Once Upon A River by Diane Setterfield: Book Review

If I’ve taken my time to get round to reviewing Once Upon A River, it’s because I don’t know quite how to approach what must be up there with the best books I’ve read this year. 

These days I don’t read much literary fiction and haven’t read anything by Diane Setterfield, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. The story begins at some point in the late nineteenth century, in the Swan Inn on the River Thames. It’s winter and the regulars are sitting telling stories when and injured man staggers in and collapses — and he’s carrying a drowned child. 

The man survives and the little girl turns out not to be drowned but that’s the beginning of the mystery. The child can’t be identified and there are three families who are, or claim to be, missing a daughter of that age. The wealthy Vaughans lost their daughter, Amelia, to a kidnapper and she was never returned. Little Alice went missing when her mother committed suicide, and housekeeper Lily is improbably convinced that the girl is her little sister, Anne. That’s the plot, but it’s so much more complicated than that. And it’s a tale made wonderful by the telling. 

I’m a sucker for a proper setting, for a book that’s bedded into its landscape, and this book follows the river. All the families are tied to it. It gives and it takes away, a constant presence and a constant risk. The book is peopled by a multitude of characters, far too many to mention individually, but every one of them is believable and their lives are woven together.

Diane Setterfield tells a tale that twists and turns like the river itself, revealing secrets and surprises at every turn and leading to a satisfying conclusion. The real lives are woven with the folklore of the river and the ever-present spectre of Quietly, the boatman who appears to those who fall into the river, taking those whose time has come to the darkness of the river and returning those who aren’t ready to die to the safety of the bank. 

Once Upon A River is a compelling, moving book, and I absolutely loved it. 

Thanks to Netgalley and Random House UK for an advance copy of this book in return for an honest review.

Death of a Radical by Rebecca Jenkins: Book Review

Death of a Radical is the second book in Rebecca Jenkins’s series of historical crime novels featuring Raif Jarrett, agent to the Duke of Penrith and veteran of the Peninsular War. I read and (on the whole) enjoyed the first one, certainly enough to want to persist with more of the same.

The second book has pretty much the same flaws as the first, plus an additional weakness and an additional strength, which leaves me ready to give a third book in the series a try though I won't be putting publication date in my diary. Jenkins writes well (overlooking the short sentences and head hopping, which are my pet peeves but not necessarily bad in themselves) and I think she knows it. The problem is that she doesn’t have the balance right. The book feels more about the writing than anything else and as a result, the action is obscured.

In a mystery the plot is crucial and the writing should enhance it, not obscure it. In this book there there were several occasions when I had to go back and reread a scene because I wasn’t sure exactly what happened — something I occasionally do if I’m tired and reading late at night, but don’t expect to do repeatedly when I’m reading of an afternoon. For me that blunted the excitement that the book ought to have, and made it quite a slow read — something that was amplified by the unnecessarily detailed descriptions of everything from the weather down to the colour of a lady’s ribbons. It was a nice enough read, I suppose — but I wanted more action from a book that sets itself out as a mystery.

Stripping away the writing leaves the plot a little bit exposed and this is the weakness that the first book didn’t have. The whole thing never quite held up for me: I would give examples, but can’t because of the risk of spoilers, though I can say that the connection between the various murders was never quite strong enough for me, and nor did I really understand exactly what the killings were all about. Again, it may be in there but I couldn’t find it under the elegant prose. (Sometimes there’s a value in plain speaking.) There seemed to be a lot of scenes which didn’t pull their weight in terms of advancing the story — something else which slowed the pace and made the book drag — although when Raif finally decided to take action, he did so dramatically and the conclusion was satisfying.

This feels a slightly mean-spirited review, so I’ll redress the balance with what I did like — the characters. I love the way Jenkins has set up the whole series. Raif is complex and fascinating, ideal protagonist material (even if he does spend rather too much time standing around not doing a lot) and his relationships with Charles, the Duke’s son and with Henrietta Lonsdale are nicely drawn. All the minor characters are fascinating, too, although perhaps we don’t need to see quite as much of all of them as we do in the book.

I don’t like giving stars and this book illustrates why. Do I rate it for its obvious qualities, or do I rate it for how I felt about it? I did like it, but at the same time I struggled to get through. Jenkins has created a wonderful set of characters who seem desperate to be set free from the weight of her description and allowed to act. It’s a good book, and well-written. As literary fiction it would be terrific, but somehow, as a mystery, it doesn’t quite deliver.

Thanks to Sapere Books and Netgalley for a copy of this book in return for an honest review.

Dear Laura by Jean Stubbs: Book review

Time for another book review, time for another classic mystery. Though actually I’m not sure that merely reissuing a detective novel, in this case from the 1970s, necessarily makes it a classic and to be honest some of the oldies have lasted better than others.

Perhaps I’m being a bit harsh on Dear Laura by Jean Stubbs, because it does have a lot to commend it. It’s a historical mystery set in late Victorian times. Wealthy but emotionally cold businessman Theodore Crozier is dead and his death wasn’t the result of natural causes — but was the overdose of morphine in his system accident or murder? Theodore’s relationship with his wife, Laura, is cold, distant and unemotional, and her relationship with his wayward younger brother, Titus, is anything but. The servants are divided and Inspector Lintott of Scotland Yard is there to unravel the mystery.

As I say, there’s a lot going for this book. It’s well-written and the characters are cleverly-drawn. The author paints a terrific picture of a society whose conventions force those of all classes to accept what is expected of them and illustrates that the rich can be as miserable as the poor. The plot is clever, with plenty of twists and turns, although for me it had a less than satisfactory conclusion, and I didn’t particularly like any of the characters, which can make a book a hard read.

