) and really focusses, I think, on what happened after, when the three young survivors are brought to England, to the Lake District of all places. We see, slowly, the dilemma they face.

The need for safety and security. The alienness of this damp land, a country of grey streets and chilly attics. The ambivalence of the English who haven't suffered as Jószef, László and Zuzka have but who are the victors, the owners, in their own country, of the war, as it were. (And among whom there is still prejudice - anti Jewish, anti foreigner).

But also, rejection by a Hungary that joined in the Nazi purges and doesn't want them now, offers nothing, no family, no restored home, no life. (In the modern parts of this book, that's paralleled by the scary resurge in Hungary of the far Right with its attempts to airbrush history).

The three survivors find, in the end, different responses to this dilemma. I'm not going to say any more about what they are because Eva's discovery of all this is an important part of the story, for her and for her father - but none of them come without cost. And we see that while John. and Eva may be second and third generation survivors, they are still survivors and the ripples of what happened to a father and a grandfather spread out to affect subsequent generations.

It's a cleverly written book, balancing an account of what happened in the 1940s and after - which, we need to keep remembering, can't be known to Eva because she hasn't been told things, she's been lied to, the witnesses are dead - with one set in the present day, taking in Eva's mourning silk, her doubts about herself and her father, her excitement at discovering Berlin and Budapest and in them, a couple of young men. Despite the aspects of the book that expose suffering and death, there is a great sense of life in Testament, not only in the modern parts but in the lives of the young refugees in Ambleside or the Jewish community in London (on the cusp of moving from the East End to North London).

Testament is a book that beautifully masters what it is trying to say, shows what has been and what the consequences can be. I loved the characters in this book, their flaws and their struggles, and felt that it truly honoured those who suffered and those who inherited aspects of that suffering.

It's also a book which has, because it must have, warnings for us, warning not to forget, warnings to be on guard, to keep watch.

For more information about the book, see the publisher's website here

Review - The Witch's Kind by Louisa Morgan

Cover by Lisa Marie Pompilio

The Witch's Kind
Louise Morgan
Orbit, 21 March 2019
PB, 440pp

One of the lovely things about book blogging is being sent books out of the blue, like this, so different from what I might buy myself - but which are just so right for me. It gets me out of my ruts, and I'm so grateful to Nazia at Orbit for a free advance copy of The Witch's Kind.

Opening in June 1947, this is the story of Barrie-Anne Blythe, a young woman living in a remote coastal community in Oregon in the US North West. It's also about her Aunt Charlotte, and Barrie-Anne's adopted daughter, Emma. Barrie-Anne farms a few acres of land that belonged to her husband Will; Charlotte is an artist who makes her living illustrating medical texts but pours her heart into her abstract canvases. And there's Willow, the dog, who is devoted to Barrie-Ann and Emma.

The Witch's Kind moves backwards and forwards in time to tell us a little about Barrie-Ann's earlier life - both her parents died when she was young, and strange, solitary, Charlotte brought her up alone - about her marriage to dashing, unstable, unsafe Will and about the effect on them both of the War, when Will joins the Navy and is sent to the Pacific. But the book is foremost, I think, a study of women's lives, of the expectations projected onto them and of quiet, loving, determined resistance. The conversations between Barrie-Anne and Charlotte, what's said and not said, the gradual exploration of each others' lives and of their family history, are actually very moving as is the support Charlotte gives when mercurial Will bursts onto the scene.

Will is a study in himself, a version of toxic masculinity made more convincing by his being, at times, oh so amenable and charming. He isn't even a complete monster - what we learn about his background is actually deeply sad, but this only makes him even more chilling and creepy and Morgan conveys with almost surgical precisions the emotional effect of this on Barrie-Ann. That is hard to take at times, it is so well portrayed and the subtle demolition Will carries out to his wife's independence and sense of self so devastating that I think a content warning might be appropriate for any woman who has suffered such an experience in her own life.

There is a puzzle to Will and his comings and goings, only one of the wider mysteries in this book. There is the mystery of the Blythe women. There are rumours of strange sights in the sky and the sea. Roswell is being reported, and a couple of Men in Black even turn up. Underlying all is the dislocation of the War and uneasy attempts to reset things - all those men returning and wanting "their" jobs back - and a sense of policing women who may have got out of line, who are "different". Here Barrie-Anne, with her missing husband, and Charlotte, who never had one, may be at particular risk of standing out, even without their family "gift".

The book's title, referring to that, may seem like a rather obvious hint about what goes on here but while there is a strand of magic in the book - and it is important to the plot - I'm not sure about the word "witch". It seems a somewhat over definite term for the mysterious ability passed down among the Blythe women, as well as creating particular expectations for what you might find in the story. But there are no covens here, no wider organised society of women using magic and in fact I don't think the word "witch" occurs anywhere in the story. It's a much more subtle book than that, a book about love and abuse, about defending what is precious, the lengths one might go to to do that, and about male corruption and selfishness.

So there are also redeeming strands - the strong presence of Aunt Charlotte (Aunt Charlotte is really cool!), an act of charity and solidarity with Barrie-Anne's by her neighbours which lifts her at a particularly low point, the quiet affirmation of a country doctor who carries his own sorrow with him - and even the devotion of the dog, Willow. It's these quiet people (dogs are people, didn't you know?) and moments which weigh against the bluster, the whining, the bullying.

I loved this book - it's one I had to read on and on at a gallop, unputdownable in that overused phrase - and I would recommend it highly.

(Also, that cover by Lisa Marie Pompilio is superb...)

#Blogtour review - The Courier by Kjell Ola Dahl

The Courier
Kjell Ola Dahl (trans Don Bartlett)
Orenda Books, 21 March 2019
PB, 314pp, e-book

This is my stop on the blogtour for Kjell Ola Dahl's new standalone thriller, The Courier. I'm grateful to Orenda Books and to Anne Cater for inviting me to take part and providing a free ARC of the book.

Set in three time periods - 1942, 1967 and 2015 - this is a complex novel, starting out as, ostensibly, a thrilling, if dark, war story but turning into something far darker and more interesting.

In 1942, in Oslo, occupied by the Nazis, Ester is doubly hunted: as a Jew, and as a courier for the Resistance. Barely escaping arrest, she flees to Sweden, continuing to work against the Occupation, and meeting the enigmatic, haunted Gerhard Falkum.

In 1967, a woman, Turid, who lost her mother in the war, is studying law. A man from the past, who died when she was still a child, turns up in Oslo, and events take a threatening turn for Ester.

In 2015, Turid discovers a brooch on sale which belonged to her mother. She sets out to retrieve it and to learn its story.

I enjoyed this book A LOT. It soon become clear that it was more than just a thriller. The sections in 1942 and 1967 (2015 is more of a coda, albeit crucial to understanding the book) are freighted with menace, with mysterious figures in dark, snowy streets, with the threat of arrest, betrayal and worse. The world of the Resistance is portrayed as small, claustrophobic, almost existing in synergy with the Norwegian police and Gestapo. (At one stage they're puzzling over the same murder). There are no descriptions of daring sabotage, it's office work, dull errands and freezing safe houses.

The story reminds us of what's easily forgotten - alongside war, political crime, and genocide, age old human entanglements, resentments and emotions continue, and it's these latter that seem to be the focus of the story and that raise it from being a matter of spying, propaganda and near misses to a tale of heart, blood, and revenge. The tense relationships between, for example, Ester and Gerhard in 1942, or her and Sverre in 1967, are strongly drawn and for me recalled some black and white movie where Burton and Taylor are about to begin screaming at each other (and then fall into each others' arms).

And yet... this book actually has layer upon layer. Deeper still, perhaps at the heart (or does it go further?) in this book is Ester's hatred of what's been done to her parents, to her people, to her. As though 1942 Oslo was a forge pressing out a new Ester, the woman we see in 1967 seems different, harder, marked by experience. We learn a little bit of what that experience was, of the things she's apparently done. It's enough to understand that for all this difference, the girl who got ready for a night out in 1942 Stockholm is linked to the woman of 1967 by at least thing - a desire for revenge.

All in all, this is a twisty little story where enemies are not always visible, conversations are marked by what is not said, and innocent childhood seems far, far away. One thing is clear - after 1942, nothing will be the same again for any of these characters.

I said above that I enjoyed reading this book, I should add to that that I'm not sure "enjoyed" is the right word for a rather dark story. It seems almost wrong to "enjoy" some of what goes on here. But it is a fine work. The characters are strongly drawn and everybody is sympathetic - to a point. At times, events are clouded by mystery, an effect enhanced by the different timelines although Kjell Ola Dahl keeps things on the right side of the line between "puzzling" and "baffling", and the relentless drive of the narrative - it is truly nailbiting at times, always thrilling - means the jumps are pretty easy to read through. The pacing is superb, building up to simultaneous climaxes in different periods which have a real sense of jeopardy (even though the structure means we know - or can guess - how things turned out).