Where it fell down for me is in the solving of the mystery. The book is the first in a series featuring Inspector Lintott but apart from whisking across the narrative very fleetingly early on, the detective doesn’t make an appearance until almost half way through. The rest of the book is scene-setting which, while necessary up to a point, seemed rather out of balance. And the investigation itself consisted of Lintott talking to everyone involved and coming to a conclusion — no spoilers but…

Perhaps it’s down to the expectation we have detective fiction but, for me, if the investigating officer is the main protagonist (and he or she has his name on the cover) then he or she needs to be at the heart of the book from the beginning. I thought there was too much back story and not enough detecting and, as a result, I couldn’t really engage with Inspector Lintott in the way I feel I was meant to.

Thanks to Sapere Books and Netgalley for a copy of this book, in return for an honest review.

The Belting Inheritance by Julian Symons: Book Review

It isn’t often I laugh out loud on the first page of a book, still less when it’s a detective story, but I did just that when I began reading The Belting Inheritance by Julian Symons. It’s a slightly unusual read for me, a rerelease of a book first published in 1965, which isn’t exactly the Golden Age of detective fiction. It’s set in Kent, where the Wainwright family is much-depleted by the war, and the narrator is Christopher, a poor relation taken in by the family after the death of his parents.

As with all detective fiction I can’t say too much about the plot for fear of spoilers, but it’s based around the appearance of a man claiming to be David, one of two brothers thought to have been killed in the war. His two surviving younger brothers are disbelieving and downright hostile, but their dying mother welcomes him with open arms. And, this being detective fiction, there’s a murder.

I really loved this book. It wasn’t just the plot, which was clever but perhaps not as twisty as the modern reader looks for. It was the characters. Symons captures the idiosyncrasies of family life, and the part where I laughed was where there’s a family joke that caught my attention — and engaged me immediately. The book’s  huge strength is its characterisation, not just of Christopher himself but of its whole cast of fallible individuals, some of them more likeable than others but all of them human. And as the plot goes on Christopher, a somewhat pretentious would-be writer, grows up and becomes an altogether more mature human being.

Interestingly, there’s an introductory note which reveals the author’s concerns that he hung the plot too heavily on a coincidence for it to be a good book, but I didn’t find that. Yes, there was a coincidence, but it wasn’t too crushingly incredible, and it led off on a slightly mad section of the book where everything became very different to the first half. But that didn’t affect my enjoyment in any way — rather the opposite.

The cast of characters was diverse and all were handled well. I particularly liked Christopher’s Uncle Miles, the youngest of the brothers, with his fondness for jokes (especially bad and complicated puns), his genuine care for young Christopher and his tendency to slope off to watch cricket whenever things got difficult (which, of course, they often did).

It’s not a modern detective story, but it was a thoughtful and engaging read, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Thanks to Netgalley and Poisoned Pen Classics for a copy of this book in return for an honest review.

The Fifty State Fossils by Yinan Wang (illustrations by Jane Levy): Book Review

Okay, so The Fifty State Fossils by Yinan Wang, with illustrations by Jane Levy isn’t the kind of book I’d normally pick up and read, let alone review. It’s a children’s book, and I’m way past that state just now. But it did catch my attention because I’m a geoscientist (though not a palaeontologist, of fossil specialist) and because it struck me as the kind of book from which I could learn something.

For a start, I didn’t know that states had state fossils. They don’t all — some have state dinosaurs and some don’t have anything at all, but for those not blessed in this particular way there’s a recommendation, so every state has a page. The author has even managed to come up with something for Hawaii, which is way younger, geologically, than most of the fossils described in the book. 

I was surprised, in  good way, by the amount of information the author and illustrator managed to pack into such a small space. Each page has a section on the appropriate fossil, with a description, some basic information (remember this is a children’s book, so nothing too complicated) and a note on it’s relevance to the state. Alone with this, illustrator Jane Levy has produced a drawing of each fossil as it might have been when alive, and there’s a map showing where in the state it has been found and, for good measure, a photograph of it in its fossil state. 

There’s also an impressive amount of ancillary information. The early part of the book has some simple definitions of the geological context, explaining taxonomy and the geological timescale, while the back includes some really useful listings of places to go fossil hunting and a glossary of terms.

All in all I found it a fascinating read and can imagine it would go down extremely well with the next generation of budding fossil-hunters. 

Thanks to Netgalley and Schiffer Publishing for a copy of this book in return for an honest review. 

Book Review: The Duke's Agent by Rebecca Jenkins

My regular book reviews have tailed off in the last couple of weeks, for which I offer my apologies. It always happens at the beginning of November, when I take on the challenge of National Novel Writing Month and flog myself to a standstill in an attempt to write 50,000 words and the first draft of a novel. 

The 50,000 are done, now, though the draft has still to be completed, but it does mean I can take the foot of the pedal a bit and get back to reading and reviewing. So here's a review of the first of two books I've read recently on long train journeys. 

The Duke’s Agent, by Rebecca Jenkins, is a good book. It isn’t perfect, but it kept me reading all the way to London and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s set somewhere in the north/north east of England during the Napoleonic Wars, among towns and villages that hint at reality — it’s a landscape of deep dales and woods and towns and villages with rushing rivers and the rough and unforgiving lead mining industry behind it.

Into this scene comes a veteran of Wellington’s Peninsular Army, Raif Jarret, land agent to the Duke of Penrith, come to oversee the running of the Duke’s estate. Raif stumbles on an abandoned house where a man has recently died and there are signs of theft. In his attempt to pursue justice, and the interests of his employer, Raif soon finds himself on the wrong side of the local crooked magistrate and when someone else dies — an apparent murder — his life is at stake. 

There’s a lot to like about this book. The characterisation is excellent throughout, with Raif a strong and fascinating protagonist; the dialogue is almost flawless; the setting is tremendous; and the historical detail sets a fascinating background. Writing-wise I thought it was a bit overwritten and there was a bit of head-hopping that kept taking me out of the characters, but these aren’t serious issues.  

The problem for me was that, though it started off so well, the second half of the book felt weaker than the first. I can’t really say too much without giving away spoilers, so you’ll have to bear with me, but the stakes build early until, at about half way, they can’t get any higher. It’s far too soon. And after that, the pace slows, the tension slips off a bit and the whole thing feels as if it’s dragging on. This is the point at which the writing held it back a bit, too, as if the balance between writing and action wasn’t quite right in the second half. 

I also felt that the conclusion of the mystery was a little bit tame, though again I can’t tell you why without giving away the plot. Let’s just say that I thought Jarrett should have had more of a hand in it than he did. 

There are one or two things left unresolved — we learn early that Raif is some kind of relative to the Duke, and we don’t find out the story behind the bracelet of plaited blonde hair that he wears around his wrist — but these don’t matter. They’re stories for another day, and I’ll be reading on to find out.

Thanks to Netgalley and Sapere Books for a copy of this book in return for an honest review.  

Book Review: The Bloomsbury Affair by Anita Davison

So, once more I’ve stumbled late into a series of cosy historical mysteries, and once more I’m left vowing to go back and catch up with the treasures I’ve missed early on in the series. The Bloomsbury Affair is the fifth in the Flora Maguire series by Anita Davison (though, a little confusingly, Flora is now Mrs Harrington rather than Miss Maguire, but that’s a minor detail).

In Edwardian England, former governess Flora Harrington is settled with her solicitor husband Bunny and they’re doing very nicely, thank you. Affluent, well-looked after by the staff, socially well-connected and with the delightful addition of a new baby, everything is going fine — until the arrival of Edward, Viscount Trent, a young man to whom Flora was formerly governess. Ed was on a train with a young man who was found murdered, and he’s the main suspect. Convinced that he can’t be guilty, Flora and Bunny, hampered by Ed and to the exasperation of the detective on the case, set out to prove his innocence.

What follows is a romp through Edwardian London involving the aristocracy, a mysterious interloper and a plot to inherit, all against the background of exiled Russian revolutionaries, including Lenin himself. The plot was twisty yet credible and kept me guessing all the way through. The historical background was cleverly done but not overdone, and somehow Davison manages to subsume her readers without them noticing, so that I felt I was sitting in the lobby of the Dahlia Hotel, or in the doctor’s waiting room in Cheltenham or wherever else she happened to take us.

The book’s greatest strength, however, is its characterisation. All of the main characters are well-drawn and entirely believable. Flora is slightly uncomfortable with the gulf she sees in social class yet human enough to enjoy her advantages, and the relationships between the main characters are wonderfully done. Flora’s interactions with chirpy maid Sally and aristocratic Ed both respect their individuality and yet keep within the social requirements of the times. And Flora’s relationship with Bunny is humorous and touching.

I’m a harsh critic and no book is ever perfect, but the only criticism I have with this one is minor. It’s part of a series and the author seemed to want to make sure we knew it, though actually it worked fine as a standalone. Early on in the book there were plenty of references to Flora’s previous adventures, which added nothing to the plot and served only to spoil a little of the mystery for me for when I go back and catch up with the others. But that’s a minor gripe. I’m looking forward to books one to four in the series — and I’m certainly looking forward to book six.

I received this book from Aria Fiction and Netgalley in return for an honest review.



 

Book Review: Death in Paris by Emilia Bernhard

It’s always a bit of a risk trying a new author and a new series, even if the genre is tried and tested (cosy mystery, in this case). A delicious risk, admittedly, but a risk nevertheless. 

It paid off. I’d never heard of Emilia Bernhard and the book was so recently published when I downloaded it that a handful of Amazon reviews weren’t much guidance, so I opened up Death in Paris with a degree of trepidation. It’s so easy, under those circumstances, to pick a dud. But this time something went right. 

The story focuses on Rachel, middle-aged, married and living in Paris, and her friend Magda as they try to unravel a suspicious death. Rachel’s long-ago lover, the fabulously wealthy Edgar Bowen, is found dead, apparently drowned in his bowl of soup as he dined alone, a passing which generates a considerable amount of behind-the-hands laughter, but Rachel’s suspicions are alerted by the detail of a half-bottle of rose on the table. Edwin hated rose…

With a crime novel you can never discuss the plot in much detail for fear of spoilers, but I will say that I found the characters interesting and credible and the plot had enough twists and turns to keep me interested. I loved the setting, in affluent central Paris, and the real sense of place which the author imparted. And I was constantly smiling at the quirky observations of wealthy Parisians in their natural milieu. 

Did I think there were one or two unanswered questions? Did Rachel and Magda stumble into the trap of going in to confront the suspect when anyone else would have waited for the police to arrive? (In fairness, that’s the difficulty that cosy crime writers so often struggle to avoid.) Did I find the conversation and the disingenuousness of the sleuths a little on the irritating side, to the point that I might be struggling with it by book six in the series? 

The answer to all these is yes, but it really doesn’t matter. Reviewing is so subjective. There are good books I don’t like and bad books that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading. Death in Paris isn’t perfect, and I’ve given worse reviews than this to books that were probably better. But it’s good — very good. It was the right book for the right moment, and I absolutely loved it.

Bring on book 2!

Thanks to Netgalley and Thistle Publishing for a copy of this book in return for an honest review. 

Essence of Edinburgh by Jenni Calder: Book Review

I wasn’t quite sure what to make of Essence of Edinburgh, part-history part-travel and part personal reminiscence, but on the whole I did enjoy it. In it Jenni Calder takes a trip around Edinburgh, her home (and mine) for many, many years.