As ever, Don Bartlett's translation gives us excellent, lucid English with just a hint of foreignness to remind the reader that this story does come from somewhere else, as it were, something I always think adds a little tingle.

I'd recommend The Courier to fans of spot fiction, historical or crime, and especially to those who like a mashup of all three.

You can buy The Courier from your local bookshop, including via Hive, from Waterstones, Blackwell's, or Amazon.

The blogtour continues - see the poster below for forthcoming posts and for any past ones you might have missed.

Review - Transcription by Kate Atkinson

Design by Richard Ogle

Transcription
Kate Atkinson
Doubleday, 6 September 2018
HB, 337pp

I bought my copy of this book.

I should have read Transcription when it came out in September but with a lot of distractions, it slipped and I picked it up to read over Christmas. Once I did, I couldn't put it down.

Atkinson's latest is, simply, masterly. It's an immersive, compelling account of one woman's war (a phrase borrowed from the title of one of her source books, sorry) and of the price she pays for it later.

Following the death of her seamstress mother, Juliet Armstrong - a bright, scholarship girl with Oxbridge ambitions - attends secretarial college instead, then joins MI5 as a typist at the beginning of the Second World War. She assigned to monitor Nazi sympathisers in 'Operation Godfrey'. This basically means transcribing covertly recorded conversations between an MI5 agent, Godfrey Toby, and the sympathisers ('the neighbours'). They think he's a German agent, allowing him to prevent them passing on useful information to anyone who might make use of it.

The story moves backwards and forwards between 1940 - those fatal weeks around the fall of France - and 1950, by which time Juliet is ensconced at the BBC as a producer of schools programmes. Atkinson plays a long game here, gradually introducing elements looking back and hinting at how the events of 1940 played out, and how they may still haunt Juliet. More is implied than said, but it soon becomes clear that she wasn't just transcribing but at one stage actively infiltrating the 'Right Club'. (This contains just the kind of ghastly people you'd expect - traitors and cryptofascists happy to  collaborate with tyranny just to protect their privileged position in the world. Mostly, rather stupid people, of a type that, unfortunately, doesn't die out). That leads her into danger, at first of a rather 'Girls' own' type but soon becoming more serious - Atkinson drops more hints, about deaths, even as Juliet's role in 1950 becomes more complex too.

At the heart of the book are two mysteries. What really is going on at the BBC? With old MI5 contacts apparently popping up and threatening messages being sent, the past seems to be reaching out for Juliet, the corridors of Broadcasting House no longer safe, a series of mistakes threatening her position at the BBC. And what really was going on in Dolphin Square in 1940? Who, exactly, was on what side? Might a network of collaborators have been a useful asset for an MI5 agent wanting to hedge their bets?

As the story becomes more complicated, truth being reflected around that labyrinth of mirrors to which spy fiction is prone, Atkinson keeps the reader focussed less on the 'what' than on the 'why' and on the consequences. There are consequences; one character spells this out explicitly towards the end, but really, we've been aware of that all along. Just look at Juliet. She is a composed, resourceful and self-aware young woman - whether in 1940 or 1950 - yet continually speculates on the future, the past, her place in MI5 or the BBC, on the effect of what she did on others (especially this). Juliet is, really, our window into some very strange worlds at a time when so much hung in the balance. The story has often been told about how in May 1940, the UK wavered on the brink of capitulation, with an influential factor in favour of peace. This is not that story - the story of Cabinet debates and Parliamentary oratory - but it also is that story - the story of what ordinary (and extraordinary) people were doing and saying that lets us imagine how they might have responded had things been different.

Readers of Atkinson's last two books, Life After Life and A God in Ruins will be familiar with some of these themes (responsibility; consequences; the price that might be paid) which she also examined there, through the lens of a kind of of multiple worlds universe and she - teasingly - alludes to this I think. In the opening scenes, set in 1981, a Royal Wedding is coming, reminding me of the framing of A God in Ruins, and there's a certain amount of overlap too in the 1940s setting and in what we might imagine Juliet's later life to have been like. But this isn't a book in that world. The alternate paths taken here are choices made and fixed and then reflected on, not points that might yet go a different way in another life. That makes the stakes, I suppose, higher, and the things Juliet has done graver.

The book is tremendous fun, shrewdly observed (a great deal of this revolving around the internal politics of a bureaucracy such as the BBC or MI5 - Juliet wonders if these two are not really fundamentally the same organisation - but also taking in things such as class and the state of British food in the 1950s) and very human in the way it deals not only the murky shenanigans of espionage but with the frail people caught up in it. Monstrous as they are, there is still some sympathy for Mrs Scaife and her entourage of would-be collaborators and Quislings. While some readers may think they never really got what was coming too them, I'm not sure; they see their hopes and plans dashed and many suffer personal loss - and as we seen, the forces of the State pretty much play fast and loose with law and decency to achieve their ends.

Best of all though, this is a thunderingly good story, the kind of thing you won't want to be parted from till it's finished.

Those are the very best books, and this is among the best of them.

Blogtour - Friends and Traitors by John Lawton

Friends and Traitors (Inspector Troy)
John Lawton
Grove Press, 5 April 2018
HB, 342pp

I'm grateful to Ayo and to the publishers for inviting me on the blogtour for Friends and Traitors and providing me with a copy to review.

If I were looking for a snappy title for this review (as for example you have to on Amazon) I might lift a phrase from the novel itself and use "The Burgess Game". The spy, traitor and (in this book) friend Guy Burgess is at the centre of this intricately plotted, chewy novel.  (In case anyone doesn't know, Burgess was a real man, one of a famous spy ring composed of ex Cambridge men who, working for the USSR, blew the UK's spy service, MI6, apart in the 1930s, 40s and 50s. This caused ructions even into the 70s and 80s. I remember the fuss when it became generally known that one of the group, Anthony Blunt, had been protected by the Establishment he betrayed and given a cushy job counting the Queen's pictures; and when the self described "spycatcher" Peter Wright published his memoirs - without official approval, and banned in the UK - in 1987s, alleging that another senior officer, Roger Hollis, had also been a traitor).

Here, Lawton devotes ten years or more of the life of his fictional detective, Freddie Troy, to a tale that unfolds in a leisurely fashion, as the lives of the two men cross and recross - from Freddie's early days as a naive police recruit to his ascendency to the rank of Detective Chief Inspector in the Murder Squad at the Yard. Treading lightly around various cases documented in earlier books of the series, and revisiting some earlier characters, Lawton uses the world he's created to give a convincing depth to the story although this does mean that in the earlier sections Troy does comparatively little (you can't meddle with an established timeline!) and the burden of the story is with Burgess.

Rather, this part of the book is used to good effect to convey some of the moral ambiguity necessary to understand a man like Burgess and also the attitude of his friends and acquaintances. Burgess is suspect from the very start: Troy's emigre Russian family have him pretty much nailed. (They are rather grand - as a policeman Troy's wealthy, well-connected and possessed of a small house in the West End, making him something of a ringer for Margery Allingham's Albert Campion - complete with a hefty Cockney manservant). Yet nobody thinks to report their suspicions and Burgess continues to waft through Society and through the supposedly secret world, hiding in plain sight, surely too indiscreet and unreliable to really be what he appears? Can we trust our judgements here? Perhaps seventy years of Cold War and terrorism have made us all cynical and incorrigibly suspicious about such things, and the answer to the success of Philby, Burgess, MacLean and the rest (Third Man, Fourth Man, Fifth... that's "The Burgess Game" I mentioned above) is less a sinister Establishment conspiracy than an attitude we simply cannot, in these more devious times, now understand.

Whatever, Lawton does an excellent job of bringing alive older attitudes and dilemmas. Troy is, we slowly learn (even if we didn't know before) morally compromised in various other ways, with his (perhaps) turning a blind eye to Burgess a comparatively minor matter. As somebody points out here, British spooks tend to die near Troy. When Burgess reaches out to Troy for a chance to "come home" and Troy is drawn into a catastrophic operation in Vienna, his past comes into question as never before. Which is where Lawton's clever recapitulation of those ten years really pays off. There is, you sense, real jeopardy here, real skeletons that might claw their way into daylight - and real risk to Troy's life, liberty and relationships. I felt especially for his brother, a rising politician, and for his partner, Shirley Foxx (who has her own reckoning with her past as well the possibility of being hurt through Troy).

There is also - and without any anachronistic imposition of 21st century attitudes - the matter of Burgess's sexuality. He is a gay man, in a milieu of gay men (as well as a wider, Blitz induced, sense of moral freedom in which other characters, including Troy's sisters, take part) and this brings a hovering sense of danger to him (though in the end, it is not Burgess but someone else who suffers directly from prejudice on this score).