Her theme, if there is a theme, is that Edinburgh has what she calls a duality, a split personality, andI think I’d concur with that, but I’m not sure she fully illustrates it. The book moves around in a sensible enough way — there are chapters on the geology and topography, the festivals, its river and other elements that make up this unique assembly of buildings and individuals. The historical strand in the book is by far the best of it, and I learned a lot about a city I thought I knew well. I particularly enjoyed the opening, at the Heart of Midlothian itself, and how she begins to explore the city from there.

I enjoyed the writing, although there were one or two places where a jump from one thing to another was more than confusing (for example, at one point a paragraph about George IV’s visit concludes with the observation that ‘Seven years later William Burke was hanged and William Hare was released from jail’, a non-sequitur that had me scratching my head as I tried to work out the connection).

If I had a problem with it it’s that we don’t hear the author’s voice nearly enough. The quotations from books about Edinburgh are extensive to the point of being overwhelming. There can barely be a well-kent writer who features the city who doesn’t get a mention. Jenni Calder doesn’t just quote the oldies like Scott and Stevenson, but more modern writers such as Rankin and Spark, and a whole load of others who are unfamiliar to me. It’s fine up to a point, but for a book that claims to be ‘a personal journey — and eccentric odyssey’ I found it a little bit unbalanced, and I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the chapters I enjoyed most are those where she writes about the outlying areas, where there are fewer quotations and more original input.

Jenni Calder writes well and fluently, and I would have liked to have heard more of her own words and less of those of others.

Thanks to Netgalley and Luath Press for an ARC of this book in return for an honest review.

The Secret Life of Cats by Suzanne Shotz: Book Review

 

The Secret Language of Cats is something…well, a bit different. The title says it all — a scientific exploration of the sounds our feline friends make, how they make them and what they (might) mean by it. The author, Susanne Schötz, is a lecturer in phonetics and the book relies on real (if small-scale) research.

If I’m honest, a lot of the technical side went way over my head, even though I have a nodding acquaintance with the discipline of phonetics (by which I mean I know my labials from my bilabials and can demonstrate a glottal stop). But what might have been a dull and dry piece of writing is more than saved by the author’s cats. Five domestic felines and a selection of others passing through all contrived, as cats always do, to steal the show. 

The book looks at the very many sounds that cats make and is supported by web links which didn’t show up in the ARC I received, so it’s hard to judge how effective they might actually be. And I think it would require a lot of interest and effort to get the best out of this book. There are extensive appendices so that if you aren’t familiar with phonetics you can look them up and try and work out how the vocalisations she describes might actually sound, but there are very many subtle variations and it isn’t easy to pick them all up.

That said, I have a suspicion that the best of this book, if it’s used with the associated resources and with a suitably co-operative cat (mine doesn’t say much, except at night, and remained resolutely silent throughout my reading), would be very rewarding indeed. Schötz demonstrated how her cats use the same sounds in different ways, such as how we can listen for the subtle differences between the purrs a cat makes when it’s comfortable and those it makes when it’s in pain, and how cats vocalise in their territorial battles as a way to avoid confrontation. 

It’s probably the ideal book for cat owners with a grasp of phonetics and a more subtle ear than I have, but I learned a lot from the author’s cats and I already listen to my own cat — a notorious non-purrer and night-howler — in a different way. I enjoyed it far more than I thought I would when I began reading it.

Thanks to Netgalley and HQ Stories for allowing me an advance copy of this book. 

Book Review: A Picture of Murder by TE Kinsey

I approached A Picture of Murder by TE Kinsey as a lover of cosy historical fiction and I found pretty much what I’d expect in this Edwardian whodunnit — something very frothy and folksy. It’s the fourth in the Lady Hardcastle mystery series and the first that I’ve read, but that didn’t matter, because it works well as a standalone. It’s a light-hearted and not-terribly credible romp through the Herefordshire countryside, where a visiting cast of a moving picture actors find themselves flung on Lady Hardcastle’s hospitality, and are bumped off one by one. It ends with a big twist. And that’s more or less what it has too offer. In that sense, it delivers.

The problem is that, for all that’s good about it, for me it falls just short of being a good book. The story is narrated by Lady Hardcastle’s/maid companion/fixer, and we learn early on that she and her employer have a complicated history in His Majesty’s service. There’s a diverse cast of characters, from the villagers to the visiting actors to the group of Bible-bashers protesting against the new development of moving pictures — but I didn’t feel that any off them were particularly well-developed. The villagers were simple-minded, the aristocracy overly jolly, the policemen bumbling, and the relationship between Armstrong and her employer felt far too flippant for the times, even allowing for the fact that the pair are deliberately set up as eccentric.

I did enjoy the plot, although the twist at the end stretched my credibility (and I was interested to see that the author’s note at the end conceded that the hook on which the plot was hung probably wouldn’t hold up). The conversation felt brittle in a sub-Wodehousian way, and I was reminded of Gilbert and Sullivan long before the first of several references to the Pirates of Penzance.

A Picture of Murder isn’t bad, by any means, and I feel a bit harsh giving it three stars (perhaps it was just shy of 3.5) . It’s just that it falls short in the key thing I look for in any murder mystery, which is believability and the ability to engage with well-rounded characters. Of course, that’s a personal thing and I'm sure many people will love it. I would certainly read more in the series, although there are authors whose approach to the genre whose books I would pick up first.

I received this book from Amazon Publishing via Netgalley in return for an honest review. 

Review: The Drowned Village by Kathleen McGurl

I’ve told you before that I’m a binge reader, and I’m finally getting round to addressing my new year's resolution, which was to read a book a week for a year. Whether I shall fulfil that resolution is open to some doubt, since I haven’t kept a note of every book I’ve read and have had to try and cobble something together.

This is inevitably problematic, because looking at my Amazon account will tell me that when I downloaded a book but it doesn’t tell me when I read it. As anyone with the dreaded to-be-read pile knows, a book can sit waiting its turn for a long time. My current (honest) list stands at only thirty, though I must have read more than that. I think I can reasonably add the full-length unpublished manuscripts I’ve read for friends, which gives it a healthy boost, but still leaves me 16 books short of my target.

I can do 16 books in two and a half months. Easy.

The long and the short of it is, it’s book review time again. This time I won’t be posting my review on Amazon or Goodreads because I’m reviewing a friend’s book, but I will say I loved Kath McGurl’s The Drowned Village. It’s one of those what’s-not-to-like books that could have been written to my own specifications for a contemporary romance.

Best of all, Kath has set the book in one of my favourite places, Haweswater in the Lake District (it appears thinly veiled as Bereswater, but I wasn’t fooled).

It’s a dual timeline story, about a mystery in the village of Brackendale Green (real life Mardale Green) which was flooded in the 1930s to create a reservoir. In the present day, Laura goes to the Lakes to recover from a broken relationship and visit the dale which her grandmother left as a child. An unusually hot summer has revealed the village and her grandmother, Stella, begs her to retrieve a mysterious package from one of the old cottages, to solve a decades-old mystery. The origins of the mystery form the second timeline.

i’ll give away no spoilers, but I will say that what Laura and new friend Tom discovered was the key to a terrific mystery. Kath kept me guessing to the very end as to how it would be solved, and there were a couple of gut-wrenching twists as the truth of an old injustice was revealed.

In the story the village re-emerges during a drought, just as it did this summer, and I walked every step of the way with Laura and Tom. The plot is great and the descriptions terrific. If I was very picky I would say that the bit where Laura’s ex turned up drunk wasn’t really necessary for the story and felt a bit cliched, as well as begging the question of what she’d ever seen in him in the first place. But that’s a minor thing, and the only criticism I have.

I loved it.

The Drowned Village by Kath McGurl. Published by HQ

Review: A Snapshot of Murder by Frances Brody

Cosy historical mysteries are back in fashion, and my goodness, does that make me happy. I love the classics of 1930s crime — Dorothy Sayers and Ngaio Marsh are my favourites — and I went into raptures a couple of years back when publishers began reprinting other books of that era. 

The cosy historical was, I suppose, the next logical step, and I can’t get too many of them. A Snapshot of Murder is the tenth in the Kate Shackleton series by Frances Brody, and it’s the second I’ve read. (You don’t need to read them in order, which is fine by me.) Set in the 1920s, the books feature war widow Kate Shackleton, who runs an investigative agency.

In A Snapshot of Murder, members of the local camera club (Kate lives in Leeds) set off to Haworth, for the opening of the Bronte Parsonage Museum…but one of them doesn’t make it home alive. It’s difficult to review crime novels without giving spoilers, so I won’t say any more, other than that there were twists and turns aplenty and a satisfying conclusion (though there was one loose end left untied, which still troubles me a little).

There was a huge amount to love about the book. In particular, I adored the settings and the historical detail. I don’t know the Haworth area well, I’ve been there recently enough to recognise many of the places, but even if I hadn’t the description would have given me a clear idea of what it’s like. And the author used real locations, too, so that I could follow the action on the map. (Yes, I like to do that when I’m reading.)

I mostly liked the characterisation, though I did have a problem wth Kate herself — odd, because although there are several points of view, she’s the only one in first person. This ought to make her more accessible, but somehow it doesn’t. As in the previous book I read, I found myself failing to warm to her, or sense any emotional engagement, even when she looked at photographs of her late husband, or came face-to-face with the man whose marriage proposal she had previously turned down. 

I like to live the story with my protagonist, especially if they’re written in first person, and I felt that I was always looking at Kate from the outside. I suspect that may be what the author intends, because scenes from the point of view of others — unhappy wife Carine, for example, and Kate’s uber-enthusiastic niece Harriet — were much more engaging. But I wish I’d warmed to Kate rather more than I did.

I think it was this, together with the short sentences which gave the whole book a slightly clipped tone, that hold me back from raving about it. That’s a personal view, of course, and in all other ways it was a terrific, clever and engaging book. I’ll certainly be reading more of the series.  

I received this book from Netgalley/Little, Brown in return for an honest review.

In Focus Tarot: Your Personal Guide by Stephen Bright

I’ve recently developed an interest in tarot reading, so I’m pretty much an absolute beginner. The tarot, as I discovered early on, can be beyond baffling — so many different decks, so many different interpretations — so I turned to Stephen Bright’s guide with particular interest.

It’s difficult to give a complete assessment, because — by the author’s own acknowledgment —  it’s a book to dip in and out of rather than read from beginning to end, which is what I did. Nevertheless, I found it both valuable and fascinating.

It’s very clearly set out in three sections. The first is a general introduction to what tarot is, what it isn’t (that’s important) and introduces the suits. It’s not long, but it’s clear and unfussy. The second section goes through the pack and explains every single one of the cards, and how they might be interpreted in general, in relation to a situation, and with regard to the individual doing the reading. The third covers some ways of setting out the cards (spreads) and how a reader might interpret them.

I’ve dipped into a couple of other books of this nature, and this is by far the most accessible of them. It also avoids the trap of giving so much information, in particular on the different spreads, that it becomes confusing. There’s detail where we need it — on the cards themselves — and useful and relevant examples elsewhere.

All in all, a book I can see myself going back to time and time again.

In Focus Tarot: Your Personal Guide by Stephen Bright

I received a copy of this book in return for an honest review.

Murder at Hawthorn Cottage, by Betty Rowlands: book review

The people who know me probably know what a simple soul I am. I love the idea of living a sheltered life. I don’t like nastiness or unpleasantness of any kind. I cover my ears when there’s anything distressing on the news, and I don’t have a strong enough stomach to watch Casualty.