It is, as I said, meticulous, clever and well observed, the kind of book you need to read slowly and carefully because every line, every word matters. Which is as well, because it's also a book to be savoured. With its pages crowded by spies, femmes fatales, detectives, old friends and enemies and, yes, traitors as well, it can be appreciated as a masterpiece of atmosphere, character and motive as much as a thrilling story and continuation of Troy's career.

The Constant Soldier

The Constant Soldier

Image from www.panmacmillan.com

William Ryan

Mantle, 25 August 2016

HB, 368pp

Source: I'm grateful for an advance copy of this book to review 

It is early 1944. A soldier rides away from battle  through a fairytale landscape of glittering ice, snow-boughed trees and frozen rivers. he is injured and will have to spend many weeks and months recuperating before being discharged home, used, broken and racked with guilt. But the war hasn't finished with him, and even on that journey back from the Front, he passes another train - 'a long line of snow-roofed cattle trucks'. There are no windows, only high, barred slits. 'From some of them - not all - thin, blood streaked hands ingnored the wire to reach out, as if looking for something their owners couldn't see.'

In 1944, on the Eastern front, the Third Reich is entering its final days, reaping the fruits of murder. Brand is coming home to face his past, make what peace he can with it and try to save something. meantime, Polya is also coming, part of the all conquering Red Army, driving her T-34 tank on the long road to Berlin.

In an afterword, Ryan explains how this story was inspired by a real place - an SS rest hut in German-occupied Poland, where murderers and torturers came to forget their work and relax. The book includes two photographs from an album kept by one of the officers looking after the hut during those last days: incongruous pictures of Christmas trees and hunting parties. This contrast between everyday life - if one can use the term - and apocalyptic events taking place over the hills, where the Russians approach, or down the road in the camp, where human beings are butchered, underlies the story, beginning as a mere convenience for the hut's orderlies and guests - the ignoring of inconvenient and evil truths - and growing into a grand collective delusion as the enemy approach and the end comes near - but none dare admit it.

That battle rages in all the characters (except Polya, perhaps) - Brandt, who was forced into the army to escape 'political trouble' and bears a double guilt, for what he did then and for the fact that his lover fell into the hands of the Gestapo due to him; for Neumann, in charge of the hut, who has been excused 'active involvement' in the camp after a trauma which literally haunts him; Jager, the hardened Waffen SS man who has no hope left and sees through everything. Only, perhaps, the more stupid remain comfortable. 

I was in two minds about this pervasive guilt and sense of mis-ease. At one level, it might be reassuring to think that many Germans - and those who joined in the terrible crimes of the Second World War - knew, at some level, that what was happening was utterly wrong. I want to believe in their humanity, that they would be troubled by what was happening, what they were complicit in. That seems like a sign of hope, a small flower in a bleak desert. But no - I think what the book demonstrates is the terrible power of events, of going along with things. Those mental reservations, that unease, doesn't save a single wretch from death. Still less the realisation that it's all going up in flames and time to turn to turn coat and denounce what's been going on. (A couple of soldiers discuss the inevitable future war between the West and Russia and how they will be needed in it).

In this moral cesspit, Brandt, tainted and loathing himself, tries to rescue those he can. His determination to atone plunges us into an action-filled and morally ambiguous story, one that powers along like those Russian tanks sweeping westwards. Against the huge forces in motion it seems as though nothing he does can have any significance, yet he, and some of the others, do what they can. There is the woman he lost all those years ago and her fellow prisoners. There are the boys and old men of the village, press-ganged into Hitler's last ditch Dad's Army, the Volkssturm. There's his sister and the rest of his family. (The village will not be safe when the Russians come: but even before that, it's not safe - partisans prowl the woods and fanatical Nazis like the Mayor prowl the streets. And it hasn't been safe for many for years: "The Glintzmanns have moved away"). The political prisoner, Agneta, knows that the body of her Jewish friend Lena should be washed but only has tears to do it with. The two women who are 'Bible students' refuse to condone the killing even when a single word would free them at any time.  does what he can. 

One can't escape guilt - even Polya suffers guilt as her tank crushes a refugee wagon and kills a mother and her children - and there is no redemption or absolution here but one can try to save something from the wreckage, perhaps, make things a bit less bad. But it's deeds that count not inner guilt, unspoken repugnance nor even - as with a couple of characters - self-destruction (either by suicide or throwing oneself at the approaching Russians). 