It follows, therefore, that I love a cosy mystery, and Murder at Hawthorn Cottage, by Betty Rowlands, certainly fitted that bill. I’d never heard of the book, nor the author, and I picked it because I liked the cover. (I’m shallow like that.) And off I went. 

In truth, I found it a slow start. Crime writer Melissa Craig has just moved into a Cotswold village and for the first 20% or so of the book, not a lot happens. Apart from repeated agitated phone calls from a man begging a woman to meet him, the author spends a lot of time introducing Melissa, the village, her next-door neighbour and the vicar, covering her trials and tribulations with the removal men and so on.

If it hadn’t been for those mysterious phone calls, so obviously the hook for the plot, I probably wouldn’t have bothered reading on, but I hung in there, if only to see if there was a reason why Melissa didn’t dial 1471 and call the man back to tell him it was a wrong number. I’m glad I did keep going, though, because with the discovery of a woman’s body in the woods, the pace picked up. 

You can never say too much about the plot of a crime novel for fear of spoilers, so I shall keep this bit brief. Melissa and her partner in crime, local journalist Bruce, find their way through murders and drugs, not to mention a bit of porn, as the story runs in parallel with the plot of Melissa’s latest book. 

I get frustrated by amateur crime, because there’s almost always a point where the sleuth should turn the matter in to the police and doesn’t. So it was here, but at least Rowlands had a nod towards that as Melissa got a ticking off from the investigating officer for it. And there were some lovely touches in the characterisation which lifted the whole thing slightly above the run-of-the-mill and made up for that slow start, so I certainly will consider reading more in this series.  

The reason Melissa didn’t call 1471, by the way, wasn’t obvious until much later. Although the book was released this year, it’s a rerelease and was originally published way back in 1990 — hence the lack of computers, mobile phones and so on. It didn’t undermine my enjoyment of the book in any way, but I think I’d have liked some clue a little earlier on. 

A Crime Update

Grave matter in the Lake District...

Time for an update, though if you follow me on any of my social media you probably won’t need it. It was on 24 September last year that I announced my decision to switch genres and write crime and it was on 18 September this year that I had confirmation that Aria Fiction wanted to publish the first three in my crime series.

What a year that’s been.

I’m not going to repeat the story of how I began to write crime. It’s up on the blog and you can scroll back through if you’re interested. But I wanted to use this blog entry to encourage anyone else never to give up.

The reason I didn’t write crime was that I thought I wasn’t good enough. I thought it was too difficult. I thought the plotting was too complex and it would be impossible to keep readers interested in so many characters, that handling several points of view was beyond my capability.

And here’s the thing. It was almost certainly true.

I’ve been writing for ever. When I first started I almost certainly couldn’t have handled the crime genre. Let’s face it, when I first started writing I couldn’t handle any other genre. I had too much to learn. I did have a couple of stabs at thrillers but they were woeful, so woeful that even in my naive innocence I knew it. So I wrote romance, not because I thought it was easier — anything but —  but because the structure of it is simpler.

I liked writing romance. I still do, and it was the genre in which I was first published. But I couldn’t help myself and I shifted to romantic suspense, which involved a crime alongside a love story. And that’s how I became a crime writer. Without realising it.

But the message is this. It took me years to develop the skills to tackle writing a publishable novel, in any genre. I have a cupboard full of unfinished (or finished but unreadable) manuscripts to prove it, the carcases of good ideas that died on the long march to my dream.

There was no instant revelation, no stepping into crime and suddenly realising that I’d found my genre. The truth is that once I’d assembled my writer’s toolkit I could apply it to anything. Because the fundamentals of writing a good story are the same in any genre. I didn’t become a crime writer overnight. I became a crime writer because I practised and practised and practised. 

My advice to any aspiring writer is to do write and to keep writing. The chances are that most of your early work will fall way short of being publishable (there are exceptions). But writing is a craft. Give it everything. You won’t regret it.

The Women Friends: a Book Review

The Women Friends

I know, I know. I’m a binge reader. I can go for months without reading anything, but if I’m on holiday and the mood takes me I can read half a dozen books in as many days. So it is just now: oh, the joys of holidaying at home when the cloud is down and there’s a chill wind blowing. 

I won’t bore you with every book I’ve read since my last blog, partly because some of them are quite samey, and also I’ve always vowed not to review books I don’t think are very good. (There have been some of those, too.) But I tore through a novella last night that was both good and different. 

The Women Friends: Selina is by a Facebook friend of mine, Miriam Drori, and her co-author Emma Millar, and I bought it (as I so often do) to support an author who writes for a small independent publisher, in this case, Crooked Cat. It’s a novella set in Vienna between the wars and it’s the story of Selina, who (briefly) models for artist Gustav Klimt and falls in love with one of his other models with whom she sits for his famous painting, The Women Friends.

It’s not a period of history I’m particularly familiar with, and I know nothing about art, but that really didn’t matter. The two authors set the scene wonderfully, and they cover a range of characters in what’s almost a cartoon of a louche, hedonistic society that’s sleepwalking towards its nightmarish end. 

Selina’s sexual awakening comes from the Jewish woman Janika, and she goes on to have another affair with a woman called Anja. The story got considerably darker, as Anja became drawn into the unsavoury politics of the far right with what appear to be the best of intentions, but we know the course of history. It was only going to end one way. It’s a credit to the authors that I was desperately hoping that somehow Selina would be able to save all her friends who fell on the wrong side of the nazi party for their race or their sexuality. (No spoilers, though.)

It’s a beautifully written story, and highly evocative. For me the relationship with Janika, clearly the love of Selina’s life, petered out a little: I never like it when a main character disappears from the story. Klimt died very early on, too, and the story moved away from the artistic circles not long after that point, which was a little odd given that the whole premise of the books appeared to be the painting and the two women in it. That said, the blurb implies there will be more in a series and if there are, I’ll be looking out for them.

1930s Crime Revisited: The Mitford Murders by Jessica Fellowes

I yearn for the golden era of crime writing — so much so that I’m thinking of writing a series myself, though that will have to wait until I’ve got rather further with the ongoing contemporary series. I’ve always been a fan of Christie, Sayers, Marsh and the like, and the current trend for reprints of some of the less well-known of that genre is a positive pleasure to me, and has given me many hours of pleasant reading. 

With that in mind, I turned to a contemporary take on the 1930s genre with relish — a cosy historical, if you like to call it that. It’s called The Mitford Murders by Jessica Fellowes, and if the name Fellowes rings a bell in connection with the upper-class Mitfords then so it should. Jessica is a scion of the (Downton Abbey) Fellowes dynasty, and has written the companions to the tv series. 

With that in mind, I was expecting sumptuous detail on the lives of the minor aristocracy, and I wasn’t disappointed. Nurserymaid Louisa fetches up with the Mitfords as she attempts to escape from her unfortunate background (dead father, weak mother, exploitative uncle) and becomes confidante to sixteen-year old Nancy. When Nancy gets a bee in her bonnet about the murder of a war nurse on a train (on which Louisa was a passenger), the plot is born. 

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I loved the detail and the story, with plenty of twists that I didn’t see coming. If I have a grouch it’s that some of the investigation seemed a little bit simplistic, and that Nancy didn’t come across as the precocious, brittle and not particularly pleasant person she seems to have been from other books I’ve read. 

The book was nicely written and flowed well enough, though the pace slowed at a few points so that I put it down and went off to do something else. That said, I did keep picking it up again, though it wasn’t what I’d call a page-turner. I particularly loved the way that Louisa’s rather innocent romance with hapless railway policeman Guy runs alongside Nancy’s determination to find a man, regardless of whether or not he’s a crook. 

The concept of putting a fictional character in the heart of real events isn’t original — Laurie Graham, in particular, does it wonderfully well in both The Importance of Being Kennedy and Gone With The Windsors — but it works. That said, the book is billed as the first of a series and I’m not quite sure how long this can be spun out. The tagline is ‘six sisters, a lifetime of mystery’ but with the younger sister not born when the series begins and the oldest close to leaving home on a lifetime of adventure, I’m not quite sure how it will work as a series. 

I’ll just have to read the next book and find out…

Can You Write Too Well? A Review of Haweswater by Sarah Hall

Mardale Green begins to emerge from its watery grave

So, the other day I began reading Sarah Hall’s Haweswater, a book which begins with water lapping around the wheels of a cart leaving the Cumbrian dale of Mardale as the eponymous reservoir fills with water. First thing the next morning I walked along the lane leading into the hamlet of Mardale Green as it emerged after a period of drought. Then I went home and finished the book. 

What a book it is (mainly in a good way). For me it reads like a tribute to a lost Eden, a richly-written description of a beautiful land. Hall implies that it’s a lost landscape, but it isn’t. It’s very much there and endlessly attractive. (Do you have a spare hour? I can show you my photos.) 

What’s lost isn’t the landscape of the dale, but the way of life. 

This is the problem I have with the book. It’s the story of Janet Lightburn, resistant to the flooding of the valley, and her intense (for intense, read violent) affair with the man from the Manchester Water Company, Jack Ligget. But I didn’t really care about Janet, or Jack, or anyone else. Hall manages to drown her characters in the richness of her prose characters, and I never felt I knew or understood them enough to care. 

I can see what the author’s trying to do, with her switches of tense and her broken sentences, but it doesn’t work. Part of the problem is that the book is reminiscent of the 1930s rural-misery-memoir genre of Mary Webb and Lewis Grassic Gibbon, in which life in the countryside is relentlessly miserable and the stones of (insert rural area here) are stained with blood and lead only to tragedy. Of course, it doesn’t help that the genre was so wonderfully debunked by Stella Gibbons, and I do find myself wondering whether I’d have viewed Haweswater differently if I hadn’t read Cold Comfort Farm, but who knows?

No spoilers, of course, but I wasn’t surprised by the way the story turned out, and nor, I’m afraid did I particularly care. While I loved the descriptions of the landscape, and even the many pages devoted to the building of the dam (unnecessary to the story) kept me reading, I could’t engage with the characters. At one point Jack “watched the scene like a silent picture” and that’s pretty much how I felt about it. 

I feel a bit guilty about thinking this way, because the writing (those odd broken sentences apart) is pretty damned good, but for me fiction relies on characterisation and narrative drive, and in those respects it falls far short. I’ll reread it, though, if for not other reason than the descriptions of Jack climbing High Street or the hard, hard work of farming on the fells, or whatever. But in terms of character, it was over-written, with description substituting for emotion. 

Despite what I’ve just said, I did like this book — just nowhere near as much as I desperately wanted to. 

A Different Sort of Mystery

I know, I know. What I’m about to say is at best ill-advised, and the sound you can hear is that of a whopping great stone crashing through my own glass house. When I go and inspect the damage I daresay I’ll find it more extensive than I thought, but I’m going to say it anyway.

I’ve read a lot of ordinary books recently.

Now the caveats. I’ve actually enjoyed them all. They’ve been well-written and their settings have been appealing. Their characters have been interesting. They’re just the type of book I’m aspiring to write myself, in fact. By ordinary I don’t mean bad. I just mean samey. And yes it’s the genre and yes it’s what readers want. I know all that. But.

Maybe it’s the heat that’s giving me a terrible sense of ennui. Maybe what I need is some sparkling wit and a Martini, rather than sitting on my own with a hot, grumpy cat and a glass of tepid Ribena. But suddenly I find I’m tired of reading all these crime novels and I want something different.