It's a sobering and at times desperately sad book, a story of love, loss, revenge, guilt and endurance - perhaps above all, of endurance. A magnificent read and a real reminder of the times Europe and its people have been through and the need to be on our guard against their repetition.

Review: Abigail Hall by Lauren A Forry

Abigail Hall
Lauren A Forry
Black & White Publishing, 21 April 2016
PB, 374pp

I was sent a copy of this book by the publisher for review.

On a foggy evening in 1947, seventeen-year-old Eliza and her troubled little sister Rebecca are banished by their aunt and sent to work at an isolated Welsh mansion. But there are rumours of missing maidservants and a ghost that stalks the deserted halls... Wandering through the mansion's dusty rooms, Eliza finds blood-spattered books, crumpled photographs and portraits of a mysterious woman clues to a terrible past that might just become Eliza's future.

As Eliza unravels a mystery that has endured for decades, Rebecca falls under the spell of cruel housekeeper Mrs Pollard, who will stop at nothing to keep the house's secrets. But can the sisters uncover the truth and escape back to London before they meet a dreadful fate?

Roses and old books...

This is a dark and delightful Gothic fantasy, all the more so for being set in the shabby postwar period rather than some lightning wracked Victorian pile. The story takes us to  both a bombed out and exhausted London and a decaying country house in deepest Wales - and when I say "tales", I mean just that, Forry's writing is visceral, dwelling on the smells of overcooked food, unwashed bodies, coal dust, mould and soot. (As well as some other, more specific smells that are key in the emotional lives of Eliza, Rebecca and Peter.) It transforts the reader. One can almost feel the stiff, sweaty 40s clothes her characters wear and feel the hunger as they survive on thin rations. And she has a wicked ability to throw in the odd sinister detail, almost as an afterthought:

She escorts him though the house, making note of her chores as she goes: light the fire in the bedroom, order more coal for the east wing, scrub the blood from the floorboards. There is much to do in a large house such as this. 

The war and its aftermath play a large part in the book. Apart from the material deprivation, everyone here has mental scars. Peter's older brothers served and came back, variously, with Falstaffian stories of glory or shell-shocked and damaged ("[Michael] knew how dangerous leaving the house could be. Peter felt trapped. Michael said it was better being a moving target...") Eliza and Rebecca's parents died, leaving them damaged too, as did the experience of evacuation that the girls went through.

Eliza and Rebecca. There's something strange about those two. While not first person, most of the story is told from Eliza's point of view, and hers is a slippery viewpoint. Eliza is the strong one, left to look after her sister - poor, damaged Rebecca, whose behaviour was already odd before the war but seems even stranger here. Rebecca has an obsession with counting (to twenty three) and a distinct lack of affect. In modern terms one might perhaps categorise her as learning disabled. Perhaps: she remains an enigma. As readers of this blog may be aware I have a daughter with learning disabilities and I was drawn to Rebecca and very sympathetic to Eliza's situation, trying to do her best for her sister and yet suffering from feelings of guilt for not always being the saint she's expected to be.

Eliza is particularly afraid of what the enforced move to Wales may do to Rebecca. While her show of sisterly devotion is touching it becomes clear that it wasn't always like that. And Eliza is far from straightforward, showing distinct signs of OCD herself, forever cleaning her hands, fantasising about dust mites, coal dust and germs invading her body.  When she begins to suspect that something bad is going on at Thornecroft, rather than looking for the immediate threat that seems to be under her nose, she concocts a truly gothic fantasy - a fantasy within the fantasy - of ghosts, forced marriage and revenge. In some respects Eliza's hold on reality is weaker than that of Rebecca, who soon settles well in her new home.

Meanwhile, in London, faithful Peter, Eliza's would-be fiancé, falls into a world more like that of Brighton Rock than The Castle of Otranto as his search for Eliza leads him to a substratum of spivs, good-time girls, gambling dens and thugs. He's in as much danger as the girls - in some ways more, since he's unknowing, an innocent at home.

In a narrative that powers along, Forry piles on the tension until the final dramatic moments of the story, with surprises to the very end. A happy ending seems unlikely...

An exciting and gripping read. A few terms are out of place - "okay", truck for lorry - but overall the period detail convinces and the evocation of the 40s is so tangible that after reading the book you may well want to wash your hands - perhaps even 23 times...