Fortunately help is at hand, in the shape of the latest crime novel by Ian Sansom. Sansom’s books are a bit light on crime, but they do have an original theme, a very jolly writing style (and a wit as dry as my non-existent Martini) and a cast of original and entertaining characters.

The concept is a series of murder mysteries set in the counties of England during the 1930s. The narrator, Stephen Sefton, is a veteran of the Spanish Civil War with all the traumas that involves, not to mention a penchant for some of the sleazier entertainments that London has to offer. His big break, if you can call it that, comes in the opening book where he becomes employed by the extraordinary Swanton Morley, an encyclopaedia of a man whose mission its to augment his phenomenal output of books and articles with a guide to each of the counties — each one researched and written in a week or so.

Essex Poison is the fourth of them, and the pattern is familiar. Sefton and Morley travel round in a Lagonda driven by Morley’s sassy and very modern daughter, Miriam, who’s way out of Sefton’s league and besieged by alternative suitors, while some of the more villainous characters from Sefton’s past are in pursuit for payment of his debts.

To date there have been murders in Norfolk, Devon and Westmorland, and now the caravan has alighted in Essex. At an oyster festival, a local dignitary dies. Was it poison?

In actual fact I didn’t really care what happened. (I did say it was light on the mystery.) It was fun, it was different, and there’s a serious underlying theme as Sefton struggles with his demons (to which, of course, his employer is totally oblivious).

I’ll go back to my ordinary mysteries. After all, they’re a well-tested genre and there are so many, so similar, because it works. But sometimes you want something different, and by the next time I’m in need of an alternative twist on crime, I hope the next book in the series will be out.

Me and the Ghosts of Mardale Green

The old field walls of Bowderthwaite
on the shores of Haweswater 

I love a good walk. I was down in the Lakes recently, and rather than go to the gym I got up early, packed my breakfast and headed off for a scenic walk. Just as I did for the walk I described in my last blog I picked Mardale, which happens to be where my current protagonist, Jude Satterthwaite goes to clear his head. 

This time, I chose to walk round the lake rather than head up the dale. It was hot, and the route is much flatter and there is, crucially, no bog, though there are other hazards. Haweswater as we see it isn’t entirely natural, but a larger lake resulting from the expansion of the original body of water following the building of a dam in the 1930s. 

The new reservoir flooded the village of Mardale Green, leaving us one of those drowned villages that are common across the UK and that occasionally reappear in times of drought.

The long-submerged walls and old bridge
emerge from the lake

As you may be aware, it’s been incredibly dry in the UK recently, and Cumbria’s lake levels have dropped dramatically. On an earlier visit, a lady I met on my walk informed me that we would soon be able to see the church tower, which we never will because the church, like every other building in the dale below the waterline, was demolished, though the village bridge does appear along with the footprint of its buildings. 

Even the ducks sink into the soft mud.
Maybe one day these will be fossil footprints.

The village hasn’t emerged yet, though its presence is slowly crystallising as the water level drops. For my walk I left the main footpaths and walked around to Riggindale, out of sight of the car park and much of the road. Once there I followed the shore back round until I ran into rocks and had to scramble up the bank and into the woods. 

If you look at old maps (you’ll find one here) then you can see where the old houses are. I spotted the ruins of Fieldhead and the skeleton of its bridge. On the other side of the lake, the remains of the farms of Goosemire and Grove Bridge were printed on the landscape. Ducks had left their footprints on the rapidly-drying mud, making fossils for the future. Most hauntingly, I could see the trees. Cut down before flooding, their stumps roots are still there, the soil washed away from under them so that they stood free on the rocky shore like stranded aliens. 

The line between the lucky and the unlucky -
trees above and below the new shore.

It was an amazing walk, made all the better for being so early in the morning that I met nobody. I doubt I’ll ever weave it into a story, because someone somewhere will have done that before, far more elegantly than I ever could. But it’ll be a long time before I forget that sunny early morning on the parched shores of Haweswater. 

Just me, a couple of sheep, several dozen ducks and the ghosts of Mardale Green.

The Problem of the Boggy Middle

I am writing the first draft of a novel and it is mince.

I write from a plan, much as I walk from a map and, like a walk, a story has many different options for getting from A to B.

This is a map of a walk I did the other day. It’s also one of the favourite walks of my protagonist, DCI Jude Satterthwaite, who likes a quick stroll to clear his head.

Jude, in solving a crime, knows the beginning and the end, as do I. It begins with a crime and it ends with an arrest. So it is with a walk. It begins at the car park and it ends at your destination, in this case, Blea Water. 

Unfortunately, things aren’t always so simple. You will see that this map has all sorts of possibilities — a positive spider’s web of wonderment. But when you get to the ground, your options are rather more limited. Because, bluntly, a lot of these routes that are marked on the map are utterly invisible on the ground, and the ones that are there have a nasty tendency to peter out in the middle of nowhere. 

In my walk, as in my writing, I have to make sudden sideways jumps to accommodate them. (Don’t worry. In draft 2 I’ll go back and sort them out.) In the meantime, at least I have two options. I'll pick one.

 But the big problem, dear reader, is marked in green. 

It’s a bog. And to get from A to B, from the crime to the arrest, from the beginning to the end, we have go through it. There is no way round. High road, low road. You end in the bog.

This is where I am right now. 

In a draft of — say — 75,000 words the first third is easy, and the last is easy. The middle third, known to writers as the saggy, or as I now call it, boggy, middle, is where all the things you need to do to get from A to B get shovelled in to a big heap, a random selection scenes. Get to the end of it. Sort it out later. 

I’m at 34,000 words right now, and I’m not so much heading through mud as jumping from tussock to tussock and hoping the next one I land on will bear my weight. It’s an energy-sapping experience but, I tell myself, it’ll be worth it. And when I finally finish it, I hope my readers enjoy the view.